Daring (4 page)

My mother's attention would come and go, like clouds. She was there for me, mostly, in the daytime. But after dark my mother's bright star would float away during dinner and rotate into some realm known only to her. She would leave the table.

“Where did Mommy go?” I'd ask.

“Sinus attack,” my father would say.

He didn't entirely crush my mother's dream of becoming a performer. She turned to me as the surrogate artist in the family, giving me dance and music lessons. She bought a piano at auction so she could teach me to play for her while she sang “Indian Love Call” and imagined herself as Jeanette MacDonald. My father almost killed her. She was so happy when she sang, my mother, and I loved her spirit. On Friday nights, if my father took her out to a party, she would come home singing and happy, all red and shiny. I'd play the piano for her and she would dance. Sometimes, she even kissed the boys at my birthday parties. My friends said how lucky I was to have such a fun mother.

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS
about my earliest childhood were the blackouts. The war was far away, in Europe and Japan, but we practiced blackouts in case the enemy tried to attack our country. Around dinnertime the lights in our neighbors' windows would blink off, the few streetlights would dim, and I was allowed to strike matches to make little halos of light from candles. I couldn't wait to climb out on the roof under my bedroom window and watch the stars flung across the black sky like careless diamonds. To a child, war had a lot to offer.

When I was six, my cousin Ranny came home funny from that war. His skin was yellow from malaria, and his hands shook when he smoked cigarettes, which was all the time. He stayed with us for a while and sometimes screamed out at night. “Shell-shocked,” my father told me, whatever that was. I asked my father if he would have to go to war. No, definitely not, but he wouldn't tell me why. I found out from Ranny. When they were kids playing with slingshots, Ranny had accidentally put out my father's left eye. Grandma Gladys had called upon a Christian Science practitioner to pray for the “error” to be taken away and my father's eye to be restored. It didn't work.

Nobody would answer my question: Why did my father still have two eyes? I only found out when I spied on him one night through the partly open bathroom door. He took a little box out of the medicine cabinet, opened it carefully, and took out something that glowed like a magic orb, white and shiny with a brown center—a glass eye! I formed the impression that my father had special sight. With that magic eye he could see things that nobody else could.

It wasn't war that scared me. It was Bert the Turtle. He was a cartoon character they showed us in sixth grade. When a firecracker went off behind his head, Bert ducked into his shell and sang,
Dum dum, deedle dum dum, Duck, and Cover, Duck, and Cover.
The singsong voice of a civil defense worker told us just what to do:
We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous. We must get ready for it. The atomic bomb flash can burn you worse than the worst sunburn. Now, you and I don't have shells to crawl into like Bert the Turtle. So don't wait! Duck and cover.

I don't have to tell you how reassuring this was for children. We would dive under our desks and wait for the flash. With controlled alarm, the voice of the civil defense worker would issue a final, comforting instruction:
We must be ready, all the time, for the atomic bomb.
I always wanted to ask my father if his magic eye could see an atomic flash in time to warn us.

IN THE CHAOS OF OUR FAMILY LIFE,
one person's position relative to me did not change: Grandma Gladys's. On Saturday mornings she invited me into her room to listen to a radio show called
Grand Central Station
. I was enthralled by the stories, tense psychological dramas inspired by O. Henry. The sound effects pushed away the confines of our little stucco house on a tidy suburban street. Over a frenetic score, the narrator followed the rhythm of the trains as they flashed by the tenement houses south of 125th Street and dove into the long tunnel beneath the swank buildings along Park Avenue, and then . . . a screech of brakes and hiss of steam as the narrator shouted:

I began dreaming about riding into the city on one of those very trains. I just had to see those millions of private lives crashing up against one another and write about them. That was a different era: the Eisenhower 1950s. America was flush. Houses going up. Children playing hopscotch on side streets. Cars looking out for kids on bikes. Parents didn't much care where we went on Saturday as long as we were home for dinner. Bicycles made us free. My friends and I had hideouts in the woods. We roughhoused with older boys. When the ice broke up on Mamaroneck Harbor, I would go down with boots and a broomstick and pole-vault from iceberg to iceberg.

