I thrust Mona Evans’s Routine History report into his large hands, hoping that it would trigger some memory or give him enough clues to lead me to someone who treated or cared for Annie. He takes a quick look. “Where are the clinical records?” he grumbles. “I could tell you a lot more if I could read her clinical records.”
“I wish I had them,” I say. “I don’t know if they exist. I’m lucky I have these.”
He grunts, and squints again at the documents, which are barely readable in the pale glow of the microfilm machine’s lamp. He fires a second volley: “Eloise treated thousands of schizophrenic girls over the years. Why do you think anyone would care about this particular twenty-one-year-old from 1940?”
His question seems stonehearted, the sort of dismissive attitude that makes some people wary of the medical profession. I tell him he hasn’t heard the whole story, and he doesn’t know about the “five thousand,” those families just now discovering the existence of relatives hidden away in mental institutions. Besides, I explain, this book isn’t just about Annie. It’s about why my mother kept the secret, and the consequences of that choice.
In the microfilm reader’s light, I can see his demeanor soften. He takes my number and promises to contact a few people. Two days later, just before 9 A.M., he phones. “You’re a devil,” he says. “You got me all stirred up. I’ve made some calls for you and I’ve got some ideas.”
An abrupt change in plans: I had made a tentative date with David Oliwek to meet his mother for a first interview, but as I’m leaving the library, I pick up a cell phone message from Anna saying that she’s not feeling well and won’t be coming to Detroit after all. It’s the first time I’ve heard her voice. “I’m in Chicago,” she says on the message, pronouncing the first syllable with the hard “chick” sound of someone with an Eastern European accent. “I’d love to talk. You’re in Detroit, right? How long you going to be there? Okay, call me back.”
David had told me a bit more about his mother’s move to Chicago and his mother’s new beau, a man named Sidney whom she knew from her childhood in Radziwillow. It seemed sweet, the two of them, in their eighties, getting a second chance at romance, even if it did complicate my attempts to see her.
I dial her number.
“Hi, Steven,” she says, using my full name, just as Mom would want. Now that I’ve got her on the phone, I’m tempted to dive right in, but I restrain myself. I want to be looking at her face when I hear about her falling-out with Mom, not sitting in a car as dusk is falling, worrying about whether the cell phone signal will take a vacation in the middle of the call.
Instead, I just tell her that I hope she feels better, and we agree to meet in Detroit the following month, when she’s supposed to come for the Jewish holidays. “I can’t wait to see you,” she says. “I haven’t seen you since you were a little boy.”
Since I was a little boy? I wasn’t aware that we had ever met.
As I pull into the nearly empty parking lot, the decaying smokestack of the old power plant comes into full view, the vertical letters that spell “Eloise” still visible in the brickwork. I climb the curved stairs of the seventy-five-year-old building that once served as the hospital’s administrative center, and find myself face-to-face with Eloise herself, or at least her life-sized portrait, which greets visitors to what is now called the Kay Beard building.
The painted Eloise is young, no more than five or six years old, decked out in a Victorian ruffle dress, left arm draped over the back of her beloved dog, a strapping St. Bernard who is nearly as tall as his winsome companion. Eloise’s father, Freeman B. Dickerson, was both Detroit’s postmaster and, for two years, head of the Superintendents of the Poor, the board overseeing the mental institution, known in those days as the Wayne County House and Asylum. In 1894, when an impasse developed over what to name the new post office being built to handle the growing bounty of mail destined for the facility, the Superintendents suggested Eloise—without chairman Dickerson’s knowledge, according to the 1982 history of Eloise that Jo Johnson had mentioned in our first phone call. “The name was at once accepted by the Postmaster General” in Washington, the history says.
The power of the post office in shaping the local geography soon became apparent. If letters and packages now went to a place called Eloise, then it was only a matter of time before the new name showed up on road maps, train timetables, and the Michigan Central Railroad station that sat on the asylum’s grounds. “The word became of such general use,” the 1982 history reported, “that the Board applied it to the entire institution.” On August 18, 1911, the asylum officially adopted the Eloise name.
