Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  I look at it. Kathy’s horrified face is turned toward me. She is next. All of us are in a panic because if the host touches your teeth it is a mortal sin, which means if you get hit by a Mack truck that week before you have a chance to go to confession the next Saturday you’ll go straight to hell. Kathy figures if that happens she’ll never see her mother again.

  Tommy also gets a picture of me walking back down the aisle to my pew. My eyes are downcast and my face has an especially concentrated expression which everyone says is angelic. But Tommy takes the shot just after I leave the Communion rail. In the picture, the host has by now leapt to the roof of my mouth, where it has attached itself by its moist gluten. I suck at the host all the way back to the pew, desperately trying to keep it away from my teeth in case I’m to be hit by a Mack truck. Once again, Mary intercedes, answers my prayer, and sees to it that the pasty host slides on down my throat.

  My mother scrutinizes the picture. She says, She looks like she’s seen a ghost. And my God, that Kathy Delaney!

  Kathy is clearly crying. The host has unquestionably touched her teeth.

  There is another picture of Kathy Delaney sitting next to me at our First Communion breakfast and she is staring into space. Kathy Delaney never speaks directly to me until death number three, when we are in the fifth grade.

  eighteen

  BOB MALM GRABBED Pidgie’s scarf and twisted it until it was tight around her neck. He grabbed her books from her. While she struggled to breathe, he dragged her through backyards and then threw her to the ground next to a garage under some thick shrubs.

  He put the books down, and with his free hand unzipped his pants and then reached under Pidgie’s skirt and yanked down her underpants, twisting the scarf around her neck tighter to keep her from fighting him. Pidgie continued to gasp and struggle for breath. He kissed her, felt her genitals, and pressed his penis against her and then ejaculated within seconds.

  He was finished satisfying himself, which had required that he tighten the scarf enough to produce terrible sounds from Pidgie’s throat so that, during his ejaculation, he could enjoy the thrill of hearing a female in ecstasy over his performance. Now he kept it twisted long enough to order her not to squeal or he would come back and kill her. He loosened the scarf and she nodded. Then he helped her get dressed, walked her home, even holding her hand, and once they were in front of her house, made her promise again, Don’t tell anyone! She managed to mouth the words, I won’t. Then he apologized and kissed her good night. His idea of a date.

  Pidgie managed to control herself, but as soon as she was safe inside her home, she became hysterical. Her parents hadn’t been worried about her yet. The time it took the man to snatch and assault her took no more than five minutes. Pidgie’s mother tried to get her to drink a glass of water. She kept gagging on it, her throat was so swollen. Finally she was able to tell her parents what happened. Her father immediately called the police. A cruiser pulled up and when the police officer came into the house, Mr. D’Allessio told him his daughter had been attacked, pointing out the flaming red marks around Pidgie’s neck. Pidgie gave the officer a clear-eyed description of the man and then he asked her to tell him specifically what the man did to her. She did while holding tightly to her mother’s hand. The police officer took some notes and then asked Pidgie if there were any witnesses to what happened to her; asked what she was doing outside after dark; asked if she had a boyfriend.

  Back in the cruiser, he radioed in to say that he didn’t have a rape case on his hands after all. He apparently believed that the marks on the girl’s neck could have been hickies.

  nineteen

  Mickey on first day of fifth grade

  THE FIFTH GRADE starts out like any other year, but all that has been normal, routine, rote, habitual, usual comes to a wrenching halt just fifteen days before Christmas. From that Christmas season on everything will be masked from me by a Norman Vincent Peale–inspired blindfold, which doesn’t remove itself until the end of seventh grade when I put into writing, into an assigned essay, the name Irene.

  At the time of fifth grade, Tyler is now fourteen years old. Life takes an abrupt turn for him as well as me because he is in the throes of that most awful of all times, adolescence. When a mentally disabled child reaches puberty, hell is loosed and all positive thinking falls by the wayside. There is no luring a priest to the house under false pretenses. There is no invitation to come bless anything. Tyler, our free ticket to heaven, is now having sex with the coffee table. He is humping anything he comes in contact with and he’s masturbating in the kitchen at noon. Tyler has to have his bath wearing a bathing suit to keep his hands away from himself, a remedy developed by my stricken father.

