Estranged Read online

  Here, like magic, was my mother, elegant and easy at twenty-one in her gown and 1960s flip hairdo, and my father, twenty-two, looking dashing and hopeful in his tuxedo and more handsome than I’d ever seen him.

  They had met as counselors at a summer program for inner-city kids. I was proud of this fact and pretended it meant they’d been activists or hippies, even though my mother explained that they’d been too old for that and that she’d worn poodle skirts and penny loafers with real pennies in them during high school. So it was more like Happy Days. They could have been beatniks, she said, but they weren’t. She’d listened to Simon and Garfunkel, not Bob Dylan. She’d never smoked a cigarette, much less a joint, or had sex with anyone but my father, and not until they were engaged. For her freshman year, she’d ventured upstate to Elmira College, where she was assigned to room with two of the other Jewish girls on campus. She left after one semester, returning home to be with my father and study at Queens College. Back then, she said, women (like her) had three career options: nurse, secretary, or teacher. My grandmother was a secretary. My mother became a teacher.

  My parents were married at a wedding hall in December 1964. In a photograph taken before the ceremony, my mother applied lipstick in the mirror while the train of her modest ivory gown spread out on the floor, encircling her. She wore long white gloves with buttons leading up to her elbows. My father had dark shiny hair, a smart, knowing smile, and was dressed in white tie with tails and a top hat. She must have thought him a catch. He was an Ivy League–educated Jewish boy who loved her. Later I would wonder how much she knew, and had already accepted, going into the marriage. Perhaps she’d never witnessed his temper when they were dating. Or maybe she’d figured she could soften him. Or maybe, at twenty-one, she thought that was just how men were. I imagine what she wanted most of all was to leave home, to live with her boyfriend and spend the night in his arms without her mother or anyone else saying she was a hussy or accusing her of living in sin. In the reception photos, my parents stood smiling behind tables of fashionable-looking guests. I could practically hear the sound of half-full wineglasses tinkling and smell the cigarette smoke. At the end of the night, my mother waved goodbye in front of their rented limo in a Jackie Kennedy–style traveling suit. They spent their wedding night at a hotel in Manhattan and honeymooned in Bermuda.

  I recognized few of the guests. Even many of the people under the chuppah, the wedding canopy, were unfamiliar to me. I knew, of course, my maternal grandmother, Kay. She lived in a tidy one-bedroom in Douglaston, Queens, and wore lipstick and eyebrow pencil and carried a compact in her purse. When I was a girl, she hung out at the Jewish Y. She danced the cha-cha and the hora with her best friend, from whom she was inseparable, because there weren’t enough men to go around. (My brothers and I whispered other, more romantic theories.) On Fridays, Kay went to the beauty parlor and had her hair washed and set. Every other Sunday she drove to see us on Long Island, bringing babka or black and white cookies or a chocolate cake from the bakery, packaged in a white box tied with red string. Or else my mother and brothers and I went to her apartment and were careful not to break anything. Somehow, between her savings and social security, she had enough money to travel with her Y friends to places as far off as China. She brought me a small porcelain doll from each country they visited. I had a whole shelf of them. But when she came to our house, she sat on the sofa with a grim, sour expression, every so often making a racist comment under her breath about “the shvartzes”—African-Americans she didn’t know or care to know.

  Her husband, my grandpa Jack, stood next to her in the photos. He died when I was a toddler, before I was old enough to remember him. My mother didn’t like to talk about her father. Jack and Kay were separated on and off after my mother left home, and they weren’t living together when he died. My grandmother would sometimes come and stay with us, I knew. I’d heard just a few things about my grandfather, none of them good. He was a lawyer but didn’t earn a decent living, could never keep his clients, and ended up going bankrupt; he had diabetes and needed to have a toe cut off because he wouldn’t take his insulin. There must have been more to the story to make my grandmother keep leaving, given how traditional she was, but mostly what I’d gathered was that my grandfather was what my mother would call a no-goodnik.

