No Strings Attached
Her real name was Beatrice Panunzi Robinson and she was an artist who worked in the basement art department of the John Wanamaker store in Philadelphia. My mother interned in the department during World War II and worked part-time illustrating women’s fashion accessories until she moved to Port Allegany in 1946 and married my father.
With many men drafted and recruited into the war, positions had opened up for women with degrees in fashion design to render likenesses of men and women dressed in suits, dresses and separates using pen, ink and brush for advertisements in the daily newspapers.
Aunt Robbie was nearly a generation older than my mother, and had a grown daughter, Lynn, who had two children of her own. After I was born, my mother asked Aunt Robbie if she’d serve as my godmother, a position that along with that of a godfather, entailed supporting and encouraging the faith of their godchild, especially if one parent or both didn’t survive the child into adulthood.
Aunt Robbie was Italian, and most likely of the Roman Catholic faith, but because she was my mother’s friend, she accepted the duties bestowed upon her at my christening which was held at All Saints Episcopal Church in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, in September, 1947.
I was nearly three years old when my parents and I moved back to Philadelphia from Port Allegany, a borough in western Pennsylvania where my father had been a director of gas fields since before the war.
I hadn’t, of course, been old enough to meet Aunt Robbie at my christening, but was introduced to her when we moved into a three-room suite in the Penn Sheridan Hotel on Chestnut Street. It wasn’t long after our meeting that my mother took me to see the Disney version of Cinderella which played at the Boyd Theater in Center City. Although far too young to remember much of the movie, I found it easy to associate Cinderella’s fairy godmother with my own Aunt Robbie, since they were both rotund and had lilting voices, pleasant smiles and jolly laughs.
But after getting to know her better, it was Aunt Robbie’s other traits that endeared me to her, one of which was her caring nature and the warmth and affection she expressed to me as well as to her own two grandchildren. I discovered this firsthand on a visit she, her daughter and grandchildren made to the hotel. Aunt Robbie’s grandson was a year older than I and at one point he wrestled a toy away from me and hit me in the head with it. Aunt Robbie stepped in and grabbed the toy away from the boy and made him apologize to me as she held me close to her while also turning to Lynn and chastising her for her inaction in response to her son’s bad behavior.
Another story, this one told to me by my mother years later, concerned a visit by Aunt Robbie to our apartment when I was six and we had moved to Broomall. My mother had invited her to stay overnight after a visit that included dinner. Aunt Robbie had accepted, but there were only two bedrooms and no bed for her to sleep in other than mine, a double bed that had come with the rented apartment. Aunt Robbie said that she had no problem sharing the bed with me, since she’d slept often beside her own grandchildren, providing that I was toilet trained.
In the morning, my mother knocked lightly on the bedroom door and slowly opened it, only to find me curled up next to my godmother with my thumb in my mouth and my head resting on the pillow formed by me of her very large bottom. Being awake and seeing my mother beginning to speak, Aunt Robbie put her index finger close to her lips and waved my mother away, signaling to her that we’d both come to breakfast once I awoke.
Aunt Robbie’s kindness was expressed to me in many forms. She would always ask my mother if she could speak to me when the two of them had completed a phone conversation. She’d ask me about friends I had in school and always offered a short story about herself that I wouldn’t have known, such as the fact that she hadn’t ever eaten ice cream before she became an adult, and that her favorite flavor was black raspberry, which was only available at Howard Johnson’s, a restaurant chain with a branch just up the street from our apartment.
When Aunt Robbie and I were together, she made the most of each visit, by asking me questions about the toys I most liked, the songs I listened to, the TV shows I watched, and the games I most enjoyed playing. She knew that my favorite toys were puppets and marionettes and that I had a Jerry Mahoney dummy who’s head had once fallen off and was missing a chip of paint from his nose. The next time she visited, she brought her water colors and thick white gouache and mixed the white paint together to patch the chip. She then took some clear nail polish to make the chip disappear for as long as I had the doll.
