Hilda runs through the streets of her Newark neighborhood, stalked by this being-thing. Just the two of them, thrust into a cartoon-like dream, performing the hapless roles of Wile E. Coyote and the roadrunner. Except not funny. She glances up, and there it is like a plastic garbage bag, dangling from a gas lamp, swaying in the wind, hanged. As she rounds the corner of Avon Avenue, near the deli, it springs out from the bushes, pounces like a jungle cat upon her shoulders, knocks her down. She staggers up, and several paces later, looking down, sees it again, flattened out on the pavement, crawling with maggots. Up in the sky, hovering, spreading out like giant bat wings, it swoops down on her. Almost captures her, then thinks better of it, relents. Instead, as if leashed by a magnetic wind, she is forced to follow its sail billowing up ahead, leading her to that awful spot, that cross section of Bergen Street and 18th Avenue, where the accident occurred. Here she recognizes the strange form: it’s the coat. The coat. It stops, mission accomplished, then rises overhead, a thunderous cloud, leaving her alone at the scene. To witness again, now the memory, of her father sprawled on his stomach on the side of the street, his mangled pant leg, skewed oddly, soaked with blood, his arms flung out. Idling, head lights cracked, the model T Ford reveals the ghostly silhouette of the driver still in his seat with his head bent over the steering wheel. Her mother’s screams come back to her, the screams spilling over her like buckets of paint, blood red and caution-tape orange.
My mother read popular novels during the fifties and sixties, when I was growing up, many of them blockbusters, some of them trashy, mainly middlebrow. There were the historical novels, especially centering on Jewish events and figures, such as Leon Uris’s Exodus, about the founding of Israel, and Herman Wouk’s, Marjorie Morningstar, whose main character is a young Jewish ingenue seeking fame as a movie star. James Michener’s, outlandishly, and as we later learned, researched by an entire team of writers, The Source. Considered steamy in those “Mad Man” days, she read Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls; Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place; and the pulp fiction of Harold Robbins. I doubt she even knew of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, much less of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, classics of second wave feminism. I caught her once hiding a copy of Fanny Hill, the 18th century erotic novel about a woman of pleasure, on a shelf in the master bedroom closet too high for me to reach. When I questioned her about it, she told me it was not for children. Though books came and went from the Public Library, they were rarely bought or kept. We had few books in the house. But on our small wrought iron shelf, in the recreation room, along with a few of my father’s hard-cover Sexteen, a series with cartoons, dirty jokes and risqué humor, there was a copy of Anderson’s Fairytales with her name inscribed on the fly leaf. I do not know why she kept it. She never read fairytales out loud to me as a child. In fact, she never read books to me at all.
Bored or book-less, I might occasionally glance through its pages looking for diversion. But the stories made me uneasy; reading them required surrender, and a suspension of disbelief, to wander in portentous, claustral settings, the forest, the castle, the darkness, the thorny rosebushes. I’d rush unnerved through their pages, rife with menace and malice, relieved to get to the end when bad behavior was punished and the good characters redeemed.
Can a narrative be too storied for comfort? Among its meanings, the word ‘story’ can denote different floors or levels of a building. In many of my anxiety dreams I wander between floors in a skyscraper, looking for an important room I am charged to find. I can never reach it. I felt that way reading fairy tales. Even as they seemed to resolve themselves, there was something I wasn’t quite getting, too many levels of creepy feelings and sinister mystery. I felt inexplicably implicated. Then too, I found the supernatural and magical occurrences common to the genre distracting and irrelevant. I preferred a bright, literal and legible world, a ranch house, one floor, rather than a labyrinthine palace. So much for Bruno Bettelheim’s theory of fairytales as a therapeutic mirror for a child’s repressed violent and frightening feelings. Though my mother had no compunction throwing personal belongings out, both hers or others, she took that book with her to Florida, where she and my father moved from New Jersey when he retired. Now in my possession, this handsome edition with its somber dark green cloth cover, was published in l945, illustrated by Arthur Szyk, a Polish born Jewish artist, a political caricaturist, Zionist and human rights activist, who preferred to paint in medieval and Renaissance styles.
I am of a different mind about fairytales as a grown-up. I own several editions of both Grimm’s and Anderson’s fairytales and am enamored by such literary fabulists as Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Sabrina Orah Mark, who stock their realistic fiction liberally with myth, folklore, and fantasy. Inspired by their examples, I experiment with these genres in this memoir about my mother, investigating and recreating a traumatic event in her childhood that profoundly shaped her, and by generational extension, myself. Writing her story by alternating make-believe with biography was like transposing her experience into another key or reinterpreting it through a different epistemology.
Psychological complexity and ambiguity are absent in fairytales, reducing human behavior to a simplistic black and white ethics, either good or evil. That binary possesses a purity that paradoxically feels apt in my mother’s case, turning seeming limitations into latitudes. Which is to say: as a child, she could’ve been a character in a fairytale. And though I have no proof, she must have felt, even dimly, that connection. Why else, for someone without any literary inclinations whatsoever, keep the book for her whole life?
Bruno Bettelheim writes that “many fairytales begin with the death of a parent, a mother or father, which creates the most agonizing problems, as it does in real life; existential dilemmas briefly and pointedly simplify all situations.”
In late 1928, her father died tragically. He was 43. She was 12.
Bettelheim writes that in fairytales: “many of the young daughters whose mothers die are unwelcomed if not rejected by their stepmothers…According to some sources, stepmothers were a substitute for actual birth mothers, who, in a world of extreme poverty, with many mouths to feed, chose favorites, gave away their children, or at least profoundly neglected them. Also, all those ugly malignant emotions were too brutal to contemplate in a maternal figure who was to be free of resentment, envy, hatred, rage, greed, aimed at the innocent victims, their daughters.”
Her mother blamed her for it. That is, for her father’s death.
