Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  Chief Godfrey and Captain Egan drove the few blocks to Beaufort and Franklin Avenue accompanied by the other Hartford policewoman, Vera Conroy, who had been the first hired and had gone beyond walking the beat to detective duties though receiving no promotion in rank or pay in accordance with policy.

  Mr. D’Allessio answered the door and led the three into his living room. Pidgie and her mother sat on the sofa. Pidgie’s father sat down on her other side and the cops took the chairs facing them. Again, Pidgie described the man as tall, and dark-haired, but with prompting from Policewoman Conroy, she said he had a normal voice.

  The chief said, I need you to think hard here, Pidgie. Is there anything else about the man who attacked you that you can tell us about. Other than his being tall and dark.

  Pidgie said, He had black hair.

  What else?

  Pidgie looked up into the chief’s eyes and then she said, His cigarettes fell out of his pocket.

  She shuddered but she went on: He picked them up and put them back . . . back in his pocket.

  The chief said, Pidgie, but do you remember what kind of cigarettes they were?

  Yes.

  Everyone waited. Pidgie took a deep breath. Old Golds.

  The chief said, That will be very helpful to us. Thank you. Now I know how hard this must be for you, but was there anything else? Anything at all?

  Another deep breath. Pidgie said, He had a pin on his coat.

  Pidgie began to shiver. Mrs. D’Allessio took off her own sweater and draped it over her daughter’s shoulders. Everyone in the room waited.

  Chief Godfrey said, What do you remember about the pin?

  It said, Blood Donor.

  The chief said, Very good.

  He would press his luck: Is that all then?

  Pidgie said, I remember something else . . .

  Pidgie was now staring down at her feet. The cops and the D’Allessios could barely hear her when she whispered: I think something was wrong with his eyes.

  Her father leapt up; the questioning was getting to him. He shouted, His eyes? What the hell is that supposed to mean? What was wrong with them?

  Then Mr. D’Allessio launched into a tirade about how hard he’d worked to give his family a good home in a nice neighborhood and then this happens.

  Policewoman Conroy asked Pidgie gently, What was wrong with his eyes, honey?

  She answered, They weren’t normal. I mean, not like his voice was normal. His eyes . . . They were . . . they were always in the dark.

  With his hand gripping Mr. D’Allessio’s shoulder, Chief Godfrey remained silent when Policewoman Conroy asked Pidgie, Do you mean his eyes were deep-set?

  Yes.

  Her father pressed against the chief’s hand and the chief restrained him. The chief asked, Would you say they were hooded, Pidgie?

  Pidgie burst into tears.

  Egan nodded to his chief. The nod meant such a detail was important. It meant he might know who did it. He’d been studying photographs of perverts all day. His men were now looking into the records of every one of them.

  The chief said to Pidgie, I want you to try to calm yourself. And then I have to ask you for one more thing. We are all going to leave the room and I want you to tell Policewoman Conroy here what the man did to you.

  The room was silent. Mr. D’Allessio raised both his fists in the air and a noise came from his throat.

  Mrs. D’Allessio said, Might I stay, sir?

  The chief said, Of course.

  ONCE THE COPS were outside the house again, Policewoman Vera Conroy said to Chief Godfrey, It’s the same friggin’ guy.

  Egan said, And this girl survived because she didn’t resist. Would you say that, Vera?

  The policewoman stopped before ducking into the chief’s car and faced her two superiors, eyed them gravely. Here’s what I would say: The D’Allessio girl had no chance to resist. The first thing he did was to grab her scarf and twist it tight around her neck. Then he brought her face right up to his and he threatened her. Warned her that if she cried out he would break it. Her neck. And our little Irene never had a chance to resist either. He killed her for some other reason.

  twenty-five

  IT IS DECIDED that Irene’s classmates will attend her funeral, but her mother feels it is inappropriate for her friends to be at the wake. I am so deliriously thankful that I will not be expected to kneel in front of Irene’s dead body and then have to apologize to her father, who walked out on her when she was seven.

