Anna Sullivan's Sin

The weird creature looked like a bad dream. Dark hair curled dankly almost to his shoulders, and he smiled slyly out of a dirty white face. It was a wintry day, but he was barefooted. He wore long woolen underwear, an outlandish, oversize, red flowered sunsuit and, over it all, two tattered girl's dresses.

Two cops found him busy over a bowl of corn flakes and milk in a house in the Roxbury section of Boston; some kids had come upon him wandering about the street, and had taken him home. One of the cops looked over the child in the tattered dresses and rumbled: "What's your name, little girl?" Piped the child: "I'm not a little girl. I'm a boy." His name, he said, was Gerald. Later, from clues he gave them, they found his mother, Mrs. Anna Sullivan, 45, in her third-floor apartment over on Terry Street.

Locked In. Last week all Boston knew the story of Anna Sullivan and the illegitimate child she sought to hide from the world. In the dingy Roxbury Crossing police station, 13-year-old Gerald, an otherworldly child with the flabby frame of a sickly girl, told his story. His mother had kept him locked in a bare, tiny, lightless room as far back as he could remember. She had brought him food on a tray, but he was forever hungry. Now & then she gave him a few marbles or a comic book.

He said he did not know an orange from an apple, nor a cat from a baby. How had he told the passage of time? "I could see the tops of trees from my window and when there were leaves and birds I knew it was summer. Then when it snowed and the trees got leaves again, I knew it was a year." The more assured he was that at last he was among people who wanted to help him, the more glibly Gerald talked. When his mother was brought before him, he shrank from her. Cried he: "I'll never love her again."

No One Must Know. The story was not quite the way Gerald said it was, but it was bad enough. Mrs. Sullivan had two sons (both now in the Marines) and a daughter. Her husband had deserted her on & off, and left her for good in 1937. In one of the intervals when he was off, she had given birth to Gerald by a man now dead. She decided that no one must ever know. She went regularly to confession, but never told her biggest sin.

Living on relief, she did not even apply for an allowance for her new son. To Gerald's half brothers and half sister, he was her sister's child; from their mother's behavior, they learned to treat him as someone different and shameful. To anyone who might catch a glimpse of Gerald playing on the third-floor back porch (dressed in girl's clothing), he was Mrs. Sullivan's own daughter. He had the run of the apartment when the family was home, but he was never allowed out on the street, never went to school.

When neighbors visited Mrs. Sullivan (she was popular in the neighborhood, and generous with what little she had), Gerald was locked in his room, empty but for a dirty Army cot; he had been taught not to utter a sound. Last week Anna Sullivan forgot to lock the door; he escaped while she was telephoning.

After the police took him in, Gerald's hair was shorn, he was dressed in boy's clothing, and sent away to a children's home. His mother was charged with neglect. Sobbing, she said: "I sinned and had to bear my cross." The fact was, Anna Sullivan had made a child bear her cross.

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