Being Polite to Hitler

by Robb Forman Dew

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield realizes that she is truly weary of the routine her life has become. But how, at 51, can she establish an identity apart from what has so long defined her? Often eloquent, sometimes blunt, and always full of fire, The Scofield clan is not a family that keeps its opinions to itself. As much as she'd like to, Agnes can no more deflect their adamant advice than she can step down as their matriarch. And despite her newfound freedom, Agnes finds herself becoming even more entangled in the family web. She shepherds her daughter-in-law, Lavinia, who moves in with her own two daughters to escape her husband's drinking. She puts out fires, smoothes fraying nerves, and, stunned as anyone, receives a marriage proposal. Having expected her life to become smaller, Agnes is amazed to see it grow instead. Robb Forman Dew intricately weaves together personal and family life into a richly wrought tapestry of the country in the 1950s and beyond. Being Polite to Hitler is a moving, frank, and surprising portrait of post-World War II America.

Release date: January 6, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 317

Sample

Glowing praise for Robb Forman Dew’s

Being Polite

“Robb Forman Dew is one of our great national treasures: a novelist whose keen and sympathetic understanding of human nature is matched by her elegant, beautiful prose. Being Polite to Hitler is an absorbing story in which many readers will find their own families, and their own selves.”

—Dani Shapiro, author of Family History and Devotion: A Memoir

“Highly original…. Robb Forman Dew covers both the cosmic and the quotidian as she follows a formidably intermingled group of people in the town of Washburn, Ohio…. Dew’s novels identify and describe not just a town and its people but the American mind-set at particular moments in time. Being Polite to Hitler—the title refers to one character’s despairing conviction that everyone she knows would obey social protocol no matter what—tracks an individual woman, her extended community, a country, and a whirling, sliding, vulnerable world…. The novel has the ache and inevitability of real life…. Dew also sprinkles her storytelling with inventively apt asides, as when a character explains how a dog’s stomach can spontaneously twist, ‘the way a lemon drop is wrapped.’ This sort of casual juxtaposition is ingenious and surprising. Being Polite to Hitler is a deeply knowing novel—progressive, certainly, and at times quietly, thrillingly strange.”

—Meg Wolitzer, New York Times Book Review

“A winning, quietly lyrical account of a simpler time.”

—Lisa Kay Greissinger, People

“Readers fortunate enough to have been introduced to the Scofields of Washburn, Ohio, in The Evidence Against Her and The Truth of the Matter, novels chronicling the lives of the family from the late 19th century until just after World War II, need no inducement to seek out this third book in the series. While Dew’s novels can be read independently of one another, taken together they’re a remarkable achievement, a vividly detailed and deeply textured mural of a century of American life…. Dew zooms into the hearts and minds of her characters with the kind of acuity that reminds us why we read. Chief among the rewards of this novel is the delineation of a stage of human development given little attention in popular culture, that of the older woman…. Throughout the novel, Dew renders the political personal and the personal incandescent.”

—Rachel Basch, Washington Post

“I never want my favorite books to end because I miss the characters too much, which is why I loved the third in a trilogy by National Book Award winner Robb Forman Dew, the provocatively titled Being Polite to Hitler. Dew follows fifty-four-year-old Agnes Scofield through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as she reinvents herself, navigating the minefields of rapidly changing country and family. Every sentence is a rhapsody.”

—Caroline Leavitt, Miami Herald

“Dew’s quietly powerful tale is riveting.”

—Good Housekeeping

“National Book Award winner Dew wraps up the trilogy she began with The Evidence Against Her by considering, in ways both joyful and elegiac, the juxtaposition of the profound and the mundane through the years 1953 to 1973 in small-town Washburn, Ohio…. Agnes is clearly a literary heir of Mrs. Ramsay, and the narrative, ranging freely not only among Agnes’s sprawling family but also throughout her political and cultural milieu, owes a debt to Woolf…. Dew’s latest is an impressionistic portrait of a family and an age striving for clarity and understanding.”

