After that, I was drawn to the boys in my neighborhood. Playing with boys was much more interesting than what the girls always wanted to do. Tea parties and dressing up Barbie was not my idea of a good time. Two brothers, Richy and Tommy, who lived across the street would let me come over to play army, football, or baseball with them. They treated me like one of the guys. I liked that they didn’t give me extra points in kickball or throw a ball softer to me. But they were pretty tough guys, and it turned out I was not. One day when I came home bruised from playing a game of tackle football with them, my mother forbade me to play with them anymore. She tried to foster some relationships with the girls in my neighborhood, which didn’t work out very well.
AT GATHERINGS AT our house, the men usually wound up in the living room and the women in the kitchen. Kitchen duty was just an excuse for the women to get away to talk among themselves, about children, cooking, and clothes. I would gravitate to where the men were gathered, trying to infiltrate their male world. I’d hang back in the corner of the room, nursing a piece of cake one crumb at a time. I wanted to listen to my father talk about his business, politics, and what he thought about world events, the way I never heard him talk to my mother and us. The men talked differently than the women and were not afraid to argue or disagree. I liked their frank talk better than the women’s, which avoided sensitive topics. The men’s discussions held clues about the larger world—and my father.
chapter seventeen
1960
IT SEEMED THAT my parents were always prepared for some kind of disaster. Canned goods lined my mother’s pantry in case of blizzards, or worse—war. We didn’t have a bomb shelter, but we knew neighbors that did. When my father held my hand crossing the street, he let me know that even if a car waves me on, I shouldn’t trust them, I should let them go first. My mother would check each restaurant and shop we went to for the emergency exit.
When I was six, I witnessed my first real emergency situation when Hurricane Donna hit us. It felt like the roof was blowing off the house.
My mother warned me to stay away from the window where I stood watching our street fill with fallen trees, a window awning, and even some patio chairs and tables. My father took us down into the cellar when the storm got bad “just to be safe.”
My mother made hot chocolate with little marshmallows. My father got candles and a flashlight so that we could play cards.
Later, when the storm had truly been spent, my father went outside in the backyard to check on the damage while Linda and I watched out the kitchen window. It was a real mess. Branches and leaves were all over the place. Our clothesline was lying clear across the yard, its metal arms at its side and lines tangled like long fingers.
Then he saw a branch a little bigger than the others, with the roots still attached. He stopped to examine it closely, shook his head, and carried it into the garage.
With the sun back out the next day, I followed my father outside to clean things up. He stood the clothesline back up and secured it into the ground. Then he brought that branch out from the garage and studied it for a moment. He looked up at me like he had a great idea.
“Let’s plant it,” he said. “It will be our Donna tree—from Hurricane Donna. We’ll always remember, right, Juicy?”
We walked the yard to pick just the right spot for the new tree.
“We need to give it plenty of room,” he told me. “This is going to be the biggest tree in the yard someday. You’ll help me nurse it back to health.”
It was that same year that Linda had the surgery where they broke both of her legs to set them right again. I remember hoping that afterward she’d be able to ride her bike with me, or go for a walk on the beach in the summer.
Linda’s roommate in the hospital, Chi Chi, was from Brazil. Her leg was mangled in a motorcycle accident, and her mother brought her to New York in an attempt to save the leg. Chi Chi’s leg, however, was ultimately amputated.
The mothers of the girls got them each a Spanish-English/ English-Spanish dictionary. The first word they looked up was pain, dolor.
They made up their own sign language for important things like “change the TV channel,” “I’m hungry,” “It hurts,” and “When do we get out of this dump?”
Between them, they had one good leg, Linda said. But they both used it. When Linda needed a bedpan quick, Chi Chi would hop over to get it for her.
As the two mothers got to know each other, my mother learned that the trip from South America and the extended stay in the United States was a considerable hardship on her new friend. She was running out of funds and had nowhere to stay, so my mother brought her home for the remainder of Chi Chi’s hospitalization.
“Another stray,” my father muttered when she broke the news. The time before it was their housekeeper who had run into hard times.
Linda told me that no one had prepared her for the pain she had after this surgery—it was the worst she had ever had. She concocted her own method for dealing with it. With absolute quiet, she could increase her tolerance by closing her eyes and analyzing what she was feeling—exactly where the sharpest point was, how it intensified, and why it was happening. Was it less than yesterday? If it was, that meant it would be less tomorrow. Somehow, telling herself she could stand it helped more than trying to kid herself into believing it didn’t hurt. My mother used to try to distract her from the pain, but eventually she understood and gave her the quiet she needed to concentrate.
I knew my eye surgery didn’t compare with anything Linda had been through. She was a scrappy foot soldier, and I was a turncoat running for cover from any hint of discomfort. She was valiant; I was a whiner.
When they brought her home, the ambulance pulled up with its red lights on, and I ran to stand at the top of the stairs. I had on the nurse uniform that my mother got me especially to greet Linda. I loved the little white hat and the white dress with big pockets. I imagined waiting on Linda, carrying cookies for her in those pockets. A blue cape finished off the outfit, making me feel like I could fly around the house to bring Linda anything she needed. I felt powerful in that costume, like I could heal my sister with just the right smile.
