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The Bijou Dream Theatre

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Book & Cover design by Cory Freeman

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The Troy Book Makers • Troy, New York • thetroybookmakers.com

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ISBN: 978-1-61468-200-4

eISBN: 9781614682080

To my husband, Kevan Karl, with all my love.
I could not have written this without you.

To my daughters, Terry Karl and Kathleen Karl Shaw
for their tireless, generous, support and love - all my love.

And to my twin sister Jackie, and my sister Louise,
with all my love.

Contents

Prologue

Part I

Home Yonkers, New York 1941

Part 2

Mosholu Parkway, Bronx, New York 1943-44

Part 3

St. Christopher's School -
Dobbs Ferry, New York, 1945-47

Part 4

Foster Home- Poughkeepsie, New York 1947

Part 5

Home- Yonkers, New York 1952

Part 6

Riverside Drive, New York City 1956

Afterward

My Grandmother, Louise Clinton

Dad and Mother sitting together

My Mother and Father on
Honeymoon in Canada

My mother, as a young girl
in a rowboat

Prologue

We were happy once. My parents and my sisters and I lived in a frame house with banks of Iris and a Lilac hedge in Mineola, Long Island, New York. My mother’s sister, Aunt Harriet, and my grandmother, Nana, lived with us. We also had a maid named Hattie.

My father wrote then in his Yale Vicennial Record in 1940, “the good luck I have enjoyed in association with old friends in business, with the fun my wife and I are having in bringing up our active twin daughters soon to be four years old, together with their peppy six year old sister, are all contributing factors in making life in this peaceful hemisphere of the world look mighty good to me.”

Every Sunday, my grandmother Clinton, made potroast; she called it a daube, with tender beef in dark gravy; her faded once-red hair pulled back in a bun, her Sunday dress covered in a flowered apron, she hunched over the stove, stirring the gravy, redolent with onions and bay leaf.

That’s almost all I can remember, except that Louise, my older sister, told me there was a terrible fight because my Daddy said that Aunt Harriet was “auditioning half the Airforce base in the guest room upstairs.”

Mommy and Nana were angry with him. Aunt Harriet just laughed.

Nana said,“We’re leaving.” They all packed up with Aunt Harriet and took off for High Bridge in the Bronx where Mommy and Aunt Harriet had grown up and where Nana lived.

Louise said Mommy had to stay close to Nana and Aunt Harriet, so we followed. Daddy drove.

They all lived in a Brownstone at 1040 Nelson Avenue with Great Grandma Rosenow, while we found an apartment on Anderson Avenue nearby. Our apartment was at the top of Anderson Avenue that had a big, long hill.

One time there was a runaway car with no brakes, heading straight toward a place where all the children were playing at the bottom of the hill. Daddy chased the car, jumped on the running board and stopped the car so it didn’t hit anyone. All the neighbors came out and were saying, ‘Sweeney can run,” That’s our last name, “Sweeney.” Daddy was brave.

When Great Grandma Rosenow died, Aunt Harriet married, took my grandmother with her again and moved to the suburbs of Westechester; we followed as before. By then my mother had slipped into a world of voices and hallucinations, my father was drinking and gambling, and we were sadder and poorer.

We lived on the edge of Yonkers, bordering on Fleetwood, with its spacious lawns and tree-lined streets that my mother had loved in Long Island. Aunt Harriet lived in Bronxville, a fashionable address, with her well-to-do- husband, her daughter, “Pammy,” and my grandmother. We rarely saw them.

My father called our apartment house on the Bronx River Road, “The Annex”. He meant it was the annex to Grasslands County Hospital where people who were mentally ill were taken for observation. He liked to say, there were many more in the building “who qualified for admission”. My mother was taken there in 1943.

I thought of our apartment house as a castle. There were battlements along the roof line, wide stone steps leading up to the entrance, a gargoyle that hung above us, and angel faces carved in stone on each side. I imagined that they were my twin sister, Jacqueline and me.

From the rooftop at 541 I day-dreamed that we looked over our fortress to Sherwood Forest, along the banks of the river where Robin Hood and his band of jolly men lived in Nottinhamshire. I liked to think that the gangs of boys who sometimes roamed through Sherwood Forest were actually descendents of Robin Hood’s men. But it was Sherwood Park, on the Bronx River, and the boys were just kids who lived in Westchester County, Yonkers.

The happiness that I felt when we moved to the Bronx, surfaced through the years that followed each time we moved. I would feel comfortable, usually with a person that made me feel I was home; I would believe it was permanent; then there was always a reason why we had to move again. We went from Long Island to the Bronx, to Westchester, to Upstate, to a foster home where we stayed for seven years.

Through all the years, despite the moments of happiness, my sisters and I were fearful of IT- THE BREAKDOWN: the game of Irish/German-English roulette. One roll of the genes and at least one of us would land in a mental ward like our mother before us.

Part I

541 Bronx River Road
Yonkers, New York
1941

“On the road to Mandaly where the flying fishes play
And the dawn comes up like thunder out of China
‘cross the bay.”

Dawn is a spooky grey light that creeps up on the world. I thought dawn would be orange and would break through the night with a crash like the words my father sang in On the Road to Mandalay.

I can hear my father’s beautiful tenor voice holding the high notes, and see Mommy giving him that look when he sings that says, “I love you.” That was before everything changed.

