Annie's Ghosts

by Steve Luxenberg

  As if anticipating my thought, he says, apologetically, “I have a lot of patients.” But he seems genuinely puzzled when I tell him about how the secret emerged and what happened afterward—the phone call from Rozanne, my discussions with Sash about whether to ask Mom about it, my subsequent conversation with a Botsford social worker.

  “I’ll check my records and get back to you,” Hazan says, “but you know, we never talked about her childhood. The focus of our conversation was never on herself, always on someone else. She liked to talk about you children. We never went that far back in the past.”

  Now that did make sense. Hazan’s focus in treating Mom was to bring her out of very present depression, not to explore her past. He wanted to get her off Xanax, which he thought was doing more harm than good, and replace it with an antidepressant that would give her a long-term shot at returning to self-sufficiency. After those awful months culminating in her hospitalization at Botsford, we wanted the crisis to be over, we wanted the moaning and groaning to stop, and we wanted Mom back. In the short term, at least, weekly therapy sessions exploring her childhood weren’t the route to stability.

  I remember that Hazan had suggested to Mom that such therapy might do her good, but her aversion to psychiatry and psychiatrists had made that suggestion a non-starter. I didn’t think much about that at the time—after all, some people regard therapy as equivalent to a root canal—but it didn’t occur to me that her disinterest was itself a diversionary tactic. Looking back at that period, I wonder whether she was engaged in one final mighty struggle with herself—should I tell? I must tell, no, I can’t tell—over whether to shed the burden that she, alone, now carried.

  Would revealing the truth to Hazan, or to us, have prevented her depression? I can’t say I believe that. Eased her guilt? I have no trouble believing that. Given her peace? Set her free? Those were the great unknowns. Until I could reveal the past that she so skillfully avoided talking about, I wouldn’t know what I believed.

  { TEN }

  Castles in the Air

  Marrying Prince Charming: Wedding day, November 1, 1942, with Mom’s friend Faye, left, and Tillie, right

  It’s the early morning of November 1, 1980, and Dad isn’t going to make it. The day before, he went into cardiac arrest during a triple bypass operation that was supposed to prolong his life of sixty-seven years, and now the surgeon at William Beaumont Hospital is talking in terms of hours, not weeks or days. Dad hadn’t wanted to have the surgery in the first place—he was scared to have his chest cracked open—but the surgeon had said that there wasn’t much choice; his previous heart attacks served notice that his clogged arteries couldn’t do their job any longer and that the bypasses offered the best shot at a decent quality of life. “Ninety-seven percent” was how the surgeon had put it—“You look like one of the ninety-seven percent who are good candidates for this surgery, based on what we can see.”

  What they couldn’t see, what they discovered under the bright lights of the operating room, was that he belonged to the other 3 percent, the category of poor candidates with overwhelming odds against them. That’s what the surgeon is telling us now, in the waiting room, all of us gathered around Mom, our vigil now twenty-two hours and counting, twenty-two hours since we squeezed Dad’s hand and told him we’d see him after the operation, twenty-two hours since his gurney had disappeared behind the double doors.

  Mom can’t believe the worst has come to pass; she’s crying nonstop, but she still manages to focus on something larger than the moment. “He can’t die today,” she moans. “Not on our wedding anniversary. I’ll never forgive him if he does that to me.”

  She never forgave him, not really. How could she? She had made November 1, 1942, into something so large, so significant, so monumental, that she couldn’t just retire it to a box in the attic, like a wedding dress or a beloved quilt. For the first thirty-nine months of my parents’ marriage, they even treated the annual event as a monthly one, giving themselves thirty-nine opportunities to shower each other with telegrams, flowers, gifts, and the elaborate Hallmark-style cards that Mom adored. For May 1 in 1944, Mom had a military watch engraved to “Duke,” with the date and “18th,” and mailed it to Dad at the Texas camp where he was struggling to complete his basic training. This monthly tradition couldn’t sustain itself, but we all grew up with the understanding that every November 1 was a sacred day, and woe unto any of us if we failed to call.

