Snapshots: True Stories

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(1) 1964.

Mary Jane and I, just sixteen,  wait in the lobby of the old Baltimore Civic Center, waiting for the doors to open so we can be seated for a performance of the Royal Ballet. Suddenly a not-very-tall, muscular young man walks by us and smiles at us. He’s gone around a corner before we realize it ‘s Rudolph Nureyev. Mary Jane and I squeal  as we grasp each other’s hands and jump up and down in our high heels and nylon stockings and  Sunday best dresses. We’re in heaven.

 (2) 1970

Rick and I are walking back from a movie, or perhaps  a late dinner at Le Potiniere, on West 55^th Street, where we always get free drinks because the owner thinks we’re a charming young couple. It is near midnight. A not very tall, very square-looking  grey haired man in a burgundy sport coat is staggering around a few yards away from steps down from the sidewalk level to a restaurant or perhaps a bar. He’s with two or three couples, and it seems he’s arguing with them. One of  the men takes him by the elbow and says, Ed, come on, it’s time to go home. Rick and I look at each other, amazed. It’s Ed Sullivan. A really big show, right there on West 55^th Street. We can’t wait to call our mothers and tell them.

(3)  1978

Maureen, Peggy and I are  on West 47^th Street looking for the Plymouth Theatre. We have tickets to see Runaways. Maureen is driving an enormous maroon  four-door sedan   her father gave her when he bought  a new car. We ‘ve dubbed it the Pimpmobile. We’re running late. Stop and ask someone, Peggy and I tell  Maureen, who  is stopped in traffic. She lowers the driver’s side window with the fancy automatic button, and  calls out to a guy jogging down the block in very short running shorts, “Where’s the Plymouth Theatre?” He stops, catches his breath, and calls over to us.” Two blocks down, 45^th Street!” He jogs off. It’s Dustin Hoffman.

Check out “Meat for Tea: The Valley Review,” Spring 2013 issue

pages 42-43, two of my poems,

“May Day”

and

“Brantwood Lane Miscellany”

meatfortea.com

Fast (ing) Track

Before I ever went to CCD lessons on Sunday morning or later, to a girls’ Catholic school, I learned about fasting by watching my father do it,  every Lent. From an early age I knew that somewhere between Valentine’s Day and Easter Sunday, that day of bunnies and chicks and Easter baskets stuffed with candy eggs, jelly beans and  hollow milk chocolate rabbits whose ears I nibbled first—came Lent. Lent meant Dad stopped drinking beer. It meant he said the rosary more often, after he watched  the evening news and before he got into bed and turned out the light. It meant he gave more money to both the first and second collections at Sunday Mass, and dug into his pockets for change to stuff into the Poor Box on his way out of church. Sometimes, when he surprised my sister and me by picking us up after school and sparing us a long walk home, he stopped on the way home at St Dominic’s, “just to make a little visit.” Often the church was empty, but other times we saw one or two people kneeling, rosary  beads in hand. My father would give my sister and me each a dollar and ask us to light two candles. I loved taking the long, thin  wooden stick, touching it to a lit candle, and choosing a fresh new candle of my own to light.  I guided my sister as she lit another candle. We knelt while my father, unable to kneel because of the large brace and boot on his bad leg, balanced himself on  the edge of the pew, one knee just grazing the kneeling pad.  Then, we all three prayed. I was never sure whom to pray for, but I did my best to imagine my father’s father, who had died years before Anne and I were born. We knew that was  whose faithfully departed soul Dad  was praying  for.

Giving up beer for six and a half weeks, that was Dad’s fasting. Praying even more than usual, that was the second part of his Lenten practice. And giving—giving money at church, sending money to the missions, sending a check to the Maryknoll sisters—was the last essential part of his very Roman Catholic, very traditional, pre-Vatican II practice.

It is hard in this age, so rich and stuffed with things and  treats and luxuries, to know how to do Lent properly, especially for those who have drifted (or raced, as I did ) away from their childhood religions.  My husband likes to joke , “You can take the girl out of the Catholic church, but you can’t take the Catholic church out of the girl,” but he’s really talking about my Lenten habits.

It started some years ago when we were having brunch at O’Neal’s Balloon in Manhattan, having a tiff with our  sixteen-year-old son about something so trivial none of us can now remember just what the fuss was all about. I ordered a Bloody Mary even though I dislike vodka and am no fan of tomato juice, either. I just wanted a drink to take the edge off things that day. My favorite black crepe slacks were so tight I was no longer fastening the button on the waist. When we got home to Boston, I thought, “That’s it. I’m off alcohol for Lent.” Ash Wednesday was only three days away, but  I started early. I added sweets to the list. Then,  snacking. Then I realized this was no diet, but a chance to reconsider things. My relationship to alcohol, for one. My relationship to food, for another. My need to step back  a bit from the many details of every day: the job, the students, the grocery shopping, the cooking,the cleaning, the driving the kids to soccer, to dances, to music lessons. “Fasting,’”my version of it, made a space,  a   place of repose,  where  I could think without interrupting myself.

Here’s the plan, once again, for this year:   no alcohol, no sweets.  That means no stopping by the office after my morning class to  dip my hand into the glass jar of Hershey’s kisses that sits on our department admin’s desk.  No glass of red wine with Friday night dinners at the end of a tough work week. Less buying of stuff, more giving it away—and more giving money and time to people and places who need a hand.   Shopping my closet. Shopping our pantry. More meditation, more prayer and reflection.

My father died twenty years ago.  He set the bar high. If I keep going, if I live long enough, I might barely begin to approach his splendid track record—so many Lenten seasons of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. That sounds medieval. But it just might be what‘s needed.

Black Suede Stilettos

I was twenty-nine, divorced, and without a boyfriend. After a prolonged  breakup—he was a much younger man who did not share my urgency for settling down and starting a family—  I started jogging and swore off sweets and alcohol. I lost so much weight that I needed smaller clothes. And I wanted new shoes. Not any shoes, but shoes like ones I’d seen in a French film, The Man Who Loved Women.  Shoes with four –inch stiletto heels and thin, elegant ankle straps. And I found them, in the least likely place: Hutzler’s department store in Towson, Maryland, when I was home visiting my parents that Thanksgiving.  They were on sale, though still well out of my graduate student’s price range.

I spied them from a distance, sitting on the sale rack next to cordovan loafers and lime green Pappagallo flats.  They beckoned to me across the crowded shoe salon. Between me and the black suede stilettos was a sea of women trying on shoes, bent over  to pull on knee high boots, or standing and turning this way and that before low mirrors, admiring or critiquing their ankles and calves. Open boxes of shoes surrounded customers, and salesmen rushed around with towers of shoes  balanced in each hand. They craned their necks  this way and that, sweeping the room with a looks of consternation as they tried to remember who had requested which  shoe in size nine, and who wanted  the seven.

I made my way to the black suede stilettos, carefully stepping over shoeboxes and handbags littering the carpet. “Sorry. Excuse me,” I said repeatedly until I reached the sale rack. I scanned the shoes up and down for the sizes, but  saw no labels or signs. Just my luck, I thought. There were never any  size eights left in the really fabulous shoes by the time the markdowns appeared. The toes of the black suede stilettos were pointing right at me now, as if to say, “Too bad your feet aren’t smaller, girlfriend.”

I reached out and petted the front of the shoe, from the vamp to the toe. My fingers made a small depression in the suede. I ran my finger the other way and the mark disappeared. I fingered the small brass buckle on the narrow strap. “Nice shoes,” a woman standing next to me said. “What size are they?” I turned the shoe on its side and  looked for numbers, but found nothing, then  I  turned the shoe over, and saw the number 39—European size for eight. My heart leaped. “My size,” I said, to no one in particular.  The woman had disappeared into the crowd of bargain seekers.

I didn’t even wait to find a vacant chair to sink into, but slipped off my clogs and pulled off my socks, took a couple of try-on socks from the box next to the shoe rack, and leaned up against a nearby pillar.  I slipped on one shoe, then the other, then bent over to buckle the ankle straps. I carefully maneuvered over to one of the small mirrors, pulled up the legs of my corduroy pants, and glanced at my feet. “Nice gams,” I thought, remembering how once, a boyfriend had said this when I turned up at his apartment wearing  green ribbed tights and a short plaid skirt I’d had since high school.

Those shoes were fabulous, but they were also trouble. They attracted men, but  the wrong men for me. A married man who wouldn’t leave me alone, at a small dinner party. A handsome Italian-American poet at a cocktail party of literary scholars. He talked with me about Austen and Eliot for hours, then invited me to spend the night with him. I declined.  A wild-eyed actor with disheveled hair. A friend,  a talented  amateur photographer  who invited me to his studio, where we drank champagne and he took rolls and rolls of film of me in the black stilettos and a variety of short skirts and leotards and tights.

I wore the shoes through my thirties and well into my forties. But by the time I was married with children, the black suede stilettos languished  in their original box at the top of my closet. Somewhere along the line I realized I’d never wear them again, and one rainy Saturday, I deposited them, unceremoniously, at the Goodwill van that sat in the Home Depot parking lot every  weekend. I graduated to Bruno Magli suede pumps with patent leather toes and gold bands on the chunky low heel, classy numbers for une femme d’un certain age.

I don’t really miss the black suede stilettos. What I do miss is that delicious moment of anticipation I  experienced each time I slipped them on, bending to fasten the straps, wondering what excitement lay ahead in the glistening, magical night.

Wasted

 We gathered for Aunt Eileen’s wake, at a small restaurant  on 39^th Street, not far from the Hopkins campus. I counted 23 cousins—first cousins, cousins by marriage, first cousins once removed. Not one of them related to us by blood, for Aunt Eileen and Uncle Francis had adopted– first a boy, in 1946, then a girl a year later, then another boy in 1951. Once, Aunt Eileen’s spacious brick colonial had been the center of activity for her three children, their many friends, and cousins from both sides of the family. Uncle Francis and Aunt Eileen were separated, something I did not quite understand when I was a girl, for he was lively and fun. Uncle Francis took us on outings to Gwynn Oak amusement park, daring to ride with us on the scary old roller coaster. Or he treated  us to the Senator Theatre on York Road, to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis films, a  common denominator for the boys–Timmy and Paul– and the girls—my cousin Mary Jane, my sister Anne, and me. I remember my uncle’s dark Plymouth sedan, which we crowded into. Aunt Eileen stood at the front door on these weekend afternoons, reminding Uncle Francis what time to have us  back for dinner, always ready to be served in the formal dining room on good china and polished silver.

Now, five decades later,  as we stood near the bar ordering red wine or Jameson’s neat or, for the recovering alcoholics or the children, Coke or ginger ale, I took in the scene. There were two babies, several high schoolers, and a few octogenarians. One of the older men was Aunt Eileen’s  financial advisor. There was one pregnant cousin in her early twenties, with a considerably older husband. There was a fortyish blonde in an expensive mink coat, though the day was mild. Even at the gravesite, a sodden, steep hillside in  a West Baltimore cemetery, there was no need for hats or gloves.  There was a great deal of embracing, much reminiscing about Mother, or Grandmother, or Great-Grandmother, or Aunt Eileen. Who were all these people  around me, those who had flowed from a broken marriage, people Aunt Eileen had guided, taught, and supported for so many years? And where were the ghosts, the ones I remember?  I imagine her, in the ‘Sixties, answering the door in knee socks and preppy turtleneck and kilt skirt one afternoon many years ago. I recall  brunch at her house each year, on the last day of Christmas vacation before school resumed, when we children exchanged small, carefully chosen gifts.  I see her expressive Irish face, with strong brow,  her long, narrow face, wide ready  smile and dark brown hair, her red lipstick, her impeccable manners. And all those years I wondered, where was that most troubling ghost of all, Uncle Francis?

Here is the story as I heard it and remember it, no doubt a variation on the truth, but all the same, it’s what I know. Eileen was the older of two siblings and the daughter of a prosperous merchant who, with his brother, built a business from the ground up as a ship’s chandler, back in the days when the port of Baltimore was an active shipping and commerce hub. Their agency sold to freighters and cruise ships alike, everything from mops and brooms to prime beef steaks, and from that steadily growing business came a small fortune, one that Eileen’s father carefully tended. His stewardship and his foresight protected that money, secure in a family trust that supported a dozen families in one way or another over eight or nine decades.  Eileen’s brother died young, leaving a wife and two children, and a large vacancy in the family business, which he was being groomed to take over, with his counterpart, a cousin.

I have seen the wedding pictures, and know how romantic and glamorous that event was. Francis had washed out as a pilot in World War II, but had become a bombardier, a decorated war hero,  with a plaque still there  today in Harwich, county of Essex. honoring him and his unit  for their bravery in the air defense of England. My mother used to say,” He would climb out of the plane after a mission, and the Red Cross would be there, the girls cheering,  with trays of hot coffee and doughnuts.”  He had always told his brothers he planned to marry a rich girl, but everyone assumed that was merely wishful thinking. Eileen and Francis met in their early twenties and fell in love hard. On his  three-day  pass, they married, he in uniform, she in a spectacular white gown. There was time for a formal portrait and  a day or two  together,  then he  flew out to his next mission. By the time the war ended, his prodigious drinking career was well underway, and  for he next twenty-five years he broke  his mother’s and no doubt his wife’s heart, careening from job to job, disappointing his siblings who lent him money and tried to find him work. If he tried AA, I never heard about it. A consultation with a noted Baltimore psychiatrist, who evaluated him and met with his mother and siblings, resulted in a dismal pronouncement: there was no hope for him so long as he kept drinking. And drinking meant more to him, the doctor said, than any person. His brothers and sister sat in a large circle in the psychiatrist’s office. They had paid for the consultation. They were at the end of it. There was nothing more they could do.

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When I was eleven, the very day my father’s beloved Baltimore Colts played the NFL championship game against the New York Giants on their turf, Uncle Francis turned up at our house in Baltimore. My parents had traveled with football friends to see the game  at  Yankee Stadium. The doorbell rang, and Mimi, my grandmother from Cumberland, peered out through the draperies to see who was at the door. My sister and I stood behind her. “It’s Uncle Francis!” we said.  My sister and I hadn’t seen him  a long  time. He had put on weight, and his handsome face was red and full. He asked if he could come in. Mimi said nothing, giving him a stern, piercing look.  “I wondered if I could watch the last half of the Colts-Giants game,” he told her. He took a puff of his cigarette, then dropped it and stubbed it out on the cement porch. Mimi  hesitated again, then relented and asked him in. She took his coat and hat, and hung them up in the front closet.

We had a ten year old black and white  TV housed in a large walnut cabinet. It sat  in the basement family room–in Baltimore parlance, the clubroom.  My grandmother, whom we called Mimi, was a teetotaler herself. She knew better than to offer Francis a beer. She  handed him a Coke. It was the end of the last quarter. My sister, Mimi, Uncle Francis and I watched. Only he spoke, and mostly to yell or call out happily when the Colts gained yardage. The score was tied at the end of the fourth quarter, and Uncle Francis watched and listened raptly as the announcer said the teams would play a Sudden Death Overtime. We sat silently before the small  screen.“What’s happening now?” my little sister  kept asking. I hushed her. Then the television went blank. The screen displayed a cartoon of a man standing on a ladder fixing a rolling television camera, and underneath,  the words “Experiencing Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By.”  We all moaned.  There was no sound for several minutes. The interlude was interminable. Then the football field reappeared, and the commentator resumed. And within minutes, the Colts had won. We all cheered. Mimi stood up, saying, “Well, I’ll be getting some dinner for the girls, so Francis, you’d best be going.” At the front door  we hugged  him goodbye,  and Mimi handed him his hat and coat. “I’ll tell Marcella and Jimmy you stopped by,” she said. She was not smiling, and I wondered why she was so cross with Uncle Francis.

 “Goodbye, Mrs. Close,” he said from the front porch. ‘Bye, girls.” I   pressed  my forehead against the picture window, my eyes following him as he walked slowly up the block. His shoulders slumped and he listed  forward as he took the hill. That was the moment I realized he didn’t even have a car any more. He would have to walk more than a mile to the bus line up on Harford Road.

In the years after that, he went from an apartment to a rented room in Hamilton, and eventually he moved  far west to California.  He died in a gas explosion in his  motel room in a rundown section of Santa Monica, the same year I graduated from college. By then he had faded to the periphery of   my consciousness.  Years before, he had stopped showing up at  family gatherings  at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I don’t know if  he was present at his mother’s funeral, the same year President Kennedy was shot. He certainly did not put in appearances at my cousins’ high school graduations, nor at mine. And as a sarcastic teenager, I began referring to him, among my friends, as  the black sheep of our family. “Oh, girl, every family  has one,” my friend Gay  said.

Aunt Eileen outlived Uncle Francis by more than four decades, filling  her life with her children, then their spouses and their children, her volunteer work, Sunday Mass, and her weekly bowling game. When Uncle Francis  died, my cousin  Tim arranged to have the body brought back to Baltimore, the coffin draped with an American flag. My mother told me he got  a war hero’s burial.  I paid little attention to any of this; I was in New York, immersed in my own life, in graduate school, quite  apart from my complicated clan.

 My mother once said Uncle Francis  was a completely different person when she and my father were courting. Francis was  handsome and fun, and he was the only person who ever called my mother by a nickname— “Marse,” or Marcie,”  short  for Marcella.  The two decades after the war marked his descent into more and more drinking, longer benders, loans he never repaid, checks he bounced, promises he broke, and jobs that were less and less desirable, a continual process of being hired and being let go.  His brothers and sisters never stopped loving him, though they seldom spoke of him. He was a ghost long before he died, one whose presence and absence  weighed heavily on all of us, and especially on his adopted three children.

