Mil

                                               

Bill

In some ways I never knew my sister  In many ways I did.  Mildred was ten years old when I was born. My specific memories of her didn't form until my family moved to Hyde Park. I was eight years-old when we moved. My sister was eighteen, had recently graduated high school and was working. I was just a kid. Mildred was an adult. It was during the four years before her marriage when she still lived at our house on Prospect Street, she was most a part of my everyday life. Still, even after she was married, my friend Richie and I used to visit her and her husband when she lived for a short time on the top floor of a house at the bottom of Fairmount Hill.  But there was another person. Mil.

Mildred was the person I knew as my older sister. I didn't know her by the name Mil. Over the years I realized Mil was a person who had a life separate from me. Was the nickname Mil what her friends called her? I wasn't sure. I only heard it occasionally. I always used the name Mildred or the phrase “my sister Mildred” when I talked to her or about her. Formal names were always the names my family went by. Lawrence, not Larry; Ralph, not Ralphie; Mildred, not Mil or Milly. There was an exception: me.  I was the only one, birth name William, who was never called by their formal name. I was always Billy, and later, Bill. I was named after my father, William.  But no one ever called him William either. Aside from us kids who called him Daddy, everyone else called him Bill. Sometimes my Uncle John, my father’s younger brother, would call my father Willy. That struck me as funny, and odd. It sounded like a cartoon character or someone from the comics pages.  I certainly didn’t connect that name to someone like my father.

Mildred’s name was a significant one to my mother and father. Mildred Jarvis was a good friend of my mother’s when she was growing up on Haverford Street in Jamaica Plain. My mother would spend a lot of time at the Jarvis’ home.  “I would play the piano and Mildred would sing,” my mother told me.  On Sunday afternoons they’d make fudge together.  One warm afternoon in August, 1932, my mother, who was seventeen at the time, was walking at Franklin Park with Mildred Jarvis.  My father, then nineteen, was also walking in the park. He was with his friend, Joe Bagley.  As they passed each other, Mildred called out to Joe whom she knew.  It was in this way my mother was introduced to my father. Thank you, Mildred J.

My father had three brothers and one sister who was also named Mildred. As she was the only girl in a group of boys, my father felt protective toward his sister.  They grew up together and supported each other.  As kids we would visit with her.  I remember my aunt as good-natured, inquisitive and  social.  She was special to my father.

With two such important people named Mildred in their lives, it’s no wonder my parents named their first child, luckily a daughter, Mildred.

Of the three boys I was the middle one.  Ralph was older by three years and Lawrence was younger by two and a half years.  But my sister Mildred came first, and stayed an only child until she was seven years-old. Mildred and I were ten years apart.

A decade is a long time in kid years.  If you are seventy and someone else is sixty or even fifty, well, your age doesn’t make too much difference.  You’re all old.  But when you are two and your sister is twelve, or you’re twelve and your sister is twenty-two, then the contrast in age resonates in the differences between a baby and a pre-teen, a child and an adult, someone that needs to have a babysitter and the person who is that babysitter, a bratty brother and an older sister, between someone who plays with cars and someone who drives a car, a kid who has friends and a young woman who has boyfriends, someone who is entering third grade and someone who is graduating high school, and between a kid who is part of a larger family and a sister who for a number of years was an only child.  All these differences point to reasons why such a contrast in age greatly influences the relationship you will or won’t have with that older person.

It’s as adults that siblings often bond, when the age differences lose their significance. Ideally the grown up kids visit with each other, resolve the problems of the past, celebrate the good memories, and examine how the past brings us to where we are now.  I never got to do that with Mildred.  She died too young. So for those early years of Mildred’s childhood I have to resort to a realistic imagining of what her life was like before I was born, and even for several years after that. I wasn’t even aware of her as my sister until I was three or four.  I piece those fledgling years together from the few things my sister told me, family stories over the years, my own sense of the history of the times along with my familiarity of the houses and neighborhoods we both lived in and from old photographs of Mildred when she was a child.

Mildred was born in 1935, the daughter of young parents who had married the previous year. My father was 22 when Mildred was born; my mother only 20.  It was not an easy birth.  My mother’s kidney function began to shut down during the last stages of labor.  Back then this condition was know as toxemia.  Now it goes under the more specific term preeclampsia. The condition has no known cause although it’s associated with an increase in blood pressure in a mother’s third trimester.  The only cure is the immediate delivery of the baby.  Blurred vision is also a symptom.  For a short time after Mildred was born my mother was actually blind.  One of my father’s familiar phrases was “nip and tuck.” “It was nip and tuck for a while there for your mother after Mildred was born,” he used to tell us. At one point her doctors were convinced that even with the birth of her child, my mother was too far gone, that she had irreparable damage to her kidneys, that the high blood pressure could not be controlled and that her vision was probably permanently damaged. For a brief time my father was challenged with the possibility his wife would die in childbirth. A lot to deal with for a young man recently married and now a father.

Since this blog is being written by her third child, it’s clear my mother recovered.  Actually the recovery was quick.  Once Mildred was born the conditions causing the preeclampsia mitigated. After ten days or so my mother was discharged along with her healthy baby.

Mildred grew up during the second half of the Depression.  “Things were tough then,” my father used to tell me.  “Getting a job, and then keeping that job weren’t easy,” he’d say. My mother, who graduated from high school in 1933, told me, “There was no prom that June.  No one could afford it.  Instead the graduating class went out to dinner.”