“This is dawn,” I tell my twin sister, Jackie. I have to explain everything to her because I am twenty minutes older. We are five years old. It is December 7.

When we first woke up this morning, Jackie was in with me because she wet her bed again. It was still dark, but we were worried. We have no clean underwear because Mommy doesn’t wash clothes anymore and Jackie still goes in her pants. We have to hide the dirty ones so Mommy won’t punish her.

Mommy has bad headaches and has to lie down a lot. She doesn’t go out of the house or shop or bring wash down to the cellar or walk outside. She just washes germs away in our apartment, and stays in the bathroom with the water running.

This morning I cuddled Jackie so she got warm. I love to wrap my legs around hers and smell the sweet smell behind her ears. We whispered about what to do. I told her my plan.

We got up very quietly and pulled the panties out from behind the radiator where we hid them and then I got mommy's scissors so we could cut out the dirty parts and put them down the sewer. We stuck a wad of paper in the door so we wouldn’t be locked out, tiptoed through the lobby and out the front entrance. In the courtyard I pointed to the evergreens that brush against our bedroom window.

“See Jackie, that’s what that scary sound is-just the trees, come see.” But she held back until I took her hand and led her past the windows.

From the curb on the Bronx River Road I can see halos around the headlight of a car across the park on the Bronx River Parkway. A bird begins to sing. The icicle air tingles.

“My hiney is cold,” I say as I sit down on the curb.

“Say` buttocks`, dear.” Jackie imitates Mommy and her low, la-de-da voice.

I hate the word buttocks. Whenever someone says it, I feel as if I have been touched there. It is one of our forbidden words so I have to pay Jackie back. I begin to work up spit saying gamasha, goomisha, gahmasha goomisha until I have a mouthful and then I pin Jackie down and dribble on her. She rubs the spit away and makes a face.

“Now you smell biddy. That’s what you get” I tell her.

She just laughs and wriggles out from under me. “Biddy” smells like the ground in spring after a rain, or like limburger cheese, or what my fingers smell like after I put them down there.

“Buttocks, BUTTOCKS, BUTT -OCKS,” Jackie shouts and laughs her deep laugh. I cover her mouth. A light goes on in our dark apartment house.

“Now see what you’ve done. Take the scissors and cut only the part that has poopies on it,” I tell her. We push the dirty parts down between the grates of the sewer with a stick.

“What if Mommy finds the other ones we hid?” Jackie is about to cry.

“She won’t do that again,” I say as I smooth her face.

The grey light of dawn is a little lighter and birds are singing in Sherwood Forest across the road. It’s really Sherwood Park, but I like to think it is Robin Hood’s forest like the stories Mommy used to read to us from our Journeys Through Bookland when the words smelled like coffee and cigarettes.

Back in the apartment, Mommy’s door at the end of the long hall is shut where Mommy and Louise, who is almost eight, are still sleeping. Louise told me once she was Mommy’s guard dog. Daddy is on the cot in the dining room where he always sleeps. We snuggle back in my bed and fall asleep. Then I hear Mommy. She creeps in like the dawn.

“You sick cat,” she whispers. I reach for Jackie, but it’s too late. She has her.

“Daddy,” I try to yell but my voice won’t come out.

“Don’t you interfere, do you hear me?” My mother is pulling Jackie’s hair.

I hate you. I wish you were dead,” I yell as I try to push her. My legs are shaking. Daddy pulls her away.

“Helen, for Christ’s sake-she’s just a little girl- she can’t help it.” My mother scratches at Daddy’s eyes.

Mr. Merritt upstairs in 2A pounds the floor and yells, “Cut it out you Goddamn maniacs!”

Then my mother strips the sheets from the bed. I smell the pee and the Chantilly perfume we gave her for her birthday. She is pouring it on the mattress. Jackie cries and holds her head.

“Poppa is here, Eenie” Daddy says to Jackie as he picks her up. He calls her Eenie because she is so little, and he calls me Bimsey because when we were small Jackie couldn’t say my name, Virginia. It came out Bimsey.

Daddy’s cot is still warm and has his sleep smell. I lie on the side where his heart is so I can hear it beat. It is Sunday so he can stay with us. On weekday mornings he catches the train from the Mount Vernon station to New York. He works at Socony-Vacuum Oil. He has to work every day and stay late a lot, but on Sundays he stays with us all day and night. Sometimes he sleeps across our doorsill in case Mommy gets up in the night.

Later in the morning Jackie and I lie on the rug in the living room and listen to the radio, our ears against the gold tapestry with the sound turned low. Sometimes Mayor La Guardia reads the funnies on the radio. Daddy reads the Sunday paper at the kitchen table and Louise reads in Mommy’s room. Mommy sits at the dining room table covered with newspapers, Daddy’s tax forms, grocery bills, tissues, knitting needles and yarn, cotton balls, bottles of colored nail polish, polish remover, and empty Gristede boxes. (Mommy can’t go out to shop anymore because it makes her too nervous; Gristedes delivers all our groceries. The delivery boy goes in the Super’s entrance and puts the boxes in the dumbwaiter.)

Mommy lifts her arms in the air and says, “Don’t blind him.” She is talking to someone only she can see.

