Kitchen Privileges Page 4

  On receiving directions, she confirmed that she and her husband would arrive at three o’clock to inspect the room.

  Joe and John and I each anticipated our boarders with different emotions. Joe hated change. He wanted everything to be the way it was. He never complained. He was just very quiet.

  Johnny was only seven and always had been Joe’s shadow. Now more than ever, he looked up to him. Joe was the one who explained to him that when people came to live with us, he couldn’t be jumping from the fourth or fifth step to the landing. He’d have to walk quietly up and down the stairs.

  I actually was looking forward to our potential paying guests. Without Daddy, the house was too quiet. I missed him fiercely and hoped that the constant presence of other adults would help to compensate for the void his death had left in our lives.

  At five of three, Joe and John and I were standing watch at the living room windows. A car came slowly down the block, stopped two houses away as though the driver was checking house numbers, then started again and parked in front of our house.

  We all yelled for Mother, and she hurried to the window in time to see a man and woman get out of the car. “Mary, sit at the piano and play something,” she ordered. “It sounds so lovely as you come up the walk.”

  “I thought you were trying to rent rooms,” Joe protested.

  I wasn’t insulted; I knew, both despite and thanks to several stabs at piano lessons, that I had absolutely no aptitude for anything musical.

  Vivian and Eddie Fields were both in their early forties. She was a very pretty woman, whose only lapse was the small vanity of constantly remarking to the world in general that she had just turned thirty-three.

  When they told Mother they wanted to rent the big front room and the garage, but they felt five dollars a month for the garage was a little steep for their budget, Mother immediately acquiesced and threw the garage in gratis.

  On the way out, Vivian casually remarked that Buck was surely going to enjoy his new home.

  “Buck?” Mother asked.

  “Our dog.”

  Mother’s face fell. Johnny and I had asthma, and she’d been warned never to bring pets into the house. On the other hand, she didn’t want to lose her paying tenants.

  “How big is he?” she asked.

  Vivian made a kind of cupping gesture with her hands. Her gesture made one think of a tiny poodle or Maltese.

  They moved in the next day. If the amount of luggage brought in by our previous brief tenant had awed us, nothing under the sun could have prepared us for the sight of Buck, a wild-eyed boxer we first glimpsed straddling the back seat of their car, his head sticking out one window, his stubby tail arrogantly protruding from the other.

  Vivian came in first and suggested that it might be wise if the children waited in the dining room with the doors closed until Buck was safely in their bedroom.

  That became our permanent station every morning and evening when Eddie took Buck out for an airing. We watched, our noses glued to the glass panes of the french doors, as Eddie, a slight man, came flying down the stairs, a virtual Peter Pan hanging onto the leash of Buck, who by then was frantic to relieve himself.

  A few weeks later, Eddie’s wallet slipped out of his pocket. Mother ran after him to return it, but not before she had seen his driver’s license in the name of Edward Keener.

  Embarrassed, he explained that Ed Fields was his sister’s husband. Bill collectors were trying to find him because of the failure of his dealership, and so to avoid being hounded, he was using the alias. Mother of all people understood how it felt to be hounded for payments; she sympathized and kept his secret.

  The Fields-Keeners stayed with us for nearly two years, until they got back on their feet. In all that time, Vivian never did turn thirty-four.

  We had several single men tenants, and before they moved in, Mother delivered what we called her “palace guard” speech. “Yes,” she would tell them, “we are blessed with excellent police protection here. There’s Officer Potters to the left, and Officer Ahlis on the right. There’s Sergeant Garrigan across the street and directly opposite him…” here she paused so the full weight of her pièce de résistance could sink in, “…directly opposite him, we have Inspector Whelan.”

  Mother had been going steady with a moving man when she was in her twenties and had somehow caught the virus that is the sine qua non of his profession: she loved to move furniture. We all learned to recognize that speculative look in her eyes. “I was thinking if we put the piano at the window and the couch on the stair wall and…” No matter how loud and heartfelt our protests, Joe and John and I would find ourselves on the lighter end of the piece to be moved, lifting and hauling as she admonished, “Now don’t strain yourself.”

