Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  Richard is fine. He is four years old. He falls out of the maple tree all the time.

  I am five. My mother buys me a navy blue coat to wear to Jackie’s funeral. I am so impressed that I now have something to wear that is the color of the Jane’s covers just like all the adult ladies.

  My mother decides I should go to the wake, too, not just the funeral. I can see my father is very nervous about that development. But I am not—I don’t know what a funeral is and I don’t know what a wake is either. I don’t really know what dead is for that matter, not for another year when Pippi allows me to go eeling with him. I am looking forward to a new adventure.

  My father does his best to prepare me. He tells me that even though Jackie is dead and in heaven, his body is still at Fisette’s Funeral Home. How that can be, I don’t ask, since there is no other part of Jackie that I can comprehend besides his body. I can’t figure out which part of him is in heaven. This is precatechism classes so I don’t know what souls are either, though I hear them mentioned during Mass when we pray for the repose of the souls in purgatory. What is repose? What is purgatory? I don’t know. I believe we are praying for our shoes when they are at the shoemaker’s to get new soles.

  My father says, Now, Mickey, I’m going to take you up to the coffin and Jackie’s body will be lying inside of it. He’ll look like he’s asleep.

  What a coffin is, I don’t ask either.

  We’ll kneel down in front of the coffin and say a prayer for Jackie’s soul.

  Ah-hah. It is Jackie’s shoes that are in heaven. But then why pray for Jackie’s shoes? Why not pray for his body so it has a place to go, too?

  Are you listening to me, Mickey?

  I sure am. I say, Does Jackie get to go to purgatory?

  Of course not. He’s a Mongoloid. He goes straight to heaven. He didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Just like Tyler.

  I do not refute this fantasy. Tyler knows right from wrong, he just doesn’t care one way or the other. I ask, How will Jackie get to heaven?

  My father says, The angels will carry him. Now, once we say our prayer . . . Try to say it to yourself, Mickey . . . we’ll go over to Uncle John Belch and Auntie Corana and give them a little hug.

  Uncle John Belch and Auntie Corana will be there?

  He sighs, Yes.

  And Roger and Billy and Ruthie and Richard?

  Yes.

  Now I am feeling less anxious. I’m going to see my cousins, who are so much fun.

  My father says, After you give them a little hug, you must tell them you’re sorry.

  Tell who?

  Uncle John Belch and Auntie Corana.

  What for?

  For Jackie’s death.

  I can’t believe my ears.

  Then my father says, All right?

  I think, All right? But I haven’t done anything. Why do I have to apologize?

  All right, Mickey?

  His voice is now stern. I can tell he wants me to do as I’m told.

  All right, Daddy.

  Then I say, What about Ma?

  She’ll be staying home with Tyler.

  If he isn’t working, my father is the one who always stays with Tyler. Many things are amiss. Richard is the one who fell out of the tree, not me. Surely my father is mistaken to think that I had anything to do with Jackie’s heart attack and being dead before he hit the floor. At least now though, I know where Jackie’s going. Part of him, anyway. Heaven.

  I do not want to go on this adventure, but I understand that I have no choice. Without telling my father, I make a decision; I will not say I’m sorry because I am so sure my father is wrong, that my Uncle John Belch and Auntie Corana wouldn’t dream that I could possibly be responsible for Jackie’s heart attack. Much as I hate to think so, maybe my father is actually lying because he also says that Jackie is imitating foghorns in heaven and he’s got all the angels in stitches. Jackie only imitates foghorns at the beach. Or maybe my father isn’t lying; maybe there’s a beach in heaven and the angels get to swim and make sand castles when they’re not flying around. That would be nice.

  My father buttons my new coat but I find I am wishing I had no new coat. I am wishing I didn’t have to go to Jackie’s wake at Fisette’s Funeral Home. A wake is the trail left by a boat at the beach. I cannot figure out what will be trailing along behind Jackie’s coffin. Coffin. Did I hear correctly? Maybe my father meant Jackie would be coughing. Maybe when you’re dead you can still cough.