After my parents died and my sister and I went through all the family memorabilia, I ended up with the formal photograph of  Uncle Francis in his  World War II army uniform.  Its sepia tones have  faded to dark soft reds over the years. He has the high Celtic cheekbones and lovely, long lashed eyes. His look is serious and somber. Maybe his thoughts dwelled on home, on getting out from under the rules of military life, on returning stateside to a peaceful home and family.  Or more likely he was  just thinking about that next drink, and the next, and the next.

Night at the D.C. Coliseum, Part 2: (We) Meet the Beatles in Concert

 Tuesday was early dismissal day. I bolted when the bell rang at 2:20, gathered my books from my locker, and caught the first bus home. I raced through  homework, skipping algebra because I knew Chris would help me work out the problems before homeroom the next day.  I took off my white blouse and dark brown wool uniform skirt, and had a long shower, carefully washing my hair. Then I checked my face in the bathroom mirror, looking for new blemishes. I spent a long time getting my hair just right,  because I was in the process of  growing it out from an elaborate backcombed style with what we called shadow bangs. My ultimate goal was a perfect flip, like the Susan Van Wyck, everyone’s  favorite Seventeen Magazine model My short term goal was to keep my hair from frizzing up into a brunette halo.

It looked like we were in for a cold February drizzle. My mother made room in our station wagon, clearing out the books and papers she brought home each night from her job as an elementary school vice-principal.  Chris, Houch and Gay arrived, dropped off by their fathers. Each of them  carried a small overnight bag and  school books for the next day. We sat in the living room, chattering away, nervous and excited, while a cold drizzle began outside. Then it started to snow—wet, sloppy, slushy snow. And then, we lost it.

            “Oh, no!” we all began to wail. “Oh, oh, no!” We looked at my mother, who was gathering up her work papers  and handbag, and heading for the living room closet.

            “You didn’t think  little snow would keep us from driving to Washington, did you?” she said. She had called the weather service to find out how bad the storm was expected to be. “A little slush, a little cold rain,” she said. “Nothing I haven’t driven in before.” I noticed she was wearing her ankle high stadium boots.

            We  sighed and began to giggle again, wondering  what time  the Beatles would take the stage, what they would sign first, and whether we would be close enough to see them and toss the peanuts and jelly beans we had stashed in our pocketbooks. Mom  slipped into her gray wool coat and pulled on her good leather gloves

         “Let’s go, girls, we’re off—the Beatles await.”

        Our books lay in four stacks in the corner of the living room, the fat binders, Latin, history, and religion books and  experimental math texts with the bright yellow covers. I stopped to look at myself the full –length  mirror inside the closet door. I rubbed under one eye where my mascara had smeared. As we rushed to our station wagon, I smelled a heady mix of scents—Shalimar, Chanel No. 5, Wind Song. Mom refused to turn on the radio, the better to focus on the driving. I sat next to her and turned almost all the way around to talk with my friends.  We practiced  speaking in  Liverpudlian accents, then in our normal way about what we always talked about—homework, the nuns who taught us– especially our favorites, Sister Frederick and Sister Augusta– boyfriends if we had them (Gay and Chris did, Houch and I were still looking), the junior prom in three months’ time, summer jobs we’d had, summer jobs we wanted.

         As large wet snowflakes fell, the windshield wipers kept a steady, fast beat, My mother said nothing until she took a D.C. exit  off the parkway, and then, flashlight and map in hand, I gave her directions, turn by turn. Soon we pulled up in front of  the  Coliseum. We were an hour early, but throngs of teenagers, mostly girls, crowded the sidewalk. Uniformed D.C. cops stood near the door.

            “Meet me here as soon as the concert is over,” Mother said. “I‘ll be right here, in this very spot. Don’t go anywhere else when you come out. If you don’t see me, wait—I‘ll circle the block.”

            At the time it never occurred to me to ask her where she planned to wait while we were screaming and jumping up and down in our seats  with thousands of girls just like us—and some boys. We walked into the old arena. I glanced back at the spot where my mother had dropped us off. The blue and white Chevy wagon was gone, and a yellow taxicab stood in its place. Slush seeped into my good black suede flats.  I pulled Gay by the hand  into the lobby of the coliseum, and Houch and Chris followed.

            Inside, we wandered up and down long aisles parting endless rows of seats, until we found an usher. The stage was a center ring, more suited for a boxing match than a concert. Ringo’s drum kit was set up so that the drummer faced squarely away from us, and we were already worried that we would have to watch our beloved Fab Four from the rear.  Four microphones stood at uneven interval, and black speakers were positioned at each corner of the stage. We squeezed down a long row, climbing over small knots of girls and an occasional guy. When we reached our seats, we plopped down and looked around. I spotted Suzanne, our ticket benefactress, four seats down, along with three  of her girlfriends. They wore nearly identical plaid kilts and sorority sweaters. Suzanne and I stood up and talked over her friends. “Thought you wouldn’t make it!” she shouted. “We would’ve walked from Baltimore if we’d had to!” I yelled back.  I noticed that her summer bleach blonde hair was now a sedate chestnut brown,  in a perfect flip.

       I’d like to say that what happened next is as clear as if it were yesterday. But in truth it’s a blurry memory, infused with music and sound, and  palpable adolescent energy as each musical act took the stage. The performers had to shift regularly during their sets so that each quarter of the audience could take a turn gazing on the faces of the performers. The night smelled of the old boxing arena,  hairspray and perfume of thousands of teenaged girls, and aftershave cologne of their  intrepid boyfriends along for the ride. Whether I wore my Mary Quant miniskirt and Peter pan blouse with the little black tie, or the big fuzzy gray and pink  mohair sweater my mother had knit for me, I can’t remember. Our outerwear–did  we wear hats and gloves, or  just our winter coats? Did we spend hours doing our eyeliner from a Maybelline dry mascara cake wet with tap water, and applied with a tiny brush, or did we just smooth on lipstick and go out the door to meet  the Beatles?

            What I do remember is enduring an endless parade of opening  rock and roll acts. Tonight, we wanted the Beatles. So we waited, increasingly impatient. We scanned the aisles to see if  the cops were drawing closer to the stage where we knew from reading Time and Life that they were there to keep girls from rushing the stage, clambering up and trying to tear the clothes off the Fab Four.

           The parade of singers began— Jay and the Americans. The Chiffons. The Righteous Brothers.   After about 45 minutes,  Chris announced she had to go to the bathroom. “Not now!” I wailed. ”Yes, go now, right away! “ Houch advised.  Off to the ladies room Chris ran. When she returned, breathless,  she said she’d been in the stall when she heard loud screaming and applause, and she was sure she’d missed her very first chance to see her beloved George Harrison in person. But it was only yet another opening act.

        And then, at 8:31 PM our boys took the stage, and we were soon in monkey heaven. I remember these young men who seemed so much older than we were (though George Harrison was only  twenty,  Ringo and John were twenty-three, and John and Paul, twenty-one) singing above the cries, the shrieks and the screams. I remember the problems with the amps. I remember jumping up and down and holding my face and screaming “I love you, Paul!” I was one with my girlfriends and we were one with a crowd of eight thousand just like us. The police who guarded the stage might as well have been aliens from some other, quieter, more restrained planet, their faces impassive, their espontoons dangling from their belts.

       We screamed and  screamed until we were hoarse. And at the end, after the Beatles did a rocking rendition of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” complete with Paul’s falsetto “Wooooo!” they dashed off the stage to thunderous applause and more screams. The lights went down, and the coliseum began to empty. With a few other stragglers, we four approached the stage and leaned over to scoop up a few jelly beans and peanuts which a custodian was sweeping to the edge of the stage.We stuffed this  detritus into our pockets and  strolled to the front entrance.

             The snow had stopped.

            “How will your mother ever find us?” Gay asked.

            “Look.” I pointed straight ahead to our Chevy. My mother was smiling at us from the driver’s seat. A cop was standing nearby and he gave her a little wave. Had she turned on the charm so he would let her live-park there and wait for us? How long had she been waiting? Where did she go while we were inside having the time of our young lives? None of these questions ever  crossed my mind until years later. We navigated the slippery sidewalk to the curb and climbed into the car. We were too excited to nod off on the ride back to Baltimore, though it was well past our bedtime. When we reached my house, scrubbed off the mascara and lipstick, brushed our teeth, and got into our nightgowns, we remained alert and awake. We stayed up for hours, whispering in my bedroom, sleeping bags and air mattresses crammed in close. Would we ever get to meet our Beatles, one to one, in person? Would John ever get an annulment from Cynthia (and marry one of us)? We divvied them up: Gay had John, Houch had Ringo, Chris –of course—had George, and I had Paul, the Beatle with  the big expressive  eyes and the amazing voice, sweet at times, wild and soulful at others.

            The next morning we were zombies. My mother made us coffee.We downed orange juice and slowly gathered our books up, but our hearts were back  in that 1941 boxing arena. I looked down at my book in my math class and daydreamed, something I never did in school. I rested my head on my crossed forearms in study hall and dozed. I told everyone –including my Latin teacher, Sr. Jeremy, where we had been the night before. I heard the Beatles singing in my head, and  recalled the backdrop of screaming and hysterical cries –“Pauulllll! Georrrgggge!” in the coliseum.

            But a day or two later, it began to fade. My friends and  went back to our plans for Friday or Saturday night. CYO at St. Matthew’s or St. Ursula’s? Hang out at Chris’ house and stay up late watching the Steve Allen Show? Gay had  a date with her college boyfriend, the one with the red sports car. I wondered if  that senior from Loyola  would  ask me to one of those cool dances in the school library. We invited  our  classmate Debbie into our little Beatles club, and now we were five.

            We remained fans; after all, we had sworn, “Beatles Forever!”  We never went to New York to stand outside the Delmonico Hotel in New York and scream their names, but we  did go to  two of their 1965 concerts at the old  Baltimore Civic Center. Years after she’d been married, raised two daughters, and divorced, Chris went to England and made sure to include Liverpool in her route. She sent the rest of us postcards. Separated by geography and our busy lives, we still managed to commemorate anniversaries of that first concert, or to console each other with letters and phone calls after John Lennon was killed in the lobby of the Dakota in 1980, and when our beloved  George Harrison   died of cancer in 2001.

         Today, we five high school  friends live so far from each other–California, Maryland, Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts. We gather in New York  from time to time for a reunion.   We ‘ve made a ritual of walking by the Dakota and then down to  Strawberry Fields in Central Park, where we think of John Lennon and Paul and Ringo and George, and how those days bound us together.

         Two years ago I persuaded my husband to go with me to Pal McCartney’s concert at Fenway Park. There he was, my Beatle Paul. He’d been married, raised kids, been widowed, married again, then divorced. He dyed his hair. I was married,  my sons were now in their twenties, and  I dyed my hair, too. There was no way around it. He was really old, and I was getting there. And when Paul sang “I Saw Her Standing There” I jumped to my feet and screamed with joy, just as I had on that cold, drizzly February night so long ago. My husband was amused and tolerant.

        Somewhere in my old trunk, next to the old-fashioned prom dance card booklets we never bothered to fill out, Army dogtags from my GI boyfriend the summer before I left for college, and ticket stubs from rock concerts and Broadway shows, there remains a small, beat-up plastic bag containing ossified peanuts and two yellow jelly beans from Ringo’s drum set, my  little piece of Beatle history.

           Beatles’ Set List  , February 11, 1964, D.C. Coliseum

Roll Over Beethoven (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

From Me To You (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

I Saw Her Standing There (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

This Boy (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

All My Loving (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

I Wanna Be Your Man (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964).

Please Please Me (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

Till There  Was You (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

. She Loves You (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

I Want To Hold Your Hand (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

Twist And Shout [Incomplete] (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

Long Tall Sally (Concert Washington Coliseum – Feb. 11, 1964)

4/5 of the Beatles Club, Bethany Beach, DE, 2102

Beatles Night at the D.C. Coliseum- Part 1

The Beatles, February 11, 1964, at the D.C.Coliseum

Mary Jane and I were ecstatic when Suzanne, our new friend from the beach, said she would get us tickets to the Beatles concert in Washington, D.C. Suzanne was a year old than us, the only daughter of a career officer Marine. She had befriended us, initiating contact first with a smile and a wave of her well manicured hand,  then asking us what we were reading. Suzanne was camped out with several adults with vaguely Southern accents and two handsome boys, one about our age and one who looked like a college man.  Mary Jane and I were having a Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte summer, making our way steadily through the summer reading list Sister Mary  Seraphia had given us the last day of school. Suzanne carried lighter reading to the beach—Seventeen, Glamour, and Vogue. She used Bain de Soileil bronzing gel instead of drugstore suntan lotion like ours, and she had obviously bleached her hair, because we could see dark roots. We were instantly drawn to her, and soon closed our paperback copies of Pride and Prejudicewhen Suzanne offered to let us share her fashion magazines. We pored over Vogue and Glamour, Suzanne and I smoked cigarettes behind the cottage, and the three of us persuaded the parents to drive us to Ocean City so we could stand under the Esskay clock at Ninth Street and the boardwalk,where we tried to  meet older  boys, though with no success. By the time Suzanne  headed back to Fairfax, Virginia  with her parents, Mary Jane and I had secured her promise to  stay in touch.

We both wrote to Suzanne, and got back short, sweet notes from her. We made plans to meet in Washington one Sunday afternoon at a museum. We invited her to spend the weekend in Baltimore. But as Suzanne became busy with dances, dates, military balls and senior proms, Mary Jane and I easily fell back into our routine of studying during the week, the occasional movie or CYO dance on the weekends, and hanging out with a few friends from our all –girls high school. We knew Suzanne ‘s life was freer and more exciting than ours. Her letters told of dates with older boys, a special weekend of parties at Virginia Tech, and drinking too much beer in Georgetown bars, thanks to a phony ID she’d gotten her hands on. Mary Jane and I envied Suzanne but from a safe distance. We were not ready for such social experiments.

In December, Suzanne called Mary Jane with astonishing news. She had four extra tickets to the Beatles concert. It would be the Fab Four’s first concert tour in the U.S., and tickets were nearly sold out. Mary Jane’s mother put her foot down right away. No daughter of hers was going to a concert at the old D.C. Coliseum, with 6000 screaming teenagers, and who knew if a fight might break out, or a Beatlemania stampede. And that terrible neighborhood in Northeast DC  was no place for her daughter to venture into.

That’s how the four member Mercy High Baltimore Beatle Club came about—I handed over a couple weeks’ allowance to my mother, who wrote a check for twelve bucks payable to Suzanne, and five days later a fat little envelope arrived, addressed to me in Suzanne’s girlish scrawl with hearts for the dots over the letter I” and the notation BF! (for Beatles Forever!) above the seal.  Chris, Gay and Francine—who went by the nickname of Houch, pronounced “Hootch”, bestowed on her by a college guy she had a major crush on— quickly signed on, money exchanged hands, and my mother agreed to drive us to and from the concert in DC and for extra measure, said the girls could spend the night at our house. I wonder what my silver haired, fifty year old mother was thinking when she agreed to all this, and whether she knew just what she –and we–were in for.

Garden Spot

When I was very young, we  lived on the top section of a  two family house in Parkville, and my grandmother and my Aunt Sara, my father’s youngest sister, lived below us. I had to be very quiet on Saturday mornings, Aunt Sara’s only day to sleep in.   My grandmother was an elderly widow, content to take the Number 19 streetcar down to Hamilton to shop for a few groceries at the A & P, or to attend first Friday Mass at St. Dominic’s. She had her routines—saying her rosary, reading Maryknoll magazine or Reader’s Digest and the evening paper. But she never went out for a walk, seemed to have no friends, and kept to herself. Her house always smelled like freshly brewed coffee, something that was rare in my own house. From time to time she baked the most delicious vanilla brown edged cookies, which she  wrapped in wax paper and stored in a china dish with a cover. I couldn’t reach them, as the dish–with pale images of Colonial ladies dressed in wigs with ringlets, getting in or out of coaches– sat right in the middle of the dining room table. She had large blues eyes behind glasses, short white hair, and pale Irish skin. When her younger sister, Aunt Stella Bayley, came down from Elyria, Ohio by train to visit,  or  our cousin Virginia came from California for a week-long stay, Grandmother seemed to perk up, and there was much laughter in the kitchen. Grandmother kept to the house. It was Aunt Sara who introduced me to the garden.

Our backyard was a modest sized one, with an apple tree near the back porch, and a crab apple tree farther down the lot, near the back brick wall of our one-street-over neighbors’ garage. In a sunny spot Aunt Sara had made a vegetable garden, where she grew beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and squash. In spring and summer, on her days off from her job at the Marine Hospital, she tended the garden, digging and mounding the soil into little raised rows, planting seeds, and later, watering and weeding. I helped, or at least she let me think I did. Wielding a trowel, I dug in a corner of the plot, and got to plant my own seeds in my little section. I enjoyed it until one day I saw a large black spider run across the small pile of soil I had pushed together. I let out a yelp and jumped away.

            “Now, what’s gotten into you?” Aunt Sara asked.

            “ I saw a spider!  A Black Widow spider!”

           “I don’t think we have any of those around Baltimore,” Aunt Sara said, as she continued to press seeds into the ground at even intervals.  She was never one to panic about much of anything, and certainly not a spider.

