I was 16 in 1956 when Mom and Pop bought a two-story, yellow brick house. It was connected to a neighbor on either side in typical Philadelphia rowhouse fashion. Of four bedrooms, mine was the largest with a window overlooking the driveway and patch of backyard I checked each morning while rifling my top bureau drawer for underwear. Downstairs, tall windows spanned the enclosed front porch, spilling southern light onto Mom’s back as she bent over her homework at a big desk. Across the width of livingroom was the diningroom, and turning right, a narrow kitchen. At the foot of the stairs sat the Steinway upright where Mom struggled daily with Bach’s point and counterpoint. Grandma had lost everything in 1929 when Mom was 17. The piano was sold and my mothers’s dream of a concert career evaporated: a loss from which she never recovered.
When Julie began kindergarten, Mom enrolled in college with a music major, but no matter how she drove herself, her fingers could not make up for lost years. But she stayed with it, determined to get her degree. A baroque measure would begin, pause then resume and drift past me as I clumped down the stairs. Wrenching her eyes from the music, Mom would glare at me over her glasses. ‘Go back upstairs and come down again. QUIETLY!’ When not at piano or desk, she was back in the kitchen beyond the yellow dinette set and site of her morning coffee: a pale pack of Fatima cigarettes lying by the cup and saucer on the black-flecked formica. On the short back kitchen wall hung a telephone in the alcove by steps leading down to a finished basement and home of the television. At the foot of those narrow steps, wooden crates were delivered weekly to re-supply the heavy dark-blue quart bottles of seltzer with the powerful spray action. Seltzer fights were generally conducted at the foot of the stairs where my brother staged ambushes.
While Mom cooked or practiced, Carl, Julie, Pop and I were likely to be in the basement watching TV, sprawled over the ugly upholstered, wrought-iron lawn furniture rescued from the trash. Pop wired a remote control mute we called ‘the blab-off.’ Silencing commercials greatly improved programs like I Love Lucy, Sergeant Bilko and The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show. Mom might pass through the basement on the way to the the washer and dryer by the back door. Her mind on schoolwork or piano, she detested TV, and watched grudgingly when someone begged her. She had transfered her KCU credits to Beaver, a small, private women’s college not far away. With a greater academic load than before, my mother had even less time for us and the friends who welcomed her back from two years in the Midwest.
Every so often she would take time to socialize with her old pals, and I loved them all. Now old enough to hang out at my parents’ occasional parties, I’d refill refreshments, smoke and practice adulthood to a pleasant conversational hum peppered with laughter and music. Pop would have one too many and start giggling and singing, just short of embarrassing me. Mom would take him aside and try to quiet him down. ‘Now, William…’
‘Aw, c’mon Martha,’ and if a dance tune was playing he’d whisk her around the floor. More times than not she’d be drawn in, trying to ignore Pop’s breath as he crooned into her ear. She loved dancing, but was flustered by the overly romantic songs and would turn her head when he started in on, ‘Oh tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?’ Mom had recently met Sophia, mother of my brother’s schoolmate. They lived a 15-minute walk south, half a block away from a diner very similar to the Ogontz Diner at the end of our street where you could get a lamb chop or rice pudding 24 hours a day, cheap. Diners were one wonderful thing about living in Philadelphia.
A professional dancer before her marriage, Sophia now taught modern dance, so I signed up for a class in her basement studio. I wanted my own friendship with this energetic, freewheeling sophisticate who told tales of show biz in a gravelly voice and husky laugh reminiscent of Selma.
Mom loved both women best of all her friends, and they were both terrific smokers, making them even more interesting and attractive.