by Roger Ebert
My mother passed all those years in innocence of alcohol. George wasn’t responsible for her change, but only the occasion for it, and I don’t believe he was an alcoholic. He was kind to me and patient with my mother. I often saw them happy together and enjoyed being with them. But as I understand alcoholism, Annabel’s first drink filled a place in her she never knew existed, and she was not a person who could drink. I took her to an AA meeting in Chicago once, at which she told the group she was so proud of me for all I was doing to help them. She didn’t believe I was really an alcoholic, and she knew she wasn’t.
People liked Annabel. She was funny, chatty, a character. She made an impression. Whenever I return to Champaign-Urbana, I meet people who smile when they remember her. Her employers liked her. Neighbors, friends, companions, nurses. Students she met when she was working in the office at Hendrick House, the student residence owned by her friend and mine, Betsy Hendrick.
My mother continued to smoke and drink. She moved into a new two-bedroom apartment and began to employ women to look after her. The first of these was Ruby Harmon, whom we’d known since she started doing my family’s laundry in the 1950s. Ruby was her best and most loyal friend, and one day in the 1980s she called me and told me there was something I should know: My mother was drinking too much and had to be put to bed drunk every night, “although she pulls herself together when you visit.” She was being treated for emphysema and osteoporosis. I was then three or four years sober and called her doctor to tell him this news. My mother must have guessed my source of information and banished Ruby from her life. I don’t believe the doctor took me very seriously; Annabel would have never let him suspect the nature of her drinking.
What then followed were a series of enablers, some who drank with her, some who did not. Her emphysema worsened, she grew thin and frail and moved into a nursing home. Here she couldn’t drink, and our conversations grew happier. Betsy Hendrick and her daughter Becky were regular visitors, like members of the family. Karol Ann and Dwayne were always helpful. Other friends filled her room. The nurses told me with some pride that she insisted on always looking her best for her visitors.
She continued to smoke, and when she was on oxygen would remove the tube to have a cigarette: “Honey, it’s all I have left.” Her circulation began to fail, her blood pressure dropped too low, and she was moved to Mercy Hospital, where I had been born. In her last days she fell into a coma, although when asked how she was, she would faintly reply “fine.” On her last day and night, she recited the Hail Mary unceasingly, hour after hour. At four that morning she seemed to fall into a deep sleep, and I told a nurse I’d go home for a nap. She looked at me curiously but hesitated to tell me what she must have been thinking. At six that morning, I received the call that my mother had died. I fell to my knees and sobbed.
I remember her with a sense of great loss. She was a good mother during all the years that counted. After my father’s death she worked full-time to help me in school. I never felt a moment’s poverty, and after her death I found an old checkbook and was astonished to find that during some years her income was little more than $2,500. We must also have been living on the proceeds of the house my parents bought. She never asked me for money from my News-Gazette job but was happy for me to take her out for dinner.
She was smart and canny. In the 1970s I sent her on a trip to Europe and she found her way around easily and came back loaded with stories. She made friends everywhere. In Ireland, she bonded with my friend John McHugh’s family. In line at the Rome airport, the people behind her heard her name and introduced themselves as the Rotarians who’d met me when I got off the plane in Cape Town. The tension between us grew during the 1970s as we both drank more, and possibly became worse for her when I stopped drinking in 1979. But she never let down her guard or expressed a single worry about herself. She was always “fine.”
Don and Ruth Wikoff, our old neighbors, ran her funeral from the Renner-Wikoff Chapel. Martha, Bill, Jean, cousin Bernardine from Stonington, and Karol Ann and Dwayne Gaines and Jimmy and Bev Pickens, cousins from my father’s side, stood with me. Ruby Harmon came and hugged me and said, “She always loved you, Roger, and I always loved her.” I told her she had done the right thing by calling me.