  Interestingly, this is at the same time Ambassador Joseph Kennedy is having similar problems with his daughter, Rosemary. Except Rosemary is managing to sneak out of the house to make friends with the local neighborhood boys. Any boys. Any and all boys. Big boys. Their dads. The ambassador, like my father, knows he must protect his vulnerable child. So he has her lobotomized. Sadly, she loses her personality in addition to her sex drive. Still, if my father had known of such an option, he’d have done the same thing.

  Instead, he becomes Tyler’s jailer, training him to sleep during the day and be awake at night so he will be able watch him. My father crushes sleeping pills into Tyler’s food to help attain the new schedule. The phone stays off the hook all day long so he won’t be awakened. My mother can only call out. My father sleeps during his lunch hour at the Abbott Ball, and catnaps when Tyler is listening to his polka records at 2 A.M. I am now forbidden from getting into Tyler’s bed and when I pass his door, his critter looks so much more forlorn, lying on Tyler’s shoulder gazing out the door at me with his one shiny black button eye.

  AT NINE YEARS OLD, when I am starting the fifth grade, my father calls up the stairs each morning to wake me up, and then he goes off to work. I don’t stand in the kitchen waving any longer. Instead I call out, I’m up, Dad. Then I listen for the back door to close and the engine of his car to start, our latest Ford. When I can no longer hear the sound of the car heading down the street, I get out of bed. My mother, still on the housewife’s shift at C.G., doesn’t get up till long after I’ve left the house.

  Miss Bowie is my fifth grade teacher. Within days of the start of school she will become the teacher I deem my favorite because she never yells, never so much as raises her voice one little note. She does sing lustily, however; her rendition of “Red River Valley” is right up there with Dolly Parton’s. My mother’s yelling sends my brother into paroxysms of anguish and terrorizes me. When I come to have children of my own, I take them along with my mother to New York to see Peter Pan. The theater is full of children, not the kind of people my mother enjoys being with. A couple of little girls in front leap up now and again in utter enchantment. Their parents have to tug at their dresses to get them back into their seats. Once, they don’t tug hard enough. My mother bellows, Sit down in front! All the actors onstage freeze and poor Sandy Duncan can’t come up with her next line.

  Although the calm and collected Miss Bowie is a descendant of the man of knife fame, she pronounces the first syllable of Bowie to rhyme with how, not hoe. I believe the reason she mispronounces her name is because half her right index finger is gone. I think she hopes that with the mispronunciation people won’t ask her if she chopped it off with her giant knife. She writes on the board with her thumb and half-finger gripping the chalk. Until mid-December I can’t concentrate on learning because I am so mesmerized by her half-finger, after which I can’t concentrate on anything except the practice of positive thinking.

  In the fifties, girls wear cotton dresses that button down the back. One morning I button my dress wrong. When I come into the classroom, Miss Bowie notices right away.

  Mary-Ann, isn’t there anyone home to see you’re dressed properly?

  Everyone’s eyes travel to me.

  Utilizing the justification which al
lowed for Kathy Delaney’s rough edges, I say, My mother is sick in bed this morning.

  I can tell Miss Bowie knows I’m lying because she rebuttons the dress very gently and then pats my shoulder, sorry that her irritation at my mother sounds as though she is upset with me. As I sit down at my desk, the boy behind me says, I saw your undershirt.

  I am an adept liar by the time I reach fifth grade to offset such embarrassments caused by things like dress-buttoning mortification to say nothing of having a brother who sneaks out of his bedroom at two in the afternoon and hangs out the front door wielding a View-Master, directing passing children to pose and say cheese before my mother drags him back inside. Her first tack, hiding his Brownie camera, had proven ineffective; after all, what’s the difference between a Brownie with no film in it and a View-Master? At any moment someone might say to me, Do you live in the house with the crackpot?