            “Yes, we do! I saw one on television and I just saw one here!” I said, dropping my trowel and running to the edge of the garden. “I don’t think I want to help any more.”

 I ran to the Japanese maple tree and climbed onto the swing that hung from it, pumping my legs to get the swing higher and higher, away from the ground and any spiders that might be lurking there.

 By July when the green bean  harvest time came around I was back in the garden, picking beans and tossing them into the big colander that Aunt Sara had set on the ground between us. She showed me how to hold the plant carefully and pull the bean off without hurting the mother plant. We filled the colander, took the beans inside, and she rinsed them off under the kitchen faucet. We left them on the drain board for Grandma to clean and cook when she got up from her nap.

 Sometimes there were so many beans or tomatoes or cucumbers that Aunt Sara and Grandma would put them up in jars, which would then appear on high shelves in the basement, near the washing machine. I was fascinated by the way seeds would turn into two-leaved , tiny sprouts, then little plants, then vines or bushy growths that were full of new things that until now I thought came from  small  white boxes in the  freezer, or from a can. I knew about farmers because I saw their pictures in the books Mother read to me, but I understood that Aunt Sara was a nurse, not a farmer. I sang her praises to my father one night at dinner. “Aunt Sara can make beans and tomatoes from little seeds.”  My father laughed, “That girl always did have a green thumb.”

The next time I saw Aunt Sara working  in the garden I tried to get a good look at her thumbs, but she was wearing  gloves, so I couldn’t see anything.  Months later, I found out it was just an expression just like “You’re pulling my leg.”

Then Aunt Sara met Mister Bud, and she wasn’t around so much. He  worked on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and  he lived over the mountain up in Pennsylvania, I heard Aunt Sara say when she was on the phone. Mister Bud started coming by  in his car, and they always went out somewhere.  I  had to go to bed before they got back. In the morning, Aunt Sara  had already left for work before I woke up, so I couldn’t ask her about any of it. On the weekends Mister Bud drove her up to Pennsylvania where his friends had a big farm. When I heard her talk about it, I felt sad. The garden in our backyard grew a bit smaller at first, and eventually it dwindled  to a couple of tomato plants. When I asked her why, she said she just didn’t have  time to take care of it any more.

I never saw that spider again.   Aunt Sara and Mister Bud were going to be married. I  was invited to the wedding, as was my little sister, who was only three. My mother was taking us to  Jean’s Juveniles Shop get special new dresses. I put aside my thoughts of gardening and started watching  Bride and Groom  every weekday afternoon. Each day, I studied the bride’s dress and her veil. I tried to make out the flowers in her bouquet, even though the black-and-white television screen made that nearly impossible. I watched the groom kiss the bride, then the announcer wished them luck and showed a photograph of the new car that would drive them to their honeymoon.

I couldn’t wait for Aunt Sara’s wedding day, when Mister Bud would become Uncle Bud. The garden would have to wait.

The Oven Bird’s Cry: Teacher,Teacher, or CherTee, Cher Tee?

The oven bird

The oven bird, seiurus aurocapilla, a variety of warbler,  resides in the Northeast U.S. in summer but winters in Florida and Central America. The oven bird  likes to be heard, but not seen–rather like a shy child who won’t stop talking but stays  in her room. It’s  known for its loud and ringing call, “Teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher, ”  or alternately, “chur-TEE chur-TEE chur-TEE.” Although birdwatchers reported seeing (or perhaps only hearing)  oven birds on Cape Cod near my summer digs as late as last December–our very warm winter in these parts– I’ve haven’t yet seen one this spring. Yet I know his voice, insistent and strong, because it’s in my ears as I plant a summer garden, attempting to transform a sand pile full of weeds into my approximation of an English cottage garden. As oven birds enjoy a diet of terrestrial arthropods and snails, I’m certain some of these warblers will be by sooner or later—I’ve spied dozens of snails in the long-abandoned garden in front of my kitchen.

Here’s what the oven bird sounds like—more a call than a song, but quite attention-getting:

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/ovenbird/sounds]

New England’s iconic poet Robert Frost memorialized the oven bird in his sonnet of the same name. The work was published in 1916, in the collection called  Mountain Interval, published by Henry Holt and Company. For Frost, the oven bird is not so much a singer as a philosopher who looks ahead to the melancholy of fall even as summer is at its brilliant, sun-drenched best. My grad school professor, the late, brilliant Anne Davidson Ferry, taught me that  Frost’s poem was  an obvious reworking of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” part of a conversation between poets across  two decades. Still, as bleak as Hardy’s 1900 work seems, Frost’s is even more poignant, and what he teaches us is both disturbing and necessary.

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.         5 He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all.         10 The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Zen Dishwashing

for Tony

 

First, you’ll need a dishpan

preferably a cobalt blue plastic dishpan that

your mother bought in Poughkeepsie

and a couple squirts of

dish liquid. Green’s the best.

Take a mug with you,

leave the food-encrusted bowls

stacked where they are.

Really, they won’t move.

Walk barefoot to the bathroom

in your favorite pajamas

(or pyjamas if feeling British)

and turn up the faucet

to scalding.

Fill the dishpan two-thirds full

with hot water straight up

from the bowels of the dormitory;

don’t burn your hands.

Placing the mugs and bowls gently

into the now-sudsy pan, carry it,

treading carefully back to your room.

Don’t spill.

Add the dirty dishes.

Go away for some hours,

come back and remember

they’re still there.

Use the yellow dobie pad

to scrub off  bits of

Special K,granola,Cheerios

oatbran,wheat chex.

Leave the pad, take the dishpan.

Throw a towel over your arm

like a waiter in a New York bistro.

Pad back to the bathroom.

Rinse off each plate and mug

spoon and knife

the pan.

Above all, don’t forget the pan.

Lay the folded towel there.

Stack the dishes,

take them home

go about your business.

Repeat.

© 2012 Lynne Viti . All rights reserved. Do not reprint without permission.

Easter, the Moveable Feast

Easter wasn’t so much a religious holiday—although Mass on Easter was required, and coming after forty days of Lenten deprivation (for me, no favorite tv shows or candy; for my father, no beer)—as it was a fashion event. The weather was warm enough for a light spring coat, a duster in a pastel or navy blue, a new straw hat, and new shoes and dress. Each Easter morning until I was twelve and outgrew such things, my sister and I crept to the front door quietly on Easter morning as our parents still slept. We were always delighted to find two new baskets, identical in every way save for the color of the bows tied to the basket handles. We might nibble on jelly beans or a small chocolate bunny before breakfast, but we saved the best—the large, hollow chocolate bunnies wrapped in foil—for later in the day.

I knew from an early age that Easter was a solemn and joyous religious feast day, but for me,  Easter was all about ducks and bunnies, Easter candy,  and most of all, the Easter outfit. Patent leather shoes. Those hats that stayed on with a thin black band of elastic. If I pulled it too far  down, farther and farther  from my chin and let go fast, the elastic snapped back and stung me, leaving a thin red mark on my neck that stayed there all morning. The shoes felt tight and a deep crease might from right where my toes joined my foot. The spring coat was a welcome relief after weeks of heavy winter wool jackets, yet if the Easter morning was cool enough I might shiver a little.

At church, the Easter Mass was all lilies, Alleluias, and altar boys in red and white vestments, not the drab black and white of normal Sundays. The priest wore bright green vestments, after weeks of drab dark Lenten purple. Ladies wore bright new hats, white gloves, and a rainbow of pinks, yellows and lilac sheathes and linen coats. Their shoes matched their handbags. The men wore suits but left their overcoats at home. When the priest said, “Alleluia!” I thought he said Hallelujah. There were white lilies, planted in green flowerpots, arranged around the altar space.

At Communion there was incense, smoke floating out of a little gold cage hanging from a chain the priest swung back and forth. The incense smelled sweet and spicy. My sister and I inhaled it deeply, and secretly smiled at each other. My father went to communion and when he came back he sat at the edge of the pew. He could no longer kneel down because of his bad leg. He buried his face in his hands for a long time. I knew he wasn’t sad or crying, though I used to think that when I was very small. By this time, I knew he was praying.

At home after Mass, Anne and I sorted through our Easter candy. We tried not to dirty our Easter dresses. One year we would have a small Easter dinner at home, just the four of us, with leg of lamb, mint jelly, asparagus and potatoes. On other years we would go to Aunt Sara’s. When we arrived, the dining room table would be laid out with dishes of celery and olives, and the grownups would stand around drinking beer or cocktails, while my cousins and I would run around outside, trying hard not to get grass stains on our Easter clothes. Later, the dining table was expanded and supplemented by two card tables covered with linen tablecloths for the children, we would feast on ham, potatoes, and biscuits. The meal always ended with Aunt Sara’s black walnut pound cake with the hard vanilla icing that Daddy loved so much. My mother found it too dry, but never said so till we got home.  My sister and I peeled the icing away from the cake, ate the cake first, and saved the crunchy sweet icing for last.

After dinner the aunts and my mother washed and dried the good china and crystal, and carefully put it back in Aunt Sara’s china closet. The uncles and my father sat in the living room smoking and drinking one more beer. Uncle Bill’s gruff croaking voice dominated the room. The television was never on; on Easter,  it served only as a place to set down  drinks and the  pink cut glass candy dish full of jelly beans. The sound of women’s laughter came from the back of the house, and men’s mumbling voices drifted back from the parlor. And in between, sitting in the corner of the dining room, my sister and I played cards while the younger cousins sat at our feet playing with small toys and yawning, until Aunt Sara scooped them up and put them to bed.

There would be no school tomorrow, as Easter Monday was always a holiday, even for those of us in public school. I’d have one more day to pick through the cellophane grass of the Easter baskets, and to loll about reading, or roller skating down our street, or riding  my bike  to Burdick Park with my older friend Kathy from up the street. As I climbed into bed Easter night, it occurred to me  that I should be thinking of Jesus disappearing from the tomb because He had risen. But as I lay in bed feeling the  breeze from the open window, I thought only of spring, of my mother putting away the coats and scarves in the cedar closet, of the rain boots and walks home from school through delicious puddles, of the last few sweets in my Easter basket.

Opel-escent: The Art of the Jump Start, or My First Car

The Red Opel, photo courtesy of Adrienne True

I went directly from my Barnard College commencement, to my first graduate school class, at Columbia University’s Teachers College, four blocks uptown. After two semesters and two intensive summer terms, I earned my master’s degree and got my teaching certification. We baby boomers were flooding the teaching market, but I typed up applications to schools in New Jersey, New York, and to satisfy my mother, her school system in Maryland. I took the New York City teachers exam and hoped for at least a job as a permanent substitute. Then, through a serendipitous connection with a professor in the department where I worked as a part time secretary, I landed a job in the tony town of Rye, in Westchester County. I’d be teaching seventh and eighth grade English, and the money was good, as was the health insurance.  Playing a bit loose with our unwritten rental agreement with the landlord, we sublet our apartment on 116^th Street to a dependable assistant professor who was happy to pay us fifty bucks more than our normal monthly rent. He was in no hurry to move into the city, and that would give us plenty of time to find new digs  in the suburbs.

As the opening of  school approached, we jumped on our motorcycle –which we were temporarily and illegally housing in our ground level apartment’s living room, having  spent what little savings we had on it a few months before, so there was nothing left for theft insurance. We scoured the area around Rye for an affordable place to live.  We had no luck at first: the apartments were few and out of our price range. I  was  forced to endure six weeks of carpooling with a middle aged  social studies teacher, a closeted gay man who listened to eight- track tapes of  opera every day on our drive to Rye—55 full minutes of Maria Callas and Leontyne Price. All the while he nattered on about this and that—small iniquities he’d  endured at the hands of the school administration, the obnoxiousness of middle school youth, the ridiculous demands of the curriculum, and the sorry excuse for a teachers’ union in Rye. Whereas I looked forward each working day to the challenges of the classroom, determined to win the kids over and make them learn as well, my colleague was bitter, tired, and pretty much friendless in the faculty lunch room. I started out feeling tolerant, then became bored with his chatter, then after a couple of  weeks, began to dread the rides to and from school. At the end of the teaching day, I wanted to stick around and plan my next day’s lessons, or stare down over-exuberant, misbehaving boys from my seventh grade class in a one hour afterschool detention, so I could become more credible—and feared—and have better classroom management. My opera aficionado driver was in the habit of bolting from school within four minutes of the last bell, and every Monday through Friday afternoon at 2:20  sharp, his car shot  out of the faculty lot so fast that I buckled my seatbelt tightly, and said a quick Hail Mary.

One Saturday I mentally tallied up the time spent on the road each week, between our apartment at 116^th street and the ivy-covered walls of Rye Middle and High School. Ten minutes waiting for the Broadway bus, another five or ten minutes waiting on the corner of Broadway and 96^th Street for my ride, 45 minutes on the Hudson and Hutchinson Parkways, then another five minutes from the parkway exit to school: sixty  minutes times ten. Ten hours a week, time I could be spending correcting papers, planning lessons, and boning up on remedial reading, since I’d been assigned to a class of weak readers, but had absolutely no training in diagnosing or dealing with dyslexia. “You’ve been misassigned!” my mother said. She’d quickly decided my department chair didn’t know what he was doing—or didn’t care. Once more, she encouraged Rick and me to move back to Baltimore, where I could get a cushy position teaching English at a new, state-of-the-art high school.

We  stayed put, at a safe distance from both our families. Rick gave his notice to quit in the university’s Central Stores department, and we mapped out a strategy—apartment hunting every Saturday, and we’d start asking everyone we knew—my colleagues, his aunt who lived in  Old Greenwich, even the librarians at the Greenwich Public Library.  We hit upon the notion that we should write up our own ad and place it in the local newspaper. After six weekends of fruitless searching, we turned up what looked like a good deal: a small studio apartment on the second floor of a  Cos Cob garage —an “unofficial”  apartment, no doubt. There was only one catch: we needed a car, since I couldn’t be riding on the back of our 750 cc Triumph motorcycle  to school each work day.

My first car was a red Buick Opel station wagon, not much bigger than today’s Smart Cars. My grandmother sold it to me for a hundred and fifty bucks, about two years after my step-grandfather died. Mimi, by then in her sarly eighties, had never learned to drive, but she was reluctant to part with the Opel for sentimental reasons. So there it sat, through two frigid Cumberland winters and two cool springs, lonely and half forgotten on the parking lot of Mimi’s senior citizen highrise apartment building. The car was seven or eight years old by then, but still looked in fine shape, its body intact and the paint job a shiny candle apple red. There was one hitch:  I had to learn to drive it before I could drive it. Aside from a few lessons on an aging Citroen Deux 2CV the previous summer, I’d never quite gotten the hang of a standard shift.  I took the train to Baltimore, and my mother drove me west to Cumberland where Mimi handed me two sets of keys and the  title, signed over to me. I paid her the first fifty dollars of our informal installment plan.

That same weekend, back in Baltimore, my father took on the task of teaching me how to drive the Opel—on the nearest steep hill. I had no trouble figuring out the “H” configuration of gears. It was starting up from a full stop, on a hill, that flummoxed me. “Let out the clutch! Let out the clutch! LET OUT THE CLUTCH!” Dad commanded, as over and over, the engine stalled and I had to start all over again—shifting into Neutral, depressing the clutch and shifting into first, then slowly letting up on the clutch with my left foot as I hit the gas with my right— and the engine, raced, then stalled again.

I was twenty-four, I wasn’t happy being treated like a sixteen year old just learning to drive, and I refused any more of Dad’s driving lessons . My mother, ever the patient teacher, took over the next day, and taught me how to use the emergency brake to start the car on a hill, until I began to feel more comfortable with the entire operation. Within two hours I knew how to start up from a dead stop near the top of Hilltop Avenue, going uphill. A few days later, I drove from Baltimore to Cos Cob without a  problem.

For a small car, Little Red was amazingly capacious. In our move from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to Connecticut, over the course of three days, we transported a queen size box spring and later, the mattress , lashed  onto the roof rack, a chest of drawers, a desk, a small dining table, one heavy upholstered armchair, two bicycles, and boxes and boxes of records and books. We could fit three passengers in the back, and two of us up front. Best of all, the Opel averaged 42 mpg, and gas in those days was only about thirty-five cents a gallon. The problems began later, when the New England fall moved from Indian summer days to cold, damp nights. Rick and I soon figured out that Little Red needed a good hard push to get it going enough to jump start the engine. I took to parking  on an incline, just in case there wasn’t a colleague around to give me a little push. The Little red Opel came to life readily on sunny days, but if it rained or threatened to, it was anyone’s guess how long it could take to get  her going.

We checked under the hood. Rick was handy with cars, and he replaced the spark plugs, the points, this and that, changing up everything. But the problem persisted. This is when I learned what a distributor cap was—after months of troubleshooting, Rick finally figured it out—moisture collected under the distributor cap and caused the system to short out. We took to drying the cap out in the oven at 160 degrees Fahrenheit, a trick that worked well enough. But it required too much advance planning for our busy and freewheeling –twenty-something lives.

There was another issue with Little Red—the shaking. Whenever I drove the Connecticut Turnpike or the Merritt Parkway  over  55 mph, the car began to vibrate, just a bit at first, then as my speed approached 60, the car began to shake in a very disturbing way. The steering wheel vibrated, the seats shook, and a jackhammer sound filled the car. My solution was to drive more slowly. I would fall into the slow lane, feeling like a little old lady, but too scared to keep up a good speed with all that rattling and shaking. It sounded as though the wheels were going to fly off. At twenty-three, I might have been willing to engage in a certain amount of risk-taking behavior, but driving a rapidly disintegrating car wasn’t in my playbook.

