What Happened on Pleasant Avenue?

Nature and Nurture

Minnie

Patsy

In my first piece about my family of origin, I shared that I’d wondered from a young age if my mother was born with whatever was wrong inside her head (as I thought of it as a kid,) or if something had happened to make her that way.

If you missed that post, titled “Whence the Crazy?” you can read it here.

Thirty-odd years later, a relative provided some answers.

First, let’s pick up the story of my mother’s parents, Minnie and Patsy. They were married in 1912 in Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church on East 116th Street.

The 1915 New York census would have provided so much information, but I couldn’t find any family in it. I know that Patsy and Luca, Minnie’s father, continued to work for Steinway and Sons.

By the time my mother, Crescenza was born early in 1916, Minnie and Patsy had rented an apartment at 433 Pleasant Avenue. Luca and Grace likely had an apartment in the same building by then.

The words East Harlem had never crossed my mother’s lips in my time, but it turned out that was where she’d grown up. I was told that neighborhood was Manhattan’s original Little Italy, but it had lost that moniker by the early 1900s. Then it was Italian Harlem. Oddly, East Harlem isn’t part of Harlem. It’s complicated. You’ll likely know East Harlem by its later nickname, Spanish Harlem. Full circle, just as it was after the Italians left, the neighborhood is largely Puerto Rican again now.

I always liked my mother’s Italian name. Crescenza sounded like a melodic juxtaposition of credenza and crescendo.

My mother’s stories were suspect

Now that my mother’s been born, we can delve into her suspiciously happy-sounding childhood.

My mother told me what seemed like stock stories about growing up. She’d recite the same short tales in the same words. I knew that all of her mother, Minnie’s family lived within a block of two of her. That sounded wonderful to me since I only saw extended family once a year. My grandparents were the exception.

My mother said that when her parents were mad at her, she could always have dinner with whatever relatives she chose. Oh to have so many escape hatches within walking distance.

On the downside, I imagine everyone in the family knew all of your business.

To listen to my mother, her childhood was an endless swirl of fun family gatherings, food, and dancing. The worst thing that happened was that she wasn’t allowed to roller skate. Even there, Grandma Grace bought her a pair of skates and let her use them when Minnie and Patsy weren’t home.

Then there were the stories of going to Uncle Mike’s fun apartment. He and a daughter played music and they pulled back the rug and danced.

My mother loved Sunday dinners at her grandparent’s apartment. She especially liked to listen to the women tell stories while they cleaned up afterward and the men played poker. Mom always said that she adored her grandma Grace. She was special to her grandmother since she was the first grandchild. There was a telling story about how much Grandma Grace loved her that I’ll get to in a bit.

Even when I was seven or eight, I wasn’t buying that my mother’s personality emerged from a swirl of good food, dancing, and a happy family. I’d been observing her since I was five, when I’d been jarred onto permanent high alert. People remarked that I had my mother’s flawless skin. I worried that I could also get the “something seriously wrong inside her head.”

I’m going to share something important about my mother that wasn’t her fault. Before I do, I’d like to relate some of her good qualities. My mother was intelligent, well-spoken, gorgeous, stylish, artistic, and a successful real estate agent. Her career was unusual at a time when it was an upper-middle-class status symbol that a wife didn’t need to work. She didn’t need to, she wanted to and I admired her for that. It also got her out of the house, which I appreciated.

My mother could act normally in public, which made me think of her when I read The Picture of Dorian Gray as a teenager. It was as if most people saw a much better version of her and I lived with her portrait.

Observing my mother, I noticed that she rewrote reality in her head. Like a mad script doctor, she altered the disturbing things she said and did to suit an image of herself she seemed to hold in her mind’s eye. In her new, improved version of an afternoon, she’d acted like perfect TV mother Donna Reed, rather than the part she’d actually played, which was more like a suburban Lucetzia Borgia.

When I was older, I named my mother’s rewrites the egg drop method. She’d keep neutral or positive occurrences from the day, drop the twisted things she’d said or done, and pretend the good parts were the whole story. She fed this altered version to my father over dinner. He was only interested in food and I understood that the recitation was for my benefit. That was her story and I wasn’t to contradict it.

Enlightenment at last

I was in my late twenties or early thirties when another family member shared that their therapist concluded that my mother sounded like she had a borderline personality disorder (BPD). This was pre-internet, so I read a book on the subject. The descriptions matched my mother’s behavior. Finally, I had a name for her devastating, incomprehensible actions and some understanding of why she was that way. I read that people with BPDs lack a sense of self. As a result, any suggestion that they have done anything wrong is anathema. Hence the egg-drop method of rewrites and her never seeking help even though psychologists were thick on the ground in nearby New York City.

Later, a therapist that I saw came to the same conclusion about my mother. I had part of my answer. She was born with a genetic predisposition. The story didn’t end there though. There were more revelations to come.

