At Six, My First, Unfortunate Impression of Police

This is my memory.

    I was just shy of six the rainy early November, 1956 night my brother was born and our house ransacked and robbed. It was the night, too, when my first and deep impression of  police was born. It is just so odd how memories themselves are born, how they connect, how they merge, and how they grow.

     We’d known my mom was due, and soon. We’d not known precisely how soon. And I don’t know if these events induced her, but my sense of it is that, despite the grown mind’s tendency to coalesce alarming and jarring, black and blackly comic moments of early, early youth, all of these events tumble upon, over, and into one another, and create in me one singular and striking, extraordinary little-boy night-memory. 

     My parents had taken me from our four-year-old house in Elkins Park, then a relatively new suburb just north of the city to see Disney’s 1940 masterwork, Fantasia, in downtown Philadelphia. Its wholly phantasmagoric feel had frightened me thoroughly and yet I clung to its beauty and felt, somehow, that if Mickey Mouse could direct that frightening, cymbals-crashing, dark-lightning and thunderous orchestra, then I could love it as well as fear it, and I did. No doubt my parents were keen to introduce me to Leopold Stokowski’s legendary Philadelphia Orchestra, Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, J.S. Bach, Tchiakovsky and other Greats via Mickey’s waving wand, and it worked. I am no classical music expert but I do appreciate deeply the genius of those sounds and I trace this to that night.

     The entire ride home in our silver and white-finned Chevy Bel Air I whistled and hummed whatever pieces of the score that had immediately stuck. I distinctly recall my mom and dad up front, agreeing that taking me to see the film had been a great idea. I remember, less distinctly…but it’s here, here, in me…I recall dad asking her how she was doing and glancing at her tummy in the street-lights’ semi-dark.

     Even at six and even in darkness you can know, even from the outside, if something’s very wrong when you return to your home. Dad pulled into the back drive and I noticed that the screened-in porch door was ajar. We never left it open; never. And the powder-room light was on. They never left that lit. An upstairs one at times, yes, but not this one.

     My father ordered us to stay in the car. We didn’t. We followed him through the porch, through the foyer and were greeted by a living room in thorough chaos and filled–and I recall this right now so clearly–filled with hangers and clothes and shoe boxes and silverware randomly strewn all over the show. My mother’s first move was toward the flight leading to the second floor but dad asked her to call the township police from the yellow kitchen wall-phone while he looked upstairs. There may still be people up there, he said.

     I remember that so clearly, his saying that there could be people, robbers as yet upstairs. That thrilled me to the roots of my crew-cut bristles and stole my breath in fear at once. Despite my dad’s warnings I followed him up and then down a light grey carpeted hall past my bedroom and the room that would soon be my brother’s nursery to the master bedroom where he made an immediate initial, shocked and frustrated and angry inventory of loss. Suits, trousers, shirts, skirts, blouses, socks, tops, nylons, shoes, rings, watches, ties, tie-tacks, tie-clips, handkerchiefs, furs…and I remember this distinctly, too: a cummerbund. I hadn’t any idea what that word meant but my father’s listing it aloud in the furious tone in which he spat it out told me without doubt that anyone who would steal one must be a very, very bad person.

     I became angry myself only when we then looked in at my room. That was my world that had been invaded now. There was no thrill, no excitement whatever in this. The bureau drawers had been yanked and tossed on my blue quilted bed. My clothing was intact but my collection of thirty-two silver dollars, a gift from my grandpa Izzy, was gone. I recall my lips’ quiver but the tears held until I saw space where my Mickey Mouse record player should have been. Then I wanted to cry and cry hard and I nearly did but I was too angry. I said all the words a first grader learns are ok with the guys in the school yard but which are decidedly not ok at home. My dad didn’t admonish me; we’d heard the police car.

     In the living room my dad and mom began to list out missing items to two township policemen. They said that Chief Johnson himself would arrive shortly because this was a serious concern as ours had not been the only neighborhood home burgled in the past month. My dad asked my mom how she was feeling. The younger of the two police officers asked my mother if she were expecting. That was my first clue that this three-or-four-man department might not be all it could be:  my mother was nine months large and the fella asked if she were expecting. Even at close-to-six I knew this was depth-charge dumb. My father glanced sharply my way to make sure his son, even then never shy about expressing opinion, remained mute.

     The rain continued to fall. Chief Johnson arrived and now nearly the full complement of Cheltenham’s Blue Force was in our living room. The Chief walked importantly about  jotting notes in a small spiral memo-book. He asked my father to take him upstairs. I hoped he’d see the empty space where my Mickey Mouse record player had been and that he’d be as alarmed and angry as I was and note it down and track down and punch hell out of the very bad man who had taken it. They remained upstairs maybe ten minutes during which time my dad had called down to ask after my mom several times. Each time she said she was ok.

     When they returned downstairs the policemen huddled, mumbled, nodded, and shook heads. Dad looked increasingly upset and he started moving about. He walked to the dining room, then to the den, through the kitchen and I joined him, I remember clearly, when he got to the powder room. Immediately we saw the cracked window where the burglars had entered from the porch. Even I could see there had to have been at least two, large-framed men–and the dozens of muddy foot- and hand- and fingerprints still wet on the sill, on the toilet, on the sink, on the mirror, on the floor. My father’s face lit up with animation. 

     He rushed back to the living room and whisked Chief Johnson to the powder room. I saw my dad gesture pointedly, repeatedly, heard them exchange fast words. I saw my dad’s face go from an excited red to a shocked and furious crimson. I knew were it not for my mother’s and my presence that he would have raised his voice in extraordinary anger. But I didn’t know precisely why. The policemen left soon thereafter. Dad’s face returned to its normal coloration but only after some time.

     Perhaps three, four hours later, certainly close to midnight and with the house as yet fully in robber-disarray, my mother told my father it was Time. My aunt was called and she came quickly to stay with me. My brother, Brian, was born some time early on Veterans’ Day.

     Some time later, after my mom and Brian were home a few days, the house restored to order and the nursery fully set up, I asked my dad what the police chief had said in the powder-room that had made him so very mad. My father was just so rarely prone to any semblance of red-faced fury.

     Dad said, “I showed the police chief dozens of prints, muddy prints, boot prints, hand prints, fingerprints. I thought this would really help them catch the men who did this.”

     “What did he say, daddy? What did he say before he went away?”

     “He looked at all the prints; there were so many. And then he said, ‘Don’t you worry at all sir. I’m sure they’ll wash right off.'”