Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (3 page)

It was, however, through the older, frailer Helen, not the young woman of my wishful imaginings, that I came to worship the world of books. Whereas my father’s interest in reading was confined mainly to newspapers and magazines, my mother read books in every spare moment: books in the middle of the night, when she had trouble breathing; books in the morning, after she cleared the breakfast table; books in the early afternoon, when she finished the housework, shopping, and ironing; books in the late afternoon after preparations for dinner were completed; and, again, books in the evenings.

The corner drugstore had a lending library where current best-sellers could be rented for several cents a day. And in the center of our town stood the cramped public library she adored, an old brick building built before the town had a high school or a bank. With linoleum tiles on the floors, a massive receiving desk, ladders reaching the top shelves, and books spilling out from every corner, our library held a collection begun more than a decade before the village itself was incorporated in 1893. The books my mother read and reread—
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, Tales of the South Pacific, David Copperfield
—provided a broader, more adventurous world, an escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn’t change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it; she could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair.

Every night, after I brushed my teeth and settled into bed, my mother came to read to me. I loved listening to
her voice, so much softer and less piercing than mine. She read slowly and deliberately, lingering over the passages she liked, helping me to feel the rhythm of the language, the pleasure in well-chosen words. She modulated her voice to reflect the different characters and the pace of the narration. Rudyard Kipling was one of my favorite writers. I took to heart the motto of the ever-curious mongoose family in “Rikki-tikki-tavi”—“Run and Find Out.” Everything was investigated firsthand; hearsay meant nothing. If there was an inkwell on the writer’s desk, then Rikki-tikki’s whiskers would be stained with the blackest India ink; if there was a rustle in the garden, Rikki-tikki’s eyes would glow with anticipation.

From the
Just So Stories
, I learned how the camel got his hump, how the rhinoceros got his skin, and, best of all, how the elephant got his trunk. At the start of the story, the elephant had only a bulging nose, no bigger than a boot, incapable of picking up anything. Just as I identified with the intrepid mongoose, so I empathized with the elephant’s child, full of a “satiable curiosity” which irritated everyone around him. He asked the ostrich why her tail feathers grew, and the ostrich spanked him. He asked the hippo why her eyes were red, and the hippo spanked him. He asked everyone what the crocodile ate for dinner and, finding no answer, ventured to the riverbank, where he ended up in the crocodile’s mouth. His friend the snake hitched himself around the elephant’s hind legs and told him to pull as hard as he could to save himself, and as the little elephant pulled, his nose began to stretch and kept on stretching. By the time the crocodile finally let go, the elephant had a full-grown trunk. Thus curiosity was abundantly rewarded.

The young Thomas Edison, like the elephant, the mongoose, and me, was relentlessly curious. I had come to
know him through the Blue Biography series, which my mother read to me in its entirety. Written for children, this classic series focused on the childhoods of famous Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Betsy Ross. But Edison, so full of energy and elaborate plans, fascinated me the most. At one point, he decided to read all the books in the town library, one shelf at a time, something I could easily imagine wanting to do myself once I had learned to read. And he, too, was always questioning his parents and teachers. He wanted to know why he saw lightning before he heard thunder, why water couldn’t run uphill, why some parts of the ice pond were lighter than others.

But I suppose my fascination with Edison was fueled by the knowledge that when my mother was sixteen she had worked as the private secretary to the president of the New York Edison Company. It was her first job after graduating from secretarial school. I pictured her walking swiftly through the streets of Manhattan in tailored clothes with high heels, to take her place behind a big desk in a tall building. In my imagination, she worked directly for Thomas Alva Edison himself, as his gal Friday. I envisioned her at Edison’s side in his laboratory when he invented the phonograph and the electric light. She would try to set me straight on chronology, informing me that she hadn’t even been born when these inventions were made, but I refused to let her corrections disrupt the dramatic narrative I was writing in my head. Every year, on the eleventh of February, Edison’s birthday, I made up Alva buttons for the family. I cut out circles of poster board and pasted a picture of Edison on the front with the name “Alva” in big red letters along the top. The name “Alva” intrigued me, and I liked the thought that my mother knew him so well she would call him by that exotic name.

The only joy that surpassed listening to a book read aloud was listening to real stories of my mother’s youth. “Tell me a story,” I would beg, “a story about you when you were my age.” She told me stories about her father, who was a ferryboat captain operating between Weehawken and Hoboken; stories about her mother, whose parents had emigrated from England, and her uncle Willy, also a ferryboat captain, who had fought in the Great War and traveled halfway around the world. There must have been some money on my maternal grandmother’s side. My mother always referred to the house she grew up in as “the Mansion,” and she talked about an uncle who was a successful artist, who did all the frescoes for the famous Hippodrome theater on 43rd Street in New York City.

She told me about her twin brothers, who died at the age of two during a cholera epidemic that swept through New York in 1906, shortly before she was born. The two little boys were laid out on a cherrywood table in the parlor of her parents’ home. Ever after, when I passed the elegant table, which now stood in the corner of our dining room, I pictured two round-faced cherubs waiting in heaven for the rest of their family to join them. Thus the table became, not a reminder of death, but a platform to paradise.