The story went roughly like this: Hilda wanted a new coat. One day in early December, probably at dusk, the Silvermans, she and her mother, Dora, and her father, Jacob, were walking to a clothing store when a car with its headlights off came from behind them. Jacob shoved Dora and Hilda aside but took the hit himself. By some cruel quirk of physics, his leg was hooked by the car’s bumper, and he was dragged several feet on the road. He died on the spot.
Dora blamed Hilda: “If you hadn’t wanted that coat.” I am not sure that she ever could finish that dangling subordinate clause, to complete the meaning of the sentence, “your father would still be alive.” Grammar notwithstanding, the implication was clear.
If Dora had been reasonable, she might have considered that the cause of Jacob’s death depended upon the unaccountable vagaries of chance and coincidence by which the accident could’ve been averted: if they hadn’t left the house at such and such a time, if they decided to go another day, if the driver of the car had stopped to pick up some milk, if he had turned down another corner, if Hilda wanted a dress that meant going to another store, and a different route. This logic that entertains an infinite number of “what-ifs” was too crazy-making and abstract for her to accept. It never occurred to Dora that she and Jacob agreeing to take Hilda to buy a coat that night was just as much a reason for his death as Hilda wanting one. No. Dora could not bear the unruliness of chance or accident, literal in this case, nor could she attribute his death to fate, nor justify it as God’s will, nor assume her part in it. Instead, she seized cruelly upon a local cause for her devastating loss, a target close to home, in her home. Not to the driver, but to her own daughter: my mother.
According to an old photo-copied, undated newspaper clipping, thousands gathered in the streets to mourn Jacob’s death. He was a prominent and beloved cantor in the Jewish community. In a letter to her sister, Esther, my aunt Molly recalls that “The whole city of Newark seemed to turn out. The street in front of our house was filled with so many people it was hard to make our way through.” Two funerals were held, at each at the synagogues where he worked, the most prominent one at Congregation Adas Israel and Mishnayes, known as the home of famous cantors, on 32-34 Prince Street. Still standing, with a fanciful Moorish façade, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places and now the home of the Greater Newark Conservancy.
My mother, a little girl on the edge of puberty, must have walked in the funeral procession, following the coffin as it was carried through the streets. I try to envision her at this sad event. Was it very cold out? Did she have to wear her old coat then? Did it still fit her? What did she look like? There are no pictures of her in childhood.
Through a Jewish website, I find Jacob’s grave. He died on December 1st, 1928 and by Jewish custom buried within 24 hours. It occurs to me that the accident might have occurred on the same day as my birthday, twenty-three years later, on November 29th, 1951.
Each year, on her father’s yahrzeit, she felt that foreboding, a scratchiness in her throat, the signal to visit her father’s grave in the Jewish cemetery. Kneeling on the hard snowy ground, she performed her strange ritual. Removing her gloves, reaching down her throat, she pinched her thumb and index finger to search for the head of the thread, she knew was waiting, to retrieve it from the back of her mouth. The action was fraught and frustrating, like pulling a hair from a sticky orifice. It often fell back down her throat, half swallowed, eluding her fingers. Trying not to gag, she’d have to coax it back up, to get a purchase on it. The thread sometimes stuck to the roof of her mouth, or got embedded on her tongue, glued by her saliva. Then she had to rake her teeth against her tongue, slithering it back and forth, to bring it to the point for her fingers to grasp.
Once she tugged the thread outside her mouth, gaining several inches, she placed one end at the top right-hand corner of his grave, anchoring it on a twig by a knot, and then slowly unspooled the string from her mouth, bit by bit, until it fully encompassed the perimeter, about eight feet long and 2/1/2 feet wide, the standard size for a grave. With scissors, she cut the thread where its end and beginning met. There was always just enough. Sometimes the color of the thread was cocoa brown, other years, navy blue, or maroon, but it was always wool, tasting a bit like lanolin, rough, and prickly on the tongue. The thread left at the gravesite, subject to weathers, snow and rain and mud, quickly disappeared into the ground, though she saw remnants each year when she performed the ritual again.
My mother never told my sister and me this story; only our father did. But it came with a strict caveat. We must never bring it up to her, even mention it to him, again. Like many family secrets, the story was to remain deeply buried, underground like forever radioactive chemicals. Her sanity depended upon it.
Many years after Dora’s death, Hilda with daughters of her own, realizes that something is terribly wrong with her skin. It stings, it burns, it itches. Though she will tell no one of her suspicions, she is worried that there are things growing underneath her skin causing these sensations. No, the dermatologist tells her, you do not have shingles or eczema or dermatitis, you are only anxious, like so many women. She is given Librium. Valium. Mother’s Helpers. She is told to go to a psychiatrist. In the early 60s, there are no mindfulness apps or yoga classes. She is half crazed with scratching. She applies cream, takes constant baths, applies oils and unguents but her skin is still unsightly, dry, erupting with all manner of lesions, sores, blisters, rashes, boils. And then she sees the culprit, if others don’t. String-like fibers start to appear underneath the skin and sometimes pop out from the sores, creating crawling, burning sensations, like tiny worms or parasites. She would describe them as filaments, frayed and fuzzy threads, lying in wait inside her, especially her arms, twining and linking and weaving together to form a dynamic fabric. To alleviate her condition, she must pluck out the fibers growing under her skin that protrude and grow from her pores. In her bedroom, she has set up bright make-up lights and magnifying mirrors that she angles near her arms and uses tweezers to pluck and manicuring scissors to clip the strings close to the skin. In public she wears long sleeves to hide her flayed and red skin. She closes the door, takes hours to perform these procedures. But the work is never over, so many threads they are like Cinderella madly collecting the lentils thrown in the fireplace by her cruel stepmother.