5 ST. MARY’S
MY GRADE SCHOOL probably couldn’t get state approval today. The teachers were unpaid and lived communally. Two grades were taught in one classroom. There were no resources for science, music, physical education, or foreign languages except the Latin of the Mass and hymns. No playground facilities. The younger students were picked up by the single school bus; as soon as we were old enough, we rode our bikes to school, even in winter. A typical meal in the lunchroom might consist of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, a dish of corn, a dish of fruit cocktail, and a carton of milk. If you had a penny, you might buy a jawbreaker afterward.
I received a first-rate education. At St. Mary’s Grade School in Champaign, one block across Wright Street from Urbana, we were taught by Dominican nuns who knew their subjects cold, gave us their full-time attention, were gifted teachers, and commanded order and respect in the classroom. For eight years we were drilled in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Periods were devoted to history, geography, and science, taught from textbooks without visual aids or any other facilities. We learned how to write well, spell, and God knows we learned how to diagram a sentence.
I can’t prove that a St. Mary’s graduate had a better education than a majority of today’s high school graduates, but that’s my impression. Some of the high school kids who write thoughtful comments on my blog say they’ve taken charge of their own education, at least in reading and writing. At some point they needed to because their classes had become boring. I taught rhetoric in a Chicago city college for a year. The impression I got was that some students always could write, and some of the others would never be able to. For years during grade and high school I read secretly at my desk while following the class elsewhere in my mind.
I attended St. Mary’s for an excellent reason: I would go to heaven. I liked my public school friends, but they were non-Catholics and couldn’t look forward to that. It was their misfortune they weren’t pagans; pagans at least could spend eternity in limbo because they were not lucky enough to have learned about the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants and Jews had their chance and blew it. “Hindus” and “Muhammadans,” the titles under which I mentally filed all the peoples and religions of Asia, India, Arabia, and the Holy Land, were, I suppose, given a pass as honorary pagans.
We put dimes into envelopes that were mailed by Sister to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. We were each “sponsoring” a little African child, who would now be able to learn about the Church from missionaries and look forward to spending eternity gazing upon the face of God. The first hour of every day was devoted to the study of religion, which began with memorizing the Baltimore Catechism and in upper grades developed into fascinating discussions of theological loopholes. I asked in class one day if the little African children wouldn’t be better off without missionaries, because if they never learned about salvation through the Church, they wouldn’t run the risk of hell. Sister Rosanne looked at me sadly. “Those poor little children have just as much a right as you do to enjoy the love of God.”
This was, if you think about it, a liberal argument. We never discussed politics in class, but I came away with the firm impression that Franklin Roosevelt was our greatest president after Lincoln. In general the Dominicans applied Catholicism toward liberal ends, such as support for equal rights, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, and the rights of workingmen. We especially valued separation of church and state because it was all that protected us from a Protestant takeover. Abortion was off the table as a subject fit for the classroom. Birth control was also not discussed; it was assumed you saved yourself for marriage and then had as many little Catholics as the Lord desired. Religion class did however cover suc
h topics as tattoos (a sin against the body, which is the temple of the Holy Ghost) and naming pets after saints (a sacrilege; Rover was allowed but not Max). One day in eighth grade the boys and girls were separated and the assistant priest took us into the auditorium and warned us never to touch ourselves. He didn’t specify where we were not to touch.
The school building had a basement for Sister Ambrosetta’s first-grade room, the cafeteria, and the gymnasium. The gym was just slightly larger than a basketball court and had two or three rows of seats across one of the short ends. Pads under the baskets protected us from crashing into the walls. Our coach was the tomboy Sister Marie Donald, who tucked the hems of her habit into the rosary she wore around her waist and dribbled and shot better than any of us. She taught second and third grades on the second floor, and it was there we had what passed for school band practice. She passed around triangles, tambourines, ratcheted sticks, maracas, and wooden blocks, and we formed a rhythm section to pound, scrape, ding, and rattle along with music on 78 rpm records. Fifth and sixth grades were taught by Sister Nathan, a fresh-faced favorite who usually seemed amused by us. We took this as a sign of favor.
