Yes, I now know that Annie is real, yet she still seems like little more than an apparition who has floated into our lives, without form or shape or substance. But then, when it comes right down to it, couldn’t the same be said for the young Beth—or should I say Bertha—Cohen?
I’m chatting with Mom at her kitchen table sometime in the late 1980s, if memory serves, when the secret comes out.
“I had an abortion,” she says. Or something equally matter of fact.
I wonder why she has decided to tell me this now, at this particular moment. Maybe it’s because abortion has taken center stage again in politics, and her personal experience has been on her mind. Or maybe it’s because I’m a father now, approaching my late thirties, and she thinks I can appreciate how agonizing this must have been for her. Or maybe it was just impulsive, except impulse is not her style. (Unlike guilt, which is very much her style.)
Whatever her reasons, whether she’s unburdening herself or merely revealing a powerful piece of her past, I feel good that she trusts me enough to confide something so private. A hundred questions pop into my head, but I stick with the conventional: When, where, what, how. Much later, I learn that I’m not the only one in the family to hear the story, so at some point, she must have decided she felt it was okay to talk about it.
She doesn’t dwell on the details. It happened between Mike and me, which probably means the late 1940s, when Mom and Dad were still living in the tiny apartment on Euclid. Dad was struggling in the furniture business, had changed jobs a few times, and they didn’t have enough money to pay the bills. Mom was overwhelmed, taking care of Evie, by then a teenager, and Marsha (not yet Sash), going on nine or ten, and little Michael, not yet in school. Dad’s younger brother Billy was there, too, sleeping on a Murphy bed in the living room. Mom wanted another child, hoped for another child, but this was not the right time or the right place for an unexpected pregnancy. She despaired about what to do, and then she made her heartrending decision. Dad went with her.
Abortion was illegal in Michigan at the time, but like most other states, there were ways to have one. I ask where she went, how she found it. She says she doesn’t want to talk much about that, except to say that it was traumatic and terrifying, the kind of place that deserved the back-alley label. Sometimes she thinks about how things might have been different, about the child who never was, but she says she doesn’t regret her decision; she couldn’t have coped, they couldn’t have coped. She did what she needed to do. When she got pregnant again, she and Dad were ready, ready for the child who turned out to be me.
It doesn’t occur to me to ask: Any other secrets you’d like to share? I have no reason to ask that. I don’t think of Mom as a keeper of secrets.
As we were leaving the cemetery, after the ritual grasping of the shovel and spooning of a moundful of dirt onto Mom’s coffin, I spotted two people among the departing mourners who were strangers to me—a man with graying hair, about my age, and an older woman, slightly stooped, with a smile and a stride that suggested she might have been a force to reckon with in her younger days. Shading my eyes in the bright September sun so I could see them better, I whispered to Sash, “Do you know them?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s Mom’s cousin Anna, and her son,” Sash said.
“Mom’s cousin?” I remember saying. “I didn’t know she had any cousins. How come I’ve never met her?”
“I don’t think they cared for each other,” Sash said. “I’m not sure why, but I think they had some sort of falling out.”
Sash wasn’t sure of Anna’s last name—Oli-something. I considered briefly whether to go over to them and thank them for coming, but they were already on their way, and I wasn’t in the mood to chase after anyone for a bit of small talk.
In March 2006, as I begin my search for people who might have known Mom in her younger days, I go through the boxes in Jeff’s attic and find the funeral guest book. “Anna and David Oliwek” reads the final entry. Anticipating that we might not be able to place the name, the writer had penned in “Cousin” directly above Anna’s name. Well, that’s a bit of good luck, much easier than combing through all the Oli-entries in the Detroit phone books.
I call Sash. Her interest in the secret has only grown since I started my detective work; I get the feeling that she wishes she could join me on the hunt. I tell her, “At the time of Mom’s funeral, we still knew almost nothing about Annie, not even her name. We still thought she had been institutionalized when Mom was young. Now we know that isn’t true. Do you think Anna knows about Annie?”