  We arrive at Fisette’s and my father and Mr. Fisette glad-hand each other in the parking lot. Mr. Fisette asks my father if he had that long shot in the fifth at Rockingham. My father reaches into his pocket and waves a C-note under Mr. Fisette’s nose. Mr. Fisette says, Jesus Christ, Yutch, you’re always in on the action.

  Then we go inside.

  There is a room as dark as church and with church music playing very softly. The room is full of people sitting in one row of chairs up against the wall to our left, and another row against the right wall. The people in the chairs face each other and stare at us as my father and I walk down the empty center of the room to the coffin. The coffin turns out to be a five-foot-high garden. Bushels of flowers climb all the way up the walls. As we come closer, I can see Jackie lying deep within the garden. Only his upper body is visible. Rosary beads are twisted around his hands. He doesn’t look like he’s sleeping like my father said. Once I saw a dead bird, and at the time, I didn’t know that the term for its inert posture was called dead. Jackie reminds me of that bird. It’s not Jackie, it’s a Jackie-bird and it’s dead.

  My father is right about kneeling down. Someone has put a kneeler like the ones in church in front of the garden/coffin. My father and I kneel down on it and I am overwhelmed by the smell of so many flowers at once. I say the Hail Mary aloud because I can’t figure out what it means to say something to myself. Then my father takes me by the hand, we stand, turn, and walk to my Uncle John Belch, who is sitting right up against the edge of the flowers.

  I do not have to hug him, he hugs me. Then I just stand there in front of him and do not say I’m sorry, even though my father is nudging me.

  Uncle John Belch takes my same hand that my father had been holding, pulls me close, and says, Are you sorry, Mary-Ann?

  I say, Yes.

  And now I know I really did kill my cousin Jackie. But I also know, when Auntie Corana hugs me so hard and doesn’t let me go for such a long time, that I’m forgiven.

  sixteen

  PATRICIA D’ALLESSIO, called Pidgie by family and friends, was a happy, pretty seventeen-year-old just a few months into her junior year of high school. She’d gone to a friend’s house on Beaufort Street directly after school to work on a history project due in a week, the last day of school before Thanksgiving break. The girls lived two blocks apart, the friend on Beaufort Street not far from the bus stop, and Pidgie on the corner of Beaufort and Franklin Avenue, the long thoroughfare running though the heart of Little Italy. The friend’s mother invited Pidgie to stay to dinner since the girls were so determined to get a good start on the project before completing their other homework assignments.

  Pidgie called her mother, who gave her permission and told her to call back when she was about to leave her friend’s house so she could watch for her. Neither of the girls’ mothers drove and their fathers wouldn’t be home from work until later.

  The two friends finished their project, had dinner together, and then Pidgie called her mother to say she would be leaving in five minutes. That was when Bob Malm stepped off the bus down the block. Pidgie put on her coat and wrapped her scarf around her neck. Pidgie’s father got home from work just as she was skipping down the porch steps of her friend’s house carrying her books in her arms and managing a wave good-bye.

  The friend shut the door as the phone rang—Pidgie’s mother calling to say that her husband had just arrived home and he’d drive over to get Pidgie. But she was told Pidgie had already left. Pidgie’s mothe
r hung up and explained to her husband that Pidgie would be home shortly and to keep an eye out for her while she finished cooking their own dinner.

  It was 6:45 P.M. and in November that meant it was pitch dark outside. Hartford’s streetlights were positioned two hundred feet apart and each gave off just a small arc of light.

  Halfway between the two Beaufort Street homes, Bob Malm spotted Pidgie hurrying along. Pidgie didn’t think twice about the man approaching from down the sidewalk; there were plenty of cars driving by—fathers, including her own, returning from work. In fact, she was able to make out her father’s car in the driveway; she knew he must have just pulled in or he’d have come and gotten her when she called home. All winter he parked up against the sidewalk as it would mean less snow to shovel in case there was a storm in the night.

  Bob smiled at Pidgie and she smiled back. He stopped and offered to carry her books for her. She said, No thank you. He walked in step beside her so Pidgie decided to pretend the next house was hers. She would go up the porch and in the front door. She’d babysat many times for the family who lived there; the door was unlocked; all the doors in Hartford were. That is what she was thinking while Bob calculated the halfway mark between two streetlights where it was darkest.

