BLESSING YOU AND YOUR FAMILY

By Patricia Abbott

Sometimes it’s difficult to know precisely when an event began. But other times, it announces itself with such undeniable force that you can’t help but notice it. You are compelled to look—to pay attention.

In my case, it began prosaically enough at my book group. The women were discussing a new biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. Without warning, I found myself interrupting Laura Wise to say:
“Women like Zelda Fitzgerald buried their own destinies in romantically extravagant marriages. Their repressed energies eventually struggled free, demanding long overdue and therefore heavier prices, including marital and maternal disloyalty, social ostracism, imprisonment, madness, and death.”

Six heads whipped around.

“Did you read that somewhere, Dinah?” someone asked. “It’s brilliant.” A murmur indicated the group’s agreement.

It certainly was not a personal observation, and it came out of my mouth without thought—as if someone controlled my audio.

After several seconds of speechlessness, I said, “I must have, I guess.”

“Well, whoever said it was right on target,” someone else said, and thankfully the women pursued the idea that madness can result from repression without questioning my source again.

The evening ended and I left hoping no one thought I’d stolen those words planning to pawn them off as my own. I’d have gladly named my source if only I knew it.

Ironically, I’d recently begun to worry about a growing decline in my memory. Words that once leaped from my lips now hid behind a gauzy black curtain. Only last week, I’d asked my husband to pick up some sparkle at the hardware store.

“Sparkle?” he said, looking stymied for a second. “You mean spackle?” He was looking at the crumbling plaster on the wall behind me. “Although sparkle could hide the cracks too.”

We laughed, and when I referred to salmon as swordfish later that night, he didn’t bother to correct me. Good marriages work like that—accepting silently the awful things that happen to your partner over time.

I scouted bookshelves until I found WOMEN AND MADNESS by Phyllis Chesler, a book I’d read in college forty years ago. Zelda Fitzgerald was listed in the index, and I found the words I’d spouted within seconds. This sort of thing must happen from time to time but it was odd to remember it in such detail.

For the last ten years, I’d been employed at the Veteran’s Hospital in Detroit, helping returning soldiers with injuries reintegrate. A week or so after the incident at my book club, a boy who’d lost part of a leg and some fingers in Afghanistan sat down in front of me. He was quite naturally depressed about his future, and I gave my usual speech.

“You’ll be surprised at what surgeons and physical therapists will be able to do for you.”
That part of what I said was my standard spiel, rote words that I found myself repeating all too often. But then I heard myself telling him:
“For soldier returning from Vietnam, it was an entirely different situation.  A neighbor of mine fought in the Battle of Dau Tieng. His unit was called the Wolfhounds, and it was their assignment to extract rice from a large cache.”

I continued to tell the boy in front of me about the big battle—recalling even the smallest details, and ending with the statement, “Twenty nine men received valor awards.”

“And your neighbor?”

“Lost a leg too…” I stopped. “That’s what made me think of him.”

I could picture Bobby Goodman sitting on our front porch relaying the events that brought him home. It was 1969, and I’d have been seventeen—Bobby, just a few years older. All the details of an evening forty years ago were on the tip on my tongue.

A gold Pontiac sat at the curb, its radio blaring, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”

“Does anyone know whose car that is?” my father said. “Why would they leave the engine running?”

“I never saw action like that,” my patient said, bringing me back to the present. “A road bomb got me. No special valor awards. Just the Purple Heart.”

He sounded apologetic, not my intention at all. I didn’t know what my intention was, in fact. What were the symptoms of a brain tumor?

“Stu?” I said, later that night.

He didn’t hear me the first time.

“Stu,” I said, more insistently, flapping the arts section on my lap to get his attention. He looked up. “Ever hear of a memory improving over time? Getting sharper in remembering the distant past, in particular.”

“A patient’s?”

I shrugged. “No, mine.”

“Yours? Can’t say I’ve noticed it.”

Making a face, I flapped the newspaper again. “Seriously. He frowned. “I’ve read long-term memory doesn’t suffer the way short-term memory does.”

I filled him in on what had happened.

“Memory’s a quirky thing. I can remember my childhood telephone number but not the new one for my cell phone.” His lack of concern comforted me for a while.

But the incidents continued. A friend on Facebook posted a picture of our kindergarten class. I hadn’t lived in Philly since going off to college and only recently reconnected with a few old friends. Someone set up a fan page for our elementary school. I watched as my classmates tried to label the tiny faces. They came up with four or five names before throwing up their hands. 

“Remember any of the others, Dinah?” one of them asked me in a message.

