Back Door Man * Chapter I * Hatching

A memoir of the years 1944 to 2008

HATCHING

 

There has never been a time when I was not superficial. I loathed the little boy in the hall mirror. I prayed to God to make me handsome. Looking at my face, a sickening despair crept through me. God was not listening. I would never have my wish. One day, my friends must notice the troll in their midst. They would mock me with sneers and taunts. I tried not looking when I passed the mirror but that did not last. Hope forced me to look. First, I hated my nose, big and bulbous. My face had orange freckles and my color was pallid when I wanted olive skin like my Italian playmates. If only God would give me that! Still, there is no denying that olive skin does not go with a carrot top. My red hair was the final insult. I hated it more than all my other deformities. It had to be a mark of God’s displeasure. Who could possibly like a mug like mine? I was a leper. All I wanted was acceptance and to blend in. Christ had cured lepers yet he would not make me a pretty boy. How had I deserved this except to be shallow? Having no idea that I was, I could do nothing about it and continued praying for a miracle.

I believe it was around that time I heard the first murmurs of a Wee-small-voice deep within, my intuition. Even the shallow have a degree of instinct. Everyone has the power to see what is going on under the surface but it takes time for it to grow and time to build trust. Something like a coded alarm goes off when we make a mistake. We have a sense of it when someone is fooling us or we are fooling ourselves. As useful as intuition is, it only becomes so when a man can hear it above the surface roar and act on it. Such ability is rare. As a boy whose faith was thin and hinged on God acting for me, Intuition was way beyond my grasp. I do not think that I heard it or trusted it until I reached my thirties. It would be later still before I saw how I might use it. I see now that my wee-small-voice was trying to tell the freckle-faced carrot-top that he was too hard on himself and too superficial.

I was not the only harshly self-critical child. Triviality is part of childhood. People who claim to know about these things will tell you that we form our ‘character’ by the age of three. While focused on surfaces as a child, I did not see them. Looking through old family albums from that time, I find that I was cute and photogenic after all and not an ogre. I must have thought myself grotesque out of fear of rejection by my peers. Fear follows us through life. It is ironic that the face I saw in the mirror at four is my face today.

In addition, I want to be honest and add that Mother, the self-appointed Schuessler family photographer, with her great pride in us and all her affection may have made us look better than we did.

I do not need to say the parents were not fans of superficiality. They passed it off as a childhood phase. That is fair enough. In my case, however, it went deeper and it was not a passing thing. It fits right in with the character �" or lack of it �" of the back-door-man. It is hard to hold a superficial man accountable. For a little while longer, I went on believing I was a hideous gnome. Then I shrugged it off, I guess. It was many years before I found superficial in Webster’s.

When I was old enough to consider such matters, I wondered if Destiny was a seed inside us. Did it need only the luck to land on fertile soil to become something? On the other hand, was Destiny baggage handed to us at our birth like wealth, inherited disease, or poor teeth? Was it a little of both?

Brevity is the only redeeming aspect of a dark, unforgiving Northeast February. Not being sure, I still wonder if the prosaic bone chilling winter of 1944 produced the avoidant personality that is still with me. New York City was in the grip of a long deep freeze when I began my life in that Siberian winter. What newborn would not prefer to dally a while in the warm luxurious womb from which nature has only just thrust him? I burst forth complaining, on February 19^th. Soon after that, they baptized me Paul Herbert.

Here are a few world events from the week of my first appearance on the boards of my life’s drama. WWII still raged in both theaters. Thousands continued to die as Allied victory inched closer. On my birthday, 823 British bombers attacked Berlin. Off the coast of neutral Ireland, US battleships sunk German U Boat 264. At home, though it was not quite business as usual, teams still played baseball. The day before my birthday, 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall joined the Cincinnati Reds becoming the youngest major league player in baseball history. On the 20^th, Batman and Robin premiered in American Newspapers. On the 24^th, in a coup d’état in the Argentine, the former Minister of War Juan Peron ensconced himself securely for a long bloody stay as a despot.

Mom was thirty-nine when I arrived. With that in mind, they thought of me as a second heaven sent blessing. I was their miracle baby, born when they no longer expected to conceive. They had continued to hope anyway and did their best to bring about a second coming. My entrance into the world with a full head of curly red hair and a fetal membrane, a caul, around my tiny head was a good sign. Mom believed it would bring good luck and because of it, my skin would be supple and fine. A great one for holding on to odd things, she kept that dried out, shrunken artifact in tissue paper in a drawer. She showed it to me twice, reverent, smiling and a bit emotional as she did, before it disappeared. It seemed like a fragile wisp of nothingness. I could not imagine how it had fit around my head. Now I realize that it looked like nothing but an overstretched condom.

My Brooklynite parents were Marie Ford born in 1904 and Rudy Schuessler born in 1907. Both my maternal grandparents died young: Emma Liebman, New York German, and Joe Ford, New York Irish. Joe was a gardener for the City Parks Department. At 21, he fell while pruning a tree and died. There was no widow’s pension or relief for Emma left to raise a two-year-old son and six months pregnant. Only her faith would see her through the travails that lay ahead. She slaved to keep her family together before dying of pneumonia in her fifties. A few years later, Mother married.

Though it seldom came up, when asked about it Mom did not hesitate to recall what her life was like growing up. Despite hardships, it was happy. On that subject, Dad was taciturn and did not care to discuss it. Neither of them ever referred to having been poor. Yet while their childhoods were fortunate and happy, there had been harsh financial constraints on both the Fords and the Schuesslers. Mom and Dad planned a different upbringing for their own family when they married. They did not intend to be poor.

