When Barbara was ten on a rainy spring evening, re-reading Ivanhoe for the fourth time, her mother scolded her.
"Stop filling your head with fairy tales! Men aren't like Ivanhoe. They're like your father was. He was a good man when I married him before the war, and then you were born. But he came back changed and became like all men. They have a roving eye."
What did that mean? "Was his eyesight bad?"
"It means a man is unfaithful!" the mother replied, then snatched the book out of her daughter's hands. Rushing into the kitchen with it, she threw it into the coal-burning stove.
Barbara ran to the stove to try to retrieve her beloved book, but it was too late. The flames were already consuming it. She ran out of the apartment and into the cold rain. Staying away without a hat or raincoat, she caught pneumonia that almost took her life.
While Barbara was recovering in bed at home, her mother gave her a new copy of Ivanhoe. It was to show she loved her, even though she still insisted, "Men aren't like that, Barbara. If you grow up thinking they are, they'll break your heart, or worse."
Barbara grew up never seeing a photograph of her father.Her mother explained one day while scrubbing the kitchen floor. When she wasn't at work ironing shirts, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor so clean they could eat off it.
"I burned them, even our wedding picture. The better to forget him."
"Was my father handsome?" Barbara asked as she sat at the table doing her homework.
"You go to the movies. He was handsome as Douglas Fairbanks. But handsome is as handsome does. Sure as little green apples grow on trees."
"What does that mean?"
"Little green apples?"
"No, the 'handsome is.'"
"Your father had that roving eye I've told you about. He couldn't be faithful to his wife."
A few days later, her mother explained what she meant.
"Men!" her mother said one night after they heard the latest news on the radio about the exploits of Chicago gangsters like John Dillinger and Al Capone shooting other gangsters over control of beer sales to speakeasies in and around the city.
Barbara thought her mother was including her father when she said "Men!" and asked, "Was my father a gangster?"
Mrs. Markey girded herself for what she was about to reveal. "No, but there are worse things to be. You're old enough now to know... I don't keep a picture of your father in the house because he had a child by another woman, my best friend. You could have had a sister or brother, but I didn't want you to have that kind. A child had to be from me, not another woman."