I pressed her to tell me every detail about her first meeting with my father. “The first time I saw your father, he was standing at the door to our house. He had come to pick up my brother, Frank, who was his best friend.” I wanted to add to her story, to have her tell me that the moment she saw him she knew that this was the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. Unfortunately for the story I was spinning in my head, she was only fourteen when they first met. “But what about Dad? He was nineteen, right? Didn’t he know the first time he saw you?” “Perhaps.” She smiled. “But it was a few years
before he stopped thinking of me as Frankie’s kid sister and realized I was a young woman. We were friends first and only later fell in love. That’s the best way, I think.” I nodded agreement, though I could never completely give up the notion that romantic love struck like a bolt of lightning.

As we talked about the past, she seemed to forget her pains. Her eyes brightened, and when she smiled, the creases at her mouth turned upward, giving her face a look of relaxation and warmth it did not usually have. I came to believe that, if only I could keep her youthful memories alive, if I could get the happy thoughts of her girlhood to push the sadder thoughts of her womanhood away, I could prevent the aging process from prematurely moving forward. In my imagination, the brain was a finite space with room for only a certain number of thoughts, so it was critical to push the bad thoughts out to leave space for the good ones. And somehow, on the strength of the changed expression on my mother’s face, I assumed there was a direct correlation between one’s inner thoughts and one’s outer well-being. It made me so happy to see contentment on her face that I reached out to stories of the time she was young and vital as if they were lifeboats that would carry my mother through the present into the future. Through her stories, I could imagine her young again, taking the stairs two at a time. Even now, when I interview people for my books, it sometimes seems I am sitting with my mother pleading, “Tell me a story.”

As a child, I loved looking through my mother’s photo albums. Through a series of faded pictures attached by sticky corners to the pages, I discovered Ephraim and Clara Miller, the maternal grandparents I had never known, and my uncle Frank, who had died a few years before I was born. My mother told me she had considered her mother her “best friend in the world.” When she worked at Edison,
they spent every Saturday together. They would go shopping, eat lunch, and go to the movies. After my parents married and moved to East 64th Street in Brooklyn, my mother’s parents moved into a house on East 63rd Street. When my sister Charlotte was born, my grandmother virtually lived at our house, helping to care for the baby, cook the meals, and keep my mother company. I stared at the pictures of my grandparents, both heavy people with kindly smiles, and imagined what our life would be like if they were living next door. I. had never met either one of them, for they had died, suddenly, within three weeks of each other, when they were in their early fifties. My grandfather died first, of a heart attack. Three weeks later, my grandmother went into postoperative shock after what should have been routine gall-bladder surgery. She died the following morning. My mother was only twenty-two at the time.

One day, while my mother and I were looking through the album, she was called to the phone. In her absence, I decided that the pictures needed a little brightening. Taking my crayons, I colored a photograph of my mother and grandmother taken when my mother was in her teens, my grandmother in her forties. Standing side by side, they squinted in the sun, arms resting comfortably on each other’s shoulders. With my red crayon, I gave my grandmother rosy cheeks and big lips and then colored her hair yellow so it would match mine. When my mother came back and saw the picture, she was so angry she could hardly speak. “But she looked so pale,” I tried to explain, having no idea what I had done to make my mother so upset.

“T
HERE ARE SOME THINGS
we don’t ask,” my mother said, a harsh tone in her voice when she heard me pestering my father to tell me about his early life. I knew that he’d been born in Brooklyn on September 6, 1901, the day President William McKinley was assassinated by a Polish American anarchist, Leon Czolgosz. He liked to say that, though the newspapers that day carried the full story of the assassination, the headline story was the birth of Mike Kearns. I knew that his parents, Thomas Kearns and Ellen Higgins, had emigrated to the States from County Sligo, Ireland, and that his father worked as a fireman in Brooklyn. And I knew that Thomas and Ellen had died when my father was young, but whenever I asked for more details about his family, his eyes took on a guarded expression, and a look of pain settled around his mouth. It was the only time I felt uncomfortable around my father, as if some chasm stretched between us.

Left as orphans, my father and his sister, Marguerite (
above
), were split up and sent to live with relatives in different parts of Brooklyn. My father somehow emerged from his haunted childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor. He is pictured on the right with my sister Charlotte.

When I turned to my mother for answers, she filled in the picture of my father’s childhood, but only after I had promised not to talk with my father about it. She told me that his entire world had collapsed when he was nine years old, that it was better for him to leave his pain behind him, and that I must respect his wishes. The story as I understood it was as follows: My father was the oldest in a family that once included two brothers, Thomas Jr. and John, and a sister, Marguerite. They lived at 633 Myrtle Avenue, a two-story tenement house shared by four families whose living quarters were separated by thin, temporary walls. Myrtle Avenue was a congested street with an elevated train running above a trolley line. The noise of the el was so constant that people noticed only when it stopped. But relief was always possible, my father told my mother, for nearby stood Fort Greene Park, a stately public space with its double row of blossoming chestnut trees that stood in defiant contrast to their bleak surroundings.