The first two years my parents were married they lived with my father’s parents at  157 School Street in Jamaica Plain.  This house, still there, is just opposite Adams Circle where I grew up.  It was during the time my folks were living at the School Street address that Mildred was born. My mother has told me she enjoyed those few years living with her in-laws.  “Daddy’s mother and father were very different from mine,” she used to say.  “They were both very nice to me but it took a while for me to get used to them.”  While her own father was stern and even at times abusive, my father’s parents were more accepting. They made an effort to enjoy life.  “They were always fooling,” my mother would say.  “Kidding each other, making each other laugh.”  But these were serious times. The Depression was on everyone’s minds, Roosevelt was proposing and implementing radical new ideas to deal with it.  On the horizon even more radical ideas were festering in Europe. There was a lot to discuss.  My mother told me, “Your father’s family loved to talk.” Perhaps she felt inadequately prepared to take part in discussions about world events, about politics. Instead she contributed by helping my grandmother with housekeeping. And doing shopping.

Food was very important to my father’s family.  Whereas food at my mother’s parents’ house could be the same familiar Irish staples week after week, the meals at School Street were more varied, even flamboyant.  Leg of lamb. Roasts. My mother was afraid to cook for the family initially. “I didn’t want them to laugh at me,” she said.  But they didn’t. While she did help her mother-in-law in preparing meals, she often preferred doing the dishes over cooking. 

At least once a day my mother would walk up to Egleston Square to shop.  Not just staples but desserts as well.  “Mary,” my grandmother would say, “a couple of nice cream puffs would go good with our afternoon coffee.”  So my mother would walk up to the square to purchase a box of pastries which all would share later that afternoon. “It was a very different life style than what I was used to,” my mother told me.  “I liked Grandma,” my mother added. “We talked a lot during those two years.  And she was very good to Mildred.”

Meanwhile my father was working in the Woburn area on a state make-work project widening roads.  Later he got a job at a manufacturing plant in Cambridge testing boilers.  The company was filling an order from the Soviet Union to produce copper distilling vats.  But no jobs lasted too long.

In 1936 my parents and Mildred moved to 48 Haverford Street, just up from my mother’s family and a few blocks away from my father’s. If one thing distinguished living in a city like Boston eighty years ago it was how close everyone lived to their relatives. The days of taking jobs and moving the family to Cleveland or Seattle were yet to come. This proximity to family when my mother was first married contributed to her later malaise when she moved to Hyde Park in the early 50’s, a place that may as well have been Cleveland since it was no longer easy to drop in on her mother or cousins as it had been during the years she lived in Jamaica Plain.

Along with a new address my father had a new job as well.  He was working at Trimo on Armory Street in Jamaica Plain. Jobs were scarce and management took advantage of it. My father recalled rushing from one machine to another trying to keep the foreman satisfied.  He would tell my father, “There is always someone else to take your place.”  My mother was busy taking care of Mildred.  “Sometimes when the weather was nice I’d wheel Mildred down to where Daddy worked. We’d sit outside and have lunch,” my mother told me. “It was nice.”  But Trimo folded and my father was out of work again. 

With no money, my mother and father and Mildred once again moved in with his parents.  My grandmother was not one for staying too long in any one place.  She was now living at Beachmont in Revere.  “She always liked living near the water,” my mother would say.  So now they were all living near the water.  My parents stayed there a month or so before my father realized he had to get a job that would be more permanent.

One way to do that was to get on the W.P.A., the Works Progress Administration.  This required having someone “in the know” to get you the job. My father’s oldest brother, my uncle Thomas, was just such a person. An Irish politician, well known in the Jamaica Plain area, was Thomas’ contact.  He met with my father one afternoon at his Centre Street office.  “The office was crowded with people waiting to see him,” my father recalled, “but I was quickly singled out.”  What kind of work can you do, he was asked.  “Electrical work.” My father knew something about electricity but was not yet the licensed electrician he would become.  It didn’t make any difference to the politician. “Take care of him,” the politico said to a secretary.  It sounds ominous.  But this wasn’t a scene from the Godfather.  A couple of weeks later my father had a job at the Navy Yard in Charlestown.  It was hard work, digging ditches for cables.  

Not only did my father persevere at finding work but once on the job he realized this was the opportunity he had been looking for. He had spent a number of years with his brother involved in amateur radio. Since they built the radios from scratch my father began to acquire a working knowledge of electric apparatus.  He thought he might have enough experience to give up the pick and shovel to work at the power plant which serviced the navy ships in dry dock.  A supervisor there took a liking to my father asking him to take on the job of drawing schematics for the plant electrical systems. My father liked to draw, and with his working knowledge of electricity, he felt confident in accepting. Still it was not an easy task.

The job entailed tracing down all the myriad of wires and cables coming and going from the various generators and transformers, figuring out where they all led and where they all ended up.  Some of the wires were old, frayed, needed replacing, so there was an element of danger to it. Also each cable had to be labelled precisely as to its size and voltage requirements. He had to know the standard symbols for the various circuits: resistors, capacitors, switches, voltage sources and so on.   Neatness and accuracy were essential. Considering that on May 13, 1929, my father quit school, the date is significant since it was the day of his 16th birthday, it’s particularly impressive he took on this job as a self-taught electrician.

My father spent the next few months looking under floors and behind walls, along ceilings and even up on roofs, taking notes and then making the precise drawings.  It was an interesting job, he would later observe.  As it turned out it was a good blending of his artistic abilities and his new found trade, electrician.   A year or so later my father had a permanent job at the power plant at the South Boston Navy Yard, a job he’d keep until he retired thirty years later in the early 70s.

