Author Archives: carlastockton

Maestro Moment

I opened Facebook the day after I watched Maestro and saw that a friend must have watched it the night before as well.  Her response surprised me.

“There is no soul,” she wrote. “No pulse to it. What woman in her right mind would concede her life to a gay man?”

I had to laugh. Besides the music, particularly the Mahler, what I loved most about Maestro was its deeply honest, layered look at a relationship I recognize from my own life. A relationship that saved me from self-loathing and taught me true love.

 Back in the olden days when I was young, misogyny was unguarded, and discrimination against women was prevalent – it was everywhere and out in the open. Straight men and women alike extincted the Ugly Girl, ignored the misfit, discarded the nonconforming woman. If we were not Helen Gurley Brown emaciated and/or Gymnastics Barbie adorable, we had difficulty making friends, attracting lovers, finding jobs.  Our fellow women could not afford to like those of us who were less than perfectly feminine, attractive to men, passive in accepting our rightful place.  Women were motivated by the need to bag their men; to be the friend of the Ugly Girl was to risk the stigma of association.  No woman wanted to be ignored by the men she sought to impress.

In that distant pre-Stonewall 60’s past, gay men, too, found themselves too often alone and friendless. Many sought beards, female partners who would protect them from the prying sensibilities of those who would out them. Being outed could put gay men in the same position as the non-standard issue female: at odds with the ability to find suitable jobs, housing, friends. Relationships with strong women – women who could stand beside them and anchor their respectability. – were a way to buffer the implied slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. They may not have offered sex to the women they courted, but they often gave more valuable gifts in abundance.  Gifts of attentiveness, admiration, validation, companionship. Many of us who were on the outside of social acceptability in the straight world found comfort and peace among the homosexual or bisexual men who needed us as much as we needed them.

As a naive As a naïve innocent from upstate New York, I arrived on the dating scene with at best a tentative self-image, and I soon saw that I had been identified as one who would do very nicely as a doting beard.  I was clever, nonjudgmental, erudite, and empathetic. I knew I was needy as hell, but I sublimated by giving until I was empty, and I was easily sated.  I got the affection I craved but never demanded, and my needs were met.

Maestro took me back to the year I was 17 and my very first real boyfriend Mark, a lovely gay Native American from outside Santa Fe. A boy who was, in every way that counted then, my perfect match.

We met in the scene shop at the University of New Mexico, where we both majored in drama. 

Stagecraft and scene design were required freshman classes, and on that first day, because I had never ever held any kind of a construction tool in my hands, and because I was without a single acquaintance in the class, I was feeling out of my depth and alone. Then a slightly chubby, deeply tanned young man asked me why I was wearing a key on a chain around my neck.  The nonsequitur startled me a bit but made me smile.

“I lose things,” I answered frankly.  “I’ll get locked out of the dorm if I can’t find my room key.”

The boy laughed and looked through me before he said, “You know, in Mexico, if you wear a key like that, you are letting the world know you are for sale.” He grinned.

I blushed.  “Oh. I guess that would assume anyone would be interested to buy this,” I indicated my bulky body and stifled a self-deprecating giggle.

Mark laughed. Then he aimed his dark brown cow eyes directly into my soul. “You would undoubtedly attract only the best of buyers,” he said.  “No sleazy airheads who are looking for a kewpie doll but anyone looking for a real woman.”

I was instantly smitten.  Remember, it was a different time!

For the next nearly two years, Mark and I were inseparable. Being with him made me infinitely happy.  Partly because of the superficial ways in which he satisfied my fantasies. Squiring me around in his fancy sports car – we even ran away together over spring break to escape the boredom and would have landed in NY if the car had not thrown a rod. Taking me to plays and films. Teaching me how to order alcohol. Introducing me to the kinds of excitement I could not have found in my insular hometown, like state fair rides and huevos ranchero and group peyote trips.  But it also made me happy that I made him just as happy as he made me.

