The beach was the center of their lives once they learned to swim. One of Tilda’s favorite things was to swim away from shore until the water turned colder, letting her know it was deep. Then she’d flip onto her back, stretch out arms, and let the waves rock her as she looked up at the blue sky, feeling the salt beginning to tingle her face and chest as the water evaporated in the sun.
The summer between sixth and seventh grade, Tilda’s boyfriend, Jonny Langer, called to tell her he was having a beach party. Jonny was the cutest boy in her class. He was fun to be around and had the best blue eyes. She’d had a crush on him all year. Apparently he felt the same way because at one of their class parties, he asked her to go steady. She wore his ring around her neck on a long, silver-plated chain, often reaching up to cradle the ring in the palm of her hand, proudly bearing its weight. Her friends could barely contain their envy.
On the phone he told her there would be hamburgers and cold drinks, even volleyball at the party. As soon as she hung up, Tilda knew what she would wear: her new two-piece pink-and-white-striped seersucker bathing suit. It had a hint of padding in the top.
On the day of the big event, Tilda was unaware of the hours she’d spent in the sun until the sand between her bathing suit and skin began to itch and burn, until even raising her arms to hit the ball back across the net set off prickly pain in her shoulders. Tilda was ecstatic when Jonny asked her to run into the water with him one more time before his mother would call for him to help pack up to go home.
As they plunged into the surf, he grabbed her hand, and with heads underwater, eyes open, and only surfacing to get a gulp of air, they kicked their way out until the water was just deep enough so they could touch bottom.
“Let’s see how long we can hold our breath,” he said. “And when we’re under, let’s open our eyes and look at each other to see who can stay under the longest.”
“Okay,” said Tilda, quickly taking a deep breath and diving under the water. Soon Jonny was in front of her, with his eyes open, looking at her. Then he pulled in closer, putting his hands around her head, and he kissed her on the lips, their bodies floating out behind them, until they could stand it no longer and had to surface. Tilda wanted to grab him and hold him against her body. She felt so strange, as though nothing but holding him to her would help.
“Want to do it again?” he asked.
“Okay,” she answered.
But the strange feeling grew stronger and a little frightening. After the third time, Tilda said, “We’d better go back now.”
As they started to swim, he grabbed her hand again, and they kicked their way back, heads submerged, only popping up to take a breath. No one could see he was holding her hand.
Soon after, when Jonny’s father, a violinist in the Miami Orchestra, got an offer for first chair in Philadelphia, Jonny and his family moved away, breaking Tilda’s heart.
She had had a terrible sunburn after the beach party, forever sealing the day in her memory with thoughts of both pain and longing.
“In the end, it was a pretty colorful childhood, don’t you think?” asked Barbara. “I mean, we had the beach right there, and we had a lot of fun. It was probably a good thing that we left New York.”
It was true. There were good reasons to leave. A plumber and loyal union man, their father, Aldo, had plenty of work on the hotels going up on Collins Avenue. But that wasn’t the whole story. While Tilda and her sister were enjoying their years growing up on South Beach, while Tilda was experiencing first love and first kisses, there was a brother who had been left behind in Brooklyn.
Two years before Tilda was born, Maria gave birth to a baby boy, cause for great celebration in this first-generation Italian American family. Anthony, as they named him, after Aldo’s father, was destined to become everything Aldo had envisioned for himself. He would not only graduate from high school, he would go to college. He would become a doctor, as Aldo had once wanted to do, before financial realities meant work and no higher education.
But soon it became clear there was something wrong. Anthony did not grow and develop as he should have. At four months he was still not raising his head when Maria placed him on his stomach in his crib. At six months he was not sitting up. At eight months, he lay in his crib not smiling or able to focus attention on his parents or on anyone. He cried and could not be comforted. Maria and Aldo were devastated to learn soon after his first birthday that he would never progress. “He has Down syndrome,” Dr. Geminelli told them. “You are both young. For your sake—and for the sake of your children to come—put the boy in an institution where he will be cared for, and get on with your lives.”
And that is exactly what the young couple did. It was what parents did then to escape the heartache heaped upon them by a cruel and indifferent world, often including those closest, even family.
With Maria and Aldo’s consent, Dr. Geminelli made the arrangements. One night, after Aldo had returned home from work, a nurse from a new “home” outside the city rang the doorbell, while a driver remained in the car, staring into the distance. Maria let her in, gathered Anthony’s belongings, and handed over her son. Aldo held her to keep her from collapsing. Somehow the two found the strength to stand in the doorway and watch as the car carrying their firstborn son disappeared into the night.
Tilda could never clearly envision that scene. It seemed too impossible to be real. Nor could she imagine that she would be born a year later—the baby meant to make up for Anthony. She had never felt that way growing up, but surely that is what she was intended to be. Four years later, Barbara was born.
As an adult, learning her family’s history for the first time, Tilda was left wondering how her parents had found the courage to try again to create a family—and how they had amassed the power to forget their firstborn son.
Around the time when Anthony would have been six, Aldo learned about all the work in Florida, where the weather was warm year-round. The family packed up and left for Miami. Tilda and Barbara would never know their brother. In fact, they were not supposed to know of his existence. While his sisters were frolicking on the beach, Anthony lay abandoned in Brooklyn.
