Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  I think, But I already have the bad news.

  The state came and got Tyler. They intend to autopsy him.

  I freak out. Mr. Fisette gets me some coffee. He says over and over again that there is nothing he can do. Tyler died under suspicious circumstances.

  I am so appalled. The law says a nursing home has to call a family member in an emergency, but the state can require autopsies at will. Connecticut gave my brother nothing, starting with an education. Now they intended to mutilate him in death after he’d been so mutilated in life with his diabetes that my father and everyone else couldn’t prevent.

  I insist on calling someone, anyone. Who should I call, I ask Mr. Fisette.

  The coroner’s office.

  I freak out some more.

  Then I pick up the phone and I speak to a very polite woman. She explains calmly that Tyler was on Title 19. This means he is state property. She says they are, therefore, not required to notify next of kin when an autopsy is in order. She says it’s too bad the nursing home didn’t inform me.

  I call St. Mary’s. Sister Barbara is crying. Mary-Ann, we just found out an hour ago. We tried to call you. We had to leave a message on your machine.

  Then she says, Please let us have Tyler’s funeral Mass here in our chapel.

  I agree.

  Within a few months, Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, dies in a fire at her apartment in New York, a fire set by her young grandson. Her family refuses to allow her to be autopsied claiming religious privilege. I wasn’t given the opportunity to claim anything.

  Tyler’s funeral is postponed for a day.

  The next morning Mr. Fisette calls me and says, Tyler is back. Then he says, Only his head was autopsied.

  Wonderful.

  The cause of death, arteriosclerosis.

  I don’t say to Mr. Fisette that the cause of death was criminal indifference to disabled people. I do blame the government this time.

  Soon I am back at Fisette’s, and there is Tyler in his coffin, just like Jackie was decades ago, same exact spot, embanked in flowers, a pair of rosaries twisted in his hands. The first time Tyler ever touched rosary beads. Rosary beads are standard issue at Fisette’s. He is wearing my husband’s suit. He looks pretty sharp.

  Wings is somehow attached to the coffin lid as if when it’s closed, Tyler will be able to read his book. I take the critter out of the bag I’m holding. I nestle him into the crook of Tyler’s neck and shoulder, just where Tyler would put him when he was finally able to go to sleep after those hours of rounds and kishing.

  I ask the priest from St. Lawrence O’Toole’s Church if he will say a Mass of the Angels for Tyler instead of a regular funeral Mass. A Mass of the Angels is celebrated for children who die before the age of seven. I explain that Tyler was denied the sacraments and the explanation to my parents was that he would never attain the age of reason (seven years old), not mentally anyway. I explain to the priest that according to the Church, Tyler is therefore still an angel. The priest gives me a look that I would have to describe as imploring and asks, Would you go along with my just saying the special prayers from the Mass of the Angels?

  I am a sucker for imploring. I tell him that will do.

  Staff at St. Mary’s chapel outnumbers relatives ten to one. I don’t know who is with the patients. Eddie, my Nilan Street neighbor who played baseball only once on a summer day, who rescued my father from death by exposure, sends a massive basket of flowers to St. Mary’s for Tyler’s Mass. Now it is my turn to write him a thank-you for the beautiful flowers.

  MY FATHER FORGETS how to swallow food. Then he forgets how to breathe. One day, I come to visit and I see that he is dying. Rosa, his aide is crying. I sit by his bedside for twelve hours. He doesn’t die. Rosa tells me to go home, that there is no telling how long he’ll hold on, that he won’t be alone. He dies that night with Rosa standing in for me. I am filled with guilt and sorrow.

  Sitting in front of his coffin, I wonder how he could have possibly endured his son’s death. How could he have survived the news of Tyler’s autopsy? The Alzheimer’s has been a blessing is what people say to me at his funeral.

