We had never gone anywhere. By that I mean we had never gone anywhere that required spending the night away from home.

There were good reasons. My parents knew people from outside what was known as “the metropolitan area” of New York, but none of them had children, and my parents’ comparative fecundity might prove an embarrassment, or might be perceived as bragging. And what would they do with me as they sat with the other adults, talking about the state of the Church and the threat of Communism?

But the more important reason for our never going anywhere was that we had very little money. This was because my father didn’t have a job. His joblessness was a stain that colored our family life like red wine spilled on a white tablecloth. It was an utter anomaly in our working-class 1950s neighborhood and a cause of nearly unbearable shame for my parents and me. But we understood that my father’s joblessness was, as well as a source of shame and deprivation, a sign of distinction and superiority. It was as if we kept as a family pet a two-headed dog, each nose pointing in the opposite direction.

Of course we were ashamed for my father—he didn’t seem to be able to do what every other man we knew could do, a natural outgrowth of their being male, like an Adam’s apple. On the other hand, the stories my father shared with us to explain his failures focused not on his inferiority, but the inferiority of the world whose degraded tastes and standards could not take in his fineness.

Sure, the fathers of everyone in my class, my mother’s brothers, and her sisters’ husbands had jobs. But my father could speak six languages and even write in Greek script. Those men listened to baseball games on the radio, and we listened to classical music on WQXR, “the classical station of The New York Times.” Priests visited him to argue or be instructed. As an alternative to my relatives’ saccharine Madonnas that could be repurposed as planters, we had engravings of Durer and an illuminated print of Fra Angelico. Those other men and the families they headed didn’t worry about Cardinal Mindszenty, the Hungarian prelate under house arrest, pacing his balcony in defiance of the Communists; we kept track of the days of his confinement. During Mass, they wrapped rosaries around their hands; we read the Latin in our missals, covered in soft black leather with pages edged in gold. And my father had made the amazing move of converting from Judaism, which for a certain segment of the Catholic world of that time made him a particular prize.

Every night when my parents put me to bed and we said our night prayers, we offered a special prayer to St. Joseph the Worker. But I said it halfheartedly because I felt that the saint’s success as a wage earner and family man made my father look bad. We ended with, “Please get Daddy a good job.”

Because he had tried and failed to get jobs that were not “good,” or good enough for him. He was a taxi driver for two days until he was caught asleep at the wheel while parked by the train station. He lasted as a bartender for a week because he insisted on removing his dentures when they became uncomfortable. He knew how to set hot type, but he was fired from a printing shop when he refused to join the union. He explained these failures as the work of Communists, who were everywhere, and who knew of his staunch support for Joseph McCarthy. He had even offered some speeches in favor of the senator to our local congressman, but they were not accepted. As this would have been hard to put down to the work of Communists, it was not discussed. 

For the most part, my mother bought into this narrative, but every day they fought about money. I can hear her screeching, “Don’t think I’m going to give you one red cent for carfare.”

My mother determined that God would have to intervene. We would pray for a miracle, but she would provide the capital. She was the family breadwinner; we were dependent on her job as a legal secretary for our food and shelter.

For a year she saved so that we could take the one trip we took together: a pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Anne de Beaupré in Quebec. The defining feature of the shrine was a staircase, called a scala sancta, a replica of the staircase in Rome that was supposed to represent (or actually be, it’s not quite clear) the stairs Jesus climbed for his meeting with Pilate. The pilgrim, begging for a specific favor, was meant to go up the stairs on his knees, saying a Hail Mary on each step. There were twenty-eight steps, all made of white marble.

I don’t know how my mother found out about the shrine—probably from some priest to whom she confessed her despair and anger. I don’t know just how much of the planning eventually fell to her, given that my father specialized in spur-of-the-moment adventures. I have no images of maps spread out on the table, or brochures, or lists of tasks that our momentous journey might have required. I do remember the sandwiches my mother made: ham and cheddar with slices of pineapple. Two thermoses: a small red plastic one filled with hot cocoa for me, a large green one filled with coffee for my parents. A box of Social Tea Cookies. Another of Lorna Doones. Cans of exotic fruit juices called “nectars”—pear and apricot.

The journey begins.

I am five years old.

Now we are in the car. Once in the car, we can pretend to be real Americans. We can enjoy things we had been committed to despise. We were meant to despise them because they were new, a deliberate desire to break away from the treasured, exclusively European past, which my father believed was the only source of greatness, the movement away from which could only result in vulgar ostentations.

