Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  He changed, got in his car, turned on the ignition and the windshield wipers and lights, and immediately looked over his shoulder in order to back out of the driveway. If he had looked at his backyard illuminated by his headlights, he might have seen Irene’s body just on the other side of the white picket fence in front of his toolshed. But then again, he might not have because the rain was falling heavily as midnight approached. No one had called him about the child who had gone missing right there in his neighborhood. When he arrived at police headquarters a few minutes before twelve, he took off his rain gear, shook out the coat, hung it up, and went to his office.

  At 12:03 A.M., he received the first radio dispatch of the evening concerning a missing child. He passed it back to the radio dispatcher to transmit to all cruisers on patrol. Cops walking their midnight beats were not sent the dispatch. Missing children always turned up. Sometimes in their own beds. In addition, this particular child lived in Charter Oak Terrace. The cops weren’t feeling the pressure they’d have had placed upon them if it had been a little rich girl from West Hartford.

  It was a quiet night. There were no updates on the missing child throughout Officer Proccacino’s shift.

  At seven the next morning, his shift ended and he called his wife to wake her, which was his habit, and went out to his car. The rain had stopped.

  Over the next half hour, Mrs. Proccacino got dressed and cooked breakfast. She was just finishing when she heard her husband’s car pull into the driveway at seven-thirty. Officer Proccacino’s headlights lit up his yard for the instant prior to his turning them off. The light bounced off the white picket fence, something the officer was vaguely aware of. He came through the back door just as his wife went to the kitchen sink, where she happened to glance out the window. The sky was overcast and the feeble light of a winter morning was even dimmer than usual but she noticed what seemed to be a pile of clothes between the picket fence and the toolshed. Mrs. Proccacino thought laundry had blown off the clothesline next door in the previous night’s rainstorm.

  When the police officer walked into the kitchen, he was about to tell his wife of the child gone missing from Charter Oak Terrace—the D section just down the street—when she said to him, What’s that outside, Mike? The laundry from next door?

  Officer Proccacino peered through the window and knew instantly what he was seeing between the fence and the shed. His brain registered the color red and then it registered body. He knew the missing child had been wearing a red jacket. As he raced outside, he remembered how his dog had been barking the night before. His stomach turned over.

  He stood beside Irene and then bent down. Her face was swollen and blue. A trickle of blood was coming from her nose and a few drops had spilled onto her jacket. Around her neck was a silk scarf tied so tightly that it was sunk deep into her neck. He noted the bulky knot. Officer Proccacino knew Irene was dead but he followed procedure. Without moving her outflung arm, he felt Irene’s wrist for a pulse.

  Then he stood and ran back to the house. As he dialed headquarters, he said to his wife, We had a report of a missing child last night. She’s out behind our fence and she’s dead.

  Mrs. Proccacino grabbed a kitchen chair and put it behind her husband’s knees and he sank into it. Within minutes, the yard at 80 Coolidge Street was overrun with police officers, the first, Policewoman Ellen Brown, one of Hartford’s two policewomen, who was on foot patrol nearest to the address. The Hartford Police Department was the first in the country to hire female police officers for jobs other than taking dictation. They could not be placed in line for promotion though. Policewoman Brown couldn’t believe that no one had told her about a child who was missing from her own neighborhood beat.

  There was no crime lab in Hartford. The state had a coroner’s office and the coroner had a medical examiner available to him. But the coroner could not be reached and neither could his assistant, so the backup from West Hartford, Dr. Harry Allen, was called up on the Proccacinos’ kitchen phone. He arrived fifteen minutes later. He examined the scarf around Irene’s neck. Dr. Allen asked, We got a Navy man here?

  One of the cops stepped forward. He had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor. He looked down at Irene, scrutinized the scarf around her neck and said, That’s your basic square knot. We do it neater than civilians. We do it like that.

