Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  After I hang up, I hold the coaster in my hands staring at it. I’d taken the coaster home from a bar the night before because I liked it so much; the coaster advertises Lillet Aperitif and is illustrated with a rip-off of an 1890s poster, a blonde dancing in a grape arbor holding an oversized bottle of Lillet in one hand and waving a glass in the air with the other. I collect vintage posters.

  I walk around the kitchen wanting to get to the phone some other day, maybe copy the phone number off the coaster and onto a piece of paper when I have a minute, maybe lay it back down and pick it up again after a nice short one. Maybe I can just stick the coaster in my Pending File, where I am guaranteed never to see it again. Instead, I pick up the phone and dial. The area code is 860–Fred still lives in the Hartford area.

  Someone picks up. A voice says, Fred’s Auto Mart.

  I say, This is Irene’s friend, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith.

  There is a gulp at the other end and the voice says, Please hold on. I’ll get him.

  It is an employee primed to be ready for a possible call from me.

  I hold the phone and I hold myself together, I don’t know how.

  I hear, Hello?

  I crush the receiver to my ear to keep from passing out. I mumble, Fred?

  Yes, he says.

  And again, I say that I am Irene’s friend and I say my name, and I say the Courant has given me his number. And then I wait.

  Thank you for returning my call, he says.

  I say, I’m sorry.

  That’s what my father taught me to say to someone who loses a loved one. It is only long afterward that I come to understand one expresses one’s sorrow that the loss occurred, not for causing it.

  Fred has a soft, calm voice same as Irene. He says, Not a week goes by that I don’t think about her. I’ve thought about her really a lot lately what with the child snatchings going on. Amber Alert. All that.

  He pauses. I wait because I am incapable of getting out anything beyond, I’m sorry.

  He says, I’ve been hoping there is someone somewhere who remembers Irene besides me. I never dreamed anyone thinks about her. I read what you wrote. I feel good knowing there is someone else who thinks about my sister besides me.

  I am still holding the coaster. I press it against my mouth without knowing it. Then Fred says, You mentioned her eyes. We always teased her, told her she had eyes like Loretta Young.

  Oh, God. Why oh why didn’t I say that in the essay? That her eyes were like Loretta Young’s?

  I speak through the coaster. Yes, she did have eyes like Loretta Young.

  I struggle and struggle not to cry.

  He says, It was fun growing up in Charter Oak Terrace, wasn’t it?

  Charter Oak Terrace.

  I struggle some more, Yes.

  Do you remember the name of the bread man?

  I stop struggling. I bring the coaster down from my mouth. It is sogged with saliva. Fred has consoled me with a trivia question. I think back on the bread truck, the merry bread man.

  I say, I can see his face, Fred, but I can’t remember his name. (And besides his truck, I can hear his accent, see his smile, and also his tattoo: numbers on the inside of his forearm.)

  Fred says, Remember when he’d try to get our mothers to buy sweet buns? With frosting? And they couldn’t afford it so he’d put it on their tabs?

  I say, There were no tabs.

  That’s right. The buns were free.

  Fred, I can’t remember the man’s name. I was younger than you.

  He says, It starts with an S.

  I say, I give up.

  Mr. Schustermann!

  Omigod. Yes! Mr. Schustermann!

  Fred and I go on from there, reminiscing, saved by the long ago, saved by the past, the past which came prior to his sister’s murder.

  I ask if he remembers the glazier, Whitey, an albino who’d come around every spring with a pickup truck loaded with great tubs of putty to repair our loose window panes. Fred remembers. Whitey gives the children fist-size blobs of putty to play with. We roll the putty, squeeze it, shape it into long skinny snakes, try to make something—a cup—cherishing the results of our efforts. I don’t tell Fred that one time I snuck back in line to get a second helping of putty. Whitey tells me if I ever do that again he’ll cut off my ears. He waves his chisel at me. I believe him.

  Fred, I say, Did you have your picture taken in the goat cart?

  Yeah, I think so.

  I don’t ask him if Irene had her picture taken too because she must have. I want to keep reminiscing.

