“I can see through your skin, Pop,” I’d say.
“Yes, you can, dear. Yes, you can. You can see well enough for both of us.” And he’d laugh.
Pop was usually downstairs by the time I woke up. Every day he ate the same thing: oatmeal, a three-minute egg, some bacon, and toast. His prune juice and coffee were always in the same place, as were his pills and vitamins, just in front of the prune juice glass to the right of his plate. I loved to watch him glide his hand from the edge of the table as he reached for his vitamins. He slid it forward on the table, using his thumb to feel the plate as a guide and his index and middle finger crawling across the red-and-white checkered tablecloth toward his juice glass as he felt for the pills.
After breakfast, I’d go upstairs with Pop while my grandmother washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. We’d sit in his bedroom, which had a lot of light since he had a corner room. While we listened to the opening of Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club on the radio, he piled stacks of quarters, dimes, and nickels on the side table next to the crystal bowl full of sour balls. I might march around the room as though I were part of Don McNeill’s audience singing, “America awaits, the breakfast club is on the air!” as everyone sang the opening song, or I’d peer out one of the windows to see the Davis’ house next door. Their house was larger, and they had a big, long yard. Mr. Davis always looked cranky, but he wasn’t at all. He was just ill, my grandmother said. Sometimes he’d see me and wave. I wasn’t sure if I should be watching him, so I’d wave back then go sit next to Pop.
Before I’d say goodbye to Pop to go shopping with Grandma for that day’s groceries or a trip to the pharmacy on Kings Highway, he’d give me some coins so I could buy a box of Smith Brothers cough drops for myself. Sometimes he asked me to bring him a box, too. I never thought what it was like for Pop to sit alone in that room most of the time, listening to the radio; my grandmother (unless others were visiting) was his only company.
I looked over at my father as we drove. He was as old as my great-grandfather was during that time, and I was as old as my grandmother had been. When Dad was not playing golf, running errands, or on what I call “dad trips” with me in the car, he sat in his chair, watching television—baseball, basketball, and golf mostly—his only company (unless others are visiting) me. He seemed content. Relieved that we spent as much one-on-one time together as we did, I promised myself that it would not change. My father would not sit alone like Pop. Unless he wanted to.
“I don’t have a lot of memories of Mom in that house, Dad, except when there were gatherings, like Thanksgiving or Easter.”
“Probably because she tried to get out as much as she could. She didn’t feel welcomed or comfortable with them. They were bastards to her. And they tried to take you over. One day she came home, and my father had rolled up the mattresses on her bed. Who knows why? That’s when she got an apartment in Sheepshead Bay. She was pregnant with your brother and had to walk up three flights of stairs. It was harder once she had your brother. No one helped her. She had to rely on my parents to watch you from time to time, and every time she’d pick you up, it was a struggle to take her own child home.”
I could tell Dad was still angry and sad. I was, too, hearing this. And ashamed. I remembered some of those instances where I wrapped myself around my grandmother’s legs and screamed to my mother that I didn’t want to go with her. She would look at me, then look at my grandmother, and say, “Alright then. You have a nice time with Grandma, Nancie. I’ll be back tomorrow to pick you up.”
I did not share this with Dad. It was still too sad.
“But she managed by herself until I got home from Korea. Your mom picked me up when I got back. And then, boy, did she let me have it.”
“You mean Grandma didn’t insist on going too?” I asked. I remembered my grandmother always picked Dad or my Uncle Bill up from the train or Patterson Field when they returned home for short visits.
“They knew I was coming in that week,” he said, “but your mother and I kept the day and time a secret from them so that we could have some time alone. They always insisted on infringing. We went straight to the apartment. When I saw it and learned what had happened, I made sure your mother never stayed with my parents again.”
“And I said to them when I saw them, ‘By the way, thanks for taking such good care of Suzy.’ They knew exactly what I meant.”
“Did they?” I wondered.
“They sure did,” he said with certainty.
I told my father the memories I’d retained from that day. I remember clearly that he came through the kitchen door, and I looked up to see him standing there. Someone asked me, “Do you know who this is?” and I replied, “That’s my Daddy.” I remember running to him and getting a big hug and being happy. My father confirms that really happened.
I decided to share what my grandmother told me once while she and I had tea one afternoon during a summer visit after our return from Germany. As always, she described the homecoming in grand and dramatic detail.
“I met your father and brought him home. We walked through the kitchen door. He was so handsome in his uniform and just back from Korea. There you were, as you always were, playing in the corner near the radiator and the basement door, concentrating on some game. And when you saw your father, you jumped up and ran to him. You nearly flew across the room and into his arms crying, “Daddy!”
My father was laughing at this point.
I went on, “Then she said that you said, ‘They told me she wouldn’t remember me.’ I asked her if you cried, Dad. And she said, ‘es, he did. Everyone cried.’ Did you really cry, Dad?” I giggled.
“Oh, for Chrissake. What a bullshit artist,” Dad said. I looked at him. We both started laughing again.
Until that moment I had no memory of Mom in that scene at all, but then I remembered. They came through the door together and she stopped, fading into the background behind him, as he made his entrance. Yet again, inside that house and among those people, she became invisible.