It’s possible, Sash says, and then goes one step further. “I don’t know why I’m saying this, but I’m wondering whether the tension between them had something to do with the secret.”
{ THREE }
The Rosetta Stone
“The patient’s mother”: Tillie, undated photo, probably 1930s
It’s 1964. I’m eleven. I wake up in the hospital, delirious from the anesthetic and believing that something has gone terribly wrong with the operation to remove a benign cyst near the corner of my left eye. I see nothing but darkness. I’m blind, I must be blind, this can’t be happening. I cry out, and Mom goes off to grab the first doctor she can find. It turns out that blood from the surgery has congealed in my eye cavities, sending a signal to my brain not to bother opening my eyelids. “Very common,” the surgeon tells Mom. “I should have warned you.”
Mom can’t contain her fury. “You should have warned HIM,” I hear her say. “How could you do that to an eleven-year-old boy?”
I tell myself that if I just look hard enough at Mom’s possessions, I will find some reference to Annie, some oblique clue that will make sense now that I know the secret. I’m like an archeologist on a dig, scrabbling through the rubble of a lost civilization, sifting for broken pieces that would fit together nicely if only I could uncover enough of them. But no shards reveal themselves, at least none that I recognize.
So I turn instead to the Rosetta stone, the “Routine History” completed by an Eloise social worker named Mona Evans in early May 1940, at the time of Annie’s admission to the county mental institution. Here, in black and white on fading paper, is most of what I know about Annie. I study every sentence to exhume any nuance that might have eluded me the first few times through.
In my earlier reads, I had focused, inevitably, on the dramatic points of Annie’s life—the leg that left her “so handicapped physically that she couldn’t get around enough to go to school” until she was seven years old; the amputation at age seventeen; the prosthetic replacement that “never fitted right”; her deteriorating mental state at twenty, including her refusal to leave the apartment for two weeks at a time; the family “all going crazy” in the days before Annie’s hospitalization on the eve of her twenty-first birthday.
Now, I find it disconcerting to know so much about her physical and psychic ailments, and yet so little about the most ordinary of things. What did she look like? Was she small, like my grandmother? Or taller, like Mom? What color were her eyes? How about her hair? Was it curly, like Mom’s and mine, or straight, like my grandfather’s? And what about her smile—did she smile?
The Routine History offers nothing so mundane, leaving me with just enough pieces to make out an image, but it’s indistinct, a body dominated by a deformed leg, but no torso, no mouth, no nose, no eyes, no face at all.
Which is not to say that Evans’s report is devoid of description. In her professional, dispassionate style, the social worker offered this account of Annie’s entrance into the world: “The patient was born on 4–27–1919, the mother being confined at home. There was nothing abnormal about her birth except that the child’s leg was bent and could not be straightened out. Patient ‘didn’t grow much,’ and when she was seven weeks old weighed only four pounds and thirteen ounces.”
Nothing abnormal about her birth except her bent leg? Perhaps there was nothing abnormal about the delivery itself, but if seven-week-old Annie
Cohen tipped the scales at four pounds, thirteen ounces, she couldn’t have weighed much more than four pounds at birth. I consult a medical reference book: It defines “low” birth weight as less than five pounds, eight ounces, and “very low” birth weight as three pounds, five ounces. Annie arrived with the odds against her: Low birth weight babies are at much greater risk for mental retardation and other birth defects.
It’s hard to judge an infant’s mental abilities, but everyone saw right away that Annie’s right leg wasn’t normal. When she was two, “Her mother took her to Children’s Hospital Clinic, where an attempt was made to straighten the leg by stretching it out and putting it into a cast,” Evans wrote. “From that time on she was in casts and braces all the time, but the leg didn’t improve much, and failed to develop. Until she was 17 years of age, patient walked with crutches, and at that time she was able to walk a little with a brace.” Then, for reasons not explained in the report, the amputation. “It was decided by Dr. Kidner that the leg should be amputated, and he performed the operation at Harper Hospital. A minor operation followed for the purpose of straightening the hip, and arrangements were made for the Welfare Department to provide an artificial leg.”
