Pagan Heaven

by Ruth Rouff

  Tommy was pretty good with a hammer and nails, so he climbed up a ladder and hung my mother’s old beige curtains from the rafters to break up the space. When our next-door neighbor, Kevin Schmidt, popped his head into the garage to see what we were doing, I got an idea and looked around. There was an old chain in one corner of the garage, near a bald tire.

  “Here, you can rattle this,” I told Kevin.

  “Can I howl too?” Kevin asked.

  “Sure,” said Tommy. “You can howl all you want!”

  “Think I’ll ask my mom if I can take one of her old pots to bang on,” Kevin mused. “You know, footsteps . . .”

  I forget whose idea it was to place a red devil’s mask over the utility light by the garage door, but it was a good one. By jerking a long string, Tommy could turn the light on and off, so it would seem like the devil had glowing eyes.

  Tommy had another idea.

  “I think we should give out prizes,” he announced. “Anyone who comes to the show gets a chance to win a prize.”

  “What’ll the prize be?” I asked.

  “How about a yoyo? I have a couple at home that I haven’t played with much. Or maybe a fake snake? I got it. The fake snake can be the grand prize—the g.p., and the yoyo can be the grand grand prize—the g.g.p!”

  “The g.g.p?” I had to laugh at Tommy’s nomenclature. “Sounds good,” I said. Tommy ran home and back, and brought the yoyo and the fake snake. He carefully draped the snake over the mock tombstone.

  While we were still setting up, my father poked his head inside. Fortunately, he parked the family car on the driveway in the summer, never in the garage.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. Evidently my mother hadn’t bothered to tell him.

  “Setting up a spook show,” I replied.

  He frowned. That was his default expression. Like Tommy’s father, he wasn’t in the best of health. He had already had one heart attack before we moved to New Jersey from Pittsburgh several years earlier. I used to worry a lot that he’d have another one. His face would get red with the slightest exertion, and he often coughed. He had a heart doctor, but this was before they did bypasses, so there wasn’t much doctors could do if you had arteries blocked from decades of cholesterol.

  “Well, don’t get into anything,” he growled, and left. I was relieved. You never knew how my father would react to things. If he was in a particularly bad mood, he could be quite nasty.

  A day later the spook show began. The neighborhood kids had this amazed look on their faces as I guided them around the garage. Tommy switched the devil light on and off and on via the long string. Sam popped out of the steamer trunk on cue, while Kevin made hellacious noises behind the back curtain. Some of the kids were so impressed that they paid a dime to see the show again. I forget who won the prizes. All told we made a few bucks. But the biggest payoff was entertaining the kids. We lived in a development where you had to get an adult to drive you places. The spook show was something we kids accomplished on our own.

  A few months later, I learned that Tommy’s dad had died. The radiation treatments—which had probably been very crude—hadn’t helped at all.

  The next summer, my father suffered another heart attack and collapsed late one evening at the dining room table. Ever the conscientious metallurgist, he had been outlining some project for work one night on a yellow legal pad when he was stricken. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

  Neither Tommy nor I ever talked to each other about our fathers’ deaths. We continued to play catch and sometimes “kick the can” in the street as if nothing had happened. Mrs. Del Vecchio still shouted “Tommy,” and he still replied “what-y.” Sometimes Mrs. Del Vecchio would drive Tommy, Joanne Muhlbacher, and me to a roller skating rink in Glassboro. It was fun going around and around the rink to the corny music. Although Tommy was a much better skater than Joanne or me, I don’t recall him ever making fun of our tendency to hug the wall. About a year later, Mrs. Del Vecchio sold their house and the family moved away—as I recall, they were going back to live with Tommy’s grandmother. That was the last I heard of them, until recently.

  Writing all this in the warm glow of nostalgia compelled me to look up Tommy Del Vecchio on the Internet. It would be an understatement to say what I found put a different slant on my warm memories. Staring out from a mug shot taken in Florida was Tommy. I was sure it was he. He was the right age, and he had the same blue-green, close-set eyes, short nose, and round face. Only he was older and grizzled and looked to be a barfly like someone out of Charles Bukowski.

