Denial (29 page)

In fact, I never really thought about this. Three out of four of
the teenagers in our household—my stepbrother James, my sister Sara, and I—always went on these trips. But my father would bring any of the neighborhood boys who wanted to come. In my father's view, mountain climbing builds character, and he wanted to offer this gift to as many kids as he could, as many as he could fit in the car.

After my father retired, he joined a National Science Foundation–sponsored program to bring scientists into the public schools. He started volunteering in a public school in Lowell, teaching physics to the mostly Cambodian kids who live there now. Physics is what pulled him out of the German-Jewish ghetto. Physics is what rescued him from a life of being a victim. Perhaps it would work for these Cambodian kids, too. He spends a lot of time devising new ways to show the children how gravity works, conservation of momentum, the impact of friction. He jumps up on tables, sets balls in motion. He tries to repeat Newton's and Archimedes' and Galileo's experiments. “They are simple and accessible. And they don't require fancy equipment, which we can't afford,” he told me.

My father once explained to me that for an observant Jew, anonymous philanthropy is considered a greater mitzvah. The recipient might be humiliated to encounter his donor, so the relationship should be anonymous, and at arm's length. And if your good works are motivated in part by your desire to be recognized by the community, they count less in God's eyes. No one in Lowell knows my father; his name doesn't end up on a program or in a yearly Christmas letter. His work in Lowell comes very close to pure altruism. Pure altruism, for me, would have to involve no pleasure for the donor, not even the pleasure of pleasing God, and certainly not with the hope of receiving rewards after death. I am pleased to say that my father gets a thrill from demonstrating Newton's laws with books and balls.

Volunteering, I always thought, is what ladies who lunch do
to fill up their time, something I think of as “girlie.” It is better, and more rational, if you care for the poor, to spend your time working for money, as more often than not, a check does more. But recently, I have found myself volunteering in my son's first-grade classroom. It occurs to me that my father's work in the Lowell public schools has made volunteering seem more manly, and therefore more acceptable.

“I stuck to the transcript of our conversation,” I remind my father, “and those other trips didn't come up.” But then I ask his permission to take my turn, to explain how I plan to put my interview of him into a broader context.

“Okay,” he says. He puts his slip of paper down on the table. He sees me eyeing it. “I'm not going to give it to you,” he says, teasing me for my curiosity, but also slapping the hand that would touch the fire.

I pick up my list. As it happens, my list begins with our mountain trips. The first item is:

• 1. Positive aspects of climbing with my amazing dad.
  

I read this sentence out loud, but skip the childish word
amazing
. I'm already feeling like an admonished child, a child who is having an absurdly hard time growing up. But also I feel shy. I can say nice things about my dad behind his back, but it is not our style—neither his nor mine—to say anything complementary to the other's face. It might sound like flattery. It might be construed as manipulative.

Here is what I did not say, and could not say, to my father in that moment. Those mountain-climbing trips saved me from despair. They changed my life, made it possible for the best in me to emerge. Yes, climbing taught me discipline. But more important, it opened me up to a capacity for bliss.

Even now I can rest in the memory of allowing my whole
body to sink into a bed of moss by a mountain stream. It's been years since I laid myself down into a bed of moss, but the very thought of that soft bed and the moist, peaty scent brings back a feeling of rapture. If you looked closely, you would see that the ground covers—the hair-cap and peat mosses; the club mosses and horsetails—comprised a forest in miniature, mimicking the taller trees above. It was as if God wanted to create a separate forest especially for children.

In those pre-giardia days, you could drink from the streams. There was a slightly metallic taste to the streams in the spring, the scent of melting ice and snow. I remember, too, the sour thrill of wood sorrel on my tongue. I liked to chew it as we climbed, like gum.

In the spring, all was mud at the bottom of the mountain. As we started our ascent, a thick deciduous sludge clogged the trail as well as one's mind. The blackflies formed thick clouds of itch. But all that black and gray and itch made the burst of color when you came upon spring's first wildflowers even more astonishing. I can still bring into my body the joy I felt at seeing the first trillium of spring, which seemed to be telling me, “Never give up hope, spring will come.” My breath would catch at the sight of violets—so common in the woods at home, so surprising in the mountains. The violet's message to me was “Keep up your courage, stay true to what you believe in.” There were bunch-berry flowers in tight white clusters, feathery white sarsaparilla flowers, false and hairy Solomon's seal. I took a special delight in knowing the names of these flowers, having taken a nature appreciation course, odd and troubled child that I was. There were the sturdy, reliable flowers—marsh marigolds and starflowers and wood anemone. And the more delicate ones. If you were lucky, you might stumble into a perfect circle of lady's slippers, obviously left by fairies. The incongruously intricate bells of the wild columbine were the biggest surprise of all—the outer petals
red, with upward projecting spurs; the inner petals a pale yellow; the delicate filaments and anthers a brighter, bolder, joyful yellow. Why would God place such an elegant flower in the deep woods? Other flowers came at the end of the summer, but by then the winter sadness had already dissipated, and the effect of the blooms was not the same.

As we climbed higher, the flowers became fewer. But there was the comforting, slightly tannic scent of warm, dry pine needles, which bit the nostril the way tea tastes on your tongue, making you feel excited and clean. The aroma of balsam shoots when you came to a shady ridge brought on a feeling of euphoria, even among those depressed by the prison of their own disruptive intransigence. In the background of all these scents was the odor of my father's mountain sweat, the mingled scents of joy, hard work, and Woodsman insect repellent. You could rest your soul in that smell. To me, it was the scent of safety.

Best of all was the thrill of “getting your mountain legs.” That was when your muscles ceased to ache, when your body felt light and free, and you could run up and down the trail without seeing what lay ahead. This was bliss, knowing that your body—so unreliable in other circumstances—would react automatically and appropriately to a boulder or a fallen tree or a sudden turn in the path.

