Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (4 page)

Thomas Jr. died at fifteen months. Then, in the summer
of 1910, when my father was eight, his five-year-old brother, John, was hit by a trolley car. The deep wound in John’s left leg produced a deadly form of tetanus that led to spasms and convulsions and finally left him unable to breathe. He died, in the middle of July, when their mother was five months pregnant. Her grief produced complications in the pregnancy, which led to her own death in November at the age of thirty-seven. Then, less than two months later, shortly after the Christmas holidays, my father’s father died. He was forty years old.

In my imagination I linked these events into one continuous story. First my father’s little brothers died, then his mother died in childbirth, and then his father died of a broken heart. In the absence of facts, I expanded upon the saga. I pictured my grandfather trying to be both father and mother to his two remaining children, fighting fires during the day, then racing home at night to cook dinner, do the laundry, clean the house, read to the children, and tuck them into bed. At some point, I assumed, he had simply collapsed from the strain and died. It was not until much later, after my own mother died, that I discovered how much more complicated the real story was.

Left as orphans, my father and his four-year-old sister, Marguerite, were split up and sent to live with relatives in different parts of Brooklyn. I am told that my father went to see her almost every night, and promised that he would someday find a place and secure the means for the two of them to live together. He kept his promise. Before he was eighteen years old, he had a job as a runner on Wall Street, which enabled him to reunite the remnants of his family for a short moment in a small apartment on Monroe Street. For three years, he and his sister lived together while she finished school and got a clerical job. Then the almost unbearable chain of events that had begun with his brother’s
accident this grim net which had captured his childhood, fell upon his sister. When Marguerite was sixteen, a freak accident with anesthesia administered during a simple dental procedure led to complications and, ten days later, she was dead. In the space of little more than a decade, my father had lost his two brothers, his mother, his father, and, finally, his sister.

When my father did speak of his family, he spoke only of his younger sister, and always with great affection. Rather than dwelling on the tragic absurdity of her death, he focused on the reddish tint of her hair, her high coloring, her warmth, and her ease with people. Over the years, I felt a strong connection to Marguerite, in part because of our similar complexion, in part because of our common position as the youngest in our families, but mostly because my father loved her so much. When I was about to be confirmed in the Catholic Church at the age of eleven, my father asked me to take the name of Marguerite as my confirmation name. It was an easy request, for this was the name I had come to want for myself.

For reasons that I will never fully comprehend, my father somehow emerged from this haunted childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor; on the contrary, he seemed to possess an absolute self-confidence and a remarkable ability to transmit his ebullience and optimism to others. There is an old Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child for the first seven years and he will be mine for the rest of his life.” Perhaps the love he was given by his parents in his early years gave him the resources he needed to confront the trials he later faced. Or perhaps he was simply born with a sanguine temperament, a constellation of positive attitudes that became as much a part of his makeup as the color of his eyes and the shape of his nose. What is clear is that at some point my father determined he would
write the story of his life himself, rather than let it be written for him by his tortured past. And this resolve was the greatest gift he bequeathed to his children.

M
Y PARENTS
had not planned on having me. With two daughters, Charlotte, fourteen, and Jeanne, nine, they thought their family complete. Charlotte later told me she was so embarrassed to discover our mother’s pregnancy at the advanced age of thirty-five that she refused to tell her high-school friends. On the day I was born, a blustery January day in 1943, my father handed out cigars to his fellow examiners and bankers. One of these colleagues was the father of a high-school friend of Charlotte’s. When the girl arrived at school the next day and told everyone the news, Charlotte was mortified. Her only hope, she would later tease me, was that I be shut away in the attic until I was grown.

Everything glamorous, comely, elegant, fragrant, remote, feminine, and forbidden was my sister Charlotte for me. She seemed the model of physical perfection, tall and shapely, with high cheekbones, a creamy complexion, large hazel eyes, and long thick hair. She walked with a natural grace and wore a slight smile that seemed to acknowledge her beauty. The star in her high-school plays, she thrived on attention and was always conscious of her appearance. During one play she refused to dye her hair gray, fearing it would make her look old at the cast party later that night. I remember her surrounded by adoring boys—one had a Chrysler Highlander with a plush red interior, another a violet Chevy he called the “Purple Passion.”

Once, when she was still in high school, Charlotte told us that the new boyfriend she was bringing home had an ugly scar on his right cheek, about which he was acutely self-conscious. She warned us against looking directly at his face when she introduced him. I tried to obey her command, but my eyes were drawn irresistibly to his forbidden right cheek. Seeing no scar, thinking I must have confused right and left, I maneuvered to his other side, which was equally unmarred. Later that night, I asked my sister why she had told us the story of the scar. “He’s so arrogant about his good looks,” she replied laughingly, “that I figured it would throw him off if none of you looked at his face.”

