Category Archives: Personal Revelation

Our Little King

When I was very young, my father was afflicted with a strange kind of wanderlust that impelled him to move his growing family often.  We lived in eleven homes before I was nine.  Fortunately for me, in those early postwar years, as they adjusted to their American lifestyle and learned to trust their safety, my mother and her sisters were virtually inseparable.  My grandparents bought a large faux Tudor house in Bayside, Queens, which had a revolving door for the three sisters and their children. My first first cousins and I were treated as near-siblings, and we lived in that house at various intervals, and for several years, we all but breathed in unison. Each of the sisters had married a man from a different culture, and we navigated a polyglot world, overseen by our Pater familias Henri Robinson, whom we all called Papa.

Papa was short and round.  In those days, over breakfast, we’d read the Sunday comics together, and I especially liked “The Little King,” a cartoon by Otto Soglow.

“He looks like Papa when Papa wears his long red bathrobe,” I told my mother.

“Oh, dear, please don’t say that to Papa.  You’ll hurt his feelings.”

I did tell him, but instead of being hurt, he was amused. He looked at me with a rare twinkle in his eye and laughed a deep, belly laugh that I don’t think I had ever heard from him before.  He hugged me, showing me an affection that was rare for the Old World man that he was.

Papa was a flawed man.  We all knew that, and instead of judging him, his wife and daughters laughed at behaviors that were anything but funny.  We admired him and understood that he meant well even when he did terrible things. I was, however, perplexed at times. It especially confused me that they all — including my mother — thought it was hilarious that he ran away from home when my mother, his third daughter, was born. 

It was one of the many stories Grandma loved to tell.

“He was so upset that I didn’t give him a son, he ran away, and I did not see him till six months later!”  She’d laugh until an emphysema-hacking fit interceded.  “I punished him, though.  I had the last word. He got Ruthi before he finally got our Johnny.”

Some of the stories were more understandably funny.  My favorite was what we called “The Accord Story,” another one that Grandma loved to tell.

“You know. We came in 1939, when we escaped from Europe. My brother Joe was our first sponsor. You’d think he was the one who saved us. He did get us our first place. A two-bedroom apartment like the one we had in Vienna. Only this one was in Wadley Heights, Harlem.

“Papa was in Cuba. His passport from Poland, where he was born, and the Polish quota was filled. So what else could he do? He traveled to Cuba.”

“That lovely Harlem flat was too small for all us.”

At the time, the family included my grandmother, my mother, age 16, her sister Ruth, age 13, John, age 10, and Herma, her oldest sister, who was in the second trimester of pregnancy.  Herma’s husband Borislav, a Serbian painter, was with Papa in Cuba; the two of them would join the others as soon as their visas were approved.

“You couldn’t argue with the facts. We had to move.” 

Papa’s brothers offered a rescue plan. 

“Those two — the scheisters! Your papa saw what was happening all around us. He had some money in American banks, and those two found out a way to swindle us. They got a quarry in Accord, NY. A quarry!! That they put in Papa’s name. They told us they got us a big new house, and we believed them. When Papa and Borislav arrived in the States, they had us settled in the quarry farmhouse.

“I knew that when Papa would see what they did, he would go . . . there’s no good word in English.  Zornig. Deadly. He could murder those two.  A quarry was the last thing my Henri would want. Furthermore, everyone hated the farmhouse.

It was a true country homestead.  No electricity, no indoor plumbing, no privacy.  Large and looming, the house had no bedroom doors and no place to take baths without open exposure. Not a suitable home in any way.

“I told them, ‘As soon as Henri gets here, you better make this right.'”

The brothers were never put to the test.  When Papa was back for less than a week, a fire broke out.

Grandma and the sisters were all in various parts of the first floor. Papa was upstairs in the room where he and Grandma slept.  John was outside. It was he who saw the flames shooting from the house and screamed at my grandmother, who screamed at the others.

“My china,” yelled Grandma.

“Henri!!  Get what you can from the bedroom.  And get outside!”

“The baby things,” screamed Herma. 

“MY cello,” wailed my mother.

“Oh, no, the cat!”  howled Ruth.

John joined the frenzy to get out as much of what mattered as possible. The kids carried linens, dishware, jewelry, clothing. Borislav saved his easel and canvases. But Papa was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s your father?”  called my grandmother.

