Alligator Candy

For Jonathan Kushner

I shall tell you everything, my son. You have the right to know. And besides, you are aware of it all. Where you are, only truth matters, nothing else exists.

—Elie Wiesel,
The Fifth Son

M
Y LAST MEMORY
of my brother Jon was my most suspect. It was October 28, 1973, and we were on the sidewalk outside our house. I was a stocky four-year-old with a brown bowl haircut, and Jon, wiry and lean with wavy red hair, was eleven. Earlier that year, we'd moved to this small ranch house with a red Spanish-style roof in Tampa, Florida. It was the northern edge of the burgeoning suburbs, a new home on the newest street by the woods. For the kids in the neighborhood, the woods represented the great unknown, a thicket of freedom, a mossy maze of cypress and palms begging to be explored. Kids ventured into there on horseback, barefoot, on bikes. They had worn a path to the 7-Eleven convenience store across the woods, and that's where Jon was heading this day.

Jon straddled his red bicycle, aiming for the trees. These were the
Easy Rider
years, and boys' bikes were designed to resemble motorcycles, the kinds we'd see driven around town by Hells Angels. Jon's bike had a long red banana-shaped seat, shiny chrome upright handlebars, and fat tires. For added effect, kids would tape a playing card in the back spokes to sound like a motorcycle when the tire spun. They'd lower their heads, extend their arms, and hunch their backs as they pedaled, visions of Evel Knievel in their minds.

My parents had given Jon a green ten-speed Schwinn for his birthday in September, but for some reason he decided to ride his old one this morning. Maybe he wanted something more rugged for the woods or just wanted to take one more spin on his old bike before retiring it. He wore a brown muscle shirt and cutoff blue jean shorts embroidered with a patch from his day camp, Camp Keystone. His sneakers were red, white, and blue Hush Puppies. I could tell by the way his feet bobbed on the pedals that he was anxious to leave.

“You're going to forget,” I told him.

“I'm not,” he replied.

“I know you are.”

“I won't.”

“Let me go with you.”

“You can't. You're too young.”

I wanted something specific from the store: Snappy Gator Gum. It wasn't just gum, it was a toy. The gum came packed in the mouth of a plastic alligator head that opened and closed when you squeezed the neck. I had to have it and didn't want anything to get in the way.

“What if it rains?” I asked Jon. I was thinking about an afternoon at our last house, when Jon had biked to a store shortly before a torrential Florida downpour. I remembered standing next to my mom in the kitchen when Jon called, and my mom telling me that we had to go pick him up in the station wagon because he was, as she said, “caught in the rain.” I hadn't heard that phrase before, and it struck me as strange. I pictured Jon literally caught in the rain, stuck in suspended animation, hovering in a cage of falling drops.

“If it rains I'll call,” he promised.

“Call me anyway when you get there,” I said, “so I can remind you what I want.”

“Fine.”

Jon grabbed the handlebars and pedaled quickly down the sidewalk toward the woods. I watched him ride off, still wishing I could go along. I never saw him again. It would take decades to unravel what happened. But my search would always lead me back to this spot.

L
IKE MOST
parents at the time, my father and mother, Gilbert and Lorraine, didn't worry about Jon riding off into the woods alone. They were raising their children—Jon and me and our thirteen-year-old brother Andy—in a different age and a different spirit than the one in which I'm now raising my own.

It was the early seventies. The Age of Aquarius had given way to the “Free to Be You and Me” generation. We were unbuckled and unrestrained, free from seat belts or helmets or meticulously organized playdates. Our parents let us climb over the seats of our smoke-filled station wagon, puffing on candy cigarettes and, on road trips, sleeping way in the back. When we had a stretch of hours to play, they let us put the free in free time, wandering off to learn and explore and find adventures. They shared our innocence. They hadn't learned to be afraid.

My dad had been fending for himself since his early days in the Bronx. He grew up poor with his mother, Sarah, and older sister, Esther, after his father, Abraham, died of malaria when he was nine. But my dad, who was born two and half months premature in 1933 and narrowly missed being smashed by a falling tree branch one day in his stroller, was a scrappy survivor. Weaned on stickball and Woody Guthrie, he was exacting but sensitive, musical and argumentative, a tall, bearded intellectual in black-rimmed glasses. He prided himself on being a tough New York Jew, born in the Bronx but raised for a time in Palestine, where his father worked as a contractor and his cousin was the second prime minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett.

