Helen Stewart Davis Kenny Hale/Thigpen

~~Doodle~~

By Arlene Spark, ‘62

Do you remember those deliberately time-devouring essays our substitute high school teachers used to make us write? You know - the ones with unimaginative Reader’s Digest-inspired titles, like ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met’? I’d like to share with you a variation on that theme. The title of my story is ‘The Most Unusual Relationship I’ve Ever Had,’ or maybe it should be called ‘A Most Unusual Relationship Between Two Tottenville High School Students.’

“At birth I was as tiny as a doodle bug” is how Doodle explained the manner in which she acquired that singular name. In her later years, “Doodle” was shortened to the arguably more sophisticated “Dood”. She grew up in Pleasant Plains and according to Staten Island legend attended a one-room schoolhouse, which is so totally incredible by today’s standards that I cede responsibility for verifying this information to Doodle’s cousin, Stewart Davey, and her other one-room schoolhouse classmates.

When we were in high school, people like Doodle from the southern reaches of Staten Island behaved differently from those of us who lived in the more northern, somewhat more urbane towns of Eltingville (my home) and Great Kills (where Lauren Fingado lived). Although I couldn’t articulate it at the time -- what I would have said then had I known how to say it – was that there exits a perfect inverse relationship between how far one lives from the city and how conventionally one behaves. As such, I dismissed Doodle and her pals’ unorthodox activities as the ethos of a group of people who lived too far from the city to be governed by the prevailing norms of the day.

Swimming is a case in point.

Those of us from Eltingville and towns to the north never went swimming without our bathing suits on. In contrast, Doodle, et al from Pleasant Plains and points south not only skinny-dipped, but dipped skinny in the presence of all genders. In sum, my proximity to the city was responsible for my being substantially more inhibited than Doodle was, and I still question whether my inhibitions were more progressive than were Doodle’s apparent lack of them.

I don’t remember exactly when I met Doodle, but it must have been sometime during our freshman year at Tottenvillle while rehearsing for Mrs. Bubb’s annual Christmas concert. Doodle sang solos while the vocally challenged like myself performed as members of the chorus.

It always struck me as ironic that I was required to sing at Tottenville’s Christmas concerts, when just six months earlier my grammar school music teacher banned me from singing at our eighth grade graduation. “Just move your lips,” she instructed me, which I obediently did throughout every graduation rehearsal. But when commencement day finally arrived, I decided in an adolescent stroke of insight that if I must agonize through delivering the salutatory address, then she should suffer through my vocalizing. Conducting us with her back to the audience, I can still see our music teacher’s face twitching with pain (the way it does when a piece of chalk is scratched across a blackboard) every time my voice pierced through a high note I was physiologically incapable of reaching.

My relationship with Doodle was sealed during our sophomore year, during which we sat next to each other in Miss Egan’s French 1 class. Doodle and I were Tottenville’s answer to Laverne and Shirley, the quintessential complementary odd couple. Unselfconsciously rolling her r’s, Doodle spoke French like a native, while I excelled in translation and conjugating all manner of verbs (with heavy reliance on that omnipresent spiral Verb Notebook that carried me through each successive one of Miss Egan’s French courses no self-respecting student of Miss Egan’s would enter her classroom without). Because she didn’t know a verb from an adverb, Doodle was only rarely called on to translate from or to the French, while I was equally rarely called on to speak, because my oral French evoked in Miss Egan the same pain suffered by my eighth grade music teacher when I sang.

Everyone who knew her will remember that Doodle was a knockout blonde with an angelic face and a sensationally athletic body. She was particularly striking when flanked by Lauren Fingado and me, her two dorky raven-haired overweight soul mates who represented the antithesis of Doodle’s inhibition and style.

By the time our junior year rolled around I was involved with my second official boyfriend (Chuck Parness was first) and Doodle was spending more and more time with Sean Kenny, a Virginia-born baby-faced young man who lived with his mother and sister in a New York-style apartment building in the luxurious enclave of Silver Lake. It all seemed so sophisticated, not to mention -- close to the city. To make the scenario even more compelling, science teacher and budding playwright Paul Zindel lived a few floors above the Kenny apartment.