I can see the breakfront with the pretty china that Mommy says is “Ming China” - a wedding gift from Daddy’s roommate at Yale, Doug Prizer. I like to touch the Lyre bird’s blue tail and run my finger around the gold rim. There are only ten plates left because she throws them when she gets mad.

Our rug smells like Energine dry-cleaning fluid. I love the smell. (I hid a can of Engergine and a rag in the corner of my closet so I can go in and smell it when I want to.). It smells like gasoline. Whenever we need to get gas we look for the red sign of Socony-Vacuum.

Daddy says, “Look for the winged-Pegasus.” Pegasus is a magic flying horse. Louise says Daddy learned all about Greek myths at Yale. Mommy tried to get the poopy smell out of the rug with Energine where Jackie had another accident. I scratch at the rug and smell my fingers.

Mommy isn’t watching me. She says I drive her crazy always sniffing at everything. If she sees me smelling things she will come after me, but I can reach the door to the lobby before she can get me. And anyway Daddy is home. I know I am bad when I smell things. She caught me once smelling the chair when Daddy got up. She said that was disgusting. She said I was a sick Mick.

Sometimes I have to smell my hands and clear my throat three times. Then Mommy talks out loud to Daddy’s father, Michael Francis Sweeney, who isn’t there:

“Don’t talk to me about insanity in the family. Look at this little Mick. Don’t look down your nose at me,” she says to Grandfather Sweeney; “All of you, you're all shanty Irish. And your son’s fancy Yale degree can’t hide it.”

Mommy says Grandfather Sweeney has cold clammy hands and a mouth like a cod –“like your father, dear, a gaping Mick mouth and glasses”. My sisters and I have never seen him. He was a famous high jumper. Once he jumped so high that he made the world’s record and he held it for seventeen years. Sometimes I try to jump the bushes in front of our apartment, but Daddy just laughs.

Daddy told Louise that on their wedding day, his father came to the Concourse Plaza Hotel where Daddy was waiting for his wedding to begin, and said,

“Gerry, I left the car running. Get out of this before it’s too late.”

Daddy said it was like a curse in a Greek myth. He tells Louise things like that because he says she is precocious-that means she’s older and she understands.

Mommy likes to tell me what their apartment looked like when they first married. “The rug was not beige, dear, it was champagne. Everything was champagne- the rug, the slipcovers. The walls were buff. There were pale striped silk cushions on the Duncan Phyfe chairs in the dining room...Grammercy Park and very chic..touches of ecru.” She moves her hands in the air as if she is conducting a choir. I imagine her and Daddy floating like bubbles in the champagne room, dancing together singing, “Heaven, I'm in heaven.”

WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM TO BRING
YOU AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE:

THE JAPANESE HAVE ATTACKED PEARL
HARBOR.

We turn up the radio and run to tell them. “That’s nice dear,” Daddy says. Mommy says, “My God, Gerry, Cousin Eddy is there.”

Cousin Eddy is the Captain of a submarine stationed in Pearl Harbor. Cousin Eddy’s parents are Cousin Helen, who was a Wegman, Mommy says, and Cousin Wiley Taylor who live up on Kimball Avenue, above us, in a pretty house like the one we had in Mineola, Long Island.

They used to come down and visit us, and Cousin Helen played classical music on our piano. Then I opened the door to the lobby so everyone in the apartment house could hear and think we were special people.

We stand around the radio. President Roosevelt is about to speak. Daddy holds my hand while Mommy puts her arm around Louise. Jackie holds on to Mommy’s skirt.

When der Fuhrer says he is the master race

We heil! (Bronx cheer) Heil! (Bronx cheer)

Right in der Fuhrer’s face.

Daddy sings as he goose-steps around the apartment with his finger under his nose, a pretend mustache, like Hitler. We follow with Jackie singing off-key on purpose. Louise marches too. Daddy teaches us how to give a Bronx cheer. You stick out your tongue and make a bad sound like a fart. Mommy says it’s rude, but laughs.

That night Daddy goes to a civil defense meeting where he is elected section leader. He comes home wearing an arm band. He is responsible for seeing that everyone in the apartment buys black-out shades and turns out lights in an air raid.

“Douse those lights,” he calls from the street the night of the first air raid. I pick out his tenor from all the other voices. When the sirens begin I peek out from behind the shades and watch the search lights crisscross the sky. I’m not afraid. It’s an exciting game.

A year goes by. It is 1942. Daddy and I sing songs about bluebirds and tomorrows and peace ever after. I love to imitate the singers on the radio and learn all the words. “When the lights go on again, all over the world.”

Jackie listens and hugs me. She tells me, “Someday you’ll be a famous singer, and I’ll come to a nightclub and listen to you.”

It’s different now since the war, and I want it to stay that way. Daddy doesn’t go to the bars because of warden meetings. We fall asleep because we know he won’t drink and come in late and there won’t be a fight between him and Mommy. The ladies in the apartment house ask Mommy to join the Red Cross to roll bandages with them.

The day of the first meeting, a cold rainy day in the spring, I worry all day at school about whether she will go. I’m afraid she will start talking again to someone who isn’t there. Jackie and I go straight from school to the recreation room in the basement. The clothes drying on the metal rods smell good like baked potatoes. Mommy looks normal like the other mothers only prettier and she rolls bandages faster than anyone. After the meeting she makes meat loaf and tinned peas for supper.

