This is a story about a dead woman I never met, my mother’s sister, Eva, who never became my aunt because she’d only lived to be fourteen, and likely a very innocent fourteen. Eva spent her life—the first thirteen years of it—hidden away from the world, seldom venturing beyond the walls of the tenement apartments that her family lived in then.

And by then I mean the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, when my mother’s parents and her four siblings had occupied a series of slum apartments from which they’d frequently been evicted because they’d been unable to pay their rent on time.

In 1934, the monthly welfare allotment from the State of Connecticut (for a family of six) totaled five dollars and sixty cents and couldn’t be stretched far enough to pay for both food and shelter.

Consequently, their survival strategy was a simple one—to pay whatever it took to move into a rental, and after that to pay only whatever they could until they fell so far behind that they once again faced eviction. Often, the eviction process could take as long as six months—especially if the landlord was soft-hearted and could somehow be strung along.

Everybody in my mother’s family understood that their behavior as tenants wasn’t exactly ethical, but the kind of housing that welfare families occupied was also sketchy. Roaches and rats were an ongoing problem; paint often scabbed off the crumbling walls, and there was neither hot water nor central heating—or none in the kind of places my mother’s family could afford to rent. Instead, they lit a kitchen range to heat water for cooking and washing and kept warm in the winter with blankets or kerosene heaters, or, if their landlord would allow it, used a tiny potbellied stove to burn coal, scraps of wood, or sometimes twigs they’d scavenge from vacant lots.

In those dire years, steady employment of any kind was nearly impossible to come by, perhaps especially so because my mother’s father, the family’s only breadwinner, was a one-legged shoe repairman. He’d already suffered the amputation of one limb and was also slowly going blind from untreated diabetes.

The family’s matriarch, my grandmother Emma, was a painfully shy woman, an immigrant from rural Sicily who’d never learned more than a few words of broken English. She’d been a widow for six years before she’d married my mother’s father, and she had a fifteen-year-old son, Andy, from her previous marriage.

But young Andy hadn’t wanted to be a financial burden, so he’d lied about his age, and joined the
Civilian Conservation Corps. He would sometimes wire home a few dollars from his own subsistence-level paycheck, but my grandparents still had four young kids to feed, clothe, and shelter, and two of those children were disabled.

My mother’s second oldest brother, Tony, had contracted tuberculosis, which was common in slum environments and nearly untreatable back then. Effective antibiotics hadn’t been developed yet, and only the wealthy could afford care in a sanitarium. Tony spent his days in bed, struggling to breathe, but he was a generous, intelligent boy and a voracious reader. Each week, he devoured four or five public library books, which my mother would borrow and return for him.

My mother’s youngest brother, Frankie, was an undersized but otherwise normal kid—although at five he was still wetting the bed and late to toilet train. Their lavatory, by the way, was a communal one, shared with three other welfare families.

And then there was my mother’s sister, Eva, whose existence I never learned about until many, many years later. Eva’s face and mouth had been deformed by a cleft lip. A long fissure split her mouth and chin, rendering her speech unintelligible and her appearance grotesque. Such an ordinary birth defect could have been corrected by surgery, but back then, the State of Connecticut wouldn’t pay for “cosmetic” repairs.

Eva had never attended school. In fact, the local authorities had declared her “incapable of being educated,” which, according to my mother, Eva wasn’t.

Eva and my mother were close in age. My mother was only eleven months younger, and they’d not only shared a bedroom, they’d shared a bed—or rather a mattress on the floor, and my mother, who did attend school until she reached junior high, carried her schoolbooks home every evening so that she and her tubercular older brother, Tony, could teach Eva to read.

Frankly, my mother’s stories about her childhood were rather hard to take. I understood, of course, that her family had been impoverished, and I’d heard her reminisce more than once about one bitterly cold winter night when they’d been evicted without warning and had been compelled to seek shelter in an appliance carton on the street.

But I never quite knew what to make of such terrible tales. They’d always seemed so over-the-top, so heartbreakingly grim, that I sometimes couldn’t stand to listen. It seemed incredibly tragic that my own mother had once suffered so profoundly. But the 1930s were incredibly hard for many families. Breadlines and homelessness were common back then, and social service agencies were frequently overwhelmed by the number of those in need.

Besides, there were dozens of such stories in my mother’s repertoire, and, as a boy, my feelings
about my mother’s childhood were tempered by my own childish desire to avoid feeling powerless and sad.

In one story, for example, poor tubercular Tony would regularly cough up blood and my grandparents were compelled to go without food for themselves to save enough cash to purchase the iron-rich red meat that their dying son needed to avoid anemia.

Still, I’d often paid scant attention when my mother spoke about her past, and I’d certainly never once heard her mention Eva. And that particular omission was unusual for I could remember her telling stories about Tony, who’d died in 1936 (only a few months before the first antibiotics became widely available) and stories about her parents (about her shoemaker dad who died in 1937) and also stories about my grandmother, Emma, who, in her grief over the death of her beloved second husband, completely lost whatever limited ability she’d once had to communicate, but who’d nevertheless lived on, dependent on her children, until 1966.