My sister Charlotte and me (
above left and right
). Charlotte seemed the model of physical perfection, tall and shapely, with high cheekbones, a creamy complexion, large hazel eyes, and long thick hair, My sister Jeanne (
left
), was a surrogate mother, looking out for me, taking care of me when our mother was sick.

I liked to sit on a small cushioned stool in the back bedroom, which my sisters shared, and watch them get ready for their dates. Jeanne was shorter than Charlotte by more than half a foot, but had the same dark hair, thick brows, and large eyes. They shared a dressing table with a fluffy white organdy skirt, arrayed with brushes, combs, tweezers, emery boards, and colognes. I watched in admiring bewilderment as they brushed their hair, fifty strokes at each sitting, and put cold cream on their faces. And I can still see, reflected in the vanity mirror, the expression of discomfort on their faces as they held one eyebrow taut to tweeze imperfect hairs from their perfectly shaped brows. I was something of a tomboy, more comfortable in pants than dresses, with skin that freckled and blistered in the sun. I could not imagine that the day would ever come when I would voluntarily put myself through pain for the sake of beauty.

After Charlotte finished high school, she entered a three-year diploma program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York to become a registered nurse. She had picked nursing, she liked to say with an ironic turn of her lip, because, “besides saving lives and all that other noble stuff, I’ll get to wear a great uniform—all white, freshly starched each day, with long sleeves, French cuffs, and matching stockings.”
When I was five, I accompanied my family to Charlotte’s capping ceremony, which symbolized the end of her six-month probation period and the beginning of the intensive training to become a nurse. Emerging from the train station, I was overwhelmed by the wondrously mingled noises, the sound of police whistles and the multitude of cars rumbling along the streets, and the crowds of shoppers hurrying past the vast and glistening window displays.

The ceremony was beautiful. About sixty student nurses marched in a solemn line toward the stage, lighted candles in hand. The glow from the candles cast a strange and wonderful light on their faces. “Why are they carrying candles?” I whispered in a loud voice to my mother. She explained that the candles were in honor of Florence Nightingale, the founder of the nursing profession, who carried a burning light as she tended to the wounded soldiers in a makeshift military hospital during the Crimean War, earning herself the name “Lady with the Lamp.” When Charlotte’s name was called, she walked to the center of the stage, where she received a white bib with “Miss Kearns” embroidered on top in blue letters, and an organdy cap with a ruffled back which looked like a miniature chef’s hat. I was so excited I stood up and cheered, shouting her name as if she had just hit a home run.

The next summer, when I was six, Charlotte took me to Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. Before we left the house that morning, she used the curling iron on my hair until the strands on both sides curled up evenly. Unfortunately, before we reached the train station, one lock on the right side drooped downward—the same rogue piece that appeared that year in my first-grade photo, giving me a page boy on one side and a flip on the other. Our first stop was Saks Fifth Avenue, where Charlotte planned
on buying me a new dress. As we walked up Fifth toward 49th, the rhythmic click of my sister’s alligator shoes on the sidewalk seemed to draw the attention of everybody nearby, even the poodles on their leashes and the mannequins in the store windows. At Saks, she knew exactly what she wanted for me; I had to try on only two dresses to find a light-blue one we both loved. From that moment, I valued her opinion on style far more than my own. It was she who taught me not to wear pink with red, not to combine plaids and polka dots, not to wear white past Labor Day. If I didn’t always follow the rules, at least Charlotte had made me everlastingly aware of them.

Entering Radio City Music Hall for the first time, I was amazed by its majestic foyer, its grand stairway and gold-leaf ceiling. The auditorium, seating more than six thousand patrons, was vaster than any public space I had ever seen. The spectacle was dazzling—the world’s largest theater orchestra, plus the Rockettes, the world’s finest precision dancers, and a movie,
In the Good Old Summertime
, with Judy Garland and Van Johnson, on the world’s largest screen. After the movie, we went to Toffenetti’s for ice cream. As we sipped our sodas, I noticed that the eyes of four boys at the next table were fixed on my sister. They were dressed in white uniforms—Annapolis boys, it turned out—and they whispered together, casting sidelong glances at our table. As we were about to leave, a big teddy bear arrived for me with a note saying they hoped I’d grow up to be as beautiful as my mother. I could not help feeling a rush of joy at the thought that these handsome fellows assumed I was Charlotte’s child and that I might someday look like her. I fervently wished at that moment that I had a mother who looked like my older sister instead of a grandmother.

Much later that night, I was abruptly awakened by a
thunderclap and a flash of lightning outside. The rumble of the storm grew more and more insistent and I could not go to sleep. I called to my mother, and straightaway she appeared in her thin blue robe, to rearrange my bedding and stroke my forehead, her warm, familiar voice gently comforting me. I remembered the four cadets earlier in the day and my guilty wish for a different mother. Tears came into my eyes, and a deep sense of shame that lay like a physical weight on my chest. “Don’t be frightened,” my mother said. “The storm will pass in a few minutes, and I’ll stay with you till it does.”