The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  Six weeks later we would learn what she was talking about.

  * * *

  If madness reflects an inability to cope with reality, then in the context of my family, I had always been the “normal” daughter as a child, and it was Lara who had been crazy. But years later, Lara emerged as the true-blue, stable, and devoted daughter of our parents, and it was I who had gone off the rails; I was the one who no longer fit the family norm.

  Did Lara have a real mental illness? She wasn’t schizophrenic or bipolar or diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. The only word ever mentioned consistently was borderline. But I think it’s more accurate to say that she is imbued with the madness that comes with being the loyal daughter in a family of secrets and trauma.

  * * *

  The envelope arrived Christmas Eve. It was bulky, so I assumed my mother had sent me an article from a magazine that she thought I’d find interesting. But when I opened the envelope my mother’s short note fell out—It is a sad and difficult time for all of us. The cover letter addressed to her from her attorney unsettled me, but I felt relieved when I skimmed through the ten pages of my father’s will dividing everything equally between me and my sister. And then I reached the last page, the codicil. A list of numbered paragraphs, each starting with the words Delete HELEN FREMONT and ending with the word predeceased. The blow felt visceral, and I collapsed to the couch, unable to breathe. The papers fell to the floor at my feet.

  Donna was in the kitchen, finishing up her rice casserole which we were going to bring to our friends in Sudbury, as we did every Christmas Eve. I had already made the dessert, a flourless chocolate torte with raspberry coulis. “What is it?” Donna said, stepping out of the kitchen.

  I looked at her, but no words came. She rushed over to me. “What happened?”

  “I’m… dead,” I finally said.

  “What?”

  “My mother sent my father’s will.”

  Donna picked up the pieces of paper at my feet, trying to understand what had happened.

  And then a sound escaped me, a long-drawn-out howl of rage that sounded utterly foreign, a sound so loud and strange, it seemed to have issued from somewhere else altogether. It didn’t sound human. It alarmed me, and it must have scared Donna too, because she started crying. She was sitting next to me now, and had thrown her arms around me, and we started rocking back and forth, and I was crying, hot tears that streamed down my face. I tried to speak, but no words would emerge, just that terrible scream, that gut-wrenching wail.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that, holding each other and crying. I finally calmed down enough to speak. “He signed a codicil and killed me off.”

  Donna shook her head. “Oh, Helen,” she said.

  * * *

  The following weeks were a blur. I did not contact my mother or sister, and I did not hear from them. I managed to stumble through my days at work, but kept my head down and my door closed and avoided conversation. My shrink wrote me a scrip for an anxiolytic that helped me get some sleep, but I still found myself awake in the middle of the night, shaking with rage. I wrote in my journal and tried to pass the time until the gym opened at five, when I could work out for a couple of hours.

  Later that winter, I hired a lawyer and drove to Schenectady to meet with him. He helped me find out more about the codicil: my mother had driven my father to the small-time lawyer who preyed on the elderly—Don’t let Uncle Sam take your hard-earned money!—and Dad had signed the codicil removing me from the family four months before he died. My mother signed an identical codicil to her own will that day, though I wouldn’t find out until I received hers in the mail after she died twelve years later, at the age of ninety-four.

  Contesting a will is rarely successful, my lawyer told me. But when he saw the name of the attorney my family had chosen, he blanched. Apparently their attorney was not known for his scruples. If you were going to contest a will, my lawyer said, you had a chance of finding something wrong with a will written by the attorney my parents had hired. I suppose I had a slight case, if I wanted to fight. My father had been suffering from Parkinson’s for fifteen years by the time he signed the codicil. Although he had been a ferociously willful man in his prime, it’s fair to say that he was under my mother’s and sister’s influence at the end.

  “Just be aware,” my lawyer advised, “if you contest the will, it will mean war.”

  That seemed fitting. Fifty-six years after my parents had survived one war, I could start a new one in a court of law.

