OUT OF THE POORHOUSE

(c) September 24, 1989

In much delayed honor of my father on his 85th birthday

by Rick Weiss

When I was a little boy, we were poor. Oh no, not poor by the standard of the Third World's Poor. Nor were we poor like the poor Chinese and Biafrans that my mother constantly reminded us of when we gagged down the candied carrots or liver with spinach and kidney beans that she served up. We weren't even poor by the standards of the immigrant poor, our brave grandparents who flooded the Eastern America shores at the turn of the century.

Yet we were poor by the standards of the neighborhood that we lived in, the sprawling insular sixties suburban society. In our neighborhood, men and women of manifest vision built razor clean, unsparing split levels and colonials with oversized picture windows on generous, partially wooded tracts, chopping down, plowing under, manicuring the last vestiges of rural countryside to surround the eastern cities; fleeing their parents’ cities and blazing open the new frontiers of suburban America.

My father was one of those men. Having his honorable discharge from the Marines, he painstakingly scrimped, scraped, working two, sometimes three jobs, to produce the nest egg that moved my mother, me – aged three and my baby brother, out of a downtown two bedroom Pittsburgh rowhome and into a three bedroom ranch in a new development called Northwood Acres. A $19,000 GI loan bought him the property – three-quarters of an acre, cleared – and the construction of a split-level three bedroom orange brick ranch. Dad had "gotten in" early and built when prices were low. Only four properties dotted the development's ninety-some acre expanse when we first arrived. Years later, when we moved again, there were well over a hundred houses in Northwood Acres.

I was thirteen at the time of that second move. Throughout this period, I'd practiced a sort of systematic amnesia, a constant willful reinvention of myself – purging the past so I could remain pure in preparation for the promise of an unidentified, but glorious future. I became, I know now, a sad protean creature. Spongy and desperately adaptable but perpetually unsettled, I carried over only a selected handful of precious memories from year to year. Yet, if there are large gaps in my virtual recollections, I don't mind. My most distant, most wonderful childhood memories are deeply fixed in two nearly incorruptible recording media – my dreams and Dad's super-8 home movies.

There's me on my fourth birthday. Overalls, plaid shirt and fresh bristly crewcut, standing on the just-set concrete porch, so new you can still smell the damp mushroom newness of it. I squint, surveying the gentle arc of the valley in front of the house. It's lushly forested and only two other houses punctuate the green expanse.

Here at our backyard. Isn't it glorious? Freshly dug sewage and water trenches project from beneath my feet and radiate to the horizon. Pressed up against the transparent barrier of the expansive sliding glass door, I feel suspended, like a helium balloon bobbing at the edge of a cliff. I'm peering oh so longingly down into the canals outside that plunge six feet into the clay yellow-brown earth and cry out for exploration. My parents have forbidden me to leave the house.

It's not because of the new construction. Confined indoors by a virulent bout of chicken pox; I smear my itchy nose, my lips and fevered brow hard against the cool, thick glass. I ache like no ache you can imagine to go out and drink in this sparkling early spring day, to smell and feel, but mostly to scramble in and out of these exquisite lunar excavations. Yet however desperately sought, this tantalizing experience is eternally denied. Long before my fever broke and the itchy rash left my neck and arms, bulldozers came and completely covered over all the wondrous trenches in the yard. This was the first time I sensed in some powerful aching, immediate revelation, that life presents fleeting opportunities, cracks in time, that must be quickly entered before they are sealed forever and entry is denied.

Other young families soon joined the pioneers of Northwood Acres. From my vantage on the front porch or behind the sliding glass door, every year brought a new procession of station wagons that accompanied the destruction of my private woodland universe. Trees crashed down, bulldozers lumbered and roared, spitting diesel and clearing brush, chewing out large, open, unambiguous tracts of blue sky and Kentucky bluegrass that would soon sandwich the rapidly expanding community. The other men in the neighborhood built larger and more opulent houses up the hill. They advanced steadily in their careers, said progress reflected visibly to the eyes of a watchful boy, by what they built and what they or rather what their children acquired.

