Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  When his army commitment was done, George returned to the merchant marine and served another three and one-half years, a total of seven since he left Brooklyn as a teen-ager. The years abroad lodged a few indelible moments in George’s memory—the morning sun on the cliffs of Dover, Eskimos in Greenland holding out huge wriggling lobsters and bartering for cigarettes—but mainly his tour of the seas of the world was his initiation in the fraternity of manliness. He would regret the missed opportunities.

  “We were tied up in Naples for fifteen days,” he reminisced. “I didn’t see Capri. I didn’t see Pompeii. I did see the American bar and the local equivalent of Sophia Loren. I thought at the time I had to be one of the boys, that was the most important thing in the world. I remember we were once in Germany, in Bremerhaven, and a couple of young fellows from the ship rented horses and spent their leave riding all over the countryside visiting castles and monuments. I sneered at them: what a pair of creeps! I went off arm in arm with the boys to the bars and bright lights. But standing there with the beer in my hand, I kept thinking to myself, ‘I’d really rather be with those guys on their horses.’ Of course I didn’t say it out loud. How often I’ve cussed myself for not going with them. I only had one chance in life to see a castle … and I blew it.”

  Home on leave in 1948, George brought gifts to his parents, ate with relish the welcoming feast, and excused himself to walk about the old neighborhood in uniform. A block or so away, he noticed a slender red-haired girl talking to a familiar street figure, a cripple named Murphy who sat outside the delicatessen and sunned himself, keeping track of all the comings and goings on the block. When the girl moved on, George greeted Murphy and asked her name.

  Later that day, Murphy introduced George to the girl. Her name was Carol Ring. She was fifteen and lived four doors down from the Dieners. By nightfall George had decided that he would marry her.

  Chapter Two

  When Carol Ring was five years old, she was a chubby, impish child with dazzling red curls that tumbled to her shoulders. One day she fell ill with a cold, which hung on for weeks. Her mother telephoned a doctor, insisting that he come in person to the apartment house in a lowerclass section of Queens, New York, where they lived. The doctor made a cursory examination and ordered Carol out of bed.

  “Make her get up,” he said. “A kid gets well by running around.”

  A few days later, Carol’s heart began to pound with loud, frightening beats. The younger cousin who was playing with her cried out in amusement, “Listen to Carol’s heart!”

  Alarmed, Mrs. Ring rushed to the telephone and summoned another physician. “I’m not calling that shoemaker of a doctor again, that’s for sure,” she said with maternal wrath. The second doctor came and correctly diagnosed rheumatic fever. Carol was ordered to bed for an indefinite period and prescribed digitalis. The medication caused stomach pains and she cried for hours each night. Her parents took turns sitting beside her bed murmuring comfort. If the mattress was so much as touched, the child would scream in pain. Even when her father carried her in his arms to the bathroom, she shrieked. For a full year Carol stayed mainly in bed, the routine broken only by the times when her mother would carry her to the fire escape in summer and prepare a stack of pillows and insist that she sit outside to let the sun color her pallid face.

  When the doctor released her from bed rest after the year, Carol ventured into the street one afternoon and was knocked down by a speeding car. Only a few bruises marked the child, but a curious phenomenon occured. During an examination to check for internal injuries, the doctor discovered that he could no longer hear through his stethoscope the sounds of malfunctioning in Carol’s heart. He assumed that the shock of the car accident had somehow repaired a leaky heart valve. While this is medically dubious, the fact remains that Carol’s heart no longer troubled her.

  The year of sickness, however, had wrought changes in the child. She was now thin instead of chubby, shy instead of mischievous, insecure with other children instead of outgoing. As the years passed, Carol learned to fall back on her long illness, to use her “heart” when she needed to. It got her out of girls’ gym class in school, which she did not like, and it softened instantly her father’s stern glare when she summoned up a wan look or put her hand to her heart in the midst of a dressing down. When Carol and her sister, June, older by six years, lay in bed and gossiped after lights out, Mr. Ring stormed in and scolded June for keeping Carol awake. “You get away with murder because of your heart,” June would say. Carol tried to look shocked at such an accusation, but she knew it was true. June further complained that her sister got better clothes, more favors, and more attention, especially from their father.

