Carroll Sandel: STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT • Cleaver Magazine

Carroll Sandel
STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT

STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT
Hospital Service Association
of Pittsburgh

April 22, 1943

Patient Mrs. Margaret Smith Hospital Sew. Valley City Sewickley

Subscriber David Smith Group 1143 Contract 55788

Statement of Account
This statement from Blue Cross details the charges for the subscriber’s wife and their baby’s thirteen-day stay in the hospital following the birth on April 8, 1943. The subscriber fulfills his financial obligation for this bill as he will all others during the ninety-four years that will span his life. Throughout his adulthood, he will disparage those who abdicate these responsibilities as “free-loaders,” as “deadbeats,” will flare his nostrils when talking about his brother who was forever calling him for a bail-out. In a thank-you letter to this baby when she was in her late forties, he will tape a three-quarter inch clipping from a magazine: “Depression dad, he was like so many other dads of his generation who had starved their need for love in their hunger for financial stability, for certainty—and for control.” When she receives this letter, this daughter, still in thrall of her father, will be impressed that he is insightful, will feel sympathy that he denied himself the love he deserved. She will miss his more important message, that even he knew he must always be in control.

Hospital Service Association of Pittsburgh
The subscriber at the time of this birth was a district manager for the Chevrolet Motor Company. After the war, he will borrow $2,000 from his mother-in-law and buy into a Chevy dealership in a small town in western Pennsylvania. Through time, he will remain an automobile dealer until he sells the business when he is seventy-five years old. He will remain a devoted Blue Cross subscriber after his retirement—allegiance is an important trait for this man.

April 22, 1943
In April 1943, Allied troops had the Germans cornered in Tunisia. Mussolini’s morale was flagging in Italy. The subscriber tracked this news with worrisome fervor. Three days from the date of this statement, he will turn thirty-two and though a father, he needs to get over there before the goddamn war is over. The Army has finally accepted him as a Volunteer Officer Candidate. He will leave for basic training at Camp Wheeler, Georgia three weeks after his third baby arrives, who will turn out to be his most loyal child.

During the three months of training in ’43, the father will report that as an older enlistee, he tried to help the younger, weaker recruits. This was unfavorably noted in his record. A Lieutenant Colonel discovered the subscriber had earned his Able-Bodied Seaman card while a teenager. The Lt. C. offered the elderly volunteer an honorable discharge from the Army in exchange for a two-week training and admission to the Merchant Marines who were in desperate need of experienced men to navigate ships. The subscriber was proud to accept this proposal.

Patient: Mrs. Margaret Smith
The patient (known as “Peggy” or “Peg”) was born to middle-aged physician, Fletcher White, and humorless Anna Graff, who weighed less than a hundred pounds. Her family had a live-in cook who also functioned as a maid; a laundress who came to the house twice a week; a man who chauffeured her sister and her to where they wanted to go and who served as the butler. Peggy took golf, tennis and piano lessons. In this life of privilege, she never learned to cook more than hot cocoa and a three-minute egg, or to balance a checkbook, or to wash and curl her hair.

After two failed attempts at college, Peggy completed a course at Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School. In 1936, she responded to a newspaper ad to work for a securities firm. Her interviewer was the subscriber. With Anna’s focus on her older daughter who she was trying to marry off to a man of the proper social class, she missed Peggy’s high-octane sexual attraction to the six foot, four-inch tall, handsome salesman from New Jersey. The couple eloped in June of ‘37.

By the time of this hospital statement, Peggy’s husband had worked for Chevrolet several years, parking her in towns far from family and friends. The country was now at war. In a January ‘43 letter to a friend, Peggy confided, “It took me a long time to come around to [it] (the subscriber enlisting in the war), but I think he is right. He has had the bug since last March (long before I was ‘Preg Peg’ once more). He has tried every branch since then.” Married almost six years, she must have had an inkling that she would endure a marriage defined by bending to her husband’s bidding. In time, she will end up with six kids, not the two she had always imagined. She will live on a farm the subscriber buys without telling her. Peggy’s resistance will always be minimal and ineffectual, unknown to him. Behind his back, this baby, when a girl, will overhear her mother say from time to time, “After Dave washed out of Officer’s School, he was taken in by the Merchant Marines.”

Hospital: Sew. Valley
Of their brood of six, this baby will be the only one born at Sewickley Valley Hospital. In the same letter to her friend, Peggy had written: “My father died the day after Thanksgiving. If he were still alive, we wouldn’t have considered my going back home but it works out very well this way as Mother has room for us, Snuffy [the older son] can go to kindergarten & Mother has a colored gal & a gas furnace—so there will be no cooking, dishes or furnace.” (In her previous home in the Allegheny Mountains, Peggy had battled the coal furnace and the drafty windows that let in the snow. She resorted to chopping up the children’s wood toys for kindling.) One can picture Peggy happy to be resting for almost two weeks after this baby’s birth, relieved to be away from her noisy two- and four-year-olds left with her mother. The baby, while growing up, will hear her mother say on occasion, “Children should be seen, but not heard.”