  No, I lie, he lives next door. (I am clearly in training to be a fiction writer, i.e., a professional liar.)

  Every year in elementary school, as part of our health curriculum, we begin our lessons on the basic food groups with a survey of what all of us ate for breakfast that morning. In Miss Bowie’s fifth grade, the kids call out in answer to her question, What did you have for breakfast?

  She points to James with her half finger.

  He says, Scrambled eggs!

  To Gail.

  Cocoa and cinnamon toast!

  To Susan.

  Pancakes!

  To Judy.

  Wheaties!

  To me.

  Eggs Benedict! I add some color: With Canadian bacon inside!

  What I actually have for breakfast is a swig of Hershey’s Syrup, which I suck out of the triangular hole in the top of the can before running out the back door, improperly buttoned.

  Miss Bowie raises an eyebrow at my Eggs Benedict, but lets it go.

  My classmate Irene, the girl who goes to Sts. Cyril and Methodius, has no idea how to lie. Miss Bowie is determined to draw her into the group as Irene is so bashful.

  What did you have this morning, Irene?

  Irene’s quiet little answer is, Leftover golabkis.

  Golabkis, stuffed cabbage, is pronounced gawumpkees, an especially comical word. We all scream with laughter, even me, who Irene once comforted.

  FIFTH GRADE is the first year we will have a subject called Composition. We will learn to write themes. We are issued small notebooks with blue covers called Theme Books.

  Miss Bowie says, in order to encourage us to be creative, The themes won’t be graded.

  We are simply expected to bring in our theme books every Monday morning and each of us must stand and read the themes we wrote over the weekend. Miss Bowie gives us our first assignment. Our theme will be: The Greatest Living American.

  Come Monday, all the children in the class have written the minimum number of sentences called for—five—on Dwight David Eisenhower, our new president. I have written three and a half pages on Ted Williams.

  Miss Bowie is pretty much slumped across her desk in boredom when my turn comes to read since we do everything alphabetically and my last name begins with T. I read my theme and when I am finished I see that Miss Bowie is sitting up straight, gazing at me thoughtfully. There are only two kids after me, Donna Walsh and a colored kid named Stonewall Jackson Werry. When Donna and Stonewall finish their testimonials to the president, Miss Bowie says, I would like Mary-Ann and James to go down to the principal’s office. You will read your essays to Mr. Freedman.

  Albert I. Freedman is our principal.

  James is the skinniest kid in the class and the opening sentence of his theme is: The price of grapes went down when President Eisenhower was elected.

  As James and I head out the door gripping our theme books, I hear Miss Bowie on the intercom saying to Mr. Freedman: Listen, Al, as a Democrat and a Sox fan, you are going to love this performance.

  She pauses then she says, Trust me.

  Out in the corridor, James is sweating bullets. He says to me in a voice that hints of dried-up saliva, My father wrote my essay.

  The school secretary ushers us into the office of Albert I. Freedman. He is short, bald, and wears horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. He says, Ladies first.

  I read.

  While I read, James’s hands are shaking so hard I don’t know how he’s holding onto his theme book.

  When we are both finished, it is the only time I see Mr. Freedman smile. When he smiles, he looks exactly like Sergeant Bilko. The rest of the time he looks like a mug shot.

  Back in class, Miss Bowie asks me how I know so much about Ted Williams. I tell her. My father takes me on two yearly excursions; one is a trip to Fenway Park. My father informs me on a regular basis that Ted Williams is the greatest hitter in baseball. He refers to Ted as the Splendid Splinter. Being Italian, my father feels free to refer to Joe DiMaggio as the Dumb Wop. When Joe later marries Marilyn, my father says, Now there’s a wop’s wop.

  Today, of course, the Splendid Splinter is dead and decapitated, his splintered head hanging in a meat locker. Marvelous.