  According to the news story—which was from a local website in Florida—Tommy had made drunken advances toward a nine-year-old girl on a public beach—telling her she was beautiful and asking her if she and her adult cousin, who was also present, wanted to go home with him. He had also tripped the nine year old and either deliberately or by accident flicked cigarette ash at her. When the girl and her cousin threatened to call the cops on him, he hurried away. But based on his description, the police tracked him down and arrested him on charges of felony child abuse.

  The article went on to say that he had a prior arrest for “defrauding an innkeeper.” Amazed, I continued looking through the entries on Thomas Del Vecchio and came across more mug shots. In each one, he looked angry, hard, and defiant. He looked aggrieved—like the kind of guy who felt as if everyone else had something that he didn’t, and he wanted what they had. Evidently, he had been in trouble with the law more than once. His rap sheet, though not lengthy, included grand theft auto.

  I printed out a copy of the article and showed it to my brother Sam.

  “Do you think that’s Tommy?” I asked him.

  He stared at it. “Yes,” he said. He couldn’t stop staring at the mug shot. I guess, like me, he was trying to see the child in the man.

  This two-bit criminal was one of my dear childhood friends! We still had a photo of him in the family album. In it, he and Sam and Kevin Schmidt’s little sister Pamela are grinning for the camera. Tommy has by far the largest grin.

  Zip

  I was sitting in the recreation room watching TV on a Sunday afternoon with my father. I was about nine years old. I don’t remember where my mother was, probably performing one of the tedious chores that seemed to be her lot in life. As the credits rolled and the movie Pal Joey began, my father suddenly turned to me and said, “You can’t watch this. It’s for adults only.”

  “Why?” I asked, but he gave no answer. He simply repeated that the movie was for adults. He seemed sort of smug when he said it, as if he knew something I didn’t. I was pissed. Even at this early date, I adored beautiful actresses. I knew enough to know that there was no violence in this movie. Nor was it a horror movie that would be likely to give me nightmares. Storming out of the recreation room, I ran up to my bedroom, slammed the door, threw myself on my bed, and sobbed bitterly. I felt that my father was denying me a pleasure that he was intent on enjoying himself. I vaguely realized that that pleasure was intimately connected to the female sex. I thought my father was being selfish.

  Although Pal Joey, which started Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak was somewhat racy for its time, the average soap opera today has far more sex in it. In the movie, Rita Hayworth plays an ex-stripper who marries a rich man and is then widowed. Frank Sinatra, who plays Joey Evans, a second-rate singer and notorious womanizer, wants her to finance a nightclub that he will call Chez Joey. The only catch is that Joey finds himself attracted to a beautiful young chorus girl played by Kim Novak. If Joey pursues Kim Novak’s character, he loses the club deal.

  Back when I was a kid I didn’t understand why my father didn’t want me to watch Pal Joey. Now of course I do. My father wanted to enjoy the sexy women all by himself. I guess that he, a married man with a heart condition and seven kids, wanted to imagine himself as Pal Joey, a carefree bachelor whose major problem in life was choosing between Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak. Watching this movie was my father’s
escape. Having me—a product of his desire—in the room while he was watching it would have destroyed the illusion.

  My father hadn’t a clue about my budding sexuality. Because one of my childhood friends was a boy named Randy, my father would sometimes sing a lyric, “Randy, is a minister handy?” which was a variation on the song “Mandy” from the movie, White Christmas. The assumption was that my pal Randy would become my boyfriend. Even back then, before I really knew I was a lesbian, this assumption used to gall me. Randy was a bright and loyal friend, and I certainly appreciated him for sharing his Batman comic books with me, but I found the idea of marrying him decidedly unappealing.

