by Lamb, Wally
“Ready to order now?” the waitress asks after she brings us our drinks. Pop tells her we need a little more time. I’m still pretty full from all the refreshments in our classroom, but in a few minutes, when the waitress returns (she’s wearing a shiny red kimono), I will order a number 16 with gravy, an egg roll, and pork fried rice and eat it all, no doggy bag.
Frances asks Pop for a quarter and, when he fishes one out of his pocket, she gets up and goes over to the jukebox. There’s a fish tank right next to it, so I get up, too. There’s carp in there, huge ones with bulgy eyes, plus a ceramic mermaid that doesn’t have any shirt on. “Woo woo,” I go, pointing at the mermaid, and Frances calls me a moron. You get three songs for a quarter. Frances feeds Pop’s coin into the machine and punches a bunch of buttons. Dusty Springfield starts singing. Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ plannin’ and dreaming each night of his charms…
After I slide back into the booth, I stick my finger in this orangy stuff in a little dish and taste it. It’s good. Sweet. “Duck sauce,” Simone says, and I go “Qwack, qwack, qwack.” Ma says she’ll qwack me if I put my fingers in there again. Then she turns to Pop. “So Felix said you got to the school after all.”
And Pop says, “Yeah, right about when that jerky kid threw the bottle cap at the stage and got the bum’s rush out of there. When he walked past me, I felt like getting up and giving him a good, swift kick in the culo for good measure.” Ma asks him, did he have to go back and close up the lunch counter? Was that why we didn’t see him up in my classroom for the refreshments?
“Nope,” he says. “That wasn’t it.” He’s smiling kinda mysterious, like that time when, for Mother’s Day, he bought Ma a dishwasher and hid it under some old blankets in our garage.
“Where were you then, Poppy?” Frances asks.
“Do you want me to tell you or should I show you?” Pop says. And we all go huh? Then he reaches down on the floor, picks up this big envelope, takes out three glossy black and white photos, and hands one to each of us kids.
Simone’s says, “For Simone, With my fondest wishes, Cousin Annette.”
Frances’s says, “For Frances, With my fondest wishes, Cousin Annette.”
And mine says, “For Felix, Who was the best performer in the whole Christmas show!! Love, Cousin Annette.”
Pop asks me if, when I waved at him from the stage, did I see that both him and Annette were waving back? And I go, “That big-hair lady was her?”
“Sure was, kiddo. Her father called me. She’s in the middle of a press tour for her new movie. She’d just left Manhattan and was heading up to Boston, but I didn’t want to say anything because she wasn’t sure she’d have time to stop on her way and I didn’t want you kids to be disappointed. What a sweet gal she is—as sweet as sugar. And man oh man, you should’ve seen the limo she was riding in. First class all the way…. Simone, honey, maybe you better close your mouth now, or you’re going to start catching flies in there.”
“She was actually there?” Simone says. “In the same auditorium we were? You’re not just kidding us?”
Pop asks, what does she think? That he autographed those pictures?
“But for real, Pop? She was really, really there?”
I tell Simone yes, she was. Because other than Pop, I was the only one in our whole family who saw her.
“Until now,” Pop says. He’s looking toward the front of the restaurant, and when I look, too, there’s this big black limousine pulling up to the curb. The waitress returns. “Ready to order now?” she asks. “Everyone here?”
“Almost,” Pop says.
The front door opens, and there she is. Pop stands, calls her name, and waves. She waves back, smiling, and starts toward us.
Epilogue
Sister M. Dymphna (née Jean McGannon) returned to her Saint Aloysius Gonzaga fifth graders in January of 1965, at which time she halted the teaching of conversational French but also discontinued her policy of ranking pupils academically on the blackboard and by seating chart. In 1980, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (then called manic-depressive disorder) and responded well to treatment. In 1984, her order forsook traditional nuns’ habits for street-clothes and launched a number of social justice initiatives. Today, seventy-nine years old, Sister Jean volunteers at Ecole Agape, a school for impoverished Haitian girls.
Father Gerald “Jerry” Hanrahan left the priesthood to marry in 1967. A retired social worker, Hanrahan lives with his family in Seattle, Washington.