  * * *

  I drove home and mulled it over for the next few days. The days turned to weeks, and then the weeks became months. I tried to imagine what it would be like to take my mother and sister to court. I tried to picture Lara and Mom driving to their attorney’s office and spending money to defend themselves from me. It seemed like a colossal waste of time and money, and besides, what good would it do? Even though my parents had squirreled away hefty savings, I didn’t really care about their money. I cared about their killing me off.

  My new status as “predeceased” occupied my life now. I became a sort of Dead Helen Walking, defined by that piece of paper, and compelled to tell everyone about it. Being disowned seemed to fit naturally into even the most casual conversations with colleagues and friends. For a dead person, I certainly inhabited the role with great gusto.

  But despite my rage, I couldn’t generate the desire to fight my mother and sister. Contesting the will would only keep me more closely bound to them: we would be engaged, literally, in a battle of wills, and we would become even more entrenched in our outrage at each other. So I decided not to contest the will, and not to sign it either. I had spent four decades wrapped tightly around the open wound of my family’s past, and now I’d been sliced free. It was a violent separation, to be sure, but there were no bloody limbs, and I had Scotch-taped together a new family for myself: I had Donna; I had the dog and a cat and two fish and an apartment in Boston and a job and a small but solid group of friends.

  And I had a lot to think about.

  twenty-five

  Over the following years, I continued to try to make sense of what had happened to my family. It’s instinctive to search for meaning, to arrange and rearrange the pieces of the puzzle in such a way that they fit, that there is a satisfying snap of recognition, a sense of truth, of something resonating deeply.

  As I discovered in 1999, soon after the publication of After Long Silence, my family’s Jewish identity wasn’t such a big secret after all. Although my parents had hidden it from Lara and me, and from their postwar friends and colleagues, it turned out that dozens of other family members (of whom Lara and I had been unaware) knew all about us. My mother had sworn them to secrecy.

  It was only after my book came out that these cousins of my mother’s—living in the States, in Canada, in Europe—contacted me and invited me into their homes, where they showed me decades’ worth of correspondence from my mother, dating back even to before the war, when Mom had still been in high school. The cousins explained that in 1961, when I turned four, my mother told them never to contact me or Lara again; Mom was afraid we would remember them and realize we were family.

  For the next forty years, unbeknownst to Lara and me, Mom and Dad had continued to get together with these relatives for bar mitzvahs and weddings and other celebrations. Here was a photo of my father in a yarmulke, standing in a synagogue in New York at my American cousin’s bar mitzvah. There was a picture of my mother smiling with the bar mitzvah boy, her own cousin’s son. My mother continued to send her cousins photos of Lara and me in grade school, junior high, and high school each year, together with news of our lives. There I was, in a red jumper in the first grade with my front tooth missing; here was Lara in her blouse buttoned up to the collar. My mother’s handwriting on the pictures identified our grades and ages.

  * * *

  Ultimately whatever secrets Zosia and my mother were keeping played a hand in defining my
relationship with my own sister. Our family was built on a construction of lies that rattled our very foundation and held us in a state of madness. But even in writing After Long Silence, I didn’t understand the extent of the secrets. It would take another decade before I could see more clearly what had eluded me for most of my life.

  The first lie was simple and obvious: like thousands of other Jews during the war, my mother and aunt denied their Jewish identity and pretended to be Catholic in order to survive. In 1945, after the war was over, most survivors let go of this pretense and reclaimed their heritage. But my mother and aunt couldn’t do that. They both owed their lives to Uncle Giulio, the only real Catholic in our family. By marrying Zosia during the war, Giulio not only provided her with a Catholic identity, but he also elevated her to the status of countess. She was safely above suspicion during the wartime roundups of Jews in Rome. Their marriage was convenient for my uncle as well, I think, since it provided Giulio—who I believe was gay—legitimate cover as a family man.

  Giulio also used his influence as a prominent lawyer and government official to rescue my mother when she was arrested at the Italian border in 1942 after escaping from Poland. As the (presumably) Catholic sister of Giulio’s wife, Mom was later spared the Nazi deportation of Jews in Italy.