  Before 1980, a call to the two of them on their anniversary was a happy affair, but after life’s brutal twist of fate, I would pick up the phone on November 1 with dread, sometimes wondering whether it was better not to call, whether it was better not to trigger Mom’s tears and hear her hollow voice on the other end of the line. But I always concluded that the only thing worse than calling was not calling. Yes, it would be painful, but that was more my problem than hers. The anniversary already made her sad, and she would be sad even if I didn’t call. Hearing from her children would make her less lonely, and loneliness became Mom’s primary companion after her partner of thirty-eight years was gone.

  Now Mom’s gone, too, and I sit alone, reading the letters that she and Dad wrote to each other during World War II, looking back into that past that she had sought so hard to protect. I have all the letters now, including the ones that Evie took home after Mom’s funeral, and I read each one carefully, afraid I’ll miss a reference or a clue, so at best I can only make it through two dozen or so a day. In some ways, the letters are better than interviews; I don’t have to worry about the haze of memory. The stories are fresh, the words have an immediacy akin to a tape recording, the correspondence has an intimacy derived from the very fact that it takes place out of public view.

  It’s also dangerous, all too easy to read something between the lines when maybe nothing but innocence lurks there. When Mom writes on June 1, 1944, Tomorrow, our anniversary of the day we met, June 2, the day I began to live, is that merely a war wife’s lovesick way of telling her soldier how much she loves him? Or does she mean just what she says, that she was reborn on June 2, 1942, with the implication that Dad had liberated her, given her an escape route from all that had defined her before, including her mentally ill sister? If I had read this letter before I knew about Annie, I would have smiled at the melodramatic overstatement, but now, I cannot read that sentence without seeing a deeper meaning, without engaging in reinterpretation.

  My mother does not exist before 1942.

  And here is Mom saying it herself: June 2, 1942, the day I began to live.

  How often we had heard Mom’s story of that day, how she looked down the staircase during a friend’s wedding and spotted the dashing, dark-haired young man with the unforgettable streak of white hair at the edge of his forehead, like a splash of lightning against the darkened sky. His name, she would soon learn, was Julius Luxenberg, but he preferred Jack for its more American sound. Mom proclaimed to her friend that she would marry this man, this stranger she had never laid eyes on before, like Cinderella and Prince Charming, without the hassle of a glass slipper. It was so poignant, so magical, so enchanting that I embraced it as true, and believed it to be true, and therefore it became true. Now I wonder, in this time of reinterpretation, whether it will prove to be more fairy tale than fact, that my image of that day—was there such a day?—will dissolve like so much cotton candy, just another confection created for public consumption.

  “I’ll never forget the first time I saw you. And wasn’t I the little hussy. Did I ever flirt with you, and am I ever glad. I knew even then, for didn’t I say, ‘That’s the boy I’m going to marry.’”

  —June 2, 1944, Mom in Detroit, writing to Dad at Camp Wolters, Texas

  This fairy tale turns out to be real.

  In their war letters, written for their eyes only, the story she and Dad told each other matched the romantic story she had told us all those years. She must have loved that story, because bits and pieces of it appear often in her letters, sometimes to
remind Dad of happier days, sometimes to tease him, sometimes as a balm for their shared wartime loneliness. In the wee hours of Sunday, March 19, 1944, after yet another Saturday night without him, she conjured the scene once more: “When we met, I knew then standing on that stairway looking down you were my husband. How? Well, you just know.” A month later, after an evening with Dad’s cousins, brothers Hy and Hank, both soldiers and in town on furloughs, she wrote that their presence only heightened his absence and brought her back to their first night together: “Remember that little girl who looked down the staircase and flirted so brazenly—and said that’s the man I’m going to marry—and she did.”

  She was twenty-five at the time, eight years out of high school, and yet her life was pretty much on permanent hold. She still lived with her parents in their third-floor apartment, still stuck in low-paying jobs with uncertain prospects, still wondering when, if, or how her luck would change. Then, suddenly, her Prince Charming came along, and everything was transformed. The world waged war that summer of 1942, and the news from Europe and North Africa could only be described as grim, but in the world that Mom inhabited, the news couldn’t have been better. In their letters, Mom and Dad often revisit those first months of courtship—long drives on country roads in Dad’s maroon Pontiac, excursions to Mount Clemens just for coffee, a dreamy week in a lakeside cabin in Traverse City, painful sunburns from a day at Ohio’s Cedar Point amusement park on Lake Erie, dancing the night away to the big band sounds at the popular Eastwood. As their summer of love ended, they set a date to marry; they had known each other less than three months.

