Chapter 1

     The teacher was droning on about something. I don't remember what. I sat there in my appointed seat expectantly. I never knew what school was all about in those days. I'd been to so many different ones. My early grade school education was a hit-or-miss disaster, but then so much was in those war years. I was seven years old, and it was November of 1945. I know it was November because I pieced it together many, many years later.

     Suddenly the teacher walked over to the classroom door where a man wearing a suit and glasses appeared in the door-way. He was accompanied by another man wearing a strange brown uniform. I guess he was a policemen, except I thought policemen wore dark uniforms. Policemen always scared me.

     The teacher and the uniformed man walked down my aisle. They were coming to my desk.

     "You have to go with the sheriff, Dallie," the teacher said. Immediately I bounded out of my seat. I always did what the teacher told me to. I wondered where the sheriff was going as I walked beside him, slightly shivering from confusion. I wondered if that teacher would call Mom and tell her I was with this sheriff. Mom would worry about me if someone didn't tell her.

     The sheriff had opened the school front door for me to exit. I was scared to death of what was happening to me. He led me to this really fancy car and opened the back door. I got in. It smelled like all the rich and strange things I'd never had. It also smelled official, for all I knew what official was. I didn't know what official smelled like, but it smelled like a smell I wanted to avoid.

     The sheriff got in the car and we drove off. That was the last time I would see that teacher.

     The sheriff took me to this huge bunch of brick buildings a long way away. It was my introduction to the horrors of the next year and a half.

I was deposited in a front office from which a matronly lady escorted me up and down several marble hallways to a hospital-looking room. It was inhabited by another matronly lady in a white uniform. She had me strip to my birthday suit and sat me in a bathtub. I sat shivering in four inches of tepid water in a chilly sterile room while matronly lady dragged this metal comb through my hair, painfully scraping my scalp. She was looking for lice.

I didn't know what had happened to my familiar family setting. I didn't know where my brother or my two sisters were. I would not see Mom again alive. She died two months later in a hospital which didn't allow minor children in sick rooms.

     I remember some days later Ron and I were brought by Grandma to this house, for what, I do not know.

I remember going to the hospital with Grandma in the evening, the light snow blowing briskly. The sound of auto tires smacking wetly against the snow-dampened street as they passed by.

     We'd climb aboard the electric trolley car, sit in the black leather seats as the car rumbled from stop to stop, the pneumatic doors blowing open to let passengers on or off, then blowing closed, the electric motor winding back up to move the trolley along. You could hear the crackling overhead as the pole connecting the car to the overhead wire bounced on the wire.

     The trolley car had a strange and exciting smell to it. Different from the smell of the January wind blowing in your face as you lighted from the steep trolley steps to the sidewalk and began the formal walk up to the hospital doors.

Inside, the smell of hospitals familiar the world over, brightly lit, with chairs and sofas lining the walls. Nurses walked briskly from appointed chore to appointed chore, hardly noticing a seven year-old little boy shyly standing beside his portly Grandmother as she inquired after the room her daughter lay in.

     I remember Ron and I wrestling on Grandma's bed, and him saying something to me about what would Mom think? Angry at his teasing, I said that I didn't care what Mom thought. At which point my brother began pummeling me with his fists in a flash of anger. Grandma broke it up with a proper reprimand about our sick mother lying in her hospital bed while Ron and I fought.

     I remember The first time going to the hospital expecting to see Mom, only to be told I was too young to go up to her room. I sat on a wood chair in the hallway, waiting for Grandma and Ron to return. It was a long time.

     I didn't see Patty Ann or Melissa at Mom's funeral. The funeral itself is a vague blur to me. I remember this still person in a casket, wearing a beautiful dress, a dress I remember as blue and transparent. Certainly a dress I'd never seen her wear before. She couldn't have afforded such a beautiful dress.

     I remember people hovering about, arms around my neck, hands on my shoulder. An older woman who smelled of prim cache guiding me about with gentle but firm nudges. Subdued voices, strange faces, organ music waffling in the background. Then it was time to walk single file up the aisle between the fold-up chairs to the casket. Someone in the background telling me to say good-by to my mother. "Good-by, Mom, " I said with a slight embarrassment. I hadn't said it with anything approaching heart-felt meaning. I didn't know what this was all about..except Mom wasn't around anymore. I'm not sure whether I missed her at that point or not. I didn't know.

     I don't remember anything of the ride to the cemetery or the ceremony at graveside. Or of the burial. It would be many, many years before I would look up Mom's resting place again.

