By Esther’s account her mother was a stern and demanding woman—superficially the family disciplinarian, at least in everyday affairs. She was feisty, the rebel among the neighborhood wives. She got a group of them to lie to their husbands that they were having a “girl’s night out at the theater.” Instead, they stole off to downtown Cleveland to hear Emma Goldman or Margaret Sanger lecture on birth control. It was a defiant act for their time and class, though a bit like locking the barn door after the horse escaped if you figure Mother’s six kids were the norm.
Caring for those kids, who were dropping out one after the other was a daunting, exhausting task. She needed help. So she enlisted Esther, her oldest by four or five years, as a sort of surrogate. “I was never allowed to be a child,” Mother would complain bitterly to Abe and me when we were adults. “I couldn’t simply play, get into mischief, and have friends. ‘You are the oldest,’ she’d say, ‘I need you not to be silly. I need you to take care of your brothers!’” Which she did, before and after school every waking day of her childhood. Along the way she developed a fierce attachment to her brothers that was almost unnatural—not in the sexual sense but in its loyalty and love.
All this brings me to what I believe is the central traumatic incident in Mother’s young life. You see, that shiny leather strap Father Abraham sharpened his razor on had another use. By all accounts—Mother’s, my Uncles’, and Aunt Sarah’s—he was remembered as the kind, affectionate man I have described. Nevertheless, there was that strap and the boys knew it. The incident concerns Uncle Sid. I do not know what he did exactly to provoke punishment, but it was something dare-devil and dangerous—the kind of prank a fourteen-year-old full of testosterone and boyish defiance might try. I think it had to do with stunts at the railyard in company with a crowd Father Abraham considered unwholesome.
Time and again Abraham warned Sid to stop. Finally, he had enough. He called the entire family together in the living room: Mother, Esther, Sarah, Martin, Joseph, and, of course, Sid.
“Take off your clothes!” He had him strip naked, his genitals in full view of the family, including the women.
“If you are going to hurt yourself I might as well do it first! Bend over! You are going to say you are sorry! You are going to say you will never go there again! You are going to say please don’t hit me anymore!”
“I’ll never say that.”
Father Abraham brought down the strap. And again. Mother said the sound of it striking Sid’s flesh made her sick. “Stop! Stop!” she cried, Sarah cried, her mother cried. The boys were silent. But Father Abraham was demonic, possessed. He had passed beyond punishment into another realm. Sid started to bleed. He held out for as long as he could, but the pain became too great.
“I am sorry. Never do it again. No more, please!” he cried. Father Abraham had broken his son.
The nub of it Mother would recount years later was not the strapping, which was bad enough, but the humiliation. That, to her, was her father’s purpose, to have her dear brother stripped naked in front of his sisters, to leave him no dignity at all. For that she could not forgive her father. But she adored her father! That would never change. She took to temporizing, rationalizing her dilemma.
“Father warned Sid again and again,” she would plead to a nonexistent jury. In other words, it was Sid’s fault. But for what? Misbehaving? Crossing Father’s authority? How is that relevant, for her father was on trial for sadism in her eyes. And what, finally, was Father Abraham’s motivation in beating Sid? Sid’s safety? Or maintaining his authority? If the latter, upon what did that authority rest? Love or force?
To Mother, Sid’s punishment took on the force of biblical parable. She never resolved her feelings. Yet, there were such things as right and wrong. And if there is wrong in this world someone must be to blame and must be held to account. Not through physical brutality, which she abhorred, but there are other ways to punish. For example, it was unacceptable to Mother that my son Gregory was born brain damaged, afflicted with autism, and organic schizophrenia. Jessica, my ex, was to blame. She did not breastfeed him at birth, she rejected him, did not love him enough; it was her fault, in Mother’s eyes. Never mind the diagnosis of a dozen neurologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, social workers—or the cruelty such an opinion visited upon Jessica. Someone had to be blamed.
The story of Abraham and his sons does not end there. Let me tell you about Uncle Joseph, whom Abe and I never met because he died before we were born. He was a strong, adventurous kid, played halfback on the high school football team when it was a very different game. That was a time when you played both offense and defense and a player could be substituted for only once a half. You played with virtually no padding and there was no medical coverage. When Joseph broke his collarbone, no one stepped in to take his place and the games were canceled for the remainder of the season. Joseph was not a particularly big kid, but he was strong and he took no shit. He once threw the neighborhood bully through a plate-glass store window. Father Abraham said that he did not mind paying for it.
My grandfather—the ex-soldier in the Tsar’s Army, the kindly man of moral probity and military bearing and fierce temper—was constantly matching wills with Joseph. They’d argue up and down the house until Joseph stormed out in a huff. Hours later the two would be seen speaking quietly to each other, out front in the dark. The next day Joseph would help his father lay bricks. It was plain that Joseph was special to my grandfather, the favorite of his six.
There was scant demand for a skilled bricklayer in the Depression; the family fell on hard times. Joseph left college where he was studying to be an architect. He found work picking potatoes in Maine, and then rode the rails through Ontario and across Canada to the Northwest, working as a farm hand, harvesting crops. He finished the season there and traveled south into the States. He wrote regularly. At first his letters were cheerful, optimistic, bragging that he would make his tuition. Then they turned darker. Boy, this is hard work! Some of these fellows are real tough, scary; he needed to get away from them. He had had enough; he was glad to be coming home. My grandparents, everyone, was worried sick. But he was coming home! Sent them the date, the time, just a few more days. Aunt Sarah helped Grandmother cook a huge meal. The family waited, Father Abraham with suppressed joy.
Joseph never showed. He vanished from the face of the earth. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police traced him to a Canadian farm where he had worked and had sent a letter to the farmer. He told the farmer he wasn’t coming back; he was going to try the mines instead. He said he was getting a gun because of all the hijacking going on. No police reports after that. Nothing. Private detectives. Years and years of investigation. Nothing. It broke my Grandfather. He spun into depression. What purpose was there to life for a man who defined his life by his work, but could not find any? What purpose was there to life for a patriarch who could not feed his family? What purpose to life was there for a father who had a beautiful son, Joseph, but could not protect him? Father Abraham committed suicide. Mother never spoke of this. The truth leaked out gradually over the years.
Seventy years later, at the dawn of a new century, Uncle Daniel was poking through his storage room and came upon a dusty, decayed carton. Inside were several of Joseph’s textbooks.
Grandmother Ida died soon after Father Abraham. The siblings dispersed. All were either college graduates or well on their way, except Daniel. What to do with Daniel, still a boy? My parents offered to adopt him, move to Cleveland and live there with him. Aunt Sarah recoiled in revulsion at the very thought. No, she would become Daniel’s legal guardian, his surrogate mother. No need to marry. She could play the martyr and at the same time blame Mother for abandoning her responsibilities. It was an effective club to drive Mother from her family. The sisters were oil and water; their relationship poisonous. Sarah—petite, red-haired, impeccable, tightly controlled, the very model