The adorable little over-the-garage apartment  started out as a love nest, but it was a difficult year for Rick and me. He didn’t find work for months, and as a result, was miserable much of the time. He tried his hand at carpentry, doing odd jobs for a few friends in the city, but not much came of it. By November, my younger sister had returned from her backpacking trip to Europe  with a broken heart and no desire to move back home , so we let her sleep on the couch. She got a job at a deli on Greenwich Avenue, and was soon joined in the living room sleeping quarters by Rick’s younger sister, who had dropped out of college after one semester.  She found a job in an office, typing and filling out purchase orders. Rick began cashiering and then managing the Eco-Center, with its rows of  natural foods, macramé and artisan weavings, and a parking lot of electric cars, none of which ever seemed to sell. The bucolic little apartment in Cos Cob was becoming a tenement of immigrants from Baltimore. The background music to all this was ”All Things Considered” in its infancy, Carly Simon and Elton John records, and the disappointing whine of Little Red, not quite able to start up  in the cold Connecticut mornings.

In late winter, an old boyfriend of our college friend Suzie showed up for what was to be a long weekend. He parked his old Dodge with its Colorado tags next to Little Red. Dan soon became a permanent fixture. He, too, sacked out on the tiny living room floor in a tattered old sleeping bag. He came and went at odd hours. I began spending more time with teaching friends, going to the theater in the city, out for drinks every Friday after school, or to the public library, where I hunkered down in a corner, grading papers and obsessively writing in my journal.

Little Red continued to act up at least two or three times a week, and always, it seemed, when I needed to get to work.  The car didn’t do well in the snow, and once or twice I got stuck on Cat Rock Road and needed a push out from our novelist neighbor across the road.  By the time spring came, I was more than happy to promise  my first car  to my twenty year old sister-in-law, who was heading back to southern Maryland  to resume college. In mid- June, when my first year of teaching came to a close and I gratefully received my summer balloon paycheck, I went directly to the local Volkswagen dealer.

Within two days I had a sapphirblau Super Beetle, a car loan with a monthly payment coupon book, and no radio.  I packed up some favorite books, my sewing machine, summer cloths and my trusty Smith–Corona electric typewriter, and drove north to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as good a place as any to study Celtic literature and intermediate French, and to get my head straight after a taxing year as a mentorless young middle school teacher living in an overpopulated, undersized hippie commune. Rick stayed in Cos Cob, and as our sisters went their separate ways back to school, he was tasked with evicting Dan, our last remaining garagemate. Driving north to Massachusetts, I gave hardly a thought to the little red Opel. Eventually I’d have to write to my grandmother and let her know I’d sold it—for twice what I’d paid her for it.

But that could wait. I was feeling the inexorable freedom that comes with a reliable new car that could take me away to Cambridge.  When I put the key into the ignition, the VW started up, humming evenly. There would be no more parking on steep hills or calls for a good hard push to get the engine going. Lesson plans, my cranky old department chairman, and jump starts in the cold morning rain fell away as I drove up the ramp to Interstate 95 in the late June sunshine. As I shifted into fourth gear and the speedometer hit 70, I found myself humming a Carole King tune. Then  I sang out loud, all the way to Boston.

The 1971 sapphirblau Super Beetle, Greene Street, Brookline, 1974. Photo by Margaret Carvan

© 2012 Lynne S. Viti, All rights reserved

Cousins’ Club, Part 4: Requiem for Mary Jane

The day before I graduated from law school, I was married– for the second time. Both he and I were veterans of early starter marriages,  both  single for a decade. We met at an enormous  party in Jamaica Plain, in a house opposite Franklin Park and around the corner from an old stable. We did not lock eyes across a crowded room, like the song in South Pacific recounts. It was a rather empty room, as  most of the party was going on a floor below in a cleared-out living and dining room area that the houses’ residents, performance artists, used for their drumming practices. We stood next to the snack table. He introduced himself, as did I, and we began chatting. Within forty five minutes, I knew we had traveled parallel paths—early marriage, followed by long, difficult and ill-fated relationship with a younger partner, Catholic father, Episcopalian mother, and no children. Politics slightly left of center, check. Loved books and music, check. Had been through some  therapy, check. We soon fast tracked to living together and planning a small wedding—his immediate family, mine, and three close friends.

First Parish Congregational Church, Manchester-by-the Sea, Massachusetts

 My parents, sister, brother in law and their infant son came  from Maryland for the wedding, in a small white Congregational church on Boston’s North Shore. There was a fine dinner at a small restaurant in Gloucester, lots of champagne, and a thunderstorm that we completely missed. The next day, my mother told me Mary Jane had gotten  some bad news, Mother said. I pressed her for the details, though she was reluctant to say much. Breast cancer, partial mastectomy. I reached for my address book and dialed Mary Jane’s  number.

 “I didn’t want you to hear about this till after the wedding,” Mary Jane told me. “ You didn’t need to be thinking about this at your time to be happy.”

 I asked her how she had found out she had cancer, about the surgery, asked her if she’d have cosmetic reconstruction. Did her children—a son and a daughter, both still in elementary school–know? No, she said). What was the prognosis? Did she have confidence in her doctor?

 “He’s kind of nerdy,” she said, “but smart, very smart. He tells it to me straight— he doesn’t sugar-coat it.” She said he seemed like a scientist more than a doctor. She felt confident that she was in good hands. She would have hormone therapy, not chemo, and yearly chest x-rays and follow-up from her surgeon and the oncologist. As I listened, I stood in our kitchen in the third floor walk up apartment, looking out the window near the old porcelain sink,  to the parking lot of the hardware store adjacent to our building. The trees along Cypress Street were green, their leaves full and lush. The sun was shining, and soon I would put on my pink and white cotton sundress with the cutout in the back, and then over it, the blue academic robes of Boston College, with the juris doctor hood. I felt tears well up as Mary Jane wished me congratulations and told me not to worry, everyone was praying for her and she knew everything would be all right for her  in the end. I twisted the phone’s coiled cord around in my left hand as I told her I would be thinking of her and wishing for the best.

 She lived for another eleven years, much of them seemingly free of the cancer, though in retrospect it was lying in wait. I saw her more frequently for a time, staying at her home with my five year old son when Mary Jane and I had our twentieth high school reunion, and then again five years later, when her cancer had begun to return with a vengeance. We went together to our twenty-fifth,  but as soon as we arrived, she gravitated as in high school days to her old Mt. St. Agnes crowd, and I, to my Beatle Club, as we had come to call ourselves. At the end of the evening, after the speeches, the wine, the stories and the laughs at our separate tables, Mary Jane and I met up at the door as we had so many times at those old CYO dances,  and we wended our way to her car. We gossiped all the way back to her house, about who had gained weight, who looked better than ever, who hadn’t shown up, who had surprised us by appearing that night. She talked about her children,  by now young teenagers, who were a constant source of delight and challenge. We fell into our old ways—she, the raconteur of hilarious tales, me, her audience, easily laughing at her stories. On my last visit, she was exhausted, and she refused to come to that year’s school reunion. “Give everyone my best,” she said. I hated going without her.

 A month before her forty-ninth birthday, after a year or two of  intense and escalating pain and suffering, supported by her steadfast and amazing husband and her friends, her now nearly grown kids and her mother and brothers, Mary Jane died– still young, ever devout and altruistic. My mother, by then in her early eighties, said Mary Jane’s death made her doubt God existed. I didn’t make the trip to Baltimore for the funeral. One more piece of my childhood was gone, and it would take many months and years to remember the good times, to forget Mary Jane’s last act, the unfairness and the randomness of her illness and death.

 There’s an old Kodacolor photo of the two of us at age three–Mary Jane was two and a half, really– from my birthday party. It is May, and I’m wearing  a smock dress, white anklets and black patent leather shoes.  A shiny foil party hat is perched askew on my head. Mary Jane  wears a blue jumper with a frilly white blouse.  I have no recollection of that day, except for a vague sense of women–my mother, my Aunt Kay, my grandmother–bustling about, keeping order among the toddler guests. The snapshot has aged with an oddly golden glow. Mary Jane, dark-eyed, her straw-blond hair held in place with a white plastic barrette,  looks straight into the camera, surprised.  With one hand, she holds a plastic whistle with a curled paper tail  to her mouth. With the other,  she drags  a large pink balloon  near the carpet. I stand beside her, holding my own balloon and whistle, and we blithely stride forward,  into our futures.

© 2012 Lynne Viti

Cousins’ Club, Part 3: Mary Jane Got Married

Church of Saints Phillip and James, Baltimore

Mary Jane   was married the same year I was going through a divorce. My starter marriage had been on the skids within a year or two after the wedding. I remember the  day my mother called to tell me Mary Jane and her boyfriend had become engaged, set the date. It was a Sunday morning, when the long distance rates were lowest. I was standing up in the kitchen of  the first place I ever lived alone, about five months after the Organic Gourmet and I had separated. The wall phone had a short cord, so I couldn’t move very far from it. I slid down the wall and sat on the floor  as Mother talked. I felt happy for Mary Jane but her world seemed so far from mine that she might as well be getting married on the moon. Her boyfriend was, my mother said, a nice fellow who’d gone to Calvert Hall. He worked for the government, the Treasury Department. As she told me this, I was thinking about how much I hated Richard Nixon and how deeply I opposed our war in Vietnam, which had been going on for most of my life, it seemed. “I hope you’ll come to the wedding,” Mother said. “Of course,”  I told her. “ Wouldn’t miss it for the world.“ My sister was living in Europe with her Dutch boyfriend and would not be making the trip home. I focused on finding the perfect dress, something elegant and black.

Mary Jane was married  in the same imposing white  church where Aunt Eileen and my once-handsome, long-dead, charming alcoholic uncle had wed when he was on a short leave during the war. There was a full dress nuptial Mass. My cousin looked radiant, beautiful really, and the groom looked at her adoringly. I was happy for her. And  I went through the motions of those familiar liturgies for my father’s sake, for by then I was so estranged from the Church I’d been raised in—all churches, really—that I spent my Sundays reading the Sunday Times and drinking strong coffee, savoring each section of the paper, starting with the news and then moving on in the same order each week, to  the book reviews, and the magazine. 

After the wedding, we moved on to the  reception at a Baltimore country club, and as usual in those days, I drank too much. I  flirted with Mary Jane’s cousins on her mother’s side, a family of boys a year or two apart in age,  freckled, blue-eyed guys who knew how to tell a good story. I bumped into Mary Jane’s grade school friend, a high school classmate I hadn’t known well but had always thought quite cool and funny, and Fran and I stood at the bar making mean remarks about people we observed from our post. I thought I was being very sophisticated, but in truth, I was miserable—lonely, depressed, sad about my marriage slowly disintegrating and fading. Around us, everyone seemed happy, and when it came time for the groom and his mother to dance the polka, I felt myself stepping away from the knot of  guests encircling the dance floor. At first,  the groom and his mother  whirled around and around, just the two of them, and then, gradually, they were joined by a few more couples, then more, until the onlookers were far outnumbered by dancers.  I wandered back to the bar, held out my glass to the bartender and asked for another J & B, please, on the rocks.

© 2012 Lynne Viti

Cousins Club, Part 2: Two Roads Diverged

Mercy High School. Baltimore, MD

According to my aunt’s plan, Mary Jane was to move on from Mount Saint Agnes Lower School, ensconced in its octagonal building on the hill in Mount Washington, across the campus to the adjacent  Mount Saint Agnes High School and the college –a life sentence of sorts. But by the early 1960′s   the Sisters of Mercy closed their small high school to conform to new accreditation standards. Mary Jane and her school friends were funneled to a new school that welcomed students from all over the city. There, the daughters of doctors and lawyers would sit  side by side with girls like me—the children of barkeepers, door-to-door salesmen, printers, masons and cobblers. I was placed in a group required to take Latin and an experimental math curriculum from the University of Chicago, while Mary Jane and some of her grade school friends were tracked into a much less challenging class. My classmates and I were soon  deemed “brains,” and it became obvious to  the three hundred and twenty-five freshmen that Mary Jane and her friends were  the cool ones. “They’re in with the In Crowd,” my friend Chris joked, quoting a popular song of the day. “They know all the latest dances…it’s easy to find romance.”

The In Crowd  knew how to push the limits of school rules on hair and makeup –nothing too teased, nothing too blonde, but a little backcombing was all right. The Rules permitted no eye makeup, though what nun could detect  a touch of  mascara on a girl?  A little lipstick was all right, if it wasn’t too dark or iridiescent, but  colored nail polish could earn you a detention. My friends and I came to school with well scrubbed faces.

Mary Jane and I might nod to one another in the halls at school, and we sat at different lunch tables, as the cafeteria was a Petri dish for mean girls, in -groups, pecking order competitions, and the like. I might stop by her table and say hello, but nothing more.  Her friends regarded me with an odd  mixture of tolerance and disdain.

St. Ursula's School and Hall, Parkville, MD

But outside of school we remained weekend friends. Aunt Eileen would bring Mary Jane  to my house after supper, and  my mother chauffeured us to St. Ursula’s Catholic Youth Organization’s  weekly Friday night dance.       In that era of same sex Catholic schools, CYO was an oasis of coeducation—one prayer  by Father Martell to start off the night, then three hours of dancing, talking, and flirting. You waited for the boys you liked to come over and joke around. John  turned up his sport jacket collar, unfolded the lapels, with his ersatz Roman collar,  pretended to be a priest hearing your ersatz confession.  I always  hoped for one slow dance with Sam, St. Ursula’s best dancer. He was tall and  slender,  with  wavy chestnut hair. Of course, he  had a steady girlfriend, but she tolerated his dancing with other girls, so long as it was just once or twice in an evening. I tried not to stand with the girls who lined the walks. Alone, I might get a  shy but handsome boy in my sights so I  could make a beeline for him if a ladies’ choice were announced, a slow, languid song, like Skeeter Davis singing “The End of the World” or the Angels’ “‘Til.”

My imagination was so colored by Seventeen Magazine ads that I imagined my Wind Song perfume would mingle with the smell of his English Leather aftershave or — if I was lucky enough to dance with Sam– the scent of Marlboros, permanently absorbed into his herringbone sport jacket.  After we danced the last dance—if we were so lucky—with boys we barely knew, Mary Jane and I would meet up in the entryway to  the church hall. I might catch a glimpse of my classmate Gay over in the corner with her much older boyfriend. They liked to stay in the shadows, he, hunched over her, she looking up at him adoringly. I never wanted to acknowledge her, for it would feel like interrupting an intimate moment. I wondered what that must feel like, to be that oblivious to the rest of us, the uncoupled ones.

Wind Song, by Prince Matachabelli

Back at my house and upstairs in my bedroom, Mary Jane and I practiced smoking. At first we cadged cigarettes from my father’s pack, which he sometimes left on the commode in  the bathroom.  I would pocket a couple L & Ms and sneak  an ashtray and matches into my room, stashing it in my underwear drawer before we left for the dance. When we came back, we’d get into our nightgowns and sit on the floor by the window, which we opened wide even on the coldest winter nights. We’d light up and work on our technique. She worked on  blowing smoke rings, while I was attempting to French inhale, which I had heard about the year before when I was still in junior high. My parents must have smelled the smoke and known we were experimenting, but neither of them ever said a word about it. Eventually, Mary Jane and I saved our smoking for the break when the CYO hall emptied out for fifteen minutes, or lighting up outside after one of my parents dropped us off. We thought we looked so sophisticated, or in the parlance of those days, so “tough.”

Gradually,   Mary Jane’s social life and mine diverged just as our school lives had.  I was a much more serious and ambitious student than she, and her friends  were more precocious  than mine. More of them went steady and wore boys’ school rings, filled with wax to fit the girls’ smaller fingers. More of them were on the cheerleading squad, which consisted of petite, pretty girls with teased and sprayed coiffures  and carefully plucked eyebrows. My friends were an eclectic bunch, but all of us were studious  and focused. We were the journalists, the actors, the math whizzes.

By the time we were sixteen, I was immersed in a new world of books and politics. I read Dr. King and Stokely Carmichael  and I got into arguments with my father and with conservative friends at school about civil rights. My father was more than annoyed when my letter to the editor advocating integration of all  public entities in Baltimore—schools, swimming pools, restaurants and bars, department store dressing rooms—was published in the Evening Sun.  I was fifteen, and I had written it on my own. I hadn’t shown it to a soul, just typed it up om my Smith-Corona and mailed it to the editor. My mother, though proud of my publication, suggestedI should have used a pseudonym. My father said nothing, but conveyed his position  through silence.

Mary Jane and I saw each other at family gatherings, but less and less frequently. I was university-bound,  with dreams of school in Boston or New York, and she allowed herself to be steered to a local junior college. She left after a semester or two, and went to work, which she seemed to prefer to taking classes. She moved into an apartment with a girlfriend and came home for Sunday dinner. I was drawn into the anti-war movement  on my campus, and on my rare visits home, refused to go to Mass with my father, and  annoyed  my mother with my swearing and my left-of-center political views.  I married when I was a senior at Barnard because my parents wouldn’t pay my tuition if I defied them by living  in sin with my boyfriend.  I returned to Baltimore less and less frequently.  While I was refusing to work for the Man, Mary Jane was filing and typing at an insurance company’s office. While my friends and I were drinking cheap red wine, sitting around listening to Bob Dylan records and analyzing the lyrics, Mary Jane was working a second job at a Baltimore department store and dating guys with short hair and steady jobs. I was so absorbed in my rebellion against bourgeois values that I didn’t give her much thought any more. It  1969, and now, we had nothing in common.