After Mom was old enough to leave her with immigrant neighbors, before she was a year old baby, Emma went to work as a tailor in a sweatshop. Married women that did not have to work would stay home with their children during the day. Some of them were happy to take in children, for a pittance or nothing at all.

Mom talked about how she had loved the teeming streets of her native Brooklyn neighborhood. According to her, by four she was an independent, friendly, inquisitive gamine. She circulated amongst shopkeepers and neighbors no doubt caging the odd candy along the way. She adored her brother, my uncle, Joe, and he helped keep her out of harm. Her disposition was to ask for little and be happy. When I remember how I was at four �" unworldly, naïve, spoilt �" and think of Mom at the same age, the Scamp of Wilson Avenue, I shudder with contempt for myself.

Dad’s German immigrant parents always rented and they moved around as the family grew and grew. Most of the time at home his parents spoke German and their children grew up more or less bilingual as their facility for languages and their motivation to learn and use them dictated. Dad has four sisters and three brothers. They were Gertrude, Theresa, Anna and Mary, and Steve, Henry and Marty. He was born the third of eleven three of whom died - one at birth, one in early childhood, and the other of influenza in her teens. With so many children growing up in a small space, they had to be stern as well as just. Their brood was respectful with the youngest ones afraid from time to time. They had the solace of each other’s company. The Schuessler apartment could be noisy when Papa was at work. It was the happy din of polite young children working up an appetite. Delicious German food would soon grace the table, bountiful meals structured around schnitzel, sausages, various krauts, and for a rare treat on a Sunday - one we often shared with them �" sauerbraten with red cabbage and dumplings. Until dinner, the aromas emanating from Grandma’s kitchen was the glue that brought them all together. Their home buzzed with life. Because it did, theirs was a place where neighborhood children congregated. It must have been wonderful.

They all lived at home until they married. A few had no children but not by choice. None left the faith and none had a religious vocation. My maiden Aunt Mary, their youngest, worked in an office in the city and looked after her Mom and Pop until they died. In my eyes, they were tired of kids by the time the last one married. Nor did I ever detect a preference for any of their fifteen grand kids. I found them scary and insular and felt no warmth from them. Despite nine children speaking perfect English, their own English was always harsh and interspersed with hard and indecipherable German. I could not breach that barrier and today I do not even recall their Christian names.

My Grandfather worked as a tailor at Brooks Brothers. He retired late in life, nearly blind, on a monthly pension of $50. While employed by that Park Avenue institution he brought home an added pittance from playing in local bands at weddings and dances. The income was secondary to the pleasure he got from music. The few times I heard him scratch at his violin the sound was plain awful and I fled to Grandma’s kitchen as fast as I could. Was she hiding there too? I was much too young for violins. It may not have been much of a violin either; they never could afford a good one. Grandma was isolated at home raising her family. We always found her in her kitchen.

Growing up in the same neighborhood, Mom was one of the tribe that camped at the Schuessler Estate. She had known the family for years. It still took a while after Emma Ford died before Dad summoned his nerve and proposed. Did he fear rejection?

Once when she was ancient and I feeling not far enough behind, it surprised me when Mary told me that Rudy had been her favorite brother. He was so easy-going and good-looking; everyone loved him, it seems. He never fussed or complained and did his best not to make waves. Rudy was not ambitious but none of his siblings seemed to notice it or care. By then I knew well that in fact, he, too, had had an avoidant personality. Example: when my parents bought their first car in 1948, an old commodious Model T, Dad showed how unconventional he could be when refused to take up driving. I do not know if or how much they had argued about it beforehand but his inflexible decision left Mother perpetually in the pilot’s seat. She had no trouble adapting to her role. Dad sense of direction was magnificent. He never got lost. He also liked maps and did not mind in the least navigating for Mom. Her own sense of direction was not reliable.

Another instance of avoidance �" one they shared �" but this irresponsible and of greater consequence to us, was never to teach us anything about sex. They allowed us six words on the subject: “not ‘till your married” and “it is procreational”. I do not know what the right time for it might have been. I do not know how much either of us wanted to know about it. I do not know if being wiser on the subject would have changed anything in our future. I do not know if their prudery caused Joe and I to shun physical intimacy and made prudes of us, too. Do adults ever want to talk to their children about human sexual behaviour? Kids would feel embarrassed to hear it from a red-faced parent. How can an adolescent take a discussion of sex seriously if the leader is uncomfortable talking about it?

School may be the right place for it. There may have been Sex Education class in public school back then, but there was none in parochial school. In my hormonal teens, my sexual nature evolved into a predictable airbrushed fantasy of buffed body builders predicated on the photos in gay porn magazines that I found at newsstands in Manhattan. Much later in Canada, ‘talking dirty’ enhanced screwing when doing it with a likeminded partner. Most of my sexual encounters, however, were silent and disappointing ordeals.

When they married, Rudy worked at AT&T’s downtown office in the city. Thirty years later, he retired from AT&T. His pension was fair by late ‘Sixties standards. To give an idea how little it was, it took thirty years to reach $1000 a month. He died less than a year later. Yet not only did Marie and Rudy live on their income, whatever it came to, they saved and invested in the market during that those long decades of relative market stability. At the end, they left us $300,000 to share.

