Shirley Visel Describes Many Things As Wonderful, but the Word Is Extended, Thrilled, Full

‘SWonderful

by Sophie Pinkham

Shirley Visel is a tiny woman of eighty-three with white hair and a strong jaw, a woman who taught kindergarten and first grade for four decades. She is that special brand of old lady who has been made softer by time, and the wrinkled skin on her slender hands almost seems to glow. Like many ladies of this variety, Shirley’s speech is sweetened with the word “wonderful.” But that commonplace word is transformed into something extended, thrilled, and full of laughter when Shirley describes the three years she spent in Groton, living in Mrs. Baxter’s boarding house, where she shared one big spare bedroom with three other girls, two to a bed, and where she never felt cramped.

Shirley and Evelyn and Peggy were all teachers, Catholic girls who spent three years working at Eastern Point School. They went on jaunts to the forest and picnicked and swam. They went to church and sang hymns together, and they went to USO dances with soldiers who would soon be shipped off to fight the Nazis. For Shirley, the excitement of Groton conquered any thoughts of the danger of wartime. The dances were just fun, and Shirley, despite her native shyness, threw herself into the crowd of dancers.

She didn’t think about the futures of her dance partners; as she says, “There was no seriousness about it. Couldn’t be! They were going and coming, being sent off to war.”

The most thrilling of these dances took place at the naval base on Fisher’s Island.

A contingent of young teachers from Shirley’s school ventured together onto the island, and found themselves trapped when enemy ships were sighted offshore.“They set up cots, gave us each a toothbrush and a cheese sandwich, and we had to stay overnight. We had to call our principal and tell her we couldn’t get back because the enemy was around, and

1 they were afraid to let us out. We thought it was funny because the guys made up the beds and they short-sheeted them! And one girl got sick and they had to call the army doctor—oh, it was hysterical!”

Despite the excitement of Groton, Shirley went home every weekend, and gave most of her teacher’s salary to her struggling family; though Groton seemed like another world, it was close enough to home in Hamden, and Shirley was always aware that she was working for her family. Then, one day, the adventures of Groton were cut short by news of Shirley’s mother’s illness. All three Visel boys were in the military, and the cumulative effects of paralyzing anxiety and a life of hard work had left her mother with arthritis so severe that she couldn’t hold a glass of water. Shirley says, “everyone else was working, so I thought—so my sister said—‘Shirl, I think you could help out at home.’”

She cried on the bus on the way back to Hamden. A stranger asked, “What are you crying for?”

Just as all of Shirley’s conversations lead to the word “wonderful,” all of Shirley’s stories lead her back home, to the house she was born in, the house where she’s spent eighty of her eighty-three years. It’s a big three-story white wooden house on Whitney Avenue, with gables and a lawn and a driveway that’s just dirt streaks breaking through the green grass. Brick steps lead into a cool, dark wooden room full of family pictures and statues of the Virgin Mother. In the summer, she spends much of her day on a couch on the front porch. “We love our porch,” Shirley sighs, using the habitual we of someone who always thinks of herself as part of a family.

2 The house was built by Shirley’s house-builder uncles, while Shirley’s parents and their first baby waited in the light blue house next door, the home of Shirley’s uncle and later of her nine cousins. Shirley and four of her five siblings were born in the house.

They grew up during the Depression, but, Shirley says, “we didn’t know we were poor.

Everybody was. We always had a garden…I loved flowers, and planting, and being outdoors.”

When the kids were hungry their mother would send them inside for a piece of bread and butter with a little sugar; if there were tomatoes in the garden they’d have a tomato sandwich. Everything happened outdoors, where money didn’t matter so much.

Shirley and her brothers and sisters and cousins and neighbors would congregate on the brick steps of the house till the neighbors mistook it for a children’s home. The kids played baseball in the front yard, and Run Sheep Run in the back lot where there weren’t any houses yet but only trees, and they’d rollerskate when it was warm and ice-skate when it was cold. When there was snow on the ground, they’d cross the street, go up the third hill, and take the long slide down the snowy slope. “You didn’t have to worry about traffic in those days,” Shirley says. In fact, another of the children’s amusements was to sit in the front yard and guess how many cars would go by. There were so few that you could count them on one hand.

Shirley describes things simply, gently, in terms of good feelings, friendship, and the values instilled in her by her family and her Catholic faith, the values she’s helped instill in forty-three years’ worth of first-graders. When asked to describe her neighborhood, Shirley pauses, and says simply, “Everybody mixed. We knew everybody, they knew us. You could make your own fun here…everybody cared about

3 each other. We were just—friends. We’d leave our doors unlocked—anybody could walk in at any time. We shared.”

Generosity and thriftiness have been the cornerstones of Shirley’s life. During the

Depression even the youngest members of the Visel family had to work. Shirley’s mother used to bake cakes for a “rich lady” who lived down the street. “She’d give you a tip of ten cents, and you thought you were a millionaire. And everybody wanted to deliver the cake!” Shirley laughs. Her mother would iron the uniforms of the four nurse cousins next door, fifty cents a uniform. Shirley’s big sister Arlene would clean houses, iron shirts, and babysit. In the beloved Miss Judge’s first grade class, Shirley had decided that being a first grade teacher was “the most wonderful thing in the world,” so

Shirley started practicing, working at a playground and at the Jewish daycare center.