By the time we rose above the tree line, we would all be feeling drunk on the mountain air. The unencumbered breeze blew away my winter angst, making me feel hollow, even transparent, opening a space for ecstasy. During our descent, when our legs were beginning to tire, my father would cheer us along by playing his harmonica, or sing to us with his great baritone, the vibration tingling my spine.

The feeling of euphoria stayed with us a day or two when we returned back home. But the memory of this rapture is what kept us returning. It still keeps me going, even now.

We changed up there, my siblings and I, and so did my father. A great burden was lifted from my shoulders—the burden of my own badness, and the burden of my father's pain. His voice took on a new, lighter timbre. There was a contagious euphoria to his gait. I could experience him looking at me with his soft brown eyes, rather than just toward me. His sadness didn't leave entirely. I could hear it when he keened to the mournful call of the wood thrush at the end of day. But in the mountains, I was forgiven. And my dad was forgiven, too.

 

I continue reading through my list for my father. I stumble over my words, painfully aware of the awkward asymmetry of my mouth, the way my lips don't meet in a neat straight line. Somehow I have reverted to an awkward teenager, trying, once again, to grow up.

• 2. I love my father very much—I need to make that more clear.
  

With this sort of mushy girlie talk, it's best to look away, so I do.

• 3. My father experienced trauma.
  

I look up briefly, to see whether he will object to this word
trauma
, which is awfully girlie, and certainly smacks of “examining one's navel.” But he does not object, so I continue.

• 4. My father had or has post-traumatic stress disorder.
  

I pause, certain my father will admonish me for using this silly word, this “psychobabble.” I don't look at my father, but down at my list. I wait, as if sniffing the wind. Remarkably, I
sense curiosity rather than condemnation. The sensation of my father's curiosity—real or imagined—propels me on.

• 5. My life would have been very different if there had been a book I could have read that would have explained that other people experience the changes in mood that I experienced—the hypervigilance and hypovigilance.
  

“Remember that kids called me a space cadet?” I ask, looking at my father. He is puzzled. “I wish I had known then that I was dissociated, that it was a symptom of trauma. I am hopeful,” I tell him, “that this book will help others.”

“So your goal is to help other people with this disease, this post-traumatic stress disorder?” he asks. This is something he can bear. This is something that he might even be able to respect. I tell him yes, that is one of my goals.

But I want to keep going with what I came here to say. I look down at my paper and see that the next item on my list refers to my mother's death. I need to keep looking down, in order to speak the unspeakable.

• 6. My father could not face my mother's death because it came after too many earlier traumas. New traumas reignite older ones, so that my mother's death, for my father, brought back the memory of the Nazis and of having to leave his home. My pain would reignite my father's pain. Therefore, I could not face my mother's death.
  

I glance up at my father from time to time. He is not denying any of this trauma stuff. I have brought my mother's death into the room, and nothing has happened to either of us. We are still speaking, still looking at one another.

“Your grandmother would not have liked the way you spoke
about your grandfather,” he says, surprising me now with a new mode of attack. My father has often made it clear that he thought my grandfather was a lecherous liar and a cheat.

“I thought you loved your grandfather!” he says.

“I did love my grandfather,” I tell him, softly. How can I explain that one can love one's abuser? How can I explain that I know that my grandfather, my potential-maybe-almost abuser, loved me?

The topic of my grandfather, and what I have not quite said about him here, reminds my father of something he has never told me before, and which I never knew.

“He lost his hospital privileges,” my father says. “Around the time that I married your mother. I never knew why.”

My father wants to defend my grandfather from potentially false accusers. Even those we despise should be innocent until proven guilty. But that doesn't mean he won't share information that might undermine this defense. My father is an advocate only for the truth, even—or maybe even especially—when the truth hurts.

What would a physician have to do to lose hospital privileges in 1955? Those were the bad old days, when doctors were gods. Screwing your nurses—apparently a common practice for my grandfather, at least according to my grandmother—would presumably not interest hospital officials back then. What could my grandfather have done?

I ask Jack, my RA, to try to find out. But the hospital's records were lost in a fire, it seems. And there were no ethics committees back then.

I cannot say what my grandfather did to me, other than leer revoltingly at “beautiful ladies,” saying “Oo lah lah” other than comment, inappropriately and disgustingly, about my growing breasts. I cannot remember. He's dead, and cannot prey anymore on other little girls. I cannot even remember now what I
know I once recalled about what happened in the shower when I was eight or nine. I cannot bear to remember. There are no photographs or crime reports or police files to consult, as there were in regard to my rape. And even if I could remember, I would not trust myself. I know that memory is suspect.

But a strange clue did come to us, in the mail.

Several years ago, shortly after my sister and I persuaded our father to talk to us about our mother for the first time (warning us, prematurely as it turns out, that it would be the last such discussion), my mother's best friend sent a letter to my father. She had found in her files a letter that my twenty-seven-year-old mother had sent her in January 1961. This friend lives in Israel. She sent a copy of the letter to my father, and my father then made a copy for me.

As my father handed me the letter, I had many conflicting feelings. A kind of nausea. I had always felt that my mother was somehow out of fashion in my father's home. She had a kind of old-fashioned look, not surprisingly, in the old photographs that my sister and I had seen at our grandparents' house. She seemed uncool. Curiosity about her was socially unacceptable in the atmosphere in which I grew up. I had somehow absorbed the notion that it was unhealthy, a kind of perversion. I was too ashamed to be curious or excited about seeing the letter, and the shame turned into light-headedness.

The letter is typed. The style is jaunty and optimistic, although my mother had been diagnosed with cancer a year earlier, and had recently undergone a bout of chemotherapy.