In March, 1941, my parents with Mildred had their own apartment on Leland Street in Forest Hills.  My mother was not happy there since “it was so far away from everything.” She missed the convenience of walking up to Egleston Square, of taking the train into Boston, and of being within walking distance of her parents' house. They only lived there six months but my father liked it. By this time he had a car so getting places was not an issue.  “We lived up on the third floor,” he told me.  “There was a beautiful view of Boston from the porch.  Sometimes I’d sit out there after work just to relax.”  Mildred was six years-old at the time. I picture her some of those evenings sitting with my father on that porch enjoying the view as well. 

My father is reading a newspaper. Maybe my sister is looking at the comics. My father lights a cigarette, the wispy smoke curling up toward the porch roof before dissipating in the evening air. Gleaming in the distance the glimmering skyline of Boston.

For those moments I have to use my imagination.  For others I rely on a few evocative pictures from the family album.  They are of my father and sister taken behind the house at 48 Haverford Street.  (Did my mother take them?) In one, my father, in his work clothes, is standing behind my sister with his hands on her shoulders.  She is four. In a little cap and matching coat with a belt. Her shoes are white.  In the other picture, taken a few moments later, my father is standing beside my sister, his hands on his hips, looking down at her, a look on his face that I see as one of quiet pride.  Mildred holds some sort of stuffed doll in one hand, a stuffed rabbit in the other. She looks warily at the camera.

These are poignant images.  They are both so young.  One the child, one the young man.  There is a whole future in front of them.  A sadness creeps into me. I have the knowledge, in some ways a terrible knowledge, of how it all turned out, especially for my sister. The future that was ahead of them that day is now the distant past. It can’t ever be changed. 

But they didn’t care about that. They are a dad and his kid, living in that moment. A father and his daughter having their picture taken, lives full of expectation and promise.  A moment after the shutter closes, my father takes my sister by the hand.  “Time to go.”

After Haverford and after Leland there was another move for the family.  To get my mother closer to the things she wanted, needed actually, they rented a downstairs apartment in a house at 5 Adams Circle in Jamaica Plain just off School Street. This is the house I knew, where my parents lived when I was born until I was eight, the one I spent my young childhood in.  It’s also the house my sister lived in all through World War Two.

With the economic situation and now the war, life was not idyllic. After Pearl Harbor, rationing began, food coupons were issued for things like sugar and coffee and meat, collections were made for metals and grease to which everyone was pressured to contribute, gasoline for your car was limited, tires were scarce.  In cities driving after dark was restricted.  Blackout curtains were installed in many homes to limit light spillage which might lead an enemy bomber to your neighborhood. There was censorship of newspapers and radio.  Posters went up in all public places admonishing people that “Careless Talk Costs Lives” and “Free Speech Doesn’t Mean Careless Talk” and “Mr Hitler Is Listening To What You Are Saying. Someone Talked!” At the Navy Yard where my father worked, possible sabotage and the likelihood of spying were taken seriously.  My father told me stories about FBI agents questioning workers, including my father, about not being patriotic enough.

How did all this effect a seven year-old girl? My sister’s needs were being met.  In spite of economic upheaval and armed conflict, she had been born at the right time in the right place. She lived with caring parents, had school friends and the love and support of two sets of grandparents. Most importantly she was far away from the unspeakable things that were happening to kids in other parts of the world, in China, in Russia, in eastern Europe. 

Maybe the biggest challenge occurred in April of 1942.  My brother Ralph made his debut.  Mildred was no longer an only child.  Now she had to share her world with her new brother.

My mother relied on Mildred not only to help out with a rapid succession of brothers, me in 1945, Lawrence in 1947, but in the house as well.  She was also in school at the Ellis Mendell and had her own friends and own life to enjoy.  By all accounts it was a good life for her at Adams Circle.

With more children to take care of, my mother and sister would form a sort of team. “Mildred would do the dishes while I put the kids to bed,” my mother has mentioned to me. My sister also was the adult in charge on evenings when my father would walk up School Street to visit his parents and my mother and her cousin which catch the latest double bill at the Egleston Square movies. As she got older, Mildred did babysitting for some of our neighbors. The Titus’ lived next door.  For keeping an eye on their kids when the parents went out, Mildred was paid 35 cents an hour.  Easy work.  But some of it was problematic.  My mother complained that another neighbor, the Valakis’, stayed out too late especially during the week when my sister had school the next day.  My mother put her foot down saying Mildred could no longer babysit for them.  

Although not particularly prone to illness, there were times when my sister might pick something up from one of the kids she babysat for, or from some kid in school. There was a lot of flu around, the spread of which was not helped by the spartan diets some people assumed as a way to help the war effort.  During one of these bouts of illness when Mildred was very sick, my mother began to express some anxiety.  Seeing how scared my mother was, my sister reassured her.  "Don’t worry. I’m okay."  My mother never forgot that.  “Mildred was calming me.”

When I was a baby and a young child, my sister was having a complete life.  During my childhood, my sister transitioned from a girl to a teenager to a young woman.  She graduated from Jamaica Plain High School in June of 1952. A faded photograph taken on the front porch of our house on Adams Circle shows Mildred standing next to her best friend Shirley Smith who lived just down on Dalrymple Street.  Both are wearing almost identical white dresses, sleeveless, and white shoes with straps.  A corsage is pinned upon each dress. Prom dresses? Graduation clothes?  Both are standing with arms by their sides, smiling.  They are eighteen years-old.

