All through that summer, my father kept from me the knowledge that running box scores appeared in the daily newspapers. He never mentioned that these abbreviated histories had been a staple feature of the sports pages since the nineteenth century and were generally the first thing he and his fellow commuters turned to when they opened the Daily News and the Herald Tribune in the morning. I believed that, if I did not recount the games he had missed, my father would never have been able to follow our Dodgers the proper way, day by day, play by play, inning by inning. In other words, without me, his love of baseball would be forever unfulfilled.
I had the luck to fall in love with baseball at the start of an era of pure delight for New York fans. In each of the nine seasons from 1949 to 1957—spanning much of my childhood—we would watch one of the three New York teams—the Dodgers, the Giants, or the Yankees—compete in the World Series. In this golden era, the Yankees won five consecutive World Series, the Giants won two pennants and one championship, and my beloved Dodgers won one championship and five pennants, while losing two additional pennants in the last inning of the last game of the season.
In those days before players were free agents, the starting lineups remained basically intact for years. Fans gave their loyalty to a team, knowing the players they loved would hold the same positions and, year after year, exhibit the same endearing quirks and irritating habits. And what a storied lineup my Dodgers had in the postwar seasons: Roy Campanella started behind the plate, Gil Hodges at first, Jackie Robinson at second, Pee Wee Reese at short, Billy Cox at third, Gene Hermanski in left, Duke Snider in center, and Carl Furillo in right. Half of that lineup—Reese, Robinson, Campanella, and Snider—would eventually be elected to the Hall of Fame; Gil Hodges and Carl Furillo would likely have been enshrined in Cooperstown had they played in any other decade or for any other club. Never would there be a better time to be a Dodger fan.
My mother, my sister Charlotte, and me in the carriage. When she was in her thirties, my mother was told by her doctor that she had the arteries of a seventy-year-old.
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WHEN I PICTURE my mother, Helen, she is sitting in her favorite cushioned chair and she is reading. She was slim and tall, several inches taller than my father. Her hair, primly curled with the soft waves of a permanent, was brown touched with gray. She never wore shorts or even slacks. In the grip of the worst heat waves, she wore a girdle, a full slip, and a cotton or linen dress with a bib apron perpetually fixed to her shoulders. Such modesty was the norm in our neighborhood. Indeed, when one of the mothers took to sitting on her front lawn in a halter top and shorts, her behavior startled the block.
My mother had a long face, conspicuously marked by the deep creases and the furrowed brow of a woman twice her age. When she was in her thirties, she was told by her doctor that she had the arteries of a seventy-year-old. Shortly after I was born, she had undergone a hysterectomy after being diagnosed with cancer. Though it turned out that she did not have cancer, the removal of her ovaries and her uterus had precipitated a surgical menopause, which, in those days before hormone replacement, rapidly escalated the aging process. In addition, the rheumatic fever she had suffered as a child had left her heart permanently scarred.
When I was two, she began having angina attacks six to eight times a year, episodes characterized by severe pain on her left side and a temporary loss of consciousness. All we could do, the doctors told us, was break smelling salts under her nose to restore consciousness and leave her on the floor until the pain subsided, which sometimes took several hours. I can still remember the chill I felt from a place so deep within me that my entire body started to tremble when I first saw her stretched out on the floor, a pillow under her head, a blanket over her body. My father assured me that everything would be all right, and said I could sit beside her for a little while and hold her hand. After these “spells,” as we euphemistically called them, she would quickly resume her household routine, allowing us to imagine that all was well again.
In our family album there was a photo of my mother in her early twenties, sitting in a chair in her parents’ home, her long legs thrown casually over the arm of the chair, her lips parted in the beginning of a smile. Twenty years after that photo was taken, there was in her halting gait and nervous expression scarcely a trace of her former vitality and charm. I used to stare at that picture and try to imagine the high-spirited person she was before I was born, wishing that I could transport myself back in time to meet the young Helen Miller.
Every night, I would fall asleep with the prayer that while I slept the lines on my mother’s face would vanish, the leg that now dragged behind her would strengthen, her skin would lose its pallor. During my waking hours, when seated alone, I would daydream, allowing my imagination to reshape those realities I did not wish to accept. In my fantasy, my mother would appear as the young woman in the photo, wearing a summer dress with a ribbon in her hair. She was no longer short of breath, she could run and skip and dance. All my neighbors were crowded together on our lawn to watch my mother jump rope. My friend Eileen Rust and I each held one handle of the striped rope while my mother counted aloud the number of times she could jump without stopping. She jumped and jumped until she reached one hundred, two hundred, and then five hundred, and still she kept going. The strength had returned to her arms and her legs, her cheeks were red. The sun was shining and the wind was blowing, and I was so happy I could hardly breathe.
It was, however, through the older, frailer Helen, not the young woman of my wishful imaginings, that I came to worship the world of books. Whereas my father’s interest in reading was confined mainly to newspapers and magazines, my mother read books in every spare moment: books in the middle of the night, when she had trouble breathing; books in the morning, after she cleared the breakfast table; books in the early afternoon, when she finished the housework, shopping, and ironing; books in the late afternoon after preparations for dinner were completed; and, again, books in the evenings.