  The father, Richard Ring, was an interesting man. During the Depression he first worked for WPA, then as a blotter clerk for a Wall Street firm, finally joining Westinghouse in a minor job. He moonlighted seven hours a night as cashier in a nightclub, pushing himself relentlessly to lift his family from poverty. Thirty years later, he would retire from Westinghouse as a valued executive and a moderately wealthy man. His goals were realized. Yet he would be forced to interrupt his retirement in a house near a golf course in North Carolina to journey in 1972 to the cemetery on Long Island. There he would stand behind his daughter and grip her shoulders to keep from breaking down. The night of the burial he would ask her over and over again, “But honey, why didn’t you come to Daddy for help? You knew I would have tried to help.”

  Brusque, purposeful, speaking each sentence with authority, Mr. Ring lived by his own rules. When a spoon was missing from his dinner service, he would say, “I have no spoon.” And his wife, or Carol, or June, or all three would jump to get him one. It would not occur to him to fetch his own utensil.

  He was a man who expected the sun to hide behind a cloud if he pronounced the weather to be gloomy, and he would take no criticism from his wife. The only “arguments” Mr. and Mrs. Ring ever had were over his strictness with their two daughters. But even these could scarcely be called arguments since Ring responded to attacks on his will by even more stern regulations.

  When his hard work brought money enough for a down payment on a house on Autumn Avenue in Brooklyn, and when his daughters began evidencing interest in the young men of the neighborhood, Ring announced curfew rules. “If you go out on a Saturday night,” he said, “then I want you to tell me before you leave precisely when you will be home. If you say eleven o’clock, then I expect you home at the stroke of eleven. If you arrive at 11:15, then I will deduct fifteen minutes from your next night out as a penalty.”

  By the time she reached fifteen in 1948, Carol’s heart had ceased to be a valuable defense mechanism at home, and her father extended to her the same discipline that June had always received. A spark of rebellion had surfaced in Carol, however, and she decided she was old enough to test her father’s commandments, even if her sister had never dared.

  On a Friday night, Carol dressed in a skirt and sweater, in bobby socks and saddle loafers, and appeared in the living room ready to go out. Her father was also dressed, preparing to attend a Masonic meeting.

  “Where are you going?” he asked in the voice that June always considered to be equal to that of the Lord.

  “To a dance,” Carol replied. “In the park.”

  Coming in from the kitchen, Mrs. Ring overheard and repeated what she had said over and over again in recent months. “Dancing! Dancing! You’d dance your life away.” She was not sure a girl with a once damaged heart should be doing such things.

  Even though Carol remained extremely shy with boys and would cross Autumn Avenue to avoid meeting a group of them walking down the sidewalk, she went with girl friends to every summer dance held on the weekends in the neighborhood parks of Brooklyn.

  Ring looked at his watch. “What time will you be in?” he asked.

  “Eleven thirty?” Carol’s voice was a plea.

  He nodded. “Eleven thirty it is.”

  At 4 A.M. Carol re
turned, four and one-half hours past her deadline. Her father was sitting on the front porch, the glow of his cigarette a beacon in the night.

  Before Carol could offer her excuse, Ring spoke. “To begin with,” he said, “you may not leave this house for the rest of the weekend. You will stay inside and help your mother with whatever chores she has. I will let you know when, if ever, you may leave again.”

  The next afternoon, shortly before supper, Carol bathed, fixed her hair, and dressed once more to go out.

  As she entered the living room, Ring glanced up from his book. “You will recall that you are forbidden to leave,” he said.

  Carol clenched her fist and stormed to her bedroom. Behind the slammed door, Mrs. Ring could hear her daughter packing a suitcase. She hurried into the living room. “Do something!” she hissed to her husband. “Carol’s fixing to leave!”

