4
In the beginning, well, I imagine everything looked glistening, all the little children lined up in a row, with freshly shampooed hair smelling of Breck, equipped with wary eyes and tentative smiles. We were all reasonably good-looking and bright as could be; we must have struck others as a family of potential winners, abetted by money and the backbone of an Orthodox Jewish heritage. Who cared to look beyond the surface to the not-enoughness, the strange neglect that suffused our lives? I look back and can still feel the chill, but that kind of damage is invisible until it surfaces one day when you’re least expecting it, tripping you up in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
I was the fourth of six, the third girl, born thirteen months after my older brother, who in turn had been born fourteen months after the second girl, who was born the same amount of time after the oldest. After me, within five years, came two more boys. There were fewer than nine years from the first to last of us, with one miscarriage in between, jamming up the steady rate of reproduction. What a rush to get us out by two people—tough, transplanted German Jews who had found each other at a Manhattan dinner party that had been hatched by a cousin precisely with this intention in mind and who married relatively late, my mother at thirty, my father at a Jurassic forty-two. (For years my mother insisted that she had married at twenty-nine, as though that age implied a dancing youthfulness while thirty reeked of shameful elderliness.) Two people who didn’t give a thought to things like optimal spacing and the child’s need for his or her own primacy or period of adjustment. What my mother mainly cared about was keeping up in the race to procreate with her three siblings in Israel, who had gotten started well ahead of her, producing a classroom’s worth of children—seventeen in all—among them. She may have begun late, with a demanding husband who clearly wasn’t Daddy material, but she would show them.
I recognize that there is always the risk in a story like this one of alienating the reader, of coming off like a poor little rich girl, mewling piteously against a backdrop of plenitude. The very presence of money in someone’s background tends to evoke envy and irritation—“What does she have to complain about?” or “What does she know of real suffering?”—and inures the reader to too much sympathy, elicits a certain disbelief about the possibility of other kinds of privation. Somewhere, even though we supposedly know better, we persist in believing that money buys happiness—or, at least, provides an immunity of sorts, warding off true misery.
And yet, there are deprivations that can be at least as injurious as material ones, difficult though it may be to understand them, strange withholdings—impoverishments, even—that can occur within a landscape of perceived privilege. You can, for instance, go to private schools and orthodontists and all the same suffer from a kind of insidious neglect, a lack of psychological investment in your well-being. Being a good parent requires a fair amount of emotional generosity and, in looking back, I don’t think either of my parents possessed much, if any, ability to look beyond their own horizons to worlds in which they didn’t occupy center stage. Perhaps this was because they both felt cheated out of their own destinies, my mother more vocally so than my father.
Then again, in terms of yichus, or pedigree, my mother’s background was by far the more illustrious. She was a Breuer, not related to Freud’s early colleague and mentor, Josef Breuer, but from a family that was known for its brilliance and Jewish scholarship. Her father, Isaac Breuer, was the grandson of the late-nineteenth-century German rabbi and thinker Samson Raphael Hirsch, whom many consider to be the creator of modern Jewish Orthodoxy; Breuer himself was a figure of intellectual prominence, a lawyer, philosopher, and writer and an early advocate of religious Zionism. My father’s family were involved in mercantile affairs rather than the life of the mind, but were also known for their aptitude for Jewish learning. Because of the intrusion of Hitler’s rise into their lives, both of my parents’ families had to flee Germany in the 1930s—my mother’s in 1936, my father’s in 1939—and neither of them went to university. In my father’s case, this lack of higher education had as much to do with his father’s draconian insistence that he join the family fur business at age sixteen, despite his gifted student record, as with the looming Nazi threat. My mother, on the other hand, was prevented from attending Hebrew University in Palestine because of her father’s affiliation with Agudat Yisroel, an ultra-Orthodox political party that opposed secular institutions.
All the same, my siblings and I were given to understand that this omission was a tremendous waste of their native abilities, that they both might have become entirely different beings—my businessman father a Kissingeresque eminence, my mother a great doctor—had their talents been given full rein. We all listened raptly to my mother’s version of what-might-have-been, convinced that history had swindled them out of their sparkling prospects. Looking back, these alternative life-scenarios don’t strike me as very persuasive, given my father’s nonexistent diplomatic skill and my mother’s lack of scientific aptitude and her dilettante approach to the things that interested her. But while I was growing up the sense of my parents’ lost opportunities took up a good deal of space.
Was I looked on as a disappointment, a third girl instead of another boy? I was told that when my older brother was born, my father and grandfather practically did a jig in front of the hospital nursery, weeping for joy, sending crowing telegrams to far-off relatives, announcing the great event. Jewish families such as mine value sons, trumpet their entrance into the world with a bris, domesticating them for future family life. These occasions usually take place in the morning and feature blue balloons and tables groaning with bagels and lox as well as a mohel to perform the circumcision ritual. Girls are less noteworthy and I imagine my arrival after two sisters and one brother rather than another boy must have produced a sense of letdown.