Aunt Robbie also knew that I liked magic and would often ask me to show her one of my tricks. When I was done, she acted surprised, even if the trick failed. She’d then laugh heartily, encouraging me and telling me I would someday become a wonderful magician, as well as a fine ventriloquist.
Not all of my mother’s friends were as kind to me as Aunt Robbie, but they all seemed to care deeply for my mother. Margaret Jones made a good living illustrating color fashion pages for major magazines as well as for the Sunday papers. She lived in an apartment house in West Philadelphia, which was two bus rides away from us.
Miss Jones had little idea of how to relate with children, but would show me how she began a drawing and worked up layers of paint from a light wash to vivid colors to create the shading and highlights of a dress. She worked at a small booth in her kitchen alcove while she listened to my mother’s woes, which usually included talk about my father’s drinking problem and the rent that was due on our apartment. Our visits always seemed to end with Miss Jones writing my mother a check to cover the monthly rent along with something extra for groceries.
Other artists from my mother’s past would gather for lunch at the Crystal Tea Room on the ninth floor of the Wanamaker’s Center City store, and Aunt Robbie would usually join us. She let it be known to the ladies that I was always welcome to attend. Most of the women were single, widowed by war, or divorced. They were all pleasant to me, but there were subjects they wanted to discuss that they wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, share in front of me.
Before the discussion turned serious, Aunt Robbie would excuse herself from the table and take me by the hand to the escalator that descended to the toy department on the eighth floor. This was always a treat, since Wanamaker’s had the largest Lionel train display in Philadelphia, extending from one end of the floor to the other. It had two trains running at the same time on different tracks, one of which was a silver diesel engined passenger train, backlit to reveal passengers painted on the inside of the windows, and on the other track a freight train circled, tripping switches mechanically and opening doors to reveal plastic signalmen and to operate various signal lights. My favorite rail car was the yellow refrigerated milk car that would open its side door to have a man deliver barrels to a platform at a siding.
A smaller loop in the center of the exhibit contained a town of Plasticville buildings, complete with a gas station, ice cream shop, bank, schoolhouse and hospital. Circling another section of the town were Mickey Mouse and Minnie pumping a handcar past a circus tent and a group of painted figures waiting for their arrival with permanently raised arms and waving hands.
Aunt Robbie would then guide me to the entrance of the Rocket Express, a monorail that circled the perimeter of the eighth floor. She watched from below as I climbed aboard and circled twice as she waited, waving to me each time I passed her.
Afterwards, she’d buy me a toy, usually a hand puppet, or a magic trick that I could play with during the long ride home from the city.
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Part Two
From my ages of 9 to 11, my mother had an assortment of low-paying sales jobs that brought in just enough money for our basic needs, as she also tried her hand at painting watercolors of children she’d market to gift shops in the 69th Street shopping district in nearby Upper Darby. The watercolors sold poorly, since they were original art, and prints were less expensive and a far better value for the subject matter.
Thanks to her friends, we always had a tree at Christmas with ornaments handed down to us by my two great aunts. My mother made sure I always had presents on Christmas morning, provided from money sent to me by relatives. In addition to the cash she mailed to my mother, Aunt Robbie always sent along a gift for me wrapped in Wanamaker’s’ holiday paper. Some of the time it was a useful gift that my mother couldn’t afford, such as a pair of Keds sneakers, and other times it would be a topical gift like a One Eyed Purple People Eater shirt with a matching hat and horn, or a book on ventriloquism or model trains.
As I grew older, there were fewer opportunities for me to visit Aunt Robbie, since my mother had by then secured employment as a fashion accessory artist in the art department of the Gimbels Center City store. Since she traveled downtown to work, she and Aunt Robbie would occasionally meet for lunch without me.
