Chapter 6 #2
My hope had been to supply information she’d find helpful.
She might take comfort in knowing that it wasn’t her father’s intention to leave his daughters alone and helpless.
Even if he killed himself, it wasn’t because he didn’t care about them.
But it’s possible he didn’t end his own life, I’d explained to Mom.
We couldn’t say for sure that someone didn’t help him out that window.
She told me that she’d never shared the details with my father, but he found out anyway.
“No wonder you’re maladjusted,” he said to Mom not long before he left us in 1961. “No wonder you’re sick. Your father died of evisceration, and you were raised in an orphanage. You’ve never gotten over it.”
Five years later when Mom would have her first breakdown, her sister Dolores was asked by psychiatrist Dr. Bill Griffin what she recalled about the day of their father’s death.
She said that after the police officer left and the shades were drawn, Mom began crawling around and around the oriental rug in the living room, straightening the fringe. She began acting strangely.
The Zenner daughters had no choice but to leave their Foster Avenue apartment on Chicago’s North Side.
My mother was twelve, her sister Dolores fourteen, and too young to be on their own.
For some inexplicable reason their relatives didn’t take them in or do anything to help as best I can tell.
My mom and Dolores were sent to an orphanage.
At the Central Baptist Children’s Home, they were referred to as inmates.
My aunt’s name was misspelled as Dolarise.
When she turned sixteen, she moved in with Alice, the two scraping by like the characters in my favorite childhood stories The Boxcar Children.
Mom was left in the Baptist home. Defenseless and beautiful, she may have been preyed upon.
I don’t know if that happened, but her behavior makes me suspicious.
For the rest of her life when hospitalized for various medical conditions, she was frightened by orderlies, doctors, any male who had charge of her.
Believing she was being sexually abused, she would panic, often trying to make a run for it, sometimes setting off the fire alarm so that the doors would unlock.
On one occasion when she was in her eighties, she pulled out her IV lines and got dressed. Grabbing her quilted pocketbook, she snuck out of her hospital room in Asheville. She fled to the parking lot where an elderly gentleman from her retirement home awaited in a getaway car.
In the fall of 1962, I entered the first grade, and my teacher, Mrs. Gordon, didn’t like me.
A dour woman, she looked a bit like Jane Hathaway in The Beverly Hillbillies.
Mrs. Gordon was humorless, always sighing, and unhappy.
I’d try to chat with her, hoping I might cheer her up. Maybe she’d be friendly.
“My husband died, and I have frozen grief,” she saw fit to confide one day when I was standing by her desk.
I’d never heard of frozen grief but envisioned her trapped in a cold, sad place.
I remembered the time I stuck my tongue on a freezer shelf at home.
I couldn’t move without injury, leaving a spot of blood on the ice.
I wanted to tell Mrs. Gordon that sometimes we can’t free ourselves without it hurting.
“Why do you think your grief is frozen?” I figured I could help her get to the bottom of it.
“Because it is.” She was impatient and told me to sit back down.
I don’t think she liked children, certainly not an endlessly inquisitive one like me.
It was in her class that I realized I wasn’t a good reader and easily bored.
I’d look at words on a page and they seemed to morph into an alien language or hieroglyphics when we’d take turns reading Dick and Jane primers.
See Puff run
See Puff jump and play…
I wasn’t impressed. How dull. The earliest book I checked out of the school library was nothing like that.
I don’t recall the title, but it featured a girl and her boy companion on an adventure they hadn’t told their parents about.
The brave little girl led the way with a flashlight, sneaking into a dark scary house where they shouldn’t be, and I was enthralled.
Jump, Spot, jump
Jump, Puff, jump…
While Mrs. Gordon went around the circle of chairs, asking one student after the next to read, I would imagine what the girl with the flashlight might find in that dark, spooky house.
Maybe a monster like Frankenstein. Or a bloody knife on the kitchen floor, a door cracked open, strange noises sounding below…
“Patsy?” My suspenseful reverie would be shattered by Mrs. Gordon’s firm dispirited voice.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your turn.”
“‘Look, Dick. Look, Jane. Look, and see…,’” I dutifully read while imagining the girl with the flashlight creaking down old stairs into the cellar where something terrible awaited.
I might have been thinking about another library book I’d checked out, The Story of Patsy by Kate Douglas Wiggin.
A little girl lives in poverty and other unhappy circumstances.
One day she’s shipped off to her wealthy aunt and uncle in Boston.
She’s headed off into the unknown, and it was just my kind of story.
I brought the book to class, and Mrs. Gordon asked me to read from it. I stumbled over the words, and she shook her head knowingly. I wasn’t old enough to be reading things like that. I was admonished for my poor pronunciations.
Help! Help!
Run, Spot, run…!
That was about as exciting as Dick and Jane got, and my attention would wander off the grid again. I’d decide it was time to make a funny remark. I’d write notes that I stealthily passed under my desk to the kids on either side. In modern parlance, I spent a lot of time acting out.
This was evident earlier in the year when I’d been selected with other school kids to appear on Miami’s Popeye Playhouse television show that included puppets, clowns, all sorts of goofy capers and music.
During the taping, I was so excited I couldn’t contain myself.
Showing off, I made asides until Skipper Chuck took off his sailor cap and swatted me with it.
Mrs. Gordon lost patience with my constant chatter and notes that she’d intercept and read aloud. This was reflected in my report cards. I got X’s in citizenship, works and plays well with others, also an F in handwriting. Her comments indicated I was poorly behaved.
One day, she went after me in front of everyone, running a red bookmark across her throat as if I was driving her to suicide.
“No wonder your father left you!” she declared. “You talk too much!”
Pinecrest Elementary School was in walking distance of our house in Coral Gables, and that’s how Jim and I went back and forth.
After school, we’d hurry home to Snapper Creek, crossing a canal, passing Parrot Jungle.
I remember my humiliation when headed home that day.
Several classmates yelled that my parents were getting divorced. I was horrified that everybody knew.
“Your daddy’s never coming back!” one of the first graders yelled. “Because of his secretary! My daddy said so…!”
I started running as fast as I could, past hibiscus bushes splashed with bright red flowers, not stopping until I reached our yard, flying past the wading pool, bits of brown grass floating on top of dirty water. Cool air hit my face as I rushed inside the house, slamming the screen door.
Prior to Mrs. Gordon’s unkind comment, I’d assumed Dad’s leaving was a secret. I knew my parents fought and seemed unhappy. But until that moment I never imagined there was another reason my father didn’t want to live with us anymore. I talked too much. I was a nuisance.