The corner drugstore had a lending library where current best-sellers could be rented for several cents a day. And in the center of our town stood the cramped public library she adored, an old brick building built before the town had a high school or a bank. With linoleum tiles on the floors, a massive receiving desk, ladders reaching the top shelves, and books spilling out from every corner, our library held a collection begun more than a decade before the village itself was incorporated in 1893. The books my mother read and reread—Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, Tales of the South Pacific, David Copperfield—provided a broader, more adventurous world, an escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn’t change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it; she could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair.
Every night, after I brushed my teeth and settled into bed, my mother came to read to me. I loved listening to her voice, so much softer and less piercing than mine. She read slowly and deliberately, lingering over the passages she liked, helping me to feel the rhythm of the language, the pleasure in well-chosen words. She modulated her voice to reflect the different characters and the pace of the narration. Rudyard Kipling was one of my favorite writers. I took to heart the motto of the ever-curious mongoose family in “Rikki-tikki-tavi”—“Run and Find Out.” Everything was investigated firsthand; hearsay meant nothing. If there was an inkwell on the writer’s desk, then Rikki-tikki’s whiskers would be stained with the blackest India ink; if there was a rustle in the garden, Rikki-tikki’s eyes would glow with anticipation.
From the Just So Stories, I learned how the camel got his hump, how the rhinoceros got his skin, and, best of all, how the elephant got his trunk. At the start of the story, the elephant had only a bulging nose, no bigger than a boot, incapable of picking up anything. Just as I identified with the intrepid mongoose, so I empathiz
ed with the elephant’s child, full of a “satiable curiosity” which irritated everyone around him. He asked the ostrich why her tail feathers grew, and the ostrich spanked him. He asked the hippo why her eyes were red, and the hippo spanked him. He asked everyone what the crocodile ate for dinner and, finding no answer, ventured to the riverbank, where he ended up in the crocodile’s mouth. His friend the snake hitched himself around the elephant’s hind legs and told him to pull as hard as he could to save himself, and as the little elephant pulled, his nose began to stretch and kept on stretching. By the time the crocodile finally let go, the elephant had a full-grown trunk. Thus curiosity was abundantly rewarded.
The young Thomas Edison, like the elephant, the mongoose, and me, was relentlessly curious. I had come to know him through the Blue Biography series, which my mother read to me in its entirety. Written for children, this classic series focused on the childhoods of famous Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Betsy Ross. But Edison, so full of energy and elaborate plans, fascinated me the most. At one point, he decided to read all the books in the town library, one shelf at a time, something I could easily imagine wanting to do myself once I had learned to read. And he, too, was always questioning his parents and teachers. He wanted to know why he saw lightning before he heard thunder, why water couldn’t run uphill, why some parts of the ice pond were lighter than others.
But I suppose my fascination with Edison was fueled by the knowledge that when my mother was sixteen she had worked as the private secretary to the president of the New York Edison Company. It was her first job after graduating from secretarial school. I pictured her walking swiftly through the streets of Manhattan in tailored clothes with high heels, to take her place behind a big desk in a tall building. In my imagination, she worked directly for Thomas Alva Edison himself, as his gal Friday. I envisioned her at Edison’s side in his laboratory when he invented the phonograph and the electric light. She would try to set me straight on chronology, informing me that she hadn’t even been born when these inventions were made, but I refused to let her corrections disrupt the dramatic narrative I was writing in my head. Every year, on the eleventh of February, Edison’s birthday, I made up Alva buttons for the family. I cut out circles of poster board and pasted a picture of Edison on the front with the name “Alva” in big red letters along the top. The name “Alva” intrigued me, and I liked the thought that my mother knew him so well she would call him by that exotic name.
The only joy that surpassed listening to a book read aloud was listening to real stories of my mother’s youth. “Tell me a story,” I would beg, “a story about you when you were my age.” She told me stories about her father, who was a ferryboat captain operating between Weehawken and Hoboken; stories about her mother, whose parents had emigrated from England, and her uncle Willy, also a ferryboat captain, who had fought in the Great War and traveled halfway around the world. There must have been some money on my maternal grandmother’s side. My mother always referred to the house she grew up in as “the Mansion,” and she talked about an uncle who was a successful artist, who did all the frescoes for the famous Hippodrome theater on 43rd Street in New York City.
She told me about her twin brothers, who died at the age of two during a cholera epidemic that swept through New York in 1906, shortly before she was born. The two little boys were laid out on a cherrywood table in the parlor of her parents’ home. Ever after, when I passed the elegant table, which now stood in the corner of our dining room, I pictured two round-faced cherubs waiting in heaven for the rest of their family to join them. Thus the table became, not a reminder of death, but a platform to paradise.
I pressed her to tell me every detail about her first meeting with my father. “The first time I saw your father, he was standing at the door to our house. He had come to pick up my brother, Frank, who was his best friend.” I wanted to add to her story, to have her tell me that the moment she saw him she knew that this was the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. Unfortunately for the story I was spinning in my head, she was only fourteen when they first met. “But what about Dad? He was nineteen, right? Didn’t he know the first time he saw you?” “Perhaps.” She smiled. “But it was a few years before he stopped thinking of me as Frankie’s kid sister and realized I was a young woman. We were friends first and only later fell in love. That’s the best way, I think.” I nodded agreement, though I could never completely give up the notion that romantic love struck like a bolt of lightning.
