Replacement Child (24 page)

On the way to her class, Linda passed this memorial plaque on the wall near the principal’s office:

I
N LOVING MEMORY OF OUR FRIEND AND CLASSMATE

D
ONNA
J
O
M
ANDEL

J
ULY
25, 1945–J
ANUARY
22, 1952

At first, she felt like a sort of star at school. Everyone knew her, and of the accident and her sister—now famous in her death. She didn’t have the chance not to tell anyone. She wore the evidence every day.

Photos of Linda at that age showed a spunky kid with a ready smile and a determined look in her eye. My parents had put everything into building her confidence, showing her all the things she could accomplish just by trying hard. Already, she had learned to walk twice, once at a year old, and again at three
after the accident. In a few years, she would have to do it again after another surgery.

My mother started working with the PTA the year before Linda started school, while she was pregnant with me, arranging seminars and workshops with parents and teachers about what today would be called “diversity.” She kept encouraging class discussions about accepting people that were different in some way. She used the PTA as a tool to make Linda’s life easier.

Her early school years were good ones. In first grade, Linda even got her first real valentine. But, later, kids were not as accepting and were sometimes cruel. When teenagers started having parties where the boys and girls would pair off, Linda told me, she was left alone. She would go to the bathroom a lot, or help in the kitchen to get out of the situation and then go home to cry herself to sleep. Finally, she wouldn’t go to those parties at all, making up some excuse to my parents—that her friends wouldn’t be there, or that she had something else to do.

I must have realized some of this happened while it occurred, but Linda made light of it so that it was easy to ignore. She was always fine, she said, whenever I asked.

2006

W
ITH
J
USTIN AWAY
at college, this is the first time David and I have lived alone together in our six years of marriage. Although I miss my son in an almost physical way, this part of the empty-nest equation is a nice one. David and I can be just a couple, which we have never really had a chance to be. We can just be us. It’s the kind of calm, happy relationship I had always hoped to find.

I’m thinking of how my parents survived what they did. I decide to do some research into grief and, specifically, the death of a child. Online I find a plethora of books to order that promise some answers on the subject along with some online support groups. I wish these had been around for my parents, my mother especially, to help them through.

While I’m reading about how parents try to recover from losing a child, I find that many decide to have another child, and then I see a term I had never seen: "replacement child." Though the words are used to describe an antidote for the parents, the children themselves seem to be at some risk in their role as healers. They even have a psychiatric condition named for them: replacement child syndrome.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(DAY OF THE CRASH)

3:43
PM

A
FEW BLOCKS AWAY
from my parents’ house, Vincent J. O’Connell was standing in his yard at 325 Fay Avenue. He heard the aircraft approach from the southeast. Several seconds later, he heard a loud blast, and then another after a few more seconds.

By that time, the aircraft was close to where he stood and had veered sharply to the right. It was over his head when there was a third blast. He saw a yellowish glare for a moment through the fog.

“One motor stopped. The other increased in intensity and whined,” he told reporters. It seemed “as if a tremendous amount of power was being applied.” A few seconds later there was “a terrific explosion in the distance.”

The plane careened just over the rooftop of Battin High and landed across the street. Cafeteria workers were sure the blast was an atomic bomb. The three hundred students inside escaped the crash by fifty yards.

In the tiny concrete house behind my parents’ house, Mrs. Fetske heard a roar, and then one wall of the building fell away. She grabbed her baby, Albert, and escaped.

At 314 Williamson Street, Mrs. William Schwartz raced with the baby she was watching and her own two children across the street to the high school.

Selma Kurtzer, Beverly Chessler, and Leona Lewis arrived home safely just as the plane hit, thanks to my mother sending them home from their rehearsal when she did.

Having dismissed the possibility of a second crash in their vicinity only a half hour earlier, nurses at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital heard Flight 6780 zoom overhead, then crash a block from their maternity and children’s wards.

John Delaney, chaplain at St. Elizabeth’s, also ran to the scene. As he got close, he heard screams from inside the plane. They quieted quickly.

Captain Reid’s wife looked out her window to see a plane flying low, lower, disappearing into the row of houses the next street over. She heard the moment of impact, saw the explosions.

