Tell Them I'm Not Home - a memoir by Pete Byrne
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Happy Birthday Patsy Mullins
I was coming down 5th Street when I met Eddie Matthews who was coming the other way. In the course of the kind of conversations that twelve-year-olds, newly minted twelve-year-olds, carry on, Eddie asked if I were going to Patsy Mullins’ birthday party. The question kind of bounced off me. Like what birthday party, and why would Patsy Mullins invite me to her birthday party? In the sexually segregated Irish, Latin, Roman Catholic world of late 1940’s Philadelphia where this conversation was taking place, I was very much aware of young Ms. Mullins. But although we were in the same grade in the same parish school, we had never exchanged more than a “Hi” when passing on the street. Seventh grade boys were on one floor of the school building and girls on the other. In all the years I had spent in the Incarnation of Our Lord parish school, I couldn’t remember any interaction between them and us. The seventh-grade girls could have been Albanians or Martians.
Eddie Matthews’ question didn’t quite register with me until he said that he was going to the birthday party, and that Mary Ann Brophy had invited him. Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. It’s Patsy Mullins’ birthday party, but Mary Ann Brophy invited you? I was missing something here. I had no idea that I was being introduced for the very first time into the arena of boy/girl, man/woman interaction, and that missing something, of not really understanding what was happening, was to be the hallmark, the critical element, of every such encounter to follow for the rest of my life.
Here was the deal. Patsy Mullins was having a party to celebrate her twelfth birthday on the Friday night after next. For a boy to be invited to the party, he had to be invited by one of the girls that Patsy had invited to her party. “Oh, that makes sense,” I might have thought, had it made sense to me. But it didn’t. Three days later, a shock wave hit. Sally McCauley who lived across the street and was a foot taller than me, so she didn’t really count as a girl, called over to me from her porch. In a sour sing-song chant, Sally cried, “Oh there he is. All the girls want to take him to Patsy’s party.” I had never ever been mean to Sally, never called her “bag of bones” or any of the other unflattering references to her less than meaty physique. Sally, I found out, had not been invited to Patsy’s party, hence the edge.
The next day at recess, Margie Cullen walks up to me in the schoolyard. I don’t think I had ever spoken a word to Margie Cullen, a nod maybe in the candy store at the corner of her street where I stopped for sodas. As she approached me, the boys I had been with began to go into wide withdrawal patterns. Something is going on here. On the other side of the yard, a circle of seventh-grade girls was staring at Margie and at me with a serious intensity. Margie Cullen didn’t feint, jab or weave. It was right to the point. “Regina Zelinski wants to know if you want to go to Patsy Mullins’ party with her.” One of the girls in the group across the yard had to be Regina Zelinski. Easy to identify, she was the only one who turned away when I looked over. I had no idea who Regina Zelinski was, and until that moment, even what she looked like. Margie could have been asking my acceptance on behalf of Eleanor Roosevelt. In a pattern that would repeat itself endlessly over the coming years, I smiled and said “sure.” It took me a long time to learn, painfully in too many cases, that I was just about congenitally incapable of saying no to a girl.
I felt good. I didn’t know why, but I did. And every day at school I kept trying, without much success, to get a closer look at this Regina Zelinski person, this girl person. On the Wednesday before the Friday of the party, I remembered to tell my mother that I had a social engagement. My mother’s aunt, the one I called Aunt Anne Marie, was in our living room at the time. She and a whole cluster of my mother’s family lived a couple of streets away. I learned another hard lesson that afternoon. Keep your mouth shut in front of adults. My mother, who I suppose was much amused by this my first excursion into the wider world of boy-girl relationships, managed to maintain a disinterested facade as she pumped me for details. Aunt Anne Marie, a large rump-sprung, good-natured maiden lady couldn’t contain herself. “A girl friend! And a Polack too. Now you be careful when you go to her house. They’ll try to give you bread with lard on it. They’ll try to make a little hunky out of you.” When she stopped guffawing, she did give me a half a dollar to buy myself something for my “little lardhead girlfriend.” In 1950, in Olney, in North Philadelphia, ethnic sensitivity was relatively unknown. The playground separating our neighborhood from Logan, a heavily Jewish enclave, was known to all simply as the “Jew lot.” Black people didn’t exist in our world. On those rare occasions when they did intrude into our consciousness, they were never referred to as anything other than by the now unthinkable “N” word. I took the half a buck from my aunt, but I spent the next couple of years dodging her in public. When Regina Zelinski had long since become ancient history, my Aunt Anne Marie was still making loud, public inquiries on the subject of my “little Polack girlfriend.”