Like the Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegro that Bradley Cooper and Carrie Mulligan portrayed, Mark and I finished one another’s sentences, guessed what each other was thinking, provided a blanket of support, love and acceptance neither of us had experienced before.

Even Mark’s mother adored me, invited me often to visit their large reservation home outside Santa Fe, where she was a tribal elder. She introduced me to Georgia O’Keefe.  Not O’Keefe’s work.  O’Keefe.  She would sit up with us late into the nights I was there, laughing at our stories, entertaining us with her own.  We were family.

Mark and I were melded.  We were the reconstructed humans in Plato’s Symposium, reconstituted as two halves of a single being. The fact that we didn’t have a lot of sexual intimacy was reassuring to both of us then.  I still believed that good girls didn’t, and he was grateful that I had no expectations. At the time, I was naïve enough to be unbothered when he took lovers and disappeared for days at a time.  He always returned to me. To our idyll. 

Knowing what I know now, I am sure I would have been jealous had Mark fallen in love with the men he bedded.  But I also know that I would have learned to live with the pain, would have found a way to sublimate my anxiety about it.  Our relationship was worth it to me.  If Mark had been bisexual, I might have proposed that we marry and start a family just like the idealized Lenny and Felicia.  He was not.  And in the end, his inability to commit for life was what ended our relationship.

In our second year together, Mark fell in love.  With a wonderful man. Our relationship would not fit in with the kind of arrangement they necessarily made with one another.  Mark never said as much, but I knew. I moved on.  We lost touch.

That was fifty+ years ago. . . .

I recently searched for Mark on Ancestry and found his obituary. I was overcome with a sadness I hardly expected.  And I realized that the fact that I searched for him at all was proof he still lives in the deepest corner of my heart, where I hold my parents and others I have lost.  He remains my first and deepest love. 

My Maestro.

Wishing for the Nightmare to End

The trauma is passed to us in our DNA. It has been etched by myriad attempts to obliterate us, forged by centuries of Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders, Cossacks, Jihadists, ad infinitum. . . an endless list of haters. Wherever we go, wherever we settle, we are never free of it.

I felt it in the earliest fog of my dawning awareness. In the safety of postwar America, it resonated in sounds and furies I couldn’t understand.   The wailing, the anger, the despair that accompanied the opening of an envelope.  The reluctance to go to the door when a telegram arrived.  The startle and the groan when the telephone rang. I felt the pain, intuited the anguish, but I was a baby, and I didn’t have words.  The frenzy was terrifying. 

As I acquired language, words seeped into my consciousness and insinuated themselves into my vocabulary.  Nazis, camps, exile, death, torture, hiding, hate. . . .

The images swarmed into my nightmares.  Dark images I could not name usurped my dreams.  By the time I was 3, the nightmare was a cinematic horror that repeated itself over and over. My cousins and I hide in my grandmother’s attic, a house in Queens full of shadowy corners, where evil easily lurked.  And always – though I do not know how or where I ever heard them – the soundtrack comes from the whine of European sirens and the thump of jackboots on concrete. 

I inevitably wake just as a helmeted monster finds me and proclaims, “So. . . you thought you could escape us. But there is nowhere to hide, Jew. . . .”

I was eleven before the full impact of my family’s flight became clear.  When I asked my mother why she never talked to me about it, she said, “I lived.  It wasn’t so interesting.”  She had not suffered as the beloved relatives suffered in the camps or as the cousins did when they were ripped from their parents’ arms and sent on Kindertransports or the way others did who watched their parents murdered and had to find their orphaned way to Australia or South America or . . . .Mom had no words and no sympathy for her own trauma –  being cast into exile, leaving everything she valued in a world gone mad.  She could not have explained it to me.

When I was an adult, I recognized some of her coping techniques.  She married my father, an all-American boy, whose family had come to North America by choice in the 1600s, Dutch and English protestants, fleeing nothing. They came in search of a New Life that was richer than the rich one they left behind.  Dad was a towheaded blonde, whose sky-blue eyes glistened with tears when he heard his favorite hymns.  He was Safety.  Mom buried herself in his identity and denied her own so that her children would never have to fear the monsters who robbed her of so much. 

