Denial (30 page)

The letter begins innocuously enough. She refers to Kennedy's recent victory in the 1960 presidential election, and his appointment of his brother as attorney general. She mentions the shock of David Ben-Gurion's revelation, in December 1960, that the Dimona complex was in fact a nuclear reactor, which Israel had earlier denied. She mentions her recent appointment as chair
man of the Foreign Policy Committee of the Syracuse League of Women Voters. She described her work with the league as a respite from changing diapers. The four of us—my father, my mother, my sister, and I—were living near Syracuse at the time, which my mother refers to as “the wilderness,” apparently preferring to return to Manhattan, where she and my father lived when I was born. She survived the bout of chemotherapy, which “appears to have done its work,” she tells her Israeli friend. “With luck, we've seen the end of that for a while,” she writes.

Then my mother talks about me. “She is very feminine, and insists on wearing dresses and stockings all the time,” she writes. This is a surprise, since I became a tomboy. “My parents gave her a rocking horse for Chanukah which she promptly named Misha the pawnbroker. God knows where she got that one from,” she writes, amused. But then she describes a puzzling scene. “My parents were here last week and one evening my father was dressing her for bed—she opens her legs wide and pointing to the crucial area said to him, ‘Touch me there, Grandpa, it feels good.'” She concludes that Jessie “talks a blue streak and is a real little sex pot.” I was not yet three years old. My mother would be dead within a year.

Of course my mother didn't know, could not know, that child-care workers would eventually be trained, many years after her death, to look for precisely this sort of sexualized behavior in young children as a potential indicator of sexual abuse.

 

My father and I break to take a walk, into the woods that we both love. We speak about our neighbors—who is still here, who moved away, who died.

On our return to the house, my father says, “You want to see yourself as a Holocaust survivor once removed.” He says this
disapprovingly, making it clear that he believes I have taken on a dramatic persona unrelated to my actual experience, and that he finds this sort of pretension unhealthy and unethical. Most of the time my father does not see himself as a Holocaust survivor. And I, in compliance with my father's unstated wishes, have not seen myself as the daughter of a survivor, at least not until now.

“It's not that I want to, but that I am,” I say, pushing against the tide of my father's disapproval. I can hardly believe that I managed to utter these words. “But in my case, that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were so many traumas. Our mother's death, your terrible marriage to Lisa, the rape.” I say these things in part because they are true, but also because I want to relieve us both of the image of my father as victim, which neither he nor I can bear.

 

Still, difficult child that I am, I will no longer comply with denial. The cost is too high. I am not going to bear this burden alone. “Are you actually prepared to claim that your experience of Nazi Germany had no impact on you? That it didn't change you at all?” I ask him, still defiant in my “disruptive intransigence.” How I wish he would know me.

There is a pause. “It made me more appreciative of life,” he says. “I am like a person who has had a near-death experience. Everything is extra bright in my eyes.”

This I know to be true. It's true for me, too. There are positive sides to facing down one's death relatively early in life.

 

When Chet first came back into my life, I was rude. Even more rude than usual, even for me. “How old are you?” I demanded
to know, confused that he did not look much older than I, even though when I was a teenager, he was a grown-up. I thought he was around my father's age, which would have put him, at that time, at age seventy-nine. He wouldn't divulge his age, but he announced proudly to everyone within earshot that he had known me as a child. A mutual friend had invited us to a dinner party that evening, largely to introduce us, not realizing, of course, that we had known each other a very long time. Chet announced to the other guests that he had seen me a few years earlier when we sat together on a hot, stalled plane on our way back from Washington. “She took her jacket off,” he said, with a look of glee, as if he wanted the guests to understand that he had seen the buttoned-up academic they saw before them in another guise. He had seen her with arms (and feet) revealed. “I had been at an Oxfam board meeting,” he explained, “while she was lecturing spooks at CIA.”

After dinner I offered Chet a ride. I offered him a ride because I had a car and he didn't, and he was an old family friend. However, he chose to interpret this offer of a ride in a different way.

He called me the next morning. He had returned to Martha's Vineyard, where he was staying with friends, and he wanted me to come out. Not a chance, I told him. I was taking Evan to the playground, and I had work to do. But he knew precisely how to persuade me. It was the Fourth of July, a long weekend.

“How could you do this to your son? Keep him cooped up like that on a long weekend, when you have an offer to go to the Vineyard?” It now seems remarkable to me that at that stage of my life, I still thought of an hour's drive to the ferry as an extremely inefficient use of time. But something about Chet's familiarity made me feel safe, and I was persuaded. I packed up quickly. I did not change my worn-out clothing. After all,
Chet was an old family friend. In half an hour Evan and I were on the road, on our way to the ferry.

 

Evan raced around the boat, while I raced behind him. He was excited by everything—the waves. The spray of the sea. The gulls hovering above us, coasting—almost without movement—on the gusts thrown up by the motion of the boat. We tossed the remains of his hot-dog bun into the air, and the gulls caught the bread, mid-flight.

But the rolling sea sickened me. People made too much noise, ordering their hot dogs and Cokes. During this phase of my life, for reasons I did not comprehend, I had cut out most forms of stimulation. Being a working single mother was stimulation enough. I rarely saw films. I did not watch television. I rarely traveled more than twenty minutes from my home, unless I was traveling for work. Traveling would send me into what I now recognize as dissociation. Traveling dislodges you; that's why we do it. I wanted to be lodged. I wanted to be planted into the earth.