  My second funeral, another navy blue coat. A winter coat, but gabardine instead of heavier wool so my mother figures I can still wear it the following Easter. She says, It’s always so damn cold on Easter Sunday anyway.

  Gail’s mother picks me up. Susan, too. Our fathers have to go to work. Gail’s mother not only drives, she has her own car. Gail is mortified at this. My mother is now driving too because C.G. becomes the first corporation in the country to move its headquarters from the city to the suburbs. There is no bus to Bloomfield, Connecticut. At first, my mother rides to work with Freddie Ravenel’s wife, who is a cleaning woman at C.G. (my mother gets her the job), but Mrs. Ravenel’s twelve-year-old Ford station wagon keeps breaking down. A plan is made; my mother should get her license so that she and Mrs. Ravenel can take turns driving one another to work. My father will teach my mother to drive.

  My mother, quoting Ann Landers to my father says, I need you to teach me to drive like a moose needs a hat rack.

  She recalls the driving lesson he gave her twenty years earlier: They got in the first of the black Ford coupes they owned and he said, Throw it in neutral and let’s go.

  Throw it in neutral! My mother got out of the car, slammed the door as hard as she could, stormed back into the house, and her driving lesson was never mentioned again.

  My Auntie Margaret will be the one to give her driving lessons.

  Once Auntie Margaret deems her ready for the motor vehicle test, my mother goes to the MVD, gets in the car with the inspector, and does fine until he tells her to make a Y-turn.

  She says, What’s a Y-turn?

  She fails her driver’s test. When she returns home, she says to my father, What’s a Y-turn?

  He explains and she says, But I know how to do that. Margaret never told me it had a name.

  My mother starts to cry. Tyler goes berserk. I run up to my room and I sit on my bed until the bedlam ends.

  My father gives a call to a friend who is with DOT and tells him the situation. The friend appears at our door that night with a license for my mother.

  The next day, my father buys our first car without a standard shift. Cars now come in colors. My mother picks a two-tone Ford, powder blue and white.

  Though she has a license and a new car, my mother can’t drive Gail, Susan, and me to Irene’s funeral because she has to be with Tyler, of course. We do not speak of Irene to Tyler.

  Gail’s mother parks in the Sts. Cyril and Methodius parking lot in a row reserved for cars carrying Irene’s school chums. We all climb out and trudge up the steps into the church. Inside, several rows of pews are also reserved for us. The bas-relief Station of the Cross by our pew is “Jesus Falls for the First Time.” He is being scourged. His bare back is shredded and globs of blood are flying in all directions.

  Miss Bowie sits in front of us next to Albert I. Freedman. Magdalena’s entire extended family and then some are already there taking up two pews but in the back. They have walked all the way from Charter Oak Terrace, which is several miles away.

  The church is dark even with all the candles lit, which is a signal that this will be High Mass. From a child’s point of view, the difference between a High Mass and a Low Mass is that the former is longer—much longer. My mother says to me before I leave with Gail’s mother, There’ll be three priests on the altar for sure.

  She makes the prediction even though such a formation is normally reserved for a bigwig or someone who has donated a lot of money to the church.
r />   Banks of flowers are everywhere and all of them are white. The organ plays very quietly as if, like me, it doesn’t want to be there. My mother proves correct; when the church bell chimes, two lines of altar boys followed by three priests glide onto the altar, the priest in the center very old and very tall. With their appearance, the organist does what he is paid to do—create a deafening crescendo. The priests and altar boys find their positions and stare up the aisle. We all turn and crane our necks.

  The head seminarian from St. Thomas’s Seminary comes down the aisle carrying a long brass pole with a crucifix attached to the top. Then two more seminarians follow carrying thick, lit candles. Then comes Irene.

  She is in a white coffin with more white flowers on top. The coffin is carried by teenaged boys, Fred’s friends and his and Irene’s cousin. Two are crying. Magdalena and her family all start to cry too. Then so does everyone else except for Irene’s classmates as we cannot begin to believe that Irene is in the white box. Miss Bowie is holding a Kleenex to her nose. Albert I. Freedman holds her elbow against his side.

