That Went Well: Adventures in Caring for My Sister (2 page)

And even worse than their penny-pinching was their habit of not keeping up with the times. It was a full two years before Wingie realized that the moving pictures were now, some of them, in Technicolor, a phenomenon he proudly announced one night at dinner. My father asked him where he had been for the past couple of years. “Just running the school, son,” Wingie said, frowning at my father.

Dad was used to Wingie’s frowning. Dad’s older brother had enlisted in the navy to fight the Germans and the Japanese, but when Dad went to enlist, he was turned down. His hearing had been damaged through repeated ear infections as a child, in the years before sulfa or penicillin. He was pronounced 4-F, meaning he could not join up to fight. It was the best thing that could have happened for my mother and me, but Dad knew his father was disappointed and he always wanted to do more for the war effort, so instead, he concentrated on his career. He had been a radio announcer and couldn’t stand to read aloud all the terrible ads that the producer placed at his microphone. He knew he could write much better ads himself, so in 1938 he had started the R. T. Harris Advertising Agency. It went on to become Harris and Love, one of the most respected ad agencies in the West.

One of Dad’s clients was Saltair, our glorious amusement park with a fantastic Moorish dance pavilion set above the lapping waters of Great Salt Lake. It boasted the biggest outdoor dance floor in the world. Louis Armstrong, Harry James,
all
the big bands came to play at Saltair in the early forties, during the war.

One Saturday night back in 1942, four years before Irene was born, it was Dad’s job to meet the Glenn Miller Band at the railroad station and send them on a bus out to Saltair, where they’d be playing later that night. Mom was cooking roast beef for
Mammah and Wingie. I, at age three, was running around bothering everyone. “Take her with you, please,” Mom said to Dad, as he started out the door. “I’ll give your parents a drink when they come.”

So Dad took me along. When Glenn Miller himself stepped off the train, my father ran up and introduced himself. “It is such an honor for me to shake your hand,” he said.

Mr. Miller thanked him, organized his band onto the bus, and then turned to Dad and said, “I don’t have to be with them as they set up, and I’m just dying for a home-cooked meal. You wouldn’t know where there is one nearby, would you? This life on the road can get rough.”

Dad told him that Mom was just taking roast beef out of the oven, and would he do us the honor of joining us? Mr. Miller was delighted, and held me on his lap on the way home. This was my first and favorite brush with the famous.

When they got home, Mammah and Wingie were already there, seated around the fire. “Mom and Dad,” my father said proudly, “I’d like you to meet Glenn Miller.” Dad said it in the same tone as you’d say, “I’d like you to meet…God.”

My grandfather stood to shake hands. Drink orders were given, and Dad started into the kitchen to help Mom when he heard Wingie say, “What do you do, Mr. Miller?”

My father froze.

“I lead a band,” Mr. Miller said cheerfully.

There was a little silence. Mammah said, “Well, that sounds like fun.”

Then Wingie said, “Yes, but I meant what do you do for a living?”

Even with his bad hearing, Dad heard that and almost dropped
the cocktail tray. Miller was at the height of his career, probably the most famous band leader in the country that year. But Glenn Miller responded kindly and with a twinkle. Dad rushed out to try to educate Wingie, but Mr. Miller just laughed and said, “Actually, I’m trying to join the army.” (He would go on to entertain the troops in bases all over Europe, and even arranged a jazzy march for our troops, to the tune of the “St. Louis Blues.”)

Wingie brightened and said joining the army and being a soldier seemed like a much more worthwhile job for a fellow, and Dad and the “band leader” burst out laughing.

My father told the story for years. Our household held a lot of hope and laughter then. Irene would come along three years later. Then there was still hope and laughter, but the hope took a different form and the laughter was always a little more uncertain.