Now my memory fails. I know Sister Rosanne, an immensely kind woman, very smart about current events, taught seventh and eighth grades, and Sister Emma taught third and fourth. Did Sister Gilberta, the principal, come in there somewhere? To be sent to the principal’s office was a special damnation. We feared her, because we feared the feeling of guilt. The nuns weren’t “strict” in the sense usually meant. No sister ever laid a hand on any student as far as I know. Nor did they raise their voices. It was an orderly school. We regarded the nuns with a species of awe, because they were the brides of Christ and had the entire One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church backing them up.
The school year mirrored the church year. We turned the pages on a big Advent calendar, observed saints days, wore ashes on Ash Wednesday, announced what we were giving up for Lent. After a long winter, relief came on May 1, and the crowning of Mary. We held a May Day parade, the boys in ties, the girls in frocks. In eighth grade our queen of the May was Jeanne Rasmussen, whom I was smitten with, but too shy to tell her. We marched in procession from the school to the statue of Mary next to the church, and placed little bouquets at her feet, singing:
Bring flowers of the rarest
bring blossoms the fairest,
from garden and woodland and hillside and dale;
our full hearts are swelling,
our glad voices telling
the praise of the loveliest flower of the vale!
O Mary we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.
For recess, we raced from the school to the playgrounds, which were dirt lots ringed with shrubbery on either side of the convent. The nun who was cook and housekeeper kept an eye on us from her kitchen steps. There was no playground equipment, not even a swing or a slide. Bringing our own gear, we played softball, dodgeball, football, marbles, jacks, hopscotch, and mumblety-peg. There was a fallen tree trunk on which we played king of the hill, which involved two boys mounting the log and trying to push each other off. Girls fanatically jumped rope, which boys would not and as a result could not do.
I was not gifted at sports but was sought after as an entertainer. I had the knack of reading a book and repeating its dramatic highlights, and I’d walk around the block regaling my followers with the career of Harry Houdini. I went through a particularly devout period after I took the confirmation name of Blessed Dominic Savio, the saintly young pupil of St. John Bosco. I was allowed this choice by the special dispensation of Father J. W. McGinn, since technically my choice should have been a saint. Dominic made the grade a few years later, one of the youngest saints in church history. A large image of him can be seen on the wall of the grade school in Fellini’s 8 1/2.
I became inflamed by a biography of Savio in which, as a lad in school, he attempted to teach his schoolmates the folly of violence as a means of ending disputes. Two of them had a grudge and announced they would settle it with a fight. Vainly did the Blessed Dominic attempt to talk them out of this. When they squared off, he removed a crucifix from his pocket and stepped between them, holding it aloft and telling them, “Throw the first stones at me.” Shamed, they lowered their heads, and he urged them to make a good confession. This struck me as exemplary behavior, and I went to school with a small crucifix in my pocket and asked two of my friends, Dougie Pierre and Jimmy Sanders, to start a fight so I could step between them. They said they weren’t mad at each other. “Then start one anyway,” I pleaded, not quite capturing the spirit of Blessed Dominic’s message.
I was a case study. I threw myself into winning the school’s annual magazine subscription contest, sponsored by the Curtis Circulation Company. A portion of each subscription went to the school, and the best salesman won a trophy. I won two years in a row, flogging the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Popular Mechanics, and dozens of other titles (the nuns neatly crossed out Esquire on every form). A pitchman arrived to kick off the next year. “Everyone you know is a sales opportunity!” he lectured us in the auditorium. “Your parents, your neighbors, even people you meet! Don’t be shy! Sell those subscriptions!” I raised my hand. “Sir,” I asked, “would you like to buy a subscription?” I expected laughter, applause, and his congratulations. What I got was total silence and Sister Gilberta ordering me to meet with her in the hall to explain why I had embarrassed my whole school. Then followed talks with my parents. I felt humiliated and outraged. It seemed to me I had been mistreated by people with no imagination or sympathy. I suppose in another sense I was being a little jerk. That pattern has persisted.