  Captain Jimmy Egan, head of the Vice Squad arrived. Egan looked down at Irene and remembered the station house talk two weeks earlier of a possible assault that took place on Beaufort Street. He feared he might have a rapist on his hands, one who had turned to murder. (This was a time when the word serial meant a short film played before the main feature and was not applied to rapists or killers.) At that point, Egan decided to wait before telling the chief his suspicions. He would first check out the report filed on the Beaufort Street attack. Egan knew he’d somehow have to find a few minutes at headquarters to hunt up the report and read it right away. Every police officer in Hartford would soon be on the streets, including him. Especially him.

  While the crowd of cops on the scene expressed relief that Irene was fully clothed, obviously hadn’t been sexually assaulted, Egan scanned the ground where she lay. He noted her shoe half off and then he saw a sliver of pink silk under the corner of the toolshed.

  Just then, Hartford’s Chief of Police, Michael J. Godfrey, came running into the yard. He looked down at Irene and then followed Jimmy Egan’s gaze to the corner of the shed and what lay beneath.

  twenty-three

  WHEN WE COME to school the next day, all of us in Miss Bowie’s class talking about the high point of our field trip to the Hartford Electric Light Company—the girlie calendar—some sixth-graders arrive all excited. We are drawn to their elite circle.

  Irene is missing! they say.

  Missing? We look around. Irene isn’t in the playground.

  She was kidnapped!

  We look around again. No Irene.

  One of the boys says, She’s probably out sick.

  I say, Yeah!

  I tell Gail and Susan and Magdalena that the warm milk at the Hartford Electric Light Company probably made Irene sick.

  We don’t wait for the bell to line up to go in. We are already at the door pushing and shoving as soon as we hear its grating bbbrrring. We pour down the halls. Gail, Susan, Magdalena and I lead the crush into Miss Bowie’s classroom. Miss Bowie is standing behind her desk facing the door, waiting for us. Normally, she is flitting around the room, pinning stuff up on the bulletin board, or storing new packages of manila paper on the shelves under the windows. My friends and I stop, and the rest of our classmates behind crash into us.

  The days are at their shortest in December. The electric lights are on in the early morning dimness. They make the room a sickly yellow. I notice for the first time that the electric light from the Hartford Electric Light Company is not the color of real light.

  Miss Bowie doesn’t move a muscle. She says, Go to the cloakroom, hang up your coats, and then please sit down at your desks.

  We follow her orders, stuff our mittens into our pockets, put our hats up on the shelf over the hooks, and hang up our coats. Miss Bowie does not have to call out or stick her head in the cloakroom door to shush us, to hurry us along as she normally does. We are not speaking and we are not dawdling.

  We sit at our desks gazing up at Miss Bowie with our huge need to know whether or not it is true—whether or not Irene has been kidnapped.

  She says, There will be no speaking of Irene.

  Of Irene. Not about. The difference in the two words is big to me.

  We are appalled, not that we shouldn’t speak of Irene, whatever that means, but because the sixth-graders’ rumor is true. Gail leans over and whispers to me, They must have found a ransom note!

  Miss Bowie assigns two boys to take Irene’s desk out from her row and carry it to the door for the janitor to put in storage. Gail raises her hand.

  Miss Bowie says, We are not to talk of it.

 
; Gail says, I know, Miss Bowie, but shouldn’t we get her things out?

  Miss Bowie says, I have emptied the desk.

  The removal of Irene’s empty desk from our classroom is very solemn. The janitor doesn’t make eye contact with us as he lifts it up and takes it away.

  We are stricken that Miss Bowie won’t wait out Irene’s kidnapping before removing her desk from the classroom. Or maybe she thinks Irene won’t be back until next year. Or maybe it is a signal to us that no matter when Irene is returned, even if it’s next year, she won’t stay back yet again, won’t have to repeat fifth grade.

  Miss Bowie has us all move up one place, and Irene’s space is filled in with the desk of the boy who sits behind her. I look at him. His name is Danny. What is Danny doing in Irene’s place? The change means I have to go from the front of my row to the back of the next. But Miss Bowie puts me in front again because I have trouble seeing the board and need to be up close. I won’t get glasses for two years because my mother thinks I am faking the school eye exams. I sort of do; I say—E!—when the school nurse points to the top of the eye chart because I know there is an E there, not because I can see it.