In 1968, Monsignor Angus Muldoon succumbed to emphysema and alcohol-related diabetes. In his honor, St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School’s advisory board established the Monsignor Muldoon Memorial Medallion, an award given each year to a graduating eighth grade boy who exhibits, in the manner of the school’s namesake, “high moral conduct.” In 1968, the inaugural prize was shared by Roland and Ronald Kubiak.
Mother M. Filomina (née Phyllis Benvenuto) left her post as principal of St. Aloysius G in 1979 to become the residential supervisor of the Holy Family Home, a shelter for the homeless in Worcester, Massachusetts. She held that position until her death in 1986.
Following the retirement of her husband, a haberdasher, Madame Marguerite Frechette returned to her native Québec. Active in community theater there ever since, she has directed and/or performed in no fewer than seventy-seven productions. The Frechettes, now in their mid-eighties, visit Paris yearly.
Pauline Papelbon and her sister were withdrawn from St. Aloysius Gonzaga in March of 1965 and sent to live with out-of-state relatives. Under Sister Dymphna’s direction, Pauline’s former classmates wrote and signed a group letter to her, but she never wrote back. Recently, however, she resurfaced on the Dr. Phil Show in a program titled “Love Your Life, Not Your Carbs.”
As a district manager for the Dunkin’ Donuts corporation, Franz Duzio oversees the operation of more than 200 stores in central and western Massachusetts. The former lead singer of the Skinnydippers, a surf band, he is also a published poet whose work has appeared in the literary magazines Upwind, The Boll Weevil Review, and Art & Noise. With his son, Franz Duzio, Jr., he edits Screw You: An On-Line ’Zine of the Arts. Duzio and his wife (the former Geraldine Balchunas) have five children and one grandchild, Franz Duzio III.
Marion Pemberton borrowed his signature line—“Wait’ll the NAACP hears about this!”—from entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. At the 1964 Academy Awards telecast (at which Sidney Poitier became the first black American to win the “best actor” Oscar), Davis, a presenter, was handed the wrong envelope. His ad-lib received the best laugh of the evening. In March of 1965 Marion Pemberton’s oldest sister, Brenda, a college student, was injured and imprisoned during the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and Pemberton identifies this as a defining event in his life. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, he is a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney. He and his wife, a pediatrician, live in Marietta, Georgia, where they organized campaign fundraisers for Barack Obama in 2008. Having dropped the “n” in his given name, he is now known as Mario Pemberton, Attorney at Law.
Following the fall of the Soviet government in 1991, a front page New London Day article recounted the 1963 defection to the U.S. via Norway of Boris Kabakov, a writer and KGB infiltrator, his wife Lina Kabakova, an industrial engineer, and their niece, Evgeniya “Zhenya” Kabakova, who was passed off as the couple’s daughter for security reasons. The daughter of itinerant circus performers, Zhenya Kabakova had been orphaned at the age of ten when her father, Ivan Kabakov, Boris Kabakov’s brother, was killed by a spooked elephant during a thunderstorm. (Ivan Kabakov’s wife had predeceased him.) Following her graduation from St. Aloysius Gonzaga and the Academy of the Sacred Blood, a Catholic girls’ school, where her peers voted her Class Dancer, Class Clown, and “Most Boy Crazy,” she entered the Zachary Smith Academy of Beauty and became a licensed hairdresser. Married and divorced twice, she has over 800 “friends” on the Facebook social network and is today em
ployed as a blackjack dealer at Circus, Circus in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Thrice married and divorced, Lonny Flood is a graduate of Windham (CT) Technical High School. Employed by a number of area plumbing businesses, he received his foreman’s license in 1996 and oversaw the plumbing operation of Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort, retiring from that position in 2008. He owns time-shares in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and Branson, Missouri, and, through Facebook, has reconnected with his former classmate, Zhenya Kabakova. Recently treated for high blood pressure and erectile dysfunction, Flood takes a daily diuretic and Viagra as needed. He is in the process of relocating to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Rosalie Twerski was valedictorian of her classes at both St. Aloysius Gonzaga and the Academy of the Sacred Blood. A magna cum laude graduate of Notre Dame University’s School of Business, she subsequently toured for two seasons with Up With People! Married to James Hibbard, an actuary, hers is a familiar face seen on billboard and grocery cart advertising across east-of-the-river Connecticut, from which she declares, “Take it from me, Rose Twerski-Hibbard, Re/Max Realtors’ Top Seller Month After Month After Month: IF I CAN’T SELL YOUR HOUSE IN 60 DAYS, I’LL BUY IT MYSELF!”