And I don't remember if Patty Ann or Melissa were in attendance. I suspect not. I didn't see them at the hospital, that I recall. I didn't see them at the funeral, that I remember. I recall seeing Patty Ann only twice at the Children's Home, Melissa only once. The institutioners kept us separated. I'm not sure I know why.

     Our maternal grandmother, Gay as she was known to one and all, had managed to get custody of me and my brother. She spent the next many years raising us. Again in later years, I would learn that Grandma - that's how I grew up knowing her - wanted to get custody Of Patty Ann and Melissa, but she couldn't manage it. Anyway, that's what my older brother told me years later.

     Grandma worked in a rubber factory to support us boys. She could not afford babysitters for our five year old and three year old sisters. She couldn't afford the special costs that would have been associated with raising them. She could barely manage to look after her grandsons.

The last time I saw Patty Ann was at the Home, on the way to school. She had waited for me, to tell me she was being transferred to another institution, Sunshine Cottages. A converted former tuberculosis clinic. Patty Ann hoped I would get transferred there, too. "If I got sent over there, Grandma wouldn't be able to find me and take me out of the 'Home,'" I said. That was the last time I would see my sister Patty Ann, for 39 years.

     It would be eons later on reuniting with Patty Ann, she would jog my memory with the rare times she and I would run into one another on the bottom steps inside the reception area of the Home. The foggy recesses of my mind tell me there were staircases on either side of the Home's reception office, a glassed-in area wherein sat a phone operator. The staircase wound around, up into the second floor where I never visited - a mysterious place that swallowed up my sisters and the other girls; where they lived and slept. The fog of my memory tells me of one such time Patty Ann had told me about her dad Elmer's girlfriend. I just barely remember it.

     I do remember occasions when Grandma met me in the foyer-like reception area..a bench occupied both opposite walls adjacent to the double doors. We sat on the bench and talked..or rather spoke..to each other. These occasions, I remember, as also being rare.

     She would be all dressed up and smelling of cachet. She ask me how I was, did I see my siblings, and yes, she would take me out of "the Home" real soon, and button up my fly, which always seemed to come undone.

     Then she would be gone, leaving to me the long lonely trip back through the double doors to my world of 'T'-shaped halls and marble floors and strangers I lived with.

     As memory serves, we never did anything in the "Home" which wasn't structured. Off to bed in the bunk-bedded dormitory. Up at dawn to a chilly-aired morning. A session in the lavatory to the urinals being the first stop, - brush and wash, pants and shirts on, shoes all tied up..I never seemed to have a pair of socks that didn't slide down on my heel. I spent half my time in the "Home" walking on my socks. The wash water was always cold, except for showers which were luke warm.

     Line up in the entrance hall, march through the double doors down and around to the dining hall. It always seemed so big with it's eight-chaired round dining tables situated around the room. I can't recall if the boys and girls ate at the same time, but if we did, it was on separate sides of the room.

     The tables had cereal bowls placed in front of each chair. Every morning, it was cold cereal. A pitcher of milk in the center of the table. A server, probably a matron, would fill your glass with milk. You could drink it from the glass, or pour your milk over your cereal. It was usually cornflakes. On occasion we got oatmeal.

     Dinner was the same. Plates with portions of food were placed before each chair. There were never any seconds. I don't remember any dessert except on Sunday night when a small dish of ice cream was served around.

     Dessert was served at functions, like Christmas or Easter. One did get a piece of cake served to him on his birthday, but one never knew when his birthday had come before hand.

     We were marched back to our departments. Marched to the doorway on school days, expected to be off on a specified route to school - some of the more daring kids found shortcuts. Otherwise, one NEVER broke the rules. Off to school, horrors if one didn't get to class before that second bell. Back home again, wash up for supper. March here, march there. An hour before bedtime for play. One of the matrons would sit in front of the door to the matrons' bedroom, hand out a piece of candy if you had been good that day, and would tell a story or bedtime rhyme.

One day this author was refused his dole of candy for some infraction. Doleful and hurt, he wandered a distance down to the middle of the entrance hall, strolling back and forth wall to wall, cuffing the toe-half of his shoe against the wall, muttering under his breath. He noticed that he had the attention of matron and several of the department mates. He was actually entertaining them, all seven years old of him.

     It didn't get the author a piece of candy that night, but he learned to use his new-found tool for attention; he actually gained a reputation as a storyteller from his dorm mates.

     I guess it never occurred to me to look for my siblings on the playground. We were generally let out by department, anyway. . .