Of course, the house was hardly stress-free. Money seemed to be the root of most tensions: Dad liked to spend it, and Mom liked to make Dad happy, so she indulged him while lamenting their lack of savings, at times even encouraging him to spend what they didn’t have. She understood that, in Dad’s well-thumbed book, money equaled success, and with money came status, and with status came respect and admiration. So even though Dad’s annual income never topped $18,000, according to his Social Security earning records, he “bought” a new car every two years, because successful people drove new cars and laggards didn’t. Dad chose his cars for maximum impact: a Lincoln, a Crown Vic, a royal blue Mercury convertible (my favorite)—statements as much as transportation. We are what we drive, that seemed to be Dad’s philosophy; in the Mo-tor City, where grownups loved to talk about their wheels, he fit right in.
It’s probably more accurate to say that Dad replaced his old car loan with a new one. He had a Keynesian economist’s view of debt: He saw nothing wrong with deficit spending, which made him popular with the bill collectors as well, judging by their frequent calls to our house.
Dad’s reputation as a crack salesman made him a hot commodity in the furniture business, but his tendency to tell off the boss occasionally made him a hot potato. He rarely lasted more than a few years at any store, sometimes quitting and sometimes getting fired; at our house, instability became part of the furniture. In 1962, after several months without a job, he took one in Lansing, seventy miles away, coming home only on weekends. My worst fear came true when Dad announced one day that we were all going up to Lansing; they sold the house, but then Dad got into a fight with the new boss and (to my not-so-secret-delight) lost his job. We couldn’t get the house back, so we moved anyway. We ended up three blocks away—same neighborhood, same schools, same friends.
The family’s finances improved somewhat after Mom went to work, part-time, for the monument company in 1963, but not by much. Their combined pre-tax income inched up slowly from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, peaking at $30,000 in 1978. Mom had taken the bookkeeping job mostly to help with college costs that began taking a bite out of their budget in the mid-1960s. Only through a patchwork of family income, scholarships, work-study jobs, and summer jobs did we all make it through, aided by the astoundingly low in-state tuition at Michigan’s schools back then.
I was the first to attend an out-of-state private college, and even with my substantial scholarship, Mom had to add hours at the monument company to make the various ends meet. It was a house of cards that could fall at any moment, and in the fall of 1973, during my junior year of college, it did. Dad had his first heart attack, and didn’t work for six months, didn’t earn that commission. His earnings plunged, down 50 percent for the year. Until then, I hadn’t really understood just how week-to-week they lived; if the university’s financial aid office hadn’t agreed to increase my scholarship and arrange a student loan, I couldn’t have stayed in school.
Mom, of course, was bound and determined to prevent that. Education was king, and once again, I heard about the uncle from Chicago’s broken promise. History was not going to repeat itself, not if she had to call the president of the university himself (I, of course, was bound and determined to prevent that phone call from being made).
Mom and Dad chose their roles in this particular family drama, with Mom playing the nurturing, mostly practical wife, and Dad the charming, often moody husband. But Mom wouldn’t let their differences divide them, as I found out in 1975 when I learned my first family secret—Dad’s, as it turned out.
The two of us were having a casual dinner in Detroit, on one of my occasional visits home after college, when Dad started to spin a long story about a friend who wanted, late in life, to become a U.S. citizen. But the friend had a problem: He didn’t have the proper documents to apply for citizenship, nor did he have a green card. Essentially, he was illegal, even though he had lived in the country for nearly his entire life. If his friend fessed up to the government, Dad wanted to know, what would happen?
It took me two or three questions, and maybe ninety seconds.
“This friend…is it you?” I asked.
He didn’t try to keep up the pretense. “Yes.”
My mind raced to grasp the consequences. Not a citizen? What did that mean? I could do no better than blurt something out of my eighth-grade civics textbook.
“But, but, but…you told me that you voted for McGovern!” I said, as if voting for president constituted the sum total of what it meant to have citizenship.
Dad smiled, still the salesman. “I didn’t tell you I voted for McGovern,” he said. “I told you I would never vote for Nixon. Which was true.”
Truth wasn’t the word that came into my head. Nixonian was more like it, a clever dodge. I didn’t care one way or the other about his citizenship, but the deception! That I found hard to swallow. I didn’t say anything right away, but I didn’t have to—my dismay must have shown on my face. Dad looked embarrassed, and only then did I realize this wasn’t easy for him, laying himself bare before his son. He had his reasons for concealing and now revealing this long-held secret; it was time for me to shut up and listen.
Like his invented friend, Dad wanted to become a citizen before he died. A second heart attack had crystallized his feelings on that, causing him to think about the might-have-beens and the wish-I-hads, and citizenship ranked high on the list of what mattered most. The irony, of course, was that he only wanted what everyone, including the governments in Lansing and Washington, believed he already possessed.
But that wasn’t the point.