  Love may not conquer all, but it sure did overpower Mom. How else to explain her relentless pursuit of a man like my father? It was one thing to declare impetuously in the heat of a June moment that there, on the stairs, was the man she was going to marry. It was quite another to stick with that declaration after learning that her Prince Charming was two months separated from his wife of eight years, that he had two girls younger than six, and that his employment history had as many ups and downs as the Cedar Point roller coaster. For a woman so resentful of growing up poor, he didn’t exactly represent economic stability: Three weeks after he and Mom met, he filed a financial statement in his divorce case that listed his assets at $600 (his car) and his debts at $475. As a salesman for Manor Furniture, he was making $50 a week before taxes, but his ordinary expenses nearly exceeded his weekly income. If he cut out his laundry and dry-cleaning costs (estimated at $5), he had $3 in his pocket once he paid for rent, food, gas, interest on a bank loan, and the $15 he owed in child support for Evie and Marsha. Dad may have been a catch, as Mom’s girlfriends kept telling her, but was he a keeper?

  According to Mom’s letters, she never had any doubt. But if she never wavered in her belief that matrimony was their destiny, Dad was not so sure. With the wedding date only weeks away, he surprised Mom with a suggestion of a trial separation to test the relationship’s strength. “Remember the ‘scene’ as you called it, when you wanted to postpone it,” she wrote him on January 19, 1944. “Aren’t you happy now you didn’t—wasn’t everything as I said it would be—You always said test me to see, a separation would tell—well I didn’t need it, I always knew you loved me.”

  As romantic as their courtship was, in both fact and memory, there must have been other factors at work that contributed to my parents’ haste in getting married, factors that weren’t apparent to me when I was growing up. For Mom, marriage represented a clean break from the past, not just from the many disappointments in her life but also, I now believed, from Annie and all that she represented. For Dad’s part, he might have been worried about his draft status: As a married man with two children, he qualified for the coveted Class III-A deferment. But his imminent divorce meant that he would soon join the ranks of the unmarried just as the draft eligibility rules were changing, opening the door to the induction of single men with dependents. In the summer of 1942, the newspapers were full of talk about ways in which the Selective Service might further limit Class III-A eligibility. (The Selective Service abolished the III-A deferment on October 1, 1943, saying the need for fresh troops had become too great to allow ten million able-bodied men, out of the sixteen million registered, to stay home.)

  On August 13, 1942, when Dad’s divorce decree became final, it wasn’t at all clear what would happen to the III-A exemption. For the moment, as a father, Dad was safe as long as he continued to pay child support for Evie and Marsha, but all the uncertainty surrounding the III-A classification would certainly have made Dad nervous. It probably wasn’t the best time to be untying the knot; one bit of insurance might be to marry that girl he met on the stairs, and why not? They were in love. Haste made them both happy. On November 1, 1942, Miss Beth Cohen became Mrs. Beth Luxenberg.

  Toby Hazan sounds sheepish when he phones. The psychiatrist has found his file on Mom, and when he tells me what Mom said and how she said it, I’m no longer surprised at his failure to remember that she had a sister. He was taking her through a list of routine questions during their first meeting, and Annie came up when he asked Mom about her family. “It was just so matter-of-fact, it didn’t make much of an impression, I guess,” he says, apologetically.

  He read aloud: “The patient states that her sister was born with one leg and was institutionalized. There is the possibility that the sister may have suffered from an emotional disorder. She was deceased twenty years ago.”

  Born with one leg? That wasn’t true. I ask Hazan whether he thought Mom had exaggerated Annie’s physical condition—born without a leg rather than with a bent one—to leave the impression that this was the reason for Annie’s institutionalization and to divert attention from her sister’s other problems. “It seems so,” Hazan replies.