  In short, neither my mother nor my aunt could expose their benefactor. To reveal that he had married a Jew—even after the war was over—would have destroyed Giulio, both financially and socially.

  And then there was Renzo.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Renzo told Lara and me years ago, “if, in fact, I’m your mother’s son.” Lara nodded; she’d already done the math. Nine months after Mom escaped from Poland with Luigi, the Italian officer who saved her life, Renzo was born. Mom’s arrival at Zosia and Uncle’s apartment in Rome in 1943 coincides with Renzo’s birth.

  At the time Renzo suggested this, I have to admit I was skeptical. This was 1993, fifty years after Mom’s escape and Renzo’s birth, and I was still struggling to understand the implications of our sudden discovery that Mom, Dad, and Zosia were all Jewish Holocaust survivors. By comparison, the question of whether my cousin was really my half brother seemed less pressing.

  It’s only now, after so much else has unraveled in our family, that I find myself returning to this conjecture, turning it over in my mind, examining it from every angle. The stories that my mother told me of her escape and imprisonment came in small snippets over decades. Now, piecing them together, the narrative emerges more clearly.

  Mom told Lara and me that Luigi, the Italian officer stationed in her hometown of Lvov, had risked his life to help her escape Nazi-occupied Poland in October 1942 by providing her with false papers and an Italian soldier’s uniform. At the age of twenty-three, she posed as a soldier under his command, and Luigi brought her with him on furlough to Italy. But the two were arrested at the Italian border, and Mom, presumed to be a spy, was held for execution by a firing squad. Uncle Giulio sent a lawyer to the border who explained to the Italian officials that Mom was not a spy, but the Italian officer’s girlfriend. Luigi had a wife and children in Bologna; he needed to keep the story of his Polish girlfriend a secret. The Italian officials had a soft spot for romance, and with the help of Uncle’s bribe, they released my mother.

  From there, Mom said she was transported to an Italian concentration camp in the south of Italy, where she and the other inmates (all women) were treated surprisingly well, and allowed to spend their days knitting and reading.

  “Really?” I asked her when I was in college. “They let you knit and read in a concentration camp?”

  My mother had smiled. “Yes,” she said, adding in a whisper, “Many of them were prostitutes.”

  “But prostitution was legal in Italy,” I said. “Why were they in a concentration camp?”

  My mother shrugged. “It was the war,” she said.

  I kept quiet.

  “We had it easy,” she continued. “We were fed reasonably well and didn’t have to work.” She smiled mischievously, admitting that in the concentration camp, she had more food than most people in Italy had during the war.

  So why was she released nine months later in June 1943, when the war was still raging?

  “Oh, the warden let me go,” Mom said, waving her hand as if this were a silly question. “Zosia came to visit and buttered him up with her baked goods.”

  So according to Mom, she was released from the concentration camp on the whim of the warden, who became good friends with Zosia. Mom arrived in Rome that summer and lived with her sister and my uncle Giulio, and the newborn Renzo. “I was fat then,” Mom told me years later. She said she’d destroyed all the photos taken of her during that time because she hated how “chubby” she looked when she first got to Rome.

  I never questioned Mom about it, but now I wonder. She’d always told us how hungry everyone in Italy was during the war; there was never enough food to go around. She and Zosia and Giulio had had to sell their clothes and belongings for food; Mom often skipped meals, so that Zosia and Giulio would have something to eat.

  In retrospect, it seems less likely that Mom could have gotten fat as a prisoner in an Italian concentration camp during those nine months of the war, than that she had grown large with child at a home for unwed mothers in southern Italy.

  I’m guessing that when Mom and her newborn infant came to live with Zosia and Giulio in Rome, all three pretended that Renzo was my aunt and uncle’s son. They baptized Renzo and raised him as a Roman Catholic count, the legitimate heir to his father, Giulio, and mother, Zosia. He was exempt from the Nazi roundups of Jews in Rome a few months later. In the privacy of their home, I imagine that my mother nursed Renzo and raised him as her own. Renzo was three years old when my father—Mom’s long-lost fiancé from before the war—miraculously escaped from the Gulag and turned up at my mother’s doorstep in Rome.

