“Do you remember how you knew?” I ask.
His memory can’t help him on this one. “No.”
A lot rides on his answer to my next question. “Did you talk to my dad about it?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “I never talked to your dad, or your mom, about it.”
That’s not the answer I was expecting.
“Do you think you overheard something while you were living with them?” I say. “But if you had, wouldn’t you have talked about it with Mom or Dad?”
“It’s a mystery,” he says.
I have a sudden thought: Maybe the Oliweks are the connection. When Bill and Lil lived in suburban Detroit before heading out to California, they were close friends with Anna and Steve Oliwek, so close—Bill is now telling me—that he and Lil asked the Oliweks if they would be godparents for their oldest son.
“Do you think you might have heard about it from Anna Oliwek?” I tell him briefly about the falling out between Mom and Anna, which happened just about the time that his family and the Oliweks were becoming close.
“That makes sense,” he agrees. But making sense doesn’t mean it’s true, so I ask him to try to remember. I wait, and there’s silence. “I’m sorry,” he says, finally. “I just don’t have any memory of how I heard. I just know I didn’t find out from your parents, and that I never talked with either of them about it.”
I ask him about my other theory—that the secret was born because Mom feared that if Dad knew, he wouldn’t marry her.
“That’s very possible,” he says. “Your mom was fantastically in love with your father. She wouldn’t have allowed anything to interrupt or threaten it.”
Something did happen in Manila.
Several months after my conversation with Manny, an unexpectedly thick package arrives in the mail from the Veterans Administration. Without much hope of getting anything, I had asked the agency if it had any records on Dad’s disability discharge; Army regulations required the VA to get copies of his case, but that didn’t mean it had happened.
The VA found the discharge papers, and more—including the handwritten notes of the first doctor to see him on July 2, 1945, the day he fell apart. “Patient states,” the notes say, “that ever since joining his present unit last fall he has felt himself working up to a ‘breakdown.’ States that he has been kicked around from detail to detail and has never been given a regular assignment, and now he felt that he is a detriment to the Army and a liability to himself because he hasn’t been able to become a soldier…Yesterday morning he went on sick call because of diarrhea. Returned to the dispensary later and there he broke down crying and stated that he might just as well die.”
Later examinations, both in the Philippines and in the States, ruled out any threat of suicide. The doctors who saw him seemed perplexed by the cause of his breakdown, but certain that his anxiety was real and that it made him unfit for continued duty. The Darnall board sent him home with a 50 percent disability, allowing him to collect $69 a month in disability pay, subject to periodic psychiatric evaluations of his readjustment to civilian life. Three years later, the VA informed him that “your last examination discloses that your nervous condition has improved to such a degree” that the payments would stop.
Faking it? Was Dad so angry, so miserable that he would feign a nervous breakdown, humiliating himself even more in front of his fellow soldiers? But if he were that calculating, would he then tell an Army doctor that he had not been given a chance to show what he could do? Wouldn’t that risk being told, well, we can find a job for you, something that would help the unit?
No, it sounded to me as if Dad had sunk to his emotional bottom, and that his superiors had concluded, this time, that whatever his problems, he was more trouble than he was worth. Send the soldier home to his wife and let her worry about him.
Mom had called Dad her savior, and now, he saw Mom as his: Without you my life would be empty, he had written her from Darnall. I’d be a total loss.
On a single sheet of paper, I draw a line down the middle. At the top left, I write: “Evidence that Dad didn’t know.” On the right, “Evidence that Dad knew.”
Even though I still find it hard to get my head around the notion that Mom kept the secret from Dad, I rapidly fill up the “Dad didn’t know” side of the page.
“Photos: None before 1942 except baby pix of Mom and one of Tillie”
“Marriage: As Julie said, telling ‘the boyfriend’ wouldn’t help land him”
“Letters to Dad: No mention of Annie”
“Letters from Dad: No mention of Annie”
“Visits: Explains why Mom didn’t take her mother to Eloise. Couldn’t go without raising suspicions.”