But the presumed lack of excitement about my birth pales when set against the larger question: Who was there to take an interest in any of us? My father was preoccupied with work—he had decided to abandon the fur business for Wall Street sometime in the fifties—and Jewish community affairs, where he was involved in establishing a new Orthodox shul on the Upper East Side. More to the point, he was a man without a paternal bone in his body—and without much interest in other people altogether, except for my mother. He participated in no collective activities other than those relating to Jewish life, and I don’t believe he had any close male friends; it’s impossible to imagine him hanging out with his contemporaries, shooting the breeze over a couple of beers. In truth, I think he would have been perfectly happy to have had no children, much less a gang of them, and I realized fairly quickly that I and the homely details of my existence held no allure for him whatsoever.
I knew little about him, beyond the basic facts that he was born and grew up in Leipzig and that he was the kvelled-over only son in a family of five sisters. That, and the fact that he had served in the U.S. Army during World War II, which I found hard to believe, although I have a faded black-and-white photo of him standing in uniform, holding a rifle like a man who knew how to use it. The workings of political influence interested him, as did his weekly Talmud class. He was constitutionally secretive about everything; when I was younger I imagined that he was a spy in disguise, someone out of the KGB or CIA, who only appeared to lead an ordinary existence but was really off stalking the inner corridors of power. I suppose today he might be diagnosed as something of a schizoid personality, given his obsessionality and emotional remove.
No, from first to last, my father wasn’t the kind of father I would have wished for—an image cobbled together from the paternal figures I warmed to on television or in the movies, attentive and playful and full of wise counsel, like the fathers on Gidget and The Parent Trap. I didn’t like his face, his thick lips and thick accent, and feared his readily provoked rage. He would bellow at the top of his lungs when he was annoyed, even if the incitement was as small as a pencil that was missing from the neat lineup of finely sharpene
d Eberhard Faber #2 pencils he kept on his desk, next to a pile of small white notepads. There was something about him that seemed unappeasable when riled. I suspected him of being capable of great violence, although I only saw him erupt a few times (once, memorably, when he battled my naked older brother in the boys’ bathroom about some perceived misbehavior and they both eventually fell into the bathtub, to my and my siblings’ barely suppressed delight) and he rarely resorted to anything more forceful than shoving me forward or out of his way.
This dynamic might have changed as time passed—some men who are bored or mystified by very young children become intrigued by older ones—but it did not. My father was never to become intrigued by me. I don’t think he ever knew the names of any of my teachers, and he couldn’t tell my friends apart. He didn’t teach me how to ride a bike (he couldn’t ride one himself) or drive a car (he couldn’t drive one himself) or lend himself to helping me master the world in any way, which is the role often attributed to fathers in the developmental histories of daughters. Then, too, he hadn’t much use for feelings, which were what interested me the most, then as now. My habit of questioning everything wilted before his businesslike resolution, his focus on the bottom line. If I saw him as a remote, scary presence, he in turn regarded me as something of an incipient madwoman—a troublesome hysteric, at the least, given to tearful outbursts.
On those infrequent occasions when I would officially meet with him in his book-lined study with green felt wallpaper to discuss a childhood difficulty at my mother’s urging, I would invariably find my articulation of some finely honed conflict or other cut off at the pass. “Be decisive,” he’d order me, in his commandeering style. “You’ve got to be decisive.” I still remember an incident in my teens, when the very tall and angular psychiatrist I was then seeing, who approved of neither me nor my parents, called the house one morning to ask that someone take me to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation. “You take her!” my father answered, banging down the phone.
Still, I wanted him to find me smart, and to this end busied myself with world events at a younger age than I otherwise might have, dropping in casual references to the Vietnam War (he insisted on pronouncing it as “Whitnam”) and student demonstrations at Friday night dinners and Shabbos lunches. When Israeli politicians came to visit, everyone from Menachem Begin to Chaim Herzog to a young and newly ascendant Bibi Netanyahu, I would try to appear both feminine and informed, like a Diane Sawyer in the making. I think in his own way my father was proud of me—when I started writing book and film reviews in my early twenties, he kept copies on file in his office—although I couldn’t say for sure. I always had the sense that he eyed my literary aspirations warily, as something that would come at too high a cost and land me at the bottom of the river, like Virginia Woolf.
One of the few times I felt close to my father was on an occasion when I unexpectedly bumped into him in the outside world. It was such a rare and startling event that I remember every detail of it all these years later. I was in my early thirties and had gone into Rumpelmayer’s, the old-fashioned tearoom in the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, late one weekday afternoon to satisfy my always insistent sweet tooth with one of their delectable hot fudge sundaes. These were served in a silver bowl with a genteel mound of whipped cream, a sugar biscuit, and hot fudge dribbled over the top, together with a small pitcher of extra sauce. I sat at the counter, as I always did, having brought with me the latest issue of The New Republic to read.