I did not share her assurance.  I grew ever more afraid of the knock on the door, the intrusion of the evil interloper intent on taking our joy, our lives.  But I trusted that thanks to Israel, we would never again be an endangered species.  If the Nazis returned, we would have a place to go. The uncles and aunts and cousins who were denied entrance to alternate countries or who were caught because they knew of no place to go might have been saved had there been an Israel.  We the people without a country had one whose birth was within a year of my own, and we would never be flagless orphans again.

People ask me, “Why do you need Israel? You are American!”  My mother’s older sister, whose wisdom I found nonpareil, loved to say that in America we were safe.  “Don’t worry!” She would laugh. “The US is too diverse a community to hate one people with the kind of vehemence that European hegemony empowered.  We will never be hated like that here.”

I have wanted to believe her.  I have wanted to be grateful for this country that nurtured me, a country I deeply love.  Knowing that the Plot Against America of the 1930s and 40s was thwarted, I wanted to trust the country I have always believed is mine. 

Yet, even now we are reminded that even here we are interlopers.

A synagogue in Pittsburgh is attacked. Neo-nazis march in droves shouting “Jews will not replace us.”  Undereducated youngsters with no sense of history celebrate the murder of Israeli children and blame us for wanting to save Israel. They scream for its extinction.  Modern Judenratners, betray us at every turn.  We are no safer here than we are in any other gentile-dominated country of the world. 

We require the presence of a resolute, strong Israel to safeguard our future.

Israel must survive.   Or we will not.

Am Yisroel Chai!

Yom Kippur Confession — Goodby to King David

David, Age 4

I didn’t need a brother.  I certainly didn’t want one.  I liked being the center of my parents’ universe, the special doll of my much older half-sister.  Besides, I already had cousins who were like siblings when we were together, who were kind enough to leave me to return to my charmed realm. 

What egocentric three-year-old in her right mind would want the disruption of a younger sibling?

And yet I got one.

At first, he was little more than a nuisance. Smelly, wrinkly, ugly red but inevitable.  I accepted him.  And I accepted that I was responsible for him.  I even loved him. Before I was 4, I was happy to help with the laundry, comfort him when he cried, give him his bottles, sing him to sleep.

The second year was fraught.  He was ill most of the time.  Tracheal bronchitis, pneumonia, flu, ear infections.  He sucked up every ounce of attention my parents had to give, and I was their willing accomplice.  We coddled him, nurtured him, protected him. 

The day he began Kindergarten, his inability to hear enraged the principal, who thought he was simply ignoring her when she called us in from the playground.  I intervened, yelling at her, taking her hand off the ear by which she was about to lead him into school.  He was my responsibility.  I had to take care of him.

By the time I was in 5th grade, we had moved twice – once to a new state and then across town to our fourth new school in less than two years.  David had evolved into a magical boy.  People loved him.  He was powerful, smart, witty.  Everyone he met was his new best friend. He no longer needed me, and it was a good thing because the fact of five subsequent siblings, a veritable separate family, required that I no longer attend to him.

Yet David was still the victim of multiple ailments.  He was inevitably the first one to get sick and the last one to be well.  I remained healthy as the proverbial farm animal, the last to get sick and the quickest to recover. 

I was jealous, and that year I impulsively succumbed to my jealousy. It was the first and the last time I was ever jealous of David.  The experience chastised me.

The Asian flu arrived in our town sometime between my birthday in early October and Hallowe’en.  Fewer and fewer kids were coming to school.  David was felled in the first days of the epidemic.  Our siblings who were not yet in school had runny noses and low-grade fevers, but they were not terribly ill.  I had no symptoms. Whatsoever.

Which seemed like a terrible injustice.

Because I was the designated caregiver, I volunteered to look after David, who was quite ill.  I took him his meals and sat with him while he moaned himself to sleep. Then I lay down next to him and breathed as close to his mouth as I could before I licked the plate and utensils he had used as I carried them down to the kitchen for washing. I was determined to have a bit of this flu for myself.

