Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  Up and down the rows we go: On my birthday . . . The day I entered Moylan . . . I would like to attend college because . . .

  Then it is my turn. I stand up in the aisle next to my desk. The topic sentence I picked to complete is one no one else has chosen: It was a bad day when . . . I don’t remember making that choice. I don’t remember writing the composition either. I remember standing up in Mr. Boyle’s class and I remember reading it.

  I complete the sentence—It was a bad day when my fifth grade class went to the Hartford Electric Light Company for our field trip. I catch a glimpse of Mr. Boyle rolling his eyes. I go on to read all I have managed to jam into the three pages. I describe every minute of the trip from the time Gail, Susan, and I meet up in the street walking to school, going into the classroom, taking off our coats. I mention the Pledge of Allegiance, and how some of us forgot to add in the new phrase, Under God. I tell how we sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” before getting our coats back on, standing in back of the bus, smelling the fumes, getting on the bus, arriving at the electric plant, the vice president’s plywood divider, lunch, bananas . . . I describe every single detail except the girlie calendar in the vice president’s “office.” Then I read the last line: That night while I watched the Arthur Godfrey Amateur Hour with my father, my lunch partner, Irene, was murdered.

  I sit down.

  The room is silent. Mr. Boyle cranes his neck to see past the kids in front of me. I do my best to stay within the bulk of Stonewall’s back. If any part of me sticks out, that part will be guillotined. My English teacher speaks to me for the first time. He says, Mary, how you shocked us with that last line.

  I am feeling shock too. Not at being called by only half my name, which I’m used to, but because he didn’t remember that Irene went on a field trip to the Hartford Electric Light Company the day she died. He never recognized my foreboding. My teacher didn’t recall the murder of a schoolgirl two years earlier, a girl who should have been sitting in his classroom, until I jog his brain as my own has been jogged over the weekend while deciding on a topic sentence.

  The bell rings. Out in the corridor, I walk to my next class alone. Even Gail and Susan hang back. And then Helen strides by. I don’t know her because she was funneled to junior high from another elementary school, not Mary M. Hooker. She comes very close as she passes.

  She whispers, Irene was my cousin.

  Helen’s father is Irene’s uncle, the man who supported Irene’s mother’s weight during the funeral when her own buckling knees were unable to bear such a crushing burden of grief.

  Helen just keeps on walking. So do I.

  REPRESSING IRENE had been an unconscious endeavor but it would take work for me to suppress her, which is a feat I accomplish until I am a commuting student at Central Connecticut State College, where no one calls me Mickey. I am taking a course called Psychology of Self, a requirement for psychology majors and minors. The course demands a one-hundred-page autobiography, which is the reason so few students are in the program. At the end of the course, the professor will discuss each student’s autobiography individually. My scheduled appointment arrives.

  Dr. Reginald Swann, my professor, sits across his desk from me. He gestures to my manuscript lying in front of him and says, Now this is a page-turner.

  Thank you.

  There’s one thing, though. The child Irene?

  His eyes are big through his Coke-bottle lenses. I don’t say anything.

  You gave the child Irene a single paragraph?

  I’m thinking, I guess I did. I nod.

  What were you? Ten, right?

  I lie, Yes. It’s too complicated to explain my mother getting me into school a year early, one of the zillions of details of my life I was forced to leave out of the autobiography if I had any chance of finishing it before the end of the semester.

  Your fifth-grade classmate was murdered and all she got was one paragraph? One?

  Dr. Swann, I say, we weren’t supposed to talk about it.

  Then you suppressed the incident.

  Well . . . I didn’t think about it.

  Exactly. Then he smiled. Would you like to talk about it now?

  No.

  But at some point, you’ll explore the tragedy, won’t you?

  I lie again, a lie that will stand for a long time. Yes, I will.

  All right then . . . Let’s leave the murdered girl. About your older brother—he glanced down at my autobiography—Tyler, is it?

  Yes.

  You say you love him?

  Yes.

  He was a manipulative lunatic.