My conservative, fearless, and responsible Mother was a woman of ardent and freely expressed religious convictions. She believed every word handed down by the Roman Catholic Church. Where he husband was avoidant, taciturn and unassertive, she was opinionated and expressive. After working to support her devout and sickly Mother, Marie Ford believed in herself. When they moved to Flushing before the war, she took out a mortgage in her name on the newly built freestanding red brick house. There were not many detached homes for the working class in Queens though in a few more years there would be thousands more. Although ours was not large, most of the other homes in our neighborhood were attached and smaller. Our house had two stories. There was a small rental suite upstairs, and two bedrooms, dining room, living room, kitchen, and one bathroom on the main. Below was an unfinished basement with a coal-burning furnace, storage, and a clothes washer. When it was wet, Mom hung wet laundry in the basement. When it was dry, it hung from a clothes tree in the backyard. Behind the house was a large two-car garage. At the front, was a stoop and two tidy postage stamp lawns. All the residents Queensborough Hill, where we lived, were house proud, most new to home ownership, and they looked after their property.

Dad did not complain or begrudge the time it took to do what was necessary to maintain our home’s appearance and its structural integrity. They made improvements, including a new, efficient gas furnace; a finished basement; roof replacement, and a gut renovation of the kitchen in 1961. Mom loved decorating but only on the4 cheap and if she had money in hand. There was no credit then except for Diner’s Club for the well heeled. Half the time I liked what she achieved and I still applaud her for forging ahead and staying on budget. She followed her instincts. Sad to say, however, she had no design sense or taste having lacked the means and opportunity to develop them. She gave religious objects and pictures like Grandma Fords Sacred Heart pride of place in our home. They became jarring a reminder of how alone I felt as I struggled for the faith that seemed to fit them so well.

She married Dad because he was a devout Catholic from a solid Catholic home. Faith was everything to her. It alone made her life possible, resolving all her doubts. Whether God granted or dashed her prayers, she accepted his will. She structured our lives around Saint’s Days, Feast Days, Fast Days, Holydays, the Sacraments, and the Rosary.

Faith as a way of life puzzles me though I grew up witnessing that Mom’s every act was based on it. I try to understand why some have it and others do not. More than a billion religious people share our planet. The majority of them are ignorant, deprived, and poor. In the third world, you find the same three predictable groups that have always been there. First there is an oligarchy that professes religion but has no faith in anything but power Below them is a large moneyed middle class - professionals and the business elite �" all with much to lose and some of whom have religious conviction. They cow tow to those above them. At the bottom is the enormous element of the disposed, destitute, and untouchable as well as the young with radical conservative religious convictions. These last may be educated but they lack a profession and employment. They have no stake in the future �" nothing to lose �" and want to force social and religious change. Today we see them at war in the Middle East, recruiting disenfranchised youths all over the world to join then.

In western countries that espouse or give lip service to ‘separation of religion and the state’, religion stepped aside for entrepreneurial capitalism. Here the prayers of the pious remain unanswered. Yet still they cling to faith.

Mom’s gift of faith was different. It was self-fulfilling and could withstand reality. Even as a boy, I sensed it was screwy, medieval, and absurd. Perhaps it was only possible for her generation. Has it really passed on with her? She never questioned her faith. She was grateful for the strength it gave her and she tried to pass it on to us. It would have been heartless to argue her out of it, not to say impossible. I envied her faith but I was as impermeable to it as an oilskin to a deluge. Lacking conviction and unable to commit, my one hope of fulfillment, I began to see, lay in living my life in a far off place where they could not judge me. When the day came for it, I was already living on the west coast of Canada. I was still immature and I could not put my decision to remove myself from them into terms that would be sympathetic to them. Dad left comment to Mom, as always. By then she knew better. She did not have to speak; her face told what was in her heart. She worried about how I was living and feared for my ‘immortal soul’.

What is Reality if not Perception? Thus, it is personal, unexplainable, changing, and misunderstood by everyone else. There are as many realities as souls on the planet. It comforts me to see how little my beliefs matter. The world moves on. What I believe regarding religion and faith may be an easily refuted jumble, I know. For the truth is, I do not care much about religion, not any of them. What do they matter? They are as unreal as all the ‘realities’ we lean on. Yet the opposite of confidence, or faith if you will allow it, would be a state of petrifying, immobilizing fear. Since hardly anyone is in that state, it is safe to say that we all have enough faith to put one foot in front of the other, to get up, to step out, and to board a bus. We carry on from day to day in this nerve-racking world because we believe in the quality of our air and food, in the restorative value of sleep, and the necessity of working. Some of us even trust our paper currency. Yet we hear that we have polluted our air and water, and our food is tainted. Our sleep is broken and restless. Work is undercompensated boring drudgery and our paper money threatened in many ways. We manage because living is preferable to a void of invisible atoms and because we hope. As always, hope and desire propels human kind. Call it what you like, this faith is not Christian.

Joe had been the apple of my parent’s eye until my arrival diverted their attention. In my fifties, I asked myself if this were the cause of our lifelong detached relationship. Our disconnect is our fault, at least in part; had we tried, we might be closer. Joe is also avoidant, lacking in sentimentality, and non-confrontational. Moreover, after raising two daughters, he cannot help being judgmental. While we disagree on many things, we do not quarrel because we dislike quarreling. The things he finds especially important are irrelevant to me. Our personalities are opposites. Obsessional morality dominates in him while I have corruptible values and bend towards instant gratification and what seems most pleasing at any given moment. We are so absent from each other’s life that I must sometimes remind myself that he is there.

Joe and his wife, Anne, thanked God when their daughters, Meghan and Kate, were born. My Mother’s proselytizing had converted Joe. His religious conviction was strong. His role as a new parent was to lead his children to the salvation of the faith. Like Mom, he gave it his all. Still neither daughter accepted his dogmatic and old-fashioned brand of Catholicism. He became more Catholic than Mother. Once he told me that every man would have to decide. Was Christ insane, the worlds’ greatest charlatan, or the Son of God, as he proclaimed. (I wondered where he had picked it up, this ‘test’. It had an evangelical ring.) It was a great surprise to learn decades later that studying the bible all that time had led him to question the absolutism of Catholicism and the Vatican. For a while, he turned to a bible-thumping sect of evangelical. Disillusioned, he returned to the faith only to leave it again to join the Presbyterians.

