The Belief in Angels (6 page)

Howard, who, as I’ve described, disciplined us in a manner usually reserved for inmates or delinquents in a military school, displayed a paradoxical sweetness around his family.

After the divorce, when he remembered to pick us up on Sundays, we were taken to his sister Doreen’s home and dropped off while he went elsewhere. Going to our Aunt Doreen’s was a treat we looked forward to. We missed our long summers on the beach with this big Irish family and the nighttime barbeques and marshmallow roasts that followed.

Howard drank at one of the local tourist bars or spent Sundays out playing poker games.

During the winter, when Aunt Doreen went back to her winter home and we were alone with him, our visits were a different story. Without the audience of his family his mood was unreliable and often volatile. We spent our time either playing outside or cleaning Aunt Doreen’s place for him, or sometimes I would read the Sunday newspaper from cover to cover—literally—in a corner somewhere while he watched sports on television and drank beer. He never let me bring a book to read. He said I read “too many books, like your mother.” My brothers played ball outside or watched television with him. When his libacious sports television time ended he called us together and, usually inebriated, drove us back to Wendy, often without having offered us anything to eat for the entire day. We learned not to complain.

Howard drives us to a nearby restaurant and tells us to stay in the car. He hops out of the car, goes in, and comes back with a small bag. When he leans back in the driver’s seat and opens the bag, he pulls out a lobster roll and proceeds to eat it without offering us a bite. David, who sits behind him in the car, makes the mistake of asking if we will be allowed to order something to eat.

“Didn’t your mother feed you breakfast this morning?”

He always looks for ways to blame her for anything.

David replies, “We ate Wheaties for breakfast.”

“Good, you shouldn’t be hungry now; it’s only been a few hours since you ate breakfast.”

David perseveres. I’m sure hunger motivates him. But we all know not to cross Howard, as well as the consequences for not behaving well.

“But I’m hungry again. Aren’t you going to give us lunch?” Howard turns around and backhands David across the seat. “There, that’s lunch. Is it tasty?” he snarls.

We all freeze. I sit next to David in the backseat and Moses cowers in the front. None of us breathes at first. I steal a peek at David and see he’s fighting back tears. I don’t want to embarrass him by letting on I see him crying. I stare out the side window. Howard eats the rest of the lobster roll while we all sit in silence.

He says, “Lobster rolls are expensive. I can’t afford to buy you all lobster rolls for lunch.”

The cost of the lobster roll would have covered the cost of several less expensive sandwiches for all of us. I remember feeling shocked at his selfishness. I’d been a witness to it before, in many ways, but I’d never seen such a blatant display. That experience solidified my understanding of his nature.

Our stomachs were audibly rumbling, but he drove us back to Doreen’s place so he could watch a football game while we played outside.

From that point on, we never complained about the lack of meals on those visits; instead, we ate tons of Raisin Bran and Wheaties on Sunday mornings, just in case. We never told Wendy, either, knowing she would cause trouble with Howard and fearing the retribution we might endure the next time we saw him if she did.

Before, we’d gotten glimpses of his softer side at bedtimes, holidays, and birthdays. At those times he became the magical father of our dreams. We celebrated birthdays with parades. These were elaborate productions with hats that Howard had intricately folded from newspapers, worn while we marched around hunting for presents and singing “Happy Birthday.”

Christmas Day before the divorce was blissful. It was the one day that stayed argument-free. Whatever friction our parents held was put aside and temporarily forgotten. My father decorated the outside of our old Victorian with large, multicolored bulbs that made it look like a gumdrop-laden gingerbread house. My brothers and I hung stockings on our fireplace that were so big we could have jumped inside them ourselves. They’d be crammed with toys the next morning. Howard’s friend owned a toy store, and at Christmas our living room became the previous year’s “Toy Clearance” repository. We’d wake each other up in the middle of Christmas Eve night to go down and marvel at the toys stacked from one end of the living room to the other. Most were unwrapped, and we were unable to resist playing with them. These were the Useless Presents, as in
A Child’s Christmas In
Wales.
We waited to open the Useful Presents. This is how our parents found us in the morning: already occupied with the toys. They didn’t mind as long as we didn’t open the wrapped presents—the Useful Presents—from
“aunts who always wore wool”

Wendy made a Christmas pancake breakfast for everyone, and then we spent the day playing until dinnertime. Wendy complained we were being spoiled with toys, but she never made a scene about it on Christmas.

After the divorce, we rarely saw Howard’s family.

Summer days were spent with friends or pursuing other interests. Birthday parades went away. Christmas became a lonely time. Wendy, who had been raised a Jew, didn’t enjoy Christmas celebrations with the same spirit as Howard.

We missed our Christmas mornings and the
spoilage,
now replaced by a single, thoughtless, used gift from Wendy. No Christmas pancake breakfasts. Instead, after opening our present, we retreated to our rooms and met later for TV dinners. I learned to prepare them for myself and my brothers in those early years after the divorce.

After Howard left, bedtimes were not monitored. As long as we were in our rooms, Wendy could party with privacy. She never checked to see if our lights were off and we were asleep.

