Читать книгу A Life of My Own - Donna Wilhelm - Страница 10

Boarding House Life

360 Fairfield Avenue

Hartford, Connecticut, where I grew up, was founded by immigrants who never stopped coming. In the 1600s, Dutch and English settlers arrived, and for three centuries, others followed from all over Europe and beyond. In the early 1900s, my father Juzo and my mother Hania, more than a decade apart in age and from different social backgrounds, joined streams of refugees fleeing oppression in the Old World and seeking freedom in the New World. At Ellis Island, New York, they were processed, documented, and sent forward to their unknown futures. Many traveled onward to nearby cities like Hartford, where broad industries and small business opportunities flourished, and where immigrants found work and clustered by ethnic affinities. Hartford was the city where Juzo and Hania would meet and eventually marry.

Young and determined Juzo worked his way up the assembly line as a mechanic at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company. His young wife Hania saw an opportunity to meet the needs of immigrants for cheap, temporary housing. During the next half-century of her life in America, she would convert successive family homes into Boarding Houses #1, #2, and #3—an enterprise that would shape her life and the futures of vulnerable souls whom she chose to rescue.

Immigrant Hania in America, 1911

In the 1920s, itinerant down-at-the-heels Irish and off-the-boat Eastern Europeans came knocking at the door of Boarding House #1, aka “Polish Hania’s on Webster Street.” If they didn’t speak Polish or basic English, they’d negotiate renting a room by hand gestures and offers jotted down on scraps of paper. By any standard, the Webster Street house was large—US Census data indicates that as many as twenty-one people had lived there at once, including my sister Edith, who was thirty years my senior and grew up on Webster Street in a different generation.

When I was born in 1943, Mother was by then fifty-one years old, Dad was sixty, and my parents had sold Boarding House #1 to the Farley Funeral Parlor. Its warren of rooms would continue to house short-term residents, only none of them came by choice.

Boarding House #2 was where I grew up. It was a three-story brick with dark green awnings spanning the long front porch of 360 Fairfield Avenue—a significant upgrade of neighborhood from working class Webster Street. The new locale was distinguished by Trinity College, located just three miles west. Founded in 1823, it was the second-oldest private college in America, next to Yale University.

My fondest memories of Boarding House #2 was the backyard apple tree, with an inviting low limb, just right for me to climb and hide from Mother. Tucked in my leafy lair, I’d gorge on crunchy apples and survey everything around me: the neighboring cherry tree that no longer bore fruit; the adjacent vegetable garden of cabbage, tomatoes, and corn that Dad tended; and the fertile beds of voluptuous peonies that would always be my favorite flowers.

I remember the house itself as snapshot moments—a deeply shaded front porch, where on hot summer days, I sat on the canvas sofa watching neighbors, strangers, and assorted kids walk along Fairfield Avenue or pass by in cars, buses, and delivery trucks. The interior was designed for separate use: ground floor for family and upstairs for boarders. The entry vestibule opened to a hallway flanked on one side by an over-worked radiator. In cold weather, its noisy heating cycles clanked away under the long, dark metal radiator cover. There, Mother also tried to hide the “boarders no use!” shiny, black rotary telephone. Although many of them wanted to make a surreptitious call, few would risk provoking Mother’s notorious temper.

The downstairs belonged to Dad and Mother, Great Dane Brutus, and me, aka “Little Danusia.” Our family’s rooms were multi-purpose—especially the kitchen. Every day, Mother stood at the big enamel stove, long wooden spoon dipping and stirring unsavory contents in assorted pots. “Is good for you,” she’d say as she doled out large servings of “good Polish food” to family or invited others who sat in wait at the linoleum-covered dining table. Between meals, I’d retreat to my childhood desk wedged underneath the kitchen window niche that had an enticing view of the entire back yard. Sometimes I did my homework. More often I drew in my sketchbook, but most often I daydreamed about living somewhere peaceful and beautiful.