Mathematics Hall, Columbia University, May 1968

© 2012 Lynne S. Viti

Cousins’ Club: Party of Two

Mary Jane, 1963

I was from a small family–just my parents, my younger sister and me,  but we had what seemed like an endless  supply of cousins—-older cousins, like Bunky who had been in the army and had played hockey in college,  drove a Thunderbird convertible and now sold freezers. Before that, he sold Esther Williams swimming pools. Or Michael, nine years my senior, who was in ROTC at Loyola and got his commission as lieutenant when  he graduated. We never saw him, as he was in training all over the country, then posted to Germany,  then  to Vietnam,  ascending the ladder to his pinnacle, three star general.  Mary Jo completed  her nurse’s training but then changed paths, and  went to college, majoring in English. She married a man from Massachusetts  and they moved there from Washington, DC soon after their first child was born. By the time I graduated from high school,  she had two  children and one on the way. Eventually she had five,  and she became a busy, full time stay at-home mother.

There were younger Baltimore cousins, and there were the Montgomery County, Maryland and the Ohio cousins, first cousins once removed. We saw them infrequently, and I never got to know the Marylanders as well as the Ohioans, all  scattered around the suburbs of Cleveland.  There were two “old cousins” from Pittsburgh who had “been sent to California to die,” from tuberculosis, in the 1940’s. Their mother and my grandmother were sisters; their father had made a fortune in stocks, the story went, and the old man had set up a rigid, permanent irrevocable trust that made it possible for them to live off the interest comfortably, then , msyteriously, revert to his secretary’s desdcendants, after my two childless cousins died in the late 1970′s. Neither of them succumbed to TB, and  both lived well into old age. John became a real estate agent in a California desert town, and Virginia, who lived Los Angeles, was a very Catholic writer who specialized in taking in and rehabilitating women who were down on their luck in one way or another.  John was a recovering alcoholic,  formerly a   hard drinker who partied with Jean Harlow and Errol Flynn in the old days. His sister Virgina was pious and strait-laced. She had been rejected by more than one order of nuns because she was not hardy enough for the religious life. She wrote  two books, biographies of St Margaret of  Hungary and Meg, daughter of St. Thomas More.

Cousin Virginia and I corresponded for a time when I wrote for my  high school newspaper and fancied myself a journalist Her letters were long, typed on onionskin, and punctuated only with ellipses. I moved on to corresponding with John once I reached college. He was a much more romantic figure to me.  By then he had left the U.S. under nebulous circumstances, possibly  involving a crooked real estate deal, and had taken up a vagabond’s existence, living in Tangiers, Marrakech, and finally, Sri Lanka where he died. Not until I was in my thirties did I realize John was gay. I heard from my mother that John had  adopted a young, handsome Sri Lankan fellow with the unlikely name of Ashley. The last time I saw him was in Holland, when my sister was married in Breda in the late ‘Seventies. By then he had been an expatriate for over fifteen years, and as far as I know he never set foot on American soil again.

Our closest  cousins were a trio we saw often–Tim, Mary Jane and Paul. They lived with their mother, who during World War II, had married my father’s brother, Francis. The marriage had not lasted long, because my father’s bright and handsome youngest brother had a serious drinking problem that made him completely unqualified to be a husband, father, or employee. He couldn’t hold a job more than a month or two, and over the years, my aunt and his brothers and sisters had tried everything—drying out clinics, consultations with noted psychiatrists. Within a fifteen year period, Uncle Francis went from the marital home first to a bachelor apartment, then to  a rooming house, and eventually to a down and out motel in Santa Monica, where he died in a mysterious gas explosion when I was in college.

But Aunt Eileen had family money, and she and the three children lived a peaceful, comfortable life in an affluent neighborhood of brick colonials and generous lawns, tucked behind York Road and St Mary’s Govans church. Those were the cousins closest to my sister and me in age: Tim was a year  and four days older than me, Mary Jane and I were seven months apart, and Paul was a little younger than my sister, Anne. Tim teased and bossed all of us, Mary Jane and I sought refuge in her  little front bedroom, and Anne and Paul played together nicely in the club cellar, or outdoors, in good weather.  Mary Jane and I were an unlikely pair—I had short dark curly hair and was fair, while she  had stick straight white-blond hair and skin that tanned instead of burning. I was plump; she was slender. I was a reader; she was more interested in television, music and movies.

The Octagon Building, Mount Saint Agnes Lower School, Mt. Washington, MD

By the time I was eight,  Mary Jane and I had developed a weekend friendship, something quite apart from our school friends. Mary Jane went to the all-girls Mount Saint Agnes Lower School,  populated by the daughters of doctors and  lawyers.  I went to the public elementary school near my home, where we might have as many as 45 kids in a classroom. One winter when we were eight, Mary Jane and I  took drawing lessons at the Baltimore Museum of Art, a short bus ride from her house. For years after that, even when we were grown with our own children, she would regale us with her account of our first bus ride to the museum. Though we had praticed a dry run with Aunt Eileen along, this was our first solo venture. Mary Jane wanted to get off the bus at the Boumi Temple stop, and as we stood in the front of the bus near the fare box, I kept telling her it wasn’t time to get off yet. The bus driver scolded us to hurry up, girls. I won the argument, and many stops later, we alighted at the museum, with its naked statue of Rodin’s Thinker on his pedestal in front of the main entrance.

The late, lamented Baltimore Boumi Temple, 4900 block of N. Charles Street

Rodin’s “The Thinker,” in its former location outside the Baltimore Museum of Art

Baltimore Museum of Art

On summer days, while my aunt was out doing her volunteer charity work at the school for special kids,  her elderly relative, Aunt Ann,  came to supervise the five of us. Mary Jane and I were allowed to take over the kitchen, making Chef Boyardee pizza from the kit, mixing the dough and pretending to throw it up in the air like the pros. Aunt Ann, an elderly relative of Aunt Eileen’s, was always in the background to keep an eye on us, but stayed out of our way. Mary Jane and I deciphered the pizza instructions, spreading the meager canned sauce on our rectangular crust, sprinkling the top with dried parmesan from the paper pouch.  We thought it was perfect  pizza, and the smell of baking crust was heavenly to us. In those days pizza wasn’t available at every school cafeteria and corner store, and we had no idea what real pizza should taste like. We thought we were gifted bakers.

Mount Washington Country School for Boys, Mt. Washington, MD.

Starting in sixth or seventh grade, our social lives began to diverge even more. Mary Jane began going to boy-girl parties with her Mount St Agnes friends and their male counterparts from Mount Washington Country School, a military academy where the boys wore smart gray military uniforms with yellow cord trim. I envied her active social life. I was stuck in public junior high, where my social life consisted of spending time with my best friend Ann either at her house or mine, reading Seventeen Magazine and watching the Buddy Deane Show on tv. One spring Saturday, Mary Jane and I trolled the aisles at the five and dime store near her house, inspecting the Tangee lipsticks, compacts, and Maybelline cake mascara and brush sets. I bought some bright blue nail polish, which I thought I’d try out before I got home and my mother could critique the garish color. Mary Jane bought some liquid foundation, because she had just begun to break out in acne. She couldn’t possibly go to the party that night with all those blemishes. “I’m going to wear this to the party tonight,” she confided. ”If my mother says anything, if she asks me what I put on my face, I’m going to say, ‘Blem–Stick, and I rubbed it in.’ So back me up.” I readily agreed to.

I lay back on Mary Jane’s single bed with its rich green spread and white dust ruffle, reading my library book as she showered in preparation for the party. We’d had our dinner and my overnight bag was packed. I watched Mary Jane pull two dresses out of her closet. Holding first one, then the up against herself, she asked, “Which one is better?”  The full skirts, with crinolines beneath, rustled as she held them both out at arm’s length for me to compare. “The blue one,” I said. She wasn’t yet allowed to wear nylon stockings, so she laid out some thin white nylon anklets and patent leather flats,  and slipped into the dress. I zipped it up, marveling at how small her waist was. She talked about which Mt. Washington boys she liked and which ones would be at the party. I glanced at the clock on her dresser, wondering where my mother could possibly be, hoping she would arrive soon so I wouldn’t have to be left behind at 336 Broadmoor while Mary Jane went off to her party.

But my mother was late, and I suffered the humiliation of standing in the front hallway with Aunt Eileen when Mary Jane, blond and spiffy in her crinolines and  party dress, responded to her mother’s interrogation about the foundation makeup.  “Blem–Stick, and I rubbed it in. Isn’t that right?”  She looked at me, and I corroborated her story. “Yes, Blem-Stick, ” I told Aunt Eileen.

The doorbell rang. Mary Jane ran out to catch her ride with a school friend. The other girl’s father, drafted to be chauffeur for the girls that evening, sat behind the wheel of a long, shiny black sedan.  Aunt Eileen and I waved from the front doorstep. I managed to croak out a weak,” Have a good time.”

On the drive home I confesssed to  my mother that  I felt fat and left out. She told me then what she would repeat for years afterwards, whenever I bemoaned my weight, my boyfriendless state, my unpopularity at junior high.

“Your day will come,” she said, and for some reason, I believed her.

Getting To Christmas

Photo by Marvin Lightner, http://www.exploratorium.edu

When our  sons  were young, my husband and I began a tradition of taking them to a play or concert on the weekend or two before Christmas. For several years, after Mister Rogers featured two principal dancers on his tv show, both boys were fixated on the Nutcracker Ballet. In those days, we economized by choosing a  production by Walnut Hill School . We figured that at  age four and seven, the kids wouldn’t notice that the ones executing the pas de deux and the grand jetés were mere high schoolers. We settled on the matinee, and burgers at Friendly’s afterwards.  The next year my father-in- law gave us  tickets to the Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker.  So decked out in reindeer sweaters and corduroy pants, the boys not only enjoyed orchestra seats at the ballet, but were delighted to shake hands with the fully costumed Nutcracker prince and  Sugar Plum Fairy as well as one of the mice, at a fancy cocktail reception in the Boston Four Seasons Hotel.

All too soon, the boys became  too macho for the ballet, and my husband suggested  Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. By this time a “fancy” dinner– any restaurant that did not serve pizza as its specialty dish–became part of the holiday theater experience. We drove to Providence, saw an Angels in America- inspired Christmas Carol (ghosts of Christmas past, whirling overhead on a pulley contraption; female Ebenezer Scrooge), and got soaked clear through our coats walking in a downpour from the parking lot to a snazzy Italian restaurant –wine for the parents, pizza for one boy, and pasta for the other. The next year, we  went to  Christmas Revels at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, and afterwards, tucked in to TexMex food. Our younger boy loved the Revels—the costumes, the audience participation singing, the period instruments, and most of all, the antler dance. But the older one, by now in his early teens, decidedly did not. He rebelled, the next year staying home in bed with a fever–or perhaps  he meddled with the thermometer to escape revelling. We got a last minute babysitter (our church  rector’s son, as I recall) took our ten year old and  skipped the dinner out that year.

A Child’s Christmas in Wales went over pretty well with the boys  the next year, or perhaps what they really liked was  dinner at Legal Seafoods on a bustling night in a suburban mall. At the play’s intermission, the kids asked us to buy them nosewarmers-–worn by the actors in A Child’s Christmas, and sold at intermission to benefit the Boston Repertory Theatre. We suggested they spend their own money; they decided to forego the nose warmers.

Over time, the holiday outing metamorphosed–or faded–into dinner and a movie, and once the firstborn went off to college in Maine, the tradition fell off altogether. At first that made me sad: it was another sign that our children were forging their own ways in the world and did not want to adhere to their childish ways. They had plans of their own, and these excluded  their  parents.

But with the disappearance of our foursome’s family ritual, there came a new one: the empty nesters’  holiday outing.  This year at summer’s end, my husband ordered tickets for Stile Antico, an early music group of twenty-something singers from Britain. For two hours last night we sat with a couple hundred others in a grand, marble arched Catholic church in Cambridge. Until a few moments before the concert began, frigid air from the street flew into the narthex and into the back of the church where we sat in straight backed wooden pews, still bundled in our coats and woolen scarves. An enormous advent wreath, at least six feet in diameter, was suspended from the ceiling where  the transept and main aisle intersected, its wide  purple and pink ribbons stopping just short of the tallest concertgoers’ heads.

“First one to see someone you know gets a prize,” I whispered to my husband, who responded, “Bet we don’t know a soul here.” A striking woman with long  white hair gathered back walked by, and I recognized her as a former administrator from the college where I teach, but that didn’t count because I didn’t really know her, nor she me, before she retired a decade ago. Almost immediately after that I spotted a former student from several years ago—long enough that it took me half the concert to remember her name. She didn’t see me, so that didn’t count either.

The singing began. First, the women’s voices, clear, strong, sweet, emanating from a place I could not see from our pew near the back of the church. Then men’s voices joined the women’s, as the singers quietly took their places in the chancel. The women wore fashionable black dresses, the men, black shirts and pants. But the singers were merely the vehicles for the music, and to a lesser extent, the words— Tallis, Byrd and plainchant. The music made by these thirteen young voices swallowed up the Latin prayers. As I looked out over the audience, the music went into my head on the wings of the church Latin  I had learned as a child and adolescent before the days of Vatican II, when the great theologians and bishops banished the Latin Mass to a few outlier parishes. Old, familiar phrases— qui tollis peccata mundi, misere nobis, magnificat anima mea Dominum, swirled around my head, and then as the singers repeated and repeated the words, the sound fused with the words, then made its way into my head and my heart. I was no longer sitting in a cold church a stone’s throw from the Harvard yard,  with hundreds of strangers in  wool or down jackets. I was somewhere else, where human voices were so excruciatingly lovely and moving that it seemed the closest one could ever get to choirs of angels, or whatever you might call otherworldly, near-perfect beings. These  voices became pure sound, capturing me, eliminating all distraction, bringing wonder, then calm.

Stile Antico

As though jolted from deepest sleep, loud applause  brought me  back from where the voices had taken me.  We ducked out of the church just as Stile Antico finished an encore, a 16th century Spanish motet.  Cold and hatless, we walked back to the car, threading our way past pubs overflowing with ebullient young patrons in Santa suits or elf costumes.  We were  forced us back into the twenty-first century.

Over the next few days my husband and I enacted our own rituals from the years when we first met, the time Before Children:  last minute book buying at New England Mobile Book Fair, reviewing our gift list to be sure we didn’t favor one grown son over the other; lugging the Christmas tree up from its bucket of water (usually iced over) in the garage; giving the living room its annual deep  cleaning, from under the carpets to  the  corners and crannies of the sofa.

Today is  Boxing Day,  and the trick is to stay more than a  step ahead of the December blues. The leftovers from  Christmas dinner are stowed in the fridge. The cousins from Maine left this morning. Two lone pieces of pie sit covered with plastic wrap on the kitchen counter. Most of the detritus of Christmas–the bows, the gift wrap, the boxes–has been sorted into recycling bins in the garage.

At  5 pm it’s fully dark. I turn on the outside Christmas lights and make myself a cup of tea. The house, so full of laughter and talk of politics and music and jobs this time yesterday, is silent. The days are growing longer, imperceptibly, but confirmed by the daily newspaper’s almanac: ” Sunset, 4:17 pm. Day of year: 360.”

Before we know it, we’ll be cutting  forsythia to force its brave yellow blossoms from tall, spare branches, early notes of  spring.

In Thanksgiving

Often it was a quiet day for the four of us, my parents and my younger sister in our small dining room, the mahogany table covered with table pads and the mint green holiday tablecloth. The table had been carefully set the evening before, with the good china, rimmed in gold and featuring a single sheath of golden wheat, and the ornate Stieff silver. My father liked to rise early, well before sunrise, and begin his cooking. By the time my sister and I made our way down to the kitchen, the bird was in the oven, and the sauerkraut and spareribs gently simmered on the back of the stove. The potatoes were peeled and resting in a large pot of cold water on our little back porch. If the weather was grey and rainy, as it often was, we would linger over the morning paper, watch television,  play Sorry or Monopoly.

When we were a little older, our father might take my sister and me to the City-Poly football game. By the time I was in high school, I wanted only to go with my Mercy High friends to the Turkey Bowl, the annual Calvert Hall-Loyola matchup. Both games, steeped in years of rivalry,  were played at Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium, and the Calvert Hall-Loyola  game on those brisk Thanksgiving mornings provided ample opportunity to see and be seen by the cutest boys in Baltimore, as far as my friends and I were concerned.

Calvert Hall v.Loyola,Thanksgiving, 1962

Dinner was always the same menu,  served around five o’clock: turkey with dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans, two kinds of cranberry sauce, giblet gravy, sweet potatoes with brown sugar, sauerkraut, and my mother’s sole contribution to the table—if our housekeeper hadn’t made it the day before—Waldorf salad, a  concoction of diced apples, walnuts, raisins and celery held together with Hellman’s mayonnaise– that never made much sense to me and which I ate only under orders, because I wanted to get to the pie. The pie—always apple, always made late the day before by Burnell from her mother’s Virginia recipe—was uniformly wonderful, year after year. There was no mystery to it as far as ingredients went. Burnell used an old coffee cup to measure out flour and tossed in a hunk of Crisco and a little salt, then splashed ice water with one hand while she began mixing the stuff with the other. She worked quickly, and within a couple minutes turned out the dough onto a floured board and began quickly rolling it out. The used a paring knife to trim the top layer of dough, crimped the edges just so, and made slit for the steam to escape during the baking.  With the extra dough, she made a small sugar tart of sugar, cinnamon and butter. That was the small day-before-Thanksgiving treat for my sister and me, and we each ate our half while the dough was still hot and flaky, just cooled enough that we wouldn’t burn our tongues.

