I was born bald, just like my Daddy. Well, not completely bald. Mother said I had a fringe around the edges which thankfully grew into a full head of silky dark brown hair within weeks of my arrival at Gramma's small frame house on Seventeenth Avenue, the house that Mother always felt she had paid for with the sweat of her young years at Kimberly Clark's packing plant in Niagara Falls.
But it was a scare and maybe even a sign that her daughter would have the same ferocious temper that fused the follicles, the temper that had had her bridegroom screaming at the musicians who played the polkas and the mazurkas at their wedding party in Gramma's backyard.
Mother would say that she should have left him right then and there. But she didn't and nine days short of a year after Father Konstantego Cyrana consecrated their union at Our Lady of Czestochowa, I entered this vale of tears in the midst of the Great Depression. The church on Oliver Street was the center of gravity for the local Polish community. Immigrant families settled within a few blocks and their children often grew up to marry a neighbor's child. Oliver Street also was known for some 39 bars but my Daddy was not a regular customer, although he did indulge in an occasional fish fry with Mother and his sister, Vicky.
No, during the glory days when Daddy had the barber shop on Payne Avenue, he kept an ample stock of whiskies and sweet cordials but they were meant mainly for visitors at Easter and at Christmas. Such visitors almost always were close family with whom grievances were constant but the holy waters effected temporary truces in keeping with the holiday spirit.
My Daddy was born to be a priest. To the end of his life, he would see the world darkly, refusing ever to be happy. It was his children's most bitter legacy. He ranted and raved constantly, just like the rotound keepers of the faith of their fathers who each Sunday compelled collection after collection for all manner of special assessments decreed by their dioscesan superiors.
Despite the fact that he and his older brother, Charlie, had been forced to fend for themselves almost from puberty, Daddy somehow managed to attend a seminary in Michigan where the young sons of Polonia, born to peasants transplanted from the Carpathian villages south of Krakow, came to see the Church as continuity and change a corruption of the Devil.
But the miracle which took him from a blacksmith's overburdened household to the tranquil shores of Orchard Lake did not last more than a year when money, or rather a lack thereof, dictated a retreat from the peaceful pines back to the troubled waters at the confluence of the great Niagara and the Erie Canal. This is the place the Iroquois call Tonawanda, or running waters.
Today there are several Tonawandas. That north of the Erie Canal where I was born was, at the turn of the century, the largest lumber town in the world. A great fire in 1913 destroyed the mills and rendered the town a mere stop on the "high speed" trolley which ran between Buffalo and Niagara Falls until the late 1930's. North Tonawanda would remain famous in upstate New York but only because its lumberjacks were regularly reincarnated as the high school football team which reapeatedly trounced all regional opposition.
When I was growing up in the 1950's there were some 35,000 souls in the city. The Poles who lived on the numbered avenues off Oliver Street comprised that part of the population that worked in the mills and foundries and chemical plants. The Germans with swastikas built into the design of their porches were the foremen. The Italians owned the greengrocers, the pizzerias and the bars. And the WASPS controlled the banks and the newspaper.
Many of the Polish kids went to the parish school at OLC where the nuns capitulated to the language of the new world for only the hour each day mandated by a lower law. Daddy wanted my brothers and me to go there too but Mother insisted on the public schools and a more contemporary church. A battle was drawn each Sunday when she and Daddy would argue about whether to attend the church of their patrimony or Ascension which Mother perceived to be more "American" since the homilies were given in English. We wound up going to public schools and taking our religious instruction one afternoon a week at Ascension. I barely remember the black-robed brides of Christ but I do remember the day of my First Communion.
As I pulled on my dress, I glimpsed a momentary darkness over my heart and I knew that I was evil. One of the long curls had caught inside the flimsy white froth, surely a warning from God the Father against accepting the body of His Son into my own when I hated my corporal Daddy so. Unknown heavenly wrath, however, paled before the immediacy of Daddy's mouth and so I placed the veil on my head and went out to the black Ford for the tortuous drive down Oliver Street to partake of my first formal feast as an obedient member of the family of God.
Actually, Daddy was a good man. He blessed the Lord, honored his parents, fed his children and placed his wife before all others. Even though he was always carrying on about money, we ate well and we lived in a big house on the corner of two main streets in town. Of course, we lived on Payne Avenye because Mother has "plunged" Daddy into buying the place so that he could have his own shop again.
