Riding Fury Home (3 page)

The congeniality of their community did nothing to warm my parents' private life. They had furnished their new place in part by borrowing an interior decorator friend's professional discount to purchase a high-quality bed and couch. The bed was comfortable, but each night, they turned away from each other to sleep. After a celibate year, they decided it was time for a child, and they made the effort. Gloria became pregnant with me.

 

 

GLORIA'S YOUNGER BROTHER, Marvin, was the person she loved more than anyone else. Marvin was living an artist's life as an apprentice at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's school of architecture. Since childhood, he and my mother had been artistic oddballs. As teens they went together every week into New York City and bought cheap standing-room tickets at the Metropolitan Opera House, visited Manhattan art museums, or lined up for two-for-one tickets to the ballet and Martha Graham.

Just two weeks after giving birth, my mother left me with my father for ten days and went to visit Marvin. It was the first of her leavings of me.

Dad had just completed his PhD and was home full-time before starting a new job. He quickly learned how to diaper me, rock me, and bottle-feed me. Like a duckling, I imprinted the smell of his neck, the feel of his hands, his voice singing me lullabies.

Two months after that visit, Marvin was killed by a drunk driver. After the funeral, relatives and friends filled my grandparents' house for the week of sitting shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, but my
grandparents would not speak the name of their only son, or allow my mother to, either, as if naming him might shatter their hearts in a million pieces. The grief that filled my mother flowed through the bottle she held to my nursing mouth.

As my parents were driving home from the week of sitting shiva, my mother burst out, “Abe, you must go back to school to become an architect!” For once, my father found his voice, and refused. “Absolutely not, Gloria, that's crazy! I can't become Marvin.”

Instead, they petitioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design them a house, asking for one of his scaled-down models adapted for the middle class. They wrote to the elderly Mr. Wright using the combination of my mother's maiden name and my father's surname, in the hopes that “Bachman” would remind him of their connection to Marvin. He was absorbed in work on the Guggenheim Museum, but eventually responded to their request for a modest design, “My dear Wilsons: I suppose I am still here to try to do houses for such as you.”

When the plans arrived, my parents sent several letters, pleading for changes to make it less expensive. Finally, new plans removed a basement, and they felt they could proceed. They had already bought a plot of land in Millstone, a tiny colonial-era New Jersey town not far from American Cyanamid, the company where my father had begun work as a research chemist.

My parents hired three Italian masons, two Dutch carpenters, and a German father-son crew of electricians. They rented an apartment right around the corner from the lot. My mother did the bookkeeping for the project—switching the materials for one wall of the main living room from brick to cement blocks to fit their budget.

On nights and weekends, my father climbed a scaffold and sealed and stained the mahogany boards the carpenters had erected that day. Now and then, he paused and looked down at the two story-high
living area, overtaken by awe.
Holy shit, I'm doing this, creating a work of art! Incredible, I'm part of it!

 

 

DURING THE YEAR THE HOUSE was under construction, Gloria met with a psychiatrist. She felt hopeless with failure. Her sorrow was leaden, the weight of her disappointment like stones in her belly. As the futility of her marriage became more and more obvious—there would never be any passion—she told herself,
Let's not pretend anymore.
Since they had a child, she had no intention of leaving.

One day, she said to Abe, “Let's stay married, but live like brother and sister.”

Abe stared, mouth open, numb with hurt. The shock of this truth, so stark. A memory came to him: He was fifteen, working at Cohen's Rumanian Restaurant as a busboy, where his father worked as headwaiter. A waitress beckoned to him as he was walking past her with a tray. She leaned close and whispered, “Your mother is not so good to your father.” He understood this to mean that his mom had stopped having sex with his dad, who for years had been sleeping on the couch.

Abe thought about leaving Gloria, but he couldn't imagine losing his only child. When his mother had kicked his father out of the bedroom, his dad had stayed. The shame of his failure burned in his chest. Already withdrawn, he stayed, and retreated further.

As the construction of the house neared completion, my mother arranged to sell her sister Rita their double bed. She planned to replace the marital bed with two twins.

