John William Tuohy

Jesus,_ I prayed silently, __lease fix it so that my turn to read won__ come around._ And then the nun called my name, but before I stood I thought, ____l bet you think this is funny, huh, Jesus?_ I stood and stared at the sentence assigned to me and believed that, through some miracle, I would suddenly be able to read it and not be humiliated. I stood there and stared at it until the children started giggling and snickering and Sister told me to sit down.

The next day, when I came home from the library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm. __a,_ I asked. __here did you get the money for the record player?_ __ had it saved,_ she lied. My father lived well, had a large house and an expensive imported car, wanted for little, and gave nothing. My mother lived on welfare in a slum and sold her blood to the Red Cross to get me a record player. __ducation is everything, Johnny,_ she said, as she headed for the refrigerator to get me food. __ou get smart like regular people and you don__ have to live like this no more._ She and I were not hugging types, but I put my hand on her shoulder as she washed the dishes with her back to me and she said, in best Brooklynese, __o go and enjoy, already._ My father always said I was my mother__ son and I was proud of that. On her good days, she was a good and noble thing to be a part of. That evening, I plugged in the red record player and placed it by the window. My mother and I took the kitchen chairs out to the porch and listened to Beethoven__ Sixth Symphony from beginning to end, as we watched the oil-stained waters of the Mad River roll by. It was a good night, another good night, one of many that have blessed my life.

I am here because I worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won__. At age fifty-seven, I__ too damned old, and I__ look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I__ standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns. So I__l graduate with this class, but I won__ walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I__l have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I__l imagine what the rest would have been like. When you__e had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things. The ceremony is about to begin. It__ a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the other. That banging sound. It__ Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the cold. They__e finally come for us, in the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.

Denny thought our parents needed a combination of material goods and temperamental changes before he could return home. __f Dad buys Ma a car, then she__l love him, and they__l get back together and she won__ be all crazy anymore,_ he said. For years he held out the possibility that those things would happen and all would change. __f we had more things, like stoves and cars,_ he told me at night in our bedroom, __nd Ma wasn__ like she is, we could go home.

For the first time in my life, I was eating well and from plates__lass plates, no less, not out of the frying pan because somebody lost all the plates in the last move. Now when we ate, we sat at a fine round oak table in sturdy chairs that matched. No one rushed through the meal or argued over who got the biggest portion, and we ate three times a day.

Imagine being beaten up every day for something you didn__ do and yet, when it__ over, you keep on smiling. That__ what every day of Donald__ life was like. His death was a small death. No one mourned his passing; they merely agreed it was for the best that he be forgotten as quickly as possible, since his was a life misspent.

I don__ know what I would have done if they had hugged me. I probably would have frozen in place, become stiff. It took most of my life to overcome my distaste for physical contact and not to stiffen when I was touched, or flinch, twitch, fidget, and eventually figure out how to move away. I learned to accept being hugged by my children when they were infants. Their joy at seeing me enter a room was real and filled with true love and affection and it showed in their embraces. Like a convert, when I learned the joy and comfort of being hugged by and hugging those I loved, I became a regular practitioner.

Then there are all of those children, the ones who aren__ resilient. The ones who slowly, quietly die. I think the difference is that the kids who bounce back learn to bear a little bit more than they thought they could, and they soon understand that the secret to surviving foster care is to accept finite disappointments while never losing infinite hope. I think that was how Donald survived as long as he did, by never losing his faith in the wish that tomorrow would be better. But as time went by, day after day, the tomorrows never got better; they got worse, and he simply gave up. In the way he saw the world, pain was inevitable, but no one ever explained to him that suffering was optional.

I felt empty a lot and I sometimes had a sense__nd I know this sounds strange__hat I really had no existence as my own person, that I could disappear and no one would notice or remember that I had ever existed. It is a terrifying thing to live with. I kept myself busy to avoid that feeling, because somehow being busy made me feel less empty.

There is a sense of danger in leaving what you know, even if what you know isn__ much. These mill towns with their narrow lanes and often narrow minds were all I really knew and I feared that if I left it behind, I would lose it and not find anything to replace it. The other reason I didn__ want to go was because I wanted to be the kind of person who stays, who builds a stable and predictable life. But I wasn__ one of the people, nor would I ever be. I had a vision for my life. It wasn__ clear, but it was beautiful and involved leaving my history and my poverty behind me. I wasn__ happy about who I was or where I was, but I didn__ worry about it. It didn__ define me. We__e always in the making. God always has us on his anvil, melting, bending and shaping us for another purpose. It was time to change, to find a new purpose.