Over time, the Thanksgiving food became less important to me, though the reassuring cooking smells of roasting turkey and the rest provided an essential background to my coming and going to friends’ houses, to football games, to movies, and parties. By the time I was in college, I began to treat Thanksgiving break as the start of the Christmas-New Year party season, though invariably I arrived home from school with a suitcase full of books that I never touched until I stepped onto the train back to New York. In those days, final exams were scheduled for mid January, so Christmas was a time of cognitive dissonance. I knew I should study, but I was having too much fun catching up with high school friends, prowling parties and dances for interesting college men, and learning to drink scotch with friends of my parents at the odd intergenerational cocktail party.  I even tolerated extended family gatherings, where I was cross examined by older cousins and uncles on the politics at Columbia, which they called “that communist school up in New York.”

In my twenties, I often made a point of refusing to make the four hour journey south for Thanksgiving, instead, hanging out with teacher friends at a potluck supper, or scrounging an invitation to Thanksgiving with families of  my students oin Connecticut.  Gradually my visits home at  Thanksgiving became fewer and farther between, and by the time I was thirty my parents had decamped for their annual Florida sojourn by  October. There was no longer a home within driving distance on Thanksgiving, and I spent my holidays with my own growing family –my Rhode Island-bred husband and our two young sons–in the Northeast.

Two decades ago, my father died, two days before Thanksgiving. He had been ill for a few months, and I had visited him a few times in the hospital, flying in and out   of Baltimore on short weekend visits. By late November he was near death, cared for at my parents’ home by my sister, my brother -in -law, and visiting nurses.  On the Monday before Thanksgiving, my mother called to tell me it was time to come home to say my last goodbyes to Dad.  I left my husband and children behind in Massachusetts and flew to the place I had been raised in, afraid of what I was now called on to do, without a plan, without a map, without any sense of how to be the good daughter I wanted to be.

My father had been moved from home to a hospice facility by then, and I spent the evening and early morning hours at his bedside. He was comatose, hooked up to oxygen, deeply medicated with morphine. He no longer looked much like my father, only a shell of  him. His breathing was labored, his large blue eyes wide open as he struggled with each breath. The patient in the bed next to Dad’s, his cubicle separated by a striped cotton privacy curtain, dozed through a Mel Gibson action movie on the TV bolted into the wall near the ceiling. Someone turned off the television and lowered the lights. It was quiet except for the sound of Dad’s sharp intake of air and breathing out, over and over.  I shifted in the rigid chair and tried to loosen up my back. I sang quietly to him, a song he used to sing to me in his off-key way, when I was little, something that was popular before I was born. With my forefinger , I lightly  traced the faint scar on his forehead, a souvenir from his time in China, during the war.

He died that night, within minutes after the night shift nurse had given him the shot of morphine and suggested I might want to rest in a room down he hall reserved for family members who were on watch. It seemed I had just closed my eyes when she was gently shaking me awake, telling me my father was gone. I was disoriented and disbelieving. I went to him then, and held his hand and kissed his forehead, thinking I must do this while he was still warm, while his spirit had not yet left his body.

I called my mother and sister and contacted the funeral home to collect the body, and my mother drove me back to the  house. We sat up drinking tea,  talking and looking through an old scrapbook she had never shown me. It was  full of notes and postcards and valentines my father had sent her when they were courting. I fell into bed in the guest room at dawn,  wishing I could sleep for days.

When I awoke, my sister reminded me that we had made no preparations for Thanksgiving–nothing. I recall little about that day except for going to the supermarket that evening, finding a frozen turkey and wondering if we could possibly thaw it in time, pawing through the sweet potatoes to find enough good ones, looking for the stuffing mix Dad had always used.  I resisted the impulse to tell the few other late-for-Thanksgiving shoppers what had befallen me and my family. I moved through the aisles inefficiently, knowing what I had to do and making myself do it.

The next morning, my five year old nephew and I prepared the dinner. I was comforted by his innate kindness and his willingness to help. It was as though he understood the deep pain we were all feeling and felt it too in his child’s way, and wanted to help. His small hands mixed the stuffing, patted butter and sprinkled salt and pepper on the turkey breast and legs.  Standing on a study wooden chair in the kitchen, he was nearly my height, and his chatter about each cooking task kept me thinking about the next step in making the feast, even as the knot in my heart stayed constant.  There was nothing in the world to do except make the dinner, if I was to keep my head on my shoulders.

Bereft as we were that year, we still had a thanksgiving after all. The meal little Martijn and I made was not the seamless production my father would have created, but my mother, my sister and her family, and I were together. We had loved Dad and been loved by him. That day there was dinner, there was wine, there was a shared sorrow and there was a bond between him and us that could never be broken.

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“James S. Spigelmire, Owned Restaurant and Tavern.” The Baltimore Sun: 5.B.  Nov 28 1992.

Take Gutman

Elizabeth Gutman  seemed extraordinarily powerful, both in intellect and in her clear resonant voice as she lectured on The Golden Bowl, in a packed, overheated third floor lecture hall. Yet physically, she appeared fragile. She wore no makeup. She dressed for winter in two or three layers of well-worn cardigans and a long wool coat, and her long blond hair was untamed and frizzy, a mass around her small face. Her eyes were a deep blue. She was the first college professor who came to know me by name.

I had transferred from a small Catholic women’s college in Boston, where I’d been a commuter, living at home in my family’s Dorchester three-decker. Coming to Barnard, I expected a more serious, all-consuming intellectual life, absent from my first school. I hoped to meet professors who would challenge an inspire me, not merely march me and my classmates through midterms, papers and finals. But I had no idea how hard it would be to find housing on campus . I lived for several weeks in a dingy single room occupancy hotel on the corner of Amsterdam and 121^st, occupied by more than a few very old women. A  scattering of us, all  transfer students,  shared the dismal five bedroom suites with their dark, ancient kitchens and bathrooms.

It took what seemed like forever to find friends. There seemed no quick way to make connections with my teachers, either in or out of class. On the corner of 116^th and Broadway, every afternoon and evening, a young black guy, tall and skinny, stood with  his hand out asking for spare change. I got into the habit of crossing  the street  block earlier than I might have, just to avoid him. Almost every day, I saw a woman who appeared to be speaking in tongues, yelling  into the receiver or a broken pay phone in front of the Campus Deli. The IRT roared by the campus. It was widely believed in my family that I had gotten above my raising, that the local Catholic girls’ college back in Boston was perfectly fine for me and my girl cousins. When I set out for New York  I expected to find a welcoming community of sisters and teachers who showed us how to live the intellectual life. Instead, I was surrounded by those  who’d had experiences I could only vaguely imagine. A girl in my orientation group with long straight red hair and ginger colored eyes lit a cigarette, exhaled slowly, and said, “ I was playing chess with an architect friend of mine last weekend.” The housing director was impervious to my frequent visits and polite requests for a room in the dorms. Had one opened up yet? There was never even a hint of a smile from her. Eventually she stopped responding except with a shake of her head when I appeared in the doorway of her office twice a week.

“Take Gutman,” said my official orientation guide, a breezy, self-confident sophomore who was giving me registration advice.. “Gutman’s amazing. She makes Proust comprehensible. “  A buzz spread among the transfer students. “I hear Gutman’s really good.

“What does she teach?” I asked. I had no intention of majoring in English.

“Who cares?” said another transfer, a graduate of one of those rich girls’ junior colleges.  “If people say she’s good, take her. I’ve had it with bad teachers, man.”

What I didn’t realize until I got to the first meeting of The Modern Novel was that Gutman’s classes were always full  and then some. But she never turned anyone away. Columbia guys routinely showed up to take her courses for credit, instead of enrolling just to meet girls.  Gutman didn’t care how many students she had; she just kept adding small discussion sections on top of her lectures.

I’d never heard anyone lecture about novels before. I found Gutman’s  classes  inspiring, stimulating, sometimes thrilling. Each seventy-five minute class sped along as she spoke. I was enveloped in her outpouring of facts, literary theories, and intriguing connections between writers and texts. It was in one of those small discussion groups, as we worked our way through Proust (n French, for those who could read it), Mann (for those who could) , James, Joyce and Faulkner that I was first able to speak out in a class there, to find a way out of my reserve and my feeling that I wasn’t smart enough to contribute to the discussion. Early in the term I handed in a paper, leaving it in Gutman’s mailbox with a note attached, saying how grateful I was that she’d created the smaller sections,  where I felt comfortable enough to raise my hand and speak. She returned the paper with many comments and probing questions, as always, but this time, she added an encouraging note. She said my ideas were worth bringing to our class.

I saw her at the college’s Wednesday afternoon teas, too, with her two blond children, the girl with thick braids, the boy all explosive energy, and I delighted in her greeting me—by name—with a wide smile and sparkling eyes. I have forgotten by now, all these years later, what I wrote my papers for her on, but I recall studying for the exam and relishing all I had learned about the roots of the modern novel, psychoanalytic theory, the New Criticism. Gutman had opened my mind up to all this. There was so much more to learn. I had no interest any more in political science or history. I would major in English. I would ask Gutman  to be my advisor.

After finals my sophomore year, I went home  for the summer and waited tables at a plush restaurant on the south shore. I stayed out late with my old high school friends, drinking beer at the park and going down to the Cape if someone had extra room at their cottage. I’d made some new friends at Barnard, mostly a tight little group of seniors who lived on my floor and had welcomed me into their camaraderie. One of them stayed on in New York for the summer, sharing an apartment on Riverside with some grad students. One day a letter from her arrived, with a clipping from the Columbia Spectator, summer edition. Gutman had died.

Lee had heard a story, one she didn’t really believe, she wrote. Gutman had been preparing for a family vacation. She packed two enormous leather suitcases, and when she picked both of them up at the same time, she suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly.  There were few details in the Spectator obituary, only a photo of her, that curly hair, and an intense, direct look in her eyes. I am so sorry, Lee wrote. She knew how much I admired Gutman and was counting on her. I wondered who would push me, steer me, encourage me now. And I could not figure out why the circumstances of Gutman’s death were a secret.

The summer passed in  a blur of waiting tables, wine poured, tasted and drunk, empty plates cleared, busy nights, dead- slow nights. On one particularly quiet evening the young assistant manager closed up early and let the help stay on to have a  party. In the enormous kitchen, we drank beer and one of the younger waitresses brought out her guitar and sang  folk songs. A bus boy, a black kid from Roxbury, sang a Miracles song none of us had even heard yet, it was so new. The boy, no more than fourteen, did it smoothly, lyrically. White and black teenagers and adults stood around the kitchen swaying, feeling soulful. It was easy at moments like this not to think about Gutman. I stopped myself from wondering what had really gone on in her apartment that day. I put it behind me.

And for a long time, I succeeded. I returned to New York in the fall, found a new advisor, a brusque middle-aged spinster who wore tweed suits and sensible shoes and didn’t care what courses I took so long as I satisfied all my major requirements. But several summers later—by that time I had married and, finding myself very unhappy, I  was already separated and well on my way to a divorce—I went up north to a writers’ conference. By now I fancied myself a poet. One of the writers there had known Gutman. I had come to work on my poetry, but to tell the truth, I didn’t get much done. Instead, I found every opportunity to talk to the writer alone, about Gutman. I learned in minute increments, over several days talking with this grizzled writer, that the circumstances of Gutman’s life were very sad—no, tragic, like the stuff of the novels we studied in her course that winter.  I dared not ask how she’d done it, whether her husband had found her, who had raised their children. I didn’t even know how to phrase the questions. I just sank back into my Adirondack chair, looking down at the grass. I felt such surprise; my face flushed hot. What had there been that I had not seen? What insights had I been unable to produce when the evidence had been right there before me? Whatever sadness and pain there had been in Gutman’s  life, I had been oblivious, dense. She should have become a gifted teacher who lived on to teach until old age came to her.  The best I can say, which isn’t very much at all from where I stand now,  is that she’d made her mark on me.

© 2011 Lynne Viti

What We Were Wearing: From Weejuns to Bob Dylan Boots

I was seventeen,  standing in the foyer of Levering Hall at Johns Hopkins. In our ongoing campaign to meet college men, we  had come out on a school night  to Hopkins, to some sort of political meeting, or perhaps a poetry reading. My best friend MJ was with me, and so was our friend Alma, a year behind us in school. My mother had recently taken up knitting again, and she had turned out some fuzzy mohair sweaters. This night, I wore a pink one, loose and fuzzy, over a short dark skirt.

 Whatever event had brought us to the Hopkins campus was finished, and Alma’s very tall, very handsome rosy-cheeked brother was there to take her home. His friend looked short, but only because Bill was so tall, well  over six feet. He wore a navy blue shirt black tie, and jeans. Later, after he and I dated for the second half of my senior year, I came to learn that Bill thought this attire made him look vaguely like a Mafioso, but to me he looked like a Baltimore City police,   uniformed officer, but without the badge. Nobody dressed this way, at least no college guy I’d ever seen in real life.

 Wearing the dark brown skirt and white blouse uniform of Mercy High School meant that I never had to make decisions about buying clothes for school. Coordinated outfits, mostly sweaters and skirts, were absolutely necessary for Sunday Mass, Friday night CYO or going to plays or basketball games at Calvert Hall or Loyola.  The styles were dictated by Seventeen Magazine and the junior fashion boards at Hutzler’s or Stewart’s, the local department stores, which in turn probably received their marching orders from Seventeen and  Glamour . I had carefully assembled a small but workable out-of-school  wardrobe. Though I not yet  persuaded my mother to buy me a pair of Weejuns, I  had a few Villager skirts and sweaters,  the requisite Chesterfield coat with velvet collar, and  a shoulder bag that was the envy of my school friends.  Even on  the coldest winter day, we didn’t wear hats, or hoods. We eschewed scarves. Gloves and the Chesterfield coat were enough for us, no matter how frigid the weather.

 But once I started going with Bill, my preppy style didn’t play so well. He was an actor, which is to say he tread the boards at his all – male college, and sometimes, at  Mount Saint Agnes, its sister school across town. The theater crowd was sophisticated and cool. They had parties at the apartments of people who were at least twenty-five  and  sometimes—amazingly, to me—even older. They might gather around a small television to watch a special  broadcast of Brando in “On the Waterfront” while they drank scotch and smoked Marlboros or Benson and Hedges. One couple, Ray and his lover, were out of the closet–both in their late twenties, both in college, both army veterans. They, too, were in the college theater group.Ray and Fred  lived together in a large studio apartment on Belair Road, in a blue collar neighborhood, where rents were far cheaper than in the student ghetto.

From the time I was fourteen, my mother endured much moaning and crying on my part over my boyfriendless state. “You’re not  fat,” she would say. “You’re fine. Not every boy likes a rail thin girl.” By the time I started going out with Bill, she was so relieved  to see me with an active social life that she never asked for details on where I was going.  And I, in turn was vague. So long as I was home by midnight, I could do as I pleased. She trusted me to make good decisions, she said.

This particular night I wore a wine colored merino wool knot dress because Bill had sent a handwritten note, couriered to me by his sister before homeroom a few mornings earlier. “Kindness of Alma” was written in ornate script in the lower left corner of the envelope, and for the return address  F. J. Talma,   Francois-Joseph Talma, a nineteenth century French actors whose persona Bill had adopted.  In his letter, in florid, formal prose on vellum stationery, he  outlined the schedule for the Saturday night.  He told me the precise time  he would pick me up  and directed me to “wear dark, dark colors.” My mother wouldn’ t hear of my wearing black, so the burgundy wool dress — bought the year before for an afternoon  tea dance at the Naval Academy– would have to do. I laid out  the Chesterfield coat and  Bob Dylan boots.

 ”Oh, we’re just going to a play and a cast party after,” I stold my mother. Indeed, there was a play—Genet’s  The Balcony, which I barely understood, and a party afterwards at the home of  a couple in their late twenties  who lived around the corner  from the Northeast Baltimore police headquarters, in the upstairs of a two–family house.  Everyone was older than me, and everyone was drinking. I sipped at a glass of white wine, and found myself watching—not really participating—in a conversation between two Mount St Agnes seniors  and a Jesuit from Loyola,  adviser to the drama club. The girls were tall, blond and sophisticated, and they laughed and chatted and then sang, for the benefit of Father Whatever His Name Was, a parody of a Broadway show tune. I knew the song, “Can Do,” from Guys and Dolls. “Can’t do, can’t do, “ they sang. “The Church says we can’t screw. Can’t do, can’t do.” The priest threw back his head and roared with laughter.

I was shocked. I  tried to show no sign  of even  mild surprise as I  half-smiled and backed away. I  found a sofa to sink into, and looked around the room for Bill. He stood in a far corner near the kitchen, holding court. “So I said to the professor, “I don’t think it’s a matter of pathetic fallacy. Rather, I think Dylan Thomas was…pathetically phallusy!’” Everyone laughed. I looked at at my watch and saw that it was 11:40, and even though my house was only  ten minutes  away, I became anxious.

 I was quiet on the drive home. Bill lit a cigarette and he, too, was silent. His mother’s car, an older model Dodge Dart, had no radio. I felt I had disappointed him, though I‘d tried my best to be the cool and sophisticated intellectual girlfriend I thought he wanted me to be.  He kissed me good night on the front porch. I didn’t ask him in.

