Nails (Read or listen to a story by George H. Rothacker)

As far back as I can remember, my mother bit her nails. It wasn’t a furtive act, but one I watched her do while I was growing up, and a habit that at the time didn’t diminish her appearance much. It had, however, succeeded in wearing down her front teeth since she’d nibbled her nails since childhood.

    My mother admitted to being anxious, and throughout the time I knew her, she had many reasons to worry. Since I was two, my father had never had a real job after the gas wells he managed near Port Allegany proved to be unprofitable. The land was leased through the Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters to a friend of his, a Philadelphia businessman who had acquired the drilling rights in 1938 to the land located at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains along Route 6.

My father had migrated there from Philadelphia in 1938 at the urging of a wealthy friend, who had personal reasons to see him move to a small shack located a short distance from the leased fields.

After the war broke out in December, 1941, my father, at age 30, enlisted in the Army. After basic training he was shipped overseas to the atolls of the Gilbert Islands and then to Pelelieu and Saipan, islands north of Guam, where he fought in the Pacific Theater until the war ended in1945.

Having nowhere else to reside he returned to his job as the Oil and Gas Director in Port Allegany, which included the dangerous task of carefully loading and lowering a “torpedo” filled with nitroglycerin down the wellbore of a gas well using a wireline. The canister was then detonating by dropping a weight down the hole to impact a blasting cap to generate a powerful shockwave to fracture the surrounding rock formation.

There were few women who lived in the area at the time, so my father invited my mother, a former girlfriend from Philadelphia, to visit him. Though her parents were horrified by my mother’s scandalous adventure with this wild and  jaunty character who wore a cowboy hat, drank and smoked heavily, swore in heavy doses, and had sent hand-drawn V-mails to their daughter of naked native girls and bathing men, the art school alumna and the “go-devil” blaster became a couple and were married in 1946 by the justice of the peace of Port Allegany.

My mother, who was educated in fashion design at the School of Design in Philadelphia, transformed the small cabin into a charming cottage complete with a spinet piano, a glass-brick fireplace, and a large nude painting over the mantle for her Baptist family to enjoy when they visited, as well as the fermented scent of Canadian rye and the smoke from the Lucky Strikes which filled the ashtrays of the home.

I was born in July, 1947, in the closest hospital which was located in Olean, New York, and spent the first two-and-a-half years of my life in the cottage before the gas wells failed to be profitable and we returned to Philadelphia.

My father would have preferred to stay and find a job doing any task that suited his roughneck personality, but my mother, after having me, had altered her perspective on life and wouldn’t have me raised as a hillbilly in a jerkwater town, since part of my father’s allure was his family ties to wealth, society, and a heritage she didn’t share. My father’s ancestors had been wealthy brewers, with a lineage of nobility dating back to before 17th century, while her own, although industrious, were far from rich; her father had worked in a foundry and drove a cab for a living.

Our initial destination was the Penn Sheridan hotel on Chestnut Street. It had doormen and bellhops, and  we had a three-room suite on the sixth floor, complete with a rented piano and a television. A year later we moved to Havertown, into a post-war-built tract house on Lawrence Road, less than a block away from the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corporation, which manufactured candy and the “Swell“ brand of bubblegum.

From there we moved to a third story apartment in a Dutch Colonial house in Broomall and  I was enrolled in the kindergarten class of the Montgomery Country Day School, a private elementary school on the Main Line, where I remained a student until the middle of second grade when my parents could no longer pay the tuition. I then was transferred to the Broomall School, where I finished second grade. After my eighth birthday in the summer of 1955, my parents separated because we couldn’t pay the rent and there was nowhere we could live as a family —  together.

My mother moved back with her parents in Cheltenham, and my father slept on the floor of his mother’s tiny efficiency apartment in Ardmore, while I spent the rest of the summer and fall with my mother’s younger sister, Phyllis. She had two children of her own, one of whom had Parader-Willi syndrome, a genetic disorder marked by obesity and developmental disabilities.

My mother found a job as a salesgirl in the Gimbels department store in Cheltenham and in November, 1955, my parents found a two room apartment in Glenside, near my school, and a bus ride away from my mother’s job in Cheltenham. During this time my father didn’t look for a job, and my mother had only a beaver stole, cut down from a full-sized coat she purchased many years before. There was no kitchen in the apartment since there was no fire escape, so for dinner my father cooked meat patties on one side of a sandwich grill and stacked cans of potatoes, beans or other veggies on the other side. There was no dining table so we sat on the edges of our beds to eat. I have many memories of the apartment, most of which are fond, since I was glad to have my parents back together, and for us to be a family once again.

It was during this period that I discovered that my mother’s fingers appeared deformed, since her nails were bitten down to the half-moons just above the cuticles. I don’t remember noticing her hands previously. I had only thought she had always been beautiful, and I worried about her not having a suitable coat and now living with disfigured fingers.