I was so successful I nearly died.  For six days I ran a fever over 104, and at the end of the week, I had a three-day nosebleed. 

I have never been so sick before or since.  The experience was a powerful lesson.

What I learned was what a hero my brother actually was.  He so often survived battles with bugs like the one that struck me, and he paid a price.  Hearing loss, asthma, compromised immunity.  Eventually diabetes. 

Through it all, he was ever cheerful, ever willing to go out of his way to participate in athletics, at which he excelled, ever warm and supportive to his friends and neighbors. Everyone loved David.  And they loved him for a reason. 

They recognized his genuine lust for life and his commitment to having the best it could offer him, even if he had to pay a price for the privilege.

As a brother, he was certainly not perfect.  I was nowhere near a perfect sister.  Yet we were one another’s permanency.  So long as we were in the world together, we knew that we were grounded in some kind of family.  By 1999, both our parents were gone, but I was not an orphan until David left last February. 

I didn’t want a brother.  I thought I didn’t need one. But I did.

I needed David.

Darkness in the Vienna Woods

Though my mother’s family did not leave Europe until 1939, they knew for years before Nazi jackboots thundered through Vienna that they would have to leave their beloved city, and antisemitism was to blame.  Kristallnacht had not yet clarified the Jews’ position in Austria when my grandfather began to plan the family exodus.

The early warnings were sometimes subtle, sometimes overt but rarely violent.  Until a sunlit, sultry day –  July 15, 1927, when violence disrupted a family idyll and set forces in motion that impelled their emigration.

Papa had been in France on an extended business trip, and he had not been home for his birthday the day before, so the family designated the 15th a holiday, which they set out to enjoy at their favorite park overlooking the city.  Their day would celebrate Vienna as much as their patriarch.  

They boarded a tram that took them to the medieval Höhenstrasse, and from there, they transferred to a bus that carried them through the Grinzing, past the charming Heuriger taverns, into the Vienna woods, and to the top of the Kahlenberg. 

When they arrived on the mountain, a procession of mummers, along with boys and girls in costumes singing a Polish hymn, was preparing for a processional in honor of the relief army Poland’s King Jan III Sobieski sent to save Vienna from the Ottoman siege in 1683.

“See?” Said Papa, an emigree from a shtetl in Eastern Poland. “The Austrians love us Poles.”

His family laughed. Being Jewish and being Polish was not the same thing. But neither the Poles nor the Jews were popular in the post-Empire days of sprouting Austrian nationalism. The parade made them giddy.

My mother Charlotte, age three, and her sister Thea, age four,  pretended to be bunny rabbits, hop-dancing to the processional music.  Baby Ruthi cried for a bottle and tugged at the bandages covering the surgery she had had behind her ears several days before.  Herma, maturely nine, crossed her arms and waited for the silliness to subside.

When the parade passed, the family hiked together behind the remnants of the ancient Leopold Schloss and found a spot in the shade to lay out their picnic. 

They spread blankets on the grass and sat down to enjoy the grand repast Mama had prepared the night before. Then, inhaling the exquisite sunshine, Papa and Mama relaxed as the girls performed the play Herma had written to welcome Papa home.  Papa stretched out to watch his daughters and, in an unusual display of affection, laid his head in Mama’s lap.  She, gentler than usual, rubbed the top of his balding head.  When the play was over, the girls insinuated themselves into the mellow moment by resting their heads close to their parents. Sated and spent, they all sprawled on the blanket and slept.   

Mama woke first and was in such a mellow mood, she spontaneously began to hum a tune from “Die Schöne Müllerin,” which had been running through her head.  Her music woke the others, and it was Charlotte who first noticed lights bursting from the city stretched out beneath their mountain perch.

“Look, Mama, how beautiful! Is that fire?  Papa, it looks like the sun is exploding!”

Her parents didn’t share her enthusiasm. 

“That could be our house going up in flames,” Papa snapped.  His burst of anger silenced the children, who stood transfixed, watching Vienna burn. 