There are a couple more photographs I rely upon to glean more insight into my sister’s life.  One was taken on School Street just after an enormous snow storm.  The street is unplowed although it looked like someone attempted to shovel a sidewalk where a gas lamp stands.  My sister is standing on the other side of the street looking toward the camera.  She has on a plaid coat, large wooly mittens but no hat. She’s ten years old. There is snow clinging to roofs, sticking to all the trees, piled high on porches and stairs. My father took this picture in January, 1945, likely just after the big storm of January 22 to 24. He always liked weather, especially a particularly intense blizzard.  “It’s stopped snowing,” he would have said. “Mildred, get your coat.  I’ll take a picture of you surrounded by all the snow.” Did she complain it was to cold to go out?  Or was she happy to be the center of focus in a picture that encapsulates a unique moment of high winter on School Street that morning in January of 1945.  In a way this was my world as well. I was born when early spring was changing the look of School Street once again, just six weeks after that wintry picture was taken.

There is another photograph that speaks to a season.  It’s of Mildred and her friends taken one day in the summer of 1943 on the street just outside our house on Adams Circle.  The girls have on light summer dresses, the boys are in shorts and striped shirts.  Again my sister is standing next to her friend, Shirley.  Only this time they are 8 years-old.  She and Shirley and another girl are standing in front of a car, what we would call today a station wagon, likely a Ford Standard Woodie Wagon from 1940 or so. Just behind the girls are four boys, all standing on the car’s running board, a narrow step to aid entry into the car. 

I like this picture for several reasons.  In contrast to her young age, Shirley is standing in a way you could only describe as provocative. She has one foot forward while staring directly at the camera, her shoulders are squared and pulled back, on her face a look of cool confidence.  This is not a shy girl around cameras.  My sister is more demure. She is tilted slightly away from the camera.  Her face is relaxed, almost neutral.  On the running board behind her the boys are standing at attention, all saluting. 

The photograph is quite evocative speaking as it does to this particular moment, not only of childhood but childhood during which the US was fully involved in a world war, fighting in the Pacific, in Africa, in Italy. I like to think the kids’ saluting was spontaneous on their part, emblematic of what was going on in the world, a patriotic gesture that defined them as boys, rough and tumble, future soldiers, and okay with that.  The girls had different roles. The war was going on in their lives as well but the girls’ hands are by their sides.  

This photograph, taken by my father, documented this unique moment. He was aware such moments did not last.  Even as he turned to go back in the house, the kids were off in different directions, other activities caught their interest, by evening the car was in a garage.  Mildred continued to grow up, to stand again next to her friend Shirley for a photograph as high school came to an end.

Everything is momentary. Try to do what my father did with his camera; catch a glimpse now before it is too late. 

It’s interesting to think that the ten year-old Mildred, the one standing in the aftermath of the snow storm, was the girl who for the next few years would be helping to take care of me.  The eight-year-old Mildred, the girl in front of the car, had no idea she would have soon have so many brothers to deal with. That age difference greatly influenced my relationship with her. She was always my “big sister”. She fed me, changed me, babysat me, read to me, dealt with me in so many ways.  Yet I remember very little of it.  She graduated high school the same year I went into third grade.  By the time I was twelve, she was married and out of the house. So the memories I do have of her when I was a young kid are precious.

When I was seven my sister took me up to the Egleston movies to see “The Greatest Show on Earth”. This is the Cecil B. DeMille movie accurately derided as the worst film ever to receive the best picture Academy Award.  It also featured James Stewart who appeared in every scene in clown makeup.  Of course I didn’t care about any of that.  Every one in school was talking about this movie for one reason, the circus train crash which featured fires and explosions, train cars buckling and derailing, and lions and tigers running amuck.  Now I was going to see it with my sister!

I remember the festive atmosphere outside the Egleston that afternoon.  There were long lines, people all over.  But the most amazing thing to me, the memory I have that took this out of the realm of an ordinary movie-going experience, was of a guy outside the theatre selling pretzels, hot pretzels from a cart.  I had never seen anything like this before.  I wish I could tell you my sister bought me one but I do not recall.  The fact that someone was selling them amidst all the other hoopla going on took this afternoon to another level.

The train wreck was great, as good as any of my friends’ descriptions. I talked about it for days.  It’s likely my friends and I recreated it as best we could in someone’s backyard.  As for the rest of the movie, talky, dull, not worthy of that Oscar.  But that assessment would come later.  At this point in my life I was not a critic.  I loved going to that movie.  I loved going with my older sister. It made the whole thing an event.

Mildred had more reason to rejoice than any of the rest of us when we moved to the house on Fairmount Hill in Hyde Park in June of 1953.  She had been out of high school for a year now working as a phone operator in Boston. In spite of being an adult with a job, her bed was still in the corner of the large front room at the house in Jamaica Plain which she shared with her three brothers.  In Hyde Park, for the first time in ten years, she would have a room of her own. Actually Mildred had a role in the purchase of the new house.  She had given part of her salary to my mother every week which was used as a down payment.

It is at our new house that I got to know Mildred as a person and not just a big sister. She could be sweet and funny and endearing.  There are home movies of her in our back yard at Hyde Park sitting on our neighbor’s wall coquettishly inching up her skirt in a playful impersonation of Marilyn Monroe.  She has a big smile on her face as she mugs for the camera.

She’d often give me a hug saying, “Isn’t Billy so handsome.  Don’t you think Billy is a handsome boy.”  This was often done in front of her boyfriend who would likely just shrug his shoulders while I attempted to get out of my sister’s grasp.  

