Connecticut
My mother hated New York City which would explain why I love it so much! So she decided what we needed to do was move to Greenwich, Connecticut. So here we are poor, destitute losers from England and where do we go but the richest suburb of New York. We got an apartment in Greenwich called the Pickwick Apartments which my sister referred to as the Pickwick Compartments. Soon it was apparent that the only job my father could get was as a kennel man and fact totem to Marie J. Leary of Cosalta Kennels on Lake Avenue but a small apartment above the tack room was included.
My mother got a job as a saleswoman for Mary Barlint China on Greenwich Avenue. We went to an elementary school a bus ride away from the kennels. Penelope failed to get off the bus one night. She also threatened to run away from home at least once a week and would pack her little suitcase and head off down the driveway but would always come back because 40 barking German Shepherd dogs scared her.
One morning we awoke to find my parents gone. Many hours went by. Finally, they returned with our Shetland Sheepdog, Chloe who had arrived by boat from England. They had gone to New York to pick her up. She recognized her mother, Jill. Mrs. Leary was very keen that my mother learn all the ins and outs of showing dogs and my mother did pursue it for a while but found that world full of lesbians and homosexuals and it put her off although in later life she would become very inclusive so much so that she and my father were the only straight couple in East Haddam, Connecticut where they moved in the 70s.
Anyway, life with Mrs. Leary proved very trying for my father. He had an intercom connection between the apartment and the Big House where she and her alcoholic brother lived with a Hungarian housekeeper, Nancy and butler/chauffeur Stefan Zemera. Stefan had escaped the Communists in Hungary with seconds before his annihilation (his version) and Nancy had taught all the Gabor sisters English and thought Stefan was Hungarian royalty. He did the dung cleaning routine at the kennel as part of his third job which was gardener. He could be heard daily going around the dog runs “Deez shits; deez goddam dogz, deez shits.”
One night my father was driving home when he spotted a little, black kitten and he brought it home to us. Of course, we were delighted and Stefan named him “Pizzaca” which was, I learned later, Hungarian for ‘piece of shit’. Charming.
Old Marie thought nothing of waking my father in the middle of the night for an unexpected whelping or a sudden rainstorm (she was a prize gardener and had a few chrysanthemums named after her, so she said). So in the middle of the night, if there was a storm of some sort, my father would have to get up and throw hemp sacks over the flowers to protect them from hail, from snow, from whatever. My father grew slowly to detest her. It was difficult, after all, to come from a position of command and be totally subjugated to this spoiled and tyrannical woman.
Sidney, her brother, spent all day building a dry stone wall along the length of Lake Avenue - sections of which survive to this day. In a thermos propped against the wall would be scotch in the winter and vodka and ice in the summer.
Ms. Leary had made great fame at Madison Square Garden with Ace, a once handsome male German Shepherd who had spawned many champions in the show world but now he was 14, arthritic and blind, incontinent and deaf. Marie would drive off in her Woody with Ace by her side not noticing that he had peed the seat. He tried to bite my sister but he had few teeth of any importance left to accomplish the task.
I loved the dogs. I would play with the puppies in the whelping room. I would put down their feed bowls and cry “Puppy, puppy, puppy!” All these little floppy-eared puppies with lion-sized feet would come running at me. Little imitation wolves that they were, they would knock me over in their excitement at a new plaything; they would lick me and bite me and then all of a sudden realize it was chow time. I’d be left lying on the floor, forgotten.
There were two worst things: one night the Intercom went and my father ran down to the kennels. A bitch, Gay, who happened to be three-legged but was kept because of her bloodline and the beautiful puppies she threw, had been turned on by her kennel mates - the bitches had a common kennel. They had killed her. Pretty much all that was left of her was her head and her tail.
The second was Champion Earlic who was a more Austrian-type German Shepherd, long-haired and very beautiful and very sweet but had a bad habit of jumping up. When my father opened the run to put in his food bowl, Earlic jumped up to greet my Dad and the leash-like clip to close the chain-link gate swung right into his eye. He howled with pain. He was all right and was not disfigured. My father quickly and painlessly removed the clip but he decided from that moment on that he could not do the job any longer.
I felt that was a pity because I enjoyed sitting with him while he hand-rolled his cigarettes at night listening to The Whistler on the radio. I liked doing things with him and was still young enough that I could. I enjoyed his never-ending information about animals and snakes and birds and all the wildlife that abounded in rural Greenwich back then. It is all developed now but it used to be a forest from Leary’s place on.
His next job was as a gas station attendant and mechanic for Esso Gas Station on Arch Street at the bottom of Greenwich Avenue. He would report to a German man who liked to drink and as did my father, they would spend evenings reminiscing about the war. We had found a house in Riverside to rent. It was very spartan.
We would now go to North Mianus Elementary School. A good forty-minute walk from home going by a farm with a white, swayback horse called Beauty that some mean kids would try to feed with tennis balls. But she was a smart nag at age 20.
Big excitement in our lives when I turned twelve, we moved to the house on the hill above us which had been owned by my parents’ best friends, Jim and Ann Finney. We would have our own rooms and a basement and a working fireplace in the living room. Also a patio and an apple orchard in the back.
Jim Finney was the only son of Connecticut Senator Florence Finney who I adored and would go and read to when she had shingles one winter. She was the first woman senator from Connecticut and the first feminist influence in my life.
This sounds idyllic but underneath it all, reared the violent mood swings of a bi-polar mother. As I got older, she became more and more critical. She always had a violent temper. My father was terrified of her as were us girls. The dogs were the only critters that were treated pretty decently only even they would get the back of her hand if they didn’t watch their steps.