Stories of My Life

They all survived the benign neglect of their mother. They slogged through years of public school and graduated from college. Eventually they married and presented us with matchless grandchildren. I did plenty wrong along the way, but they forgave me and survived to become delightful, imaginative human beings, and if my hair is almost white—well, it’s the price of having been a less than ideal mother of four. In my defense, I did two things right. I loved them a lot, and even if I didn’t spend nearly enough time cleaning the house they lived in, I made it up in countless hours of reading aloud.

Me and C.C.

Pets

Every pet the children had is a long story in itself, and we had almost every legal pet known to American life before we were through, but some of them were more memorable than others—notably Frank. On an excursion to DC’s Rock Creek Park that neither parent was a part of, the boys came home with a native black snake—all black except for a tiny white chip on the right side of his lower lip. The argument they gave me was that Frank would be a companion to Sam, the baby boa currently in residence. In retrospect, Frank should have been named Francine, as there were unfertilized snake eggs to be found whenever Frank escaped his/her cage. And Frank made more escapes than Houdini. No matter how secure we tried to make the cage, Frank would find a way out, only to be found days later. Once, in the middle of the night, I met Frank coiled around the sink stand in the bathroom. Fortunately, I am not afraid of snakes.

I was at the time a part of a committee reluctantly appointed by the Montgomery Country Board of Education. Those of us in the poor east end of the county needed some of the perks that were being lavished upon the richer west side, and we were trying to come up with creative ideas to get our share. That particular evening the meeting was held in our living room and all of us were seriously struggling with an approach to parity for our children, when I spied Frank, who had been missing more than a week. Behind the glass front of the old secretary, I could see dark black loops.

“There’s Frank!” I cried, startling my fellow committee members. “He’s in the desk.” The boys heard me and came running. But yanking an unwilling snake who has managed to wind himself in and out of the cubby holes of an antique desk is no simple matter. I think the committee gave up before we did and quietly adjourned themselves behind my back.

After the beloved Sam died, I suggested that Frank wasn’t really happy in our home. He had no reptile companion, live mice were pricey, and besides, if he were content, why was he always escaping the cage to roam the house?

Reluctantly, the boys agreed. We made a real ceremony of it. All six of us went to Rock Creek Park to return Frank to the wilds from which he had come.

Some months later, David came racing into the house after school. “Guess who I saw today?” he cried.

“Who?”

“Frank!” he said. Their class had gone on a school field trip to the nature center in Rock Creek Park and there, in an enormous cage, was a “Native Black Snake” looking very sleek and basking in all the attention.

“How do you know it was Frank?” I asked. Coincidences on this order only appeared in Dickens.

“It was Frank all right. He had that little white chip right there on his lip.”

The dogs were always my favorite pets, but we did have one very memorable cat, Charlie Chaplin, for his little black mustache, but always known as C.C. At the time that C.C. came into our lives we had Blossom, the springer spaniel, as well as other assorted creatures.

One late Friday afternoon when their father was away on a short study leave, John came home carrying a pasteboard box. On the outside of the box, in black marker, were the words “Free to a good home,” and inside the box was the tiniest, most pitiful-looking kitten I had ever seen.

“Can we keep him?” John asked.

“No,” I said firmly. “If your father comes home and finds I have let you all have yet another animal, he’ll think I’ve lost my mind.”

“But he was just on the picnic table at the park. If I take him back, the dogs will get him.”

He had me there. There were a lot of neighborhood dogs who had never known a leash and who would undoubtedly be in the park that night. It was late Friday afternoon. The SPCA would have closed for the weekend. Besides, I was being picked up in a few minutes by friends to have a rare dinner out. There was no way I could deal with the pitiful little creature that evening. So I sighed and told John to get the poor thing some milk. I would deal with it in the morning.

Morning came and it was obvious to me that the kitten was on its last legs. I called the vet to see if they were open on Saturdays. They were, so I took the kitten over. Whatever the SPCA would do with it, I didn’t want it dying on my watch.

I explained all this to the receptionist—that I was only trying to keep the thing alive until the humane society opened on Monday. Many dollars later I left the vet’s, only to return that very afternoon, sure that this time the kitten really was dying.

When I paid another, for me, enormous bill, the receptionist was not even trying not to laugh. “Now, are you going to keep that kitten, Mrs. Paterson?”

I assured her I was not, but, of course, by Monday, we had all fallen in love with the piteous little creature who was almost too weak to meow. By the

time John Sr. got home, and, as predicted, thought his wife had lost her mind, he had five of us pleading for C.C.’s life. Ironically, or perhaps because C.C. was a very clever cat, it was John Sr.’s lap he chose to sit on and purr. John softened, and many years later he said to me, “You know, if we were ever to divorce, I get the cat.”

There is a postscript to this story. Long after C.C. had lived a happy life with us and departed peacefully, young John, now out of college and working in New York City took a course in creative writing at the New School. I was curious to know about the course and he told me the first assignment was to write a story from one’s childhood. “So I wrote that story about how we got C.C.”

There was something about the way he said it that made me inquire further.

“Oh, you know, the neighbors down the street had all these kittens they were giving away, but I knew that if I brought one home and told you where it came from you’d march me right back to return it, so . . .”

I was incredulous. “So you made up that whole thing about the box in the park?”

“Yeah, I told you that. I got a box and wrote ‘Free to a good home’ on it. I told you that years ago.”

“You did not.” Apparently, it was another of those things you did as a child you wouldn’t want your mother to know about.