  I DECIDE TO SELL the cottage in Old Saybrook. More guilt. I know my father figured I’d keep it and go there every summer with my family. It is a four-hundred-square-foot shack with a leaking roof, leaking sink, and leaking toilet pipes. It smells like the inside of my childhood treasure box, the Dutch Masters humidor. (My son says to me that once in a while he catches the odor of a cigar and thinks Grandpa is coming down the street. Only it’s someone else.) Cleaning out the kitchen cupboards, I find a box of LaRosa number 8 spaghetti hidden behind a box of broken dishes. There is a price on it—twenty-five cents. It’s from Jack’s store. Tyler liked spaghetti number 8 and Jack always kept it in stock for my father. I decide to keep the box of spaghetti, put it on my cookbook shelf at home.

  When I leave the cottage for the last time, I stop at an antique shop because a walnut dresser with a marble top is sitting in the yard in front of the store and it catches my eye. It reminds me of the one that was in my Italian grandfather’s bedroom. My father told me it had been my grandmother’s pride and joy.

  I buy it and pay a lot to have it delivered sixty miles away. When the deliverymen arrive, I have them put it in my bedroom. They leave and I begin putting my clothes into it. There’s something in the bottom drawer that rolls around when I open it. I pull it all the way out and a large shiny ball bearing rolls toward me.

  I am now one of those whackos who say things like: After my mother died a butterfly landed on my shoulder and I knew she was all right because she loved butterflies.

  My father has channeled a ball bearing to me; it’s all right that I sold the cottage.

  Part V

  The Future Is Now

  Dad and Mickey

  forty-seven

  Dad and Mickey dancing with her cousins. Paul with back to the camera. New husband, rear left, dancing with Auntie Kekkie

  WHEN I FINISHED this memoir, I thought about Irene’s brother, Fred. I wondered if Fred couldn’t help but be overprotective of his estranged daughter and so she chafed. Maybe something as simple as that. Or was it a kind of vicarious survivor’s guilt? Did he, unconsciously, feel bitter that his daughter survived childhood but his sister did not? Maybe as complicated as that. Or was it something in the middle: Did his daughter feel an uneasiness in him and interpret it as rejection?

  Well trained, I stopped thinking about that. Instead, I fantasize that Fred has reached out to his daughter, or her to him, and they have established a new relationship. My fantasy includes a grandchild for Fred, a girl who is named Irene in honor of her great-aunt.

  I take a vacation. I go to visit my husband’s cousin and his wife and their dog, Thurber, in the Georgia mountains near the Tennessee border where the land is pristine and the pine trees tower over all. One day the four of us are out riding around looking for a piece of property the cousins are considering buying. But they can’t find it, can’t figure out where the turn is. My husband’s cousin asks over his shoulder, Do y’all shoot out road signs up North?

  We have such a swell time, exactly the kind of break I needed.

  From there we take a quick trip to Charleston because I’ve always wanted to visit Charleston. When we get there, I stand by the harborside looking at all the piers, and find myself wondering where Bob Malm’s ship, the Charles F. Osborne, was berthed when it was decommissioned before Bob was sent off to New London to train at the sub school.

  We tour Fort Sumter. There is a plaque listing the members of the company who defended the fort during the attack by the Confederacy. Many of them, I learn, were with the regiment’s marching band. The list includes:

  First Sergeant John Renehan

  Musician Charles Hall

  Corporal Christopher Costolan

  Musician Robert Foster

  Private Edward Brady

  Musician James E. Galway

  There
is a woman’s name at the bottom of the list, Anne Weitfieldt—her title, Matron. The park ranger tells me that matron meant married woman and no one has any idea who the woman was.

  On the National Park Service ferry returning to the city, I take my pen and notebook out of my purse. I start writing a new novel. I will make up who Anne Weitfieldt was and what she was doing at Fort Sumter when the first shot was fired. Me, writing a Civil War novel, of all damn things. I am so excited I start to cry. Crying is such a luxury; people have no idea.

  All writing is therapy. To some extent all writers seek their craft to heal a wound in themselves, to make themselves whole.

  GRAHAM GREENE

  Better to have a miserable childhood than a miserable adulthood. The first is so much shorter.

