Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  Besides the oak floor, the velvet wing chair, and the embossing on books, I also feel my mother’s silver mink collar on her black Persian lamb jacket. My mother can’t afford a full-length mink, and a stole is a public admission that she can’t, so she decides on a Persian lamb jacket with a mink collar, which she purchases with a bonus she receives from C.G. for suggesting a better way to analyze data, saving the company three million dollars a year. (Her jacket is exactly like the one Whoopi Goldberg will wear in the movie Ghost.)

  When I’m into a really good book or if I’m worried about something, even now I find myself holding the bottom corner of my shirt up against my face the way I did with my mother’s fur jacket. My mother notices me doing that once. She tells me I started pressing soft things against my face when she took away my baby bottle on my first birthday, right after we ate the cake—the accepted practice then among no-nonsense mothers.

  As a child, I don’t read the military books in my brother’s library; I read the books my mother bought for him when he was an infant, on layaway from a door-to-door salesman. Even though my parents didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, my mother came up with a dollar a week so that baby Tyler would have two shelves of classic children’s literature intended to start him on the road to an eventual and brilliant career as a priest, preferably with the Society of Jesus. Despite my mother’s countless novenas, a religious vocation isn’t in the cards for Tyler though I believe the Jesuits might have signed him up considering the rare editions in his library. Tyler never reads a one of the books my mother bought him—I do. All of them, a hundred times over.

  Included in the collection, in addition to Silver Pennies, are a first edition of Felix Salten’s Bambi (1929), which I read before Disney makes the movie. Also, The Knights of the Round Table, Robinson Crusoe, the children’s Odyssey, and a dozen others. She also pays fifty cents a week for the twelve-volume Journeys Through Bookland, which contain every myth, fable, and fairy tale ever conceived, plus full-length works such as The Swiss Family Robinson, and Tom, the Water-Baby, all illustrated with art nouveau prints and original drawings. In the fable Why the Sea Is Salt, the illustration of the ship going down has naked women interwoven with the foam of the giant waves turning the ship over. The women don’t have tails. They are not mermaids. When I read the Odyssey, I understand they must be sirens, the same ones who tempt Odysseus.

  Many of the stories in Journeys Through Bookland have antagonists who are evil Jews.

  Before Tyler begins demanding military books, my family owned only two books meant for adults: The Power of Positive Thinking, by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (also known as the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale), a best-selling treatise on what is now called denial, and the Bedside Esquire, which contained short stories and essays that appeared in Esquire magazine over a couple of years in the early thirties. Both books were given to my mother when she was in the maternity ward with Tyler so she’d have something to do.

  In the forties, women were hospitalized for two weeks upon giving birth. It took at least two weeks for them to fully come out of the heavy-duty, anesthesia-induced near-coma they were put into. Forceps were a given. Nurses saw to remind doctors to pull their paper booties over their shoes to avoid sepsis when they planted a foot on the edge of the delivery room table inches from their patient’s birth canal to give them the leverage necessary to haul the babies out.

  Dr. Peale’s book doesn’t interest me but I read the Bedside Esquire. I am eight. The seventy-seven stories and essays include an excerpt from the novel Christ in Concrete, by Pietro di Donato, a scene narrated from the point of view of a man trapped in the footing of a building under construction. The concrete mixer is leisurely pouring its contents upon him and the wet cement crushes his lungs, fills up his nostrils, and finally, buries him. The reader gets to know what it’s like to suffocate in the worst possible way.

  The Bedside Esquire also includes William Faulkner’s “The Ears of Johnny Bear,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ben Hecht’s “Snowfall in Childhood,” Paul Gallico’s “Keeping Cool at Conneaut,” Ring Lardner’s “Greek Tragedy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Night Before Chancellorsville,” D. H. Lawrence’s “Strike-Pay,” John Steinbeck’s “The Lonesome Vigilante,” Theodore Dreiser’s “You, the Phantom,” Erskine Caldwell’s “August Afternoon,” Havelock Ellis’s “The Euthanasian Garden,” Irwin Shaw’s “The Monument,” John Dos Passos’s “The Villages Are the Heart of Spain,” and the ever-famous (and my favorite) “Latins Make Lousy Lovers” by Anonymous, who turns out to be Helen Brown Norden, the only woman included.