Every month Aldo and Maria received a “progress” report from the Children’s Division of the Rockland County Asylum for the Mentally Infirm, but there was never any progress, just doctors’ notes on height and weight and diet, a note from the infirmary whenever he had a fever or other illness. These reports were then secreted away in a large envelope tucked under papers in her father’s desk—as Tilda would discover after his death.
We had a lot of fun, Barbara had just said about their Miami childhood. And that was true, Tilda had to admit. They were a tight-knit family unit, their family of four that should have been a family of five.
Tilda never would have known about Anthony had she not volunteered to go through her father’s things after he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at fifty-five. By that time, Tilda had moved to New York. She’d gone for college and stayed, while her parents had remained in the family house in North Miami Beach, where they moved before Tilda entered high school. Maria, too overcome at the time of Aldo’s death, either forgot or never knew that Aldo had kept all of Anthony’s records in the bottom drawer of his desk. There was a final letter in the stack informing the parents of Anthony Marrone of their son’s illness and death at age thirteen, in 1954. The letter requested the parents’ attention to the funeral arrangements. If not, the letter read, Anthony would be interred on Hart Island, New York’s potter’s field. Anthony had died, the letter said, after a brief illness, of peritonitis.
Reading the letter left Tilda with rage and guilt. How could her parents have left him, never telling her or her sister about Anthony?
“How could you?” were Tilda’s very words when she confronted a still-grieving Maria.
“You can’t judge me, Tilda,” Maria had said in her own defense. “You have no idea on God’s earth what it was like for us, and you don’t know what it wa
s like in those days.”
Maria told her and Barbara how Anthony’s condition caused them not only great sorrow but great shame. His condition was a dark secret. When the asylum people came to take Anthony away shortly after his first birthday, it was in the dark of night for a reason—to shield them from prying eyes. Later the young couple told their friends and neighbors that Anthony had died.
“It was easy to pretend he was dead, because of our real grief. We stayed in our house with the curtains drawn for days. We would have starved if our families hadn’t brought us food.” Maria was inconsolable in the retelling of it.
Tilda, too, was desperate. She had come home to help her mother and to mourn her father. Instead, she had discovered a brother, who she would mourn now too. Her sorrow overwhelmed her and became anger directed at her mother. Her mother’s pain, she would realize much later, was doubled by Tilda’s rage. Not only was Maria forced to relive the greatest sorrow of her youth, but she was also struggling with the unexpected death of her husband. Years later, Tilda would see herself in her much younger mother and recognize their new bond.
“It was cruel, yes,” her mother had said then. “But we weren’t the cruel ones. It was how it was then. You didn’t keep these kids at home. Don’t you think it tears me apart every time I see parents who have children with Down syndrome or other problems—and they’re coping; they’re not hiding in shame? Don’t you think I say to myself maybe we could’ve done that? The guilt never goes away.”
Barbara and Tilda made their separate peace with their parents’ tragedy. Barbara readily forgave and felt it best to let Anthony’s memory rest in peace. “We can’t undo the past,” she had said soon after their father’s funeral. “We only hurt Dad’s memory and cause Mom more pain if we don’t let it go. Let it go, Tilda,” she advised.
Tilda had a harder time. She began to see a fuller picture the more she looked into it. She learned that her mother had been right. Young parents were almost forced to institutionalize their children deemed too damaged to lead normal lives. But the more she learned about the harsh treatment inflicted on the children in the often overcrowded and understaffed institutions, the harder it became to “let it go.” She began to understand how her father had carried this burden until he died, a burden bound in an envelope inside his desk, never to be discarded, as if by keeping the contents, he had somehow kept a part of his son with him. Maria, too, had died carrying the pain of her lost son, her firstborn. Tilda believed, like them, that she would never be able to let Anthony go.
“If you change your mind about Thanksgiving, we’re here,” Barbara said before they ended their call.
“Remember how Dad always talked about Harry Houdini?” asked Tilda.
“What? Why are you bringing that up?”
“Oh, no reason really. Just that I always thought he represented escape to Dad, like maybe he wanted to escape, but then later I thought, no, it was because Houdini died of peritonitis.”
“Look, sis,” Barbara said, not wanting to go down this road with her sister, Tilda knew. “I want you here, but do me a favor and make sure you’re with Laura’s family. Please don’t be alone. You’re not cooped up in that house all day, are you?”
After assurances that all was well, Tilda was able to get off the phone. Just don’t be alone, Barbara had repeated before hanging up.
Tilda didn’t tell her what she knew to be true: I’m always alone now, no matter who I’m with.
Tilda hadn’t thought about her brother in a while. Before Harold’s death, she’d made it a point of going to the cemetery where Anthony was buried every few months to leave a pink rose, her mother’s favorite. And now she realized she hadn’t been there since late March.
It had comforted her to learn that the weekend she and Barbara had stayed with neighbors, when her parents had “unexpectedly been called home to Brooklyn,” an event never fully explained, they had actually been attending Anthony’s funeral. “He’s buried at St. James Cemetery,” Maria told Tilda soon after she discovered Anthony’s envelope in her father’s desk drawer.
