Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (25 page)

A week later, as I shimmied into the dress David bought me, I realized that I’d fallen in love. David could tell me he loved me so easily, but those words conjured fear in me. That night on the dance floor he pressed his cheek to mine, posing for a photo with the satirically somber face of a man leading his partner in a tango. My expression could have been the same one I wore at age ten when I’d faced the sign at the crest of the rollercoaster:
Hold your h
ats!

From their table behind us, Colette and James, who had started dating, cheered us on. James and I were both in better hands now. I would not only survive college; I’d come away with fond memories of it.

CHAPTER 17

Ancestral Knowledge

O
n a Sunday afternoon that same spring, David drove his Toyota at a hectic pace, taking a pothole rather hard on the highway north to my parents’ house. “Are you nervous?” I asked.

“Not a bit,” he said, squeezing my left hand.

My parents’ new house, a replica of one in Colonial Williamsburg, fit into a hill, so that it was three stories on the back, a Cape Cod on the front. This neighborhood was known for its Protestant roots and lately its Jewish families. It was the perfect place for my parents to rebuild their lives.

The entry was a sight more welcoming than our last house, where toddlers had been known to jet down the driveway on scooters into traffic. At this house you were greeted by a border of peonies and a white picket gate set into stone pillars with urns spilling impatiens. I poked my head in the back door to find Mom at the kitchen counter slashing a head of lettuce with a steak knife. She’d never bothered with proper kitchen tools.

“Mom,” I said, stepping inside, “this is David.”

She set the knife down by her martini, wiped her hands on the gingham apron I’d made as a Girl Scout, and as she shook his hand she offered David a drink.

“Scotch on the rocks.” He sounded relieved. “Please.”

I tried not to look worried while I searched for my father, who had been displaced from his reading spot at the old kitchen table, which was now downstairs in what was a party room for the grandchildren. From the dining room, Mom eyed David suspiciously as she poured a drink from the bar she’d set up in a dry sink. Her antiques gave this house the feel of a roadside tavern from a couple of centuries back. Dressed in slacks and a sweater, her town-and-country look, she seemed an average suburban homemaker. Her hair was neither the lacquered crown from the sixties nor the Joan-of-Arc from her Catholic-vigilante phase. Now it was a smart cut, no fuss, and without any gray—no coloring, she was always quick to point out. After she handed David his drink, she got right to the point. “David, you’re in medical school, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell me this. Is my grandpa Bruehl still hanging in the lobby?”

“What are you talking about?” I said to Mom. Was she going to bring up some embarrassing family history?

She acted as if she hadn’t said anything. Again I wished Dad would show his face, but he was hiding on the sofa downstairs among the middle school kids and a handful of grandchildren. From down there a television blared, a pinball machine rang bells and flapped oars, a ball slammed a wall, a baby cried, another child laughed, someone scolded him, and all that was capped off by Dad’s snoring.

I leaned into the kitchen counter. Mom had never mentioned this grandpa Bruehl. Would this story involve a hobo?

“Your mother’s talking about those portraits in the med school lobby,” said David. “I guess her grandfather is one of those guys.”

“Have you seen him?” asked Mom. She poked David hard on the shoulder and said, “Gustav Bruehl?”

“Huh?” I asked.

“Sure, I’ve seen him,” said David. “He was one of the founders of the medical school.”

“What?” I directed this question to Mom, who now fingered the shreds of lettuce like confetti. She’d never mentioned this grandfather. “Mom, is this true? Gustav Bruehl, who is
he
?”

She shrugged. “He’s my mother’s daddy ... Or he might have been her grandpa.”

I wondered how she could not know whether he was Ida’s father or grandfather when our father’s family history was constantly brought up by our grandmother Katie. At her house, Katie frequently whipped out a black-and-white photo of a woman with a beehive hairdo, heavy black-framed glasses, and a tragic smile. She’d say, “This is my cousin Joan,” before fixing her eyes on me and adding, “Spitting image of you, Eileen.”

Now Mom was feeding David and me the same line she always gave me: “My mother died when Kevin was a baby. Ida Bruehl Fanger.”

