My mother has a Victrola that she keeps, along with a small stash of 78-rpm records, where she supposes they are beyond our reach, on the highest of the shelves next to the fireplace. It is an ancient machine. Just like the one on the RCA record label. The one with the white dog sitting in front of it. The sound comes out of a big brass cone and you have to crank the thing to get it going. Sometimes, on holidays especially, she will climb on a chair and haul it down. And Wayne and I will fight for the coveted privilege of cranking it up. And then we will all sit there, staring into the big brass cone as music spills into the room.

The record she plays most often, the one that is foremost in my memory, is a song called Hurt. I can hear it now. The big, brassy crescendo that starts it off. Roy Hamilton's voice. Just as big and brassy. Leaping from the mouth of the cone.

Huuuuurt! to think that you lied to me . . .
Huuuuurt!
way deep down in-side of me . . .
You said our love was true and we'd ne-ver part . . .
Now you've some one new, and it breaks my heart . . .

Something at once soft and yet brittle enough to break at a touch gets into my mother whenever she listens to this song. Her eyes go off to some other place. And I am reminded that she is a woman. Of the sad beauty that is the woman thing in her. And I find myself wondering after my father. About him not being here. Mostly I wonder about the two of them. I wonder, with an uneasy stomach, how such a grand and sacred thing as love could ever fail to lead to happiness.

My mother tells the story of the first time she came within kissing distance of a boy. It was in high school. During gym class. They had paired up all the girls and boys for dance lessons. And my mother got partnered with a boy she didn't even know. A freckle-faced, red-haired boy. Whose face turned red too, when they had to embrace. "Red as a beet," my mother says. Always adding, "That poor child. I felt so sorry for him." The first time she said this I wondered what black devices of her young life had so battered her self-esteem that she could see her own loathsomeness in the eyes of a complete stranger.

She grew up shy to the point of pain about boys, my mother. Perhaps from living in the shadow of her sister, Lillian. Not only was Lillian fourteen years older, she seemed to have been cut from a different batch altogether. Her skin was the color of pecans. What they called "high yellah" back then. And she was built in the fashion of the times. Full and busty up top. Slender and boyish in the hips.

My mother was dark and gangly.

Lillian got all the boys.

When she was twenty-two, my mother got a job with the navy secretarial pool in Washington, DC. World War II was on at the time and they needed people. She stayed there for three and a half years. And in all that time she made no new friends and had no social life to speak of. The one exception was a party, thrown by a coworker. She allowed herself to be talked into going, but hugged the wall for most of the evening.

When she left, a young man from the party trailed her and offered to walk her home. She told him she was taking the trolley, thank you very much. But that didn't discourage him. He walked to the trolley stop and waited with her. And when the trolley showed, he hopped aboard too and sat with her and made what pleasant conversation he could. When they got to her stop and he went to step out my mother stopped him. "This is the last trolley back for the night," she told him. "I think you'd better go home."

That was the end of that.

She never saw him again.

When the war ended, so did the secretarial job. My mother moved in with her mother, Mabel. Mabel was a widow by then. Her husband Jethro had been a diabetic and died from the disease when my mother was in her teens. She was now living in Peekskill, New York, in a two-bedroom apartment near the center of town. And she had taken in three foster children from the Westchester County Department of Child Welfare in order to make ends meet. So it was three cribs in one bedroom, my mother in the other, and her mother on the pull-out couch.

One morning on her way to work?Įshe had found a job folding and packaging goods at a nearby pajama factory?Įmy mother noticed a young man in front of the dry cleaners next door. And she could have sworn he was checking her out. She of course gave him the "no nevermind," as she tells it. A few days later she noticed him there again. Smiling, this time.

She hurried on her way.

It played out like this a few times before my mother allowed herself "to be spoken to by him." His name was Tolan, he let her know. Tolan Stringer. He lived in Montrose, the next town over. And he worked at the cleaners, driving the delivery truck.

"And your name?" he wanted to know.

" Elizabeth ," she told him, but never Liz.

My mother hates the name Liz.

After that it was, " Hello Elizabeth ," and " How are you today Elizabeth? " when he saw her. And then one day it was, " Can I call you Betty? " And soon after that, " How about I come over to visit some day ? After work. When your mother's home, of course ."

He had to ask more than once.