CHAPTER 7
New Recruit
THE FIRST SEEDS of any tension between my mother and me were planted back then by my grandparents, who led me to believe she wanted to keep me away from them. These seeds germinated and grew. It was unfair, but my grandparents seemed more like parents to me than she did. If I compared ours to other families, my mother seemed more like an older sister. I believed they loved me more than she did. They never yelled at me. They seldom told me no. Discipline and punishment, if necessary, was carried out gently. Even after my brother was born, I felt I was more loved than he. I felt bad about believing my grandparents loved me more than my brother because I adored him. My grandmother told me that when we went to pick him up at the hospital on Governors Island, I said, “Give him to me, he’s mine.”
I admit now that I was not in the least bit happy to hear that my mother was going to have another baby, which only added to the conflicting feelings I had about her that my grandparents nurtured. By the time I learned what seemed to be happy news for everyone else, we were living in Brooklyn again because my father had been shipped to Korea.
“Isn’t it wonderful, Nancie? Soon you’ll have a little sister or brother to play with,” my grandmother told me.
When I responded that I did not need or want a new brother or sister, everyone laughed at me and let me know that, unfortunately, I was not in charge of that.
“I know you’ll be such a wonderful big sister. And when you see the baby you’ll fall in love and want to be with it every moment,” Aunt Julia told me.
I gave this a lot of thought. It seemed that no one cared what I thought about this situation. I came up with a plan. If there were to be a new baby, I wanted it to be a boy. At least then I’d still be the only girl. Apparently, my attempts to set myself up as being special began for me when I was quite young. I went into stealth mode.
When people asked me if I was happy that I’d be a big sister soon, I’d reply, “Oh, yes.�
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When they asked me if I wanted a baby sister or a baby brother, I’d respond, “I want a baby brother.”
Each night at bedtime, my nightly prayers included, “And please send a little baby boy to be my little brother. I will love him and protect him forever.”
With my brother’s birth, a new family story unfolded. Though Dad had been in Korea, he filled in the parts that were missing from the versions I heard from Mom and Grandma. Mom was living in the three-floor walkup in Sheepshead Bay after the rolled-up mattress incident. When the labor pains began, Mom said she called my grandmother to drive her to the hospital, which required a ferry ride to Governors Island.
Grandma told me that Mom’s labor progressed so quickly that by the time she, Aunt Julia, and Mom got to the ferry, Mom was almost ready to have the baby and the ferry was about to leave. I’m not sure why I didn’t ask Grandma where I was, but I didn’t. Perhaps they left me with Mom’s downstairs neighbor who had been one of Mom’s best high school girlfriends.
“They were putting down the gate, and we were next in line,” Grandma told me. “I told the man, ‘You have to let us on the ferry,’ but he said we’d have to wait for the next one. So I told him if we waited, your mother would have the baby right then and there on the ramp, and it would be his responsibility, so they squeezed us on.”
Dad told me that Mom, still upset from all the events leading up to her getting her apartment, did not want my grandparents involved in my brother’s birth in any way. Grandma, with her Pontiac and assignment as the family chauffeur, insisted that Mom call her. Going to the hospital in a taxi didn’t make any sense.
If they almost missed the ferry, it was my mother’s fault,” Dad said. “Your mother called to say she needed to go to the hospital, and your grandmother didn’t show up until an hour or more later. And she brought Julia. Julia didn’t need to be there.”
Sometimes I would go to my grandparents’ home alone after my brother was born. Sometimes he would come with me.
I do remember loving him and feeling very protective of him—most of the time. I was also amazed by the differences in our bodies and his ability to shoot and hit the chandelier above my grandmother’s dining room table with his “different parts” during diaper changes.
Despite visits to my grandparents from time to time, my brother and I lived at my mother’s apartment. I began to love it there. The Clancy clan lived downstairs, so I had playmates. My mother took us out when she shopped for groceries, walked by Sheepshead Bay, and visited other people. We had television, and I watched Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, and Romper Room. And then Dad came home.
CHAPTER 8
Change of Command
I KNEW I HAD A FATHER and that he was a soldier (that was reason he was away so much), but I had not quite grasped the concept of either role. At that time in my life, most children I knew had fathers who lived with them in the same house. I believed that mine did, too, in a way.
My father was blond and handsome, the youngest of the three men who grinned down at me from the silver-framed photographs of uniformed young brothers—Uncle Bill, Uncle Jack, and my father—that stood in a row on my grandparents’ living room bookcase just next to the Waterford Crystal holy water bottle. I grew to love him based not only on the stories my grandmother told me, but because he was a large part of my early religious experience.
On the nights that I spent at my grandparents’ home, my grandmother bathed me in an old claw-foot bathtub, which seemed to me as big as one of the boats we saw in Sheepshead Bay. Then she carried me down to the kitchen for eggnog—real eggnog, with raw eggs, creamy whole milk from the glass bottles that waited on the front step each morning, vanilla, and sugar. Grandma said the eggnog would thicken my blood and make me strong. When I became full and sleepy, she carried me to the living room, took the holy water bottle and moistened the tips of the fingers of my right hand. I performed the Sign of the Cross with solemnity.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost …” I would ask God to bless my father and my Uncle Bill and keep them safe.