Mama feared that they had overstayed their time on the mountain.  It would soon be dark, and in the dark, the woods could become treacherous. “Let’s go,” she instructed. 

“Mama,” Herma cried, “Is it safe to go home when there is fire all around?”

Mama shrugged.

“Walk carefully,” she instructed.  “But quickly. “

Mechanically, they obeyed, racing the descending summer night. 

At the bottom of the park, they waited for a bus until a passer-by yelled to them, “Haven’t you heard there’s a revolution in town? No more buses today!” 

A revolution!

It had begun as a protest strike. In January of that year, in a remote border village, a group of socialists clashed with fascists over the Kaiser’s militarization policy.  In the melee that ensued, a barman and his two sons shot and killed a worker and an eight-year-old child.  At his trial on July 14, the barman pled guilty but he was acquitted. On July 15, the socialists rioted in front of the Parliament House in the Ringstrasse Plaza.  Mounted police, the nationalist Heimwehr Militia, and coworkers brandished weapons of all kinds. Long after the police were ordered to cease firing, the shooting continued.  Miraculously, though the fire brigade was unable to get through the barricaded streets, the fire remained contained in the one building, and by morning, the revolt was over. Six hundred people were severely injured, 89 were killed, and the Palace of Justice was demolished.

In the ensuing days, reports in various publications blamed the uprising on the Jews, who, because of their Eastern European roots, were said to be Communist agitators.

As the conflagration raged, the Robinsons knew only that they needed to be home.  No public transport was running, but they found a taxi with a driver who thought they looked like refugees. He drove cautiously through the fire zone as the family huddled close to the floor of the cab, seeking cover from the gunfire that echoed through the normally hushed streets now teeming with confusion and terror. 

At the Ringstrasse, soldiers stopped them with hoisted bayonets but altered their stance at seeing Ruth’s bandages.  One of the soldiers said, ‘That little girl’s been hit.  Let ‘em pass.  She’ll need medical attention.”  No one contradicted the soldier’s surmise.

The family’s home was unaffected by the fray.  No fires, no guns, no screaming citizens.  Henri drew the shutters, barricaded the doors, turned off the lights, and took the children into the master bedroom, where they all spent the night.

 The frightening events stayed far from their inner sanctum, where the sisters were protected and loved.  For them, the day was a glorious adventure marked by an outpouring of parental affection.  By their own recounting, all three were too excited to sleep yet too afraid of their parents to get up, so they lay awake holding hands and listening to the night.  In the distance, they could make out sounds – the toy-like popping of guns, wailing of racing water trucks, clomping of running boots – like background sounds in a radio play.  Eventually, they must have slept because suddenly it was over, and their little corner of the morning sun-drenched city glistened as though nothing had happened. 

The city had gone quiet.  A general workers’ strike persisted for a few days, but there was no more violence. Except for the charred carcass of the Palace of Justice, all evidence of Friday’s melée seemed to have faded. 

Later in the week, returning from a piano lesson, Herma brandished a leaflet being handed out on the street. “This is about the riot,” she reported. “They’re saying it was just a demonstration. A blowup by the Communist workers. The Heimwehr militia was doing its job, protecting the city.”

 “Fascists,” Papa muttered.

“They’re saying the Communists are taking over the country. They plan to make puppets of us all.”

Papa scowled.  “If they’re saying Communists,” he said, “We better start packing our bags.  ‘Communists’ is just another word for Jews.”

Oskaar Kokoshka, Anschluss 1942

Summertime Daddy

Summer is my season of Daddy.

Most of the time, he was a restless man, my father, with a permanent expression of perplexity on his face. Relaxation was beyond his ken.  He was in constant motion every waking minute of every day.  Stress seeped from his pores and put us all on edge. A milk spill could create a firestorm of screamed recriminations.  He never used bad language, and yet his anger was obscene.  

However, on rarified sun-gilded summer days, he was transformed, and I in turn was freed to be myself.  At the beach, we could love each other unconditionally.