My father, with that gentle quirk in his nature that didn't allow him to either demand of his employers what he was worth or to seek more lucrative employment, instead took his measure of pride in his stability, loyalty and reliability. Too young to appreciate these subtle virtues, I seethed, noting the other fathers installing large vinyl and redwood aboveground swimming pools in their backyards and console color television sets in their living rooms.

We on the other hand, had a cheap plastic wading pool and a long succession of morose castoff black and white TV's with sputtering picture tubes. The other parents gave their children new candy apple red PF Fliers and other riding toys shaped like tanks, racing cars and bombers. When our cousins got sleek new bikes, we got their dull, rickety castoffs with the hideous balloon tires.

The other families took annual pilgrimages to places with magical names like Disneyworld, Virginia Beach, Atlantic City and Bushkill Falls. I spent the long, empty summer days riding past the sealed up houses, taking mental inventories of the abandoned driveways. When the neighborhood mothers returned to reopen their houses at the end of the every season, they emerged tanned, coifed and arrayed in the crispest of linens, the boldest florals and the smartest plaids. Like Technicolor laundry soap ads, they wafted past our house, serenely perfect, in sleek, muscular wood-grained paneled station wagons.

Even their cars hummed with the assured power to transport their families beyond the invisible barrier at the entrance of the neighborhood. I was allowed no farther than the picket entrance gate, just beyond which I sensed an unseen portal to exotic bumper sticker, window sticker escape destinations.

The sign on the fence read "Welcome to Northwood Acres!" Was I the only one who read irony into that wholesome greeting as, ever-heedful of my mother's warning, I made my loop?

Our embarrassing progression of shabby, evil looking, station wagons bore no travel trophies, only rust, grime and dents. Rumbling, rattling, chattering, fuming, ravaged by decay and disrepair, this shameful procession of vehicles barely got us to church and back. All told, this was just as well, because we rarely ventured far beyond the neighborhood.

My pale, nervous mother mostly wore her hair pulled back and pinned in a severe, unfashionable bun or in tightly wound pink curler curls that oozed the smell of Lilt from beneath her pinned scarf. No beauty parlor trips for her. She wore the most threadbare shifts, which like our clothes, were often hand-me-downs from extended family members who thought they were doing us a favor. I despised their smug "generosity.”

The other families. Theirs was an expanding universe, generously inscribed by the swelling perimeter of their new possessions and mobility. Our world was fixed and seemed to contract until it wound us in wet claustrophobic gauze of unfulfilled desires. For the longest time I regarded this fate as a special punishment meted out to my parents for their sins of mean fortune and ethnicity—and inherited, with profound injustice, by me.

And the babies kept coming, first one, then another, now three more, until the ranch groaned at the seams with creaky bunk beds, sour diaper pails and overflowing laundry hampers. That house and property had been Dad's proudest investment and his young family was rapidly outgrowing it. For him this must have brought an equal dole of pride and desperation. Eventually, the economic strain of a growing family and a fixed income would force him into a reluctant change in jobs and a move to a new city. The urgency of the move would force him to sell the ranch at no profit, even in an era when real estate values continued to boom. From that time to the present, he'd never own another house and it would be many years before my mother could forgive him this from among a litany of his other failings.

Unlike his brothers who are successful merchants, Dad never had "a head for business" as Mom reminded him when they fought. Though undoubtedly magnified in my imagination, like most of my imaginings, it seemed that they fought all the time. I was seldom privy to the complete text of their battles, yet it seems one way or another, that they were always about money. My mother is still of the mind that my father's lifelong failure to put money aside has always been at the root of their financial worries.

"Just save something", she advises me now, decades later. "You can always save something, even if it is five dollars a week, and eventually you will have something. If you save nothing, in the end, you'll have nothing, just like your father." Now that I'm grown, she confides this to me over the phone, in hushed conspiratorial tones, as if my father is just out of earshot and would berate her for passing this homespun wisdom on me.