“I know all about Ida,” I said, before she could launch into the saint story. “But why didn’t you tell us about your grandfather?”

“You eat steak, don’t you?” Mom asked David, changing the subject.

T
he meal itself was uneventful. Afterward, Dad slipped away as quickly as possible. He still hated making small talk with boyfriends. I came into the kitchen from clearing the table to find Mom and David like roommates, hip to hip at the sink, giggling while they washed the dishes. Suddenly and awkwardly, Mom turned to him, staring right into his eyes, and said, “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You are?” This had never occurred to me. I would not have even thought to ask. What prompted Mom to ask David? It occurred to me that she might even ask if we were sleeping together, so I said we had to get back to school and left.

In the car, I wondered what my mother would think about David’s religion. To me, having a Jewish boyfriend was almost as exciting as going away to college. Anyway, the world had moved on from Ricky and Lucy. In 1980, even
Bridget Loves Bernie
was passé. But not to my family, nor to me. I still swooned every time I saw the Bernie character in later roles.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were Jewish?” I asked.

“I’m not that observant.” We were both silent a while before he added, “You have this HUGE Catholic family. I guess I didn’t want to make an issue of it. It’s not an issue for me.”

“Okay,” I said. “I get it.” I certainly didn’t enjoy when people identified me by my legs, nor did I enjoy being called out on the size of my family. Those were in fact two points that I’d worried about with regard to his family.

“Is this going to bother your family?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, sincerely believing it. How could my family not love anyone who loved me so much? “Well,” I added, “it’s never come up before. We don’t even know any Jewish people.” My parents had moved to a neighborhood with many Jewish families, but they made their new friends through the Catholic school and the church.

I was hung up on the question of how my mother had guessed David’s religion. This would hound me over the years, as more questions would follow. For instance, why had Mom never mentioned her grandfather’s achievements? She had every reason to throw them in our grandmother’s face. Katie boasted that she was related to Oliver Ellsworth, a drafter of the Constitution, and Ephraim Ellsworth, an advisor to Lincoln. “Oh really, Katie?” Mom would say. Then she’d mutter under her breath, “Were those the same Ellsworths who ended up in that igloo in Minnesota?” Katie never even blinked at Mom’s jabs. Instead she’d calmly insist that Mom had her own ancestry all wrong. “A common mistake,” she’d say.

But what did Mom know about Jewish people? Why did Mom always say that “all doctors are Jewish”? Was her grandfather Jewish? Was this why we didn’t know any of Ida Bruehl’s family?

Then there was the bantering on our screened-in porch almost every Sunday for years, as Katie claimed her Ellsworth ancestry. After practically declaring that she had been born on the
Mayflower
, she’d say to Mom, “Joy, you’re not German. Your mother was Alsatian.” And she’d turn to Grandpa. “Don’t you agree, Charles? Didn’t Ida
look
Alsatian? Those dark features?”

Mom refused to go along with it. “No, Katie. That’s not it at all. I’m German on both sides.”

“French, Joy. A common mistake. Alsatians are French, not German. Your mother was Alsatian.”

“I know what my own mother was, and my mother was German! Ida Bruehl was German through and through and, by the way, I never even heard of this I’ll-saint-ya place.”

At this point, we kids would burst out in laughter from behind the Dutch door. Then we skittered away. Until now that argument had seemed as ludicrous as I’ll-saint-ya. I’d assumed Katie’s insistence on this French heritage came from an anti-German sentiment left over from the war. Now I wondered if Katie was spinning Mom’s possible Jewish roots into Alsatian ancestry.

Many years later, I researched Gustav Bruehl’s biography and found in him an ancestor anyone would be proud to claim. His name is spelled as Bruehl or Bruhl, even Brhl, in the records I found, but all have the same history. He was born in Hersdorf, Prussia, in 1826 and came to the United States in his twenties after earning degrees in medicine, philosophy, and history. As a physician, he performed the first laryngoscopy in Cincinnati, but he was known around the world for his contributions to anthropology, ethnology, and archeology. He studied the remains of indigenous cultures from Alaska to Peru and wrote a book,
Die Kulturvölker
Alt
-
Amerikas
, still in print, in which he claimed that the indigenous Americans first greeted the Spanish interlopers as gods. In his dissertation on “The Pre-Columbian Origin of Syphilis,” he concluded that Columbus’s team brought syphilis to Europe from the New World. This theory, which was met with both condemnation and acclaim, is still debated. He also excavated the remains of an American Indian tribe buried in southern Ohio. After examining the skulls, he determined that this tribe had not perished from fever but had been attacked by blows to the head with instruments of blunt force, probably in their sleep.

