“I had a lot on my plate having them sick for a long time.”
“You took care of them? That must have been very difficult.”
“It was! Of course it was. I wish someone would ask if I needed something instead of always asking if they could have something from me.”
“Is there anything I can do for you, Teresa?” I stuttered. “I would love to help in some way.”
“Just leave me alone.”
I couldn’t make much sense of what she’d told me, all I knew for sure was Roman eventually caused his second family as much pain as his first.
I spent a few more days speaking with some of my parents’ roommates, walking around my mother’s old neighborhood and the University of Chicago campus with her friend Chip, then ended the trip with my friends Chris and Meredith. Meredith, a midwife, was working an overnight shift when I arrived.
Chris was one of my most important friends. I spoke to plenty of people more than I spoke to him, but I spoke to few people as eagerly. Sometimes we avoided calling each other because we knew we’d talk for hours. When he still lived in New York, he’d often bring a list of things we needed to discuss to whatever bar or restaurant we met at. We never got through it. Once, we both admitted that we didn’t know how we’d felt about something until we discussed it with each other. We enjoyed sharing the new developments of our lives as much as discussing events from the past, revisiting favorite stories about awkward parties and weirdos we’d dated until events from each other’s history became part of our own. As we launched into this familiar pattern, I realized we were mimicking my mother’s behavior that I’d so often complained about. Telling and retelling stories we knew by heart. I did it because it felt so good. It reaffirmed my bonds with people, explained what we had and where we’d been. But my mother’s were most often sad. She’d been touching a wound to remind herself who she was.
I told him everything I’d learned—my mother’s traumatic birth, her molestation—as he doted on me, serving me braised pork and custom cocktails. I explained that I was starting to understand the neediness I’d observed in her when I was a child. My grandmother’s devotion wasn’t enough. Roman’s flight left a cavity that couldn’t be filled by other people’s love or traveling the globe. I was still dealing with issues from my own childhood; hers must have haunted her as well. But I hadn’t ever understood that; being my mom meant she was supposed to be perfect.
I was more affected by hearing her stories from other people than I’d ever been by her own telling, and by the ones she’d never shared with me. Without her insistence that I view her as a victim, I could see her as a person who’d experienced an enormous amount of loss and be furious at myself for not being sympathetic when she needed me to be.
Chris told me that he and Meredith were going away for the weekend, and I asked if I could stay at their house while they were gone. I was driving to Minnesota in a few days, and when Chris said yes, I lied to Chrissy and Arlene and told them I was leaving early. By this point, I couldn’t handle more stories or sorrow. I wanted to be alone, enclosed by silence.
I’d been filled up with so much information but felt empty, pressed flat and thin by a weight bearing down on my body. I padded through Chris and Meredith’s house, foraged for food in the fridge, popped Klonopin, watched hours of Netflix, and poured myself drink after drink.
My last night, I saw I was dirty and disheveled; I looked like my mother. Her pain hurt me so much that I’d needed to turn the world, and my brain, off. For so long, I’d considered her weak, but simply hearing of her burdens and horrors had caused me to take to bed for days and drunkenly hope that tomorrow wouldn’t come.
My parents met in 1964 on a bus from Chicago to Washington, D.C., which had been chartered by the University of Chicago, when my mom was a freshman and my dad was in his second year of graduate school.
He was already sitting on the bus when she arrived, escorted by Helen; my mother was still living at home because the dorms were too expensive. As she boarded, her mom loudly reminded her to call once she got to D.C. and to be safe. My mother took the seat behind my father and returned her mother’s wave with a sigh.
They were only a block into the trip when he turned to her and started flirting. “Be safe,” he teased. “Don’t talk to strangers.”
She rolled her eyes and told him that she was going to D.C. because she figured the city would soon be her home. She was majoring in political science and hoped she’d get a job in Washington after she graduated, one that might lead to something at the United Nations or in the foreign service. Blushing, she confessed that she was on her first big trip. She’d never even been out of the Midwest and was just as excited to see the mountains they’d be passing on the drive as the city’s famous sites. She’d never seen mountains before.