 My mother was still awake down in the basement family room. watching an old movie on the black and white television, something with Rita Hayworth. Dad was upstairs  in  bed, long asleep, and Mom was in her pajamas an robe, drinking  ginger ale.

” Didn’t we see this once, at the Northway Theatre,when I was  in fifth grade? ” I asked her. “Remember, it was  a school night. I fell asleep on the ride home, and  you had to tell me  how it ended.”

“Sit down, sweetie,” she said, patting the sofa next to her. “Wasn’t that Rita Hayworth a beautiful girl?”

Love That Red

Growing up, my little sister and I  shared a room. And much more than a room–we shared toys, dolls and books, and a big double bed Mother bought at Sears. All too frequently, we fought—bickered, mostly. Once in a while, the quarrels became physical—a slap, a shove. Since I was four years older than my sister, I usually had the advantage, though she was scrappy and fearless, and sometimes gave as good as she got in the rough and tumble department.  When our battles escalated to the point that we required mediation by a higher authority, we went to our mother. “You two have to learn to get along,” she said. “If the United States of America and Russia carried on like this, we’d have a nuclear war. The world could end! ” If she said that once, she must have said it a hundred times. I dared not argue with her, because she sounded so stern and annoyed.

But  my sister and I knew we weren’t countries sharing a border, or having political disputes. Our  bedroom was small, and my sister kept encroaching on my territory, my half of the room. My half of the closet. My half of the divided chest of drawers. My side of the double bed we shared. Fights within the family, at our house, were not looked favorably upon by the authorities. Dad rarely raised his voice, except to shout at the television when the  Colts fumbled the ball or missed a touchdown. Mom might call to us (or scold us loudly for forgetting to wipe our muddy feet when we came in from play) but when she was at her angriest, her voice was quiet—in fact, you knew you were really in trouble when she spoke in that low, clenched teeth voice and her dark eyes flashed and almost bored into you. If she took you by the shoulders and made you look squarely at her, you were done for.  Such occasions were so rare that I can count them on the fingers of my right hand.

 Instead of quarrels, in our house, we had discussions. We aired our grievances.  We had family meetings. We had interrogations and dispute resolutions. And sometimes when I did something I’d been told not to time and time again, I didn’t even learn my punishment for a day or two. It was torture. And once Mother had dealt the sentence, she was in it for keeps, so it was best not to argue with her.

 A couple months shy of my tenth birthday, I tiptoed into my parents’ room and removed a new lipstick, Revlon’s Love That Red, from my mother’s dressing table. She was at work, and our housekeeper, Burnell, was in our kitchen making dinner. I went out into the hallway to look into the large mirror, the better to paint my lips. I opened the golden tube, and held the top in my left hand while I unscrewed the lipstick well above the top of the tube—too far up, because when I pressed the lipstick onto my lips too hard, a half inch of greasy Love That Red fell onto the rose colored wall to wall carpet. That was my mother’s pride and joy, the first wall to wall carpet she had ever had though she was forty-three years of age, and  we had only moved into our new little house with its splendid carpet the  year before. I panicked, quickly reassembling the lipstick tube and dashing back into the master bedroom to restore the lipstick to Mother’s makeup drawer.

Once I had returned the purloined goods, I tackled the cleanup. I took toilet paper from the bathroom nearby and picked up the shards of lipstick from the rug. I flushed the paper and the lipstick fragments down the toilet. Then I attempted to clean the lipstick that  had shattered on the carpet. Soap and water seemed like a sensible solution to my little problem. I dampened a washcloth with warm water and rubbing it onto the bar of soap at the bathroom sink, then scrubbed at the red stain on the carpet. It barely worked. After a few minutes of this, the stain had only spread, and looked worse than when I’d started. In desperation, I moved the little mahogany table that sat in the hall a little to the left, to cover the spill. I stood back and appraised the situation. Not bad, I thought. Mother will never notice that.

 I was wrong, for  I had forgotten the mangled lipstick, which Mother discovered the next morning as she was getting ready for work. “What happened to this?” she demanded, sticking her head into my room as I was getting dressed for school. “Haven’t I told you over and over not to go into my drawers and use my lipsticks?”

I professed to know nothing about it. I tried denying that I had used the lipstick. I tried blaming it on my sister, but she was only five and had no interest in such things as makeup, whereas it was well known in our household and our extended family that I was fascinated by such things—mascara, powder, perfume and most of all, lipstick.Onc e it was obvious that I could not assemble any sort of colorable defense for my conversion of the lipstick, I confessed. Then the real trouble began.

“Where’s the rest of this lipstick?” Mother asked me, twisting the misshapen column of red up out of the tube. It looked like someone had taken a bite out of it.

“Don’t know,” I answered.   Her eyes narrowed and the place between her eyebrows crinkled as she frowned.

“It’s been dropped,” she said. “Where?”

I knew I might as well come clean. “I dropped it when I tried to put it on. “

“Where?”

“There,” I said, pointing to the hall mirror. She wet over to the mirror, moved the little table, and looked down. Then I witnessed the full extent of her wrath. I heard, “Never can have anything nice….saved up for years for this carpet….no respect for other people’s things….”  Her words tumbled out. Then, she was silent for a few moments. As I stood there feeling guilty and fully expecting to be grounded for the entire weekend, I heard her say,” I don’t know what your punishment is going to be, but it will be severe. I have to think about it, young lady.”

When she addressed me as  “Young lady,” I knew I was in for a serious penalty, perhaps no TV for a week or two, no sleepovers at my best friend Ann’s house, no movies on Saturday afternoon, no radio on the shelf at the top of the bed, playing the hits at low volume till my sister and I drifted off to sleep to the sound of Fats Domino or Elvis Presley. Worse than any impending punishment was my mother’s disappointment in me, both for invading her makeup drawer, and for fibbing when she discovered the damaged lipstick. Head down, I slinked off to my room and tried to read the Dolly Madison biography  I had borrowed from the school library,  but I kept looking at the same paragraph over and over, unable to concentrate. I spent the next hour before dinner playing alone, in my room, with my sister’s doll collection. It wasn’t much fun, as she was extremely particular about her dolls in their  national costumes of  Spain, Holland, Italy, and  Russia. These dolls only stood there. Their eyes didn’t open and close, and they couldn’t turn their heads. I went to the closet and pulled out  my own doll, a Saucy Walker almost as big as a real live toddler. I combed and braided her hair, changed her clothes from her dress to pajamas, and waited to be called down to  dinner.

 Later that  week, Mother announced the Punishment. She did so quietly and dispassionately. “Your birthday is in six weeks,” she said,” but this year, no party.”

 I was aghast. “No party?”

 A year without a party was unimaginable. For as long as I could remember, I’d enjoyed large, elaborate birthday celebrations. My mid-May birthday seemed always to fall on a perfect sunny Baltimore day,  roses and late spring flowers  in full bloom, warm days, and still-cool evenings. One year my party included a Maypole dance in our back yard. Another year, before we moved to our new neighborhood of identical semi-detached brick houses, my mother decorated our attic at the house we shared with my grandmother and aunt, Ten little girls from our  neighborhood  played pin the tail on the donkey and  musical chairs. We ate cake and Neapolitan slices of ice cream under the pink and baby blue crêpe paper streamers.

 By the time I was in third grade my parties had become the stuff of legend at Hamilton Elementary School. One year we invited 30 boys and girls from my class, plus another half-dozen girls from my Brownie troop. We feasted on hot dogs, chips, ice cream and cake. Five picnic tables, most of them borrowed from neighbors, were placed end to end in our yard, from the  back stoop to the clothesline poles near the alley.  The  next year, Mother rented a special separate viewing room at the Colony Theatre, where 15 of us watched “Forbidden Planet” and afterward, shook hands in the lobby  with a model of Robby the Robot.

 This year I was envisioning a more grown up party, with rock and roll blaring and dancing  like the teenagers I watched every afternoon on “The Buddy Deane Show” on TV.  My best friend Ann and I had been practicing our dances for weeks—the cha cha, the Madison, the  jitterbug—and I had my collection of 45s carefully arranged in alphabetical order according to artist.

 “Please! “ I pleaded with Mother. “Please, I will never do anything like that again, I will never be bad again, I will never borrow your things again, I promise!” She was steadfast in her decision.

 “Does Daddy know about this?” I asked. She nodded. It was pointless to run to my father, as he backed her up on every disciplinary decision, without fail.

 “Couldn’t I just have  small party?” I begged her. “A few of my girlfriends?  Maybe just one for a sleepover? Please? “

“No party this year.” She was unmoved by my tears.

 I kept up my requests for reconsideration for a few days, but to no avail. She had made up her mind. And I would turn ten with no party. Nowhere to wear that new apricot colored chemise my grandmother had brought me from Rosenbaum’s Department Store  in Cumberland.  Nowhere to wear my new black patent leather dress shoes.

 Eventually I grew used to the idea that there would be no big party this May. There was a special family dinner on my birthday, a school day, and I got to choose the menu: Burnell’s  Southern fried chicken, mashed potatoes,  and green beans. And for dessert, a  yellow cake with chocolate icing that Burnell made from scratch. There were ten candles and my mother and sister sang “Happy Birthday” right  on key while my father, as tone deaf as ever, sang the words to his own tune, one  that sounded vaguely like “Cruising Down the River,” just like every other song we ever heard him sing. I opened my presents—books, a real watch, and a baseball glove—at the dinner table. It was a good birthday.

 Years later, my mother would often recall the time she called off my  big party that year.   ”It hurt me much more than it hurt you,” she said, for she loved social gatherings of all sorts, and she had never been given a birthday party even once during her unhappy, chaotic childhood. I laughed at that comment each time she repeated it over the years, knowing how much delight she found in bringing me and my sister joy, through planning and carrying out celebrations on our most important occasions—birthdays, First Holy Communions, confirmations, high school graduations, and later on, weddings.

 I learned three important lessons that year: You can survive your birthday without a party. Don’t  borrow someone’s lipstick without permission. And never try to cover up the damage you’ve done. Own up to it, and take your medicine.

RSD 1Room Studio, No Vu: How We Got Married

 Paul and I are  standing on the corner of 116th and Broadway when up pulls a big black late model Cadillac. Out jump  Juan  and the lovely long haired, skinny, tanned, bare armed Boo, whose real name is Elizabeth.

Want a ride? they say. Boo is wearing blue engineer striped jeans and a white t shirt, no bra,  and her long honey colored hair is catching bits of sunlight and glinting here and there.

Whose car is this? we ask.

We don’t know, we boosted it, says Miss Debutante, which is how I think of Boo. Juan is tall and handsome with heavy dark brows. He  wears blue jeans, an old black t shirt, and  a purple beret. His skin is tawny, perfect.

We laugh. Are you out of your minds? we say.

It’s okay, we’re going to take it back in a little while, says Boo. Mostly I am impressed that Boo, who has just finished her freshman year, is hanging out with Juan, a senior. Or maybe he’s dropped out, after the shouting, the cops running into Hamilton  and Mathematics Hall,  New York City’s finest, billy clubs swinging. One girl who lived down the hall in my dorm said some of the pigs  taped over their badge numbers so no one could report them for brutality. The day after the bust I saw people I knew from SDS and their fellow travelers walking around campus with bandages  or their arms in casts, or their glasses taped together, but I couldn’t believe that cops would conceal  their badge numbers or that the university administration  called the police in to get everyone out of the buildings after all those days of occupation, we called it.

So it’s a couple weeks later now and Paul and I have already been down  to Baltimore and  had these terrible arguments with my parents. They didn’t understand why students were protesting, and they certainly didn’t get the part about the sit-ins in university buildings. Gandhi, we said, Martin Luther King, you see, nonviolent protests against the military industrial complex  Bull crap, my dad said. It’s trespassing. I saw the picture  in Life Magazine of that Jewish boy with the long hair,  smoking a cigar with his feet up on the university president’s desk. We didn’t send you to an expensive college, eighteen hundred dollars a year, to be around the likes of those boys. Maybe you should’ve stayed at College of Notre Dame.

 We’re moving in together, we tell my parents. My mother cries and my father gets up out of his red armchair  and leaves the room. So Paul and I take the bus back to New York and I move  what few belongings I have out  of my dorm room in Hewitt Hall and into the  sparsely furnished  apartment with its galley kitchen. My mother keeps calling me and crying on the  phone, telling me I ‘m ruining my life. Then a couple of weeks later she starts writing me letters saying they won’t pay my tuition if I ‘m going to live in sin. Paul’s parents are  busy with their own problems, so we don’t hear much squawking from them.

So here we are, Paul and I,  talking to Boo and Juan who‘ve  boosted a car, temporarily, they claim, and we tell them about our situation.

“Why don’t you get married?” Boo says.

I tell her I don’t think that will work. My parents have been saying since I was twelve that if I got married before I finished college, I would have  to pay the cost myself as soon as  I slipped that wedding ring onto my  left hand.

Juan says he has a better idea. Why not live in the dorm in name only, and live in the apartment we found?

That would be a lie, I tell him. And a ridiculous waste of my parents’ money. Not everyone’s rich like you two, I say.

Juan laughs, but he gets the point. Part of him must realize that he can talk the revolutionary talk all day long but he can always call up his parents for bail money if he gets arrested. Which is exactly what he did the month before, the morning after the bust.

We  turn down that offer of a ride in the stolen car, and make our way back to the apartment, half street level, half basement, since it’s in a building wedged into a part of West 116^th Street that slopes at a thirty degree angle  towards Riverside Drive and the river.

Paul’s  been paid that afternoon, and he’s cashed his check at the bursar’s office, no charge for staff. He headed from there to the Daitch Shopwell at  110^th and Broadway and bought ingredients for beef stew. I’ve watched my father make beef stew but have never attempted it myself. When Paul turns the key to the metal door of  Apartment C and the lock clicks and the door sort of falls open, the room is suffused with the rich smell of beef stew. I haven’t  realized how hungry I am until this  moment.

Paul checks the stew and thickens  it with cornstarch, not flour like my father uses.  I taste it and think it needs salt. There’s a loaf of crusty Jewish rye bread with a little paper sticker on one end  that says Diamond Bakery. We sit on the floor because there ‘s no table or counter. We drink tall glasses of milk, tear chunks of bread off and  butter it liberally, dip it in the stew. We have no television, only a radio, so we listen to the War Summary on WBAI. We turn out all the lights but one,  and climb into  the bed we bought a few days before, a queen sized box spring, mattress and metal frame. Single bed sheets that I‘ve borrowed from a girlfriend barely cover the mattress, and there’s no  mattress pad. There’s a thin old blanket Paul has brought back to New York from his mother’s house. We open the window that faces the air shaft to let in a little breeze.

We need curtains, I say. I can make some this week. Just before we drift off to sleep,  it sounds like he says, let’s get married. It ‘s a pleasant thought, and I say we’ll talk about it tomorrow.

The Night I Met Jim Morrison: Party in the Soul Kitchen

We had been married a little over a year. He was twenty-six, and I, four years younger. I’d graduated from college and was working on  my masters in education, about to begin student teaching at George Washington High School  in Washington Heights. Rick, who had dropped out of college several years before, had a menial job at Columbia University making deliveries for the central stores department. I  convinced him to take advantage of the free tuition at Columbia’s evening program, and he had hadrecently completed his freshman composition course—with a lot of effort on his part and much coaching from me. What he learned most in English 101 was not how to write a strong thesis paragraph, what constituted a run-on sentence, or how to marshal evidence to support his claims. Rather, he learned, in exquisite detail, about the Doors, and –as much as one really could learn at that moment in time—about Jim Morrison. In the ‘Sixties, this qualified as a legitimate topic for a research paper in an English composition course.

 I had always liked The Doors’ music  from the time “Light My Fire” topped the music charts, the summer I met Rick at my summer waitiressing  job. He was the bartender and assistant manager at Peerce’s Plantation, and I was one of a fleet of college girls interested in working hard and making what for us constituted very big money. I made a habit of razzing Rick about his conservative politics (he voted for George Wallace in a Democratic presidential primary, quel horreur), and what I saw as his materialistic values. “How can you stand to be tied down by all those objects?” I asked him, parroting a remark I had overheard in the college cafeteria the winter before.  The teasing morphed into flirtation, and by summer’s end we were girlfriend and boyfriend. Bending to my passionate undergraduate rhetoric, Rick decided to sell his sleek black XKE, quit his job, and take his first trip out of the country,  to Coventry, England, where he planned to attend Jaguar School and learn his way around those temperamental British machines. I returned to New York for my junior year of  college, and  we continued our romance over the next four months by twice weekly letters on aerogrammes and a few emotional trunk calls from Coundon House Hostel, Coventry to Reid Hall, Barnard College. When his English sojourn ended, he moved to New York, finding a run-down apartment with two Columbia undergraduates on a dicey stretch of West 95^th Street. The smell of garlic and fried plantains  lingered in the dilapidated lobby of that building. Once, there appeared a handwritten notice, in black pen on a large ragged piece of white notebook paper, taped to the wall of the shaky elevator: “Do not leave garbage  in elevator. He looks to [sic] bad.– Super Gonzales.”

