Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (30 page)

I sat through the service with my jaw clenched. Occasionally
I glanced toward my father, but he looked straight ahead, rigid, as if in a trance. After the burial, we returned home. I smelled the sweet pungency of the dozens of flower arrangements sent in condolence and I became violently sick to my stomach. Ever since, clusters of cut flowers have repelled me.

O
VER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS
, it seemed as if my life were being led by two different people. My activities with playmates on the block and my friends in school had always been a source of pleasure which helped obscure illness at home. Now I threw myself into high-school affairs with unprecedented zeal. I had many girlfriends, a steady boyfriend, and teachers I admired. I became an honors student, an officer of the student government, and, ultimately, would captain the victorious Red Team in the Red and Blue Meet. I had always found content for my fantasies in books. The works I now studied—the stories of great events and the people who shaped them—were not fantastical, but I found that I could shape them with my own understanding, make them part of my own experience in the way I had with the romance of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. I came to treasure the small details that made an event or a figure from the distant past come alive. I fell in love with history.

At a time when there were no opportunities for girls to play in Little League or participate in varsity level sports, the Red and Blue Meet attracted the attention of the entire town. In my senior year, I was captain of the Red Team. I am pictured here with my co-captain, Jackie Seide, the two of us in matching dresses.

At home, however, I entered into a private realm of sadness. The old rituals of family were gone, dissolved by death and my father’s continuing grief. Though I dimly remembered a few occasions when my mother had reprimanded my father for “unwinding” too much on his way home from the train station, drinking now became a serious problem. During the days, my father remained sharp and clearheaded; he never missed an hour of work. But with increasing frequency, he returned home in the evening with the smell of whiskey on his breath. He staggered into the house, bumping into the piano, missing the step of the stair. His eyes, normally bright green, were bloodshot, his cheeks puffy. Increasingly, he drank at home, alone in the dark. Sometimes I tried to sit with him, hoping if I were there he wouldn’t feel the need for drink. But, invariably, I’d end up talking on the phone, studying at a friend’s house, or listening to music in my room. When I tried to talk with him about his drinking, I could not reach him. He insisted there was no problem for me to worry about. I began to feel that I had lost both my parents.

Without my sister Jeanne, who moved home after the funeral and commuted daily to Lenox Hill Hospital, the months following my mother’s death would have been unbearable. In some respects, my mother’s death was even harder for Jeanne than for me: she had lost a confidante, friend, and counselor. Yet she willingly assumed responsibility for our home and for the needs of my father, allowing me to remain a teenager, free to focus on my activities at school.

Others have reported that after the death of a family member their home seemed larger, having become hollow, empty, and strange. My own house, on the contrary, seemed to shrink around us, the very rooms disappearing, as my father found himself unable to endure the porch where he and my mother had shared cocktails every evening, unwilling to eat in the breakfast nook where their day had begun, incapable of sleeping in the room where she had died. My father’s depression left him no choice but to sell our house and move to a new place as quickly as possible. A buyer was found in May, and we planned to move to a garden apartment near the center of town in early July.

Although I understood my father’s decision, I was sad, even resentful, at the prospect of leaving the only home I had ever known. The associations which compelled my father to leave only bound me more desperately to my home. For as long as I could remember, my sense of place, my past, and my identity had been rooted in this house, this street, this neighborhood. Almost every memory I had of my mother was connected in some way or other to the house, to the rooms where she had been virtually housebound. I could picture her standing at the back door talking to the bakery man, reading in her favorite chair on the porch, ironing in front of the television, or cooking at
the stove. I was afraid that when we moved these images would be left behind, that I would forget my mother.

Reluctantly, I began to sort through my belongings. Since I had never liked to throw things away, I was fortunate that we had a big attic, accessible by a pull-down ladder, where I could store my valued possessions. Over the years, I had filled dozens of boxes with old report cards, books, baseball cards, programs, toys, dolls, board games, and letters from friends. Occasionally I would spend a few hours rummaging through my boxes. I liked the musty smell of the attic and the feel of the unplaned floorboards. Most of all, I liked to rediscover some old letter, or program, or scorebook to take me backward in time.

But I did not look forward to this trip to the attic. I would have to discard all but the few keepsakes that would accompany me to our small apartment. I sat in the middle of the attic floor, boxes piled around me. Wishing to postpone my painful task, I looked around the room. In one corner, an old baby carriage rested against the slanted window, casting a shadow on the floor. Across the room, two rocking chairs with broken slats stood side by side, along with some rolled rugs, a pile of
National Geographic, Saturday Evening Post
, and
Life
magazines, and yellowing stacks of newspapers. Behind the newspapers there was an old wooden trunk belonging to my parents. I had never looked inside, but now I lifted the lid and uncovered a thick manila folder marked “Family Documents.” I pulled out a sheaf of birth and death certificates arranged in chronological order.

I was thrilled with my discovery. Here, written in hand at the time of each birth and each passing, was the documentary history of my family, including the details which allowed me to picture the lives which had led to my
own. The notice of my father’s birth in 1901 revealed that his father, Thomas Kearns, was thirty-one and his mother, Ellen, twenty-eight, at the time of the birth, and that they had come to America from Ireland when they were twenty-one and eighteen respectively.

From this meager sheaf of brittle notarized documents whose handwritten words were beginning to fade, I began to create images of the past: the confident walk of my grandfather as he boarded the boat for America; his marriage to Ellen Higgins, whose family he had known in Ireland, the wedding ceremony in Brooklyn. I imagined my grandmother lying in bed, smiling, holding her first-born son, my father, Michael Francis Kearns. Although I had known some of the facts before, the official papers made the story come to life.