Just as I was obliviously digging into my order I heard the discreet, mitteleuropean waiter say to the person on my right: “The usual?” Intrigued by the idea that there was someone who came in so regularly that he or she had a standing order, I looked up to see who this personage might be. It was none other than my father, stopping in on his way home from work to have a slice of the establishment’s silky-smooth cheesecake. We greeted each other like fellow fugitives, escapees from an austere regimen, as we both hungrily devoured our illicit confections and went on to discuss the book review I was reading, which was by a friend I thought had an excessively orotund style. My father had an interest in language—he kept a list of words he liked or wanted to investigate further on the notepads on his desk—and I explained to him what I didn’t like about some of the more finicky descriptions in the review. I knew my mother kept him on a fairly strict diet since he had a tendency to put on weight, and, sitting there at the counter, gobbling up our respective sweets and talking about writing, I felt a momentary kinship with him. It was as though I could glimpse, however briefly, the possibility of a closeness where none actually existed.
Years later I would find some of my relationship with him expressed in Franz Kafka’s famous, importuning letter to his father, with its fearful, futile wish for a communion that cannot be. (As it turned out, Kafka gave his mother the letter to give to his father and she never passed it on.) From the very first sentence of this twenty-odd-page document—a manifesto, really, which Kafka described as “a lawyer’s brief”—I felt my own father being invoked in all his indifference to me: “You asked me recently,” Kafka begins, “why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you.”
Aside from being an absent parent, our father was our principal competitor for our mother’s attention; he was, in effect, her best baby boy, the person she willingly fussed over, and she unfailingly placed his needs above our own. “Hermi comes first,” she liked to tell people. “Then the children.” The rigmarole of child care she left mostly to Jane, who scared all of us into a state of fearful compliance with ferocious spankings and a general air of fed-upness, which expressed itself in an abrupt manner and constant threats. “Don’t you dare!” was her favorite way of forestalling behavior that went against her dictates, whether it was resisting leaving the playground or failing to get into bed at the appointed bedtime hour or even “talking back”: Just who did we think we were?
Set against this joyless landscape, reading became my only true escape; it brought me as close as I ever came to a sense of pleasure. Going to the cozy, overheated public library way over on East Sixty-eighth Street on Friday afternoon to select a new batch of books—the latest Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle or another in Noel Streatfeild’s Shoes series or in Edgar Eager’s Half Magic series—was one of the few unalloyed delights of my childhood. I loved everything about the library: the way books smelled, both musty and papery, and the fact that they never ran out, and the way the librarian stamped the due date on a card that was then inserted in a clever little pocket on the back. Reading was also—deliciously, confusingly—a pastime I shared with my mother. She had encouraged my and my siblings’ reading in a wholehearted fashion she extended to few other activities and I can still remember the sense of excitement I felt when she bought me a book that she had liked as a child, such as The Adventures of Maya the Bee, which was translated from the original German and which she gave me for my tenth birthday.
So perhaps it was no wonder that I longed for Thursdays, Jane’s day off, even if my mother disappointed me with her own unwillingness to hover, to minister lovingly to my hothouse needs. Inevitably, it didn’t take long for her to become visibly tired of her understudy role, what with my siblings and me pulling hungrily at her. She’d soon enough become irate at one or the other of us—usually my older brother—and my dreams of reading out my English composition to her as she listened admiringly would be dashed. In any case, she was always in something of a hurry to get us finished with our homework and into baths and bed (although one of the pluses of my mother’s being on duty was that we’d often skip baths) so that she’d be done with
parenting for the night before my father came home.
The high point came at the end of the evening, when she would sing a few lullabies as we lay in our beds. My mother had a lilting, musical voice and her repertoire included a mixture of Hebrew, German, and English songs. Many of them, like “Goodnight, Irene,” a Hebrew lullaby called “Numi Numi,” and another Hebrew song about a boat bringing settlers to the new state of Israel, were inherently melancholic and I would wonder as she sang if she was feeling sad about her own life—or, perhaps, her past. These occasions offered a little-seen—and thus all the more tantalizing—glimpse of my mother’s tender side, and I wanted them to go on forever. We weren’t supposed to get out of bed while she sang but once in a while I would slip out and sit in her lap, the better to keep her company in case she felt lonely (Was she lonely? Or was I? I could never tell these two things apart), and to bring her back to the present and to me, who loved her to the exclusion of all else.
5
The thing about depression is that it often starts young—younger than would seem possible, as though upon exiting the womb one is enveloped in a scratchy gray wool blanket instead of soft pastel-colored bunting. Although the diagnosis of “early-onset depression” remains a controversial one, the subject of long magazine articles arguing for and against its validity, these days more attention is being paid to the possibility of depression rearing its head even in preschoolers. But when I was growing up young children in the main weren’t given the benefit of such consideration.
This Close to Happy Page 4