I’ll visit again soon, Anthony, Tilda promised her brother. Even when she was in the throes of her dark mood, she never wanted to push Anthony out of her thoughts. He’s part of my life, in my heart, where he belongs, she thought to herself.
Trying to get a better grip on the day, Tilda went to see if there was something she could put together for lunch, but the cupboard was bare. Better steel myself for a trip to Nature’s Food, she thought, a venture sure not to lift her spirits. The parking lot was always crowded, the prices always too high, and the aisles, jammed. But she went anyway because there were certain things she could get there that she couldn’t get anywhere else, like the dark-chocolate-covered goji berries she had become addicted to ever since Tilly had shared some of hers on an outing to the movies, one of the last the two had enjoyed together before Tilda’s life had fallen apart.
Sure enough, the parking lot was a disaster, with giant SUVs vying for spaces wide enough for nothing larger than a Volkswagen bug. Tilda was lucky enough to scoot in behind a car that was leaving without setting off a major rumble among competing drivers. She’d seen it happen, usually male drivers getting out of their cars and engaging in some major chest bumping before the Dominican lot attendant could good-naturedly break it up. The women usually just shook their long ponytails vehemently at the offending driver to express their indignation.
Tilda thought the ingredients of a good fruit salad would do, so she wouldn’t have to navigate the entire store with a cart too large for the cramped aisles, full not only of shoppers stopping in the middle to read every word on every label, as though no one else existed, but also, invariably, employees stocking shelves from dollies piled high with huge boxes from which they replaced old products with new ones. It was a bumper car ride, getting through it all, and making it to the backed-up checkout lanes required finesse and patience. Of late, Tilda was definitely lacking in the latter.
Finding herself miraculously alone among the melons, she began diligently assessing the quality of the cantaloupes to see if the jacked-up price was worth it. Most were green (not a good sign), they were tough to the touch, and they had no smell. Eventually, she found one, nice and beige, tender to the touch on the bottom, but not too soft, and it had a sweet, not-overpowering aroma. She had a moment not entirely sad remembering that it was Harold who had taught her how to buy fruit.
She rolled it over in her hands several times trying to determine if it was worth the price.
“That looks like a good one,” she heard someone say, as she looked up from the melon in her hands.
A man had come up near her, but she hadn’t noticed. She looked at him, not answering, her mouth skewing a bit to the right. He looked friendly enough, but she didn’t like strangers thinking they could just strike up an uninvited conversation.
“They’re expensive, but they’re also out of season, probably from Guatemala.”
“Uh-huh,” replied Tilda, putting the cantaloupe back.
“Aren’t you going to take it?”
Tilda didn’t answer him and began walking over to the strawberries. Now I’ll probably get a lecture on these, she thought, as he walked over to the raspberries.
“The prices here are ridiculous, but the quality is generally good, don’t you think?”
“Not particularly,” replied Tilda. “I take stuff back all the time, tomatoes at the bottom of the container that are moldy, grapes that are sour, that sort of thing.” She noticed that the talkative stranger was about her age. He didn’t look a thing like Harold, except he was about the same height, and while heavier, he looked straight and healthy. Not as good-looking as Harold, not now or ever, she was sure. But he had a nice smile. Good teeth, if they were his own. And nice brown eyes, but nothing like Harold’s.
“Sure. Produce is tricky anywhere, but I keep coming back for the organic stuff. I do a lot of juicing, and . . .”
“That’s nice,�
� said Tilda, “but I need to get going.”
“I was just going to the juice bar across the street. Would you join me? Maybe?”
Tilda was taken aback. What was going on here? Was she being picked up over the berry counter?
“I don’t, um, juice,” she said.
“Sorry to impose.” He bowed his head to her and turned to walk away.
Maybe it was the gesture, so inoffensive, sort of old-world sweet, that got to her.
She laughed and said, “No, please, you’re not imposing. I’ve just been a little grumpy lately. You’re fine. Thanks for the offer, but I . . .”
“It’s okay. Maybe another time.”
Tilda gathered up some berries, a pineapple, and bananas before going back for the cantaloupe. Then she grabbed a container of cottage cheese and headed for the checkout. She put down her bag, placed her items on the counter, and said hello to the cashier, a manager-in-training who was having trouble getting the scanner to scan. A young woman with Down syndrome began putting the produce in Tilda’s bag. Tilda had seen her before and was glad to see that she was employed and probably living on her own. Maria had been right. Things were very different today. Tilda paid the cashier as the young woman put her bag in the cart. “Thank you,” said Tilda with a smile. When the young woman didn’t answer, Tilda said it again, but a little louder, and she put her hand on the woman’s shoulder, startling her. She began to scream, “Don’t, don’t, don’t!”
Tilda kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but the woman was not comforted. The real store manager came over as Tilda kept apologizing.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said.
“She won’t get in trouble, will she? It was my fault. I shouldn’t have touched her.”
“No, of course not.” Then he turned to the young woman. “Brenda, would you like to come with me? You can sit in my office for a while if you’d like.”
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