More about Woodbury

To go on with my Woodbury stories, I have to confess that I was a very wicked child when we lived there. I mentioned before that I went to Catholic school, St. Patrick’s, to be exact, which is now a good-sized school as I can see from Google Earth. When I attended there was less of it, the school building (a mansion that had belonged to the Greens, patent medicine millionaires in the olden days),  and the nuns’ quarters, the Greens’ old stables and outbuildings, I think. I remember a garden out front of the nuns’ quarters and maybe a stone wall or an iron fence. Behind the mansion was no garden anymore, only a trampled wasteland where the brutish children frolicked during recess.

The thing is I wasn’t Catholic.

I was made to attend St. Patrick’s instead of the public school because it was only three blocks from my house, with no dangerous streets to cross, and I could walk there by myself even as a kindergartner. We did not keep a car. It was wartime. Rubber and gasoline were rationed. My mother neglected to make friends with the other mothers, still less with the nuns. I don’t remember trying to befriend any of the little wretches in my class, but I certainly had no friends there. I hated the nuns. The nuns hated me. As part of our moral education Sister used to draw diagrams of The Soul on the blackboard and then color in the stain of venial and mortal sins. “We’re all going heaven some day if we keep our souls spotless,” Sister said, “Except for Katie here, who is not of our faith.”

Well, what the hell, right? As long as I was destined for The Pit I might as well be perfectly bad. I knew I was developing in the right direction when I was able to lie to Sister to her face without laughing.

Next week: How I Became a Juvenile Delinquent

Early Murders

The Mystery Writers of America is (are?) gathering materials for another swell anthology, a YA this time, I think they want to call it My First Murder. The premise seems to be that dealing with murder, or committing murder, is a normal part of coming of age these days. They have sent out a call to members to submit short stories to be selected. I twitch,  competitive animal that I am, and reach for my word processor. But, adolescents and murder. Do I want to write about this? Have I got the experience? Have I got the right attitude? (Have I got the chops?)

It’s true that I just finished writing a book about an eighteen-year-old girl who killed three people, but they were German agents in 1915 and they deserved whatever happened to them. It’s also true that I know the stories of a number of real young people involved in murder. Their stories are too sordid to write about. A young girl wakes up to find her mother beaten to death, probably by her father. She remembers nothing of the event even to this day, forty years or so later, while the father goes free. (Actually he’s dead, but he was never brought to justice.) Another young girl, after seven years of sexual abuse by a family “friend,” walks in on the “friend” in bed with her father and shoots him. Impossibly sordid.

And then there’s young Skakel. I once collected a dossier of online writings of inmates of Elan, the so-called school his family sent him to to keep him out of the public eye after he murdered Martha Moxley. How the “students” were treated at the “school.”  Sordid to the thirteenth power. I found it fascinating, in a horrible way, but I could never write about it, never sit down with these people’s lives long enough to write even a short story.

I’m no good at writing short stories anyway. So there’s that. When I was younger and had a thicker skin and less understanding of the meaning of life and death I suppose I could have tried my hand at writing about adolescents and murder, but I’m too much of a snowflake now. Contemplating young people and murder causes me to feel distress. I prefer peace and quiet. Good luck to the other writers, blessings on you, knock ’em dead and all that good stuff.

 

 

Woodbury Revisited

When I was a small child I lived in a town in South Jersey that I moved back to later as a young housewife. I was reminiscing about some aspects of the place to Harold this morning. He told me I should write an essay. Truly my experiences in Woodbury are worth a number of essays. The differences and similarities between the Woodbury of 1943 and the Woodbury of 1963 are worth talking about all by themselves.

Bad plumbing is the first thing that comes to mind. When I was little my family rented the first floor of Doctor and Mrs. Harney’s house on Woodland Avenue, a neighborhood respectable enough to please my mother. The Harneys lived upstairs. The household sewage would back up at inconvenient times and rise up in our bathtub, usually when my mother was about to give a party for the neighbors, or worse, for my father’s fellow naval officers. For some reason I thought it was my fault, because I had dropped some pebbles in a drain in the back yard. For weeks I lived with a crushing sense of guilt (did I mention I was going to Catholic school?) until I dreamed that I confessed everything to my mother and she spanked me. Children were spanked in the old days. That was life.

But bad drains were endemic to the town. Not my fault. Twenty years later my first husband and I rented a second-floor apartment where the landlords lived on the first floor. In a fit of go-go mod enthusiasm I painted the little bathroom in many shades of pink, from deep shocking to palest petal, and it was a sight to see. People remarked on it. To complete the effect I used to buy pink toilet paper until I noticed shreds of pink toilet paper appearing in the gutter out in front of the house. Whatever they used to do for sewage disposal in that town was not awfully effective. Nowadays you can’t even buy pink toilet paper, nor would you want to. It’s bad for the environment, you see.

The tap water, at least the delivery of the tap water, was as bad as the sewage. From time to time the pressure would fail and the water would run backward out of the pipes. Then the air in the pipes would compress. When you turned on the tap at the kitchen sink it would fire a charge of water strong enough to blast whatever you were holding underneath it right out of your hand, smashing it in the sink. And yet I kept forgetting. That’s why I only have three Wedgewood cups left out of the four that my Canadian aunts gave me for a wedding present, along with a teapot, cream pitcher, and sugar bowl, together with instructions on smuggling them all across the border.

One afternoon as I was washing my hair, lathering it all up nicely, the water pressure quit. Luckily I found the landlady at home downstairs when I knocked on her door in my bathrobe. Being on a lower level she had water, and she kindly rinsed my hair out for me in her bathroom sink. Neighbors should take care of each other. If you live in a place where the neighbors don’t take care of each other you should move.

And here I leave you, dripping but squeaky-clean. Perhaps I will continue this reminiscence next week.

Ta-da!

The years of strange research are over, the obsessive collection of the memoirs of WW I spies, the painstaking scrutiny of subway maps, elevated railway maps, street maps, and neighborhood maps of 1915 Manhattan, the writing, rewriting, and finally the deleting of embarrassing sex scenes.

Also the heart-in-mouth approach to agents, those all-powerful gatekeepers to the publishing world, and the three-day depression that comes with each rejection, no matter how encouraging or polite. I’m self-publishing this puppy. It feels like a fifty-pound weight off my shoulders.

I don’t expect commercial success, I just want my friends to read it if they like. Here is the book, FREDDIE ZORN AND THE DARK INVADERS. It will be available as a Kindle on February 10, and you may pre-order it if you so desire. I think $5.99 is reasonable. For $15 I will send you a paperback copy, if you send me the money first and let me know your mailing address, but I have to tell you that the paperback copies are pretty scarce, so you’re probably better off with a Kindle.

If your book club wants to read it and talk about it, I’d be happy to show up, as long as they’re not too far away from Lambertville and they don’t meet on choir night. But I’m not getting on a plane and flying to Houston. I’m not even getting on a bus to go to New York. I’m perfectly comfortable right here. *Sighs contentedly*

Anyhow here it is.