Babby was three years older, and that age difference gave her a certain authority in watching out for me. She had brown hair and eyes and was very pretty. Being older, she was a big step ahead of me in knowing the ways of the world and especially about boys. When puberty erupted and the hormones kicked in, she stepped in as a form of guardian angel because there was no mother or grandmother figure around to rein me in.
“When he comes into your mind, just think about things you hate about him,” she told me. That was her form of psychology to help rid me of puppy love. She thought my feelings had become a little too hot and heavy (nothing beyond kissing!) for Gene Springer, the boy who worked at the taffy counter at the carnival. She was also concerned about another boy named Doc Bush, and for good reason. He was five years older than I was! And I was crazy about him.
Temptation was all around, and had I been a little freer in spirit and not so Catholic, I might have gotten in some serious trouble. Case in point: Babby, Oscar, and I often went dancing at the Rendezvous Dance Hall in nearby Tell City. When I was out on the dance floor, I really felt the music and wasn’t shy about expressing it—which would later prove to be a good thing when I became a Broadway performer. “Don’t shake your behind like that,” Babby warned me. Guys were always asking me to dance, and I was only thirteen.
Along with Babby’s loving influence, religion also served to hold me in check. When I was a child, I had to go to mass nearly every day. And once a week, we all lined up to go into the little box for confession. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” was how I would begin. Our parish priest was on the other side of the perforated slot. When I was little, my sins were fairly predictable: “I disobeyed my parents”; “I fought with my brothers and sisters.” As I got older and when it was something I thought was really a bad sin, I tried to disguise my voice, because the priest knew us all. My voice would go into a higher register: “I lied”; “I had impure thoughts”; “I touched myself impurely.”
Confession is a fairly serious sacrament in the Catholic Church. It’s all tied to owning up to our shortcomings, expressing genuine sorrow, receiving penance of some sort, and finally, absolution. Also, one of the other big rules is that what is said in the box stays in the box. One day, this rule provoked a particularly severe case of soul-searching for the simple reason that our priest absentmindedly forgot to close the slot on my side before he had finished with the person in front of me. As I entered, he had already begun to hear the confession of an older girl named Maria—better known as “Maria with the big boobs” among us other less endowed girls. Maria launched into her confession, and it was much better than listening to the radio. “Oh my God,” I said to myself, realizing that I would probably be compelled to add this inadvertent eavesdropping to my already prepared list of sins. But this was juicy stuff. Maria said she was truly sorry how she let her boyfriend Simon have his way with her ample breasts. I decided to leave well enough alone.
A short time later, our priest revealed that he too fudged on the rules. At the end of one of my confessions, he asked, “By the way, Florence, how’s Carl?” He was referring to my brother, who was gravely ill at the time. So much for the pretense of anonymity!
Our priest had no doubt a fair good bit of material for his own confession. It was clear that he thought that all of us blossoming young girls were pretty cute. As a group of us were graduating from the eighth grade, he called us to his rectory upstairs. He had us all line up. He was seated in a chair with his legs spread wide. When it was each girl’s turn, he would rub us against his crotch. At least he kept his clothes on. I remember thinking, “That’s Father So-and-So. Oh my God! What about confession? Is this his sin or ours?”
One of the girls must have told her parents about the incident. My mother got wind of it and asked me about it. “Yes,” I admitted to her, “but I don’t think he meant anything bad with it.” I was always trying to make everything right, which was not always a good thing. The priest had been at the parish for many years, but was transferred somewhere else soon thereafter. Many years later, he came to see me performing on Broadway in Fanny.
In general, when those kinds of things happened, whether it was going on in the home, at church, or anywhere, kids didn’t speak up as promptly as they should have. In high school, I was living with another family, and their friend came to visit one afternoon in quite a drunken state. “Now, you’ll be very sorry,” I said to him, trying to talk him down while circling the table in order to get close enough to escape through the door. Even though that self-preservation instinct luckily worked in our favor, we always had a blurry line of what was appropriate and what was not. Someone touching your private parts or hitting you was not called sexual abuse or domestic violence back then. You didn’t tattle