“That was delicious Helen, dear.” Daddy pushes back from the table and lights a cigarette.

“More coffee darling?” Mommy asks as she pats Daddy’s hand. I pray: Please God, let this be forever. Afterwards the three of us sit with Mommy on the couch while Daddy goes to his meeting.

“Tell us again how you and Daddy met,” Louise pleads.

Mommy takes a big puff on her cigarette. “All right dear.”

She looks down, and grinds out her cigarette, and gives us a quick sideways look. Her face is like a stranger’s as the other part of her tries to laugh at us. She doesn’t want to go with that other part, I can tell.

She laughs-I think I hear her say under her breath, “little micks”- and then she says, “No.” I tug at her hand. “Mommy...” She comes back.

She lights another cigarette. “I was a secretary at Prudential where I met your father’s sister, Helen, who introduced us, his dear, Helen Ann.” Her voice is mean.

“Did you love him right away?” I ask quickly, trying to keep her with us.

She holds her hand up to someone she thinks is near her. “NOT NOW,” she says. She puffs on her cigarette, and turns to Louise.

“Your father was a charmer when I met him, dear. He was thin and handsome, still had his hair and his teeth, a wonderful dancer. Sometimes the other dancers would stop to watch us.”

Louise says that Daddy always had bad teeth –she saw them in the pictures she found in the hope chest- and he was old when he had us, in his forties. Now he’s almost fifty and he has false teeth, and he’s bald.

“And tell us about how you went to the Bijou Dream Theater,” Louise says.

Louise found an old yellow picture of the Bijou Dream Theater in Mommy’s hope chest. Louise says it is a very important picture because Mommy keeps it in the hope chest. She is always telling us things like that to make us think she knows so much more than we do. I think she does know a secret about the theater. Maybe they fell in love at the Bijou Theater.

“Daddy took me there on a Saturday night.” Mommy stops smoking and looks out the window. “I was wearing peau de soie and a little cloche...”

That’s what Mommy wore on her wedding day”. Louise and I look at each other. Louise knows.

“No, I mean -- tell us about the movie. What did you see?” We move close to touch her. “It was the twenties, wasn’t it?” Louise asks.

“Oh my putzy, so curious,” Mommy says. She pats Louise. She doesn’t answer, but she stays with us.

Louise knows all about movies. She will write movies and I will be a singer some day and I will sing in a movie like Virginia Mayo. Louise made up a skit about nurses who have to put on a show to entertain the soldiers, and I made up a song that we sing in a chorus line:

We’re angels of mercy, please con’t call us nursey

We play for the boys woo, woo. (Here, we turn around flip up our skirts and show them our hineys.)

Our bedroom is the hospital ward. We have to close the door because the enemy lines are nearby. Then we take turns playing the wounded soldier who has to be examined. We have to take off our underpants and get under the sheets and the nurse says. “Turn over, soldier, I have to take your temperature.”

We know all about taking temperatures and enemas because every morning Mommy asks, “Have you had a b.m., dear?” We answer, yes, and run before she takes down the enema bag.

One morning I ask if I can help with the war effort--she knits wool socks and sweaters for the soldiers overseas. She says, “This is a skein, Virginia, can you say that? You are Mommy’s bright girl.”

She shows me how to hold up the skein of wool while she winds the yarn off the skein into a ball. She forgets about the enema. I want to sit as long as she wants me to be her helper, but my arms are too tired. I can hardly hold them up. Just when Mommy is happy with me and loves me I can’t do it. It makes me cry. When I try to swallow I feel as if I have a sharp stick in my throat. Mommy feels my forehead. By afternoon my temperature is 105. I have a rash all over my body. The doctor says I have Scarlet Fever and our family has to be quarantined. Mommy says she can keep the quarantine.

Mommy moves Jackie in with Louise. She scrubs the room with ammonia. She scrubs the walls as far as she can reach, the sill and the molding around the door, and the door knobs on the inside and out; no one is allowed in. She changes my sheets every day and brings them down to the wash room in the cellar, and then because she is afraid to ride the elevator, she climbs the six flights up to the roof. She is REALLY afraid of heights and hangs the sheets in the air.

When we moved to the Bronx from Long Island so Mommy could be near Grandma, Daddy found a nice apartment on the fifth floor. Daddy had the walls painted the color she likes-sort of like the color of meringue. Mommy came in the apartment, took one look out the window and started screaming. She said we couldn’t stay there because it was too high up. We had to move to a dingy apartment on the ground floor. Daddy was mad.

The bed pan is kept under my bed. When she slides it under me I cry. It feels like ice. Then she empties the pan and cleans it with ammonia. She writes on a pad that she keeps on the dresser.

“Did you write that I did poopies?” I ask.

“Don’t be vulgar, dear. Say ‘b.m.’” she says.

Then she pulls the shades and lies down beside me.

I wake up and she is watching me. She peeks at me from behind her hands and plays peek-a-boo with me the way she used to when I was little. I giggle. She laughs the way that I love that has a little squeal at the end. Her wedding ring slides off and she lets me put it on my finger. Her hands smell like ammonia. I measure our hands and she says I have her hands. She has freckles on her hands like Daddy.

Two times a day she gives me a sponge bath with warm soapy water. She slides a water proof sheet under me and keeps the part of me that isn’t being washed under a cotton blanket. She holds my head while I sip ginger ale.