Daddy had been the most successful insurance agent in the local Polish community for years. He believed in insurance and to the end of his life old timers would consult him about their needs. But he had become sick and tired of working for Prudential. He didn't like to be bossed around by people less able than he, another legacy he bequeathed his offspring. However, he needed Mother to be willing to take the blame in case things didn't work out.
Amd take the blame she did each and every day. Daddy complained constantly for the twenty five years we owned the big Victorian store front. When he finally sold it for a pittance after broadcasting its shortcomings to his customers for years, he became so remorseful that Mother had to stop him from buying it back for twice the price.
About a year after he opened the shop, Daddy was able to buy a brand new Buick. His customers resented it and business fell off, but only temporarily, because Daddy was the best barber in town. Nobody else could race through twenty customers during a typical lunch hour so that they could back to their jobs in time. Of course, Daddy complained nonstop that he wasn't able to sit down exactly at 12 noon each day but he had Mother running back and forth with juices and soups whenever he rang a bell.
Mother used the back downstairs bedroom as a beauty shop until Daddy told a State inspector that she was out of business. She was very angry because, more than the money, she enjoyed her customers. Daddy, of course, resented any attentions not devoted exclusively to him. Before we sold the previous house on Nash Road, I had warned her about 24 hour a day togetherness when Daddy's lunchtime appearances during his days with Prudential caused such stress.
While I was in high school my name was in headlines each time the local paper published quarterly grades. I would hear him bragging to his customers through the living room door but he never said a word to me. To him I was just "she," the disobedient daughter who refused to sweep up while customers were still in the barber shop.
Daddy bought me a brand new Smith Corona for my sixteenth birthday upon the advice of the highly respected George Vetter, the social studies teacher and coach of NT's winning football team. Of course, Daddy's intention was that I become a typist, an ambition as lofty as might be expected for a member of a first generation family whose most illustrious member had been coachman to a Polish count.
When I was fourteen the Tonawanda News gave me a weekly column writing high school news, a job I had for three years. They also offered me a job as assistant to the Society Editor during the summers. Daddy was pleased because his cousin Sophie had been working at the News for years. But he ceased to be pleased when, the second summer, they rehired me at the same salary. He said I should quit. So I did and then he yelled at me for leaving.
When I mentioned college in my junior year, Daddy was astounded. "We would have planned, if we'd known you wanted to go." I remembered Daddy telling Uncle Louie at his gas station when I was six or seven that I'd be the first in the family to go to college because any kid who never got less than an A, or rather an E for excellent in those days, deserved to go. But Daddy didn't remember and I never could say anything to Daddy, at least not out loud.
Mother went to work at Remington Rand to earn my tuition. My Aunt Vicky worked there her entire life and even Gramma spent some years making the slips with huge lace bodices and borders, a few of which are still packed away in my trunks.
Even though I won the Elmira Key as outstanding junior girl, I didn't want to go to a small girls school of which no one had ever heard. No, I wanted to be a journalist so it was off to Syracuse I went. I who barely spoke to classmates and teachers, let alone a school counselor, did not even apply for scholarships. After all we weren't poor. We gave our used clothes to those living on the lower numbered avenues. And when my grade point average dropped my senior year from 99.9 to 97, I felt undeserving. I withdrew my application to Cornell. Of course, Mr. Lowry, the principal, and my teachers thought I was so smart that I knew what I was doing. "Brainiest" it said under my photo in the yearbook to my utter desolation.
I attended Syracuse for a year but I had to transfer back to the University of Buffalo so that I could live at home. Daddy felt deprived by my Mother's workday absence. "Always looking after those brats first," he harangued. But even UB proved too expensive so I dropped out for a year to work as a receptionist for a prominent architectural firm in downtown Buffalo, earning little more than money for sundries and the bus fare back and forth.
Daddy next decided that I should become a teacher. This meant Buffalo State. I hated the school and I hated listened to how lucky I was that I had free room and board. During a trip to New York to visit my friend Joan I saw an ad for overseas employment in the New York Times. I visited the State Department's recruitment office but did not formally apply. Two letters of inquiry arrived and some months later I joined the Foreign Service as a code clerk. I thus became the typist that Daddy deemed sufficiently exalted a position for someone of my background. After all, he regularly would say, no one climbed out of the circumstances into which they were born in just one generation.
It would be several years before Mother told me that Daddy had used their last hundred dollars cash to buy that typewriter soon after he had opened the barber shop on Payne Avenue.
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