Today she might’ve been a candidate for the controversial diagnosis of Morgellons disease. In fact, she suffered from no such disorder. That perhaps is my hyperbolic claim for a trauma that might have affected her less than I imagine. She did have Graves’ Disease, however, a hyperactive thyroid, temporarily misdiagnosed as an agitated depression, only to be cured medically with a radioactive iodine cocktail that extinguished it.
“In fairytales, there is no social context, back story, even proper names, or psychological motivation, only what happens to characters, or just simply what they make happen. Nor is there a close description of the natural world or individual.”
Phillip Pullman
True to our vow, my sister and I never broke silence until well after our mother’s death in l995. By then our father had been dead for fifteen years. After that point, emboldened by her absence, and my own curiosity about family history, I gathered more information. When I pressed my Aunt Molly, my mother’s sister, for more details, she was surprised that I even knew about my grandmother’s accusation. Who had told me, she asked indignantly, as if I had betrayed my mother by divulging her secret. My father, I said, an answer which apparently satisfied her. In turn she surprised me, with a different more complicating narrative, telling me that my grandfather had not died at the scene of the accident at all. In fact, he had been taken to the hospital where she and Dora were visiting him. Just eighteen years old, in teacher’s college, Molly was learning children’s songs for her intended position as a schoolteacher. During that visit, to cheer him up, she sang one of the song’s refrains, probably Thanksgiving themed, that went “gobble, gobble, gobble.” To her delight, he was joining in the singing, with his rich baritone, enjoying himself. Yet when the doctors advised amputation for his compound fractured and gangrenous leg, he refused until it was too late.
What could he have been thinking? Did he not understand the implications? In such terrible pain and confusion, too afraid of the operation than of death itself? Jacob was a dashing man, the youngest of eleven siblings, who had emigrated to the States. A flopped businessman, he became a cantor by default, parlaying his beautiful voice into an august livelihood, allegedly the third of his generation to do so, and the third of his brothers to pursue the pulpit. In the late twenties, one could buy a prosthetic leg made from wood through mail-order catalogues. I scan those published in 1929 to see the kinds offered. In one of them, a picture of a fully jointed leg, looks much like a primitive cyborg, or a puppet limb, if not the Ahab peg-leg style, sold for $15. The upscale ones were pricier, $30-40, a fortune then, allowing a fuller range of movement and accommodating sitting. Cold comfort. Was the thought of living with such a disability so great that Jacob chose to die rather than live, to abandon his wife and five children? Was it shame? Vanity? Despair? I never asked Molly; I doubt that she would have answered truthfully. Ironically, late in her life, when she was in her 80s, with a heart condition, she developed an infection in her leg and at the urging of her family, amputated it.
After my cousin, Judy, Molly’s daughter died, her surviving husband sent me a packet of memorabilia, in which a reporter in an undated newspaper clipping clarifies many details of the accident:
“The automobile, which brought his [Jacob’s] death, was driven by Jacob Sigletary, colored, [sic]of 216 Broome Street. The Rev. Silverman was crossing the street, accompanied by his daughter, Hilda, when the accident occurred. The girl escaped with minor injuries. Sigletary, being held by police on charge of manslaughter, will be arraigned in Fourth Precinct Court today, then turned over to the prosecutor’s office.” This account contradicts the family story that Jacob also pushed Dora aside. In the article she’s never mentioned. Perhaps she was waiting on the other side of the street, as a horrified witness to the accident. Still, one part of the story rings true. As my father told us, the driver was prosecuted and my mother required by law to testify against him in court.
Using Google map, with the addresses and locations provided by the article, I trace their path starting from their residence on Avon Avenue, as they crossed 18th Avenue at Bergen Street, the intersection where the car hit my grandfather. On the corner today is the Nat Turner Park, a green space developed in the 70s, presumably after the Newark riots. I could go there and stand on the very spot where the accident happened.
What sort of coat would a young girl have wanted for New Jersey winters? The style in 1928 was most likely collegiate cut coat with a fur collar. Straight, double breasted, closed with two rows of six large buttons down the center, plaid or wrap over, thin with narrow arms, slightly tapered hem, made of wool, vicuna, velveteen plush, tweed or wool velour, coming in such colors as brown, tan, rust cranberry, grey, black, green, rose or blue, or patterned like window panes, in plaid, check, Art Deco chevrons. Linings were made from crepe or satin de chine, brocade or other silks. I suspect my mother would have picked a tan or grey-colored coat, tasteful, stylish. But she might have gone for something flashier, more youthful. Who knows? I forget that she was only 12.
But she must have gotten a coat at some point.
I never knew my grandmother Dora. She was dead in 1937, long before I was born in 1951. To collage some notion of her personality, I gather images and anecdotes from a few, but rich, documented sources, especially a letter I referenced earlier from my Aunt Molly to my aunt Esther, forwarded to me recently by her granddaughter, my cousin Mindy. The typed letter, from which a page is missing, is less a newsy correspondence than an extended reminiscence, a fond recounting of family history that covers large swaths of time. Born in 1916, my mother was the fourth of five children, first-generation Americans, whose parents were part of the big wave of immigrant Russian Jews who settled in New York and New Jersey in the early 1900s. The children, in birth order, were Esther, Molly, Morris, Hilda and Paul. According to Molly’s rosy account, during the 1920s, everyone pitched in to help Dora, along with a weekly cleaning woman, with the running of the household, cooking, cleaning, and babysitting, sharing domestic tasks. In the letter, Molly asks Esther if she remembers “that little alcove, where mama, D’vorale, had her sewing machine, and Yankele taught me to sight read?” Dora’s chief domestic task seems to have been sewing, her maiden name, Portnoy, meaning tailor in Russian, perhaps indicating an inherited generational skill. Twice a year, for the High Holidays, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, she made the boys suits, and the girls, slips, panties, and dresses that she smocked and embroidered. Though lost, the family hired a professional photographer to take a picture of the five children dressed in her outfits. While Molly can describe each of her sibling’s clothes, she can’t recall Hilda’s.
