{"id":91,"date":"2025-06-18T19:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T19:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=91"},"modified":"2025-07-01T18:01:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T18:01:30","slug":"girls-of-tender-age-chapter-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/?p=91","title":{"rendered":"from Girls of Tender Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

In<\/em> Girls of Tender Age (2006), <\/em>Tirone Smith drew on the memories of a Hartford childhood and the tragedy that haunted it. In Chapter Seven we meet her autistic and beloved brother Tyler, a portrait of the Charter Oak Terrace housing project in its early days, and a hilarious piano-moving scene.<\/em><\/p>\n

Girls of Tender Age<\/em><\/strong>
\nby Mary-Ann Tirone Smith<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Chapter Seven<\/h5>\n

WHEN I AM SEVEN YEARS OLD, my mother starts her job at the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company; she holds a grudge against Aetna and doesn’t apply there. She refers to her new employer as C.G. Today the company is called CIGNA. Her job is with the newly introduced housewife shift, three-thirty to ten. This time frame allows housewives to work when their older children come home from school to babysit for their toddler and infant brothers and sisters until the dads get home from work around-five and take over. (Day care is an unheard-of concept.) When all the housewives’ children come of school age, the mothers are able to segue into nine-to\u00ad-five jobs all trained and ready to go. Still, no one I know has a mother who takes advantage of the housewife shift besides mine.<\/p>\n

From the time I am seven until I go to college, I see my mother once a day for ten seconds (except for weekends) as I run in the door after school while she runs out to catch the city bus.<\/p>\n

I am responsible for my brother from five after three until five\u00ad fifteen when my father comes home. After-school activities have to be eliminated.<\/p>\n

Why? asks the teacher in front of the whole class when I say I won’t be at choir practice.<\/p>\n

My friend rings in, Because she has to babysit her brother. And he’s twelve<\/em>!<\/p>\n

I look at my shoes.<\/p>\n

Another kid explains, Her brother is crazy<\/em>!<\/p>\n

In an attempt to comfort me, a shy girl in my class named Irene says to me, apropos of nothing, My brother is twelve, too.<\/p>\n

Irene doesn’t say anything about having to babysit for him; I can tell she’s just trying to be nice.<\/p>\n

I feel myself choke up but I don’t cry as I am used to not crying. I crush down the whimpering that tries to come out of my throat. Even whimpering now causes my brother to bite his wrist.<\/p>\n

One day, actually, I press Tyler.<\/p>\n

Tyler, what happens when you hear crying? He ignores me.<\/p>\n

Or sneezing?<\/p>\n

Nothing. I persist: Or laughing?<\/p>\n

I keep at him because he is only biting his wrist a little bit. Nib\u00adbling.<\/p>\n

Finally he says, A cloud of needles flies into my face and it takes me a long time to pull them out because they have barbs at the end.<\/p>\n

Oh.<\/p>\n

I go to the kitchen and make chocolate chip cookies. I let him eat half the batter instead of merely giving him the bowl to lick.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

IN THE HOUSING PROJECT, we have our own little school, the Charter Oak Terrace Extension School, grades K through 2, and a nice playground. For grades three through six, we cross Chandler Street, the eastern border of Charter Oak Terrace and go to the Mary M. Hooker Elementary School. Our sweatshirts, which read HOOKER SCHOOL, elicit many a chuckle, but we students don’t know why. Charter Oak Terrace is six acres of row upon row of two-story, whitewashed, cement block buildings. This grid is divided into four sections, the A, B, C, and D sections. The A and B sections are on the west side of the Hog River, a tributary of the Connecticut River, and the C and D sections are on the east side: We are assigned D and my mother is happy because that’s the closest section to our church, St. Lawrence O’Tooles, which means she can walk to High Mass after my father takes me to the children’s Mass at nine. She has yet to rise to the monumental challenge of learning to drive, something especially difficult for a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of children live in Charter Oak Terrace. We are instructed time and time again by parents and teachers not to go to the Hog River. Still, some go and they drown.<\/p>\n

