Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  Praise for Girls of Tender Age

  “Like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Girls of Tender Age peers into the dark spaces between the street lights in a quiet residential neighborhood. Something sinister lurks just off the page, and it creeps closer and closer until the memoir’s two story lines twist together . . . Smith’s deadpan delivery and comedic timing give the narrative spark.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “This beautiful memoir succeeds not only in recovering the author’s past, but also in uncovering and ordering the few sordid facts of the crime and creating a narrative where one was not allowed to exist. . . . Riveting and suspenseful.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Spellbinding . . . Tirone Smith tells the truth . . . but she also skillfully tells its slant, looking back at a remove of some 50 years in longing, avowed anger, and tough-girl humor.”

  —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

  “This is such a multi-dimensional and triumphant book that it’s hard to do it justice. It is an exacting and deadly accurate depiction of less cynical and less compassionate times; it is absorbing and convincing, and it must have taken great courage to write.”

  —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  “A riveting memoir that encompasses the murder of a schoolmate by a pedophile and life with a brother who suffered from autism.”

  —People

  “Larger than the sum of its parts, this book illuminates a social class as it recounts a tangled story of a family and a crime.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Publishers churn out true-crime books by the hundreds, but few are anywhere near as good as Girls of Tender Age, which also happens to be one of the sharpest and most affecting family memoirs to come along in years.”

  —The Berkshire Eagle

  “A neighborhood map appears at the beginning of the book, but the engrossing text makes clear that evil can never be charted accurately enough.”

  —Booklist

  “Smith intertwines delightful stories from childhood with a grim chronicle of a sexual predator whose murder of the author’s grade-school classmate has haunted her for decades. . . . Creates almost unbearable tension.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Nostalgia collides with horror in Girls of Tender Age, and the effect is at once warm and unsettling. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s voice is wry and elegiac, and her memoir is utterly absorbing.”

  —Stewart O’Nan, author of Wish You Were Here

  “I read Tirone Smith’s memoir with my heart in my mouth. What starts as an evocation of a lost time—immigrant lives in 1950s Hartford—takes a dark turn when a killer walks into this world. Visceral, sharp-edged, beautifully nuanced, Girls of Tender Age is the real deal.”

  —Alison Smith, author of Name All the Animals

  “When you read Girls of Tender Age, you will realize that this could be the best family memoir you have ever read. Smith is more than a masterful writer. She can find the joke in a broken arm, and she can bring you to tears in a booklong description of brotherly love. We are carried along on a wondrous peregrination among bookies, catatonics, crazy relatives . . . plopped under a wedding table—a veritable whirl of family dysfunction presented by an artful and very functional storyteller. I loved reading this book. It delivers the essence of family life, the pulsing blood of despair, and the soft breath of real and unadulterated love.”

  —Dennis Smith, author of Report from Ground Zero and San Francisco Is Burning

  “In Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s Girls of Tender Age, a masterful fiction writer shares her own story. And what a poignant memoir it is: one little girl dies, another comes of age and gives voice to herself and her murdered friend. Partly a celebration of family in all its quirky, lovable, and maddening complexity and partly a clear-eyed examination of Eisenhower-era justice, this story strikes a universal chord as it investigates a highly specific and singular childhood. Riveting, heartbreaking, hilarious, untainted by sappy sentimentality: I loved this book for its compassion, its vividness, and its flashes of justifiable anger. Girls of Tender Age is a life-affirming read.”

  —Wally Lamb, author of She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True

  “This is a riveting book, memory lane as a crime scene that needs to be relived to be understood. In this family saga of ethnic New England (a seldom-visited subject, but one dear to my heart), Ms. Tirone Smith has put all her energy as a writer of crime fiction to solve a mystery from her own past.”

  —Paul Theroux

  “Mary-Ann Tirone Smith is an adept literary juggler. She creates a tour de force in Girls of Tender Age by combining a coming-of-age story with a heinous crime that shapes her life. In addition, we get a visceral sense of the Connecticut she grew up in and a fascinating look at her family’s struggle with an autistic sibling. I could not put this book down until I had turned every page.”

  —Jane Stern, author of Ambulance Girl

  “Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s Girls of Tender Age succeeds in that most difficult of a memoir’s measures: making the reader sit up and shout, ‘Yes, my life felt that way too!’ Though Mary-Ann and I grew up many states, decades, and a gender apart, she gives voice to what we all share in common: childhood fears, familial duty, the struggle to find our way, and a desire to be loved. By turns darkly funny and achingly sad, Girls of Tender Age leads us on a stirring journey through an American childhood.”