My father was charmed by her eagerness, but he explained that she wouldn’t be seeing any mountains on that trip. The bus would be far beyond them by sunrise.
She was disappointed, but said she’d see them another time.
“You’re very brave,” he said. “Traveling to a new place on your own.”
She asked if there was something she should be afraid of.
He said there wasn’t, then asked, “Is someone whisking you away when you arrive?”
She laughed. His interest gave her confidence. There wasn’t. What about him? Would a motorcade be waiting for him outside of the bus station?
He said no, he wasn’t even staying in D.C. but was continuing on to Baltimore. He told my mom he was visiting friends from college, but that wasn’t the truth. He was going to see an old flame, one he was still pining after.
She listed the places she planned to see over the weekend, then the ones she hoped to see during her life: the Parthenon, Germany, and the Great Wall of China. She felt suffocated and stuck in Chicago, and was determined to have a life full of movement and freedom.
My father told her he’d been born in Ukraine and moved to America when he was eight. He’d seen lots of Europe, though he didn’t remember much of it. There were many places he wanted to see as well; that’s why he’d switched his major from premed to business while he was at Johns Hopkins, and was now working toward a joint JD/MBA. That was the best path for a career in international business.
They smiled at each other, recognizing shared interests and motivations. They wanted similar things and were determined to get them.
My mother gave in to her tiredness first. She made a bed for herself using her sweater as a pillow and her coat as a blanket. My father stayed awake as the other students followed her into sleep. The hum of conversation was replaced by the heavy breathing of the passengers and the growl of the engine.
People were moaning for coffee when my mother woke up. She was looking out the window at the gray of the approaching city when my dad placed a piece of paper on her lap. The side facing her was blank. When she flipped it over, she saw he’d drawn a picture of mountains, a range that filled the entire page and seemed to continue beyond it.
My parents didn’t tell me how they met. I constructed the above from what they’d told their friends and family. It was an auspicious beginning to their relationship. My mother wanted to see the world, and my father had done what he could to show it to her.
What did they see when they first looked at each other? My father’s hair was black, his skin olive. His hooded eyes were magnified by thick glasses. My mother’s long platinum hair shone from constant brushing. She tried to deflect attention from her sharp chin and crummy teeth by penciling in her eyebrows, which were fair and sparse. She made the blue of her eyes pop by packing matching shadow onto her lids.
My mother had gotten into the University of Chicago on a scholarship and was still finding her footing. I imagined her feeling overwhelmed when she walked its storied campus. Her Catholic-school education was less rigorous than that of many of h
er peers. Their parents were lawyers and professors, not factory workers who didn’t finish high school. But Helen’s expectations were as high as anyone else’s, and my mom planned to surpass them.
My father was in graduate school and on a path that seemed long and clear. Sylvia told me that my mother liked that he was in law school and that he was older. His age and intellect probably made him more attractive than the guys my mother sat next to in class.
At school, she was surrounded by young women like herself, whose ambitions were much bigger than the opportunities available to them. Like her friends, she didn’t intend to work hard and prove she was as capable as any man, only to graduate and stand behind one as a wife or a secretary. If she met someone she wanted to marry in college, he would be someone who expected great things from her as well as from himself, and wouldn’t place his career before hers.
My mother moved into the dorm her second year, and her roommates became lifelong friends. Knowing how gregarious my mother was, I asked her college roommate Linda how much they goofed around, talked about boys or movies or music. She said, “We had really heavy-duty discussions, we didn’t gossip. We talked about ideas. We had so much work, and we always had to read stacks of books and write treatises and essays. It was amazing we survived.”
When I asked my father’s friends and roommates to tell me what he was like at that time, I always heard the word “serious” first. They said that sure, everyone at the University of Chicago was serious, but my father was even more so. He socialized occasionally, but was mostly a loner. He’d hung a sign above his desk that said, “Once in a while I want to be with a smart person, myself.”