I shudder to think of how my grandparents must have felt when confronted with the choice: Leave the leg alone, and doom your child to crutches for the rest of her life, or remove it, making her disability permanent and requiring her to accept a prosthetic limb that might improve her ability to get around but which would forever symbolize something lost as well as something gained. Not only did her new leg require daily cleaning and maintenance to work and fit properly, but it was just plain heavy, up to eighteen pounds of extra weight pulling on her shoulder and hips, every step a constant reminder that she wasn’t normal, wasn’t like those around her.
There was one benefit to Annie’s leg problem, but the benefit is mine, not hers. A girl on crutches or in a brace until age seventeen meant a girl who stood out—at home, at school, on the bus, on the street, at the store, in the library. A girl on crutches or a wooden leg meant a girl harder to forget.
Surely someone would remember, if only I can figure out who that someone might be.
Evans’s job wasn’t to act as a family biographer, but she produced a more comprehensive and candid report than her counterparts today would write. I’ve shown her report to a variety of people who work in the current mental health system—social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists—and they all commented that Evans’s style, once standard in the field, has gone out of favor in this age of lawsuits and political sensitivities. It is unlikely, for example, that a social worker in the first decade of the twenty-first century would begin her report this way: “On 5–3–1940, patient’s mother, Mrs. Tillie Cohen, kept the initial history appointment…She is a poorly dressed, middle-aged Jewish woman. She talks in a complaining, whining voice, expressing a great amount of antagonism toward the Welfare, various hospitals, etc., with whom her daughter has had contact. She feels that if her family had money, the patient could have been made well long ago and the present mental disturbance would not have been manifested.”
Others might bristle at Evans’s language or dismiss her words as the defensive view of a jaded bureaucrat, but I inhale them as I think Evans meant them to be understood—as a matter-of-fact, even sympathetic, observation of her distraught client, a panicked mother defeated by her circumstances. The grandson may recoil at the social worker’s unflattering portrait of his grandmother, but the reporter in me appreciates Evans’s attempt to chronicle how Tillie saw the world, rather than how the world saw Tillie.
And what about Evans? What did she see? She saw a woman whose appearance and demeanor had changed drastically since her initial contact with the staff of Detroit’s Harper Hospital in 1936, when she brought Annie in for an examination. “She was always well dressed, neat and ‘proud,’” Evans wrote after interviewing Jean Powell, a social worker who met Tillie in 1936. “She appears to have aged considerably and has lost all interest in herself.”
If Tillie could not escape the avalanche caused by Annie’s downhill slide, what about my mother? Mom, of course, wasn’t responsible for Annie, but as Tillie’s oldest child, as the daughter who did well in school and could speak English without a heavy Eastern European accent, it’s likely that my immigrant grandparents relied on her for help and support, if not advice. Did my mother resent her sister? That would be a normal reaction to a sibling who’s getting all the attention.
The Evans report hardly mentions Mom, except to contrast her with Annie. “Bertha”—that’s what the report calls her, so this is pre-Beth, or at least before Beth has asserted herself and banished Bertha from her life—“is said to be an unusually intelligent girl, popular with both boys and girls, and is normal in every way. She has had much difficulty finding work, however, and becomes very discouraged at times over this.” (She and Annie had that in common, at least.) “She is said to be kindly toward and friendly toward the patient.”
Said by whom? By Tillie, probably. Perhaps this statement was true—I want it to be true—but somehow I doubt Mom’s feelings could be summed up so simply. In 1972, during the four months that Annie spent at Northville before going to the nursing home where she died, another social worker reviewing Annie’s thirty-year history at Eloise wrote something that suggested Mom’s attitude had changed over the years. “She admitted to Wayne County General that she hated the patient,” reported social worker Jim Mulherin, apparently after reading some note in Annie’s records from many years before. He didn’t say when Mom “admitted” this, or the context in which she might have said it.