“Mom’s argument with Anna Oliwek: Suggests that Mom’s real worry was Dad finding out, not the children. Mike too young. I wasn’t born”
“Dad’s brothers: Manny didn’t know (and Manny thought Dad would have said something); Bill knew, but says he never discussed with Dad or Mom”
“Records: Mom saved her parents’ marriage certificate (pre-Annie), but no other family documents”
“Dad’s psych discharge: If Mom didn’t tell him before he went off to the Army, not likely to tell him when he returns. Having not told him, maybe there’s never a right time? So she’s…”
“Stuck with it: Keeping the secret from Dad meant keeping it a secret from us, which meant keeping the secret forever”
On the “Dad knew” side of the ledger:
“Too hard to hide it, Dad would find out anyway: run into an old friend of Mom’s, take a phone call from Eloise, something would come in the mail (but if he knew, why no mention in the letters?)”
“They didn’t keep secrets from each other (but how do I know that?)”
The pattern seems obvious. The “Dad didn’t know” side depended on both evidence and logic, while the other side relied solely on logic; the “Dad didn’t know” side accounted for specific facts (no mention of Annie in the letters), while the other side was generic and debatable (it’s hard for spouses to keep secrets from each other).
I try to put myself in Mom’s place in 1940, after Annie went to Eloise. What would I feel? A stew of emotions, probably: anger at my parents for their poverty and their failure to assimilate better; antagonism toward my sister for making life harder and putting more pressure on me to carry the family forward; fear that I don’t have what it takes to deal with my circumstances—and, perhaps, guilt for feeling any hostility at all when I’ve got two good legs and a sound mind.
At first, after Annie’s hospitalization, Mom has no reason to keep her a secret—everyone in her world knew all about Annie, so what would be the point of pretending she doesn’t exist? Then, at that wedding in June 1942, Mom meets a reason, and he’s standing below her on the staircase, Prince Charming to her rescue. According to Marty and Julie, she’s already afraid that marriage has passed her by; she’s been a bridesmaid four times at least, but never a bride. She declares her intention to marry this Prince, and as Uncle Bill says, she’s so in love (or so infatuated with the idea of love), that she won’t let anything get in the way.
So she doesn’t tell “the boyfriend,” as Julie put it. That requires enlisting her parents in her cause, and while Tillie has qualms about acting as if she has only one daughter, she also has to think about her older daughter’s happiness, and so she goes along, at least when Dad’s around. Circumstances conspired to make the ruse possible: Annie’s prolonged stay at Eloise and a move to a new apartment allow the family to put Annie’s physical presence into the past, reducing the chance that Dad might see something that can’t be explained away.
Harder, though, to remove Mom’s friends from her life or make a blanket request for their silence. But as Julie had said, she didn’t need Mom to tell her to keep quiet.
We will never know to a moral certainty why Mom created the secret. I have circumstantial evidence and a mix of firsthand and hearsay testimony from Anna, Julie, Mill
ie, Marty, and others, but the weight of the evidence—the accumulated facts—makes me feel confident that my reinterpretation comes as close to the truth as memory and history allow.
One final mystery: If Mom chose to keep the secret from Dad in 1942, if she never found the right time or place to tell him, why didn’t she reveal it to us after Dad’s death in 1980? If she were willing to tell Hazan a doctored version of the truth in 1995, why not tell us that version as well? I was pretty certain of the answer: She had judged herself so harshly that she couldn’t imagine that we wouldn’t do the same. The longer she kept the secret, the larger it loomed, until it grew to such proportions in her mind that it overwhelmed and paralyzed her.
Support for this thinking comes unexpectedly, when I call the daughter of Ethel Edelman, Mom’s old bridge partner. I haven’t talked to Natalie Edelman since high school; she was a couple of years behind me, and more my brother Jeff’s friend than mine, so I can only imagine her reaction when she hears my message on her cell phone.
We connect a few days later. As usual, I feel a tinge of anticipation as I begin my now-familiar list of questions, even though I’m certain that this particular call will be brief. It’s unlikely that Mom had said anything to Ethel, but even if she had, it’s even less likely that Ethel would have repeated it to her daughter. Why would she?
