The big red brick house on 84 Stetson Street in the Brookline section of Pittsburgh, half-way up a high hill overlooking West Liberty Avenue, has been sold. My Aunt Mary's family and mine shared the house for the first eight years of my life. Then we moved, and her family stayed. It will ever be my house, though, and I like to think its spirit will always hold within its walls, a little part of me.
Aunt Mary was my father's sister. Lawrence, Anita and Joe were my cousins. Joey was four years my senior, and so much more intelligent than the rest of us that he had few friends his own age. Alack for him, of course, but lucky for me. He and I got along great. He was my mentor, and I followed him around like a puppy dog. I thought he knew just about everything in the world there was to know.
One of the best things about him was his imagination. Other kids, in those long-ago days, played cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, but Joey thought up much better games for us to act out. Sometimes we were Eskimos, and the terrace in front of the house was tundra we had to traverse in raging snow storms. When the terrace wasn't Alaskan terrain, it was parched desert we had to ride our camels over in search of water. Just in the nick of time, as we were about to die of thirst, we would come upon an oasis. Joey explained to me all about oases. Sometimes the terrace, especially in summer, was where we sat on the grass and just talked. He told me vampire and monster stories that made the skin on my back tingle, and scared the bejebbers out of me. I loved hearing them. At night, though, when I climbed the narrow stairwell up to the attic bedroom I shared with Joey's sister Anita, I would remember those tales of his, and would have to slither up the stairs sideways, my back pressed hard against the wall, so that no monster could sneak up behind me and say, Gotcha!
One day (I couldn't have been more than five or six), Joey said, “Saturday when my mom goes downtown, I'll ask her if you and I can go to the movies while she shops. Dracula is playing at the Art Cinema.”
In those days the Art Cinema Theatre on Liberty Avenue showed regular movies, but mostly horror films, not pornographic ones as it did in later years. I don't know how Joey got Aunt Mary to agree to drop us off at the theater the next Saturday without questioning him about what was playing, but drop us off she did. As it turned out, she finished her shopping earlier than she had expected and wanted to get home, so she convinced the theater manager to allow her to come in to get her two young charges while the movie was still in progress. As she told us later, she walked down the aisle of the darkened theater to find me hunched over almost double in fright, my hands over my eyes, and Joey mesmerized by what Count Dracula was doing on the screen. What Dracula was doing, I guess, was sucking someone's blood, but I was too traumatized to watch. Well, my Aunt Mary yanked us out of there fast, and that was the alpha and the omega of our Saturday afternoons at the old Art Cinema.
Joey continued to invent chilling stories for me, though, and to think up magic games for us to play.
Between playtimes, Joey tried to prepare me for when I started school; he was grooming me to be the best student in West Liberty Avenue Grade School. How successful he was is definitely a matter for debate, but I remember how diligently he would grill me in arithmetic. My cousin Anita, I could tell, felt sorry for my struggle to grasp all he was trying to teach me. I so wanted to make him proud. She often stood behind him, facing me, and would hold up her fingers to me, displaying the answer to an arithmetic question he had posed. She would say, “Don't be so hard on her, Joe. She's just a little girl.” Joey persevered, nonetheless, and by the time I started First Grade, because he had taught me how to sound out the printed word, I was able to shine in reading. I remember that one day the teacher, Miss Liepart, put the word used on the board and asked if anyone knew this new (to us) word. In my head, I sounded it out before raising my hand and answering, ǔs-ed.
Miss Liepart smiled and said, “Well, yes, there is our old-friend word us in it, and that's very good, Mary Stella, but there is also the word use there, and so we say ūse-d.” She went on to repeat two or three times that my answer had been a good one, but I felt I had let Joey down. I remember hoping he would not ask me if we had learned any new words that day, but, of course he did – as he asked me most days. I told him the whole us-ed/use-d story, expecting him to scold me, but to my amazement, he said I had done very well. “That's how it is sometimes with English,” he said – or similar words to that effect. I was relieved.
In my eighth year, my family moved into our own house in Beechview, and I no longer saw Joey every day. I thought my heart would break, but of course, hearts don't really break and life goes on. My mother, to ease the separation for me, put me on the 42-Dormont trolley (we called them street cars then), and allowed me to go by myself to the old house, which Joey and his family now filled top to bottom. I missed that dear house so, and all the joys that living there had given me. I ran all the way up the hill from the trolley stop to Joey's house, breathless to see my aunt and all the family again, but mostly, I could hardly wait to see Joey. I had a million questions for him to answer for me.
In June, 2006, Joey died. The house with a soul of its own still sits there on its hill, but strangers fill its rooms. And all those precious memories? They are mine to my dying day – another of Joey's many gifts to me. My regret is that in all those years, I never told him thank you.