Selma Kurtzer, Beverly Chessler, and Leona Lewis arrived home safely just as the plane hit, thanks to my mother sending them home from their rehearsal when she did.
Having dismissed the possibility of a second crash in their vicinity only a half hour earlier, nurses at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital heard Flight 6780 zoom overhead, then crash a block from their maternity and children’s wards.
John Delaney, chaplain at St. Elizabeth’s, also ran to the scene. As he got close, he heard screams from inside the plane. They quieted quickly.
Captain Reid’s wife looked out her window to see a plane flying low, lower, disappearing into the row of houses the next street over. She heard the moment of impact, saw the explosions.
chapter fifty-three
1972
WHEN I WENT away to college at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, I can’t say that I was any different from any other eighteen-year-old in wanting to be off on my own, but I felt a certain urgency to get away. It was almost like I needed to be away from my family to survive as an individual and to escape some underlying expectation that I could not identify. The school was far enough away from home, three hours by car, to avoid the drop-in visit from my parents, and it was close enough to drive home for holidays and the occasional weekend.
Music was taking a back seat by the time I went to college. I majored in theatre, even though I had never landed a part in any play in high school. Nevertheless, ever since seeing Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, I had decided that I could become anyone I wanted to be through acting. During my first semester, I jumped at the chance to go to England with my theatre class. We saw an average of two plays a day for two weeks in London. On the weekends we took tours of historic sites and traveled in the countryside. The trip opened my eyes to the larger world and made me want to broaden my experiences.
In the spring semester of my freshman year at college, I met a transfer student from England in my fencing class. Steven was the opposite of any boy I’d ever met. He was tall, blonde, and bearded.
When he called and asked me if I liked the theatre, I reminded him that I was a theatre major—so, of course I liked the theatre. He had tickets for the Hartford Stage Company for Saturday and asked if I would like to go.
I was impressed that this would be a real date, not a walk back to my dorm after a mixer dance. That night I put on a pair of slacks—not jeans—excited to be going to the city in Hartford to see a play.
The play was Noel Coward’s Private Lives. The whole farce is about a combative, if humorous, marriage with interchanges like this one:
“What is so horrible that one can’t stay happy . . . ”
“How long will it last, this ludicrous, overbearing love of ours?”
“Who knows.”
“Shall we always want to bicker and fight?”
“No, that desire will fade, along with our passion.”
Steven was preoccupied with showing me how much he knew about Noel Coward while I was trying to follow the fast-moving dialogue, and I missed half of the double entendres trying to listen to him at the same time. By the end of the play, I was mostly annoyed.
On the way home, Steven looked down at the gas gauge and announced, “I guess I should have stopped for gas this afternoon. Looks like we’re out.”
He pulled over to the curb in an unsavory part of the city. At least ten hooded teenagers blocked the entrance to a convenience store, passing a bottle and laughing. They nudged each other when the bottle stopped for too long. The sidewalk was littered with empty cans, bottles, and burger wrappers.
Steven said, “Wait here. I’ll go call my father to help us out.”
The convenience store guys watched him get out of the car and spotted me in the passenger seat. I was scared to be left alone in the car. Steven gave them a wave and made his way to the pay phone. I was cursing under my breath when he finally got back to the car, really upset that he had left me alone with these thugs leering at me.
“He’ll be here in a minute. Sorry about this.”
When we said good night, I jumped from the car before the awkward moment of a possible kiss, said “thanks for the evening” and “see you in class tomorrow,” and walked resolutely to my dorm without looking back. Although I saw him in fencing class, we didn’t date again that semester.
But that summer he called me out of the blue. He would be driving through New Jersey the following weekend, he said, and wanted to stop by. I agreed to see him—I was having a boring summer, working at a law office as a gofer.
His visit was very different from our date. He picked me up from work one day and drove me home. Then, we went out to a local diner for something to eat and we talked for hours about everything—about how we wanted to travel and try new ways of living our lives. We seemed to want the same things out of life. My family warmed to him, which also changed how I saw him. The contrast of seeing him in my home with my family just exaggerated his exoticness.
He was headed for Africa the next week on a photographic safari.
“I only shoot animals with my camera,” he liked to say.
It was his letters from Africa that captivated me and gave me the rush of freedom I was looking for. He described hot-red sunsets over the endless expanse of dense jungle, waterbuck that wandered into his camp, the thrill of getting a close-up of a rhino. Through his letters, I felt as if I was there, cooking with him on the camp stove in the black night, startling at the howls of distant hyenas. By September, I was sorry I would not be returning to college with him in Connecticut. I had transferred to the University of West Virginia for their theatre program and to explore a new part of the country.
“I’ll visit,” he promised.
I didn’t count on it, knowing it was a fourteen-hour drive from Hartford.
That semester, though, Steven wore out his ’65 Mustang driving to see me every weekend. And I failed my Friday 8 AM forestry class since he always arrived on Thursday nights.