The wisdom of my mother. It's no doubt sound, but somehow ignores the particulars of the case. The case is that my father supported six children and a wife on one modest income. I doubt he ever had an extra dollar to save. His support included everything from sewer line fees to pediatricians and orthodontists, to private and parochial schools, colleges and now even law and medical schools for my younger brother and sister.

Recently, after taking out a twenty thousand dollar loan to help with my brother's and sister's tuitions, Dad confided to me that he and Mom had made a conscious decision long ago to invest everything in their children. I'd heard them say this before. In fact, as long as I can remember, they've both been trying to convey this message to us in one form or another. Yet it is just recently, as an adult, that I began to appreciate the full import of the statement.

Today, decades later, my parents are considerably more comfortable than they were when we were growing up. Yet to this day they are both obsessive penny-pinchers, both unable to put their early days behind them; those days fraught with arguments and real worries about how they were going to make ends meet.

Dad's eventual response to Mom's diatribes and the inevitable conflicts was sullen avoidance. Retreating to the quiet sanctum of his office, he began to skip supper more and more frequently. Mom would put us to bed almost immediately after the evening meal with Dad still at work. In the awful void of his absences, my pre-slumber visions replayed morbid scenarios of fiery automobile crashes and the imagined dread of waking up the next morning without a father.

In the lengthening shadows, time inched sickeningly down the darkening walls above my bed. I'd stand on the mattress, shimmy, bounce, stretch and claw desperately to reach the sill of the too-high-window through which trickled only the feeblest light. At this point, my brother would roll over and threaten to tell on me, so I'd retreat back into my clammy berth where I could only listen to the other kids my age who had permission to play on the street well beyond my bedtime, just beyond my window.

I thrashed about in my bedclothes and would gradually settle down. Then, with a powerful burst of concentration, I'd extended my radar vision beyond my own flushed skin, beyond the cool, unyielding plaster skin of the walls of home for signs of life in the cosmos.

When the other kids finally went inside, I pressed the earpieces of succession of crystal radio sets to my head; chirpy little sounds produced by knobs endlessly fiddled with, tuning past the strong AM signals from Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York or New Orleans, scanning for the vast ethereal static waves in between.

I became a bird, no a birdboy, pajamas fluttering, soaring and dipping along the contrails of the shimmering radiomagnetic pulses that filled those immensely empty starry black gulfs between the great luminous cities of a great expansive country.

Mostly I just listened for, waited for, prayed for, the sounds of my father's safe return. The familiar sound of his car in the driveway, the crunch of tires against cinders, the rolling thunder of the opening garage door, the solid slam of its closing, all the familiar reassurances from the outside world that for one more day, all was concluded as I’d wished it to be. Every night it seems, I raged my silent, pitched battles against fear and death, but more often than not, I fell asleep long before Dad came home.

As an adult, I reflect back on these modest, claustrophobic, anxious beginnings and can honestly report that I see in them, far more virtue than shame. Childhood always holds a completely different reality while it is being lived in. These were the times when being different was a crime; when the shame was palpable. Those times, distant to the mind, yet of relatively recent chronology, were times when I simply did not understand.

Those times were also filled with endless juvenile refrains: "Can we get," "Can we buy," "Can we go," "Can we see," "Can we," "Can we." To which my father would invoke his favorite reply, spoken with ritualistic solemnity, a tilt of the head and a gentle faraway look in his eyes.

"Yes, we can, we will … as soon as my Rich Uncle comes out of the poorhouse."

Now my mother's family is a huge, crazy-quiltwork Italian brood. Yet all were present and largely accounted for by the family archivists, my mother being the most authoritative. Even the family still residing in Italy is a known commodity. We got letters from Genoa, a visit from a Roman Monsignore and frequent onslaughts of boisterous domestic cousins, elegantly coiffed aunts and cigar chomping uncles piling in the door at least twice a month to sample the pride of my mother's kitchen.

