Returning to the Scene of the Crimes

It’s been more than 50 years since I last stood in front of the semi attached house in the East Bronx. I stand in front of my car parked across the narrow street, which is dotted with one family homes, many having “mother-daughter” ground floor apartments. The community remains solidly lower-middle class.

I try to conjure up some good memories, but it’s a struggle: there were the summers spent playing a variety of board games; the massive comic book collection; the excitement of opening packs of baseball cards; the first crush; the triumphs of our softball team. Then there was the excitement of petty pilfering. Somehow we all felt we were completely justified in sneaking into partly constructed residential houses and removing the hanging closet rods for use as stickball bats; or sneaking into FREEDOMLAND, the local amusement park; or our most storied “accomplishment”, walking out of a hardware store in broad daylight with a 25 foot aluminum ladder.

All things considered, a meager list of positives from one childhood.

Looking up at the porch, no longer enclosed, and what had been a small front garden area now paved over, my memories were dominated by other events. My eight-year-old self, coming home from school to find my father at the doorway. My mother had been sick and had given birth to my brother just two months earlier, but I was too young to realize how serious her condition was. My father wasn’t usually home at this time. He had clearly come from work wearing his taxi driver “uniform” of a white, short-sleeved, button-down shirt and gray chinos. From the sharp angle of the stairs, he looked even bigger, his broad form filling out the doorway to the enclosed porch. But somehow, he seemed weaker. His customary slumping shoulders were even more pronounced, turning his body into a human question mark.  I thought I heard people crying from inside the house. My stomach hurt. My heart was beating faster. My father never expressed emotion very easily. And truth be told, I can’t remember what he said. But his inability to look at me, his uncharacteristic sadness and halting speech, combined with the plaintive sounds coming from our living room, told me the news without him saying anything. 

My mother had died. 

My grandmother came to live with us for a while, then two years later we had a new person living with us. Edith was her name. The cliché of the wicked stepmother. Edith never hit us--she didn’t want to break a nail-- so instead, when she was upset, she would throw stuff at us. Anything that was handy. If we didn’t respond to a demand immediately, something was going to fly in our direction.  

I have this distinct memory of a wooden box about 12 inches long and four inches deep and wide that held a block of cream cheese. I can still see the Breakstone’s logo coming towards my head and hear the wood crack against the kitchen wall. There was something in that noise that was frightening. The sound of the potential damage went right through me as if the box hit me directly. I stayed crouched down as my heart raced, wondering if I could make it to the door unscathed. I decided to zig zag as quickly as I could, emulating the cowboys I saw in westerns when they were trapped. For a moment, I had the impulse to laugh the way we did as kids when in fun, one of us threw a ball at each other from a short distance and missed. That instinct lasted a nanosecond because I instantly recognized that reaction would simply provoke more flying projectiles. I was grateful that the box was empty and grateful that it missed me. I could not begin to tell you what precipitated that particular assault. They all seemed to run together. 

Other punishments included being locked out of the house to spend the night outside if we were not inside at the specified time. My sister Renee and I colluded in letting each other in. The irony is that neither of us was in any hurry to come into the house. For us, it represented the worst part of our lives. A place that was uncaring, unloving, and sprinkled with torment. But at some level we knew we needed a place to sleep and that eventually we’d have to come in.  

We could see the sequence of events take place on our block every night: Vito’s, the corner grocery where we would fuel up on Nedick’s orange soda and Devil Dogs would close for the night. Our evening game of hide and seek would end and concerned parents would summon their children in for the night by yelling from their windows. Eventually the only sound on the block, would come from portable televisions on the porches of some of the old men watching Yankee games.  

 The first time we engaged in sneaking each other in was an October night. The weather was comfortable until after about ten, when it started turning noticeably cooler. After the last of my friends was summoned by their mothers, I was alone and had no choice but to turn toward the misery of home. 

It never occurred to me that Edith would make good on her threat of locking us out if we didn’t come in at the assigned time, but sure enough, the large wooden door behind the open screen door was securely bolted, and no amount of knocking was going to get her to unlock it. If she even deigned to open the door, what followed would be a torrent of emotional and physical abuse. 

My solution to this dilemma was to wait until Edith’s bedroom light went out and walk around the side of the house to where Renee’s bedroom was. I proceeded to fling pebbles at her window until she woke up and went to see where the sound was coming from. She opened the window and saw me. 

“You scared me” she said, instinctively knowing she had to whisper. 

“Open the door”, I said to her, “it’s locked.”.  

“She’ll kill me”, Renee pleaded. 

“C’mon, just do it. She’s asleep.” 

“I can’t.” she replied in a tortured voice 

“If she says anything, tell her I made you.”  

I had no idea how much weight that excuse would carry, but I did not want to spend the night on the street. 

“OK.” 

Apparently being able to blame her brother was the ticket. Renee crept down the hallway as quietly as she could and quietly turned the knob that opened the front door. She scooted back to her room as fast as she could to avoid being discovered as an accomplice. I tiptoed into my room without waking my sleeping brother. Even in the dark, I was able to squeeze between the foot of the beds and the wooden chest of drawers. My bed was next to the front window which was directly on the other side of an enclosed porch. It was ironic that moments before, I was trapped on the other side of that window just inches from where I slept. At the time, it completely escaped me that the room I was so desperately trying to get into was the one where my mother lay dying in the last days of her life.  

My father, beaten down from a 12-hour night shift, would accept Edith’s version of any of our behaviors so we knew there would be discipline the next day.  

The next morning, rather than bolt out of the house as usual, I sat on my bed fully dressed and waited for my Father to get home. My reasoning was that with me having to go to school, whatever wrath that would come my way would be short-lived. I heard the screen door and then the front door open and close. I heard Edith greeting my Father from the dining room, which was close to my room. I wanted to hear what Edith was telling him, but part of me didn’t because I couldn’t refute the fact that I was late coming home. Their conversation was muffled by the bedroom door. As usual, my Father didn’t have much to say. Finally, I girded myself for some yelling and came out of the bedroom, acting like nothing unusual had taken place. I barely looked at them, saying “Late, gotta go” and, feigning a casual departure, left the house. When I got home that afternoon, Edith said nothing about what she had said to my father, or of his reaction. 

Emboldened, my sister and I took turns being each other’s reverse jailer, both of us mastering the trick of leaving the window from the porch to my bedroom open so we could squeeze in without running the risk of being detected when opening the front door. This lasted a year or so until Edith started forgetting to lock the door, or far more likely, stopped caring where we were. 

This family disfunction overwhelmed my other remembrances, but staring at our old house the bad memories multiplied: our teenage neighbor, shot and killed by accident; my father, waiting until my brother was ten years old before telling him that Edith was not his birth mother; the unthinking anti-semitism I experienced as a teenager.

I kept looking at the house unable to extricate myself from memories which clearly left scar tissue. I looked up and down the block and did not see another person on the street. For some reason this pleased me-as if by experiencing this scene with no living humans in it, I could assign it to the past and it could stay there-in my mind, or not,-for better or worse.