My parents are in the front seat; I am in the back. My mother drives. It is understood without question that she will drive, that the car is hers, absolutely essential—because of her polio—to her mobility in the world, too important to risk to my father’s untrustworthy hands. There is no question about this: things are as they always had been and would always be.

But on this trip somehow the new is allowed its savor, or at least I am allowed to enjoy it without questioning my own standards. We drive on the newly completed New York State Thruway. Piles of sand have been left on the side of the road by the recently departed construction workers, which gives the smooth lined surface of the highway a provisional look, at once disconcerting and desirable. My mother declares the glory of God in the rocks that had been blasted through, jagged as if they had been worked on by improper tools, anything that was left aside or just to hand.

I was allowed to choose a new outfit. Nearly all my clothes were hand-me-downs from my multiple cousins or made by my grandmother, always well-crafted but never fashionable. But for our trip, we went to JCPenney and I chose a skirt whose thousand sharp pleats seemed miraculous to me: I could squeeze the pleats together and then open my hand, causing the red flowers of the fabric to disappear and come to life.

No one stops my enjoyment of everything because on this trip we are outside time and space. I realize that many of the things I am enjoying were deliberately created to be simulacra. Our motel room was made to look like a log cabin, although the logs are not real wood. My father buys me some maple-sugar candy in the shape of a maple leaf. At the diner where we breakfast, the milk for my parents’ coffee comes in little glass containers that are made to look like jugs, and the cream for my cereal comes in a pitcher that is meant to look like a cow.

In the car, I experience the release of no longer having to pretend to be a child. My daily life was peppered with torments because I hated most of the activities that were urged on me simply because I was seen as a child. Part of my problem was that I was an extreme physical coward, terrified of anything that involved climbing or jumping from heights. I was inept at hitting a ball with anything like a bat, racquet, or paddle. Then there was the plain tedium of games others of my kind seem to enjoy: hopscotch, hide-and-seek. I couldn’t draw and the idea of coloring within an outline someone else had made seemed ridiculous. There was one appropriate activity I seemed to like: playing with paper dolls, or, as we called them, “cutouts.” There were cardboard images of movie stars with accompanying paper images of their clothing, also needing to be cut out. Care was required for the little tabs that would keep the outfit on the star. 

The outfits were endlessly fascinating to me. They varied from star to star. Esther Williams had a lot of bathing suits. Grace Kelly sported well-tailored dresses and the princess dress that she wore in The Swan. Ava Gardner was provided with a full skirt and peasant blouses, toreador pants, and vividly colored sweaters. I would sit on the stoop with one of the two friends I had for this purpose, and we would make up dialogues for our cutouts. “Hi, Grace. Hi, Esther. Hi Ava. How are you today? Well, time for lunch. I guess we’d better change our clothes for the restaurant.”

But these sessions didn’t last long because I grew bored rather quickly. I was bored because none of the children I knew were a tenth as interesting as my father. Nothing they could offer was as satisfying as what he and I did together.

And none of the children I knew seemed to be interested in words. I had learned to read by the time I was three. I remember the first book I read on my own. The refrain was, “Look, look and you will see. All the things I’d like to be.” A series of professions was offered: nurse, teacher, stewardess. But not on offer were the only two in which I was interested: nun and writer.

My father and I took weekly trips to the library, a single room above a paint store. The sign in the store window advertised Dutch Boy paints; there was a cheerful blond boy in a cap and wooden clogs. My father would leave me alone in the children’s section of the library, allowing me time to make my own selections while he read in the main section. The librarian was a sour-faced woman with flaccid, freckled arms. Why were her dresses always sleeveless, or is that a distortion of my memory? I was fascinated with a pencil she had whose top was attached to a little stamp that, when pressed to a sticker in the back of the book, magically transferred the due date.

When we got home, we would take our books and lie on my parents’ bed. If I were in the mood, I would read to him. He would teach me Latin and French words. We played word games like hangman, which he always let me win.

Most exciting were the dramas we acted out, scripted by me. Some were of religious origin. I enjoyed being Mary, having just given birth to baby Jesus. My father knelt on the other side of the manger, a serious St. Joseph (not the worker). Sometimes there were scenes from movies I liked. My favorite was a Disney historical romance called The Sword and the Rose. It starred Glynis Johns, with her fascinating voice, as the sister of Henry VIII who runs away with and marries the untitled man of her dreams. My father is the king. He regularly tosses pencils over his shoulder, pretending they are the chicken bones he has just devoured. I kneel before him, repentant for having tried to escape with my lover to America. “I am guilty sir, not he. If anyone is to be punished, it is I.” 