  Whatever Mom’s motives, her circumlocution worked: Hazan says that his notes from their initial meeting on April 19, 1995, contain no other references to Annie.

  We arrange to meet in Detroit after I’ve reviewed all his records on Mom, which he agrees to send me, as well as the files from Mom’s two weeks at Botsford’s psych ward, which I’ll need to go to the hospital to see. “I’m sure I’ll have new questions,” I say, telling him that I’m also reading all her war letters to see what she might have said about Annie. In the meantime, I offer to send him copies of Annie’s hospital records.

  “I’d be interested in knowing your reaction,” I say.

  “I’d be interested in reading them,” he replies.

  Mom’s life might have begun anew when she met Dad, but her wedding didn’t change her address. The newlyweds returned from their honeymoon in Chicago and took up married life in the Cohens’ apartment, sleeping in the same bedroom that Mom had occupied before the magic date of November 1. It wasn’t what Mom envisioned, but until the young couple could make some money and figure out whether they could persuade Esther to give them custody of Evie and Marsha, it made sense.

  This wasn’t the apartment that Annie had called home before her commitment to Eloise. The Cohens had left the place on Euclid sometime in 1941 or early 1942, and moved to a similar sized apartment on Pingree, just two blocks away. Still, if Dad didn’t know about Annie, it seems hard to imagine that he wouldn’t find a trace of her in the Cohens’ apartment; after all, her commitment to Eloise had taken place only two years before, so surely some hint of her remained—if not a photo, then some of her clothes, or some of the medical equipment she once used, or the fairy books she once read.

  But perhaps not. If it looked like Annie might not be coming home, the move from Euclid to Pingree certainly provided the opportunity to discard her belongings, re-arrange the furniture, start over. I suppose it’s possible that a newcomer to the apartment on Pingree, where Annie had never lived, would see nothing to suggest that this family of three had once been a family of four.

  Possible, yes, but still hard to believe.

  “I’m ashamed to say this darling. I’m not making a very good soldier. It’s gettin
g me down dear and I’m going to pieces. I just can’t take it…It’s impossible to take all that’s dished out. They just don’t seem to have any heart. I’m being worked 18 to 20 hours a day, and every nite lying in bed I shed a tear. I just can’t help it. Perhaps I’m not a man—at least in the army way…I doubt whether I’ll ever be the same where and if I return to you.

  “Precious, if it’s at all possible in any way regardless of price—get me out of this—if I stay much longer I’ll be in the insane asylums. I know I shouldn’t be saying this—I can’t help it. I know now once and for all that I won’t be able to take 17 weeks of this Hell. Please, darling, do whatever you can—I really don’t know what you’ll be able to do—do something—please—please. Don’t get upset as I know you probably will be—control yourself as much as you can and try and see if there is any way for me to get out of this mess. Even if you have to write the President—I mean it…”

  —February 2, 1944, Dad at Camp Wolters, writing to Mom in Detroit

  My father, I often heard growing up, was a particularly lousy soldier. Some men, I guess, have the personality, and the body type, for the rigors of combat and the shock of war. Dad was not one of them, as he was all too quick to tell you. He literally didn’t have the stomach for it—in his second month of basic training, he landed in the hospital with some sort of gastric distress. He was beyond miserable. “I cannot do this,” he wrote Mom from Texas. “I am letting everybody down, but I’m sick all the time.”

  Training draftees for war is a daunting proposition; they come in all shapes and sizes, and there’s no automatic way to tell at the outset who will be reliable on the battlefield and who will be a risk. After married men and fathers lost their III-A deferment in early October 1943, Dad had hoped that his finicky stomach and his age (thirty) would be enough to keep him out of the service; he was older than the Army’s announced target group (men younger than twenty-six) and others in their thirties had received deferments based solely on age. His hopes undoubtedly rose even higher when the director of Selective Service ordered the nation’s nearly 6,500 local draft boards to “first exhaust the pool of available unmarried men, and next the pool of married men without children, before fathers would be called.” But the luck Dad often had in card games failed him in this lottery; when the first batch of 13,330 induction notices went out to fathers in the weeks after the exemption’s end, Dad’s name was among them.