 I take full credit (or blame) for introducing Rick to the Doors. Though Rick was as straight a guy as one could ever meet, as opposed to Doors frontman Jim Morrison— with his storied reputation for consuming large amounts of grass and booze— something about Morrison resonated with Rick. Morrison’s creation of a charismatic alter-ago, the Lizard King, his posing and his poetic lyrics, and his defiant, rebellious, in-our-parents-faces attitude struck a chord with Rick, who like me and all our friends, was rejecting many of the values he had grown up with in middle class white America. The Columbia student demonstrations and subsequent arrests of several hundred students and community activists had radicalized us all. The beatings and arrests of  many of our peers at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention added another layer to our cynicism about the government, the war machine, and our parents’ staunchly traditional values. Spending several hours on a Friday night sitting around dissecting  Morrison’s lyrics to “The End,”  or “ Soul Kitchen” was nothing unusual in our circle. We thought Jim Morrisson was a brilliant poet, not your average rocker.

 Rick was more taken by the Morrison mystique than anyone. When the Doors came to town for several nights at Madison Square Garden, Rick bought as many tickets as our modest cash reserves could cover, and went to nearly every performance. I settled for two, mostly because I had boatloads of school work to do. The Felt Forum was far larger than our usual music haunts—the Fillmore East or a cramped midtown club, Ungano’s. Our seats were so far from the stage that the sight lines were poor and the sound distorted. Still, I had to admit, Jim Morrison, in his white flowing shirt and ultra-tight pants, had an uncanny ability to command  the attention of everyone in the house. Joints were passed, dope was consumed, men and women alike were enthralled.

 A few months earlier, in the course of his Doors research paper, Rick  had met music journalist Patricia Kennealy,  Jim Morrison’s sometime girlfriend (or as some accounts have it, wife, via a Celtic Pagan handfasting ceremony). Kennealy, the   editor of Jazz & Pop, gave Rick an interview and  provided him with back issues, article from other publications, and plenty of inside dirt on The Doors and especially on Morrison. She  obviously took quite a shine to my charming, outgoing husband, and I wasn’t at all surprised when she invited us to an after-concert party Elektra Records was putting on for Morrison, the Doors and their entourage. We gladly accepted her invitation and hoped we could pass for the hipsters we knew we weren’t.

 The January night was frigid. Rick wore his pastel vertical striped shirt and jeans, and his boots. Opening the closet, I dithered—would it be the red Indian print mini-dress with the enormous bell sleeves, or the tiny lavender double knit with the low cut V neck? I chose the knit, the shortest dress I owned. My hair was long and I straightened it in those days, a process that require me to set it  and then flatten it so that all traces of wave or curl vanished. Strategically planning our arrival for after ten, we first went to the Statler Hilton, then soon learned  the party was at the other New York Hilton. To save subway fare, we hoofed it from 33^rd Street to 54^th, a  mile and a half—not so easy since I was in high heels, all the while trying to keep pace with a long-legged husband.

 The elevator opened onto a penthouse, the first of its kind I have ever seen before or since. We could hear music emanating from one of the larger rooms.  Men in electric blue dress shirts and wide ties were standing around  in small conversation circles, drinking and talking in animated tones. Rick spotted the Doors keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, and gave me a nudge. There were young women, lots of them, some in flowing hippie  dresses, some  in more mainstream attire. In an adjoining room, several guests passing around a joint, while a guy curled up in a fetal position underneath the glass coffee table in their midst. “What’s wrong with him?” Rick asked Patricia Kennealy. ”He’s been smoking opium all night,”  she said.

 What happened after that is open to debate. Rick has one version, I , another. I was standing in the foyer, not far from the elevator. Rick was exploring the penthouse, looking for Jim Morrison. Suddenly a long-haired young man in a gauzy white shirt was walking towards me, smiling. He looked at me very directly, and extended his hand. “Hello,” he said , “I’m Jim.”

“I’m Lynne,” I said, briefly taking, but not really shaking  his hand. “Nice party. Who are the guys in the blue shirts and ties?”

Jim Morrison gave a small laugh.There was something of sleep in his eyes and in his voice. I felt my heartbeat speed up. I didn’t know whether to flee or stay put. “We’re going to see  a movie now,” he said. ” You like Hitchcock? We’re watching The 39 Steps.”

As a matter of fact, I did like Hitchcock, and had liked him since my mother had taken me to see The Man Who Knew Too Much, when I was nine, followed by  North By Northwest, when I was twelve. In a grad school film course, we had screened earlier Hitchcock films,  Rope and Vertigo. But I didn’t mention any of this to Jim Morrison because I couldn’t get much out. “Oh, cool,” was all I managed to utter.

At that moment, Rick appeared, and here is where our recollections diverge. He says that he met Jim Morrison briefly, just as I had, but in another room, and that two women whisked Jim Morrison upstairs, complaining that there was a severe dearth of  drugs and booze at the party. I remember that Rick appeared in the foyer as I was talking to Jim Morrison,  and that I was the one who did the introductions.  To this day, Rick claims he has no memory of a  movie, but I distinctly recall the mechanical whirr of the old projector, the damaged old black and white print, the rolling of the opening credits, and the first few minutes of a film I was otherwise completely unable to focus on.

 Instead of watching 105 minutes of The  39 Steps, we took in the scene around us. People were coming and going from the room, and the smell of marijuana was everywhere. We weren’t much for smoking dope with strangers. Morrison, the Lizard King, was now closeted with his girlfriends and we knew we had missed our chance to engage in profound, poetic dialog with him—assuming he was even capable of a lucid thought at this time of night and in his state of stonedness. It was time to go home, I said. This time, we took  a taxi.

 © 2011 Lynne S. Viti. All rights reserved.

Dancing Girl With Headband

My mother was a born  dancer. Not a hoofer, nor a chorus girl. For most of her working life she was an elementary school teacher. But at heart she was a child of Terpsichore, muse of the dance. And I’m not referring to classical ballet or modern dance, though she clearly saw the value of these, enrolling my sister and me in the Taylor Avenue School of the Dance so we could learn to plié and arabesque with the other little girls. My mother loved any popular dance. But most of all, she loved the Charleston.

 She often told us about the time she won a Charleston contest at St. Rita’s fair, when she was thirteen. The prize was five dollars, and she beat out a dozen other Dundalk girls in the competition. I can only imagine what they danced to—a gramophone with a large horn for sound production? A live band from the local Moose Club or Knights of Columbus, perhaps.  And when my grandmother got wind of the news, either from a neighbor or perhaps from the happy prize winning dancer herself, my mother was whipped and punished, and one can only wonder what happened to that cash prize, likely confiscated. Whether it was jealousy or a sense of propriety that made my grandmother react this way, I  never figured out. More to the point, this episode did not cure my mother of what my grandmother called “making a spectacle of yourself.”

 When my father’s extended family gathered for holiday parties and the topic of dancing came up, my Uncle Bill would talk on about how he and my mother “could really cut up a rug”  back when they were young and running with the same crowd. At weddings, my mother would be the first one  out on the dance floor, though  my father could barely manage a foxtrot because of his bad leg. In the ‘Sixties, she was more than willing to get up and do  the Twist with me or my sister.  When I was in high school, she would watch Shindig! with me and my sister, rising from her chair to Frug or Hully Gully along with the television dancers. We thought this was hilarious, so long as she did not carry on like this in front of our friends.

 But most telling of all was the time my father stayed home with us while my mother went off to one of her state teachers’ conventions, this time at the Alcazar, an old downtown Baltimore ballroom and auditorium. I was  ten, and my sister, six. For weeks our mother had regaled us with stories of the comedy skit that she had helped write, highlighting education issues over  the  previous five decades. To show the changing times, her friend Jessie, one of the principal actors, reached under her chair and selected a new hat, choosing a variety of styles,  from broad-brimmed 1915 chapeau to Jackie Kennedy  pillbox. On the last night of Mother’s convention, our father told us to change into good dresses because he was taking us somewhere special. We’d already eaten, so we knew we weren’t headed for  Howard Johnson’s, our idea of dining out. He was very mysterious, simply mentioning as we headed downtown that we were in for a surprise.

He ushered us up to the balcony of the Alcazar’s auditorium. Onstage, sitting at the head of a conference table was Mother’s friend Jessie Parsons. She bent over to stash the 1915-era hat she had just removed from a large box under her chair and placed a ‘Twenties’ style cloche  on her head. Laughter erupted from the audience. Then, she appeared– our mother, in full flapper regalia—a sparkling shift, feather boa, long ropes of beads, high heels, and a feathered headband around her short coiffure. Charleston music blared from the sound system. And dancing next to her, wearing an old raccoon coat and waving a pennant, was Jessie’s ex-husband Lee. My sister and I bounced up and down in our seats and squealed as we watched our mother kick and strut, while Mr. Parsons executed the Bees Knees step perfectly. Teachers from all over the state rose to their feet, clapping in time to the music.  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Mother and Mr. Parsons took a bow, to loud applause. My father whisked us out of the auditorium, though we pleaded with him to take us backstage to see our mother. “Did she know we were going to be here?” we asked. Our father just laughed and shook his head. “Your mother sure  is a wonderful dancer,” he said, and then he became quiet.

Perhaps he was remembering a  night many years before, when he was young, able-bodied and athletic. The Great Depression  may have hovered in the background of their romance, but that night they put their  worries aside for a few hours. That was the night he proposed, while they were dancing slow and close  at the Dundalk Post Office Outing, as the little orchestra played on.

My Cambridge Summer and Kate McGarrigle: Jump Starting Memories

My husband, a librarian and lover of all manner of music, recently  brought home  a  reissue of the  the late Kate  (mother of Rufus Wainwright) and Anna McGarrigle ‘s first two albums,  Kate and Anna McGarrigle and  Dancer with Bruised Knees.  These came with a bonus CD of outtakes, most of it recorded between 1971 and 1974.As I listened to Kate’s “Saratoga Summer” (replete with images of skinny dipping, dallying on a rope swing, getting high, making love) over and over, it transported me back to St John’s Road in Cambridge, a stone’s throw from Harvard Square, and my Cambridge Summer.

The ostensible reason for my ten-week stay was eight weeks of Harvard  Summer School. I have vague recollections of a French literature class  and another one on Irish literature in  translation, taught by a kind, wizened little man from Trinity College, Dublin.

But the real reason for coming to Cambridge was to escape the chaotic,crowded garage apartment in Greenwich, Connecticut that I’d shared for five months with an odd assortment of garage mates. The apartment started out as a cozy spot for me and my significant other, known locally as The Organic Gourmet, after  his small shop full of Walnut Acres natural foods, nuts, berries, vitamins and, since this was the ‘Seventies, macramé.  We were soon joined by my younger sister, a community college dropout who had backpacked through Europe till she ran out of steam in Amsterdam. A bad breakup with the Dutch boyfriend sent her not home to the folks, but to me and the Organic Gourmet. We made room. My sister was soon joined by the Organic Gourmet’s younger sister, who’d left college after a year and was at loose ends. The four of us barely managed with three small rooms, one large walk-in closet and one bathroom, but we experienced genuine overload when Dan, the Colorado boyfriend of a friend of a friend, started camping out on the living room floor in his ancient sleeping bag. Either we couldn’t get rid of him or we didn’t know how.

It was my first year of teaching ( a one-year leave replacement, kind of a dead end stint), the middle schoolers I worked with were rapidly depleting my pedagogical and emotional resources, and I expected the Organic Gourmet to kick everyone out –including my sister.  Instead, he helped me buy a shiny new sapphire blue Volkswagen SuperBeetle, and I was off to Cambridge. My friend Maureen had sublet an enormous house on the grounds of the Episcopal Seminar, and filled it with Barnard women. This was to be my summer of reflection. Would I go back to Connecticut and find a new teaching job there, or would I stick around Boston?   Would the Organic Gourmet and I kick out all the superfluous roommates (even if some of them were our sisters), or drift apart?I was twenty-four, I felt like I was decades older, and I needed to “get back in touch with my center,” as we said in those days.

The background noise seeped into my consciousness now and then: Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers secrets to the New York Times, Jim Morrison and Louis Armstrong died, and the Vietnam Was dragged on.  But mostly, I was self-absorbed, brooding, ruminating.

The Cambridge house was full up, not a guestroom to offer, so Maureen let me share her twin bedded room until Barbara moved out in late June. I inherited the master bedroom, with its grand bed even though Maureen was the one with the steady boyfriend, and I was the one trying to get some distance on my rocky marriage.

Summer school was a delight: reading, doing homework, going to class and acting the superstar there. I’d bike up to the Harvard Yard, each day feeling more and more like an undergraduate. I made friends with  two nineteen year old girls in my French class and went dancing with them one night at a gay disco in Boston. Maureen’s boyfriend David, a medical student, took us out for hamburgers at the Fresh Pond Ho Jo’s. One night David stopped by and announced that we were going to the Logan airport to drop in on Big, a family friend. We  parked in the employee lot, ascended the  control tower, and spent the next hour watching the guys bring the planes in and send them out.  In August, I drove out to the suburbs to spend a day with my distant cousins and their kids.  We sat under the grape arbor stuffing ourselves with pasta, salad and fresh fruit at  a noon dinner and a few hours later, reprised the menu at supper, all in honor of the patron saint of Papa Tecce’s Italian village. Over those weeks, I drove my Beetle to the north shore to Plum Island, and south to Hull, taking a blanket, a hat, and a book and staying till the sun began to sink. My head, and my heart, needed to clear.

There were  impromptu dinner parties at the Cambridge house. Maureen’s July Thanksgiving dinner started out as a joke, but by the time she and I pulled the perfectly roasted turkey out of the oven and she mashed the potatoes while I made the gravy, we were convinced we‘d created a culinary masterpiece. There was homemade cranberry sauce, stuffing, peas, sweet potatoes.  It was over 90 degrees that evening, and we had no air conditioning, so we collected what fans we could and a dozen of us—some housemates some boyfriends and a few hangers-on—dug in.  The point of the July Thanksgiving Dinner may have been for Maureen to show the boyfriend she could cook—or perhaps she just had a hankering for roast turkey during that heat wave.

Much later that night, we went skinny dipping at the reservoir. We sneaked to its shores by walking right on to  the grounds of the DeCordova Museum and down to the nearly still water. Moonlight let us see the water and the vague outlines of bodies. We were all perfectly sober, but giddy. It wasn’t very smart,  but we were acting like teenagers, not like responsible young adults—medical students, teachers, novice journalists.

I drove my Beetle back to Connecticut at the end of August, to rejoin the Organic Gourmet, at least for a time, and to begin teaching at a spanking new high school in Stamford, working for the boss who would become—and still is—my mentor, my teaching guide, my umfundisi. Listening to Kate McGarrigle sing this plaintive song, full of aching for that  self-indulgent time, recreated my own Cambridge Summer, a window of light for me in a difficult time.

Here’s Teddy Thompson’s  version of “Saratoga Summer” on Youtube, but Kate does it best: “Bring back the laughs, bring back the tears, bring back the beer, bring back the dope and the rope.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCEF-07pKcI

“Are you done yet?”

Baltimore, Maryland Hamilton # 236, my first school

“Are you finished yet? Is your semester done?”

No, still in school.  In fact, born teachers are always in school. The semester ends but the thinking about learnng  and teaching is always on the periphery of the summer, if not taking center stage.

When I was in graduate school in my late twenties, my mother, a fifth grade teacher, and my dad, a bar owner, were very proud that I was earning an advanced degree. But my aunts weren’t too impressed.

I wrote my thesis on Henry James and George Eliot, finished my graduate degree, taught college composition  for a few years, then took a detour, this time  to law school. “Still in school?” Aunt Eileen would ask. I’m sure they called me a professional student out of my hearing, and not  till Caroline Kennedy married Edwin Schlossberg and the New York Times dubbed him a  Rennaissance Man because of his two PhDs, did I gain a scintilla of  respect from the aunts.

My father called me Barrister from the day I was accepted to law school. He’d dropped out of college in the 1930’s,  after a couple of semesters. My mother graduated from a two year teachers college program, then known as the State Normal School at Towson, but she beat me to the bachelors degree mark by a decade, going to night classes at Johns Hopkins while holding down a full time teaching job. Education was highly valued in my nuclear family, if not in the extended clan.

I returned to full time teaching over a decade ago, so yes, I’m still in school.

It’s June now, and all my friends who work in hospitals, or as lawyers, or in business, look my way enviously and ask, “Are you finished yet?” They don’t quite understand that once I crawl out of the essay grading cave in late May, there’s more work to do: planning courses, reading books and deciding what to require for next semester, updating the department web pages, writing articles trying to squeeze in some creative writing—that short story that’s lay unfinished for three years, that cycle of poems I swore I’d start last summer.

And the work day doesn’t start at 9 or end at 6–I can be working, in school in a way, in my pjs at the dining room table before I have breakfast–or at night after the dishwasher is humming its way well into the post-dinner cycle.

And there are things to learn: the guitar, the cello, how to plant a tree, how to grow cauliflower, how to write a sestina.

So yes, after all these years, still in school.  And loving every minute of it.

Salutamus: All Hail the Victorious Baltimore Ravens!

The Ravens, of course, are named after the bird

in Poe’s famous poem, of which you have heard.

But these Ravens are bigger, and stronger, and badder

than anything Poe ever thought of, and madder

than hornets thrown out of their  snug little nest–

these Ravens are tough guys, and they are the best.

They ran and gained yardage, they blocked and they tackled,

the Broncos, the Pats and the Niners they spackled.

And Baltimore celebrates, once again  champs!

So tune up the guitars and blow out the amps.

For  memories of Gino, Big Daddy and John

and the ghosts of the old Colts in the Ravens live on!

 

2012 in review: Thanks so much for reading!–Stay with me in 2013 and pass it on to your family and friends!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 3,200 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 5 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.