When my siblings and I get together, we can tell stories about our mother and laugh in retrospect, although things weren’t always so funny at the time. One such episode that best epitomizes the kind of love/hate relationship I had with my mother was about my high school prom. Although I had a job after school working at a soda fountain and lived with the Chinn family taking care of their kids, I didn’t have very much money and not nearly enough to buy a dress. So I wrote to her in Cleveland to ask if she could help me out with this all-important milestone in my life. I would have been overjoyed if she had sent me a couple of dollars, but instead a box arrived. I opened it up, and my heart sank. Inside was a white frilly dress, the kind that a young girl might wear to first communion or confirmation in the church. God knows why she sent it to me. Was it because she had no money? Stinginess? Or was it simply that she was ignorant of what was appropriate for a teenage girl? Or all of the above?
I told my brother Joe about it. I guess I had loaded my entire inventory of disappointment onto this single event. It was impossible to hold back how deeply upset I was about the situation. Like he did in many situations, he came to my rescue. He sent me ten dollars, and I got a dress.
One other memorable example of when Joe stuck up for me happened a few years earlier. It was during World War II, and he had come home on leave dressed in his sailor uniform with the white hat. Mother was fed up, exasperated by how I was asking too many questions all the time. But he had a question of his own. “Why do you think she’s so smart?” he asked her. “It’s because she’s asking questions. Don’t ever stop her from doing that.”
My memories of my mother’s departure from the family seem shrouded in fog. I was resigned to it, but I also didn’t want to think about it because it would remind me that my situation was not okay. It was the child’s mechanism for coping. That was the way it was. I put it off to the side. “If she comes back, she comes back,” I thought. You just go about your business. I was the optimist, convinced that everything was going to be all right. At the same time, my father was beginning to get terrible headaches, probably the precursor of his cancer, so I was frankly more focused on his well-being than my mother’s.
I would see my mother from time to time after she moved away, and I grew much closer to her late in her life. But she never came back to Rockport, not for my hospitalization for appendicitis nor for my high school graduation. In fact, she never set foot in our family home again.
No one outside the immediate family except my best friend Oscar came over regularly to visit. There wasn’t much to see. It was exactly how you would imagine Depression-era poverty to be. From the outside, it didn’t look that bad—a small, well-built wood-frame house. In fact, it still stands there today, albeit in much better shape than when we lived there. Downstairs, there was a small kitchen and a living room with a stove for warmth and a radio that my father often tuned in to listen to the boxing matches.
One bright spot in the sitting room was a sofa covered in a yellow plastic-like fabric. To the best of our abilities, Babby and I tried to fix the place up. We painted and put up curtains. Where there were holes in the walls, we stuffed old clothes and rags into them to protect against the cold. We then put paper over the hole and painted it. It didn’t look too bad.
Another downstairs room just by the staircase was full of some old storage trunks, mostly things that my mother had left behind and other assorted junk. Since we didn’t have a car, the adjacent garage was also used for storage, including the stockpile of emptied liquor bottles.
Upstairs, there were two small rooms, one more filled with junk, and the other a bedroom where my sister and I slept in one bed and my father in the other. The bedroom closet was also short on amenities. The few clothes we had hung from hooks on the wall instead of the customary bar with hangers. In the winter, the bedroom’s broken windows gave no protection against the cold air, overwhelming any warmth that might rise from the woodstove in the living room below.
To deal with the cold, my sister and I often slept like spoons, turning over systematically in intervals, switching when one side was warm to heat up the other side. On really cold nights, my father put a big old overcoat on top of our blanket.
Inside our Rockport house, Babby and I had more serious things to deal with than the cold. We always had to be on guard, hypervigilant around our father because we never knew what to expect around him when he was drinking. Since there was no one else there to protect us, we saw up close and took the full brunt of the daily reality of the destructive nature of alcoholism. We learned quickly how all semblances of human dignity, morality, and judgment of what’s simply right and wrong can evaporate into thin air.
“Pauline, I know he thinks that