This is the second week. Sometimes when I first wake up Mommy looks like a skeleton. Her eyes are deep in her head, and her forehead bulges. I can see a blue vein in her temple.

“What is the very best thing you can remember?” I say.

“My mother’s red hair,” she says.

The doctor says it is a miracle that no one else got it. I am all better. But I don’t want Mommy to go back to her own room with Louise. I want her to stay and take care of me.

When I go back to school, I find that our first grade class at P.S. 14 is part of the war effort too. After school Jackie and I pull a wagon around the neighborhood collecting scrap metal. They say they will use it to make guns. “To fight the Nazis and the Japs.”

But the best thing we do is plant victory gardens. One Friday morning in the spring, our teacher rolls in a cart filled with boxes of seeds in little packets. Every student gets a small box with five packets of seeds. That night Jackie and I count ours over and over. I love the bright red and green pictures on the front. I take them in the bathroom when I have to go. When my eyes get teary when I'm going, the print on the packet gets blurry. I imagine our garden coming up first, and how we will get a gold star by our names on the board.

There is an empty lot near our apartment house that the owners said the tenants in the apartment could use, so the next morning Daddy helps us plant the seeds. He wakes us up to the tune of Reveille.

You’re in the army now

You’re not behind a plow

You dig up a ditch

You never get rich

You’re in the army now.

Then he does a tap dance up and down the hall. “You’re better than Jimmy Cagney, Daddy,” Jackie says as she tries to catch him.

“Ah,” he says, “I went to dance school with George Murphy.” He does a shuffle-off to-Buffalo-step while we follow.

On our way to school each morning we kneel down to see if the seeds are sprouting. One day Jackie stays home sick, with a cold, but the real reason is because she still goes in her pants. Mommy won’t let her go to school with soiled panties and there are no more clean ones. I stop at the garden and I see neat lines of bright green seedlings like rows of cross stitches on a sampler. When I tell Mrs. Wilsie about the plants, she puts a gold star by my name on the board. I'm glad I’m the only one with a star and Jackie doesn’t get one.

It starts out to be one of my best days until recess when I’m climbing on the monkey bars and the boys underneath me yell they can see my hiney. The safety pin in my underpants has become undone. The boys are in a bunch looking up at me. Their voices get louder and echo in my head until I cry. I sit down on the bars and pull my dress under me and won’t come down. Mrs. Wilsie calls to the second grade teacher to take our class in, but the boys don’t listen.

“Every one of you will march into the school this minute. Follow the second grade,” she says in her meanest voice. Then they move.

Mrs. Wilsie comes under me and holds her arms out. “It’s all right, Virginia.”

Then she takes me to the school nurse who pulls the curtain around and asks me to take off my panties so she can mend them. I didn’t want her to see that they are dirty, or to see the safety pin that holds the seat together. She wrinkles her nose when I give them to her. I sit on the edge of the cot inside the curtain while she mends them. She washes her hands after she gives them back to me and asks me for my phone number.

“Beveryly 7-7612.”

“Well, that’s a smart little girl”. She seems surprised that I know my number. “Now you go along back to your room.”

That’s what I get for wishing for the gold star all for myself. I walk slowly so the sewing wouldn’t come out, and keep my head down when I walk into class. At lunch the nurse comes over to Mrs. Wilsie and whispers. I worry about what Mommy said to her on the phone, and then I got a stomach ache, so I ask the monitor permission to go to the lavatory.

When I walk by, I hear the Nurse say, “Something has to be done” but she stops talking when she sees me.

What does that mean? What “has to be done?” I feel as if everyone in the cafeteria knows what happened to me. I try to walk faster, but the light in the hallway leading to the lavatory seems as far away as the moon.

When I get home the apartment smells like Nair and Ammonia. Mommy cleaned up. Daddy’s cot is made, the dishes are done, and Jackie said Mommy gave her tea and honey for her cough. Mommy stays in the bathroom and never asks what happened at school. Maybe she cleaned up because the nurse called. I show Jackie the work for school while Louise makes us grilled cheese sandwiches for supper.

The next morning Mommy keeps Jackie home again. At school I think everyone is thinking about what happened the day before, so instead of going on the jungle gym I sit on the steps by myself. Mrs. Wilsie asks me if I want to jump rope. I say no, that I have another stomach ache. I watch Eleanor Arthur doing cartwheels and summersaults showing off her new plaid dress and her clean white underpants with the tight bands around the legs. I hate her because her apartment is like a real home with pretty rugs and a bed with a canopy and fluffy curtains and the smell of pot-roast on Sundays and I want to have good underpants like her. I feel different from her and everyone else the way I did before the war.

I begin to remember the times I felt that way like the Sunday Mommy decided we had to go to the Dutch Reformed Church because there was no Lutheran church nearby. Mommy is Protestant and so are we. Daddy was a Catholic. Mommy hates the Catholics and the Irish.

I watched Mommy make herself up to go to church. It was as though she had some picture in her head and she tried to look like that. She put on dark lipstick, then rouge- rubbed it all off and started again until there were only smears and streaks. She covered it all over with powder and finally a black veil.

After we were out in the lobby, she ran back in and dusted herself in the front and back with a powder puff on her black crepe de chine dress. When we walked up to the church I tried to brush the powder off her bottom. At the church door she turned around and ran back to our car.