My father's family by contrast, is small and to this very day, virtually unknown to us. I'd heard vague tales of my grandparent's escape from the pogroms in Russia. There were stories of Papa's brother who went to Brazil and was never heard from again. Was he the Rich Uncle? No I was told, it wasn't him. So, who is he? I was utterly entranced by the assurance of this Rich Uncle. He was the purest, brightest magic.

What did he look like? What was this poorhouse business? Why if he was rich, would he subject himself to such a terrible place? Was he there involuntarily? Of course he was. The contradictions spun me around and my imagination filled in the gaps with radiant visions of a tall, top-hatted Daddy Warbucks of a man with thick-maned silver hair; a long, kind face ennobled by a natty goatee and piercing eagle blue eyes. So he'd been bowed by misfortune too, but that didn't matter. He’d triumph over the indignities that were not of his own making. He was one of us and would not be defeated or denied. This was incontrovertible.

One day, very soon, I knew he would appear at our doorstep. He would complete the yearning puzzle that was my life and so I would know him immediately. Tophat in hand, proud of eye and resonant of voice, he would lavish on us all those things we ached for. I would be the first one to run to his side and I would never leave it. They would have to pry me away with crowbars. I'd hold out my hand and ever so proudly, but respectfully, would introduce my younger brothers and myself.

We would take him in and share with him with the one thing, the only thing we had in abundance, but that he'd been denied. Love. Respect. Filial piety. My parents had schooled us well in these virtues, in incontrovertible preparation for this very day. This commodity, family love, translated so poorly into the lucre that ran the world outside my window. Yet to Rich Uncle, our loyalty would be as good as gold. And he would reward us in kind.

He'd buy me a better bike than Jimmy Kelly's. We'd put in a sunken swimming pool with a sun deck too. He'd buy my Mom and Dad each their own new cars. Maybe Dad could even quit his job and help Rich Uncle in his businesses. Rich Uncle would see to it that Dad was home for dinner. Maybe Uncle could put in a good word and see to it that we didn't have to go to bed so early. And maybe, just maybe, he'd fix it so my parents wouldn't argue so much. With him around, there'd be nothing left to fight about.

Rich Uncle comforted and contorted my visions for years. He was a real and persistent presence that gave my sorry little life a sense of dignity that I imagined it lacked. He offered hope against the disgrace of having little else but faith. He, not God, was the answer to a child's prayer, a magical key that would soon turn and open a door to wondrous possibilities. Yet Dad, when pressed, would brook no further discussion beyond the ritual conjuration. Instead he deflected the discussion by admonishing us to clean our rooms or the basement, or to go to Mom and see if we could help her since we obviously had time and energy to spare.

There was a day before the birth of my sister, sibling number five, that I remember with crystal clarity, even though I was only ten and a half years old. My parents had argued late the night before. I'd listened and this time I heard it all through two closed doors, from deep within the joyless sanctum of my darkened bedroom.

Father: "Why can't you just leave me alone? Don't you see that I work hard? Things have to get done. I have to do them."

Mother: "Things always have to get done there. But they have to get done here too. You don't care. You spend all your time there, but you don't make any more money. You don't bring home any more money. Where does the money go?"

Father: "Where do you think the money goes? There is no more money. I'm so tired of this. I'm tired of you. Asking all these questions. Mistrusting me."

Mother: "I'm tired of this too. I'm tired of you. I'm tired of you never being around."

Father: "If you're so tired of me, maybe I'll just leave for good. Is that what you want? Do you want a divorce? Do you want that?"

Mother: "Do you want a divorce? Do you want that?"

And so on. I buried my head in my pillow and cried myself into sodden sleep, I don't know how or when. I just remember the dream. It was the most amazing dream, poignant and terrible with incredible possibilities and dashed promises, my life encapsulated in the few seconds of flashing synapses.

