Doris Lane

Whenever I think about it, I am brought straight back to the Easter of 1932. I grow numb all over, cold all over, thinking about the boys. It was hard on the girls, too, my two sisters, but they were saved. Those poor boys and the poor Lindbergh Baby and the 21,000 suicides and Annabel Lee, come all together as a memory piece in the dark of night.

A song accompanies the memory when it comes, a song my father used to sing when I was a girl. I’ve learned to accept the memory when it comes, to put my head back against the pillow and let it replay itself until it plays out, is finished, over with, until the next time.

I go back and they are calling this time the “Great Depression.” The bridge to Jersey is just finished building in 1932. Mama used to sit at the front window watching that bridge go up. She’d sigh and say, “I will never see that bridge finished.”

And she didn’t.

In her last year, there were only the huge concrete stanchions lined up all in a row, along our street, down the long hill to the Kill Van Kull, stopping at the edge of the water, and starting again in Bayonne, New Jersey. The stanchions with no bridge on top of them, just the empty space of sky, looked like a string of giant legs, she’d say. Having lost their bodies, they seemed to stride purposefully along their merry way. If I could have one wish, it would be that Mama lived to see the bridge finished building.

It is a beautiful bridge with the perfect shape of a rainbow. Whenever I can get away I like to walk out on that bridge to the middle of the span, and look down. It is always a free, happy moment just then, being high up there in the atmosphere, looking down at life on earth. There aren’t that many cars in the world yet to make a disturbance and nobody can buy gasoline to run the ones that are here. The bridge can be quiet and perfectly empty for long stretches of time. I think myself alone at the top of the world. I wish my Mama could have come up with me just once.

Pop was a good provider as long as Mama lived. He had his drinks, but never missed a day’s work. Mama would hear him singing his way home along the quarry path on his regular shortcut from the tavern. She’d get up out of bed dressed in her white gown, her long hair streaming to the backs of her knees. She’d open the back door and help him into the house. She’d sit him down in a straight-backed chair near the coal stove. She’d get down on her knees and take his shoes off for him. She’d rub his feet. He’d sing louder and louder. My Mama’s name was Annabel Lee and so is mine. There was a poem he’d set to music in his mind and that’s what he would sing.

It was many and many a year ago
In a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee

She’d murmur, “Shhhh, Vail, you will wake the children.”

He’d sing louder, “By the na-ame of Anna-bel Leeeeee!”

But once Mama was gone, well, we were five kids under thirteen, with me the oldest, and Freddie still an infant. Elizabeth was seven and Mary only six. Buddy was four, but he seemed to grow up the quickest. I was taken out of school right away. At first I listened in the night for him to come home singing, my father. I thought I would get up out of bed and take his shoes off for him.

He just never seemed to come home, not while I was awake. He’d be there in the morning, heading out to work, as I was getting the kids dressed. The government gave him work in road building. They even picked him up with a gang of other men and took him out to the other side of the Island. I wish that work had lasted longer than two years, even if it didn’t stop him drinking.

I thought he didn’t come home at night, but then one cold day Mrs. Harper came downstairs. She said, “Annabel Lee, you’ve got to get your father inside to sleep now. It’s getting cold for the porch and he could freeze to death out there this winter.”

“The porch?”

That night I stayed awake until I heard him stumble up the back steps. He fell heavily onto the floorboards. I thought he might be hurt, but when I opened the back door, he was curled up, snoring softly. I was wearing one of the white gowns I had inherited from my mother. I loved sleeping in them. I believed they still smelled like her after no matter how many washings and bluings. My hair was as long and dark as hers had been. It fell to the backs of my knees. I stooped and started pulling off one of his shoes. He woke all groggy and started singing.

I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea
But we loved with a love that was more than love
I and my-

He broke off the song and said harshly, “Girlie, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He jumped up fast as if he were sober. He smacked me hard enough to send me flying backward onto the porch floor. The back of my head slammed down on the set stone border at the top of the steps. I was stunned, by the smack, by the fall, by the concussive sound of my head hitting hard stone. I had never in my life been hit. He stood over me and pulled off his belt. He was snarling and breathing hard, as would any wild animal. He reared back, holding the strap as a whip, and I could feel it coming at me. I shut my eyes tight, but it didn’t come, the lash.

When I opened my eyes, Mrs. Harper had his arm twisted around his back and my father was all bent over. She was a powerfully built woman. She held his bent up arm with one hand. She used her other hand to smack him in the back of the head, as she walked him into the house.

“Vail Porter,” she was saying, “you are one disgrace. What would your good woman think looking down from Heaven and see you set to beat her child?”

