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By Root 549 0

ran in a pack, but that never appealed to me. I always wanted just one friend, someone like Joey. I did have a few Joey-like friends after that: Bill Hennison, Frankie Farley, and Harry Wiley. In fact, Harry and I went to game six of the 1947 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers. We got up at 1:00 a.m. and waited until the gates opened at 10:00 a.m. We were among the last ones to get tickets before they sold out. That was quite a game and quite a memory. But even so, there was nobody like Joey. He was the one who had said the words from my dream—“I like you. Can we play together?” He had voiced the deep desire I felt, something I had asked for. But like my mother said, you don’t always get what you ask for. Or maybe if you do, it doesn’t last long.

Joey’s death occurred alongside an argument my mother was having with our landlord. He was raising our rent, and my mother was furious; she thought it was illegal. So she began planning our move. Not that there would have been much anyway, but any talk of Joey’s death took a backseat in our family to the panic of our raised rent. So I experienced the death of a friend in conjunction with being uprooted to a new place. We moved quickly, blocks away to a whole new neighborhood, new school, new kids.

Joey’s death took me by surprise and forced me to grow up fast. I realized that not only was my household this fragile place where anything could happen, but other kids’ homes were too. Another experience with death revealed that even the whole world was dangerous.

I vividly recall the day in December 1941 when my father called me into the living room. We had one of those great big radios. He said, “Just be quiet and listen.” The next voice I heard was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy …” There was such gravity to his voice as he talked about Pearl Harbor, and I felt sad for all those killed the day before. I didn’t know any of their names, but the president made it all feel so personal. But whereas Joey’s death was marked only by sadness, that day was also marked with pride. The president challenged we the people to sacrifice, to make something good out of something bad. That kind of hope was absent from Joey’s death; it was just a wound. But as strange as it might sound, December 7, 1941, was a wound filled with hope. It is the day I remember feeling like I’d become a man.

Notes

1 Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 421.

2 Ibid., 6.

5

It could be said that my parents were many things, but two of the many were for certain—Irish and Roman Catholic. They wanted their children to continue that heritage too, so the grade schools I attended were etched with names like St. Anselm’s and Our Lady of Angels. The education I received was comparable to that of most schools; however, Our Lady of Angels was considered the premier grammar school in all of Brooklyn. The fact that my mother made sure I attended a prestigious school might seem to contradict my feelings of unworthiness. But it doesn’t. For the shame-bound family, appearances are everything, and my mother made sure that on the outside we looked respectable, as if we fit in with the Irish-Catholics around us.

The heart of the pedagogy in those schools was repetitio est mater studiorum—“repetition is the mother of study.” The Ten Commandments are forever tucked inside my brain alongside “thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,” complemented by the multiplication and division tables. The instruction in our classrooms came from nuns, also known as sisters. I don’t remember any of them looking much like Julie Andrews, but some possessed a different kind of beauty.

One such lady was Sister Thomasina. I bet other students believed they were her favorite, but I would argue that I was the one. At least that was the feeling she conveyed to me each day. She was one of those women who never seemed to have a bad day; I’m sure she did, but I guess I missed them. She was motherly to me, a warm feminine figure