5. Canton, 1962
Within weeks of this snapshot, my mother will run out on the mob-connected second husband beside her, to reunite our family and flee Ohio for Texas. Was it a spur-of-the-moment act, or one that’s already underway?
ES, I’M A STORYTELLER. I can’t help but make up stuff. I’ve even been told I have a tendency to look at photos and see more than is actually there. They say I imagine things. Perhaps even fabricate narratives.
Just the same, I’m convinced something was going on that day in Canton, Ohio.
But to make sure I’m not reading too much into the family photos on this page, allow me to describe what I think is going on here. Then I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions.
It’s the summer of 1962. It’s hot. Fourteen on my mother’s side of the family gather at the tiny, un-air-conditioned starter home of her youngest sister, ostensibly to celebrate a cousin’s birthday.
But we never gathered in Canton, a considerable drive for my elderly grandparents. So was that the real reason?
In the photo above, the adults lounge awkwardly on the patio outside. Even the crowded kiddy pool seems less a recreational activity and more of a safety precaution, to make sure the kids don’t suffer heat stroke. Everyone seems to be wondering, are we having fun yet?
My sister, at far left in the pool, appears especially uncomfortable. I wonder if, at thirteen, my mother had decided she was old enough to know the truth. Maybe, just maybe, that our parents had talked again. That they’d decided to reconcile. That they’d made a plan, to leave all our troubles behind, to escape our dangerous stepfather and become a family again.
But to do it – she would have told my sister – we would have
to flee Ohio for Texas, leaving behind her friends, her cousins, and everything she knew.
It would have been a secret plan, one our mother couldn’t share, not only with her second husband but not even with her own family. Because, if she wanted to gather them and say goodbye, it would have to be right under his nose. She must say goodbye to the ones she loved the most without their even knowing it.
As it turned out, she would see them again, and very soon, only days after we escaped Ohio. The irony is, I wouldn’t see her again until I was in my twenties. Read about that next.