In the letter, Molly recalls her parents’ happy marriage. She writes that on the way home from an evening wedding where he would officiate, Jacob often stopped at the deli on Prince Street to buy some snacks for himself and Dora, who was waiting up for him. He’d transport in the pockets of his black Chesterfield coat some Muenster cheese wrapped in newspaper, pumpernickel, sturgeon, and olives. When he got home, he’d pull them out and place them on the table where together they’d eat, talk, go over the day’s events. After his death, “the greatest tragedy of their lives,” she writes that Dora “took a very long time, years, to find some peace and reason to live.” Her children suffered both from the financial and emotional impact of his death and her destructive grief. Hilda’s education was cut off at seventh grade, as she was forced to go to work. Esther, married to Mike, took Paul and my mother into her home. I’m not sure where Dora landed. Worried about money, she persuaded Molly to marry a man with means whom she didn’t love and later scandalously divorced. Esther provides the closest resemblance to Dora. Imperious. Haughty. Icy. Intimidating. Caustic. On several occasions, when I was growing up, Esther would harp about the sacrifices that she had made taking in her family members. One time, during the winter, when she was visiting our family, she started in again, berating my mother, guilting her about the sacrifice that she had made for her. By that time, my father had had enough. Without a word, he picked her up in his arms from the chair where she was sitting, carried her outside the house and along with her coat and hat, dumped her in the snow on our front lawn, with the ultimatum: “Until you stop reminding Hilda of this, you are not welcome in our house.”
In fairytales, “the characters’ motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good, and if bad, they’re bad.” Phillip Pullman
In pictures of Dora, she is never smiling. Her face is broad planed, her lips thin, her forehead high. She looks like the full moon, woeful, remote. I think of Sylvia Plath’s lines in her great poem, “Edge.” “The moon has nothing to be sad about/staring from her hood of bone/ She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.”
“Fairytales, paradoxically, represent the profound effects of cruelty and trauma, without reflecting upon them.” Philip Pullman writes, “There is no psychology in a fairy tale, little interior life. There are no whispers of memory, regret or doubt or desire.” Not to mention, therapists.
In fact, my mother never told stories about her life at all. She seemed to have no past. She never reminisced. One would think that having a cantor for a father would make her observant or at least knowledgeable about Judaic ritual. But we never celebrated unless invited elsewhere. The Jewish holidays were nominally noticed, and in a reversal of the Jewish custom, we went to Chinese or Italian restaurants on Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and Passover. Of course, the absence of her religious observance was not only personal but also cultural, typical of first-generation immigrants who wanting to assimilate, quickly shed the superstitious vestiges of the Old Country to become modern and American. I do recall, though, that in a rare admission, she said that this time of year in the Jewish calendar made her feel ‘blue.’ Yet she did complain about her relational grievances, with neighbors and family members, whatever the issue. If she felt anything overtly, it was often anxiety, about operational things like her ability to toss coins accurately into the basket for the Garden State Parkway tollbooths or remember to turn off the oven. She’d often question her own assertions, saying to my father, “Am I right, Alvin?” Sometimes she frightened me, when she would enter into a kind of fugue-like state sitting at our grey Formica kitchen table at breakfast, blue eyes staring into space, her instant coffee growing cold in a ceramic mug, her cigarette billowing smoke, notched in the ashtray, and her daily bran muffin sitting untouched on the plate like a clenched fist. I would wait until the brief trance was over, and she’d blink back into animated living. We never talked about these strange exits.
When I was in college, in the early seventies, I zealously adopted the dress, the expressions, the espoused positions, and the philosophy of the counter-cultural movement. She was appalled. She’d admonish me that sooner or later, I would have to conform. Everything I did physically and socially met with her overt disapproval and smoldering anger: my hippie clothes; my body hair, under my arms and on my legs; my hair style, too long, too short; my presumed lost virginity; cohabitation with my boyfriend; my lesbian and ‘unusual’ friends. Had she only known the extent of it! I am sure I wasn’t alone in my rebellion’s effect on my parents, and their outraged and anguished response. In retrospect, with grown children of my own, I can understand their concern. During my college years at Rutgers, one winter I flew in from New Jersey, to Florida, where they lived in an adult retirement community, to attend my cousin’s bar mitzvah in Miami. I got off the plane with my hair hacked off, wearing a long men’s wool overcoat, several sizes too big, with padded shoulders. I had snagged it at Goodwill—it was too big to shoplift) — and on my feet, my boyfriend’s combat boots. (They fit. He was small.) The temperature was in the high 90s. My mother and father waited for me at the end of the concourse. As I strode towards them, she took one look at me, covered her eyes, and began to hiccup and cough convulsively. When I reached the two of them, she reared back in revulsion, refusing to hug me. I realized that she was sobbing, her face contorted, one of the few times I saw her cry.
