Saratoga Graces

My Father, Herm Scratchenton, took a job with the band at DelMonicos upstate in Saratoga in the summer of 1948. DelMonicos was located in a very large structure almost in the middle of Saratoga’s downtown. But we lived out of town in a cabin in a camp on Lonely Lake.

Before World War Two, Saratoga had the makeup of a midsized metropolis in the country.

A number of large Victorian hotels gave the town a cultivated presence; local residents were given to flaunt their own homes as well as the town’s great public spaces with their internationally famous racecourse. There’s the famous Saratoga Springs, which brought many of the populace to the area in the first place. The residential area around the downtown hub was designed to a density of about six homes per acre, on a grid of tree-lined streets. Beyond the residential neighborhoods were the farms. Beyond the farms was the wooded forest.

The band had about twenty musicians and four or five show girls. The only showgirl I remember was Helen Dancer, which I thought was a great and wonderful coincidence. If there were any sexual fantasies that a four-year old boy could have had, it would have involved Helen. But I can’t honestly remember having any fantasies in the summer of 1948. Not about Helen Dancer anyway.

In 1948 my father was forty-three years old, graying, but in decent shape for a man his age who lived so hard trying to survive. By then he was already a serious alcoholic but that was never brought up primarily because no one knew what an alcoholic was at the time or if they did they were polite enough not to discuss it. They just knew that was the “other guy” and it was a way of dealing with the deeper misery that everybody felt but to which no one would admit.

My father was just six feet, a handsome man who enjoyed performing and playing the saxophone. It was truly the only thing he could do well enough to make a living and he had been making a living at it since he had as fourteen when he left home to play in Boston and Providence and then travel on the ocean liners while playing in the band.

He was a likable, very likable man. He joked a lot; most musicians had a wonderful sense of humor and they often played practical jokes on other musicians. My father was no different.

He brought my mother, Ethel, who was also called Eth, Bruce and me moved into a cabin at a camp where all the other musicians were staying. It was a great summer place.

One day as I walked and hopped, hopped and walked back to the cabin one of the musician’s wives saw me and asked, “what happened little man?”

“Stubbed my toe,” I mumbled boy like, my hidden head giving only a view of my sun bleached blonde.

“Do you want me to look at it?”

“No!” I pushed past the woman.

And when home, amongst the musicians and wives, someone washed the cuts and someone, not my mother, tried to comfort me by singing for the occasion, a devised ditty, “Poe Road took po Scratch’s toe down around Lonely Lake, ho ho,” rang the words.

I didn’t have fun though. All I wanted was my mother but she hadn’t even noticed the cuts. I was very embarrassed to cry about my hurting. I sat quietly.

I remembered Poe Road for another reason. Poe Road was the road my father and Bruce came down one day and yelled ahead that they had some gold fish. I ran up the hill to meet them not knowing that the instinct to of this act, meeting the returned hunters, was more than two million years old and was clearly and deeply embedded in my youthful, yet very old, DNA. It was genetics that sent me scampering up Poe Road to meet the returning hunters. But when I got up close to my kin perhaps the first small horror started to play out.

As the older men, Bruce was now sixteen and therefore was included in the category, got closer to the cabin, and I got closer to them, one of the goldfish made a full body breach out of the bowl Bruce was holding, fell three or four feet and it began to flip flop over the hot hard road, which had earlier taken part of my toe. My father tried to pick the fish up with his fingers but would only get it a few inches off the ground before the slippery wet skin of the small fish combined with its gyrating body made it impossible to complete the task. Indeed, prior to the first fish returning to the bowl, the second fish was going to join his brother on the hot summer road. My father cursed after the third, fourth and fifth attempt failed.

I was prompted to go home and when I didn’t obey immediately my father directed my brother, “Bruce, take Scratch to the cabin now.”

“Let me help, dad, come on, I ken help,” Bruce implored.

My father was now facing the problem of collecting two small goldfish who were flip flopping all about on a hot summer afternoon on an old concrete road named Poe, a fete he had never before completed. I was yanked away from the small scene of horror by an older brother responding to a man who knew how to play complicated musical pieces but couldn’t pick up a fish. No words were uttered when the young and old brothers went off to their cabin next to the lake called Lonely on a road called Poe.

A few minutes afterward my father came into the small cabin with nothing in his hand, no bowl, no fish, no water, nothing. And he did it ever so casually. I don’t remember precisely what he did next but I know the troubles with the goldfish were not discussed. Other conversation about what have happened around the lake was discussed instead.

After a period of time, an hour or so, two things dawned on me. The two items were, the goldfish were dead; they were dead and that thought frightened me. The second notion was that my father was never going to talk about his particular actions after the boys left. It would be a mystery, of sorts, which would never to be discussed, and that frightened me even more.

Lonely Lake had a very sandy bottom. The lakeshore was just outside our cabin and that is where I played with shovels and pail thing s that four year olds use to create towns and universes.

On many afternoons my mother and father would have a “highball” while sitting on wooden lounge chairs, which they would roll out into the water when they had the energy and desire to if so.

I felt very comfortable wading at lake’s edge.

But as the family walked slowly toward the rumbling engine of a seaplane that a family friend owned two things began to happen.