The former dining room was converted into Mother’s bedroom/hiding place for “Danusia-no-see” things. The enclosed, but unheated, side porch served as Dad’s sleeping room. At the front of the house were two “for company” rooms. On the left was a living room with heavy blue velvet draperies that hung across the doorway. There, Mother’s aristocratic past was reflected in her best antique furniture and the ebony upright piano. On the right was a smaller parlor that held a mish-mash of furniture including Dad’s well-used chair and a wooden floor lamp. When Dad’s relatives visited, they’d sit in the parlor to gab away in Polish while sipping hot tea in tall glass mugs. A small but indispensable downstairs space was the family-only water closet angled tight under the stairway. It was so cramped that we had to squeeze ourselves in for “private business” and barely had room to turn around for cleanup at the petite pedestal sink.

Floors two and three housed the boarders. Whether singles or couples, they paid one week’s rent in advance for rooms. All of them had shared use of the enclosed sun porch/Pullman kitchen with its jammed-in Formica dining table. Views from the upstairs windows depended on location, either in front or in back of the house. However, no boarder was permitted to actually sit outside on the front porch or in the back garden. Mother decreed the outdoors was “Nie zezwolenie!”—off limits to boarders. There was, however, a major equalizer at Boarding House #2. The only full bathroom was on the second floor, meaning our family and all the boarders had to compete for bath times. During my fourteen years of living at 360 Fairfield Avenue, not once did I get a relaxing soak in the big enamel bathtub without constant banging on the door from a boarder shouting, “How much longer you in there!”

Despite Mother’s rules to separate our family from the boarders, my bedroom was the exception—I slept in a room on the second floor, right next to the boarders. During childhood, I didn’t think that was unusual, and I liked my bedroom view of the entire garden and my secret hideout, the backyard apple tree. Also, the stairway was right next to my bedroom door—if I had to pee at night, I could get downstairs to the family toilet real quick.

My parents’ oblivion to possible dangers involving their young daughter, alone upstairs at night among strangers, didn’t even occur to me until years later when I’d grown up. At any given time, at least a dozen boarders lived with us in the house. Any one of them could’ve been a thief or worse. But later, I had so many mysteries to contemplate, that sleeping among strangers was a minor detail in the tangled mass of oddities that defined my childhood.

Great Dog Brutus

One of those oddities was that gentle giant Brutus, the family Great Dane, was my designated guardian. Canine Brutus loved ice cream as much as I did. On hot summer days, our favorite place for ice cream was Maple Avenue Drugstore. Walking from Fairfield Avenue down a steep hill was fun and easy: coming back was long and sweaty. Behind the shiny marble counter, busy soda jerks nodded and smiled at me—a chubby little girl who always ordered the same thing. “Two large please ice cream cones, one vanilla and one strawberry.”

Mother, Dad, Danusia, and Great Dog Brutus in Hartford, 1946

The vanilla was for me and the strawberry was for Brutus. If any adult patron of the drugstore thought it strange to see a child—I couldn’t have been older than four—ordering and paying from a supply of coins in her pocket, they didn’t mention it. No one ever asked me where my mother was, or why my only companion was my dog. As for me, all I cared about was getting away from Mother’s unpredictable temper and the yucky food that she prepared and I detested.

One blistering hot day, the ice cream was irresistible to greedy me. Sad-eyed Brutus watched me exit Maple Avenue Drugstore, preoccupied by voracious, up-and-down licking of both ice cream cones. Brutus waited for a few minutes until he saw his chance. Then, in one great gulp he seized his rightful share of the strawberry cone, followed by licking of my sticky berry-coated fingers. Consumed with outrage, I lunged for Brutus, grabbed his barrel chest and bit into his Great Dane lip. Like a wounded soldier howling with pain, Brutus sank to the sidewalk and collapsed his massive torso over the hot cement. Brushing a giant paw across his bleeding lip, he blinked up at me. I loomed above him—legs-splayed, gulping in and spitting out hot air. Mere moments later, Brutus lumbered back up to his full height. Gentle as always, he nudged me away from the traffic side of the walk and waited for me to grip his leather collar. His canine strength forged us up the arduous hill—once again, Brutus safely led me home.

