Tomato Soup for Dinner

Tornato Soup for Dinner Jim Toner Every Saturday morning when I was smaU my Aunt Loretta drove across town to pick me up. She would honk the horn of her blue Dodge Dart—a car whose front end I would smash into a buüding seven years later— and out I would bound, taking the steps two at a time. The bounding had nothing to do with Loretta and everything to do with glazed donuts. On the front seat ofher Dodge Dart would always be a half dozen ofthem, hot and greasy and fresh from KeUys Donuts up the street. I hardly said heUo to Aunt Loretta before I had eaten two or three, and by the time she had driven me from my safe suburban Lakewood and into her Cleveland—a bleak Cleveland with blown-out windows and dark, idle men on street corners—I had eaten just about the whole bag. Aunt Loretta lived with her mother in the same house that my dad grew up in, a red brick side-by-side with hardly any windows. It was on East 61st and Superior, names as exotic and dangerous to me in 1966 as Saigon and Hanoi. At that age I didn't know anything about encroaching ghettos, or about the Hough riots that would break out around the corner in a few years, or about the toxic fumes from the steel plants that I breathed aU Saturday long. AU I reaUy did know was this: that East 61st and Superior was the root of my roots—my dad's home, he and nine siblings and two parents crowded into a two-bedroom home. EventuaUy my aunt would seU it in 1980 for $4,000—yes, that's right: $4,000, with another crumpled home in back thrown in—and by 1995 both would be condemned as crack houses. But for now in 1966 it was in many ways an exciting place to be. There were the big buildings ofdowntown, the old brick churches, the old ethnic ladies with thick calves sweeping their sidewalks. There were the Polish farmers pushing their fruit carts, singing robustly at the crack ofdawn about cherries and blueberries. There were the black faces I never saw back in Lakewood, faces fuU offolds that looked tired and sad and yet wildly exotic. 2 Fourth Genre And there was my grandmother. For the most part she stayed upstairs in her bedroom, sleeping or staring out the window with deep fascination at things that seemed pointless to me—tree branches, wires, other homes. Her journey downstairs was slow and rare, her thick black shoes shuffling inch by inch. Once down there she would sit in the same green chair, this tiny and fraü Irish woman nearly hidden in the high green wings and the thick green cushions. She said the rosary constandy, keeping count on the black beads with her transparent fingers, and every time she finished saying a set she'd look up, lost and starded, and say, "Loretta! Loretta, are we going to say the rosary?" "Aw, Momma," Loretta would scowl, "you just said it, for crying out loud!" My grandmother would think about this very hard for a Uttle while, nodding , twirling her rosary beads, and then say, "Loretta, are we going to say the rosary?" No doubt about it, my grandmother was nuts. I suppose it wasAlzheimer's, though that word wasn't around then, at least not to a nine-year-old. To me it was simple: She was old and she was nuts and that's aU there was to it. There was a kind ofserenity and wonder in her nuttiness, sitting there in her green chair saying things Uke, "Oh, wül you look at those machines out there"when referring to cars, and, "Yes . . . yes. . . . Now teU me, which one are you?"just seconds after teUing her who I was. It wasn't so easy for my aunt. Day in and day out for years she lived with this nonsense, and so she dropped any pretense ofpatience long ago. On top of that was the hard life that was Loretta's: arthritis that twisted her fingers sideways; a...