  I can’t imagine a psychology professor using the term lunatic.

  I say, Well, when you’re retarded, you can’t help—

  Retarded?

  Yes.

  Your brother is not retarded.

  I don’t respond. That’s because I’m so surprised to hear such a thing.

  He leans back in his swivel rocker. He says, Mary-Ann, the man has a library of two thousand military books and he reads prodigiously almost all of his waking hours. Since when is that retarded?

  I do not respond quickly enough.

  Mary-Ann, can people who suffer mental retardation read?

  Not too well.

  He smiled again. Then he said, Your brother is an idiot savant. You remember what that is, don’t you?

  Yes. I recite: It’s a form of autism except the person has pools of brilliance.

  Very good. Then he sighs and says, The poor, poor fellow. Mary-Ann, did you never consider your brother as suffering from autism?

  No.

  You never associated that disorder with . . . Tyler’s egregious behavior?

  No.

  He says, You have survived life in a rigid, narrow grid constructed by your brother, who forced you and your parents to run yourselves ragged catering to his every obsession and compulsion, every urge and impulse. He needed the grid, of course, to protect himself from unbearable anxiety.

  Oh. I wonder if perhaps my description of the demographics of Charter Oak Terrace put Dr. Swann in mind of a grid.

  And do you know why you survived life as a pawn intact?

  No.

  Then I’ll tell you why. You are a gifted writer.

  Oh.

  My professor says, Freud’s definition of success is the ability to work and love. You are a cheerful, life-loving young woman and you have successfully written something quite remarkable. So considering the dreadful circumstances of your childhood . . . how is it you’ve thrived?

  I say to him, I never thought of my circumstances as dreadful.

  Ah, but they were. Face up to that and explore what allowed you to escape and soar.

  Time for another lie. All right, Professor Swann, I will.

  The professor can’t get rid of another itch that still needs more scratching. He says, The dead girl. Irene. She was a friend?

  Yes. But not a close one.

  More than just a classmate, though.

  I guess she was.

  You played with her?

  Sometimes. I’d have played with her more but she was bashful.

  She lived near you?

  Yes.

  How was she murdered?

  She was strangled.

  Raped?

  I think sexually abused.

  Raped. I’m sorry.

  Thank you.

  I am overcome that he thinks to express his condolences to me. No one has ever consoled me over the loss of Irene before.

  Was her killer caught?

  I think so.

  You think so? You don’t know?

  He must have been.

  He studies my face. Then he says, I have an assignment for you and I will trust you to do it even though I’m not asking that you do it today, or tomorrow, or in a year’s time.

  I study his face.

  He says, Find out the name of her killer.

  I continue to gape at him.

  And too, another assignm
ent, Mary-Ann.

  What?

  Keep writing.

  All right.

  I’m serious, he says. Then he smiles at me as though I am a little dying dog, just run over by the ice cream truck. He doesn’t believe me. His students are blue-collar commuters. We lack any ambition beyond the hope of graduating and becoming teachers. He pushes my autobiography across the desk to me. He’s given me an A.

  Good luck to you, dear girl. I’ll be here if you want to talk.

  I thank him, leave his office, head over to the local pizza place, and drink a pitcher of beer with my friends. I don’t want to know who killed my little childhood pal. Between the beer and the chatter I am able to begin anew to suppress Irene, which I continue to do for decades until I get a telephone call one morning from the book editor at the Hartford Courant.

  twenty-nine

  THE PHONE RINGS and when I pick it up it is Carole Goldberg.

  Hi. I’m the new book editor at the Hartford Courant. We met once.

  She tells me that she introduced me when I was the keynote speaker at a writing seminar a few years back. I recall that and we catch up on things. Then she says, I have big plans here.

  Her plan is to refine the Courant’s quarterly literary supplement, which is basically a big yawn. She wants it to be special, to include profiles of Hartford writers from the Puritans through the most contemporary including the city’s mainstays, Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She’s hoping to tack on an essay from me on how Hartford impacted my life as a writer. She says, Or something like that.