  Ring went to his daughter’s room opened the door, and watched her stuff the suitcase. Carol did not look up. “How much money will you be needing for your trip?” asked her father in a business voice.

  “One hundred dollars,” snapped Carol, summoning an impossible price.

  From a roll of bills in his pocket, Ring peeled off one hundred dollars and tossed it on the bed. “Buy ninety-nine dollars’ worth of bus tickets,” he said, “and don’t come back.”

  Startled, Carol looked up, but her father was leaving the room.

  She had gone too far. She had to leave. But a few hours later, following the silent, trembling exit that proclaimed her new independence, Carol weakened. Even the fantasy of how long and how far she could travel on one hundred dollars had collapsed. She telephoned home.

  Her father answered.

  “May I speak with Mother, please?” asked Carol.

  “You may speak with your mother only in person in her home,” said Ring.

  Carol sagged. She hung up the telephone and went home. Her mother embraced her, her father tried to keep back his smile, and Carol resigned her rebellious ways. “That was the first and last time I broke the rules,” she said later. “I decided then and there it was best to do what people told me.”

  Carol had seen George before on Autumn Avenue, promenading in his uniform, but she did not know his name until Murphy, the cripple at the delicatessen, introduced them. Immediately she was interested. George was not tall enough—Carol had always dreamed of a man six feet at least—nor was he rich, nor was he a neighborhood hero in athletics. But he was funny, he made her laugh right away with a story from Japan, where he had only just been. He looked a little like Jimmy Cagney and he talked like Eddie Bracken and he had thick dark curly hair and, barely seen, on his upper left arm was a new tattoo of the American flag, the work of a drunken tattooist in the Bowery. Most of all, he was interested in her, which not many boys around had been. Carol had remained thin and shy, and her more successful competition all seemed to be voluptuous and carefree.

  Thus began a sporadic three-year courtship in which George would go off to sea in the merchant marine and Carol would weep. When the letters were few and the months between were many, she would declare that she had renounced and forgotten him. But then he would reappear in uniform, drenched in foreign flavors, bringing the teen-age Brooklyn girl tribute from the ports of the world—a stuffed koala bear from Australia, an antique brooch from Italy, a star sapphire from India. How, Carol told her girl friend, how could she not forgive and take back a man who, upon giving her a sapphire, said, matter-of-factly, “We played marbles with these on board ship”?

  They dated quietly: an occasional movie, dinner at an Italian restaurant, a favorite bar in Jamaica, Queens, with Carol piling her hair in an Ann Sheridan-inspired pompadour and covering her lips with dark color to look older. One night at the restaurant, George apologized for not taking her to more glamorous places. “I was never much of a Lothario,” he said haltingly. Carol suspected more was on his mind. Later, on her front porch as she fidgeted to go inside because she was past her deadline, perhaps her father was timing her and watching her from behind the lace curtains, George proposed marriage.

  Carol had a ready answer. No! Not until! “I won’t even consider it unless you quit sailing and get a job that keeps you at home,” she said. “Do you have any idea what I go through? Every time you leave, usually at midnight when I can’t even come down to the dock and see you off, it’s a terrible scene. Tears, sobbing into my pillow, worrying that the ship will sink.”

  George shook his head. That was a decision he would have to think over. Not until this moment had he considered grounding himself for the rest of his life.

  While George went back to sea to deliberate, Carol graduated from high school. For a time she had thought of a career as a dietitian, supervising meals in a hospital or university. But she had never liked school and made below-average grades, and now that her diploma was gratefully in hand she took a secretarial course and went to work as a receptionist on Wall Street.

  Even though she dated other men and enjoyed flirting and receiving attention from the visitors who passed by her desk, Carol never seriously entertained another man in her life except George. Nor was there another woman in his. Sometimes he would write a letter and tease, “I’d better hurry home because the girls in Japan are certainly tempting.” But on leave in March, 1951, on the very first evening of spring, George stood once more on Carol’s porch and announced that he was ready to stay home permanently. “There’s no direction in my life,” he confessed. “I have no idea what I’m trying to make of myself. The only thing I know for sure is that I love you and I need you.”

