few of them girls. I took Jesus out of the window and drew him into my prayer, with an outsized halo and surrounded by a bunch of stick figure kids, some with triangle-shaped skirts—on earth as it is in heaven.
I knew I wasn’t a good artist, but it didn’t seem to matter much.
Chapter 2 The Old God-Man
My home altar is a low table in front of which I kneel daily to whine, plead, babble, keep silence, read, and give thanks. It is covered with spiritual tchotchkes, each one carrying its own meaning. Two pictures carry special meaning for me. Both stood in places of prominence in many family homes before they got to my altar.
A three-year-old girl looks out from a small oval rose-adorned frame, her serious gaze daily reminding me to remember her under the table. Next to her stands a photo of the same girl at eight, her dark brown hair tucked behind her ears, tumbling over her shoulders. A beretta-like choir cap perches on the back of her head; bangs cascade over her forehead. Her choir robe is topped by a shoulder cape tied with a crooked bow. In her right hand she holds a tilting electric candle; her left hand, clutches sheet music; but her eyes glance to her right.
My mother cherished both photos. The small one she kept at her bedside; the other one made the living room mantel. It first appeared in the Christmas Eve edition of the New York Herald Tribune in 1946. In it I’m standing with the children’s choir on the steps of the Brick Presbyterian Church. My mother got a copy and had my father cut away the background figures so she could place me alone in a round stand-up gilt frame.
More interested in maternal pride than in church, Mom thought I was an angel. But I was no angel, just one among many child singers, all lungs for the birth of a special baby named Jesus who loved us, we knew, because the Bible said so, along with just about every hymn we sang. I wasn’t so sure about Jesus as the only son, but I’d come to believe that Jesus loved kids like God did so I sang with all the power my alto voice could summon. Sometimes I’d wish I were a soprano because they were so loud. Miss Ball, our school’s music teacher, said all voices were important and sopranos should blend. They were show-offs, I thought.
Christmas was coming and the war was over—no more black shades or bombs. I could look out of the clear windows and see city people below almost bouncing instead of trudging along. Everything was happy.
I’d seen pictures of dancers called the Rockettes in the newspaper. These lady dancers stood in a straight line and moved their legs all at once, so they looked like a string of paper dolls cut from a single piece of paper that when you shook it out there they were all strung together. The Rockettes were precision dancers, the latest big-city phenomenon. I read that they could kick over their heads and change costumes like lightning, sometimes forty times in one show. To keep up their stamina they ate chocolate and other sweets and never had to go on a diet.
“Daddy, can we go to the Rockettes?” I begged. “Look at their legs.”
“Pretty amazing,” he said.
“Yes, but can we go?” I persisted. “My legs might be like Mommy’s some day.”
“Well, we’ll see, Lynnie,” he said.
I felt pretty.
I often wondered if he suggested the Rockettes excursion to my aunt, who soon invited me to go as a Christmas treat. It was like him to do a thoughtful thing like that when he wasn’t attached to his martini glass.
Radio City Music Hall was enormous and filled with children whose usually immodest voices were hushed. You would love this, I whispered to God. We sat in row fifteen. I counted the rows to pass time, and hardly noticed the man who took the aisle seat to my left. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed his long white beard, sleek and silky—like God’s, not Santa’s. The curtain slowly slowly rose and the lights dimmed. I was spellbound. It wasn’t long before I felt the old man’s hand on my left leg. He began to caress it softly, going further up every time I took his hand away, further up under my brand-new green-and-purple dirndl skirt.
What is he doing?
I knew this was bad, but my skin tingled with pleasure. At the same time I felt paralyzed with terror. I felt as if I had no power and no voice at all. All that moved was my left hand, which like a robot removed his hand—over and over and over.
I never saw the Rockettes.
Going home in the taxi, my aunt gushed about the the show. I listened carefully so I could tell my mother all about it. I couldn’t tell her I’d missed the Rockettes, because I’d seen the bearded old man in the lobby after the show and his fierce beady eyes caught my gaze, paralyzed me the way his touch had, and gave me a message: don’t ever tell. The other reason I didn’t tell was that a new and sharp feeling clutched my gut. It was shame, not the same as hot cheeks and a blush in school if I got the wrong answer, but a full-body blush that didn’t go away.
City buses hissing and taxi horns beeping no longer had their usual lullaby effect as I tried to sleep that night. I might have had visions of lovely ladies’ legs and dreamed them right onto my grown-up dream body. Instead, I felt the old man’s touch. I tried to pray but it felt wooden. All that came out was a dutiful blessing list, then amen. My thumb was still attached so I sucked it raw and finally, finally dozed off. In the morning I no longer felt the old man’s touch but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. My mind demanded that I make sense of this horror; it searched for some place to land and found a memory. I’d overheard my mother say to my father, “What’s wrong with that child? She never says hello to the doorman, dear sweet man. Every morning she just walks on by.” My father gave no answer.
Being nasty to the poor doorman was just my way of trying to be me, and not my mother’s project—perfect and never quite right. Mom’s comment was a thing of the past by three years and nothing unusual for any frustrated parent, but my frightened and needy mind seized on it and turned it against my very soul. Something was wrong with me. It had nothing to do with the doorman, but it did have to do with the shame I felt because my body had felt something my mind didn’t want it to feel. I could no longer get God, my anchor and confidante, to tune in. My spiritual confusion hurt almost worse than self-condemnation because, you see, the old bearded man looked so exactly like my mental image of God. My mind named him the old god-man.
Rationalization is a very poor substitute for the whole truth, but what frightened eight-year-old knows that?
What happened to me? What is wrong with me?
In silence I yearned and hoped my parents would ask or guess that something had happened. I couldn’t tell God about it because God, I believed, had betrayed me. The child in the framed photo was far away. I hung my dirndl skirt in the closet where it would stay till I outgrew it. My mother never asked about it. So I focused on something else—school, especially music class.
Miss Ball, the music teacher, was tall and had a big voice. She wore her hair curled into a bun covered with an almost-invisible hairnet. I loved her with a childlike adoration verging on envy. Miss Ball had become Mrs. Davis over Christmas that year. Things happen over Christmas. But she looked the same so I was sure she would call on me, as usual, to demonstrate my “whole-throated notes.” When I got up to sing, my notes came out squished and ugly. I tried over and over, until finally Miss Ball told me I must have a sore throat and sent me back to my seat. My throat wasn’t sore, just locked. This was another