  My mother’s younger brother, Alan, stood under the chuppah, too. He was the rebel in the family, but all that meant was he was a gym teacher who wore bell-bottoms and had hair that came to his collar in the back. He was thin and in shape and had a weak stomach and a series of attractive girlfriends, and he talked about moving to California, but my mother and grandmother warned him about the dangers of earthquakes, so instead he stayed in Queens. At the wedding he would have been eighteen or nineteen.

  On the other side of the photographs, to the rabbi’s left, was a small lady with curly gray hair. That was my paternal grandmother, Rifka, or Ruth, whose name I was given as my middle name. We didn’t have many photographs of Ruth: only the ones in the wedding album and a few of her holding baby Mark in her lap, taken shortly before she died. My father’s eyes wet when he saw these. He loved and missed his mother terribly.

  Standing next to Ruth was a tall, imposing man, perhaps in his late twenties; a large lady with her dark hair in a beehive; and with them, a young boy and girl a few years apart in age. She was the flower girl, with a basket of rose petals, he the ring bearer, carrying a silk pillow with the two gold bands. Who were these people? I didn’t know any of them. Why were they under the chuppah? And what about the wedding guests? My parents had pointed out only two or three friends from as many tables.

  Just then my father walked in the room.

  “Daddy,” I asked, not as carefully as I might have, “who are these people with you and Mommy? This man and woman here, and this flower girl and little boy? And the people at these tables?” I pointed first to the ceremony pages and then to the guests at the reception afterward, the women with their short dresses and bouffant blowouts and the men with their smooth haircuts and trim suits.

  “Old friends, mostly. People from high school and college we’re not in touch with anymore,” he said with a vague wave of his hands at the lot of them. “Most of them are dead by now.”

  My parents were hardly forty. But I believed him.

  * * *

  One summer day I was in the basement, busy playing with my Fisher-Price schoolhouse and farm and gas station and parking lot and airplane, and my assortment of Little People (the cowboy, the baby, the farmer, the teacher), when I overheard my mother on the phone in the laundry room.

  “Marty’s sister called,” I heard her say. Sister? My father was an only child. That was a fact. An only child and an orphan, he’d told me so a million times. His mother died before I was born; his father died when my father was just a boy. He had no family left at all. We were it. We were all he had. We were his family. What did she mean, sister? I figured I couldn’t have heard right.

  Several days later my parents sat me down at our wooden kitchen table. Mark and Josh already knew. My father cracked his knuckles.

  “I have a sister,” he told me. “Her name is Edna.”

  I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d said he liked to dress up in women’s lingerie and heels like those husbands on Phil Donahue, or if he’d announced we were moving to Alaska or Paris.

  “We haven’t spoken in a long time. My uncle Leo, my mother’s older brother—your great-uncle—has gotten back in touch with me, and we’ve been talking on the phone. He’s a sweet man, you’ll like him.”

  My father had a brother, too. He was the real reason our phone number was unlisted, not because my mother was a teacher and might get prank calls, which was what my father always said when I’d asked why we couldn’t be in the town phone book like everyone else.

  The truth was, my father didn’t speak to anyone in his family.

  I was so stunned by my father’s admission and so excited about this new batch of
relatives that I didn’t think to be angry with him for lying to me my entire life.

  And there was more.

  “We’re going to go see Edna on Saturday,” my father said. “She has two kids, they’re older than you.”

  See them! That Saturday!

  But we weren’t going to see the brother, not ever. They didn’t even tell me his name. My mother said he was bad news.

  “That’s why we always want you and Josh and Mark to be close,” she explained. “All you have in this world is each other.”

  * * *

  When Saturday morning came and it was time to meet our secret relatives, my mother had a migraine. I went up to her bedroom and stood in the doorway while she talked to my father from underneath the covers. The shades were drawn and the lights were off and the noise machine on her nightstand hissed. I turned around and went back down the stairs before they could notice me. A few minutes later he told us to get ready and said she wouldn’t be coming with us. He didn’t seem upset, even though he spent every second or third Sunday with his mother-in-law.