The real name of the Hog River is the Park River, which once meandered prettily through the city of Hartford. But in the mid-1800s, the residents began calling it the Hog because of its stench. Hartford’s garbage and all the waste from dozens of factories lining the Hog are dumped into the river. A century later, a plan is put into effect whereby the Hog River is diverted underground, confined by large culverts until it empties into the Connecticut River. This diversion of the dangerous river begins just beyond<\/em> Charter Oak Terrace. Since only Working Stiffs live there, fuck them. In the sixties, a neighborhood activist, Ned Coll, renames the Park River yet again. He names it the River of Tears as part of his proposal to see that the rest of the river is piped underground. No dice. Ned Coll runs for the presidency, is a candidate in the 1972 Democratic primary. At a debate where he is sitting at the end of a table with George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson, he holds up a dead rat and tells the TV audience that there are many, many poor children who have to live with rats.<\/p>\n

George McGovern wins the primary and Ned goes back to trying to save children’s lives in Hartford.<\/p>\n

Today you can canoe the Hog River with a conservation group, an adventure with perhaps not quite the cachet of the Sewers of Paris Tour.<\/p>\n

We have conservationists when I am a girl but they are called “bird-watchers.” They are degraded because they are Republicans as Hartford is a Democratic city.<\/p>\n

When I am growing up the bird-watchers try, to no avail, to stop the demolition of Hartford Public High School, the second-oldest secondary school in the country, after Boston Latin. Hartford High is to be demolished to make way for a cloverleaf-patterned exit-entrance ramp for the new Interstate 84. Alas, no dice. So under the bulldozer go terrazzo floors; two hundred twelve-foot-high solid cherry doors; carved stone balustrades; and authentic Palladian windows, each pane cut into shape by hand. The only things saved are the telescope, which is used by the honors science class\u2014no girls allowed in the hon\u00adors science class\u2014and a marble sculpture of an owl, our mascot, which sat over the main entrance for over a hundred years. I figure the “bird\u00adwatchers” don’t want the school demolished because of the owl over the door.<\/p>\n

My father takes me to the Hog River when I am four. It is a hot summer night. My parents and I, and my Uncle Guido and Auntie Palma are sitting outside on beach chairs in our six-by-six-foot front yard in Charter Oak Terrace.<\/p>\n

My father is saying, If we’d had a plan to knock out the krauts’ ball bearing factories we’d have won the war within a year of Pearl.<\/p>\n

Uncle Guido says, You’re goddamn right about that, Yutch.<\/p>\n

My cousin Paul, a year younger than I am, has fallen asleep in his mother’s arms. I listen to the adults talk while we all try to ignore my brother’s solitary conversations, which are emanating from his bedroom’s open window above our heads, conversations based on what my parents and aunt and uncle are saying while he eavesdrops.<\/p>\n

Tyler begins shouting\u2014bellowing, actually\u2014into his Red Phone connected directly to the Oval Office in Washington, D.C. Tyler’s Red Phone is an old Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup can. The reason Tyler is shouting is his need to hammer home the gravity of the Japanese aggression.<\/p>\n

He yells into his Campbell\u2019s can: We are severely damaged at Pearl Harbor!<\/em><\/p>\n

Then, once Tyler has FDR\u2019s attention, he goes on to describe the extent of the attack. The actual president at the time is Harry S. Truman as FDR is already dead.<\/p>\n

My mother tried to get Tyler to trade in his chicken noodle can, which was rusting, for a new one. Tyler’s response was: Prepare to dodge ack-ack fire from our left flank, men.<\/p>\n

That meant no.<\/p>\n

While we sit outside on this midsummer night, I watch Fluffy and her litter of kittens lying under a shrub. I beg to have one of the kittens but I can’t as Tyler can’t abide meowing. A dog comes trotting down the street, seemingly minding his own business. He stops, sniffs the air, and lunges through our little circle and into the shrub where he grabs one of the kittens and rips its throat open, which sets Fluffy to screeching. My brother, inside, begins screeching, too. My father and Uncle Guido chase the dog away while my mother dashes in to Tyler before he can maul his wrist.<\/p>\n

When Tyler is settled down again, back to communicating with the White House, my mother comes out and she and my father, my uncle and aunt, continue to chat. The commotion does not wake up Paul, who is a deep sleeper. I watch the fatally injured kitten squirm while its mother licks it even though my own mother says, Mickey, don’t look.<\/p>\n

When it dies, my father picks it up by the tail, takes me by the hand, and we walk to the bank of the Hog River. He throws the kitten into the black water amid the bedsprings and tires.<\/p>\n

