The Loo Sanction (34 page)

I should mention that my mother never told us that our father spent time in prison, presumably to protect us from the shame. I learned about this later, when reading over the letters she left behind.

We joined my father in Schenectady in the winter of 1932–33, the nadir of the Depression, when dazed men stood on street corners, the collars of their suit jackets turned up, and begged passersby for jobs or handouts, hopelessness muting their voices to mantra drones. We survived on a series of short-lived scams he ran, penny-ante hustles that didn't require much setup money. One of these was the Sure-Fire Employment Agency that disappeared from its storefront office within a month. (Mother had one of the business cards for this fraudulent enterprise in her photograph album, its corners held by stick-on tabs.) Another hustle was selling exclusive franchises to market Jiffy Fifteen-Way Mirakle Kleener (Fels Naphtha bar soap cooked down in water, bottled, and labeled in the kitchen of our basement apartment to flash as samples of the product). I remember standing in the front room looking up at the window to see the legs of people passing by, sometimes followed by little doggies that sniffed the window and sometimes cocked a leg at it, their leashes leading up from their collars to . . . nowhere. The room was full of the nose-stinging steam of yellow bar soap being cooked down to make Mirakle Kleener.

The Sure-Fire Employment Agency scam provides an insight into the con-man mentality that reasons: If you can't find a job, then it must be possible to make money off other people trying to find jobs. And the jobs my father offered were opportunities to become franchised door-to-door salesmen of Jiffy Fifteen-Way Mirakle Kleener. This double-barreled scam shows how hustlers automatically think on the diagonal. Lots of men with no work and a family to support might have bottled and peddled Mirakle Kleener from door to door; but only cons like my father would have sold other out-of-work men
franchises
to sell it: offering them not only a chance to survive but an opportunity to “Make a Killing in the Cleaning Industry!” because, let's face it, no matter how good or how bad things are, there'll always be dirt! My father had the con man's instinct for the jugular of human greed.

These low-grade scams ultimately built up a body of victims eager for an opportunity to inflict retributive damage (if I may imitate my father's hokum/comic style, à la W. C. Fields), so it is not surprising that after seven months in Schenectady he accepted an offer from “some friends” to go to South Dayton, New York, and supervise the transport of what his first letter back to Mother called “prohibited merchandise” from Canada to “deprived communities.” National prohibition had just ended, but the old supply systems remained functional because there were still dry states and counties. A second letter told her that he missed her more than he could say because “You Were Meant for Me,” Toots. Following this letter, there was a three-year silence, during the first month of which my sister was born.

It was while we were in Schenectady that I ran away from home for the first time. For some reason, perhaps because the return of my father suddenly deprived me of my mother's undivided attention, I began to wet my bed at night, although I had been toilet-trained for a year. The first couple of times this happened, my mother dismissed it as a “phase,” but she was ultimately obliged to accept that it was full-blown regression. She decided to correct my urinary insouciance using a method she had read about in a book on “modern” child-raising, a book that was against corporal punishment, preferring bloodless tactics that caused only emotional and developmental damage. One evening she came back from shopping with a package for me. I eagerly tore off the wrapping and discovered to my surprise, but not to my horror, a dress that she had picked up in a secondhand clothing shop. Following the advice in her book, she told me that if I was going to act like a little wet-the-bed girlie, then I would have to dress like a little wet-the-bed girlie, and she made me take off my clothes and put on the dress. At first I didn't realize this game was meant to be a punishment. Dressing up like a girl seemed strange, but not shameful; and I was far from displeased by the attention I got as I pranced around the room in my dress. It was only when my father grasped my arm angrily and said that I would have to wear the dress like a little girlie until I decided to stop wetting my bed that I realized the costume was meant to be humiliating. I was first confused then hurt by the realization that my mother . . . my
mother
was trying to shame me. And this big man was angry because I had found the punishment amusing. I threw myself to the floor and kicked and screamed and tried to tear the damning dress off me. But I was put into my crib wearing the dress, and long after my incensed screams had collapsed into sobs and gasps, I lay in the dark, my teeth clenched.