When Mrs. Harper came back outside, she picked me up off the floor and carried me in to bed. My two sisters were pretending to be asleep, I could tell. Buddy, five years old, was holding the baby, who was a year old now and crying. I saw Buddy’s own eyes filling up, so I went and took the baby from him. I could hear Mrs. Harper in my father’s bedroom telling him to go to sleep or she would knock him into the middle of next week.

And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me

“You ain’t the first man to lose a wife, Vail Porter,” Mrs. Harper told him with good sense. “You got her children to raise.”

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me

“You don’t watch they will take those kids away from you.”

But we loved with a love that was more than love
I and my-

“Did you hear what I just said to you, Vail?”

He snarled at her, “Growing up in an institution didn’t hurt me.”

“Yeah, you’re a fine specimen,” Mrs. Harper told him as she was leaving.

I am working for the doctor’s wife already in 1932, cleaning for her. She has a big house on Westervelt Avenue. I never saw such big houses to keep clean. Big lawns to be cut, many, many windows to be washed, a multitude of repairing chores, but some of the big old houses are running down. Plenty of people to do the work, but few are paying them to do it. There are a number of For Sale signs on houses in this nice neighborhood. There are 21,000 suicides across the country in 1932. One of them lived next door to the doctor and his wife and now the family’s gone away.

I am very lucky the doctor’s wife has taken me on. It’s a shame that people have to get sick for it, but we are feeding the kids on my earnings now. Pop doesn’t know how the rent will be paid, but the kids are eating. Buddy and Freddie have a job, too. They walk along the railroad tracks every day and gather bits of coal that drop down from the trains to the railroad ties. The weather is warmer, but not so warm that we can go without heat, and we still need the coal for cooking.

Freddie is not even two years old. I worry myself sick a railroad train may hit him. I worry that Buddy at age six has such responsibility, too. The girls are in school all day, so I know they are safe. Buddy will be in school this fall, I just realize, and what will happen to Freddie then? He can’t do coal-gathering alone. It will be cold weather. I am just 14, myself. What…? I can’t think about it now; the doctor’s wife has been talking and I don’t know what she has said.

I never knew a Jewish person before I went to work for the doctor’s wife. I like Jewish people. They help each other and believe in education. The doctor’s wife was sorry I had left school when Mama died. She guessed there was no choice, though, with four littler kids to care for.

She stopped there, a little confused, I guess. What was I doing cleaning for her when Pop took me out of school to raise the kids?

I don’t like to say they found Pop drunk asleep in the boiler room at his new job at the factory and fired him on the spot. I don’t mind he put me out to work, either. I am happy to be cleaning for the doctor’s wife. I get on the trolley where life is gray and sad and get off where it is green and happy, except for the suicide next door; one of many suicides next door that year.

I wish her a Happy Easter as I leave and she smiles kindly.

She must think me an ignorant girl, and I am in 1932, but I would soon enough learn.

As I walk up the hill from the trolley stop the height of the new bridge is like a silvery mountain in Switzerland only sensed from the corner of my eye. Coming to the top of the hill and over the train trestle, I hear men from a railroad crew calling, “Hey, Lindy! Lindy of the Tracks!”

I know they are calling to Freddie. He is the most beautiful two-year-old boy with bright blue eyes and soft pale curls I wave around my fingers. Everybody loves Freddie. He is a joyful child, plump and delicious. I know, because I softly bite his legs and he laughs and laughs.

He’s become something of a pet to the railroad men and everybody else. People call him “Lindy of the Tracks,” because he looks like the missing Lindbergh Baby. The baby’s father is known as “Lucky Lindy.” He flew his plane across the Atlantic Ocean and was lucky enough to reach the other side.

Charles Lindbergh was not lucky a couple of months ago, when somebody took his child in his pajamas from his own crib. There is a nationwide manhunt going on for the kidnappers and to find the baby. I read in the paper the other day a description of the baby: 20 months old, curly hair, fair skin, 30 pounds, 29 inches tall. In other words, he looks like Freddie. If the Lindbergh baby wasn’t safe in his own crib, not ever in his short life out gathering coal, what hope is there for Lindy of the Tracks?

“Freddie, come up here now,” I shout with panic in my throat.

Buddy looks up startled at the sound of my voice. He is such a serious child and almost never smiles. He takes Freddie and lifts him up to the platform before hoisting himself up after. He takes Freddie carefully by the hand and they start up the steep stairway. It is difficult for Buddy with the heavy pail of coal in the other hand, so I go down to meet them and take the pail. I almost ask Buddy where Pop is, but I know he won’t answer. He will just turn away from me. There is no sense to the question, anyway.

