Page 15 - letmetellyou

My Family
the World War II generation, my father was also humble and taciturn and most of what I heard of him or learned from him came from others or from my own observations. My mother was the dominant person in their relationship but my father had a quiet strength and, in a real family crisis, my mother deferred to him. When, as a freshman in college, I called home, homesick and lovesick, to announce that I was leaving school and surrendering my scholarship to come home, it was my father rather than my mother who found the words and struck the tone that kept me there. Despite the risk, he calmly reassured me that I could come home and that nothing would ever be said about my giving up this opportunity. My father had had a scholarship to college and had left to help support his parents’ large family during the Depression. Despite intermittent attempts through correspondence courses and the like, my father was never able to return and never earned a degree, a circumstance that prevented him from advancing in his work as did my mother’s prolonged fight with cancer and his family inheritance, alcoholism, about which I was personally to learn more later. He told me his story and suggested that I sleep on my decision and if I still felt the same way in the morning, I should come home. I never even thought about leaving school again.
On the other hand, lest I leave the impression that my mother wilted under pressure, my mother single-handedly saved the sanity, if not the soul, of her only daughter who, at sixteen, was kidnapped and raped in a notorious incident that claimed front page, banner headlines in The Toledo Blade. I hesitate to share this story out of respect for my sister who I dearly loved. However, my sister has been dead for many years, lived and died under her married name, and her anonymity was utterly destroyed by the federal investigation which permeated her private life at the time revealing to friends, teachers and even acquaintances her identity as the victim under the pretense of assuring that the five defendants were not being falsely accused. The FBI was involved because the perpetrators transported her across state lines. I believe that my sister would approve.
7
I was twelve years old when it happened. In our too small, rented home on Locust Street, in the heart of our heavily Polish working class neighborhood, where English was often a second language, I lay awake listening to my mother’s anguished voice repeating the certainty that her daughter was in grave peril, maybe even dead, to my father. It was late and it was warm and I could not sleep as I lay between my two younger brothers who, I suspected, were also awake. My older brother, who had been commissioned to watch out for my sister had returned earlier empty-handed. They had gone to a wedding reception at St.