Babylon, Dd4, and the Dancing Nun

By Bob Battersby

For the young boys of Valley Stream, Long Island, growing up in the shadow of the horrors of December of 1941 is about finding ways to cope. The boys join in on the wartime efforts where they can, helping with scrap drives and working in the victory gardens. Just as their gardens mature, so do the boys who tend them. In baseball, they find welcome distraction from their grief amid more joyful reminders of their youthful innocence.

Delmar Darby IVbetter known as DD4 to his friendsis in love. The irresistible Alice Meachamalso known as Alice Blue-Eyes to her young beaucaptured his heart at the start of their teens. Now, with the world threatening to tear itself apart, they do the only thing that seems sensible when nothing makes sense anymore. Their wedding is a symbol of hope and love and optimism, even if its hard to make promises in war.

Their story is told by their friend Bob and a would-be hermit known as HAG. Compared to the war, the desire to learn how to dance may not mean much, but to DD4 and Alice Blue-Eyes, its what they can do to stay sane. With the help of Maud and Sister Mary Elizabeth, a nun renowned for her spirited Irish jig, their community hopes to learn that the surest cure for tragedy abroad may be the embrace of small victories at home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491733028

Bob Battersby

Bob Battersby is the author of the book of prose The Gardener at Sea and Other Tales, the novel Babylon, DD4 and the Dancing Nun, and the children’s book Pete the Cat and Calico Joe. He lives in Mill Valley, California.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

At Sea and Ashore

My dad was barely seventeen when he heard the call of the sea and shipped out of Boston as a merchant mariner in early 1917. I am sure that he thought, what better place than Boston Harbor for me to find some adventure and excitement—on an unarmed merchant ship hauling cargo across the North Sea? He came ashore a few years later, sufficiently weathered and tattooed and finding that he liked the feel of solid ground more than the rolling sea.

Later, lest my brother or I had any plans to run off to sea, our father told us that part of the excitement for a young seaman was swabbing decks, running errands for anybody more senior—which was everyone—and either scraping rust from or painting the ship while it was docked. He concluded by asking us to consider the likeness between a four-hour watch port or starboard of the bow in iceberg territory and a four-hour, belly-whopping ride down a hill in midwinter on our Flexible Flyer sleds.

Dad was the second son of Joseph (Joe) Battersby, who was from Oldham, Lancashire, England, and of Katherine (Katie) Sullivan from County Cork, Ireland. Joe and Katie had emigrated separately from the British Isles in the late 1800s. At home in the Isles, they would never have met. If they had, what with Katie’s being Irish Catholic and Dad’s being a member of the North Country Church of England, they would have found nothing in common. But when they were both on foreign soil, their differences became similarities. They soon found that an Irish brogue and a North Country lilt sounded the same to an America grocer. Married, Katie chose to become a member of the Church of England when it came time for her to raise a family. Before long, there were John, Edward, Emily, Alice, and William. Edward, my dad, was born in 1900.

After leaving the sea, Dad adapted well to life on land. He soon found himself driving big Mack trucks with solid rubber tires on the streets and avenues of Manhattan and Long Island. It was this grounding and the ability to adapt that was the mark of young folks of that era. Granted, we are challenged just as dramatically today, but in a much more cerebral, sedentary way. In the early days of the twentieth century, our dads and granddads carved out lives for themselves—and sometimes fought each other for a living—without health-care insurance, unions, or guaranteed wages.

A mate from Dad’s seafaring days helped him find his way around the gears of his Mack. Soon enough, he paired up with another ex-seaman ashore, who helped with the loading and unloading. Jobs that included wheeling that solid-tire Mack around were hard work, but each trade had its own identity. For instance, some groups like the Teamsters saw themselves as a burly breed apart. In any event, it was a good life for a young, carefree, single guy.

In 1929, being carefree was a thing of the past. The stock market crashed and hurt everybody, from the banker down to the lowliest lug-nut mechanic. As was often the case, the mechanics and the truck drivers, though battered and scarred, found their way through the maze of economic uncertainty with their well-honed survival skills. It was the bankers and merchants who were to be found selling apples on street corners.

