Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (29 page)

When the debate was finished, we were asked to make a decision. It didn’t take very long. Influenced by the grim reality of the images we had seen on television, we voted overwhelmingly to send in federal troops. I decided to draft a letter to President Eisenhower urging him to take the action we had recommended. I spent hours laboring over the composition of the letter. It was important to be respectful, to set forth arguments like those we had heard from our teachers—calm and reasoned, not an outpouring of anger. I proudly showed my effort to my parents and my teachers. If this doesn’t persuade the president, I thought to myself, nothing will. The crisis dragged on for days, until Eisenhower finally decided to send in the troops.

The night of September 25, 1957, we watched exultantly as a long line of trucks, cars, and jeeps wound its way through Little Rock, while the state Guards, now under federal authority, joined with troops from the 101st Airborne Division to ensure the successful entry of the nine black students. “Oh, look at them,” said Minnijean Brown,
one of the Little Rock Nine. “It gives you goose pimples to look at them! For the first time in my life, I feel like an American citizen.”

My classmates and I, children of the fifties, were entering upon a change in attitude, not wholly unlike that of Mr. Fine when he left his reporter’s post to help a young black girl at Little Rock’s Central High. Not satisfied to be observers of injustice, we undertook to right it. In a few years another decade would begin, one very different from the relatively calm span of my childhood. And we would all be part of it. The schoolchildren of the fifties would become the young men and women of the sixties.

L
ATER THAT YEAR
we invited Ben Fine to address a special school assembly, expecting to hear a firsthand account of the action at Little Rock. We got more than we had anticipated. After briefly recounting his experiences, Fine instructed: “Don’t think racial problems are just Southern problems. We in the North have very serious racial problems of our own.”

He was right, of course. There was undoubtedly a large aspect of self-righteousness in our attitude toward race. We told ourselves that the mob of angry bigots we had seen on television had no counterpart in the North. Our own school system in Rockville Centre had been integrated for decades. Mr. Jenkins was adored by students at South Side, and each year we were certain to include a member of the black community in our student government. Even in music class, a progressive teacher, long before the era of “political correctness,” had removed racist intimations from the old Stephen Foster songs we sang in class—supplanting the word “darkies” with “sweetheart”
in “Old Folks at Home,” and with “children” in “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Mr. Fine punctured our complacency. A kindly, distingished man with a gentle voice, he explained that housing patterns in New York City had produced a “de facto” segregation in schools that was every bit as damaging to young blacks as the formal segregation in the South. Even in our own village of Rockville Centre, he pointed out, anyone who cared could see that something had to be done about the blighted area known as the “west end,” where the small black community of not quite a thousand people lived in badly substandard housing. Situated north of the retail district in an area three blocks wide and five or six blocks long, the west end had remained largely invisible to the rest of the town. Elaine and I had never ventured into the west end on our frequent bike trips, not because we thought it unsafe, but because it was not on our way.

Many of the houses, Fine told us, had primitive toilets, dangerous coal stoves, no central heating, collapsing stairs and walls. At least ten people were living together in one two-bedroom cold-water flat where the kitchen sink provided the only place to wash. In another old house, the mother slept in the dining room; two sisters, a brother, and an aunt slept in one bedroom; and a married sister, her husband, an aunt, a niece, and a nephew in the other. To be sure, there were a few well-kept homes within the dilapidated area. But the majority of the buildings were owned by absentee landlords who refused to make badly needed repairs and were satisfied simply to collect the monthly rents.

Not long after Fine’s talk, Rockville Centre would commit itself to a controversial urban-renewal project. Convinced they were acting in the best interests of both the
village and the residents, authorities approved a plan to raze the entire area and replace existing houses with a low-rise apartment building. The plan became the focus of a bitter battle as property owners with sound structures fought in vain to keep their houses. Even residents who hoped for improved living conditions feared the loss of the social structure provided by the old neighborhood. Initially, some black residents and activists, our teacher Mr. Jenkins among them, were active supporters of the plan; others charged that urban renewal was merely a device to eradicate the black section of the town. Year after year, through charges and countercharges, sit-ins and petitions, the project dragged on. More than ten years would pass before the plan was realized with the completion of a two-story brick complex known as Old Mill Court. In the interim, many of the black residents left the village and never returned.

