In the middle of a hot New York summer 60 years ago, my mother and her two roommates were invited to spend a weekend at Fire Island. The three girls, recent nursing-school graduates, worked together at Bellevue and were sharing the rent on their first apartment. When a fourth young nurse of their acquaintance overheard them talking about the trip, she asked if she and her young man, a resident at the hospital, could borrow the apartment while they were away.
In those days, lovers had to seize on those kinds of opportunities to be alone together. The apartment key was given to the friend, no big deal, and my mother and her roommates left for the beach. They returned late Sunday evening, in a commotion of kicked-off shoes and set-down carryalls and switched-on lights.
One of them pulled the string on the kitchen bulb, and her cry brought the other two. At first they thought a crime had taken place. Strictly speaking, one had: The boyfriend, a kid with a year or two of medical training under his belt, had performed an abortion on his girlfriend.
Literally, a kitchen-table abortion. There was blood on the table and the floor, and there were wadded-up bloody towels in the sink. All three were accomplices to a crime, and they would have been keenly aware of that. About 15 years before my mother took her weekend trip to Fire Island, she was a little girl living in Brooklyn in a bad situation. It was the Depression, her father was an unemployed laborer, and her motherโ28 years old, a young woman from Coal City, Alabama, very far from homeโhad a toddler, a 3-year-old, and my mother, age 8.
The can of tuna fish was tainted with botulism poisoning. Apparently he sent word that the woman in question had gas, and that she would be better in no time. She was dead in no time. This surprised me, and I began to wonder about the story I had always been toldโbeginning with its central element: the can of tuna fish.