My schedule had also changed after completing grade school and entering junior high. I was beginning to have difficulties with my studies and worked odd jobs in hopes of earning enough money to afford a car by my junior year in high school. I delivered groceries using a rusty red wagon borrowed from a friend, washed cars, mowed lawns, weeded gardens, clipped hedges in the spring and summer months and shoveled sidewalks and driveways in the winter. It was during these years that I realized that I had developed a learning disability, but also discovered one of the fundamental rules of business: the transaction of payment for labor expended.
When working for my mother’s friends, I was often asked by her to perform tasks for no payment, since my mother owed them money and the work I did was a way of paying back her debt to them. Some of the women were kind and paid me a tip despite my protests. Others accepted the gift in kind and merely thanked me and my mother for my services.
When taking on jobs I found on my own, I soon learned to declare an amount up front, and most of the time people paid me the amount I stated, while some would counter with a somewhat lower amount. Since I needed the work, I always accepted the offer, knowing that some money was better than no money.
Still other customers were more clever in their modifications of transactions, and agreed to pay the price I stated, but at the conclusion of the job tacked on a few additional tasks I might do while I was at it, for which they paid me little or nothing more than the price originally quoted. I didn’t know it then, but later realized that this early training would come in handy in the future, when the amounts transacted would be far more significant.
I was 17 when I fortunately inherited a well-worn 1952 Plymouth from my grandfather. I’d been saving money for three years to take on the responsibility of ownership that included insurance, upkeep, and repairs. Once I got my license, I’d collect nickels, dimes, quarters and even pennies from kids I piloted back and forth to high school in trade for gas money.
By that time in my life I’d completely ignored any thoughts of college, since neither my mother nor I had enough money for tuition, and my grades weren‘t good enough to earn a scholarship. I was also plagued by a statement that my mother made after my father came home drunk one evening, berating her for everything she wasn’t as a wife.
I couldn’t stand the bickering and asked them both to stop, after which my mother turned to me with anger towards my father, and said, “You know that you’ll be the one to pay back his debts,” emphatically placing the burden of his financial obligations on me.
I accepted her words as truthful, since in the last few years many of the odd jobs I did for her friends were in payment for her debts. It might have been at that moment that I ceased to dream of a future, and lost all hope of reaching beyond my current situation to find a better place where any dreams might be attainable.
Toward the end of my senior year I managed to enroll in Temple Technical Institute, on a last minute suggestion of my uncle. My mother paid for the first semester and from then on I obtained a state-funded scholarship and paid the rest of the tuition with money earned from jobs acquired through the school’s co-op program. Although there were many times I was on the verge of quitting the program, I earned my associates degree in 1968, and two weeks after graduation landed a job as a draftsman at an engineering firm in Drexel Hill.
I very much disliked my job and made a lot of mistakes. But I later taught myself five point perspective and joined the publications department as a technical illustrator while also learning airbrushing, cartooning and the rudiments of photography.
At the age of 25 I agreed to marry my girlfriend, Judy, who I’d been dating for past three years and moved with her into an apartment in Havertown. A year before we married, I’d been hired into a low-level chart-art position at an investment firm. I remained there for five years and we bought a house in Springfield and I received a promotion, but then quit and joined the staff of a suburban ad agency as an art director.
I worked there only six months, during which time I developed additional skills, and at nights and weekends continued to hone my illustrative and graphic talents while forming new friendships and beginning to reassess my goals after learning from Stephen, the Comptroller at the agency, that my father’s debts would not be passed along to me, whatever the amount. I was amazed by the discovery that I might now be able to build a future unburdened by promises my father had failed to honor.
I eventually rented office space near our apartment, and hired a part-time secretary to assist with the accounting, and to run errands and arrange appointments for me. With the limited knowledge I’d gained at the agency and from my job at the investment company, I was able to negotiate prices for my services and followed the rules of what I thought were those of a small business.
It all took time.
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Part Three
In 1979, in an attempt to shore up our disintegrating marriage, Judy and I conceived a daughter we named Heather. But only two years after Heather was born, Judy and I separated, and I moved into a smaller apartment in Swarthmore while Judy kept the house and resumed her job with the assistance of her parents, who took care of Heather during the week.
