I try another route. The Routine History of Annie’s admission to Eloise, I tell her, says that Hyman had two brothers in New York City and that Tillie was one of ten children. “Is that right?” I ask. “Do you know any of them?” I explain that if I can find some of them—or, more realistically, their offspring—it might open an entirely new avenue. As I had already learned from my first conversation with David, Annie was my mother’s secret, not my grandmother’s, and for twenty years before her hospitalization, Annie wasn’t a secret at all.
David chimes in. “Wow, one of ten? I never heard that.”
Neither had Anna. She thought maybe Tillie had a sister in Israel, but she doesn’t know her name. Another dead end.
Anna senses my disappointment, and begins an apology. “You know, I lost all my family,” she says, blinking back tears. “I was so young…” She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t need to. I can imagine what she means. She was eighteen years old when she fled Radziwillow, too young to have learned all the family names and relationships, too young to know about those cousins in America who left Radziwillow before she was born, too young to envision a day when she would meet relatives who would call her homeland the old country rather than their country. In that way, we’re alike. When I was eighteen, I didn’t know a thing about my overseas family, either.
In fact, I hardly knew anything about my grandparents.
It’s a Saturday morning sometime in 1963, and I always spend Saturday mornings the same way—in the car, with Mom, on the way to Dr. Bernstein’s for my weekly allergy shot, then to Bubbe and Zayde’s for a visit. It’s a routine, and I hate it. No, that’s not right, it’s not the routine I hate. I’m used to the shots by now, I’ve been getting them since I was six, every Saturday morning for five years, but I hate that I need them, that I have these allergies that won’t go away, that I keep having asthma attacks when I’m allergic to something, and I’m allergic to plenty—apricots and almonds, shrimp and shellfish of all kinds, broccoli and brussels sprouts (which seems like a favor from the gods, as if they’re giving me a break in return for saddling me with this defective body).
In my memory, the smell of the doctor’s office—the antiseptic aroma of the waiting room, the swab of alcohol on my arm—mingles with the scent of my grandparents’ apartment. For years afterward, a visit to a doctor’s office would remind me of the doilies on the back of the couch, the sugar cubes that Bubbe plunked into her tea, and Bubbe herself, her wispy gray hair, those rounded shoulders, her quilted housecoat. When I hug her, I worry that she’s so small, so frail, that I’m hurting her.
I don’t hug Zayde. He has a gaunt, defeated look about him, and I instinctively keep my distance, as if I’m afraid that his dourness is catching. Maybe I’m following Mom’s lead—I can’t remember seeing her give him more than a perfunctory hug or peck on the cheek, nothing like the tenderness she shows toward Bubbe. He doesn’t talk much to anyone, and he says even less to me. Like Bubbe’s, his English isn’t easy for me to understand. He’s a tall man, several inches over six feet, and slender enough that I can see the outline of his ribs under the thin undershirts that he wears.
Lately, it seems that Mom is constantly worrying about their declining health and whether she can deal with their descent into old age. More than once, Mom has rushed out of the house to attend to some emergency that sends one or the other to the nursing home for a while. Occasionally, on our Saturday morning rides, Mom says something about it, about how all the responsibility falls on her, how hard it is to care for aging parents all by yourself. I can’t remember her words, except for these: “I don’t ever want to become a burden to my children,” she says.
I can’t imagine Mom—young, vibrant, independent Mom—being a burden to anyone. It’s not fair, I think; if she weren’t an only child, she wouldn’t feel so alone.
“She was a wonderful woman, a wonderful wonderful woman.” Anna is singing my grandmother’s praises again, telling me how Tillie maintained her dignity in the face of all the adversity that the world threw in her direction. “She was a good soul. There wasn’t a thing she wouldn’t do. As poor as she was, she would do anything for you.” She also has admiring words for my grandfather. “Chaim, he would split the wood for us and bring it over so my kids wouldn’t freeze. He was a good man, a kind man.”