I remember the looks on the faces of the people on the street when they saw her. They looked at her as if she was a freak in a circus. We all looked like freaks-me with my hem hanging out and Jackie, six years old still in diapers waddling around, and Louise so fat and Daddy wouldn’t even walk with us. He would stand outside the church the way he said his father always did.

Sometimes I can make a memory like that seem far away as if it happened to somebody else.

Recess is over and I go to the back of the line.

One Saturday morning in the spring Daddy packs a lunch for a picnic in the park. He makes my favorite- bologna sandwiches on white bread while Mommy washes her hair and dresses. We cross the Bronx River road and the parkway holding hands, and chose a place by the river under a willow tree where Daddy puts the picnic basket in the middle of his old army blanket. The blanket is olive green the same color as the river. The river is high from a rainstorm and makes a soft rippling sound over the rocks shining green in the sunlight. We all sit on the blanket closed in by the fringes of the willow, quiet and safe. Louise recites lines from Wind in the Willows: “Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below...” Daddy takes a picture of us with Mommy.

“This reminds me of Mineola and the picnics we used to have in our garden,” Mommy says. “You were wearing a pale blue dimity dress, auburn curls...” She touches my hair “And Jacqueleine, wearing the same- so sweet - platinum hair, those big blue eyes- Louisa, in dotted Swiss.”

Then she turns to Daddy: “Harriet has a beautiful garden in Bronxville. Why did we have to leave Mineola to live in that rat trap?” She is looking across the parkway to our apartment house, 541 Bronx River Road.

“There’s no reasoning with you, Helen. We left because you had to live near Bronxville to be with your sister and your mother,” Daddy says

“And here I am with Micks and Dagos and God knows what else. I need to be near my own- people with some taste.” Mommy’s family is mostly German- the Shreiners, and Schmidts and Wegmans.

“Oh Helen, let’s not quarrel. It’s such a fine day. There, my sweeties, isn’t this grand?” Daddy seems happy again. “You needed a little fresh air my dear,” he says to Mommy, patting her hand. “Now for a leetle nourishment n’est-ce pas?” But Mommy slides her hand away.

Jackie moves close to me and curls up sucking her thumb.

“And here we have la pièce de resistance- la bologna sanveech avecle mustarde. A petits choux,” he says as he gives us ours.

I love it when he calls us his little cabbages. Then he hands out cartons of chocolate milk, a special treat, and black and white cookies -half‘n half’s he bought at Cushman’s bakery. I finish my sandwich and start on the cookies.

“Here, Eenie,” I say to Jackie. I take her thumb from her mouth and give her a cookie.

“Helen, dear, you need to eat.”

Mommy opens her sandwich and looks at the filling.

“I know what you’re doing.” She says in her other voice. “Don’t you think I know what you're doing? What did you put in here?” She looks at Daddy as if he is trying to poison her.

She throws down the sandwich and runs across the parkway to the apartment house. She doesn’t even look out for cars that brake and honk as she runs zig zag right through them. She flies in the lobby door. I stare down at the khaki blanket, poking my finger in a hole, the cookie stuck in my throat.

After a while Jackie asks, “Why didn’t you try to stop her, Daddy?”

“Because he can’t be bothered,” Louise says, in a mean voice. “He’s too busy thinking about Sherry up in 4A.”

Daddy jumps up so fast I almost choke.

“I've warned you, Louise.” He stands above her. ‘You keep up that talk and you'll regret it. You have no idea what I've been through with your mother. She’s been no wife to me.”

“If you would come home for once, or take her out for rides- she loves to go for rides- or to a nice restaurant, instead of a stupid picnic. No. You go to the bars with Sherry.” Louise was standing up, shouting at him.

“Goddamn it, I need a little relaxation from all this. Daddy throws out his arm as if means us too. “Lord knows I've tried .My own father saw it coming. I should have listened to him.” He walks back and forth rubbing his head.

“Why didn’t your father want you to marry Mommy?” Jackie asks.

“Because Mommy’s father was mental,” Louise says in a nasty sing-song voice.

“That’s enough do you hear?” Daddy shouts.

Louise stares up at him and then kicks over the picnic basket spilling everything out.

“You pick that up,” Daddy yells, but Louise is crossing the parkway just like Mommy without looking. Daddy runs after her, but Louise is already on the other side.

Daddy is out-of- breath. He throws his arms in the air. “Christ almighty. That was wonderful. What a goddam wonderful picnic that was.”

He sits with his arms around us, while he says over and over, “I tried. I tried. No one can say I didn’t try.”l

For the whole next year, the scary look is back on Mommy’s face and Daddy hardly ever comes home until we are asleep. One night when he comes in late, they began to fight. I watch through a crack in the door. Their giant shadows look like trees in a storm. They scuffle and thud against the hall walls. I try to be very still, but my heart is beating too loud. I hope Jackie is asleep. She lies very still and sucks her thumb. I lay my hand on her chest. Her heart is beating like an injured bird when you pick it up.

“I’ll tell you a story o.k.?” I whisper. She nods. So I tell her the story of Hansel and Gretel only I change it to our names. “Once upon a time...” When I finish she takes her thumb out long enough to say, “Again.”

In the morning Daddy’s hands are shaking and he has red scratches around his eyes.

“What did she do to you, Daddy?” I kiss his bald head.

