Replacement Child

by Judy L. Mandel

  Newark Airport was closed on February 11, 1952, after protests from the community, but the U.S. Air Force reopened it for military use after six weeks, and for commercial flights shortly thereafter.

  Each new detail allows me to share in the tragedy, but I am still left with the philosophic questions:

  Why this plane?

  Why this house?

  Why this child?

  My New Agey friends talk about learning something from each lifetime. Choosing your own circumstances for each successive life in order to learn what you need for your soul’s progress.

  I like this idea, but I can never swallow that Donna chose to be killed by a plane dropping from the sky when she was seven. Or that Linda chose to be scarred and in pain much of her life. Or even that I chose my role.

  No, I do not believe these to be part of any master plan. We are on our own. We make decisions that determine our survival each and every day. We are at the whim of every decision made by every other human on the planet and at the mercy of the forces of nature, whirling through this life without so much as a twist tie holding us steady. The more I read of the accident, the more I am convinced: Anything can happen.

  chapter twenty-three

  JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)

  1:00 PM

  DONNA WAS BACK in her second-grade classroom after lunch period watching a film of President Truman signing the G.I. Bill of Rights for Korean War veterans. She was thinking of the brave soldiers and the pictures she’d seen of the injured.

  My father was in the back room of the store at his old oak jewelers bench that was crammed with his accounting books, adding machine, and receipts. He had spread out the bag from his lunch over the top of the mess to protect the papers and opened up the butcher paper to retrieve his sandwich. He could keep an eye on the front of the store from this vantage and pop out to the counter if a customer walked in. Biting into the sandwich, he felt a surge of affection for his wife, who thought to bring him lunch.

  My mother and Linda walked the two blocks from the bus stop to home. Linda was getting sleepy, and my mother let her walk the last distance to tire her out fully for her nap. They climbed the steep stairs to their second-floor apartment. My mother peeled off Linda’s coat and her own and hung them both in the hall closet.

  Captain Reid was checking the weather at Syracuse airport. He may have been worried about the fog and cold rain, but by the time he landed in Syracuse at 1:34 PM, visibility had improved, and he had no problem at all. In fact, the flight was routine to the point of boredom.

  chapter twenty-four

  1963—1972

  MY MOTHER HAD not been out of bed all day. She was still in her flowered nightgown. The room was stuffy and close. She wasn’t reading a book, watching TV, or even sleeping. On better days, she would be waiting for me with a glass of milk and a snack of cookies or fruit. She’d be planning dinner or telling me to get in the car to come with her on some errand.

  I first noticed it happening when I was around eight years old, and then at intervals that might be spaced out for months or sometimes years.

  On one of my mother’s “bad” days, I would enter her room quietly, sit on the edge of her bed, and tighten my insides into a solid core. She would pat my hair and take my hand and stroke it. When I found her in bed, I knew I would need to be the one giving comfort.

  “How was your day, honey?”

  “Fine, Mom. Are you sick?”

  She would sit up, pull me toward her, and hug me very hard. She’d whisper in my ear, “I love you so much, sweetheart.”

  I would lean away. To distract her, I’d tell her how my friend Susie had to move to Kansas, and how we were all so sorry to see her go so far away. Did she think we should have a going-away party for her? Or I’d talk on and on about how much I wanted to learn to play “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on my guitar—anything to keep up the banter, to make her smile, to stay away from her pressing need for me.

  I leaned away. I couldn’t hold her together myself.

  I was grateful when my father finally came home. He would take in the scene and immediately change his end-of-a-long-day tired face to the one he used to cheer up my mother.

  “It’s so nice out, I think I’ll leave it out,” he’d say with a wink at me. My mother would smile. Soon they would be talking about his day, about a customer who bought one of the new expensive digital watches. They’d laugh at the new silly watches, how people were so lazy these days they didn’t even want to read a clock face anymore.

  She would get up to make dinner, and I would sigh with relief.

  Linda and I seemed to have different parents during our teenage years. To her, my mother was always critical—of her hair, her makeup, or whether she wore clothes that showed too much of her scarring. “She always wanted to fix something on me,” Linda told me.

  But their closeness showed in the way they fought with each other. She and my mother had knock-down drag-out fights all the time. It might be over clothes, or a boyfriend, or something trivial—but they did it wholeheartedly and with gusto. Usually there was yelling and slamming doors. It was thrilling. I watched from the sidelines, taking bets.

  One of the big fights was when Linda dyed her hair blonde in high school. She had naturally beautiful thick jet-black hair. My mother hit the roof when she got home and saw what Linda had done. She screamed about Linda ruining her “good asset,” that hadn’t been taken by the fire, and Linda cried that all the girls were doing it. My mother blamed Linda’s best friend for talking her into the dye job and started going on about how the friend didn’t care about Linda.

  My mother and I had a more laissez-faire relationship. She was loving and sympathetic and usually tried to reason with me when we disagreed. She tried to coerce me with “Judy, do you think that’s the best thing to do?” or “Judy, I really liked that other dress on you better,” or “Why don’t you try a little eye makeup tonight?” If I disagreed, she would quickly throw up her hands and give in. I can’t remember a time when we really fought. She might have gotten exasperated with me, especially when I couldn’t make a decision, but she rarely yelled or slammed anything. I remember sometimes wishing she would, craving the kind of passionate connection she and my sister shared.