In winter, our routine shifted to the front vestibule, where Brutus’ prostrate body covered nearly every inch of the shabby Oriental rug that bore endless comings and goings of dirty shoes. On certain days, when instinct told me that snow was coming, I’d climb over Brutus’ supine chest and position myself in front of the etched glass door panels to watch and wait. At last, the icy crystals began to fall. My imagination transformed the snow into delicious layers of melted marshmallow flowing over the front yard, topping the hedges and covering squares of sidewalk. The entire world around me had turned into a sugar-coated fairyland.

“Danusia, take letters to mailbox!” Mother commanded from somewhere in the house, piercing my daydreaming and alerting Brutus to lift up his great bulk. Slowly, he’d pad to the wall of coats and hats hung on wooden pegs, high for adults, low for me. I’d stretch to reach my red hat with ear warmer flaps and jammed it over my auburn hair. Then I‘d pull down my snug wool coat and stuff my arms through sleeves blocked by pesky woolen cords attached to dangling mittens. Puffing with effort, I’d bend over to pull on my rubber boots and fumble to close two rows of metal clips.

Wrapped and ready, hanging on to Brutus by his collar, we’d slide across the icy porch to make our way down snow-covered steps. What an odd pair we must have been, trekking along the sidewalk to the public mailbox several blocks away. During the early years of my childhood as I stood on mounds of cold winter snow, I actually believed that the thoughtful city of Hartford lowered mailboxes in winter so that little children like me could more easily reach the metal handle of the mail bin, slam it open, and shove important envelopes into the chute. Yet again, if any neighbor saw something strange about a small child and a very large dog undertaking walks together in the middle of winter, I never knew.

Grandma S

In spite of the constant presence of transient boarders, I was a lonely child. No kids my age arrived with the adults who came to live in our house. Perhaps by then, Mother didn’t take in boarders with children. Aside from my cousin Theresa, Great Dog Brutus was my sole companion—until Grandma S arrived.

Jennie S, who had no apparent relatives living near to care for her, arrived at Boarding House #2 during my preschool years and found a home with us during her remaining days. Although our time together was brief, I soon called her Grandma S out of love for the only grandma I’ve ever known.

“I’m ninety-eight years young,” Grandma S said, challenging anyone to doubt her piercing blue eyes. “I’ve lived this long because no morsel of meat has ever passed my lips.” A conviction she attributed to being a Seventh-day Adventist.

Mother nodded. “You are first healthy vegetarian person ever stay my house.” The deceptive smile on her face told me something devious was on her mind.

Brutus adored Grandma S as much as I did. We followed her around the house and kept her company in her small bedroom. Brutus always took his regular place stretched over the circular cotton rug on the floor. Grandma S would pat the chair seat cushion, too large for her trim bottom, and motion to me. I’d scramble up next to her and watch her fingers, agile and swift despite wrinkles and age spots, guide needles looped with brilliant colored threads. The bouquet of violets emerging within the wooden embroidery hoop mesmerized me.

“Stay close little one,” Grandma S murmured. Her affectionate voice, like her slimness, disguised a will of steel. With a thimble-tipped finger, she pointed just below the yellow embroidered bow, a blaze of hundreds of meticulous yellow silk stitches, and said, “Soon I will put your name here.”

Never doubting Grandma S, I imagined my name right along with hers. Would it be yellow or another brilliant color?

“Dear child, these flowers wouldn’t exist without you by my side,” she said. I pressed my chubby body into her leanness. Was the floral scent I inhaled coming from Grandma S or had the embroidered violets come to life?

From day one, Mother loved Grandma S. Unique among boarders, Grandma S was allowed to take her meals with me in Mother’s kitchen, where cooking odors seemed embedded in the walls. Even Brutus didn’t like the smells. He’d keep his big body turned backward in the corner. Three times a day, we’d wait for what was coming.

Mother shoved a plate heaped with mounds of Polish mystery food in front of me. “Eat!” she threatened with a greasy metal spatula. “Yes, Mamusia,” I blurted through a mouthful of yucky mush. When Mother spun away, I raised a paper napkin to my lips and lowered one less mouthful to my lap. Conspiring glances passed between Grandma S and me. And as if he knew and approved, Brutus grunted and farted from the corner.

“Something special for Grandma S,” Mother announced at the stove, then turned outstretched hands slick with spillage from the overfilled folk-patterned blue and white bowl. “Is only good Polish vegetables and broth!” As she slid the offering toward Grandma S, I took a suspicious look at the “broth” brimming with solid brown lumps. “No meat for you!” Mother’s voice was loud and she averted her eyes. Grandma S kept a serene smile on her face as she reached underneath the table to gently detach my hand from its soggy paper mass and hold it tight.

Grandma S had lived with us only six months when I had the bad dream. I was lost in dense white clouds, searching for someone important who had disappeared. My body temperature spiraled from numbing cold to sweating hot. Suddenly, a small opening compelled me, and I began to step through. A voice commanded, “Get back to earth!” Lightning flashed, everything around me turned black. I was back in my single bed, legs pushed tight against the wall. I twisted around to see pale morning light filtering through the venetian blinds.

It was freezing in my room. Crawling across damp and rumpled sheets, I dropped down to the wooden floor. On my knees, I palmed and circled through layers of dust under the bed, searching for and finally grabbing my worn, corduroy slippers. I found my pink chenille bathrobe draped over a nearby chair, pulled it on, and trussed the belt tight. Shaking with premonition, I raced down the hall to Grandma S’s room.

She never locked her door. I pushed it open, desperate to see Grandma S sitting secure and erect in the high-back chair, fingers and silk threads flying in and out of the embroidery hoop in her lap. But not that morning. Grandma S lay still in her single bed, a small mound draped with a pale yellow quilt. I crept close and leaned over. Grandma’s eyes were closed, her hair fanned out like a silver halo around her face. She must be tired today, I thought. Maybe last night she stayed up too late reading from her Bible. With tentative fingers I touched her cool, unresponsive cheeks and smoothed away the wisps of silver strands touching her forehead.

“Good morning, my little one,” she whispered.

I was relieved to hear her voice. “Grandma S, are you sick today?”

“Oh no, dear child, I feel just fine. Well, maybe a little tired.”

“Would you like me to help you get up?”

“No, not just yet, I’ll rest a bit more.”

“Did you read too long last night?”

“No, I had something else to finish, on the table. Have a look.”

On the pine table, next to the high-back chair, rested the wooden embroidery hoop. Its center glowed with the perfectly completed bouquet of purple violets, stems held together by a golden bow. Yellow streamers trailed down to a finely executed inscription: Made with Love—by Jennie and Danusia.

Grandma S didn’t get out of bed that day, or any other. Her final piece of embroidery complete, she could rest well. No matter how often Mother had pummeled my soul and lashed my body when I disobeyed her, Grandma S soothed my anguish, always ready to embrace and restore me. If only she’d arrived sooner and stayed longer. Soon enough, her little room in Mother’s boarding house was occupied by a stranger. Never again would I tiptoe down the hall to push open that bedroom door. Brutus would miss Grandma S as much as I did. At least we had each other for comfort.

In years to come, I would receive another gift from Grandma S—her handsome grandson would teach me a very different lesson about love and loss.

Polish Relatives and Secrets

Our social life revolved around Dad’s extended Polish family. Other than occasional Polish boarders and Dad’s allegiance to the local Polish newspaper Novy Swiat, we didn’t mix with the rest of Hartford’s immigrant culture. For Dad, Mother, and me, there were no Polish Hall dances, no traditional Pulaski Day parades, no Polish Catholic church.

Mother didn’t like sitting around making nice, but she liked free babysitting. Boisterous relatives getting together at someone else’s home gave Mother the perfect opportunity to show up just long enough to drop me off. She’d poke at me and announce, “Danusia no make nuisance.” Then she’d scoot out the door, head for the Packard, and take off on some mysterious errand.