  Their engagement was received with favor and enthusiasm by George’s parents, who knew Carol to be a “nice, lovely, sweet neighborhood girl.” Carol’s family, however, disapproved. “George is a little fresh-mouthed if you ask me,” said Mrs. Ring. “He called just the other day and asked for you, and when I asked, ‘Who is this?’ he said, ‘Charley Fink!’ and hung up in my ear.”

  Carol giggled.

  Ring had a more practical reason for disapproval. “I’ve never been very impressed by your George,” he said. “He seems to have a lot of wild ideas. He’s spent too many years running around the world. He doesn’t seem to be the kind of boy who will settle down and raise children and provide for them. He doesn’t even have a high school diploma.”

  Wait, Carol said. George has been taking a night course to get his high school equivalency diploma. And besides, seven years at sea is an incomparable education. Moreover, none of this matters anyway because we love one another.

  Romantically, Carol wanted the wedding to be on March 21, 1952, the first day of spring, exactly one year from the day George proposed. But the Masonic Hall where the reception was to be held was booked on that occasion, so the wedding was set for April 5, the next available date. The couple had agreed that whoever was more religious could have the service in their church. Because George was a lapsed Catholic, and since Carol was slightly more faithful to her Evangelical faith, she won. The bridal gown was floor-length white lace, from Buckner’s Bridal Shop in Jamaica. The wedding party arrived in a dreary spring rain and hurried under umbrellas into the Church of Peace Evangelical of Brooklyn. But after the brief service was over, after everyone had exclaimed over the beauty of the bride’s red hair and glowing face, and as the couple left the church, the rain suddenly stopped and the newlyweds were flooded with brilliant sunshine. Carol considered it an omen of good fortune, but so, probably, did the other men and women involved in the 472 other marriages held in the City of New York that day, ordinary people setting out on ordinary lives.

  Mrs. and Mrs. George Diener spent their honeymoon night in the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel, with Carol slightly annoying her husband by staying up and writing thank-you notes. The next day they left for Niagara Falls.

  “Nobody honeymoons in Niagara Falls,” said George in later years. “But we did.”

  Chapter Three

  They began with a $500 nest egg, mostly a wedding gift from Carol�
�s parents. “The thing about me you’re going to find out,” said George, “is that I don’t know about money. What I make today I spent yesterday.” Carol immediately assumed responsibility for budgeting and handling their small income.

  She planned to continue working as a receptionist while George looked for a job. Their first home was a dismal apartment with gray walls in the Richmond Hills section of Queens, which was advertised as a “two-and-one-half-room” suite, but which was in reality a studio—one room that had been carved into a living-sleeping area, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Their first purchases were an inexpensive hide-a-bed on which to sleep and sit, and a secondhand chrome dinette set at which to eat.

  Through his father-in-law, who was now an executive in the industrial projects department of Westinghouse, George obtained a job with that company, assembling electrical control panels. The pay was $30 a week and the work, though tedious and boring, was at least different from the merchant marine. But in less than a year it came to an abrupt end. The electrical union was building a housing development, and the shop steward asked George to buy a $100 construction bond.

  The steward made it clear that all union members were expected to buy at least one bond. “I’ll be glad to,” said George, “when I have the money.”

  “Well,” said the steward, “there’s no rush, but you won’t be getting any raises or promotions or overtime until you buy one.”

  George checked his anger. The word “extortion” came to mind, but he chose not to use it. He also felt like hitting the man, but he had long ago told himself that fighting was an immature business. Not since he left Brooklyn to go to sea had he been in a brawl. “In that case,” he finally said, “I’m giving you and your union notice. As of now.”

  In the out-of-work weeks that followed, George realized that his decision was rash, since he was a newly-wed with responsibility. But he was also a man who refused to be put into a box and be told the only way out was to bend his principles. Though he was only twenty-five years old, George had set up boundaries for his life and he would stay inside them, he told Carol, even if they led to hardship.