Indians on the Loose

"Indians loose in the house! Indians loose in the house!" Routinely I recited this alarm anytime my boyfriend Norm walked quietly down our long hall to the bathroom, placing one foot in front of the other like a red fox, the way Indians walk. If my parents enjoyed the black humor of my standing prank, they never acknowledged it, nor did Norm, in his stoic, poker-faced Indian fashion. The joke never got stale because Norm rarely used the bathroom, apparently possessing a hollow leg, as the saying goes, for he would sit with me in the kitchen for hours, drinking coffee, on top of several beers he had consumed in local bars before his nightly visits. It was no surprise that his kidneys failed first as he lay dying in intensive care at age 56, but for the first 15 or 16 years of the 20 years we went together until I held his hand and watched him die in Samaritan Hospital in Troy, we spent countless hours together, mostly at my house, but often at his small cabin on Tsatsawassa Lake in nearby East Nassau.

If at first my parents frowned angrily and protested vehemently at our romance for many indisputably legitimate reasons, as the years passed --along with my flamboyant youth and my chances of desirable matrimony --they came to a state of disapproving resignation---probably assuming it wouldn't last forever, in view of my first 29 years of fickleness and apparent lack of dedicated husband-hunting, unlike most other Jewish girls from middle-class upwardly-mobile families.(By upwardly-mobile, I am referring to financial and educational upward mobility--not class status. My father's family migrated from New York City in 1901 when Daddy was a year old. He grew up on a farm, planting vegetables and milking cows. He dropped out of the one-room schoolhouse a five mile walk from his home--in the fifth grade at age 15 to work on the farm under orders from his stern, dictatorial but beloved father Daddy always maintained that he flunked all his final fifth grade exams with such marks as 27 in arithmetic and 49 in spelling, not because he was dumb but because the teacher punished him with insulting grades after he dipped the long blonde braids of the girl in front of him into the inkwell to get even on her for swishing them across his test paper. Probably the girl had a crush on him, my mother speculated. Until her dying day, she considered my tall, broad-shouldered Daddy the handsomest and most desirable man in the world, often decrying the fact that my sister and I would never find a man as wonderful as Daddy. So my father's ambitions for my older sister, younger brother and me were that we finished college and either married money or made lots of it. Money was of enormous importance to him because he worked so hard for a living and suffered from poverty throughout his youth, although to hear him tell it, there was no self-pity or even real deprivation. To him it was all a great adventure, every detailed, humorous, rich chapter engraved in the minds of his family and half the town of Nassau, as he became a popular raconteur from the time he left the farm, with all of us crammed into a pick up truck and a cousin's car, and moved seven miles away to a house bordering the state road, which he bought along with the local tavern that was also a gas station and general store. It was formerly known as Luke's Place, but changed to Jack's Place by my father, whom we all called Jack, even though he was called "Jake" by the old-timers who frequented our establishment.

My mother, whom we called Mommy, also aspired to see her children become well-educated and rich, as the poverty of her childhood and adolescence in New York City's lower East Side, the Bronx, and even Harlem Jewish ghettos left deep emotional scars. Cheerful and upbeat most of the time, my mother was an inspiration to us children, always looking on the bright side, encouraging us with her love and humor, reminding us all the time that, "There may be some people as good as you, but there's nobody better." The only times she lapsed into a somber mood was when she reminisced about going to school crying because her mother had nothing for breakfast, having given the last meager fare to her children, or her family's constant moving from one tenement to another every time they were evicted for not paying the rent, or the severe headaches she suffered because her family could not afford fresh fruit or vegetables. As a child she longed for fresh oranges, and shortly after she married my father, who had not a penny saved but lived from the small profits he earned selling eggs and vegetables at the farmer's market near Albany, at least they always had enough food on the table, and when they left the farm and bought Jack's Place, the money came in slowly but steadily, insuring plenty of food from then on. Still, my mother always feared that the wolf might reappear at the door and that fear fueled her ambition that her children should be rolling in money so that we would never have to suffer the humiliations and deprivations that haunted her childhood.

Getting back to my parents' understandable objections to my romance with the Indian --actually, Norm was only half-Indian and half-French, which made it even worse because he had been born and reared a Catholic--harder for Jewish parents to accept than a mere protestant. No need to worry on that score, however, because after marrying a beautiful protestant years before I met him and having four children with her, Norm had converted to Methodist. We rarely discussed religion, as it was a moot point. He was a gentile--it didn’t matter what the particular denomination. Eager to please my parents so he could continue seeing me--the great love of his life as it turned out--Norm offered at first to convert to Judaism. I found this highly amusing, as he didn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything or anyone remotely Jewish or even any distant Semitic tribe. Six feet four, with wavy, inky-black Indian hair, grey at the temples, dark, deep-set, slitty Indian eyes, and a complete outdoors man, Norm was the quintessential gentile, albeit a most attractive and charming specimen, I thought. Religious differences were the least of my parents' objections, as it turned out, partly because we ourselves were not zealously orthodox, although my parents considered the possibility that any of their three children would marry a non-Jew unthinkable and a complete betrayal of their values. Also, Norm had no religious interests or convictions, never went to church, disclaimed any religious affiliations, and never even spoke of God. His only concession was Christmas, when he bought me lovely presents, and I reciprocated. But that was pure romance---nothing to do with religion.

