Concrete Angel (6 page)

M
y grandparents couldn’t figure out what to do with little Evelyn. Neither coveted (a word they often used) material things, craving only God’s and each other’s love—hoping fervently for a spot in heaven when their earthly ordeal was ended. And a large part of that ordeal centered on little Evie. She descended on their simple Lutheran lives in 1938 like a tsunami.

When Grandmother learned she was pregnant, they’d hoped for a girl, someone to help around the house, accompany them to church, tend to them in their old age. Raising a girl was easier from what they’d observed around them.

I’ve no doubt Evelyn Hobart was a shock and probably from her earliest days. They marveled at her beauty, her energy, her passion, but by her teenage years tried to steer clear of her. There’d been a few dicey times early in high school, occasions when a teacher called them in about items missing from drawers or locker thefts; Monday mornings when a classmate’s parent called to report items lost after a party on the weekend. But none of those incidents were important enough to make a fuss about. Silly things went missing: a pair of cheap hoop earrings, a small porcelain poodle.

“These were not weekly events,” Grandmother told me. “We’d forget about it, push it out of our minds.”

“It’s ridiculous to bring this up,” a friend’s parent might say to Grandmother in the grocery store or at church, “but it was my mother’s favorite broach and it’s been missing since Eve spent the night. It could’ve fallen into some crevice, but I’ve looked and looked…”

“Can I pay for it?” my grandmother offered quickly, unlatching the clasp on her huge handbag, looking worriedly in her change purse for the spare five. Or would it be more? What if this person demanded a fifty?

“Oh, of course not,” the woman said, alarmed at the lightening-quick gesture. “It’s a silly trinket—a family remembrance. A worthless thing—probably misplaced. You know teenagers.” My grandmother nodded, dispiritedly. “No one would want such junk. But I thought I’d check with the girls’ families before calling it a day.” The woman sputtered on, any sense of an accusation buried by now.

No one, certainly not her parents, understood Mother’s dreams were made of silly worthless trinkets. With the exception of one or two more serious incidents, the years passed. And my grandparents tried to forget about it.

“Dropping her off at college was such a relief,” my grandmother confessed. “What a wonderful feeling.” Looking at my expression, her eyes dropped.

T
hey sent Evelyn off to college, barely able to afford the fees, but relieved she’d agreed to go despite her complete disinterest in all things academic, ecstatic when her mediocre grades opened the door to one distant, overpriced religious school in New England. They bought her the number of outfits she decreed necessary, filled out the forms, helped her settle into her room, and drove away with a relief seldom experienced by empty-nesters.

“I wonder if she’ll take to her roommate,” my grandfather said as they headed for the Massachusetts turnpike. “Nice enough family, wasn’t it? I liked the look of her too. What was her name, Dell?”

“Gertrude or Trudy, I guess. A perfect roommate for our Evelyn,” my grandmother said. “Didn’t pluck her eyebrows or wear lipstick.” They exchanged glances. “She probably won’t have the kind of things Evelyn might take.” She paused. “Want to borrow, I mean.”

Her husband nodded. “No calls from Trudy’s family in the middle of the night.”

My grandmother chuckled, a rare thing. “The only thing for Evelyn to take from that girl would be a Bible or her cross.”

“Is the cross gold?” Grandfather asked, a rare smile lighting his face.

I imagine they flashed each other a carefree look and stepped on the gas, eager to put distance between their daughter and their future lives.

They drove the two hundred miles home and within days packed away the many possessions of Mother’s that had worried them over the years: items with tags still on them, or things clearly costing far more than any allowance she’d been given, belongings looking like gifts from older men—and carried them to the basement, filling the cubbyholes, cedar chest, and shelves in a few hours. In effect, they created a lifelong sanctuary for stolen property without realizing it. Once or twice, something too valuable, too likely to have been stolen, went into the trash.

“Think I’m doing the right thing,” Grandfather said, a pink cashmere scarf in his hand.

“Why wouldn’t she have taken something so pretty along to college?” Grandmother wondered aloud. “If it was hers, that is.”

“Must belong to the girl who went up there too. Remember the night they filled out their application together.”

