by Joan Wheelis
Perhaps because this was on my mind, I was startled when on our way back home a man with a hat, a cane and a small mongrel dog at his heels came out from behind a clump of trees. Both dogs were off their leashes. Monty stood still at our heels with ears alert. My father grabbed his collar, clearly assuming the other man would do the same. But when the mangy mongrel lunged forward, Monty broke away from my father’s grip and hurled himself into battle.
What followed is stored in my memory as a kaleidoscope of images and sensations twisting and turning in my mind. My father ran toward the dogs to stop the fight, and the man started hitting him on his back with his cane. I can still hear the raspy voice of the man shouting, “Leave them alone. Let them fight.” My legs became weak as I was overcome with fear that I would lose my father and my dog. I slipped down onto my knees in the grass, crying inconsolably, desperately. I couldn’t speak.
I have no memory of how long the fight lasted. Probably only a few minutes. When it was over, Monty had a bleeding ear and my father was shaken up but unharmed. As we walked home, I held my father’s hand tightly and my father kept Monty on a close leash. I asked many, many questions about what had happened. I don’t remember his answers.
In my father’s log:
Sunday, December 11, 1966
The day of the fighting dogs, the sobbing child. Monty’s ear is bitten. The crazy, promiscuous violence that is everywhere can occur in an instant, with as little warning as a dog fight. How little time for laughter, for innocence of the knowledge of violence, and of the death that lies in wait.
caped devil
EACH DAY AFTER WALKING ME TO THE BUS STOP, MY FATHER returned home with Monty and then spent the rest of the morning reading, writing, playing tennis and running errands. We ate dinner every night at 6:30, served typically by Yvonne, a French cook from the Bretagne region who came in the afternoons to prepare the evening meal. After dinner my father returned to his office and my mother to hers. I went to my room to do homework. It was not uncommon for my father to play music in his office after dinner. Not infrequently it was Mahler. It was always loud, and the deep crescendos of timpani would often rattle the arched windows of the main floor of our house. My mother was irritated by the combination of the noise and the fact that my father was in his office alone, writing rather than being with her. In response she retreated to her office upstairs, shutting the three-inch-thick oak door with considerable force and a resounding thud. With both my parents sequestered in their respective offices, I felt alone and unsettled by the palpable tension.
Though forbidden during the day to enter the living room while my father was seeing patients, I felt I had the right to go into the room at night. Or maybe it was because I didn’t think either of my parents would notice, between the music and the closed oak door to my mother’s office. Nonetheless, holding my breath, I came down the central curved staircase, careful to avoid the creaky spots in the stairs. I unlatched the small brass hook that fastened the two large glass-paneled pocket doors that closed off the living room from the rest of the house. It was a beautiful room that we used mostly when we had guests or on holidays. A large, fine Yomut rug covered much of the darkly stained parquet floor. A couch covered in warm blue silk velvet stood in front of the east arched window, a rosewood coffee table in front of it. Two smaller dark blue wool-covered couches and mid-century Danish wood chairs punctuated the spaces toward the east side where there was a fireplace. An Austrian silver box with cigarettes, a blue and white East Asian plate, the statues in the windows, the art on the walls. Everything beautiful and in its place.
Standing there above my father’s office and under the molded, beamed, twelve-foot-tall ceiling of the living room just under my mother’s office made me feel secure. The tension in the house and the fact that the room was somewhat forbidden territory intensified my emotional state of keen alertness. I stood there motionless, yearning to understand what was happening in my father’s office. What was he doing? I decided that in the small locked closet of his office he kept a long black cape, which on such tormented occasions he wore. He had to because it was the only way he could exorcise the demons that claimed his soul. I wondered if he looked different as he listened to Mahler and swirled around his office in the billowing folds of the cape.
I was six when I came up with this notion. When I was ten, I noticed the door to the locked closet was open one day. There was no cape—only a large file cabinet and tennis rackets.