My parents started hanging out once they returned to campus, meeting often in the library since they both had so much work. “They were doing their little mating dance between the stacks,” Sylvia explained. After they’d been dating for a few months, my mother returned late to her dorm and told Linda that when she’d met my father that night, “There was a glow on his face. He looked so happy to see me. I knew he loved me.”
She spent more time with his friends than he did with hers. My father loosened up around her, talked and joked more. Even if he was quiet, he appeared to enjoy watching her socialize, and admired how she’d jump into conversations and hold her own on political theory, current events, and art. No one seemed to think anything of their age difference; it was common for graduate students to date undergrads. “However much younger she was,” one of his roommates told me, “she was clearly his intellectual equal. He wouldn’t have been attracted to her if she hadn’t been mature and capable of matching his intelligence.”
They were a striking couple. The girlfriend of one of my father’s friends told me, “Your mother and father were such an interesting contrast in appearance. Your mother was very beautiful, so blond and fair. Your father was dark.” He was serious and focused, while she was “lively and witty, and spoke beautifully. Your mother just sparkled.”
My father proposed in 1965, almost two years after they met. He was in his last year of graduate school and was moving to Boston to begin a three-year training program at the Bank of Boston. They decided my mother would finish her degree in three years instead of four, so she could join him. Knowing that my mother had been hoping to work in D.C. or for the UN, I wondered if moving to Boston for my father’s career was a difficult decision. But none of her friends said that she’d expressed such concerns, only that she was worried about the extra work that graduating early would entail.
A new job, a new city, rushing to finish college early—these were exciting inconveniences. They believed they could weather them together and worried about a far bigger obstacle to their future: my father’s parents.
His parents would have been disappointed with any partner who wasn’t Ukrainian, but they were furious that my mother was Polish. That was far worse to them than the fact that she was from a poor, single-parent family. They raged at my dad and demanded he call off the engagement. It didn’t matter that my mom’s family hadn’t lived in Poland for two generations; her people had been terrible to theirs. Neither of them were surprised by this reaction—they hadn’t approved of my mother when she was his girlfriend—but they were hurt. The rabid opposition of his parents didn’t make any sense to my mom. Her background should have been as irrelevant to them as it was to her.
My dad begged her to be patient and asked that she try to understand his parents’ perspective. One evening, her friend Chip found my mother dozing off over a large book in the library. When he asked what she was reading, she showed him the cover—an encyclopedia of Ukrainian history.
My parents spoke of their dreams, where they wanted to live, work, and travel, but I learned from my father’s friends that he interrupted these fantasies with two stipulations. The first was that they’d raise their children as Ukrainians. He was willing to defy his parents by marrying her, but his Ukrainian identity was as important to him as it was to them. The second was that she’d let him “go back and contribute” to Ukraine if he was given the chance. It may have been easy, even romantic, for my mother to agree to these conditions. Raising their future kids as Ukrainian sounded exotic, and she assumed that he’d never have a chance to act on his duty toward his homeland. No one expected Ukraine to ever gain independence.
After they got engaged, my mom went to Europe for the summer to study German. My dad decided he’d meet her when her courses finished so they could take their first big trip together. While they were apart, they sent each other letters full of longing multiple times a week.
I have just finished a most hectic evening working on one of my papers, but I just have to stop and think a bit about my dearest scrump. Just the thought makes everything much more pleasant. Thinking about you sweetie, I fly away to Austria and sit beside you and together with you drink in all of the wondrous things that make life and the world around us so exhilarating.
In Europe, my mother was in places she’d always fantasized about. Simply walking down the street made her euphoric. The “kindness, warmth, and hospitality” of her host family, and the “mountains consumed in clouds and the greenness of the countryside” were so overwhelming that one day, as she returned from mass, she started crying. “I just could not contain it all and was just weeping as I was walking—everything and everyone is just too beautiful for words.”
She missed my dad as much as he missed her. “You’re so wonderful, darling. I love you and appreciate you so. I really believe all my experiences, all the people I meet, every one now culminates in you.”