  I must have paused because she quickly added, Or anything you feel like writing.

  Then she immediately follows that up with, I can’t pay you.

  Carole’s been told she can go right ahead and produce her literary quarterly with the understanding that her budget will be zero. Since she can’t exactly ask the Dunne brothers to write for nothing—Dominic, the international gadfly who is a minor character in my fifth novel, or John Gregory who has just died at huge loss to contemporary literature—she is relying on me, not on the glitterati.

  My Auntie Mary was the Dunne père’s secretary.

  The editor says, The whole operation will end with your essay, Mary-Ann. You’ll be my anchor.

  So I say, Sure, why not?

  I have no trouble reviving the Hartford lore as it’s filed away in my brain’s card catalog. I start with my family’s first public crisis, which happened before I was born when my Uncle John Belch shoots himself in the arm working the line at Colt. The Colts say he brought his own firearm to work, was cleaning it, and accidentally shot himself. Years later, my mother is talking with my Auntie Margaret about the Uncle John Belch debacle, and I am eavesdropping as always and my mother says to Auntie Margaret, As if John owned a gun.

  Auntie Margaret says, God forbid.

  My mother says, This is Hartford, not Yuma. I’m telling you, Margaret, he wouldn’t have been fired today, he’d have sued! I blame the government.

  In addition to the Uncle John Belch shooting incident, my essay includes several Hartford events I remember clearly, some of them occurring before I was born as with the Colt shooting, and some when I am too young to possibly have a recall, like the very biggest: the Great Hartford Circus Fire. The fire is a tragedy that changes the character of the city. I am five months old. The circus comes to town one month after the D-Day invasion; consequently, women and children are the vast majority of the matinee audience.

  The mayor is quoted in the Hartford Courant: New England has lost more lives today than we did on the beaches of Normandy a month ago.

  My mother tells me that on the day of the circus, fire sirens blasted throughout the city and everyone ran outside to shade their eyes and look upward to see if they could spot the Luftwaffe in the skies. Some years before my essay for the Hartford Courant, I wrote a novel centered on the circus fire: was it arson and if it was, who set the fire?

  I think how my third novel had a scene, set in 1943, with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra playing while Frank Sinatra sang. Writing the scene, I remembered their hit in 1943 was “I’ll Never Smile Again.” I could see Frank crooning. But I wasn’t born yet. My memories of what I’ve seen and heard are sometimes true, or sometimes they’re not. This is a human phenomenon especially difficult for law enforcers who depend on witnesses whose memories are not accurate though they swear on their grandmothers’ graves they are. I understand, particularly since, when I’d finished a draft of that third novel, I did some fact checking and found that Frank’s 1943 hit was “I’ll Never Smile Again,” with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra.

  When I am finished writing my contribution to the Hartford Courant Literary Quarterly, quite pleased with it, I dig up an old photo, which the editor has also requested. It’s me at six years old sitting in the back of a goat cart. When I was six, a man with a goat and a cart came to Charter Oak Terrace. He took a big camera out of his suitcase, and then unfolded a tripod. He let the children feed the goat while he set up. The goat feed came in a box that read Donkey Feed. The mothers paid fifty cents for the five-by-seven photo, which they received in the mail in two weeks time.

  Now I look at the photo and remember my mother’s anger when the postman delivered it. She said to my Auntie Margaret, Will she ever learn to smile for a camera?

  My smile isn’t genuine. I don’t know how to fake a smile. I look like I have Bell’s Palsy in the picture. The goat, a trained professional, has a lovely smile.

  I end my essay with a conclusion that makes me a little uneasy but there really isn’t time to dwell on uneasiness if I want to make the Courant’s deadline. My conclusion: My writing is driven by such fragments of a Hartford childhood: recollections, images of neighborhood faces, my family’s reminiscences. I recover previously unsurfaced memories on a daily basis. Some events occurred before I was born, and some, perhaps never occurred at all. But still, I remember them, and I place the emotions they stir into the consciousness of my characters.

