One of the brighter spots of my early life came in the form of Oscar. She was my saving grace and my best friend from the time we were five years old until she died all too early from asthma at age fifty-three. I’m not sure exactly how my lucky break happened, but Oscar was going to attend St. Francis Academy, the Catholic high school on the other side of the Ohio River in Kentucky. She came from a well-to-do family, and I think her grandparents didn’t want her taking the Greyhound bus alone every day back and forth to school. I never found out how it was paid for, but regardless, it was all arranged. I got to go with her on the bus.
On those bus rides, we’d laugh and talk about girly things: school, making fun of teachers, boys, and movies—usually in that order. But beyond that, we usually didn’t dwell on our problems. Oscar had her share of misfortune with her home situation too, albeit markedly more benign than mine. Her mother gave birth to her at seventeen. Due to alcohol problems, her father was not in the picture, but she was raised by his parents.
Oscar would visit her mother, who rented a room in the home of a wealthy Rockport family. Sometimes I’d come too, and we’d spend the night together in that room, all three of us packed in the same bed. Often I would stay at Oscar’s house as well. During one sleepover, Oscar had an asthma attack. She couldn’t breathe and got very frightened. We were alone, and I didn’t know what to do and felt powerless to help. I tried to comfort her. It was terrifying, but it shocked me into a real state of compassion and gratitude when the calm was restored. It reduced things to basics. We supported each other the best we could. We were both trying to fit in and live as normal a life as we could imagine.
In that regard, going to St. Francis with Oscar was made to order, even down to the fact that we wore uniforms, since I didn’t have any decent clothes. Still, often I’d get off the bus in the morning with a soiled uniform or wearing something other than the clean white blouse required as part of it.
“Why aren’t you in your uniform?” Sister Mary Auxilium, the wonderful mother superior wearing the full nun’s habit, asked me when I was sent to her office.
“I spilled hot chocolate on it,” I replied, trying to mask the truth. Hot chocolate? I hadn’t even had breakfast.
“Oh, I see,” she said in a neutral tone. She offered me something to drink. Sitting there with the cup in my hand, I was completely clueless that she or any of the other teachers knew of my circumstances. How could I have been so naïve?
Thinking it might help, Sister Mary would send me to the school’s spiritual director, Father Saffer, for counseling. I don’t remember any particularly profound insights from our conversations, but there was something more powerful in the unspoken, in his gesture of caring kindness. As I sat in his presence, there was another thing about him that I couldn’t resist. Even back then, I guess I was preparing to be an actress and conducting my own character study. He had a nervous manner about him that I found fascinating. And I had the audacity to imitate him, to everyone’s delight, including his (I think!), when we had school assemblies.
“How’s everything?” was how he’d usually start the conversation.
“Great,” I’d say, but he knew I really meant, “Not so great.”
“Would you like a candy bar?”
“Oh, thanks.” So we would just sit and talk, and I’d eat the candy bar. That treat seemed extra sweet with his nurturing energy.
On a few occasions, my geometry teacher, Father O’Bryan, would make me leave the classroom because I was talkative and laughed a lot in class. He had been a Navy chaplain during the war, and he ran a tight ship in class. If you misbehaved or weren’t listening, he was prone to throw erasers at you. Chalk does not taste good even when you’re hungry—take my word for it.
I was staying temporarily with my older sister Marty during this time. She was not a happy person, and for good reason. She was married to a man who had a short fuse, to put it mildly. Being fifteen years old and his wife’s youngest sister gave me no immunity from his treatment. I once tried to pull him off my sister when he was hitting her. He was a big man. He picked me up and threw me against the wall. Then he picked me up again and literally threw me out the door. I ran over to the neighbors and told them, “He’s going to kill my sister.” Mr. Wilkie calmed me down. But I don’t remember them going over there or intervening in any way. Another time during this stay, I was babysitting for them. They came back late one night, and my brother-in-law discovered that I hadn’t done the dishes as he had asked.