—Publishers Weekly

“The author has imagined an entire past and future for characters major and minor, and she periodically distributes tantalizing morsels thereof. The inner life of women, and of Agnes in particular, is Dew’s subject matter, along with its corollary, the relentless littleness of daily life. The novel develops in exquisite detail the pressures of preparing a big-family, small-town Christmas; the nurturing of pets, often so much more rewarding than nurturing one’s fractious family; and other minutiae. Larger events—Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, is integrated, Russia’s Sputnik shockingly penetrates the heavens—register briefly, usually in the consciousness of others well outside the novel’s immediate social circle. Arch yet affecting, conventionally realistic one moment, metafictionally ironic the next, and leisurely to the point of outright eccentricity, the narrative defies easy characterization. Very little seems to happen, except for much of midcentury American reality.”

—Amanda Heller, Boston Sunday Globe

“A widowed schoolteacher realizes she can’t handle another day of taking care of other people in National Book Award–winning novelist Robb Forman Dew’s generous, insightful new social comedy, Being Polite to Hitler…. This is Dew’s third book featuring Agnes Scofield, but (once they’ve made a flow chart of Scofields, Claytors, and Butlers) newcomers won’t regret visiting Washburn…. Being Polite to Hitler does a wonderful job of revealing, as one character puts it, ‘the inevitable conclusion that the profound and the mundane are joined at the hip’ and ‘there’s no such thing as an ordinary person anywhere in the world.’ ”

—Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor

“And this is what Being Polite to Hitler is all about: a twenty-year sliver of Agnes Scofield’s life. Robb Forman Dew, who won a National Book Award in 1982 for Dale Loves Sophie to Death, has captured again, beautifully, the poetry of the everyday. Her narrative flows effortlessly from character to character, from voice to voice, as does her sense of time, from present to future to past and back again…. Dew’s elegant words capture personalities so well…. In Being Polite to Hitler, with lush, graceful language, Robb Forman Dew reminds us that much of what we consider to be ordinary in our lives, in the end, turns out to be quite extraordinary.”

—Jim Carmin, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Dew uses her signature elegant and often delightfully funny style to move seamlessly back and forth between the macro-and microcosm of the new America.”

—Beth E. Andersen, Library Journal

“Robb Forman Dew is a master at delineating the way the mundane and profound are ‘joined at the hip,’ and Being Polite to Hitler in its portrait of midcentury America shuttles us smoothly from the most intimate heartbreak to events of interest worldwide, reminding us of the nearly infinite variations of grief, and solace, and how even the most conscientious and compassionate can leave emotional havoc in their wake.”

—Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway and You Think That’s Bad

“Readers familiar with Ms. Dew’s earlier books, The Evidence Against Her and The Truth of the Matter, will be happily reunited with the many Scofields, Butlers, and Claytors in these pages…. Not surprisingly, it’s in her careful delineations of the quotidian that she writes most piercingly…. Being Polite to Hitler never loses its real purpose: to demonstrate that in a world full of iniquity, potential as well as realized, the very least one can do is stay morally vigilant, even if it means making a ruckus at someone’s dinner party.”

—Suzanne Berne, New York Times

“If you’ve been reading Robb Forman Dew these many years, fiction and nonfiction, you know that she is, like her main character Agnes Scofield, the consummate matriarch. There is beauty and order in her sentences and in the lives of her characters. There is trauma, pain, and uncertainty but also a community of spirit beneath all of her books…. This novel shows why history is supplemented and often surpassed by fiction, by the fleshing out, the empathy, the imagining of lives lived and lost in the not-so-distant past.”

—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

AGNES SCOFIELD didn’t know—nor would she have cared—that at precisely the moment she gave up her pretense of disinterest and lost touch altogether with her common sense, the Mississippi River reached its lowest level in history farther south in Memphis, Tennessee. As did the Kokosing River, right there in Washburn, Ohio, on the Monday afternoon of October 5, 1953, as it made its sluggish progress past the industries that had grown up along its banks.

Since early spring a drought had overspread most of the country, extracting energy from every source available and causing extreme reactions on the part of all manner of plant and animal species. Locally, however, no one in Washburn gave much thought to the communal stress caused by the prolonged and extreme heat and the lack of rain. It would be unseemly, in October, to complain about heat and light when generally the weather at that time of year would be shifting toward fall and the short, gray days and the often painful cold of winter.