I had overheard my mother talking about a naughty boy in the apartment above ours who ran away from home, not caring how much his parents suffered and worried until he was found and returned to them. This equipped me with the means to avenge my humiliation. I would run away to my grandfather LaPointe, who had been the only man in my life before the return of this
father
who had changed my loving mother into a woman who liked to shame me. They would suffer and worry about where I was, but I would never return to them; instead I would go live with my grandfather, who had choo-choo trains and would give me rides all the time.

The next evening, when this . . . father . . . was safely out of the house and my mother was upstairs having coffee with the neighbor lady, I collected my knitted winter hat with a green tassel, a folded-over piece of bread for sustenance, and my red Christmas tricycle for transportation, and I left home forever. I can recall only blurred snapshots of the great escape: pushing my tricycle along the edge of a sidewalk crowded with impatient workers swarming out of some big factory; then night fell, and I was cold and scared. I remember waiting forever for the courage to cross a wide street with floods of noisy, speeding traffic, then being helped across by an old lady; and I asked a gasoline-smelling man in a service station with green-and-orange pumps which way it was to the choo-choo trains; and later I got tired of pushing the red tricycle, so I left it in a dark narrow space between two buildings where I could find it when I needed it. But I never found it again, and it started to rain, and I needed to poo very badly, but didn't know where to go, so I poo'd in my pants. A car pulled over to the curb and a policeman got out and asked me my name and where I was going, then he told the policeman in the car that I was the one the lady had called about, and that I smelled pretty “high.” I remember being obliged to sit on newspapers in the back seat with the windows open as they drove me back home.

My mother cried and yelled and kissed me and smacked my legs and hugged me and cleaned me up and got me warm by bathing me in the kitchen sink, then she fed me and told my father that he'd better get rid of that damned dress or he'd have to deal with
her,
believe me you! I slept in my cozy crib that night, and never wet the bed again. I don't know what happened to the book on modern child-raising. I never saw it again.

My father went out the next morning to look for work. After a few days our money ran out, and my mother was obliged to accept that he wasn't coming back. She had been abandoned . . . again. She sent a letter to my grandfather and he took a day off from his job as station master of the whistle-stop railroad depot in Fort Anne to help us move back to Lake George Village. We were tided over by small amounts of money from my grandfather, who depleted his savings by helping to support his children and his nieces through the Depression. My first sure, unfragmented memories come from the time Mother and I and my new baby sister lived in Lake George Village with only a tin kerosene heater to combat the cold that seeped through the uninsulated walls of a two-room summer cottage. As a special treat after she got back from work late at night, my mother used to make us toast on the top of that kerosene heater: toast that browned in the intricate hole patterns of the heater's lid. I loved the char taste of that toast, and the crunch of it between my teeth, and the late-night celebration of all being together. And I remember my grandfather's weekly visits. He used to smell of talcum powder and leather and he always took me on his lap and asked me how the world was getting on, then he gave me a lollipop. After supper, he would play two-handed pinochle with my mother and make her laugh by pretending to be furious about the rotten cards he'd been dealt. His visits were not only to give us the little money he could spare, but also to sustain us morally. I was enormously proud of my grandfather, and not only because he was in charge of trains and could click messages down a wire all the way to New York City, if he wanted to, but also because he was a half-blood Onondagan whose parents had immigrated to the United States from their unproductive farm on a tributary of the St. Lawrence. This meant that I was an Indian too, although my grandfather's marriage to a woman from a New England family and my mother's marriage to a man of English extraction combined to dilute my Indian blood terribly. Nevertheless, I used to feel a secret and thrilling kinship with a bronze statue of an Indian drinking water from his palm in Lake George Village.