  The intransigence of our parlor furniture led to the entrapment of one paying guest who was two weeks behind in his rent and was trying to tiptoe out at dawn. Unfortunately for his scheme, we had moved the furniture the night before, and he tripped over a lamp that had been freshly placed on the landing near the bottom of the staircase. Mother rushed out from the dining-room-turned-bedroom to find him sprawled on the floor, his feet entangled in the lamp cord.

  She sighed. “If you didn’t have the money to pay, all you had to do was tell me,” she said, “God knows I can understand that.” When he left, he had two dollars pressed in his hand. He claimed he’d been promised a job in New Jersey. It would be nice to say that our departing roomer never forgot the kindness and returned the gift a thousandfold, but unfortunately that was not the case. The guy was a dead-beat.

  His spot in my little room was taken over by Herbie Katz, a twenty-one-year-old doctoral candidate who was working for the WPA. He was so skinny that Mother invited him to dinner regularly, which was a pain in the neck for Joe and John and me. We liked Herbie, but he always brought his Victrola to the table and waved his fork to accompany the dirgelike music he favored. If we tried to talk, he raised his other hand to his lips and whispered, “Shhhhhussssh.”

  Our other memorable paying guest was Madeline Mills, a sixtyish grammar school teacher who valiantly tried to teach me to play the piano. I never got past “Drifting,” and I was much more interested in hearing about Harold, the great love of Miss Mills’s life.

  Harold had been gassed during World War I. When he returned from overseas, he was in the hospital for a long time while he and Miss Mills prayed that his lungs would heal. Then one day when she visited him, he gave her a single rose and a poem he had written. She recited the poem for me while tears rolled down her cheeks. I forget most of it, but it ended with, “Forgive me if I lay the burden down a little sooner.”

  Miss Mills had a gentleman friend, Gunther, a reserved and kindly fellow-teacher who was her devoted escort. As I took a break from struggling through the first few pages of John Thompson’s piano book for beginners, she confided that at one time she had been engaged to Gunther, but then the husband of the young German woman to whom he had been giving English lessons had named him as the corespondent in their divorce.

  “Gunther swore it was a lie, but I broke the engagement, and we just stayed friends,” she explained. “That was many years ago.”

  Her eyes strayed to Harold’s picture when she spoke, and I knew that she didn’t refuse to marry Gunther because he may have been involved with another woman—it was because she didn’t love him enough, and she couldn’t stop loving Harold.

  I used that plot in a story I wrote that was one of the many literary efforts of my teenage years. I remember the way the story ended:

  Happiness is like mercury. Hard to hold, and when we drop it, it shatters into a million pieces. Maybe the bravest of all are those who have the courage to reach for it again.

  Can’t you just tell I was born to be a writer?

  With Joseph, a photo taken at a family party, circa 1935.

  Three

  We all attended St. Francis Xavier Grammar School. Joe graduated in 1940, the year after my father died. />
  My mother’s occupation and hobby, vocation and avocation was motherhood. She loved the three of us fiercely, but there’s no question that Joseph was the center of her heart.

  It is said that a Jewish mother looks into the cradle and sees a possible Messiah. It’s equally true that an Irish mother gazes at her first-born son and sees the Christ child. Joseph was a premature baby, weighing only four pounds when he was born. She fed him with an eyedropper those first months and scarcely left him for an instant. After she died, I found a diary she had kept, and in it she wrote, “I was so afraid he’d slip away. He was such a beautiful baby. The other two had allergies.”

  Growing up, Joseph justified her pride in him. He won the General Excellence medal all eight years of grammar school, even though in the eighth grade he missed forty days of school. Six months after Daddy died, Joe cut his heel on the jagged edge of the metal stripping on a door. The infection traveled through his system, and within a week, he was in the hospital in critical condition with osteomyelitis.