  All those stories collected from one magazine over just a few years.

  No story of John O’Hara’s is in the book because I come to understand he called the editor of Esquire, in public, “a sucker of cock.”

  The overleaf of the Bedside Esquire is covered with Tyler’s art—one B-52 after another just like the line of planes he drew on the doctor’s office wall who set my broken arm.

  Besides the Bedside Esquire and the books my mother buys Tyler when he is a baby, I read two newspapers every day: The Hartford Courant and the Hartford Times, the latter now defunct. I read the Courant, which is the morning paper, when I get home from school as I have no time before school. I read the Times when it comes to the door at 5 P.M. Through reading, the vast majority of my unanswered questions get answered even if the knowledge gained is often awry. My mother gives me a book on menstruation when I am ten. The vagina part is so confusing I am left with the impression that the monthly flow will spill out of every pore in my body and I will have to wrap puffy white oblongs called Kotex around my arms and legs and therefore wear long sleeves, slacks, and mittens even in summer. With my trust in Mary and the Lord, I assume the blood will not come out of my face.

  To this day, I sometimes mispronounce words because of the dearth of speech in my home; aside from a nightly fairy tale and my prayers, no one really spoke to me much except Tyler, who was the voice of George Patton. Tyler didn’t allow the radio or records to be played, except when he was asleep, but when television arrived, my cousin Roger Belch fixed us up with earphones, which produced a lot of static. And the Church carried out the theory that children should be seen and not heard. When I was in college, I mentioned the cartoon character Yosemite Sam to a friend. I pronounced it Yoze-might Sam. Also, I thought the park was pronounced that way, too. So first, this friend and I had a laugh, and then she said to me, Why do you have so much trouble talking?

  twelve

  LIVING AT THE New London, Connecticut, YMCA, Bob Malm managed to last a year supporting himself with odd jobs before he was arrested again. One night, he attacked a seventeen-year-old girl who he seriously injured when she put up a struggle. But she would not press charges. The police, who had had quite enough of Bob Malm, noted that he stole her purse, which he hadn’t. Consequently, he was charged with robbery with violence.

  He was convicted and sentenced to seven to ten years and sent to the state prison in Wethersfield, a historic town just a few miles from Hartford.

  thirteen

  Uncle Guido: the Greatest Generation

  TYLER’S DEN is lined with sagging creaking shelves, the subject matter of every book, World War II: theaters of operation, battles, weaponry, and what with Mr. Jane, obviously, warships and fighting aircraft. The den is probably ten by ten feet and there is only space for his books, him, a chair, and a table covered with oilcloth where his record player sits. Although the rest of us aren’t allowed to play records, Tyler plays two hours of polka music every day. He also has a tiny radio; Sunday afternoons he turns on the radio and listens to the Polka Hour. (We try to set me up with a radio in an upstairs closet when I enter my teens, but Tyler detects it what with the bass sounds of rock and roll.)

  With his great aversion to noise and loud sounds, how it is that polka music soothes Tyler, no one can figure. But I guess it’s because he hears it from the time he has
working ears, in utero, just like everyone else in Hartford, Connecticut.

  Hartford in the fifties, just prior to the influx of African-Americans from the South and Latinos from Puerto Rico, is divided into distinct European fiefdoms, each with a ruling church: Italy is represented by St. Augustine’s; Ireland by St. Lawrence O’Toole’s; French Canada by Our Lady of Sorrows; and Poland by Sts. Cyril and Methodius. My bashful school friend Irene, who still lives in the Terrace, is Polish and her mother has a special dispensation to take her across town on some Sunday mornings to the children’s Mass at Sts. Cyril and Methodius though she is not a resident of the Polish parish.

