Leni

© 2013 by John LaTorre

Her name was Leni Keiner, and she came into our lives in the late 1950s. Her occupation was "Putzfrau" or cleaning woman, but she ended up being much more than that.

She was not the first maid my family had. When my parents lived in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, both of them worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, which meant that they had both the income and the need to hire somebody to do some cleaning and ironing, and to make sure their two young sons had somebody to take care of them when they came home from school. They ended up engaging somebody I knew only as Mrs. Bouvier. Mrs. Bouvier didn't think much of of us kids, nor we her, but we generally respected each other's space. My only complaint was that we couldn't watch our new television when we came home from school, as Mrs. Bouvier insisted on watching it as she did the ironing. She favored soap operas and game shows such as "Queen for a Day," whose format consisted of several women telling the world their problems, after which the audience would determine which of the contestants had the most miserable life; the winner would be named Queen, robed and crowned as befitted her new estate, and showered with appliances, perfume, and other prizes. (I don't remember whether any of the other contestants got anything for their troubles.)

We moved away from Hillcrest Heights when I finished second grade. After a year in Bethesda, my father got a promotion and a reassignment to West Germany. This was in 1957. We lived "on the economy," in a rented apartment, for a few months, and then were assigned quarters in one of the US housing areas that had been built in the early fifties to accommodate the huge number of military families in Frankfurt.

One of the first things my mother learned was that maids could be had dirt cheap. Germany's economy, ravaged during the second World War, had been slow to recover, and there were more able-bodied people than there were jobs for them. So many people who would otherwise have been shopkeepers and skilled workers took whatever jobs that could put food on the table. Mom also discovered that our apartment building had a series of rooms on the attic floor, which I think were intended for single officers but were mainly used instead for maid's quarters. Evidently, these could be had for a small fee, and the attraction of a room in an economy short of living quarters was a powerful inducement for young women to take up temporary careers as maids.

As I recall, the first maid we hired was Julianna. A middle-aged woman with bad teeth and an easy laugh, she quickly made friends with me. I saw her knitting one day, and she taught me to knit, a hobby I practiced until Mom told me that it was not a manly thing to do. Julianna would also play records on our new hi-fi, which my parents didn't mind. She also helped herself to the family liquor cabinet, which my parents minded very much, so she was given her pink slip.

The next one was a quiet, docile girl named Renata. She did everything quietly and without complaint. I didn't get to know her as well as I did with Julianna, but that was probably because she didn't last as long. My parents got a call from the German police one day. Evidently one of the maids had been stealing from the other maids on the floor, and after some investigation they determined that it was Renata. So she was taken away to the pokey, and we were maidless again.

There may have been another maid or two, but then Leni came along. She had some advantages: she was as honest as the day was long, she had unfailing energy, and she could speak some English after a fashion. Mom was delighted to find her, and before long she was a regular employee. Also, she had her own apartment in a nearby suburb, where she and her husband lived on a pension and from which she commuted by means of a big, heavy, black bicycle, thereby saving Mom and the Dad the maid's-room fee.

Leni's frame was largely composed of spheres ... a round head, a stout body, heavy breasts, and fat hands. She had a pale complexion and straight black hair, mixed with gray and usually pulled up in a bun ... yet another sphere ... on her head. She was stronger than she looked, and when engaged on a project like scrubbing the floors, she preferred to work at a constant vigorous speed rather than stop for rests. She would usually arrive at ten in the morning, after we kids had gone to school, and we would first see her when we came home for lunch (our school was only a few hundred yards from our apartment, so we seldom took our lunches there). She would have chicken noodle soup ready for us, and would make us peanut butter sandwiches (which, in her fractured English, would come out "peanoots-booter sandvich"). She would usually be gone by the time we got home in the afternoon, having gone to her own place to prepare dinner for Herr Keiner. Once in a while, though, she would stay longer, if my mother needed her to; this was usually when we were having company, and Mom wished to serve dishes that were beyond her modest cooking skills. When Leni was finished, she would announce her departure in German, or more accurately, in the particular dialect of Hesse: "Ick geh' da-hahm."

In 1960, our family adopted a baby girl, and my mother was suddenly busier than ever, so Leni stayed longer and longer. She was the first grandmother-figure my sister had. In fact, in large part, she was the first grandmother-figure my brother and I had, too; Mom's mother died before I was born, and Dad's mother never really established much of a relationship with is, preferring to talk to us in Italian, a language we never learned. When I think of what a proper grandmother should be like, it's always Leni who comes to mind.

I can't say that she ever impinged on our social life, or we on hers. I do remember going over to her house from time to time, where she would serve us tea and cookies. (When visiting in Germany, it is expected that one will be given at least tea and cookies. Anything less is considered a horrible breach of etiquette.) I almost never saw Herr Keiner. He was often there, but preferred to stay in another room, smoking and watching television or listening to the radio. But Leni was usually there at our birthday parties, whether as a friend or a servant I neither knew nor cared. And, once or twice, I met her daughter, a middle-aged woman with a trim figure and a reserved politeness to me.

Our family returned to the States in 1962, but were back in Germany for another tour in 1964. And again we hired Leni whenever we needed a maid. Her hair was grayer, but she never seemed to slow down. In 1965, I was hit by a car and spent several months in the hospital. One day, my father brought me something. It was a medal, awarded to soldiers in the German army who had served in the Franco-Prussian War. My father told me that it was from Herr Keiner. To this day, I have no idea where Herr Keiner obtained it; he was too young to have participated in that war, but it might have been earned by someone in his family, or he may have purchased it from a veteran. (Such medals can be bought today for about twenty to thirty dollars, which suggests that there were probably a great many of them in circulation at one time.) And I'm not sure whether he meant to indicate that I, too, was fighting a battle that deserved recognition, or that he simply thought that the medal might be something a teenaged boy might find cool to own. Either way, I was touched. I have it to this day.

My parents moved back the United States briefly in 1969, and then for good in 1974. I don't remember seeing Leni when I visited them during my college days, but my sister tells me that Leni was constantly in her life during that time. Once our family had moved stateside for good, we lost touch with her. I guess that she was, in the end, just another employee with which our family had a long relationship, and I have no reason to think that were more than steady employers to her. But now that I'm at the age that she was when we last met, I think that I'd like to have known her better. I think that we could have been friends of a sort, or even part of an extended family. I guess I'll never know.