From This Day Forward (39 page)

But it was Connie who was worried. She remembers thinking about her husband: “It's my blood that goes through these children. I'm the one that pulled this together. Is he going to feel alienated? How about our children?” Connie recalls telling Tony of her offer: “Thank goodness I had a great guy, who said, ‘All right, we'll all move over.' They did. And that's when the fun began.”

Mary's oldest girl stayed behind in Massachusetts to finish high school, but two weeks after their mother died, the other five—four girls and a boy, ranging in age from nine to sixteen—moved in with the Morellas in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of Washington. And Tony's two-door automobile started looking awfully small. “All of a sudden it dawned on me,” he says, “and I called a friend of mine and got his huge station wagon and went out to the airport. And there were these waifs, coming off the plane, led by Connie. It was just an extraordinary experience.” Ursula Munroe, the youngest child, who is now a nurse, recalls that “once we got there, the first thing we all did was pull out our stationery and write letters to our friends back home.”

The Morellas' modest home bulged at every seam. A recreation room and a study on the lower level had been chopped up into three bedrooms, and the laundry room was now a bathroom. The oldest Morella boy, Paul, was away at college most of the time, so there were seven kids in full-time residence, five girls and two boys. “The boys had a bath and the girls had a bath,” recalls Catherine Sanborn, the second oldest cousin along with her twin sister, Louise. “We wanted nothing to do with their bathroom, but when the girls' room was busy we had to use the boys', and it was horrible!”

“The transition was a lot smoother than I anticipated,” recalls Paul Morella, “but it was tough for everybody. I'd be lying if I said otherwise.” When he came home from college, he sometimes slept on a cushion underneath an air-conditioning unit. “I kind of liked it,” he says, “because it had white noise, and I wouldn't hear all the ruckus that was going on. People got up at different times and had different patterns as far as breakfast was concerned. It was almost like shifts.” Mark Morella and his only male cousin both worked as janitors at a nearby church: “It gave us a place to go sometimes when we had to get away.”

Tony installed an industrial-strength washer and dryer in the garage, telling the salesman, “I want the longest warranty you can give me.” But Connie's idea, assigning different kids to do the laundry each week, quickly broke down. Somebody was always complaining about shrunken jeans, lost socks, dirty blouses. So she bought each child a separate laundry basket, showed them how to operate the appliances, and put them on their own. “This meant”—she laughs—“that there were times in the middle of the night you'd hear ‘clunk, clunk, clunk.' Those were the sneakers in the dryer.”

The Morellas had always been “frugal,” one of Connie's favorite words, a habit learned from her mother, an Italian immigrant who worked much of her life in a Laundromat for
minimal wages. Connie was a schoolteacher who went into politics and now serves in the U.S. Congress, representing the Maryland suburbs of Washington; Tony teaches law at American University. So while the family was always comfortable, it was never rich, and Paul Morella remembers that long before his cousins arrived, his mother was a master money manager: “When I was young, I was amazed at how many sandwiches she could squeeze out of a can of tuna fish. She would sometimes make them ahead of time, and freeze them, and I remember taking out my lunch at school and the bread was sort of warped, because it had been in the freezer. And there was this thin layer of what I guess was tuna fish. Maybe sometimes she just whispered the word ‘tuna' over the bread.”

Ursula recalls a truck backing up to the house and unloading large quantities of frozen food, which the family bought wholesale: “It was the joke of the neighborhood.” When Connie went shopping by herself, she'd load up three carts. One day, she says, “a woman said to me, ‘You must be shopping for six months,' and I smiled and said, ‘No, five days.'” How does one person handle three carts? “You push one ahead and park it,” she replied with a chuckle, “and then you can pull the other two along.”

Since one teenager can tie up a telephone single-handedly, a half dozen vying for a line can cause chaos. “Getting the phone on a Friday night was quite an assignment,” says Mark. “Within seconds someone else would pick it up and say, ‘Can you hurry?' So I used to get on my bike and ride up to the corner to make my phone calls.”