Dad played folk songs in Greenwich Village and, skipping a grade, studied his way up the ranks of two of the city's most competitive schools: the Bronx High School of Science, and City College of New York. It was at CCNY where he discovered anthropology, a burgeoning social science that was not just a career but also, as he often told me, a way of looking at the world, participating and observing. Perhaps it had something to do with how displaced he felt after his father suddenly died at sea. My dad told me he had no memories of his life before the year his father died. The traumatic loss had somehow erased his data. Anthropology allowed him to explore a fundamental question of his life: how the culture of a people, particularly oppressed peoples, survives.

One night in 1958 at a party while completing his master's in anthropology at the University of Arizona, a young woman asked him for a light, and he decided he couldn't survive without her. Her name was Lorraine, a raven-haired Minneapolitan with movie star looks who was passing through on her way to California. Rainy, as she was known by family and friends, was the youngest of three children of a successful attorney, Sam, and a homemaker, Ann.

She'd become enamored of jazz music and, while working at a jazz record distribution company, befriended many artists and musicians (including pianist Dave Brubeck, who dedicated his song “Sweet Lorraine” to her when he was playing in town). This world of music and adventure appealed to her more than the provincial life at the University of Minnesota and so, at the age of twenty-four, she left for California, where a friend and a new future awaited.

The wonderful thing about chasing freedom—whether on a bus to California or a bike through the woods—is that you never know what you will find. What my mother found, during a stop in Tucson to stay with her brother's family, was my dad. Meeting him at the party, he seemed exotic yet familiar, a New York intellectual who knew both union songs and the best place in town for bagels. Now that he was in the Southwest, my dad had taken to faded jeans and turquoise belt buckles, the folk songs of Mexican singer Miguel Aceves Mejia, and looked like a beatnik cowboy. They fell hard, and quickly, harmonizing together as my dad strummed Pete Seeger songs on his nylon-stringed guitar. He confessed that a mutual friend had told him that if he ever met Rainy from Minneapolis, they would get married. Just a week after meeting, he got down on one knee and proposed.

Together they sang folk songs in living room hootenannies and, after moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where my dad was in graduate school, joined early civil rights sit-ins. Freedom and revolution were in the air, and Dad cut a single of the mountain ballad “Old Joe Clark” with a buddy under the name Mike and Gil from Chapel Hill. In 1960, while pregnant with her first child, my mother turned her activism to women's rights—particularly, the rights of mothers and families in childbirth. At the time, mothers were being drugged in delivery rooms, their husbands banned from entering, and their babies born limp from the anesthetic. The doctors prided themselves on delivering quiet, albeit sedated, babies.

But my mom saw another way, when she read a book published in 1959 called
Thank You, Dr. Lamaze
. It described a technique—popularized by a French obstetrician, Fernand Lamaze, in Europe—that taught women to breathe their way through delivery in lieu of sedation. In America, it was still a relatively unknown and radical method.

For Andy's birth, my mom refused anesthetic and breathed through the labor, just as she had taught herself to do. “I know what you're doing,” her doctor told her. “Keep it up.” Empowered, she decided to take on the largely conservative birth industry—which favored speedy and predictable deliveries—by teaching women how to enjoy and experience on their own what at the time was called “natural childbirth.”

The next year, she and my dad were on a boat with one-year-old Andy, bound for Israel, where my dad had arranged to research and write his PhD dissertation on Jews who had emigrated from the Cochin region of India. They moved into a small, bare concrete home with an outhouse and no hot water. It was in Mesilat Zion, a moshav—a cooperative agricultural community. The Cochin embraced the young family like their own. For my parents, it was a magical time of new experiences and adventure. My father spent his days researching and writing; my mother, tending to Andy and visiting with relatives. There in Israel, they conceived their second child, Jonathan.

A
NDY WAS
only two years older than Jon, an age difference that, as most siblings know, is both a blessing and a curse. You're close enough in age to be friends, sharing common references and interests. But you're also close enough to be rivals. In the early years following Jon's birth, however, the sibling rivalries were still far away. Instead, Andy and Jon enjoyed the playfulness of camaraderie amid the excitement of a young family still finding its roots.

At first, it seemed that the roots might lead them back to Tucson. After finishing his PhD research in Israel and teaching briefly at the University of Houston, my father had planned to return to complete his PhD at Chapel Hill. My dad had always been outspoken about his support of Israel and, while at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, butted heads with a powerful, anti-Israel professor. The next thing my dad knew, he was informed that he couldn't come back. Devastated and angry, he told my mother he was considering giving up his pursuit of the PhD and just settling for his master's. But my mother reassured him that he'd survive, and thrive. “You can't quit,” she said. “You have to keep going. Don't let this stop you.” So he didn't. A mentor of his at the University of Arizona, Edward Spicer, encouraged him to finish his PhD there.