These events took place when his daughters were grown. While still a devout Catholic father of your daughters, he was outspoken about his puerile religious convictions. I was not there but when I spoke with him on the phone, I heard my Mother. He sounded discouraged. I imagine Meghan and Kate found his Catholicism as irrelevant as I did. They became agnostics, which offended him deeply. They did not change their attitude and this was a relentless reminder of failure.

Joe and I never learned to love ourselves. He could never reconcile his spiritual side with reality. He could not comprehend that genuine faith is personal, not religion. Rigidity and fixation separate us from the world and reality. These factors foiled him when he tried to bring his family to salvation. Playing God was not his role. He was preaching to twenty-first-century material girls.

This overrated Gift of Faith? Joes’ faith is not the Gift per se but a life jacket. He clings to it because he has made himself unsuited for the world. He cannot accept the extinction of the soul with that of the flesh. Joe loves his family. He has always been present for them and had the best intentions. Missed goals and good intentions are not enough. They are a miscellany of seeds �" flowers, edibles, and weeds �" flung against a headwind. One cannot know if any will take root. While remaining prudish and given to panic, Joe has earned philosophy and tolerance by raising a family.

Joe showed musical talent as a child. To develop it Mom and Dad bought an upright piano and enrolled him for lessons at five years of age. His first tutor discovered that he had perfect pitch. It would serve him well. He soon excelled and made our parents proud. Before I could be trusted to stay at home by myself, I joined Mom at his piano recitals. Sitting still in one place for any length of time drove me crazy. Most of his classmates played poorly. I could not appreciate all the effort at practicing. Their anxiety performing was palpable and made me antsy. Recitals bored me until Joe played. Being the best student, he played last. Everyone looked forward to Joe. The other compensation you got for sitting through a recital was tea and sweets at the end. Overall, they were slightly preferable to wakes and funerals. She began to take me with her to these dreary events at around the same time. I was always the only child at these dreary events, with the embalmed body front, center, and the noxious scent of calla lily. My job was to stay quiet and unseen until Mom introduced me to the bereaved family. Mom was enthusiastic about fulfilling her Catholic duty to the dead and dying. She would see them in their hospital beds, where she also took me a few times. Likewise, she never neglected her duty to pray for the departed souls of family and friends. I got treats for being solemn and invisible on these occasions. These things ended when I started school.

When he was twelve or thirteen, Joe mastered the acoustic accordion. He entertained us on two instruments. He balanced the accordion on his leg playing lefty, and played the piano with his right. I was in awe. The music was great. He looked proud and happy at such times, basking in the admiration of everyone. At the beginning, he had only wanted to show off and not to capitalize on this skill. Soon, however, it was all his audience wanted. He had become a sideshow at a country fair. He was uncomfortable in the spotlight; something to do with his height for he always stood at least a few inches above everyone else. If he had enough talent, he did not have the temperament for a career in music. He had asked Mom and Dad if he could quit lessons and they insisted he wit at least until he turned sixteen. They felt duty bound to steer us into a profession or career at the first sign of talent. The tried to believe Joe would outgrow his stage fright and become a performing pianist. He did quit at sixteen, however, leaving them seriously disheartened. They had stayed true to their word and for he must have been grateful. My Uncle Joe, who was now an ordained priest, gave them his advice on dealing with the blow to their self-esteem and with Joe in his high-strung, temperamental teens.

Among other early memories of Joe, I recall that Mom drove him and a few other neighborhood kids to St. Michael’s in downtown Flushing. She would take me with, as she still could not leave me by myself. It was a dark foreboding brick structure, a late Victorian pile, behind a tall, pointed, black iron fence. There was loud noise coming from the asphalt schoolyard. I wondered what the kids did there all day and I was relieved that I did not have to follow them. Joe and I would squat beside the bed to listen to Amos and Andy and The Lone Ranger on the gigantic console radio in my parent’s room. On Saturday evenings before bed, we bathed together in the immense pink bathtub. Dad got on his knees and scrubbed us while Mom finished up in the kitchen.

When Joe was born, they thought they would not have another. They put every good intention and all they knew about child rearing into raising him. They must not weaken him with indulgence. He must learn self-discipline. Joe grew up serious and respectful. Their joy and delight when I was born must have kyboshed any concern with disciplining me. Either that or I was too willful to control.

Joe and I were different. Yet we played together until he went to school and made friends his own age. All they ever seemed to do was play stickball endlessly in the street or in the vacant lot at the corner beside the church where the parish hoped to build a school one day. I could never see the point of sports. Besides, I was not good at it. Had I been I might have played but I did not join my brother and his friends. I may have missed something by not making friends with older boys and developing a skill that would have made me more of an insider. I still find any obsession with sports absurd. When he was eighteen his peers pressured him into joining them at the Oasis, a neighborhood tavern. He made new friends there, some older and other around his age and it soon became his second home. While they got drunk around the bar, they drank beer and talked the ponies. They liked to bet and would often take the bus to Aqueduct. Today he talks of having drunk to excess at the Oasis. I never saw him loose control. When he thought he had gone too far with drink, he stopped. However, he still follows the ponies.

Dad would get home close to six with just enough time to wash his hands before we gathered at the kitchen table. Ten hours working and commuting drained him. There was not always time and energy to connect with Joe and me. Dinner made us all somewhat lazy. Until we got the round screen Zenith, we listened to the radio. After that, there was no going back. Dad usually dozed off for a while but came to by eight to say, “Well, look at that! It is time for you to go to bed, Paul.”