"It’s all right, baby, it’s all right. Mommy is sick, that’s all. She’s sick,” he says.

When we start back to our room, Jackie pulls back and hides her face with her hands. “It’s dark in there,” she says from the doorway.

Our room is the darkest room in the apartment. There is no sun because we have only one window and it looks out on the courtyard so the other side of the apartment house blocks the sun. Evergreens grow in front of the window.

“There are jack-o-lantern faces in the window laughing at me”

I pull her hands down and make her look.

“There’s no one there, see.”

We kneel on the window seat in our bedroom and look out. The courtyard is empty except for the scraggly evergreens that scrape our window.

“Let’s go down to Abe’s and get Rumour bars and walnettoes and comics. I’ll sneak some money from Mommy’s room.”

The change mixes in with powder on the top of Mommy’s chiffonier and slides off creamily.

Abe owns the luncheonette on the corner of Bronx River Road and Kimball Avenue. He has big sad eyes and always pats Jackie’s head. When Jackie was really little she had platinum blonde hair like Jean Harlow, Mommy said, but her hair got darker and then Mommy said Jackie looked like an Irish Mick

She has Irish eyes, Daddy says. Sometimes she gives me “butterfly kisses” with her long black lashes. She holds her face close to mine and brushes my cheek with her lashes

“Such a beautiful girl,” Abe says, shaking his head. He doesn’t ask us if we want milk the way he used to. He just shakes his head, and gives us the Rumour bars.

Louise is waiting at the super’s entrance when we get back.

“I'll tell Mommy you took her money if you don’t give me a candy bar.” I throw one at her and run.

We can hear Mommy and Daddy fighting all the way out in the lobby. They don’t even hear us. Daddy is banging on the bathroom door and swearing. Suddenly he blasts the door open.

“Goddam you, you’ve gone too far this time, I’ll have you put away he shouts.

I know Mommy hurt him.

“Jesus Christ, you are a goddam madwoman.”

I cover my ears and sing Frère Jacques. Then I open them for a minute.

“I’ll have you put away, I swear to Christ!”

I go to the closet, get the can of Energine and the rag and pour the Energine in the rag. Then I curl up in the window seat and bury my nose in the rag. I look out at the teal blue evergreens against the window. There is a soft humming noise in my head like the sound of an airplane away up high, and my legs feel soft and warm. The evergreens make soft sounds against the window. Jackie is sucking her thumb and watching me from the bed and the bed begins to swim around and the room starts to blur and the colors mix with the humming sound and the sounds in the hall are muffled and something pounds inside me and slowly, slowly, I fall asleep.

I wake up in the window seat. It’s Saturday. Daddy is home. I can feel the happiness go through me like the first taste of chocolate. In the kitchen he is slicing oranges for fresh orange juice and I wonder what he is making up for. He shoves pans, rotten potatoes and onions away as roaches run out of the cabinet. He finds the juicer.

“Voila”, he shouts.

We sit at the table clinking glasses. Maybe he won at the races. Then he whirls me around the kitchen singing “Waltz me around again, Willie/ around, around around/O, don’t let my feet touch the ground.”

“Waltz me around, again, Daddy,” I sing, as I rub my cheek against his, as I smell his Old Spice lotion, everything from the night before forgotten.

In the hall Mommy walks by with a bucket of ammonia. She scrubbed the wood floors in the hall and is about to do the kitchen. She has taken off her blue robe and is wearing only a slip. When she bends down I can see her breasts like little cones.

“Put your clothes on Helen, and have some breakfast,” Daddy says.

She stops and looks at the perspiration on his bald head and she laughs an awful laugh as if Daddy is a joke.

“Two micks, two of a kind,” she says.

She picks up the knife Daddy used and begins slicing the oranges wildly until the pulp and juice are all over the counter. Then she turns with the knife in her hand and stands over Jackie.

“I won’t have it do you hear? I won’t have a sick cat mewling and puking and soiling all over the place.”

She looks like Lena the Hyena, a character Jackie made up, who wears her hair behind her ears and has sharp teeth that tear you limb from limb.

Jackie covers her own face with her hands so she can’t see Lena.

“Helen, put that down. You must be tired- you were up all night cleaning”

She glares at Jackie; her bottom jaw is grinding back and forth. But she leaves the knife on the counter.

Daddy washes the knife and puts it away high over the cabinets. Then he whispers, “How about a trip to the old Bijou?” Daddy always calls the Kimball Theater the Bijou, The Bijou Dream Theatre. In the picture of the theatre there is a rainbow of lights above the marquee.

We don’t even ask what is playing, but begin to look for some clothes. We dump out the hamper. The enema bag is hanging on the back of the door. I see the metal clamp. I remember when Daddy had to hold Jackie down and we all watched when Mommy put the enema in Jackie and pushed the metal clamp and Jackie screamed because the water was hot. I pull out two dresses fast and stuff the rest of the clothes back. We pull panties out of our hiding place.

Then we push chairs to the kitchen sink because Mommy is back in the bathroom. There are coffee grounds and orange skins on top of dishes. We splash our faces and dry them on the kitchen towel.

“Ugh that stinks! Smell my face, smell me. Oooo biddy.” Jackie chases me with the towel and sticks it in my face.

