Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  My friend rings in, Because she has to babysit her brother. And he’s twelve!

  I look at my shoes.

  Another kid explains, Her brother is crazy!

  In an attempt to comfort me, a shy girl in my class named Irene says to me, apropos of nothing, My brother is twelve, too.

  Irene doesn’t say anything about having to babysit for him; I can tell she’s just trying to be nice.

  I feel myself choke up but I don’t cry as I am used to not crying. I crush down the whimpering that tries to come out of my throat. Even whimpering now causes my brother to bite his wrist.

  One day, actually, I press Tyler.

  Tyler, what happens when you hear crying?

  He ignores me.

  Or sneezing?

  Nothing. I persist: Or laughing?

  I keep at him because he is only biting his wrist a little bit. Nibbling.

  Finally he says, A cloud of needles flies into my face and it takes me a long time to pull them out because they have barbs at the end.

  Oh.

  I go to the kitchen and make chocolate chip cookies. I let him eat half the batter instead of merely giving him the bowl to lick.

  Mickey at Charter Oak Terrace

  IN THE HOUSING PROJECT, we have our own little school, the Charter Oak Terrace Extension School, grades K through 2, and a nice playground. For grades three through six, we cross Chandler Street, the eastern border of Charter Oak Terrace and go to the Mary M. Hooker Elementary School. Our sweatshirts, which read HOOKER SCHOOL, elicit many a chuckle, but we students don’t know why.

  Charter Oak Terrace is six acres of row upon row of two-story, whitewashed, cement block buildings. This grid is divided into four sections, the A, B, C, and D sections. The A and B sections are on the west side of the Hog River, a tributary of the Connecticut River, and the C and D sections are on the east side. We are assigned D and my mother is happy because that’s the closest section to our church, St. Lawrence O’Toole’s, which means she can walk to High Mass after my father takes me to the children’s Mass at nine. She has yet to rise to the monumental challenge of learning to drive, something especially difficult for a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  Hundreds of children live in Charter Oak Terrace. We are instructed time and time again by parents and teachers not to go to the Hog River. Still, some go and they drown.

  The real name of the Hog River is the Park River, which once meandered prettily through the city of Hartford. But in the mid-1800s, the residents began calling it the Hog because of its stench. Hartford’s garbage and all the waste from dozens of factories lining the Hog are dumped into the river. A century later, a plan is put into effect whereby the Hog River is diverted underground, confined by large culverts until it empties into the Connecticut River. This diversion of the dangerous river begins just beyond Charter Oak Terrace. Since only Working Stiffs live there, fuck them. In the sixties, a neighborhood activist, Ned Coll, renames the Park River yet again. He names it the River of Tears as part of his proposal to see that the rest of the river is piped underground. No dice. Ned Coll runs for the presidency, is a candidate in the 1972 Democratic primary. At a debate where he is sitting at the end of a table with George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson, he holds up a dead rat and tells the TV audience that there are many, many poor children who have to live with rats.

  George McGovern wins the primary and Ned goes back to trying to save children’s lives in Hartford.

  Today you can canoe the Hog River with a conservation group, an adventure with perhaps not quite the cachet of the Sewers of Paris Tour.

  We have conservationists when I am a girl but they are called “bird-watchers.” They are degraded because they are Republicans as Hartford is a Democratic city.

  When I am growing up the bird-watchers try, to no avail, to stop the demolition of Hartford Public High School, the second-oldest secondary school in the country, after Boston Latin. Hartford High is to be demolished to make way for a cloverleaf-patterned exit-entrance ramp for the new Interstate 84. Alas, no dice. So under the bulldozer go terrazzo floors; two hundred twelve-foot-high solid cherry doors; carved stone balustrades; and authentic Palladian windows, each pane cut into shape by hand. The only things saved are the telescope, which is used by the honors science class—no girls allowed in the honors science class—and a marble sculpture of an owl, our mascot, which sat over the main entrance for over a hundred years. I figure the “birdwatchers” don’t want the school demolished because of the owl over the door.