It wasn’t all bad, though. That was the year that Dad—though out of work and in the town of Babylon on Long Island, selling his skills as a trucker—met Mary Marie Mulcahy. Where Dad was over 6’2, thin, and dark, Mary Marie was about 5’4, full figured, and fair skinned. She was the product of another English–Irish linkup, just like Dad. Mary Marie’s mother was Mary Ann Williams. Mary Ann had met Mary Marie’s father, Joseph Patrick Mulcahy, through a mutual friend, Jerry Magee, who ran a kerosene fuel delivery service. Patrick ran a lumberyard in Babylon and needed a do-all, be-all trucker to handle deliveries. Dad fit the bill. Mary Marie was born in 1908 and had lived her entire life in Babylon on Long Island. When she met Ed Battersby, she worked as a telephone operator for the local exchange and saw her future in this tall, dark, do-all, be-all trucker. They were married the following year. Soon, the first of two sons was on the way.

President Herbert Hoover tried to fix the economic collapse by instituting the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, but it wasn’t until his successor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, passed the Works Progress Administration (WPA) bill in 1935 that the country and our dads and granddads got back to work. Dad put the part-time job at Mulcahy’s Lumberyard on hold and joined the ranks of the WPA. The money wasn’t that good, but it was steady. Dad earned a little over $52 a month. According to the rules at the time, he could only work eight hours a day, or one hundred and forty hours a month. Those free hours left him time to do some deliveries for the lumberyard. Fifty-two dollars a month today may sound pretty low. Granted, nobody was getting rich—but food was cheap. Bread was five cents a loaf, and chickens were twenty cents a pound.

Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA provided almost eight million jobs. The program built many public buildings and roads and operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects. It fed children and distributed food, clothing, and housing. Almost every community in America today features a park, bridge, or school constructed by the WPA. The work was done quietly and without fanfare. On almost every completed project, there is a brick, a stone, or a small plaque identifying it as a WPA project. In San Francisco, near the Saint Francis Yacht Club, is a retaining wall near the water organ that has a stone or two identifying it as a WPA project. It is still standing strong after seventy-five years. Two other notable projects built by the WPA are Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, and LaGuardia Airport in New York. The WPA was everywhere; it did good and long-lasting work, and my dad was part of it.

CHAPTER 2

Long Island

By now, Dad had homed in on Long Island and, once married and soon a father-to-be, had settled there. In addition to the WPA work, which had limited hours, and pickup work at the lumberyard, Dad tried his hand at door-to-door sales on weekends. On Long Island, we lived in the towns of Lynbrook, Babylon, and Valley Stream. My only memories of Lynbrook are of when we visited my mother’s friend Tess Taylor when we were older. Tess had gone to school with Mom. For a while, they had both worked as telephone operators in the local exchange. Otherwise, Lynbrook stirs no memories.

We must have moved to Babylon when I was two or three. Later, we moved to Valley Stream. Both of these moves, I remember. My memories of Dad in Babylon are sketchy, as he was most often working to make ends meet. On Sundays, he would sleep late while Mom took my brother and me to Mass. Did I miss Dad on those days? I don’t think so. Mom made his presence known, whether he was physically there or not. Mom invoked the name of Dad, saying, Your daddy this or Your daddy that or Wait ’til your dad comes home. Oh yes, Dad was there. He spoke through Mom.

We didn’t have much money when we lived in Babylon. The WPA and the pickup jobs at the lumberyard put bread on the table, but Dad’s Saturday job as a Fuller Brush salesman was a real task. That much I know. This was in the late thirties. Being a door-to-door salesman was a thankless, difficult job, even if one was a super salesman. Dad wasn’t. This was a time when people had more hope than money. Dad would go around knocking on doors, trying to sell brushes, using his sample kit as a display. People would order brushes, perhaps because they discovered a need for the brush or perhaps because they wanted to do something for another person as bad off as they were. Dad would go back a week or so later to deliver the order, only to find the people unable to pay.

