Looking up from his newspaper and cocking his ear toward the Kunkel’s house next door, my father said, “Dootsie Bobo’s at it again.” Dootsie Bobo was the tag my father originally had hung on the younger Walter Kunkel. In the years since Walter had moved out, the name had gravitated toward and finally stuck on old Mr. Kunkel himself.
A decade after the death of Mrs. Kunkel, and several years after the departure of their only son, the original Dootsie Bobo, it became clear that old man Kunkel’s main hobby was getting tanked on cheap wine. Once the weather turned warm and windows were left open, the giveaway that the old Mr. Kunkel was hitting the bottle was the sound of music coming from the otherwise silent house next door to ours. Early evening, any night of the week, in Spring or deep in August, we’d hear the laid-back voice of Perry Como and the holiday song, “Silver Bells.” Over and over and over in the summer air, “Silver Bells, Silver Bells. It’s Christmastime in the city…” It may not have been his only phonograph record, but it was the only one we heard. An old man, alone seeking solace in a few drinks, and maybe memories of happier holidays past. Not quite.
Mr. Kunkel had been given a benign, friendly face that belied his dour, miserly, misanthropic nature. He was tall and thin, and his face and his movements had an almost rubbery quality. With his long overcoats and turned up hat brims, he could have been the model for a cartoon character. But there was nothing funny or amusing about Mr. Kunkel. A nod in return to a greeting was about all you’d get. Once, before his closet drinking came out into the open, I had gotten an stern lecture from him on linguistics. Standing in front of Kunkel’s porch, I had said something to Bobby Yanks about the difficulty of learning another language. Mr. Kunkel rose from his rocking chair and proceeded to rant about the irregular nature of the English language. “I mean,” he said, “what about a word like machinery? Ma-sheen-a-ree, right?” His voice rising, he shouted, “ oh no, no, no. If you were trying to learn English, you’d have to pronounce it mack-hine-a-ree. Don’t tell me,” he said indignantly, “that learning other languages is hard. Our own language is the one that’s hard.” Finished, he plopped back down in his rocker, disappearing behind the big hydrangea bushes that screened his porch.
My mother’s active dislike of Mr. Kunkel dated from the third year we lived in our house. Mrs. Kunkel, a tiny, nervous woman with oversized eyes magnified by thick glasses, had taken to confiding in my mother. It seemed that “the Mister” was the master of all things in their universe, with particular emphasis on financial matters. She told my mother that in the thirty years of her marriage, she had never been allowed to have any money of her own. If she had to make a purchase, no matter how small, she had to ask him in advance every time for the precise amount she needed. Whether it was for a pair of shoes or for the week’s groceries, he had to know exactly what the costs would be, and she had to leave the receipts for his inspection. She told my mother of terrible rows over small change. My mother had the impression that she was more than a bit afraid of him.
While we were relative newcomers to the street, Mr. Kunkel had bought the house next to ours new in 1923. I had been inside only once. On a cold rainy afternoon after school, Mrs. Kunkel called me in and asked me to run an errand. I remember the kitchen with the original gray enamel, footed gas range. The furnishings were spartan and I would have guessed that everything was much the same as it was the day they moved in. When I got back from the errand, Mrs. Kunkel said she wasn’t feeling good and gave me a nickel. When I told my mother, she didn’t say anything, but she put on her coat and went next door. When she came back, she told me that I should always do anything that Mrs. Kunkel needed doing, but that I should try never to take any money for it. “In fact,” she said, “you come to me and I’ll give you something.”
My mother’s lasting, implacable antipathy toward “The Mister,” and to some degree the son, arose when she learned that Mrs. Kunkel had been sent home from the hospital to die. The old man worked for G.E. in their Steam Turbine Division. His title, young Walter once let slip, was Supervising Designer. My father estimated that Mr. Kunkel’s daily earnings probably far exceeded his own weekly pay. Every morning at five a.m., Mr. Kunkel would walk the five blocks to the train station at Seventh and Tabor. Once in town, it was another five blocks to Suburban Station for a train to Colwyn in Delaware County, south of the city on the river. I’d see him coming back up the street every night about seven.
One weekday in mid-morning, my mother heard a knocking on the common wall separating Kunkel’s from our house. Unknown to “The Mister,” Mrs. Kunkel had given my mother a key to the house in case of an emergency. My Mother rushed over and found Mrs. Kunkel crumbled up on the floor in the upstairs hallway. She had gotten out of bed to use the bathroom and had not made it. When my mother had helped her back to bed she discovered that the Kunkel’s, father and son, had gone off to work leaving their dying wife and mother in bed with a hotplate, a can opener, and a can of Campbell’s Soup on the nightstand next to the bed. My mother was enraged. After that, she went next door for most of the day, every day until a week and a half later when Mrs. Kunkel died. If Mr. Kunkel knew that my mother had been in their house, he never brought it up. And my mother never said another word to him, not at the funeral and not once in the next ten or more years that he lived next door to us.
Tags: 1923, 1945-1955, colwyn, g.e., memoir, olney, perry como, philadelphia, suburban station
