Guilt Edged Bonds
Introduction
When I was eight, my mother took to debriefing me each weekday after she came home from work. I was required to be home when she arrived, typically about 4:45 PM. She would sit in the big armchair at the head of the dining room table, and I would stand facing her. She would question me about all my activities from the moment she had left the apartment at about 6:30 AM until the time she returned. This interrogation took anywhere from a quarter hour to over an hour, depending mainly on how tired or cross she was. Within weeks, I learned to create a completely fictitious soap opera, vibrant with incidents and characters that had not and did not exist. I might tell her:
"After school, my friend Alan and I walked to his house. His mother had a migraine again, and she was in bed with the window-shades down. Alan heated up some tea for her, and we brought it to her on a saucer on a tray, with a napkin, a teaspoon, and a jar of honey. She had about half a cup, and then she told us to drink the rest. After a few minutes, she got up and gave us milk and cookies."
There was no Alan, no mother, etc. Actually, I probably went into the nearby woods with some friends, and we made a campfire and peed into it. If my mother had learned what I had actually done, I would have been severely punished, probably whipped with her umbrella. I was strictly forbidden to play with fire. She would have considered the sort of kids who would pee into a campfire to be too rough for her little darling (me).
However: I distinctly, vividly remember Alan and his mother. Alan's full name was Alan Idle. When we were both eight, he wore a black eye patch over his right eye to correct congenital cross-eye. His mother was a frail-looking washed-out blonde with very pale freckled skin, a thin nose, a tiny mouth, and a weak, breathless high-pitched whiny voice.
I am not sure which of my memories are true and which are false. I have reinvented myself again and again. I have had many different childhoods, many different young adulthoods. Even yesterday is highly uncertain. I am a compulsive editor. I edit fiction I read. I even edit news items. I am forever saying, "No, it didn't happen that way. I just couldn't resist adding that detail to make the story more dramatic."
So, what I narrate below is what I remember, not necessarily what actually happened. I like to say, “I have an excellent memory for facts, but many of the facts are wrong.” I have made no systematic attempt to verify what I report. However, here and there I may insert a footnote where I happen to have documentation verifying or falsifying a memory.
My Mother
Children of the Ugly Sister
My mother's mother, my grandmother, usually took care of me after my mother went back to work when I was three. She and her crazy son, my Uncle Moses, lived in the same household with us, but she and my mother were never on speaking terms. I was forbidden to have anything to do with Grandma Tsena. My mother hired live-in "maids" to take care of me and the household while she was off at work. Their turnover was rapid, because most of them were outpatients from the nearby mental hospital where anther uncle, Sam, lived. By the time I was five, when a new nursemaid appeared at our door with her pathetic cloth satchel containing her worldly goods, I had learned to say, "Hi! My name is Herbie. What's your diagnosis?" Concerning that last question, Katie, one of the earliest, was paranoid. She was the only one who took seriously my mother's command that I not go near Grandma. All the other maids were delighted to have me "visit" my grandmother. They then got paid for doing nothing. Katie was afraid my grandmother might poison me. Bessie, who came next, saw cute little fairies flitting about the house. When I was five, Eva locked me in a closet; she lied to my mother, blaming me for breaking the goldfish bowl she had broken, and she did something terrible and sexual to me that I don't remember. I remember asphyxiation, shame, and the feeling that I am yielding to a disgusting but overwhelming urge that resembles needing to defecate in my pants.
My grandmother spoke very little English, and so I became secretly bilingual, speaking Yiddish with her and English everywhere else. She actually taught me to read Yiddish when I was four, well before my mother taught me to read English. Most of what I think I know about my mother's family history I learned from my grandmother. My mother never said much, except to say that it was too horrible to talk about.
The family lived in Vaslui, a garrison town south of Iasi that guarded a ford across the Prut River that separated Romania from Russia. One summer day in roughly 1809, during the Russo-Turkish war for control of Moldavia (or possibly a bit later, in, say, 1812, when the French joined the fray), the entire family or clan had gathered at the compound of one of the wealthier members. While they were feasting and partying, enemy troops broke the town's defenses and looted the town. My grandmother believed it was French troops. They stormed into the family compound, killed all the men and boys, then raped and killed all the females except one, a three-year-old girl who crawled under an overturned laundry tub. In those days, Jews, under the Turks, had their own court and social service systems. The leaders of the town's Jewish community ruled that the little girl, as sole survivor, was the heir of all her relatives, and so she became instantly the wealthiest person in town. Thus, although they were Jewish, my mother's ancestors became de facto the town's nobility. When I was a teen-ager, there still was a statue of my grandfather in the town square, and another mad uncle, Bennie, although himself in chronic poverty, would regularly send money to Vaslui, contributions to town charities the family had traditionally supported.