This isn’t the grandfather I remember. The grandfather I knew was lost, sad, withdrawn. Anna is talking about a time that’s ten years earlier, so maybe the wood-chopper had changed. But no, I think, this isn’t the man described in Mona Evans’s Routine History, either, and that was written a decade before Anna met him. In her 1940 report, Evans portrays him as sickly, discouraged, and “willing to leave all decisions to his wife.” The report says he “peddled spasmodically” for a living until 1933, when an injury in an automobile accident caused two years of frequent fainting spells and he landed on the city’s relief rolls in 1934. A doctor at the city’s welfare office concluded that he was suffering from “poly-arthritis and old healed varicose ulcers.” He was just forty-seven years old, eight years younger than I am now.
“Let me ask you something else about Hyman,” I say.
Anna waits.
“I’m wondering what brought him to Detroit, and how Tillie ended up here, too.” I mention the census record, which shows that Hyman emigrated to the United States in 1907 and that Tillie followed him in 1914. They married a year later, in Detroit. “Do you have any idea? Do you think Hyman was in touch with people in Radziwillow?”
Her reply is so startling that I ask her to repeat it: “Well, Tillie was his cousin, so that’s probably why.”
His cousin? My grandparents were cousins?
And if that weren’t startling enough, she adds: “First cousins, I think.”
Her words sink in. Anna sees my reaction, and realizes this is news to me. “Are you sure?” I say. “First cousins?”
“That’s what I always heard,” Anna says, although I can tell that my reaction has introduced some doubt in her mind.
First cousins? All sorts of thoughts flood into my head, but here’s the one that pushes its way to the front: Was this one of the “sins” that Tillie was talking about when she told the hospital staff that “the sins of the parents are paid for through their children?” I had been puzzled about that sentence ever since I first read it, but I had never thought about this particular possibility. Was Tillie saying that she committed a sin by having children, because the children of first cousins run a greater risk of birth defects? Or was she saying it was a sin to have married Hyman in the first place? Was it a sin under Jewish law for first cousins to marry? I wasn’t sure. And whether it was a “sin” or not, was it legal as far as the state of Michigan was concerned?
None of us knew the law, but David reminds me that it was more common in those days for cousins to marry. Whatever sins Tillie had in mind, he says, he’s sure that this wasn’t one of them. Anna agrees. “They were poor. That was the sin,” she says.
I ask Anna whether Tillie had ever said anything to her about sins. Anna shakes her head. “She did say she feels guilty about putting Annie in Eloise,” she says. “But I told her, ‘Tante Tillie, you can’t blame yourself. The girl was sick.’”
Sin or not, was it even true? I rummage through my mind, trying to remember whether I had ever heard that Tillie and Hyman were related, and suddenly I’m aware that I honestly don’t know what I remember, that now that this powerful possibility has entered my consciousness, I cannot say with any degree of certainty what I knew before Anna’s revelation and what I knew after. Like a computer’s hard drive, my memory has been overwritten with the new information. I was confident that I had never heard anyone say my grandparents were first cousins. But what about distant cousins? Had I heard that, and just forgotten it?
There’s only one certain way to know whether it’s true, and that would be to examine the Radziwillow birth registry. But David has already done some genealogical sleuthing, and he’s ha
d no luck in finding the Radziwillow records from that era. For the moment, and maybe forever, I’m left to wonder as we say good night: Is this just another family secret?
{ NINE }
Lost and Found
Close quarters: Eloise ward for female patients, 1947 (courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)
Gasping for breath, I scanned the bleachers, trying to see if Mom could tell that I was on the verge of an asthma attack, the kind that might have caused her to take me to the emergency room in my younger days. In three years of playing basketball for Henry Ford High School, I had kept my asthma under control and under wraps. But now, in my senior year, I was having trouble in the middle of a game, in front of hundreds of fans and my coach, who was undoubtedly wondering why the hell one of his starting players was so winded that he needed a substitute and was doubled over, gulping air. He was looking at me as if to say, it’s midseason and you’re that much out of shape?
