My Uncle Frank considered himself to be quite the ladies’ man. The fact that during 80 some-odd years on this earth there was not another human being who even remotely regarded him that way was immaterial. In his mind he had a way with the ladies.
Auntie Rose, Frank’s wife and my mother’s favorite sister, was under no such illusions. On Auntie’s frequent visits to Florida, when she would displace my younger brother and me from our bedroom, she and my mother would sit at the dining room table and talk late into the night while I pretended to be asleep on the living room sofa.
“I never loved Frank,” she once told my mother; Auntie saw Frank, a hard worker, as her ticket out of the working-class, Slovenian neighborhood where she and my mother grew up. “But he’s a good provider.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t put up with John cheating on me,” mused my mother.
Auntie guffawed. “Frank doesn’t cheat,” she said, then quoted a line that she used frequently during her long life: “A dog chases cars, but what would he do if he caught one?” They both chuckled, then, certain that I was asleep, Auntie shared some of the more salacious details of her personal life with Uncle Frank, details she would not have knowingly shared with a 10 year old boy and although I didn’t understand a lot of what I heard, I know I heard Auntie say, “No, more like a gherkin,” and my mother said, “Rose!” in a scandalized voice. That pretty much ensured I would never look at Frank the same way again.
It was a couple of years later that we were all in Cleveland for some family function; my parents and brother and I were staying with Auntie and Uncle this trip and once again I was on the sofa while Mom and Auntie were up late in the dining room.
That night we had endured a horribly awkward dinner at a neighborhood restaurant during which Uncle Frank spent a good part of the meal flirting with a bored waitress while Auntie ignored him and my parents squirmed in embarrassment. The meal ended with Frank patting the waitress’s bottom; she shouted “Don’t touch me!” loud enough that all conversation in the restaurant stopped. I looked at Frank: he was beaming proudly.
“Why do you tolerate that?” asked Mom now. “It’s degrading.”
I was pretending to be asleep but I could visualize Auntie shrugging. “It’s harmless,” she said, and I knew Mom was pursing her lips in disapproval; she did that a lot with Auntie.
“How can you be so sure?” asked Mom and Auntie laughed out loud.
“I’ll tell you how I’m sure,” said Auntie.
Apparently there had been a recent dinner/dance at the Country Club that Frank, at Auntie’s insistence, had joined, golf being the one thing they had in common. As in all country clubs there was a fair amount of tension between two competing factions: the golf ladies, who dyed their hair unnaturally dark and drank like fish, and the tennis ladies, every one a pert blonde with an eating disorder.
At this particular soiree, as the alcohol flowed freely Frank asked tennis lady Tillie Hoover to spend some time with him in his Cadillac and, apparently to Frank’s surprise, she agreed. Accordingly, the two took a bottle of vodka to the backseat of the Caddy — where, to no one’s surprise, except possibly Frank’s, nothing happened. Nothing at all.
Before the evening was done every member, guest and employee at the Country Club knew the story of the whole non-event and eventually Tillie’s best friend felt compelled to tell Auntie who shrugged.
“What did you say?” asked Mom, appalled.
“A dog chases cars, but what would he do if he caught one?” said Auntie.