Nowadays, no doubt, someone would call Child Protective Services. My mother and father would be arraigned and sent to a parent retraining course or worse. But in that
Ed Sullivan Show
era, children were not the obsession of adults. We were there to flesh out the family album.

In seventh grade, I started to sneak into the city on Saturday mornings. My grandmother understood. She kept my secret and gave me the change to call her if anything untoward happened. The New Haven train stopped frequently at our station, a commuter hub. I bought my ticket from the old ticket master. “Tap class,” I'd say, then do a little shuffle and ball-and-chain. He'd smile benevolently and punch out my ticket to the crossroads of a million private lives. My legs were too short to reach the high steps to the old washboard trains, but somebody would always give me a boost. The ride to Grand Central Station took only forty-three minutes. Then I'd run up the steps to the marble balcony that overlooked the teeming throng and become a giant telescope, sweeping around, all-seeing, able to record everyone's secrets. No one knew I was there. No one knew I was missing. Except Grandma. I was little but I was in control. I had a notebook and a pencil.

The aqua ceiling was as high as the real sky. Animals flew across it, outlined in gold stars. An invisible voice echoed off the marble walls: “Stamford, Track Fifteen!” I scribbled notes about the stick figures below. Why did the bearded man stop when he bumped into the woman with a floppy hat? She must be passing him microfilm; they were Communists, like the bad people Senator McCarthy talked about on TV. I dreamed myself into the life of the colored man who sat on the floor with one trouser leg empty from the knee down. His sign read
NEED A LEG UP.
Was he really a cripple? Yes, but he had a fine wooden leg at home. He would put it on and go out at night to play his trumpet and pretend to be Louis Armstrong. Who was the little lost dog who yapped and yapped and dragged his bottom across the floor? He must have dropped from the aqua ceiling. He needed somebody to put him back up among the stars.

I couldn't wait to ride back to our dozy suburb. I'd bike home to the desk my father had built beneath the window overlooking our porch and punch out little stories on my typewriter. Sometimes, I got so excited, I'd jump off the roof of the porch and roll over in the backyard. That was what they scolded me for, not for the secret rides into the city on my magical mystery train.

I ASKED MY GRANDMA GLADYS
to tell me her story so I could write a “book” about her. Born Gladys Latham Ovens in 1887, she was proud to tell me that her ancestor, William Latham, came over from London on the
Mayflower
in 1620. (I had no idea then that hundreds of thousands of Americans had ancestors who somehow managed to stow away in the hold of that hundred-foot-long vessel, unbeknownst to the 102 men and women whose names were actually on the passenger list.) But Grandma had records to prove that Billy Latham really was one of the early settlers of New London. “A pretty shrewd customer,” she said, making me promise not to tell that he was the town tax assessor and he cheated on his taxes! Now Cary Latham, his son, she told me, was even shrewder. He got the lease for the ferry from Groton to the other side of the Pequot River. That made him as rich as a tollbooth!

Grandma Gladys had married a man named Harold Merritt (like the Parkway) Henion. They had one son, my father, also named Harold Merritt Henion. But until the day she died, my grandmother would call my father “Sonny Boy.” Did that mean he never had to grow up? She didn't answer my question.

It wasn't until I was older that I learned about the Great Depression. Grandma's husband didn't have to jump out a window on Wall Street when he lost all his savings. He suffered a stroke at the age of fifty and died in my father's arms. Grandma Gladys had no money and no skills. She had never gone anywhere except in the backseat of a car or a horse-drawn carriage. But she remained true to the self-reliance of her forebears. She promptly learned how to drive, bought a typewriter, taught herself to type, and marched out to get herself a full-time job as a real estate agent. For the next forty years she went to work from nine to five every day. Still working, she moved in with us when I was a baby. I never heard her complain.