  I wasn’t surprised that she was staying home, either. Conventional wisdom in our family held that my father was a near-genius who, though underpaid and generally unappreciated by the world at large, was tough and could handle almost anything. When my mother had a problem with her principal, he went in to help her negotiate. On Saturday mornings he’d spread the bills out on the kitchen table and work through them with his coffee and the calculator. He kept track of gas mileage with a notebook in the glove compartment. My mother had to balance her checkbook and show it to him; unlike her, he was an expert. Good with his hands, he spent the weekends fixing things around the house. Maybe he’d be repairing a car, or stripping and sanding the kitchen cabinets, or dealing with a plumbing leak under the kitchen sink, or tiling the downstairs bathroom. He always had something he was working on. She was more refined and middle-class; weaker, the family lore went, prone to illness and hypoglycemia and heart palpitations, at the mercy of hormone shifts and enduring exhaustion. Supposedly, she wasn’t as smart as my father, who read the newspapers and listened to NPR when Imus wasn’t on the radio. She read more books, though. And could beat him at Scrabble. He was better at strategy, but she knew more words.

  On the car ride over, my brothers and I learned more about our father’s childhood. Old stories were retold and reworked to make room for his having been not an only child after all, but the youngest of three. The egg salad sandwiches his mother packed for the beach that tasted crunchy with sand by lunchtime. Their apartment in Washington Heights getting so hot in the summer that on the warmest nights, my father strapped himself to the fire escape so he wouldn’t fall off when he slept out there. Though his immigrant parents weren’t particularly religious, they spoke Yiddish at home and sent my father to a yeshiva, a Jewish day school, where half the day was spent on Torah and Talmud and Hebrew studies. The lone nonobservant boy in school, he learned to take on one role in public and another in private. In the late afternoons he played stickball with the neighborhood boys until his mother called him in for dinner. They were poor, he said. His father worked at a corner grocery store.

  And there was something else he wanted us to know.

  “My father hit me,” he said.

  His declaration made me hold my breath.

  “He’d use his belt or sometimes plumbing pipe. Anything he could get his hands on.” My grandfather had wanted my grandmother to have a back-alley abortion since her later-in-life pregnancy—my father—was unwelcome, but she’d refused. Maybe that was why. “I was the one who found him when he died. He was on the toilet. He was having a heart attack. I was twelve. Part of me was relieved.”

  I had a hundred questions but couldn’t ask any of them. Did my father want me to feel sorry for him? Was this his way of apologizing? Did this mean I was destined to hit my children, too?

  He didn’t come out and say this was why he hit us, but he didn’t have to. I could tell, though, that he thought what he’d gone through had been worse, that plumbing pipe was harder and more unforgiving than hands, and that being poor somehow made the violence count more. Which meant that maybe what happened in our house didn’t really.

  I stared out the window.

  My father continued. Edna was his older sister. Unlike my parents and almost everyone else we knew, she hadn’t gotten to go to college. When my father was a teenager, my grandmother had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for depression or bipolar disorder, or possibly for schizophrenia, the details were murky. Edna had stayed in the family apartment and taken care of my father when my grandmother couldn’t; he’d gone to a regular public high school after my grandfather died, then on to Columbia University with a full scholarship, but he wasn’t able to compete with the prep school boys there. He struggled to get gentleman’s C’s. Their brother, the middle child, was psychologically unstable and jealous of my father for being the youngest and their mother’s favorite and a college boy. These days he came and went and couldn’t hold down a job and was always borrowing money. Sometimes Edna and my father would lock him out of the apartment. Once, when my father was in college, my uncle had shown up and pounded on the door, threatening to kill my father. They called the police on him.

  * * *

  We drove to somewhere in Brooklyn or Queens. My father said this was a working-class neighborhood with lots of Italians and Jews. Rockville Centre had Italians and Jews, too, but this place didn’t look anything like where we were from, even though we’d driven for less than an hour. The aluminum-sided row houses reminded me of Archie Bunker’s Place. The streets were steaming and crowded and noisy with honking car horns and radios blaring from apartment windows. Older men in tank tops and women in housedresses sat on lawn chairs on the sidewalk, and children played in front of open fire hydrants, just like in a movie. My father told us to make sure the car doors were locked.

