Promise Me (3 page)

O
ur father, Marvin Goodman, was of robust Russian and Lithuanian ancestry. We suspected a little Irish, though for some reason, no one in his family would talk about it. Daddy and his sister, Ruth, had white hair, greenish eyes, and fair skin. The old family portraits are sharply angled with square jaws and stiff upper lips. Daddy’s father was a deputy sheriff in Colorado, which was an extraordinary thing for a Jewish man to be back then. Daddy’s mother was smart and articulate, but quick and unforgiving as a mousetrap. She ended up with Alzheimer’s, but even as her mind and memories abandoned her, she remained constant about what mattered to her, most notably (it seemed to Suzy and me) the cleanliness, proper behavior, and mandatory silence of children.

Our hardworking father was a driven but principled businessman, and I’m glad to be my father’s daughter in so many ways. In those days, it was hard to find any Jewish family who hadn’t lost someone in the Holocaust, and our family was no exception. Yet Daddy never forfeited one ounce of his soul to hatred. I learned from him the empowering nature of purpose, how our own courage will rise up and surprise us when beckoned in service of family, country, or passion for a cause greater than ourselves. I also saw what his driven nature cost him. The years have outfitted me with that same hard-earned hockey gear.

Suzy, of course, remains forever carefree and barelegged in a summer dress. She has the advantage of never growing older, never knowing bereavement, never making it to a place where unwelcome wisdom interferes with a decent night’s sleep.

I understand now that charity is a form of gratitude, and certainly, Suzy and I had much to be grateful for, but the dynamics of stewardship
and volunteerism were central to our upbringing, a family tradition that stayed with us powerfully because we were shown, not told. Our parents were sincere but comfortably reformed Jews, and we attended a scandalously easygoing temple, Anshai Emeth, where people were zealous about service to their country, community, and each other, but fairly wide open when it came to religious dogma and ritual. The fun-loving, affectionate community met in a building that used to be a Baptist church. They had their share of family squabbles, but I think it speaks volumes that in several old photographs of temple events, the son of one of the members is surrounded by friends and beaming broadly, wearing a cocktail dress and full makeup.

Mom was far too busy to ponder the orthodoxy of charity, but she embodied the idea of
tzedakah
, which isn’t about performing
acts
of kindness; it’s about the state of
being
kind. This isn’t something my mother has to think about. It’s simply who she is. Her mother’s daughter.

Mother’s tribe was a boisterous, demonstrative bunch. This branch of the prosperous Silberstein family started over from scratch when Great-Grandpa Moses emigrated from Berlin to the United States in the late 1800s, but he prospered in America as well. Mommy’s mother, Freda Newman—affectionately called “Fritzi”—was a founding member of the local Red Cross chapter in Peoria and dedicated most of her life to serving in hospitals and hospice. During World War I, Fritzi and her family took in soldiers, tended the wounded, comforted the dying. It offended her faith and her sense of justice to think that each of these brave young men had made it through the trenches and mustard gas, only to come home and die in his bed.

One day, Fritzi’s nineteen-year-old sister, Esther, came home from work, disoriented and complaining of a strangely piercing headache. Fritzi and her big sister, Rose, made Esther lie down, and Fritzi ran for a doctor. According to the story that was passed down from Fritzi to Mother and from Mother to Suzy and me, the doctor came, briefly assessed the patient, dashed cold water in her face, and told her frantic family, “She’ll get up.” Ninety minutes later, Esther was dead.

“Aneurysm, maybe. Or an embolism.” Mommy shakes her head when she talks about it now. “Nobody knew back then. Nobody questioned doctor’s orders.”

It’s not likely that they could have done anything to save Esther, but doing
something
would have saved Fritzi from having to live with the fact that nothing had been done. Fueled by rage over the way her sister had been treated, she started asking questions from that day forward. She demanded answers, staunchly advocated for those who weren’t in a position to stand up for themselves, and brought Mommy up to do the same.