My heart is broken. I have nightmares and wake up screaming in my crib: Stop, stop!<\/em> I am not screaming Stop<\/em> to what is going on in my parents’ bed, but my father’s remedy is the same: He brings me a glass of water and tells me, correctly, that I am having a nightmare. But I keep screaming so my mother runs to my brother and my father takes both my hands and tells me, Mickey, say the Hail Mary.<\/p>\n

I have learned the Hail Mary only recently.<\/p>\n

My father says, Mary will make the nightmare go away.<\/p>\n

And so I pray: Hail Mary, full of grapes, the Lord is with thee . . .<\/p>\n

The prayer ends … now and at the hour of our death, amen<\/em>. The last line of the prayer tells me that I will die, too. I whisper a prayer of my own: Mary, don’t let a dog kill me. Don’t let a dog rip open my neck. Don’t let my father throw me into the Hog River.<\/p>\n

Mary answers my prayer so I don’t believe what I learn later in cat\u00adechism\u2014that Mary doesn’t answer prayers, but rather she intercedes<\/em>. I don’t know what intercedes<\/em> means. I only know that Mary doesn’t let cruising dogs kill me.<\/p>\n

I am named after her and Jesus’s grandmother too. This pronouncement oft-declared by my mother is an attention grabber.<\/p>\n

People ask, What grandmother?<\/p>\n

My mother smirks and says, St. Anne!<\/p>\n

Everyone laughs at the bizarre but true fact that Jesus had a grandmother.<\/p>\n

The Ann<\/em> in my name is spelled without the e<\/em>. My mother feels the e<\/em> is one letter too many.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

WITH MY FATHER’S PROMOTION to foreman at the Abbott Ball Company and my mother’s new job at C.G., my parents now have an income that no longer allows us to qualify for low-income housing. They buy a house and we leave Charter Oak Terrace. I am finally out of the crib, out of my parents’ bedroom. I am seven.<\/p>\n

We move to a little Cape Cod house on Nilan Street, on the other side of Chandler, parallel and one block from the Mary M. Hooker School. In the year that Terrace residents begin to make the kinds of salaries that force them out, colored people from the South begin moving in, Freddie Ravenel and his family the first. The real estate values around the Terrace plummet, so the house my parents buy on Nilan Street is a bargain, which is why they are able to afford it.<\/p>\n

The people who sell us our new house leave their upright piano. My mother is melancholy. She knows how to play, but Tyler forbids the sound of a piano, far more assaultive a noise than crying. She must give up the thought of playing; otherwise Tyler will probably sever his hand. My mother won’t have a nervous breakdown over this particular disappointment because she is no longer on the verge. She is at C.G. instead, working at a job she loves. Also, she’s moved on from basketball to golf and becomes as adept a golfer as she was a basketball player. At first she plays Hartford’s public courses and then joins a country club. She squeezes in a bowling league, too.<\/p>\n

People say to my parents about Tyler, You spoil him. But the alternative to spoiling Tyler is to watch him sink his teeth into his wrist and bite it to the bone.<\/p>\n

My father enlists uncle Guido to help him get rid of the piano. Uncle Guido brings Paul so I will have someone to play with and therefore stay out of the way. I am happy because Paul is my best childhood friend even though we fight a lot since he’s an only child and I am an only normal child so we aren’t accustomed to sibling relationships. Also, I am not allowed to have friends to visit, only cousins.<\/p>\n

Because the piano is so heavy and cumbersome, my father must face the fact that he and Uncle Guido will not be able to carry the piano out of the house by themselves. Also, they will need a truck to haul it away and even though my cousin Roger Belch has been recruited in the effort because he owns a truck, they’ll need a hydraulic lift to get the piano up and into the truck. A hydraulic lift is an item no one can produce though my cousin Hawk Deslauriers, who has accompanied Roger, says, Hey, I know where I can get ahold of a hydraulic lift. And the guy I have in mind won’t even know it’s gone.<\/p>\n

His voice then lowers to a whisper: So long as we get it back into his garage before he gets home from The State<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The State<\/em> is a place where many people work. I think it is the name of a company, like the Abbott Ball Company, or like C.G. I don’t know it is actually any number of jobs offered by the state of Connecticut. My Uncle Ray is at The State<\/em>. He is a toll bridge collector.<\/p>\n

My father and Uncle Guido rule against borrowing a hydraulic lift without the owner’s acquiescence. Instead, they get a couple of axes and a sledgehammer out of the back of Roger’s truck.<\/p>\n