  But Fred says, I’m for the death penalty.

  With the sudden skip in subject, it is as if I am forgetting who I’m talking to, who we are talking about. So I say, But I think violent acts can only beget more violent acts.

  The words are out of my mouth and I can’t take them back. He isn’t talking about the death penalty, he’s talking about whoever it was who killed his sister. But Fred ignores me, has other things to say too, isn’t interested in discussing the death penalty so he goes right on talking past me.

  He says, A couple of years ago, I had this customer . . . an elderly man. I looked at his name on the credit card. It was the guy who found her. He lived in the house on Coolidge Street. I asked him why he didn’t go outside that night to see why his dog was barking.

  Up pops a memory. Oh no. The dog barking in the night. The dog was barking at the time Irene was being attacked. Tyler couldn’t tolerate a dog barking. Is that the night I’m remembering? The night of the field trip to the Hartford Electric Light Company? Tyler carried on with a vengeance. Stop that dog. Stop that dog.

  Tyler was running up and down the eight feet of hallway between the kitchen and his den, hands over his ears. When his wrist came up to his mouth, my father said, Tyler, look. I’m going out. I’m going to stop the dog from barking.

  But the dog stopped barking while my father was putting on his jacket, the one with a hood—the jacket he wore when it rained. He hung it back up. Tyler calmed down.

  Fred says, I mean . . . The guy was a cop.

  I press the small, rolled-up sog that was once a coaster back to my mouth. I remember. Now I think that maybe my father could have saved Irene if only Tyler had threatened to bite his arm a little sooner or if the dog’s barking had persisted.

  Don’t faint, don’t faint, I tell myself, as the piece of memory fits into place.

  What an extraordinary coincidence that Irene is killed in the backyard of a Hartford police officer, who is the dispatcher on duty that night—the very cop who sends out the call that a child is missing. While Irene is being murdered a few hours before the cop leaves for work, his dog is barking and barking. The cop and his wife bring him in and he keeps barking until they give him some table scraps and then he is quiet. That is the night my father sighs and says to me, I better get my jacket.

  Fred is going on: The cop told me he just didn’t know. The dog barked at everything. Anything.

  What has that cop suffered? I think. How many times has he asked himself why he didn’t go outside and see what was bothering his dog? And my father. He must have asked himself why he waited until Tyler was about to bite his wrist before getting his jacket. Why didn’t he go out right away? And how many other neighbors heard the dog? How many of them were about to call that cop, or in fact, did call him to tell him to quiet his dog? But then he was a cop; who would have dared to complain to him?

  Fred is still talking. He says, The police came to our house. They said they needed to talk to me. Two cops got me outside and I thought they were going to offer condolences. They took me to their cruiser and put me in the backseat, locked the doors. One cop said, We all have fights with our brothers and sisters, don’t we? So I said that we did. They talked to me some more and then they told me they knew I’d killed Irene and that I might as well admit it. I told them I hadn’t. They said I must have blacked out and didn’t remember killing her, but that I did. They said they were pretty sure
they had someone who saw me do it.

  I don’t know if Fred hears my voice, muffled, when I say, Oh God.

  He goes on: My mother came out to find me. She pounded on the window of the police car. She sent me into the house while she spoke to them. The cops never bothered me again.

  Then he sighs.

  After the sigh, he asks me about myself, about being a writer—what’s it like?—and I answer with some stupid damn thing, I don’t know what, and soldier on; my turn to ask about him.

  How are you doing, Fred?

  He says, Business is good. Oh, and by the way . . .

  Fred tells me he is married to a wonderful woman, his second wife. He says, She’s very smart and she reads all the time, and she can write . . .

  He pauses. Then: But she’s very quiet about it. I wish I could encourage her.

  I think of a writer I know who is quiet about her work. The two of us had travel pieces included in a collection of essays. She told me she’s kept almost all of what she’s written hidden away . . . Protected, she said, from agents and editors.

  I ask Fred, Do you have children?

