My mother was mucking Stalls at Hanover Shoe Farm outside of Hanover, Pennsylvania, within a shout of the Mason-Dixon line, when her water broke. Had the hospital not been nearby, I would have been born in a manger. Perhaps I came into the world knowing Jesus had already done that, and since he suffered for all of us I saw no reason to be redundant.
So I was properly delivered in a hospital. God cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Look out below!” I arrived at 3:45 A.M. war time, which was double daylight saving time, on November 28, 1944. Truthfully, I’d have rather been with the horses.
My natural mother conceived me without benefit of marriage. At eighteen she was in no position to care for an infant, although the family had resources. Good blood. Good money. The goodness ran out at the socially embarrassing prospect of raising an illegitimate child. Surely there must be an ASPCL—for ladies. My poor young mother, in a maternal fit, snuck away in the middle of the night from the hospital, absconding with her own baby. My natural father, inconveniently married, drove the getaway car.
No one knew where she was or I was. The Young family, for all their commitment to corpulent emptiness and propriety, had the decency to worry.
Two weeks later, give or take a day, Juliann Young came home by weeping cross, a southern expression meaning you’ve been hurt and humbled. She appeared at Julia Ellen Brown’s kitchen door. Before my birth, Juliann had promised Julia and Ralph Brown that since they couldn’t have children of their own, they could have me—kind of like a zygotic door prize. As it was, Juts (Julia Ellen’s nickname) and Juliann were related. In fact, the whole family was mixed up worse than a dog’s breakfast. Juts and Juliann were cousins, or rather half cousins, with twenty-two years between them. Their mothers were half sisters.
Juts had been pitching a fit and falling in it ever since Juliann disappeared, because she wanted the baby. Although suffering at the time from pneumonia, she was formidable in her rage. Juliann confessed that she had dumped me in an orphanage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Ralph Brown and Juts’s sister Mimi lost no time rounding up ration coupons. Gas, critical in war, was controlled for civilian use by Uncle Sam, who rationed plenty else as well. The Browns and Dundores had good friends. They gathered enough coupon books to reach Pittsburgh and return, a long trip on wretched roads.
Ralph Brown put Juliann in the car. He needed her with him to release me. Twelve hours later Dad, Mimi and Juliann arrived at the Catholic orphanage—I don’t know its correct name—in the Steel City. The administration was only too happy to give me the boot. I’d been there for two weeks, I hadn’t gained a pound, and since I’d weighed only five pounds at birth I resembled a tiny skeleton. One of the nuns advised Dad not to take me. I would die. Dad said, “This baby will live”—a line my aunt Mimi, “Sis” to Juts, loved to quote.
So many children were born out of wedlock during the war years that the orphanages and children’s homes threatened to burst at the seams. Nobody wanted us. The churches provided what succor they could, but we’ll never know how many infants and young children died for lack of proper nutrition or, truthfully, for lack of love. Not all the casualties of a war are on the battlefield.
On the trip back to the Browns’ home in York, Pennsylvania, a snowstorm struck, ferocious and bitter. Dad put chains on the tires, then fought to keep the car on the road. Aunt Mimi, the mother of two daughters, had brought some of their old baby clothes and blankets; she never threw anything out. She held me, wrapped like a mummy, close to her chest. Juliann Young refused to hold me. Every time they spied a light at a gas station or a farmhouse. Dad rolled off the road to ask people if they could spare some milk and heat it for the baby.
I owe my life to people I will never meet. Like Blanche DuBois, I relied upon the kindness of strangers. This wartime odyssey, with friends and strangers sacrificing some of their comforts for an infant, drives my life. I may have been born into difficulty, but I was kept alive by generosity and love. People may not always be consistently good, but they can be occasionally good, gentle and giving. I don’t think we can ask more of one another.
Once home Dad immediately drove to old Dr. Horning’s. The doctor told Dad and Sis that I’d never make it. His glasses halfway down his nose, Dr. Horning warned Dad not to place me in Juts’s arms. She wouldn’t be able to stand losing the baby. Worse, I was so emaciated, he feared I’d contract her pneumonia.
