My husband as a child

A FRIEND told me once that he walked into a bar in North Philadelphia many years ago and noticed a crowd of people gathered in the back of the room. The crowd was standing around a young man of modest stature with red hair, listening with rapt attention to him speak. He was telling stories of his childhood.

That man was my future husband and I have listened to those stories too.

When I married 27 years ago, I didn’t just marry a man. I married a whole community. A community that no longer existed.

I married Jonesy, the retired welder who served on a ship with the Five Fighting Sullivans and was a boarder in my husband’s childhood home. I married Mrs. Wier, known as “Wiery,” who lost her legs on the train tracks while playing as a child and survived as an adult on disability. I married Pete B., the alpha male whom my husband overheard saying to a girl, “I’ve just been leading you on, baby. You mean nothing to me.” I married Bobby Kerrigan, my husband’s first and favorite cousin. He was raised by my mother-in-law and sent her a piano and a cuckoo clock when he was stationed in Germany. He committed suicide not long after the mother who had abandoned him reappeared. I married Bessie Haughey, who was not always kind to her invalid husband but would be moved to tears of admiration for domestic life when she walked by my husband’s house and saw nine people gathered around the dinner table.

I also married a dog. Part-dachsund, part-beagle, Buttons would walk to the butcher shop himself for a bone. He spent his days in this urban paradise fighting dogs, hunting cats and engaging in unapologetic acts of free love.

I married them all because they all came with my husband. They were part of my husband. I have never personally met any of the above, even my mother-in-law and certainly not Buttons, who died of a heart attack after killing a cat, but I have known and loved them, as well as others from the streets and living rooms of Chester, for years.

My husband, A. Wood, grew up in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River, nine miles south of Philadelphia. Chester was once home to one of the world’s great shipyards and tightly-packed neighborhoods of row homes, twins and stores. Two world wars helped make Chester a boomtown. It did not fare well in peace. The servicemen came home, but they didn’t stay long.

The G.I. Bill, passed in 1944, made cheap mortgages available to veterans, which they used to buy the brand new mass-produced homes in the suburbs. Borrowing techniques from the automobile industry, builders rapidly turned meadows and woods in Cape Cod and split-level subdivisions. Compared to these sparkling clean houses and tamed lawns, the humble homes of industrial towns such as Chester looked like so many worn-out shoes.

Meanwhile, the government was busily building evacuation routes to get people out to new communities. From 1945 to 1960, the U.S. government spent $200 billion on highways and virtually nothing on public transportation.

Wealthy foundations at the same time had discovered a way to break up the growing political power of urban Catholic neighborhoods. They encouraged poor blacks to transgress the respected divisions between neighborhoods and move into white neighborhoods. They demonized whites who fought to preserve their culture as “racists.”

During the 50s and 60s, Chester gradually devolved before the eyes of an attentive young boy.

By the time Joe Hoffman, the father of eleven children, was shot to death in 1978 while walking from St. Michael’s church hall to the rectory with the bingo proceeds, most of the homes in my husband’s neighborhood had been abandoned, crime was rampant and it was far, far too late to turn back.

The larger social forces that helped bring about the decline of Chester never absorbed my husband as much as the people who lived there.

Perhaps you will grow to love them too.

Renner

Renner was a ghostly figure. When he ventured outside, which wasn’t often, he was an apparition in white. White shirt, white pants, white cap. He had white hair and bore an uncanny likeness to Boris Karloff. Renner lived in a dark house with stained-glass windows. Long shades blocked off the front windows. Just last week, Della, who lived behind us, had seen a ghost slip through his wall. Our dog, Judy, the dog who ate caramels and who preceded Buttons, had wandered into his yard on a summer afternoon and mysteriously dropped dead. Other kids in the neighborhood had seen his ghostly form materialize out of nowhere on Eighth Street.

One night I rang his doorbell, which jutted loosely from sooty bricks. I heard no response. I pressed again upon the doorbell button, compressing taped-over wires into the bricking. Finally, footsteps thudded along a creaky hallway. A lock on the vestibule door was unlatched and then a second one and the steps approached the front door. I still had time to leave. I heard the slow manipulation of the lock atop the door knob, then an upper lock. A solid minute passed before the clacking of a lock chain. At last the front door opened. It was Renner himself. He let me in wordlessly.

He was expecting me. I visited him almost every night. I believed we were best friends.

I could think of no place on Earth I’d rather be.

Renner’s house had wandered in from another era, had refused to leave it, or vice versa. It was the utter opposite of the raucous, ramshackle place next door, where we lived, where the doors were never locked because there was no way to lock them.

Renner had locks. Locks in front, locks in back and on the side. He lived a lonely, barricaded life. I was his only visitor. He was a widower who had married well. He had his own garage where he kept a virtually unused, rounded-back white Oldsmobile. His house was dark and drafty, even in summer, but I found it as irresistible as his company.