Hoping to escape attention, I’d snug into a well-worn chair in the corner. No adult relatives suspected that I understood nearly every Polish word of adult conversations. Raised eyebrows and guilty glances signaled that juicy gossip was coming.

“Hania and Juzo—how they live so good, buying them bigger and bigger houses?” Speculation was rampant about my parents’ mysterious source of money. They’d owned a house on the Connecticut shore (sold before I was born), Boarding Houses #1 and #2, and the 300-acre Old Glendale Farm, where Dad and I escaped from Mother for days at a time.

Inevitably, one question led to another. “You think Hania and Juzo got plenty secret money from Old World?” Even though I had no idea about the source of any “secret money,” such speculation fed my hungry imagination.

Years into the future when those relatives were dead and gone, I yearned to hear them again, gabbing in Polish while dipping and stirring Polish krusticy, sugar dusted, fried twists of dough, in glass mugs of hot tea. Such happy memories belonged to times when I believed that grownups had answers to all my questions.

There was one person willing to share the family stories and secrets with me—Aunt Mamie, Dad’s sister. She was also the top person on Mother’s drop-off babysitter list. Aunt Mamie and Uncle Matthew owned Kazanowski’s Delicatessen, where expat Poles came to “taste the homeland” and left with butcher-wrapped kielbasa sausages and squat jars full of pierogies, dough bundles filled with mashed potato, cheese and onions, or sweet fruit preserves.

Mother burst into Kazanowski’s with me in tow and thrust me behind the counter toward Aunt Mamie. “Here is Danusia for visit!” With no concession to small talk, Mother whirled back out the door to the Packard that she’d left with the motor running. As always, it was anyone’s guess when she’d be back or where she went. I loved Kazanowski’s Deli, redolent with tasty Polish treats. And I was in no hurry for Mother to come back and claim me.

Aunt Mamie and unidentified employee in Kazanowski’s Deli, 1947

Gentle Aunt Mamie took my hand. “We go to take-a-rest place,” she said, then guided me to the cluttered back room of the deli. Easing into a forgiving leather chair, Aunt Mamie sighed with relief and lifted her swollen legs into the familiar indentations of the poufy leather ottoman. I snuggled next to her and began to ask my questions.

“Ciotka Manya,” I said, using the Polish that made her happy, “why do Edith and Carl live in Arizona? Don’t they like Hartford?”

Now, the mere mention of Edith’s name brings a sense of dark betrayal, but there were early years when I loved and admired my sister. Years when Polish relatives in Hartford extolled Edith as “our free spirit of the desert.” She did indeed cross America solo at least once a year in her battered station wagon—journeys that made her mythical reputation as vast as the distances she traveled and as enigmatic as the places we could only imagine.

“Ach, my little Danusia.” Aunt Mamie hugged me close to her ample bosom and smoothed back wisps of hair from my damp forehead. I savored how her skin smelled of Ivory Soap. When I pressed my face deep into the folds of her cotton apron, I inhaled scents of Polish ham and dill pickles. “Your mama Hania never talks about how Edith eloped with Carl. So gifted violinist, only nineteen years old when she meet Carl, no-talent baseball player but so-good dancer.” Before anyone could stop the “wildness,” Carl snatched Edith away to get hitched. “Hania never forgive.” Aunt Mamie shook her head at the memory, her blonde braids quivering. “Your mama calls him good-for-nothing Carl.”

Aunt Mamie patted my hands as they rose and fell on top of her tummy with the rhythm of her breath. I drew comfort from her warmth and gentle affection. Unlike Mother, Aunt Mamie never yelled or hurt me.