Pop has never hit me after the night Mrs. Harper came downstairs. We both act like it never happened. If he was too drunk to remember, it’s all to the good. I don’t want him ever to know that I remember. Some things are better left unsaid, as my Mama used to say. But he’s gotten to drinking in the daytime now that he finds no work to be had anywhere. My aunts sometimes take the girls to stay. They say our house is no fit place for them. They would take me, too, but that would mean taking the boys, and it’s just too many with their own children. Besides, I won’t leave him. How could I ever face my mother?

There are black cars parked along our street, three of them. They call them Black Mariahs. Not many people have cars on our street. It’s less unusual to see horse drawn wagons in 1932. Pop used to be a drover, but he lost the horses the first year of the Great Depression. Our front door is ajar. We don’t ever use the front door. Buddy is holding back, as if he senses something. Freddie is tired and pulls at Buddy’s hand to go around the side to the back door, as usual. A man steps out. He is wearing a suit and a Fedora.

“You the Parker kids?”

For a moment, I think we are spared, a case of mistaken identity.

“No, we are not,” I say. “We’re the Porters.”

He doesn’t give us time to say more before he hustles us in through the door. There are more men inside my Mama’s small parlor and a woman. She, too, is dressed in a suit, but with a skirt, and a Fedora. For a moment I just stare. But then I recognize her; she is from the County. She visits homes to inspect the lives of children. Someone, we think, Auntie, reported our family to the County once. I remember I sent the kids upstairs quick to Mrs. Harper. I told the woman to come back when my father was home. Is she here to take us for the County? But these men, so many of them crowded into my Mama’s parlor.

“It’s a mistake,” I say. “We are the Porters.”

Suddenly everyone starts moving. Mrs. Harper is there and she says she will take the boys upstairs. But the County woman picks up Freddie. He smiles and gives her a kiss. He takes her hat off and puts it on his own head. Buddy is fighting Mrs. Harper and saying he won’t go, he won’t leave his brother and sister. Elizabeth and Mary come home from school just then. Frightened by the crowded room, they start crying. Two of the men are helping Mrs. Harper hustle the kids out, when another man steps forward.

He says, “Girlie,” not my nickname, but how adults addressed girls in those days, “where’s your father?”

Mrs. Harper looks around and I can tell she hasn’t said that he is up the street at the Bridge Tavern. Not that it helped for either of us to hold our tongue. They found him easily enough. He was drunk, of course, and they all but carried him home. Freddie is tired of being on the strange woman’s lap and he begins reaching for me. I go to take him, but they stop me. They tell me to go upstairs, but Freddie becomes so upset, they change their minds, and have me sit in the parlor. The men take Pop into the kitchen and leave me with the County woman and Freddie, who is soon asleep.

I hear rapid-fire questions coming from the kitchen. I can’t make out what they are saying. The woman has turned on the radio set. But I can still hear some. They have started hitting him. I jump up and run screaming into the kitchen, “Leave my father alone!”

One of the men grabs me and turns me back to the parlor. Just then the front door opens and two new men arrive. One of them is wearing a brown leather jacket. There are goggles hanging loose around his thin neck. He has blond wavy hair and blue eyes. I recognize his face, partly from the newspaper photographs, but mostly from the deep cut lines etched into it by grief and worry.

“It’s not him,” the man in the leather jacket says, Lucky Lindy, says, “It’s not my boy.”

One minute the house is brim full of strangers and the next they are gone. Freddie is safely asleep curled up on the chair cushion where the County woman has left him. He is breathing softly and sweetly and I can hear every breath in the quiet of the house. The hush goes on and on, until I hear my father stir in the straight-backed chair he is still tied to. I hear him murmur softly. I hear him sing so tenderly.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee

I untie him and apply ice to his bruised face. I stoop down and remove his shoes. He doesn’t push me away from him, just starts in weeping, stumbles to bed, and stays there. I go upstairs for the kids. Mrs. Harper gives us supper and not for the first time. Mrs. Harper puts out a jigsaw puzzle for the kids and takes me into her parlor. She gives me a hot cup of tea and has one herself. We sit quietly at first, until she seems to have decided something.

“Annabel Lee,” she starts and stops.

After a minute goes by, she says, “I think the drink has got to your father’s mind, honey. He told me that he killed your mother. Oh, I know, I know, she had the Bright’s Disease. But your father thinks if not for the last pregnancy, she would have lived. He blames himself and it’s eaten away his mind. With him so drunk all the time, it’s just hard to recognize it.”

“What should I do?” I ask.

“Honey, your family can’t stay together. Your aunts will take the girls.”

“My family will stay together,” I insist.