  A sound finally breaks the dead silence in our classroom. Magdalena is crying. Miss Bowie comes down the rows and puts her arm around Magdalena’s shoulders. Magdalena is the only one who intuits that Irene is dead.

  When Miss Bowie looks up she says, Line up at the door for the Christmas pageant rehearsal.

  Susan, Gail, and I make a plan to tutor Irene on the work she’ll miss, just like we tutor Magdalena.

  THE HARTFORD TIMES arrives every evening just minutes before my father gets home from work at five-fifteen. Each night, once Tyler and I have finished playing Crazy Eights and a game of Monopoly, I bring it in and read the funnies. I especially love Dondi, the World War II orphan adopted and raised by the most loving and caring parents a child could hope for. Dondi is six when I start reading him. I am six, too. When I am nine and in the fifth grade, Dondi is still six. I am about to realize that despite his trials as an orphan, he is not only a lucky boy to have been adopted by perfect parents, he is also lucky in that he will never have to be nine years old.

  When my father comes home from work that is how he usually finds me—reading Dondi and the other comic strips. Then I go on to the rest of the paper while my father cooks dinner. On this night, I listen for the paper boy and open the door when I hear his footsteps on the back porch. He hands me the paper. He isn’t smiling the way he usually is and he doesn’t say, Hi, kid. I take the paper, bring it inside the house, and unfold it. Irene stares up at me from the front page with her big Loretta Young eyes, Irene at seven years old, in her First Communion dress and veil, a big grin on her face. Irene clearly did giggle, only at home, rarely at school, where she felt humiliated.

  I read the headlines—big, black, bold, block letters—stretching from one side of the front page to the other.

  GIRL, 11, STRANGLED WITH HER OWN SCARF FOUND BY POLICEMAN IN COOLIDGE ST. YARD

  Every article on the front page is about Irene and what happened to her. I sit down at the kitchen table and begin to read.

  At seven-thirty that morning, the morning after our trip to the Hartford Electric Light Company, just at the time my father calls me to get up for school, Irene’s body was found. It was found in a backyard on Coolidge Street in a yard behind Nilan. Eighty Coolidge Street. An even number. My house is at 75 Nilan Street. That means Irene’s body was lying in the backyard of a house just down from my yard right next to a boy named Barry’s yard. Barry lives on Coolidge Street next door to a cop. Good thing, my mother said once, he’s a ticking time bomb. Barry will later go on to become a juvenile delinquent.

  When the school bell rings, nobody knows about Irene’s death except the police, Irene’s family, and our principal, Albert I. Freedman, who tells Miss Bowie. The media is informed but the police ask that the news be held back until after school begins so that the children won’t know about it till they’re safe in their classrooms. Best the news is broken to the children by their teacher.

  And it is.

  There will be no speaking of Irene.

  That is how the news is broken.

  The local television and radio stations agree to hold off on the story of Irene until after the school bells ring.

  I read every one of the articles. When I am reading them for the third or fourth time, I hear my father’s car flying into the driveway, the gravel clattering into the side of the house. He always tells people to drive slowly into the driveway because the sound of the gravel hitting our new aluminum siding disturbs Tyler. Tonight he doesn’t put Tyler first, ahead of all other things. That’s never happened before and it will never happen again.

  I hear his running steps. He throws open the back door and, breathless, stares at me in my chair at the kitchen table, the Hartford Times spread out in front of me. I am looking up at him.

  I ask, What’s rape?

  He grabs up the newspaper. He rasps: Go to your room!

  I don’t question why I have to go to my room because of my catechism lesson: The worst sin you can commit against an adult, particularly against your mother and father, is to ask Why? when they tell you to do something. Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.