Until she finally said yes.

Mabel thought Tolan was a little young when she met him. He was just nineteen. My mother was twenty-six. And Tolan's father felt the same way from the opposite side. He was polite to my mother when Tolan brought her to meet his family?Įthree brothers and a sister?Įa few weeks later. But he kept a distance. None of this got much in the way of things, though. One thing after another, the two of them fell in love. They were happy together. For a while at least.

Then my mother discovered she was pregnant.

The first thing she did was keep it to herself. The second thing she did?Įwhen it was coming to where it would be harder and harder to keep it hidden?Įwas tell her mother. The third thing she did?Įher and Mabel together?Įwas tell Tolan. The first thing he did when he got the news was tell my mother he would marry her. The second thing he did?Įhe and my mother together?Įwas go to the county building the very next day. To take the requisite blood test. The third thing he did was talk to his father. And the fourth thing he did, just days after he had proposed, was tell my mother he had changed his mind. He was too young, he said, to get himself married.

" Fine ," my mother told him, " then later for you! "

She gave notice at the pajama factory the next week.

Despite that it had just been ordained a city, due to a robust postwar boom in light manufacturing, Peekskill remained at heart a small town. It wouldn't do for my mother to be seen with her belly out to there and no husband in sight to speak for it . Nor was abortion a consideration. It was not a thing even talked about. Not amongst any of the people my mother knew. A few weeks later she checked herself into a home for unwed mothers.

On October 6, 1948, she gave birth to my brother, Wayne Livingston Stringer. A "scrawny kid," as my mother remembers it. Who could cry "loud enough to wake the dead." And who was wailing away the next day, in fact, when Tolan showed up "out of nowhere." Just walked into the hospital room and said, "How's my girl doing?"

"What are you doing here," my mother wanted to know.

He had to come, he told her.

Had to see his son.

Wanted to do the right thing.

Sign the birth certificate.

Give Wayne his name.

My mother was surprised.

When she got out of the hospital, she stayed home with Wayne instead of going right back to her job. This enabled Mabel to earn extra cash doing day work, cooking and cleaning for another family, while my mother looked after the foster kids. And when Tolan stopped by one day with a gift for the baby, she let him. She didn't have it in her to deny him seeing his own son.

Soon he was stopping by afternoons, here and there. Always solicitous of anything my mother might want or need. Always ready to run whatever odd errand she asked of him. The extra attention must have made a difference. Because despite how hurt and disappointed my mother had been with him, a month or so later she and Tolan were dating again. And despite that my mother never got much out of "fooling around," as she puts it, one thing after another, a few months later she ended up pregnant all over again.

Then Mabel died. Dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of cleaning someone else's house. My mother was home when she got the call. In the kitchen. Preparing baby formula. The phone rang. She picked it up. And the lady on the other end, the person for whom her mother worked, told her Mabel had suddenly collapsed. Just like that. Fine one minute and then, Boom . They had called an ambulance, but she was pronounced dead at the scene. My mother hung up. Called her sister Lillian in Harrison, who came to Peekskill the next day.

Two days after that Mabel was put in the ground.

There was now nothing to keep my mother in Peekskill. Nothing for her but more of Tolan if she stayed. And nothing with him, since it seemed that she couldn't resist him, but having more babies. She called the county. Told them to come pick up their foster kids. And when the county social worker assessed her situation she suggested she take Wayne with her too. Put him up for adoption. My mother said no. Wayne was her son. She would never think of giving him away. The lady argued that given my mother's plans to leave and that she'd have no means of support or home of her own, it might be best. But my mother simply refused. In the end they settled on a temporary foster home for him. Just until my mother could get back on her feet and take him back. So Wayne was taken to the Bronx. To the home of Mrs. Daisy Littell.

I came into the picture a little over a year after my brother. On October 24, 1949. I wasn't alone either. I had a twin sister. Only she didn't make it. She died five hours after she was born. The surgeon heading the delivery team was a kind and gentle soul. A Dr. Caverly. My mother was so taken by his bedside manner, that when it came to a first name for me she borrowed his. I thus became Caverly Eden Stringer.

There was no visit from my father this time. My mother had had enough of him. She had put him out of her life once and for all. Which meant, in the long run, that he was out of Wayne's life and out of mine too.