A Doll's Boot [first posted 2005]
We had a built-in china closet in the house on Trinity Place where various and sundry items of trash and treasure were kept. The brother had taken it upon himself to rid the house of the former while I declared myself the preserver of the latter. Occasionally we had classification problems.
“What the heck is this?” he asked, holding up a tiny rubber doll’s boot. I took it to Mom where she sat in the living room calmly dying.
She smiled. “When I was about five years old, my father used to take me along on the truck sometimes, delivering groceries. One day I found that little boot in somebody’s house and the very nice lady told me I could keep it.”
Keep it? Sixty-five years had passed. Mom had grown up, gone to college, left her home town, lived as a young professional woman in Schenectady, fallen in love, gotten married, moved to Troy, moved a couple more times, lived six years outside of Albany, moved to Amsterdam, raised a family, buried her husband and still had this little piece of footwear belonging to a doll she probably never saw in the first place.
But then, I suspect it wasn’t the boot she was keeping. It was rather the memory of happy times spent with her father, a man still in his twenties that one night, the night he was riding in the rumble seat. He probably never even saw the uninsured motorist who plowed into him. No good night kisses or tucking her in snug as a bug in a rug, ever, ever again.
*******************
Guido Brunelli was the son of hard-working Italian immigrants who ran a grocery, a diner and a bakery and managed some real property investments. In his teens he became smitten with the girl down the street, wrote her a charming “Dear Miss Geromini” note in pencil, seeking permission to call on her. “I loved him so much!” Grandma Anita told me with tears in her eyes sixty years later when I found that note in a little box at her house. “Oh, how I loved him!”
He was a strikingly handsome young man, and the pictures we have of him exude a brassy confidence. It’s not surprising that he considered moving his young family to Argentina to make his fortune. When a mobster wannabe came into the diner one day and offered to provide Guido with “protection” for a monthly fee, he reached under the counter, pulled out a gun and shoved it in the man’s face.
“This is all the protection I need, and if anything happens to my store or my family I will personally use it on you.”
The man never returned.
As sometimes happens, Anita became pregnant. Guido explained the situation to his father, Francesco Brunelli, who refused to allow them to marry until sometime after the birth of our mother, after which they had three more children. The neighborhood was Mom’s home, but her bedroom remained at the Geromini house with her grandparents, even after her mother moved in with the Brunelli family down the street. Between births, Anita helped run the store, and there would always be a pot of sauce cooking in the back, and a wicker clothes basket that served as crib for the latest infant.
The Italians lived on the wrong side of the tracks, though they may never have noticed. The extended family of aunts and uncles overlapped generations, and there were dozens of shirttail relations and friends from the old village in Italy to keep them company.
They spoke only Italian at home. Mom never learned English until she entered school, but she had a keen mind and was an excellent student (as was her mother, who had completed the fifth and sixth grades in one year upon arriving in America, and who a long lifetime later could still recite the 48 states and their capitals in regional order, as well as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” in grandiloquent manner).
Guido was killed shortly after the birth of his first son and fourth child. It was during the last gasp of Prohibition and he was supplementing his income by running bootleg liquor to Omar Dupre’s speakeasy. (Much later Omar’s son married one of his daughters).
A few years later, Mom’s grandmother Geromini died and her mother decided it was time she moved into “the new house” with the rest of the family. That lasted about two weeks and the stubborn young lady returned to her grandfather and an uncle and aunt and no one raised the subject again.
In her senior year of high school an intense academic rivalry developed between this child of an immigrant family and the son of an old-line New England WASP family. No Italian had ever been Valedictorian of Franklin High School. No one until Laurabelle Brunelli in 1943.
Imagine the pride they all felt, listening to her deliver her address on “Women in the Service”. Years later, reflecting on having seen Carousel on stage in Boston, my grandmother wrote her that the graduation scene in the play reminded her of Mom’s graduation. “That was the happiest day of my life,” she said, “and you know I can count all my happy days on one hand and still have a couple of fingers left over.”
Mom was entitled to a full college scholarship, but perhaps because of an oversight, or perhaps not, the paperwork never left Franklin High School. She nonetheless commuted by train for four years to Emmanuel College in Boston where she once again finished at the top of her class.
She took a job in nuclear research at General Electric in Schenectady and began a regular (often weekly) correspondence with her mother that lasted nearly forty years. She married Dad the following year and soon had four children, followed by the near death of her husband from heart surgery, then a second heart operation a few years later, then another child, then Dad’s heart attack and third surgery, followed by a lingering five year death watch ending in 1974 when Dad was 52 and Mom 49.
By now her older children were leaving the roost. How she loved traveling to see them: Alabama and Florida and Newport and San Diego and San Francisco. Those were days of laughter and joy and the wonderful smells of home cooking and baking that followed her wherever she went. She was off visiting one of the sibs in July of 1986, about to come home in fact, when my uncle called me. I decided to wait before passing on the news.
I met her at the airport. “Your mother died this morning,” I heard myself saying.
****************
Nine years later and here she was dying herself, with as much dignity as she could muster, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, lovingly fingering a little rubber boot.
Someday, I suspect, my kids will be cleaning out my attic. They’ll open up a plastic bag, reach in and grab a strange object and maybe hold that boot up to the light, taking turns touching it, rolling it in the palms of their hands, wrinkling their brows.