In the dream I stood on the hill overlooking the St. Ursula’s schoolyard. In the valley below, an immense gleaming silver rocket ship stood poised to the sky! Wispy tendrils of steam escaped from its jets. What is it doing here? Then I remembered. The entire school was going on a field trip to the moon. And I was going too! I had permission, I had the note right in my pocket and little did anyone know, but I was not about to come back. Not on your life. I was going to stay up there and help build a fabulous Moon City. As soon as they weren't looking, I'd leap into a crater and hide until they were gone. I'd become the youngest moon colonist ever.

My class marched down the hill, two-by-two and I quickly fell in stride. As we marched up the metal ramp and into the cavernous opening of the ship, I felt into my pockets for my lunch money. No lunch money. Hot shame crept up my neck and into my face. "Okay, I just won't tell anybody. I'll just keep quiet." Inside the spaceship was a huge, darkened auditorium with a panoramic representation of the night sky, the moon, stars winking and comets whisking in celestial brilliance underneath which hundreds of the most excited kids on the planet were strapping themselves into cushioned seats, preparing for the most amazing journey that they'd ever undertake.

Down in the center of the ship, the captain and his crew were moving silently between flashing, complicated panels, preparing for the takeoff. To my horror, a large hard hand clapped down on my shoulder. I stared directly into the granite face of Sister Euphemia.

"Show me your lunch money young man," she intoned. I withered inside. No. No. "You can't go without lunch money young man. You shouldn't be here!" The hand on my shoulder tightened in an iron grip. I found myself being helplessly hustled back out into the awful daylight. The hatch slithered down in front of me. As the rocket roared, the gangplank shuddered beneath my feet and the dream slipped like a thief from my grasp.

Neuroscientists say dreams only last for a handful of seconds, but to this day I don't believe it. No dream that contained the incredible detail that this one did, overburdened with so much hope, so many dark, unrequited betrayals, can be so clinically brief—a mere synaptic flash.

I awoke, screaming silently into my pillow, "No! Don't leave me. Let me go back! Let me go back!" As the last vestiges of sleep drained away, the day oozed in as thick as the air on Jupiter. I went through my morning rituals inconsolable, eating breakfast, dressing, quietly tending after my younger brothers who were blissfully unaware of my near escape the night before. God, how I envied them their ignorance!

Dad prepared to spend that Saturday at the office, wordlessly shaving, dressing, packing his briefcase. Mom moved about her duties in a sullen robotic silence. I asked her if I could turn on the television set and she responded with a noncommittal shrug that I was more than happy to interpret as a yes. My two younger brothers took up expectant perches in front of the tired old set. I switched it on and waited patiently for the picture tube to warm up. Sometimes you had to switch it on and off a couple times. Praying to Saint Jude between flicks of the knob occasionally helped too.

If we were lucky, a cold fuzzy phosphor dot would eventually appear in the center of the screen. This dot would intensify and stretch into a thin blue horizontal line and ever so slowly would reluctantly distend into a blue bar of wavering ghostly cathode images—which if we were lucky, would fill the screen. I undertook these vigils with superhuman patience, but this particular one was to go without reward.

After ten minutes without even the remotest flicker of a picture, I cautiously approached my father and informed him that the television was broken again. He only stared at me, his eyes quiet and sad.

"Do you think,” I pressed him, "that we could get it fixed, maybe get a new one.” He didn't know, he replied, he couldn't afford it, but perhaps, perhaps when our rich uncle got out of the poorhouse, perhaps then.

Something terrible snapped in me.

"Dad,” I insisted in a trembling fury, not to be denied this time or ever again. "Who is this Rich Uncle? Aren't we ever going to meet him? Why hadn't we ever heard from him? Couldn't he even write us a letter? Make a phone call from the poorhouse? Wouldn't they even let him use the phone?"

Dad was at the door, struggling to leave, but I had him pinned by my pleas and accusing eyes. He stood in the foyer for the longest time, his hand poised on the screen door, his adult conflict no doubt meeting and exceeding my child's anguish. Finally his hand slid from the door and he turned to face me. But he wouldn't meet my eye.

"Look,” he began, softly, kindly, eyes downcast, "There is no rich uncle. It's just a saying. When your rich uncle gets out of the poorhouse. Like “when the cows come home.” Get it? It's a saying. I don't have a rich uncle. I wish I did, but I don't. It's just a saying. Understand?"

