Thomas is a small boy who wears glasses with thick lenses to correct his astigmatism, has a concave chest, is “book” smart, and plays the piano. It’s a challenging combination for a boy growing up in a working class neighborhood in Massachusetts in the 1940s and 50s. Sometimes the other boys pick on him. Sometimes he’s lonely and worries that he’s weak, not like other boys, unable to fit in.
Thomas does have one sister. But she’s eight years his senior and doesn’t spend much time with him. His parents are immigrants from Nova Scotia and very old-fashioned. They either call him Thomas, which is too formal, or Tommy, which is too babyish. He wants to be Tom. Every summer they send him “down home” to Cape Breton Island, where he stays with one of his mother’s sisters.
Thomas does well in school and eventually goes to college and becomes an electrical engineer. But he’s envious of boys who become carpenters and plumbers. He never feels like he’s as much of a man as his father, who’s an electrician. As an adult, he teaches himself to build walls and unclog sinks, to show that he can do everything those other boys can do.
Cynthia is small, like Thomas, and has wavy brown hair and big brown eyes. She’s the middle child in a family of five children. No one pays much attention to her. She’s not one of the two younger brothers, so cute and cuddly. She’s not the older sister, a good girl who’s smart in school and will become a nurse. She’s not the older brother, always in trouble, always breaking the rules, always laughing. He’s the one she adores, the one she wants to be like. She’s his sidekick, getting into trouble with him, taking his dares to win his admiration, laughing at his stunts.
When Cynthia is not playing with her older brother, she plays with the younger ones, dressing them up like dolls, pushing them in their carriage. Or she plays with the many children in the neighborhood. Adults are always nagging and yelling and worrying about money. She lives as much as she can in the world of children. But she doesn’t much like babies. They’re always crying and “leaking.”
Cynthia dreams of having a career. But she struggles in school. Some of the letters look backward and upside down, so it’s hard to understand what words they spell. No one helps her, but eventually she learns to read by teaching herself. Still, she worries that she’s stupid.
Cynthia’s older brother, Gerald, does well in school, despite being a troublemaker. By the time he and Cynthia are in high school, he has become best friends with Thomas. They’re the most unlikely pair anyone could imagine, the piano-playing kid and the troublemaker. But there it is. They are Tom and Jerry, like the cat and mouse cartoon. And Cynthia is Cyndy. She’s never had a nickname before. Her mother has always insisted on calling her Cynthia. Being called Cyndy makes her feel special, known.
Tom and Jerry and Cyndy are always together. Soon enough, Tom and Cyndy are in love. They will never understand what causes Jerry to suddenly move away to California soon after high school, and will mourn the loss of him together.
Finally, the boy named Thomas has someone in his life who thinks he’s strong, who looks up to him, who admires his brains and his ability to make music, who thinks he has a better future ahead of him than the boys who will be carpenters and plumbers. Finally, the girl named Cynthia has someone in her life who pays attention to her, who thinks she’s good and pretty and smart.
Cyndy doesn’t know much about sex and nothing about birth control. There are no sex education classes at school. All Cyndy knows is that she wants to make Tom happy. So she goes along with whatever he wants to do.
In the summer of 1954, Cyndy is seventeen and has just finished her last year of high school. Tom is eighteen and has just finished his first year in the co-op program at Northeastern University. He and Cyndy are planning to get married when he finishes his degree. But Cyndy has discovered she’s pregnant, so instead, they get married at the end of August. She lets go of her dream of having a career – she will be a mother instead.
Cyndy wears a blue silk suit at her wedding. She’s not allowed to wear a white dress – she’s “in trouble.” The few photos taken that day show Cyndy defiantly, glowingly happy, marrying the boy she loves and pregnant with a baby she can’t wait to love. But Tom is tense and frowning in the pictures because he’s furious at his mother for treating Cyndy like she’s trash. Tom will never completely forgive his mother.
After their wedding, Tom and Cyndy go to Cape Cod for the weekend and then their married life begins. At first, they live with Tom’s parents. His sister has already married and moved out of the house, so they live in her old bedroom. Tom returns to Northeastern, Cyndy to her job in a bank. Sometimes Cyndy goes back to her mother’s house, to escape her mother-in-law’s judgemental looks. Her mother agrees that Tom’s mother has no reason to judge: “She seems to think her precious Tommy had nothing to do with making this baby.” But Cyndy’s mother doesn’t let her stay: “You’re married now. You belong with your husband. You’ve made your bed and now you must lie in it.”