During this time, Dad was driving all over Long Island in the Model A Ford that my godfather, Jerry Magee, had given him. Dad was trying to do something for which he was not made, trying to live up to the Fuller Brush credo of fine and dandy. This was the company motto. Whenever the Fuller Brush men met, one was supposed to say, How are you doing? The other was supposed to reply, Why, just fine and dandy. Fuller Brush management felt that if employees repeated this motto often enough, they would convince themselves that they were, in fact, excellent salesmen and that things were fine and dandy. It didn’t work for everyone. It certainly didn’t work for Dad.

CHAPTER 3

Child Rearing

There was a spirit inside my dad that rarely surfaced. To me, he was an adult who shared our home, rising before the rest of us and going to bed long after my brother, Jim, and I did. Breadwinning and being a father figure were his primary assignments, as child rearing was left to Mom—although Dad’s authority and support were there, whether he was asleep or awake. Neither Jim nor I made it a practice to test that authority at home. Nor did we feel compelled to test the authority of the nuns at our school. Not that we were a docile pair. We were raised in an era when spanking was considered a necessary part of character development. The same was true of the corporeal punishment administered by the teaching nuns at our parochial school. Mom never resorted to spanking when reason would work just as well. Still, she provided my brother and me with swift and immediate understanding of the alternative to reason. Dad, with his long hours and commute, was never tasked with punishment—and he never had cause to threaten us with the belt. On those rare occasions when a spanking was called for, Mom handled it very well.

The nuns, on the other hand, seemed to feel that their authority was best secured by delivering a rap across the knuckles with a wooden ruler or by using peer pressure and punishing the entire class for the failings of one or two miscreants. The nuns were a fearsome lot—but, that said, they taught us well. Years later, when our family moved to California and we had to go to a public school, both Jim and I were a year ahead in almost every subject.

Jim and I had a few questions about Dad’s behavior. As practicing Catholics, we ate fish on Friday, went to confession and did penance on Saturday, and went to Communion on Sunday. Dad ate the fish with us on Friday but didn’t join us for the Saturday and Sunday Catholic activities. We wondered if this meant that Dad—and, apparently, many other dads—had received some sort of papal pardon specifically for breadwinners.

That was okay with Jim and me, as Dad was pretty hopeless as a ball thrower and ball catcher. Dad was not much of a hunter-gatherer, either. He liked fish, but he didn’t care much for fishing. This set well with me since I was afraid I might have to eat my catch.

We gave Dad a pass on many things because Mom had taught us the realities of life in the mid-thirties and early forties. Families may have bonded in different ways than they do now, but bond they did. We didn’t see Dad much, but when we did, he always had time for us and we always had time for him.

As far as Dad’s not running bases, fishing, or hiking with us goes, that was okay too. Jim frequently had his nose in a book, studying and learning as much as he could about being Catholic, as he had his eyes set on the priesthood. As for me, I liked to play in the old packing cartons and in the dirt, climb trees, or get together with some of my pals and play stickball or kick the can. Skinned knees, shins, and elbows were all a part of that, as were torn shirts, scuffed shoes, and bloody noses. I was more rascally, whereas Jim was more studious.

It took a while for me to return, but, years later, I visited Babylon, eager to show my wife, Pat, the old homestead. We were in New York preparing to take a long voyage and had a few days to spare. We boarded a train for Long Island out of Penn Station, with plans to visit Babylon for the day. Having never made the trip as an adult, I was at the mercy of the conductor to tell us where we were and what was next. Pat was no help, as she is British and didn’t have an ear for New York English. Luckily, I heard the Babylon call. We detrained as quickly as possible.

My old home at 30 Cottage Row was gone. The space had been paved over and converted to a parking lot. The bank, one of the buildings I remember, was now a coffeehouse. We joined the locals there and enjoyed a double espresso, a regular coffee, and a brownie. The Magees had left for more fertile fields, so, coffee finished, Pat and I left for Argyle Lake. As we approached the lake, we saw a sign saying that the area was reserved for passive relaxation. The lake, much larger than the Argyle Lake of my childhood memories, spanned twenty-five acres. There was fishing up at the north end. The soft rattle of oars, the almost silent wrrrrrrt of fishing reels, and the plop of the baits and sinkers did nothing to deter us from enjoying the place. On our stroll, we, two middle-aged lovers, enjoyed the passive relaxation. We found ourselves even more passively relaxed as the gardeners, who were