  From upstairs, I hear the sounds of my father cooking. Half an hour later he calls me for dinner. First, I bring Tyler his three eggs and three slices of spam, and place them on the table next to his latest Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft which engrosses him. In the kitchen, I have one pork chop on my own plate, my father, two. We have fried potatoes and applesauce. We have pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. My mother bakes on Saturday and brings her cakes and pies to her Saturday night card game. If there are any leftovers, she brings them back home as is the case this week.

  We eat. There is no sign of the Hartford Times.

  Then my father watches I Remember Mama with me, tells me to get ready for bed, hears my prayers, lets me read for half an hour, comes back to my room, and instead of telling me a story, which is his habit, he recites a poem:

  “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.

  Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  The poem is apropos of nothing. It is the equivalent of Miss Bowie’s saying: There will be no speaking of Irene.

  twenty-four

  PIDGIE D’ALLESSIO’S FATHER picked up the Hartford Times after work. Like my own father, he sped home; his wife had already heard. Pidgie had, too. He found her in her bedroom holding a pillow to her chest, his wife sitting in a chair by the bed. Pidgie’s friend from around the corner was sitting on the floor. All three looked up at Mr. D’Allessio standing in the doorway. He said, It had to be him.

  He walked back to the kitchen and they heard him call police headquarters. He demanded to speak to the officer who had come to their house the night Pidgie was attacked. The family had heard nothing from the police since that night. In the fifties, charging a man with a sexual offense against a teenager was rare—too difficult to prove that the teenager didn’t victimize her rapist with her wiles.

  When the officer got the message, Pidgie’s story came back to him. Before that, he hadn’t put together what Pidgie said happened to her and the murder of the little girl. He was under the impression that the little girl was not sexually assaulted. But he’d been ordered, as had all the Hartford cops, that if they came upon the slimmest shred of information, the smallest glimmer of possibility, they were to call the chief’s office. That is what the officer did. He spoke to a detective and the detective put him on the line with Chief Michael J. Godfrey, who listened and then proceeded to blow up.

  The chief called Captain Egan. Jimmy Egan explained to his chief that the D’Allessio girl hadn’t been raped or injured, though there were a couple of marks on the neck that may have been hickies. He told Chief Godfrey that the officer who took the call had also noted that the girl was quite attractive and her father subject to histrionics. The officer
had taken a cursory ride around the neighborhood and concluded there were no signs of a pervert.

  Chief Godfrey blew up again. When he was finished raving, Egan told him they were working with the state police, had cast a wide net, and were dragging in all known perverts in Connecticut.

  Chief Godfrey himself called the D’Allessios and told Pidgie’s father he needed to speak with his daughter. Mr. D’Allessio put Pidgie on the phone. The chief said to her: Young lady, could you identify the man who attacked you?

  Pidgie said, Yes.

  And would you be willing to come into headquarters to identify him directly once we’ve caught him?

  Yes.

  Good girl. And, Pidgie, when the man attacked you, did he speak to you?

  Yes.

  Would you agree to come into the same room with the man, listen to him speak so you could be sure he was the one?

  There was a pause. Then Pidgie said, Yes.

  The chief spoke to Pidgie’s father and told him what his brave daughter had agreed to do.

  Mr. D’Allessio said, Listen, when you know who the sonofabitch is who did it, just tell me where to find him. I’ll take care of the bastard for you.

  After the chief hung up, he and Egan looked at Pidgie’s file. It wasn’t especially detailed. The girl claimed she was choked with her scarf and then assaulted but not raped. All the chief said to Egan was: Jesus Christ, Jimmy.

  The chief read Pidgie’s description of her assailant—a tall, dark man. Then he called Mr. D’Allessio back to tell him that he and a couple of officers were coming to the house to have Pidgie describe the man again. He apologized for having to put Pidgie through this.

  Mr. D’Allessio said, My daughter’s a tough cookie. Tougher than me.

  The chief could tell the man had been crying. Not surprising since Pidgie’s father must have come to understand what a miracle it was that his daughter was alive.