“I’ve got a good mind to shoot her right now,” he told my sister. He owned a nightclub in Owensboro and always carried a gun on him.
“Stop talking like that,” I could hear Marty pleading. Although Marty’s husband didn’t drink, his anger was terrifying, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. My grades, which were usually good, understandably went downhill. My conduct at school wasn’t the best either.
When my behavior was not to his liking, Father O’Bryan would say, “Henderson, take a walk!” The classroom had a large glass window. From the outside, I could peer in and watch what was going on during my detention. One of the students would be sent to get me after a while. Father O’Bryan loved my singing, so his message to me would always be the same. “You can come back in if you sing an Irish song.”
Many years later, I received an honorary doctorate at nearby Brescia University in Owensboro. All my old teachers from St. Francis came and some as well from my elementary school in Rockport. During the ceremony, I talked about my time at the high school, especially of the extraordinary kindness of the teachers and the enormous impact it had on me. They remembered what I had been through during that time of my life. They all were crying, but Father O’Bryan cried the most. When I left for New York, he gave me a beautiful crucifix he had made. It still hangs in my house.
One of the other duties I had as a child was to sing at funerals. If there was anything that wounded my childhood faith, it was the death experience. The poorer Catholic families usually had the viewing of their deceased family member in their living room. The rosary would be said, and I would sing the funeral mass. As part of it, they always wanted me to touch the dead body, which scared me half to death.
I’ll never forget the time when two men and a woman were killed in a gangster war in Chicago and dumped in a field near our town. Everybody lined up outside the mortuary, adults and children alike (including Oscar and me), waiting to view the bodies and see the bullet holes up close. Their deaths were turned into a festive carnival in Rockport. It gave me nightmares.
No matter how much I believed in prayer and saw its power in action, it could not defeat death. My beloved brother Carl had survived World War II only to come home and die of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix a short time thereafter. He left behind a wife who was eight months pregnant. How shocking it was to see his once handsome, curly dark hair turned suddenly straight as I viewed his corpse laid out in his home. I didn’t know him as well as some of my other siblings, given our age difference and the fact that he had been gone for a greater part of my childhood. But that didn’t diminish my grief, just as the standard line that he was going on to heaven only comforted me so far. That body didn’t look anything like him in real life. But the child finds a way to shut the thought out and keep going.
Not so long after Carl’s passing, I had a personal introduction to death myself. I was riding on the bus home from school with Oscar when I started to get a horrible stomachache. I rushed home and waited for my father to arrive. “Daddy, my stomach hurts so badly. I’m so sick.” There was little response, so I had no choice other than to try to ride it out. A short time later, Billy Richards, the cutest boy in the school, came over. I let him only into the hallway. We were both in the Catholic Youth Organization through our church, and we were planning a dance and looking into getting a bus so the kids from Owensboro could also come. Finally I said, “Billy, I’m really sick. You’re going to have to go.” As soon as he left, I passed out from the pain and collapsed. To make matters more dramatic, I hit the back of my head hard on the floor and was bleeding.
“What happened, Gal, did you slip up?”
“Daddy, I think I fainted.” Such a thing had never happened to me before, but it was a safe assumption.
My father proceeded to do the next worst thing. He went into the cabinet and brought out a bottle of patent medicine, a.k.a. “snake oil.” It was some cure-all elixir he had mail-ordered. He gave me a teaspoon of it. I promptly threw up.
“I think we need to go over to Pauline’s house,” my totally helpless and clueless father concluded, alarmed at seeing my rapidly deteriorating condition. Walking was the only option because we didn’t have a car. My sister lived at least a mile away.
“Daddy, I don’t think I can make it.” But I walked all the way hunched over. By the time we got to Pauline’s, I was in sheer agony.