In October, we camped out with some friends in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Walking through the cathedral-like ceiling of golden leaves in the lavish woods was spiritual, a new religion of fresh green calm in the ethereal light of sunrise. The natural beauty seemed to frame the whole weekend in a transcendent glow.
Late that Saturday afternoon, I stumbled headlong into the lake. When Steven caught me in his arms and gently carried me up the embankment, I truly fell. We didn’t have sex that night, but sleeping warmly cuddled together in his sleeping bag was almost more intimate for me.
After that we talked about taking our relationship to the next level, the physical one, and the next weekend, I cajoled a friend into lending us her apartment. The bed, with a thick quilt of reds, blues, and greens, took up the entire bedroom. We had to crawl over it to get into or out of the room.
Cat Stevens played on the small stereo. “Oooh baby, baby, it’s a wild world . . . ”
We sipped wine and breathed each other’s essence, his the scent of vanilla, as I rested my head on his chest. We reveled in each other, finding new ways our bodies fit together under the multicolored quilt. Experimenting to the point of exhaustion. Sleeping, waking, and making love again and again. I don’t recall taking any other nourishment that weekend.
The next July, Steven got a summer job that promised to provide the journey across America that he had always wanted. He would be traveling the country buying scrap metal from dentists, who saved all the gold and silver dug from their patients’ teeth. I couldn’t imagine being away from him all summer, and so I hopped a bus to Philadelphia one night to meet him, leaving my poor parents a note. When I called them from Philadelphia, my mother sounded resigned, and my father recited his usual “be careful” and asked me to call every few days.
On that trip, I saw parts of the country I may never have seen otherwise. It felt at times like we were transported back a hundred years when we stopped in one-horse towns in the midwest that had only a diner, a gas station, and a general store. I found it hard
to believe these places still existed in 1973. We navigated miles and miles of corn, every road flat and endless.
We crossed each state border like Marco Polo—looking for the intrigue, noting the characters at the diner counter, the texture of life there. Steven somehow knew the right roads and the right stops to make, and I began to think of him as my life guide. I attributed his cool reserve to his being English, a cultural trait, and figured that I could change that tendency in time. Again, I found myself defining myself from his vision of me. I was an explorer. I was courageous. I was Steven’s girl.
When our red Chevy was laden with gold and silver, the car tilted at a forty-five-degree angle and shocks threatening to break, we headed back east. I ditched my plans to return to West Virginia and attended a local college instead so that I could live at home while Steven finished up his degree in Connecticut. My parents seemed oddly quiet and accepting about my decision.
chapter fifty-four
2006
I’M STARING OUT at the maple tree over the top of my computer screen in my home office. It snowed this morning, and the branches are dipped in white. There’s a huge black crow sitting alone on a branch at eye level, staring me down. He’s probably cawing, but I can’t hear him through my closed, frosted window. My cat has just spotted the bird too and is stalking him on the windowsill.
I’m scanning through the pile of books I ordered online about grief and recovery from the loss of a child. And about replacement children.
I first turn to Freud to try to get a sense of how my parents may have dealt with the grief of losing Donna. In Mourning and Melancholia, he said that grieving “involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, and yet it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. Instead, we look to its being overcome after a certain lapse of time.”
I read further that it’s probable that Donna’s sudden and traumatic death and the destruction of all her possessions and of her very bedroom were all factors that robbed my parents of some of the usual forms of grieving.
For my mother, the ache of losing Donna never went away. In a way, I don’t think she wanted it to. Her grief was her secret child. She nurtured it, fed it with melancholy, clothed it in her depression.
I could not adequately understand my mother’s grief until I had my own child and felt firsthand how the child that was once part of your body remains an essential part of your being.
I know she tried over the years to rise above the hurt of losing Donna. In the mornings she would say to us, “I can’t go out yet, I have to put on my face.”
Her “face” consisted of delicately applying highlights under her eyes, a demure line of brown outlining them, the pale cream foundation for an even palette. But, for her, it was more than a figure of speech or her makeup—it was her mask. Often, it worked, and she believed what she saw in the mirror. Other times, the happy mask stood out grotesquely against her inner reality. A sad clown with a painted smile.
My father, I believe, did his grieving in private. He also medicated himself with comic relief, which ultimately gave some balance to my parents’ relationship. Victor Borges said, “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” And so it was for my mother and father. With an innate understanding of this truth, my father kept my mother from disappearing into the kind of tragedy that could have swallowed any joy.
The research book I ordered about replacement child syndrome just came in the mail, and I rip open the padded envelope. I read that replacement children often feel they can never live up to the memory of the dead child.
I recognize myself in some of the descriptions of those with this affliction: guilt, a wavering sense of identity, the feeling of responsibility to measure up. In my case, it was guilt at being spared from the crash—from death, but also from Linda’s injury. There was a feeling of responsibility throughout my childhood that I needed to be the one who was easy to care for, that no one had to worry about. I felt this, even as I may have resented the extra attention Linda needed.