As I suspected, Natalie has no idea that my mom had a sister, disabled or otherwise. I’m not surprised; after all, if Natalie had called me after thirty years without contact, I couldn’t have said whether her mom had any brothers or sisters, and yet I had spent many an afternoon with Ethel at the bridge table, where gossiping about family life was as much a part of the game as the pad for keeping score.
Figuring that I may as well take advantage of Natalie’s training as a therapist and hospital social worker, I ask her a few questions about how today’s world compares to Annie’s. Natalie’s professional side clicks in, and now she’s interviewing me—when, where, how long was Annie institutionalized? As I’m sketching the outlines of what I know, Natalie interrupts.
“Was she mentally retarded?” she asks.
I hadn’t yet said anything about Annie’s difficult birth or her IQ scores or Bohn’s recommendation that she belonged at Lapeer. I reflexively begin to answer, thinking that it’s part of the checklist of questions that a trained social worker would run through, but then I stop, curious about why she had veered in that direction so suddenly.
“Why did you ask that?” I say.
Her answer takes my breath away. “Because I do recall something now, vaguely.”
For the next few minutes, she speaks in short bursts, as she retrieves memories long dormant. “They had been playing Scrabble…I was in high school…my mom let slip…” I keep quiet, letting her grapple with the hazy, half-remembered images.
“I really don’t remember too much, and I don’t want to push it too far,” Natalie warns me, unaware how that reassures me. “I know your mom told my mom something. It was furtive, as if my mom knew she shouldn’t be telling me.”
Natalie’s story, as best as she could piece it together: When she was about seventeen, our moms were Scrabbling and chain-smoking; Natalie was in her room. “Afterward, my mom was very upset,” she says. “She came in, almost like she had to talk with someone, and there I was.”
“What did she say?” I ask. I’m holding my pen so tightly that the knuckle on my middle finger hurts.
“That they had put your mom’s sister away,” Natalie says. “My mom was very troubled about it, very pained. She was shaking her head.” Ethel couldn’t believe that Mom had been keeping this secret from her. But that wasn’t all; Ethel had a mentally retarded niece who had been institutionalized, and Ethel had been crushed when it happened. She had told Mom all about it. But Mom, her closest friend, had never said a word about having a sister in the same straits.
That might have upset Ethel just as much as Mom’s revelation, Natalie suggests. “They had been constant companions for years,” Natalie reminds me. “Sometimes, I thought they were closer to each other than to their husbands.”
We try to figure out when this all happened. “It must have been the fall of my senior year…The school year had just started,” Natalie says. “So that would have been September or October of 1972. When did you say Annie died?”
“August 1972,” I tell her.
This is more interpretation than reinterpretation, but here goes: After Annie died, Mom felt free, finally, to let go, tentatively, warily, of her secret. She tested the waters, telling her best friend, and what happened? It backfired. Ethel was sympathetic, but she also felt confused, perhaps even slighted that Beth hadn’t confided in her years before. Their relationship survived—at least until Ethel and her husband migrated to Florida in the early 1980s—but as time passed, they talked less and less. I had always thought their relationship had suffered from the distance, but here’s another reinterpretation: The distance mattered less than that conversation in 1972.
And if unburdening yourself to your best friend doesn’t work out too well, why risk telling your children? So the secret went back underground, until that day in 1995 when Mom mentioned it to Dr. Hazan, for reasons known only to her. Even then, it might have remained buried—if not for a puzzled social worker’s phone call and a routine letter from a cemetery asking about the planting of flowers for the spring.
“Do you think your mom ever told your dad?” I ask Natalie, without mentioning the ironic parallel to my question. Her father, Jack, is still alive at ninety, living in Florida.
“I don’t know,” she says. “His memory’s not great, but I’ll ask him.”