My grandfather's car skidded off the road in a blinding snowstorm when he was driving from Granville, where he had given money and encouragement to his niece and her husband, to Lake George, where he was going to do the same for us. When the news of his death came, my mother was sick in bed. She had caught a bad chest cold walking to work through the snow, and for days she had been lying in the back room, a racking cough denying her sleep and bursts of high fever causing her to drift along the edges of reality—a recurring pattern of illness that was to become familiar over the years. The neighbor lady who was looking in on my sister and me assured us that Mother would make it through, “So don't you worry your little heads.” It hadn't even occurred to me that my mother might not make it through until the neighbor's assurances suggested that terrible possibility. And it was this same neighbor who got the telephone call about my grandfather and decided that the news of his death would be easier for my mother to bear if it came from me. This neighbor lady whispered into my ear that my grandfather had been killed in a car crash, then she pushed me into the dark bedroom, and when I paused, unwilling, she urged me forward with impatient flicks of her fingers.

I sat on the side of my mother's bed—she smelled of sleep and the mustard tang of Balm Bengué—and I stroked her damp forehead as I told her that her father had gone to heaven. I was four and a half and she was twenty-five, and on that snowy evening I became my mother's confidant and “good right hand,” roles that were to continue throughout my childhood. I was proud of my newfound importance; but my retreat into long and complex story games began at this time.

Two years passed, and my mother had just been told that she wouldn't have a job come the summer because her bad health made her unreliable, when she received a letter from my father, a letter I have before me on my desk. He had made an “error in judgment” for which he had been given five-to-seven in “an institution dedicated to the moral reconstruction of those who take shortcuts to success and comfort.” But he had proved “a contrite and willing pilgrim on the road to redemption” and had received early release after working as assistant to the prison librarian. He was now in Albany, the state capital, and he had rented us temporary lodgings until he was able to find a decent job . . . maybe in a library somewhere. He was all through with chasing rainbows. He was ready to settle down and make a life for his family. He knew he didn't deserve a second chance (or was it a third chance?), but . . . “You Were Meant for Me,” Toots. Remember?

Although Mother had vowed never to accept another thing from her cousin's husband after the way he had complained about being burdened with us, she swallowed her pride and wrote, asking if he could bring us and our stuff down to Albany in his old truck. During the trip, I looked out the side window at passing farmland, at the blur of bushes beside the road, and up at the telephone wires that seemed to part and reweave, part and reweave above us. And now we were eating peanut butter sandwiches in the kitchen of 238, and Anne-Marie and I were anticipating the St. Patrick's Day party to celebrate our family's finally getting together to start a new life.

It was growing dark, so Mother turned the old-fashioned porcelain switch for the kitchen's naked overhead lightbulb. Nothing.

“Just like him! Didn't even think to get the electric turned on!”

I had an idea. I went into the bathroom and turned its switch, and the light came on. The kitchen bulb was only burned out. So we finished our sandwiches by the light from the open bathroom door. For some time Anne-Marie had been dipping and dozing on the rim of sleepiness, then her head would snap up as she fought to stay awake until her father came home with the green cake, which she was determined not to miss.

But Mother stood up with a sigh and said he'd come when he came, and there was no point in our sitting up all night. She unpacked the box containing our sheets and our most treasured possession, three Hudson Bay blankets given to her as a wedding present by my grandfather, and we made the beds together. The blankets were thick, top-quality, “five-tail” Hudson Bays with those bands of bright color that fur traders thought would appeal to primitive Indian taste sufficiently to make them part with five beaver hides to get one. I had seen pictures of Indian chiefs wearing “five-tail” blankets, and I wished the neighbors who had scoffed at our battered possessions out on the sidewalk knew that we also owned three of the best woolen blankets in the world. Mother put her reluctant but comatose daughter into the little bed in their bedroom, where, after making Mother promise to wake her up for the party, Anne-Marie instantly fell into a deep sleep, sucking her fingers. Mother and I sat at the kitchen table for a while, silent and with that metallic emptiness in the stomach that follows long periods of excitement. Then she said we might as well go to bed too. I could help her unpack in the morning. I kissed her good-night and told her I'd just set the table first, and I began putting the green paper plates and napkins back into place around the bottle of lime soda, while Mother watched me, shaking her head.