I only partially hoped that Judy and I could put aside our differences to co-parent amiably. We sought counseling, but I soon realized that we had as many disputes about parenting as we had in almost all other aspects of our mismatched life together.
Stephen, my friend from the agency, and his wife, Evelyn, had become confidants to me. And in many ways I envied their lives. They had two young boys, Glen and David. Glen was four years older than Heather, and on weekends I would often take her to their house to be around their children. The older boy, David, wasn’t much interested in games suited for a three-year-old, but their seven-year-old son was happy to build Lego houses with her, construct tents from tablecloths and blankets, and take Heather on excursions into the field behind their house to search for flowers and bugs, and otherwise engage in child’s play. After a few hours with the boy, my daughter’s mood would alter dramatically and she’d become lighthearted and happy until it was time to leave and I had to return her to her mother’s house.
I realized that I could only do so much for her as a father, but that Glen held the secret to her happiness. And that made me happy. So I soon became dependent on those visits... perhaps too dependent.
Fast forward.
During the time I visited them, Stephen and Evelyn separated, after which my relationship with Evelyn grew closer. After both of our divorces were settled, we were married and Glen and David became my stepsons, and Heather their step-sister. There could have been no better brother for my daughter than Glen, who by then was nine years old. He included her in play with his friends and engaged her in all sorts of games and activities. They rafted in the creek behind the house, and baked cakes and cookies together. Glen read to her and helped her assemble puzzles, and in those moments my daughter completely forgot the division between me and her mother, and enjoyed the love and companionship that was freely given by her new step-brother and Evelyn.
Glen and his mother were not the only member of their family to be kind to her. After after a brief period of alienation from Evelyn and me, Stephen remarried and re-embraced Heather as part of his new family, which included his new wife, Amanda, and her 14-year-old daughter, Amy.
Over the years, children’s issues became central to the collective conversations of both families, and we had all grown to realize that Glen’s acceptance of Heather was central to the healing process.
As Glen reached the beginning of his teenage years, we all suspected that he might possibly be “gay,” although he showed no overt signs of sexual preference for either gender. We hoped, for his sake, that he was just naturally ebullient, giving and forgiving, and would someday make a wonderful partner for some lucky lady as he matured into adulthood.
In 1986, Evelyn gave birth to a daughter, Lana, who was embraced by all three children. There was never a mention of her being a half-sister, or a step-sister; she was just viewed as their sister.
After purchasing a video camera the year after Lana was born, Glen would often stage home videos using the girls as his “cast.” These short plays were often performed in Heather’s bedroom using a toy chest as a counter, behind which the girls would act out scenes from TV shows or commercials. They would often include our neighbor’s seven-year-old daughter, Tracy, or some other unsuspecting guest. Some of these skits dealt with bodily functions such as diarrhea, puking and farting, the last which evoked the loudest laughter, especially when it happened accidentally and could be caught by the microphone.
Following the filming of a series of these productions, my wife and I were invited to view the children’s antics on the 27” TV in the family room. Despite the crudity of the themes, we chuckled at the skits, some stolen from Pee Wee’s Playhouse or other children’s shows.
One of the more noteworthy incidents occurred when my stepson invited Tracy’s parents to watch their young daughter’s acting debut in a commercial for Kaopectate, during which she held up a messy brown diaper, saying “Has this ever happened to you?” as the other two children burst out laughing, and she said “Try ‘T’aopectate.”
Though somewhat strait-laced, the couple laughed harder than we expected, and didn’t seem the least offended by the gross nature of the topics they’d been presented, but were rather pleased by the gaiety of their daughter’s performance.
When Glen turned 18 and entered college, he finally realized by his second semester that he was, in fact, gay. We had visited him near the end of the first semester and noticed an alteration in his speech and body movements. When he finally came out at dinner with the whole family six months later, his mother smiled and responded to his confession by saying, “We were wondering when you’d finally tell us,” never mentioning to him that we had all expected this revelation years earlier.