Most objectionable to my parents was Norm's ex-wife and four children. Also high on their list was his heavy drinking and chain-smoking. Soon we learned that he was several thousands of dollars in arrears for child-support payments that he had no intention of paying, as he blamed his wife for cheating on him and leaving him. Thus she was forced to live on welfare for a year or so until she got a secretarial job and a lawyer who hauled Norm into court several times to make him start paying up. Once when he decided to disobey the court order--apparently his idea that his Indian prerogatives permitted him to ignore support payments, he was hunted down by State Troopers, who had no trouble finding him at one of the local neighborhood bars, and thrown in the county jail for a couple of days until a drinking buddy of his ante-ed up the $500 fine; the generous friend and I then drove to the jail and freed Norm who was so relieved that he kept up payments for awhile. Later on, my brother Marvin, upon passing the bar exam, took on Norm as a first client and gave him a cheap divorce, uncontested by his furious wife who wanted to be rid of him and all the aggravation of getting an attorney and hauling him into court, even forgiving a large debt of over $2500 that he owed her in back payments. Although he still had to pay child support, he went to court one day to plead for reduced payments because she was now working, and as a construction worker, Norm was laid off in the winter months and lived on small unemployment benefits. Luckily for Norm, the judge seemed unsympathetic to Norm's wife, and drastically reduced the support payments. For years afterwards, my brother regularly reported back to me that one of the officers in the Rensselaer County Family Court who knew the case used to go around telling anyone who would listen,"There's this big Indian named Norman DeLorme who works as a bulldozer operator and makes big bucks while his wife was on welfare for a year and now makes a small salary and has four kids to support, and all she gets is a measly 50 bucks a week in support payments? Norm used to laugh gleefully every time I told him that Marvin reported
another such recital.

Further parental objections included the educational disparity between Norm and me. He was a high school dropout while I had a B.A. from Washington Square College of NYU, having majored in English literature with a minor in philosophy. When I met Norm I had taught English for four years in a local school and was completing a Master's degree in library science. With only a few weeks to go, I dropped out to pursue him. The following year I won a scholarship to the State University at Albany and in two years I had a Master's Degree in Social Work, graduating at the top of my class with a nearly straight A average. My parents assumed that the educational disparity would eventually bring me to my senses, but after four years, Norm had no intention of letting me slip away. Many times I tried to break off with him--not because of my parents' objections--which had dimmed with time. I think my father actually decided it was a good thing, realizing that I was not the marrying kind. The thought of marriage always struck me as a trap; it meant the end of romantic pursuit, which I was so good at and thoroughly enjoyed. Besides, I had a short temper when anyone tried to dominate me, and I knew that any marriage I attempted would end in either divorce or violence. My father, witnessing several of my outbursts, said to my mother one day, "Sylvia will never get married. No man will ever put up with her." I agreed. Marriage was never in the cards for me; when it finally dawned on my parents, it considerably eased their objections to Norm.

Arguments between Norm and me were frequent and increasingly bitter; his jealousy was a major problem. He mixed me up with his ex-wife, assuming that I, like her, was cheating on him. He began following me around whenever he wasn't working, particularly in the winter months when construction work came to a standstill. A couple of times our arguments escalated into physical fights, once when I slapped him and he slapped me back. Another time when I stopped my car after seeing him emerge from a local bar and we argued, he punched me in the face. I shot off at once for the State Police barracks and reported the assault, although I had no scars or bruises. Unfortunately, it was treated as a lover's quarrel, and I stopped seeing him for several weeks until he begged forgiveness and I relented.

Over the years my parents grew genuinely fond of Norm, admiring his persistence and stoic tolerance of my temperamental outbursts and domineering ways. In all important respects he became a full-fledged member of the family. Often during his daily and nightly visits as we sat around the kitchen table, my mother would say, "Norm, how long are you going to put up with this, day after day?" Each time a sadistic smile would beam across his handsome face, his slitty Indian eyes narrowed for emphasis, and his stock reply came forth, "Not much longer. Any day now."

That day never came, until Norm left us forever. By then, my father had been dead for four years, I was 50 years old, and my mother had another year and a half to live. I'm 66 now and I live with my three dogs in the same house where Norm made almost daily and nightly visits for over 20 years. And there are no more Indians loose in the house.