gat

they were arguing over an abortion for what would have been her third child, my never-to-be
brother or sister.
Mother was tired of being poor and didn’t want to be any poorer. She was tired of constant work
when she had grown up with servants. She was overwhelmed by the unfairness of being confined
with children, day in, day out, when her husband drove off to the outside world in a suit and tie,
often to be gone for days at a time, living in hotels, seeing exciting things. She would have implied
(because I was to hear the insinuation many times in their marriage) that he was living the life of
Riley while she slaved.
Bootie wanted an abortion, and the angry words that went back and forth discussing what was
then a crime wafted up the stairwell to where two little children sat huddled in uncomprehending
disbelief. It was the end of our childhood. I was seven, Joan was nine. Finally Mother shouted,
"I’m leaving!" and ran out the front door, slamming it so hard it made my ears hurt and the glass
ring. "If that’s the way you want it, I’m locking the door," my father said with a trace of humor in
his voice, trying to defuse mother’s anger, I think.
A few seconds of silence, and then we heard a pounding and pounding upon the locked door.
"Open the door! Open the door! Open the door or I’ll break it down!" An instant later her fist and
entire arm smashed through the glass panes in the front door. I saw bright arterial blood flying
everywhere and bathing that disembodied hand and arm. I would rather be dead than see such a
sight again. But as I write, I see Mother’s bleeding arm in front of my eyes.
Do such things happen to nice people? Of course, and much more often than we acknowledge in
our sanitized, wildly unrealistic human relations courses. It was the end of the world. Without
waiting to see the next development, I ran back to bed and pulled the pillow tightly over my ears.
If I had known what was coming next, I would have hid in the cellar and prayed.
A week later, Swissvale was gone for good. Just like that, without any warning, like the blinking
light of fireflies in our long, narrow, weed-overgrown backyard, it stopped abruptly on a secret
firefly signal, on a secret tragic signal—Marilyn and Tinker, penny candy, McKelvy school and
contact with my Italian relatives stopped for the next six years. With those familiar things gone,
my parents went too. I never allowed myself to have parents again. Without any good-byes they
shipped us off to Catholic boarding school in the mountains near Latrobe, placed us in the hands
of Ursuline nuns who accepted the old road to wisdom and maturity, a road reached through pain
long and strong.
There was no explanation for this catastrophe, none at least that I could understand. In my fiftieth
year Mother told me offhandedly in an unguarded moment about the abortion. She wasn’t
apologetic, only in a rare mood of candor, glad to be unburdened of this weight on her spirit at
last. "I couldn’t take another child," she said. We stopped for a hamburger and the subject
changed, but I knew a part of the mystery of my own spirit had been unlocked.
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