On moving day, my parents set up the twin beds in a house of mahogany and glass, a house of beauty and light, filled with estrangement and regret.

OUR ULTRA-MODERN HOUSE, with its flat roof—wedged between two pre-Revolutionary colonial houses—looked as out of place as my Jewish parents felt in this small town, populated largely by the Protestant descendents of Dutch settlers. Only fifty miles from teeming, multicultural Manhattan, the center of 1950s Millstone, all four blocks of it, was frozen in a colonial time warp, oblivious that it was poised on the edge of changing demographics.

Along the uneven slate sidewalks there still remained white wooden hitching posts for horses, while the town boasted the oldest working blacksmith shop in the United States. Directly across from our house on Main Street stood the Hillsborough Reformed Church. In its front yard, the town's namesake rested in the grass—a waist-high gray boulder with a hollow depression in its top for grinding grains. A bronze plaque read: “THIS MILLSTONE WAS FOUND ON THE JACOB VAN DOREN FARM 1000 FEET SOUTH OF THIS CHURCH, ON THE SITE OF A LARGE INDIAN VILLAGE.” The plaque left unnamed that village's native people, the Lenni Lenape. Of their disappearance—whether
they were massacred, relocated, or died from exposure to European germs—nothing was ever said.

 

 

IN SMALL-TOWN MILLSTONE, GOSSIP flew like dandelion spores, yet the burn of history went unspoken. My parents had purchased the vacant lot in 1953, two years before the house was built, since Frank Lloyd Wright always required that a structure be designed for its site. In Millstone, they discovered a prime lot right in the center of town. The property had a blackened hole, the charred remnants of the basement of a historic inn that had burned down in 1928.

One afternoon, several years after we moved into our house, elderly Mr. Brezniak, a Slovak, who felt a common bond with Dad as an outsider, told him the story of the old inn's fire. Dad and the old man were alone in his little grocery store, but even so, Mr. Brezniak looked out the front window to make sure no one was about to enter, and lowered his voice.

One early morning before dawn, he was driving down Main Street in his truck, loaded with vegetables that he grew on his farm on the town's outskirts. As he drove past the inn, orange flames lit the dark sky. Several men were dancing around the incinerating inn, roaring with laughter, their heads flung back. He thanked God they were too caught up to notice him witnessing their act of destruction. The vacant and decrepit inn had been bought by a Jewish couple who were renovating it. They were just about to move in and reopen the inn for business. Those men were making sure no Jews moved into town.

No one attempted to burn our house down. But one morning, during the year our house was being built, my father found these words scrawled on the dust of his trunk: “Dirty Jews—Get out of town.”

My parents never spoke to me about the hatred someone's finger had etched onto Dad's car. Just as I never told them that now and then on the school playground at recess a boy would come up to me and hiss, “You Jews killed Christ!”

We had our own defense. Unlike our neighbors' colonial houses that brightly faced the street with their open-shuttered windows, our house was set back from the road. A long curved driveway led to the front of the house, where a windowless cement-block facade squatted fortresslike against the intruding world while the back of the house opened to acres of light and green.

On that back side, an open living space was framed by a two-story wall of floor-to-ceiling glass, interspersed with several tall French doors leading to a patio. From within, the view shimmered with green foliage: A lawn edged with mulberry, apple, and pine trees sloped to a woods of tall black walnut trees, maples, and oaks. Through the middle of the woods, a path led to the river, where we had a dock and a tethered rowboat.

It was a life facing nature, turned away from community. My parents played classical music on the Heathkit record player my father had assembled. Every night, in order to go to sleep, I needed my lullaby: Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 played full blast on the living room hi-fi so I could hear it in my bedroom. I lay in bed with my door open as the record spun, washed by the rhythmic beat of the violins, their frenetic optimism lulling me.

Even at five, I sensed that we were different from our neighbors, and that difference seemed better. We were more elevated and cultured, and I felt lifted, wrapped in the protection of superiority.

We had lived in the house two years the day it all shattered. The day my mother held my father's rifle to her head and pulled the trigger.