On Saturday, October 3, the Brooklyn Dodgers had tied the Yankees at two games each in the 1953 World Series, but she had listened to game five on Sunday afternoon with her youngest son, Howard, and Sam Holloway, who had dropped by with tomatoes from his garden and stayed on to hear the game. It had been a blowout: eleven to seven Yankees, but Agnes remained optimistic, and Sam pretended to believe there was still hope, because he hated seeing Agnes disappointed. Having grown up in southern Louisiana, where football reigned, Sam had never known any woman—any family—as passionate about baseball as was Agnes Scofield and the assorted lot of people who were more or less related to her. Any one of them could generally be found at her house during a game—just stopping by briefly to catch the score or settled for an afternoon or evening on the wide back porch, where two radios were set to different stations if both the Cleveland Indians and the Cincinnati Reds happened to have games scheduled at the same time.

Sam himself had slowly been converted from the adrenaline surge of an LSU football game on Saturday nights to the subtle and sometimes excruciating tension and obsessive statistic keeping of the game of baseball. In fact, it was Sam’s idea to set up Agnes’s schoolroom with some of the trappings of a genuine ballpark so that she and her third-grade students could listen to game six.

He went to some lengths to make arrangements for Agnes’s class to listen to that sixth game, which was broadcast live at noon on Monday. He brought his radio from home, tuned it to the right station, and left it centered on her desk in her classroom at Jesser Grammar School. At lunchtime, instead of filing into the cafeteria after “big recess,” her third-grade students returned to the classroom for what Agnes had explained to them would be an “afternoon at the ballpark.” Sam had called in a favor from the Eola Arms Hotel, where he conducted a lot of business, and two of their kitchen staff set up a buffet table at the back of the room from which Agnes served potato salad, baked beans, and hot dogs from a chafing dish. She dressed the hot dogs with each child’s choice of condiments as he or she filed past one by one.

As Mr. Byerly, head of the Eola Arms crew, directed the clearing away—including the buffet table itself and other assorted equipment—Agnes invited him and his two helpers to stay and listen to the game as well, but Mr. Byerly said he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it with the Yankees likely to win the series again.

As the game progressed inning by inning, Agnes passed out twenty-eight boxes of Cracker Jacks and, in the seventh inning, twenty-eight bags of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts. The hotel had also provided Coca-Cola, root beer, and Nehi grape and orange soda, all bought out of Sam’s own pocket, Agnes imagined, but set up for her in an ice-filled tub by the Eola Arms crew.

Some of her students didn’t know what this particular event was all about; they weren’t sure what the World Series consisted of, especially the girls, but no one had any complaints. Sharon Kuhlman, for instance, who was eight years old, didn’t discover that the World Series was not always a game between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers until her first year of college in Bennington, Vermont. She had made a point in her life, as soon as she was old enough to realize she had a choice, of ignoring athletics altogether as an anti-intellectual pursuit. But in her first year away at an all-women’s school, she fell in love with a boy from Williams College, thirty miles south of Bennington, who happened to be on the college’s baseball team. His major, though, was art history, which, in Sharon’s view, made his interest in sports endearing.

But in Sharon’s third-grade classroom during the sixth game of the World Series in 1953, she pretended enthusiasm when any of her classmates cheered. Otherwise she simply enjoyed the freedom to color or paint or read any of the books Mrs. Scofield provided in low bookcases at the back of the classroom.

As the game wound on, though, and the excitement of unlimited Coca-Cola and the inevitably disappointing Cracker Jack prizes wore off, Mrs. Scofield resorted to busying those students less self-sufficient than Sharon Kuhlman with a jigsaw puzzle she had spread out on a card table. She encouraged freehand drawing and watercolor painting, and she even agreed to the paper-airplane-folding-and-distance competition. But the children’s sweaty hands smudged their artistic efforts and wilted and grubbied the crisp upturned wings of their white paper planes. An air of petulance hung in the classroom as the heat intensified throughout the afternoon inside the unshaded, wedding-cake-white-embellished but otherwise dark redbrick box of Jesser Grammar School. And, as the Yankees’ Billy Martin got hit after hit, Agnes, too, grew disconsolate, although she believed she was successful in not showing her disappointment.

By the time the game ended, the Yankees had clinched the series, beating the Dodgers four games to two for their fifth consecutive World Series win. Ricky Johnson and Adrian McConnell—who were best friends but each a passionate fan of those separate opposing teams—erupted from their desks into a shoving match in the aisle. The confrontation escalated into punches thrown and furious name-calling. Agnes came from behind her desk and stooped to separate the boys. Ricky was red-faced with heat and despair, and Adrian was also overheated but fervently triumphant.