But she meant it.  Sometimes she was so optimistic.  She seemed happy to compliment me. She thought I was an intelligent young kid. “Billy is so smart,” is something I’d hear a lot.  She could be very funny in a droll sarcastic sort of way but without the bite that would sound mean.  I liked hearing her laugh.  Certainly with the age difference we never talked about anything serious although occasionally, as I got older, in my teens, she’d admonish me to do well in school, make something of myself, that life goes by fast.  It’s what an adult would say to a kid but I often wonder if she were talking about the opportunities she had let slip away more than she was advocating my taking advantage of the ones that were to come my way.  Maybe a little of both.

Mildred had another side too.  Antagonistic, temperamental, self-centered. She was headstrong, demanding when she wanted something.  I was never the object of her wrath but both my father and mother felt it.  I often wonder too if some of these fights were the early signs of the mental illness that would plague her for much of her adult life. I don’t recall my parents arguing very much with each other or Mildred in Jamaica Plain but Hyde Park was a different story.

One morning, I must be 11 or 12, I am woken from a sound sleep by Mildred yelling at my mother. It’s raining out.  Mildred wants to use my mother’s umbrella to get to work.  For some reason my mother is refusing.  Maybe Mildred has borrowed a previous one and did not return it, or has lost her own umbrella.  Whatever the reason my mother is not going to budge.  I lie in bed listening as the fight escalates.  I don’t like people fighting.  I never know where it will lead.  My sister intensifies her demands that my mother give her the umbrella.  She is yelling now, beside herself with anger.  I am upstairs listening, equally wrought up with anxiety.  Mildred swears.  It’s the first time I have ever heard a girl swear.  Then there is a crash.  I leap out of bed along with my brother.  We run down the stairs.  In her pique my sister has snatched a vase off a bookshelf and smashed it on the floor.  Yelling, “Wait ‘till I tell your father about this,” but seeing how agitated her kids are, my mother relents.  Mildred gets her umbrella and goes off to work. 

My father is considered indulgent. One of my mother’s complaints was, “Your father was too easygoing.  People took advantage of him.”  Whether this was true or not I can’t say.  I do know I anticipated with a sort of glee what kind of reaction my father would have when he came home that night and heard about Mildred’s tantrum.  I sided completely with my mother.  Breaking things on the floor.  Crazy!  But nothing much came of it.  A few quiet words from my father to my sister.  That was about it.  Probably the best way to handle it anyway.  But things between my father and sister could get a lot more acrimonious, and sometimes did.  Again I was caught on the outside trying to figure out what it all meant.

One evening the police were involved. 

Arguments between parents and kids, fathers and daughters, are so common they are the norm.  Less common is a fight that gets out of control.  I don’t know what started this one.  Mildred’s door was closed, my father was outside yelling at her.  She responded by opening the door and then slamming it shut.  

I tried to stay away from it.  I was in the living room, the TV on.  The next thing I knew my father was at the front door throwing some of my sister’s clothes into the yard.  Mildred picked up the phone in her room and started yelling for help.  In a few minutes there’s a cop car outside, it’s lights filling the living room with a flickering red and blue glow.  My father talked to the cops out in the front yard a few minutes, assured them this was just about a daughter losing her temper.  Then it’s quiet.  It’s all blown over.  The next morning everyone is talking normal again.

These situations, though brief and unusual, did reveal a certain residual undercurrent of unease in the house. It’s also true I was more sensitive to the the possibility of such an atmosphere than some other kids might have been. I was the kind of kid who anticipated problems, unpleasant situations, predicaments, difficulties.  You name it.  Not just at home, but at school, out with my friends.  The fact  those things I worried about rarely happened did little to change this mindset. I was more concerned about the possibility than the actuality. I wanted everything to be calm, normal, predictable.  This isn’t life in any way, shape or form.   Faulty coping mechanisms often make life situations worse rather than better. 

First comes love, then comes marriage, then something about baby carriages. But before any of that comes boyfriends.  I remember two of my sister’s boyfriends, including the one who became her husband.

Both were named Bobby.  The first Bobby may have been a good guy, decent and understanding and all that.  I don’t remember much about him.  He comes down to me over the years as “the one Mildred should have married.”  As opposed to the second Bobby whom she did marry.  

The second Bobby I do remember.  In good ways.  And not so good.

He met my sister through a cousin of mine.  My cousin went by the name of Little Tommy to distinguish him from his father, my uncle Thomas, my father’s older brother. Bobby and Little Tommy met when they both were working at Green Shoe in Boston.  (Green shoe later became Stride Rite which in turn became Payless.) 

Bobby would be over to the house to either pick up Mildred to go out or, occasionally, just to hang out with her. My father liked Bobby.  He was mechanically-inclined so they had things to talk about, cars in particular.  I remember getting gas at a station where Bobby worked for a while as a mechanic.  (The other thing I remember about that station was that gas was 19 cents a gallon! )

I was already writing my short stories about creatures and gunfights and crime, ideas that with my friend Gene became our plays, but, with him now living in Milton, I wrote the ideas down more as stories than scripts.  Once I was struggling with how to begin a particular story about a ship in a foggy harbor onto which a strange being climbs.  My initial work was clumsy.  Bob was in the kitchen, saw what I was doing, came over to give me a few pointers.  I couldn’t write as well as he did but it was the beginning of my understanding that every sentence did not have to be subject, verb, object.  I began to see the usefulness of modifiers, gerunds and participle phrases, that more complex sentence structure using a whole array of parts of speech could give my writing vigor, definition, and a distinctive flow. I was already learning about these things in school but it was Bob that day who applied it in a way I could appreciate.

