What's a house without a mystery or two!

Looking roughly 61 years back, I think I got off pretty easily as a child. I did a lot of pretty reprehensible things when I was a little kid, for which I paid absolutely zilch. In addition, I was fortunate enough to have two parents who were inordinately forgiving.

On the other hand, there were a few times when it seemed to me they were inordinately unobservant.

I'm six years older than my sister Beverly. So, when she was 6, I was 12. But that doesn't quite complete the story, because when she was very small, she was also, I thought, very strong. An avid Brooklyn Dodger fan, I was particularly eager for her to know how to play baseball, or, to start off with, softball.

One summer day, the two of us went out to the backyard, and started to throw the softball back and forth between us. I was standing with my back against the back wall of the house, and Bev was stationed in the middle of the yard. I tossed the ball softly to her, and she dropped it in the yard. Then she picked up the ball, wound up, hurled it back to me. It soared up, sailed over my head, and crashed into the basement window behind my head. "

Sorry, Chuckie!" she cried, as I stood facing the shattered basement window, in awe of what destruction she‚d accomplished.

"Holy &*#%," I answered her, as I anticipated the parental scolding we'd receive from either one of our parents when he or she would see the carnage.

As it happened, our mother came to the door and asked what all the "noise‚ was about." "Bevy threw the softball through the basement window" I gallantly reported.

My mother completed her walk to the yard, looked the two of us over, and reached a decision. "Oh, come on, Chuck, do you mean to say little Bev here has the strength to throw a softball half way across the yard and through the basement window?"

Well, I saw the way the wind was blowing, and didn't attempt to carry the argument farther. As for my little sister, she simply smiled at me and let me take the rap. My mother then proposed I fix the window before my father returned home in a few hours. I spen! t the rest of the day walking to the Village of Larchmont, buying the proper size glass and glazing compound (my Mom gave me the money for that, I admit), returning to the house, fitting the glass, and sealing it in the metal frame. Dad never knew of the incident. I remind Bev of it on her every birthday when I phone her.

When my mother broke her hip, my father hired a black maid by the name of Elizabeth Wagstaff to come every morning and help around the house for a few hours. She vacuumed, did the wash,cleaned the clothes, and performed a multitude of other chores that kept the household functioning.

One Saturday morning, when I was about the same age, my father called me into his bedroom, and pointed to his mahogany statuette of Ho-Ti, the Chinese god of mirth and humor, which he'd owned since his college days, when a fraternity brother had given it to him. Now, when he told me to look at the figure, I was puzzled, because it looked to me exactly as it had looked for as long as I could remember. "What?" I asked, at a loss.

"His hands look a little odd?"he added.

I picked the eight-inch figure off his chest-of-drawers and looked at it close-up. I noticed Ho-Ti's fingers, all ten of them, had been carefully glued to his hands with rubber cement, no less. It must've required a lot of hard and tedious work.

"Were you just not going t! o tell me about this?" my father continued.

"I didn't know anything about it till just now," I went on, anticipating I didn't know what.

"Who else but a model airplane builder would have the patience to glue each tiny finger to a hand like this?"he asked, growing angrier by the minute. Who, indeed, I wondered, had the patience and hawk-eyed eyesight to pick each finger out of the carpet that the chest-of-drawers sat on? When he pul! led his belt out of the loops on his pants, I suddenly got scared. He'd never done this before.

"Dad, I didn't do this!" I implored him.

"Maybe Elizabeth did it. I'll phone her."

But, of course, when I phoned her, she denied doing it. When I returned to my father's bedroom, for the purpose of taking my undeserved medicine, whatever it might be, I found that he'd had a change of heart.

"Son, if you say you didn't break the fingers off Ho-Ti, then I believe you. Besides, it seems to me that only an amateur would glue wood fingers together with rubber cement. I figure you for a Duco cement kind of builder."

If these were among the few incidents in which I did not deserve the punishments I almost received for the depredations of other folks, there were other incidents in which I fully deserved any punishments I might have received.

I can still hear it ringing softly in my ears: "Don't play ball in the house! How many times do I have to tell you two kids that?"

It usually took place on Saturday nights, when my mother and father were away at a friend's house for the evening and my younger sister and I were left alone to entertain ourselves "constructively." Surely, by that one last word, my mother and father must have envisaged card games or Scrabble or crossword puzzles, I can‚t be sure.! nbsp; But the reality of the situation was always different. When my parents no longer felt a babysitter was necessary, they entrusted my sister and me to be alone and out of trouble‚s way.

When I was roughly 12(and I do mean roughly) and Bev six, we no sooner heard the car drive up the lane outside than we got a tennis ball and baseball mitts and commenced to have a game of catch in the long living room. If a tennis ball was unavailable, a baseball would do nicely. I think we were using a tennis ball, one night, when one of Bev's throws got out of hand and went crashing into one of the two beautiful, eight-inch-tall, porcelain blue horses standing atop the Magnavox console. It was, I noticed, a clean break of the right front leg, so I ran after my Duco cement and towel. Applying the clear cement carefully and wiping the excess clean with my towel, I rested the horse upside down on the Magnavox and returned to our game of catch.

Our parents never knew, and why should they? Nothing was permanently damaged.

On another occasion, an errant baseball flew into the plaster nose of the lion emblem on the living room fireplace. When I saw what had happened, I looked around on the floor for the dismembered nose, but could find only a little pile of plaster dust. Rushing to the basement, where all my equipment was housed, I grabbed a little packet of mix-it-fast plaster, and rushed back upstairs.

With Bevie helping me, I mixed the plaster and, when it was the right consistency, modeled it (roughly) into the shape of a nose and affixed it to the lion. Back to the basement, I found a little jar of paint the professional painters had left for just such an emergency, and daubed my plaster nose, which, at close-up, I realized looked pretty much like the nose of Karl Malden, the original "Mr. Potato Nose," and let it go at that. To my knowledge, that little ruse forever escaped detection, too.

All of which, as of this writing (February 28, 2006), leaves only the gravy stain on the kitchen ceiling, of number 9 Normandy Lane, New Rochelle, New York, an unsolved mystery? But that's OK.

For, after all, what's a house without an unsolved mystery or two?