It was my mother who informed me that by accepting the invitation to the party, I was obligated to bring Patsy Mullins a suitable birthday gift. What did I want to bring? Huh? I was being toyed with, but on Friday night when I was getting ready to walk the two blocks to Patsy’s house, my mother handed me a gift-wrapped package the contents of which were a mystery to me. My father, who could barely contain himself, started hinting about the package containing girl’s underwear. Even at twelve, I couldn’t be caught on something like that. I as yet had no consciousness of style and allowed my mother to dress me up for the occasion. What I remember was a brown gabardine Norfolk style jacket with plaid insets on the front, a hand-me-down from an older cousin, but cool. Birthday present in hand, I walked bravely up 5th Street to Patsy Mullins’ house. I was excited about having been included, and I was excited about what would take place at this, my very first boy-girl party. I had heard about some things.
Patsy Mullin’s mother opened the front door and asked me my name. I told her and handed her the gift. She told me to come into the living room and sit down. Oh no! I was the first boy to arrive. On the sofa and on one of the chairs were four girls, four girls whose names I knew and had seen in the schoolyard, seen on 5th Street and around the neighborhood for most of the years of my life, but to whom I had probably never so much as said hello. They couldn’t be the same girls I thought I knew. I had only seen them in church, or in play clothes or in their school uniforms. Here they were all dressed up in party clothes. They looked like real girls, almost grownup girls and I was thoroughly intimidated. I sat silently on the chair furthest from the girls and tried to make myself invisible. But in the confidence given them by numbers, and since I was the only game then in town, they began whispering, giggling and darting looks in my direction. If I thought I could have gotten away with it, I would have been out the door, down 5th Street and safely at home browbeating my little brother. At that critical moment the front door chimes rang. Mrs. Mullins sailed through the living room giving me her best “I understand” smile. When she opened the door, six of the leading lights of my seventh-grade boys’ class came pouring into the living room. The fact that they were six together allowed them a swagger that had been denied me. And worse, they had agreed to meet and come in together without including me in their plans. Within seconds my resentments faded in the relief that I now had a herd within which to lose myself.
The next opening of the door brought four more dressed-up girls into the Mullins’ living room, one of whom was none other than the much awaited Regina Zelinski. She was a small girl, but she seemed to me very self-assured. She never so much as looked at me. Soon there were a dozen or more boys and an equal number of girls, including the birthday girl, Patsy Mullins. I think I had a thing, an utterly vague and innocent thing, for Patsy Mullins. Before my remaining years of elementary school were to pass, I would have had things, some of them not so innocent, for just about every girl who had been in Patsy Mullins’ living room that night.
There were sodas and paper plates with pretzels and cookies. The boys took up one side of the room and the girls the other, the boys doing the expected goofy twelve-year old boy things, with the girls looking on, pretending not to notice. Patsy Mullins’ high school aged sister, almost a grownup to us, and her girlfriend came into the living room and began taking charge. We were assigned seating in a circle on the floor, boy-girl-boy-girl. The room wasn’t big enough for everybody so two circles were set up, one in the living room and one in the dining room. There was lots of shuffling and switching of places that resulted in the girls who had invited the boys positioned in the same circles with those boys. I found myself seated directly across from Regina Zelinski who had yet to acknowledge my existence. Patsy’s sister’s friend came into the dining room and laid a glass milk bottle on the floor in the center of our circle. “We’re going to play,” a pause, “spin the bottle.” Has anyone ever played spin the bottle? I knew, or I had heard about spin the bottle, but like everyone else in the circle, I wasn’t volunteering anything.
Our facilitator as she’d be called today, said, “OK Barbara.” That was Barbara Murray. She was as big as the biggest boy in the group who happened to be Ritchie Reardon, who she had invited to the party. “Spin the bottle.” She did, and it stopped pointing to Johnnie Donahue. That meant Barbara had to kiss Johnnie. The sheer randomness of the outcome and the public nature of the game kept the kissing on an academic level. These were birthday kisses, the kind you had to give your cousin when she graduated from St. Martin’s last year. Once or twice there was the desired outcome when the bottle matched the invitation list. But even then, in the full glare of the dining room chandelier, the intensity of the kissing didn’t reach much beyond the perfunctory. I got to kiss Margie Cullen, which was kind of neat. But I also had to kiss Barbara Murray and Mary White. In terms of excitement, that didn’t seem much of an improvement over bobbing for apples or pinning the tail on the donkey. The game went on for about a half-hour without ever bringing me into lip contact with Regina Zelinski.