After reading about how complicated the syndrome can be for children, I think my parents did well at letting me be an individual in my own right. Some parents never fully separate the replacement from the replaced in their own minds and even continue to dress the child in the dead child’s clothes, name them with the same name, and fully expect them to become that lost child. After some ill-fated hairstyles early on, my mother let go of that expectation for me. My father, too, did the best he could at letting me be me, though I feel he wanted Donna to be here in my place. In any case, I never felt, as some replacements do, that I needed to become Donna.
chapter fifty-five
JANUARY 22, 1952 (THE CRASH)
3:45 PM
ALOW ROAR. SPUTTERING cracks of backfire. Explosion. Screams.
Witnesses all remembered the sounds. My mother didn’t.
She saw the flash of fire, her children in flames.
My mother’s world came crashing down, literally through her roof. The fire burst from nothing. In an instant, the kitchen was a collage of white-red, blue-yellow against black smoke. Her canary yellow walls faded into gray, crumbled to black. A metallic fume filled her nostrils, her eyes stung and teared. The blast had thrown my mother flat on the linoleum, the floor rumbling beneath her. She felt the heat on top of her, insistently pressing her to stay down. She glanced up to see one clear passageway to safety—down the front stairs to the street.
Fleetingly, she thought, “The oil burner has exploded!” But that was located at the front of the building. It made no sense. She heard screams and realized that some were her own. Her mind ceased making rational meaning of the scene, and her instinct took over. Her own mother was sprawled just feet in front of her.
“Run!” my mother screamed at her. “Run, Mom, don’t ask questions!“ She grabbed her mother’s arm and hurried her down the front stairs. Hermina, my grandmother, bewildered, stumbled out the door to safety.
Turning back, my mother saw that her daughter’s visiting friend, Sheila, was on fire, and she threw a rug around her to smother the flames and pushed her toward the door. Sheila ran outside to safety, though badly burned.
The fire rushed through the apartment, rolling in on a carpet of thick, white smoke toward the stairway. The screams and cries of her children rose above the crackling roar of the fast-moving flames.
chapter fifty-six
1974
IT WAS VALENTINE’S Day when Steven asked me to marry him. I was twenty and still living at home, going to school nearby, and he came down from Connecticut for the weekend. When he brought me home from dinner that evening, we sat my parents down in the kitchen and told them the news. Steven had brought a bottle of wine for the occasion. He popped the cork, and I fetched some wine glasses from my mother’s dining room hutch. After our toast, I sensed something was amiss in our happy announcement and glanced over at my father studying his wine glass. My mother was looking his way as well. He looked upset about something, although I was oblivious to what it was. My mother motioned for me to come into the hallway with her.
“Your father expected Steven to ask him first,” she explained. “Before he proposed, he should’ve asked for your hand.”
I was a little annoyed. This was 1974 after all. It was my hand.
But after seeing the disappointment in my father’s eyes, I went to Steven.
“You need to ask him,” I said. “It’s ridiculous, but he’s hurt. You have to do it.”
In the interest of equality and feminism, I went with him. The three of us settled downstairs in the family room. The room had a theatre theme. Gold masks of comedy and tragedy hung over the couch on either side of a print of a grand costume ball, with a jester at its center. The lamp on the side table looked just like the jester in the picture.
Steven was positioned on the brown tweed couch against the long wall with my father and me on the matching love seat perpendicular to him. My father too
k a sip of his coffee and put his cup on the round mica table in front of him. He sat back with his arms folded.
The jester lamp was poking up behind Steven’s head as he spoke in quiet tones that underscored his English accent. I wrestled a nervous giggle to the pit of my stomach.
“Mr. Mandel, I’m so sorry we didn’t come to you first . . . ”
The jester grinned, his eyes masked in black, his toreador hat perched at an angle.
Then my father and my fiancé stood facing each other, shaking hands.
“Take good care of my little girl,” my father said as he looked him in the eye, a steady laser gaze.
“Of course I will, Mr. Mandel. You can count on that.”
The deal made, my father put his arm around Steven’s shoulder in conspiracy, turned him away from me.
“And, don’t worry, son, she’ll fill out in a few years, you’ll see. Her mother was as skinny as a rail when I married her. Now look at her,” he said, cupping his hands in front of his chest in the universal sign for large breasts.
WE WERE A very idealistic young married couple. After the wedding and a short road trip of a honeymoon, we went back to Connecticut to find jobs and an apartment. I had quit college to get married, so job opportunities were not plentiful for me. I got a clerical job in Hartford at a brokerage firm, and Steven started working for an ad agency that sold space on the side of VW Bugs. Neither of us was living out our dreams. Steven had set his sights on broadcasting, and I wanted to break into music to sing.
One day, we both came home from work and sat silently at our tiny kitchen table, unable to find a way to explain our day to each other, when I blurted out, “I got fired.” Steven one-upped me: “I punched my boss in the face.” He had a better excuse than I did. I was just a lousy clerical worker. Steven had hit his boss when he said he had married me just to get a green card to stay in the States. We agreed then that we would support each other if either of us found a way to go after what we wanted.
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