Doodle’s schoolwork was suffering because she was spending so much time with Sean. By mid-March she told Lauren and me that she and Sean were getting married, and we were ecstatic. With my boyfriend from New Jersey in tow, the three of us took two long bus rides to somewhere I no longer remember on the north shore. We completely missed the wedding ceremony because the No. 103 bus crawled down Hylan Boulevard, eating up more time than we had allotted ourselves. But we did manage to celebrate later that day with Doodle and Sean at the reception held in Mrs. Kenny’s apartment. Doodle out-danced each and every one of us. There was lots of alcohol and lots of food.

Afterwards, in response to my wondering aloud why they got married at such an odd time, my pragmatic boyfriend shattered the innocent joy of it all by suggesting they were married because Doodle was pregnant. “Impossible,” I said. A few days later at the Tottenville train station, I told Doodle what Nardi had told Lauren and me. As if to prove how wrong he was, she sprinted up the station stairs and on to school. She was perspiring when we caught up to her. I noticed the buttons in the front of her sweaty dress were stretching the buttonholes, which I attributed to the tug on her dress of her swinging arms as she tore through the Tottenville streets.

Although unsaid among us, it was clear from Doodle’s ever-disappearing waistline that she was, indeed, expecting. Doodle and Sean moved from Silver Lake to a second floor walk-up apartment over a store in Annadale, conveniently located close to the Annadale train station. During our senior year I often visited Doodle on my way home from Tottenville, a schizophrenic divide between the idealism and innocence of school chased by the not so rosy reality of teenage marriage. In due course, we had a baby shower for Doodle, the centerpiece of which was a beautiful walnut Early American cradle that looked like it came right out of an upscale Ethan Allen showroom. In truth, Sean bought at Sears for the then princely sum of $19.95.

At about the time Doodle was coming to the end of her pregnancy, my mother needed some hands-on experience for a maternal & child health rotation that was part of her Masters of Science degree in Nursing. The ever willing-to-please Doodle agreed to be her case study, a fortunate pairing because Doodle’s complicated labor and delivery resulted in a 10-day stay at Richmond Memorial Hospital that was attended by my mother, day and night, as Doodle’s own special duty nurse. Doodle handcrafted an ornate combination birth announcement/thank that my mother attached to her final paper. I don’t remember visiting Doodle at the hospital, but I knew I was ably represented by my parents. After her discharge from the hospital, my father who was an attending physician at Richmond Memorial and practiced general medicine in Eltinvgille took over Doodle’s medical care, and also that of newborn Erin.

The first time I laid eyes on Erin she was asleep in her cradle, just under two weeks old. Mother, baby and Sean seemed fine. Doodle defied all odds, a mother at barely 16 years of age, she successfully breastfed Erin, a triumph of frugality as well as the will to demonstrate that she would be a world-class mother despite what the pundits predicted about the almost inevitable outcomes of teenage parenthood. Doodle went on to have Dana and Piper in the next four years. All three of the Kenny kids were bright, artistic, respectful, polite, attentive, adoring children.

In late 1965, Doodle visited me in my three-room Bronx apartment, two pregnant 20-year old former Tottenville classmates who were still children ourselves. We played with her babies while wondering what our other Tottenville classmates were doing, many of whom, like Lauren, then midway through their third year of college and oblivious to the organ-crunching experiences of post-adolescent pregnancy.

Dani was born so soon after Piper that I had to accept she would not be in the original cradle. Thus, a mere four years after the Annadale debut of the Kenny cradle, its exact duplicate (at an escalated price of $24.95) would become my daughter’s first bed. Subsequently, my daughter’s Doodle-inspired cradle was passed along to Lauren for her four sons, and then served as the first bed for Jesse Hamilton, whose parents live on my block. Dani’s cradle was retired six years ago when, much to my chagrin, she decided to forego it in favor of new furniture for her own firstborn. But I’m happy to report the cradle’s still supporting new growth, its slats having been unceremoniously recycled into a trellis that now stands in my garden.