  I want him to say yes, a half-dozen, all girls.

  He says, I have a daughter, but we’re estranged. I don’t see her.

  Jesus Christ. Another little girl in his life, his daughter, only to be gone from him, too. But it is not my business.

  We chat a little bit more and then I give him my phone number, tell him to call back anytime. Or his wife can call me if she likes. We’ll talk about writing.

  After I put the phone down, after my conversation with Fred, I start gagging but I will away throwing up. I believe I am gagging because I have so little experience with crying what with Tyler, who wouldn’t allow it. I wonder which hurt Tyler worse. The sound of crying or the barking of a dog?

  thirty-one

  I THINK ABOUT IT—crying or the barking of a dog? The one that affects my life most, even as an adult, is crying.

  When I am married and then have a baby, I am banished by my parents. I cannot enter my Nilan Street home or the cottage at Chalker Beach unless I’m alone, which I never am it seems, not anymore. The new baby will, at some point do what new babies do: Cry.

  I accept this. I have been trained to obey the demands of Tyler. I give no thought to complicating my parents’ life pointing out the injustice in my banishment. And too, my father arranges for a sitter for Tyler—usually Auntie Palma—so he can visit us once a week. Sometimes, when he doesn’t have much time (I now live seventy-five miles from Hartford), we meet halfway for lunch.

  When the baby is two as we are getting into the car, she tells the postman that we are going to visit Grandpa. The postman asks, Where does Grandpa live?

  In a restaurant, she says.

  I have to laugh to myself. Why should a two-year-old question why her grandfather lives in a restaurant when her mother doesn’t question his decision to banish her?

  My father takes early retirement to devote himself to Tyler’s care. He becomes a living tool, a combination hammer and screwdriver, in order to fix the world so that Tyler can be kept in an agitation-free state. A real challenge, that. I don’t say anything.

  In the summer, we stay at a motel on the corner of Chalker Beach Road and Route 1. My father visits us poolside or we go to the beach; Tyler is still sleeping during the day. My father’s friendly next door neighbor who built our cottage has rigged up a line between the cottage and his house so that if Tyler wakes to find my father gone, he buzzes the neighbor who comes and gets him.

  My mother takes early retirement so she can play uninterrupted golf and cards. Also, she and Auntie Margaret take the church bus on outings to the new Pequot bingo parlors.

  On occasion, my mother, along with her sister, visits me. She sits stiffly in my living room chair. Over time she comes to have a great affection for her grandchildren, bringing them gadgets and toys and sweaters she knits. She gets out of the chair to teach them songs from her childhood. Auntie Margaret and I fall all over ourselves laughing at one song in particular, which requires the children to follow her lead in touching their various body parts:

  I touch meinself here,

  Vat is it, mein dear?

  Das is my browsweater here, yah-yah,

  And dat’s what I learn in my school, yah-yah.

  I touch meinself here,

  Vat is it, mein dear?

  Das is my schnotblower here, yah-yah.

  And dat’s what I learn in my school, yah-yah.

  I touch meinself here,

  Vat is it, mein dear?

  Das is my bullshooter here, yah-yah.

  And dat’s what I learn in my school, yah-yah.

  I touch meinself here,

  Vat is it, mein dear?

  Das is my breadbasket here, yah-yah,

  And dat’s what I learn in my school, yah-yah.

  I touch meinself here,

  Vat is it, mein dear?

  Das is my fartcellar here, yah-yah.

  And dat’s what I learn in my school, yah-yah.

  But my mother doesn’t touch the children. Once when she’s sitting in the chair, my baby son crawls toward her. She puts her palm up: Don’t touch Grandma, sweetheart. Grandma is wearing pantyhose.

  So Auntie Margaret scoops him up and the more he slobbers on her, the happier she is.

  One day, my father says to me out of the blue, Your mother thinks we can’t take care of Tyler anymore. I told her I would take care of him myself.

  I’m flabbergasted. He has great fear in his eyes, fear that I will take my mother’s side. So I don’t. I tell him that’s what he’s been doing all along.

