Coming to Terms: A Writing Lesson

It is a family joke that we were so poor that I was born in humbler circumstances than Christ -- in the back yard of a stable rather than the stable itself. Irish on both sides -- my mother was from Donegal, and both my father’s parents were originally from Cork and both named Sullivan. Poverty in Ireland had forced both Sullivan families to relocate to Wales to find work in the mines. There, according to romantic family legend, my grandfather fell in love with my grandmother when he heard her singing in the choir of the Catholic Church they both attended. Even before catching a glimpse of this young woman whose sweet and lovely voice had moved him as he had never been moved before he vowed to seek out and marry her. After their marriage, they came to Forest City, Pennsylvania where my grandfather continued to work in the mines and where my father was born, and even as a boy, in turn, became a miner.

Much more to the point at the time of my birth -- despite my own thoroughly Irish background -- I had an equally thoroughly Jewish uncle, Alex Spitz. His wife, my father’s sister Kate, a small, darkly pretty, very Irish type with a great reputation for dependence and incompetence, had established her poor judgment irrefutably by marrying this stout little bald man, who, most irredeemably, was a Jew. My aunt insisted that as a young man he had been slim and handsome, a professional figure skater, but by the time I first glimpsed his rotund form clad in a vested charcoal-gray suit, he had become the constant butt of family jokes during and following each visit to what he described to his Manhattan neighbors as his Long Island estate. This boast he substantiated by lugging back to New York on the Long Island Railroad bright bouquets of fresh-cut flowers shamelessly mooched from our generous Polish neighbors,

Indeed, Uncle Alex had at the beginning of the depression purchased from a disreputable, Lakeview, Long Island builder named Raphold -- endearingly rechristened "Rathole" by our family -- a large drafty house that with its long sagging front porch and general shabbiness looked run down even before it was completed. In the rear of this structure was a tiny building called the bungalow included in the sale with the builder holding the mortgage on the entire property, which eventually he repossessed as he did most of the houses he had built in Lakeview. Into this waterless, heatless bungalow, when she was seven months pregnant with me, her fourth son and seventh child -- one boy had died of pneumonia at thirteen months and was thereafter always referred to as Saint Alphonsus -- my mother moved on a cold and rainy April afternnoon in 1929. In this bungalow I was born on June 4, 1929, attended by saintly Doctor Dooling who for years afterward took care of all our illnesses and many other problems without ever charging a cent. Since for a while after my birth my survival was questionable, I was baptized three times, first by a neighbor, Mrs. O’Neill, then by Dr. Dooling and finally, when I was sufficiently strong, more formally by Father Himmelracher, the pastor of our Lady of lourdes Church in Malverne, where we became regular parishioners.

The depression had caused the insurance business to fold, and my father, after losing his job and our home in Philadelphia, had to seek new shelter for his large and very young family. So it was Uncle Alex to the rescue, allowing our family to live in his bungalow while our father took a job as an elevator operator in New York City. This work the police, for his safety, advised him to give up when a mobster was gunned down before his eyes in a much publicized gangland slaying. For a short time, then, my father ran unsuccessfully a combination luncheonette/ ice cream parlor, a venture that failed because of the depression and because of my father’s tendency to give away his delicious treats to children without money. After the failure of the store, he held a succession of canvassing and sales jobs hawking everything from laundry services to old gold.

The only clear victory that I recall -- literally almost a knockout -- was that scored by Juano Hernandez of "Cabin in the Cotton" fame, against the shifty developer, Raphold. When the black entertainer purchased a home on the corner of Wadleigh Avenue, the builder collected a petition and attempted to intimidate him from actually occupying the premises. Raphold, accompanied by a band of young ruffians, mounted the front stoop to deliver his ultimatum to the comfortable black celebrity; Juano then lashed out, caught his tormentor squarely on the chin and sent him sprawling to the walk below. Within months, the actor/entertainer had completely won over the neighborhood and even had a number of his former persecutors, the same depression-idle youths who had tried to force him out of the neighborhood, working on projects to improve his home and property. As a result, a child about my own age, his daughter Palmy was one of my regular and no doubt wealthiest playmates.

In later years, I always wondered how much of my picture of my Uncle Alex as a figure of fun was accurate and deserved and how much was blatantly prejudiced and prompted by the envy that sprang from having to accept his charity. At any rate, I recall vividly how we would all imitate his "clumsy Jewish" efforts to plant shrubs and flowers, since his digging method was to hop his rotund form, both feet beneath him, onto a spade in the hope, frequently unrealized, that it would penetrate the earth. Because of our father’s love of music -- he played the piano and sang constantly -- the entire family felt exceedingly talented musically by inheritance and infallible music critics also by inheritance. We, therefore, mocked with gleeful derision Uncle Alex’s own piano playing to which he unfailingly treated us. Of course, just as our great love of and talent for music was by inheritance, coming from my father, who in turn had taken it from his father, our tendency towards prejudice might also have sprung from my grandfather, who, when he referred to his two sons-in-law named Spitz and Swartz, complained that other men had acquired sons-in-law; whereas, all he got were "sh**s and farts."