Coach had every right to wonder, because he didn’t know about my asthma. At least, he didn’t know it from me. That was my secret, probably not a smart one to keep, but I wanted to play varsity basketball more than anything in the world, and I thought telling him I had asthma was as good as hanging a sign around my neck that said, “Damaged goods. Do not play.” This was the late 1960s, before comprehensive physicals and lengthy questionnaires replaced the more generic permission forms, so I could keep Coach in the dark, running extra laps to boost my conditioning and finding excuses to leave the floor during practice if I felt a wheeze coming on—which, fortunately, rarely happened as I grew older and better at managing my asthma.
I didn’t tell Mom that the coach didn’t know, because I couldn’t risk the possibility that she would intervene. So I had two secrets, and I had to enlist a few of my friends (who knew about my asthma) to help me keep both. I told myself that I wasn’t exactly lying, that a lie was different than an omission, and that since I truly believed that I could control my asthma, that it was so infrequent a problem, everything would be okay.
Until the infrequent happened at the most public of times, and exposed my deception. I cursed whatever allergen had brought on the wheezing, but I knew that I couldn’t just stay on the court and wait it out. I couldn’t run, or even pretend to run, and Coach could see that this was more than a case of fatigue. As best as I could manage, I wheezed out the truth: Coach, I’m having an asthma attack, but don’t worry, it’s probably not serious. I just need a breather and I’ll probably be fine.
Afterward, after I recovered (no emergency room necessary), Coach did what coaches do, expressing both his anger about my immaturity and his hope that I wouldn’t suffer any repeat episodes during the rest of the season (I didn’t). Mom, however, didn’t quite know what to say. Beyond feeling betrayed, she couldn’t seem to believe that I had put my varsity dreams before common sense and my own safety.
I’ve forgotten her words—aided no doubt by my wish to forget the whole embarrassing episode—but I remember her message: It’s okay to keep some things to yourself. But not things that can hurt you.
David answers my knock. It’s a few nights after our lengthy restaurant session, and I’ve been invited to meet the rest of the Oliwek clan—Bella, the oldest at fifty-nine, and Dori, the youngest at fifty-one—at the house in suburban Detroit where they all grew up, and where David now lives by himself. I’m particularly eager to talk with Bella, who accompanied Anna on some of her Eloise trips, and was old enough to have some memory of the glimpses she caught of Annie.
“Where’s your mom?” I ask David.
“In the kitchen,” he says. “She’s a little woozy. Her diabetes.”
Dori arrives a few minutes later, prompting hugs and kisses all around, and concern for Anna, who’s looking less lively than she did at the restaurant. I pick up some tension between Dori and David over Anna’s eating habits, and whether David is being too lax in monitoring her meals. They spar over the cold cuts that David has bought for a light dinner (“Corned beef and pastrami aren’t good for her,” Dori says. “She can eat the turkey,” David replies. “She doesn’t like turkey,” she shoots back). Dori decides to sit with Anna as she tests her blood sugar. David escorts me into the dining room.
The house has the glass-and-chrome style common to suburban ranchers of the 1950s and 1960s. The dining room table, laid out with the cold cuts and a salad, looks out on a large sunken family room with enough couches and chairs to accommodate another dozen family members. “Plenty of room if we discover any more cousins I don’t know about,” I joke to David.
I’m glad for the few minutes alone with him. I want to ask him what he thought of the interview the other night, especially Anna’s uncompromising view of my mother. “Your mom didn’t seem to like my mom much,” I say.
“I was surprised at some of what she said, or rather, the way she said it,” David replies. “She didn’t miss many opportunities to criticize your mom.”
“Most of it rang true,” I say. “But some of the quotes didn’t sound like her.”