“Last I saw, he went back to get things from the bedroom.” 

“Get out, Herma,” scolded Grandma.  “The smoke is getting thick.  Protect your baby.”

“Mama,” cried John.  “I keep calling Papa, and he doesn’t answer.”

“Get out, John.  Your father will find his way.”

Having saved as much as they could, the members of the family converged on the front lawn.  

Ruth worried. “I still don’t know where Papa went,” she whined.

My mother, who had walked around the house to assess the extent of the fire, said, “I won’t miss this house, that’s for sure.”  Then she looked up. “Omigod, Mama, look, up on the roof.”

There was Papa. Standing on the sloped roof of the house.  Calmly looking for a place to slide down.

“Henri,” called my grandmother.  “What are you doing up there?”

“I went back to the bedroom,” he called, “And when I started down the stairs, I saw that there were flames in the center of the house, so I came up here.”

“What have you rescued, Henry?” asked my grandmother. 

At this point of her narration, Grandma always stopped and looked us in the eye. 

“There he stood,” she would say.  “My brilliant bald husband.  Holding his hairbrush and his hand mirror.”  If we failed to laugh, she was crestfallen.  We made it a point to laugh.

The house was damaged beyond repair.  The family moved to Kingston in time for my cousin to be born there. And the story remains a moment of levity for a family that was otherwise plagued by tragedy.

But that’s not what this story is about.

Pride

  In the third week of my second year of college, I decided I had to drop out. I told the registrar at the University of New Mexico I was pregnant so I could collect my tuition money and run away to New York with my boyfriend.  We were both gold-green and scared. I was 18, still living in books, and he was 20, just a kid from the rez near Santa Fe.  We’d heard that even in New York there were laws against illegal cohabitation, and we were worried we’d be arrested if we tried to shack up.  Where would we live?

Mid-flight, halfway across the country, I remembered that my grandmother had a cozy little apartment in her Queens home basement that we might rent if we were married.  So, soon after we landed, we wed.

Grandma’s and my relationship was historically fraught.  Her life had tortured her, and even I understood that that gave her license to torture me.  Before her whole family was forced out of Vienna, the city she loved, before the Nazis murdered her two most beloved brothers and a revered sister, before my grandfather’s illness took all that was left of her endurance, she had buried her favorite daughter, her much-adored first grandson, and even her long-awaited, highly prized son to freakish illnesses and accidents. She took solace in the Cutty Sark and beer she kept close to her in ample supply. As she drank, she descended into dark, evil moods that riveted her to her couch in an unlit corner of her living room. 

In those days, Grandma was a big woman, and her presence was terrifying. She would sit on her couch by herself, sullenly knitting or crocheting, a bloated, glowering Mme. Defarge, muttering her complaints mostly about me, her third surviving grandchild and a massive disappointment.  She smoked a pack of unfiltered camels a day, so her litany of my shortcomings – too fat, too lazy, too blonde, too stupid to be 6 or 7 or 8, 9, 10—was punctuated by the rasp of expectorating sputum. My only defense? I called her Grandma, which she hated, instead of Mamma, as my cousins did.

By the time I needed her apartment, however, she and I had forged a truce.  I was, after all, a married lady, and I worked hard to maintain my professional demeanor, never missed work, cared for my new husband with all the deference and respect expected of a proper 60s wife.

But not for long.  Mickey and I said “I do” in October.   He nearly died of hepatitis in December, and I finally understood why we hadn’t yet conjoined.   Turned out he’d been living la gay vida loca all over NYC.  Yes, I had had a clue.  I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the information.  Besides, I loved him, loved his company.  His friendship was the most precious relationship I had ever had, and I never wanted to lose it.  The illness forced him to leave.  He was miserable in New York and wanted to be near his mother. He moved to Santa Fe in January, and I remained in Bayside, terrified to share the explanation with my grandmother. I didn’t want her to stop loving him.  But mostly I feared her derision.

One night I got home late from work in Manhattan, and I was lounging in bed, watching the Million Dollar Movie, when I heard a knock at my door.  I opened it to find my grandmother bent over in the cold, holding a batch of cookies she had baked earlier.  I was surprised to see her and just as surprised by the cookies – she rarely baked, and she never allowed me to eat bread in her presence, let alone cookies.  But I smiled and thanked her.