  Irene’s mother comes down the aisle next, with Fred on one side of her and her sister’s husband on the other. She is dressed all in black and has a sheer black veil covering her face. I think she is so beautiful. I can’t imagine my mother with a black veil in front of her face. Irene’s mother keeps stumbling. Everyone is staring at her and at Fred and at Irene’s uncle, who keep having to lift her back up.

  The priest begins: Confiteor Deo omnipotenti . . .

  All my classmates, everyone but Stonewall, who isn’t Catholic, take Communion. Irene will never take Communion again. The host settles against my teeth. If I die before Saturday when I can go to confession again, I will go to hell. Irene is in heaven. Everyone says that over and over. The old priest says so when he speaks from the pulpit, that she has entered paradise. If I die, I won’t see Irene. I’ll go to hell even though my father will probably tell everyone that Irene and I are jumping rope with the angels.

  I feel dizzy because of the smell of the flowers and because I am so hungry. My father had my Uncle Guido bring me a butterscotch sundae from the Lincoln Dairy at bedtime the night before the funeral and then let me stay up an extra hour besides. Hopefully, the late-night sundae will carry me through to the funeral; I must fast for twelve hours, will not be able to eat my usual breakfast since I’m going to receive Communion at the funeral. What usual breakfast? My father thinks I have Wheaties before I go to school but I never have time to manage anything but my long draft of Hershey’s Syrup.

  The Mass is a spectacle of priests and altar boys do-si-doing all across the altar, a soprano singing Polish hymns, and all of us kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting. Gail’s mother wears a big diamond ring. Every time she stands, a light through a stained-glass window hits it, and sends a prism of colors against my navy blue coat. Then the funeral ends and Irene is carried back down the aisle in a reverse of the procession that began the Mass. Her mother’s eyes are closed; Fred and his uncle are basically carrying her. We all file out.

  In the car, Gail’s mother sees to it that we break our fast as soon as we shut the doors. She has a box of crullers for us.

  We sit in the car eating the crullers while we watch people pouring out of the church. We watch the teenage pallbearers slide Irene and her coffin and blanket of flowers into the hearse. The schoolchildren will not go to the cemetery as the temperature has taken a winter drop. Irene’s mother doesn’t want us to catch colds. So Gail’s mother drives us to school, all dressed up in our navy blue coats, freezing.

  We have a substitute teacher that day who smiles and smiles and lets us color and paint and play with clay like kindergarteners. Then she takes us out to the field next to the Mary M. Hooker School playground and we collect dead weeds, which she refers to as weather-dried wildflowers. She identifies them for us, holds up a few stalks, and says, Wood asters, pointing out that some of the petals still have color to them. Purple. She holds up other stalks. Fleabane. She says to us, Animals roll in these flowers and then fleas jump out of their fur. Then she gives us a big smile of inclusion, letting us in on a wondrous detail: They’re also known as daisies!

  I am enthralled that there can be so many kinds of wildflowers even if they’ve turned into dead weeds. Irene is dead now, too.

  When we get back to the classroom, we girls squat down to pull prickers out of our socks and the hems of our navy blue coats, and the boys from the bottom of their pant legs. The substitute teacher explains that most of the prickers are a certain kind of seed, square flat brown seeds with sharp prongs on two of the corners so that they can cling to the fur of field mice and rabbits. Or fox. And then the seeds are carried to a new place where they will propagate next spring. We examine the seeds, feel the prongs. She says, Beggar’s-lice. She tells us what beggars are, how they sleep in fields, how the lice cling to them.

  I love the word propagate. Also, I know about lice, which stick themselves to the base of individual hair shafts, lay eggs, and propagate so that your head has to be washed with a foul-smelling shampoo or if you’re impoverished, shaved.