“Monster is a PROCESS without a stable object. Difference will not just go away and because this embodiment of differences moves, flows, changes; because it propels discourses without ever settling into them; because it evades us in the very process of puzzling us, it will never be known what the next monster is going to look like nor will it be possible to guess where it will come from.” Rosa Braidotti
It could be a wedding, a bar mitzvah, or a golden anniversary, in any event, ever a splashy and lavish affair among nouveau-riche Jews. At the tables, huge centerpieces of flowers tower over the guests, who have just consumed the main course, a choice of salmon or roast beef au jus. Waitstaff whisk away plates and reset for dessert. But something’s up, something’s wrong. Guests exchange curious glances, raise eyebrows, whisper among themselves, tittering. All alone, Hilda stands in the middle of the dance floor in a floor-length coat. It is black wool, dense as a bear’s fur, hulking as Shrek’s. The kind of coat flashers or exhibitionists might wear, a shoplifter stashing steaks in its huge pockets, or a stormtrooper herding the Jews into cattle cars. Murmurings. A low rumbling. Can that be Hilda? It’s so unlike her to make a scene. I mean, that’s her husband Alvin’s thing. What’s with that preposterous coat? It engulfs her. Like a giant turtleneck, a chimney of cloth, a baby whale. Maybe the start of some sort of performance art? A surprise planned by our host. That sort of thing where a show girl bursts out from a wedding cake. The humming undercurrent of speculation grows sharp, serrates the air. Give her the hook? Mild Hilda, for once, does not care about appearances. She barely registers the consternation of the guests. A tense silence stretches like taffy. Thankfully, someone cues the live band, to assemble to play something, and it is, it must be, the hora, perfect call, the A#1, dingdong folkdance, guaranteed to stir the tribe, to provoke the Jewish Pavlovian response of jubilation and patriotic fervor. The music starts. Havi Nagila! Havi Nagila! And presto, everyone launches from their chairs to form a circle around Hilda. As if under a spell, she is motionless, bewitched, held captive inside the coat. Save for the top of her head, the cloth jails her without bars, holds her down with its ponderous weight, its fabric chafing, impressing itself against her skin, down her length and breadth. As she tries to escape from inside, its long sleeves knot like a straitjacket, its buttons close and lock shut, absolute as a bank safe. In response to the music, the coat begins to dance, or rather to dance Hilda, coercing her body to serve as its center pole, a structure for it to twirl her and itself faster, like a top, a carousel that won’t stop turning, a centrifuge. The musicians play, while the dancers in the circle, linking hands and arms, kick and step forward and back in the center and out. They look on in wonder and fear. In the coat’s clutches, unbeknownst to them, Hilda is strangely serene, even relieved. Finally the dybbuk has manifested itself. Here, at long last, is her adversary, the insidious coat revealed. Evidence at hand! She was not crazy.
As if summoned by the coat’s force, the women guests, those who wear Gucci and Chanel, shop only at Bendel’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, bedecked with jewelry, diamonds, sapphires, pearls, and gold, those with facelifts done by Park Avenue surgeons when they lived in Manhattan, those who live in wealthy suburbs of Boca Raton, Bal Harbor, Palm Beach (not West), those whose husbands are doctors or lawyers or wealthy businessmen, those who wouldn’t know the difference between a bobbin and a treadle, surge forward, propelled by some collective atavism, to rescue Hilda, free her from her bizarre enthrallment. They surround her spinning figure like well-dressed EMTs, or cheerleaders around a fallen player. Glamorous Elaine, who refuses to confess her lifelong anorexia. Matronly Mary, whose father took liberties in her bedroom that she would never reveal. Miriam, who was called a meiskite, a Yiddish word for ugly, by her father, the reason behind her multiple ‘plastics.’ Even the ruthless Pearl, deemed too short and dumpy to dance for Balanchine, pitches in for the team. But it involves risks they hadn’t anticipated. Perhaps if they knew what would happen? Too late, ladies! the transformation has already begun: their make-up, like masks, peel off their faces; their coifs flatten, sag, wither; their gowns unzip, unbutton, slide off. They are left only in their bras and panties. Not for long, though. As if their DNA were reminiscing, going back in time, to fondly look at old pictures of ancestral combinatory chemistries, the women are thrust back into earlier genetic incarnations. And what an atavistic sight for sore eyes! Here, they are in full Ashkenazi glory! the bubbies with mustaches and hair sprouting on their chins, babushkas tied around their heads, breasts pendulously resting upon their waists, in dour woolen sack-like dresses, seamed stockings rolled down like bagels around their thick ankles. In a show of solidarity for their kinswoman, they incant in a guttural Yiddish, a language they never knew they could speak, and with a facility for magic they never knew they possessed, proceed to lay a curse on the sinister coat. Exorcism! the keyn ahera, the evil eye of the coat. They spit. Once. Twice. Thrice. On the scuffed dance floor. Out of their mouths, they hiss,“Peh, peh.” They chorus, “Go, scat, be gone, get the hell out of here and out, out, out of her, good riddance, far and away, away from the dyers, the shears, the spinning wheels, the needles, the threads, the tailors and seamstresses, return to your source, where you belong: the body of the animal that is your true home, the shaved skin shivering with goose pimples needing warmth, its beating heart longing for you! Grow back to your origins: the white wool on the sheep’s back, the hairs lining the camel’s hump, the winding silk in the worm’s pupae. Be still. Be gone. And never, ever, come back to wear her down.”
Attacked by their magical speech, the parts of the demonic coat begin to disassemble, as if by invisible knives carving an animal. At the seams, hunks of fabric, the front and back, unstitch and cut loose. The cylinders of sleeves hang limp in mid-air, their function lost. Each detail of the coat follows suit: the collar, the vents, the gussets, the shoulder pads, the cuffs, the lining. The woven content of the fabric begins to unravel, each patch surrendering to its own undoing, its de-creation, unweaving itself, horizontal woof strands pulling themselves out from the under-over network of warp threads. Not for long, they in turn remove themselves from the loom’s grid, one vertical thread after the other. Until what is left of the coat is a massive mound of tangled thread that covers the dance floor, rises high as the ceiling. Hilda climbs out, and stands freed on the floor, stunning in her black taffeta maxi skirt and her iridescent sequined top. The violinist steps forward to perform solo a plaintive folksong, the perfect accompaniment. A Prospero with a wand, a snake charmer, Hilda, who could never knit or sew to save her life, commands the thread to do her bidding only with her hands. In an amazing demonstration of dexterity and patience, she untangles the huge clump of knotted loops and interwoven strands to isolate, like a needle in a haystack, the single leading thread to supervise its uncoiling. It begins by wrapping around the legs of the tables and chairs, the cups and saucers and pitchers and napkin rings and sugar cubes, the forks and spoons and knives, the plates, the goblets, the flower arrangements, the crystal chandeliers. Next up, the thread circles around the guests, every thumb on every hand, the band members with their instruments, trumpet and sax, piano and violin, the waitstaff, the cooks and the cleaners, webbing all the humans within the room. The strand continues its work, unwinding itself out the building, through the open front doors, over and under the cars in the parking lot, around the trunks of the palm trees, reaching to the tops of the church spires and the skyscrapers of downtown Miami, catching on the points of stars connecting earth with the sky. A magnificent entanglement. This single thread with its unbreakable tensile strength, its capacious and lengthy reach, envelops the whole city and skyscape in its inspired web.