  If you live in Hartford, you are a polka fanatic whether you are a Polish parishioner of Sts. Cyril and Methodius like Irene, or not. You eat guinea food, drink in harp bars, ostracize the frogs (since, as the most recent immigrants, they are at the bottom of the pecking order), and you listen to the polka. At all weddings—Polack, Guinea, Harp, or Frog—you dance the polka. (I find today that weddings aren’t the wild fun they used to be because no one is racing around the dance floor, polka-ing and shouting hoop-eye, shoop-eye at the tops of their lungs.) The best dancers in my family are my Uncle Norbert’s wife, Auntie Ida, and Auntie Doris, who specialize in the side by side, arms-around-each-other’s-waists polka-style, and when they partner up and take wing across the floor, you know to get the hell out of their way.

  Hartford’s stars are the polka accordionists Stosh and Yosh Wiscznesky, “The Connecticut Twins,” and little Jean Marie Kabritsky from a suburb of Hartford, New Britain (a Polish enclave affectionately called New Britsky), who plays tambourine and sings the “Beer Barrel Polka” and Arthur Godfrey’s smash hit “She’s Too Fat for Me” with a voice not unlike Ethel Merman’s. Tyler has an autographed photo of Jean Marie in her national costume festooned with ribbons matching those flowing from her tambourine.

  Tyler calls the radio station so often to request another of Jean Marie’s hits that they promise to send him a picture of her if he’ll quit. He negotiates, demanding a new, updated picture every year and they comply. (In the last picture of Jean Marie to hang over his table, she looks about forty years old and weighs maybe three hundred and fifty pounds, but still appears very merry.)

  There is also a Polish reference in Hartford connected with Saturday night card playing, a diversion enthusiastically enjoyed across ethnic lines. Whether poker or pinochle, gin rummy, or canasta, none of the games hold a candle to the popularity of that native Connecticut game, setback, which is unique in that making points of your own is secondary to forcing your opponent to lose points. In setting your opponent back, the game offers a socially acceptable way to humiliate and denigrate friends. Also, when you play setback, and an opponent makes a careless move, you hiss “New Britsky.” In other words, you’re announcing the fact that the player is such an asshole he might as well be a dumb Polack from New Britain.

  My mother is a champion setback player and is asked to leave her golf club when she accuses an opponent of cheating during a setback tournament. The opponent is the president of the club. There is huge opposition to the request that she resign her membership since the president of the club thinks he’s entitled to cheat, which jars all the members, and my mother has the lowest handicap of all the ladies. But she storms out, and then she joins another club.

  ONCE MY MOTHER STARTS her job at C.G., my Uncle Guido and my cousin Paul come over every Monday night to keep my father and me company. While Paul and I play Parcheesi or Sorry in the cellar, the two men have coffee with a shot of grappa, which my Italian grandfather makes. Playing in the cellar is fun in the summer when it’s hot outside, but my cousin and I freeze in the winter. There is nothing we can do about it; Tyler won’t let us play anywhere else since we can’t be trusted not to whoop and holler at a fortuitous roll of the dice.

  Paul and I look forward to one special Monday night each year during the lowest point of winter in late January. We anticipate it more than we do Christmas and Halloween. It is when Uncle Guido and my father make bagna cauda for the four of us. Bagna cauda is the national dish of northern Italy, where my Italian grandparents emigrated from, that part which used to be a nation unto itself until the early twentieth century. Bagna cauda means hot bath in the Piedmontese dialect.

  Bagna cauda is the most delicious thing on earth and my Uncle Guido is a great cook besides. He was in the second wave of the invasion forces in Normandy, U.S. Third Army. Patton attached Uncle Guido’s outfit, the 188th Combat Engineers Battalion, to the Fourth Armored Division and ordered them all to race across France to Belgium, only to see them stopped temporarily and devastatingly at the Bulge.

  One of Uncle Guido’s favorite war stories is when his platoon is freezing in the woods outside Bastogne for a month. The men have run out of food so Uncle Guido gathers a bushel of fungi he breaks off dead trees, plus wild onions and shoots of dandelions waiting under the snow for spring. Then he fries his bounty in the back fat of a squirrel another GI manages to shoot. All the soldiers tell him that his guinea food is the best thing they ever tasted. They begin to help him forage. They don’t give any of the food to their German prisoners. Instead, they escort the prisoners behind a barn and shoot them. Uncle Guido says there just wasn’t enough food to go around so whenever they’d take prisoners they’d have to shoot them to save them from dying of starvation.