I have no recollection of asking God to bless Uncle Jack. Maybe that was because he was no longer in the Navy. Or perhaps Grandma didn’t think he needed any blessings since we saw him frequently and he seemed to be fine. I always felt bad for not asking God to watch out for Uncle Jack, but I included him with my prayers for the civilians.
Next, we’d go upstairs to say goodnight to Pop, who would say, “God bless you, dear.” And I’d fling a kiss to him from the doorway. The fun part came next.
Grandma would turn on the lamp beside my bed and lift the little plastic irradiated statue of Saint Joseph holding Baby Jesus close to the lamp’s bulb. I can still see her sitting on the twin bed opposite mine, long legs crossed, left arm held high inside the lampshade as she watched me, her right hand in her lap.
I kneeled on the floor, barely able to reach my folded hands to the bed, leaned my head against the mattress, and said my prayers. I had no idea what they meant. One was about our father. One was about Mary and her room of fruit. The other about four boys named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then I’d say the prayer my Uncle Jack taught me:
Now I lay me down to sleep
A bag of peanuts by my feet.
If I should die before I wake
Please give them to my brother Jake.
Grandma always laughed, then made me say it her way. She’d place Saint Joseph on the nightstand facing me. She’d draw the blackout curtains, kiss me, and say, “Sleep tight, Glory,” and I, bathed in the radioactive rays of Baby Jesus and his daddy, would think about my own and wonder if he could glow green in the dark, too.
During my father’s eighteen-month tour in Korea, the children of the neighborhood noticed my father’s long absence.
“You don’t have a daddy,” they told me.
When I insisted that I did have a father, they insisted I prove it and show them who my father was. One day we marched down East 12th Street, up the front steps, through the glassed-in porch, and into the vestibule, where I rang the doorbell because I could not manage to open the big door. My grandmother answered and smiled down at the motley crew in front of her.
“They say I don’t have a daddy. I want to show them.”
“Be my guest,” my grandmother said. She stood back and waved us through as we moved through the door. She followed us through the foyer and into the living room. She smiled, amused. This story, too, would become part of family legend. I pointed to the three pictures on the bookshelf.
“There is my Uncle Bill. He’s a pilot. There is my Uncle Jack. He was in the Navy. And there is my daddy. He’s a soldier.”
“That’s not a daddy,” Eileen said, “that’s a picture.”
She looked at my grandmother and asked, “Where is her daddy?”
My grandmother explained, “Nancie’s father is in the Army. He’s away in Korea right now. The next time he is here you can meet him.”
After that the children continued to tease me, adding, “Nancie’s father ran away because he doesn’t want to live with her.”
My grandparents just laughed when I complained. “You know that’s not true. You remember your father.”
They were right. The soldier in the picture was not a stranger to me. I had vivid memories of the times when Mom, Dad, and I lived together when we weren’t living in New York. I remembered Dad sweeping me up in the air as I tried to dart away from my mother at the swimming pool and head for the water.
“Oh, no you don’t. You can’t go in wearing a diaper,” he’d say laughing, giving my diaper a soft swat as a reminder.
I remembered him pushing me in the stroller around the block in Fort Rucker, Alabama, on hot afternoons, patiently answering questions, never displaying boredom, but stopping at the back door each time we came around the block, where I could see my mother cooking in the kitchen. “Can we come in now?”
“No. I’m not ready,” she’d say without look
ing up, and off we would go again until she said we could come in.
Still, to stop the taunting, I began to run to my grandfather when I saw him on the street shouting, “Hi, Daddy!” My grandparents did not discourage this and laughed; however, this could not have made my mother happy and served as another device for removing her from the picture.
When my father came home from Korea, my grandmother claimed I took him right outside and marched him up and down the block, introducing him to anyone we met.
With him holding my hand, I introduced him: “This is my daddy.”
“Oh, that never happened,” my father tells me. I may not have, at least not the way my grandmother described it, but I do remember walking with my father to St. Brendan’s or around the corner to the drugstore on Coney Island Avenue where someone would ask, “Who’s that, Nancie?” I was very happy to announce, “This is my daddy.”
Dad and I were on our way to the dump in his thirty-year-old truck. As we did when we drank tea, we told stories when he drove me anywhere.
“When I learned how they treated your mother while I was away, I knew that we were on our own. We couldn’t count on anyone except ourselves. We had to be our own little unit. We wouldn’t ask them for anything again. From then on it was just your mom, me, and you kids. We finally came into our own when we moved to Germany.”
“It took an ocean and a new continent to escape those people,” I said, and laughed.
To me, our life as a family began when Dad moved into the apartment while he arranged for our move from Brooklyn to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
My mother was so happy. Dad played with us and fixed things in the apartment. I had no idea that I would not see either set of grandparents frequently or how far away this place Oklahoma was. I had a father, a mother, a baby brother, and a whole new lifestyle. The era of packing up, moving out, and discovering new places together had begun. The platoon was on the move.
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