Fairy tales end with an ethical triumph, the wrong doers are punished. Rarely, though, do the wicked ask for forgiveness. To my knowledge, no stepmother is penitent in Western fairytales. Although I have tried to imagine restitution for my mother, I cannot include Dora, entwine her in this triumphant and unitive thread. I just can’t. In this respect, I suppose I reinforce the fairytale characterizations of a wickedness unredeemed. Begging for forgiveness at her daughter’s knees and placing her into any scenario of reconciliation seems forced. I must carry in me my mother’s past rage, still wanting to defend and to protect her. In photos of Dora, her face is like the seemingly placid surface of a lake but with sharp rocks underneath, in the depths a lurking monster. Endless and desolate as a prairie, more landscape than face, her features are vacant. She was not evil. But that doesn’t mean I can forgive her.
I know nothing about the relationship between them, Dora and Hilda. I can only extrapolate backward in time, by analyzing family anecdotes, mapping resemblances, making speculative connections. At the time of the accident, Molly was 18, and Esther, a few years older, already married. My mother never fit the role of the ‘balabusta.’ (uncomfortably close to ball buster), a Yiddish word to denote a skilled and competent homemaker who cooks, bakes, cleans, hosts, and runs a household like a domestic five-star general. As the youngest girl, I doubt she was taught to do much of that. As adults, my sister and I would joke about her abysmal cooking skills. We ate out a lot. Bookended by two brothers, Moe and Paul, she was closer to them than her sisters, and a kind of tomboy. The younger three siblings were athletic and my mother, only five feet tall, had been a tumbler and gymnast. When I was in high school, she demonstrated a cartwheel for me in our living room and slipped a disc that sent her to the hospital for an emergency laminectomy. She had been spunky. At age three, she ran out of the house naked and wound up down the street at the fire station where they gave her chocolate ice cream, which Molly noted, covered her ‘from head to toe,’ when her father came to fetch her. When I was older, she could be fun, if fleetingly and never interactively. Though reserved by comparison to my flamboyant father, for a few precious moments at bar mitzvahs or weddings, she would do her version of the catwalk. She’d cross her legs over, thrust her hips from side to side, and walk with mincing steps. Delighted by these rare demonstrations, we’d beg her to continue but soon she’d retire to sit down off the dance floor. The dancing wasn’t seductive, nor was she. She got along with men in the same way that she got along with her brothers, the gas station guy, the milkman, the Good Humor driver. Lively. Friendly. Curious. With the onset of Graves’ disease, punishing her with its common side-effect, bulging eyes, she took to wearing sunglasses whenever she went out. It was a huge blow to her ego. She was said to be the most beautiful of the three Silverman sisters, and I believe it. In a studio photo at seventeen, she’s a babe, with full sensuous lips, long, lustrous chestnut hair, and big blue eyes. Perhaps Dora was jealous of her. Could she have been Jacob’s favorite? A daddy’s girl? Hilda was not wanted by her mother, according to my outspoken Aunt Esther, who attributed my mother’s bad gums—her teeth were all extracted, and she wore dentures in her late forties– to Dora’s attempts to unsuccessfully abort her.
The very last time I saw my mother, she was in a skilled nursing facility, after yet another episode, one of many, of congestive heart failure. She was dying. It was October 1995, and by that time I was almost in my mid-40s, married with two kids. My mother never liked being questioned about her feelings or challenged for her judgements: “You and your sister delve and analyze too much,” she’d complain, dismissing or countering our observations, then walking away from any substantive discussion. Seeing that she didn’t have much time left to live, I thought here was my last chance to ask her about the accident, to coax out her story. As I sat reading in a chair by her bedside, I mustered my courage, with an oblique but leading question: “So, tell me, Mom, what was your mother like?” There was a long pause. To which she said wearily, “She sewed our clothes.” “Do you remember any one outfit in particular?” “One dress with piping.” Another long silence, and a sigh. “She was a typical mother.” Nearly inert in the hospital bed, she was exhausted by her illness, Did I realize that this was no time for what she would call the third degree? Her death-bed confession? Good grief! Maybe, just one more question? Could I approach the accident head-on, none of this pussyfooting? But then, mercifully, just at that moment, a nurse entered the room, and we were marched back into nursing home routines, time to take her vitals, her afternoon medications. I had an airplane to catch. One month later, she died of heart failure in an ambulance on her way to the hospital.
I would never know how it had happened for her.
It is perhaps no accident that I am married to a man whose father, sharing the same birthday as my mother in early August, carried burdensome family stories. Like myself, my husband knew only fragments of his father’s past, which his mother had told him in confidence. After my husband innocently asked his father, a former Marine colonel, about his childhood in the South, he ran out of the room. My husband’s mother warned him never to bring it up again.