Even so, I remember a surprising sensation as the ferry came into shore—a sensation of coming home. It must be because I was going to visit someone from my hometown, someone who knew me, or at least knew of me, through several different phases of my life, and might understand why I found it hard to connect the person that I was then with the person I became.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling
of “lights, camera, action” when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

Chet met us at the boat in a rented convertible. Evan said to him, “You're not as fat as I thought you would be,” as if meeting someone he had been waiting for.

 

After our last meeting, in which my father spelled out his concerns about our interview and I listed some proposed additions, he sends me a letter. He would like to see and approve of my additions, to make sure the reader will understand the actual situation in my family when my sister and I were raped, and the constraints my father faced.

I send him the material. I tell him that I have added the context now, and that I intended to do so in any case, even before he requested it.

And then, whence I do not know, I hear these words come out of my mouth: “This is a story, Dad, about how trauma affected both you and me as well as our relationship. The reader needs to see how we resolve the situation. I think we should apologize to each other, to show how we have reconciled ourselves to our own actions and each other.”

Not only was this rude, it was manipulative and not entirely honest. Why did I say it?

There is a pause, as if my father were contemplating his daughter's lack of social graces and considering how that might have occurred. But my father surprises me. “I get it. It's a story that requires resolution.”

And then he adds, “That's fine.”

I have to press my father to meet with me. I drive myself out there on a day that I know he is free.

We sit in the garden. “I like to be outside,” my father tells me.

I do, too, but I don't tell him that. At this point in this long conversation between my father and me, I can focus on him and nothing else.

“The most important thing I can say about why I didn't come back is that I felt that we were estranged. I felt that I couldn't help you,” he says.

I don't like this word
estranged
, which reminds me of
stranger
and
strange
. I must have appeared very strange back then, in my father's eyes. I know that. It hurt then, and it hurts now.

“I remember thinking, There is no point rushing home,” my father says, “because you will reject me in any case. You still wouldn't talk to me.”

I note the present tense of “will reject me.” I recall my father's earlier words about his fear of losing us. “Losing one's child is a terrible thing,” he said. He wanted me to talk to him, but I couldn't talk unless he made clear that he wanted to listen. I needed his permission to feel, and that permission wasn't granted. I needed him to feel with me in order to feel safe. I understand that now. But I don't say anything. I sit quietly, waiting for more.

“I had no idea what rape was,” he says. “I first learned about it reading about yours. I don't understand the mechanics. The whole subject is repellent to me. You never talked to me about it. I reported to the police that you seemed to have gotten over the rape because you weren't saying anything about it. It didn't come up in conversation.

“It was the same after your mother died,” he says. “You didn't talk.”

What is happening here? The topic of my mother has been taboo in my father's house for more than forty-five years, but now my father is bringing it up again and again, as if a dam has been broken.

We return to the topic of how my grandfather insisted that my
mother undergo what my father considered to be “quack chemical procedures” after she was clearly dying. This is the one topic regarding my mother's death that my father has always been able to talk about. It seems to haunt my father—this mad scientist side of my grandfather.

“She was sent home to die. She was in a hospital bed on that porch, that front room,” my father says. I never knew this.

We are sitting on a porch now, my father and I, on the cool side of his house.

“Where Grandma used to sit?” I ask, trying to picture my mother dying in that sunny room. I had always imagined her dying in a darker, more secret place. I have a vague recollection from that dark period of my mother lying on her back, with her knees bent, in the guest bedroom. I decided this was a very grown-up position and tried to emulate it. My grandmother sat in that sunny garden room all day long during the last decade of her life. She was obsessed with the news. She read all the papers and then listened to the news most of the day.

“Yes,” he says. “She never said she knew she would die, but she must have known. You would try to climb up on her bed, and she would turn her face away and push you off the bed.”

She was twenty-eight. She must have thought that this was best, to turn her face away from us, to push us off the bed. Why is my father telling me this now? It is almost too much, this sudden shift, like a mountain stream in the spring.

Somehow, I manage to find the courage to ask, “Did we cry?”

“I don't recall. You were numb. Or you seemed numb; you were quiet. You were like that for a long time. Your face was closed. Sara was just a baby then. She didn't understand what was happening.”

Although I am astonished that my father is speaking so freely about my mother's death, I cannot take this in now. Compared with this image of my dying mother pushing me away, the topic
of my rape seems familiar. Something that by now, I have processed. I will feel about this later. I want to return to the topic of my rape and what happened afterward.

“I am very sorry that I was so awful when I was a teenager,” I say.

“I was really sorry, too,” he says. “You kept attacking me.”

Now I feel slapped. But I can't help laughing. My father is a very strong and stubborn man.

“Do you want to apologize for not coming back to us right away?” I ask my father.

“I want to explain something to you,” he says, suddenly pedantic. “There is nothing for you to forgive and nothing for me to apologize for. Relationships within a family are based on trust.”

I'm not sure what he means by this. I wait for more.

“I kept calling Sidney,” he says, referring to our family doctor. “He said that you were quiet and tranquil.”

“We were on drugs,” I scoff.

“Presumably you were on tranquilizers,” he says, patient, at least at the moment, with his intransigent daughter. “I kept calling Sidney…. We must have had four or five telephone conversations,” he says, defensive now.

It was so expensive back then to make overseas calls. It is hard for me to imagine my fiscally conservative father phoning from Norway to the States. He must have been more worried than he has let on.