I didn’t say what else I was thinking—that I felt somewhat trapped between the roles of son and journalist. I had spent much of the day transcribing my notes from our first interview, and there were moments when I could have risen to Mom’s defense by challenging Anna on this point or that, but my goal was to get the best and most complete account I could, not to act as Mom’s advocate. Also, I was at a disadvantage—I didn’t have Mom’s version of these conversations. The best I could do was offer up logic and a few facts that didn’t quite match up with Anna’s memory.
Pointing out minor discrepancies didn’t prove anything, of course—some fuzziness around the edges is to be expected when someone is recounting conversations from fifty years past. (Sash and I have slightly different memories of the day at Botsford when we forced Mom to stay in the psych ward, and that was in 1995, not much more than a decade ago.) But that’s just it: Anna’s account of those conversations wasn’t fuzzy. If anything, she recounted them with a clarity both notable and dramatic. That clarity was proof of the effect of these conversations on Anna, how she had absorbed Mom’s words, translated and compacted them, so that when she told the story, she was expressing the essence of what she remembered and what she felt about Mom—and what she felt was disapproval and anger. When the right moment comes, I want to ask her about this disapproval.
Dori and Anna join us. If I had seen Dori across a crowded room without knowing that she was Anna’s daughter, I wouldn’t have connected the two. Her face is long and thin, with that healthy outdoor look more common to a sunnier clime than Michigan—maybe California or Arizona, which is where she lived for eleven years, I soon learn. Her clothes suggest that she didn’t leave the Southwest entirely behind when she moved back to the Detroit area—she’s dressed in the denim style of Santa Fe or Sedona, her home during her time in Arizona.
Bella arrives a few minutes later. As the sisters greet each other, I’m again struck by the difference rather than the resemblance. Partly, it’s style: Where Dori is decidedly casual, Bella’s clothes, hair, and makeup give her an au courant look. Neither Dori nor David has any children, leaving Bella and me to spend a few minutes talking about ours. That provides a natural segue into asking about her trips to Eloise when she was a kid.
“Do you remember what Annie looked like?” I say.
“Her hair was real frizzy,” she says.
“And she wasn’t too skinny,” Anna chimes in.
“No,” Bella agrees, “and she had this housecoat on.”
“You were how old, like twelve?” I suggest, doing the math in my head.
“I don’t want to lie to you,” Bella says. “I really don’t know. I think I might have been younger than that.” She seems a bit agitated, and I soon discover why.
I turn to Anna. “Do you have any memory of when you took Bella?”
Anna shakes her head, and the conversation lapses momentarily, allowing Dori a chance to say
good-bye. She’s doing some dog breeding, and has to get home to take care of a new litter.
I focus again on Bella. “From a kid’s perspective,” I say, “what did you think was wrong with Annie?”
“What my mother kept telling me…” Bella begins, but before she finishes her thought, we hear Dori calling, asking Bella to move her car, which is parked behind Dori’s. As Bella grabs her keys, Anna jumps in, turning the subject back to my mom. “Your mother never went there,” Anna says. “She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want nobody to tell that she has a sick sister. She said, ‘I don’t want my kids to know.’ I drove her mother there. She said, ‘Anna, you take her.’”
She can’t let it alone. This is the third or fourth time tonight that she’s taken the conversation back to Mom when we were talking about something else. Then I think, wait a minute: In our first interview, Anna had told me that Mom had gotten angry at her for taking Tillie to Eloise, seeing it as interference. Now she’s telling me the opposite, that Mom was encouraging her to take Tillie?
I ask which it was. Anna hesitates, trying to sort it out. Finally, she says that it was both—Mom didn’t like it, but she couldn’t stop it, so she resigned herself. Besides, Anna said, “She was afraid I was going to say to someone that Beth had a sister. Better to let me take Tillie.”
Bella returns, and picks up right where we left off, with my question about her view of Annie’s illness. “Should I tell him?” she asks, looking directly at Anna. I’m not sure what’s coming, or why Bella needs her mother’s permission.
I glance at Anna. She shrugs.
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