4

OK, maybe not the town itself. After all, my mother had grown up there and occasionally still harboured deep affection for it, an affection that would well up from some remote corner of her heart whenever she left. During her time in Phoenix she came to speak of Gloversville with something like longing, as if she’d been banished by cruel decree. Though I’d never encountered this before, the pattern was all too familiar to my grandparents. As a girl my mother couldn’t wait to go away to college, but was terribly homesick when she got there and quit after a year, returning home to work as a telephone operator. Two short years later, when the army stationed my father in Georgia, she followed him there eagerly, like a bird released from a cage, but she didn’t like the South and as soon as he shipped overseas she returned to Gloversville just as eagerly.

Once I came along, Gloversville had come to represent to my mother everything that was keeping her from living the finer life to which she was intended. She thought of herself as modern and freethinking, whereas her home town was backward and parochial. More than anything, what she longed for, first as a girl and later as a woman, was independence from scrutiny and interference, and the freedom to exercise her own judgement, which she believed to be excellent. All Gloversville offered was structure: church; neighbours; work; Sunday picnics with family at the lake – with her parents, right downstairs, second-guessing her every decision. If she stayed put, my grandparents argued, she’d be safe. But she didn’t want to be safe. She wanted to be free.

Had I been asked my opinion, I might have weighed in, but probably not. As a high-school senior I was by definition already gone, as anxious as any other seventeen-year-old to embrace whatever came next. Like most of my friends, I knew that wouldn’t be in Gloversville. For decades the mill owners had in effect run the town, and even as the leather industry slipped deeper into decline it kept other industries out, or so it was widely believed. If you were young, the conventional wisdom held that you had to go away and make something of yourself elsewhere – as a doctor or lawyer or pharmacist – before it made sense to return. My grandparents, unlike my mother, didn’t hate Gloversville, but they understood the skin mills were finished, and anyway, mill life was a drudgery they wouldn’t have wished on me even if it were lucrative. My grandfather, too young for the First World War and too old for the Second, had nevertheless served in both, and as a boy I assumed this was because he was very brave, very patriotic. Which he was, but war also offered him a respite from the shops. His wife, thinking of him on a ship in the South Pacific during World War II, was envious, if you can believe it, of the great adventure he was on, while she was left behind to measure out the long, grey days with their two daughters as best she could in a town she’d never wanted to move to anyway, because it took her away from her sisters. But neither she nor my grandfather blamed Gloversville for their circumscribed lives. They didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether it was better or worse than other places. It was simply where they were, where they would remain.

And my own feelings about Gloversville? As a boy I’d been happy as a clam there. Our block on Helwig Street was neighbourly, with a grocery store situated diagonally across the street. My mother’s sister and her family lived around the corner on Sixth Avenue, which meant I grew up surrounded by cousins. In kindergarten and first grade, my grandmother walked me to school in the morning and was there to meet me in the afternoon, and in the summers we went for walks to a lovely little park a few blocks away. On weekends it was often my grandfather who’d take my hand and together we’d head downtown for a bag of ‘peatles’, his peculiar word for red-skinned peanuts, stopping on the way back to visit with neighbours on their porches. By the time I was old enough to get my first bike and explore beyond Helwig Street, I’d discovered the magic of baseball and so, wooden bat over my shoulder, mitt dangling from my handlebars, I disappeared with friends for whole mornings or afternoons or both. At my aunt’s there was a basketball hoop up over the garage, and during the long winters my cousin Greg and I kept the driveway shovelled meticulously so we could shoot baskets, even when it was so cold the net froze and you couldn’t dribble the ball. Come autumn I raked leaves, stealing this job from my grandfather, who loved to do it, though he didn’t always have sufficient breath. Sometimes he’d start the job and I finished while he snuck a cigarette around back of the house where my grandmother couldn’t see him. Summers I mowed lawns, and winters I shovelled sidewalks, jobs I continued straight through high school, even though by then I had other part-time, after-school employment. I fell in love with one local girl after another. Was something missing? Anything amiss?