Ralph Clifford Brown, called Butch, was at thirty-nine a big, blond, handsome man, movie-star handsome really. He was not given to loudness or excessive emotional display. Of course, with Juts around there was rarely an opportunity, since she had to be the star. Dad possessed a quiet strength, which occasionally surfaced, surprising people who took him for a pushover.
My dad asked, “What do I have to do to keep this baby alive?”
The tone of his voice must have scared Dr. Horning, because he outlined an exhausting program of feedings every three hours for the next four months. Since Juts was languishing abed, that meant Daddy had to do it. Sis fed me during the day while Dad worked, then he got up during the night for the month it took Mom (Juts is always Mom) to recover. After that, they shared the burden.
Sometimes in the ensuing months Dad woke up when Mom did, so they’d feed me together. Their marriage careened into a few potholes over the years, what marriage doesn’t, but I think those nights were some of the happiest times they spent together.
Not only did I live, I flourished. They fed me so much I resembled a sumo wrestler. Well coordinated, I crawled everywhere, got into everything. Mickey, the long-haired tiger cat who slept in my crib, fascinated me. I crawled after him morning, noon and night. I spoke early, too, and as luck would have it, the first word out of my mouth was “Dada.” “Mama” surely followed soon after, or Mother would have burst a blood vessel through jealousy. The next grand pronunciation was “kiddle cat.”
As to my natural mother, Juliann, she disappeared again. A pretty young woman, she knew she had to get out of Dodge because even if everyone forgave her, no one would forget, least of all her own father, Jack Young. He wasn’t too thrilled about me, either. Then again, neither were Daddy’s parents, Caroline and Reuben Brown. In fact, Caroline was positively poisonous.
Merrily crawling, cooing and cuddling with Mickey, I hadn’t a clue as to the controversy I’d caused.
Juts told the tale of my beginnings many times. Aunt Mimi assisted. Surely there are other sides to this story, but I know only theirs.
I arrived by the back door, but I arrived.
You’ve met the irrepressible Juts if you’ve read Six of One or Bingo. You’ve also met Mimi, who is called Louise in those volumes. I called her Little Mimi or Aunt Mimi since her mother, a glorious, radiant woman, was Big Mimi. Big Mimi Buckingham was as wide as she was tall. In the novels she’s Cora.
In case you haven’t read them, here’s Mom: five foot two, with a trim, feminine figure, which she exploited to the fullest, dove gray eyes, curly light brown hair and a tongue that could rust a cannon. Mimi Dundore, four years older, possibly more since there was an awful lot of age fudging going on, could have been her twin. Mom was born in 1905. Let’s give Aunt Mimi the benefit of the doubt and say she was born in 1901, christened Monza Alverta Buckingham after a popular stage comedienne of the turn of the century. She hated being labeled Monzie and as soon as she was legally able she changed her name to Mary. Not that the older generation paid her a bit of mind on that. She finally wore them down until even Big Mimi called her Mary.
Aunt Mimi, burdened as a child with the responsibility of “watching over” Juts, was a real bossyboots. Naturally Juts defied her, sabotaged her and goaded her at every available opportunity. Those occasions when they behaved maturely in each other’s presence were rare. Generally it was like living between Scylla and Charybdis: watch out. Even their husbands ducked.
The gods gave both sisters a fabulous sense of humor. More times than not, that sense of humor freed them from yet another scrape. In a way they were the character Lucille Ball modeled Lucy on. Back then I think women weren’t as earnestly good as they seem to have become, or perhaps the gray pleasures of psychology hadn’t seeped in to steal away people’s primary colors. One thing was certain—they were funny, wonderful and often mean as snake shit. You couldn’t take your eyes off them.