The issues of race which had fired and enlarged my schoolgirl’s mind had come home to Rockville Centre. They would soon become the focus of mounting dispute, of government programs and citizen protest, engulfing the North as well as the South in bitter controversy. In years to come, the afflictions of racism would lead me to the civil-rights movement, to political action far more involved than writing a letter to the president. I was still a patriotic American. But thanks to teachers of uncommon skill and breadth, patriotism would never again mean unthinking adherence to things as they were. I would not confuse the temporary leaders of a country with the country itself.

I
F EVENTS
in Little Rock stirred me to a new awareness of my relationship to the nation and its ills, another event,
which also signaled the end of the decade, had no comparable impact.

I was at my boyfriend’s house when the television news reported that the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, a “space” satellite. Weighing nearly two hundred pounds and circling the earth every hour and thirty-five minutes, it was humanity’s first successful venture into the fabled territory of outer space. “Listen now for the sound which forevermore separates the old from the new,” the radio announcer intoned, alerting us to the pinging sound emitted by the satellite as it soared over the surface of the globe. Although I tried to listen, I couldn’t hear the ping at all, but accepted on faith the repeated observation that the sound represented a serious defeat for the United States. Newspapers reported that Sputnik had given the Soviet Union a triple victory: militarily, it meant that Russia was far ahead of the United States in rocketry; politically, it gave the Russians an enormous jump in their efforts to be treated as a first-class power; and psychologically, it offered evidence that socialism was the wave of the future.

Since various sightings of the satellite were being reported in different parts of the world, my boyfriend suggested taking a blanket and binoculars to the park in the hope of seeing Sputnik as it whirled above the East Coast. As the dark set in, the trees seemed to close in around, and we strained our eyes to catch a glimpse of the artificial moon. We had been told that Sputnik was as bright as a star of the fourth magnitude, the dimmest star in the handle of the Big Dipper. Whether it was visible that October night or not I will never know, for, as we lay on our blanket, my boyfriend reached over and kissed me. It was not the first time I had been kissed, but always before it had been in a darkened movie theater or in the back of a car.
On this clear autumn night, the spangled heavens seemed nothing more than a setting for romance. I didn’t give Sputnik another thought.

M
Y MOTHER DIED
sometime during the predawn hours of Saturday, February 22, 1958. On Saturday morning, while I was reading in bed, the phone in my parents’ room rang, awakening my father, who yelled for me to take the call on the extension downstairs. It was my friend Valerie. I raced downstairs, made plans to go to the movies with Valerie later that day, and started back up to my room.

Halfway up the stairs, I heard my father calling for Jeanne, home for the holiday weekend. “Jeanne! Jeanne!” he cried. “My pal is gone…. My pal is gone.” I ran to my parents’ bedroom. My father was sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, sobbing into his hands. My sister sat on the opposite bed, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Mother is dead,” my sister said. I reached for the bedpost to steady myself. Perhaps my mother’s long illness, the dread sight of the hospital rooms, the visible signs of her deterioration should have prepared me for the prospect of her death. Yet the gap between a possibility—a word—and this reality was far too large for my imagination to bridge. I recoiled in shock at the sight of her body. “Are you sure?” I pleaded. “Did you listen to her heart? Call a doctor! Are you sure, Jeanne, are you really sure?”

“Yes,” Jeanne said. “I’m sure.”

My mother lay perfectly still on her back. She showed no evidence of pain, but her open eyes gave her face a startled look. “I saw her just after midnight,” Jeanne said. “When I came in from my date, she heard me. We sat up talking while I had a cigarette. So it must have happened in the middle of the night.

“She never knew she was dying,” my sister continued. “I’m certain of that. Look, her comforter is still in place.” I understood immediately. Usually, mother’s restless struggle for a comfortable position would throw her comforter to the floor by the time she woke in the morning.