I looked at the picture with a magnifying glass (no, my vision wasn’t sharpening) and was able to name every one of the 28 students, some of whom I hadn’t seen since age five.

“What kind of supplements have you been taking?” one of them joked.

“Didn’t know you had hyperthymesia,” another woman messaged me.

I looked hyperthymesia up, but I didn’t remember every detail of my life—just strange ones that turned up on their own.

I was shopping in a fabric store for the material for a quilt when the next episode occurred. The store had a new shipment of materials replicating the designs of the fifties. Lucienne Day’s, especially. Graphic, quirky, and with a great sense of color. I loved the nubby feel of it. I picked a bolt up and unwound a bit. The original design was called Calyx according to the tag. Day’s most famous creation had a brown background with orange and yellow objects—looking like champagne flutes—floating by.

Suddenly I remembered sitting on a beige sofa with curtains of a similar graphic pattern hanging behind me.
“Just sit there while I think,” someone was telling me. I was squirming and whoever it was—certainly not my mother—didn’t like it. “Sit still, you little brat.”

I was wearing a plaid skirt with a pinafore top and anklets with patent-leather Mary Janes. I must have been about five.

The girl was Ellen Palumbo, an occasional babysitter. She wore a maroon uniform with a white blouse from the Catholic high school down the street, St. Boniface. Her hair was so heavy on her back I didn’t know how she could stand upright. Her face was very red, and it scared me. My mother only used Ellen to babysit when Jeannie Riley wasn’t free.

“Ellen’s an odd one,” I’d heard my father say the last time she came to sit.

“The priest recommended her,” my mother reminded him. “Father O’Keefe.” Daddy had nodded, rubbing his chin. “And I spoke to the Ryans who use her. They had no complaints.”

Ellen paced the floor that day, agitated. “What am I going to do now?” she asked me. I followed her gaze to a bassinet. My brother, Tommy, was asleep. He wore a blue romper with a duck on the chest. Do about what? I wondered.

“Can I help you, Miss.”

I came out of my trance to find a clerk trying to pull the bolt from my arms. “That’s very valuable fabric.”
I could see I’d made wrinkles in it already. How long had I stood there clutching the bolt with the grip of a stevedore?

“Oh, sorry. I’ll take three yards.”

I paid the shockingly expensive bill and fled.

My head told me if I went home and sat quietly the memory might return. None had yet, but they’d been complete recollections—ones where I’d learned what I needed to know. Or information my memory or brain thought I needed. This one—a memory about Ellen Palumbo—a girl I probably never saw again after that day—had been interrupted.  I drove home and sat quietly, but my mind wouldn’t be still. I was straining to summon up a memory that couldn’t be forced. I’d have to wait.  But, irritatingly, instead the next recollection concerned a bike I had at seven.

The bike was blue—a boy’s color—and used. I was embarrassed my parents couldn’t afford a new one, and this bike was painted a matte blue so it didn’t even shine. No chrome, the plainest bike you could possibly imagine. But it did have a basket and a fake license plate from an earlier owner. The metal plate, attached by four tiny screws, had rusted and was impossible to remove.

“I guess you’ll just have to live with it, Di,” my father said, standing up. “I’ll damage the paint job if I keep trying to remove it.”

I doubt I’d ever examined that plate with any great interest at age seven, but now the numbers and letters came back to me as I removed the dishes from the dishwasher.

Kathy 5 PA.

A specialty plate, I thought now. Someone had it made for his little girl. 

Two weeks after my Dad gave up on the plate, I’d left the hated bike on the lawn where it was stolen.

“Did you leave it outside on purpose?” my father asked me. “You’ll have to wait a long while for a new one.”

He looked sad—but he always did. I didn’t like being the one who made him look even sadder than usual and didn’t really think I’d left it outside on purpose. But given my feelings about that bike, I might have.
Dad died twenty-five years ago and up until that moment I had no conscious memory of him as a young man. My mother, still alive in her eighties, never talked about the past. This memory, though charred by my carelessness, warmed me.

A day or two later, I stopped in to talk to Nan Albright, a psychiatrist who worked at the VA Hospital.
“End-of-life patients or even the elderly often review their childhoods. You’re just a bit ahead of schedule.”
“Why do you think that happens?”

“Current research suggests it’s to comfort ourselves. To find meaning in our experiences—our life. To come away thinking our life was worth living.” She shrugged. “It’s just a theory, of course. It could also just be some random brain activity—perhaps as a result of cell death, small strokes, some brain incident.” She shrugged.