I say, Wait!<\/p>\n

I tell my father that Paul and I would like to save the ivory strips glued to the piano keys. Can we peel them off, Dad?<\/p>\n

The men look at one another thinking, Why the hell would they want to do that? But Paul and I prevail and are allowed to salvage the ivory while my father, uncle, Roger, and Hawk prepare for the demolition by raising a short one. Paul and I divide up the nearly paperthin ivory bars, and we put them in our Dutch Masters humidors. (My father has managed to secure an anniversary humidor for Paul too.) My WEA scab has disintegrated to nothing. One day, when I hear: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust<\/em>, I understand the metaphor exactly.<\/p>\n

First, the men rip the top and back off the piano. Paul and I look inside. The insides of the piano make me of think of the insides of a horseshoe crab, an animal I look forward to observing each summer when we go to the beach on Long Island Sound. Unexpected things are under the shell of a horseshoe crab; that shell, Tyler says, is the prototype for the Nazi helmet. Peering into the guts of the piano I spot a harp.I beg to keep the harp. My father says, No, Mickey.<\/p>\n

Uncle Guido says, Just what Tyler needs . . . you running around strumming a harp.<\/p>\n

Paul says, Then can I keep the harp?<\/p>\n

I experience jealousy for the first time. I beg Mary to intercede, Please say no, please say no.<\/p>\n

Uncle Guido says, We don’t have room for a harp.<\/p>\n

They don’t. They have moved from the Terrace to a four-room ranch near the Luna Club and it isn’t all that much bigger than the apartment they had in the A section of the Terrace.<\/p>\n

The reason the men feel free to swing and pry with reckless and noisy abandon is because Tyler has been taken out for a ride by my Auntie Margaret to see the dike that was constructed in downtown Hartford in 1938 after the great hurricane, which caused the Connecticut River to overflow its banks submerging Main Street under several feet of water. Tyler is the only one who knows that the cement wall next to I91 in Hartford is a dike. Paul and I are tempted to go along with Auntie Margaret because we know Tyler will demand an ice cream cone along the way and Auntie Margaret will stop at the Lincoln Dairy. But the destruction of the piano is too exciting an event to pass up even for ice cream. (My mother, meanwhile, is on the course. She still works the housewife shift at C.G. so that she can play golf during the day when either Auntie Margaret or Auntie Mary can stay with Tyler.)<\/p>\n

My two uncles and two big cousins take up their weapons and smash the piano to smithereens, harp and all.<\/p>\n

Paul and I then help out, putting all the large and small chunks and fragments of the piano into Roger Belch’s truck. Then we head out through Charter Oak Terrace to the Hog River, where we throw the horseshoe-crab parts into the water to join the bedsprings, tires, and Fluffy’s kitten.<\/p>\n

In the fifties, there is no such thing as a tag sale and you don’t insult someone by offering them something you don’t want, even a piano.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I MAKE FRIENDS with the kids on Nilan Street: Judy, whose father is dead (unheard of), Cookie, whose parents are divorced (unheard of), and Joyce, whose father is a bookie (common). One day I am coloring with Joyce at her kitchen table while her father is organizing piles of little slips of paper. There is a knock on the door and the knock becomes a hammering. Joyce’s mother grabs her husband’s papers and runs to the bathroom where she flushes them down the toilet. She misses a few so Joyce’s father eats them. He is chewing and swallowing when the police break the door down, Joyce keeps coloring and so do I. The police race through the whole house but they will not find any of the pieces of paper. They leave. One little piece of paper is under my foot. I pick it up and give it to Joyce’s father and he thanks me. I wait, hopeful that he will eat that one too but he doesn’t.<\/p>\n

The next morning my mother is reading the Hartford Courant<\/em>, puts it down, and stares at me. She says, Did anything happen at Joyce’s house yesterday?<\/p>\n

I tell her what happened. She doubles over with laughter and then calls everyone she knows and tells them what I told her. That night, a man comes to our door and hands my father a bottle of twenty-five-year-old scotch. When the man leaves, my father says to me, Good work, Mick, and then takes me out for a hot fudge sundae at the Lincoln Dairy. I don’t know what I did to deserve my mother’s laughter or my father’s treat. I don’t ask because I don’t want to risk losing the trip to the Lincoln Dairy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I AM A BED WETTER and every day there is a sheet blowing in the breeze from the clothesline. The neighbors deduce that Tyler wets the bed. My mother, always stepping up to defend Tyler, sets them straight whereupon they report this fact to their children and I hear about it every morning on the walk to school with my new playmates. They hold their noses and chant:<\/p>\n