  My father’s survival was inconceivable. “No one came back from Siberia!” Mom told me. Since learning of his deportation by the Soviets in 1940, she’d heard nothing further. People simply disappeared in Siberia. Until he showed up in November 1946, my mother and aunt and uncle had pretty much solved the problems of genocide and homophobia and illegitimacy. They had outwitted Hitler and Mussolini and proper society. The sisters had come under Uncle’s skirts; he had taken them in and covered them all with his Catholic nobility. He sired a son—it was a perfect story. It worked. They had forged a family of four, just like that. It was brilliant.

  My father’s appearance a year and a half after the war ended threatened to blow the lid off that story. They had to scramble to incorporate him into it, but this is where the lies became corrosive. This is where the secrets began to do real psychic harm, I think. My father had made it out of the Gulag, and into the arms of a plot so twisted that he was trapped and frustrated by it for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  Within days of my father’s arrival in Rome, Zosia and Uncle had arranged for Dad and Mom to be married during my mother’s lunch break from work. Dad agreed to pretend to be Catholic; he couldn’t have married her otherwise. After six years in Siberia, he told me, he no longer cared what religion he was. Time was short; he wanted a family.

  What was more difficult for him to accept, he told me, was the “unnaturally close” attachment between three-year-old Renzo and Mom—my father’s new wife. Renzo had always slept in Mom’s room, and now the child threw a fit at the prospect of being moved into Zosia’s room when my father showed up. “We were newlyweds!” my father told me. “But Mom wouldn’t part from the boy, so the child slept in the same room with us. I was very hurt by that.” My father would resent Renzo for the rest of his life. Years later when he told me about Mom’s overriding attachment to the child, he was still angry. Why wasn’t she happy to be reunited with him, her long-lost fiancé? Why did she only care about her sister’s child?

  It wasn’t until five years later—when Renzo was eight years old—that my moth
er finally left Renzo behind with Zosia and Uncle, and emigrated to the States with my father. The parting at the Rome train station was so traumatic, my mother told me, that she couldn’t bear to leave the boy. “Renzo was in hysterics,” she said, her eyes tearing up forty years after the fact. “It was devastating.” Heartbroken, she traveled with Dad north to Hamburg, the port from which their ship would take them to America. But my mother was so distraught by the separation, she left my father the next day and returned to Rome, in order to spend one last day with the child. The following day, she rejoined my father just in time to board the ship for America.

  As Mom tells the story, my father was also hurt that she had refused to have children right away. “I put him off,” my mother told me. “I wasn’t like the other women who survived the war. They couldn’t wait to have babies! The DP camps were filled with screaming infants, and Dad was desperate to start a family. But I didn’t want to have a child until I was settled down.”

  My mother managed to postpone for three more years, until Dad finally put out his shingle in Evans Mills, and Mom ran out of excuses. In 1954, Lara was born. This is when my mother collapsed in an all-consuming depression that lasted years.

  If my conjecture is true—if Renzo is actually my mother’s son, fathered by Luigi, the Italian officer who saved her life— then the baby embodied all that my mother had lost and left behind: her parents who were murdered soon after her escape; her friends and other family members who were gassed, shot, and starved; her hometown and community that were destroyed. She escaped with nothing but the seed of this child growing inside her. Years later, to be ripped apart from Renzo must have been cataclysmic for her.

  How does someone survive what she went through? How could Mom endure the weight of her secrets and losses? At least she and my father could share the secret of their Jewish identity with each other and with a handful of her other surviving relatives in the U.S. But I imagine Mom was utterly alone with the anguish of her separation from Renzo. Only Zosia and Uncle knew the truth. No wonder she depended so desperately on her sister. Their bond was built on a lie so difficult and painful and protective, Mom would have lost her mind without Zosia. As for Lara and me—we were the malleable offspring, living receptacles of a contorted reality of which we were unaware.