I prayed every night before bed. There was the standard “Now I lay me down to sleep ...” and then you could mention your specific issues to God. I always prayed hard for a miracle so my older brother, Steve, would become able to hear. I added my own little pleas to the multitudinous ones of my parents, who'd been praying for the same thing almost from the day of his birth. My dad stopped by church every day for solitude and consolation. Although at some point Mom gave up praying for the Steve miracle—her knees raw from novenas on his behalf— Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, remains her primary saint.
At some point in the lives of all five of her offspring, each of us either became or threatened to become the particular lost cause Mom prayed to save. While no patron of her saints, these days I am convinced my mother has powerful energy that she prays into her universe. When I need a little extra protection or strength, I get Mom on the phone and ask for her prayers to Saint Jude. It makes both of us feel better. Also, from time to time—and even though we've had amusing debates about religion—I fire off an email to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and ask for his prayerful support, too. So far he hasn't turned me down.
Perhaps surprisingly, these days I find satisfaction in contemplating Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god. He is revered as a remover of obstacles, an attribute that seems to parallel Jude's intervention on behalf of lost causes. Ganesh makes me smile, in contrast to my unhappy recollections of sin and Catholic hellfire. But when I was a kid, even the dashing of my papal hopes didn't alter the fact that being Catholic was a central element of my life. I came by it naturally.
My grandmother, Marianna Bertolino, whose name was ultimately shortened to Anna or Ann after she came to America, was born in Italy. At the beginning of the 1900s, when she was about a year old, her parents left that seat of the Church's power for the tiny village of Poultney, Vermont. It didn't matter that years later my grandmother married my grandfather, Ralph Colvin, a self-proclaimed heathen. To get her hand, Ralph had to solemnly agree that any offspring would be raised Catholic. The same promise was required of any of the other heathens who wanted to marry my grandmother's seven sisters: it was the Catholic way or no way.
Therefore, my mother, Ruth, and her younger brother, Chuck, were raised in the Church. As was I and my two brothers and two sisters. It didn't matter that my father's side of the family, who we almost never saw in any case, was Scottish-Welsh Presbyterian. Despite the small percentage of our blood that is Italian, we kids all cleaved to that heritage and its religion. Ralph and Anna B. Colvin were my “real” grandparents. Dad's parents didn't figure hardly at all in our family equation. He didn't particularly like them himself.
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My father, John Clarence Williams, was drop-dead gorgeous. I have a picture of him at around age eighteen, and to my eyes he's virtually smoldering from beneath its sepia tint. To me he smacks of James Dean. When fifteen-year-old Ruth Colvin first saw him, her heart did a triple somersault, and it never stopped. She's related the story a million jillion times, but it always feels fresh in her telling.
“Jody,” she says, seeing her past through luminous eyes. “When I first saw John, he was just home from World War II, walking downtown in his navy whites. He was so handsome I ran myself ragged trying to ‘casually’ appear in his line of sight no matter where he was.” She bounces around the living room in imitation of her teenage self trying to nonchalantly chase down my father. Throughout their fifty-eight years together, anytime Mom saw my father unexpectedly, she got butterflies in her stomach. “Just like the very first time I saw him,” she says.
Two months after they met, Dad asked my grandfather for permission to give Mom an engagement ring for her sixteenth birthday. Uninspired at the thought, and predictably, Ralph said flat-out no. He wasn't mean about it, but he said there'd be plenty of time for that once his daughter finished college. And, he pointed out, she wasn't even out of high school yet.
No fool, my father knew if Ruth went to college unattached, it would spell their end. Not long after my grandfather quashed the engagement hopes, my parents went to New York—easy because you can spit into New York State from Poultney—lied about my mom's age, and got themselves married by a justice of the peace. Later that evening, after the stark little ceremony, Dad dropped Mom off at her house and went back to his own place.
They supposedly envisioned carrying on as before and keeping their marriage a secret indefinitely. Ridiculous. In any case, some months later, Mom noticed that her period was late. She tried jumping rope, hard, to make it start. It didn't, and soon the impending need to tell her parents that she might be pregnant ended that delusion. Stephen John Williams wasn't part of any official strategy of outing the secret marriage, at least not that I know of. But some years ago I began to wonder if the thought hadn't been playing around somewhere in my dad's subconscious.
Despite the shock, there were no recriminations in the Colvin household—you stand with family. And much like I do, my grandfather tended to make more noise at life's more inconsequential irritants. With things that really mattered, he was straight, calm, and solid. After the requisite Catholic marriage ceremony to sanctify the union, Dad moved into my grandparents’ home, carrying all his belongings in one brown paper bag. My grandparents and Mom's younger brother, Chuck, fully embraced my dad, and they became the loving family he'd always dreamed about.
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Steve came howling into the world about six months later. Mom's undetected German measles during her pregnancy had left my brother stone deaf. His vocal cords worked, but Steve would never accurately pronounce words he couldn't hear. His ability to scream was unmatched, however. Four decades after his birth, sometimes it didn't feel all that different, although that was for very different reasons. And still it took more years before proper medication was prescribed that finally began to help him.
Even if my parents had known Mom had measles and considered the possible impact on a fetus, the course of their history wouldn't have changed. Their fate had been sealed from the moment Ruth Colvin first set eyes on John Williams in downtown Poultney in 1946. Notwithstanding their difficult first child.
Steve was the kind of night crier who makes all young parents want to scream themselves. He rarely granted a night of uninterrupted sleep. In those days, my father was earning twenty dollars a week shoveling coal. He left home early in the morning and came back late at night covered in coal dust. Mom says my six-foot-tall father's weight dropped to 137 pounds in those days. He looked like a scarecrow dusted in black, a far cry from the dashing navy man she'd drooled over.
Always exhausted, my father could fall asleep instantly. But even Dad couldn't sleep through Steve's screaming, and he'd take his turn walking his son around the dark bedroom trying to lull him to sleep. What my grandparents and Chuck did to block it all out, I do not know.
After about a year and a half of interminable crying, Steve began to calm down. Life was finally finding balance when Mom began her campaign for another baby. It seems insane. All I can imagine is that the screaming had something in common with giving birth—it was like the horrible pain that mothers soon forget or they'd never want another child. Apparently, once Steve was sleeping consistently, Mom forgot the tension and distress of eighteen months spent with a shrieking baby.
My dad didn't share the enthusiasm. After growing up extremely poor with seven siblings during the Great Depression, he was frightened and oppressed by the thought of a large family. He worried constantly about how he'd ever be able to give his family all the things he'd never had as a child. My parents and Steve were still living with my grandparents. But Mom was relentless in pursuit of her objective. I was born two months after Steve turned three.
By then they'd managed to move to a second-floor apartment in a house directly across the narrow street from my grandparents. When hugely pregnant with me, Mom gained fifty pounds, and she'd sit in the window