Bob also liked to discuss movies.  My friends would call a movie “great” or “so cool” and that was the end of it.  Bob would talk about the characters’ motivations, the look of the movie, the mood of it.  My father was like that too.  I enjoyed hearing them talk about movies together.  After seeing Vertigo, Bob recommended it to my father.  He piqued my interest with a description of the spirals in the opening credits suggesting the vertigo the main character deals with throughout the film.  Later my family and I saw the film on a rainy summer’s night at the drive-in. It turned out to be one of my great movie-going experiences.

Another time Bob told me all about a movie he had seen when he was younger, The Thing, about a creature running amuck at a remote research station in the Arctic. Describing it to me I got a sense this was not just about people being chased but it was a film that had some depth to it. It added to my growing realization that even monster movies could have something to say.

There were aspects of Bob that I did not find illuminating or desired to emulate.  In particular the way he would treat my sister.  A man’s feelings of superiority over a woman, that there is some kind of biological imperative behind it, continues today but in the 50s many people considered these beliefs the norm.  A number of times I was told that a woman, or a girl, needs to know a man is the boss.  Worse than that, I was told a woman wants to be reminded of this, likes to be told what to do, even if it requires belittlement.  Bob mentioned this to me a number of times.  One day he clearly demonstrated what he meant.

A Saturday afternoon.  Bob and Mildred are in the front seat of his car; my younger brother and I are in the back.  We are driving from my house over to Mattapan to get some ice cream.  Not being that tuned in to the subtleties of such things, I didn’t know if Mildred and Bob were arguing in the front seat or was it just some animated banter. What got my attention was when the car came to an abrupt stop. Bob turned to Mildred, “Get out of the car then.” The next thing I knew Mildred was on the sidewalk and we were driving away.  I looked out the back window to see her getting smaller and smaller while Bob was telling me this was all part of some game, the battle of the sexes I guess, that couples play.  “Women want it, like it, expect it.”  Well, I didn’t like it, or expect it.  What I wanted was Mildred to be back in the car so we could get our ice cream. Also I was anxious that Bob might not go back for her.  How would she get home?  What kind of crazy game was this that couples played? And would I have to play it?

It wasn’t physical abuse. I never saw any of that; it was psychological abuse which over the long term can exact a toll.  I do know Bob used to tease my sister a lot.  There is fooling around, joking. Then there's hurtful teasing: taunting, provoking, mocking. At times it could seem playful.  Other times it was mean-spirited.  Bob would mention to me once in a while how much Mildred “aggravated me.”  I always thought, then why are you marrying her? 

Eventually Bob returned for my sister who got back in the car seemingly none the worse for an experience I might have called humiliating if I knew that word at age eleven. I put it out of my mind.  It was their business.  The complexities of adult relationships would bewilder me for years because of situations I observed but never understood between my parents, between Mildred and Bob, and between other adults.  Kids might not have the skills and maturity to correctly interpret what is going on in their lives but they are always watching and listening.

Although she was my older sister, Mildred was less connected to me than my mother. As Mildred’s wedding approached, it was my mother’s situation which affected me the most.

A wedding is stressful enough for the bride and groom and for the mother of the bride as well. It could be my mother was glad Mildred was going to be out of the house.  But at the same time this was her first child, her little girl.  There’d be many feelings swirling about: happiness, pride, regret, sadness.  Mixed all together,  I’m not sure what you get.  What you don’t need is another conflict, especially one about core religious beliefs.  But that’s what my mother had.

This religious schism that wedding year, 1957, was a major contributor to my apprehension.  The issue involved which church Mildred would be married in, the Catholic church or a local Protestant church.  I’m not sure if it mattered all that much to my mother.  She, after all, had married a man who was not religious.  But it did matter to my mother’s family, all Irish-Catholic.  This religious clash in Boston between the Catholics and the Protestants had been going on for hundreds of years.  It caused a rift in my family that was never appropriately explained to me. My overreaction to what I thought was supposed to be a happy occasion, a celebratory transition, turned into something unpleasant, unknowable and a potential situation that I worried might  separate my parents and leave me poor and alone.  This was not the most sophisticated of thinking but then all this was swirling around our house when I was only twelve years-old.

My mother’s parents’ Catholic faith came with all the tenets, convictions, doctrine, piety and prejudices of any strongly held religious belief. My father’s family was not religious but favored Protestantism over Catholicism.  My father called himself an atheist.  He had little sympathy for the Catholic church which had caused divisions in his own family. There had been a court case in his family centered on which religion an adopted child would be raised.  Such religious discord had long term ramifications in which the families of the parties involved would break off all ties with each other.  The animosity could last for generations.

These old conflicts revealed themselves anew when Bob and Mildred announced they would marry in the Congregational Church on Webster Street down to Cleary Square in Hyde Park. My mother’s parents told my mother if Mildred was married in the Protestant church then they would not attend. Mildred could have used the tolerance of her other set of grandparents, my father's mother and father. I think they would have enjoyed going to the wedding of their grand daughter.  But they never did.  They passed away before Mildred even met her husband-to-be. My grandmother died in November of 1953; my grandfather in April of 1955.  On her wedding day Mildred missed them the most.

My mother’s parents insisted their Catholic faith gave them strength and purpose. It was a core belief.  If the priest of your parish says it's a mortal sin to be married in a religion other than the Catholic one, then that is all there is to it.  In a similar situation years before, it was my mother who announced she was planning to marry someone who was not Catholic, my father. I doubt if my mother’s family took this very well but there was far less vitriol associated with my parents’ wedding than my sister’s. My father won over his future in-laws. They liked him. But there were stipulations. My father had to sign documents when he married that he would bring his children up as Catholics. Mildred was baptized at the St. Mary of the Angels church in Roxbury.   But, brought up Catholic or not, Mildred and Bob would not relent.  Their relationship was to be formalized at the Congregational Church. That is when my mother’s family dug in their heels.  There was talk of Mildred being ex-communicated.  The whole thing became very contentious.  This is what my mother had to deal with. It began to effect her mental health.