Crescenza in a family wedding

The pieces start to come together

In my mid-thirties, I decided to delve into the family history while some members of the older generation were still around. My mother wasn’t interested in talking about the past and suggested I try her cousin, Tessy.

It was like a portal to Nirvana had opened. Was I dreaming? Was it possible that I might soon have access to an unbiased fount of information about my mother’s early life?

In her next breath, my mother warned me that Tessy was a recluse. She’d been one since her beloved Eddie had died. I hung on to my hope.

By then I lived in another state, so I mailed a letter to Tessy in the Bronx and waited. I’d last seen her when I was in my teens.

I hadn’t had an opportunity to develop a relationship with any extended family, much less ask probing mental health questions.

Tessy had been a favorite of mine as a kid. I saw her and Eddie at an annual family party in a Manhattan apartment. Tessy was a character and a lot of fun. She was a multitalented artist. She painted, carved scenes into canes, made miniatures, and even sculpted. What I loved about her was her unique voice and laugh. She had a high-pitched one with a thick Bronx accent. My mother had one of those newscaster non-accents, so the contrast was great.

Part of Pleasant Avenue circa 1919 from the New York Historical Society

Life on Pleasant Avenue

One day a small envelope arrived in the mail with Tessy’s name in one corner and a doodle of a woman with curly hair. Tessy was happy to help with family information and stories. She was the daughter of Minnie’s only sister, Lillie, the youngest of Grace and Luca’s kids. That first letter began a flood of snail mail that was fun to receive. Her envelopes often contained a doodled self-portrait indicating her mood or a holiday. A sun around her face, her with Statue of Liberty headgear, or as the Easter bunny. They always made me smile.

Tessy answered my legion of questions about the family and everyday life on Pleasant Avenue, always sticking to positive memories. It was nice to hear that my mother’s little cousin had looked up to her and enjoyed her company. Tessy was enjoying writing and talking about her childhood and I sensed that she too dealt with depression. I was glad to be someone lifting her spirits.

I love reading and hearing about people’s everyday lives and have read many a historical journal or memoir. These stories were about people I knew, my people.

She told me that a woman named Cecelia owned the corner grocery store. They would go in there and hand Cecelia their list. She’d walk around the small store selecting the items. In little stores in Italy, you tell them what you want and they choose for you as well. The produce is only touched by one hand.

Cecelia’s shop had a telephone. Since my relatives didn’t have phones in their apartments, if someone needed to get ahold of them, they called Cecelia. She’d step out the back door and call up to their apartment window, letting them know who had a call. I can’t imagine that happened often since the whole family lived in the neighborhood. Most men didn’t have the kind of jobs that allowed employees to use a precious work phone to call home at that time.

Down a block, there was a coal and ice store. Luca, Patsy, and other men stopped to place orders for those essential items on their way to work, and deliveries were made later in the day.

All morning, the women heard vendors on horse-drawn carts sing out the names of their products. Grace, Minnie, and the other ladies went to their windows and called down their orders. If they lived on an upper floor, they lowered a basket on a rope down with the money and pulled their purchases up. If an old enough child was at home, they might be sent downstairs to complete the transaction.

The milkman always came early, with milk in large metal containers on his cart. Tessy remembered his horse’s name, but I forgot. My relatives would have known all of these vendors and their horses or other animals. They were an integral part of the neighborhood and everyday life. They joked, laughed, and shared family news with those men.

I heard that Minnie and the other women engaged in harmless flirting with the men selling produce at a local market.

I have a black-and-white picture of 433 Pleasant Avenue. It was taken in 1940 as part of a Works Progress Administration project to employ artists. Photographs were taken of almost every building in New York City for tax purposes. I’ll add information on how you can request photographs of buildings that played a part in your New York City family history at the end. Unfortunately, I don’t have permission to include that photograph here. The picture above is of another block. 433 was a four-story building like two of the ones above.

Big shock

Tessy’s stories were great, but what I really wanted to know was how my mother came to be the way she was. Was there any abuse in her childhood? Mental illness elsewhere in the family? I knew that she hadn’t heard from her eldest son in over two decades and didn’t know if was alive. I hoped she’d feel comfortable telling me that story one day, but it was a good bet it would be upsetting. Right then, I sought information about my mother’s early life.

Nothing about my mother’s own stories raised a red flag. Mom said that when her father spanked her, she refused to give him the satisfaction of crying. Hers went on much longer than her brother’s, who she said was smart enough to begin howling and crying from the start. Nothing she related sounded unusual or abusive.

Even as a kid, I knew that I’d probably never put the whole story together. By the time I’d become close to Tessy, I’d waited a long time to get some answers.

Tessy never said anything negative about her older cousin. It was nice to hear so many positive stories and that her cousin had loved her. My mother bought Tessy her first pair of roller skates. Lovely. Tessy loved to sleep over with my mother or her other older girl cousins.