Their family, the Buckinghams, were blue bloods. The first Buckingham arrived in Boston in 1620. Thomas Buckingham, perhaps driven mad by those Boston accents, headed south as soon as he could. A talent for making money never evidenced itself in the Buckinghams. Whatever they made, they spent. Mother’s motto was “Tomorrow can take care of itself.”
Both sisters—indeed, most people of their generation—had witnessed the deaths of brothers and sisters, close friends, or parents. Life was fleeting. Mom and Aunt Mimi had lost their older brother, John, to meningitis, and a beautiful, truly beautiful sister, Maizie, to diphtheria. They nearly died of it themselves. The youngest Buckingham, George, a handsome man—the Buckinghams are fine-looking people—lived only into his thirties.
Witnessing death at a young age terrifies some children, silences others. In Mom and Aunt Mimi’s case they wanted to sing, dance, taste the world—carpe diem. This lasted until Aunt Mimi was sent to McSherrystown Academy, a Catholic boarding school of some rigor. Charles Buckingham, their charming, alcoholic father, had abandoned them. They hadn’t a penny. As Aunt Mimi showed musical talent, a relative who worked at the academy took her in so she was fed and properly educated. With all the passion of a grade-schooler, Mimi embraced the One True Faith and determined that the rest of us would embrace it with her.
Mom was farmed out to Sadie Huff Young, her mother’s half sister. George, called Bucky, still an infant, remained with his mother. Juts once told me, and Aunt Mimi confirmed it, that before their mother found homes for them they would go down to the pretzel factory to beg for scraps. Big Mimi’s vegetable garden spelled the difference between survival and disaster.
Big Mimi suffered at breaking up her family, but it was the only way to keep them alive. Mother was close to six, so Aunt Mimi had to be nine or ten.
The good thing about Juts’s being placed with Sadie was that she remained close by. Big Mimi and Sadie had the same mother but different fathers. Over time Juts felt that Sadie was her mother and Big Mimi was her aunt. The two half sisters cooperated all through their lives, so Juts came out on top.
Sometimes I think my life has been framed by these two pairs of sisters, Mom and Aunt Mimi, Big Mimi and Sadie. Or perhaps framed is the wrong word. I’ve been shadowed.
Back to 1911. Big Mimi did what most women have to do in painful circumstances. She worked at any job she could find, kept up her small farm and looked for another man, a reliable one. This was before she got big as a house, so attracting men was no problem.
George “PopPop” Harmon fell in love with her. A merry creature no matter how cruel her fate, Big Mimi drew people like a magnet. People were important to her. She let them know it and she made them laugh. Hearing her tinkling laugh made you laugh.
I never knew how Big Mimi and PopPop met, but they both admired good hounds. I wonder if they first saw one another at a hound meet.
After they got married Big Mimi wanted her girls back. However, my aunt Mimi, popular and bright, was flourishing at McSherrystown Academy. Her schoolmates couldn’t bear to see her leave. She stayed, and it’s a testimony to my aunt that she remained friends with those schoolmates throughout her life.
Mother adored being at the center of life in Hanover instead of out on the farm. Hanover, a small town, might not seem like a hot spot to today’s casual visitor, but to a child as impressionable and sociable as Juts, it was the center of the universe. Knowing Mother, I suspect she rather enjoyed the drama of being separated from her mother. It made her special.
Juts continued to stay with Sadie and Jack Young until tenth grade, when the boredom of Hanover High School propelled her to leave. Not getting your high-school diploma wasn’t a big deal then. Since she danced the night away, was the life of every party—in fact, she was the party—both her mother and Sadie realized the futility of trying to keep her in school.
She had adventures and she even married one of them, a big secret she kept all her life. Being divorced carried a tremendous social stigma, and Mom was a divorcee by her early twenties. Somehow she managed to overcome it. Everybody knew, of course. The secret was really for the next generation and the one after that (mine). By that time divorce wasn’t so awful.
Sadie Huff, as Mother has always called her, had a great effect on my mother’s life and on mine. Mother wanted to be the refined lady that Sadie was and loved her aunt until Sadie’s dying day.