Unlike my house, where all the lights were on all the time, his was as dark as a church during the 6:30 Mass on an autumn morning. The only light in his living room, where we used to sit for hours talking about baseball and world events listening to his tabernacle-shaped radio with the glowing tubes, was a sickly yellow glow that came from a heavily fringed lampshade in a corner. The room always smelled vaguely of fire. At the time, Renner was the only human being I knew who smoked a pipe. He had an extraordinary collection of pipes that he kept in a china closet in the parlor, although he smoked only a corncob. The house had other things I had never seen. Those stained-glass windows. A secret passageway from the second floor to the kitchen. A collection of diamonds he once showed me after soliciting an oath of secrecy I was surprised they weren’t shinier. My mother, who took Jesus Christ quite literally when he said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, told me that those diamonds had made Renner a widower. During a fire at my house, his wife had rushed up a flight of stairs to rescue the diamonds. On the way back down, she died of a heart attack.

Renner had a piano that played by itself. One time he had it play “Bicycle Built for Two” for me. He gave me my first taste of grapefruit juice. He once took me for a daylong drive in his Oldsmobile, for which he made apple dumplings with white icing. The interior of the Oldsmobile had the smell of unworn car upholstery and a faint hint of cigar smoke. We rode through hilly countryside. Renner beeped at every intersection to warn nonexistent cars that we were coming. The roads felt like roller-coasters.

It was one of the happiest days of my life.

In any year, the Chester winter was a dreary one. The town took on the color of the sky, as drab as the Scott Paper smokestacks. Occasionally, the Chester winter was interrupted by a period of enchantment wrought by a generous snow cover, something we could count on at least once a winter. It didn’t happen that winter. It was neither especially cold nor mild, just relentlessly dreary.

What I remember most about that winter was Renner. Renner had sold his magical Oldsmobile. His garage was torn down, and the land sold to a Lincoln-Mercury dealership, which erected a huge billboard next to his south wall. His house was colder than ever. He sat in his living room wearing a heavy coat with a fur collar. He appeared to be smoking as much to keep warm as out of habit.

Renner had stacked luggage next to the large, Victorian-scale windows in his living room, eight bags of well-worn leather, each of a different size. On all eight, the finishes were worn off of the handles and in the vicinities of the fasteners.

Are you moving, I asked him.

No, he said. He wasn’t going anywhere. The upstairs had become so cold that he was going to live downstairs from now on.

********

If Renner appeared on Eighth Street, he would be heading toward Ted’s, the candy and tobacco shop owned by his brother-in-law Ted was the only adult with whom Renner had consistent conact, and as far as I know, the store his only destination. No one had seen him anywhere else outside the house. He was either at Ted’s, or on his way to Ted’s.

So I was surprised one afternoon when Renner’s name surfaced at Jake’s.

Jake’s was a precursor of the convenience store. Actually it was called Jacobs’ Bros. Market, owned by Bennie and Morris Jacobs. We knew it only as Jake’s, and for years I tried to figure out which one was “Jake.” The store carried small items, such as 6-ounce cans of evaporated milk or boxes of baking powder, that weren’t worth a trip to the supermarket. Bennie and Morris also had a superb butcher, and their meats were of the highest quality.

A trip to Jake’s was our least-favorite errand. It wasn’t the distance, so much, fewer than three blocks. To a kid there is nothing longer than a wait, and Bennie and Morris kept you waiting forever. The pleasure of watching them fetch items on high shelves with their grip poles was insufficient compensation for the ordeal. On a typical afternoon, by the time you showed up they would be “serving” three or four other customers who had been waiting and waiting.

If you didn’t hand them a note, they would ask you what you wanted and write each item down, whether it was two or 20. They would fetch each item individually and slowly, interspersing random conversation between each fetching. “He-He-He-Hello, Wo-Wo-Wo-Woody ” That was Bennie, who had a terrible stutter that delayed the filling of the order even more. “You know that Z-Z-Z-elesinik? He sh-sh-shot a man.” Poor Helen Mason, who had been in the store at least 20 minutes by now would roll her eyes and shake her head. She lived next door to the Zelesniks, and had heard Bennie say this every time she walked into the store for at least the last 365 days. For it had been a year since young Zelesnik accidentally fired a rifle and wounded a friend. Helen, who went to Jake’s every other day, would have to hear the same excruciating question and answer with each new customer who came in.

On one of those afternoons on which my mother sent me to Jake’s, I found Helen there waiting. I knew what was coming.

“He-He-He-Hello, Wo-Wo-Wo-Woody ” I mentally completed the rest of the sentence and hoped against all experience that he would get on with my order.

“You know that Re-Re-Re-Renner? He tried to se-se-sell me some diamonds.”

***********

At 1 a.m. on March 10, we were roused from our beds – by whom, I didn’t know – and ordered to get out of the house. Fast. Fat, sickly flakes of wet snow were lighted by a rotating red-and-white light atop a fire truck.

Renner’s house was on fire.

I was disappointed that I couldn’t see flames. It was nonetheless exhilarating, standing outside wrapped in a blanket, a central figure to a high drama, next-door neighbor and best friend to the man with the burning house.

The fire chief, Harry Bomberger, was standing on Renner’s front porch, near the door buzzer that I had rung so often. Nothing had prepared me for what I heard him say to no one in particular: “That’s the most obvious case of arson I’ve ever seen.”

Please follow and like us: