Bread of Angels

Chapter 1

The Age of Reason

The first sensation I remember is movement, my arm waves back and forth, a small endeavor that results in the toppling of Bugs Bunny from my highchair tray. My silent partner, propped there before me big as life, disappeared like a Viking ship tumbling off the edge of the world. All but a blur well beyond my reach; the earliest consequence of an action. I remember being held by my father and how different it felt from being held by my mother. He was calm; I sought his reassuring shoulder. I gravitated toward him though it was my mother who was ever present, ever dominant. Not yet one, I took my faltering first steps across the kitchen floor, then kept going. My mother was continuously challenged by her inquisitive and mobile first child who could not resist exploring, disengaging from her grip, breaking free in the park, disappearing in department stores, and spurning her affection.

She warned me of the cost of a thousand actions, but I had to see for myself and was thus bitten, stung, and exposed to all manner of insults and injuries. With little sense of the struggles surrounding me or the havoc I caused, I’d reach for the forbidden, a lit cigarette, a silver table lighter, flicking it to produce a pretty flame, sliding a tight rubber band on my wrist. A burned finger, a blue hand.

Bit by bit I piece together an ever-expanding mosaic of my pre-existence. At the end of World War II, Grant Harrison Smith, emotionally broken and plagued with malaria-induced migraines, returned to Philadelphia from active duty in New Guinea and the Philippines. He never graduated from high school, instead joining his sister and brother as the principal dancer in their tap and acrobatic trio, but the war had cut short their prospects. Beverly Williams, a young widow who had lost a son in childbirth, was working in a nightclub. They had known each other as teenagers and found comfort and familiarity in one another after the war. He was uncertain about the times ahead but believed television was the wave of the future. In 1946, he applied and was accepted to a technical school in Chicago that included a postwar incentive of a twenty dollar a week stipend. Following his plan, my parents wed in a simple civil ceremony and boarded a train to Chicago. They rented two rooms in a boardinghouse in a Polish neighborhood near Logan Square. My mother, pregnant with me, worked as a waitress for as long as she could stay on her feet.

I was due on New Year’s Eve, but arrived in the center of a huge blizzard, a day early, ruining my mother’s opportunity to receive a promotional New Year’s gift of an early freezer prototype. Instead, she continued using an old-fashioned ice chest, waiting each week for the iceman in his horse cart to deliver a large block of ice.

Within the pages of My First Seven Years, my oversized faded pink baby book filled with lists of illnesses, birthdays, and notations of my progress, my mother inscribed a poem entitled Patti. One could sense her joy giving birth to a little girl, though a sickly one with severe bronchial distress. My father said I was born coughing. He bundled me up, and together they departed the hospital in a swirl of snow. My mother said that he saved my life, holding me for hours over a steaming stand-up washtub. But I knew nothing of these things, neither the hopes of my father nor the labors of my mother, soon pregnant with another child.

My sister Linda was born thirteen months after me, during yet another Chicago blizzard. At two, I couldn’t pronounce Linda, so I called her Dinny, and for some time that name remained. I can picture my mother with her dark wavy hair and ever-present cigarette, with me toddling about, another in a carriage, and secretly carrying a third beneath an oversized Chesterfield coat. When she could no longer hide the pregnancy, our landlord forced us to relocate. With a third child on the way, my father was obliged to leave behind his vision of stepping into the fast-evolving technical world of television and find full-time work.

My mother listed all our addresses in my baby book. In the first four years of my life, we relocated eleven times, from rooming houses to furnished flats. We traveled by train to Philadelphia, stopping for a brief, unwelcomed stay with my father’s beautiful but mean-spirited sister, Gloria. I can picture my grandmother Jessie’s spinet, a small upright piano, and my aunt whacking me for attempting to play.

That winter we moved from Gloria’s to nearby Hamilton Street. My father found a job in a union factory, working the night shift; my mother continued to waitress. On Christmas Eve after a long day waiting tables, before she boarded the crowded bus home, my mother bought two large lollipops and two small hand-painted wooden penguins for our stockings, all she could afford. When she got off a strap dangled; someone had cut it and made off with her shoulder bag. She would recount the story over the years, still stricken that we had no presents for Christmas that year. Since then, I have found it impossible to pass up little penguins in flea markets or dime stores, as if to fill the vast ice field left in her sad sturdy heart.

Our new baby brother was born in June of 1949. He was named Todd, a small, wrinkled thing wrapped in a pale blue blanket. My mother set him in a wicker bassinet, and we were told not to disturb him. I remember standing over him staring, overcome with the sense that he needed protecting.

Soon after I was diagnosed with tuberculosis, spreading among poor immigrant children in our neighborhood. To safeguard the little ones and offer me a healthier environment, my maternal grandfather, who we called Daddy Frank, spirited me from our crowded Philadelphia rooming house to his sheep farm in Chattanooga. He was handsome, good natured, and played ragtime-style piano. I was free to run in the fresh air and fattened on sheep’s milk, along with heavy doses of streptomycin administered by a large glass hypodermic. I would later learn Daddy Frank’s much younger and childless second wife Dolly had it in her mind to keep me. My mother loved her father, but after nearly a year of separation, she was forced to legally threaten him to bring me home. She said I returned with a Southern accent, patent leather shoes, and a silver fork and spoon set with patti lee engraved. I have little recollection of this estranged stretch of time. My baby book only contains the date of my flight to Chattanooga and a blank page for how we celebrated my third birthday.

On May Day 1950, we moved less than two miles away, across the Schuylkill River, to Baring Street. I was talkative and rambunctious, so my mother allowed me to perch on the stoop by myself while the baby slept, so long as I promised to stay put. I was happy there observing the last vestiges of the 1940s, soon to succumb to modern times. There were horse-drawn wagons, the iceman, a ragman, and an organ grinder with a monkey with a little red cap. Across the way was a medieval-style building, built in 1892 by an Irish railroad baron. It resembled a small castle with crenellated towers, a Victorian wood porch, and a gabled roof. It was later transformed into a Dominican House of Retreat, a fairy-tale place manned by scurrying friars in black cloaks over white robes. The comings and goings on Baring Street fueled my imagination; the storybook castle and the organ grinder’s friendly monkey found their way into future tales I would weave for my siblings.

Linda was quiet, much smaller than me with big, astonished eyes, always tagging behind holding on to my dress. She had a sad-looking doll named Jessica. It must have been a secondhand doll, or born in poor condition, but she loved Jessica and dragged her everywhere. One day one of Jessica’s arms came off. I desperately tried to fix it, but the rubber band attaching the little arm had snapped. Her arm sat on a shelf waiting for a more capable surgeon.

My mother now had the three of us to tend to. She taught us our prayers and policed the precious arena of my lively imagination. She noted in my baby book that I was prone to falsehoods. If the truth didn’t interest me, I presented an alternative reality. To curb my skilled little mind, I received some whacks from the paddle, along with futile attempts to guide my early Bible study and moral education. She had little time to field my endless metaphysical questions about Jesus and the angels and the ins and outs of heavenly bodies. Recorded in my baby book in her hurried script are two of my questions: What is the soul? What color is it?

I plagued my mother with so many questions during evening prayers she decided to enroll me in the Presbyterian Sunday school. At three and a half, I joined the older children memorizing scriptures. I was content for the time being though none of my questions were answered. At bedtime, I would recite what I learned to Linda, who listened wide-eyed with her one-armed doll in her lap.