1972

W
HEN
I
WENT
away to college at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, I can’t say that I was any different from any other eighteen-year-old in wanting to be off on my own, but I felt a certain urgency to get away. It was almost like I needed to be away from my family to survive as an individual and to escape some underlying expectation that I could not identify. The school was far enough away from home, three hours by car, to avoid the drop-in visit from my parents, and it was close enough to drive home for holidays and the occasional weekend.

Music was taking a back seat by the time I went to college. I majored in theatre, even though I had never landed a part in any play in high school. Nevertheless, ever since seeing Patty Duke in
The Miracle Worker
, I had decided that I could become anyone I wanted to be through acting. During my first semester, I jumped at the chance to go to England with my theatre class. We saw an average of two plays a day for two weeks in London. On the weekends we took tours of historic sites and traveled in the countryside. The trip opened my eyes to the larger world and made me want to broaden my experiences.

In the spring semester of my freshman year at college, I met a transfer student from England in my fencing class. Steven was the opposite of any boy I’d ever met. He was tall, blonde, and bearded.

When he called and asked me if I liked the theatre, I reminded him that I was a theatre major—so, of course I liked the theatre. He had tickets for the Hartford Stage Company for Saturday and asked if I would like to go.

I was impressed that this would be a real date, not a walk back to my dorm after a mixer dance. That night I put on a pair of slacks—not jeans—excited to be going to the city in Hartford to see a play.

The play was Noel Coward’s
Private Lives
. The whole farce is about a combative, if humorous, marriage with interchanges like this one:

“What is so horrible that one can’t stay happy . . . ”

“How long will it last, this ludicrous, overbearing love of ours?”

“Who knows.”

“Shall we always want to bicker and fight?”

“No, that desire will fade, along with our passion.”

Steven was preoccupied with showing me how much he knew about Noel Coward while I was trying to follow the fast-moving dialogue, and I missed half of the double entendres trying to listen to him at the same time. By the end of the play, I was mostly annoyed.

On the way home, Steven looked down at the gas gauge and announced, “I guess I should have stopped for gas this afternoon. Looks like we’re out.”

He pulled over to the curb in an unsavory part of the city. At least ten hooded teenagers blocked the entrance to a convenience store, passing a bottle and laughing. They nudged each other when the bottle stopped for too long. The sidewalk was littered with empty cans, bottles, and burger wrappers.

Steven said, “Wait here. I’ll go call my father to help us out.”

The convenience store guys watched him get out of the car and spotted me in the passenger seat. I was scared to be left alone in the car. Steven gave them a wave and made his way to the pay phone. I was cursing under my breath when he finally got back to the car, really upset that he had left me alone with these thugs leering at me.

“He’ll be here in a minute. Sorry about this.”

When we said good night, I jumped from the car before the awkward moment of a possible kiss, said “thanks for the evening” and “see you in class tomorrow,” and walked resolutely to my dorm without looking back. Although I saw him in fencing class, we didn’t date again that semester.

But that summer he called me out of the blue. He would be driving through New Jersey the following weekend, he said, and wanted to stop by. I agreed to see him—I was having a boring summer, working at a law office as a gofer.

His visit was very different from our date. He picked me up from work one day and drove me home. Then, we went out to a local diner for something to eat and we talked for hours about everything—about how we wanted to travel and try new ways of living our lives. We seemed to want the same things out of life. My family warmed to him, which also changed how I saw him.
The contrast of seeing him in my home with my family just exaggerated his exoticness.

He was headed for Africa the next week on a photographic safari.

“I only shoot animals with my camera,” he liked to say.

It was his letters from Africa that captivated me and gave me the rush of freedom I was looking for. He described hot-red sunsets over the endless expanse of dense jungle, waterbuck that wandered into his camp, the thrill of getting a close-up of a rhino. Through his letters, I felt as if I was there, cooking with him on the camp stove in the black night, startling at the howls of distant hyenas. By September, I was sorry I would not be returning to college with him in Connecticut. I had transferred to the University of West Virginia for their theatre program and to explore a new part of the country.

“I’ll visit,” he promised.

I didn’t count on it, knowing it was a fourteen-hour drive from Hartford.

That semester, though, Steven wore out his ’65 Mustang driving to see me every weekend. And I failed my Friday 8
AM
forestry class since he always arrived on Thursday nights.