  Just as Pidgie was about to turn into the walk leading to the house where she’d babysat, Bob struck.

  seventeen

  Pippi and Mickey in the “yard” at Burgey’s Barn

  WITH JACKIE’S PASSING, I am worried that I’ll have to go to Fisette’s Funeral Home every day to pray alongside his body but that doesn’t happen. Jackie will be buried. Buried!

  Under the ground? I blurt out.

  My mother says, Where else?

  I figure Mr. Fisette will dig a hole in his backyard and put Jackie in. If the alternative is to be tossed into the Hog River, so be it.

  My parents somehow decide I will not go to the cemetery for the interment. My father is now saying interment instead of bury—he perhaps noticed my shock. However, I know that even though it’s a different word, Jackie will still be buried in the ground. But I am relieved that Jackie will be buried in a place called a cemetery, not Mr. Fisette’s backyard. I picture a cemetery to be a park with more flowers.

  Though Jackie is dead and buried, incredibly, things remain the same. When the following summer arrives, we are Shangri-La-ing at the beach, and my mother announces that the Belches will arrive the next day for their annual visit. I wonder if Jackie will be with them. Perhaps my parents were mistaken and he didn’t get buried but rather became alive again like Jesus did on the third day.

  My Uncle John Belch has a delivery van instead of a car so he can fit his big family in. The van pulls up next to our Ford in front of Burgey’s Barn and all the Belches pile out. I check to see if Jackie is with them. He isn’t.

  We walk to the beach and I run to Jackie’s hiding spot in the jetty where he squatted and imitated the foghorn. Then I come back to our blanket and lie down next to my father. I whisper to him so that the Belches don’t hear me: I want Jackie to come back now.

  My father says, He’s in heaven.

  I look up into the blue sky and I say, Maybe the angels will bring him back today.

  Mickey, he will never come back. The angels don’t bring you back from heaven.

  It’s one way?

  He smiles sadly. Yes. But we’ll see Jackie again when we go to heaven.

  What if we go to hell?

  Of course we won’t go to hell. Try not to think about it.

  I try, but I am thinking God is very mean to take people away and never let them come back. I believe heaven is a lie, just like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Then I stop thinking.

  I AM SUCCESSFUL at not thinking about dying again until I turn seven when I bump into death number two via Kathy Delaney.

  Kathy Delaney is an especially beautiful, round-faced, blue-eyed blonde, her little nose and rosy cheeks sprinkled with pale freckles.

  My first memory of Kathy stepping front and center out of the background of my life is in Mrs. Merucci’s second-grade classroom at the Charter Oak Terrace Extension School. She leaps out of her seat, lifts her dress, and says, Omigod. I cut my can!

  Our chairs at the makeshift school are old and rickety, and breed slivers. A sliver goes right through Kathy’s underpants and her can is bleeding. Mrs. Merucci hustles Kathy off to the nurse and then she gives the rest of us a lecture on the appropriate vocabulary we need in order to refer to our private parts. She has us all stand, puts both hands on her ass, and has us repeat the word buttocks aloud.

  Buttocks, we all call out.

  Then she touches her chest and says, Breasts! Repeat!

  We all call out, Breasts!

  Then she puts her hands in front of her crotch and says, Privates! Repeat!

  Privates! most of us shout, and the others, Pirates!

  I have never heard any of these words before. My Auntie Mary calls her breasts, stars. Once she said to my mother, My stars are itchy, and my mother said, So scratch them, and Auntie Mary reached into her bodice and scratched. But I thought Auntie Mary said jars not stars, just as some kids in Mrs. Merucci’s class now think their genitals are to be called pirates.