Inside the five-story Beard building, I spend an hour wandering through the Eloise Museum, a dozen or so glass cabinets that line the first-floor hallway. The jumbled collection of memorabilia opens a variety of paths into Eloise’s history, and into the history of mental illness in the early twentieth century. Here in one cabinet are the tools of the trade, including bulky leather arm restraints; here is a pair of shoes like those furnished free to male infirmary residents, with “Eloise” stamped in the sole to discourage them (so the story goes) from selling the shoes for liquor at the nearby Eloise Inn; here are milk bottles, dinner plates, and coffee mugs inscribed with the “Eloise” label; here are packages of home-grown tobacco provided to patients from the Eloise drying shed, marked “Luxury, Pipe and Cigarette Tobacco, Wayne County, Eloise, Mich.”
A scrapbook in one cabinet displays a yellowed July 1945 news clipping about the institution’s name change to Wayne County General, and describes the facility, authoritatively but perhaps not altogether accurately, as “the largest of its kind in the world.” Eloise was certainly one of the nation’s larger mental hospitals in the early 1940s, when its psychiatric population hovered at 4,000 patients. Maybe, if you added the infirmary residents—mostly homeless men whose numbers swelled the infirmary’s rolls to 7,000 in winter before declining to 3,000 in summer—it conceivably could be called number one, because so few institutions had this dual mission.
If nothing else, the news article’s grand statement stands in contrast to the museum’s modest size. There’s no admission fee or onsite staff person; the job of curator falls to Jo Johnson in her role as head of the local historical commission. Her efforts to preserve Eloise’s history, at least what’s left of it, have become a nearly full-time occupation. It’s not a passion she expected to be pursuing in her seventies, but it’s a passion that she pursues with the vigor of someone half her age.
The country lilt I heard in our phone conversation turns out to belong to a bespectacled, gray-haired sprite of a woman with glinting eyes and a determined set to her chin. We climb the stairs to the large conference room where Jo chairs the monthly meeting of the Friends of Eloise. As promised, Jo has put me on tonight’s slate of speakers so I can ask the preservation group for help in tracking down anyone who knew Annie. I make my brief pitch to the dozen or so Friends—no one knows my aunt, but they all promise to ask around—and then Martine MacDonald and Andrea Irwin have the floor.
Martine and Andrea represent the Downriver Council for the Arts, a local organization with a small budget and a big idea. To commemorate the former Eloise patients buried in a potter’s field near the hospital, the council wants to invite poets, musicians, and visual artists to contribute to a one-time show. The project has a dual focus: creating opportunities for local artists and celebrating a forgotten part of Eloise’s past—yet more ghosts, I find myself thinking.
The show’s proposed title echoes my thought: “Resurrected Voices.”
If keeping a secret is hard, burying one must be even harder. Yet when Annie died in August 1972, between my sophomore and junior years in college, Mom managed to arrange for her burial without any of us suspecting a thing. I was home from college that summer, painting giant lathes in an auto parts plant and flirting with a girl who boarded the same bus as I did every weekday morning, so perhaps my attention was elsewhere. Still,
it’s no mean feat to pull off a stealth burial; the American way of death isn’t a quiet one. Mom must have received several phone calls and probably made several of her own; maybe she went to Hebrew Memorial to choose a coffin.
Beyond that, there must have been an emotional toll. Whatever she felt about her sister at that moment, or about herself for keeping Annie a secret for so long, Mom had too much invested in her notion of family not to feel something about the loss of the last direct link to her parents and her childhood—whether it was relief, sadness, anger, defiance, or embarrassment. Whatever her emotions, she hid those, too, just as completely as she had hidden Annie.
Knowing Mom, and thinking about how naturally compassion came to her, it amazes me to think that she could have handled all that the burial involved and not alert any of those around her. But until my visit to Detroit, I didn’t know how amazing it was.