W
e were not in the habit of praying at our house, although I had been taught “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Even though both my parents came from Mormon pioneer stock, over the years they had fallen away from its theology and traditions. Although they had stopped going to church, they sent me anyway. My parents didn’t want me to be left out, since they had loved going to church as children. When the teetotaling Mormon home teachers came around to entice them back into the fold, Dad would say, “No, but may I offer you a drink with me? No? Well, then. Come by anytime. Nice to see you. What? Kneel and pray with you? No. No indeed. But how about a nice Manhattan? No? Well, another time then….” He always smiled happily as he showed them out. “Oh, Dick,” Mother would say, shaking her head in disapproval and laughing at the same time.

I often invited Mary Frances Murphy to come to our church, because we had lots of activities to which anyone was invited: tal
ent shows, campouts, taffy-pulling parties. Her parents always shook their heads “no” whenever I asked if she could join me.

It made me wonder why, and what went on in their church that could be more fun. I began to long to go with them, just to see for myself.

All the Murphys went to confession on Saturday evenings. One Saturday I asked if I could go with them. Mrs. Murphy smiled and said she didn’t see why not. The sight of the magnificent Cathedral of the Madeleine, hushed and yet filled with mysterious echoes, the fragrance of incense, the jewel tones of the stained-glass windows glowing with the setting sun, simply enchanted me. I watched Mrs. Murphy walk forward to a pew, kneel for just a moment, then get back up and go into the pew, where she promptly knelt again. She took out a beautiful, long string of small pearls, each separated by golden chain. Kneeling and holding the beads, she fingered them and began whispering a prayer. I wondered if she was doing magic. Mr. Murphy went into a wooden box the size of a phone booth and closed the door.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Mary Frances.

“He’s confessing.”

“Confessing what?”

“Well, anything bad he did this week or last week.”

“Who does he confess to?”

“A priest.”

“And does the priest get mad at him?”

“No, the priest tells him how many prayers he has to say. Then it’s all right again because God will forgive him.”

I thought about this. I tried to think of a really bad thing I had done, and I couldn’t. This was a problem, because I really wanted to see what was in the little box.

I sat in the pew, hearing the footsteps of devout Catholics echo as they walked toward the altar, and I examined my life so far. There must be
something
bad I had done. I closed my eyes and went over any potential sins I could have committed.

Then it hit me: I had done something really rotten that I had buried deep inside myself.

ONCE, WHEN MOM
and Dad were having their cocktails by the fire, my baby sister Irene had lost her bottle in her crib and was crying. Mom asked me to run upstairs and give it back to her.

Annoyed at having to go upstairs, I stomped up, went into our bedroom to Irene’s crib, found the bottle, and jammed it into her mouth. It wasn’t a damaging jolt, but it was hostile enough that it made her start to cry all over again in outrage.

Bammy heard the difference in the cry and came running upstairs. She picked Irene up and cuddled her. “What happened?” she asked, looking at me.

“I have no idea,” I said, trying to look innocent.

Bammy frowned at me. She got the bottle, settled Irene in her arms, and started singing, “From this valley they say you are going…”

“The Red River Valley” wafted from our little bedroom the way it had when I was a baby, and Bammy’s arms made everything cozy and safe again. Irene was asleep in ten minutes.

Sitting there in the pew, I realized that this had been a terrible sin. I’d ask Mrs. Murphy if I could confess as soon as she came past my pew on her way to the confession box.

It had occurred to me that maybe by shoving that bottle
against Irene’s little face, I had been the one to damage her brain, and her being slow was all my fault. We knew Mom had trouble having babies because of her arthritis. Why had I come out strong and normal, then? What if Irene had really come out normal too, but my own brutality with that bottle had been the cause of her injury?

By the time Mrs. Murphy came past, I was a puddle of remorse and anxiety.

“Mrs. Murphy!” I whispered loudly.

She turned. “Yes, Terrell?”

“I want to confess!”

She smiled at me. “You can’t, honey. You’re not Catholic.”

Well, this was the worst news of my week. How could I tell God what I had done and ask him to forgive me? How many prayers did I need to learn? Can you really make up for a sin that terrible? Why didn’t Mormons get to go confess in a little box every week and have someone forgive them?

When we got home, I announced to my parents that I wanted to be a Catholic.

“Why?”

