My Parents Powerful Silences
Speak loudly 60 years later.
It is early evening late in the summer of 1961.
I’m 12 and lying in bed looking at a Superman comic book.
I hear the phone ring. Our only phone is in a tiny nook at the foot of the stairs inside the front door. My bedroom is to the right at the top of the stairway.
Life is good.
My brothers, friends, and I had played lots of Wiffle Ball in our backyard make-shift ballpark. No longer a scrub, I had made the Little League All-Star team. I wrote about that transition here.
But my mother was about to stop speaking to me.
After several rings, I answer the phone. “Who am I speaking to?” she asks. “Paul,” I said. “This is Mrs. Cleveland, your neighbor. Could I speak to your mother?” No one talks like this on the phone, I think.
I find my mom sitting in the chaise lounge on the backyard patio. My dad is mowing the lawn. I start worrying as I walk back through the house and up the stairs to my room.
Mrs. Cleveland lived a block away. You could see her house from our backyard. I delivered her late-afternoon Times-Democrat newspaper. She was a sturdy and loud woman.
But she was not in my mom’s circle of neighborhood friends. She lived next door to Vinnie and two houses down from Mark.
That’s why I’m worried.
Vinnie, Mark, and I are a band of thieves.
Vinnie was a year older and the leader. His dad was the Mayor of Davenport, Mark’s dad owned an advertising agency, and mine was a chemical engineer. Mark’s mom and my mom were stay-at-home. I never met Vinnie’s mom. She was never home during the day. We planned our caper at Vinnie’s house, the Mayor’s house.
To be in the gang, each had to steal one item from Smith’s drug store a few blocks from our homes. Smith’s had wood floors, narrow aisles, and loaded shelves. The checkout counter was in the back of the store. This little sneak chose a small bottle of aspirin down the path from the unattended till. I stuck it in the back pocket of my jeans and hurried out the front door.
I’m sitting on my bed facing the door. It’s open a crack. I hear mom’s voice but not words. And then silence. I sit on my bed and wait. My useless comic book lies next to me.
My dad comes through the door without knocking and sits next to me.
He was calm and direct. That was his way. The owner of the drugstore had told Mrs. Cleveland about the aspirin. Dad asked me what was going on. I spilled the beans.
Not only was I a thief but now a rat.
And in the doghouse that we didn’t have for our beagle, Sam.
Vinnie beat me up. Mark never talked to me again.
These consequences were survivable as school was starting up. My former mates went to public school. I went to Sacred Heart. Soon I would be back with my Catholic friends.
Trickier to handle were my parents and their silence.
Silences, as each was different.
Dad told me mom was upset, disappointed, and would not talk with me for a while. My sentence would be two weeks.
One morning while I was eating Cheerios, she turned from the refrigerator, looked at me, and said, “Good morning.” The spell was broken.
I felt the world was good again.
But something had changed inside me. Before I finish with that, I need to describe my dad’s silence.
A few days after the phone call, he came home from work and said to me, only me, not also my two brothers, Peter and Pat, “let’s go for a ride.”
He would often take only me, the oldest, to get donuts on Saturday mornings. Being in a car alone with him was not unusual. But this was a Friday, late afternoon. He said nothing as we headed down River Road toward downtown.
And the Davenport Police Station.
We walk through the front doors. We’ve driven by this four-story building many times to Sears Roebuck. I look at dad. A man in uniform comes through a door and grips my hand. Dad retreats. Uniform man and I go through a locked door into a hallway with empty cells on either side. He talks.
I look at how small the cells are.
When we come back through the locked door, dad is waiting.
On the way home, we sit in silence.
A few weeks later, another phone call. My mom answers the phone, listens, and gives it to my father. He tells me the story.
Mrs. Tate, neighbor and paper route customer, said another kid was collecting for my route. He had the name and address, about three blocks from our house.
My dad and I walk to the house in silence. The house is tiny. A man answers our knock. The living room is dark and messy. I wait inside the door. My dad walks with the man and an older boy into the kitchen.
On the way home, my father tells me some kids are the way they are because of the kind of families they come from.
I could tell he felt sorry for the kid who tried to steal my paper route money.
But even this Superman-reading 12-year-old knew he wasn’t talking about that thief.
Later that fall, my mom made my favorite cake — a chocolate wafer icebox cake — for my 13th birthday.
My father shook my hand.
My Life was good again, but I was not the same.
I took the above photo of my parents’ grave site last summer. Dad is dead 30 years, mom six.
I stood in silence to honor them.
A month ago, Rebecca and I attended the Bar Mitzvah of Elon, one of her grandchildren. As I watched Elon take this formalized step toward manhood, I remembered my parents, their silences, and the year I turned 13.
My Bar Mitzvah moment.