There’s a lot of fighting between Tom and Cyndy’s two families, with Tom and Cyndy in the middle. Tom’s family thinks that Cyndy is ruining his life. Cyndy’s family thinks that Tom’s family is stuck up and prudish. The atmosphere of disapproval in Tom’s parents’ house becomes more and more unbearable. Finally, in February, Tom and Cyndy move to a tiny studio apartment. The move is a turning point for their young marriage. They’ve decided that it’s “us first.” They build a wall around themselves with their two families firmly on the outside. That wall will remain in place for as long as they live.
Cyndy can no longer hide her pregnancy, so she’s fired from her job. I’m born in April of 1955, seven months after the wedding. Tom doesn’t think they can survive on the little money he makes in the co-op program and is under a lot of pressure from his family to drop out of Northeastern and start working full time. But Cyndy insists that he stay in school. To supplement their income, he begins playing the piano with a dance band on Friday and Saturday nights. Somehow they get by. Everyone around them predicts that Tom will never finish college and the marriage will never last. But Tom not only finishes his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, he goes on to earn a master’s degree in physics and becomes a successful high-tech executive. He and Cyndy are married for more than sixty years and raise six children together.
But the hurt they experienced when they were young, and the wall they built to protect themselves, remains a troubling part of Tom and Cyndy’s long relationship. In the second decade of their marriage, when Cyndy begins to suffer from a confusing illness, she and Tom withdraw even further into themselves and refuse all offers of help from friends and neighbors. They fortify the old wall, insisting that they can take care of themselves, that they can solve their own problems. It is painfully clear to their children, my siblings and me, that we are not on the inside of that wall.
Wow, Karen. I never knew all these details about your parents’ past. It helps to fill in the gaps of their love story. But I’ve known for a long time that you were very wounded to find yourself on the outside of the wall they built. I’m really looking forward to reading more about Tom and Cyndy’s story.
Thanks, Molly. I never stop wondering about my parents and trying to understand why their relationship worked the way it did and why they made the choices they made when my mom got sick.
Wow, is right. How interesting that your dad did get his degree, and more, under those trying family stresses, and financial stresses. Also, it goes a long way to understand why that wall was built but it leave me puzzled as to why it stayed up, in all the wrong places.
Lori, you’re right, it’s pretty amazing that two teenagers managed to withstand all the pressure and guilt-tripping they got from their families and stay together and in many ways have a successful marriage. But clearly they paid a price. They didn’t know how to take the wall back down, so when my mom got sick and they were in trouble, they didn’t know how to accept help. And they were so quick to see “outsiders” as enemies that it was easy to put us kids in the wrong category if we made a mistake or didn’t agree with their approach.
I’m thinking about how (so far) the only people who have commented on this powerful story, including me, are people outside of your family. People who didn’t grow up within your family system, who are reading this story as “outsiders”, but whom the story can touch in deep ways, as it relates to our lives and understanding.
I grew up in a big white American Catholic family of English/Irish descent of the same generation. My parents’ personalities and original relationship were very different than yours, but there were some similar fault lines around “keeping the world out”, and huge difficulty communicating with their own families about painful history.
Tom’s and Cyndy’s “trial by fire” early marriage was intense, to put it mildly. This story makes me think about the enormous invisible pressure system that builds around families who have a “keep the world out because it’s not to be trusted “ internal code. And how much work and time it can take, for the kids who grow up within that structure, to identify those codes as adults, and start to try to disentangle from them.
What a powerful, eloquently told story, Karen.
Gina, I’ve always thought that one of the reasons you and I understand each other so well is because we both grew up in large families. There’s something about that experience, of being one of a “gang,” that seems to have shaped us in some similar ways, even though the dysfunction in our two families was different. That “keep the world out because it can’t be trusted” code is a hard one to break. I remember how transgressive it felt when, as a young adult, I began to talk to friends about my family’s problems.
Crying because it hurt so much being placed outside the wall. Even moving to and living nearby them in Florida, I was never allowed back in. I know I should be commenting on your actual art of writing, but the topics are too personal and close to home. I can’t help writing my emotional responses. Obviously you’re bringing written life to your memories, the visuals you bring are quite vivid for me.
Heather, your emotional responses are more than welcome – they mean so much to me. Please don’t stop sharing them. I wasn’t sure until recently that Mom and Dad put all of us kids outside the wall – I thought maybe I was the only one. There was a sad sort of comfort for me when I started to realize that we were all on the outside. I can understand how natural it was for them to retreat behind their wall when trouble came – it was how they learned to cope with the painful way their families treated them. But I will never understand why they didn’t bring us along.