Mary-Ann wets the be-ed. Mary-Ann wets the be-ed.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I am an adult, hired by Mary Warburg of the banking Warburgs to put her personal papers in order, we become fast friends. In her diaries, she has written that she was a bed wetter. I say to her, So was I.<\/p>\n

She says, And so was my best friend, Mary Astor.<\/p>\n

Wow.<\/p>\n

Then she says, I suppose if one’s name is Mary, one is a bed wetter. Isn’t that too divine?<\/p>\n

Then she makes us each a gimlet so we can toast divine bed wetters named Mary everywhere.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

Chapter Nine of Girls of Tender Age treats a visit to the downtown Hartford department store G. Fox, a visit that can\u2019t possibly have been duplicated any time in the store\u2019s history.<\/em><\/p>\n

Chapter Nine<\/h5>\n

NILAN STREET. My own bedroom. I am overjoyed and the number of nightmares I have goes down. There is wallpaper with pink roses on the wall, the pattern almost as beautiful as the internal red glow of the coal furnace that I will never see again. Now my father turns a little disk on the wall to heat the house instead of shoveling coal. The outside of the house is clapboard, unlike Pippi and Grandpa’s houses, which are sided with something called asphalt shingles, rough thin squares with edges that curl up in the hot summer sun. The floor is wood instead of linoleum. I touch the wood with my fingertips taking in the pattern of the oak grain.<\/p>\n

We have a new chair, a wingback upholstered in a pattern of grapevines. Its back is velvet, the color of wine from the grapes. I sit behind it and feel the velvet with my fingertips. I feel the cover of my favorite book, Silver Pennies<\/em>, too. Silver Pennies<\/em> is a collection of children’s poems, many of them having to do with fairies and several of them written by Yeats. The cover is midnight blue and there is a girl on the cover sitting in the grass reaching up into the night sky. She is reaching for the silver pennies embossed on the cover spilling down upon her. I feel the small silver disks. They are cold and smooth.<\/p>\n

Tyler has the other upstairs bedroom under the dormers of our cookie-cutter Cape Cod house. I am not a good sleeper even with fewer nightmares because I am afraid of the dark what with all the previous primal sex I witnessed four feet away from my crib. Night lights are verboten because they are a waste of electricity. In the fifties, you are aware of wasting electricity, wasting food, wasting water. Wasting time is not a negative phenomenon; if you have time to waste, it means you’re happy and doing well. ‘Waste all the time you want. Afraid of the dark means I must pull my hands and feet in close to my body because if my foot hangs over the side of the bed, a blade will come down and slice it off. Perhaps Joseph Ignace Guillotin, the French physician who proposed the concept as a method to execute people, was afraid of the dark. (Mary Warburg will tell me she was afraid of the dark so her father gave her a loaded gun to keep by her bedside.)<\/p>\n

What soothes me in the night is Tyler’s voice, across the hall.<\/p>\n

He is always in conversation with his “critter,” a mangy, one-eyed stuffed animal, its fur entirely worn off. It might have been a teddy bear once. When I am an adult and I see the critter lying on Tyler’s bed, it reminds me of a swarthy five-month fetus.<\/p>\n

Sometimes Tyler calls: Sister, come tell a story to the critter.<\/p>\n

Autistic people don’t like to use real names. He calls our mother Lady and our father Pop-pop.<\/p>\n

The stories he prefers are anecdotes that chronicle some trouble he got into when he was little. I am happy to run to his bedroom and get into bed with him and the critter because Tyler is not the least bit afraid of the dark. How could he be when he has far more serious things to be afraid of\u2014like clouds of needles lodging in his face.<\/p>\n

His favorite story is the commandeering of the elevator at G. Fox, Hartford’s fifteen-floor department store. We call G. Fox, Fox’s. Before Fox’s is forced to close when malls are invented, you might need a new blouse to pep up your old suit so you’d go to Fox’s, get off at the ninth floor, where the entire sprawling space is devoted to rack after rack of blouses organized by color. Bring the suit along, and a sales lady finds the perfect match immediately.<\/p>\n