It seemed useless to explain how vivid these remembrances were, how precise. I’m sure all her patients insisted their memories or dreams were special.

The day I spent with Ellen Palumbo came back to me a few nights later in a dream. Or something like a dream because it didn’t really seem like I was sleeping at all. I was lying there, going through my case list for the next day when suddenly…

I was sitting on the sofa again and Tommy was crying.

If I was right about my age—five—he would’ve been just a few months old. He died around then, and I barely remember him. It was SIDS or meningitis, one of those diseases that sneak up on an infant. No one ever talked about it. His death was why my father was sad—why my mother never spoke about that time.
Tommy was a bit sick when my mother left us with Ellen to go to work at the night shift at a hospital. She’d missed too much time since Tommy’s birth and been threatened with dismissal. They, or we rather, needed her paycheck since Studebaker had laid Dad off. He was out interviewing at GM the morning Tommy died, in fact.

This time the memory started a bit before the last events I remembered. Before Ellen called me a brat.

Tommy was crying and Ellen was carrying him around the room, patting him on the back, making little cooing noises. But the crying grew worse, and I watched, feeling helpless, as Ellen grew more agitated.

“I told your mother I had a lot of practice with babies. I shouldn’t have said that—shouldn’t have taken this job at all. I’ve only babysat for Terry Ryan and she’s ten.” Ellen whirled around. “What does your mother do when he cries like this, Dinah? Put a little whiskey on his gums maybe?” She looked inside Tommy’s mouth. ”Nah, he’s too young to be teething.”

Although I was worried about what was going on in front of me, I wanted to see the TV show that I always watched after school and was inching my way toward our television set.

“She jiggles him. Or gives him a bottle.” I made the motion with my arms, not even looking at her. “Maybe he needs to be burped.”

I slipped around her then and turned the TV on to Popeye Theater with Sally Starr. Sally was saying the thing she said first every day so I hadn’t missed any of the show.

“Hope you feel as good as you look, 'cause you sure look good to your gal Sal."

Sally wore her usual red cowgirl costume including a gun in a holster, and I was entranced. I’d begged for a cowgirl outfit for Christmas but only got a hat. 

“Turn that off,” Ellen yelled. “It’s making him cry even more.”

If I had been given Sally’s gun for Christmas, I might have pointed it at her. She was jiggling him pretty steadily now and something like vomit started to rise in my throat. Tommy was screaming even louder. Both Ellen and my brother were hysterical.

Reluctantly, I switched off the set, being careful not to disturb the rabbit ears. In the now dark screen, I saw Ellen and Tommy practically waltzing across the floor. It was a rough dance though, and his head was bobbing like he had no muscles in his neck. When I turned around Tommy looked limp in her arms. Like the rag doll someone gave me once. Ellen stood frozen, holding him, her eyes big and empty-looking too.

Then she placed him carefully in the bassinet. “I guess he finally fell asleep,” she told me. All the air went out of me, and I sank onto the sofa.

“Sleeping real good now,” Ellen said, patting his head. “Nice little Tommy.” She sounded a lot like Sally Starr.

“Let me see him,” I said, feeling something wasn’t right. I started to rise and that’s when she said it.
“Sit still, you little brat.”

I sat still. Ellen was still pacing the room as if Tommy hadn’t stopped crying at all. As if she was still worried about how to make him stop.

“You know what, Dinah,” she finally said. “Bad things can happen to little girls that carry stories back to their mother.”

I’d no idea what she meant.

“Okay, why don’t you put on Sally Starr again?”

I rushed over and turned it on and listened until I heard Sally’s final words, “May the Good Lord be blessing you and your family, Bye for now!”

Ellen picked up the phone and called my mother. Mom rushed home, my father was located too, and Tommy was taken to Children’s Hospital. It was determined he died from a flu, meningitis or encephalitis. It could have been SIDS too—not yet diagnosed often. I think that’s what they said.

My parents asked me what had happened, and I corroborated Ellen’s story that she had carried him around screaming until he fell asleep. I didn’t do that out of the fear Ellen tried to instill in me, but because I believed it to be true. The only deaths I was familiar with were the cartoon ones I’d seen on TV. Surely no one died from being danced around a room, being cuddled too tightly, being jiggled too much. But something felt wrong. I just wasn’t sure what.

I was shaking when I came out of this trance. Ellen Palumbo had killed my brother. Perhaps it wasn’t murder, but she was responsible for his death. My mother had spent the last 55 years blaming herself for going off to work with Tommy sick. My father died years before his time, berating himself for not taking care of his family. His wife shouldn’t have had to leave a sick baby home with a teenager. Not if he were a good provider.