My grandma, Tsena, was that little girl's granddaughter. She was the smaller, uglier, and sicklier of non-identical twin daughters. When she was born in 1860, the town physicians predicted she would never live past infancy because she had a defective heart. Later, when she surprised them by becoming a tiny but determinedly alive child, the same physicians assured the family that she would die before she became marriageable. So, there was no point wasting money on her. They made her a scullery maid, a Cinderella. Her sister, Pearl, had a French governess, private tutors, a horse. Grandma learned to read by listening near the door to her sister's lessons and stealing her sister's copy books. She grew up hating her twin. When she was nine, she tried to push her sister into the mill pond. That did not exactly improve how she got along with her parents. No one liked my grandmother, and everybody loved her sister.
Eventually, Pearl married a handsome, wealthy, well-liked member of the Jewish community’s equivalent of aristocracy. My great aunt went to live in a fine white mansion on a hill overlooking the town.
Despite her wealthy family connections, Grandma was not considered a desirable marriage candidate. She was a tiny, sallow, mean-tempered woman. My great-grandparents forced her to marry a lazy, shiftless, good-natured fool who soon afterward got himself kicked out of carpentry apprenticeship. He was never able to do serious work of any kind. A sort of Rip Van Winkle, he spent most of his time hanging out with teen-age boys, mostly playing ball and fishing. He also sang a great deal, and did have a lovely singing voice. Adding to his undesirability was a serious question about his ancestry. Though raised Jewish, he had been found in a basket outside the home of a Jewish wine-taster. However, he grew to be over six feet tall and was a pale blond.
While her husband hung around with his cronies, Grandma ran a sleazy cafe in the poor end of town near the Army camp that was the main reason the town was there.
My grandmother, despite her weak heart, had seven babies in ten years. The first six were boys. It was considered a religious obligation that a couple have at least one child of each gender. However, after the six boys, grandma got permission from the rabbi to name the seventh child “Clara,” regardless of its gender, and call it quits on childbearing. However, Mom came along, the magical seventh child.
In those days, the cafe was no place to bring up a little girl. My mother loved to tell me about how the customers tried to abuse her. When she was four years old, one of the men who hung around the bar room asked her to sit on his finger. Several other men stood around, watching and grinning. Something in the atmosphere made the little girl uncomfortable. The more they tried to bribe her with candy and money, the less willing she was to do what they wanted.
Although my grandmother didn't like her sister, she sent my mother to live in her childless sister's mansion. My mother stayed there most of the time from age four on, glad to be separated from her parents and brothers. Her father was lazy and stupid. Her mother was cross and critical. Her brothers were either mean or wimpy or crazy. Two of them died when they were still children.
When my mother was nine, on one of the rare nights she slept in her parents' home, a gang broke into her aunt's mansion. They murdered her uncle, then raped and murdered her aunt. The subsequent investigation revealed that, until she was raped, my great aunt had been a virgin. She had kept her husband's secret that he had never sexually matured. From that night on, my mother lived with her parents and brothers. Her mother never even attended her twin sister's funeral and didn't let my mother go either. My mother wasn't allowed to mourn for the woman who had taken care of her since she was four. My mother never forgave her mother for that.
After her aunt died, there was no one my mother felt close to. You probably can guess what ensued: when she grew up she married a man who was a lot like her father, although she had promised herself she would never make that mistake.
My Sister's Abortion
I was ‑‑ am ‑‑ the product of my mother's third pregnancy, and I am her second child. In 1926, three years before I was born, she had a late-term abortion. It was, of course, illegal. I think that the abortion was the most important thing that ever happened to me, even though at the time I hadn't even been conceived.
You see, my mother never forgave herself for that abortion. It affected every aspect of how I was brought up. The child she aborted was female. My mother had always longed for a daughter.
Why did she have that abortion? At the time, she and my father were separated, and my mother was working to support herself. She wasn't getting any money from my father, who was a professional gambler. At the time, she didn't even know where he was.
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Autobiography: Guilt Edged Bonds by H. G. Gerjuoy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