Though I wasn’t aware of its etiology at the time, I maintain that through nurture, I developed a kind of compensatory superpower, the ability to extract ever so gently the secrets of others. As a professional interviewer, a feature writer for various publications, I had an uncanny ability to serve as a confessor when my subjects would veer off topic to blurt out some unfortunate or shameful detail from their personal life. With a promise of keeping it all off the record, in my jobs as a publicist for an art museum and for a college, I’d hear from docents and alumni and faculty whom I profiled, prime, state-of-the-art gossip: stints at rehab for alcoholism, illicit love affairs, white collar crime, intractable or recurrent mental illness, addiction, acrimonious divorces, sexually abusive professors. Why is it that people tell you everything? my friends and colleagues would ask. “You’re like everybody’s therapist.” Unlike a gossip columnist exploiting my subjects’ stories for commercial gain, or nowadays social media, I had other unconscious motivations. To some extent, I was like a vampire of empathy, feeding on others’ vulnerabilities in lieu of my own, to give me a false sense of my own superior mental stability, and to delude me into rating myself as sane and whole. If I wasn’t the smartest of my set, then I could be the nicest. Everyone else was fucked up. I could quietly gloat about my own psychological sturdiness, serve as a secular priest for their confessions. My gift of acute listening and gentle questioning originated partially from my social conditioning as a woman, but also because of my mother’s intractable reticence. Every heart-rending story from others was at bottom my unrealized hope and quest to hear HER story, in her own words. All told, I would be the chosen one, her intimate, the only other keeper, besides my father, of her secret.
Molly describes Jacob as elegantly dressed in his Chesterfield coat, which, I learn, is a formal dark knee-length coat with a velvet collar introduced around the 1840s in the UK by Lord Chesterfield. In costume history, the Chesterfield was the very first overcoat, one to be worn over a suit. Made from heavy wool, it features straight-side pockets (those with horizontal openings that run parallel to ground), fly-front closure (concealing the buttons), and ‘suppressed’ waist seams or front darts to allow the coat to fall loosely over a garment. Jacob also sported a homburg, a more formal and structured hat than its close cousin the fedora. It features a curled brim, a single dent or crease down the center of its tall crown and is usually made from fur felt, such as beaver or rabbit. He was a dapper man.
A little girl, I’d cozy up to my mother in the recreation room on the long Danish modern couch while we watched television, as she lay on her side, my head perched upon her butt, snaked behind her. She stroked my face, cooed Yiddish endearments, called me a shaina maidel.
Patting the blanket, she invites me to come lie down with her, side by side, on the hospital bed. Like two equals. She turns to me and says, “I’ve never told anyone this except your father, but I will tell you.” At these words, the silhouette of a man suddenly appears at the door. It is her father! He draws from his deep pockets a small expandable loom, a shuttle, a hook. Rays of silvery blue from the moon, and of pale yellow, Cosmic Latte, from the stars, thread their way, gleaming, like harp strings, through the hospital window, illuminating the room. Working in concert on the loom, strands of moonlight and sunlight alternately weave the vertical warp, and then shuttle under and over, back and forth, to create the weft. Together they weave a prismatic fabric, humming, shimmering with the spectrum. Then shadowy hands remove the material from the loom, cut the pieces and stitch them together, to create a coat, really now, the coat, the coat that she had always wanted. Jacob holds it aloft and beckons for Hilda to rise from her bed. In her johnny, she stands up, faces towards him, like a little girl, as he helps her into the coat, dressing her, thrusting one arm into a sleeve, then the other, settling on her shoulders, warming her with its bands of joined colors. One by one, he closes each button, mother-of-pearl, slipping each into its corresponding hole. Here it is! the unrequited coat, the Edenic coat before Adam and Eve knew they were naked and told they were bad, the new constellation, a coat of stars, rotating in the sky on a circular rack around the earth. Hilda notices with joy something different about Jacob. His leg is intact. He stands tall. He reaches for her hand. Though she is old and purpled by heart disease and could be his mother, together they leave her room, walk down the hospital hallway, take the stairs, then out the double doors onto the street. This time, at the cross-section, they look for oncoming cars. Assured of their passage, they step into the road, to the opposite side, where a sumptuous cloud appears in the shape of a taxi, broad and roomy as a cumulous Checker. The puffy door opens, and they climb in. Sprouting wings the taxi ascends quickly into the sky, vanishing into the night. I am still there in her hospital room. Alone. But when I look at her empty bed, the covers rumpled, I see that resting against the pillow is a journal with my name on it. It is covered with the same fabric as the coat, and as I turn its pages, I realize that the entire story is written down for me to read and never have to write.
For a long time I assumed, privileged enough to access therapy and medication for mental health problems, that had my mother availed herself of these treatments, she would’ve led a healthier, happier life. But lately I’m not so sure. Trauma, as research studies have shown, is not necessarily mitigated by talk therapy. Indeed, sharing the minute details, revisiting one’s devastating experience can further exacerbate it. Steering clear of a treacherous emotional past may be preferable to avoid re-exposure. These days trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapies such as TF-CBT, and EMDR, and lately, somatic therapies involving psychedelic drugs are being implemented with some success. None of them are guaranteed.
Recently I saw an oil painting featured in an exhibition Mary Cassatt at Work, at the Legion of Honor Museum, in San Francisco, titled “Maternal Caress.” It portrays Cassatt’s usual subject matter, a mother or caregiver holding a small child in an affectionate embrace. The wall label read: “The viewer is positioned behind the mother’s shoulder. In this way, we see the mother’s head, in abbreviated profile, facing the child. A toddler with strawberry blonde hair, leans back with her hand splayed, her fingers pressing into the mother’s cheek. The look on the child’s cherubic face seems inquisitive, tender, full of wonder, adoring.”
As I gazed at the painting, swept up by the maternal sentiment in her work, something snagged. Hang on. Examining the image more closely I noticed an overlooked detail. The mother’s hand and forearm grasp the child’s pudgy arm not in a gesture of affection, but as a means of restraint. Unexpectedly, a memory bubbled up of my own small children, my son and daughter, who would roughly grab my face in their little hands in a proprietary manner, as if they had the right to explore me as their territory, holding me vice-like within their grasp. They would pinch my chin, thrust fingers into my mouth, or pull at my lips. Tender they were not. Their seemingly loving caresses masked a not-so subtle aggression. Reflexively I’d push them away, angered by their trespass.
