Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (5 page)

At exactly 6:30, every night, we choked down Mom’s beef, dry as cotton, without complaint, except from Ted, who called Mom’s stews “witch hazel” because she served them from an iron cauldron.

“Did that kid just complain?” Mom would call over her shoulder from the stove, so that Ted was met with Dad’s grimace, which made Ted laugh. I was a quiet offender, usually choking on the meat, then sobbing at Dad’s scowl. Laughter or tears inevitably triggered Dad to signal Michael, who dragged us up to our rooms, Ted celebrating his good fortune with arms raised in a V for victory while I clamped my hands to the saddle of my chair even as Michael’s fingers bore into my armpits to break me loose.

No matter how intimidating Dad appeared to us, we savored every second we found ourselves alone with him. But he was in a never-ending quest to “finally get some peace,” away from us “punk kids.” To accomplish this, he had a screened-in porch built. An exposed brick wall and a Dutch door separated it from the living room. Green carpet was chosen because it reminded Dad of Astroturf. He usually got in about two hours of peace on a Sunday—the one day his dealership was closed. By late afternoon the porch filled with Jesuits and neighbors, aunts and uncles, and Dad’s parents. His mother was known as Katie to everyone except for Grandpa, who called her Katherine.

I lived for the sight of Grandpa’s Ford sedan in the driveway, and I harbored resentments toward Katie, who stole him away with the same line every week: “Charles, we’ll be late for Margaret’s.” Until then I would nestle into Grandpa’s enormous lap, which erupted into volcanic laughter when Mom tried to spar with Katie, who was selectively hearing-impaired, and whose motto was “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” rendering her practically mute until she could get to her daughter’s house, where I imagined her chattering away.

In the warm months before our Sunday guests would arrive, Dad stretched out on the sofa like a black bear basking in the western sun, the transistor radio broadcasting a Reds game that inevitably ended with “Joe Nuxhall rounding third and heading for home.” Nuxhall’s departure through the crackling radio was so intimately linked with my father in my mind that it seemed as if Dad himself was signing off, though the radio was just one of his routines.

Every Sunday he rose at nine, poached eggs and fried bacon for roughly a dozen people (depending on babies born or teens off to college), went to the 12:45 mass because the pastor was too tired to lecture by then, stopped at Duke’s Pony Keg for a case of Hudepohl, made a bologna sandwich and popped a beer before lying on the couch to tune in to a game, and rose at four to pour drinks for guests. At dusk, he grilled on the back porch and heckled the bad shots my brothers made in their endless game of basketball.

Whenever a ball veered toward Dad at the grill, he’d drop his tongs to catch it and charge the basket, his legs wrestling the gravity of his beer belly as he went for the dunk. His body in motion was comic and graceful all at once. The boys would swallow their laughter, and then their pride, as Dad sank the ball, retrieved his tongs, and taunted them from behind a cloud of smoke at the grill: “I wouldn’t put a nickel on any of ya.”

He didn’t have time to coach the boys on form. In fact, none of us knew exactly what Dad wanted from us, although he was quick to say what he did not want: “Stop your bellyaching” or “That’s just yellow-bellied talk.” Those vague indictments motivated us because we were certain that Dad had achieved more at age sixteen than we could hope to do in a lifetime. We knew that at ten years old he was already riding the train alone from Chicago to Katie’s parents’ farm in Minnesota, where he worked every summer. By age twelve his family arrived in Cincinnati after living in at least three cities. By sixteen he’d bought a car and driven it to Chicago to visit friends.

Cincinnati is a place where everyone’s grandparents went to school together. Friendships are formed with family history in mind. Since Dad’s family had no history in this town, he wedged his way into the social scene via football. He was known as the guy with short, bowed legs and a keen eye for the open spaces at which George Ratterman aimed his blazing passes.

Dad favored Katie’s laconic style. Grandpa was the demonstrative one, coaching me through games of gin rummy with Rosa and Liz. “Let’s get ’em!” he’d say. Then he’d whisper, “Breast your cards.” I never could get the poker face down. Grandpa loved an underdog. The time he said, “I love you,” words not often used in our family, I slept with that cheek pressed to my pillow as if to pin the whole evening down.