  I am so wrapped up in the story that a question comes right out of my mouth: Did you ever shoot any prisoners, Uncle Guido?

  He doesn’t say yes or no. He says, If one of us lost a buddy, he’d get to shoot the prisoners.

  At that age, I understand that this lost means the buddy is dead. I say, And then he’d feel better?

  No, Mick, he’d feel worse.

  Did you lose any of your buddies?

  My father says, Mickey, find a pot holder for your Uncle Guido before he burns himself.

  When you make bagna cauda, you simmer a great load of garlic cloves and a ton of chopped parsley in an aluminum Italian version of a fondue pot filled with bubbling melted butter and olive oil. The parsley is the last of the harvest from Auntie Palma’s garden, which she protects with burlap after the frosts arrive. Most of Auntie Palma’s parsley has been gathered by Christmas but she has one section of the parsley patch between the asphalt of her driveway and the foundation of her house that faces south. She reserves this particular parsley patch for our yearly bagna cauda. Auntie Palma chops her other parsley harvested earlier very finely and stirs the bright green pile into rendered salt pork, a whole lake of it filling a huge frying pan. Then she shuts off the burner. After the parsley-laden fat becomes firm again, she cuts it into little cubes and freezes the cubes. She does the same thing with her basil. All winter, she grabs a few cubes, fries them, and they become the base for spaghetti sauce or chicken cacciatore or stew. My Auntie Palma has a spotless, white kitchen that smells like any good kitchen in Turin.

  The last thing to go into the bagna cauda is a couple of cans of mashed anchovies. Paul and I are allowed to pry the keys off the cans—we’ve had plenty of practice before, peeling the ivory off the piano keys—and then roll back the tin lids. Actually, we have a race to see who can roll a lid back first. But neither of us is particularly competitive and who cares about winning a race when you’re about to eat bagna cauda?

  Paul and I are always warned to be careful not to trip over the extension cord leading from the pot on the table to the outlet in the wall. This order is given with such seriousness that we know not to ignore it.

  When the cloves of garlic are soft, the bagna cauda is ready.

  On one side of the bagna cauda is a platter of raw peppers and cauliflower cut in bite-size pieces. On the other side, two big loaves of Italian bread. You take up a fork, spear a piece of raw cauliflower or pepper (though other vegetables I’ve come to learn are included in a bagna cauda if you prefer), and you dip it into the still-simmering brown liquid laden with anchovy pulp.

  Dig in deep, you k
ids, Uncle Guido says.

  That’s where the best part of the butter is. Everything but the bottom inch of the hot bath becomes ghee, which is why, I suspect, as an adult I come to love Indian food.

  Next, withdraw your forked, dripping vegetable piece from the pot carefully holding it over a chunk of Italian bread—previously ripped off the loaf by my father—so you don’t drip onto the table. Then, pop it into your mouth. After about six pieces of vegetables, your chunk of bread is entirely saturated with the bagna cauda so you eat that, too. The most heavenly tasting bread imaginable.

  During the feast, Paul and I burn our tongues on the simmering bagna cauda and also our wrists against the edge of the hot pot. We don’t care. While we eat our crunchy raw vegetables and besogged bread, Tyler appears to pilfer a little bread himself, and then runs back to his den, giggling. He doesn’t really like the bread, he just likes to tease us. When we have pizza, he’ll sneak into the kitchen—dramatically on tiptoe—and grab a chunk of sausage from someone’s slice and then dash back to his room. He doesn’t eat the sausage. His diet is mainly canned food: he loves all Campbell soups—his favorite Scotch Broth; Dinty Moore Beef Stew; Franco-American Spaghetti; Chef Boyardee Ravioli; and Spam.

  When the bagna cauda pot is empty, we wipe it out with the last of the bread which we then somehow stuff down our throats though we are filled to overflowing. Then we open the windows and doors and put on fans so that my mother won’t get a migraine when she comes home from C.G.