Island Practice (13 page)

While Edna Lepore was hospitalized, her husband played her wire recordings he made of Tim and Sherry talking. He played the children recordings of their mother speaking too. That was the only way they knew her for what seemed like a long time. “She was just this voice,” Sherry recalls.

Then one day, a woman walked into the house and asked, “Do you know who I am?” Sherry didn’t know. Tim did, though. “You’re my mother.”

The mother Tim knew was a shadow of the woman she had been before her illness. Pioneering and outspoken, Edna Maria Granitsas was the daughter of a man from the mountains of Greece and a woman from Sweden. The couple came to America after Granitsas’s mother’s father was trampled by horses. They joined a tide of Greek, Italian, and Irish immigrants who settled in Marlborough, about twenty-five miles west of Boston, a shoemaking stronghold that stayed that way long after other factory towns wilted. Marlborough, often accidentally
or deliberately misspelled without the “ugh,” was the hometown of Horatio Alger Jr.; perhaps Alger’s up-by-the-bootstraps ethos influenced Granitsas.

She was a trailblazer early on: graduating from high school at sixteen, the youngest in her class at Boston University, racking up a master’s degree before she turned twenty-one. Then, while studying for a doctorate at Radcliffe in 1935, she decided to run for school committee, the first woman ever to seek political office in Marlborough.

“Do Voters Like Blondes?” asked a headline in the
Boston Evening American
, accompanied by big photos of Granitsas in coy poses, with her dogs “Tina and Cookie and the puppies” and at the Pine Grove Inn, a roadside restaurant and dance hall her parents ran. “Five foot two eyes of blue; But, oh, what those five feet could do!”

The article about Granitsas, written by a woman, noted that “there was a young man named Peter who was constantly consulted during the interview. Naturally curious about a possible romance, I asked about it. ‘Romance!,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I haven’t time for any.’” Asked if a woman could be as effective a school committee member as a man, Granitsas replied: “Better.”

When Granitsas won, becoming the youngest woman on any school committee in the state, the
Boston Post
called her “blonde, pretty and not a grind,” a woman who did not believe “Latin and solid geometry should be choked down the throats of children.” She stated that “teachers should be quite as exciting to their pupils as movie actresses,” and “if a child wants to yell out in class, the teacher should not throttle the child. Let the child yell until it decides not to yell.”

Granitsas made her own voice heard, pledging to eradicate Communist sympathizers from the schools and pushing to require teachers to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Perhaps conscious of her foreign-sounding name, she asserted: “I am 100 percent American.”

And in 1938, she led the charge to remove two statues from Marlborough’s high school, a copy of the Venus de Milo and a statue of Apollo, because their nakedness made them too scandalous and “indecent”
and might inappropriately affect the morals of students. The removal of the statues, which had perched in front of the school’s assembly hall for nearly fifty years and were nicknamed Venie and Pol, was ridiculed in newspapers and editorial cartoons.

“With the lady having no arms, it was hardly hand-in-hand, but Venus and Apollo were driven in disgrace from the old homestead,” one paper wrote. “Venus and the boyfriend have suddenly become sinister threats in Marlboro High school life.... Venus wears the more clothing, being about 50 per cent draped, but Apollo is clad in the L street bathhouse mode.”

A Boston minister came to the rescue, offering by telegram to “provide shelter and decent exposure for the ostracized Apollo and Venus” in his Congregational church. “Original Apollo statue is in the Vatican in Rome. If it is decent enough for the Vatican, it is decent enough for our young people to see and admire.... And as your Venus is a copy of the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, it will give me joy to present her grace and beauty to people who believe, and hope, that the human body is one of God’s fairest creations.”

Granitsas’s blunt opinions and verve would be echoed in her son, Tim, who decades later became an unceremoniously candid member of the Nantucket school committee. Tim would also inherit Granitsas’s political independence and inability to be pigeonholed; despite some staunch conservative stances, Granitsas was quoted in the papers supporting birth control, following the death of a close friend from a back-alley abortion. “It was rather scandalous at the time,” Sherry notes.

In 1940, in what one paper called “a wedding of much interest,” Granitsas married John Lepore. They had met in high school and dated over the objections of her father, who wanted her to marry someone Greek. If Granitsas’s father hadn’t died while she was still single, “he would have shot my father with a Smith and Wesson .44,” Tim says.

Lepore’s parents were Italian immigrants from the Adriatic village of Corfinio, where the soil was so poor that Tim described them as
“rock farmers.” Lepore, a surname derived from the Italian word for rabbits, was a nickname for a fleet-footed person. John was one of thirteen children who survived infancy. (“I think they had two or three Patricks and gave up on that name when they died,” Sherry says.)

As a child, John Lepore loved tinkering and “almost blew his brother up” when he was playing around with blasting caps, said Tim, who would inherit his father’s interest in mechanical things. And a defining moment for John Lepore occurred at sixteen, when he and some friends fell through the ice at a reservoir. Lepore managed to swim ashore and summon help, so that most of the boys could be rescued, but one, a police officer’s son, drowned.

Broad-shouldered and quick, Lepore became a star Marlborough High School fullback and played semipro football in Marlborough during the summers. Helped by football and scholarships, he became the only one of his siblings to attend college; in just three years he took enough courses to qualify for medical school.

“I think my mother said he had to make something of himself,” Tim said. “My mother wasn’t going to marry a sluggo.”

Lepore was hardly a slacker. He would spend mornings in surgery and see patients at his home office in the afternoons and evenings. In the summer, when the family rented a cottage on Cape Cod, Lepore would commute to Marlborough, a hundred miles away. Patients of limited means could pay in lasagna. Priests, rabbis, and other community leaders were treated for free.