  BETTE MIDLER

  notes

  Mary-Ann’s fourth-generation Sox fans

  The Charter Oak was purportedly felled by a thunderstorm in 1855. However, a few days earlier, Samuel Colt presented his top five gun dealers with sidehammer revolvers; the grips were carved from a large branch of the tree, lopped off by Colt’s good friend on whose land the tree stood.

  Uncle Guido, who served in World War II as a combat engineer, had two duties: defusing explosive devices (booby traps) and laying mines. As any fan of The English Patient knows, Uncle Guido was, therefore, a sapper. One day, on the road to Bastogne, the GIs came to a footbridge and although the men couldn’t see an explosive device in the bridge, Uncle Guido—by then attuned to the German mind-set—was sure it was booby-trapped. His commanding officer, who had become a good friend and whose job it was to get to Bastogne, disagreed and proceeded to the bridge to show his men there wasn’t a bomb. As soon as his foot hit the bridge, he disappeared in the explosion.

  There has always been discussion as to Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb. I asked Tyler why Truman dropped the bomb. Tyler said, To end the war. Then he said, But the tactic failed—Truman had to drop a second bomb. That did it.

  When Daddy Welch died, Mrs. Auerbach sent twelve cars to carry Fox’s employees to the funeral. A record number of cars. A tribute to her loyal employee.

  All my family served as an extended employment service. Auntie Margaret could get you into Hartford Hospital; my mother could get you into C.G.; my father could get you into the Abbott Ball; and my Uncle Ray could get you into the state, where you’d have great benefits and plenty of vacation days. Today, my Auntie Ida who is eighty-seven can get you into the Civic Center as a temporary usher if you need a few extra bucks or want to see the UCONN girls play for free.

  When my daughter turned sixteen—about to take her driver’s license test—my mother advised her to be sure to know how to make a Y-Turn. My daughter—tall, slim, and with gorgeous jet-black hair like my mother—said, Don’t worry, Grandma, I’ve got everything under control. At the Motor Vehicle Department she said to the inspector as she walked out to the car with him: How about we just bypass all this and go get a couple of Big Macs instead? The man gaped at her. She laughed and said, Just kidding, and she nudged him with her elbow. When they came back, she was sucking up a chocolate shake; she’d passed the test and she got her Big Mac too. She told her grandmother that she got to do her Y-turn in a McDonald’s parking lot so it was a snap.

  I finally drove by my old house on Nilan Street. My Auntie Palma told me that the Puerto Ricans who bought it must be well-off as they’d surrounded it with a brand-new chain-link fence, which is a status symbol in some circles. The fence was hideous; my little Cape Cod house looked like a mini-penitentiary. But the lawn was neat and trim and new shrubs have been planted. I looked up at the two dormered bedroom windows, mine and Tyler’s.

  After I sold the house, my daughter walked me out of the lawyer’s office with her arm around me and said, Some other little girl is sleeping in your bedroom and she’s so happy to have a room of her own. I could only hope that if the little girl had a brother sleeping in Tyler’s room that he wasn’t a manipulative lunatic. While I drove down the street, past Eddie’s house, I heard a rumbling. At the stop sign at Chandler Street I watched a line of bulldozers beginning a new job: disappearing Charter Oak Terrace. Sweet Jesus. I skedaddled on home, happy to note that the big church and the tiny library across from each other hadn’t yet fallen victim to progress.

  At a very posh nursing home in West Hartford I had lunch with retired state Supreme Court Judge Douglass B. Wright, who was the Assistant State’s Attorney to Albert S. Bill at the trial of Robert Malm. He became a preeminent torts authority, wrote a book called Wright’s Wrongs, which is still used by law schools today. Jerry Demeusy, the retired Hartford Courant crime reporter, arranged the lunch. The two men joked how the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors had to have a name change because it was so often referred to as the Connecticut Court of Supreme Errors. The official title is now the Appellate Court. Judge Wright slipped a little flask out of his pocket and offered me some “schnapps”—he didn’t think much of the nursing home’s ban on alcohol. The judge is the person who revealed to me that Robert Malm told the cops Irene winked at him. When it was time for me to leave, the judge invited me to come back on any Saturday night when he and his band played American standards for the residents and guests. He’d also named his band Wright’s Wrongs.

