Fragments of a Hartford Childhood
Written by Steve Courtney
Growing Up in Hartford
Asked by the Hartford Courant in 2002 to write about how growing up in Hartford affected her “world view and her writing,” the author Mary-Ann Tirone Smith found herself awash in memories that “popped tumultuously into my head.” These were memories of being a child in the city in the1940s and 1950s. Her family lived in the Charter Oak Terrace public housing project until she was seven, then moved into a house just blocks away. A cousin’s grandmother, who didn’t speak English but “sang songs to us in Italian,” had sliced raw potatoes to put on the burn wounds of children who had survived the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944.
As a child, Tirone Smith went to circuses herself, “and the circus is why I’m a feminist,” she wrote. “At the circus, women did what men did: flew on trapezes, walked tightropes, got shot from cannons, cracked whips at lions, climbed to the top of the armory and swung by a heel or their teeth from a rope.”
Her family exercised the mutual support of low-income families everywhere, in every era. “If you were in my extended family and needed a job, my mother could get you into Connecticut General. My father, into Abbott Ball; Auntie Margaret, into Hartford Hospital; Uncle Guido, into Fuller Brush and – best of all – Uncle Ray could get you into a state job, where the benefits were good.”
When she was nine, evil struck: “A fifth grade classmate of mine at Mary Hooker School, Irene, was raped and strangled in the yard behind mine, down two. In school, we knew not to speak of it. We took Irene’s desk out of the row, and everyone moved up. … I couldn’t go out to play until the murderer was caught. He was caught soon after. But Irene would never go out to play again.”
She continues: “My writing is driven by such fragments of a Hartford childhood: recollections, images of neighborhood faces, my family’s reminiscences. I recover previously unsurfaced memories on a daily basis. Some events occurred before I was born, and some, perhaps, never occurred at all. But still, I remember them, and I place the emotions they stir into the consciousness of my characters.”
Hartford’s Circus Fire
Those characters and others populate her early novels: The Book of Phoebe, Lament for a Silver-Eyed Woman, The Port of Missing Men. (Lament, a story of love and loss and the horrors of modern history, drew on her own experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon after graduating from Central Connecticut State College.) She went on to work as a librarian and a freelance writer for the Reader’s Digest: “I learned economy of language writing such pieces as ‘How to Play Tennis’ in fifty words.”
The novel Masters of Illusion came out in 1994. Here she returned to Hartford with a vengeance: The novel treats an iconic event in Hartford history, still alive in some local memories: the circus fire of 1944, an explosive nightmare in a tent waterproofed with a gasoline mixture. The tent contained more than 6,000 people. More than 170 people died, many of them children, and more than 400 suffered terrible burns. This was the event for which Tirone Smith’s cousin’s grandmother ministered to children with potato slices. The grandmother in fact appears in the novel as “an old Italian woman” who treats the burned back of Margie Potter, a six-month-old baby whose story is the novel’s story.
As a young woman, Potter meets (Hartford-style, on the beach at Old Saybrook) a young fireman who as a Hartford 10-year-old at the time of the fire had become obsessed with the tragedy. Married, she supports his obsession. As the years pass – subtly keyed by reference to books Margie is reading or political events – it becomes clear that there are more masters of illusion in the book than one character, a hypnotist whose stage name is Master of Illusion.
Memoir of a Hartford Childhood
After Masters of Illusion she published An American Killing, in which a true crime writer takes on a cold case and finds herself entangled in Clinton-era Washington intrigue. Said the New York Times: “The reader can’t help being torn between racing ahead to discover the denouement and slowing down to enjoy the company of a host of superbly drawn characters who find themselves on surprisingly intimate terms with evil. According to Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, most of us are.”
Which brought Tirone Smith to the murder of her friend Irene. After the 2002 Courant essay was printed, she got a call from an editor at the paper. Irene’s brother was trying to reach her. He had thought no one remembered Irene. That sparked Girls of Tender Age, a recounting of the tragedy that deftly weaves it into a loving portrait of Hartford. And a loving portrait of friends and family, particularly of her brother Tyler, who was autistic at a time when no one knew about autism. He was called “retarded,” despite the brilliance obvious to his sister; he was immersed in the history of World War II, had a considerable library on the subject, and involved her in all kinds of wartime fantasy games.
The central horror of the book develops slowly as Tirone Smith interjects the life of the killer, in distant Washington State and Hawaii, as he preys on women and girls. The night of the rape and murder is chillingly detailed. She takes us through the aftermath at a time when horror was something to be suppressed and put away and hidden from children, and when the police could be deeply skeptical about sexual crime.
The case broke when another girl, 17 years old, who had previously been assaulted by Irene’s murderer, identified him in a lineup and was almost required by the police to meet him face to face. Found guilty, the killer was one of the last to be executed in Connecticut. “There is much that is moving in the book,” wrote Courant Books Editor Carole Goldberg, “which is written in the voice of a wise child who was always full of questions and filtered through an even wiser adult who remembers it all with a mixture of tenderness and exasperation.”
“We love trying on someone else’s life”
Next, as Tirone Smith says, “I wrote something entirely different, a four-book mystery series, the last centered on the 2007 Boston Red Sox, the team that showed everyone we could do it again. It was a collaboration with my son Jere. We have season tickets.” She has another novel about a woman who was at Fort Sumter when it was fired upon; Tirone Smith saw the name on a plaque while visiting Charleston. That and a second memoir, First You Get Pissed, await publication. Now living in Florida, she is working on another true crime tale – the killing of a local library director she knew and loved by a disturbed young man.
In 2010 she was awarded the Diana Bennett Fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she wrote the first draft of the Civil War novel, The Honoured Guest. Her work has been reprinted in the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and Romania. She has taught fiction and memoir writing at the Mark Twain House in Hartford; the Aran Islands, through the National University of Ireland, Galway; and online via her website.
“My Mark Twain House students would ask me why the memoir [genre] was so popular,” she writes. Her answer is also relevant to why we read fiction: “We love trying on someone else’s life.”
Girls of Tender Age has been a favorite of book clubs and library program directors ever since its publication, and in 2021 it made news. Thanks to Tirone Smith’s efforts, and with the help of a state legislator, a reward that had been denied the girl who identified Irene’s killer back in the 1950s was finally given to her. “Books change lives,” said one speaker at the ceremony led by Governor Ned Lamont.
Anthology Selections
“Awhirl in a Kaleidoscope of Hartford Memories” (Essay)
from Masters of Illusion (Chapter 1)
from Girls of Tender Age (Chapters 7, 9, and pp. 121-3 of Chapter 22)