At the office of Hebrew Memorial Park in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, Elaine Klein agrees to dig a bit deeper into the files. I want to know who paid for the funeral. Was it the state of Michigan, because of Annie’s status as a mental patient? Or Mom? Was there any evidence that Dad was involved?
When I arrive, Elaine is beaming. She slides another copy of Annie’s burial record across the counter, the same as the one she sent us in 2000, but with the following handwritten notations added:
“8/7/72—Religious Rites–Gratis
Rabbi Milton Arm–$20.00
Death Certificate–9.00
Cement Frame–30.00”
Religious rites? Mom hadn’t just buried her sister. She had arranged for a service, with a rabbi officiating. But why? Mom wasn’t particularly religious, and while we celebrated the Jewish holidays at home when I was growing up, we rarely attended synagogue services, even on the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Yet I always had a sense that Mom believed in the rituals of our faith, so perhaps this service for Annie came from some deep reservoir of familial duty—Mom’s attempt to do what her parents would have done, to give their daughter a proper Jewish funeral.
Or maybe it was something deeper—guilt or penance, Mom’s way of saying to Annie, “I’m sorry for all those years that I didn’t visit you, all those years of keeping you a secret.”
The state of Michigan, apparently, had paid for the coffin, the biggest expense, and Mom had paid the rest. No sign of Dad’s involvement. Elaine couldn’t say why Hebrew Memorial hadn’t charged for use of its chapel to conduct the rites. “Maybe your family couldn’t afford it,” she ventures.
That night, I phone Rabbi Milton Arm at home. Now in his mid-eighties and long retired, he says, understandably, that he has no specific memory of presiding at a service in 1972 for someone named Annie Cohen, but hold on, he has records and he can check.
A few minutes later, he’s back. “Yes, that’s right, I did the service,” he says, and reads me the details—date, place, name of deceased.
“Does your record say whether it was in the chapel or at the graveside?” I ask.
“It doesn’t say graveside,” he says. “I’m sure it wasn’t. Otherwise, I would have made a note that it was graveside only.”
“Do your records indicate who hired you?”
“No,” he answers. “But it must have been the family. Otherwise, why would there have been a service?”
Good question. Other than Mom—and Dad?—who else would know that Annie had died? And if no one knew about her death, who would be there to mourn the end of her difficult and painful life?
Fred Garfinkel is wondering why I’m being so mysterious. I had phoned my mom’s former boss at the monument company earlier in the day, explaining that I was researching some family history and that I hoped he could help. “Give me a hint,” he says, but I tell him that it’s better if I ask him all my questions at once so that I can get his freshest memory.
“Steven, come in, great to see you,” he says. He always calls me Steven, like he’s part of the family—which, in a way, he is. He and Mom worked together for thirty-six years, almost as long as Mom and Dad were married. After Dad’s death in 1980, Fred probably spent more time with Mom than anyone else on the planet. For that reason alone, he makes my short list of people to interview.
Fred’s wife is out for the evening, so we sit at his kitchen table, without distractions or interruptions. After hearing me mention family history on the phone, he collected all the burial records for Mom, Dad, and my grandparents. “I didn’t know if you had those, so I called around and got them,” he says, handing me a folder. It’s a typically Fred thing to do, eager to be helpful, anticipating the customer’s needs. I glance at them to make sure there’s nothing I don’t already have, and my lack of reaction only serves to heighten his curiosity, so I leave the folder in my lap and make the leap.
“Do you remember a time when Mom needed to leave the office in a rush, to take care of some sort of family problem?” I ask.
He isn’t expecting this line of questioning. He thinks about it, finally gives up. “No, nothing comes to mind. Why?”
Fred’s in his seventies now, and like me, his hair retreats a bit more every time I see him, but otherwise he looks healthy. I’ve known him most of my life—through high school and college, marriage and children—and in the long stretches between the family visits that would bring me back to Detroit for a few days, Mom kept Fred abreast of her children with a running narrative that I occasionally found embarrassing. But now it has an unexpected payoff—he understands what writers and journalists do, and he trusts me enough to indulge my enigmatic approach.