  Two years later, my father died of a massive heart attack, years before I could have announced my lesbianism to him. Just out of curiosity, I recently watched Rita Hayworth’s big song and dance number “Zip” in Pal Joey on Youtube.com. In it she references her stripper past as she vamps across the stage making references to the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, the political commentator, Walter Lippmann, and the burlesque house operator, Minsky. But the only thing Hayworth takes off as she prances about the stage is her long white gloves. She also does a bit of flirtatious posturing with some long white embellishments that hang off her dress. That’s the number my father didn’t want me to see? Shit.

  Or perhaps it was another Pal Joey number, in which Kim Novak’s character takes a dare and strips down to her bustier and a little skirt thing. Before she can go any further, Sinatra, who has the hots for her, grows squeamish and tells her to go to her dressing room and put her clothes on. He has realized that she’s a nice girl at heart, nice and young enough for him to marry. Not old (thirty-nine!) and used up like Rita Hayworth. (By the way, Sinatra was three years older than Hayworth when Pal Joey was released.)

  When I came of age, I used to go to lesbian bars in Philly. Sometimes the bars would feature strippers. These young women stripped down to pasties and a g-string in front of an admiring, if not exactly lustful, all-female audience. The strippers had luscious bodies. I wonder what my father would have thought if he knew I had seen them.

  Like father, like daughter? Or, all his efforts, for naught. That’s what happens when a parent dies young. You just never know.

  Great Depression

  I was eight years old and knew I was in trouble when the screw fell out of the right hinge of my eyeglasses. In desperation I got down on my hands and knees and scoured the sidewalk for the screw, but I couldn’t find it. But necessity is the mother of invention. So what I did was take a pin from my mother’s sewing box and put it in the hinge in place of the screw. I bent the pin so its sharp end wouldn’t cut my face.

  So here I am walking around with a pin holding the right earpiece to my glasses. Stupidly, I hoped my mother wouldn’t notice.

  Unfortunately, she noticed. We were standing in the living room of my family’s split-level home.

  “What is this???!!” she asked, her voice rising as she plucked my glasses from my face. “What did you do to your glasses???!!!” she shrieked.

  “The screw fell out . . . I couldn’t find it,” I managed to explain.

  She got a mad gleam in her eyes.

  “Taking a pin . . . !!!” My mother was simply outraged that I had allowed the screw to fall out. It was just one more aggravating thing for her to deal with. She, who couldn’t cope.

  I began to blubber and ran to my room. My mother ranted for a few more minutes, then quieted down and began preparing dinner. Meatloaf.

  In actuality, a trip to the local Kmart would have fixed the glasses. As I later noticed, they sold eyeglass repair kits, complete with tiny screwdriver and replacement screws, at checkouts. They cost about a buck or two. After my mother recovered her sanity, that was probably just what we did. But I forget that part.

  Another “situation”: It was night time, a Saturday night in summer, and my younger brother Sam was running around the recreation room in his bare feet. He stepped on a thumbtack, and it went into his foot. I don’t know where the thumbtack came from . . . probably from a bulletin board that my older brother Bob used to display the old postcards he collected. I don’t recall Sam shouting in pain, though he must have. I do remember my mother shrieking at him for stepping on the thumbtack. It was like Armageddon going off in our rec room. Even the cat ran and hid. How foolish of Sam to have an accident! Now my mother would have to take him to the doctor, and he would have to get a tetanus shot. It was just too much to deal with.

  My mother had some insight into her condition. “I have bad nerves,” she used to say in her quieter moments. But she never apologized. I guess she felt that cooking and cleaning for us all those years was enough. It’s a good question: how many dinners cooked and cookies baked and toilets scrubbed compensate for terrifying your children?

  My mother had been taking the tranquilizer Meprobamate throughout my childhood, even when my father was still alive. However, it didn’t seem to help much. Sometimes she’d tell me that she hadn’t slept all night. When she had a run of insomnia, she’d let her short gray hair get greasy and lank. Other times she’d tell him how badly her head hurt. She’d sit at the breakfast table with her hand on the side of her head, a crucified look on her face. I felt bad for her, but what could I do?