I remember times before the wedding, and after, when my mother would not get dressed, when all she wore was some old bathrobe.  She would walk slowly as if she had a great weight upon her.  She was depressed, would cry easily.  The energy I associated with her was diminished.  She got by, still kept the house, made us breakfasts before school, but it required a lot of effort.

My father told me she had had a nervous breakdown.  Then, in the same sentence, would tell me it’s nothing I should worry about. Sometimes he would talk about “the change”.  I really did not know what that meant but maybe it was okay if, as he said, “all women go through this.” I tried to take him at his word but this was all in front of me.  I was seeing and I was listening.  It was a difficult summer for everyone.

I always considered it to be a miracle how wonderful their wedding day turned out.  Animosities were turned aside.  Although my mother’s family did not attend the church service they all came to the reception at our house.  (A part of some previously worked out compromise?)  Saturday, June 1, 1957. My brother Lawrence and I anticipated it with much excitement.  He and I began to make plans.

Just about every part of our house would be a venue to celebrate the marriage of my sister. The kitchen and living room, the cellar room, the backyard. There’d be people everywhere. I never imagined such a party.  There would be lots of people, lots of food, lots of social interactions.  For me most of that would be along the lines of “So Billy, how is school?” Adults didn’t give me too much recognition.

What my brother and I wanted to do was to maneuver easily from place to place; the kitchen for food, the cellar room to keep on eye on what was going on down there, the back yard where a lot of people would be sitting, eating and drinking. We decided we needed a place to rendezvous. After some deliberation it was decided that every half hour we would meet by the door in the cellar that led out to the back yard.  No one else would be there and we felt it was the best place to offer us a few minutes to inform the other what was going on, where we should go next, and how not to miss anything.  As I said, we were excited.

The person taking the wedding pictures was someone my father worked with, George DeLisle.  He had a side business doing wedding photography.  I haven’t seen the pictures he took that day in many years but I remember those black and white images as being precise, relevant and professional.  He used some of the same standard tricks that wedding photographers use today, like a reflection of my sister in the mirror trying on her wedding veil or her bridesmaids all surrounding her helping her get ready.  There were the formal pictures as well, at the church, group pictures in our yard of the wedding party and wedding guests.

At times remembering back to that day my memory skips over moments.  I can not for the life of me remember being in the church when Mildred was married but I am told not only was I there along with my brothers but in a new suit my mother bought for me just for this occasion.  Maybe the circumstances regarding Mildred being married in that particular church disrupted my memory of it.

Two things I do remember about the reception were smoke and alcohol.

What little I knew about alcohol was negative.  In my school health book there were drawings of a shady character named Al K. Hall hanging out with an equally disreputable guy named Nick O. Teen.  They’re standing on a corner under a street light swathed in smoke.  Very film noir. Littered about them are bottles of alcohol and cigarette butts.  They both looked the worse for wear.  My father smoked; my parents drank as did many of my relatives. On that June Saturday, the house was full of cigarette smoke and there were glasses everywhere. The drinking going on, the smoking, was part of what adults did at a party.  I never pictured my father or an uncle standing under that street light.  As it turned out, some of them would have felt very much at home there.  But those are stories for another time.

My Uncle Eddy, another of my father’s brothers, was bartender. In the days before the reception my father stocked the bar in the cellar room with ice and mixers and bottles of beer and rum and vermouth.  Uncle Eddy had done bartending so he was more than competent to run a professional show.  Back behind that bar, talking and joking with everyone, he reminded me of the classic Jackie Gleason character, Joe the Bartender: good-natured, gregarious, committed to every one having a good time. The reception is in full swing.

It is mid afternoon on this lovely sunny day.  I am making my rounds before meeting up with Lawrence at our prearranged spot. The house may have started off neat before we went down to the church but now there are plates of food in the living room, empty glasses on the shelf above the fireplace, and someone has put the television on to the ball game. 

In the kitchen I take a swig of the Tom Collins mixer that has been left out on the counter.  No ice.  I want  that sweet grapefruit taste straight!  As I stand with the glass in my hand, I look out the kitchen window.  I’ve never seen so many people in the back yard.  Some sitting, others in groups, most of them are holding glasses too.

I take the stairs two at a time up to my attic bedroom just to lie on the bed a few moments. It’s not an ordinary Saturday.  My room seems charged with the uniqueness of it. I close my eyes, give myself over to the party swirling around me. Both windows are open. The people in the backyard sound like they are in the driveway, their voices echoing off the side of our neighbor’s house. I try to distinguish a familiar voice.  Is that Aunt Doris talking loudly?  That deep voice.  An uncle?  I hear someone going up the back stairs to the kitchen. The refrigerator door opens.  There is the sound of an ice cube tray cracking into a bowl.  Someone’s talking in the living room, their conversation suddenly punctuated with laughter.  I jump up.  I might be missing something.

The cellar room is crowded.  A couple of people sit on stools by the bar. My uncle the bartender is reaching for a glass.  I walk over.  He tells me he’s making someone a martini. He’s just made someone else a highball. “Whisky and ginger ale,” he says. Music is playing. A few people start to dance.

Out in the backyard I talk for a few moments with some relative.  A younger cousin wants me to play with him.  “I’m bored,” he says.  Our neighbors, Andy and his wife, stand nearby having a drink. It looks like Andy has been working; he’s a contractor.  He’s wearing dungarees.  