City: Sewickley
Sewickley was a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. Families belonged to country clubs and had help to manage the household. Children were sent to boarding schools in the East. Anna married Fletcher assuming wealth in the family—after all his father was Judge White of some renown. But her husband treated doctoring as a hobby, generating a meager income. Fortunately, Anna’s bachelor uncle Harry set up a trust fund for his great-nieces. She managed it with great care, so no one in town was the wiser.

Peggy will always think of herself as a Sewickley girl. When her children meet new friends, she will ask, “Does she look like somebody?” This means, they all will know, does the friend look like they could have come from Sewickley, from old money, from the upper class.

Subscriber: David Smith
Known as “Dave” or “D.H.” by his friends, his fellow auto dealers, the subscriber will be called Dad by four of his children (Snuffy, the oldest, will refer to him as “the old man”), but this baby girl will continue to call him Daddy long after he dies.

At the time of the hospital bill, he has survived the Great Depression by tumble-weeding through jobs as an orderly at the Massachusetts State Hospital for the Epileptic Insane, riding “shotgun” running booze from New York to speakeasies in Hoboken, NJ, as a door-to-door Hoover Vacuum Cleaner salesman. When he is eighty-five, his adult children will gather at the home of this daughter. They will videotape him retelling his Depression tales, their voices chirping in the background, exhorting him to retell their favorites. He was born the oldest of three boys, named for his father, a “cold Irish Protestant” (the subscriber’s words). From whom he learned the art of storytelling is unclear, but he relished a rapt audience and could weave a yarn worth paying for.

It is known from a letter from Peggy to her husband that he shipped out of New York with the Merchant Marines in March 1944 (Dave, the romantic in this couple, saved every bit of correspondence he ever received from his wife). It can be surmised he was living with his wife in Sewickley after his discharge from the Army and during the early months of this baby’s life. To her twenty-year-old brother-in-law, a bomber pilot stationed in Germany, Peggy will write that her infant was driving Dave crazy as they tried to wean her from the bottle to a cup. She suggests her husband might willingly sell this squawking baby “for a nickel.” (Peggy is known for her sense of humor.) Indeed, the mother will recount in later years how the baby wailed so furiously, they had to close the windows so as to not disturb the neighbors. Perhaps the parents should have noted her staunch resistance to giving up the bottle might have foreshadowed the girl’s determination to figure out how to get what she needed in this family.

Dave will not see his baby again until early 1945 when he returns stateside following an injury during the Battle of Anzio. In following years, he will refer to her as “the runt of his litter” due to her scrawny size. It will sound like a term of endearment to the girl who by then has learned how to become his favorite.

Group: 1143 Contract: 55788
The fortuitous date of this birth—while the subscriber was still employed by Chevrolet and before he left for Basic Training—allowed Blue Cross to cover the majority of the charges for the hospital stay. Timing will continue to work in Dave’s favor. He will own the Chevy dealership in the 1950’s when his loyal customers buy new cars every other year, move on to Volkswagen just as the VW bug becomes a craze, then to Mazda when Americans begin buying Japanese cars. He will purchase his 109-acre farm, then all the surrounding farms as land is appreciating in value.

His children will all grow into hard-working, good-hearted people—no drugs, excessive alcohol, no trouble with the law. Yet, ever the pessimist, Dave will not view his life as a success. In his eighties, he will regularly phone this daughter with revolving complaints about his other children. Money will be at the root of his dismay as he ruminates about which ones have taken advantage of his largesse. “Everything in my life turns to shit,” he will tell her. This daughter listens without pointing out how absurdly lucky he has been.

ACCOMMODATIONS:

Private_____x__________ Semi-Private_____________ Ward______________
Seriously—could anyone consider that Peggy would not be in a private room? Though Dave will make frugality his hallmark, chanting ad nauseum “Waste not, want not,” “A penny saved is a penny earned” to his children, he will also want to be viewed as a man able to provide handsomely for his wife. In those early years of their marriage, he will never complain about bills from Lang’s, their town’s tony dress store, or for the furniture Peggy and the interior decorator select at the Joseph Horne Department Store in Pittsburgh. His bitterness about their different values around money will come years later.

HOSPITAL SUBSCRIBER’S
CHARGES SAVINGS

Admitted___4-8-43___{a. m} Discharged: _4-20-43__ {xxx}
date {p. m} date {p.m.}
. xxx

Days’ stay: __13______ {Flat rate $___7.50___________ $97.50 $65.00
{Rate per day
……………..12 Baby 1.00 12.00 12.00

Baby:
The infant will not be identified on this bill, but she will be listed on the birth certificate as Carol Earhart Smith. The child will learn as she is growing up that she was named for her mother’s favorite uncle, Carroll. She will also be told Carroll is how her name is spelled on her Baptismal Certificate though she has no record of it. Her mother will refer to her as Carol in letters to the father during his stint in the Merchant Marines. Carol will learn to write her name with that spelling as she enters first grade. However, when she attends a prestigious girls’ school for her freshman year of high school, she will somehow become Carroll. She will never recall how this happened, which is astoundingly odd as she will be known throughout her life for her excellent memory. Carroll will like this spelling as it differentiates her from so many other Carol’s with the popular name. Due to all the unaddressed drama in her family life, she, by the age of fourteen, will have learned to avoid questioning what she doesn’t need or want to understand.