Hated the patient. The starkness of that statement makes me blink. I never knew Mom to hate anyone. She certainly could dislike people, particularly those who disappointed her, such as the doctor who had neglected to warn me that I would be temporarily blind after my cyst operation, or the uncle who had failed to follow through on his promise to send her to college. But hate? Not in her repertoire. Her face to the world was kindness—she preached it, practiced it, was fully aware of its power. She understood that people spoke well of those who were kind, and that kindness earned you points. So even if she did hate Annie, wouldn’t she try to repress it? I want to know more about this “admission”—When did Mom make it? What were the circumstances?—but the 1972 report, much skimpier than Evans’s, offers no details or documentation of this pronouncement.
What to believe?
I would have to find out on my own. Rosetta stones do not yield their secrets so easily.
Without really trying, I have become a collector of other families’ secrets. Whenever I tell anyone about my detective work, the first question is invariably something like this: “Can you tell me the secret?” Sure, I say. The next question often is: “Want to hear my family’s secret?”
No shortage of heirlooms line this attic: hidden affairs, of course, but also hidden marriages, hidden divorces, hidden crimes, even hidden families. I have heard so many secrets that I started a list. One of the most memorable: a man who learned, as a teenager, that his father was leading a double life—two wives, two houses, two sets of children, all two miles apart in a Detroit suburb. Perhaps it’s a testament to the insular nature of suburban life that this master of deception managed to straddle these skew lines for more than a decade before his double life came crashing down around him.
Even when secrets do emerge, the reasons for the secrecy often stay buried. Families never learn the motivations, the circumstances, and the pressures that compel people to choose deceit rather than honesty. In this shroud of silence, the secret takes on the characteristics of an artifact—interesting to examine and exotic to behold, but mysterious and often impossible to fathom.
Families need not live their lives as open books, for anyone to read. Just as a cure can be worse than the disease, revelation can be more devastating than reticence. That’s the fear that seems to drive many of us to embrace silence or deceptio
n. But too often, we’re just telling one more lie, this one to ourselves.
Now that Annie was no longer a secret, now that Mom wasn’t here, the revelation had lost its power to hurt anyone. Or had it? Would understanding Mom’s reasons make me wish that I, too, had left well enough alone?
The question wasn’t so much where to start, but which direction to go in first. Leads abound in Mona Evans’s Routine History—file numbers, names of doctors and schools, my grandparents’ addresses (including one on Medbury Avenue that went back to the 1920s), medical problems, and work history (such as it was—the report says that junk-peddling was my grandfather’s primary occupation when he worked, which wasn’t all that often after 1929 and the Depression’s seemingly never-ending stay in Detroit).
Yet the report contains contradictions as well as clues. On the one hand, Annie can’t walk well enough to go to school, “gets around with difficulty” as a teenager, and ends up with an ill-fitting artificial limb that means she “does not walk well” even though it is changed or repaired several times. On the other hand, “As she grew older, she went everywhere by herself, not allowing herself to be deterred by the difficulties of getting on and off buses, etc.”
What to believe?
Was Annie a girl “who does all the housework she is able to, relieving her mother of a good deal of responsibility”? Or was she the girl who “took advantage of her physical affliction to demand special consideration,” and “insisted that her family wait on her hand and foot”? Is it possible to be a girl of “poor intelligence” who might be better off in an institution for the feeble-minded, and yet possess enough insight and self-awareness for Evans to conclude that “in the last year or two, she has come to realize that many of the normal activities of other people will be necessarily forbidden to her, and she has become depressed over the impossibility of ever being independent, becoming more desperately determined to locate work and more and more dejected when she failed”?
Annie's Ghosts Page 5