I kept reading. The death certificate of my father’s brother, Thomas Jr., who had died at fifteen months, was stamped by the Brooklyn Department of Health indicating a communicable disease. The back of my neck shivered as I read the date and the time of the little boy’s death, 5 a.m. on January 4, 1905—thirty-eight years to the hour before my birth! Next came the death certificate for five-year-old John, who had been hospitalized for nearly a month before he died from the wound in his leg. This was followed by the death certificate for my thirty-seven-year-old grandmother, Ellen. How strange, I thought, as I scanned the document, that she, too, like little Thomas, died at 5 a.m. And how very young they all had been.

The next document was titled “Death Certificate Number 799,” verifying my grandfather’s death at age forty. Uncomprehending, I read the stunning, unanticipated words: “Cause of death, Pistol shot to the head.” And then, in the coroner’s precise script, “Thomas Kearns. 633 Myrtle Avenue. Suicide.” For my entire childhood, I
had imagined the romantic tale of my grandfather, so sunk in grief over the death of his wife and child that he had died of a broken heart. No one had ever told me this, of course. But from the few facts I had been told, I had created a story which had become fixed in memory. Now I wanted to deny this new, far crueler reality. But there it was. In black and white. Undeniable.

My poor brave father, I thought. He had been such a little boy when it happened. What a powerful determination he had. Left an orphan, he had made a life for himself and for his sister, Marguerite. And then, even after her grim death in a dentist’s chair had left him completely alone, he refused to yield, went on to make a future for himself and then for his family—for all of us. If I grieved for the loss of my mother, what must it mean to him, whose whole life had been drowned in death? My self-pity, my trivial resentments at the disruptions to my own life, drained away. I would be strong. I would help him. I loved him so very much.

Absorbed in my thoughts, I never even heard the footsteps on the ladder. I started at the sound of my father’s voice.

“I see you found the family papers.” His voice sounded small and weary. I looked guiltily toward the offending document in my lap.

“Why did you never say anything about your father?” I asked. “I thought he died of sadness.”

My father didn’t reply right away. He put his hand on my head and sat down beside me.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “Sometimes you have to forget what you’ve lost and deal with what you’ve got.”

I put my arms around him. I wanted to cry. I knew I shouldn’t. “You see,” he continued, “in a way you were right all the time. He did die of sadness. I would have told
you about all this”—he gestured at the papers—“when you were older, when I thought it wouldn’t hurt you or make you feel ashamed of our family.” He sighed and surveyed my boxes. “My, you’ve really got a collection here.”

“I wish I could keep it all.” My eyes rested on a box of papers and mementos. “I know we won’t have room for it, but I hate to throw anything away.”

“You know,” my father looked at me, “after my little brother died, then my parents, then my sister, one after the other, I used to wonder if things would ever be all right.” He swept a layer of dust from the cover of an old Dodger scorebook that lay among the stack of cards, autographs, programs, and newspaper articles I had collected. “I know this move won’t be easy on you, but I don’t see any other way. I loved your mother so much. I still see her in every room.”

“That’s exactly why I wanted to stay.” I stroked a blue felt pennant and tried to hold back tears.

My father squeezed my shoulders. “I’m sorry. It’s strange the way something that comforts one person is so painful for another. Time will cure a lot of ills, but I don’t think there’s enough time in the world for me to get used to living here without her.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t care where we live. I just want us to be happy again.”

“Do you still have every year?” my father asked, looking at the pile of Dodger scorebooks.

“Since 1949, when you gave me the first one.”

“They were so close, so many times,” my dad said, shaking his head. “Remember we said, if they just kept fighting, they’d make it in the end. And they did. We’ll just have to do the same.”

Then, for the first time in months, I saw my father
smile. He pointed toward a discarded calendar which had been printed by a Brooklyn company after Bobby Thomson had destroyed the Dodgers’ hopes. “Look at that,” he said. And there it was, in large black type, Wait Till Next Year—the simple anthem that had served to comfort disconsolate Dodger fans and would now serve our family.

I
N
M
ARCH
, 1965, seven years after the conversation in the attic of my house in Rockville Centre which closes this book, I flew to New York for my father’s wedding. A few months earlier, my father had called me at my Harvard graduate school dormitory to tell me he intended to marry Florence Millea, an attractive outgoing widow who had been his companion of recent years. His voice on the telephone was hesitant, tentative, as if anticipating disapproval, but there was no equivocation, no concealed doubt in my enthusiastic response. My glad acceptance of his decision was fueled by a feeling of pride at the way he had overcome the crippling impact of his grief, the latest and most profound tragedy of a life marked by death and loss. In the years after my mother died, I had watched as he tapped the strengthening springs of his native resilience, stopped his drinking, and began to travel through America and Europe in the company of Mrs. Millea—visiting the
distant cities and mountain villages which my mother had known only through books. As we talked, he interrupted my enthusiastic monologue: “She makes me happy, Bubbles.” And I almost cried.

At the entrance to the pale granite Our Lady Chapel at the rear of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, my sister Jeanne embraced me. In the years after my mother’s death, Jeanne had taken on the responsibility of tending the family and me, and was now at Catholic University studying for her master’s degree in science and nursing. Jeanne would go on to a distinguished career as an executive director of a regional nursing organization in the state of Colorado. Charlotte’s responsibilities to her two young daughters and her husband, Paul, a thoracic surgeon at St. Jude’s Hospital, had kept her at home in Fullerton, California, where she still lives, still beautiful, and still active in her own community of family and friends.