The point was this: It galled Dad that he didn’t have the same status as native-born or naturalized Americans. For him, for this man who bought a new car every few years (and only American-made cars, to show his support for all things American), status counted. In his own mind, he was as much a citizen as any of them—he had lived here since he was six years old, served honorably in the military, raised a family of five, worked hard all his life, paid taxes, kept on the right side of the law, done everything a good American should do. How was he any different?
I didn’t know much about citizenship laws, but I wondered: Why hadn’t Dad applied for citizenship during or after the war? Didn’t the government make it easy for vets?
I learned that he had tried several times during his Army days, but the immigration service could not find any record of his entry into the country and kept asking him for more information. But he had no more information, nothing on paper to document his arrival from Poland or Russia or whatever that disputed sliver of Eastern Europe was called at the moment he and Bubbe Ida left it. Dad wasn’t even sure of the year (1919? 1920?), his age (six? seven?), the name of the ship, or even the port—although it had to be Ellis Island, he asked me, didn’t it?
Growing up, I had heard two explanations for Dad’s uncertainty: His mother, Bubbe Ida, a bit of a ditz (everyone said), had lost his papers; or Bubbe Ida had smuggled her son in, hiding him under her greatcoat, because he was sickly and she feared that the immigration authorities would send them back to Europe. (This second version had a whiff of intrigue and bravery, so it gained favor over the less interesting story line of beleaguered Bubbe Ida misplacing documents.) No one could get a clear answer out of Bubbe Ida about what exactly had happened, and I wasn’t the only one who had trouble imagining how a greatcoat could conceal a six-year-old, or how he could stay there for as long as it would take to pull off such a subterfuge. But immigrant history offers stranger tales than that, so the greatcoat version had a shelf life out of proportion to its logic. Who knew, maybe it was even true.
Either way, Dad was stymied. Whatever options he had to rectify this lack of documentation, he was too discouraged to pursue them. His application went into permanent limbo, along with his hopes for citizenship. Now, in 1975, after a second brush with mortality, he wanted to revive that effort, and he wanted his journalist son’s help in navigating the bureaucracy. Sure,
I said, I’d do some research, I’ve never written about immigration law, but I suspected that if citizenship meant as much to him as he had said, he could make it happen. He had a lot going for him, I said—this was the sort of heart-warming story that congressional representatives and newspapers love. The first step would be the hardest; he would need to tell the immigration authorities that he had no green card. Deportation? Out of the question. Come on, I told him, you don’t even know for sure where you came from, and wherever that is, the territory has changed hands two or three times since you left in 1919 or 1920, or whatever year it was.
I later learned that I wasn’t the first to hear Dad’s secret. It had come out a few years before, but only to a limited audience. My brother Mike, a civilian employee in the Navy at the time, was up for a promotion that required a security clearance. Mike asked Dad for details about his background to fill out the required forms, and Dad had revealed the truth rather than cause Mike trouble.
When Dad started spinning his story at our dinner, though, he must have known that I was unaware of the Navy security snafu, or he wouldn’t have bothered with the elaborate “I have this friend…” gambit. Our dinner ended with an agreement: I promised to find out what he would need to do, and he would decide if he wanted to proceed. I kept my part of the bargain, but ultimately, he could never shake that old-country fear of government authority, and so he did nothing. He died in 1980, a non-citizen to the end.
“Did you know that Dad isn’t a citizen?”
Mom showed just a flicker of surprise at my question.
“Of course I did,” she said.
I remember nothing else from our conversation. But the overriding impression she left—the one that has stayed with me all these years—was that they were keeping secrets from their children, but not from each other.
So if Mom knew about Dad’s secret, wouldn’t Dad have known about Mom’s?
Maybe a trip to Texas would offer a clue, if not an answer, to that question.
That’s where Dad’s brother, my uncle Manny, now lives with his wife, Shirley, reluctantly leaving their beloved California to be near their daughter, Sharon, as they got older. (Yes, California—they had achieved what my parents had only dreamed.) Manny and Shirley had topped my original list of people Dad might have told about Annie, if he knew. That list included business associates, but somehow members of that crowd seemed like Dad’s least likely confidantes. He worked with them, but rarely socialized with them, and he had changed jobs often enough that most of those relationships hadn’t lasted or matured. Besides, as I quickly learned when I started checking, the vast majority of them had died long ago. The men of that generation went long before the women.
No, if Dad had shared the secret with anyone, I think he would have chosen family over business. I had already checked with his younger sister, Rose, who didn’t know anything, and I doubted that Dad would have confided in his baby brother, Bill, who was just thirteen when Mom and Dad married. His brother Manny seemed a better bet—he was Dad’s junior by eight years, but still old enough to have served in the Army at the same time as Dad, so they had shared that experience. They had corresponded during the war and had even managed to get together in 1944 when they were both stationed in Texas. At family gatherings, the two often hung out together; at least that’s the way I remembered those weddings and bar mitzvahs before Dad’s death in 1980. No one could doubt the brotherly resemblance when the two men—both salesmen, both known for their charm—stood together, especially as age took its toll on their hairlines. The last time I saw Manny, I thought: I’m looking at Dad, if only he had lived as long.
“I never knew Beth had a sister,” Manny is saying. “Never had a clue.”