I attributed his passion for sun and surf to his having been a summer baby. Born the end of July in 1911, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Father grew up as far from the ocean as an American boy could be. The year he was twelve, right after his father died, he stole the family car and drove it to New York, where his Uncle Milton owned a shipping company.  “Let me go to sea,” he pleaded. Uncle Milton summarily sent him home, which only fueled his desire.  

Whenever he could sate his thirst for proximity to the ocean, Daddy was a happy man.

Every summer until I was four, we vacationed with my mother’s family in New London, CT.  Mom’s older sister Herma was married to Borislav, a Serbian painter of some renown, and he had a patron who loaned him a cottage on the beach, a glorious venue for a family holiday.

My memory of the house – undoubtedly flawed by time and distance —  is of a single-story expanse with multiple tall windows standing upright in every room. Their diaphanous, white curtains fluttered and danced in the omnipresent breezes.  No matter how hot the air was wherever we had been, the briny, vanilla-scented cool of the beach enveloped us when we entered. Daddy, however, had no interest in the house.

As soon as we arrived and parked our car, my staid, reticent, subdued father would emerge from behind the wheel of the car, shed his grumpy silence, and turn giddy. Suddenly he was playful, happy. He reminded me of those sea creatures we used to order from the bubble gum cards.  As soon as we added the salt sea air of the tantalizing water, Daddy would animate. He’d bound into the house, embrace each of the assembled relatives, and rush to any corner that afforded him enough privacy to change into his swim trunks. He could not wait to get into the ocean.

We children – the first three of eleven cousins-to-be – knew what was coming next. “I’m off to the water,” he’d announce. “Who’s with me?”

Cousin Peter, eight years older than I, remained aloof. He was too mature for such childish exuberance. Johnny, eight months younger than I, only went where his mother took him. He would stay behind.  I got to have Daddy all to myself.

Stripped down to my crisp white drawers, I would ask my mother to secure my towhead mop into tight braids, and I’d follow him into the gently undulating water. He walked slowly, watching my every move, coaching me to tiptoe carefully over rocks and shells, beckoning me to stop and marvel at the jelly fish and crabs that tickled my shins and scraped my toes.  Once, a crab mistook part of my foot for a tasty morsel and chomped down hard.  I screamed, more afraid than injured, and my father laughed.  “Too bad for that little guy. You’re way too big a prey for him.” 

In the afternoons, Daddy, who never rested at home, took a blanket down to the edge of the Sound. He would wrap himself up, put a hat on his head, and coo, “Nothing like the sound of the ocean to sing me to sleep.”

He would nap for what seemed like hours, while Peter, dressed in his cowboy chaps and holster,  pointed his toy pistol and chased Johnny and me all about the beach.  Our mothers would watch us, laughing and applauding, as though we were brilliant actors in a spellbinding film.

Nowhere else, at no other time were we as insouciant as we were then. Uncle Borislav would join us on our beach blanket when he took a break from his easel, and if there were no Yankee game on the radio, Uncle Fred would be there as well. Borislav performed magic tricks, and Fred told silly jokes. My father, cocooned nearby, smiled in his sleep.  We ate dinner on the patio and told silly jokes,  then slept with the windows open so the sea could sing us its lullaby.

 Daddy would wake me before dawn to watch the tide come in.  We would stroll along the waterline, giggling at the horseshoe crabs scuttling away, peering strenuously into the half-light for a glimpse of a ship or a dolphin. We would wade in and let the deepening water lap at our legs. 

Whenever the tide was lowest, he would invite me to a grand adventure.

“Come on,” he’d chortle. “Let’s walk to China.”

“No, not China,” I’d laugh. “Paris!”

“Sure!  But you have to hold my hand.  It’s a very long walk.”

We would splash in, the water level unchanged for what seemed like miles. When we were finally far enough out that I became buoyant, he’d hold me while I half walked, half swam among the sailboats lazing in the summer sunshine.

“Maybe we won’t get all the way to Paris today,” Daddy would sigh at last.  “Let’s come back tomorrow.”