  When I am stuffing the essay and photograph into a priority mail envelope, without any warning the face of my fifth grade classmate, Irene, parks itself right in front of me, her large dark Loretta Young eyes skewering me. She wants something. She wants me to do what Dr. Swann at Central Connecticut assigned—to be released from my brain. She wants me to see to her recognition, see to my remembering what happened to her. In one big flood the two-year gap in my brain—the empty card catalog drawers—fill up with the terrible days and weeks and months that followed Irene’s murder. So I throw up a dike. The dike holds. But still I have to take my essay out of the mailer and at least add something—some little thing—which I insert just before the concluding paragraph:

  A fifth grade classmate of mine at Mary M. Hooker school, Irene, was raped and strangled in the yard behind mine, down a few. In school we knew not to speak of it. We took Irene’s desk out of the row, and everyone moved up. The night after she died, the Hartford Times arrived with Irene’s picture on the front page in her First Communion dress and veil.

  I read it and said to my father, What’s rape?

  He ripped the newspaper out of my hand and sent me to my room. I asked if I could go out and play instead. He said no. I couldn’t go out to play until the murderer was caught. But Irene would never go out to play again.

  Now, remembering Irene’s eyes, my brain shuts down.

  But my brain didn’t really shut down; I just couldn’t write any more. Suddenly, I can remember reading in the Hartford Times on December 10, 1953, that Irene was not raped, hence, the question I’d asked my father. But she must have been. I found myself wanting to understand.

  GAROLE GOLDBERG’S HARTFORD COURANT LITERARY QUARTERLY comes out as a supplement to the Sunday edition. It looks quite nice and is acclaimed. On the cover is a close-up of a vintage Royal typewriter. I wonder if Pippi installed the keys. There are articles saluting the oral histories of Native Americans; the terrible sermons of Thomas Hooker (Mary M. was a descendant, but
my school was named for her because she was the first woman to serve in the Connecticut State Legislature the year women got the vote); the serene writings of Horace Bushnell; the diaries of the slave Jupiter Hammond; the children’s stories of Samuel C. Goodrich; then on to Samuel L. Clemens; Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her sisters Catharine Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker (Hookers galore in Hartford); Ann Plato, the first black woman to publish a book of essays; Anne Petry, who wrote the biography of Harriet Tubman, someone no one ever heard of until Ms. Petry wrote her book; Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who published sixty-four books and no one’s ever heard of her to this day and no one will unless someone writes her biography; the Hartford Courant editor Charles Dudley Warner; Wallace Stevens; Brendan Gill; the Dunne brothers; and the transient Jack Kerouac, who touched down in Hartford for just a few years. With his mom, of course.

  The next day, the phone rings. It’s Carole Goldberg at the Courant.

  I say to her, Congratulations. The supplement is beautiful.

  She says, Mary-Ann . . .

  I wait. What?

  I’ve got a message for you on my voice mail.

  Oh good. Some famous editor has seen the essay and wants me to expand it into a book for which he will pay a million dollars and then some movie producer will option the book for another million and I’ll be rich.

  She says, The message is from the girl’s brother. The murdered girl . . . Irene. He’d like you to call him.

  I immediately hear Miss Bowie’s stern admonition not to speak of Irene, which I complied with being a good little Catholic girl who will not ask adults why.

  I write down the phone number on a cardboard coaster, lying on my kitchen counter.

  thirty

  IRENE’S BROTHER, Fred. Fred is fifteen when Irene dies, so much older than us, another era. All I can think is how I deliberately kept my lines about Irene in the Courant essay devoid of sentiment. I am kicking myself. The problem is, though, that I hadn’t wanted to be consoling. After all, no one consoled me at Irene’s death; I was ordered not to speak of it. I had to wait a dozen years for Professor Swann at Central Connecticut State College to offer me sympathy. If he were still alive he’d be happy to know that when I was finishing my essay I needed to share Irene with the Courant’s readers; he was always so patient.