  In my town, the kids with more money—some of whom I knew from Hebrew school—wore Jordache jeans and Champion sweatshirts and lived in big houses. Most but not all of the African-American kids ate school lunches and were “bused in” and came from “the projects,” though I didn’t really know what either of those things meant. My elementary school friends were mostly middle-class Irish or Italian Catholics and Jews. We seemed to have the normal, regular, right amount of money. Not enough for eight weeks of sleepaway camp but enough for a slice of Sicilian after school at Miceli’s or Sal’s or Palmeri’s and a movie on the weekend. This was just the way things were.

  My father found a spot and parallel-parked. Aunt Edna stepped out of the house and hurried to the car to greet us. She was wearing a flowered muumuu and had a perm and a thick New York accent. By comparison, my father’s (still-strong) accent seemed all-American, like a newscaster’s. She hugged my brothers and me, a warm and tight embrace, like she was really, truly happy to see us, before leading the way to the front door and into the kitchen to meet our cousins. Edna’s daughter was in her early twenties, and her son was a teenager. If I’m remembering right, they both lived at home. The daughter had bright pastel eye makeup and a much older non-Jewish, divorced Italian-American fiancé with kids from his previous relationship and tattoos on his biceps. (My mother had told me and my brothers many times that she’d sit shiva for us and pretend we were dead if we married a non-Jew or got tattoos, which she said would mean we couldn’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery.)

  My father shook his brother-in-law’s hand. “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “Too long,” said my newfound uncle.

  “Sit, sit,” Edna said. “I have food. We’re going to grill. Martin, would you like some coffee? Or a beer?”

  In the kitchen, the question of their brother came up.

  “He calls,” Edna said, shrugging. “Sometimes he comes by and eats through the whole refrigerator. Then I won’t hear from him for a while. Not for months, even.”

  “I want nothing to do with him,” my father said.
“Whatever you do, don’t give him my number. Make sure he doesn’t get in touch with me.” Edna looked disappointed but resigned and nodded her agreement. My father had stopped talking to her sometime after their mother died. It had been over ten years. It was enough for her to have us in her house. She wouldn’t push.

  I played with an electric train set in the basement with my new uncle and the younger of my two cousins. My brothers played catch with a baseball in the yard, but they seemed uncomfortable. I decided I wouldn’t be. I liked Edna and her family. They were nicer and more fun than my grandmother, even though they wore too much polyester.

  Edna telephoned a few days later. My older cousin and her fiancé wanted to invite me to Six Flags Great Adventure, just me without my brothers. My parents had what they called a “heated discussion” because my mother didn’t think this was a good idea. My father said it would be fine. I was to sleep over at Aunt Edna’s the night before so we could leave for the New Jersey amusement park first thing. I wanted to go, sort of, but when my father dropped me off, I realized I was in a house full of stranger-relatives, and I felt way too young to be navigating the situation by myself. I wasn’t sure why my parents had let me come after all.

  The following morning the park was hot, and I got a headache from the sun and the roller coasters and the candy, but my cousin and her boyfriend were good to me, buying me trinkets and letting me go on as many rides as I wanted. Still, I knew my mother looked down on this family though she was trying her best to accept them for my father’s sake. She called them low class when she thought I couldn’t hear.

  * * *

  Not long after, we went to see our great-uncle, my paternal grandmother Ruth’s brother. Ruth had come to New York before the war, but her brother, Leo, had stayed behind in Europe. A family of Polish farmers hid Leo in their barn during the Holocaust. My father called them righteous gentiles. Great-aunt Bertha, whom Leo married soon after the war, had been sent to Auschwitz, where she was, my father explained, “experimented on” by the Nazis. Because of those forced surgeries and other unimaginable abuses, Bertha suffered from psychiatric and medical issues for the rest of her life, and she and Leo weren’t able to have children. By the time we came to know them, they must have been in their sixties, though they seemed older. Bertha lived in a nursing home, where Leo faithfully visited her every day. Years before, arriving in New York, Leo had opened a small grocery, then another. My grandfather and the other brothers, whom I’d never meet, worked with (or was it for?) him. My father said there was some tension between the brothers about their business dealings. Leo was the successful one, the envied brother, but he lived simply, preferring to send money every month to the Polish family who had saved him, eventually helping some of them immigrate to America.