“Edith had so bad sinus trouble,” she continued. “Doctors say she must live in hot dry climate. They pack everything in Carl’s old junk car and drive thousands miles from rain-and-snow Hartford to who-knows-where Arizona.” Aunt Mamie’s Slavic complexion glowed with perspiration. It was real hot in that back room, and her plump figure was double-wrapped in a long, crisp white apron that touched her ankles, leaving only a hint of pastel blue dress peeking out at the hem. Aunt Mamie’s blue eyes darkened as she returned to her story. “If only they no stop by side of the road. Why Carl go outside somewhere and Edith stay in car? Maybe driver of big truck was crazy drunk when he crash into their car. Edith’s body go through the front window. Glass all over, some in her eyes, many broken bones in her shoulders and arms.”

A chill ran up my arms. I shuddered at the thought of how much that accident must have hurt Edith. Aunt Mamie lifted up my chin, and her eyes met mine. “You know how her face looks now?” she asked.

I nodded. Edith’s face and neck were pockmarked with tiny, indented scars. Even in hot weather, her clothes covered her arms and came right up to her neck. Bright light bothered her eyes so much she wore pink tinted glasses day and night.

“Edith take so long to recover.” Aunt Mamie sighed. “Her dreams to be concert violinist shatter like broken glass.”

Edith and Carl had a daughter named Reggie. She and I were exactly the same age. My mother was old enough to be my grandmother, Edith was old enough to be my mother, and despite my tender age, I was technically Reggie’s aunt. According to family gossip, these were strange flukes and coincidences.

“Where was Reggie born?” I asked.

Aunt Mamie tensed with nervousness and strained to lift herself out of the leather chair. “All I know is they adopt her,” she said, avoiding eye contact with me. “Customers waiting.” The conversation was over. Aunt Mamie took my small hand in her rough one, and we walked to the front of the store.

That day, I’d learned something only Aunt Mamie would tell me: Reggie was adopted. Edith never talked about anything private. And even though I was young, I knew that there was something forbidden about this conversation—and the word adoption. Mother and Dad avoided it like a curse word. During my childhood anything related to adoption was kept dark and secret.

Hunched over my childhood desk under the kitchen window, I retreated into an imaginary world where everything was perfect. In one of the drawers, I kept my treasure chest made from a cigar box, its lid covered with pictures of fashion models torn out of glossy magazines. Inside was my collection of my hand-drawn paper dolls. “Dress like me! Look like me!” they compelled. Every one of my dolls was a fantasy image of me. The cardboard box was so overstuffed with my treasures that I had to patch it together with layers of Scotch tape. None of my paper dolls ever felt lonely or ugly. None of them suffered verbal or physical abuse from an angry mother. In that ideal world, I had a mother who assured me every day, “You are beautiful! You are smart! You are talented!”

Mother, Dad, Edith, and babies Reggie (L) and Danusia (R), 1944

I grabbed my box of colored pencils and began to sketch something to make myself feel wonderful—like a pink cashmere sweater with satin bows and pearl buttons.

“Danusia, now!” Mother shouted from the hallway. “Get apples from tree for Ciotka Clarcha.”

We never visited Aunt Clara without Mother’s idea of a gift, especially if she planned to leave me for an overnight with my cousin Theresa. Aunt Clara was my aunt by marriage; she was married to Dad’s cousin Eddy. Although we were several years apart, Theresa and I were as close and complicated as sisters, brought up in very different households, yet Polish customs and relatives linked us together. Throughout our adult years, Theresa and I would forge through family sagas, love and jealousy, laughter and tears. No matter what and where, we were always there for each other.

I scrambled outside to the backyard covered by a bumpy carpet of fallen apples. Furiously, I stuffed oozing, over-ripe fruit complete with stems and leaves into a bulging canvas sack. Mother waited at the wheel of the Packard—motor running, fingers tapping, glaring at me as I ran breathless to the car.

Shoving the bag of apples onto the car floor, I scrambled into the back seat. I had only mere seconds to draw my last calm breath and inhale the smell of rich leather. With a mighty groan, the Packard lurched forward. As a five-year-old vigilante, I knelt at the rear window to report any sightings of highway police. Commando Mother up front braced muscles and quite a bit of fat as she leaned into each swerve of the four-ton Packard careening like a military tank across Hartford traffic. Hapless pedestrians be warned: driver of vehicle does not follow speed limits or roadside warnings! Driver-warrior Mother pushed luck to the limit.