When he was ninety-two, I asked him he would have liked that life had not already brought him. He replied with no hesitation, “More children”. That took me by surprise. What a wonderful thing to hear your father say.

Mom took black and white snapshots of us growing up. Dad was in many of the �" a younger and handsomer man than the father I knew. He was comfortable with fatherhood, without the wistful look of other husbands who appear too long for the return of bachelorhood. With so little else, I cherish these photos. They were keys to revealing the past. The locations and dates of many are beyond recall. One well-composed snapshot �" so professional that it is hard to attribute it to Mother �" if of my young Dad and me at five. We sit on opposite sides of a large metal glider on the lawn outside a house in the country. We are looking into the camera. At first, I thought the boy was Joe. Then I turned it over and in mom’s handwriting, I found “Dad and Paul, 1949”. Someone else must have snapped it.

Nineteen-forty-nine was also their tenth wedding anniversary. To mark it, among other things, we took a great deal of trouble to go to a photography studio for a hand colored family photo. This craze for hand coloring of photos was at the end of its popularity. It was a terrific thing and I am glad I still have the photo. It is now my favorite and I have several copies in different sizes. The smallest are on tin backed two to three inch pocket mirrors. The photographer posed us close together, en famille, smiling, and close. We had dressed to Mom’s approval with a sense of occasion. We three men are wearing sports jackets (mine was plaid) white shirts, and ties. Mom wears a midnight fashionable blue satin dress with her pearl earrings. Mom and Dad are at the center with Joe next to Dad and me beside Mom. My right arm is over her shoulder so I am squarely in the photo while Joe is slightly too far off, as though he wanted to be somewhere else. We never again looked more like a family. Mother’s initiative got us to the studio; she booked the session and she decided to give mirrors to relatives and friends to observe the occasion. We were all glad she did it.

A still earlier photo is of Joe taking me around in our wooden ‘High Flyer’ wagon. We are at the back on the cement between the house and the garage. Joe is smiling in this one as he holds the wagon from behind. I beam like any elated three-year-old with his first set of wheels. Dad squats behind. His arms encircle us as well as the wagon, which is tiny. He appears a contented father pleased with his life. Why not? He was only forty, with working class goals aimed at success. His secure office job �" and Mom’s knack for stretching a dollar - fed us and paid the bills, with money left over. He had two bright and healthy sons and a loving relationship with his wife �"a mature and practical-minded wife who could take charge and manage things.

Another photo shows Joe and me in blue jean overalls and tee shirts. We are petting a black cat at the front curb beside a spindly Maple sapling in front of our house. That furry little creature was the start of an episode I’d forgotten. As I looked at the photo, I pieced together the strands of the story. One morning at breakfast when I was four, I went to the garage for something that was forgotten when I heard a meek, frightened meow. I followed the call, which continued. Finding something tall to raise me high enough to see the wooden storage shelf at the back of the garage, I soon uncovered a large litter of jet-black kittens on a high shelf at the back. The p***y in the photo was their mother. She had given birth in a box of newspapers and rags five feet off the ground. Still almost a kitten herself, mother cat was friendly and glad to see me. She was starving and her kittens were, too. I ran back to tell them something strange and exciting had occurred and they simply must follow me to the garage. While Mom and Dad disliked house pets, they still fell in love with the kittens and decided to leave them all alone in the garage at least until she had weaned them.

We fattened up mother cat on milk and canned tuna and she was nursed her litter. I was enthralled, having wanted a pet for what seemed like forever. This litter in the garage gave my parents respite from my pleas. Marie and Rudy had never lived with house pets. They had no idea of how a domestic animal fitted into family life. The concept was alien to them. So they were happy that I spent hours playing with them and looking after them. Having discovered them, I was serious about my responsibility for them. At the start, my parents said that there was no chance of keeping any. They did the right thing by not leading me on to think otherwise. It was summer and they were content in the garage. By fall, we had given them all away, mother cat, as well.

Before I’d my tonsils out at five, I used to have recurring sore throats and fevers. They were not serious but while I’d them, they kept me in bed. She treated me with honey and lemon, or hot milk with honey and margarine. She alternated these with tea, also flavoured with honey and lemon. She was never without lemons in the refrigerator. The flavors of such things when I have them today takes me right back to her comforting affection and the womblike ‘Forties. To help me to rest and not to fidget too much in bed, she read to me from illustrated Golden Books. Rumpelstilskin, Gulliver’s Travels, the legend of Ivanhoe, and The story of Alexander the Great are a few I remember. I do not recall any specific stories of Jesus or biblical stories either, though I am certain there were some along with the others. When I learned to read, reading became my truest source of exploration.

My very earliest memory is choppy but vivid. I cannot accept all of it without quibbling here and there. It occurred in the days when she still took me out in a stroller. On the day I write about, I stood waiting and watching, every inch an elf with the hood of my winter parker over my head. (I have a tiny black and white of myself in that very outfit taken the same morning.) I must have been around two and a half and I do not think I was speaking much. On a rare visit, Mom’s unmarried, auburn haired former girlfriend from Trenton was with us for a week. Her name was Jo (Josephine) Kane. The day was sunny but icy and cold. They were bustling about inside, chatting, getting ready to take me out for some air in the stroller. In all likelihood, they were hoping I would go down for a long nap after. A glass bottle of dark liquid shoe polish �" remember glass bottles? �" stood on the parapet around the stoop. Mother was afraid of spilling it and leaving a permanent stain on the floor inside so she polished shoes outside. She had just polished her own shoes that very morning and forgotten to bring it inside. The contents were still liquid.