In 1999, when I was forty-four, my father was asked to give the plenary address for the American Psychoanalytic Association’s winter meeting and I was asked to write a piece about it for the association newsletter. I wrote about the cape and my childhood understanding of his guilty self-criticism as an ongoing battle with the devil. I sent a copy to my father before I submitted it to make sure he approved. He called me immediately. He was impressed and proud. He told me he didn’t know I could write so well. And that he felt so understood and so loved. Then he asked with a chuckle, “Did you really believe I wore a black velvet cape to exorcise my demons?”
“Of course not, Daddy, just literary license.”
He laughed as I invoked the same defense he often used when challenged about fact or fiction.
blue angels
TWICE A YEAR THE BLUE ANGELS FLEW OVER SAN FRANCISCO. Over the Presidio and Pacific Heights where I lived. Right over the house—six of them ripping up the sky—leaving blue and yellow traces, the roar and piercing crack rattling the windows of my home. It seemed that I was always walking out of the house with my father when they flew over. When I was little, the sound terrified me, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere. I moved in closer to my father and clutched his hand tighter. I think my father always liked this gesture—a clear demonstration of my vulnerability and instinctive desire for his protection. My hand was small and sweaty, and his, large and dry. We would stop walking as though a great procession were passing before us, blocking our way. My father would often take such occasions to teach me something about the experience—a lesson that would begin in the pause at the doorstep in a moment between feeling scared and protected. I hung on his every word, parsed with deliberate distinction and diction. Over the years I learned all about F/A-18 Hornets, Mach speed, breaking the sound barrier, afterburners, g-forces. One day when I was a teenager the shearing sound above led my father to say with passionate satisfaction: “That is the sound of power.” I felt a thrill linking the sounds of the jets with the warm surge of adrenaline spreading within. Subsequently I developed a fantasy of falling in love with a Blue Angel pilot. The fantasy began with the thunderous roar of engines and an exquisite landing. The air hot, and wind blowing every which way. A tall pilot in a blue jumpsuit running toward me across the tarmac: he’s smiling, and then I am in his arms, sinking into his powerful embrace.
The last time my father and I saw the Blue Angels fly over the house was a few months before he died. This time my hand protected him. He had terrible back pain and often felt weak and unsteady on his feet; he gripped my hand, knowing I would lend him my strength so he wouldn’t fall. We were standing in the warm sun outside the front door when the Blue Angels flew overhead. His movements were slow and the jets were gone by the time his gaze had turned up.
“Ah, I missed them,” he said wistfully.
“Daddy, do you have another story to tell me about the Blue Angels?”
“No. I think I have told you everything I know about them.”
I felt disappointed. I counted on my father to tell me stories.
We started down the street, slowly. I moved closer to him to support him more securely. After a few blocks he said, “Well, I guess I do have another story to tell.”
“I knew you would!”
“I heard a story the other day that stuck with me. From an astronaut. He was talking about ‘three degrees.’ Unfamiliar with that expression, I asked him what he meant. He told me that it is the difference between life and death when he brings the shuttl
e home. The angle of attack—the angle at which the shuttle is piloted toward Earth. It’s exactly forty degrees. Forty-two is too steep and the shuttle gets too hot. Thirty-eight is too shallow; it skips off the atmosphere and the tail falls off. Either way it’s over. Even forty degrees is scary but beautiful because the orbiter is bathed in a seven-thousand-degree plasma fireball, which you can see glowing outside each window. Only those infamous tiles stand between you and extinction. Dazzling but dangerous slice of sky in which to fly. Three degrees.”
He stopped speaking and his hand felt cold in mine. I felt mildly irritated by the grim existential undertones.
“Are you trying to say that within those three degrees is where we should try to live our lives?” I asked.
My father turned toward me, taking off his sunglasses to see me more clearly. He chuckled and I knew that he was amused by my psychological challenge.
