The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  The absence of the closet from the drawing was of compelling interest to my father because it seemed to undermine the primary significance that Bailey had assigned to this experience, and it may have proven influential in the jury’s judgment, reinforcing, as it did, other points my father raised, based on the conclusions he had drawn from talking with Patricia. In the strength of these conclusions, he was able to sustain the tough assault that Mr. Bailey launched upon his credibility.

  Mr. Bailey badgered him, for instance, about his methods of note taking in his conversations with Patricia and asked him to explain why he did not tape-record these interviews. My father said it was not his practice to use a tape recorder in examinations. In the case of a defendant who has had the benefit of “eminent legal talent,” he observed, “there is a high likelihood the person will be talking for the record,” drawing upon “a memorized script” in which, as he implied, her lawyer would presumably have drilled her in advance. The presence of a tape recorder would intensify the likelihood that she would be sticking closely to that script and would thereby compromise “the integrity of the examination.”

  If he did not use a tape recorder, Mr. Bailey asked, what other method of recording did my father use? “You don’t take shorthand, do you, Doctor?”

  “No,” my father said.

  Mr. Bailey pressed the point. “What method did you use, please?”

  “I used my right hand and a pen and a piece of paper right in front of me,” my father said politely.

  My mother, who was there throughout the trial, said that Mr. Bailey seemed to be unhappy with this answer.

  In the end, what may have been the most decisive factor in the outcome of the trial was that Mr. Bailey, when he rose for his summation, could not focus on the points that mattered most in the exoneration of his client but rambled in perplexing ways that were difficult to follow—Patricia later said she wondered if he had been drinking—which, by any standard, represented a betrayal of her interests. Patricia was found guilty and given a long sentence, later reduced to seven years, of which she served somewhat less than two before President Jimmy Carter granted her a commutation.

  In reading these materials, I was struck again, as I’d been in following the trial nearly thirty years before, by the poised and graceful way in which my father held his own in the give-and-take of cross-examination. Still, I remember I had been relieved when the case was over. His involvement in the trial, which had been given unrelenting press attention, placed him briefly in the public eye. And, in his obituaries, this event was treated as if it were emblematic of his life and his vocation, to the relative exclusion of his clinical career. I found this emphasis disheartening. Several of his former patients wrote to me expressing the same feeling.

  —

  It was now the spring of 2005, two years and six months since my father had come home to the apartment. Even though his hands were agile and he kept on making jottings on those pieces of blue paper when he was sitting at his desk with Julia, I noticed that, at bedtime, before he fell asleep, he would often curl his fingers into fists and hold them pressed against his chest.

  As time went on, he did this more insistently. Silvia and Julia inserted pieces of soft towel underneath his fingers so that he would not do damage to his palms. If I spoke to him and stroked his fingers gently and he was alert enough to look at me directly, he would sometimes open up one of those hands and let me hold it in my own. As slight a thing as this may seem, I always took it as a little victory.

  At the end of April, my father’s trust attorney told me that my parents had exhausted their life savings. Their only income, from this date on, apart from the social security checks they would continue to receive, would be my father’s very modest pension from the Massachusetts mental health department. This, the lawyer said, would meet their rental costs and some other items of a minor nature. The remainder of their costs—medical expenses not covered by insurance and not reimbursed by Medicare, as well as the costs of medically related needs such as special supplementary nutriments that both of them required, and, by far the largest item, salaries for their attendants—amounted to more than $15,000 monthly, or nearly $200,000 for each year that they remained alive.

  The lawyer said he realized that my sister was in no position to assist in their support. She had, as I’ve noted, children of her own. They were grown-up women now, and both of them were married, but she tried her best to help them out, and she had other financial needs and obligations closer to her home. I already knew this. My situation was much simpler than hers.

  The lawyer also said he needed to point out to me that, if I were willing to declare my parents indigent, which would call for selling off any of their physical belongings that had financial value, they would qualify for Medicaid, in which case the government would cover the expenses for my mother to reside within a nursing home, and for my father to return to one. But he also said he recognized that this was an option I would view as unacceptable. After having brought my father home at last, I could not imagine anything more disconcerting than to return him to an institution and, this time, my mother with him.

  I naturally said nothing of this to my mother, but I know she had suspicions about what was going on, because Julia told me that she worried whether I was taking money from my own life savings and might later find myself in trouble if I lived as long as she and Daddy had. When one of my books landed, all too briefly, on the New York Times bestseller list in October of that year, Julia showed this to my mother to convince her that I wasn’t on the verge of destitution. This quieted my mother’s worries, Julia said, but only temporarily. “Then she would start in again….She’d question me repeatedly.”