While the rest of us were still in college, Doodle and Sean moved to a remote farmhouse on Bloomingdale Road in Pleasant Plains, where they lived for several more years before their relationship started disintegrating. Next, Doodle moved to New Dorp or one of the other towns closer to the ferry and eventually met and married Ron Hale, an actor whose real last name is Thigpen. The first time I saw Ron, he was in a show at Playwright’s Horizons in the city. I don’t recall anything about the play because I was coughing throughout the performance due to incense that was burning in the theatre, but I do remember remarking to my husband that I hoped the handsome one was Ron. Much to my delight, the handsome one was Ron. Soon after that performance, Dood, Ron and the children visited my husband, Dani and me in New Jersey where together we watched the first episode of Ryan’s Hope, the ABC network soap opera Ron starred in for the next 10 years. He earned such a good salary playing Dr. Roger Coleridge that he and Dood bought an old house they wanted to restore just off the Taconic State Parkway, about 60 miles north of the city. Ron had lots of time off between episodes, and they had lots of parties. The kids were growing and grown. Erin finished college and was married in their backyard under a 100-year old sprawling oak tree. Doodle became a grandmother. Dana and Piper left home to finish school and find work. Tension started mounting between Dood and Ron.

According to those who know me well, I became the proverbial basket case when my husband and I separated in June 1985 after 20 years of marriage. I felt like a horse had kicked me in the stomach. The pain lasted for over a year. It was the only time in my life I lost my appetite, dropped 31 pounds, and loved what I saw in the mirror. But I was otherwise trying the patience of almost everyone who knew me. When one resourceful friend offered to occupy me with the loan of her beachfront Fire Island house for the 10 days that she and her husband would be abroad, Doodle volunteered to care for me there. She packed food for our entire stay (there are no cars and only one small store on the part of Fire Island we were visiting), and we spent the time together with Doodle cooking, Fingado philosophizing, my dog Megan (named after a Ryan’s Hope character) loving every minute of it, and me crying my eyes out. Doodle could not have been more nurturing.

A few months later I was still crying while driving with Megan to Doodle and Ron’s annual Halloween party. There was no visibility at all given my nonstop tears and the torrential autumnal downpour. I thought for sure Megan and I would die that night on the spectacularly hazardous hairpin turn off the Taconic onto the road that led to Doodle’s house. But we made it through, and when Megan and I arrived at Doodle’s, the house was filled with Channel 7 television personalities. There was lots of food, a lot of alcohol and a lot of tension. Although I had planned to stay the night, Megan and I left within the hour. Things went from bad to worse between Ron and Dood, and eventually Ron left. He moved to Los Angeles and landed a supporting role on General Hospital. Sometimes I still see him on the show.

Sadly, Doodle was failing at a geometric rate. I visited as often as possible, but could never give her the nurturing she gave to me. On one visit to her house I was accompanied by my significant other, a physician who ordered Dood to the hospital because of the unhealed wounds he saw on her leg. She ended up staying for weeks. When she returned home I brought her groceries. She was clutched by an unremitting sadness. We looked through old pictures and letters, and crafts she had made with the children. We laughed. We wept. I didn’t want to leave her alone, but neither could I stay.

A week later at our 30th high school reunion, I was kicking myself for not bringing Doodle with me. I had managed to convince Fingado to fly in from Syracuse and also somehow enticed the usually reclusive Gena Connolly to attend the reunion. But why did I fail to include Doodle!

About a week after the reunion Doodle telephoned with the news that Sean had just died in a fall. She started feeling even more miserable.

Exactly one week after Sean’s death, Erin called to say Doodle had been in a car accident on that treacherous hairpin turn on the Taconic. Her golden retriever Pi, survived the crash, but Dood did not.

I took custody of Pi, and in one of those ironic twists of fate, he now lives with Jessie Hamilton’s uncle on 100 acres of King James deeded property in Virginia. Doodle, of course, lives on in me.

Plans will soon be underway for the 2002 reunion that will celebrate the 40th anniversary of our high school graduation. It’s fitting to remember each personality who has become a part of us, but cannot attend the reunion in his/her own right -- Doodle, John Drennan, Craig Hoehn, William Hamilton, and doubtless there are others. As we get ready to celebrate our shared coming of age at Tottenville High School, these old friends deserve to be commemorated.

Along with those elements of Doodle that will always be a part of me, I look forward to seeing you at our reunion next year!

Arlene Spark

Arlene managed to graduate from college in six years; it then took her another 10 to complete her formal education. She directs the BS program in Nutrition and Food Science and the MPH program in Public Health Nutrition at Hunter College, where she is an associate professor.