Pauline decided that it was surely something that a good old-fashioned enema could fix. It was a close runner-up to my father’s earlier “next worst thing” intervention. They all went to bed after the deed was done. I remained on the sofa writhing in pain. After a few more hours, I called out to Pauline and cried how I couldn’t take it anymore. By this time, the pain had moved down to my right side. She finally called the doctor in Rockport. He came and examined me and said she needed to get me to the hospital in Owensboro immediately. Nobody had a car except for Marty’s husband, that abusive man who was never pleasant to me to begin with. He was furious that he had to drive from Owensboro to get me, and didn’t say a word in the car the whole way.
It got worse. We got to the hospital’s emergency room and the doctor took one look at me, a fourteen-year-old girl, and assumed that I was pregnant. Great! Adding insult to injury, or more accurately, embarrassment to agony, the doctor performed a pelvic exam on me. Excruciating! Finally, they decided to operate. The appendix was perforated and ready to burst. I would have ended up like my brother Carl if they hadn’t operated. It made sense that part of my father’s paralysis in helping me was related to the trauma associated with Carl’s death. He was equally troubled about how he was going to pay the hospital bill. At least he was sober at the time.
They kept me in the hospital a bit longer than usual because they probably realized there was nobody at home to take care of me. Reverend Mother Superior Auxilium as well as Ilean, Pauline, Marty, and some other friends came to visit me in the ward I shared with seven other people. So did my friend Ruth Helen. She was the first new friend I made when I started high school in Owensboro.
Ruth Helen was one of those girls who had already become a tall, full-figured woman. And there I was, still a girl, at five feet two inches and flat-chested. She lived in a mansion in Owensboro. Despite our radically different economic backgrounds, we found that we had a lot more in common once we opened up to each other about our problems. My eyes opened to the fact that my family circumstances were not just the domain of the poor. She told me that her mother, a glamorous, wealthy, and well-traveled woman, beat her. Her father was also an alcoholic. I’m getting ahead of the story, but Ruth Helen and her family would soon make a miraculous impact on my destiny.
What I also cannot forget about my stay in the hospital was one old lady in the ward, Mrs. Chancellor.
“I’ve got to get these fishhooks out of my side,” she moaned repeatedly.
I begged her, “Mrs. Chancellor, don’t do that!” She kept taking off the metallic clamps that closed the incision after her surgery. Doctors used those as an alternative when problems with the skin tissue made suturing difficult. I had to yell for the nurse more than once.
I went home to Marty’s near the hospital for the first few days after I was released. The day I got there, Marty went into the hospital herself for—guess what?—appendicitis. I often wonder if it was a coincidence or inherent symbolism that we all got appendicitis. In my situation, the case could certainly be made that my body and spirit literally couldn’t stomach what was going on any longer, and my insides threatened to explode. When I went home to Rockport, I stayed downstairs on a cot for a while to further recuperate. It was not the most pleasant of times.
The more I look at my own children and grandchildren, the more I’m convinced that infants come into the world with a certain wiring. It is probably one good reason why Babby didn’t have as easy of a time coping as I did. When we would talk about what we were going through, it was always curious to me why she was more prone to cry and become negative in her thoughts and words and get nightmares, when my first response was always to look for a solution.
The experience of my youth, as challenging as it was much of the time, proved to have many tangible and positive by-products. For example, I learned how to read people extremely well (most of the time!), something that was put to good use once I started acting. With the few who protected me not always there to shield my eyes, cover my ears, or lead me away from harm, I saw too much. I could easily pick up lies. I had to grow up fast.
I realized very early on that the choice was mine how I was going to respond to my circumstances. I never wanted to be perceived as a victim. And I never wanted people to feel sorry for me. When you come from a disadvantaged and deprived situation you have a tendency to either become hateful and mean or end up as a type of person who is more giving in nature—giving, in fact, in compensation for what you didn’t receive yourself. I chose the latter. I also made another conscious decision: to be in the company of achievers rather than losers. I was attracted to role models like my teachers and Ruth Helen, people whom I wanted to be like or whose achievement I felt could be within my grasp someday.