I developed a bad nocturnal habit of staying up late due to the noise level, which earned me tardy slips at school. This is where my ability to forge Wendy’s signature came in handy.

Although Howard kept his Sunday appointments for child visits sporadically, there were a few times he showed up for other reasons. Once he came back with a gun—again—to threaten Wendy’s new boyfriend. He also showed up when Wendy had a motorcycle accident, and once more during the Blizzard of ’78.

After Howard left, Wendy changed. The house changed, too—after Wendy’s redecoration it looked like someone had hired a lunatic as a designer, someone who had plenty of money to spend but had experienced a prolonged, visual anxiety attack during the process. The neighborhood changed; the land Howard sold off got developed into rows of aluminum-sided, raised-ranch houses all around us. We became less like children and more like neglected pets. We got intermittent feedings until I learned to cook, no affection, and almost no attention, except when we didn’t behave in a way that pleased Wendy, which pretty much meant being in the same room as her and breathing. We developed independence beyond our years. Within our own pet universe we found hierarchy and function.

I still practiced my escape down the ladder, and the ruggedness of the beach kept our new neighbors from crashing my private retreat in the cove.

A huge meadow of wildflowers decorates the area surrounding our house in the spring and summer months. Another Victorian-era house, the O’Donnells’, built the same year as ours, sits across the road. For years, nothing more was built around us on the cliffs with their sweeping, dizzying view of the rocky coast below.

The calm I found within the chaos was almost always instantly available to me there below the cliff.

I have been to church and synagogue. None of it feels personal. The pronouns are wrong. I think that place on the beach provided a kind of substitute church for me. I don’t think I would have called what I did back then
praying.
I’d have called it
wishing hard.
I kept a hope I’d get over feeling so badly about things. I don’t know why, but I anticipated that things would end up all right and I’d come out strong and feeling better.

When I imagined God’s image I pictured the wooden woman, the ship masthead. When my father lost the bar, I was devastated to learn she’d been sold at an auction, yet I still believed she was watching out for me. Otherwise, I felt isolated. I felt a child’s social understanding of existential loneliness. I felt different, but I couldn’t name or describe my difference. All I knew was that my concerns, my needs, my likes, and my dislikes were different than those of my brothers and any of my friends.

At times, when I was recognized, I became embarrassed by the difference and tried to figure out a way to hide. I decided early on I’d learn to pretend to be like everyone else. But I couldn’t seem to get a bead on how to respond spontaneously and still remain certain. When I could rehearse communication with other people, I felt fine, but in a situation where I had to improvise I became lost and grew quiet, which I’m sure made me appear even more unusual. I compared myself to my family members. Wendy seemed to have been born with an innate understanding of the dark side of human nature, while I grew into my teens needing a field guide for intention. My older brother, David, let everything roll off his shoulders. He hardly noticed and seemed to never get upset by the things that happened. Moses preferred to hide in his closet. I couldn’t tune it out like David. I became angry and acid-tongued around my family. I needed to fight. I didn’t believe anything could change otherwise, and I needed it to change.

I never believed my family made me different or that my difference grew as a result of my environment. I didn’t even feel like a member of a family. Our house very loosely held a group of individuals who happened to share a space but no commonality. We were solely growing up together.

In the meantime, I decided I would try to be smart and strong. These were the qualities I strived to develop through the years of my childhood, though it got more difficult as I got older.

I began to see my life in parts. When something bad, or weird, or crazy happened, like my father having a gun and threatening my mother, I’d say to myself:
This is the part where my father points a gun at my mother’s head.
Like in a movie or something.

I don’t know why that made it seem better, but it did. It became more about watching the weirdness than contributing to it. Also, when you see your life as crappy in parts rather than crappy as a whole, it somehow seems easier to handle.

Samuel Trautman, 69years | August, 1979

BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

YOU ASK ME to write my story. This is not a story I will want you to read now, while you are starting out your life with hope. Later, after I am gone, I think. But I will write for you, Chavalah, my little Chava.

I have three stories. I will tell the first and the third story. I don’t tell the second story. No one I know who lived the second story will tell the second story except to someone who lived it. Better to forget that story and live to tell another one.

You will find that most of the parts are lost. A few memories survive as fragments. Other parts are as whole and grounded as the earth of my
Bubbe
Chava’s orchards. My boyhood home. I will put down every detail of these stories I can remember before all the parts are lost.

And so you will have my truth.

I will begin at my beginning, when I am still called Szaja.

September 5th, 1923. Ivnitza, Russian Empire.

We lived near the Teteriv River in a small village called Ivnitza, which is surrounded by ancient forests. Zhytomyr, the nearest city, sat north of us.

This is the day my
mater
and
foter
left the Ukraine, which had, in recent years, been swallowed up like a pig’s dinner and become part of Russia. I am thirteen years old.
Mater
and
Foter
also left me, my two younger brothers Idel and your uncle Oizer, my two older twin sisters Ruchel and Sura, and my eldest sister, Reizel,
your aunt Rose, eighteen and married to a young man named Berl. We are left on my
Bubbe
Chava’s farm.