The plane’s engine, by the virtue of simply getting closer, became louder and louder inside of my mind. But what was worse was that the sand bed at the bottom of the lake began going down, and I perceived that the rippling sand bed began to undulate.

Putting the loud sound with the strange feelings at my feet I panicked and began to clamor for my mother.

Ethel McGlynn was born one year after my father. She was the third and last daughter to a second generation Irish family in Portland, Maine. Dan McGlynn, my grandfather, had a long nose, I remembered, and he smelled dank and bad from sitting in the cellar next to the boiler for so many years listening to the Boston Red Sox on the radio. He did this because he was told to by the family matriarch, his wife, senior Ethel McGlynn. He said that was because he was a devout Boston fan and the best radio reception was in the cellar.

“Papa, where are yow,” I would yell down to the cellar, waiting to be beckoned from the top of the stairs. More often than not though, I would dare to go down unannounced. I would find Papa snoozing on the cot that had only a thin stinking mattress. I didn’t know then, but know now that Papa Dan McGlynn spent many years in the cellar to avoid his wife Ethel McGlynn. Dan McGlynn was an iceman who delivered ice to the people of Portland, Maine.

My mother, Ethel, if Eth, as she was called by her sisters, Mildred and Gladys, was the princess. Indeed, anything she wanted, her mother or sisters served to her. When her boyfriend and future husband was in Boston and Providence playing music, Eth was taking ballet lessons down on Congress Street.

She was beautiful in her teen years. She had a perfect nose and steel blues. She was exactly five feet tall and weighed exactly one hundred pounds. Her sisters and mother taught young Ethel two things, don’t do a thing, let others do it for you and don’t ever trust a man, and then they would look toward the cellar as if to say, “you know what I mean?”

The McGlynn family ran an inn and restaurant for transients in down town Portland. Nana McGlynn would serve the mostly men customers, smile at them and when they were out of site say dreadful things about them. The three daughters, my mother included because this kind of work didn’t count in the rules about life, helped make up rooms and served during lunch and dinner. Nana McGlynn was watchful from early in the morning until late at night trying to keep the business and family going with some sense of solidity.

She would often boast about how she baked an apple pie for Theodore Roosevelt one day. She was very proud to have been called to duty for the President. After a few moments, and a bit of contemplation, Nana McGlynn would then call Roosevelt an awful brute. My mother was taught early and regularly not to trust men.

But she did trust my father and ran away with him.

Indeed, they lived on the road with the band for a few years before they got married during a short three-night engagement in Baltimore, the place where she also died sixty years later. Soon after Bruce was born in October of 1932. My mother and father returned to Portland for the birth. They lasted in Portland for a year if that. My father tried to earn a living doing this and that but never held a day job very long, often missed work and was real unhappy about life. One day he got the call he had hoped for, a job playing the saxophone in Chicago.

Saying good-bye to my mother, my newborn brother and the McGlynns he got on a long train that pulled out of Portland one lonely Sunday night. Three days later he joined Mugsy Spanier in Chicago. This lasted for a few months. After that, it was the Harry James Band. A young Frank Sinatra was vocalist.

But my mother was home with her family on Brighton Avenue in Portland when the letters announcing the different bands that my father was with, leaving my mother envious and desirous of not having to attend a newborn.

It wasn’t very long before my mother begged her family to take Bruce for a few months so she could join her husband. They resisted for a few weeks but when my father wrote home that he was joining the Tommy Dorsey band, my mother went over board and just took off without any notice. Meeting my father after a long rail journey to San Francisco, it wasn’t until she got pregnant with me that she went back to Portland to be with Bruce full time. Bruce was raised by the McGlynns with part time visits by my mother and father. He was twelve when he finally got his parents back. In Saratoga the family was together.

My mother, sadly, was unable to nurture. She grabbed me and started to shake me, fearing that she may lose the chance for the plane ride. She quickly calculated a strategy.

“He’s afraid of flying. I knew that. When he was a baby we flew down from Portland and he didn’t stop crying until we landed,” she said starting to back off with me being pulled from behind.

“No mommy, noo, noo,” I screamed. I had only wanted to be picked up out of the water but my actions were read as a fear of the plane, or at least she said it was.

“Tell Jim to hold the plane, I’ll be right there,” and then she looked down at me and said, “it’s okay sweetie, we’re going in now.”

“No mommy no,” which was all I could manage to plead under the circumstances of missed communication.

My mother walked rapidly ahead of me, pulling me as I began to cry, trying to make less of an inconvenience to the others who were anxious to fly. By the time I got to the shore I was hysterical from the pain of the misunderstanding, my fear of snakes and the nightmares that sometimes show up in the afternoons.

She looked for one of the musician’s wives, quickly spotted one and shouted to the woman to watch me. I pulled away and flopped on my fanny in the shallow water of the shoreline.

“Come on Ethel, Jimmy’s waiting,” my father tried to yell over the engine. My mother heard nothing but saw the agitation in her private sax man. She was still in love with the romance of love and ran toward the plane while I sat and calmed down.

There were no snakes in the shallow water.      

Scratch on the Stoop.