Backbone > Frankly Speaking

My Aunt Grace
By Frank Crocitto Illustration by Leslie Bender

Picture a busy, energetic woman—on the short side, shapely, with shiny black hair, permed or upswept, framing a round pretty face, and large, soft brown eyes.

She was my mother’s kid sister, and they were as thick as divas, ever-whispering, ever-scheming. She lived downstairs from us, on my grandparents’ floor, in the frontroom overlooking the little garden with the mulberry tree, and the sidewalk and street and our grand, expansive sycamore tree. She liked that cold room.

She was a perky one. During the war years when the fear of Germans and Japs was in the air, she was the one that got us all dancing. She would push back the big table in the basement—by herself, asking for no help, wind up the Victrola and set the big bands playing. She was partial to the Lindy, breathlessly exhilarated by the stepping, the swing out and the spinning.

She loved to sing too. She sang when she was housecleaning or washing clothes as well as when we were dancing. She had no voice though—no real voice. Singing or speaking, it was a strained sound like a rush of steam from a radiator; like laryngitis. Emotionally, she was a bubbling pot of tomato sauce, but her voice carried little of what was in her. Some people, like my friends, thought her hoarseness gave her a special charm and a velvety sexiness.

The family never spoke of my Aunt Grace’s lack of voice. Visitors noticed it right away, of course. And it was the last piece of her after-image to fade out of mind and the first to come to mind whenever anyone brought her up. It was barely a tenth of a human voice, and it always put her at a disadvantage. She might have had a far different, far better life if she had had a voice.

As a boy I don’t recall ever asking what had happened to her voice. If I asked I don’t remember being answered. And if I was answered I don’t remember what the answer was. But I knew the answer was connected to the scar down the front of her neck.

It was a puffy, pink seam of a scar. Although she powdered it and as often as not wore high collars and scarves, it was difficult to hide. Eyes invariably went to it. Whenever she lifted her head, there it was.

I never asked my Aunt directly about the voice or the scar. She was my best friend, a real friend. After I had careened into my teens and became privy to more of the family’s secrets, I learned the scar was the result of an operation, many operations, all aimed at restoring her voice. Nothing came of them. But what had driven her to so many bouts with the knife remained a mystery to me.

Aunt Grace was a bit of a mystery herself. She lived a life outside the typical family patterns. She was a secretary—when few women went out to work—and she was at it week in and week out for over twenty years. She must have been a pretty good secretary to get so many sick days and to get away with being late so often. Many’s the time I rushed her to catch the train at 79th Street in one of my early cars, including my great midnight green Cadillac. She slaved for some attorneys whose names were redolent of Fishbein and Gassberg. On her summer vacations she flitted off to resorts in the Poconos or to showplaces like Washington, dc, always bringing back a stack of snapshots. The most memorable to me were the ones with Lincoln enthroned sternly behind her and the ones with her and her friends splashing their feet in the pool in front of Washington’s Monument. Girlfriends of hers posed in most of the pictures, odd girls with big noses who liked to smile and show off their legs.

Much to my grandmother’s consternation Aunt Grace remained single deep into her thirties. She was always on the lookout for Mr. Right, as she called him. I don’t know if she got him but, after a long string of goofy sailors, she got somebody—a somebody who became my Uncle Joe. The wiseacres of the family said she had to take what she could get. I guess Joe was what she could get, although it seemed to most of us he played hard to get, and without much justification.
I remember his first appearance—under the streetlight, in a fedora and wrinkled brown suit, a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Peeking at him through the venetian blinds we snickered at his four-eyes and flat feet and how he let the ash grow until it collapsed onto his suit jacket. We’d seen an assortment of sailors and soldiers and strange-shaped civilians over the years; none of them deserved Aunt Grace.

Uncle Joe was a drowsy-eyed kind of guy who spent most of his life force scheming how to make the least effort in life. Consequently, he became a bus driver, acquired a bad back, and drew on compensation for the rest of his life. While he was on it he dabbled as handyman, mechanic, and finally oil man. He bought an old rinky-dink oil truck—on which I myself painted SPLENDID OIL, in western-style lettering, for which artistic triumph he let me deliver oil with him in the dead of a long forgotten winter. When things became serious between him and Aunt Grace both families were brought together at Sheepshead Bay, where Joe had a job opening clams. We stood on the sidewalk eating clams for hours. He and his sleepy-eyed family thought he was a fish well worth the catching.

After they married they moved in downstairs where Uncle Joe’s slovenly ways—particularly his walking around in his underwear through most of the day—exasperated my grandmother so much she made life intolerable for the newlyweds. Behind his back the family called him “Calza-needa”, a Barese word that I think meant “boxer shorts,” though it implied a lot more. Before they moved out to the Island they had two boys who inherited their father’s listlessness and their mother’s hypochondria.

I missed my aunt when she left, and I went out to see her as often as I could. I was in college by then and my infatuations—with girls and theater—were pulling me every which way. She would call me and pester me to come see her. She always made me some delicious cake dripping with juicy peaches or oranges when I went out there.

My Aunt Grace stood by me through all my growing years. She was my confidante, she encouraged me when the whole family was arrayed against me, she was my bank. Whenever I “had to have” something and I couldn’t get it through the proper channels, she’d slip me the cash, saying:

“Make sure you don’t tell your mother!”
or
“If your mother finds out she’ll kill me!”

On my l8th birthday she lent me the money to buy the Caddy. No one in the world would have done that...but her.

We did a lot together too. We used to watch wrestling on television when it was in its innocency—when there were heroic figures abounding like Gene Stanley, the platinum-blonde Mr. America, and the Italian Guy (whose name eludes me) with the flying drop-kick and the Golden Superman, who came from Brooklyn and who had developed the power to keep his boots glued to the canvas so even big bull-necked beasts couldn’t throw him. She and I wrestled sometimes, ourselves. She was strong and she pinned me most of the times; I laughed all the while she was doing it because she got such a serious expression on her face. We watched dramas and movies together, and the McCarthy hearings, which we enjoyed better than Cheerios. I used to help her with her housework too, just so we could be together and talk.

She was an ally who never let me down. There were ravines of depression that I fell into, from which she pulled me. There were times when my romances went sour, and she showed me the sweet side. There were times when I wanted to run away from the family and lose myself in sunny California, and she showed me how much sun there was in Brooklyn.

Shortly before she died I learned what happened to her voice. It seems she was sixteen—in her bed—one sweltering summer night—sleeping—with the window open. Someone climbed in. She struggled. He clamped his hand over her mouth. When he heard my uncles and my grandfather stirring he ran off. He removed his hand from her mouth and with it her voice. The family suspected who it was—a wild-eyed lunatic who had married a cousin, Teresa, and kept her pregnant and kept her eyes blackened throughout their married life. No one did anything about it, though. I think they felt the damage had been done.

Aunt Grace went through thirteen operations, always believing the doctors, that the next operation would bring her voice back. In her early fifties she insisted she felt a tumor on her brain. There were three operations. On the third day after the third one, without any tumor ever being found, she died. I didn’t get there in time to see her.