“Maybe if we can . . . when we are able and lucky and ready . . .”
And with that he gripped my arm with uncustomary strength and said, “With you at my side I am ready to walk home in those three degrees.”
easter
AS I REMEMBER IT, EASTER ALWAYS FELL ON A BEAUTIFUL sunny day in San Francisco. The garden was full of life. The Japanese plum had already shed the last delicate white blossoms, revealing its dense purplish leaves. Beside it was a circular planted area. It was once a fishpond, but my mother had it filled in and planted a Japanese maple with finely chiseled pale green leaves and delicate red stems. Begonias, fuchsias and columbines filled the planter at its base. The camellia was blooming and the thorny bougainvillea climbing up the side of the house was full of signs of the paper-thin magenta flowers to come. Primroses, clematis, and Icelandic poppies rose from the low concrete planters that ran the length of the house from the wrought-iron gate to the backyard. A Meyer lemon and a fragrant pink and white rose planted in large pots stood tall near the front door, and many other pots sprouted white cyclamen and other bulbs. It was a voluptuous garden full of places to hide Easter eggs.
I have been told that for a couple of years when I was a small child my father dressed up in a one-piece bunny suit. I had my eye out for it when I cleaned out the basement after my parents had both died, but I never did find it. Somehow the thought of my six-foot-three-inch-tall, thin, proper father parading as a rabbit never seemed credible. Without the costume or a single photograph as proof, I wonder if the story was apocryphal, made up and then held out as amusing and wishful testimony that my father had such frivolity in him. What I do remember is that my mother scattered dark chocolate eggs and bunnies under leaves and flowers, and my father went to great lengths to hide presents, one for each guest, carefully wrapped, labeled for its intended recipient and hidden cleverly low and high throughout the garden. With choruses of “warmer, warmer, colder, cold, warm, warmer, hot,” children and adults were all coached to the discovery of their gifts. The search for presents, chocolate eggs and rabbits required lots of bending over, peering under bushes and lifting up leaves. My mother was always attentive to ensuring fairness, coaching the little children to find eggs and attempting to curb the greediness of the older ones. And then there was always the worry that some of the chocolate eggs would go to waste undiscovered in the garden.
The combination of sunshine, flowers and the reflective colorful foil sparking throughout the garden was festive and pleasing. For many years Monty seemed both intrigued and perplexed by the behavior of the humans on Easter in the garden and in his backyard. One year I noticed him with his nose in the flower bed wagging his tail wildly. When he emerged from beneath the leaves, I could tell he had something in his mouth by the telltale gentle tension in his jowls.
“Monty, come here!” I called somewhat urgently, fearful that he had found something alive. Triumphantly he opened his mouth and dropped a perfectly intact foil-wrapped Easter egg into my palm. One of his most endearing traits was that he had a clear moral sense of what was for him and what belonged to the humans. Food, even inches from his nose, would never be eaten if it wasn’t offered to him or placed in his bowl on the floor. And in true retriever style, whatever was in his mouth that he fetched was gently held, as a matter of pride, so as not to damage the recovered prize. By the time I had fully comprehended that my dog had just discovered the art of finding Easter eggs, he was off into the garden looking for more. He got to be so good at it that we had to keep him inside to let the little children find some. He sat by the window with his ears pricked, looking out longingly as the search went on. After the children felt satisfied they had found them all, I dropped one or two of my own into the bushes and then let Monty out. Invariably he found the ones I had left and often a few more.
I live on the East Coast now, where Easter typically falls on a cold day still too close to the grip of winter to feel like spring. Sometimes the vertical leaves of tulips and hyacinths are up, but apart from that the landscape is barren, with virtually nothing else green in which to hide anything. Over the years when we didn’t go to San Francisco for the holiday, I did my best for my young son, hiding the foil eggs behind the trunks of trees or nestled into the base of the emerging foliage of the bulbs. The tangle of branches and dried leaves of the honeysuckle or wisteria left over from the fall could at times hide a wrapped present. Bundled up in the wintry garden, I longed for the warmth and sunshine of my childhood.