Only then did he look up. Furtive, guilty. Then with awkward bravado, he ruffled my hair and was gone. Audio came sputtering out of the darkened television set. My baby brothers waddled off together in search of better entertainment. I don't know exactly when my despair turned to hatred for my unfortunate father, but I do know that it lasted a long, shamefully long time.

He didn't make matters any easier by being home so infrequently and being such a rigid disciplinarian when he was. I grew, it seemed, in painful jolts and starts, marked by the moves our family made, away from Pittsburgh, to New Orleans and back again to the hometown. We moved, it seemed, just as I’d summoned all the courage I had to make some friends. So up into my college days, I led a painfully shy and isolated existence; the life of the mind. And this mind was not the place for a teenager to be. Yet if I was unhappy for what seemed an ocean of time, I am not unhappy now.

How and when did this transformation occur? I suppose it started, almost immediately, with the first move I made of my own accord. Throughout my young life and all its routine dissatisfactions, I was absolutely fixated on the notion that all I had to do was reinvent myself, start fresh and that everything would be better. So against the advice of both parents, I leapt at the opportunity to escape their house and attend an out-of-state college. Barely in my twenties, I leapt for the girl who said she loved me and married her shortly after graduating. There was no going back. It was toward the end of this, my second decade of manifest destiny, that I began to forgive my parents for all my past disappointments, for all their imagined transgressions.

Fourteen years after we married, our first son came. Another six years passed and another little boy was born. Late one night, three weeks before my wife's first delivery, I remember lying in a reverie, my ear pressed to her warm, swollen belly, a scant inch from where my new boy floated in his amniotic slumber. Like sleeping in the sun, I felt it wash over me, a clean, final revelation, the philosophical equivalent of that satisfying aural evacuation a drain makes when the last bit of murky water is pulled down its spout. In that instant I knew that I had finally succeeded at my young life’s ambition. I’d reinvented myself at last—and in so doing, there was no need for forgiveness.

My mother, forever the pragmatist, recently confided to me over baby pictures and coffee that "fairy tales simply do not happen to my family." I'll buy that. Some might call this Italian fatalism, but I believe it is the beginning of wisdom. Mind you, just the beginning. It took many years to realize that my father, forever and like me, a secret dreamer, had conjured the Rich Uncle, not out of cruelty, but out of a deep and abiding need to provide us with something that nobody else had.

Poor Dad, was he to be faulted for his inability to sustain the spell? He hadn't factored the fierce, evangelical literality of children; that combined with an almost limitless capacity to transmute reality, to move so freely between the diaphanous curtain of hope and imagination, between love and enchantment.

Children live with one foot in our adult world and the other in their own mirror world. We are trained as adults to forget this. Their wistful gazes are most certainly turned toward their other world, not ours. What we do as adults, with our calling and rules and persistent solid presence is to coax their gaze away from the magic and back upon us. And when they finally do turn away—poof! The window closes. The spell is forever broken. They know this. You can see it in their eyes. I'm not sure we do them any favors.

When my children come of age, they may witness some hardships that we'd prefer they not see. That is unavoidable. Yet I shall never whip them up a rich uncle. If they want him, they’ll not have him from me. I think it's up to them to conjure their own illusions. For me, the tepid spell of the Rich Uncle is broken forever. What replaces him is a far more potent, more elemental magic which I'm not quite sure yet how to share.

It's a rainy old Saturday afternoon but I don't mind. I'm twelve years old again; it's one-o'clock on the dot and time for "Chiller Theater." I don't have to pray for the television to work this time. I know it will. Power radiates from my fingertips. Lovingly, I stroke the silky cherry veneer of the cabinet. Confidently, I bend over and cradle the knob between my thumb and forefinger. Snap, and the thin blue line leaps up without a waver. It pulls me in to the mirror world, just like I knew it would.

(c) September 24, 1989 (all rights reserved)