Agnes grabbed the backs of their sweat-dampened collars as if they were rabbits, and pulled them apart, but just at that moment Adrian sprang backwards, and his head slammed against Agnes’s temple. She exhaled a sharp “Ah!” of surprise and put her hand to her head, and each boy immediately subsided into his desk across the aisle from the other. They were still so mad at each other, though, and horrified by Mrs. Scofield’s dismay, that they dissolved into tears, as did Agnes Scofield herself, to the consternation of her dumbstruck students.

The classroom became unnaturally quiet as Mrs. Scofield continued to speak to Ricky and Adrian without any quaver of crying in her voice, but with tears running freely down her face. As she spoke, she stroked a gentle circle with the tips of her fingers over the side of her head that had collided with Adrian McConnell’s. “… and you both know better! You both… Being a good sport about losing—and winning, too…” She wasn’t aware that she was crying, but her voice floated away without resonating in her own mind as the pain of the collision briefly blossomed across her forehead and the bridge of her nose and shockingly deep behind her eyes and along her cheekbones.

She paused midsentence and briefly closed her eyes until the pain subsided a bit, and then she carried on, carefully looking out the window so the children wouldn’t notice her distress. She aimed her gaze above her students’ heads at the dry playground, but she found no consolation there. The jungle gym glinted white in the appalling glare, and the swings baked in the sun just beyond the shade of the single, ancient walnut tree, under which the girls played jacks at recess. “… learning how to lose is part of growing up,” she said. But she knew what she was saying was nonsense; it was only ever possible to pretend not to mind losing: Losing was always terrible.

Agnes’s head hurt; her lips were chapped and dry, and yet the nape of her neck was damp and her collar clammy with perspiration. “And learning to win without bragging—especially if you’re a Yankees fan”—her own voice suddenly broke tearfully—“and your best friend’s team loses to them for the second year in a row…” Ricky and Adrian were all attention, as was the rest of the class, and the steady throbbing of her head as well as her own bitter disappointment hit Agnes like a ton of bricks, transforming the brief welling-up of tears into a genuine sob, which was interrupted by the final bell. She was able to pull herself together while the children gathered their things and fell into place in the separate girls’ or boys’ line, departing in opposite directions in relatively good order.



As the summer of 1953 had dwindled toward autumn across much of the United States—in Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Washington, DC—the unusually dry, hot weather, which had first manifested itself in June, held fast, and anyone whose livelihood depended solely upon agriculture became edgy and preoccupied by the relentlessly sunny days. Small farmers were worried, of course, but not nearly so anxious as the major national and international brokerage houses, newly invested in the booming postwar food-processing industry, pesticide manufacturing, and grain and sugar importing and exporting. That a prolonged arid season had stalled over much of the United States and part of Canada was of interest worldwide, and a change in the weather was hoped for by powerful industrialists, major and minor bureaucrats, and a variety of businessmen all over the world.

Residents of the stricken areas were far less aware of the consequences of the drought, even though most endured a mild variation of grief as the climate continued to confound their expectations. But who could complain about the dazzlingly clear skies and weekend after weekend of being able to go fishing, or swimming, or golfing? What a boon it was to busy mothers that, day after day, their children could play outside from morning till night.

Gardeners, however, from Indiana to Washington State were at liberty to bemoan the dry pods of overlarge pole beans, the stunted corn. And, too, anyone whose household relied upon a private well was free to complain about having to abandon watering the arduously cultivated but frivolous flower beds in order to save the tomato plants and melons.

Late in September and into early October, the crop damage from the drought had already been done, but, still, the peculiarly dry, hot, windy weather didn’t abate. Day after day an unarticulated discontent grew even among people who had no stake at all in agriculture, commercial or otherwise. Even people who never set foot in a garden grew short-tempered and uneasy, although it remained the case that the general edginess wasn’t recognized collectively. Most people blamed their disquiet, if any, on issues particular to their own lives, and certainly those tensions were at a peak under the persistently bright, sunny, rainless skies.

