Miss Askew on Ice

First of all, it is important to pronounce her name correctly. Askew, like ask you, more or less. The other way, askew, meaning out of line, awry, would certainly describe Cousinsville in those candy-striped days. But never Miss Dorothea Askew, although she weighed over three hundred pounds and stood taller than six feet when she fell on the ice that winter in the 1930s and couldn't get up for the life of her.

You would have known that Miss Askew was always together, so to speak, by the fact that thirteen years' worth of extraordinarily horny students in her seventh-grade English classes at Oakwood Avenue School had never been able to catch her with her big fine legs sufficiently open to look up her dress. When Miss Askew hit the sidewalk, bells from Catholic churches near and far began throwing their tintinnabulations all over town hilariously, like colorful confetti thrown at carnivals.

What the bells meant, of course, was that old Irish and Italian women wearing somber kerchiefs, and most of them with a sprig of beard, were piling into Cousinsville's churches just at the moment of Miss Askew's impact, to suck and gnaw over the blood and body of Christ at that hour of the evening. It is probably safe to say that none of this consuming of the Deity really affected Miss Askew, who was Baptist, like all the other colored people in Cousinsville. While our stern and frowning red brick church did have a handsome bell, it was almost never rung and had probably become glued by cobwebs in its decrepit roost, while Catholics preempted the airwaves at practically every hour to announce the eating of their god.

Still, it did seem somewhat prophetic that the Catholic bells began their clamoring at the precise moment that Miss Askew fell, which was at six o'clock in the evening of the second Saturday in February of 1939. Miss Askew, like myself, was part of that era's audience--when life was fairly uncomplicated, or gave the sly appearance of being so--with World War II standing not far offstage to perform in the coming tragedy. The Depression was winding down, and the war in Europe was bringing prosperity to America before we ourselves entered the conflict on two fronts and the prosperity was unexpectedly stained with American blood.

Nevertheless, those were good, bright, and golden days in Cousinsville. I was nineteen going on twenty, in my second year at Newark Rutgers, on the outs with what had been the current girl friend and leisurely looking around for a new victim. If I did not have the world precisely by the balls, I felt that I certainly had a fair handful of its crotch hair, which was the correct way for a Rutgers sophomore to feel in those days. Even that winter behaved herself and carried a definite promise of spring about her; and it had been unseasonably warm all that Saturday up until Miss Askew fell, as though we had skipped a whole season and were waiting for the fires of summer rather than the robins of spring.

The main activity of Cousinsville, away from its commercial center, went on around a small park with a raised band-stand in its middle, which politicians had erected to excite rallies and to make their speeches from. This was in the Decatur section of Cousinsville, where the colored people lived, along with a sprinkling of Irish and Italians and a few Jews who had stayed behind. One of those Jews was Miss Miriam Finkelstein, who had recently converted to the Catholic faith, and soon thereafter became very friendly with Miss Dorothea Askew.

When Miss Askew fell on the ice, shortly before sunset, Miss Finkelstein was in the park trying to scrape up other candidates for Holy Mother Church. There was also bare-chested Wilson Brown--decidedly a 97-pound weakling--practicing his Charles Atlas exercises over near the bandstand where red, white...