WINTER ' FOURTEEN
My mother was a woman named Sylvia Drew, and when I was sixteen, we lived in an apartment
overlooking the steel mills to the east, with the pool hall, a few family-owned grocery stores, and a dress
shop interspersed between. It is a place where everyone had their own connection to the mills, however
inconsequential. My mother, however, was from Philadelphia, from a family of lawyers.
She was an English teacher at the high school, introducing students to Hemingway and Mark Twain,
trying to get on however she could, since my father had left when I was two. She had once wanted to be
an actress, although her father disapproved. He considered acting a profession dominated by Jews and sent
her to Wellesley, where he hoped she might make sense of her life.
The apartment is abandoned now. I’ve visited quite a few times. It was a small three-room and smelled
of cigarettes and burnt hamburger, although the windows have now been boarded up with planks of wood,
and the lower floors turned into a disco. At night the sounds of male laughter from the pool hall and
sputtering motors on Franklin Street drifted in, putting me to sleep. I would ride to school with my mother
in the morning and go home with her in the afternoon.
That was our routine on the most normal days.
My mother was a thin, flame-haired woman with a foul mouth, which she cheerfully deployed in every
situation. She insisted on being called Sylvia because Mother was a reminder of the world she’d come
from, a world of lace-curtains and kitchens. She’d married my father because she wanted a chance for
adventure, to reinvent herself. That was what she wanted, without thought to the scheme of things, but I
can’t blame her. She was young.
“I’m thirty-eight, Mattie,” she said once. “You always think you have time and you put things off. You
wake up one morning and life’s drifted by. You don’t fucking recognize yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have to grab the opportunities by the balls,” she said. “Don’t be an observer.”
I wish I could have lived in that manner, but I didn’t know the world well beyond the confines of that
life with Sylvia. I had dated here and there, a few girls from Munster, brief flings that hadn’t gone far. I
had also gotten into trouble with my friend Frank Lawrence, knocking over garbage cans and playing
mailbox baseball, which I had tried to hide from Sylvia, unsuccessfully.
I’d wanted to become a lawyer then, something I’d kept largely to myself. I’d been following the trouble
in Little Rock that fall, and wanted to defend Negroes down South, to advocate for civil rights. I thought
we were all stuck in the worst stations, underdogs trying to get a piece of the action. But, more than
anything I wanted it, because it was a profession of which people took notice, where I’d have some tangible
proof of my place. Of course, Sylvia disapproved. She worried that I was taking after her family, whom I’d
rarely seen since my father had left.
“Lawyers are good-for-nothings, Mattie,” Sy