Father, I can__ take this,_ I said. __hy not?_ __ecause you__e a priest, Father._ __nd my money__ no good because of it? What are you? A member of the Masonic Lodge?_ __aw, Father,_ I said. __ just feel guilty taking money from you._ __ell, you__e Irish and Jewish. You have to feel guilty over somethin_, don__ ya? Take the money and be happy ye have it.

My affliction decided to join us, forcing me to push my toes on the floor as though I were trying to eject myself from the chair. I prayed she didn__ notice what the affliction was making me do. I half expected to be eaten alive or murdered and buried out back in the school yard. ____ not afraid of you, ya know,_ I said, although I was terrified of her. The words hurt her, but that wasn__ my intent. She turned her face and looked out the window into North Cliff Street. She knew what her face and twisted body looked like, and she probably knew what the kids said about her. It was probably an open wound for her and I had just tossed salt into it. I was instantly ashamed of what I done and tried to correct myself. I didn__ mean to be hurtful, because I knew what it was like to be ridiculed for something that was beyond one__ control, such as my affliction, and how it made me afraid to touch the chalk because the feel of chalk to people like me is overwhelming. If I had to write on the blackboard, I held the chalk with the cuff of my shirt and the class laughed. __ou look good in a nun__ suit,_ I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but I meant well by it. She looked down at the black robe as if she were seeing it for the first time.

I don__ know_,_ he said. __hose three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage._ And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer. I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author__ craftsmanship.

I was tired of fighting the windstorm I was tossed into, and instead I would let go and ride with the winds of change. How bad could it be, compared to the life I knew? I was living life as if it were a rehearsal for the real thing. Another beginning might be rough at first, but any place worth getting to is going to have some problems. I wanted the good life, the life well lived, and you can__ buy that or marry into it. It__ there to be found, and it can be taken by those who want it and have the resolve to make it happen for themselves.

Eventually, many years later, I came to see him the way everyone else saw him__ nice guy who, despite all the damage he did to us, wasn__ a bad man, not inherently bad, anyway. He just wasn__ very bright, and was in over his head on almost every level of life. He was capable of only so much and not a drop more, and because he seemed so harmless and lost, people not only liked him, they protected him. My mother, despite her poverty, left the opposite impression. She left no doubt that she was psychologically tough and mentally sharp, and because of that the Wozniaks disliked her. And that was another difference between my mother and father. My father was a whiner, a complainer, a perpetually unhappy man unable to comprehend the simple fact that sometimes life is unfair. My mother never complained, and yet her poverty-stricken life was miserable. She never carried on about the early death of her raging alcoholic mother, or the father who raped her, or of a diet dictated by the restrictions of food stamps.

They were no better than common thieves. They stole our childhood. But even with that, I was heartbroken that I would not know the Wozniaks anymore, the only people who came close to being parents to me. I would be conscious of their absence for the rest of my life. I needed them. You know, if you think about it, we all need each other. But even with all of the evidence against the Wozniaks, I had conflicted emotions about them, then and now. They were the closest I had to a real family and real parents. But now I was bankrupt of any feelings at all towards them at all. I felt then, and feel now, a great sense of loss. I felt as if I were burying them. when I never really had them to lose in the first place. Disillusioned is probably a better word. In fact the very definition of disillusionment is a sense of loss for something you never had. When you are disillusioned and disappointed enough times, you stop hoping. That__ what happens to many foster kids. We become loners, not because we enjoy the solitude, but because we let people into our lives and they disappoint us. So we close up and travel alone. Even in a crowd, we__e alone. Because I survived, I was one of the lucky ones. Why is it so hard to articulate love, yet so easy to express disappointment?

I had decided that I wanted to earn my living as a writer and the only place in Waterbury where they paid you for writing was at the local newspaper. My opportunity came when the paper had an opening for a night janitor. Opportunities are easy to miss, because they don__ always show up in their best clothes. Sometimes opportunities look like beggars in rags. After an eight-hour shift in the shop tossing thirty-pound crates I hustled down to the newspaper building and cleaned toilets, with a vague plan that it would somehow lead to a reporter__ position.

In foster care it__ easier to measure what you__e lost over what you have gained, because it there aren__ many gains in that life and you are a prisoner to someone else__ plans for your life.