I am with Tyler that day at Fox’s, the day the elevator story is born. He is nine and I am four.<\/p>\n

My father is shooting the breeze with a friend he meets on the lobby floor by the elevator. (In the days of the big department stores, the buildings are so otherworldly that they have lobbies like the Plaza Hotel, a place that actually no longer has a lobby but rather a shopping mall. Ironic.)My father’s friend’s name is Abe Lieberman. My father calls out to his friend, Hey Abe, you Jew bastard!<\/p>\n

Abe’s face breaks into a grin and he calls back, Yutch Tirone, you sonofabitch no-good wop, how the hell are ya?<\/p>\n

They smack each other on the back, shake hands, and then get down to the business of comparing notes as to which horses should have won in the fifth at Narragansett yesterday, as opposed to the one that did, which they didn’t have, goddamn it. Abe says, My nag stopped to take a leak at the clubhouse turn.<\/p>\n

Tyler and I slip away into one of Fox’s elevators. It goes up. Once the last passenger is ushered out at eight\u2014Shoes\u2014the elevator operator always steps across the threshold to hold back the shiny, bronze accordion gate in case it malfunctions and crushes a dawdling customer. Tyler pulls the gate out of the operator’s hand and throws it shut. Then he swings back a lever closing the back-up metal door. He presses a special button that means the doors won’t open no matter who is outside hammering away at all the floor numbers. Down we go.<\/p>\n

We ride up and down pretending we are in a flying boxcar, transporting the troops across enemy lines. Tyler keeps saying to me, You’re a fine soldier, Sergeant. Where did you train? Hickham?<\/p>\n

I say, Yes sir, I did.<\/p>\n

A maintenance worker is called to the scene by the elevator operator, who tells my frantic father there is nothing to be done but to wait us out. My father knows it’s an extended combat mission Tyler has planned on so he asks Abe Lieberman to go see if Lukey Welch is working that day. Lukey Welch is our neighbor in Charter Oak Terrace. I call him Daddy Welch and his wife, Mommy Welch. I don’t know why but I do. Lukey Welch is Fox’s head painter. Abe finds him and brings him to the lobby floor elevators.<\/p>\n

My father says, Jesus Christ, Lukey, Tyler’s stuck in the elevator.<\/p>\n

Lukey Welch says, Where the hell’s Mickey?<\/p>\n

She’s in there with him.<\/p>\n

Jesus Christ!<\/p>\n

We have landed the flying boxcar back at the first floor so we hear all this. Tyler makes a slashing gesture to his throat which I know is a signal not to speak so I don’t. I am a fine soldier trained, after all, at Hickham.<\/p>\n

Lukey Welch says to my father, Can Tyler handle a bump on the noggin?<\/p>\n

My father says, What choice have we got here, Lukey?<\/p>\n

None.<\/p>\n

Lukey Welch doesn’t concern himself with my noggin as I am the normal one expected to handle any problems with panache never mind that it’s not normal for a four-year-old to have that kind of je ne sais quoi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lukey Welch says to the maintenance worker, What in the Sam Hill are ya doin’ standin’ there like some kinda fuckin’ wooden Indian? Go get a plank and we’ll stick it into the shaft between the floors.<\/p>\n

The maintenance man says, We’ll burn out the motor if we do that.<\/p>\n

Lukey Welch says, The only other choice is to shut down the electric power and if we do that, Mrs. Auerbach will take a shit and fire every goddamn one of us. Now go get a fuckin’ plank!<\/p>\n

Mrs. Auerbach is G. Fox’s granddaughter, who now owns the store.<\/p>\n

Tyler hits twelve, Men’s Furnishings, and up we go. Then down to the main floor again. Then up, and our elevator hits the plank. We come to a jarring stop and our heads bang into the ceiling and we land in a heap. I don’t cry of course.<\/p>\n

Tyler and I disentangle and get to our feet, come out, and there is a crowd gathered. Lukey Welch is standing in front of all the people in his paint-covered overalls. As I am rubbing my head, I say, Hi, Daddy Welch.<\/p>\n

He picks me up.<\/p>\n

The crowd applauds, which sends Tyler running for the hills. Abe catches him and he and my father get him into our Ford parked out on Main Street. My father takes off but Tyler gives an order to reconnoiter because his heroic gunner, who trained at Hickham, is missing in action. My father does a U-turn on Main Street, and Lukey Welch is standing there on the curb in front of Fox’s still holding me in his big freckled Irish arms.<\/p>\n

