by Carol Roper

When I was sixteen, I was hired at a Catholic summer camp in East Hampton, New York, to be a drama counselor. I was not a practicing Catholic, having doubted some of its dogma since my Confirmation. My entire dramatic experience was based on my participation in the chorus of “Anything Goes,” a show we’d performed at my high school. I was, however an adept liar.

I was hired for the job. It was the nineteen fifties and due diligence wasn’t yet a thing.

With all the confidence of a teenager, I knew I could fake being a drama counselor.

My responsibilities were to rehearse campers for a musical based on the parables: “The Prodigal Son,” “The Good Samaritan” and “The Lost Sheep” in which the audience participated as the 99 lost sheep, as the entertainment for parents during their mid-summer visit. 

For some reason between the time of my being hired and boarding the counselor’s bus for the trip to the camp in East Hampton, I acquired an Italian accent.

My roots are from an Italian immigrant family. As second-generation Americans, we not only spoke perfect English, we were forbidden by our parents to speak the language of our grandparents lest we be judged foreigners. My speaking English with an Italian accent would definitely be viewed darkly if my family were to hear of it.

One possible explanation for this impulsive speech alteration was that both Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida were popular, curvy Italian actresses. Having viewed their movies, I’d chosen Gina as my female role model though I had none of her physical attributes. To my mother’s dismay, I cut my hair very short and box-dyed it black in the hope that made me resemble my idol.

We arrived at Catholic camp and gathered in the wood chapel for a welcome prayer and counselor introductions. The other counselors were college students, except for one cute seminarian. I was the youngest, about to enter my junior year of high school, which I didn’t mention when I introduced myself with my new Italian accent.

After the meeting, the woman director took me aside to comment that I’d had no accent when we’d interviewed months earlier. I blithely lied that I had been cast in an off-Broadway play after the summer and getting in character for my role.  

No doubt she didn’t believe me, but what choice did she have? The camp had begun it was too late to replace me.

I lasted three weeks; long enough to develop a crush on a red-haired Irish seminarian who though devoted to becoming a priest was often available to hang out chatting with this confused, sixteen-year-old drama counselor, interested in God knows what about me.

When he gave me his final rejection, I quit, giving the director the excuse that my grandmother was ill and I had to leave. My grandmother was, of course, not ill. She had been dead for years.

The flirtatious seminarian drove me to a boarding house in East Hampton, where I paid for a room out of my camp salary. The boarding house owner was a large, heavy-set, amiable woman. Breakfast was included. From there I used a pay phone to call to my mother, who herself, had that summer negotiated free camp for my two younger brothers in exchange for her being the Camp Mother, a job for which she had no prior experience. My stepfather was also there, but I never knew what he did there. Nobody did. He was just there.

As a side note: Early in their marriage, my mother bought him a small private school bus service using part of her divorce settlement from our father. But her second husband did not possess the business talents of her first husband, who together with her skills had built a successful trucking company. My stepfather was an easy-going man who between bus routes hung out at the parking garage, playing cards, smoking, drinking, and gambling with others. This was the source of my mother and stepfather’s many arguments. 

We’d moved to Riverdale, a new nineteen fifties apartment building community for the middle class being developed on the hills northwest of New York City near the mansions of Fieldstone. Before the bulldozers arrived, Riverdale’s trees and grassy slopes were where my younger brothers and I escaped when our mother was shouting at our stepfather for being an idiot, usually because he’d lost a bet and that meant she’d have to call her ex-husband for an advance of child support to pay a bill or rent. 

My brothers would race ahead down the hill toward the railroad tracks to count the number of passenger cars as trains passed. They had strict orders never to cross the tracks. I would amble along dreaming of how perfect my life would be when I was free of the burden of younger brothers and had my own apartment in the city. But one day, as I roused myself from fantasy to check on my siblings, they were gone.

Disappeared.

Below me a silent electric train hurtled along. I began running, heart gripped in terror and guilt. In my mind I pictured my brothers’ bodies carved to pieces on the tracks. How would I tell my mother they were dead? As the last of the train passed, I screamed.

I saw my two brothers in one piece on the far side of the tracks, their facial expressions frightened and sheepish.

I’d never loved the sight of  their stinking little faces more. That afternoon I learned what responsibility meant.

The bus stop in East Hampton was located at the road out of town. From there I caught a bus that took me to the Port Authority for another bus for the long haul to Massachusetts, where my stepfather was waiting for me in an old thirty-seat camp bus.

“Ciao, buona giornata,” I said.

He rolled his eyes and pointed his thumb to the rear of the empty bus, indicating I should take a seat. He wasn’t the talkative type, but he was generous with us, often giving us loose change from his pockets and never scolded us because our mother had made clear from the start that he wasn’t our father.

As the bus drove onto the camp grounds, a woman standing in front of a bunkhouse waved to us. At first glance, I didn’t recognize my own mother, the camp’s mother. She had been transformed from a furious-looking woman wearing an old bathrobe that smelled of sweat and tobacco, a lit cigarette dangling between her index and middle fingers to a vision.

I stepped  off the bus to a smiling woman in her late thirties who had shining, shoulder-length hair, tinted auburn and worn loose. She wore a plaid button-down shirt, knee-length shorts and sandals on her feet. As my mother embraced me the aroma of fresh flowers surrounded us. 

I held onto her like my life depended on it in and when we stepped apart and I spoke, my Italian accent was gone.

It was the best summer of my young life.

© Carol Roper Copyright February 2026

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