I bring a small basket with a green ribbon full of dark chocolate eggs and bunnies to my son, now in college in New York. I want to tell him the stories again, describe how his Jewish Viennese great-grandparents loved Easter, how Monty found the eggs. But I don’t. Some things are best left in the past. In memory. Or unknown and unresolved. Like the bunny suit.
loss
MY MOTHER LANDED AT ELLIS ISLAND ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1938. She was twenty-two. Her visa had been issued on the first of August after she was asked to withdraw from her medical school studies in Vienna. She surrendered her Austrian passport and was told she could never return. She left Vienna sometime in August, traveled to London and boarded the S.S. Veendam in Southampton, England, on September 3. She arrived in New York with a trunk containing some china, linens, clothes, important papers, journals, and jewelry. The rest of her family’s belongings were packed up in a carton and ultimately made their way to Denmark, where my mother’s uncle Josef resided. Many things were lost or stolen. My mother never dwelled on it. It had been wartime and one was to be grateful for what one had.
MY MOTHER STRUGGLED for years to raise money and procure visas to help her parents leave Austria. Making contact became increasingly challenging and ultimately futile. Letters written by her parents were held up by the Nazis, opened, read, numbered, delayed—some even arriving after the war was over. After they were already dead.
Once when I was six, helping my mother set the table for a dinner party, I sensed her agitation as she opened the locked chest containing her mother’s Austrian silverware. The smell of the unfinished wood on the inside of the opened chest and the linen cloth over the uppermost drawer of silver reminded her of home. I asked questions about the little spoons, and whether her parents had had dinner parties too and used the same knives and forks I was laying out on the table. Tears tumbled down her cheeks and she hugged me silently.
“What’s the matter, Mummy?”
“You are too young to understand. I’ll tell you when you are older.”
I heard that answer for many years before I finally learned what had happened.
Her anxiety and distress were palpable. It made me fearful. I didn’t understand, nor could I imagine what it might be that I didn’t understand. I learned things in bits and pieces. The information seemed fragile and elusive. I worried that it would slip out of memory.
Now and then on a Sunday afternoon my mother and I would sit together with an album or a box of old photographs. My mother was the only child to her father, Richard, an obstetrician and her mother, Sofie, who had been a nurse in World War I. She played the piano, and
once Richard had been an extra in Aida. They had two dachshunds and vacationed in Yugoslavia on Lake Bled in the summertime. Little by little she painted a picture of their life and hers. Even more slowly came the painful stories. My grandmother became delusional and obsessed with a well-known composer, tried to kill herself several times and was hospitalized for two years when my mother was four. I learned that my grandfather had a stroke, and it left him with a minor speech impediment, which worsened when he was emotionally affected. While being interviewed by the Americans in 1938, he couldn’t speak and they deemed him unable to function in the U.S. workforce. My grandmother was cleared to come to the United States, but she wouldn’t leave without him. And then the terrible incomprehensible reality of their deaths. My mother couldn’t remember the date and often remarked that she, who never lost anything, had lost their death certificates. After my mother died, I found all the things that she had made reference to over my life. I found boxes in the most inaccessible reaches of her office. They were tied with string and contained all the letters from her parents in their envelopes, carbon copies of hundreds of efforts seeking information and money to acquire visas. I found my grandfather’s journal kept while in the bunkers in World War I, my grandmother’s journal chronicling her descent into madness, legal documents, medical school records of my mother and her father, letters from family members and friends looking for one another after the war. And among all those things a letter from a cousin decades after the end of the war with a document listing the names of my grandparents as passengers on a train bound for the Polish death camp Sobibor, on June 14, 1942. Upon arrival they were killed in the gas chambers, thrown into mass graves, and burned. Their deaths were never recorded.
