What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [98]
It was James Salvatore Gagliano Jr., otherwise known as Jim, who, it turned out, was Sandy’s boyfriend’s good friend. Nancy and Jim were introduced and, riding home on the bus that night, exchanged their first kiss. Jim likes to tell a different tall-tale version of their meeting. “One day I was walking home and passed her house. I saw her swinging a giant sledgehammer, and with just a few blows, she demolished a garage shed. That’s when I knew that she was the girl for me.”
Nancy credits her mother’s voracious reading habits with her early passion for the library. Every two weeks her mother sent Nancy to the local branch of the Chicago Public Library with a red leather shopping bag to pick up a new batch of books, principally mysteries, that the librarian, Miss LaPrez, selected for her. What most interested Nancy, though, were not the books themselves. It was the graceful way the assistant librarian checked them out. “She was a tall girl named Janice Smith, and she had the most beautiful hands and fingers you can imagine. I would stand there and watch her take each card out of its book and then stamp it, perfectly on the line, with those beautiful hands and nails, with the tip of a pencil-like marker. It was like heaven. It was an art. And I thought, I want to do that.” When she was fourteen, she told Miss LaPrez as much. “Come here when you’re sixteen,” Miss LaPrez said. The morning of her sixteenth birthday, Nancy was at the library when it opened. Miss LaPrez sent her downtown to fill out the necessary papers so she could hire her. After graduating from high school, she became the assistant librarian, only taking time off in 1960 to go on her honeymoon with Jim at the Castaways Motel in Miami Beach. She quit a month before her first son, Jimmy, was born the following year. In quick succession, she gave birth to two more sons, Joey and John, and relished her role as a mother.
But the joy of motherhood vanished for a while after Monday night, April 18, 1966. Instead of watching Elizabeth Taylor receive an Oscar at the Academy Awards on television, Nancy found herself waiting for the pediatrician to make a house call to treat her husband and sons Jimmy and John, then five and two years old respectively, for the flu. Citing the close quarters that they were living in, Dr. Harvey DeBofsky, then the junior member of the pediatric practice, gave shots to the entire family, even Nancy and Joey, age four, who had no apparent symptoms. Jim spent the next day on the couch, watching the three boys work in coloring books on the living room floor.
On Wednesday morning, everyone was awake by 9 A.M. except for Joey. “I called in, ‘C’mon, Joey, get up, Lazy Bones, time to get up!’ I went into the boys’ room. Joey was lying there in his crib, completely discolored and lifeless. I knew immediately that he was gone.” Nancy ran out of the room, screaming to Jim to call the fire department and then out of the house and into a neighbor’s house, crying, “Joey’s dead! Joey’s dead!”
As she recounted the tragedy on the screened patio of her house in Tamarac, Nancy’s eyes filled with tears. She stopped and gazed out at a placid lagoon. An ibis stood still at its edge.
“There wasn’t any trauma. There wasn’t any suffering. It was an easy death for him. God just took him. I went nuts. Just went nuts. It was really awful. There was no warning and nothing anyone could do. It was just supposed to happen. And still I near died.”
A clerk in the coroner’s office told the Gaglianos that night that the cause of Joey’s death was lower lumbar pneumonia. It seemed implausible to them because he had shown no signs of illness, but the couple was so grief-stricken they never questioned what they were told.
Life recovered in the house with the births of daughters Lisa and Denise in successive years. Of course, quarters in the 1,108-square-foot house in Hegewisch were always tight—as tight as a family budget that depended on Jim’s modest salary as cost accountant for Interlake Steel. But as long as there were children around, Nancy says she