Our father’s nurturing came in the form of structure, a structure that was up to us to delineate. He made it his job to provide us a good education, and he would see to it that all of his children went to college, if not graduate school. His own education had been interrupted by the Second World War. He was sixteen when the US joined the Allied forces and so, to his vexation, he had to wait two years to sign up. In the meantime, his older brother left Notre Dame to become a fighter pilot. Dad wanted to follow him to flight school. Since he wasn’t old enough to enlist, he spent the next two years viewing his victories on the football field as something of a national duty. And he hit on a distraction more consuming than war.

Dad met Mom at his Jesuit high school May Fête dance. She was only fourteen, dark and exuding vulnerability, a stream of dance partners in her wake. All night, Dad cut in on them. When he came home he woke Katie to say that he’d met the girl of his dreams: Joy Fanger, Gert’s younger sister, who was “even prettier than Gert.” Katie approved, at first. She admired Gert, a grounded girl with plans for nursing school, and she might have assumed that Mom would be as focused on school as Gert.

By all accounts, Dad was mesmerized by Mom, who was mostly focused on playing the coquette. Yet she was the heartbroken one when Dad turned eighteen and went to pilot training camp, where he faced his first big disappointment. His entire squadron came down with pneumonia, recovering only in time for the war effort to dwindle and the pilots’ training to cease. Dad’s wartime experience boiled down to two unremarkable years on an island in the Philippines. After the war, our disappointed father did not follow his fighter-pilot brother, along with George Ratterman, to Notre Dame. His grades were excellent but he chose to stay in town, adopted his “what’s done is done” outlook on life, and played football for Xavier University.

It has been said that Dad brooded for the next two years. Then he rose from the ashes by proposing to Mom and choosing marriage over college. His mother, upon hearing the news that her son was dropping out of school to get married, locked herself in her bedroom for three days without a word of explanation. None was needed. Everyone knew that Katie had turned down three marriage proposals herself in favor of college and even some graduate education. To her, marriage was the reward that came after a good many years of school. Despite this policy, she had chosen a man with an eighth-grade education who was seven years her junior. Only Grandpa, with his height, girth, and booming laughter, had been able to coax the reluctant Katie into marriage. What Katie thought of Joy Fanger, a girl who chose pen-and-ink “caricatures” over academics, Katie would not say.

Grandpa, on the other hand, was delighted by his son’s marriage. At thirteen, our grandfather had punched his abusive, alcoholic father before running away. He hated to leave his nine siblings behind. He was more inclined to take care of people. Perhaps for this reason he adored our mother, a girl in need of a father. Grandpa could have cared less about her academic choices; he’d hardly been held back by his lack of education. He’d made a success of himself, first with Firestone and later with Ford. Now, under Katie’s well-researched guidance, they were touring the world. By the time I left for college I had two rows, stacked in doubles, of silver spoons from three continents.

Grandpa was glad to have Dad join the sales team at his Ford dealership. He was eager for grandchildren, and Mom soon became pregnant with the first, but she miscarried. Two years later, she gave birth to Bridget. She produced five more babies during the fifties. Grandpa cheered her on. He had nurtured a large brood of younger siblings. With such an imprint, one’s heart aches for the familiar clan, even as it pines to be rid of it. (I would find this out for myself one day.)

With mounting expenses from an ever-expanding family, Dad chose to open his own dealership, for Volkswagen. He would become a risk-taker like his father. In 1960, he and Mom flew to Germany for a Volkswagen convention, their first trip abroad together. They were not entirely free of children, though. Mom was pregnant with her seventh baby: me.

Dad had finally reached the place where his own adventures would take off. Who would have imagined this victorious trip would be a precursor to tragedy? In fact, my parents wouldn’t even know to connect this trip to my birth defects. The news about thalidomide would not come out until 1962, and fifty years later I can’t say whether my parents, upon hearing that news, took a moment to wonder whether Mom had somehow taken it. They had innocently flown into a place where a whole generation faced pockets of devastation so random that it would take at least two years for physicians and researchers to connect the dots.

I
don’t know if he was changed by my birth, but the father I knew was not a risk-taker. Instead, he was a man with a daunting sense of responsibility. Maybe this is why my favorite part of the week was Dad’s two-hour window of downtime on Sundays. If you were willing to listen to a lot of sports, you could spend a Sunday afternoon with him.