These were the letters that shook me when I was cleaning out my mother’s house. I’d been so convinced that they’d never been in love, but the passion I found in their letters was undeniable, enviable. My parents were intoxicated and confident; each new declaration was more emphatic than the last.
Their fevers were interrupted with conversations about my dad’s parents’ continued anger. After visiting them over the Fourth of July, he wrote,
My mother is quite committed to seeing that I’m happy, even though she may be not too happy with my decision. My father, however, is unapproachable. I’m becoming more and more convinced we ought to go off and elope.”
My mother’s response was composed over multiple days, and included attempts at German, stories of dancing and drinking and problems with her camera. When she reached the topic of his parents, she was firm but diplomatic.
It’s still difficult for me to understand your family. How can your father be ‘unapproachable’? Doesn’t he appreciate you as another man, and can’t you speak to each other as such? How, love, can you maintain such a patient attitude?
He countered,
You suggest that I am too patient. I have not been very patient and my earlier discussions of this subject at home have produced bitter arguments. I would certainly be much happier if my parents approved but if you are suggesting that I can force my parents to
change their opinions simply on the basis of the fact that I think I am right, then I think you are being somewhat unrealistic.
After defending himself, he softened his tone.
My only concern is whether you are willing to accept the fact that they are and probably will be for some time opposed to our marriage, even after the fact. I would hope that if our love is strong then their oppositions will have no effect on your happiness with me. Therefore, I ask you to please accept their opposition as something which is a product of many things neither of us can perhaps fully understand. I ask you to love me, to make your happiness with me—in the end everything else will turn out right.
His letters usually included instructions for how she should handle potential suitors. He insisted that she tell “any fresh Austrian or other Salzburg Institute inhabitant to go out and yodel in the traffic, or under a snow avalanche.” A few weeks later, he said, “I know you must be knocking them dead…make sure the old (and young) lechers stay their distance, remind them that nothing is more violent than the wrath of a Cossack.” These comments were more playful than possessive, but the distance probably made him insecure. He knew the men she was meeting might be as taken with her as he was.
I was awed by the strength of my father’s feelings, their colors and fire. My mother’s wild emotions, her love of the world and him, seemed to give him the opportunity to share parts of himself that he’d kept hidden. Quiet for so long, he now composed letters full of poetry. I read them again and again, spellbound by their beauty. My mother must have done the same.
Your leaving didn’t fully hit me at first…I walked among the columns on the lower level of the campus and then out into Halsted. I walked up that street—past the interchange at Congress, whirring with traffic even on a quiet Sunday afternoon,—the pigeons were more interesting than the cars,—I walked up Halsted, looked into Greek shop-windows, into the bars, at the blank, reddened faces of the men that frequent the vacant lots, alleys and curbs of the areas. I turned onto Madison and just walked. I didn’t show much emotion, I don’t know if I really cared, I just walked, they just stood, slept, stared blankly, no one really saw anyone, I just walked. I really didn’t lose my composure until I had reached closer to lopping Madison, those blocks just before you reach Canal. I guess there is only so much that you can passively accept—out of the corner of your eye, on those side streets, those buildings just behind that vacant lot along the street,—you see them—it reminds you of a prison, a concentration camp, are they animals or human, but they are there—those buildings where they sleep for fifty cents, they have fire escapes running down their whole length on one side, and all the windows and doors open up on them—and they stand there, sit, hang, without shirts, the heat is tremendous—the bars come up to their waists, there are dozens of them on each floor, floor above floor and on each floor—long iron gangplanks they stare, they stare, stare, stare,—there is little sound—almost a picture, a frozen stare, blank, completely blank, but you know they are living, you can almost smell the sweat, but you just keep on walking, you barely hesitate, you just keep walking. And I kept on walking, I passed a theater and then another, I went in, the movie was stupid, stupid because it tried to recreate the depth of reality in the childish imagination of moralized history.
My Dead Parents Page 17