  My mother doesn’t use the word can. She calls a rear end, derriere, which I associate with the Lincoln Dairy. There is only one counter stool at the Lincoln Dairy where Tyler will sit. One day we go in and another child is sitting on Tyler’s stool so Tyler pushes him off. The child cries hysterically and Tyler goes running out into the traffic, my father in hot pursuit. I say to the child’s distraught mother, My brother’s retarded and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

  However, I am aware that Tyler knows exactly what he’s doing. The man who runs the Lincoln Dairy backs me up, tells the mother he won’t charge her for her son’s new ice cream cone—the old one is on the floor—and then he makes me my hot fudge sundae while we wait for my father to come back. A few minutes later he does, Tyler in tow. My father apologizes to the woman and offers to pay for her ice cream as well as her son’s. He makes Tyler apologize. Tyler says, Sorry, and then he says to the sniffling child, That’s my stool, dummkopf. The woman easily diagnoses my brother as not retarded but rather a sociopath and grabs her child and makes for the door.

  I think of the word derriere again during rehearsals for graduation from Hartford Public High School when we are told that our school song, “O Hartford High, beloved school, all hail to thee . . .” is, like “Danny Boy,” sung to the tune of “Londonderry Air,” and was written centuries before the lyrics to “Danny Boy,” hit the air waves. This is yet another reminder of the pride we should feel that Hartford Public High School is the second oldest high school in the country after Boston Latin. I figure the original lyrics must have been some Shakespearean bawd sort of song referring to London’s can. (Excuse me, Mrs. Merucci, London’s buttocks. Excuse me, Ma, derriere.)

  The night that Kathy cuts what had been her can but is now her buttocks, I test my new vocab at home, singing about breasts and buttocks. Consternation breaks out. After I explain Mrs. Merucci’s lesson, my mother says to me, Kathy has a lot of older brothers and a mother who is sick in bed, and that is why she is so vulgar.

  I hear my father say a little later to my mother, Buttocks is a lot worse than can, if you ask me.

  She says, No one asked you.

  I think, If you ask me, jars makes more sense than breasts, which are chicken pieces that you eat.

  No one asked me.

  That same year, Kathy is in my catechism class, the prelude to making our First Holy Communion. Our classmate Irene is in our catechism class too, although Sister Mary Bernadette announces Irene has a special dispensation from the bishop to receive her First Holy Communion at the Polish church, Sts. Cyril and Methodius because she’s Polish and that’s where she goes to Mass. However, she will receive instruction with us because there isn’t any way to get her to the other side of Hartford for her ch
urch’s after-school cathechism class. At the same time, Irene will not be given a partner for our procession rehearsals. Irene is mortified to be singled out by Sister, and on top of it, has to parade down the aisle of the church alone.

  After a cathechism class where we practice asking forgiveness of the priest hearing our confession—Bless me, Father, for I have sinned—Sister Mary Bernadette announces that poor Kathy Delaney might be missing the first few procession rehearsals because her mother has been very sick, bedridden for months, and now the family has lost her. We all figure that mothers who get very sick and live in their beds will then get lost and have to be found and put back to bed again. But then Sister Mary Bernadette asks us all to say a prayer for Kathy’s mother in Purgatory so she can get to heaven ahead of schedule. I learn that lost can also mean you are dead.

  All adults, even nuns, adhere to the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s supposition of Positive Thinking. When you’re both a man of the cloth and a doctor besides, people will believe anything you advise, for example, the use of euphemisms. Or maybe people have just been waiting and waiting for permission from the right person to tell them to believe whatever the hell they want to believe instead of the truth as long as it makes them feel better for the short term.

  Although Kathy Delaney’s mother is the second official person whose death I am connected to following my cousin Jackie’s, I have, by now, been made aware of other deaths. My mother says things like: That poor Carl Luzzi. They opened him up? Loaded with cancer! Loaded! Sewed him right back together again. Damned shame. One of the best bowlers at the Washington Lanes.

  I picture cancer inside someone as oatmeal and the person suffering from it in danger of bursting.

  AFTER THE DEATH of Kathy’s mother, all the nuns act maternally toward her, but she will have none of it. She isn’t used to mothering. She prefers the camaraderie of her older brothers. Kathy and I are the same height so we are partnered in the First Communion procession. My cousin Tommy, who is married to Auntie Doris, is a professional photographer. He manages to get a perfect shot of me at the Communion rail just as Father Kelly puts the host gently upon my tongue. When my mother sees the picture she says, That Kathy Delaney has spoiled this picture.