Wanting to help Shirley fulfill her desire to become a teacher, Shirley’s parents and aunts and uncles scraped together enough money to send her to the little private teacher’s college on Howe Street in New Haven. Teacher’s college led to a job in

Groton, farther from home than nineteen-year-old Shirley had ever gone.

She had, in fact, never even been on a train, and she couldn’t drive; though her father was an automobile salesman, she never got her driver’s license. She passed the written exam, and failed the driving test. She cried afterwards, but today she laughs, saying, “it must have been for the best…I probably would have killed somebody.” Now that her mother needed constant care, Shirley was obliged to find a job as near home as possible. The closest one she could find was all the way in West Haven. Fortunately her sister’s husband worked there, and Shirley rode to work with him every morning. After

4 school she’d stop at Malley’s to look at clothes and maybe buy something—and then she’d take the bus back home to Whitney Avenue.

The difficulties of caring for her mother, who needed to be lifted even to use a bedpan, were made worse when her sister’s husband died suddenly of a heart attack.

Arlene was left with four children and no money except her Social Security payments.

When Arlene seemed depressed, her mother, spirited despite her physical affliction, told her to go cook dinner for her kids. But despite her mother’s encouragement, Arlene found herself more and more alone at home with her youngest son, Jimmy, who is retarded.

Shirley’s mother didn’t hesitate to invite Arlene and her kids to come and live in the spacious family home. Arlene lived with Shirley for years, and Shirley thinks of

Jimmy as “partly hers.” Shirley had been Arlene’s bridesmaid when she got married in the church where they’d both been baptized; now both young women were back at home, with their mother and Jimmy. Three generations were reunited, because they needed each other.

This living situation was the background for one of the largest ripples in the surface of Shirley’s tranquil life. At a friend’s wedding, Shirley spoke to a young man named George, who she’d met once before, at a friend’s party. After the wedding he called, and took her out to dinner and to the Shubert to see musicals, her favorite. He had a sailboat, and they fixed picnic lunches and went on sailing expeditions. Shirley says they had “a wonderful relationship. Then, one day, George said, “Did you ever think of getting married?” Shocked at the suggestion, feeling that she hardly knew him, she replied, “I’d expect somebody that I’d want to marry would take care of me.”

5 Still sounding puzzled and taken aback sixty years later, Shirley says, “I guess that wasn’t the right thing to say. That was the last I heard of him. We didn’t talk enough about getting married or settling down.”

“I had just inherited this house, just made out a will that cost me over three hundred dollars. Before my mother died, she said, “Shirley, can you take care of the house? And I said, “Yes.” She wanted Jimmy and Arlene to be part of the household, and I did too. And that was the sticking point, I’m afraid. I said, I can take care of the house. And I’ve been happy doing it. And I wasn’t sorry that I made this decision...You have to make a decision. And it was such a blow to me that he would ask me that without talking about it… So I was too naïve, I guess…I did like him. And he treated me nicely. I never saw him after that. And that was days. Weeks. Years. That was the end.”

“After the bombing in New York, I sent him a card; it seemed appropriate. It was a long time after I knew him, but I wrote to him and it said something like, “Just when you thought you were all alone, someone is thinking of you.” And I never heard anything. And I signed my name and said, “Love, Shirley.” So I just assume he has a new interest.”

“I say a prayer for him every night. Because he was good to me. We were seeing each other not a year. Maybe half a year. I think being married is a hard job. And I’m not a homemaker. I am not. And I’m not a good cook.”

A woman who was born in her house, grew up in it, grew old in it, and, if she has her way, will die in it, a woman who gave up the possibility of marriage to stay in her house with her mother, sister, and nephew, a woman who has organized the last years of

6 her life around a struggle to stay in her home against the advice of doctors and family members—this woman says that she did not marry because she wanted to be free, didn’t want to be tied down. The edges of her account have been smoothed by time, and it is difficult to tell quite why Shirley did not marry George. Maybe they were too different, maybe she didn’t know him well enough, maybe she was afraid, maybe she felt obliged to stay with her family. But the nightly prayers, the September 11th card out of the blue, the perusal of newspapers for his name all suggest that Shirley feels more than a twinge of regret at this loss.

What is even clearer, though, is that Shirley’s life has truly been wonderful. She spent forty-three years as a kindergarten and first grade teacher. She found her greatest joy in teaching hundreds of children how to read and write. ““I like the age group and the success they felt to learn how to read,” she says.

She loves her brothers and sisters, and delighted in beachcombing with a metal detector, in the company of her beloved younger brother. Though she never found anything valuable, she loved the ping of buried treasure, of lost coins and rings and baubles.

Shirley enjoys the secrets and surprises of everyday life: her favorite holiday is

Easter, when she used to watch her twenty-three nieces and nephews search for the eggs she hid throughout her house and garden. She enjoys the company of her neighbors and friends. She still sees people she met sixty years ago, and former students pop up everywhere she goes. Shirley describes friends and family as “wonderful” or “loveable,” never criticizing, always quick to qualify any mention of her own sacrifices with mentions of the contributions of others. “That’s what brothers and sisters do.”

7 Shirley spends her old age safe in a net of familial love. A lifetime of hard work and saving has allowed her to remain financially independent at eighty-three, able to remain in the house she owns, able to use her pension to pay for a live-in caregiver to help her with daily tasks. She is a cheerful, loving woman, who, in her own words, is “so happy to be home!” But one still wonders what would have happened if she’d never left

Groton, if she’d learned to drive, if her mother had never gotten sick and Arlene’s husband hadn’t died. Would Shirley love her house a little less?