Outside, settling me in the stroller, Jo’s big padded overcoat brushed against the bottle, splattering contents and container on the stoop. Mom was fixated on the likelihood of accidents like this, ones that would leave marks. Entertaining a guest as well as dealing with two young kids placed her under added strain. Like a homeless people in their first subsidized apartment home, Marie was the vigilant grown up Scamp of Wilson Avenue managing her first new home. Now she turned on her friend, blaming her for it. She fell into a flap because shards of glass were everywhere and she knew the stain would never come out. How was she to deal with shoe polish on cement? Then her initial anger blew over, ending with apologies and forgiveness. This was the first time I’d witnessed an eruption of Mom’s temper. My secure little word shook violently. Watching her lose control and hearing her angry shouts, I wished I were anywhere else. It made me fear her reaction should I ever made her cross and the impression of the event never faded. She attempted several times to get the stain out before giving up. One day not too long after, time, sun and the weather accomplished what Mom could not: they faded the stain in the cement and in our collective memory. Then we forgot about it.

Like most kids, I went through a phase of playing with stuffed animals as well as dolls. My first most cherished animal toy was a soft stuffed rabbit, which I dragged about by its ear. I called it Bunny MaLaCha. This critter went back so far that it could have been a hand-me-down from Joe. By the time we parted, bunny and me, bunny was a torn, floppy eared and odoriferous dark grey. I’d a few dolls, too, over my first four years and at the end of this phase, I felt an urgent desire for a small, black, baby doll. My parents were reluctant to give it to me. I do not think it was a race issue for them. More than likely they felt, rightly, that I was too old for a new doll. They would have preferred to treat my desire for this doll as a passing fixation. Yet the longer they held back, the more stubborn my need became. For my part, this incident became nothing but a test of wills. I let my obsession grow so extreme that my parents gave in and gave me my black baby. As foreseen, shortly afterwards, I dropped dolls altogether. My development forged ahead.

My first libidinous stirrings were normal. Mom was the object. I was a child - I want to say pre-school age because I was at home. Uncertain of that detail however, I must doubt that I was hormonally precocious in that way. It would have been much too early for that. Therefore, let us say I was in grade two or three. That seems fair. The first time, we may have been alone together because I’d a cold. Mom, still sleeping with Dad, was suffering a long-drawn-out bout of stressful low back pain. In her primitive and absolute faith, she kept a tiny vial of miracle oil from Lourdes in her top drawer. She believed it would give relief. We went into the bathroom where she lifted the skirt of her dress, revealing her garter and a chubby, stocking encased leg, and pulled down her panties an inch or two at the back. Then she had me rub oil over the area. As I did, we asked God to relieve her pain. We repeated the procedure a few times over the following weeks and, at first, I loved rubbing the top of her warm, pink buttock with my finger. When her pain was particularly bad, I reminded her that we should reapply the oil. I did not believe in it; I wanted another peek at her a*s. At the same time, she projected what we did as a lesson in faith for me. It would establish the association of the relief of affliction with the application of a balm and prayer. She thought me too young to experience temptation of the flesh. The Lourdes oil did not help and in her old age, we learned that Mom’s back troubles were an early stage of gnarly osteoporosis that never released her.

My folks were charitable and they gave us a sense that we, too, must perform acts of charity in our turn. For every nickel in our pocket, ten people had nothing. God said, “Love thy neighbor,” did he not? The four of us gave small amounts to Catholic charities such as the overseas missions, which they valued in a special way. My Uncle was ordained into a missionary order. They also wanted us to appreciate the necessity of self-discipline. Like everything else, Mother managed to associate this with religion. If discipline did not come easy, prayer would bring God’s grace. Prayer was her solution to every difficulty. It was plain to see how far she stretched reality to accommodate the Vatican drivel. Faith permeated her every act and this irrational side of it embarrassed me. Instead of questioning or challenging, I prayed for simple faith. When my questions subsided, another episode was never far behind. Intuition played a part, cautioning that silence was wiser than expressing doubt. Silence is the greater part of wisdom.

Dad left it to Mom to teach us to pay attention to our appearance and to how we dressed. We tied our laces and shined our shoes. We had a clean handkerchief when we went out. We never picked our noses. We washed our hands and faces and combed our hair. We learned the formulas of politeness, sociability, and greeting. The world, she warned, judged harshly.

Dad left it to Mom to dress us and she took pride in dressing us well. She was careful, however, not to overpay. After all, we would soon outgrow our new duds, would not we? My memories of shopping for apparel with Mom are vivid. We had to do this often because we kept growing. Clothes’s shopping was frustrating because Mom seldom bought me the flamboyant things that caught my eye. Her own taste in men’s clothes was conservative and usually right. Looking at the old archive of family photos, I see our clothes were stylish, not silly, and they fit us and suited us.

For shoes, she spared no expense. She was especially careful to buy us lace-ups, not loafers, in sturdy leather. I cared less about the ‘health’ of my growing feet; I hated those shoes. They were not stylish or cool and twice as expensive as what I wanted. Her feet had always given her trouble; she had to wear orthopedic shoes. Consequently, she believed in taking care of yours no matter how much good shoes cost. Nevertheless, I paid no heed; I was sorry her feet hurt but mine did not. I wanted blue suede loafers. She called them black men’s shoes. I was relentless about what I wanted. I would not give up. Sometimes I wore her down to a compromise so we both got a bit, of what we wanted.