“What the heck is this?” one of them will ask.
“Boy, he never threw out anything.”
“What the heck is this?” he asked, holding up a tiny rubber doll’s boot. I took it to Mom where she sat in the living room calmly dying.
She smiled. “When I was about five years old, my father used to take me along on the truck sometimes, delivering groceries. One day I found that little boot in somebody’s house and the very nice lady told me I could keep it.”
Keep it? Sixty-five years had passed. Mom had grown up, gone to college, left her home town, lived as a young professional woman in Schenectady, fallen in love, gotten married, moved to Troy, moved a couple more times, lived six years outside of Albany, moved to Amsterdam, raised a family, buried her husband and still had this little piece of footwear belonging to a doll she probably never saw in the first place.
But then, I suspect it wasn’t the boot she was keeping. It was rather the memory of happy times spent with her father, a man still in his twenties that one night, the night he was riding in the rumble seat. He probably never even saw the uninsured motorist who plowed into him. No good night kisses or tucking her in snug as a bug in a rug, ever, ever again.
*******************
Guido Brunelli was the son of hard-working Italian immigrants who ran a grocery, a diner and a bakery and managed some real property investments. In his teens he became smitten with the girl down the street, wrote her a charming “Dear Miss Geromini” note in pencil, seeking permission to call on her. “I loved him so much!” Grandma Anita told me with tears in her eyes sixty years later when I found that note in a little box at her house. “Oh, how I loved him!”
He was a strikingly handsome young man, and the pictures we have of him exude a brassy confidence. It’s not surprising that he considered moving his young family to Argentina to make his fortune. When a mobster wannabe came into the diner one day and offered to provide Guido with “protection” for a monthly fee, he reached under the counter, pulled out a gun and shoved it in the man’s face.
“This is all the protection I need, and if anything happens to my store or my family I will personally use it on you.”
The man never returned.
As sometimes happens, Anita became pregnant. Guido explained the situation to his father, Francesco Brunelli, who refused to allow them to marry until sometime after the birth of our mother, after which they had three more children. The neighborhood was Mom’s home, but her bedroom remained at the Geromini house with her grandparents, even after her mother moved in with the Brunelli family down the street. Between births, Anita helped run the store, and there would always be a pot of sauce cooking in the back, and a wicker clothes basket that served as crib for the latest infant.
The Italians lived on the wrong side of the tracks, though they may never have noticed. The extended family of aunts and uncles overlapped generations, and there were dozens of shirttail relations and friends from the old village in Italy to keep them company.
They spoke only Italian at home. Mom never learned English until she entered school, but she had a keen mind and was an excellent student (as was her mother, who had completed the fifth and sixth grades in one year upon arriving in America, and who a long lifetime later could still recite the 48 states and their capitals in regional order, as well as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” in grandiloquent manner).
Guido was killed shortly after the birth of his first son and fourth child. It was during the last gasp of Prohibition and he was supplementing his income by running bootleg liquor to Omar Dupre’s speakeasy. (Much later Omar’s son married one of his daughters).
A few years later, Mom’s grandmother Geromini died and her mother decided it was time she moved into “the new house” with the rest of the family. That lasted about two weeks and the stubborn young lady returned to her grandfather and an uncle and aunt and no one raised the subject again.
In her senior year of high school an intense academic rivalry developed between this child of an immigrant family and the son of an old-line New England WASP family. No Italian had ever been Valedictorian of Franklin High School. No one until Laurabelle Brunelli in 1943.
Imagine the pride they all felt, listening to her deliver her address on “Women in the Service”. Years later, reflecting on having seen Carousel on stage in Boston, my grandmother wrote her that the graduation scene in the play reminded her of Mom’s graduation. “That was the happiest day of my life,” she said, “and you know I can count all my happy days on one hand and still have a couple of fingers left over.”
Mom was entitled to a full college scholarship, but perhaps because of an oversight, or perhaps not, the paperwork never left Franklin High School. She nonetheless commuted by train for four years to Emmanuel College in Boston where she once again finished at the top of her class.
She took a job in nuclear research at General Electric in Schenectady and began a regular (often weekly) correspondence with her mother that lasted nearly forty years. She married Dad the following year and soon had four children, followed by the near death of her husband from heart surgery, then a second heart operation a few years later, then another child, then Dad’s heart attack and third surgery, followed by a lingering five year death watch ending in 1974 when Dad was 52 and Mom 49.
By now her older children were leaving the roost. How she loved traveling to see them: Alabama and Florida and Newport and San Diego and San Francisco. Those were days of laughter and joy and the wonderful smells of home cooking and baking that followed her wherever she went. She was off visiting one of the sibs in July of 1986, about to come home in fact, when my uncle called me. I decided to wait before passing on the news.
I met her at the airport. “Your mother died this morning,” I heard myself saying.
****************
Nine years later and here she was dying herself, with as much dignity as she could muster, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, lovingly fingering a little rubber boot.
Someday, I suspect, my kids will be cleaning out my attic. They’ll open up a plastic bag, reach in and grab a strange object and maybe hold that boot up to the light, taking turns touching it, rolling it in the palms of their hands, wrinkling their brows.
“What the heck is this?” one of them will ask.
“Boy, he never threw out anything.”