suppose you could say this was my first crisis. I learned to mourn as this experience slipped away. Still, I never forgot it, nor my four friends. Their voices still echo inside me: Cookie, the good girl who loved rituals like the one we invented under the table; Gawkie, a bad boy, my secret favorite, full of mischief and creativity; Cracker, the curious explorer; and God, who listened for “weeny sounds.”
•
By the time I was six World War II was underway. It made the world feel tentative but it gave me a job: dashing around our apartment to pull down all the thick black shades so the war enemy couldn’t see to bomb us. I was helping the war effort, Dad said.
School brought more adventures. My school was only for girls. I knew girls were as smart as boys. Still, I went through a cap gun cowboy phase and dreamed of being a boy. The Lone Ranger was my hero, mostly because of his huge and glorious stallion, Silver, and the music of the William Tell Overture that set my heart thrumming. Though sometimes I seriously doubted my own boldness, I galloped around the apartment anyway, yelling “HI HO Silver, away!”
In the summer we went to a farm where I galloped on a real steed and learned some of life’s most vivid and dire lessons. The farm was in upstate New York far from anything city-like—dirt roads, small squat farmhouses dotting a landscape of pasture lands, and a big red barn full of animals I’d only seen in picture books, like horses, cows, bulls, pigs, and chickens, and a lot of hay that made me sneeze. I found new “chapels,” like my pony Snowfie’s velvety snout and the giant cornfields that whispered back to me as I walked, invisible, through them.
My summer job was to crumple up newspapers and stuff them into the rat holes. The farmhouse where we stayed was so full of holes it whistled. I only knew about city cockroaches—shy and mostly hidden—but rats had no modesty. I’d heard lore about rats gnawing babies. Sometimes at night I heard them scritching so I turned on a light and shouted loudly to let them know it wasn’t safe to come out. I worried about my little sisters: Laurie, a toddler and Jeanie, born in June, 1945, with curly hair all over her head. My job kept rats away from my sisters.
The war affected life on the farm, too. Farmer Kurtie ran the dairy farm with his wife Ba. Kurtie had come from Germany—Hamburger, I’d thought. Some official people came and confiscated his radio. It was Kurt who persuaded my father not to enlist because he had a family.
“Aren’t you happy you don’t have to be a soldier, Daddy?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” he said, but he didn’t smile.
“Would you like a martini?”
“No, thanks,” he said then stooped to my level. “But how ’bout a hug?”
Bella, Kurt’s and Ba’s daughter, was just my age. When we were old enough, we got to ride out on our ponies and herd the cows from their field back to the barn for milking—another important job. Once I saw a pregnant cow sink in quick mud and disappear—completely gone. Another time I watched a cow deliver her calf, a girl Kurtie named Lynnie after me. That slimy knee-buckled calf walked too early yet she made it to her mother. I swear the mother and baby kissed with their noses.
Another time I watched surgery on a cow’s stomach for hardware retrieval and learned I could faint. Bovine sex, however, was by far the most harrowing farm lesson, one I should have fainted over. But I’d wanted to see a male cow, a bull, so my mother brought me to the barnyard where I stood up on the fence for the best view. This was one time when my insatiable curiosity did not pay off, through no fault of the bull. The cow stood chewing her cud, heedless of the creak of the barnyard door and the large bull trotting out. Bulls were supposed to be fierce and snort but this one didn’t seem ferocious, as he angled over to the cow and climbed up on her back side of all things. She raised her head and let out an ear-splitting bellow as the jouncing bull dangled from her haunches.
“What are they doing, Mommy?”
Right then and there, my mother seized the moment and told me all about human sexual intercourse in detail, finishing up with the astonishing disclaimer, “And Lynnie, this is the most beautiful thing a man and a woman do together. It’s love.” Mom said many odd things but that was the most insane. My father would not do such a thing. Sex, I decided, would not be my preferred route to maturity; nor would trusting my mother much, especially after she told me I couldn’t watch her and Daddy do it.
Horses, I felt sure, were above sex. They were the most powerful, holy creatures God could ever have made. One of my most enduring memories of the farm was riding breakfasts. Bella and I, the two oldest daughters, rode out with our fathers into the open country predawn. The image engraved on my heart is this: my father and I sitting still and quiet, I on my small pony and he on his big horse—together like one, our souls riveted as we watched the globe of orange sun rise and take over the earth for a new day. After that we ate breakfast sandwiches Mommy had made of bacon slathered with mayo and a shred of lettuce—unhealthfully delicious and with no cocktails. Sometimes we’d end up at the swimming hole and ride our horses bareback into the cool water. I didn’t know horses could swim, but Snowfie slipped into the water and glided along like magic. I gripped his mane with both fists until I understood that I had to trust his strength, not mine.
The summer I was to turn eight I had a strange experience. I was sitting in jodhpurs on the edge of my bed removing my riding boots. I smelled of barn: scents of stable dung, hay, and oats, all mixed together. I closed my eyes: I could sense Snowfie’s nose quivering to my kiss and feel the warm exhale of his snort; I could hear the clink of the bridle as it came off and he tossed his head, spraying me with saliva that he licked off my hands. When I opened my eyes I saw only the thin curtain flutter, lifted by a hot stale swish of summer air. Watching thoughtlessly, I suddenly felt saturated with a feeling of inexplicable well-being. It lasted seconds and felt eternal. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t make it happen again.
I decided right then that when I got back to city school and entered third grade, my art project would be an illustrated version of The Lord’s Prayer, which I’d memorized in Sunday School. I spent the rest of that summer planning my project: God’s sandals would be difficult but I’d get help, then use a lot of gold and glitter for GOD, a name so unique no human had it. Thy will be done was a puzzle because God had never exactly told me what it was. Jesus, I’d heard in church, was God, but he hadn’t made it into this prayer—probably because he was encased in stained glass and preoccupied with far too many clingy children, a few of them girls. I took Jesus out of the window and drew him into my prayer, with an outsized halo and surrounded by a bunch of stick figure kids, some with triangle-shaped skirts—on earth as it is in heaven.
I knew I wasn’t a good artist, but it didn’t seem to matter much.
Chapter 2 The Old God-Man
My home altar is a low table in front of which I kneel daily to whine, plead, babble, keep silence, read, and give thanks. It is covered with spiritual tchotchkes, each one carrying its own meaning. Two pictures carry special meaning for me. Both stood in places of prominence in many family homes before they got to my altar.
A three-year-old girl looks out from a small oval rose-adorned frame, her serious gaze daily reminding me to remember her under the table. Next to her stands a photo of the same girl at eight, her dark brown hair tucked behind her ears, tumbling over her shoulders. A beretta-like choir cap perches on the back of her head; bangs cascade over her forehead. Her choir robe is topped by a shoulder cape tied with a crooked bow. In her right hand she holds a tilting electric candle; her left hand, clutches sheet music; but her eyes glance to her right.
My mother cherished both photos. The small one she kept at her bedside; the other one made the living room mantel. It first appeared in the Christmas Eve edition of the New York Herald Tribune in 1946. In it I’m standing with the children’s choir on the steps of the Brick Presbyterian Church. My mother got a copy and had my