We had twice-yearly dental check-ups. Joe’s teeth were healthy and did not always need work, or not much. My check-ups were preludes to long and painful dental work. If they used Novocain, it was not as effective as what they use now. Dental drills were slower. I found that singing or humming aloud during the procedures eased the pain. This was quite a feat to carry off with my mouth bulging with instruments and a drilling machine. The dentist called me “the crooner”. My mouth may have been elastic but I was no Velvet Fog. The louder I crooned the less pain I felt so I crooned on.

My parents, while not highly educated, were well-spoken individuals, grammatically correct. They built their vocabulary by listening in social and work association. My Mother’s vocabulary was especially rich. As I heard her speak, the parrot in me picked up her expressions. I enjoyed using them though I knew no more than the gist. At home, we observed strict rules about language: they forbad all profanity and vulgar street language, for being undignified. Such speech was insulting to God and beneath us. Mother �" assured, gregarious, confident - was our family ambassadress. She was respectful of clergy and professionals and demanded no less. Her bearing and language bore that out and won everyone’s respect.

After we learned sentence structure and could read and write, Mother tried to instill the virtues of letter writing. We were never to send a greeting card to a relative or a friend without attaching at least a sentence of something personal as a topical comment. “Love, Paul” would never suffice. She made us sit on opposite sides of the dining room table and write legibly in a clear, grammatical style. At first, Uncle Joe was our only correspondent. We wrote a draft in pencil. Then, she would look over our drafts, correct and make suggestions and we would rewrite in ink on good stationary. We used old-fashioned ink and fountain pens into the early ‘Fifties. The steel pen nib was not easy to control. If an inkblot formed, we had to start over. We waited eagerly for our Uncle’s replies and when they came, we were not to make him wait long for an answer. Correspondence was a tiresome chore �" especially for me who could not sit still. She made us do it regardless. It was good practice and discipline but did not make a Mdm. de Sevignè of either of us. The fruit of this protracted exercise is that I still keep up with correspondence and do not put off replies.

My Mother did not leave me with sitters. She may not have trusted them or she may not have wanted to pay. Aside from wakes, which seemed to come in bundles at a certain point, and Joe’s recitals, I recall no other occasions when a sitter was necessary. I went along to Joe’s piano events, to funerals and wakes, and accompanied her on visits to friends and family. For a while, losing friends seemed like the leitmotiv of her existence. I did not enjoy adult company with no other children around. Wakes bored me and made me unresponsive to the proximity of corpses in coffins. Grieving adults were off-putting �" those experiencing the loss of a family member and all the rest. I did not feel the same obligation to the deceased or to the surviving family.

We did not spend every waking moment at wakes and funerals, far from it. It only continued until I started school. Still, it was an impressionable period, and it was unnecessary. Looking back, her decision was an extraordinary departure from prevailing attitudes of childrearing and not an inspired one. After all, she based her justification for it on saving a dollar and convenience. Death was part of life, Mom said. I would understand one day. For now, it was enough that I see death and learn that everyone must die. Again, the impression attending wakes made on me was not the one she desired. I was not in touch with death but with mourning and embalmed cadavers. Bereavement is a private matter and faithful friends can do little for the survivors until after it passes. I was unable to swallow the dogma of afterlife, reward, and punishment without some scrap of evidence. Death raised far too many questions for me to remain silent. In the car, driving home, my reservations rolled off my tongue. She was eager to settle them, brimming with answers. To her the truth was clear. However, her replies only raised more questions for me. They sounded like the recitation of a catechism. Her explanations of death raised more difficulties in the mind of a four year old. Intuition did not allow her one-size-fits-all answers to rest easily. I was not given to debate and had not the will and knowledge to try. While my trust in her was absolute, still, I kept my own counsel with the murmurings of my wee-small-voice.

My qualms were the first drumbeats of a distant struggle. I listened, remembering what she told me, and then grew quiet. Over time, I wiggled and squirmed to walk in her sturdy, orthopedic shoes, to believe what she believed and assume her faith. I could not do it. The absurdity of it was too obvious to ignore. My doubts went unanswered because I no longer raised them, knowing the facile answers I would get. A few years down the road, I knew Mom was only human, like me. I grew more skeptical about everything, and dealt with death by not dealing with it. Not dealing with things seemed to suit me.

A few times, we went into Gotham City together for a matinee at the palatial, art deco, Radio City. We went to see the dreadful epics of the Fifties that I loved as a child. The centurions and gladiators were eye candy while Mom and Dad thought the struggles of the early Christians portrayed on the screen would have an uplifting effect. Such tawdry spectacles had no effect except to awe and entertain. The other part of the bill was more enthralling. Cheap theatrical tricks like a large brassy orchestra and the Hammond pipe organ rising majestically through the floorboards of the pit. Such things made our spines tingle. The grand on stage finale was a long line of Rockettes, in gorgeous costumes, dancing their way into our hearts. My parents found the décolletage and pretty legs a tad risqué for their two young sons. However, it was far from where we sat so they allowed us to watch. Manhattan surprised me. I took to the city immediately: the din, the crowded sidewalks, the aroma of street food, the steam emerging through grates in walls, sidewalks, and out of the ground. I was captivated. Looking up at the midtown towers, as we emerged from Rockefeller Center subway station the first time, spoiled me for anything else. These visits ended with sweet treats at Howard Johnson’s on feverish Times Square.

Before our trips to the city en famille, I first met the Grand Seductress when Joe chaperoned me for one of Dad’s Christmas office parties. I was five and he was eight. I was too excited to give much thought to why Mom stayed home. Probably, after some debate, she and Dad had decided that Joe could manage the subway on his own. Our time together in the city was to be an exercise in male bonding. She gave both of us spoken and written notes, not omitting full directions to our destination. She repeatedly cautioned us to stay together on the train as we dressed for a cold evening and continued in the car as she us to the Roosevelt Avenue station. There, before releasing us, before we left her and went down into the subway, tokens ready, she unfurled the earmuffs built-into our little brown quilted hats, and screwed them down tight on our heads. She hugged us once more, before leaving us with an embarrassing number of kisses.