Was I guilty of such a violation of my own mother, the adult version, even if I did not entirely act upon it? To fathom my mother’s secret, it was not as if I was a miner with a glaring headlight, blasting into the dark rock of her psyche to extract its valuable ores. Still, my golden ear was an unused gouge. Did I really want to liberate her from her imprisoning trauma or just be the one to crack open the combination to the safe? It would give me a power, knowing something about my mother that she herself did not know I knew. Then, too, my mother’s past was intriguing. It gave me some trauma capital among my friends, writers or not, like the crazy “Queen for a Day” show, when we traded stories about our families, competing for the most dysfunctional. Her story was rich subject matter. Janet Malcolm said it well: “Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.” But I did draw a line. While she was alive, even if I had more information, I was not that brave or ruthless to write about the accident. It would have been a betrayal and a mortification. With her death, the coast was clear.
The word “blame” derives from the word “blaspheme”—to speak ill of God. Blame, then, can carry the same punch as blasphemy. Is that how it felt to Hilda? It was not as if she was comparable to Satan for his disobedience or to Eve for eating the apple. A coat was not forbidden fruit. And yet, my mother was blamed for a desire, though it was purely subjunctive. A simple wish for a new winter coat. But in her mother’s twisted grief, this desire for a coat—it could’ve been anything, really, was tantamount to a knife, a gun, and her daughter, a murderer. Dora did not blame the real culprit, a careless man driving with his lights off, in a model T, seriously wounding a man’s leg. Remember, the injury was not fatal, though in those days, the risk of infection after the amputation quite high. Perhaps it was easier to cast herself as the victim of her daughter’s wish rather than the wife of a husband who left her and the children?
Why do we blame? The answer is so psychologically simple as to be useless. By the operation of a kneejerk defensive psychological mechanism, blame keeps one from being vulnerable, protects one’s ego, projecting the unwanted feelings onto a perpetrator. Surely my grandmother was psychologically fragile, perhaps unstable or delicate even before the loss of her husband. I recall hearing a story that she was the only one of her family, a mere sixteen, to follow Jacob to America from Russia. The poet Wieslawa Szymborska writes that “Hans Christian Anderson didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays…but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.”
Relatives, former neighbors, old friends from grammar school now, tell me how much they loved my mother. On Facebook a cousin of mine recently posted a picture of my mother whom she described, as ‘sweet, kind, and tolerant.’ Indeed. My mother took in her sister-in-law, Delores, for a long weekend, who had packed up and left my mother’s philandering brother Paul when she found out about his numerous affairs. She advised her nephew’s wife Iris on make-up, clothes and deodorant so she’d be presentable to her judgmental mother-in-law, my mother’s sister Esther. She greeted everyone calling on the phone with endearments, such as ‘cookie,’ and ‘honey.’ My father would say “Your mother is too good, and she gets kicked in the teeth for it.”
At home, however, she had plenty of anger, not always suppressed, and expressed in outbursts in unexpected situations. At my father’s funeral, when the casket swayed as the pallbearers lowered it in the grave, she turned to me and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if that son of a bitch father of yours is faking this.” On a family visit to see her new granddaughter, my daughter Alexandra, she cursed me and my sister: “I only hope that your children and your sister’s children will do to you what you did to me.” Fresh from the recovery room after a triple bypass, as I followed the orderly taking her to her hospital room on a gurney, she looked up at me, my hair still wet from washing, and said, “You look like a drowned rat.”
According to one of the precepts of monster theory, the classic monster is a liminal character, an alien or other kind of being, half human, half bestial.
Grief transformed Dora, made her monstrous. The real monster was not the coat. It was Dora.
I think of Picasso’s famous portrait of his own Dora, his lover and muse, the artist Dora Maar, in his unforgettable masterpiece “Weeping Woman.” Her angular face is made up of broken geometric shapes, slashed and fractured by thick, bold, black lines. Within those agitated outlines are geometric blocks of color, deathly skeletal white, sickly green, and as one critic noted, the effect like stained or shattered glass. Worse are the big and wild and white animal teeth, gnashing, blurring into a hand that wrings a handkerchief. Grief explodes the face with volcanic force, deranges the features, blasts the usual symmetry, so the eyes are knocked off balance, the nose tilted, the mouth askew. The black holes of the eyes vacuum into themselves, X-ed out, voided. Nothing polite, demure and Victorian about this image of mourning. She is close to caricature. It’s as if only graphic art can convey the acute brutality of her grief and elemental anguish. In this painting, Picasso’s Cubism is not a style but a reality.
My mother, if she did not decide consciously, was able through indomitable psychic strength and tremendous powers of repression, to keep that monstrous mother from ruining her life. Hilda refused to be a victim. She was neither a materialist nor a social climber. She never pushed or demeaned my father, who considered himself a failure, to make more money as a used car salesman. She did not seem envious of others. She did not want much. She was not a big shopper. She did not numb her emotional pain with alcohol or drugs. She endured my father’s many illnesses. She asked for help only when truly needed. She did not want to be a burden on us. For all her various disappointments in me, she never shut me out. When I was suffering from a postpartum depression, she admitted to one herself. She raised me to be a good person, to care for others, and for her as she grew old and sick.
Perhaps, as a writer with a penchant for drama, experimentation, and mystery, I have made far too much of its effect on her, exaggerating its consequences, when in truth, she had long moved past it. I will never know. During her life, she chose to stand out in the cold without a coat. A stoic. Only now do I respect her refusal to speak what for her was unspeakable if she could or would not. Thirty years after her death, she is still out there. I no longer ask her to come back in.
_________
Deborah Gorlin is the author of three books of poems, BODILY COURSE, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997; LIFE OF THE GARMENT, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize; and OPEN FIRE, Bauhan, 2023. Her work has appeared in a wide range of journals including Poetry; American Poetry Review; Bomb, Best Spiritual Writing 2000, Plume; On the Seawall; the Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades,” was published as a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing. Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.