This movie is replaced by a scene from White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney. I like enacting this because I am allowed to take my white fur muff, my most prized possession, out of the closet: I can do it, if I like, in the midst of summer. I put my hands in my muff and my father and I stride across the living room, he crooning, I belting, “May your days be merry and bright / And may all your Christmases be white.”

We are all happy in the car. My parents are in the front seat, not fighting. I am on my own in the back seat. How much room, how much freedom there was in the backseats of Oldsmobiles. And of course, no one had heard of seatbelts. I spread my dolls out. I teach them to read; I correct their spelling errors. I break up their fights.

And I am granted a miracle so wonderful I wouldn’t have even known how to pray for it. We stop at a place called Storytown, a distant and deliberately minor relative of Disneyland which, like the Thruway, has only just been built. Some of the cement is still wet. Storytown is a series of life-sized models of characters from fairytales and nursery rhymes. I insist on solo roles: I am the old woman who lived in the shoe, Miss Muffet, and Snow White. I need my father, though, to hold Cinderella’s glass slipper.

I can’t imagine how my parents found out about Storytown. It was not the sort of place within the range of their associations. It was probably not my father, who was the purveyor of delights but whose geographical imagination encompassed only Manhattan, Hollywood, and Europe. So it must have been my mother who might, in the course of her work as a legal secretary or her membership in Catholic women’s organizations, have somehow heard about this new mecca for parents and their children.

I am blissfully happy, feeling for once neither an imposter nor a freak. I am doing something that other children might have done, but I’m not bored, and I don’t feel foolish. And for once, my parents are united in playing with me; they are together as audience, and take turns with the camera.

We cross the border into Canada and relinquish our false identities. Our playacting as Americans is over. Sure, the official identification we have to present suggests that we are residents of the United States, but we know that our real identity is another matter. We are not Americans: we are Catholics and we feel at home in Quebec, which is obviously a Catholic state.

Nearly as numerous as the billboards are roadside shrines to the Madonna. At first, we stop at each one for a prayer, but we become jaded as we grow to understand their frequency.

I have no memory of the hotel we stay in near the shrine. My memory begins again in the basement of the church where we attend Mass. My mother and I wait there while my father climbs the stairs on his knees. We have the place to ourselves.

There is a picture of me kneeling at a prie-dieu, looking at the camera in a revolting display of false piety. There were times when my religious expressions were a genuine reflection of an inner experience, but I know that this was not one of them. The essence of a true religious experience is self-forgetfulness, and it is impossible to be self-forgetful when you are staring at a camera lens. I know that I felt my own falseness. What I remember to be true is that the elastic band that held my hat in place was uncomfortable in the tender place below my chin, and that I didn’t know what the word prie-dieu meant, only that it was French and that when he comes back I will ask my father. I like that the prie-dieu is only big enough for one, and that the kneeler is spongier than the ones at home.

My father asks us to pray for him: a brave and solitary soldier, entirely on his own.

We wait for him, my mother saying endless rosaries on her silver beads that always seemed to me a mark of her distinction. But I know many fewer prayers than my mother, and I keep repeating them until they grow stale.

Then he appears: my father, bathed in the radiance of his arduous endeavor. And my mother’s smile is radiant. My father lifts me up and carries me to the upper church. We proceed slowly, as stairs are difficult for my mother. After the darkness of the basement chapel, the light through the stained glass windows seems quite marvelous, otherworldly and never to be replicated. 

We don’t spend much time in the church because my father—not a complainer—admits that the climb was “a bit rough on the old knees.” My mother says it’s a good thing she brought the first-aid kit because we can see that he is bleeding through the cloth of his trousers.

In the hotel room, my parents sit across from each other on straight-backed chairs. My mother unpacks the first-aid kit: iodine, bandages, scissors, tape. My father takes off his shoes and socks and rolls his trouser legs above his knees. He rests his legs on my mother’s lap. My hero father does not cry out, as I know I would have, when my mother dabs his knees with iodine.

I feel terribly uncomfortable. I am unused to my parents’ tenderness. Occasionally, I would come upon them kissing, and I didn’t like it. “Stop kissing like in the movies,” I would say. But now I am uncomfortable in a new way. I had always known that my mother had been stricken: the aftereffects of her polio had left her visibly afflicted. But for the first time, I see my father as wounded and I am frightened to know myself as the only one inviolate.

I remember nothing of the trip home. 

It is possible to say, most people would say it, that the trip was a failure. My father died two years later, never having found “a good job.” My parents’ display of tenderness in the hotel room was not repeated.

We never took another trip.

But we continued, every night, to pray.