  —Nathaniel Fick, author of One Bullet Away

  “Girls of Tender Age begins as a charming story of place; it becomes a brutal moral indictment and a very important book. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith writes with the muscle and sly ease which are the hallmarks of a master at work.”

  —Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch

  “Just when you think there can’t be another memoir, along comes a book as fresh, funny, sad, and well written as Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s Girls of Tender Age. She covers new ground: the blue-collar world of her parents and their many relations, the coal-dusted childhood with an autistic brother and a child molester a few backyards away. As serious as it is, the book startles us into laughing, recognizing so much that is universal, yet expressed in a new voice.”

  —Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country

  Praise for Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and She’s Not There

  “An accomplished whodunit with solid premise, well-observed characters, and a great setting . . . Poppy’s true skills lie in her insights into troubled characters.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Dark and compelling.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  Praise for Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and Love Her Madly

  “Readers with a taste for tough-minded heroines—and a ten-gallon sense of humor about the Lone Star State—should be pleased to meet Poppy Rice.”

  —People (Page-Turner of the Week)

  “You won’t anticipate any of the surprise plot twists in this smart, sassy, good thriller.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  Praise for Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and She Smiled Sweetly

  “Blend literary brilliance with outstanding mystery writing, stir in a bit of political intrigue, and you get a surefire winner . . . a desperate chase across the country and beyond, the action concludes in a heart-hammering climax. Smith shines in this superb whodunit.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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  Contents

  Part I: Mortality

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part II: Brain Jog

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Part III: The Quest

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Part IV: What Goes Around . . .

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Part V: The Future Is Now

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  About Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  A short one to you, Dad

  ten•der (ten’dœr) adj. 1. a. Easily crushed or bruised; soft; fragile: a tender petal. b. Having a delicate quality: a tender song. 2. Young and vulnerable: of tender age. 3. Frail; weakly; delicate. 4. Not hardy. 5. a. Easily hurt; sensitive: a tender skin. b. Painful. 6. a. Gentle and solicitous. b. Expressing gentle emotions; loving: a tender glance. c. Given to sympathy or sentimentality; soft: a tender heart.

  Part I

  Mortality

  Mickey, Mother, and Tyler

  one

  Dad and Mickey at Chalker Beach, Old Saybrook, Connecticut

  HERE IS HOW my father describes our socioeconomic level: Working Stiffs.

  We live in the D section of Charter Oak Terrace in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford is a city where all manner of public buildings, bridges, restaurants, playgrounds, and gin mills are named after the oak tree where Captain Joseph Wadsworth hid the Charter of Independence granted by England in 1687. He hid it because England changed her mind. When James II assumed power, he sent an agent to seize it but the charter had gone missing and the agent didn’t think to look in a squirrel’s nest. Likely story.

  Charter Oak Terrace was the first low-income housing project to be constructed in the United States. It was built for the GI’s returning from war to give them a leg up while they put the Battle of the Bulge, Anzio, Bataan, and Corregidor behind them and looked for jobs. My father’s brother-in-law, Uncle Guido, was a WWII veteran so he got to live there, and my father, who wasn’t, got to live there because of his job making ball bearings for the war effort. Also because Uncle Guido had pull.

  At D-106, we have a coal furnace in its own little room, an alcove black with soot, between the front door and the kitchen. Our furnace utilizes a primitive heating system consisting of aluminum pipes and ducts and a narrow chimney that carries fumes, gases, and grime out through the roof while providing fitful outbreaks of warmth to our kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms. The vents in the walls have an aureole of coal dust. These heating details differentiate us, Working Stiffs, from the truly impoverished, who also work, but at the most menial of jobs—picking tobacco in the fields bordering the city’s North End, sweeping factory floors, or risky jobs like running numbers. Their coal stoves have no alcove; they are in the kitchen.

  The truly impoverished attach a rolled-up piece of sheet metal to their stoves that leads through a hole gouged out of the wall. Plus they gerry-rig hoses from the main shoot to bring heat into the other rooms. These hoses melt and then the houses catch fire and burn down.

  Their children come to school with rags tied around their shaved heads because they have lice. The truly impoverished girl who sits next to me in first grade with her head wrapped in a rag has a name that intrigues me, Poo-Poo. When her house burns down, she moves to a new school district. Two days after she leaves, all the first-graders have lice. Since we’re the children of Working Stiffs, not the truly impoverished, we don’t have our heads shaved. Instead we are subject to foul-smelling shampoos, plus my mother combs my hair every night with a fine comb to remove the nits, which are lice eggs.

  Got one! she goes, whereupon she carefully slides the nit out from the teeth of the comb and snaps it between her thumbnails.