  My father takes me to the Hog River when I am four. It is a hot summer night. My parents and I, and my Uncle Guido and Auntie Palma are sitting outside on beach chairs in our six-by-six-foot front yard in Charter Oak Terrace.

  My father is saying, If we’d had a plan to knock out the krauts’ ball bearing factories we’d have won the war within a year of Pearl.

  Uncle Guido says, You’re goddamn right about that, Yutch.

  My cousin Paul, a year younger than I am, has fallen asleep in his mother’s arms. I listen to the adults talk while we all try to ignore my brother’s solitary conversations, which are emanating from his bedroom’s open window above our heads, conversations based on what my parents and aunt and uncle are saying while he eavesdrops.

  Tyler begins shouting—bellowing, actually—into his Red Phone connected directly to the Oval Office in Washington, D.C. Tyler’s Red Phone is an old Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup can. The reason Tyler is shouting is his need to hammer home the gravity of the calamitous Japanese aggression.

  He yells into his Campbell’s can: We are severely damaged at Pearl Harbor!

  Then, once Tyler has FDR’s attention, he goes on to describe the extent of the attack. The actual president at the time is Harry S. Truman as FDR is already dead.

  My mother tried to get Tyler to trade in his chicken noodle can, which was rusting, for a new one. Tyler’s response was: Prepare to dodge ack-ack fire from our left flank, men.

  That meant no.

  While we sit outside on this midsummer night, I watch Fluffy and her litter of kittens lying under a shrub. I beg to have one of the kittens but I can’t as Tyler can’t abide meowing. A dog comes trotting down the street, seemingly minding his own business. He stops, sniffs the air, and lunges through our little circle and into the shrub where he grabs one of the kittens and rips its throat open, which sets Fluffy to screeching. My brother, inside, begins screeching, too. My father and Uncle Guido chase the dog away while my mother dashes in to Tyler before he can maul his wrist.

  When Tyler is settled down again, back to communicating with the White House, my mother comes out and she and my father, my uncle and aunt, continue to chat. The commotion does not wake up Paul, who is a deep sleeper. I watch the fatally injured kitten squirm while its mother licks it even though my own mother says, Mickey, don’t look.

  When it dies, my father picks it up by the tail, takes me by the hand, and we walk to the bank of the Hog River. He throws the kitten into the black water amid the bedsprings and tires.

  My heart is broken. I have nightmares and wake up screaming in my crib: Stop, stop! I am not screaming Stop to what is going on in my parents’ bed, but my father’s remedy is the same: He brings me a glass of water and tells me, correctly, that I am having a nightmare. But I keep screaming so my mother runs to my brother and my father takes both my hands and tells me, Mickey, say the Hail Mary.

  I have learned the Hail Mary only recently.

  My father says, Mary will make the nightmare go away.

  And so I pray: Hail Mary, full of grapes, the Lord is with thee . . .

  The prayer ends . . . now and at the hour of our death, amen. The last line of the prayer tells me that I will die, too. I whisper a prayer of my own: Mary, don’t let a dog kill me. Don’t let a dog rip open my neck. Don’t let my father throw me into the Hog River.

  Mary answers my prayer so I don’t believe what I learn
later in catechism—that Mary doesn’t answer prayers, but rather she intercedes. I don’t know what intercedes means. I only know that Mary doesn’t let cruising dogs kill me.

  I am named after her and Jesus’s grandmother too. This pronouncement oft-declared by my mother is an attention grabber.

  People ask, What grandmother?

  My mother smirks and says, St. Anne!

  Everyone laughs at the bizarre but true fact that Jesus had a grandmother.

  The Ann in my name is spelled without the e. My mother feels the e is one letter too many.

  WITH MY FATHER’S PROMOTION to foreman at the Abbott Ball Company and my mother’s new job at C.G., my parents now have an income that no longer allows us to qualify for low-income housing. They buy a house and we leave Charter Oak Terrace. I am finally out of the crib, out of my parents’ bedroom. I am seven.