  Mother was told that an operation to remove his leg at the hip was necessary to save his life. Widowed only a few months, she made the stunning decision not to operate. She wouldn’t make a cripple of Joseph, and she knew God wouldn’t take him from her.

  It was Christmas Eve, my twelfth birthday. The doctors held no hope for Joe’s recovery. Mother and John and I carried all his presents to the hospital. His main gift was a hockey stick. “You’ll use it next year,” she promised him.

  Joe needed a lot of blood transfusions, and they literally poured in. Neighbors, relatives, people who only vaguely knew Joe made the trek to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital to offer blood. That Christmas Eve, twenty-year-old Warren Clark, who had just returned from college, was there and rushed to the hospital when he heard Joe was sick.

  They were special friends. Joe was such a good ballplayer that when the college guys were home, he was asked to join their impromptu teams. The Clarks lived around the corner from us, and Warren’s eight-year-old brother, Ken, was Johnny’s best friend.

  Warren drove us home that day, and seeing that our Christmas tree was still leaning against the wall in the foyer, offered to put it up for us. “I’m no St. Joseph,” he apologized as he hacked at the trunk, “but maybe I can get it in the stand.”

  I sat crosslegged on the floor, sorting lights and ornaments and stealing glances at him.

  The doctors told Mother there was a new sulfa drug that was being used successfully in the war in Europe. She gave them permission to try it with Joe, and he recovered to the point that when he accepted the General Excellence medal in June, there was no trace of the limp that the doctors had warned might never fully go away.

  Blessed with a fine singing voice, Joe was always the star of the annual school play, and he was the captain of the sports teams as well.

  Johnny had a good voice too. On the other hand, I was born tone deaf, and while I loved acting, I never did get a speaking part in a school play.

  That almost changed when I was in the sixth grade. That year the end-of-the-term school play was based on the legend of Evangeline and Gabriel. The three upper classes all performed in it. There were sixty of us in the sixth grade, and the way Miss Lanning, the music teacher/director, disposed of us was masterful. When Evangeline and Gabriel announce their engagement, Evangeline’s mother cries out, “We must invite the villagers to celebrate with us.”

  That was the cue for the sixth grade to come thudding in from the wings.

  And at last I got my speaking part. In rehearsals, I rushed to the front. Center stage. The spotlight fell on me. And I gushed, “Come. Let us dance to the music of this happy day!”

  We then lumbered through some kind of group folk dance and within three minutes were off the stage, having satisfied our beaming parents and not having substantially slowed up the progress of the evening.

  A speaking part!

  I practiced for months.

  Was it better to say, “Come. Let us dance to the music of this HAPPY DAY!”

  Or “COME. Let us dance to the MUSIC OF THIS HAPPY DAY!”

  Or should I punch every letter of every word? “COME. LET US DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF THIS HAPPY DAY!”

  I decided on the last version.

  The night of the play arrived. I was in a twitter of anticipation but totally without stage fright. I knew I was going to be great.

  Then, three minutes before the sixth grade was to go on stage to celebrate the engagement of Gabriel and Evangeline, Sister Mary Laurentia, the principal, came to me, her kindly face troubled.

  A girl in the eighth grade was crying her eyes out. She was about to graduate and she had never had a speaking part in one of the plays. Would I consider making a very special sacrifice?

  So I never did get to say, “Come. Let us dance to the music of this happy day.” Oddly enough, I wasn’t upset or unhappy. Even then I thought it was kind of funny.

  I guess I’d always realized that it was a dumb line, no matter how you delivered it.

  My brother Joseph, October 1944.

  Four

  I graduated from St. Francis a year after Joseph and was awarded a scholarship to Villa Maria Academy, a toney school run by the Congregation de Notre Dame de Montreal. Situated on a former estate on Long Island Sound in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, it was a lovely place; my aunts, however, weren’t sure I should accept the scholarship.

  “She won’t be able to keep up with the other girls, Nora,” they said, worried, to my mother. “The others will have more clothes and more spending money.”

