There’s a scar just off my mother’s left eye shaped like an early map of Idaho. It’s one of the few blemishes on a face that is by and large devoid of wrinkles, age spots and other signifiers found on the skin of someone about to turn 80 years old. She’s had this scar for 76 of her years.
Alice Krakowiak had been playing in the yard at 3017 South Lyman. To such a young child, the double-lot yard adjacent to the south façade of the building must have been a new world to explore every day. Ala tripped - who knows on what - and tumbled face-first into a firewood pile on the porch. A sliver from a log pierced her skin like an épée, and broke off.
I imagine my mother cried. I imagine my grandmother ran from the house to cradle her daughter. My grandmother must have cried, too, seeing blood on the face of her miracle child, a child born 14 years and five miscarriages after Edward, my mother’s only sibling.
Today that yard is gone, the extra lot sold off to build another house where some other child must surely have played. Much else is gone, too - my grandmother, my uncle, the huge oak tree across Haynes Court. I still have my mother, though, most of the time. And I still have 3017 South Lyman, though it passed from my family’s ownership long ago.
My own home is a few blocks southwest, closer to the river, at 31st Place and Little Throop. I pass my mother’s childhood home often, thinking of it as family, thinking of its sturdy brick construction as a family trait. I like to put my hands on the bricks; I love how they warm and cool with the seasons, how they trick me into thinking the building has a body temperature. 3017 South Lyman represents the American beginning of my mother’s side of the family. It is our Ellis Island.
Sometimes, there are - not so much ghosts as overlapping temporalities - when I’m in front of this familial landmark. My mother might be some 40 miles away in her current home and about to be labeled an octogenarian, and yet she is concurrently with her own mother in the kitchen in 1947 watching my babcia cook czarnina because you never waste any part of the animal. And I am observing from the window, to the consternation of the current residents. Buildings are potent with such supernatural holds. So are photographs and artifacts like old clothes or a favorite necklace.
There’s a photograph of my mother with her small family in the yard where she fell. She is wearing some kind of flowered headband to keep her hair back. No one in the quartet looks particularly happy; I’d say they were going for casual. I can’t tell if my mother has the scar yet.
In many of her earliest pictures, Ala is bright-eyed and happy. Such were the times when it was still special to have one’s photograph taken. The Alice Krakowiak of that era often has a Shirley Temple haircut, the epitome of American little girl style. She is unaware that, after 1953, there will be no more photographs of her together with her father because he will have died of a heart attack, that after 1987 there will be no more photos with her mother, or by 2018 no more with her brother.
I want to call out to the child in this photo, to hold her and absorb the pain I know she will feel. But it’s 75 years later, and anyway five-year-old Ala is making the most of the time she has with tata, mama, and starszy brat; in such photos I can tell by the look in her eyes and the way the scar crinkles ever so slightly when she grins.
My house is somewhere in the landscape of that picture, beyond the camera frame. I’m sure my family in the 1940’s would have known it. Built in 1888 across from a rendering factory it is a wooden A-frame covered in vinyl siding. I wish it had been brick, but at least I can clean it with a garden hose. I wanted to buy in Bridgeport for many reasons, but none so much as because of the family connection. I find it hard to think of my house as old. Between the modifications of the engineer who owned it before me and my own changes, most of the history seems gone. Only the skeleton, with its hand-carved beams and rafters charred from a long-ago coal fire, give away its age. Even so, my house is surely someone else’s 3017 South Lyman.
My mother, who loves my house, tends to be content most days to play games on her iPad, taking short breaks to do some cross-stitching. She does not, as do I, have an urgent need to remember or articulate the past. This is why I say I still have my mother most of the time; sometimes I can’t connect with her in the way I need. I can’t blame her. We think of our lives, once we have lived large portions of them, as ordinary and choose to be indifferent, to be passive, about what we’ve seen and done. And that’s why I am thankful for the buildings and the photos and the artifacts – they can tickle the mind and bring forth the stories.
It worked just the other day. I was speaking to my mother about her first home and I unlocked a memory she had never before told me. I learned that in Bridgeport she was friends with the little boy who lived in one of the other three apartments in the building. His name was Stanley Saturnes. He was around the same age. Maybe they were playing the day my mother got the scar. I hope he was there, to give my mother some comfort in a moment of pain. And I hope he is somewhere now, taking a break from his own iPad to think of 3017 South Lyman.
Mospratt Street goes live on the air November 5th, as part of the Week in Review on lumpenradio - 105.5fm, Chicago. Alice Krzak (née Krakowiak) will be one of our first interviews.