“Remember Mr. Beneka?” Jackie says. Mr. Beneka was an insurance salesman who sat on the chair with the flowered slipcover. He was very fat and smoked a cigar. When he got up, his pants caught in his crack. Then we smelled the cushions where he sat.

“Biddy!” We shouted together.

“Come on girls,” Tempus fugits.”

I like it when he uses Latin and I know what it means. His change jingles in his pocket.

“What’s playing Daddy?” He is rustling through the news paper.” You've seen it before. The Wizard of Oz.

“Oooooo,” we say. Then we laugh at our twin thing. I think he is going with us until he gives us money at the super’s entrance. When I turn around he is gone. I hear him knocking on the super’s door: “Ann. It’s Gerry.”

Mommy would be mad if she knew. She calls Ann Drago a dago. Drago, dago.

Ann Drago was calling to Daddy from the sidewalk and Mommy saw her from the window and said, “Why don’t you go off and drink with your dago friend?” Then Daddy slammed the door and the Ming china shook.

When the movie ends I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to be outside in the world with the noise of traffic and people talking on the street and the lights that hurt my eyes. I want to be back inside dreaming that I am Judy Garland. I can sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” just like her. I can even make that same sound in my throat that she does as if she is going to cry but she is too brave. As we come out to the street I hope people coming out of the movie will think I am Judy Garland because I look like her. When I get someone’s attention I walk away fast pretending that I have to hide my face the way a movie star would.

Jackie sees the ambulance first. As we begin to run we can see the people from our apartment house out front as the ambulance pulls away. Ann Drago is standing at the curb.

“Slow down. Watch the cars,” she yells from across the street.

I love Ann. She’s safe. She doesn’t look it when you first see her with a purple birth mark stain on one half of her face, and her long hair dyed black and a cigarette hanging from her mouth. A regular Gravel Gerty Daddy says.

“It’s my place for supper tonight,” Ann says as she grips her cigarette in her teeth so she can hug us.

“Who was in the ambulance?” Jackie asks.

“Come inside. We’ll get your father and then we'll talk.”

Daddy is pacing up and down in front of the elevator in the basement talking to Mr. Kitchen. He lives in a little store room in the basement near the elevator. He is Roy, the super’s assistant, and he smells of alcohol, too. He burned himself on the furnace once and his hands and arms are always wrapped in dirty, grey bandages that hang in tatters. Something yellow and awful oozes through the bandages. I'm afraid of him, afraid I'll run into him in the basement. Daddy says he’s harmless. He disappears into the store room when we go over to Daddy.

“Hello, my darlings. How was the old Bijou?” Daddy’s eyes are red.

We walk through the rough cement hall to the super’s apartment. Ann’s slippers slap the floor as she pads along in her flowered house dress. Their apartment is like an elf’s house with its dark brown doorway and the chimes that ring when you enter. The ceiling and walls inside are carved out and rough like a cave, and it is always warm there because the furnace that heats the whole apartment house is next to them. The rooms off the hall are dark even in daytime, and in my favorite room, the living room, the green glow from the fish tank is the only light. There are faint sounds from the fish tank, a humming, and a soft plop plop of bubbles and glints of gold and silver fish swishing through the water. I sit down on the carpet in front of the tank with Jackie, as Ann and Daddy sit in the soft armchairs and light up their cigarettes.

“Who was in the ambulance?” Jackie asks again.

“It was your Mommy. Someone in the building called Grasslands Hospital and told them your mother was very sick and they came here and took her away,” Ann says.

I feel a shock run through me like an electric wire and then I feel like I'm going to wet my pants.

They take them away and they never come back. I can see the ambulance doors and the black seam when someone inside pulled them shut. Mommy was in there.

“Mommy,” I cry

She must have been scared. I know about Grasslands State Hospital, the Looney bin. They came for the lady in 2B because she sat on the stairs and even ate her supper there. We never saw her again.

“Can we see her? Jackie says. “If we promise not to be bad ever again, can we see her tomorrow?” Daddy puts his head in his hands.

Ann pulls us down into the chair against her chest and holds us tight while we cry.

“Oh my God, Gerry, where is Louise? The poor child.” Ann drops her cigarette.

“God almighty Ann, I couldn’t think of everything,” Daddy says. He goes into the next room.

When we are quiet, Ann says, “Your father has been through a terrible time, girls I think you should stay here tonight. Let’s get some supper; maybe some of the boys' new comics. Would you like that?

“I'm not hungry,” we say.

The next morning I wake up at Dragos and remember. Jackie is still sleeping, and Ann says, “Let her sleep, God love her.” I climb the basement stairs to our apartment. In the stairwell I scooch down and hide when I hear the neighbors talk as they get their mail from the brass boxes in the lobby.

“They had Helen in a strait-jacket ...took her out on a stretcher.”

I recognize Mrs. Arthur’s voice, “I was right here in the lobby -heard it all- the screaming and crashing- they said she fought like a tiger- just terrible. The eldest, Louise, saw it all. It breaks your heart. They were running wild before; I can’t imagine what will happen now.”

When they leave I sneak out of the stairwell and into the apartment. The lamps in the living room are broken, and there are only eight plates of Ming China left. I find the broken pieces in the wastebasket. Louise is reading on Mommy’s bed.

“Get out,” she shouts.” This is my room now.”

I hang in the doorway.

“I mean it!” She screams.