We lived in the Glenside apartment until shortly after Christmas, at which time we spent one night in a first-floor apartment in Mount Holly, New Jersey. We arrived there by cab and one of my memories was of soap suds that bubbled up in the sink in the kitchen, the scarcity of furniture throughout whole apartment and the wallpaper stained brown on one wall of the bedroom. I cried and begged my mother for us to leave, so the next day we landed on the doorstep of the North Philadelphia row home of my mother’s two aunts: Lizzie and Emma. They found us a rear bedroom, a few doors down their row, split into a common room with a Murphy bed and cot, and a small kitchen. We shared the bath with the owner and another couple with a child, who occupied the front room at the opposite end of the corridor from us.

I was enrolled in the Simon Muir School for the second half of third grade, and learned little while there, but I remember that I wasn’t unhappy either, since we were together and my father wasn’t arriving home drunk as he had when we lived in Broomall. I hadn’t thought about his drinking while in Glenside, but it dawned on me nearing the end of our five-month stay on North 13th Street that my father hadn’t had a drink since our move to Glenside.

We would often spend the evenings playing Canasta or Gin Rummy with bent-edged cards while lying on the Murphy bed, and listening to “stories” on the radio lent to us by my mother’s aunts. They included mysteries, talk shows and my favorite: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.

It was during our stay in the North Philadelphia apartment that I first encountered black roaches that appeared from nowhere at night and scattered to the edges of the rooms when any light was switched on. But there was nothing I could do about them, so I tried to avoid them by walking across the Murphy bed from my cot when I had to relieve myself during the night.

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After my 9th birthday in July, 1956, my parents had good news. My godfather, who had been my father’s boss when he was employed in the gas fields, was going to finance my mother’s formal entrance into music. From what my father told me, his wealthy friend had always loved piano playing and agreed to sponsor her venture. I knew my mother was talented. She had taken lessons since the age of three, could transcribe songs into any key or rhythm, and was familiar with all of the songs from the 1920s through the 1940s: the Gershwins, Kern, Rodgers and Hart,  Cole Porter and many others. She had always played at parties, and could sit down in any household with a piano and charm the listeners as she’d improvise and create a medley from any shout-outs from her audience. Although she enjoyed entertaining, she had never played professionally, but my father had convinced his friend and my mother that she was ready and able to launch a new career in music.

In addition to hiring an agent, my godfather assisted in acquiring us a furnished apartment, retouched publicity photos, three cocktail dresses, a small library of sheet music from the 1950s, a rented piano and a 1953 Pontiac sedan. It seemed to be a miracle for our family and still does, since to this day I have no idea how my father pulled it off, or why my godfather chose to finance the project, except perhaps, some responsibility he felt for his godson, me.

After several months of practice and preparation, my father drove her down to the Fleetwood Room, a cocktail lounge in West Philadelphia for her debut. She dressed that evening in a gauzy yellow gown, and to me, looked lovely. My father waited for her in the Pontiac while she performed her first set and then nervously called the neighbors who were sitting me to find out how I was doing.

During her break, she was supposed to chat men up and encourage them to buy her drinks, a part of the job on which she hadn’t planned. She was told her drinks would only be ginger ale, unless she wanted other, and that she was only to engage in conversation, but nothing more. After finishing the second set, she left in tears and realized that she was no longer suited to a role she might have played at twenty or thirty, but not at forty-three.

So my mother ended her new career on the same night she began it, having worn only one of the fancy dresses purchased for her and leaving my father carrying yet another debt he’d never be able to repay.

Two weeks later, my father sold the leased car to pay our rent. He earned little from its sale since he had no title or proof of ownership. My mother then went from store to store on the 69th Street shopping strip in Upper Darby and settled on a part-time position as a sales girl in a gift shop, and continued to borrow money from friends and relatives to pay the rent and purchase food. The $35 a week she earned didn’t cover even the basic costs, while my father continued to spin stories to both of us about the big oil deal he still had in the works, and the money owed to him that would get us out of debt and “back on top.”

My inclination at the age of nine was similar to that of my mother, who preferred my father’s dream of future wealth to addressing the realities of our lives. I sometimes wondered why my father couldn’t get some kind of job while waiting for his “ship to come in,” but he seemed also to prefer the lie he’d tell me and my mother that “next Tuesday” the money would arrive and we’d be rich, to the thought of making a dollar an hour selling shoes, mending sidewalks, or even bagging groceries.  

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When Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Emma died, my mother got a small amount of money from the sale of their house and my parents split up again. I was fourteen and was still sharing a double bed in the bedroom with my mother, while my father slept on the couch in the living room. She had upgraded her employment from a salesgirl to a freelance artist at the John Wanamaker Department Store in Center City. Knowing there was no better alternative,  my mother and I moved into a two-bedroom, second-story apartment near the Upper Darby shopping district, while my father rented a single room nearby and found a part-time job taking phone orders for a fish market in Ardmore. 