I would be the first of the women in my family to go to college, something I wanted desperately. My father took me out in the backyard for a serious talk. I planned to be an English major. He said he was prepared to pay my tuition to a state university, but after graduation, immediately after, I would be expected to support myself, and a B.A. in English wasn't going to earn me carfare.

“The University of Vermont has a good home economics department,” he said. “Why don't you study something practical?”

“You want me to get an MRS degree?” I was crestfallen. I wanted to be a writer. Didn't he know? Hadn't he edited my copycat Nancy Drew mystery stories? He'd even read some of my stories out loud to his golf friend. “She's every bit Hal Henion's daughter, can't you tell?” But when it came to money, my father was a tightwad just like my mother's father. I could not pretend that I could make a living at writing. Who did?

Because Vermont was basically an agricultural school with a robust government extension service, the home ec department was the closest thing they had to a business curriculum. They told me I could take courses in economics, advertising, design, even public speaking. I agreed to take a double major, English and—the one I never told my friends about—home ec.

I WANTED THE FRAGMENTS OF MY YOUNG LIFE
to link up and convey the satisfying feeling one gets from piecing together a puzzle. I was my grandmother's child: plucky and selfish, and determined to be a writer. I was my mother's child: a cute little shrimp who liked being onstage. I was my father's child: coached to be as competitive as boys and sent out into the world to win, for him. But there are puzzle pieces that I left out, jagged pieces that didn't fit into a neat coherent picture.

It was my sister, on reading an early draft of my recollections, who pierced my idealized rendition of our father. I'd always told people that he encouraged my writing, how he'd get down on the floor with me and help me concoct stories. What more could a writer want in a father?

You forget, my sister said, you became more successful than he was. He never read anything you published. Not one of the hundreds of magazine articles you sent him. Not one of the books you've written. Not a word.

CHEERS STARTLE THE SILENT VERMONT NIGHT.
A ladder slaps against the sill of my dormitory window. All along the third floor, girls in rag curlers and baby doll pajamas throw open their windows and stick their heads out, straining to witness a scene as dramatic as a high school production of
Romeo and Juliet
.

“He's here! Gail, come out!”

My roommate is calling for me, calling for the girl who was thrilled only hours ago because of a summons from her excitable boyfriend.

“I'm coming to get you,” he had announced over the long-distance line in his dark and secretive voice. “After midnight. Be ready.”

Tremors of dangerous delight.

“But they lock the doors after curfew.”

“I don't need a door. I'll use my extension ladder. Your room's the last one on the left, third floor, right?”

“Your ladder! You're a genius.”

“Wait at the window.”

Ladders have always excited me. I used to climb a ladder up to the ten-foot diving board. That was a heart-in-the-mouth climb. The ladder my father put up against the little roof under my bedroom window was meant to discourage me from jumping. I used it in high school to sneak out in the middle of the night and meet my friends to drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Ladders are challenge. Ladders are adventure. Ladders allow escape.

I am in the bathroom primping, knees shaking, heart racing. How does a girl dress to elope? I'm not ready. This is only my third week at the University of Vermont. I've hardly finished unpacking. I don't have a white dress. The black-and-white polka dot I was going to wear to the first freshman dance will have to do. And white gloves, the beautiful white kid gloves my mother gave me for church. The thought of church turns me limp. I can't put my lipstick on straight. Does God know?

“
C
'
MON, GAIL
,
C
'
MON!
He's climbing up the ladder!”

I am about to be wooed away from confinement on the freshman women's campus of a remote university into the arms of a lover who will not take no for an answer. I am all of seventeen. He is a ravishing twenty-two, a real man, a brooding veteran who has seen the hell of war and has the wounds to show for it. My Romeo holds the lure of jailbreak.

I had warned him. “If the housemother sees a man on the girls' campus, my God, she'll call out the Green Mountain Boys!”