“Madeleine something. A rich girl, I think.” Grandmother fell silent.

They’d forgotten, of course, that Eve would have to return home for holidays and vacations. Or maybe they thought ridding themselves of her belongings was the first step toward ridding themselves of her. Her bedroom was turned into a sewing room, and when Eve returned home, she lay wedged between an ironing board and a sewing machine, both relics from another time, made of iron and cumbersome. Instead of storing her prized possessions, the shelves on the walls in her bedroom now held baskets of thread and fabric, tape measures, balls of wool, packets of needles, extra parts for the sewing machine. It smelled of lubricating oil, new fabric, and the starch my grandmother sprayed on clothing before ironing. Gone too were Eve’s delicate scents.

“You can’t imagine how quickly they dispatched both me and my things,” Mother told me when she wanted sympathy.

I stroked her soft hand.

The shelves, the ironing board, the sewing machine must have loomed over her head at night, casting shadows on the walls and giving her claustrophobia. It reminded Eve she didn’t live there anymore. But her booty in the basement still had a secure home.

M
y grandmother told me stories about Mother’s girlhood many times over the years, humbled, embarrassed, and still tearful. Not confessions about what her daughter had done, probably still did, but at how little love she’d felt for her and, I think, of their inability to seek help. Mother grew up at a time when finding professional help for children was not much discussed. It’d never occurred to the Hobarts’ that Evelyn could be “fixed” or “changed” in any way. She was an immutable presence in their life.

“It’s good you can overlook your mother’s ways,” my grandmother told me often. “She needs someone who can. We let her down—got scared of her at some point.”

But the real Eve was not their Evelyn and was a woman who needed things, glitzy things. And I didn’t overlook her “ways,” I abetted them, not finding it odd that I, a child, was supposed to do for her what they hadn’t. And Daddy, well Daddy…

M
other met Daddy at a dance during Christmas vacation in her freshmen year of college in 1957. Hank Moran, a former high school football star and straight “A” pupil at Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s High School, was a cadet at West Point. His uniform, with its shiny buttons, crisp pleats, and row of insignias, knocked her out. “In a room full of dopey teenagers, he stood out. Our eyes met in an instant and our future was set.”

His shoes were polished to a sheen seldom seen in college-age men, his haircut more precise than the ones given by military barbers. Creased, shined, and clipped into perfection. Exactly the sort of man Mother would’ve selected from a Hollywood casting office.

“You look wonderful,” his mother, Sophie Moran, had said with approval earlier, adjusting his tie although it needed no such alteration. “Perhaps you’ll find the perfect girl tonight. It would be so nice if you married a local girl, someone who knows our ways—someone eager to settle here, not halfway across the country.”

Since Daddy was with men only at West Point, this scenario was unlikely, but still a source of worry for Sophie. She’d no idea what was coming down the pike vis a vis a local girl.

It was one of those crisp December days in Pennsylvania, a hint of snow in the air, and Eve wore a tight, green satin dress with four-inch heels dyed to match. The dress was so snug, she didn’t sit once during the evening. A picture of her was featured in the local paper to illustrate the occasion; she showed me it time and again. Her hair was shoulder-length, blonde for the first time, and poker straight in an era when everyone else’s was curled and short. No one at the dance approached her level of glamour—in her estimation. Girls still dressed in full-skirts with squared-toed shoes. Stockings only occasionally replaced bobby socks. A bit of plumpness was not uncommon, and ponytails were the rage if your hair was long enough.

“You look lovely,” her mother, Adele Hobart, said as she watched her slip on a coat. “But you’ve probably met more interesting men at college dances than you’re likely to meet here.”

Rail thin, Eve looked better in clothes than out of them when all of her angles looked potentially painful. Her hair and her makeup followed the trend in Hollywood at the time, lots of pearly pink. There was a legion of young blonde actresses she imitated in the late fifties: Tuesday Weld, Sandra Dee, Carol Lynley and, of course, the new plastic Barbie Doll: small-waisted, high-busted, long-legged, pert-nosed.

She’d been talked into coming along to the dance by an old school friend who assured her some men of distinction would be present.