  My mother had told Julia once that, during World War II, she had worked as “an investigator” (I don’t think she ever said what she was investigating) for one of the branches of the military. She also said that she’d enjoyed this work tremendously. “I couldn’t keep from smiling when she told me this,” said Julia. “I said to myself, ‘You better believe it! Once she knows she’s on the track of finding something out, I don’t think that anyone or anything can stop her.’ ”

  I asked Julia recently about the question that had worried me before I brought my father home: Would my mother feel competitive with Daddy after she had been accustomed for so many years to the undivided and solicitous attention of her helpers?

  “At first she was a bit competitive,” said Julia. “If I was talking with her in her bedroom in the evening, I might look up at the clock and tell her that I had to go and give your father medicine. She’d say, ‘Do you have to do it now?’ When I’d tell her yes, it was important for your father, she would say, ‘Well, hurry up! And do it fast! And then come back to me.’

  “But after a while something changed. It got to the point where we’d be talking and she’d look up at the clock and tell me, ‘Julia, I think it’s time for you to go and get the medicine for Harry.’

  “I’d say, ‘Thank you for reminding me.’ When I came back, she’d want to know if he had fallen asleep again and whether he was comfortable.”

  When my father first came home, as I have said, my mother started calling him “the baby.” But after he’d been home some months, Julia told me she would sometimes speak of him more tenderly as “Harry.”

  “She’d go back and forth on this. Now and then, before she went to sleep, she’d decide she wanted to go in and look at him and see if there was any change. ‘Julia,’ she would say, ‘take me to see Harry.’ I’d help her to get out of bed and bring her to his room and I’d lower the guardrail on his bed and she’d kiss him on his forehead. After that, she’d stand there looking at him steadily….

  “Then it was like a switch or something clicked within her mind and she’d say, ‘Yes, he’s still a baby.’ ” Julia said she was sure my mother didn’t really think he was going to be any different one night from the night before. “I couldn’t tell exactly what was going through her mind. Anyway, we
’d be walking back into her bedroom and she’d say, ‘No change. Still the same….’ And that was the end of it.”

  Every so often, people who had known my father many years before would call and ask if they could speak to him. Or if they knew that he was ill, Julia said they’d ask how he was doing. “One of the Chaplin girls has called up a few times,” she said. “It was Victoria. The last time that she called was just about two weeks ago.

  “She was in Boston for some reason and she wanted to come up and see your father. When I told her that I didn’t think this was a good idea, she said she’d like to see your mother and she asked if she could take her out to lunch. Your mother took the phone and spoke with her and asked about her sisters, but she said she didn’t think she had the strength to get dressed up and go out to a restaurant. Victoria asked if she could just come up and say hello. I was hoping your mother would agree, but she said she simply wasn’t feeling well enough to have a visitor. I could tell Victoria was disappointed, but she told me that she understood.”

  My mother had told Julia once that she and my father had been invited back to Switzerland for the marriage of one of the Chaplin daughters, and she had described the wedding in the smallest details. “She said that it was at their home, and not in a hotel.” Her memory of the daughters from the first time she had met them, Julia said, remained extremely clear. “One of them, your mother said, ran away from home when she was seventeen. Her boyfriend was an actor. She told me Mr. Chaplin was very angry with her when she did this, because she was so young, even though she said that he had married Mrs. Chaplin when she was a young girl too. You know your mother. ‘Serves him right!’ I think that was Victoria….

  “Anyway, I was sorry that your mother wouldn’t let her come to the apartment. I think it would have done her good. I know how much she liked her.”

  Julia believed, as I did, that it was a matter of my mother’s vanity. Every time she’d visited my father in the nursing home, she had gone with Julia to get her hair done at a place in Copley Square. Sometimes she had also gone to one of the stores nearby and bought herself a pretty dress, because she was “going out.” Julia said my mother worried constantly about the way she looked because she said that she had never felt she was attractive. “Do you know, Julia,” she had told her, “it’s not an easy thing to be a woman and grow up to feel you’re ugly.”

  She’d said something very much like that to me a long time before. When I had protested at her words, she told me my opinion did not count. “You’re my son. All children want to think their mother’s beautiful.”

  She was adamant about this.

  —

  During the last years of my mother’s life—Julia described this after my mother died—the two of them had several conversations on the subject of religion. My mother would question her about her own beliefs and would ask about the church that she attended. Julia, like many of the mothers and grand-mothers I had come to know when I was teaching in her neighborhood, was a devout believer. My mother’s beliefs—not surprisingly, given her irreverent personality—were far more tentative and qualified.

  I realize I’ve said almost nothing up to now about my mother’s feelings or convictions on this subject—or those of my father, which, in honesty, should probably be called his absence of conviction or, to be entirely blunt about it, his vehement resistance to the tenets of conventional religion. (His Harvard thesis, it will be recalled, was titled “Religion and Insanity.”)