It tested of her confidence to let Joe take me to the city. At eight, it was test of his maturity. It would not be easy for Joe to remember the ins and outs of subway system, keep a track of me while changing trains, and get both of us to Dad’s office building. There was some doubt that I would defer to Joe. While I was respectful towards the parents, I might not feel disposed to be so to him. There would also be the long walk east on Forty-Second along the edge of Tudor City, to Dads building. Icy winds blew off the East River, and for the first time, we were to battle Thomas Wolf’s “million-footed manswarm”, herds of office workers with their heads down, heading with determination in every direction. Joe was no daydreamer. He took responsibility seriously, focused on his mission, and did not falter. I felt safe in his hands and became a docile, obedient child. I did not want to get lost alone in the city and there was nothing to gain by resisting.

We arrived on time, around five, greeted first by revolving glass doors that did not stop for slow pokes, elevators, and mobs of strangers in the lobby. However, we were seasoned city boys after all; there were crowds in Flushing, too. Dad’s labyrinthine office in Midtown was a novelty �" I’d never been in an office, a place of business. I liked the great open space, albeit filled with rows of desks, and the dry, papery smell of an office. There were other kids, and the party was short. It was structured just enough to be fun. We got candy, soda, and small gifts to take home.

However, it was not the ‘party’ per se; it was afterwards that we most looked forward to. For dinner, he had promised us macaroni and cheese, served au gratin, with a crispy, brown, breadcrumb topping �" a dime at Horne and Hardardts. He did not let us down. He gave both of us a coin to slide into the chrome plated slot next to the hot ramekins brimming over these golden treats. We took them to the table on a tray where we three men ate dinner together. Our hunger sated, we took the subway to Fifth Avenue and emerged back into the cold at the vast, monumental Library. We headed north, in accord with the strolling tourists and shoppers on Fifth, our eyes big enough to take in the surprises of a commercial Midtown Christmas nearing its height.

As a diversion and a brief respite from the cold, we went into proud St. Patrick’s, to genuflect. It was magnificent, decked out in green wreaths, wide red ribbon bows, and bright electric candles. We crossed to the west side of Fifth to watch the skaters on the rink at Rockefeller Center. Before us stood the tallest, brightest Christmas tree, we had ever seen. It was too cold to stand still long so we held hands and proceeded up into the Fifties. Along the way, after pausing to gawk at Saks’s and look into their famous holiday windows, we passed the spas of the rival vanity merchants, Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden. We peeked at the fancy bibelots in Tiffany’s huge bronze shadow boxes at Fifty-Seventh.

The terminus of our journey was Grand Army Plaza where we stopped beside the Pulitzer Fountain in front of The Plaza. I looked up to be awed at the lighted minaret that crowns the Sherry Netherland like the gold Diana at the pinnacle of the Crown Building. “What’s that, Daddy,” I asked, having never seen such a structure. While he knew Manhattan well, or parts of it, I do not think he recognized a minaret and it was years before I figured it out for myself.

I was unready for the pungent equine potpourri here, amidst such urban splendor �" the aromas of horse, hay and dung �" that we found upon reaching the horse drawn carriages lined up for custom beside The Plaza. Some were in motion jingling their long leather ribbons of bells. That jolly sound mixed seamlessly with the acrid smoke of roasting chestnuts and the tantalizing aroma of wieners and sauerkraut.

Dad, whose place in our lives remained somewhat vague, was still not done with treats. He topped off all our pleasures with every child’s Christmas dream, an eat-your-heart-out tour of the gigantic glittering F. A. O. Schwartz flagship toy store. Though I remember the street food, I cannot recall the toys we brought home. I am sure he bought us a few; otherwise, the toy store would have been one great frustration. What father would take a child to a toy store and not buy something? At that time, we played with cold-painted lead soldiers, and wooden cowboys and Indians. He must have bought us one or two sets of those for under our artificial tree.

I ended the night in a weary trance on the train, satiated from those few hours of a brilliant city Christmas. Later, after leaving the bus on Queensborough Hill and a short walk home, Dad handed me back to Mother, as limp as a glove. Such things were not for all though. What we had seen in the windows of the stores on Fifth Avenue was Christmas for the Manhattan elite and tourists who could afford to come to New York at that season. Although we never repeated it, that glimpse of manmade splendor was a seed of worldliness that found fertile soil in my hothouse innocence.

 

Reviews

[tremainiator]

Referring to the "dash" as punctuation, and scanning over this chapter as the punctuation is rendered in this posting, I now see that only some of the dashes appear as " while others are actual dashes. I cannot explain this but it is no doubt confusing. I wish I could do something about it. But, alas!
I'm gratified that the story flows for you and that you find my comments honest, incisive, and intelligent. Who wouldn't be?

[Carl Halling]

It's an interesting and well-written story; and I'm going to read on. As I say...think of copying and pasting, what you write will be perfectly reproduced here, which is why Writers Cafe has become my new Home Page :)

[Carl Halling]

I'm really getting into this; it's fascinating, you are searingly honest in your observations, not least about yourself; but this is one of the most compelling aspects of this exuberant recit. The style flows well; and the digressions work well within it (I like digressions I'll admit it), the intelligent meditations on faith and religion I enjoyed reading: they are not didactic, which is a plus. And there are incisive insights. There is a phenomenal amount of detail and information; but the style as I say flows nicely, so it's all pretty easy to absorb.