In the winter, Ted and I lived behind the couch in the den, Dad’s second-favorite place to spend a Sunday afternoon. Ted and I thought of this couch as our hiding place, though it was the first place everyone looked when we went missing. We’d wait for golf to come on because that’s when Dad promptly began to snore, and we’d crawl out from either end of the couch to dive-bomb his belly, at which point Dad always sprang to life, growling like a lion, “Arrr!” Then he took each of us by the scruff of our necks and pretended to thrash us. He owned us, and we loved it. Finally, he’d put us to work massaging his back or scalp, or even his feet. “Don’t forget the dogs,” he’d say in a sleepy voice. “Not the dogs!” Ted would insist.

I was willing to do anything for Dad, so I always peeled off his musty socks. His feet were too tired to sweat, let alone stink. They seemed barely alive. I’d almost weep at the sight of them; they were as dry and pale as old pie dough. If I pinched the soles the skin flaked off; when I curled the ridge of his toes it sounded like a pretzel snapping.

“Eew,” Ted would say, as he fled.

But I stayed for the payoff. That’s when Dad said, “Thanks, Trix.” He’d look at me with genuine appreciation and rub my “angel wings,” his sign of affection for me. I’d wait all week for it.

CHAPTER 4

The Hanger

O
n our previous visit to Hanger, Inc., an artificial limb company, the prosthetist, whom we called the leg man, had said, “Let me take a look at that stump.” I drew back and sucked my thumb. He looked at me, waiting for something, until I realized that he wanted my leg. Mom sat beside me, her elbow poking into her pregnant belly, a forgotten cigarette dangling from her hand, her head cocked sideways with an open-mouthed stare fixed on the goop in the bucket. Mom could not stomach slime. The leg man, on his knees, began to unravel a scroll of wet plaster up and down my thigh, making me gasp and wheeze. “Can you lift that up?” he said, pointing with his chin at the hem of my dress. I turned to Mom, expecting her to slap his face, but she was still locked into that vacant stare so I did as he asked and closed my eyes while he molded the plaster. When I looked down again, he was dipping his hands into the bucket of water. He flattened out the last bump and said, “Gotta work fast ... before it dries.” In about fifteen minutes, he yanked the solid mold from my thigh. That’s when Mom snapped to attention, stamping out the now-remembered butt with its two-inch ash. In a flash she was up, her outstretched arms the signal for me to leap into them.

Up to this point I’d seen myself as a squiddler, which wasn’t an issue in our neighborhood, a suburban hub of conservative Catholicism north of the city. Perhaps we were all there for Saint Vivian, the model grade school for our brand of faith. Living within a block of our house were the Keatings, an eight-term Republican congressman, the founder of the National Right to Life Committee, and a conservative news anchor with a dozen children. Based on my neighborhood, I assumed that Republicans lived and died to raise athletes. Swimmers, cheerleaders, baseball, football, and basketball players thrived here. I claimed squiddling as my sport. If I wanted to speed up, I’d throw my arms into it and gallop. I bragged that I could outrun Chief Taylor’s dog, Topper.

Squiddling was not something people outside our neighborhood appreciated, though. I gathered that from Rosa’s face when she’d say, “Ska-wid-del-a-long, I-lean,” in her sideways drawl. The smug grin she added as punctuation made me worry about how others might see me. There was also the fact that I would have to walk to attend the Catholic school in our neighborhood.

In an effort to get me “on my feet,” someone decided that I needed braces on my legs. No one seemed to know what the braces were for, or why I had to wear them. Maybe they were supposed to train my legs for prostheses. I kept taking them off and Mom had to keep strapping them on again. There was no guidebook for how to educate a child without legs, so this became one of many issues Mom would reluctantly take up with our pediatrician. Her opinion of Dr. Epstein was complicated by her notions about physicians, particularly “Jewish doctors.” Whenever Dr. Epstein suggested that Mom try birth control, she would stomp out of his office. “What does
Isaac Epstein
know about
Joy Cronin
?” she’d say in the car.

As an adult, I would ask, “If you don’t trust Jewish doctors, then why do you always pick doctors who are Jewish?” To which Mom would say, “Because they’re the smartest,” with an expression that announced: “Everyone knows this.”