I was both eager to understand as much as I could about my family and dreading what I would learn. It was bound to be disturbing and depressing. Did I really want to know?

During one phone call with Tessy, I had no idea I was about to take a deep dive into the murky, frightening unknown. For the most part, I tried to keep things light for Tessy, who had an undertone of deep sadness. One day while we were talking, I related my mother’s favorite childhood story. Tessy’s mother Lillie was part of it and I thought it would be a fun memory. It was a story about how much my mother’s grandma Grace loved her.

I said, “Here’s a story you must know since it involves your mother! My mother said that when she was young, her family planned to take the train to Philadelphia to visit one of her father’s brothers, who owned a factory there. Her grandma Grace adored Mom and didn’t want her to leave. Mom was her favorite, and Grandma would miss her too much. She hid my mother’s shoes so she couldn’t go. Minnie and Patsy took Mom’s baby brother with them, leaving Mom with Grandma. A day or two later, when Mom’s shoes were found, her older cousin Lillie, took her to Philly on the train.”

As I repeated the story, I felt happy for my mother that her grandmother had loved her so much, since her parents seemed to have always preferred her brother. When I finished, I expected Tessy to laugh, remembering her mother telling that tale. Instead, I heard silence at the other end.

It stretched out for a few moments, then Tessy said, “That’s not what happened.”

“No?” I heard the doubt in my voice and got that familiar sick feeling in my stomach, the one I got when I knew that I was about to hear something disturbing.

“Uncle Patsy and Aunt Minnie moved to Pennsylvania and took your uncle with them. They left your mother with Grandma Grace.”

“Left her? For how long?

“They moved there for a year and a half, maybe two. But she did visit them. My mother did take her there on the train.”

When we hung up, I turned the real story and my mother’s often repeated version over in my mind and pieced another part of her emotional map together. My mother had turned a story about being abandoned by her parents into one about how loved she was. Something clicked into place. That meant that my Mom’s penchant for rewriting an afternoon and leaving out something devastating she’d said or done, had begun the other way around. She’d started by turning a story about something terrible that had been done to her into a happy story. She’d begun her rewrites to protect herself from pain inflicted by others.

Before I’d ended that call with Tessy I asked her how old my mother had been when her parents moved without her.

She said, “Two and a half. I wasn’t born of course, but my mother remembered it well and felt bad for your mother.”

It upset me to hear what had happened to my mother. Her parents’ clear preference for her brother was bad enough, but to abandon her…

When I related that story, a doctor friend commented, “We know the effects of disrupted bonding at that age, two or so, which is well known for producing borderline personality disorder.” My understanding is that genetics play a significant role in BPDs, but childhood abuse, neglect, abandonment, or other trauma can cause them to manifest earlier and be more severe.

Both of the factors I’d wondered about seem to have been in play. My mother’s mental health challenges were hereditary, but something traumatic had also happened to change her.

I wondered who had passed on the gene. It didn’t have to be either of my grandparents. I’ve read that personality disorders can skip generations. By then I knew that serious mental illnesses like that run in families, popping up here and there in different forms over generations. Someone can have a bipolar second cousin, an uncle who has schizophrenia, and a child with a personality disorder.

The way that my grandparents had left my mother made me wonder about them. How could Minnie leave her two-year-old daughter like that? I couldn’t give Patsy a pass either.

More insights

Tessy put me in contact with other family members who I hoped would be willing to fill out family history sheets for their branches. I soon found that introducing myself as my mother’s daughter was not a good calling card. I should have surmised that, but hadn’t. That was partially due to Tessy’s positive reception. I thought my mother had chosen not to be in touch with her cousins partially because she never wanted me to be close to anyone but her, not even my father. Relatives could also have contradicted her stories about her earlier life. It hadn’t occurred to me that there may have been another factor in play. That they didn’t have fond memories of her.

One day I said to Tessy, “I’m glad that you have such good memories about my mother, but she was something of a horror show to me. Were there signs of that in her childhood?”

I think she’d been waiting for me to bring up that subject. She told me that her mother had said that mine never grew out of having tantrums and that she had witnessed many herself. I wouldn’t have used that term, but it fit with the behavior I’d experienced.

Finally, I was getting somewhere. Even if one or both of my grandparents on that side weren’t dealing with that level of mental illness, others in the extended family must have been. I just didn’t know who. Chances were getting slimmer that I ever would.

What about your family? Are there traits that you’ve found running through it that helped you understand your family of origin or even yourself or your child? It doesn’t have to be mental illness. Musicality or other traits or habits passed down through the generations can be interesting surprises and connections.

Resources for you:

You can obtain WPA pictures of New York City buildings from the NYC Department of Records and Information Services.

If someone in your life has a personality disorder, you might want to check out a site called Out of the Fog. It’s a volunteer-run site where you can learn, ask questions, and receive help with how to handle specific situations. You aren’t alone and may find community there.