  The other yearly excursion is to New York where we don’t go to Yankee Stadium. The trip to New York is on my birthday. My father tells my mother that since I can’t have parties because of Tyler, he will take me to New York to see the sights instead. Once Tyler attains adolescence, he is no longer allowed to accompany us on my birthday trip to New York; my mother must stay home with him and so she sulks for a week. She doesn’t complain though, because she can’t tolerate child-oriented activities and is glad not to have to participate.

  We go to New York on the train. (There is no direct train anymore. You want to go to New York from Hartford, you drive or go Greyhound or you fly from Bradley Field to LaGuardia which, all told, takes at least two days.)

  Each year, I get to choose three New York venues. By the time I am nine I have visited the Hayden Planetarium; the Museum of Natural History; Coney Island, where we take a ride on the parachute; the Empire State Building; a television studio where we watch The Lucky Strike Hit Parade rehearsals with Dorothy Collins, Snooky Lanson, and Gisele MacKenzie; the UN; the Statue of Liberty; the Bronx Zoo. Every attraction a child could dream of. We don’t go to see the Rockettes because my father says, That’s for tourists. His feeling is that tourists are dumbbells, not us.

  How do you tell a dumbbell, Mick?

  Yankee fan.

  That’s right.

  My favorite New York City site is in Times Square, where we watch the man in the Camel’s billboard blow smoke rings just like my father does. I decide when I grow up, I will smoke Camels, not Luckies. But I come of age in the sixties when I will smoke Marlboros just like everyone else. Also in Times Square is a movie house that shows nothing but Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the Three Stooges. We duck in at the end of our days in New York for a few yucks before we have to run for the train ride back home to Hartford.

  When Tyler comes to New York City, before he enters puberty, my father has to be far more vigilant than he is with just me. One time we go to the Statue of Liberty and there are several Japanese businessmen at Battery Park waiting in line with us for the ferry. Tyler picks up a long stick, gets down on his belly, aims the stick at them, and says, The only good Jap is a dead Jap, which is a quote from a Marine lieutenant who led his troops through the bullets and surf onto a Pacific atoll.

  Then Tyler fires. He shouts, Take this for Kwajalein, you yellow-bellies. He fires again. And this one’s for Corregidor, you . . .

  My father disarms him and throws his stick into the Hudson River. Tyler says, Men, your weapons have been confiscated and consigned to the ammo dump due to . . .

  MY BEST FRIENDS in fifth grade are Gail and Susan, who I know from religious instructions at St. Lawrence O’Toole’s Church, where we are preparing for Confirmation. We are overjoyed to be in the same class. Also, our parents deem it acceptable for the three of us to walk by ourselves to the library across the stre
et from the church after the Confirmation classes. Gail and Susan sneak off to the five and ten up past the library, but I stay and carefully select the three books I will take home. There is a children’s section and an adult section; children cannot go into the adult section until they are twelve. Sometimes I sneak over there and slip an adult book between my two children’s books but the librarian never fails to catch it when she checks me out.

  Where did you get this? she asks, holding up the offending book.

  Over there, I lie, pointing to the children’s section.

  It was misshelved, she says, and puts it under the counter.

  I stay at the library long after Gail and Susan have gone home. I don’t tell my father that I walk home alone.

  At Mary M. Hooker School, Miss Bowie assigns Gail, Susan, and me a new friend, Magdalena Rodriguez, from Puerto Rico, who is a member of the first Puerto Rican family to move to Charter Oak Terrace. Today, Hartford, Connecticut, is home to the largest Latino population per capita in the United States including New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

  Gail, Susan, and I are to help Magdalena learn English. We get the job as we are smart and finish our work before the other kids do. Miss Bowie has us sit at a corner table with Magdalena, and we are instructed to begin Magdalena’s lessons with her colors.

  We hold up a red crayon and we speak, loudly and clearly, as Miss Bowie has demonstrated: Red!

  Magdalena puts her hand over her mouth and her head down.

  So we say louder and even more clearly, Red, Magdalena! Say, red!