I could even remember my mother telling me stories about her little brother Frankie’s struggle to fully control his bladder, but she had never once mentioned Eva—not until the discussion that I’m about to describe took place.

We were gathered around the dining room table for a Thanksgiving dinner at my mother’s home. Amazingly, she had lived to be ninety-four years old, but, as it happened, this would be her final family gathering. She’d been in generally poor health since her seventies, but she hadn’t seemed especially diminished that year. At ninety-four, she was still living semi-independently, and although, in retrospect, her decline had been so slow as to seem imperceptible, I also probably hadn’t wanted to imagine my mother dying.

Thanksgiving was a time for abundance and celebration. A large golden-brown turkey had been carved, a sweet-potato casserole steamed, and fragrant stuffing and cranberry sauce were heaped in serving bowls. My wife, Diane, had helped my mother do the cooking, and our son, Davy, my mother’s only grandchild, was behaving for a change. My mother sat quietly at the head of the feast-laden table, smiling at us and at the plates of overly abundant food, and said: “Eva would have loved to have seen all this.”

“Eva?” I asked.

“My sister, Eva,” my mother said, and then proceeded, for the first and only time, to tell us about her sister—about Eva’s terribly deformed face—and about how she and Tony had taught Eva her ABCs.

It was exactly the kind of tale that put a damper on everybody’s appetite, but once our
Thanksgiving dinner was over, I nevertheless felt obliged to press for additional details. “I never knew you had a sister,” I said. “I don’t believe you ever mentioned her before.”

My mother was already filling a lidded plastic container with leftovers.

“After my father died, the welfare people came and took Eva away,” she said. “They told us we couldn’t care for her, and they took her away to an asylum for the insane and feeble minded. It was a long way upstate—we had no way to get there. I cried every night. She was my sister. And she was only thirteen.”

“So, what happened to her?” I asked softly, for there was still some selfish, self-protective part of me that was both reluctant to know and yet somehow already did.

“Eva died in that asylum,” my mother said. “After only a few months.”

“At thirteen?”

“She turned fourteen in that place,” my mother said. “But I don’t like to think about it. I was only twelve years old. There wasn’t anything I could do.”

And because my mother’s story about Eva had now also become my story—a story about resistance, helplessness and avoidance—I could see that there was a pattern to it. Those hauntingly tragic details got under my skin, and I took it upon myself to try to learn more if I could. I had Eva’s name, and my mother remembered her sister’s birthday, so I contacted the bureau of public records and managed to locate Eva’s birth and death certificates. An official cause of death had been assigned: “failure to thrive,” but that explanation didn’t satisfy me either.

“Failure to thrive” sounded like a phrase that a deliberately evasive doctor might employ to explain a mysterious death, and except for her facial deformation, Eva had been a healthy and intelligent young girl who had probably just gone through puberty when she’d been sent to that asylum.

A few weeks later, I did some additional research at the local public library, which still occupied the same ancient brownstone building that my mother had visited in the 1930s, to secure library books for her tubercular brother Tony.

And it was there, after hours of searching, that I finally found mention of the institution to which Eva had been sent. It wasn’t much—just a paragraph or two in an old microfilm copy of what had once been an article in the pages of the local newspaper, The Bridgeport Telegram.

The Bridgeport Telegram had gone belly-up in 1963, and nobody had bothered to digitalize its back issues. But according to a short article I’d found on microfilm, the asylum to which Eva had been sent had been shuttered and demolished when the physical and sexual abuse of patients had come to light.

And as for Eva…well, her medical records had been lost or destroyed years ago, so why she had failed to thrive, and why an otherwise healthy fourteen-year-old had died in a state-run institution would forever remain a mystery.

But I could imagine Eva being ridiculed by indifferent or sadistic caretakers. I could imagine her being starved or beaten. I could imagine her being raped. I could imagine her taking her own life after she’d been victimized. But there was no way to know for certain. Her young body was also long gone, consigned to a cardboard casket and buried in an unmarked grave.

I did learn from my mother that there’d been some kind of religious service. My mother’s entire family—except, of course, for her stepbrother Andy, and her dying brother Tony, who’d been too ill to leave his sickbed—had been there for Eva’s interment, when a local priest had sprinkled holy water over a mound of dirt. But Eva’s family hadn’t had the means to purchase a headstone to mark the location, and even a well-marked grave would have told me nothing about what Eva had suffered in those final months of her life.

And as for those who had neglected or mistreated or molested or tortured or perhaps even killed Eva—by now they were also ghosts, for there was nobody still alive who might be able to explain or be held accountable and brought to justice. I found myself wondering if Eva had struggled with her tormentors, and if she had attempted to resist if they’d raped her. Perhaps she’d had a blanket tossed over her head, so they wouldn’t need to see her deformed face or hear her cries when they pinned her down.

And this? This is simply a story written in homage to my mother’s sister, Eva, a memory triggered by the abundance of Thanksgiving; it resulted in a story that my mother barely managed to preserve before her own death and that will be unlikely to survive mine—for it is already as fragmentary and fragile as the words on those reels of library microfilm that are beginning to turn brittle and decay.

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