My mother, Eleanor Tressa Newman, was born in 1920, effectively the only child of eight parents. Grandma Fritzi and Grandpa Leo (later affectionately dubbed “Boppie” by Suzy and me) lived in a big apartment with a constantly revolving cast of relatives, neighbors, friends, soldiers, and strangers—basically anyone who needed a place to stay. Growing up during the Great Depression, Mom was accustomed to sleeping in the dining room whenever some displaced drifter needed a bed for the night. When she was a little girl, if one of the uncles or a friend of the family was in the hospital, Fritzi would station her outside the hospital room and say, “Ellie, stay here while I dash home and make dinner for everyone. If anything happens, you run to the nurse’s station and tell them to call me.” Mommy took this responsibility very seriously. I think it brought out the guardian angel in her. Nothing was more important than looking out for each other.

Mom’s flamboyant Aunt Rose came and went between husbands, and the dashing uncles all spoiled and doted on their little Ellie. She loved to travel with them to Atlantic City, the Illinois State Fair, or anywhere else someone would take her. She went to visit Aunt Rose and her husband of the moment in California or New York. Once a year, the whole family traveled south to see relatives still living in Kentucky, where they’d been raising hogs since before the Civil War, and Mommy had her own little billy goats there.

Mom was beautiful and stylish, making the most of everything, even when there was little money to work with. Aunt Rose passed along an evening dress with a beautifully crafted pearl and rhinestone collar. The fancy gown was too big and not something Mother had occasion to wear, but she snipped off the collar and sewed it onto a plain black dress Fritzi had made for her. And when that dress became faded and worn, Mommy snipped the collar off and sewed it onto the next generation. Old photographs show her blossoming into that collar. At first, on a girl of twelve,
it seems a bit much, but by the time she was in her late teens, it looks elegant and proud. Instead of the collar glitzing her up, she’s the one making the old hand-me-down look like something special.

When I was sixteen, the brilliant Betty Friedan published the now-legendary feminist classic
The Feminine Mystique
. Imagine how impressed I was to learn that Mommy and Ms. Friedan were actually classmates back in temple school. In my mind at the time, this was Mommy’s only brush with greatness. They didn’t dislike each other, but they weren’t pals. Mom was one of the
It
girls who probably left Betty chronically perplexed.

“She was whip-smart and very serious,” Mom says. “She didn’t have much use for girls who were breezy and frivolous and not deep thinkers.”

Mom went to college for a year, but there wasn’t money for her to continue, and she’s only a little wistful about that now. She met my father at a B’nai B’rith party when she was not quite twenty. He and his family had made their way to the Midwest. She’d just gotten home from California, where she’d been visiting Aunt Rose, and while she was gone, Fritzi had begun playing cards with Daddy’s sister, Ruth. Daddy waltzed over to Mom, orchestrated a quick exchange of partners, and was immediately smitten, but Mommy was on a date with someone else. By the end of their first dance, it was all settled. She abandoned her other suitor and stayed out with Dad until four in the morning.

He told her right up front that he intended to be the head of his household and provide for his family; he envisioned a wife who’d devote herself to making a pleasant home, raising well-groomed, well-behaved children, and actively participating in community and charity projects. Though Mommy and Betty Friedan had more in common than either of them would have believed back in temple school, this proposal fit perfectly with Mom’s vision for her own life. She understood the difference between service and servitude and wore her traditional role the same way she always wore perfect shoes: she liked feeling comfortable, functional, and beautiful. Mom never questioned or denigrated the different choices made by other women, but this was her choice, and she never regretted it. An unquestionably liberated woman, my mother did exactly what she wanted to do. Her parents loved my father. The uncles, impressed with young Marvin Goodman’s entrepreneurial spirit
and cast-iron work ethic, gladly brought him into the family real estate business.