  Finally she had to be hospitalized for depression. A staff psychiatrist at Underwood Memorial Hospital put her on Paxil. The psychiatrist wanted her to come in for therapy, but she refused.

  “What good would that do?” she said. She wanted to be self-reliant, like her immigrant parents had been. Talk therapy was self-indulgent . . . something for rich people. But drugs were okay, under certain circumstances. I know that a lot of people frown on antidepressants these days, but Paxil definitely helped my mother. Gone were the depressive lows, and the anxiety abated somewhat, too. She joined a senior citizen group at her local church and went on bus trips to the Atlantic City casinos, which she seemed to enjoy. She mellowed, somewhat. Besides, Sam and I were out of the house by now. She couldn’t shriek at us the way she used to, although she still did tee off on Bob sometimes, who was developmentally disabled and who would always live at home.

  Years later, I was sitting in a board meeting of a local theater company, to which I belonged. Someone asked me to perform a task for the company. I was to contact local media and try to arrange publicity for the company. My lack of confidence must have shown.

  “You get a haunted look on your face,” my friend Gina later told me. Gina was the president of the company. She was the first and so far the only person to ever say that to me.

  Gina is one of the few people I know whose mother wasn’t a victim. Gina’s mother went to college and then to law school. She eventually became a family court judge. A judge!

  My mother had wanted to go to college, but her mother wanted her to work and help support the family, so that was just what she did. This was during the 1930s . . . during the Great Depression. My mother loved literature. When she was a girl, she walked miles to check works by Charles Dickens out of the public library in Sheridan. She told us that she loved walking “up to Sheridan,” as if the walk itself put her on a different plane of being. She loved David Copperfield and Great Expectations and all of those humongous 19th century Victorian novels. She even read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. She would have excelled as an English major in college. Instead she worked in an office for a time, adding up columns of numbers. Then she got married to my father, a metallurgist for the Navy, and had seven kids. My younger brother Sam and I were the last two. We lived with her after our father died of a heart attack. The other kids, except for Bob, were out of the house by that time, either going to college or married or working.

  One sunny day in April when I was seventeen years old, I got a fat letter in the mail from Vassar College. I opened the letter, read it, and then went to tell my mother what it said. She was out in the back yard hanging clothes.

  “I got accepted by Vassar,” I said. “They’re giving me nearly a full schol
arship.”

  My mother looked at me. She didn’t look pleased. She looked annoyed.

  “Good,” she said. “Why don’t you help me hang these clothes?”

  I did so.

  Anne Taintor is a writer/artist who adds witty captions to 1950s-style images that look as if they could have appeared in the Ladies Home Journal. In one of her books there’s a picture of a 1950s-style housewife serving dinner. The caption reads something like this: “Pot roast, with a side dish of resentment.”

  That housewife was my mother to a T.

  When I Liked Country

  A long time ago I liked country music. The man who fostered my appreciation was a young English instructor I had in college whom I shall call John Fredericks. John grew up on a ranch outside of Stockton, California. As far as English professors go, he was rather unusual. He was a cowboy with a Ph.D. from Yale. I wouldn’t call him macho per se, but he wore cowboy boots and dipped Copenhagen snuff, which he spit out into paper cups that fell over and stained the interior of his white Volkswagen Beetle. He was too intellectually sophisticated to be comfortable with the sophistries of cowboy life, but he knew men who were, and was comfortable around them. And of course, he had a warm spot for country music, especially bluegrass and the outlaw sub-genre most famously interpreted by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. Despite his Ivy League pedigree, I believe that John fancied himself an outlaw. I got the sense that he was somewhat embarrassed about teaching at a formerly women’s college. It wasn’t exactly a “manly” occupation. In fact, it was something that the men he had grown up around would have made lewd jokes about. “All that pussy,” they would have said.