It’s been more than an hour since I’ve talked with Lawrence.  He’s over by the bulkhead which leads to the cellar.  I fill him on on what I’ve been doing.  He tells me there is cake that’s going to be cut soon.  “Mr. DeLisle will be taking more pictures,” he says. What a great day.

My father has a double 8 camera for home movies.  Late in the afternoon Mildred and Bob, dressed now in more comfortable clothes, announce they are getting ready to go.  Their car is parked under the large maple trees on the street in front of our house. People begin to gather in our small front yard to wish the new couple happiness and blessings.  

The film starts.  It’s silent but that makes these images even more poignant. There is Mildred, laughing, talking with people.  Bob is by the car shaking a hand, nodding.  My father appears.  He’s handed the camera off to someone else.  Lawrence flits through.  There I am.  My mother walks over to Mildred.  They talk together for a moment. Words of wisdom. Words of advice. Her daughter is married now.

My uncles and aunts look so young. Because they are. My sister and her friends were in high school just a little while ago. I am still very much the nervous naive kid. The sun splashes through the lush, green trees creating sparks of white light amidst the deep shade. Mildred and Bob are in the car. They begin to drive off. 

That was a long time ago.  We never had quite the party again. I claimed the cellar room as my own. Other members of my family rarely used it.  Sometimes my father would play his records down there. For years, right through high school, I did my homework sitting at that bar, the room quiet and empty.  On a nearby shelf was a bottle of vermouth, Martini and Rossi, bought for the wedding, never opened. It sat up on that shelf for years, a reminder of that special Saturday, the day my sister Mildred got married.

There’s more to this story. The years pass. Mildred has two children. She’s been living in Connecticut. I am living now in the western part of the state.  I hear things about Mildred that are disturbing. She begins to lose some of her grip on reality.  There are voices speaking to her. A malaise descends upon my sister, a condition she could not shake. She moves to Wayland in eastern Massachusetts where her children grow up. She and Bob are not living happily. Mildred is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. In time she is living by herself in Framingham in subsidized housing. Her bright future is now a thing of the past.

Not too long before she died I visit her in Framingham. She is overweight, her hands making fists as we talk, both effects of her medication. It’s a day in spring. I am sitting with her on a bench in a little park just a short distance from where she lives. The flowers are in bloom lining the sidewalks. Nearby, my daughter and my wife walk along the pathway, my daughter stopping to smell a flower or walk over to a tree.

Mildred and I just sit and talk. She is telling me she enjoys walking.  “It’s relaxing and good exercise,” I respond. I tell her she should try to cut down the number of cigarettes she smokes.  She laughs.  “I really should.” Then lights up another one, the smoke drifting in soft ringlets above our heads.  I ask her what high school was like or about her job as a phone operator at the Bank of Boston or what she remembered of me when I was a baby. She enjoys talking about her life when she was a teenager, back in her time, in the 50s.

Then, before we leave, I give her some money and a hug and kiss on the cheek. She says, “Bye, Billy. I love you.” And she’d walk back to her apartment, sometimes over to the movies to meet someone who lived nearby. She continued trying to adjust to the world in which she now lived.

I am sad at how my sister’s life turned out.  Here was the girl who took care of me as a baby.  Here she is as a teenager standing on the pier at the camp in Wrentham, a wide smile for my father’s camera. Here is the woman leaving for work, often late, from the house on Prospect Street.  Here she is on the edge of the future at her wedding. And here she is in a world of shadows.  And no matter how much everyone tries, she stays lost for the rest of her life. 

And now it’s now. I’m thinking about my sister.  On my computer one day I find the 1952 Jamaica Plain High School yearbook.  It’s the year Mildred graduated.  I’ve never seen it before. As I look through it’s pages I realize these are the teachers she knew, the halls she walked through, the classes she sat in. These are the kids she talked with, took classes with, her acquaintances, her friends. It’s dated.  The clothes, the hairstyles, even the shoes.  But these are real people. This was one of Mildred’s worlds that growing up I was unaware of. One of many.

On one page there is a large outline of the number 52. Written inside the numerals  are the signatures of the seniors who graduated that year.  I imagine an announcement from the yearbook staff that a large poster would be hung in the cafeteria and that all seniors should sign it in the next few days.  I look closely. There in a corner is Mildred’s signature.  Just above her name is the signature of  Mildred’s friend, Marilyn, who would be one of her bridesmaids.  I like to think about both of them walking down to the cafeteria late one morning to sign their names, Marilyn first and then Mildred. They got a good spot, easily noticeable amidst all the other names. They step back.  Seniors in high school. They laugh.  It’s time for lunch.

I begin to scan through the pages looking for Mildred’s yearbook picture.  Along with names and addresses, activities and ambitions, the little blurb above each graduate’s picture also includes a nickname in quotes.  There’s a “Johnnie” and a “Barbs”. Someone who liked to be called “Bunny”. There’s a “Buzzy” and even a girl nicknamed “Mustard”. 

Then I find it, that most recognizable face.  My sister.  She is relaxed and smiling. It’s a good picture of her. I look more closely.  There is a nickname.  It takes me a moment to figure it out. Then I realize.  I am looking at two people. The sister I know, Mildred.  And the other girl.  The one I never got a chance to know.  Her nickname is in quotes.  “Mil.”

I look for a long moment before signing off. 

I sit.  Close my eyes.  I realize something. The Mildred I know is also the Mildred I never knew. 

Goodbye, Mildred.  Goodbye, Mil.  Together you are my sister.