Getting the car was harder than getting the phone. Connie thinks that nine trips to the Motor Vehicle Administration for driver's licenses qualifies any parent for hazardous duty pay. “It never ended, you're taking somebody every year,” she recalls. “And it took one of the girls four times to get that license! She couldn't parallel-park, so each time we went, we
took a smaller car. Finally she made it—in a Yugo we borrowed from a friend.”

Tony bought the kids an old used car, an “army green” Dodge Dart, and laid down one rule—they paid for gas. Maryland license plates contain three letters, and just by accident, the Dart's tag said “IRV,” and that of course became its name. “I was mortified to drive around in that thing,” recalls Ursula, “but I grew to love it.” No one loved buying gas, however. “I remember buying one gallon, that's all the money I had,” says Catherine. All the kids earned their own spending money, and at one point, so many of them were working at the local Roy Rogers restaurant that they could have staffed an entire shift by themselves. Ursula, however, opted for a greeting-card shop because her older sisters smelled so badly of grease when they came home.

Gas money was one thing, college money was something else, and Connie likes to say that the family suffered for years from “maltuition.” Tony tried to contact Mary's former husband and “get some help out of him for college—it was getting pretty rough.” When persuasion didn't work, Tony sued, and hired a prominent Boston law firm to handle the case. As he tells the story, the law firm was too genteel for its own good, and couldn't find the guy to serve him with a subpoena. Finally Tony learned the father of his six wards was getting remarried and he told his lawyer, “He's having a reception at five o'clock at the Ritz-Carlton; get a process server over there to meet him.” When the lawyer gulped in reply—“You really don't mean that”—Tony shot back, “I certainly do.” But in the end, Tony says, the father fought the case “and never did contribute” to his children's education.

The real challenge was not food and phones and laundry, it was emotions. Asked if he felt cheated at times, deprived of his parents' attention, Paul replied, “To be brutally honest, I'd have to say yes. There were times when I felt like saying,
‘Hey, look at me.'” One Father's Day, he adds, his sister Laura sent Tony a card signed, “Your only daughter.” It was her way of reminding him that “there's blood and there's blood, so let's be aware.” And Tony
was
aware: “I would find an opportunity to take her off, to hold her hand and say, ‘You're my baby daughter, you're my girl.' I still say it to her because it was hard on her. She'd been our total focus among the girls and all of a sudden she's got five sisters.”

The transition was even harder for the newcomers. “The biggest adjustment was realizing this was really home now, we weren't visitors,” recalls Catherine. “We couldn't say, we're just here a little while, and go back home later. At times we felt like we were intruding on what they had. They never made us feel that way, but we just felt it anyway.”

Things improved after Mark burned a hole in his pillow smoking, and his cousins covered for him when Tony got home, assuring their uncle that what he was smelling was overdone grilled cheese. “Later we told Mark, ‘You owe us big time,' but it really bonded us together,” laughs Catherine. There was always a line, however, between the cousins and the “real children.” After Mark cracked up the family car while Connie and Tony were away on a trip, Catherine remembers thinking, “Thank God it was Mark and not one of us.”

Perhaps the biggest source of tension was the cousins' father. The elder Morellas “never even discussed him” with their nieces and nephew. “We just lost him,” says Tony. “I don't know to this day if the kids had any contact with him.” The most angry family member was the mother of Connie and Mary, who harbored deep resentments against her ex-son-in-law and communicated them to her grandchildren. “My grandmother was very Italian, very old-fashioned,” remembers Catherine, and she was convinced that her daughter's divorce had somehow contributed to her illness. “That added to the tension.” Ursula understands why her father was
never mentioned in the Morella household, but his absence left his children with a stain of insecurity. “I had this feeling that my situation was precarious in some ways,” she remembers. “I didn't have anything to fall back on, so I always had to tread lightly on things.”