WITH MOM GONE, EACH day after the school bus dropped me off there was a gap of two unsupervised hours before Dad arrived home from work. Dad's first attempt to cover that gap was to hire thirteen-year-old Judy Gifford to baby-sit me. It didn't last a week. For the first couple days, I went over to the Giffords' after school, but I didn't like their house because it smelled like cat pee and Judy's younger sister was mean and teased me.

Dad then said that all I had to do was stop over at the Giffords', a half-block from our house, and report to Judy my plans, and after that I was free to go home to play by myself. Although I was barely seven, having to check in with Judy offended me. If Mom wasn't there to take care of me, I would allow no one else to.
I can take care of myself,
I thought fiercely. For several days, I didn't show up at Judy's, running from the school bus straight to our backyard. She gave up the job in disgust, and my father relented.

We made a new arrangement. As soon as I got home, I went into the front hall, where the black rotary phone sat on an end table,
and called my father at the lab. Once I checked in, I would go up to my room and play with my plastic palomino horse, making up elaborate tales while I cantered him over my bedspread.

As time went on, my father arranged for me to stay after school with different families who had kids my age. For a while, I went to a family out on River Road after school, but Dad stopped letting me go there after the father was charged with shooting his rifle at some neighbor kids who were pestering him.

Over time, I stayed with quite a few families. I watched the mothers.

Ann's mom was a school bus driver. On the days I went to stay with them, after school, I boarded her mom's bus to go home with Ann instead of to my own house. Ann lived on a dairy farm out in the rolling land beyond the encroaching tract homes of Hillsborough. We would ride through the flatlands, dropping kids off at their pastel ranch homes until the bus was empty of all but Ann and me. Then it was like we got our own special ride in the big bus. I loved to watch her mom's back as she drove, the decisive pull of her shoulder and arm as she reached for the long metal handle and opened and closed the squeaky bus door.

At last, we would pull into their driveway and park the yellow bus in the roundabout in front of the barn, next to the green John Deere tractor. Ann and I spent the afternoons running and playing in the weathered red barn or in the sorghum fields behind their house.

Once, we were exploring the barn. All the cows were still out grazing in the pasture. The pungent odor of cow manure and hay filled the dimly lit barn as we clambered among the metal milking stations. I climbed up on top of a metal gate. I sat on the top bar, one leg dangling on each side, and then I looked down, anticipating
my descent. It seemed so high up. “Ann,” I whimpered, “I'm stuck! I can't get down.”

“Aw, come on,” Ann replied, squinting up at me.

I started to cry. “Go get your mom, get her!”

I can still remember her mom's arms reaching up to grab me down, the salty smell of her neck as I clung to her chest, my legs around her waist. The feel of her hand, gently patting my back. “See, you're fine now.”

 

 

THE SCHMITZ GIRLS, all four of them, had long hair, and they all wore it in the same style: parted in the middle with a single long braid dangling down their back. They were a big family—four girls and one boy—and we loved to play hide-and-seek and tag in the woods behind their house.

Sometimes, I stayed overnight. I shared a lower bunk bed with Nancy, who was my age. In the morning, Mrs. Schmitz placed a stool in the middle of the living room. One by one, she called each daughter in turn. They sat on the stool while their mother combed their hair with a bristly brush. First, Mrs. Schmitz would brush the hair, then carefully divide it in three sections, braid the three plaits together, and secure the end with a stretchy band with two colored balls attached. I watched from the living room doorway, my chest tight, silenced and riveted by the crackle of static and the repeated strokes of mothering.

 

 

MY SITUATION WAS TABOO IN so many ways: a mother gone, and what had happened to her. I talked about it at first. Once, standing next to the metal jungle gym at recess, I repeated to a girl
what Dad had told me. I told her matter-of-factly, “My mom's in a hospital, but it's not her body that's sick, it's her head. The doctors are fixing her.” She stared at me, her eyes wide, mouth open. I felt I'd made some terrible mistake. A chill of shame overcame me: Mom's condition was not like having a broken leg; something bad was wrong with her.