Alvin “Chino” Molinaro purchased the New London Bus Station’s lunch counter from its previous owners in 1985. The business went into foreclosure the following year, after which time Molinaro relocated to Orlando, Florida, where, when last heard from, he was employed by KleenPoolz, a swimming pool maintenance company.
Following his retirement from the food service business, Salvatore “Sal” Funicello was active in Festa Italiana, an annual community event, and was the New London County Senior Citizens’ bocce champion for six consecutive years. Surrounded by his three children, he succumbed to congestive heart failure in 2001. His final words were, “Take care, kiddos. I’m running out of gas. God bless.”
In retirement, Marie (Napolitano) Funicello was active in the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Rosary Society and the church’s Grief Committee, for which she knitted “comfort shawls” for deceased parishioners’ loved ones and cooked for post-funeral buffets. A victim of stroke-related dementia in her last years, she resided at Easterly, Rhode Island’s Saint Catherine of Genoa Nursing Home. In October of 2005, she informed her son Felix that her husband Sal had dropped by that morning to help her pack. Rather than pointing out that Sal had been dead for over four years, Felix asked her if she was going on a trip, to which she replied, with a Cheshire grin, “As if you didn’t know.” She died in her sleep that evening.
Perhaps it was her playpen encounter with her later-to-be-famous third cousin at a family picnic that made Simone Funicello long for an Annette-like life. (At the age of eleven, she had begged her parents for permission to have her name legally changed to Jeannette Funicello.) As a stepping stone to her own imagined Hollywood career, Simone enrolled in modeling school in 1966. Her modeling jobs were few: a Grange fashion show, a weekend stint as a Chicken of the Sea mermaid positioned in a papier-mâché scallop shell at a Hartford, Connecticut, food show. In 1967, she entered the Miss New London County beauty pageant but failed to place in the pageant’s top five. She entered dental hygienist school soon after. For the past twenty-four years, she has been employed by the office of Maya Paulous, D.D.S. She resides in Niantic, Connecticut, with her husband of twenty-nine years, Jeffrey Sands, and the couple’s son, Luke. As do no fewer than four other family members on his mother’s side, Luke Sands, twenty-seven, lives with the challenges of multiple sclerosis.
In the living room of her Noank, Connecticut, home, Frances Funicello displays a framed 1966 photograph of herself, a bubble-haired radio contest winner, standing shoulder to shoulder with her blond, bubble-haired idol, British pop star Dusty Springfield. Frances earned a Bachelor’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Connecticut and a Master’s degree in reading from New York University. She is employed as a reading specialist in the Stonington, Connecticut, school system. Like Dusty Springfield, Frances came out as a lesbian in the mid-1980s. “Just a phase,” her mother assured her father, but Frances’s parents came to love their daughter’s partner, Victoria Jankowski, a U.S. Navy nurse who in 1996 ran afoul of the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Frances and Victoria were married in February of 2009, shortly after gay marriage was legalized in Connecticut. The couple enjoys hiking with their two dogs, Ella and Libby.