Forty-five tense minutes later, the Packard roared into the driveway of 88 Burlington Avenue in Bristol. Yet again, we’d evaded our enemy, the Connecticut State Highway Patrol. Aunt Clara’s white two-story house was my safe harbor after the storm. Its black shutters framed streak-free windows that glistened in the sunlight. Shaky with tension but grateful that we’d arrived, I crawled out of the Packard that seemed to perspire gasoline and ran for the side door to Aunt Clara’s kitchen. Mother hoisted the sack of apples onto her shoulder, cradled a large crockery bowl filled with greasy leftovers from last night’s dinner in her hands, and puffed along behind.

My Aunt Clara, Connecticut, 1950s

Before I could reach up for the knob, the door swung open. There stood Aunt Clara, stretching welcoming arms toward me. Tall and slim in a pastel pink cotton dress protected by a floral apron, she was the perfect image of the 1950’s Polish-American housewife. “Danusia, moya kohana,” she said. I loved how she called me her “sweet dear.” Pressing my short, plump body into her embrace, I breathed in an intoxicating blend of Coty’s Lily of the Valley perfume—and Polish apricot bars.

“Hania, again you bring gifts.” Aunt Clara rushed to relieve Mother of the heavy burlap sack of apples and placed it upon the polished kitchen counter. She turned to take the crockery bowl from Mother’s calloused palms. “Hania, you work too hard,” Aunt Clara said gently. “I must rub your dry hands with Jergen’s Lotion.”

Mother beamed, a young-girl smile on her aging face. Aunt Clara carried the bowl of spoiling contents to the big Frigidaire, opened the door, and cleared a space on the bottom shelf. As she turned her back to us, I saw only the wiggling tail of a fresh tea towel as fastidious Aunt Clara wiped smears of grease from her scrubbed-clean hands.

“Now we take time for tea and fresh Polish apricot bars.” Aunt Clara set a copper kettle on the porcelain Hotpoint stove. I spotted my favorite wooden chair leaning against the wall, pushed it up to the red and white checked kitchen tablecloth, and sat down with my elbows bent on the table top, fingers cupping my chin. I inhaled deep, full breaths of contentment. In Aunt Clara’s kitchen, I felt safe. Nothing in this house could hurt or disappoint me, especially when Polish apricot bars were waiting.

One cup of milky tea, three sugar cubes and four apricot bars later, Mother was fueled up for the drive back to Hartford. “Tatush waiting I fix good Polish dinner for him,” she said. With a cursory wave, Mother sped away. Without me as her backseat vigilante, the stakes favored the Connecticut State Highway Patrol.

With my cousin Theresa at school and Uncle Eddy at work, I had Aunt Clara all to myself. In Aunt Clara’s pristine Betty Crocker world, my childhood indoctrination to healthy eating began and ended. Aunt Clara religiously followed the 1950s-era Basic Seven Food Wheel taped to the wall of her tidy pantry: nothing deep fried; plenty of fresh vegetables; measured portions; and no between-meal snacking. I was her avid convert.

In my imagination, dinners at Aunt Clara’s house were picture perfect, a typical American family sitting around a table set with matching china, no shouting, Emily Post manners, everyone served heaps of loving from the oven. In reality, we couldn’t have been perfect. Maybe Aunt Clara and Uncle Eddy argued sometimes, and maybe my cousin occasionally didn’t want to do her chores. But at dinnertime, when I sat across from Theresa, listening to quiet, polite conversation, I felt content and well-fed. And I could actually identify what I was eating—baked chicken, green peas and puffy American white rolls. Bliss!