  The mother I got, however, relied on me for emotional support, especially as I got older. I was the one she turned to when she was down or had complaints about my father.

  “Love doesn’t last,” she told me one day on the way to my guitar lesson when I was nine. “Just don’t think it does. Money lasts.”

  My father was a completely different case. He was Linda’s cheerleader and confidant.

  Linda told me she used to wait until everyone else had gone to bed and my father would be in the kitchen reading, or having a snack, so that she could have alone time with him.

  As far as my father was concerned, Linda was always perfect, and he forgave her almost anything if it could make her happy for even a moment. His theory was that she deserved it. She had been through so much that anything she did to give herself a good day, he supported. He even told her as much. My father always came through with just the right compliment for Linda and just the right joke to lighten her spirits when she needed it. I remember being glad she had that from him and pushing down the feeling that I wanted some of it for myself.

  The only time he got angry where Linda was concerned was when someone else tried to take advantage of her or hurt her. He bought off the greasy-hood boyfriend Linda had as a teenager so he would leave her alone. I thought he would kill the boyfriend who asked Linda to marry him before he went to Vietnam but who was actually engaged to another girl at the same time. My father was small but wiry—and he owned a gun.

  In contrast, when I was heartbroken over a boy when I was sixteen, my father treated it like a frivolous episode. I was facedown, crying into my pillow, when I heard my mother urging him to come to comfort me. I could almost hear him wince and shrug before he opened the door to m
y room. He sat on the edge of my bed and tentatively patted my back for a minute.

  “Oh, come on, Judy, you’re so young, you don’t want to get tied down with one boy right now,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of boys in the future for you.”

  I cried even harder then, until he left.

  Before he cracked my nose with that baseball, I was daddy’s little girl, but after that, there was a break in the way he treated me as I entered adolescence. He resisted my becoming a young woman. I was morphing into a different animal, and he was not happy about it.

  More than once, I overheard him tell my mother not to tell me I was pretty because it “would go to her head.” I only got a nod and a smile even when I dressed up for my first junior prom, had my hair done for the first time, and wore a long frilly gown.

  His indifference fed my growing dissatisfaction with myself and magnified my self-consciousness. As a result, I tried to blend in as much as possible with the woodwork. At fourteen, I grew my hair long, wore army-navy surplus jeans and jackets, and wore no makeup to speak of. The intent was to become completely generic and nearly invisible. You could have exchanged me with any other teenager in town and not noticed the difference. On the other hand, I sought attention from any male that found me attractive. Not that I was promiscuous. I was too much of a late bloomer for that. But, in my mind and heart, my father made me a sucker for any boy that showed an interest. I was a psychological pushover and maybe even more vulnerable than I would have been if it were just my body I were giving away. Every unkind word or rejection from a target of affection would sear the delicate skin of my self-esteem. I switched boyfriends frequently so I wouldn’t get too invested in one relationship. It was a hard habit to break.

  chapter twenty-five

  2005

  IT’S A COLD, rainy winter day. A light fog is lifting in my back yard. The trunks of the trees look like they reach up forever, with the greenery obscured in the earthbound clouds. The very type of weather of the day of the crash, I think. The kind of day when I’m glad I’m not getting up at 6:00 AM and traipsing out in the cold to go to an office. I’m happy to put on a pot of tea and settle in to work. Lately, my project is taking more and more of my work time.

  I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for as I rifle through the material I brought home from the library. The headlines I find in the old newspaper clippings still feel remote, like they are about any family, any tragedy. Even when I see the pictures of my parents and my sisters in the articles, I feel detached. It’s not the connection I want. None of it offers any clues to how I fit into their survival or gives me an outline of my own portrait that I can begin to color in.

  I’m beginning to wonder if this is all just a way for me to stay with them, to keep my parents in my life since their death. A friend warned me that writing about the recently dead is dangerous for them. It keeps them tethered to this life, not releasing them to the next. If that’s true, I guess I have to apologize to my parents—but I cannot seem to stop myself.

  I concentrate on information about the crash site, the ashes from which I eventually rose. I learn that when the smoke cleared, there was one engine of the plane embedded in a mass of wreckage thirty feet from my parents’ home, and the nose of the aircraft was in the basement of the house next door. The left wing tip rested in the back yard of a yellow frame house at 658 South Street. The belly of the plane sheared off the top of my parents’ building and spewed fuel into my mother’s kitchen in a burst of flame.

  Some of the details fascinate me. Whether they help my search or not, I can’t look away. Like the book found in the rubble of the crash—Passage into Peril. Or learning that one semifamous man, former Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, died in the plane.

  Uncovering more, the impact of the crash seems to spiral out, like great ripples, or the famed butterfly effect. Each beat of the butterfly’s wings affecting far-reaching weather patterns across the globe.