It wasn’t long before my mother had built up her portfolio of drawings and secured a position as a full-time artist at the Gimbels store in Philadelphia, using pen and ink and gouache to render shoes, handbags and notions, a term that covered all non-fashion sundries such as perfumes and toiletries.

Although my mother’s skills were impressive, she had lost confidence after her failure as a pianist and was constantly worried about how she would care for me and the debts she’d accumulated over several years. Her nails were so badly bitten that she’d wear gloves or hide her hands on interviews and in conversations with her employer and her fellow artists.

It was during this time that she resorted to wearing artificial fingernails that, at the time, were poorly made and badly fitted to her small fingers and hands. The glue that held them on was messy, often oozing out the sides and bottoms of the nails. I would sometimes watch her apply them and wondered why she didn’t cut them properly in a curve extending from the sides of her fingers to the tops. Instead, she clipped them only from the sides into a point, before carelessly covering them with red polish as well as the glue that oozed out from the borders.

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When I was seventeen, my father moved back with us and slept on the couch in the living room. He had lost his single room several months before due to his failure to keep up the rental payments, and had been sleeping in the back of the fish truck parked behind the market, until he was let go from his job, most probably due to his drinking and his unkempt appearance. My mother felt badly for him despite his abuse and failures, so she told him she needed his help raising me further as well as to help her with the cooking and cleaning and to teach me how to drive a 1952 Plymouth left to me by my grandfather.

My mother continued to work in the Gimbels art department until she was 62, when photography completely replaced renderings for visuals in newspaper advertisements. She received severance pay and a small amount of social security benefits, and tried to sell her illustrations to other stores, but industry trends had changed and her style was no longer relevant. During this period she noticed that her ankles were stiff and painful, and she soon after was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which over time extended through most of the joints in her  body.

By that time I had found my own job in the art field, gotten married to an older girl I’d been dating for some time, and had moved into an apartment in Springfield, along the trolley route and El lines to my job in Center City. Though I spoke with my mother nearly every other day, and lent my parents my car on occasion to drive into the country and “smell the cows,” as my mother said about their excursions, I knew little about her illness and how my parents were dealing with their lives without much income. By the time my wife and I bought our house in Media, my mother had contracted ovarian cancer and had become dull of mind and unclear in her thoughts from the mixture of the drugs she took and a lifetime of worry.

Although I was concerned about both of my parents, I was more focused on my own life and prospects for a better future than I was about the troubles of my parents who had made their mistakes in life, and now were living with them.

My wife and I had never been the perfect match, but she was getting older and her family was urging us to have a child. So, in 1979, our daughter was born. While I was making progress in my career in art and design, and  becoming known for my illustrations and creativity, the division between my wife and I grew wider, and the distances increased.

Before my mother died at the age of 67, she was able to see her granddaughter born and visited our house most Sundays. She, at this stage of her cancer and other afflictions, considered herself unclean and was afraid to hold the baby. I have one picture of her taken shortly before she died. She was frail with thinning white hair and wore a ghostly stare visible through thick glasses. My daughter’s  on her lap, most likely placed there by my ex-wife. Her right hand can’t be seen, as it’s hidden by my daughter, but the other hand, though gnarled and bony, is extended as if she’s reaching out to someone. Looking closely at the photo, one can see a set of beautifully cared for fingernails with gentle curves at the top and white tips. After she died, I asked my father about her nails, and he told me that she’d stopped biting them shortly after she left her job at Gimbels, and that the social worker who sat with my father and her at Lankenau Hospital had taken great care in filing and polishing her nails each time she accompanied my mother to her treatments.

I asked him why I’d never noticed her nails in the five years since she’d been laid off from Gimbels.

“She hid them from everyone,“ said my father. “I guess she was embarrassed by them, but they looked fine to me. Much better than those plastic things she wore to work.”

Later that night I broke down in tears when I thought of the kindness of the social worker who had tried the best she could to mend my mother’s broken hands, making the nails that had once been such a scourge into works of art. Though I believe I  cared greatly for my parents, I had let go of my concerns once I moved away — from the drinking, poverty, lies and lost hopes. I had my own demons to contend with, and new responsibilities to take on. 

I arranged her funeral, and asked my former Episcopal minister to preside. Only a few friends and family showed up and she was laid out in her casket  holding a small bouquet of roses. Her hands had been relaxed  by the mortician at the parlor, and I had asked that her nails be done in much the same way as they were in the photo that sat next her in the casket.

”French nails?“ the mortician had asked with an understanding smile. “Clear polish with the underside of the tips painted white.”

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