  Jerry Demeusy and I discussed why people confess to crimes they didn’t commit, as did Army Private John Williams, who claimed to have killed Irene. People confess to murders all the time for lots of reasons, one loonier than the next. (The soldier’s father told Jerry that a bureau had fallen on his son’s head during his last leave home and it made him goofy.) When police accept false confessions, the term hoax is no longer used to allow the police to deny accountability. Cops are supposed to know a hoax when they see one. Actually, they do. Any mystery writer worth her salt will attest to that based on conversations over a few beers with a couple of chatty officers. Cops are trained to be success-oriented or face the wrath of the hungry State’s Attorney.

  Chief Godfrey did not rely on the State of Connecticut v. Palko when it came to extracting a confession from Bob Malm, did not trick him into thinking his mother had asked him to confess, or that someone had seen him kill Irene. But State’s Attorney Albert Bill relied on the Palko decision when it came to Malm’s appeal. Yes, it was true that Malm was not informed of Private Williams’s confession, but according to the Connecticut v. Palko decision . . . the object of evidence is to get at the truth and a trick which has no tendency to produce a confession except one in accordance with truth is always admissible.

  Bill turned to another case when it came to the two-witness statutory rule, Connecticut v. Poplowski. He described every bit of evidence the state had against Robert Malm. He submitted that the evidence as presented complied with the rule—that the evidence was the equivalent of eyewitness testimony from two people. Then he stated: The whole duty of the court is to call the attention of the jury to the statute and instruct them that the case must be proved by the “testimony of at least two witnesses or that which is equivalent thereto” leaving them to judge entirely for themselves what constitutes sufficient evidence, whether it be direct or circumstantial, or made up of both.

  Bill pointed out that in counsel’s brief, counsel relied on the two-witness equivalency rule in State of Connecticut v. Poplowski, to the effect that facts cannot be established by not believing witnesses who deny them.

  My initial reaction was, of course: Say what?

  Bill summarily dismissed any idea of the Court proving if evidence is the equivalent of the testimony of two witnesses. Such must be left to the jury.

  Executions by electrocution often went awry. When the current didn’t get the job done, curtains might be drawn and the first of the autopsy procedures begun immediately. Or in less genteel prisons, a corrections officer might be ordered to strangle the prisoner. I found this out when researching methods of execution for a novel I was writing. I asked a Texas prison official why the executioner co
uldn’t just throw the switch a second time. He said, You could blow the whole circuitry out. A maximum security prison without power? That would be a place no man wants to be at. Now, course, we just give ’em the stick. Thank the Lord above for that.

  The United States Supreme Court has recently ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the execution of those who committed crimes as juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. George F. Will was fifty years ahead of his time.

  Connecticut now has another governor who is a woman. She was Lieutenant Governor under Governor John Rowland when he decided to give away state contracts in exchange for a hot tub; he resigned to avoid impeachment and she inherited the title.

  Execution in Connecticut has been in the news again. After the Taborsky execution, new legislation removed the viability of the death penalty—the numbers and kinds of appeals allowed would take forever. But after forty years of no executions, an inmate in the number 1 position on death row stopped the appeals process and his newly hired lawyer went along with the plan. The man was assigned an execution date. However, a federal District Court judge did not go along. He determined that a lawyer’s job is to consider what is in the best interest of his client; committing suicide may or may not be in his best interest. The execution date was postponed while other people filed appeals on the killer’s behalf claiming he was mentally incompetent to make such a decision. The governor-by-default said she wouldn’t grant the condemned man a temporary reprieve while things got sorted out. She made that determination after reading the details of his crimes, which caused her to lose sleep. In a television interview she announced that she had no sympathy for him. (As if that has anything to do with the price of rice, as my mother would say.) On Friday the 13th of May 2005, the State of Connecticut allowed the killer his suicide by medically assisted lethal injection, which took place just after he received the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. Coincidentally, on this same day the Bush administration announced the closing of the submarine base in New London, a decision later tossed by the BRAC Commission.