Fred once joked to me that he’s never forgiven Mom for dying, but on one level, it’s no joke. Mom’s been dead seven years and Fred never hired a replacement. He’s now the sole owner and employee of Monument Sales Corporation, the small gravestone company that his brother-in-law Sid Frumkin started in the early sixties. On the scale of family businesses, this one couldn’t get much smaller: After Sid’s death in 1997, Fred and Mom soldiered on themselves, Fred selling the stones and Mom keeping the books.
Like many family businesses, this one didn’t draw much of a line between family and business, and Mom had her feet on both sides of the divide. She worked for Sid and Fred, she played bridge with Sid’s wife, Marilyn, and Sid’s sister, Ann Black, and she occasionally socialized with Fred’s wife, Barbara. When we had a family celebration—Jeff’s bar mitzvah, Mike’s wedding—the Frumkins and the Garfinkels were on the guest list. When Mom’s health took a downturn in the mid-1990s, Fred went beyond an employer’s duty, visiting her at home and in the hospital, occasionally driving her to doctor’s appointments, alerting us when he thought that Mom might be telling her far-flung children less than we needed to know.
“Does it help,” I ask, “to say that I’m talking about 1972, around August, and that it involved the death of a relative?”
He knows my family well, so the part about the death of a relative throws him.
“You’re talking about thirty years ago…” he says. “No, sorry.” He spreads his hands in the universal gesture of defeat.
“The relative was a sister. Does that help?” If this didn’t go anywhere soon, I would put him out of his misery and tell him the story.
Still no hint of recognition. Then his eyes light up, a snatch of memory, and he points his finger at me. “She was handicapped.”
Wow. I hadn’t mentioned anything about Annie’s leg.
“What kind of handicap?” I ask, cautiously.
“I don’t know. Physical, I think. I don’t remember when we were talking or why, but it just came to me—she told me she had a sister who was handicapped, who lived in a group home or a halfway house or something like that.”
I press him for details, and his brow creases in concentration. Finally he says, “It was just something your mom said in passing. She didn’t even say what kind of handicap, or if she did, I’ve forgotten that part.” He pauses, trying to recover more of this fleeting conversation. “It wasn’
t one of those things where she was confiding in me. She didn’t say, ‘I want to tell you something…’ I got the impression that her sister’s death was years before, that it was in the past, just one of those sad things.”
“Did she ask you not to talk about it?”
His eyebrows lift in surprise. “No. Like I said, it was just something she said in passing.” He can’t even begin to guess when this conversation took place. “A long time ago. Probably the eighties.”
It isn’t much, but it’s still a breakthrough—an indication that as tightly as Mom controlled the secret, she did volunteer some information to someone close to her, even if she omitted or invented facts to control how that information might be understood, telling Fred that her sister was handicapped but not mentally ill, saying that Annie had lived in a group home rather than in a mental hospital, describing her death as long ago so that Fred might naturally conclude that Mom was very young when Annie died. It fit the pattern of 1995, when Mom had said she was just four years old, and Annie just two, when Annie was institutionalized. In both cases, she put the information out there, but in a way that shut off questions rather than provoked them.
I’m planning to give Fred a full account of what I’ve learned so far, but first…
“Fred, did Mom tell you her sister’s name?”
His brow furrows again. “Not that I remember. What was it?”
“Annie,” I said. “Annie Cohen.”
The day dawns blustery and gray, perhaps not the optimum conditions for visiting Annie’s grave. The sun tries, timidly, to dent the cloud cover, and a few rays make it through before the gray wins out again. The Hebrew Memorial Park cemetery occupies a large expanse in the far eastern suburb of Clinton Township, a good half-hour’s drive from the Hebrew Memorial Park office and the northern/northwestern suburbs that have become the dominant centers of Detroit’s Jewish community.
Annie's Ghosts Page 9