  Each morning my father fuels the furnace, shoveling coal into its belly as quietly as he can so as not to wake my mother, who is the prototype of the light sleeper. My mother can be wakened by the smell of cigarette smoke outside.

  Yutchie, wake up. A prowler!

  She’s also awakened by Mrs. Alexander’s radio even though it’s late in the evening in the dead of winter and we’re all sealed in tight with our coal dust. My mother can hear a field mouse in a nearby empty lot as well as Fluffy, the neighbor’s cat, stalking it.

  Later I will learn that fog comes on little cat feet. My mother can hear arriving fog too. Beyond that, she is just as easily awakened by the absence of sound; one spring night the freight train barreling through Hartford like clockwork at 2 A.M. doesn’t send forth its dull blast at the Flatbush Avenue crossing three miles from D-106 at the northeast corner of Charter Oak Terrace. That’s because it never reaches Flatbush Avenue.

  She rouses my father. Yutchie, wake up! The train has crashed.

  My father calls my Uncle Norbert, my mother’s youngest brother, who is a fireman.

  Early the next morning Uncle Norbert drops in.

  What do you mean, Florence? he says to my mother. You couldn’t have heard the crash. The goddamn train derailed in Meriden! (Meriden is twenty-five miles away.)

  She says, I didn’t hear the crash. What I heard was the train’s horn not blast (which it always does when it crosses Flatbush).

  My father says to my Uncle Norbert, How about a short one?

  Word is that my mother has psychic powers based on her placement in her family of fourteen. She is the seventh daughter. When I ask my Auntie Corana, the sixth daughter, what psychic powers are, Auntie Corana says it’s when people can see and hear what the rest of us can’t. A devout Catholic, my mother eschews such nonsense. But the night the train derails in Meriden there is fire and destruction and death too, because in Meriden the train tracks run right down the middle of Main Street. Being a psychic, no matter that she denies it, is it any wonder she woke up?

  Ten years later, my Uncle Eddie, my mother’s brother born between her and Uncle Norbert, is staggering home from Alphone’s Bar and Grill and is hit by the 2 A.M. train when he passes out on the tracks at the Flatbush Avenue crossing. The engineer never sees him, never applies his brakes, so my mother doesn’t hear the train coming to a screeching halt, which would have really woken her up.

  At six each morning, I force myself to open my eyes and climb out of my crib in the corner of my parents’ bedroom, where I experience many horrific nightmares probably due to the sounds of sex a few feet away and my, no doubt, witnessing the shadowy tussles in the dark. When my father hears me whimpering, he comes over to the crib and says, You’re having a nightmare, Mick.
(My nickname is Mickey though I am a girl.) Go back to sleep.

  He brings me a glass of water.

  At 6 A.M., I scramble downstairs, take a right through the kitchen, and sit on a little rug by the front door in order to watch my father perform his daily, cold-weather ritual: he takes up a shovel leaning against the wall of the alcove and heaves coal out of a three-sided metal bin and into the fading pink interior of the furnace until its gaping black maw magically blooms into a wildly crimson glow. Then a tiny lick of flame leaps up above the coals signaling the end to my father’s chore. The red glow is the most beautiful, most ethereal image that exists in my life. Sitting and watching, I think that if Our Lady ever appears to me (all little Catholic children are insanely envious of the children of Fatima) it won’t be in a bush, it will be in our incantatory furnace.

  When my father is finished shoveling coal, he gives me a piece of toast from the toaster on the kitchen floor. There is no counter space in our kitchen to speak of, just a sink against the wall and a white metal table next to it with one drawer packed tightly with Raleigh coupons. One day, I lean against the hot toaster acquired via Raleigh coupons and the first three letters of the name WEAREVER are branded onto the back of my calf. I am four and starting to read. WEA I know, is not a word. The toaster burn is my first memory of pain. I gag and press my hands to my mouth as I leap away from the toaster.

  My mother says to my father, Look at what you’ve done!

  This is the chronic response to crisis in my family. First, there can be no cry. That is because of Tyler. Tyler is my brother, five years older. We are all half-mad because my brother is autistic at a time when no one has ever heard of autism. (Today it is rampant.) Tyler cannot stand noise, which includes crying out or, in fact, just plain crying. The agony he feels when he hears such noise is extreme; when that pain comes, he bites his wrist. He grasps his left hand in his right and gnaws away like he’s devouring a drumstick. He squeals hideously while he does this. His left wrist is covered by a thick, often oozing, callous. People will do terrible things to satisfy their compulsions and in Tyler’s case, he does them to himself.