She called back the next day. Her dad had no inkling about Annie, but he did have a number for Ann Black, who had recently moved back to the Detroit area after thirty years in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. She and Mom had lost touch years ago, and I was never sure why. Ann would be my next call.
She’s shorter than the woman I remember from the bridge games, but Ann Black’s nearly white hair frames the same face that I found both appealing and intimidating all those years ago. Her pantsuit of velvety purple suggests that Ann has maintained her sense of style, as does the handcrafted jewelry on her fingers and around her neck.
She gives me a hug that’s more than polite. “How many years has it been?” she asks. “Thirty? More?”
The dining room in the seniors’ community where she lives, in suburban Detroit, hums with Valentine’s Day activity, as staff members bring in a dozen heart-shaped balloons for an evening celebration. I joke with Ann about Mom’s fondness for Valentine’s and other “greeting-card” holidays: Mother’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, and—this was the topper—Sweetest Day, which I learned when I got older was the invention of some candy-maker from Cleveland and unknown to many in other parts of the country. “Your mom certainly was a romantic,” Ann says.
I had decided to ask first about Tillie and Hyman, whether Ann had ever met them, and then follow up with an Annie question. As soon as I mention my grandparents, though, Ann shows me that directness remains her hallmark. “There was a big secret in your family,” she says. “Your mom had a mentally retarded sister.”
No one, not even Anna Oliwek, has described it quite so starkly. “That’s not what I was expecting you to say,” I say, placing my recorder on the table. “Keep going.”
Ann’s story starts with an innocuous conversation between new neighbors, playing Jewish geography in one of the many suburban subdivisions that attracted families moving out of Detroit’s old neighborhoods in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Marilyn and Sid Frumkin settled into The Ravines just before New Year’s in 1964, and Marilyn discovered that she had a few things in common with the woman in the house directly behind hers. One day, Marilyn mentioned her weekly bridge game, and so Mom’s name came up.
As Ann tells it, the neighbor said, “I know Beth Luxenberg.” They hadn’t seen each other in years, but when they were teenagers, their fam
ilies had adjoining apartments in the old neighborhood around Fourteenth Street. “She told Marilyn about Beth’s retarded sister,” Ann says. “That’s how we knew.”
She doesn’t remember the woman’s name. “It was a family that owned an alarm company.”
“You mean Guardian Alarm?” I say. “Sylvia Pierce?”
“That’s the one,” Ann replies.
Ann’s account proved again that the biggest threat to Mom’s secret came from the old neighborhood, from the people who knew her before Annie went to Eloise, before Annie became a secret. Nathan Shlien told Anna Oliwek about Annie; Sylvia Pierce told Marilyn; Julie Reisner knew, but she didn’t tell anyone; Fran came along after the secret was born, and never found out at all.
What, exactly, did Sylvia tell Marilyn? Ann only knows what Marilyn told her, and even that’s fuzzy at this point. When I ask her for details, she says she never knew the sister’s name, or that she had gone to Eloise, or that she had a psychiatric illness.
“What did Marilyn tell you about the sister?” I ask.
“She said Beth had a retarded sister who was in a special home and nobody ever mentioned her.”
“Did you ever ask my mom about her?”
“Your mother never brought it up, and we certainly wouldn’t bring it up,” she says, her words tinged with what sounds like irritation or anger. This surprises me—and suggests that Ann’s silence flowed from a different source than Medji’s and Julie’s.
“Did you think about bringing it up?” I say. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because it was her job to bring it up if she wanted to. It was her secret.” Well, that’s more or less what Medji and Julie had said—respect for Mom’s wishes. So why the irritation? I’m about to find out.
“Beth knew I had a handicapped brother, Marvin, who’s deaf,” Ann says. “I also had a cousin who was mentally retarded. She could have told me about her sister. It wouldn’t have been a shock to me.” She doesn’t take her eyes off mine. She’s speaking directly, forthrightly, just as she always had. “We never hid Marvin. Wherever we were, he was always my brother. In fact, I went into teaching the deaf because of him. He inspired me to do that. Your mom knew all that, and yet she never mentioned her sister.”
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