Ostentatiously
dressing for church and then slamming the door on my mother, who was sleeping-in
over in the corner of our furnished one-room garden apartment, I’d take the bus
to the impressively massive corner edifice of the Methodist church on West 13th
Street. It was right across from St.
Vincent’s hospital, where I’d been treated for severe tonsillitis the year before- the very hospital that had saved the life of poet Edna
St. Vincent Millay’s uncle, shortly before her birth in
1892. This miraculous event was the inspiration for Edna's unforgettable middle name).
A conservative doctor elected not to remove my tonsils, an unusual decision at the time. Good man. Mostly I remember sharp pain and a lot of ice cream.
A conservative doctor elected not to remove my tonsils, an unusual decision at the time. Good man. Mostly I remember sharp pain and a lot of ice cream.
For me the main
attraction of the neighboring Methodist house of worship, however, had nothing
to do with God, medical miracles or poetry, but was centered on the new
minister. Tall, lanky and sporting a crew-cut, he was an Anthony Perkins
look-alike who played basketball on Saturdays with the “youth group.” My friend Judy Long had urged me to check him
out, and I did.
Bingo, instant
Methodist. Surely, no conversion had
ever been so effortless.
My second motivation
was basically to annoy my mother, a darkly beautiful lapsed Catholic from
Omaha, Nebraska who had been educated by convent nuns and escaped to New York
by the time she was 20. A Bohemian in
spite of herself, she had given birth to
two out-of-wedlock (quaint term) children
fathered by a married photographer before she reached her early twenties, and
then had 3 more children by two different fathers, one of whom she married
(mine). Five kids (one set of twins), three dads. Somehow,
I was a middle child with absentee upper and lower half-siblings; essentially
an only child. How could this happen?
My older brother
and sister I hardly knew, as they were shipped off to boarding schools; my two
younger sisters were fraternal twins, born 5 years after my own parents had divorced
when my mother was 40 and I was 7. They
never knew their own father, who died before they were born. These sweet girls
grew up in the foster care system of New York City; by the time they were
toddlers my mother, an aspiring screenwriter with little patience, simply
couldn’t cope with anything more than herself and me. We visited them when we
could, taking the train upstate to the town where they lived, parting painfully
at the end of the awkward Saturdays spent at the local movie theater or ice cream
parlor.
Although my mother
and father had divorced when I was 2, he faithfully paid child support to her and
lived near us in Greenwich Village, an anchor for me when my mother flailed in
the waters of an era that did not in any way encourage combining urban life,
motherhood and the writing career she never stopped pursuing.
At 12, on the cusp
of young womanhood, I desperately needed
to demonstrate to my mother that someone in our family could be “respectable.”
Other adolescents were flocking to the folk musicians in Washington Square from
New Jersey and Westchester; for one year I was hell-bent on becoming
pious. Go figure. (Surely it was the one
action of which she might disapprove.)
Months passed and
I earned my perfect attendance pin; finally the gold one-year award bypassed
the copper emblem of 3 months and the silver pin of six. A whole year of wholesome Sunday mornings,
the sleeping mother (and sometimes boyfriend) left behind! Out of sight, out of mind, unwelcome images erased
by the scents of candle wax and fresh flowers at the altar.
Finally, as I was beginning to feel I had
proved my point and was getting restless, the subject of evolution raised its
hoary head. I was on my way to becoming a scientist and a lifelong Darwin
groupie at that point. (And yes, there
may have been a charismatic biology teacher named Mr. Cohen in the
background. We all loved him, boys and
girls alike wowed by his absolute faith in the new world that seemed to explode all around us with the
launching of Sputnik. Every single boy in my class aspired to go into
engineering; the girls….well, girls weren’t supposed to be too ambitious.)
I confronted my
Sunday School teacher. “How can you believe some guy with a beard created this
planet and all the animals….and human beings….in 6 days?” I actually felt embarrassed for her as I
waited for her response. (Secretly, I hoped she’d demolish me.)
Her answer, “Think
of a day as hundreds of millions of years- the Bible is all a metaphor, really…”
brought the whole religious edifice crashing down on my head.
I didn’t want
metaphor. I wanted truth and beauty and
certainty and accountability. That was the last day of my impeccable tenure as
a Methodist. It was a wrenching disappointment. Darwin 1, God 0- but it was a Pyrrhic victory.
Lately it has occurred to me that in some way,
that church-going year gave rise to this memoir you are now reading: my very
own hand-crafted family myths, my “Bible” stories, the only creation tales I
have to try to explain my inexplicable family and how I became who I am. The images in these tales have flickered
again and again in my head, and now they are taking shape on the page.
Make of them what
you will. Perhaps you can unravel the
mystery of these lives.
I offer herewith
some breadcrumbs, some clues, for your journey along the wandering cowpaths of Greenwich Village. Settle in.
* * *
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