  Our substitute teacher doesn’t speak of Irene either but at least she makes an extensive effort to keep our minds occupied. She succeeds.

  twenty-six

  JUST HOURS after officiating at the funeral Mass for Irene, the tall old priest who was the leader of the three on the altar and the pastor of Sts. Cyril and Methodius Church had something else he needed to do. Monsignor Stanislaus Musiel (same name as the ball player’s only spelled differently) wrote down his feelings about the killer. The next morning, he asked the Hartford Courant to print what he’d written. He explained his hope that the killer would read his words. The Hartford Courant published an extra edition in order to comply with the monsignor’s request. Monsignor Musiel wrote:

  The best thing this person can do—for himself and for the community—is to come forward and reveal the awful burden of conscience which must weigh upon him. It would be far better for him to reveal himself now than to live in the dread of the hunted, and to live with the guilt of his crime.

  He must realize, too, if he possesses his reason, that the terror this crime has brought to the parents and children in the community is an evil which only he can end immediately. He cannot change what has happened to this child, and he cannot expect leniency for giving himself up. But he can put an end to the evils of fear and suspicion which afflict the community as a result of his deed. Thus, by surrendering, he would be doing the only good he has in his power to perform.

  If this crime is the result of emotional or mental sickness, it is only by coming forward that this person can hope to receive the help he needs.

  If he is of sound mind, he cannot help but realize that he cannot escape the penalty of his crime by keeping his silence—he can gain nothing that way but to prolong the dread of that day when punishment finally befalls him.

  And then the priest spoke directly to the killer:

  You have but one course that is right. Give yourself up.

  It was a homily, a plea based on orderly reason. It was not a sermon. His words did not contain sentimentality, bathos, spiritual illogic, pomposity, scripture, hellfire, or mention of God. No talk of forgiveness or redemption. (No mention, of course, of closure.) Only emotion for the miserable human condition; Monsignor Musiel felt so much compassion centered in humanism that he suggested Irene’s killer possessed the capability to do good even though there was only one good available for him to perform.

  I did not experience the fear Monsignor Musiel spoke of when he described the community in his plea to the killer to give himself up. A child’s inability to comprehend how an adult can murder her friend preserves her from experiencing fear related to the event. Instead, the fear is related to the irrational—terror of the guillotine lopping off my feet, for example.

  twenty-seven

  NOBODY EVER SAYS ALOUD that Irene is d
ead—not my parents, not Miss Bowie, not the priest at my church, and not the kids at school. Nobody except for one girl, Kathy Delaney. In all our lives, I don’t remember Kathy ever speaking to me, not even when we sit next to each other at our First Holy Communion breakfast.

  Kathy Delaney is also absent the day after our field trip to the Hartford Electric Light Company. We figure she hasn’t been kidnapped because her desk remains in place. She must be out sick.

  I suppose Kathy remembers how we received Communion side by side when we were seven and that’s why she speaks to me. She figures maybe I can count as a girlfriend. So in the corridor on the way to gym, the day after the funeral, she says to me with the same terror on her face as in the photo just before Father Kelly gives her the host, When they catch him, I have to go to court.

  Go to court fills her with the same anxiety she experiences when she is about to receive the host not knowing exactly how difficult it might be to keep it from touching her teeth and going to hell. Her mother has died so, after all, she could die, too, and if she goes to hell she won’t see her mother, who the nuns tell her is in heaven.

  Now she has no mother to explain to her what go to court means, not that she would have understood what her mother was talking about. Who knows what her brothers tell her?

  Kathy has one more thing to say to me: I have to go to court because I’m the one who threw stones at the boat.

  I run away from Kathy and into the gym because we’re told, again and again, not to speak of what happened to Irene. And Kathy is speaking of it. She has to speak of it because she is one of the children who threw stones at the boat and now she must go to court and she is terrified. The reason she was absent the day after Irene was murdered was because she was being questioned by the police.

  My guess now is that Kathy thought go to court meant she was responsible for the death of Irene, just as I had once thought I was responsible for the death of my cousin Jackie.