Behold, I have refined thee, but not with
silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.
-Isaiah 48:10
NO TIME TO SAY GOODBYE.
Chapter One
Do you think, because I am poor,
obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I
have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I am here because I
worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university
that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won’t. At age
fifty-seven, I’m too damned old, and I’d look ridiculous in this crowd. From
where I’m standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two
decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and
gowns.
So I’ll graduate with this class, but I won’t
walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I’ll have the school
send it to my house. I only want to hear
my name called. I’ll imagine what the rest would have been like. When you’ve
had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things.
The ceremony is about to begin. It’s a warm
June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the
dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the
other.
That banging sound.
It’s Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury
cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They
are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the
cold.
They’ve finally come for us, in the dead of
night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.
“They’ll come and get you kids,” she screamed
at us, “and put youse all in an orphanage where you’ll get the beatin’s youse
deserve, and there won’t be no food either.”
That’s why we’re terrified, that’s why we
don’t open the door and that’s how I remember that night. I was six years old
then, one month away from my seventh birthday. My older brother, the
perpetually-worried, white-haired Paulie, was ten. He is my half-brother,
actually, although I have never thought of him that way. He was simply my
brother. My youngest brother, Denny, was six; Maura, the baby, was four; and
Bridget, our auburn-haired leader, my half -sister, was twelve.
We didn’t know where our mother was. The
welfare check, and thank God for it, had arrived, so maybe she was at a gin
mill downtown spending it all, as she had done a few times before. Maybe she’d
met yet another guy, another barfly, who wouldn’t be able to remember our names
because his beer-soaked brain can’t remember anything. We are thankful that
he’ll disappear after the money runs out
or the social worker lady comes around and tells him he has to leave because
the welfare won’t pay for him as well as for us. It snowed that day and after
the snow had finished falling, the temperature dropped and the winds started.
“Maybe she went to Brooklyn,” Paulie said, as
we walked through the snow to the Salvation Army offices one that afternoon
before the cops came for us.
“She didn’t go back to New York,” Bridget
snapped. “She probably just—”
“She always says she gonna leave and go back
home to Brooklyn,” I interrupted.
“Yeah,” Denny chirped, mostly because he was
determined to be taken as our equal in all things, including this conversation.
We walked along in silence for a second,
kicking the freshly fallen snow from our paths, and then Paulie added what we
were all thinking: “Maybe they put her back in Saint Mary’s.”
No one answered him. Instead, we fell into
our own thoughts, recalling how, several times in the past, when too much of
life came at our mother at once, she broke down and lay in bed for weeks in a
dark room, not speaking and barely eating. It was a frightening and disturbing
thing to watch.
“It don’t matter,” Bridget snapped again,
more out of exhaustion than anything else. She was always cranky. The weight of
taking care of us, and of being old well before her time, strained her. “It
don’t matter,” she mumbled.
It didn’t matter that night either, that
awful night, when the cops were at the door and she wasn’t there. We hadn’t
seen our mother for two days, and after that night, we wouldn’t see her for
another two years.
When we returned home that day, the sun had
gone down and it was dark inside the house because we hadn’t paid the light
bill. We never paid the bills, so the lights were almost always off and there
was no heat because we didn’t pay that bill either. And now we needed the heat.
We needed the heat more than we needed the lights. The cold winter winds pushed
up at us from the Atlantic Ocean and down on us from frigid Canada and battered
our part of northwestern Connecticut, shoving freezing drifts of snow against
the paper-thin walls of our ramshackle house and covering our windows in a
thick veneer of silver-colored ice.
The house was built around 1910 by the
factories to house immigrant workers mostly brought in from southern Italy.
These mill houses weren’t built to last. They had no basements; only four
windows, all in the front; and paper-thin walls. Most of the construction was
done with plywood and tarpaper. The interiors were long and narrow and dark.
Bridget turned the gas oven on to keep us
warm. “Youse go get the big mattress and bring it in here by the stove,” she
commanded us. Denny, Paulie, and I went to the bed that was in the cramped
living room and wrestled the stained and dark mattress, with some effort, into
the kitchen. Bridget covered Maura in as many shirts as she could find, in a
vain effort to stop the chills that racked her tiny and frail body and caused
her to shake.
We took great pains to position the hulking
mattress in exactly the right spot by the stove and then slid, fully dressed,
under a pile of dirty sheets, coats, and drapes that w our blanket. We squeezed
close to fend off the cold, the baby in the middle and the older kids at the
ends.
“Move over, ya yutz, ya,” Paulie would say to Denny and me because half of his
butt was hanging out onto the cold linoleum floor. We could toss insults in
Yiddish. We learned them from our mother, whose father was a Jew and who grew
up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York.
I assumed that those words we learned were standard American English, in
wide and constant use across our great land. It wasn’t until I was in my
mid-twenties and moved from the Naugatuck Valley and Connecticut that I came to
understand that most Americans would never utter a sentence like, “You and your
fakakta plans”.
We also spoke with the Waterbury aversion to
the sound of the letter “T,” replacing it with the letter “D,” meaning that
“them, there, those, and these” were pronounced “dem, dere, dose, and dese.” We
were also practitioners of “youse,” the northern working-class equivalent to
“you-all,” as in “Are youse leaving or are youse staying?”
“Move in, ya yutz, ya,” Paulie said again with a laugh, but we didn’t move
because the only place to move was to push Bridget off the mattress, which we
were not about to do because Bridget packed a wallop that could probably put a
grown man down. Then Paulie pushed us, and at the other end of the mattress,
Bridget pushed back with a laugh, and an exaggerated, rear-ends pushing war for
control of the mattress broke out.