“I like their beads and their stained glass and their tiny little white prayer books, and it’s quiet in their church, not like our church. The Mormons are just so noisy!” I couldn’t tell them I just wanted to go into a confession box, to see what it was like, and to be forgiven.

They smiled and looked at each other. Dad said, “You have to wait until you’re older. Then you can do anything you want about church.”

Gradually, my fascination with confessing subsided, but I
harbored a faint suspicion for years that perhaps I had at least contributed to Irene’s disability, if not actually caused it.

Catherine Murphy continued to have lots of babies and look longingly at Mom and her life. She had no idea that Mom’s second child would take as much effort as all eight of the children she eventually had.

And of course, neither did we. To this day, our home movies show flickering black-and-white footage of Dad galloping through the living room with Irene on his shoulders; Mom in the kitchen making her famous, fluffy coconut cake or the delicious vinegar chocolate cake; Bammy weeding the Victory Garden and shooing Dad away, shielding her face because she did not look her best for a camera; Dad and me on a sled on a winter morning, scooting down J Street. Every Christmas Eve Dad filmed Irene and me in our pajamas, hamming for the camera, hanging our stockings on the mantel. The stockings we hung were our actual little socks. We did not have giant felt receptacles ready to receive the hundreds of small treasures Americans now feel are necessary. We were thrilled to get some candy, a few small trinkets, and a tangerine in the toe. We looked like a picture-perfect family, right out of
Father Knows Best,
only with a grandmother in the cast. And it felt like one to me. Cozy. Content. Protected. Loved.

You never saw in the home movies that my parents were terrified about Irene. I never saw it, back then, day to day. So it was a complete surprise to me the day Dad turned on me out of the blue.

Irene was two and I was eight. She was sitting on the toilet on her little potty seat with the duck in front. She looked so sweet
and sort of helpless, perched on that potty seat. I went into the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the bathtub across from her. I smiled at her and took her little wrists in mine. “Irene,” I said, “you are my little sister. Do you know what that means? It means I will always take care of you and I will always protect you.” I looked deep into her crossed dark brown velvet eyes, and tears of love welled up in me.

Dad, passing the bathroom, came in. Grabbing my wrists, he said, “What are you doing? Are you twisting her wrists? You leave her alone! She can’t defend herself!”

I stared at my father, stunned. Then I got up and ran out of the house.

I leaned against the willow tree, crying at the monstrous injustice done to me. I sobbed and buried my head in the black, wounded, splintered trunk, holding onto it for support. When I had sobbed enough to feel better, I felt that splintered trunk in my hand and realized that it could be a handle. I looked below me and saw another place that could be a foothold. Looking up into the tree, I saw a perfect way to climb into its branches, and hoisted myself up. A thick branch made a perfect seat, and behind it, a backrest for me. I had found my own spot, a place where I could bring my books, hidden from everyone, including my father, who had been mean to me for the first time in my life.

He was my best buddy. I was his pride and joy. He told me so regularly. How could he turn on me like that? I was heartbroken. But up here in my tree, I could escape to my own special place and watch the world go by. I spent every summer for the next four years up in that willow tree when I wasn’t playing with friends.

By now Irene was wearing glasses to help straighten her eyes.
Her attention span for any plaything was less than a minute, and then she’d be off wandering again. She squirmed and got up to leave after one page of a storybook. She was sweet, not destructive, just demanding of your attention at all times.

“Mommy? Mommy?”

“What, darling?”

Long silence. Then, “Mommy?” She was trying to form thoughts, but couldn’t complete them. When Mom would go on with her tasks, the whole scene would begin again. It was very wearing on everyone.

Irene hung around the house and the backyard, asking her endless, repetitive questions and Bammy and Mom took turns tending her. Irene’s attention span was so short that she moved from coloring book to sandpile to swing to dolls, all in the space of five minutes.

Now and then Mammah tried to take Irene for an afternoon, but you could tell that when the few hours were over, she was worn out. “It takes a very patient person to do this,” she told Mom. This angered Mom, even though she knew it was true. “Did you hear what she said to me? She actually said Irene is too hard for her to take care of! Of all the nerve! How dare she say that to me!”