Something happened the summer after eighth grade that puts St. Mary’s in a new light. It was my last year at St. Joseph’s Camp for Boys, on Bankson Lake in Michigan. One of my buddies was Mole Hasek from Ohio. One day the kids were grabbing off his glasses, putting them on, and staggering around: “I’m blind! I’m blind!” I took my turn and suddenly the entire world shifted into focus. I didn’t want to ever take them off again. I wrote to my parents: “I need glasses!”
The optometrist had me read the charts and slowly straightened up. “Has Roger ever worn glasses?” he asked my mother. “No. He hasn’t needed them.” The doctor said: “He’s probably always needed them. He’s very shortsighted.” He wrote me out a prescription. “Wasn’t he ever tested?” It had never occurred to anyone. My parents and my aunt Martha the nurse monitored my health, which was good; I was in the hospital only twice, to have my tonsils and appendix removed, and had monthly radiation treatments for ear infections (they were probably responsible for the salivary cancer I developed in my sixties). I’d never complained about eyesight, and no one noticed any problems. My father said, “Now we know why you always had your nose in a book.” I also knew why I was no good at sports: I couldn’t see well enough. I remember in seventh and eighth grades having a desk in the back row of the room. Apparently I couldn’t read the blackboard very well—then, or ever before. How did I get through grade school? I have no idea. Maybe Blessed Dominic coached me.
6 DAN-DAN THE YO-YO MAN
WHEN APRIL WITH its sweet showers brought flowers to the lawns of May and birds filled the air with melodies, Dan-Dan the Yo-Yo Man made his annual pilgrimage to our playground at St. Mary’s School. He drove up in a dark maroon 1950 Hudson we all recognized on sight: It had the Step-Down Ride that allowed it to outcorner Fords and Chevys at the stock car races out at the fairgrounds. To own a car like that was to be a Duncan Yo-Yo professional.
Dan-Dan dismounted on the far side of the big Hudson, and when he walked into view there were already two Yo-Yos spinning in the air before him, a whirl of red and yellow. He walked smiling toward home plate, let the Yo-Yos bounce off it, and snapped them on the fly into his pockets. He took out one and rocked the baby, walked the dog, skinned the cat, made the monkey climb the string, and went around th
e world. Then he pulled out a Camel, lit up, and passed out flyers for the citywide Duncan Yo-Yo contest that would be held on the stage of the Princess Theater on Main Street in Urbana for the following three Saturdays.
The marathon began with an elimination contest. Whoever couldn’t do a sleeper, the easiest trick of all, had to leave the stage in shame. This first Saturday was run like a cattle call: Contestants onstage at the right, sleep or wake, offstage to the left, keep it moving. Ushers made sure no one sneaked through for a second chance. Survivors were given a Yo-Yo Club card to show the next weekend.
The Saturday matinee at the Princess at one time cost nine cents. Popcorn was a nickel. Candy bars were a nickel. So were bags of drops: licorice, lemon, root beer, or horehound. An all-day sucker with Mickey Mouse on it was two cents. Jawbreakers a penny. Girls would buy a roll of Necco wafers, ten cents, and share them out. Urban legends were passed along about the kid who was running with a Holloway bar in his mouth, and he fell and the stick got driven through his brain. You gave your ticket to the usher and got your serial card punched. The serials had twelve episodes. Eleven punches, and you got into the twelfth show for free. What if you gave your card to a buddy? The Princess didn’t care. Then the buddy had to buy a ticket.
We raced inside and grabbed our favorite seats. Then big kids took them and told us to get lost. The interior would be flooded with light as someone let a buddy in free by the alley door. Much whistling and stamping of feet. An usher would race to collar the sneak before the door slammed and he took cover in protective darkness. Boys sat with boys and girls with girls. Sometimes older kids might be going steady. She would have his class ring around her neck, its weight ever so slightly depressing the uncanny valley between the sweet little bumps of her cashmere. If you sat behind them and said anything, you might get a knuckle sandwich.