All the way home, my father says, Don’t tell your mother, either of you.<\/p>\n

Tyler says to me, Name, rank, and serial number, Sergeant, that’s it. Then he says to my father, But don’t forget to stop at the Lincoln Dairy, driver.<\/p>\n

We get ice cream, we don’t tell our mother, but Daddy Welch tells Mommy Welch, who does tell my mother, and there is hell to pay. Tyler doesn’t pay, my father does. And me. My father gets the silent treatment for about a month, and I am deprived of Big Brother Bill<\/em>, my favorite radio show, which I listen to on Saturday morning, while Tyler is still asleep so it won’t bother him.<\/p>\n

When I finish telling Tyler his favorite bedtime story of the Fox’s elevator, he knows the deal is that he has to tell me a story too. But first he shares a three-month-old chocolate chip cookie he’s rationed. He gets it out from under his rug.<\/p>\n

I request Cinderella<\/em>. Here is Tyler’s version of Cinderella<\/em>: A lady goes to a ball and a prince wants to marry her but she runs away. She loses her shoe, which is made of glass. The prince finds it. Luckily, no breakage. Cinderella’s wicked stepsister tries it on because the prince says he’ll marry whoever the shoe fits. She puts her foot into it and \u2026grunt<\/em>, grunt<\/em>: Fail<\/em>-ure! Then her other stepsister tries and\u2026grunt<\/em>, grunt<\/em>: Fail<\/em>-ure! Then Cinderella tries and . . . grunt<\/em>, grunt<\/em>: Suc<\/em>-cess!<\/p>\n

We giggle. My father yells up the stairs, Mickey! Are you in Tyler’s bed?!?!<\/p>\n

I scuttle back to my room on my hands and knees and call out, No, Daddy.<\/p>\n

Tyler also calls out, not to our father but to me: Continue your watch, soldier. No enemy made it through our lines tonight due to your diligence. I’ll be seeing to your commendation. Count on it. And remember, first and foremost, we must protect the antiquities.<\/p>\n

Aided by Tyler, the critter salutes me.<\/p>\n

I hear my father’s distant voice a moment later. He is reporting to my mother. He says, They’re both in bed, for Christ’s sake.<\/p>\n

My mother says, All I know I have a member-guest first thing in the morning.<\/p>\n

I hear Tyler say, Over and out.<\/p>\n

\n


\nReader Advisory:<\/strong> some readers may find this segment disturbing<\/em><\/p>\n

In Chapter Twenty-Two the central horror of Tirone Smith\u2019s childhood is almost too difficult to read. Tirone Smith is not one for sensationalism, though, and crafted detail follows crafted detail in grim succession. The aftermath of the murder of 11-year-old Irene Fiedorowicz starts with a police officer leaving for work late at night.<\/em><\/p>\n

from Chapter 22 (Final Section)<\/h5>\n

OFFICER MICHAEL PROCCACINO left for work at 11:30 P.M. after dozing on and off through the fights on television. His wife was in bed. It had been three hours since a little girl was strangled in his backyard and her body left lying in the rain next to his toolshed.<\/p>\n

He changed, got in his car, turned on the ignition and the windshield wipers and lights, and immediately looked over his shoulder in order to back out of the driveway. If he had looked at his backyard illuminated by his headlights, he might have seen Irene’s body just on the other side of the white picket fence in front of his toolshed. But then again, he might not have because the rain was falling heavily as midnight approached. No one had called him about the child who had gone missing right there in his neighborhood. When he arrived at police headquarters a few minutes before twelve, he took off his rain gear, shook out the coat, hung it up, and went to his office.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At 12:03 A.M., he received the first radio dispatch of the evening concerning a missing child. He passed it back to the radio dispatcher to transmit to all cruisers on patrol. Cops walking their midnight beats were not sent the dispatch. Missing children always turned up. Sometimes in their own beds. In addition, this particular child lived in Charter Oak Terrace. The cops weren’t feeling the pressure they’d have had placed upon them if it had been a little rich girl from West Hartford.<\/p>\n

It was a quiet night. There were no updates on the missing child throughout Officer Proccacino’s shift.<\/p>\n

At seven the next morning, his shift ended and he called his wife to wake her, which was his habit, and went out to his car. The rain had stopped.<\/p>\n