A few months before my parents were married, Grandma Fritzi took ill with a kidney infection. A simple thing, these days: usually little more than an inconvenience. Ten minutes in the physician’s office. Ninety seconds at the pharmacy drive-through. Penicillin, the drug that would have saved her, was discovered quite by accident in 1928 and first tested on human subjects in 1939. In 1940, when Fritzi’s fever drove her to the hospital, that simple but effective remedy was in the pipeline and would be commonly available just a few years later—barely a breath in the scope of history. Meanwhile, sulfa drugs were all the rage, the most potent weapon there was against battlefield infection; soldiers were issued a powdered form in their first aid kits. But because of its low solubility, sulfanilamide tended to crystallize in the kidneys when taken internally. Fritzi’s doctor—
drunk
, Mother maintains to this day—accidentally gave Fritzi a toxic dose.

Poor Mommy crouched in the corner of the hospital room as her mother, this angel of mercy, died in twisting agony. It left her grief-stricken, infuriated, and radicalized. From that day forward, contrary to the “doctor’s orders” standard of the times, Mom was unfashionably fearless about questioning the judgments of God and doctors who think they’re God’s golf buddies, and she was utterly committed to the temple definition of stewardship Fritzi had instilled in her.

“Don’t let the world fall apart on you, Ellie,” Fritzi said before she died. “Just do those things that need to be done.”

Mother had been Fritzi’s right hand from the time she was little. Now it was her responsibility to clean, cook, and care for Boppie and the bachelor uncles, attempt to keep Rose on the straight and narrow, and tend to whatever strays and strangers needed her help.

She and Daddy got married later that year. Suzy and I came along on the leading edge of the baby boom. The war was over. Patriotism was a fervor. Optimism was a fever. Two weeks after I was born, movie theaters across the country were showing
It’s a Wonderful Life
, and in Peoria, Illinois, this was most certainly true.

I
t was Boppie who taught me the gentle art of strong-arming when I was just a little girl. Every year he took me by the hand and escorted me through the buildings he managed, selling Girl Scout cookies. He was a jolly, beneficent landlord, and his tenants were always pleased to see him, but even I could see that my cookies enjoyed a whole different reception when I walked into the room under Boppie’s corporate umbrella.

“Why, Leo!” the tenant would say. “Hello! How are you?”

“Very well, and you? How’s your wife and the new baby? Of course, you remember my granddaughter, Nancy.”

“Oh … is it that time of year already?”

My cue to pitch the Thin Mints, sandwich cookies, and shortbread squares stamped with the Girl Scout emblem along with a brief recitation on the illustrious history of the Girl Scouts of America and a couple of talking points on how the community would be served by a thriving population of healthy young women, all outfitted with skills in life and archery from Camp Tapawingo.

I learned a lot from our cookie sales excursions, and I loved being squired around by Boppie. His laugh was thunderous. His presence was huge. Doors seemed to open magically in front of him. He was no tycoon; Fritzi’s brothers were the driving force behind the family business. But Boppie brought a healthy soul to their endeavors. He fostered good will and intangible assets that are just as bankable as wheels and deals at the end of the day—which is essentially what he did during our shortbread sorties. Boppie didn’t sell any cookies for me; he just got me in the room. But it’s amazing what a motivated person can do when partnered with someone who has the clout to get her in the room. And I was very motivated. Back then, there were no incentives or rewards for selling Girl Scout cookies; our reward was having Girl Scouts, and that meant a lot to us.

After the war, Mom banded together with a small group of friends to start the Girl Scouts chapter in Peoria. Boy Scouts had been going strong for decades, and it rankled Mommy that there was nothing like that for girls, but she heard the same dismissive arguments Girl Scout leaders had been getting since the 1920s. Conventional wisdom said girls didn’t need the self-reliance skills boys needed. No money was going to be invested in that. So the mothers of invention came up with the Girl Scout cookie.
Once the Peoria chapter was up and running, Mom ascended the ranks in the Kickapoo Council, participating as a leader at the regional and national levels.