Bathrooms

As most of you know, I was born and raised in Manville.  Born at home on Winter St. and raised in a 4th floor tenement on Railroad St., right there on the banks of what was then the very fragrant Blackstone River.

Our house sat flush up against the sidewalk in front, with just enough room for a driveway on either side, and a cement yard edged with a row of garages out back.

This was my immediate world and it shaped my perception of the world around me.  I knew, for example, that only rich people had grass, and only the very rich had bathtubs.

Our bathroom, which back then was referred to simply as “the toilet,” was just that – a closet-size room in one corner of the kitchen that contained a toilet.  Period. No sink. No shower. No tub. Just an old-fashioned toilet with the overhead tank and a metal pull-chain.

The best that you could say about it was that it was one step up from an outhouse.  In fact, most of the French-speaking people in town called it the bécosse, bastardized French for backhouse.  And “boss de bécosse” (boss of the outhouse) was what you called someone when they got a little too pushy. My grandson Nick has a fascination with French words and that’s one of his favorites.

Our bathroom, crude as it was, was a cut above some, however.  It had a window that opened to the outside and enough room to stretch your legs out in front of you.  Many had only a small window high on the wall that looked out (if you were tall enough) onto the kitchen, and a door that hit you in the knees when you closed it.

I’ve long treasured a story about a friend’s mother, a tall woman, who decided one day while home alone, to allow herself the luxury of leg room and left the bathroom door open when she went.  The bathroom faced the apartment door, and on that one fateful day the bread man, making his weekly delivery, gave just one cursory knock and, not waiting for an answer, opened the door only to come face to face with the lady of the house who was not at all pleased to see him.

A similar incident occurred at my Aunt Eva’s in upstate New York when my cousin Raymond, similarly crowded in their downstairs bathroom, fell asleep with his head resting against the door.  In his case the latch let go and out he came, sprawled facedown onto the kitchen floor in front of a roomful of company.

The lack of a bathtub in the house didn’t present much of a problem when we were little.  My parents would just fill the kitchen sink and give us all a good soak. The problem came in later years when we physically and socially outgrew the spectacle of public bathing.  That’s when we graduated to bathing from a basin in the privacy of our own bedroom.

We’d fill a basin with warm water (heated on the stove, since there was also no such thing as hot running water), grab soap and towel, and retire to out room for our weekly ablutions.  Primitive, I know, but effective. It, too, had its downside, though.

For instance, there are few experiences in life to equal the humiliation of emerging from the bedroom, basinful of scummy bath water in hand, only to discover that your date has arrived a bit early and is now watching your red-faced progress across the kitchen.

But for the ladies of the house there was no alternative.  The men, however, had it better. If they so chose they had the option of heading over to the Club Montcalm, or something like it, where showers existed.  I can still see my father, many years ago, clean clothing rolled up in a towel, heading out on such an outing.

Times have changed, of course, and homes now come equipped with showers and tubs. But when the world was young and I was little only the very rich had bathtubs.  I knew that this was so.