  We move to a little Cape Cod house on Nilan Street, on the other side of Chandler, parallel and one block from the Mary M. Hooker School. In the year that Terrace residents begin to make the kinds of salaries that force them out, colored people from the South begin moving in, Freddie Ravenel and his family the first. The real estate values around the Terrace plummet, so the house my parents buy on Nilan Street is a bargain, which is why they are able to afford it.

  The people who sell us our new house leave their upright piano. My mother is melancholy. She knows how to play, but Tyler forbids the sound of a piano, far more assaultive a noise than crying. She must give up the thought of playing; otherwise Tyler will probably sever his hand. My mother won’t have a nervous breakdown over this particular disappointment because she is no longer on the verge. She is at C.G. instead, working at a job she loves. Also, she’s moved on from basketball to golf and becomes as adept a golfer as she was a basketball player. At first she plays Hartford’s public courses and then joins a country club. She squeezes in a bowling league, too.

  People say to my parents about Tyler, You spoil him. But the alternative to spoiling Tyler is to watch him sink his teeth into his wrist and bite it to the bone.

  My father enlists Uncle Guido to help him get rid of the piano. Uncle Guido brings Paul so I will have someone to play with and therefore stay out of the way. I am happy because Paul is my best childhood friend even though we fight a lot since he’s an only child and I am an only normal child so we aren’t accustomed to sibling relationships. Also, I am not allowed to have friends to visit, only cousins.

  Because the piano is so heavy and cumbersome, my father must face the fact that he and Uncle Guido will not be able to carry the piano out of the house by themselves. Also, they will need a truck to haul it away and even though my cousin Roger Belch has been recruited in the effort because he owns a truck, they’ll need a hydraulic lift to get the piano up and into the truck. A hydraulic lift is an item no one can produce though my cousin Hawk, who has accompanied Roger, says, Hey, I know where I can get ahold of a hydraulic lift. And the guy I have in mind won’t even know it’s gone.

  His voice then lowers to a whisper: So long as we get it back into his garage before he gets home from The State.

  The State is a place where many people work. I think it is the name of a company, like the Abbott Ball Company, or like C.G. I don’t know it is actually any number of jobs offered by the state of Connecticut. My Uncle Ray is at The State. He is a toll bridge collector.

  My father and Uncle Guido rule against borrowing a hydraulic lift without the owner’s acquiescence. Instead, they get a couple of axes and a sledgehammer out of the back of Roger’s truck.

  I say, Wait!

  I tell my father that Paul and I would like to save the ivory strips glued to the piano keys. Can we peel them off, Dad?

  The men look at one another thinking, Why the hell would they want to do that? But Paul and I prevail and are allowed to salvage the ivory while my father, uncle, Roger, and Hawk prepare for the demolition by raising a short one. Paul and I divide up the nearly paper-thin ivory bars, and we put them in our Dutch Masters humidors. (My father has managed to secure an anniversary humidor for Paul too.) My WEA scab has disintegrated to nothing. One day, when I hear: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I understand the metaphor exactly.

  First, the men rip the top and back off the piano. Paul and I look inside. The insides of the piano make me of think of the insides of a horseshoe crab, an animal I look forward to observing each summer when we go to the beach on Long Island Sound. Unexpected things are under the shell of a horseshoe crab; that shell, Tyler says, is the prototype for the Nazi helmet. Peering into the guts of the piano I spot a harp. I beg to keep the harp. My father says, No, Mickey.

  Uncle Guido says, Just what Tyler needs . . . you running around strumming a harp.

  Paul says, Then can I keep the harp?

  I experience jealousy for the first time. I beg Mary to intercede, Please say no, please say no.

  Uncle Guido says, We don’t have room for a harp.

  They don’t. They have moved from the Terrace to a four-room ranch near the Luna Club and it isn’t all that much bigger than the apartment they had in the A section of the Terrace.

