When I was an eighth grader, then a high school freshman, I struggled mightily with mathematics. I was lucky to get into any high school, I was that bad. There was a wall there. I could not climb it. Perhaps I never tried hard enough.
But my poor father wanted to help this situation. He received advice, most probably from the Catholic nuns that were trying to teach me, that tutorial services were available from the retired teachers in the Women’s Home near the corners of Gallivan Boulevard and Washington Street in Boston’s Dorchester section. I forget if it was free or just available for a small fee to help the women support themselves. My mother somehow was led to believe that the women’s home was called “the home for incurables,” and she freely referred to it as that, though that struck even my adolescent mind as woefully bleak and uncharitable, regardless of the women’s conditions or circumstances. True, the women were all elderly and did have serious infirmities — mostly, it seemed, severe and disabling rheumatoid arthritis. I don’t believe any of them were ambulatory. They wheeled or were wheeled down those dark, polished, barren institutional corridors.
The Women’s Home is still there, though I don’t know who are currently its patients or residents or who operates it. (In older, less euphamistic times, I guess it was, in fact, called The Home for Incurables)It remains a brick, Victorian-looking structure at the end of a long drive across a spacious lawn. ( When I Google “Women’s Home,” nothing comes up. When I do a Google Earth search, I don’t see it where I know it to be. Many times on the job as a Boston TV reporter, I recall my photographer and I driving by the long, elevated wall and chain link fence and vegitation bordering Gallivan Boulevard, and bordering the home. But, for some reason, I can’t find it. I can only assure you that I am not imagining there was such a place.
I would arrive, getting a ride from some family member, and take an elevator (as I recall) to the second floor. My sense of the place is, again, of a place clean, but stark and unadorned. ( I can fix the time of my visitations in the summer of 1962, because I somehow recall that I learned of the death of William Faulkner while leaving the property one day (on the radio?) and that date was July 6, 1962. I don’t recall any pictures of paintings on the walls, but my memories might be limited to what an adolescent boy might be likely to take in. And though time may be denying me that memory, I still see in my mind a place where there was nothing of any color, nothing on display — no flowers or paintings. There was an equally bleak-seeming second floor lounge with a piano in the middle of it. A piano was a good thing. (The only person I ever heard playing the piano was yours truly, but that comes later.)
I will continue this memory another time; promise. But, for now, I’ll stop — or stall — here on one of memory’s darker back roads….
19 Cent Notebook 