During his freshman year at Alexander Hamilton Senior High School, Felix Funicello grew five inches and finally became taller than over 50 percent of the girls in his class. The subsequent elongation of his face and the soft, dark down that had begun sprouting above his top lip made him look less Dondi-like. At Hamilton High, he took honors courses, ran cross country and track, and was elected class treasurer. An English major at the University of Massachusetts, he unexpectedly fell in love with film—Midnight Cowboy, Fellini Satyricon, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show. In his senior year, he opted for graduate school, wanting both to study movies more widely and deeply, but also to escape his parents’ never-quite-spoken fantasy that he would return to New London and run the lunch counter with, and then for, them. He met his future wife, Katherine Schulman, at the Waverly Theatre, a cramped fifty-seat alternative movie house in Easterly, Rhode Island, that featured stale popcorn, sticky floors, and an excellent Tuesday night foreign film series that Schulman organized. It was at the Waverly that Felix became enamored not only of Kat but also of the French film directors Truffaut, Godard, and Malle, whose work he analyzed in his doctoral thesis, which was later published by a small arts press. In 1983, the year the couple married, Kat gave birth to their daughter, Aliza, and Felix was hired as an assistant professor of film studies at Emerson College. Kat and Felix divorced in 1991. To date, Dr. Funicello has published six books on film and is currently at work on a seventh: an examination of the second half of actress Bette Davis’s career, from the 1950s All About Eve through Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and the films of her final years. After his parents’ deaths, Felix wanted nothing of theirs except the family photographs, of which he was made unofficial curator. Of those hundreds and hundreds of black and white, Polaroid, Kodachrome, Instamatic, 35 mm, and digital photos, Felix has three favorites, each taken in 1964: a picture of his mother posed between TV personality Art Linkletter and future U.S. President Ronald Reagan; a photo of his family at their New London bus station food concession, Felix and his sisters seated on stools in the foreground, his parents standing behind the lunch counter; and a snapshot taken by a waitress at a Chinese restaurant. In this picture, Simone and Frances flank their cousin Annette on the left, Felix and his parents on the right. Everyone smiles and waves.
Born in Utica, New York, Annette Funicello was cast by Walt Disney as one of TV’s original Mouseketeers in 1955 and quickly became the most popular cast member of the Mickey Mouse Club. She also starred in a number of Disney motion pictures and recorded four Billboard chart hits. With her costar Frankie Avalon, she later became a beach picture icon. In 1965, she married agent Jack Gilardi and the couple had three children together, Gina, Jack, and Jason. Later divorced from Gilardi, she married Glen Holt in 1986. In 1992, she was designated a Disney Legend. That same year, she disclosed to the public that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The following year, she established the California Community Foundation’s Annette Funicello Fund for Neurological Disorders. Blind, wheelchair-bound, and in the advanced stages of her debilitating disease, to many of her baby boomer fans she remains America’s Italian-American sweetheart.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Harper’s publisher, Jonathan Burnham, and my good friend, Barbara Dombrowski, who, coincidentally, on the very same day in January of 2009, both suggested that I write a Christmas story. Nah, I thought. But the next day, I concocted the name Felix Funicello and was off and running.
A writer does his best, then passes off his work to those professionals who edit, design, publicize
, vet, sell, and send a finished book into the world. I’m ever-grateful to my editor, Terry Karten, and my agent, Kassie Evashevski, both of whom encouraged me, laughed at the funny stuff, and nudged me toward making this a better book. Thanks as well to the crackerjack Harper team, especially Christina Bailly, Leslie Cohen, Beth Silfin, Tina Andreadis, Kathy Schneider, Archie Ferguson, Leah Carlson-Stanisic, Lydia Weaver, Jennifer Daddio, and Evie Righter. And once again, a tip of the hat to the HarperCollins sales force, the best in the business.
One of my oldest and best buddies, Bob Parzych, had vivid recall of his mother’s trip to California when her “Sweet Dreams Cream Torte” made her a state finalist in the 1959 Pillsbury Bake-Off. Another good friend, Harry Mantzaris, shared his recollections of the days when his family ran the lunch counter at the old New London, Connecticut, bus station. Bob’s and Harry’s memories provided the springboard from which I plunged into this tale.
Thanks to the following writers and readers who looked at and listened to the various drafts of this story and offered me the gift of their critical feedback: Doug Anderson, Bruce Cohen, Steve Dauer, John Ekizian, Careen Jennings, Leslie Johnson, Terese Karmel, Chris Lamb, Justin Lamb, Sari Rosenblatt, and Ellen Zahl. Special thanks to Pam Lewis, who helped me solve the dilemma of the novel’s epilogue chapter. (Pam and I have been friends for 25+ years, since the days when we were students in the Vermont College MFA in Writing program.) Special thanks as well to Aaron Bremyer, my loyal, longstanding, and soon-to-depart office assistant, who listened to these chapters first and laughed the hardest. Good luck, Aaron.
