Unfinished Stories

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My mother never spoke about her early childhood. I really didn’t think about that fact until after she was gone. I do have some information about those early years because two of my aunts, my father’s sisters, were constantly telling stories of their childhood. My father’s family and my mother’s family were backyard neighbors. My mother had two sisters Rose and Lucy. Rosie was one year younger than my mother and Lucy was 13 years older. My father’s sisters, Anne and Connie, were the same ages as my mother and Rosie and they were best friends.

One of the stories that was often repeated was one told by my Aunt Connie. She remembers the day the four companions played a game that included my Aunt Rosie being struck by a car. This was the late 1920's and the fact that not every family owned an automobile probably influenced this macabre "play." A wheelbarrow served as the automobile. After the “accident” Aunt Connie picked up Rosie and carried her to a place of safety. Three days later my mother’s godmother came to visit. My mother, my aunts, and their dog Puchinello crossed the street to greet the visitor. Aunt Rosie was the last one to cross. A car driven by a chauffeur struck her. Aunt Connie picked up Rosie and carried her to the house. Aunt Lucy, who was married and expecting her first child lived in a nearby apartment house. She heard the noise from the street, came out onto her balcony, and saw her youngest sister being carried away.

Rosie died the following day. Due to the stress my Aunt Lucy suffered a miscarriage and began to hemorrhage. She died three days later. My aunts remember Lucy wearing her wedding dress in her coffin. They never spoke of Rosie’s funeral or the grief that most assuredly surrounded those terrible days. In retrospect I now understand that they viewed the events through the eyes of children and they remembered the facts, but not the emotions. My mother never spoke of those days and rarely mentioned her sisters. She did remember her mother going to the parish priest and asking to borrow a bible and her father expressing his grief by throwing bottles into the street to flatten the tires of passing vehicles.

Lucy and Rosie died many years before I was born. I assume I am named for Rosie even though my mother never admitted this fact. When I would ask about the origin of my name, she would say it was the name of a character in a long forgotten book or movie. Lucy’s wedding portrait hangs on a wall in my home. Every day I see her in her wedding dress with her new husband forever captured in that happy moment untouched by the foreknowledge of what was to come.

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next." ~Gilda Radner
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