As we talked about the past, she seemed to forget her pains. Her eyes brightened, and when she smiled, the creases at her mouth turned upward, giving her face a look of relaxation and warmth it did not usually have. I came to believe that, if only I could keep her youthful memories alive, if I could get the happy thoughts of her girlhood to push the sadder thoughts of her womanhood away, I could prevent the aging process from prematurely moving forward. In my imagination, the brain was a finite space with room for only a certain number of thoughts, so it was critical to push the bad thoughts out to leave space for the good ones. And somehow, on the strength of the changed expression on my mother’s face, I assumed there was a direct correlation between one’s inner thoughts and one’s outer well-being. It made me so happy to see contentment on her face that I reached out to stories of the time she was young and vital as if they were lifeboats that would carry my mother through the present into the future. Through her stories, I could imagine her young again, taking the stairs two at a time. Even now, when I interview people for my books, it sometimes seems I am sitting with my mother pleading, “Tell me a story.”
As a child, I loved looking through my mother’s photo albums. Through a series of faded pictures attached by sticky corners to the pages, I discovered Ephraim and Clara Miller, the maternal grandparents I had never known, and my uncle Frank, who had died a few years before I was born. My mother told me she had considered her mother her “best friend in the world.” When she worked at Edison, they spent every Saturday together. They would go shopping, eat lunch, and go to the movies. After my parents married and moved to East 64th Street in Brooklyn, my mother’s parents moved into a house on East 63rd Street. When my sister Charlotte was born, my grandmother virtually lived at our house, helping to care for the baby, cook the meals, and keep my mother company. I stared at the pictures of my grandparents, both heavy people with kindly smiles, and imagined what our life would be like if they were living next door. I. had never met either one of them, for they had died, suddenly, within three weeks of each other, when they were in their early fifties. My grandfather died first, of a heart attack. Three weeks later, my grandmother went into postoperative shock after what should have been routine gall-bladder surgery. She died the following morning. My mother was only twenty-two at the time.
One day, while my mother and I were looking through the album, she was called to the phone. In her absence, I decided that the pictures needed a little brightening. Taking my crayons, I colored a photograph of my mother and grandmother taken when my mother was in her teens, my grandmother in her forties. Standing side by side, they squinted in the sun, arms resting comfortably on each other’s shoulders. With my red crayon, I gave my grandmother rosy cheeks and big lips and then colored her hair yellow so it would match mine. When my mother came back and saw the picture, she was so angry she could hardly speak. “But she looked so pale,” I tried to explain, having no idea what I had done to make my mother so upset.
“THERE ARE SOME THINGS we don’t ask,” my mother said, a harsh tone in her voice when she heard me pestering my father to tell me about his early life. I knew that he’d been born in Brooklyn on September 6, 1901, the day President William McKinley was assassinated by a Polish American anarchist, Leon Czolgosz. He liked to say that, though the newspapers that day carried the full story of the assassination, the headline story was the birth of Mike Kearns. I knew that his parents, Thomas Kearns and Ellen Higgins, had emigrated to
the States from County Sligo, Ireland, and that his father worked as a fireman in Brooklyn. And I knew that Thomas and Ellen had died when my father was young, but whenever I asked for more details about his family, his eyes took on a guarded expression, and a look of pain settled around his mouth. It was the only time I felt uncomfortable around my father, as if some chasm stretched between us.
Left as orphans, my father and his sister, Marguerite (above), were split up and sent to live with relatives in different parts of Brooklyn. My father somehow emerged from his haunted childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor. He is pictured on the right with my sister Charlotte.
When I turned to my mother for answers, she filled in the picture of my father’s childhood, but only after I had promised not to talk with my father about it. She told me that his entire world had collapsed when he was nine years old, that it was better for him to leave his pain behind him, and that I must respect his wishes. The story as I understood it was as follows: My father was the oldest in a family that once included two brothers, Thomas Jr. and John, and a sister, Marguerite. They lived at 633 Myrtle Avenue, a two-story tenement house shared by four families whose living quarters were separated by thin, temporary walls. Myrtle Avenue was a congested street with an elevated train running above a trolley line. The noise of the el was so constant that people noticed only when it stopped. But relief was always possible, my father told my mother, for nearby stood Fort Greene Park, a stately public space with its double row of blossoming chestnut trees that stood in defiant contrast to their bleak surroundings.
Thomas Jr. died at fifteen months. Then, in the summer of 1910, when my father was eight, his five-year-old brother, John, was hit by a trolley car. The deep wound in John’s left leg produced a deadly form of tetanus that led to spasms and convulsions and finally left him unable to breathe. He died, in the middle of July, when their mother was five months pregnant. Her grief produced complications in the pregnancy, which led to her own death in November at the age of thirty-seven. Then, less than two months later, shortly after the Christmas holidays, my father’s father died. He was forty years old.