Now it was me who paced the floor as I worked through this information. Would any good be served by telling Mom? Even if Tommy didn’t die from an illness, he died because my mother left him in poor hands. The new version might even be worse. It placed the blame more solidly at my mother’s feet.
What happened to Ellen Palumbo. Did she suffer any remorse about shaking my brother to death? She’d been seventeen at the time. She might have stood trial if they had known more about shaking babies then. She’d be seventy-two now I calculated.

I had some ideas about how to find her. But before that could happen—as I was paging through a cookbook, looking for a recipe for corn chowder we hadn’t had in ages—I was whisked back to that day again. I’d been certain the memory was complete. But it wasn’t.

“Turn that off,” Ellen was saying. “It’s making him cry even more.”

She was jiggling him pretty steadily now and something like vomit started to rise in my throat. Tommy was screaming even louder. Both Ellen and my brother were hysterical.

Suddenly, she plopped him in the bassinet and ran into the kitchen. A second later, I heard her talking to her boyfriend on the kitchen phone, complaining about us. “I’m supposed to put up with this for a $.35 an hour,” she said. “I don’t think I can stand it much longer.” She paused and then said, “My folks are away so I can’t call home.”

“Shut up, Tommy,” I told my wailing brother, peering into his bassinet. The words thrilled me. I was not allowed to use such words. But I couldn’t hear Popeye over his cries and Ellen hated us because of him. I didn’t know my parents had to pay girls to take care of us, and it seemed like it was Tommy’s fault. Stamping my foot in pique, I picked him up. Something I was forbidden to do.

“Be quiet now. I can’t hear the show. You’re a bad boy.” I gave him a little jiggle, gripping him hard. ”Ellen hates you. She might leave us here alone here if you don’t stop.”

All at once, Tommy’s back arched. His sudden movement startled me, and just like that, I dropped him. The fall was a short one, but it brought his crying to an immediate halt. I could hear Ellen hanging up the phone in the next room. I quickly grabbed him from the floor, depositing him in his bed where in a second, he resumed his crying. The tone was different though, whiney, faint.

“Didn’t I tell you to turn that off,” Ellen said, walking back in the room. “It’s too loud.” She clamped her hands over her ears.

The rest of the memory replayed—much as it had: the waltz, watched by me, in the dark TV screen, Ellen’s blank face, her placing him back in the bassinet. The quiet that descended finally. 

But now it’d become much more difficult to blame Ellen—it was me who dropped Tommy in between her jiggling and waltzing. Dropped an infant on a hardwood floor. My God! It was probably the fall that set his death into motion. Between the two of us, an inexperienced and short-tempered babysitter and a frustrated five-year old, my brother hadn’t stood a chance.

It was also possible, at least I wanted to believe this, that his incessant wailing was a sign of a serious illness. I fretted for days, hoping to return once more to that living room, to see something to absolve both of us. Some fact I could take to my mother and make the pain go away. I started to tell Stu about it a dozen times—but it was just too difficult. Knowing him, he’d doubt the truth of the memory and perhaps think I was going mad. Was I? Was it possible that none of this was true?

Stu and I had no children. He never pressed it because congenital blindness ran in his family. Was Tommy’s death why I pushed the idea of children aside? Did this incident, buried for so many years, unconsciously squash a desire to be responsible for a baby? Finally, I broke down and I filled Stu in.

“Maybe you’re inventing things that never really happened.” He paused the football game and put down the remote. “Think you should talk to someone about it? A professional?

“Beneath the guilt, I feel something else. Like my chest isn’t bound so tight. Does that make sense? That the memory of that day, unleashed after more than fifty years, is a relief.”

But Ellen Palumbo and her role in it preyed on my mind. Did she go on to mother a family like Catholic girls did in that day, or was she also stuck in time?

No more childhood memories visited me. This was the piece of information my mind wanted me to know. Why had my mind found it necessary to revisit that day? What had been settled by resurrecting it?

I found Ellen through the Internet.

Facebook had a fan page for St. Boniface’s and Ellen was on there—still calling herself Palumbo or possibly unmarried. The spot for a face was blank. Most likely, it was another Ellen altogether. How many women of 72 are on Facebook. After several days of vacillating, I sent her a message.

Saw your name on Facebook and wanted to touch base.

That was all I said, and, as I expected, she didn’t respond. Of course, most of the people who join Facebook give it up. Dredging up the past has a limited use. I looked at her wall and homepage. Nothing. I sent another message and googled her name a hundred times, checked the white pages. She was invisible.