As Jeanne spoke, my father stared fixedly downward. He didn’t even look at me. His silence was unbearable. I put my arms around him and hugged him. I wanted desperately to comfort him and to find comfort for myself, but there was a terrible blankness to his eyes. I could see that he was having trouble breathing, as if shock had constricted his chest. “My pal is gone,” he kept repeating. “My pal is gone.”

Our family physician, Dr. Ben, arrived shortly afterward. He told us that either a massive heart attack or a massive stroke had caused her death. She was barely fifty-one. After Dr. Ben left, my father became increasingly passive. Jeanne made the necessary calls and decisions. Arrangements were made for Charlotte and Paul to fly home the following day, and the undertaker came for my mother’s body. The rest of the day has vanished from my memory, except for the sight of our black cocker spaniel, Frosty, howling at the bottom of the stairs. Since he was injured as a puppy, Frosty had been unable to climb stairs. He loved my mother most of all, and each morning he would wait at the bottom of the stairs until she came down. On the day of my mother’s death, and for weeks afterward, he remained at his post, waiting in vain for my mother’s descent.

The next morning, I woke at my usual hour of seven o’clock. In the first seconds, as I rolled onto my back to stretch, there was no recollection of what had happened, and then every detail of the previous day flooded my mind—my first glimpse of my mother lying in bed, the startled
expression fixed on her immobile face, the utter vacancy of my father’s eyes, the grotesque intrusion of the men from the funeral parlor carrying the blanketed form down the stairs. No one was up yet. I wandered listlessly from room to room. I wanted my father, yet for the first time in my life I was afraid to disturb him. I wanted to call my friends, but did not want to be pitied. I wanted it all to go away, but knew it wouldn’t. The phrase “I am fifteen years old and my mother is dead” sounded repeatedly in my head. I went downstairs and looked at our family album, turning to the photograph I had loved which showed my mother in her early twenties, her legs hung over the arm of the chair. I felt bitter. It did not seem fair, so much pain and sickness in a life so short. It wasn’t fair to her. It wasn’t fair to my father. It wasn’t fair to me. Then I was ashamed. How could I think of myself now? It had been so much worse for her. Yet she had never complained. And now she was dead.

At the start of the three-day wake, I had to force myself to look into my mother’s coffin. I avoided looking at her whole face, focusing instead on details—her gently waved hair, the odd color of the rouge which had been put on her cheeks. My eyes were drawn to the set of rosary beads strung around her long fingers, and then the wedding band on her left hand. In over thirty-one years of marriage she had never removed her wedding band from her finger. As a child, I had thought that the permanence of the marriage magically resided in that ring, and I would worry that something terrible might happen should the ring ever accidentally slip from her finger. Now there was no need to worry; the ring would accompany my mother to her grave. I reached over and touched her hand, but the thick cold of it filled my eyes with tears and my knees trembled.

Never had St. Agnes seemed so cavernous as on the late-February day of my mother’s funeral Mass. Although the cathedral could hold twelve hundred people, only the front pews were filled. But it did not seem empty. Everyone was there, all the people whose lives my mother had touched—the neighbors who made up the circle of her daily life, the men and women who ran the local stores at which she shopped, the milkman and breadman who came weekly to her door. And others, of course—my father’s colleagues, my sisters’ friends, and my own friends.

I could not concentrate on the Mass. I had no doubt that my mother deserved to go to heaven, but I couldn’t picture what heaven was like. My childhood imagination had been stirred by the thought of an eternal dwelling place where all the members of my family would join with angels and archangels and live among the saints. I had taken some comfort in the teachings of my catechism that “at the end of the world the bodies of all men would rise from the earth and be united again to their souls, nevermore to be separated.” It had all seemed so simple and so beautiful. But now I was puzzled; my knowledge seemed inadequate. Did the teaching of the catechism mean that my mother would live in heaven until Judgment Day with the body that had failed her on earth? Did it mean that on Judgment Day her body would be made whole and healthy, and if so, how could it still be her body? I sat in our pew, confused, each question giving rise to another. Think for yourself, my schoolteachers had told me. The Sisters had instructed us that there were answers, that faith would provide them. I tried to think. But I couldn’t find answers. I would have to pray, I told myself. But for the very first time in my life, I wasn’t completely sure that my prayer would bring an end to doubt.