Next came a really awful game where a blindfolded kid pointed at random and the person who was pointed out had to tell a joke, sing a song or do something to amuse the group. I was terrified that I would be selected and was trying to figure out how I could escape. But that game, like spin the bottle concluded with my continuing to dodge the bullet. “Now,” said Patsy’s big sister. “We’re going to play Post Office.” Post Office offered two variations on spin the bottle that pushed it into another dimension. First, the person in the Post Office got to select who had mail and second, deliveries took place in the now darkened dining room behind a closed closet door. Something told me that things were now of a different order. I forget how the first person was chosen, but it was Kay Riley who of course called with a letter for Eddie Poulton. There was a lot of hooting as a blushing Eddie got up and went into the darkened dining room. After a few seconds, the whistling and yelling began again in earnest. The door opened and a visibly flustered Eddie Poulton attempted to make his way back to the safety of the boys’ side of the living room. Kay came out smiling and looking utterly in charge of the whole situation. “No, No Eddie,” Shouted the two high school girls. “You have to go back in and call mail for someone else.”
“Aha,” I thought. You get called in, do whatever, and then you call somebody else in and do it again, before you’re free to come back out. Another revelation, your choice of calls could be used as an exercise in power. The loudest hooter at Eddie Poulton’s discomfiture had been Eddie Matthews. Mary Ellen Bowden had invited Eddie Matthews. From what little had been said, Eddie Matthews wanted no parts of Mary Ellen Bowden. Eddie Matthews was actually the kid I knew best in the entire crowd. Like a chess master, Eddie Poulton didn’t even hesitate. “Mail for Mary Ellen Bowden.” So, he had to kiss Mary Ellen. Big deal. He didn’t care as long as it meant that Eddie Matthews also had to do the same and that everyone knew Mary Ellen was after Eddie. “Hmmmm,” I thought.
But wait a minute. Mary Ellen Bowden, I had been told was Regina Zelinski’s best friend. I should have seen what was coming next. Mary Ellen exited the darkened room with a knowing smile and Eddie Matthews in a completely disinterested voice announced, “Mail for Regina Zelinski.” In the ten seconds or so that elapsed between Eddie’s call and his coming back out of the dining room, I think I experienced every known form of panic humanly possible. My Norfolk jacket began to itch, furiously. I could feel my face getting hot and I wished desperately to somehow disappear from the face of the earth. “Mail for ….” And my name was spoken across the now absolutely silent living room. Eddie Matthew’s was grinning as I stood up and walked the long miles to the dining room door. In the half darkness of the closet doorway, I could see through into the lighted kitchen where Mrs. Mullins was preparing the cake and ice cream portion of the party yet to come. Maybe she doesn’t know what’s going on. Maybe she’ll turn around, see us and put a stop to this before it goes any further. But no, she just continued sticking candles in a decorated cake while Regina Zelinski waited silently in the total darkness behind the closet door.
Someone pushed the door closed behind me. There had been some light hooting and wolf whistling when I stood up. Now the noise was rising from behind me. It seemed that everyone but me had known that this was something preordained, something inexorable to be consummated in a darkened dining room closet of a house on North 5th Street. I don’t know exactly how it came off, but Regina Zelinski never said a word to me. She took a step toward me, threw her arms around my neck and my arms moved instinctively around her. There wasn’t anything else to do with them. Our faces came together and my first sensation was olfactory. She smelled wonderful. It wasn’t like the stuff my Mom used, “Evening in Paris.” This was different. And her hair smelled nice, strands of it brushing against my face. Our lips came together and I think she must have been practicing because she kissed me with a purposefulness that sent a powerful surge through my entire being. I had never ever experienced anything like this. We were hugging. In our family nobody ever touched each other let alone hugged. Here was this girl. That’s right, a girl, a real girl and she was hugging me and kissing me and it was the most wonderful moment of my then seemingly long, long twelve-year-old life. I ceased hearing the shouting, the whistles and the catcalls coming from the living room. Regina Zelinski and I were welded together, neither of us with any intention of being the first to break the lockup. Only the sharp rapping on the door and Patsy Mullins sister’s voice saying “C’mon you guys. Break it up in there.”
With my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I looked into the face of Regina Zelinski with whom I had yet to exchange one word, and decided that she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. This would happen again and again with every girl I was to kiss over too many of the coming years. In fact there would be times in the hormonally-charged teenaged years to come, when my falling in love would occur more than once on a single day. But that’s another story. In those one or two minutes in Patsy Mullins’ dining room in October 1949, I had discovered the meaning of life. Regina Zelinski and I went on to become an item that lasted well into eighth grade, until the moment she unceremoniously ditched me for a more sophisticated high school sophomore.
I didn’t see Regina nee Zelinski again until an Incarnation Elementary School 50th reunion. Now a woman well into her sixties, she still looked pretty good to me. Leaving the reunion, and giving each of the attendant ladies the pro-forma hug and peck, I bent down to say my goodbyes to Regina. It was hard not to try and leave a little something more behind, nothing noticeable, but something appropriate to what I hoped were our shared memories of Patsy Mullins’ twelfth birthday party.
all content copyright Pete Byrne 2011