Over the next half hour, Mrs. Proccacino got dressed and cooked breakfast. She was just finishing when she heard her husband’s car pull into the driveway at seven-thirty. Officer Proccacino’s headlights lit up his yard for the instant prior to his turning them off. The light bounced off the white picket fence, something the officer was vaguely aware of. He came through the back door just as his wife went to the kitchen sink, where she happened to glance out the window. The sky was overcast and the feeble light of a winter morning was even dimmer than usual but she noticed what seemed to be a pile of clothes between the picket fence and the toolshed. Mrs. Proccacino thought laundry had blown off the clothesline next door in the previous night’s rainstorm.<\/p>\n

When the police officer walked into the kitchen, he was about to tell his wife of the child gone missing from Charter Oak Terrace\u2014the D section just down the street\u2014when she said to him, What’s that outside, Mike? The laundry from next door?<\/p>\n

Officer Proccacino peered through the window and knew instantly what he was seeing between the fence and the shed. His brain registered the color red and then it registered body<\/em>. He knew the missing child had been wearing a red jacket. As he raced outside, he remembered how his dog had been barking the night before. His stomach turned over.<\/p>\n

He stood beside Irene and then bent down. Her face was swollen and blue. A trickle of blood was coming from her nose and a few drops had spilled onto her jacket. Around her neck was a silk scarf tied so tightly that it was sunk deep into her neck. He noted the bulky knot. Officer Proccacino knew Irene was dead but he followed procedure. Without moving her outflung arm, he felt Irene’s wrist for a pulse.<\/p>\n

Then he stood and ran back to the house. As he dialed headquarters, he said to his wife, We had a report of a missing child last night. She’s out behind our fence and she’s dead.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Proccacino grabbed a kitchen chair and put it behind her husband’s knees and he sank into it. Within minutes, the yard at 80 Coolidge Street was overrun with police officers, the first, Policewoman Ellen Brown, one of Hartford’s two policewomen, who was on foot patrol nearest to the address. The Hartford Police Department was the first in the country to hire female police officers for jobs other than taking dictation. They could not be placed in line for promotion though. Policewoman Brown couldn’t believe that no one had told her about a child who was missing from her own neighborhood beat.<\/p>\n

There was no crime lab in Hartford. The state had a coroner’s office and the coroner had a medical examiner available to him. But the coroner could not be reached and neither could his assistant, so the backup from West Hartford, Dr. Harry Allen, was called up on the Proccacinos’ kitchen phone. He arrived fifteen minutes later. He examined the scarf around Irene’s neck. Dr. Allen asked, We got a Navy man here?<\/p>\n

One of the cops stepped forward. He had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor. He looked down at Irene, scrutinized the scarf around her neck and said, That’s your basic square knot. We do it neater than civilians. We do it like that.<\/p>\n

Captain Jimmy Egan, head of the Vice Squad arrived. Egan looked down at Irene and remembered the station house talk two weeks earlier of a possible assault that took place on Beaufort Street. He feared he might have a rapist on his hands, one who had turned to murder. (This was a time when the word serial meant a short film played before the main feature and was not applied to rapists or killers.) At that point, Egan decided to wait before telling the chief his suspicions. He would first check out the report filed on the Beaufort Street attack. Egan knew he’d somehow have to find a few minutes at headquarters to hunt up the report and read it right away. Every police officer in Hartford would soon be on the streets, including him. Especially him.<\/p>\n

While the crowd of cops on the scene expressed relief that Irene was fully clothed, obviously hadn’t been sexually assaulted, Egan scanned the ground where she lay. He noted her shoe half off and then he saw a sliver of pink silk under the corner of the toolshed.<\/p>\n

Just then, Hartford’s Chief of Police, Michael J. Godfrey, came running into the yard. He looked down at Irene and then followed Jimmy Egan’s gaze to the corner of the shed and what lay beneath.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[END OF SELECTION]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Girls of Tender Age (2006), Tirone Smith drew on the memories of a Hartford childhood and the tragedy that haunted it. In Chapter Seven we meet her autistic and beloved brother Tyler, a portrait of the Charter Oak Terrace housing project in its early days, and a hilarious piano-moving scene.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[39,69,35,47,38,26,30],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mary-ann-tirone-smith","tag-catholicism","tag-childhood","tag-hartford-history","tag-hartford-setting","tag-italian","tag-memoir","tag-womens-lives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}