  After he and my mother had been married—in a nonreligious ceremony in a small town in New Hampshire—they had become members of a synagogue, but they attended services only intermittently, sometimes on a Friday night, mostly on the holy days. My father told me afterward that he remained a member of the synagogue primarily for social reasons—“in submission,” as he put it, “to proprieties,” but also out of his respect for his older brother, who was a leading figure in the congregation.

  All of this was not without its complications and apparent contradictions. My father sent me and my sister to religious school once a week for several years, and he hired someone to come to our house for about six weeks one summer and try to teach me Hebrew before my bar mitzvah, but here again he gave me the impression that he did this as a matter of correctness in the face of social pressure. I don’t know if there was more to it than that, but I didn’t have the feeling that his motives were religious.

  I think his attitude about religion might have been quite different if his mother’s faith had been transmitted to him in a way that took deep roots within his heart, as it did (emotionally at least) for me, rather than, as he described it, “mostly as a lot of rules and dire threats that made no sense to me,” which he’d rejected by the time he entered college. My grandmother (Bubee, as I called her) had somehow given me, on the evenings that I used to spend with her while I was in college, a less admonitory and more personally stirring sense of her religious faith than she had imparted to my father.

  I knew he loved his mother deeply—he spoke about her as if she were still alive while he was in the nursing home—but I knew he’d also been afraid of her. He called her “the generalissimo” and said she was “a walking terror” when it came to Jewish people who did not obey the rules by which she lived. (He told me she had walked into a Chinese restaurant one night and, finding a member of her congregation eating ribs and shrimp and rice, she took his plate of food “and dumped the whole thing over him.”)

  It was my good fortune that she’d mellowed through the years and was more forgiving with her nonobservant grandson than she’d been with people of her generation or with her own children. But by this moment in her life, a gentleness and generosity pervaded everything.

  My father’s resistance never softened with the years, while my mother’s independent disposition and the spiky nature of her character had led her to evolve her own original ideas about religion. She often told me she believed in God, not as some imaginable being who handed down a set of laws that Moses had transcribed while standing on a mountaintop—which she said that she regarded as “improbable”—but as a transcendent force, some kind of ethical but abstract entity, a benevolent presence in the world, as vague as that may be. She also said she was convinced there was a moral reason for our being, and she admired people who believed this and whose lives gave evidence of this belief.

  This may be one reason why, when she was nearly ninety-eight, she began to question me insistently about one of my closest friends and colleagues in New York, an Episcopal priest named Martha Overall, the pastor of a congregation in the same impoverished South Bronx neighborhood where I was spending time with children and whom I’d described in detail in a book, Amazing Grace, which Julia had been reading with my mother. Martha’s self-denying life and her devotion to the children in that neighborhood elicited a sense of reverence in my mother and she asked if I would bring the priest to visit her someday. Since Martha came to Massachusetts now and then for what are known as “pastoral retreats,” she took one of these opportunities to come to the apartment and become acquainted with my mother.

  This is how they got to meet each other and, because Martha had a maverick’s spirit and a lot of independent values of her own, my mother’s feisty personality appealed to her. She said that she enjoyed my mother’s sense of humor, even the outrageously improper things my mother would allow herself to say with fewer and fewer inhibitions in the period when Martha got to know her.

  Never proselytizing—it was not in keeping with her character to do so—Martha nonetheless discovered before long that she had been elected by my mother as her mentor in what she continued to believe to be the dubious idea of immortality, an idea that I think she somehow wanted to believe in, if not in the way a priest believes in this, then in some other way that she might find agreeable. The main point, though, is that she came to place tremendous faith in Martha’s sense of ethical integrity. As a result, she asked her finally if, at the time when she passed on, Martha would conduct the
service at her burial.

  Martha has a seemingly unlimited compassion for the frailties or, more to the point in my mother’s situation, the vulnerable uncertainties of others. Her visits brought a quiet sense of reassurance to my mother in the face of the unknowable. Mostly, however, the two of them just had cheerful times together. Even in those final years when my mother wouldn’t let Victoria or other old acquaintances come up to the apartment, Julia said that “she would ask me all the time when Martha would be coming back to visit her.”

  Martha, of course, never had to undergo my mother’s crotchety and commandeering ways. My mother saved those tendencies primarily for me and for the patient women who took care of her while they also did their best to meet my father’s needs and bring some joy into his life, as long as life remained to him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  My Mother Gives Me My Instructions

  More and more, from that time on, as my father steadily declined into the condition of a very gentle, usually sleepy, and bewildered-looking little boy, my mother emerged in greater fullness and complexity.

  Julia was with her in the evenings now more frequently than Silvia, who usually arrived at the apartment in the early morning and had to spend almost the entire day tending to my father. It wasn’t until he went to bed, usually by six o’clock, that my mother had an opportunity for the company and conversation she enjoyed with Julia. In view of the many hours she and Julia spent with one another, I think I ought to say something, which I’ve avoided up to now, about the way in which my mother treated Julia.