  Their warnings fell on deaf ears. I wanted to go to the Villa, and my mother wanted me to go. As she pointed out, there was nothing to worry about. There was a school uniform. I’d be dressed like everyone else.

  And so it was—at least to a degree. We hadn’t read the fine print saying that uniforms weren’t required on the first day of school, so I arrived, the only one in a droopy jumper and jacket with a long-sleeved blouse, tie, hat and gloves, and oxfords.

  It was a hot September day. Everyone else was wearing pretty summer dresses. To compound the error, it was only when we had unpinned the blouse that we realized it required cufflinks. Since there were none in the house, I sat through that first day miserably aware the pins holding the cuffs together were clearly visible.

  Collegiate Outfitters had a lock on the business from all the Catholic schools in those days, and my classmates and I were sure that they were a front for Omar the Tent Maker. During the next four years, although I gained fifteen pounds and grew four inches, that uniform was still hanging off me when I wore it on my last day as a senior. You can imagine what a godforsaken waif I must have looked like as a freshman.

  Needless to say, as soon as we got over the terror of being brand new freshmen, we began stretching the limits of the dress code. We all hated the clumpy oxfords and would wear penny loafers instead, explaining to the nuns that our oxfords were with the shoemaker being soled or heeled.

  You could get away with that for a while, but then the day would come when the homeroom teacher would sternly demand that all the young ladies wearing “bedroom slippers”—the faculty’s definition of loafers—were to stand up. A lecture and detention followed, and for a few weeks we’d all come dragging in, wearing oxfords, and then the cycle would begin again.

  In those days the nuns were addressed as “Mother.” There were Mother Superior, Mother St. Margaret of the Angels, Mother St. Thomas of Canterbury, Mother St. Patrick of Charity. Of course, they became known more familiarly among us as Soupy, Maggie, Tommy, and Patty. Very quietly among us, of course.

  When a nun came into the room, we jumped to our feet. “Good morning, young ladies,” she would greet us.

  As we curtsied, we’d murmur, “Good morning, Reverend Mother.”

  In those four years there was only one nun who almost all of us thoroughly disliked. She used her tongue like a razor-blade, and her goal in life seemed to be to reduce at le
ast one student per class to tears. The fact that she was only in her late twenties still makes it hard for me to fathom why she was so downright mean.

  I wonder if any adult—parent or teacher—realizes that young people never forgive or forget being humiliated.

  This nun let nothing go unnoticed. Besides being a martinet in the classroom, she would glide past the lunch tables to see if she could spot anyone with an elbow on the table or not sitting up straight. One day she came to our table to challenge a student whose egg salad sandwich had not been cut to her satisfaction. “Young ladies eat only dainty sandwiches,” she informed that girl with withering condescension. There was no knife on the table, so she attempted to break the sandwich into sections, and to our infinite delight the egg salad spattered all over her. It made our day.

  Another time, when our class filed into chapel, she was kneeling in front of the crucifix, her arms outstretched. There wasn’t another nun who wouldn’t have immediately dropped her arms when the chapel door opened, but this one wanted to show the depth of her piety. Joan, my closest friend, and I sat next to each other. Talking in chapel could really get you in hot water, but seeing the nun in her pious position, Joan leaned over and whispered, “If I only had a hammer and nails.”

  All the other nuns were great. In those four years, we received a fine education and a sense of self-worth. It felt good to be a Villa girl. The principal was also the senior-class homeroom teacher and she generously encouraged my writing. Not that I needed much encouragement. I was always writing a short story, including those times when I should have been paying attention in math or science classes. That habit, of course, did not endear me to Mother St. Thomas, the teacher of those subjects.

  In fact, forty years after I graduated from the Villa I stopped in for a visit. I found Mother St. Thomas, age ninety, sitting in a wheelchair. She was not eleven feet tall as I had remembered her, but her clear gray eyes were unchanged, and after all those years she still had me pegged.