Gustav was also a poet. Under the pseudonym Kara Giorg, a tribute to the Serbian warrior “Black George,” he published five volumes of poetry in German. He took an interest in public education and was the first president of the Peter Claver Society for the Education of Negro Children.

I was not able to determine Gustav Bruehl’s religious background, but he came to Cincinnati in the 1840s when an influx of Jewish immigrants fled persecution in Germany, including Isaac M. Wise. Wise and his contemporaries opened the Reform Temple in Cincinnati, which then had one of the highest populations of Jewish citizens in the United States. The city became home to Hebrew Union College.

Was Gustav a Jewish immigrant who converted to Catholicism instead of launching the Reform Temple with the others? Some Jewish immigrants in Cincinnati made that switch. I’ve asked Mom if Gustav was a convert, and she has neither denied nor confirmed it. Instead she said, “Did I say he was my grandfather? Maybe he was a great-grandfather, or an uncle.” After some research I found that Gustav was Mom’s great-grandfather. Mom inherited his walking stick, a black cane with a carved gilt head, which she has passed on to Ted.

I was never able to confirm whether Gustav was Jewish, but I did find a reference to a marriage certificate for another Gustav Bruehl in the Jewish Records Index in Poland.

Maybe family history is made only of the parts we remember or choose to believe. But what happens to the part we ignore? Does it vanish? Or is it announcing itself everywhere we go? Could it become the story that everyone else knows about us and we are the last to find out?

CHAPTER 18

Swan Song

A
fter pushing through the heavy brass doors of the Dixie Terminal, a building with marble walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings, I was plunged into humidity so thick that my cotton dress instantly stuck to my back. This was the last day of my job in the summer of 1980, and I would leave the next day for Buffalo, where David was working in a hospital.

I’d worked as an account rep in a recruiting business downtown, which meant that I spent the whole day on the telephone drumming up jobs for people, and it was not easy given the recession. Because of my habit of people-watching, I enjoyed commuting from my parents’ house to downtown on the bus, but the ride was about an hour long and involved a tiresome walk home. I wasn’t halfway to the bus stop when I stepped into a phone booth and called the house.

At the time, Mom and Dad were on a ranch outside Las Vegas with Dad’s brother and other car dealers. This was part of my parents’ victory tour, having survived their separation and coming close to the end of their parental responsibilities. The difficult years were almost behind them. Together they were on the verge of finally becoming Dick and Joy, jetsetters.

In their absence, my brothers and I enjoyed being the oldest kids at home, throwing impromptu pool parties, grilling steaks, and holding our own cocktail hour. I couldn’t wait to dive into the pool. “Come on, come on,” I said, praying that one of my brothers would pick up. Finally Frank answered.

“Please come and get me,” I said. “I can’t take the heat on the bus tonight.”

“Where are you?” he asked, only slightly put out. I heard him grab the keys, unlike what Ted might have done. Ted, who was now calling himself a Marxist, would have said, “You’re not above the working class, Looney. Ride the bus.”

Within twenty minutes, Frankie arrived on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in the Beetle with its top down. He’d never looked so good. Clear skies reflected off the silver car, tinting his hair blue. I tossed my purse in the back, and if I could have I would have leapt over the door. On the highway, we cranked up the stereo.

We were both celebrating. Recently turned twenty-one, Frank was completely in love with his first girlfriend. Having gone on exactly two dates in high school, both awkward, he had recoiled from girls. Our family read that as a sign that he was surely our priest. Then, on a spring break in Florida with Stilts and the Taylor brothers, he met Sarah Jane from St. Louis. For two years now he and Sarah Jane had traveled between cities. She was expected to arrive in a few days and Frank was happy.