As the girls went away to college and started getting married, each one in turn asked Tony—not her father—to give her away. “I really feel closer to him than my own dad,” explains Catherine. “He cared about me when I really needed a dad.” Her words reflect the critical role Tony played. As Connie points out, the six cousins were
her
family, not his, and she offered to take them in without consulting him. But he treated the newcomers with a warmhearted, low-keyed affection that filled a deep need in their lives. As Catherine puts it, “If we had problems, or celebrations, Uncle Tony was the one who was always there. For him to take us all in was an outstanding thing to do.” Tony was particularly touched by his role in his nieces' weddings, and he can still remember how each young woman would clasp his arm as they stood together at the back of the church: “I could feel her trembling, and each time I said to myself, what a joy, and what a stupid idiot this guy was to give that up.”

Catherine now says that she “used to be bitter” about her father's absence, but feels less that way now. “It really was his loss and his choice.” By the time Ursula, the youngest girl, was getting married, her father had gotten back in touch with his children, but she asked him not to come to her wedding. “I didn't want to upset my aunt and uncle,” she recalls. “He wasn't very happy about it but he respected my wishes.”

Today, with a daughter of her own, Ursula feels closer to her father than ever before. “He's had to make an effort,” she says, “to prove to us he's really serious about having a relationship with us. As he's been getting older, I think he regrets the way he handled some things.”

The Morellas have few regrets. Tony likes to call his six
extra children a “gift from God” and Connie's experience has helped her become one of Congress's leading experts on family and women's issues. One lesson she has learned at some cost—blended families need help. “You need help from your spouse, you need help from other family members, and if you don't have any of that, you need help from special neighbors and friends that you can call on for peace of mind,” she says. “People should realize that women sometimes carry tremendous burdens and knapsacks of guilt, because we want to be everyplace and do everything. And frankly my advice is, you can't be Wonder Woman. Don't expect that you're going to be the fashion expert and have the perfect office and the perfect home and entertain beautifully and take care of children and do a great job at your profession. You're going to have to establish priorities. And the family and the children come first. You can't do everything.”

Those “waifs” who trooped off that plane twenty-three years ago are now all married with children of their own—twelve in all. And they've learned well the lesson that “you need help from family members.” Four of the five sisters live in New England and stay in close touch, helping out with each other's kids and sharing a special bond forged by their unusual upbringing. After their grandmother, Connie and Mary's mother, died last year, her house was sold and the cousins inherited a slice of the small profit. The five women decided there was only one way to spend the money and honor their grandmother. So they left their husbands and kids at home and went to Italy together.

Ellen Terry: Only Child of Four Parents

Ellen Terry flew so often between Kansas City and Houston that she belonged to several frequent-flier programs and qualified regularly for first-class upgrades. But the free drinks and bigger seats didn't matter much. She was eight years old.

Like many kids in modern America, Ellen spent her weekends shuttling between divorced parents. There were so many regulars on the Friday-afternoon flights between the two cities that the airline dubbed them the “brat pack” and sat them all together in the first few rows. “Everyone would have their backpack of goodies, with their Rubik's Cubes and their coloring books and you would kind of trade off on what you were going to play,” Ellen recalls. “Pretty much the same kids were on the pattern of every other weekend and you kind of got to be friends. I didn't like a lot of them, though. I thought they were rude to the flight attendants and would throw things, so I tried to have my father seat me by myself.”

Ellen had other motives for sitting separately. She was very worried about her mother, Rita, raising a child by herself in a big lonely city, so on her way to Houston she would interview fellow passengers as possible dates. “I think deep down I selfishly wanted someone to settle her down and make her there more for me,” says Ellen. “I would meet guys who I thought were good-looking on the plane and haul them out to meet my poor mother and just build her up the whole time. Of course, I had already slipped them our phone number on the plane, and once they saw my mother, they would always call and pester her.” The Ellen Terry Dating Service was not very successful—Rita rejected most of her selections—but Ellen's Insurance Referral Service was another story. Her father, Stan, ran an agency outside of Kansas City, and when she spotted a likely prospect, she made her pitch: “I knew my father's address and phone number and I would just write it down on the napkins they give you with your Coke, and say, ‘He's the best in town, you gotta call my dad to get insurance.'” And some of them did. “I made some money off some of them,” Stan recalls with a laugh.