After dinner, Uncle Eddy typically headed to the adjoining living room and relaxed in his favorite chair to read the paper. Aunt Clara pulled the latest Good Housekeeping from a tidy stack of magazines on the coffee table and settled on the sofa without wrinkling her housedress. Theresa—adored by her parents and envied by me because she was older, prettier, and owner of a closet full of pretty clothes and shoes—disappeared upstairs to do homework. This left me alone in the kitchen in front of a heaping dessert plate of Polish apricot bars and a pile of Theresa’s dog-eared Junior Guide magazines. Life didn’t get any better than overnights at Aunt Clara’s.

Low voices stirred from the living room, and either Aunt Clara or Uncle Eddy slowly pushed the kitchen door closed. How strange—they weren’t reading, they were talking. Tiptoeing to the door, I pressed my ear tight against the smooth wood.

Uncle Eddy repeated a familiar question, one I’d overheard from other relatives, but he also added something new. “How Hania and Juzo afford so fancy house on Webster Street—when those girls were little?”

Those girls? Until that moment I believed my parents had raised only one girl besides me—my sister Edith, grown up and gone off to Arizona, long before I was born. What other girls was he talking about?

“Hania found good use for so many bedrooms upstairs on Webster Street,” Aunt Clara added.

“Yes, she fill them with boarders,” Uncle Eddy said. “Too many poor families in Hartford with too many children. Hania made good business—”

“Until she took in the Holdens,” Aunt Clara interrupted. “One day they just showed up, a milkman with his sick wife and four children.”

“Clarcha, is no wonder they are poor, with sick wife and four girls to feed and raise. Hard times for them Irish immigrants.”

I pictured Uncle Eddy, a quiet man with strong opinions, shaking his head, shaggy with thick, gray hair.

“Juzo has good luck with his mechanic job at Pratt & Whitney. When war come, the factory is crazy busy making airplane parts.” He was talking about my dad. My ear pressing so tight against the door began to hurt. I realized that if Aunt Clara were to check on me in the kitchen, there wouldn’t be time to scramble back to the table and look innocent. But I couldn’t stop listening.

Now Aunt Clara was talking about money. “If you think Hania’s money was a mystery, you know nothing!” Her voice, though muffled by the door, turned shrill and grating. “The wife died and the milkman was left alone with four daughters. No mother. No money. Hania and Juzo agreed to keep the Holden girls. Nothing legal—that’s how the Irish were.”

“So terrible,” Uncle Eddy’s voice sounded angry, “the father of those Holden girls—he just disappear!”

My head was pounding, sore ear forgotten. Hearing my sweet Aunt Clara sound so blunt and harsh gave me stomach cramps. How could a father walk out on his children? Why did my parents take in four children of total strangers? Almost overnight, Mother suddenly had five children! Everything I’d learned had happened long before I was born. I tried to imagine how I would have felt in Edith’s place.

“Hania is tyrant,” Uncle Eddy said, describing the same mother I knew—at least that part made sense. “She punish hard and quick.”

Aunt Clara finished the story, “Those Holden girls grew up, and one by one, they left. No one in the family ever heard from them again.”

Mother showed no compassion for the meager finances of her boarders, and she willingly profited from their distressed circumstances. Yet, the secret I’d overheard behind closed doors in Aunt Clara’s house told me that Mother had once saved four young girls from destitution and danger—four girls who apparently felt no need to return and thank her.

In future, I’d again confront the mystery of the Holden girls taken in at Boarding House #1. And I would find evidence—an old photograph of Mother with Edith and four instant sisters—Frances, Mildred, May and the youngest they called “Bunny.” Yet, I could only speculate about why Mother had made such an incredible, impulsive decision. Had she rescued others to save something she had once lost and was trying to recover? What had she seen in these motherless girls that perhaps struck a deep chord and warmed her heart? Mother’s stories, to be repeated again and again during my childhood, would be clues to her past. As she wove her narratives, I clung to them with obsessive fascination. Were Mother’s stories truth, fiction, or a combination of both? And, in the end, would the answer really matter?

Edith (2nd L.) and Mother with the Holden girls, Boarding House #1 in Hartford, 1930s