Though a sober young child, this daughter will become chatty by first grade and, while an excellent student, she will receive “Carol talks too much” on every report card. From time to time, she will be a bit of a smarty-pants, challenging her Bible-school teacher on how many books there are in the Bible, knowing full well most people do not include the Apocrypha in their count. She will know that how intelligent she is makes her father proud. He will ignore all the “O’s” for outstanding on her report card and will suppress a smile as he finds some minor point to pick on. With the other kids, he will focus on how they need to do a whole lot better.

When she is seventeen, Carroll will ride a bus alone for two days to Rapid City, South Dakota. Though she has been led to believe there will be a job for her, it turns out there is none. She will on her own organize a program for Oglala Sioux Native American children at a community center. Liking this feeling of doing good will convince her to pursue a career in social work. For more than four decades, Carroll will treat adolescents, couples, individuals—depressives, alcoholics, incest survivors, schizophrenics, those with bi-polar disorder, conflicts with family members. During this time, she will have four children, a caring husband and will believe herself fortunate, so fortunate to have had such a normal childhood, such a happy life. Her problems are minimal compared to her clients.

Carroll will be relieved she is nothing like her mother who she has always viewed as shallow, a lightweight holding no power. She will make her father her role model—frugal, well-organized, a doer, in control of his life. Her filtered lens, in refusing to acknowledge the other parts of him, will constrain her relationships with her siblings to ones that are friendly, but guarded.

Six years after her father’s death, her reverence for him will fall apart.

OPERATING (Delivery) ROOM _____________________________$5.00      $5.00
ANESTHESIA (Administered by hospital employee No__Yes_x_) $3.00      $3.00
MEDICATIONS______________________________________________ $2.10      $2.10
LABORATORY_______________________________________________ $7.50      $7.50
Other charges (specify)___________Phone____________ ____ $5.34

That Peggy would have a phone in her private room is no surprise (though the charge, not covered on the subscriber’s plan, equals almost half that of the stay of the infant). Who she called is a mystery. Did she talk daily with her little boy and toddler daughter, reminding them to be good, to say please and thank you? It’s impossible to imagine her telling them “I love you,” as no child will hear her utter those words while growing up. Grandmother Anna caring for them was not known to tolerate any sign of what she considered rowdiness. After Dave leaves for Officer’s Training, then months later for the Merchant Marines, Anna will complain so much about the children, Peggy will ship Snuffy to his father’s parents in New Jersey where the boy will be unconditionally adored for the only time in his life. Perhaps the phone sat idle for most of the days, used only to commiserate with a friend or two whose husbands were already overseas. Perhaps she avoided hearing how her children misbehaved by allowing that phone to rest in its cradle. Never one to consider the cost of things, she would not have worried about her husband paying for something she rarely touched.

TOTAL CHARGES_______________________________$129.44 $94.60
SUBSCRIBER SAVING__________________________ $ 94.50* [mistake]
BALANCE TO BE PAID BY SUBSCRIBER______ $ 37.84* [correct balance]

Services as indicated are hereby acknowledged:

__________________________________________________
Signature of SUBSCRIBER

Dave signs David H. Smith in his legendary scrawl, the “D,” “H” and “S” slanted to the right and large enough to smack you with. Smacking comes to mind with this father as he will be remembered for hitting the back of his children’s heads for spilling milk at dinner, for moving too slowly to complete their chores, for not grabbing piglets fast enough when he was trying to deworm them, or for any number of minor infractions. Smacking will include his badgering with vicious words and the frequent use of his belt. When his children are adults, they will have a broad range of memories about, and feelings toward, their father. Some will hold onto fierce bitterness, some a messy mix of fondness and loathing. Carroll’s devotion, for the duration of his life, will be unwavering.

The subscriber’s signature will reflect how he lived up to all his financial obligations whether they be the annual bank loans to purchase new cars, college educations for his children, the dozen years of assisted living care for the wife he stopped loving decades earlier. He will disperse much of his wealth to his children through shares in his land and auto dealerships (though he will also keep track of those he feels have taken advantage of his generosity).

Only after her father’s death will Carroll learn about the cruelty he foisted on several of her siblings, recognize his crushing control over every financial, physical, and emotional part of the family’s life. Only then will she come to understand that her father left this earth with a balance owed.

After a career in social work, Carroll Sandel took her first class at Boston’s Grub Street Writing Center in 2010 and felt as though she had leapt off a cliff. That exhilarating, terrifying feeling re-emerges each time she sits at the computer to write again. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Pangyrus, r.kv.r.y., The Drum and Grub Daily. She was a 2014 and a 2017 finalist for the nonfiction prize in New Letters. Currently she is working on a memoir of linked essays exploring her untrustworthy memories.