“Come on, what’s the difference now? Dad’s gone, and Grandpop is not in a position to care.”
“I wish you’d just forget about it.”
“No, I’m not going to forget about it. This is bullshit. Can you for once, please, just tell me something about my family so I don’t have to keep on inventing details?”
Oh, the look my mother gave me. A withering, icy-blue stare that instantly reduced me to a child.
“I didn’t find this out until after you were born, but apparently your grandfather used to beat up your grandmother.”
My skin went cold as I imagined my grandmother—my sweet grandmother who had nothing but kind words and cookies for me growing up—being struck.
Mom saw she had me. She kept going.
“Your father said he really didn’t remember it until after you were born. But when he became a parent, I guess it all came flooding back. He was depressed all the time, and spent most family holidays avoiding your grandpop Henry—only talking to him when he had to. And that’s the way their relationship stayed until your father died. Now can we finish dinner?”
In 1917 a Philadelphia developer named Gustav Weber went to Los Angeles on his honeymoon. He fell so deeply and promptly in love with the Spanish mission-style architecture that he decided to re-create a piece of Southern California on the East Coast. Upon his return, Weber bought a triangle of land on the outskirts of Philadelphia, divided it up into blocks with street names like Los Angeles Avenue and San Gabriel Road, and then built the homes of his dream: stucco bungalows with red-tiled roofs.
Weber, however, didn’t take into account the harsh East Coast winters that killed the plants and froze the occupants of the uninsulated homes. By the time the Great Depression hit, Weber was bankrupt.
But Hollywood never died.
My grandmom had lived there—at 603 Los Angeles Avenue, near San Diego Avenue—ever since I can remember. While her ex hopped around various apartments in Frankford over the years, Ellie Wadcheck—she never went back to her maiden name—stayed put. I used to waste away many summer afternoons in the postage stamp–sized yard behind her house. Especially in the years after my father died, and my mom needed someone to watch me.
I didn’t think anything was weird about Hollywood, PA, until I went to college, and discovered that my friends thought I was full of crap.
Meghan didn’t believe me either—at first.
“She lives where?”
“Hollywood. It’s a neighborhood in Abington.”
“How have I never heard of this?”
“Oh oh oh, you’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far…”
“Shut up.”
We stopped at the Hollywood Tavern. I didn’t have a chance to finish my Johnnie Walker Black at my mother’s, and I needed another drink. Meghan decided she could use one, too. Maybe something that didn’t come from a box.
The place was a former show home for the Weber development that was later fitted with a brick addition that stuck out like a cancerous growth on the face of the mission-style pad. Inside, the bar was designed for serious drinking and sports watching. I ordered a Yuengling; Meghan had a white wine.
“My God, you weren’t full of crap. This place looks like it was scraped out of the Hollywood Hills, flung across the country and it landed here.”
“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
“Did any famous actors grow up here?”
“I don’t think so. Unless you consider Joey Lawrence famous.”
We drank. I pretended to watch baseball—a Phillies night game. But mostly I was thinking about what my mother had said.
Grandmom Ellie was surprised to see me. I never dropped by unannounced. In fact, I usually tried to wriggle out of family commitments whenever I could. Not that I didn’t like to see my family, but I always found the first ten to twenty minutes of reacclamation to be awkward and painful. There was always an undercurrent of guilt to it—
But Meghan took the edge off. Oh, how my grandmom fawned over her.
“Look at how beautiful you are! My God. Mickey, do you tell this beautiful woman how gorgeous she is every day?”
“Hi, Mrs. Wadcheck. So great to meet you.”
Meghan even pronounced the name like a pro. She was a quick study, that one.
“Oh, you’re so lovely.”
The interior of my grandmom’s bungalow hadn’t changed…ever. If I were to pop one of those white pills now, I have a feeling I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the early 1970s and now until I stepped outside and checked the cars. Everything was off-white or blinding yellow. Yellow is her favorite color.
Grandmom insisted on serving us giant tumblers of Frank’s vanilla cream soda—which let me tell you, does not go well with Yuengling or Johnnie Walker Black—as well as a tray of the most sickeningly sweet butter ring cookies I’ve ever tasted. If she noticed that I only picked up my soda with three fingers of my left hand, she didn’t let on.
Instead, Ellie Wadcheck smiled at us, but you could tell she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. You could count the times I’d dropped by just to visit on…my missing right arm.
“I wanted to ask you about something, Grandmom.”
Deep in the throes of sugar shock, I lied and said I was writing a piece about my father, and how he’d died. In my defense, I wasn’t totally lying. Maybe there was a magazine piece in this, or even a book. But writing about my father and his killer hadn’t yet occurred to me. It was just something to say to my grandmom.
She smiled at us.
“Billy Derace was the son of a whore.”
Meghan and I sat there, momentarily stunned.
“Don’t hold back, Grandmom. Tell us how you really feel.”
Grandmom laughed. She was pretty much the only relative who thought I was remotely funny.
“Oh, I didn’t know her. But she was notorious. I’ll never forgive that Billy Derace for what he did, but I’m not surprised, considering how he was raised. He was born to a very immature mother. She married young, but refused to stay home. She worked all day and went out drinking and dancing every night. Eventually the husband had enough, he left. Everyone in the neighborhood talked about it.”
“This was Frankford?”
“Yes—where I lived with your grandfather until I moved here. Anyway, there was a rumor that Billy had a younger brother who died when he was young—only three years old, they say. And Billy was the one watching him when he died.”
Meghan turned pale.
“What happened?”
“The story goes that he choked on a piece of cereal. Billy didn’t know what to do. This was…oh, 1968? 1969? Nobody taught children the Heimlich maneuver back then.”
“Where was his mother? In 1969, Billy had to be only nine or ten years old.”
“Yes, he was. His mother was out at a bar, and I suppose she thought that a nine-year-old was mature enough to care for a toddler. Billy and his brother were often left to fend for themselves.”
Meghan glanced over at me, eyebrow raised a little—but I was already taking mental notes. A three-year-old choking to death would certainly have made the newspapers back in the late 1960s, wouldn’t it? But then why wasn’t Billy taken from his irresponsible mother?