  A shrink would have a swell time analyzing my father’s need to spend the rest of his life catering to Tyler instead of attempting to find normalcy in his final years. And Tyler has no advocate who might come up with a solution to his psychopathic anxiety.

  I leave it. I have enough of changing diapers, breast-feeding, and getting up at 4 A.M. to write while the house is still. I completely understand Sylvia Plath’s sticking her head in an oven.

  As the years go by, I miss Tyler terribly.

  Part III

  The Quest

  thirty-two

  AFTER I TALK to Irene’s brother Fred, I only know one thing: I want to go back and read those newspapers my father didn’t let me read. I want to find out what happened to Irene. I want to know who killed her. How dare there be no one who remembers Irene? No one who thinks about her? I owe it to her to bring her back. But how stupid is that? She’s dead. So maybe I owe it to myself. But who the hell cares about what I owe myself? I guess just Professor Swann at Central Connecticut State College. And Fred cares.

  Irene was killed twice, murdered by a horrific man, and then erased by the era that was the fifties—all who needed to talk about her silenced. A memorial is something to preserve the memory of a person. That’s what I want to do. Build a memorial to Irene.

  I GO SIT in my office and stare into the wall. Thinking is mostly what writers do—stare at walls, out windows, into space. Sometimes, practically drooling. When my son is around seven or eight years old, he comes into the kitchen to find me rooted in front of an open cupboard, seemingly mesmerized by its contents. Being such a soul mate, he calls out to the rest of the family, Don’t go in the kitchen—Mom’s writing.

  Of my eight novels, three are a mystery series. I have felt compelled to create a sleuth who finds out what happened to murder victims, who killed them and why. And then my sleuth brings them to justice. The second in the series is about a serial killer who preys on teenaged girls. When he is killing his last victim, he realizes she’s younger than he thought. She’s actually only eleven. He stops just short of killing her but abandons her in a place where she will surely die. Then my intrepid sleuth comes to the rescue and saves her life.

  I fictionalized Irene’s death except that I didn’t let her die. But she did die and now it’s time to face up to that and allow the memory of h
er to take hold. A murder wanes, but memory lasts forever. But the murder wanes only when the memory is dealt with.

  Taped to my office wall is something JFK once said: A writer must be true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. I think about that and what Kurt Vonnegut said too. A little over two of my first twenty-five years are gone missing. Just like my French grandparents having a baby every other year for twenty-four years with that unexplained four-year gap, which I later learn was created by Pippi’s service in the Boer War. My gap was created by the death of Irene.

  Time to fill in the gap. Sorry, Irene, that it took so long but here we go. Here is what happened to you. Here is who did it. Here is justice. We’ll just let the chips fall.

  40 POLICEMEN PRESS HUNT FOR STRANGLER OF GIRL, 11

  Sitting in front of a microfilm machine, I watch the Hartford Courant headline, December 11, 1953, whirl past. I turn the knob the wrong way. More and more headlines flash along. I put the knob in reverse until I find the one I want again. I remember clearly the Hartford Times headline of the night before, but not this one in the Courant. The photograph I remember from the Times is Irene posed in front of a spring-flowering tree, standing straight, wearing her First Communion dress and veil and the big grin on her face. In the Courant, a more recent photo fills the page, a close-up, head and shoulders, a fifth-grader with eyes as warm and bright as Loretta Young’s.

  I read about the killing, the relief that she was not raped is obvious in the reporter’s words. No one knew yet about Detective Egan finding the pink underpants. I turn the knob and turn the knob, and read the articles that appeared in the Hartford Courant over the next week until I find myself staring into the face of a former sailor from California named Robert Nelson Malm.

  He is very very handsome. He is wearing a trench coat and a cigarette hangs jauntily from his bottom lip. He looks like a forties movie version of a private detective, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. I press the print button on the machine and I watch his picture slide out. I pick it up and look at it. He looks sincere; he looks like he’d be able to solve the case of the Maltese Falcon. But I wanted him to look like a ghoul. I hate his guts for being so damnably charming.