  The reason the men feel free to swing and pry with reckless and noisy abandon is because Tyler has been taken out for a ride by my Auntie Margaret to see the dike that was constructed in downtown Hartford in 1938 after the great hurricane, which caused the Connecticut River to overflow its banks submerging Main Street under several feet of water. Tyler is the only one who knows that the cement wall next to I91 in Hartford is a dike. Paul and I are tempted to go along with Auntie Margaret because we know Tyler will demand an ice cream cone along the way and Auntie Margaret will stop at the Lincoln Dairy. But the destruction of the piano is too exciting an event to pass up even for ice cream. (My mother, meanwhile, is on the course. She still works the housewife shift at C.G. so that she can play golf during the day when either Auntie Margaret or Auntie Mary can stay with Tyler.)

  My two uncles and two big cousins take up their weapons and smash the piano to smithereens, harp and all.

  Paul and I then help out, putting all the large and small chunks and fragments of the piano into Roger Belch’s truck. Then we head out through Charter Oak Terrace to the Hog River, where we throw the horseshoe-crab parts into the water to join the bedsprings, tires, and Fluffy’s kitten.

  In the fifties, there is no such thing as a tag sale and you don’t insult someone by offering them something you don’t want, even a piano.

  I MAKE FRIENDS with the kids on Nilan Street: Judy, whose father is dead (unheard of), Cookie, whose parents are divorced (unheard of), and Joyce, whose father is a bookie (common). One day I am coloring with Joyce at her kitchen table while her father is organizing piles of little slips of paper. There is a knock on the door and the knock becomes a hammering. Joyce’s mother grabs her husband’s papers and runs to the bathroom where she flushes them down the toilet. She misses a few so Joyce’s father eats them. He is chewing and swallowing when the police break the door down. Joyce keeps coloring and so do I. The police race through the whole house but they will not find any of the pieces of paper. They leave. One little piece of paper is under my foot. I pick it up and give it to Joyce’s father and he thanks me. I wait, hopeful that he will eat that one too but he doesn’t.

  The next morning my mother is reading the Hartford Courant, puts it down, and stares at me. She says, Did anything happen at Joyce’s house yesterday?

  I tell her what happened. She doubles over with laughter and then calls everyone she knows and tells them what I told her. That night, a man comes to our door and hands my father a bottle of twenty-five-year-old scotch. When the man leaves, my father says to me, Good work, Mick, and then takes me out for a hot fudge sundae at the Lincoln Dairy. I don’t know what I did to deserve my mother’s laughter or my father’s treat. I don’t ask because I don’t want to risk losing the trip to the Lincoln Dairy.

  I AM A BED WETTER and every day there is a sheet blowing in the breeze from the cloth
esline. The neighbors deduce that Tyler wets the bed. My mother, always stepping up to defend Tyler, sets them straight whereupon they report this fact to their children and I hear about it every morning on the walk to school with my new playmates. They hold their noses and chant:

  Mary-Ann wets the be-ed. Mary-Ann wets the be-ed.

  When I am an adult, hired by Mary Warburg of the banking Warburgs to put her personal papers in order, we become fast friends. In her diaries, she has written that she was a bed wetter. I say to her, So was I.

  She says, And so was my best friend, Mary Astor.

  Wow.

  Then she says, I suppose if one’s name is Mary, one is a bed wetter. Isn’t that too divine?

  Then she makes us each a gimlet so we can toast divine bed wetters named Mary everywhere.

  eight

  ON APRIL 3, 1946, Bob Malm was separated from service on the Charles F. Osborne in Charleston, South Carolina, where the ship was mothballed and then decommissioned on April 18. The captain asked Bob what his intentions were—what duty he was considering—and Bob told him he hadn’t really thought about it; whatever came up would be fine with him. The captain suggested submarine duty and sent a recommendation to Washington whereupon, in May, Bob was transferred to New London, Connecticut, where he would attend submarine school and then receive a promotion to chief petty officer.

  Bob, at that point, was a big and brawny twenty-three-year-old military man.

  After ten weeks in New London, Bob realized that the small Connecticut city was not Okinawa—forcing himself on little girls was tricky business. He asked for a transfer, which was not granted.

  During the month of July, New London’s south end was plagued by what police described as a reign of terror. Homes were broken into late at night and on several occasions girls awoke to the feel of a man’s hands around their throats choking them. In every case, other members of the households heard the commotion and the man fled. A special police detachment was put on patrol.