When they started to unload her from the back of the ambulance, I saw the wide white cast from her waist to her toes, with a bar between her legs. It took three men to carry her, but when they got to the front door, they stopped. My mother looked over at my father, who had that worry crease in his forehead, and they both ran down the stairs. Linda, in her cast, couldn’t fit through.
“I can take the door off the hinges,” my father told the men.
“She may not fit even then. We may have to turn her on her side.”
My mother took a deep breath. From what I could see, Linda looked pretty worried and scared, so I gave her one of my healing smiles. She smiled back.
My father got his tools, unscrewed something, and lifted the door off its hinges. They finally turned her sideways, with one leg up and one down, to fit through the opening. Her feet came in first, and I watched to see her head come in. When they turned her right-side up, her cheeks were wet.
Since my mother needed to sleep in the extra bed in Linda’s room while she recovered, I had to move to my own room for a while. This was a grave disappointment to me. Having missed my sister for a month already, I now had to give up sharing the room with her too. We wouldn’t get to talk at night and try to listen to my parents talking in their room next door.
It was winter, and in the next few days we saw our first real snowfall. Linda could see the top of the lower roof, over the garage, from her bed, and I caught her staring out at the snow-covered surface.
“I would really like to feel that snow,” she said.
I went to the kitchen and got one of my mother’s metal mixing bowls. Then I got my jacket and mittens and went back to Linda’s room.
“What are you doing?”
“You’ll see.”
I opened up the window and the screen underneath, c
rawled out on the roof, and scooped some snow into the bowl. When I started back in, I saw my mother coming through the door.
She didn’t yell like I was afraid she would. She just took the bowl from my hands as I climbed back in and put it on top of Linda’s cast on her tummy.
My mother pulled up a chair next to the bed, and I sat on the legs of the cast. The three of us each grabbed a handful of the cold icy stuff, rolled it into a ball, and stuck them all together in the bowl. It ended up a perfect miniature of the snowman we always built on the front lawn, and we used raisins for eyes, a small piece of carrot for the nose, and a funny hat my mother made out of an old red sock. I crawled back on the roof to put our snowman where Linda could see it from her bed.
chapter eighteen
2005
I’M GETTING MORE disciplined now with this project, as I have started to call it. Mornings I will find one pile of notes or news clippings and reread them until they jar a memory from my past. Then, I’ll write a page or two from that memory. Afternoons, I’ll review and rewrite the piece. The next day, I either add it to my growing file called The Book on my computer, or I trash it if it’s awful. Either way, I usually wind up with a revelation I didn’t expect.
My office is getting crowded with notes hung on my bulletin board or Scotch-taped to the edges of my windowsill. Photos of my parents, my sisters, and myself are tacked up where I see them each time I look up from my computer. I took pictures of the rebuilt neighborhood when I went to visit the crash site, and those are hanging next to a photo of the burned-out building from 1952 as well as one of the split-level house I grew up in.
Today, I’m starting with more notes from my mother. They are spread out randomly on my kitchen table. Because of her notoriously bad handwriting, it takes me a while to decipher each piece. Her writing was so bad that she had printed most of her notes in block letters. The more I read, the more I see that she had a burning desire to tell the story, and I’m hoping I can do it justice for her. I know, however, that some of the story will be information she never told me—and might not have wanted me to tell.
I’ve skimmed over these notes before, but I never really gave them attention. Now, they look different to me as possible puzzle pieces. In my mother’s stark accounts of that awful afternoon, she remembered her horror over and over again:
I can still hear my little girl’s scream—a cry I shall never ever forget and the only cry in her short life I was unable to answer.
The devastation of the loss of our beautiful seven-year-old daughter, coupled with the heartbreaking condition of Linda, was more than any human being could bear all at once. But two people as close as my husband and I could cry to each other and lend one another support. When we met Donna’s friends who were growing up and getting on with their lives, we felt Donna was cheated, and Linda was cheated of a normal life. And so were we.
I’m surprised to read about my parents’ closeness in my mother’s notes and wonder if it was more of a wish than a fact. It’s one of many ill-shaped fragments of the story that I begin to realize won’t fit into my version of their puzzle, or my own.
My mother and father surely must have had fortitude to make it through such an ordeal together, but I remember their fighting most vividly. Much of the time it was about money. They were always trying to make ends meet, and there was an undercurrent of resentment about not getting an adequate settlement from the airline for Linda’s ongoing care. My father was always the affable joke teller when we had guests, but his jokes were often aimed at my mother. And I never saw my father put an arm around his wife, reach out to hold her hand, or steal a kiss at the kitchen sink.