“If it turns out to be the jokers we went to high school with, I’m leaving,” Eve said. “I didn’t buy this dress to dance cheek-to-cheek with a bunch of drips.”

Actually she hadn’t bought the dress at all, but had slipped her street clothes on over it at Filene’s Department Store in Boston. The paltry spending money her father gave her would not buy dresses like this one.

“It was ridiculously easy to steal clothes back in the fifties,” she told me later. “Especially if you had an air of confidence about you.”

There’d been no one worthy of her attention at the Bible College, despite what her mother thought, and she was growing anxious about returning to the Hobart home permanently one day soon. Sleeping wedged between the iron board and sewing machine well into middle-age.

Her father dropped several hints suggesting her college expenses exceeded his expectation. “Wouldn’t be such a bad idea to take a year off and find some work. Boston might be a good place to set down roots.”

Hank Moran, clearly one of the so-called men of distinction in his cadet uniform, was smitten with Eve Hobart in seconds. He’d been waiting for the “one” too, if only subconsciously. It was an era when people married young, finding no reason to put it off. Birth control was still a chancy thing, and women, even educated ones, often couldn’t support themselves. Marrying solved both of those problems. Mother sashayed into his arms, laughing at his jokes, hanging on his every word.

“Eve Hobart,” he said, looking into her eyes. “Sounds like a name I was destined to hear.”

“Or one I was destined to leave behind,” she told him, proud of her clever repartee.

“W
e lit up the room like Scott and Zelda,” Mother said later when she was feeling charitable about Daddy. “They all must have felt the electrical charge.”

I didn’t doubt it for a minute. I’d felt the effects of their vibration all my life.

They took in a play at the Walnut Theater the next night, and had dinner at the Latin Casino in New Jersey the following evening. Hank Moran knew how to treat a girl, bringing a white orchid for each outing. The plain-living Hobarts were impressed. And hopeful. Marriage would be a more permanent solution than college, where the price of Eve’s tuition and first semester grades, newly arrived, were worrisome. And Hank was in the service so Eve would have a chance to travel. Perhaps across the country or to Germany, they hoped.

Mother and Daddy returned to their respective educational institutions in January but wrote long, soulful letters, saw each other over breaks, and eloped when Hank graduated a year later, Eve dropping out without hesitation.

Carting her stuff to his parents’ home to Bucks County gave Hank a hint of Eve’s proclivities. “I brought my stuff home in the trunk of the car,” he told her, climbing into the front seat of the truck they’d rented. The back was more than half-full. Several girls in her dorm had apparently stored things for her.

“Oh you, boys,” she said. “You’ve no sentiment.” She’d watched incredulously a week earlier when he tossed half of his things before moving out of his room at West Point. For a rich guy, he didn’t have much of a wardrobe.

“More room for me,” she’d said gaily.

Eve linked her arm through his and put her head on his shoulder as they made the six-hour drive with her loot in a trailer looming inches behind them.

“D
idn’t you want a big wedding?” I asked her later. A big wedding should have been the perfect centerpiece for her.

She shook her head. “My parents were planning a reception in our church basement. Can you imagine the Morans and their hoity-toity friends in the basement with the mold, the battered tables and folding chairs, the boxes of extra Bibles and hymnals? Watching the festivities with smiles pasted on their faces as the church ladies carried in chipped trays with bowls of steaming cauliflower and a platter of pot roast. Toasting the happy couple with pineapple juice from a five-quart can placed on each table, a faint circle of rust on its bottom.” She made a face. “I preferred eloping to being humiliated. You know, I’ve never cared so much about being the center of attention.”

And it was true in a way. It was her own attention that interested her.

My grandparents were pleased on many counts: she married someone who’d take care of her; there’d be no more college tuition to pay, no more Evelyn creeping up the stairs at two in the morning. And no more Evelyn in their basement, unwrapping and repacking countless items of dubious origin. They waited a few weeks to be sure the marriage
took
, wrapped her mattress in plastic, and took it down to join the rest of her things. They were too frugal to toss it, which turned out to be a good thing.