Agnes, in her deserted third-grade classroom, collected the children’s artwork, picked up the paper airplanes, and straightened the desks into neat rows; she leaned out the window to clap the erasers clean in a cloud of chalk and then returned them to the shelf beneath the blackboard. She boxed up and put away the jigsaw puzzle and folded the card table. She straightened the room by rote, all the while thinking how much she hated the Yankees, hated Billy Martin and his shoddy life… Mickey Mantle, with his pugnacious but smarmy boy-next-door expression that didn’t quite disguise what Agnes believed to be an underlying nastiness. She pegged him as a slyly disguised bully. She didn’t even have a kind thought for Yogi Berra, too cute by half. It simply wasn’t fair… and what sort of parents would allow their son to be a Yankees fan?

She sat down again at her desk, in a sudden clutch of panicky breathlessness. It was a sensation she had recently begun to notice with fair regularity, and she sat very straight with the heel of her hand against her chest, imagining she would feel the odd flutter beneath her palm, imagining she could quiet it with applied pressure. She concentrated on slowing her breathing, and although she could not, after all, find any rushing pulse beneath her hand, that unnerving internal quaking did begin to ease, and her breathing became less ragged.

She slumped once more against the back of her chair and took a deep breath, which turned into a sigh as she exhaled. It was only October and all at once she was assailed by the fact of all the many long days remaining in the school year. She glanced out the windows, again, in the idle hope of a mitigating distraction, but the arid landscape offered her nothing more than a visual manifestation of persistence under duress.

She never wanted to teach another day in her life! That realization finally eclipsed her disappointment over the ball game, overshadowed the throbbing pain in her temple, and came full into her mind, at precisely the moment regional waterways reached their shallowest levels of the century. Of course, Agnes had no idea of that fact, and perhaps it had nothing at all to do with her own bottoming-out.

Once the notion of being free of her teaching responsibilities solidified, however, she recognized the inflexibility of it. But she also had to take into account the fact that she was just over fifty years old and couldn’t possibly afford to retire, and her eyes filled with tears once again, which embarrassed her even though she was all by herself.



Julian Brightman, the documentary filmmaker, viewed the long, dry spell of weather as a godsend; he hadn’t had to postpone filming for a single day since he had arrived in Washburn in mid-June. But the heat did make it hard to sleep in his third-floor hotel room. The temperature rarely dropped below ninety degrees all night, and for weeks now he had slept in only three-or four-hour intervals of tossing and turning, rotating his pillow when one side was damp with sweat. Each morning, he awoke feeling unrested and dissatisfied until he raised the shade and the brilliant, flat, white light streamed through the window of the Eola Arms Hotel. And each morning, the early traffic of cars and delivery trucks and pedestrians on and around Monument Square, directly across from the hotel, filled him with unexpected and expansive elation.

On that same first Monday in October, Julian gazed out at the people of Washburn taking up their various everyday lives on a day when it was unlikely that any devastating surprises would be visited upon their tidy, bustling community. Of course, he knew that they had no idea of the luxury they enjoyed, which made them doubly fortunate. Mr. Brightman wasn’t a petty man; he didn’t begrudge these luckiest people on earth their safety, their freedom to engage in ordinary pursuits. What he did feel toward the people of Washburn that morning was a tender beneficence as he stood at his window, planning the day’s filming. He would make a record of these people moving about with unself-conscious ease, walking along the sidewalk or sitting down on a bench to read a newspaper without the slightest hesitation. The very fact of their existence seemed to him to be the bedrock of any hopefulness left in the world.

In the hotel’s shadowy dining room Julian sat gazing out at the light reflected off the automobiles, a newspaper stand, a metal awning, and it seemed to him that the fearlessness of everyday life in the United States made Americans glisten with well-being. He was determined to illustrate their conscientiousness, as well, their industry; he wanted to illuminate their good-natured diligence, which he admired with a nearly familial and entirely sentimental indulgence, as he sat sipping his coffee. For a moment he was so intoxicated with affection for every single citizen of Washburn that it was as if he had suddenly fallen head over heels in love. He hurriedly finished his breakfast, all the while looking forward to the day’s work, during which he and his assistant, Franklin Cramer, would film an example of a day in the life of an ordinary American doctor.

Julian had already completed The Town, and The Businessman, and had begun filming The Doctor in mid-August. If everything continued to go smoothly, he expected that by the end of November he would be finished with the final three films, The School, The Working Man, and Growth and Progress—for which he already had bits of footage. So far, Dr. Edwin Caldwell, a retired physician who was cast in the leading role of The Doctor, was proving to be the easiest to work with of all the townspeople who had agreed to participate as characters in the films, essentially, of course. . .