We had always known that Glen was an overly caring and compassionate child and kind to those who were inordinately heavy, physically disabled, shy, or mentally challenged, and that his kindnesses were acknowledged not just by his family, but by his teachers, neighbors and random acquaintances.
During high school he’d volunteered for a program that served meals to the homeless in Philadelphia, and he would often give away his sweater or a jacket to someone in need without ever telling us about it. He befriended children who were autistic and those with social deficits, and he held few biases toward people who might have seemed abnormal to almost everyone else but him.
As he began his working career as a hotel concierge, and soon became expert with technology in his late twenties, he also dated several men before partnering with an older man who had previously adopted two African-American boys with a former partner. Glen soon became an active and involved parent to them both, and even after his partnership with the adoptive father broke up, he continued to provide shelter, financial assistance and advice to the boys well into their adulthood, thus making them part of our extended family.
Over the years I got to know Glen, and realized that he had many of the same traits as my Aunt Robbie, since they shared a generosity of spirit, as well as their time and money. It rarely took either of them any time at all to evaluate a situation that required their assistance, even if it would interrupt their plans, instinctively stepping in when called to action. Where I would have to think first about the implications of a situation, they always seemed to know, without question, the appropriateness of their action and the proper response without any prompting.
Throughout my lifetime, I’ve observed people who believe themselves to be generous, but who almost always have expected or required repayment for their good deeds in one way or another. As Aunt Robbie knew, and Glen later figured out as he grew up, true gifts are given without any strings attached.
While looking back through my history at the age of 77, I recalled a phone call from Aunt Robbie’s daughter, Lynn, soon after my mother’s death in 1980, during my separation from my ex-wife. Although it was wonderful to hear from her, I felt guilty for not having kept in touch with my godmother over the years.
Lynn and I chatted about memories we shared, along with the current jobs and accomplishments of her children. She then told me that her mother now lived with her in Florida after selling her home in Philly some years back. She also mentioned that her mother had gradually succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease in her mid-eighties.
I expressed my sorrow to her, but Lynn laughed and said, “My mother’s as happy as she can be. Her house sold for far more money than what she ever thought it would go for, and she lost thirty pounds in her 70s, a weight problem that had plagued her most of her adult years.
“She also laughs a lot about moments from her past... those she still remembers. And she pokes fun at herself and, on occasion, tells a dirty joke or two, something I never heard her do when I was younger.
“She also remembers you... and asked about you. It’s what prompted me to find your number and call.”
“What is it that she remembers? About me?”
“She told me a story of her waking up in your bed when you were quite young to find you curled up asleep with your head on her rear end. She also wondered what happened to that troubled woman who must have been your mother. And she hoped that you’d grown up alright, and were happy.“
“She was my mother’s closest friend,” I said. “She doesn’t remember that?“
“Mother doesn’t even remember the names of her own grandchildren, and barely recognizes me. But she’s always cheery and delighted to see me when I get her up in the morning, give her a shower and dress her. And she still remembers how to prepare the recipes she learned as a child from her own mother growing up.”
“Please tell her that I remember her,“ I said. “And tell her I remember her lasagna and the delicious desserts she made for me. Your mother meant a lot to me.“
“I’ll do that, but I can’t guarantee that she’ll know you by name, or even remember the incident she recalled only yesterday.”
Over the next few days, I mused over that conversation, and sincerely wished I could have been there for Aunt Robbie over the years. My conclusion was that Aunt Robbie didn’t need any “thank you” from me. Her happiness came from her gifts, and what she’d given me in those moments was more valuable than any present I’d ever given to anyone.
Thinking back on that conversation at a moment nearly 45 years later, I muse about Aunt Robbie and the qualities she had that were so similar to those that my stepson Glen exhibits, and wonder if there’s any hope that I could yet become more like them in my few remaining years.
Probably not, I guess. But as impossible as that might be, I do believe it would be nice for me to try just a little harder to be that kind of person.
The End
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