Thinking of my parents’ complicated relationship, I wonder whether my father’s inattention was an impetus for my mother to look elsewhere for validation as a woman, and I am starting to recognize a similar pattern in my own life. There was a persistent rumor about an affair with our “Uncle Jack.” He was the father of Sheila, Donna’s best friend who had been visiting on the day of the crash and who had also been terribly burned in the accident. Jack was a balding, soft-spoken, gentle man with heavy black-rimmed glasses. He was taller and broader than my father. Uncle Jack would stoop over slightly to get down to my size whenever he talked to me when I was a child. Along with Sheila, he had an older son, Michael. Jack owned a successful sporting goods store.
When we moved from our apartment to our new house, Jack bought a house on the next street over. He was a member of the swim club we joined so that Linda could have the swimming exercise she needed for her legs. We went there every day in the summer for quite a few years, and Jack was ever present. For a while, I remember he and his wife (also named Florence) would come over often for coffee in the evenings. Then we only saw Jack by himself, usually when he brought Linda and me presents. My father would nearly growl when Jack showed up at our house. I also remember occasionally stopping by his store.
STUCK INSIDE A yellowed envelope between the pages of one of my parents’ old photo albums, I find three wrinkled tickets to Radio City Music Hall. When I was eight, my mother packed our pj’s, underwear, and extra clothes, and she called a taxi that drove us to the bus stop—without my father. The bus ride to New York City was only about a half hour.
I had asked Linda why my father wasn’t coming with us.
“I think Mommy’s mad at him.”
“We’ll go to the Empire State Building today, and I got us tickets for Radio City tomorrow,” my mother told us while we unpacked our suitcases at the hotel.
Later, we went to lunch at the Horn & Hardart Automat. I loved that you could see all the different food behind the little glass doors and pick whatever you wanted, then put the right number of nickels in the slot and slide open the little door. Everything was wrapped in wax paper. As soon as one thing came out, another went in. I saw people working behind the glass when I took my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
My Tiny Tears doll with the wooden head came along with me. She was a great comfort. Just the week before, I had cracked her head open on the basement steps. My father brought her to his doll “operating room” and fixed her. He painted her head to have brown hair just like mine. Thinking of that made me want him with us even more.
Over the next two days, my mother was on the phone a lot talking to my father. I tried to hear, but she pulled the phone into the bathroom.
After Radio City, I asked when we were going home.
“Soon,” she said, which told me nothing. “Soon” could mean hours, days, or weeks.
In a couple of days, we did go home. My father was waiting at the bus stop, smoking a cigarette with his lips all squeezed together. When he saw us, he threw down the butt like a dart and stamped it under his shoe. He ran over to us and hugged my mother for a long time.
MY FATHER’S WRITINGS are in a different folder. There are fewer pages, and the sparse information is written in his neat, almost calligraphic style. His notes to me focus on getting the facts straight: . . . that may be pertinent to whatever story you might write.
He wrote about the other two crashes that occurred within the four-month period surrounding ours: one in December of 1951 and one in March of 1952.
When a plane hit in March of ’52, he and my mother were still homeless from the accident, staying in a hotel.
We were preparing for bed when we heard on the radio that another plane crash had just taken place not far from the hotel. We dressed and went to the hospital to relieve Linda’s nurses in case they would be needed.
My father’s notes to me are filled with contradictions, a veritable fugue of internal conflict. In one version, he muses about the miracles of that day; my mother wearing a flammable apron that never caught fire and Linda’s survival against the odds. Other times he rants on the injustice of a God that would let this happen to his family.
He was clearly touched, though, by the outpouring of the community:
We were completely wiped out except for the clothing on my back, but t
he response from the public and generosity of relatives was, for me, overwhelming. Calls came in from people in all walks of life, offering donations of blood, skin for grafts, and clothing. One Elizabeth policeman and another good friend took up a collection to help us in the immediate emergency and we were able to buy clothing we needed just then.
MY SISTER’S NOTES tell the story of her many surgeries, of friends who saw her through, of how she struggled to fit in as she got older.
Then, there were the thinly disguised love notes to me from all three:
Our youngest was our joy.
You gave me a reason to escape the pressures of the outside world.
The most precious gift I ever received, my baby sister.
One of God’s special children.
chapter nineteen
JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)
9:00 AM
DR. COHEN LIFTED Linda’s tiny chin upward to see her face in the light, turning her cheek from side to side to examine her. It tickled, and she giggled at his touch.
“It’s a very minor procedure to remove a birthmark like this. It’s only a discoloration, no raised skin or deformation. I can do it on an outpatient basis. Very quick, very routine,” he told my mother of the strawberry mark on Linda’s right cheek. She said she would discuss it with her husband and get back to the doctor soon.
Linda was so pretty, my mother thought, it would be a shame for the birthmark to mar her face. Appearances mattered. It could affect her whole life, even whom she married or what kind of job she got.
After the doctor’s appointment, my mother and Linda walked to Broad Street to look in the shops and get a bite to eat. Even on this dreary day, my mother was in no hurry to go back to the small apartment. She planned to stop in and see my father on the way. He never went out for lunch, so she would pick up a sandwich for him.
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