Mom was in denial, but, in a way, I sort of understood, because that protective anger rose up in me all though my childhood. When Irene and I were in the backyard with the Murphys, I expected them to be kind to her. I knew how very vulnerable she was, with her little eyeglasses, trying so hard to understand what games we were playing. As we all know, kindness is not in young children’s nature. It’s not that they’re really mean; they just haven’t learned to tiptoe around sensitive situations.

Tommy Murphy had a friend, whom I always thought of as Mean Merrill Hall. He once dug up a doll the Murphy girls and I had buried. We’d held a grand funeral for her, too. So when he proudly showed us the shoebox, caked with dirt, we chased him with such fury we actually scared him. Who would rob a doll grave? This guy was evil.

Later, another day, Merrill asked me, “Hey, what’s wrong with your sister?” I clenched my fist and tried to punch him in the face. He ducked and backed away.

“Nothing!” I yelled at him. “What’s wrong with
you
?” and I lunged for him again. He warded off my blows and ran away.

I’m still looking for him.

The summer I was nine, I came down from my perch in the tree and began to straddle the fence in front of our house instead. I had read every book about horses I could get my hands on, and the fence became my stable. With black crayon, I inscribed the names of my various mounts: Sparky, Silver, Black Beauty, Golden Sovereign. There was one that I had seen in a horse show catalog, Maple Sylvia, only I hadn’t grasped the name and wrote “Maple Saliva” instead. Mother had inquired about all this graffiti, but when she saw the pile of library books with the same titles, she understood. “Honey, I am sure you would love a horse. I know you’ve asked Santa for one for the past three years. It’s just that we have no place to keep one! But I’ll tell you what we
can
do: we can give you riding lessons at the Wasatch Riding Academy. I’ll find out about it. I’ll bet you’d make a fine rider.”

So every Saturday of that summer and the next, Mom drove me out to the foothills, where I mounted various horses under the tutelage of portly Aunt Sally Benson, who wore false eyelashes and a glittery fringed vest every day we rode. She was also
the head of the Gene Autry Riding Club. While Mom sat in the car under a tree and read a novel, I learned to trot, then gallop, then stay on at a flat-out run over those hills. I had a marvelous time.

The winter of 1948 buried Salt Lake City. The snow was almost waist-deep, and the hungry deer strolled out of the mountains and into everyone’s backyards. Our Christmas tree glittered in our bay window. On one of the branches was a pair of shoelaces, a family tradition started by Mammah when Dad was just five years old. He had written a note to Santa, saying that he really needed shoes with shoelaces for Christmas. When Mammah asked him about it, he said, “I only have shoes with buckles and I don’t know how to tie a bow.” Santa brought the laces, and the laces only (after all, he could learn to tie a bow without the extra pair of shoes!). Each year after that, the laces went on the family tree as a poignant symbol of a little boy’s need to learn.

Every Christmastime, Dad showed us his home movies, with cartoons and Christmas shows flickering in black and white. My favorite one featured Santa playing sandman, waving sparkling dust over the children’s sleeping eyes, then leaving glittering presents under the family’s tree before he escaped back up the chimney. I fell asleep dreaming of that movie. In the middle of the night on this wintry Christmas Eve, I woke up and looked out our bedroom window. There, grazing, was the horse Santa must have finally realized I needed so much! I almost wept with joy and ran in to wake my parents.

They staggered in, rubbing their eyes, and peered out the window with me. “Oh honey,” my dad said, putting his arm around me. “See, it isn’t a horse. It’s a deer. A female deer. She
sure does look kind of like a horse when she’s eating my bushes, doesn’t she?”

And then he hugged me, and told me he knew exactly how I felt, because all his childhood he had wanted a bicycle for Christmas, and Santa never thought to bring him one. “But you know what?” he asked, crouching down by me, “that never spoiled Christmas for me. In fact, it made it even more fun, thinking about all the surprises that might be waiting for me. See what I mean?”