The Lepores weren’t rich, but they were comfortable enough to afford a small boat and a new Buick every couple of years. John Lepore once ordered an Alaskan dog sled, which he attached to his car to tow his children through snowy streets. They were financially generous to friends and family, sending nieces, nephews, and friends’ children to college or medical school. “They helped people,” Tim recalls.

To Bob DiBuono, Tim’s best friend, John Lepore “could do no wrong. In my eyes, at the time, he was kind of like John Wayne.” Bob considered his own father, who sold dairy equipment, was a Marlborough
city councilman, and was a violinist who learned to play saxophone in a big band, to be a “dud” by comparison.

Bob experienced John Lepore’s skill firsthand. Once, during one of Bob and Tim’s regular frog hunting excursions, when the boys were about eleven, Bob was holding a frog the boys had shot with a bow and arrow. He was trying to saw off the back legs with a knife so the boys could bring the legs home to Bob’s mother, who would cook them. “I cut the frog and my thumb at the same time.”

His thumb dangling, he was rushed to the hospital, where, while “stinky, muddy water was pouring out of my boots,” John Lepore stitched the thumb back on. A year later, Bob was making a knife, using another knife to pin the handle down so he could attach it to a blade. The knife slipped and tore through the back of his hand. “It was pouring blood.” John Lepore came to the rescue, closing the five-inch gash on Bob’s right hand.

“I have not seen another man like him,” Sherry asserts. “He could sing; he could recite poetry; he was in plays; he could build a car; he did all the architectural renderings of the house we lived in; he did all the electricity. He made all of my dresses when I got married. If Timothy feels a little inadequate, it could be because they don’t make people like my dad.”

It could also be because John Lepore, despite being good with children in general, sometimes kept his own son at a distance. He had a huge collection of electric motors, scooped up from neighbors’ junk piles, that he used to build an extraordinary American Flyer train set, rigged to run on three levels, with lights and a drawbridge. It was so impressive that it was displayed at a Shopper’s World store, but so intricate that “I couldn’t play with it much,” Tim remembers. “My father could be a little bit cold except about electric motors. When he died he still had a wall full of electric motors that he had salvaged.”

Tim found his father unsentimental about other things. For instance, “he destroyed all of his letters to my mother” that he had written during World War II. The only letter he saved was telling too: it was “pretty
syrupy talking about baby John and how much he missed him.” Tim was also “locked out” of his father’s workshop, a paradise of salvaged metal and junk that John Lepore protected with a door with chicken wire strung over the top. Tim would “figure out ways to break into it. I used to sneak over the chicken wire, but I was always too noisy, and he could hear me.”

Tim’s father wouldn’t run up and catch him, though. He would wait until dinner, where “my father sat at the head and I sat next to him. If I had screwed up, that was when the hand would be coming down. He’d put his finger underneath my collarbone and pull me down on the floor. It wasn’t horribly painful, but it was an attention getter. It was ‘This is my house, these are my rules, you do not know anything, and if I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.’”

Once, “he was giving me a shot of penicillin for something, and I can remember telling him I didn’t want this injection. I got a slap in the ass, and then I got the shot. Sitting and telling my father I didn’t want to do something he wanted me to do—not a good idea.”

Lepore was gentler with his daughter, but he could apply his medical expertise with a kind of no-pain-no-gain approach. Sherry recalls that he “used to bring me to visit every sick person he could, saying, ‘I want you to get whatever it is they have—chicken pox, mumps, measles—because someday you’ll be pregnant and I want you to be exposed so things don’t happen to the fetus.’ And I got infected with all of it.” Tim said his father’s experience in World War II made him more conservative, even dogmatic about some things as time went on. “Back in the early ’50s, around Korea, I can remember him suggesting that perhaps bombing them all is not a bad idea. He would talk about it at the kitchen table. My mother did not agree with him. My opinions were generally not solicited.”

With only part of a lung left, Edna Lepore could not work. For a while, she stayed close to bed, and her husband built a sunroom onto the house so she could rest on the first floor.

Her mother became the children’s main caregiver, coming from California “reluctantly because my mother needed her,” Sherry says. “She and my mother were at odds an awful lot about us.”

When Edna Lepore had more energy, she took her children to a little stream in the next town; they named it Lepore Brook. “We’d build dams, walk on rocks, look at fossils, dirt,” Sherry recalls. “My mother had the spirit of being an outdoorsman. She lived vicariously through us. She couldn’t participate in it much, but she made sure that we did.”

She also used to pile them in the car, along with Bob DiBuono, who remembers her driving long distances and saying things like, “Let’s go to New York.” Bob protested: “Oh gee, Mrs. Lepore, I have to be home by 5:30.” She was joking, but it hadn’t seemed like it at first. Sherry says her mother was “the only one I ever knew that crossed her legs when she drove. I have no idea how she drove like that, but she did. She would say, ‘Let’s go down this road and that road and see what we can find.’”

Tim believes the rides may have had another motivation. His mother was convinced that his father was having an affair with his nurse. She said she got that notion because Tim, when he was about ten, had told her so, although Tim doesn’t recall it that way.

“I perhaps said something innocently, that I had somehow walked in on them in flagrante delicto. I don’t have a clear memory of that. But I remember being in the car with my mother when she went after my father’s nurse.”

With Tim in tow, his mother summoned the gumption and stubborn pride that had fueled her precocious educational and political achievements, and beamed them toward the nurse. She chased down the nurse in her car and screamed at her. “My mother was pissed off out of her head. I remember just shrinking under the dashboard.”

Sherry remembers that her mother was “always tracking down” the nurse and “would talk to me about it and get me involved. My father always denied it, but my mother would have me check, and I would find evidence of them being together, spot them together.” The nurse “would give us presents for Christmas, and I was in charge of returning them to her.”