A month or two later, I flew in to visit my mother who lived in an independent living facility outside Philadelphia. I’d wanted to bring her out to Michigan, but two of her oldest friends lived in the same building and she was more comfortable living near them. “I like my bridge partners close by,” she said.

“I’m thinking of taking a ride through the old neighborhood,” I told Mom after we talked about her new meds, the new curtains she’d hung, and the economy. It was hard to make small talk when there were no siblings or grandchildren. And the past was always hard to broach.

She made a face. “Why would you want to do that, Dinah? It’ll just depress you to see what they’ve done to the house. I can’t believe they cut down the spruces and the oak to plant that fussy row of boxwoods. Stinky little shrubs.” She thought for a minute. “And they pulled off the shutters. Can you imagine? Place looks like it got an army haircut.”

“I’ve been thinking about Ellen Palumbo.” I’d planned to soften that sentence with other names or a reason, but it didn’t work out like that.

Surprisingly, she didn’t react much. I wondered if she remembered the name. But after a minute, she said, “She’s dead, Dinah. Ellen Palumbo died a few years ago. I saw the obit in the Inquirer although I’d heard she died through friends even before that.”

“You kept up with her?”

Mom shrugged. “Your father did—and then when he died, it fell to me to keep track.”

“Fell to you? Why? Why would you keep track of her?”

“Do you remember any of it?” she asked, drawing her sweater around her. “You were only five after all.”

“I’ve been remembering that day a lot lately. I’m not sure why.”

“Remember how hysterical she was? We couldn’t get her to stop screaming that she’d killed him.” Mom’s voice was shaky.

“I don’t remember that at all.” I stopped to think. “I’m pretty sure you’d sent me home with Nana by then.” I remember my grim-faced grandparents hustling me into the car.

She nodded. “I’d forgotten that. Well anyway, Ellen’s family wasn’t home and we were afraid to leave her alone. So we took her along to the hospital. We knew Tommy was dead, of course, but they sent us there anyway.” She sighed. “Poor Ellen. She told everyone who came into the waiting room she’d killed a baby. That she didn’t know what to do with him and shook him too hard. We couldn’t get her to calm down. No one thought to medicate her.”

“That’s horrible.” But not as horrible as dropping him, I thought.

“She continued to think it was her fault—didn’t believe what the doctor told her—what we told her. It became an obsession. Those weeks between his death and autopsy results were horrible for all of us. She was so certain she was to blame.”

 “So why did you keep track of her once you knew it was meningitis?”

Mom drew in her breath. “She kept trying to kill herself. Must have tried three or four times in the next year or two.”

“And did she finally succeed. Is that why she’s dead?”

My mother shook her head. “She just died a few years ago. Ellen eventually became a nun. Devoted her life to caring for kids. Just not her own.”

Penance for sure. “Around here?”

“The place is long gone now, of course. Foster homes became more common and then she taught for a while. Watching over her got to be a habit with us. Once or twice, she spotted me on the playground, I think. Probably thought I still blamed her.”

“So she wasn’t responsible for Tommy’s death? Not in any way?”

Mom looked at me strangely. “Absolutely not. The autopsy was conclusive. He—Tommy—had meningitis. Your Dad had trouble letting go of it too—trouble in not blaming himself. I guess we all blamed ourselves in some way.” She shrugged. “It was easier not to talk about if after a while.”

“Even me,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“You?” she said, sitting up straighter. “How could you blame yourself?”

The image of Tommy falling to the floor flowed over me. Would putting that image in her head do my mother any good? Sometimes confession is not good for the soul.

“Just being there and not being able to do anything, I guess. Being too occupied with TV instead of Tommy.”

“My God, you were only five.” She clenched her fists. “I’ve made peace with it at last. Perhaps since Ellen died—the last vestige of that day is gone. Blame is not an easy thing to let go of when it’s all you have left of something. But after a while….”

“Do you know where she’s buried?” I asked, surprising myself. ”I might go see her grave before I go.”
“West Laurel Hill,” she said immediately. “The other side. Not where Tommy is.”

“It’s been a few years since I’ve been there.”

 “Well, it won’t be many years till you’re there again. Will you place flowers on her grave for me too?” She smiled and reached for my hand.

Patti Abbott is the author of MONKEY JUSTICE AND OTHER STORIES (Snubnose Press), the co-editor of DISCOUNT NOIR (Untreed Reads), a Derringer Award winner for the story “My Hero,” the Spinetingler runner-up for the best ebook of 2011, and the author of more than 80 stories. You can find her at pattinase (http://pattinase.blogspot.com)