  All told, thirty-one people died as a result of the crash, but that official death toll didn’t include the miscarriage of Captain Reid’s unborn child. I find an account written by one of Captain Reid’s surviving daughters, who had done her own research about the crash that killed her father. Something had gone terribly wrong with that plane, she wrote. In the autopsy, both his wrists were broken from struggling against the controls. I want to contact her, a kindred survivor, but I have no idea how to find her.

  The headlines following the accident give me only a tiny glimpse into what went on for my family in the aftermath of the crash. In the article “Hospital Treats Survivors,” from The Elizabeth Daily Journal, there is a photo of my mother lying in a hospital bed a day after the accident. Her vacant eyes, the knit of her brow, the rigid set of her mouth reflect the lost child, the near-death baby. I search her face for a hint of the woman I knew as my mother, but I cannot recognize her through the protective shell, the steely facade that may have germinated here in the flash of a camera. A photo next to this one shows little Linda in an oxygen tent. Mostly a bundle of bandages, with only a glimpse of her eyes. It’s a cartoon of tragedy. I wish I could put my hand over the photographer’s lens and push him away.

  A glamour shot of my mother takes a quarter page under the headline: “Condition Improves,” from The Newark Evening News. It is an old photo—her “before” face. Her beautiful eyes sparkle even in grainy black and white. She glances over her shoulder playfully, like a starlet. The relaxed smile beckons the photographer. She is a different woman from the one in the other article, where her features were remarkably transformed.

  In the article “Separated in Death” from The Elizabeth Star-Ledger, my two sisters are in a formal shot taken just weeks before the accident. Linda’s unmarred face fixates me, and I realize how much her life changed in an instant. Donna is the confident big sister, lording over Linda protectively. Her maternal instincts, overly developed for her seven years, would be put to a definitive test very soon.

  chapter twenty-six

  JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)

  2:00 PM

  THEIR AFTERNOON RAN late, but my mother knew that Donna and her friend Sheila planned to stay after school to work on a project, so she still had some time to clean up and bake some cookies. They weren’t expected home until four thirty.

  “Let’s go upstairs and tell Grandma we’re home, sweetie,” she told Linda. “Then I’ll make those cookies I promised. You were such a good girl at the doctor. The girls from Temple will be here in a little while to practice the skit for the B’nai B’rith show tonight, and Donna will be home soon.”

  My mother could hear the Pagoulatos upstairs bringing in some bags from the market.

  When Captain Reid landed in Syracuse, he went into the American Airlines office to check the weather. He saw no problem with landing in Newark, he told them. The plane was fueled with 340 gallons, bringing the total amount of fuel to 900 gallons. Flight 6780 was carrying twenty passengers, 85 pounds of mail, 112 pounds of air express, and 400 pounds of ballast. It took off from Syracuse at 2:01 PM.

  chapter twenty-seven

  1963

  “THEY LOOK LIKE ragamuffins,” my father said, frowning, halfway through “I Want to Hold Your Hand” when we watched the new band from England on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was nine.

  “Dad, what are beetles anyway?” I asked.

  “They’re like roaches. Pests! Fits ’em. These meshuganas are just a flash in the pan. They’ll never last. They can’t even comb their hair!”

  But I was entranced. First by Paul McCartney, then by the sound. It started my love affair with music, the silken thread to connect me to something my father also loved. I begged him to buy me a guitar.

  Months later, he brought one home—the one I’d pointed out each time we went to Woolworth’s that was packaged in a cardboard box with a cellophane window and was marked $15.98. It had a mottled amber wood front with a black back and came with a red plastic pick, a black guitar strap, and a songbook.


  “If I Had a Hammer” was the first song I could play all the way through. I learned songs by Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul and Mary; and, of course, the Beatles. My mother found a small music store nearby where I had lessons once a week, and I practiced every day after school. The steel strings cut through my soft fingertips until I built up calluses on my left hand.

  My father would often be crooning “Moon River” while Linda played the organ in the living room, tipping his head up and closing his eyes when he hit a high note. She was nimble with the foot pedals, her legs strong now. Building them up from her leg operation was the reason we got the organ. I wanted a piano.

  But now that I had the guitar, I started singing as I played, and my father seemed to take an interest. One day as I played in my room, sitting on my bed, I heard my father say to my mother, “She’s not half bad you know. Maybe I should show her some things about singing.” That was the first time I considered that I might have a talent all my own.

  From then on, I could count on my father showing up while I practiced. He’d lean up against the doorframe of my bedroom for a few minutes at a time and shout advice as I sang.

  “Always hold your notes on the vowel, not the consonant. No one wants to hear ‘Mmmmmoon River.’”

  I listened hard and tried to do what he said. He never came into the room or sat down to sing with me. He was always on his way somewhere else in the house when he stopped by.

  I never did learn to play “Moon River” or “The Impossible Dream,” so my father never sang with me. Linda and I couldn’t figure out how to play together, either. I strummed the chords of a song, and she played the melody, but it never came out as music. So, when the family came over—the aunts and uncles and cousins—it was still just my father and Linda at the organ. I don’t know why I never sang with them. It seemed a kind of intrusion on my father’s singing style. Sometimes they’d ask me to play something for them on guitar. I was a solo act.