Sadie’s slow death from pneumonia allowed her to keep her wits to the end. She asked Mother to take care of her youngest daughter, Juliann. Sadie’s other daughter, Betts, a few years older than Juliann, was in good shape, or at least Sadie thought she was. But Juliann at fourteen needed a strong hand.
So when Sadie died Mother took in her cousin, helping to raise her. That half cousin is my natural mother.
Like I said, we’re all mixed up worse than a dog’s breakfast.
Mother honored Sadie’s wish just as Sadie had honored her sister’s need. Really, there were three sets of sisters if you count Juliann and Betts. The debts of generations were paid off by my person.
The individual who seemed most sensitive to this was not Juts, really, but her sister Mimi. The sordid romance of my beginnings reverberated somewhere in my aunt’s mind. Perhaps it was because I was a daughter. Aunt Mimi preferred daughters to sons. Juts, of course, would have preferred sons to daughters.
When I came along I was a clean sheet upon which to write Aunt Mimi’s religious longings. Mother, a Lutheran, viewed this prospect with horror. Besides, she had her own plans for me. The true path of Our Dear Lord, as Aunt Mimi would say, was also the true path of gargantuan family blowouts. Aunt Mimi wanted me to rectify whatever mistakes she felt she had made with her own two girls, i.e., they hadn’t become Dominican nuns. Mother wanted me to become a movie star. She’d argue with Aunt Mimi, “Look, she can play a nun, she doesn’t have to be one. Think of Loretta Young.”
These theological matters meant nothing to me as an infant, although I did perform admirably at my baptism. Daddy held me and I didn’t cry when the holy water was dabbed on my head.
This incident was recalled to me many times in my youth as a counterweight to my occasional pranks in church. If nothing else, I was determined to find out if God had a sense of humor.
In 1940s America, especially out in the country, your church affected your business and social affiliations. We worshipped at Christ Lutheran Church on George Street. Tombstones in the small graveyard in the quad go back to the seventeenth century. It is the oldest church west of the Susquehanna River. As an old family, we had a pew near the front, the fifth row.
This was never spelled out, of course. But no one sat in your pew. The location of our pew, so prominent, meant I had an audience for my capers.
One of the first of these occurred before I could walk under my own power. The glorious choir enthralled me. Because of the stupendous Bach—one of the great things about being a Lutheran is that you listen to Bach all the time—I was inspired to sing and sing. No amount of bouncing deterred me from my mission.
Mom said that I turned around, beheld the congregation beholding me and really belted out my “hymn.”
A red-faced Dad carried me out, to general relief. I, however, was displeased. It was summer, the windows were open and my bellowing carried from the courtyard. Finally, Daddy walked around the block with me.
When Mother shook Pastor Neely’s hand, as is the custom at the end of the service, he said, “Well, Julia, I believe the baby will live.”
I have no memory of this, obviously, but I do remember the patterns on the rug, Mom’s cat, Mickey, purring, and Mom’s shoes. I was still crawling, and as I grew I used to ask Mother to verify my memories, those from the time before I could talk—really talk. She was astonished at what I remembered.
I think we each remember a lot from that early time. After all, we’re seeing the world for the first time. Impressions swirl in our brains. We can’t tell anyone because we can’t speak.
These impressions are far more vivid than, say, something you did in your thirties—or at least I think they are.
Cats and horses. Those are my earliest impressions. Daddy’s deep baritone, almost bass, voice. His big hands. He could hold me in his palm. Mother’s perfume, Chanel No. 5, and her laugh. But mostly I recall Mickey and the Percheron horses in the next pasture as well as the stunning Standardbreds of Hanover Shoe Farm—still there and still breeding the best.
I also remember everyone laughing at me. Big Mimi used to clap and I would “dance.” In fact, I just remember laughter. The Buckingham clan—all the Dundores, the Zepps, the Haffners, the Finsters, the Weigels, the Bowerses, the Beans and even some of the Youngs—what people. They loved life.
The Browns were quite a different story.