We’re having breakfast, just the three of us, with the Austin sun already warming up the room, making the air conditioner cycle on and off, background noise to our early morning conversation. Shirley relies on a walker to navigate their condo, but when I make a move to carry the grapefruit halves to the table, she firmly shoos me away. “As Manny will tell you, I rule in the kitchen,” she says. I believe her.
Shirley’s physical problems leave Manny with most of the non-kitchen tasks, but he seems almost spry as he hauls out linen for my bed and fetches boxes of old photos from the garage. At eighty-five, he still has the big hands and big ears and wide smile that I remember from my youth; aging hasn’t diminished him yet, although he’s survived a major heart attack and bouts of colon and prostate cancer. He’s my genetic hero, a Luxenberg male who didn’t succumb to heart disease at forty-eight, like his father, or at sixty-seven, like mine—living proof that it’s possible to make it to my eighties in relatively good health.
By the time I get to Austin, word of my project has reached the extended family grapevine, so I no longer have the element of surprise when I pop the question about Annie. But Manny and Shirley are plenty surprised by the many details and layers, especially when they hear that Annie was twenty-one when she went to Eloise. (“It blew their minds,” their daughter Sharon would tell me later.) As we puzzle through the story, Manny reminds me that he didn’t meet Mom until 1943, after Annie had been at Eloise for more than three years.
“If Dad knew about Annie,” I say, “I was thinking he might have told you. You seemed close. You sent him those letters during the war.”
“Your mom’s idea,” he says of the letters. “She wanted to keep his spirits up.” I had brought his letters with me—four to Dad, three to Mom—and he’s already reread them. “I don’t see any tone in my letters of real warmth,” he says. “Your mom was worried about your dad, and she thought letters from me might help.”
The mere fact of the letters did not equal the intimacy that I had assumed. What he said made absolute sense: Four letters in two years? Bosom buddies would write more often.
“We really weren’t that close, your Dad and I,” he says. “You know, we moved from Detroit to Syracuse when he was eighteen. I was ten. He detested it, left after a year, went back to Detroit. I hardly saw him until after the war.” He shrugs, almost apologetically.
Now for the big question. “Do you think he knew about Annie?” I ask.
“No,” Manny says, immediately. “No,” Shirley chimes in a second later.
“Why so sure?” I say.
“Because he would have told someone,” Manny replies.
“Even if Mom told him not to?” I ask.
He thinks about that. “Well, I never thought he was all that good at keeping a secret.”
We spend the weekend in a family history marathon, ranging over a dozen subjects and nearly one hundred years, back to the mystery of Dad’s immigration and the greatcoat incident, why my grandfather Harry left Bubbe Ida and his infant son behind when he left Russia in 1914 (“he had to leave in a hurry—the Russians were going to draft him,” Manny says), how Harry’s failed bakery ventures in Detroit led him to leave town one step ahead of the bill collectors, the circumstances surrounding Dad’s discharge from the Army (“nervous stomach,” they both say), Mom and Dad’s persistent money troubles in the late 1940s and 1950s (“they had to borrow from us several times,” says Shirley, followed by Manny’s “but they always paid us back”).
Shirley and Mom shared equal status as outsiders to the Luxenberg clan, a bond that might have led them to forge a close friendship. But when I was growing up, Mom seemed closer to Aunt Rose—they kept up a phone relationship, in the days when long-distance costs limited both the frequency and duration of calls—and Rose knew nothing about Annie, so it wasn’t surprising that Shirley didn’t, either.
Still, Shirley knows as much about the Luxenberg family history as any Luxenberg. She had an academic’s love for her subject—she studied it, analyzed it, archived it—so I’m thinking that she might have picked up information about Mom and her family along the way.
“What do you know about my mom’s family?” I ask her.
“She never talked about them,” Shirley says. “For the first fe
w years after I met her, I wondered if she even had one. I even thought she might be adopted.”
I leave Texas no closer to the truth about whether Dad knew about Annie. Manny and Shirley’s duet of “No” counted for something, but it didn’t settle anything. While I was tilting toward the view that Mom hadn’t told Dad—maybe she, like Manny, thought Dad had trouble keeping a secret—I still couldn’t rule out the possibility that Mom had enlisted Dad in the conspiracy of silence, and that he had carried off one of his best con jobs ever, not just keeping the secret, but giving off the impression that he wasn’t any good at keeping them, which would be the perfect ruse.
Which was it? Unless I could find out more about why Mom had created the secret, I would be stuck in the land of maybes and possibilities and likelihoods.
On the plane back to Baltimore, transcribing my notes, I come across one question I had asked Manny as I was trying to get a handle on how Mom presented herself in the early years of her marriage, as she was getting to know her husband’s relatives. We were talking about my parents’ money problems, their multiple requests for loans from the Syracuse branch, and I had asked him, “Did you see my mom as self-centered?”
Manny had always liked Mom, from the minute he set eyes on her. He congratulated Dad for finding someone special, someone both lively and nurturing. So I was interested in Manny’s answer.
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