The next morning Pop goes out, but comes home sober. Pop sits us all in front of him in a line of chairs in the kitchen, the five of us, smallest to biggest. It has been so long since I have seen him sober that I almost don’t know him. He is strange to me, this man. He doesn’t even look like himself.

I can tell the kids feel the same way they are so quiet and attentive. They sit so straight their backs don’t touch the chairs. He considers us a long while without saying anything at all. He looks from one of us to the next to the next. His eyes stay on Freddie. I feel a stirring of fear in my belly.

“Pop,” I say.

He raises his hand to quiet me. He continues to stare at Freddie. I go and pick Freddie up in my arms. My father acts like I am not there. It is as if Freddie is the only other person in the room. What is he doing? What is he about to say? Is my father about to tell his two-year-old son that together they killed my mother?

“Pop,” I plead, “he is only a baby.”

I am not frightened in the same way as I was the night he hit me. I am scared cold and then hot. Suddenly, I am burning like a skillet of bacon that can’t stop its own sound, “Pop. Pop. Pop.”

He looks at me, not unkindly, but in a way that I shut up. Again, he scans his line of offspring.

“Children, I have to tell you the truth. You must know the truth.”

“Pop, stop it, please.”

“Girlie, I’ve been to see the doctor’s wife. You are going to live with her and work. The children are coming away with me on a trip.”

“What do mean? Where are you going?”

I am choked with fear and can barely get the words out of my throat. Pop ignores me. He tries to take Freddie, but I won’t let the baby go. Freddie screams, and I realize I am hurting him with my resistance. I let Pop take Freddie. I go into the bedroom and wrap some things in a shawl.

I carry my bundle as if I am going somewhere he wants me to be going. I walk as calmly as I can out of sight to the quarry path before I start running. I run breathless to Auntie’s house and beg her to come. When we get back to our house, it is empty.

This is where the memory ends, in 1932. I remember more after that, but it does not come as part of the piece that visits in the night to my father’s tune of the poem by Edgar Allan Poe, “I And My Annabel Lee.”

The police found the girls late that same night at the foundling home. My one aunt took one girl, my other aunt the other. The boys had already been moved elsewhere. My aunts refused to inquire. They refused to take the boys; just let them go, like that, so, in a sense, the boys were never found. I begged them, my aunts, but they refused point blank. They were hard put to feed their own kids, they said.

I begged the authorities to let me raise my brothers. I had been doing it for two years, I said. Please, please, let me keep my family together. I was too young, they told me. I was placed with the doctor’s wife, who saw to it I had high school in the mornings at the extension school, and nursing school after that. Bless her, the doctor’s wife.

I never saw my brothers again. I never spoke to my aunts again. They never let me see my sisters. When Elizabeth was married, I wasn’t invited. I turned up there big as life at the church that day. I walked up the aisle and sat down to witness my sister wed. They couldn’t stop me. I try to picture Buddy and Freddie as men, but I cannot. Buddy is forever the serious six-year-old and Freddie the picture of the Lindbergh Baby.

Years later, once the aunts were gone, my sisters and I reconciled. We were as strangers, but we gained some closeness over time. Where the boys had been taken they never knew, either. What, I asked, had become of Pop? What was the truth told that last day we had as a family? What were his final words to his children?

He said he had kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and was to be sentenced to death. Right after he said it, the woman in the skirted suit and Fedora returned for the kids with some different men in a new Black Mariah. Had they been waiting nearby? Had they watched me leave the house for the quarry path?

Many years later, I would come upon shadowy, slinking figures in Fedoras painted against the sides of buildings in SoHo in New York. The sight of them brought a sharp pain to my heart and I sat down quickly at a café table.

My daughter told me the figures were art. She said the shadow art protested the dropping of the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima. She said that at the incineration, the shadows lingered even after the human bodies vaporized. The painted shadows represented the lingering souls of the evaporated humanity at Hiroshima.

My daughter was not even born until after World War II, so I don’t know what she thinks she knows about it. But before she explained about the victims at Hiroshima, the shadow paintings made me think of men in Fedoras, slinking along the bridge stanchions, watching, waiting, until I was out of sight along the quarry path.

As they were taken away in 1932, my sisters and brothers heard Pop start singing, as I do still, although I was not there.

I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea

When Mrs. Harper returned from Good Friday service at her church, she found him swinging from the rafter on the back porch.

But we loved with a love that was more than love
I and my-

At the unfinished line in the unending sentence, I fall asleep. I dream of the bridge, then, of the shimmering steel span, of the pedestrian way high above the waters. From one end of the bridge comes my mother; from the other end comes my father. As they meet in the middle beneath the steel rainbow arched overhead, finally, I hear in my sleep, the simple truth of it from my father:

I and my Annabel Lee.