She coughed for a full minute and a half before she collapsed into a chair at my kitchen table.  I brought her a glass of water, and she nodded. 

“My brother was a faygele,” she said apropos of nothing.

“Hunh?” I wasn’t sure I had heard what I thought I heard.

“Like your Mickey.  He liked boys.  That’s why they took him first.  The Nazis.  To the death camp.”

I sat next to her, and she told me about my great Uncle Ferdinand, a gifted musician, a small hump-backed man, who painted and made his living as a bookbinder.  The Nazis relocated him to the popup ghetto along with his professional musicians brother and sister-in-law with whom he boarded. Then, the three were sent to Mali Trosinac. 

“The Nazis hated the homosexuals.  And anyone who tried to protect them. The brightest and the best they took from me.  Ferdinand, Max, and Paula.” She sighed, and her head dropped to her chest.  I thought she would fall asleep.  Then her emphysema cough startled her upright. She lit a cigarette and talked on into the night. The more she talked, in German and in English, the more elegant her prose became. What a facility she had for narration.  I was spellbound.

“Listen,” she said as she neared the end of her story.  “I know what it was like for you with all your brothers and sisters. You the oldest, you in charge of so many personalities. For me, it was not so different. Everywhere we went when I was a child, we, too, stuck out like a seamstress’s thumbs swollen with pinpricks. “

“You, Mamma?”

“Well, you know. I was the youngest.  Of ten.  Whether you’re six or eight or ten, you’re too many.  You’re always special.  Like my Ferdinand. And your Mickey.”

Elegy

It’s an odd thing to be a sister whose little brother has died.

The sister is not the wife who tended to him for 42 years, who devoted her existence to making sure he lived longer than anyone could have predicted.  The sister is not responsible for orchestrating his diabetes care, his two kidney transplants, his quintuple by-pass, or for guarding his limbs with her life so that he would die with most of himself intact.

The sister is not the adopted son, the boy-now-man who needed a father and found in the brother a gently adamant hand that guided him through the tumult of adolescence and into an altruistic career.

Nor is the sister the granddaughter he took in at her birth, whom he nurtured, fed, coddled, and adored while his wife, her grandmother, worked to support them all when he had been forced into early retirement.  The granddaughter who ran to her Poppi whenever her feelings were hurt or her path confused her.

Or the 9-year-old niece who came to visit and stayed till she graduated from college, married a surgeon, attended law school, and settled in the heartland.

The sister is peripheral.  She has no rights to the mourning.  She knows that the wife, the son, the granddaughter, and the niece own the wailing rights.  And who is this sister to suffer from his loss?

After all, all this sister is is the grown-up child into whose hands her grandmother placed this brother when he arrived home from the hospital on his fourth day of life.  She is the person who hardly remembers life before there was this brother, whom she didn’t always like but never failed to love.

It was she who caught him when he fell off the neighbor’s garage roof pretending to be Davy Crockett on the trail of Big Bad Mike Fink. She is the one who ran to get Daddy when little brother climbed a telephone pole in the aftermath of a hurricane and tried to use his new tool kit to fix a live electric wire.  It was she who walked him to school on his first day of Kindergarten, when his hearing was still returning from near-deafness. She stood guard over him while he played with gusto, alone and jubilant, on the playground. When the principal called them in, and he didn’t hear, the principal grabbed his ear to pull him inside.  It was the sister who pushed the woman’s hand away.  “Don’t you dare touch my little brother,” she screamed.  “He didn’t hear you.”

No. She didn’t always like him.  At times she hated him. He could be a tyrant, barging in on her bathroom time, teasing her about her appearance, robbing her of time alone when she wanted to write. Then there was her abject jealousy. He was more popular.  He had a broader grin.  He was cute and funny.  Which she was not.  And he got sick.  A lot. Which meant people took care of him.  That’s why she crawled into bed with him and licked his breakfast fork when he had the Asian flu. It was her turn, and though she nearly died for her trouble, she was never sorry.  For once the brother tended to her and brought her soup and news from the schoolyard.  He found her shivering and brought a cover from his own bed. 

She coaxed him to read, to write, to expound his wisdom.  In his last year in high school, he spent a week with her in her New York apartment working on an essay and a speech he was to give in a competition.  He won the contest and got an A on the paper, and she was not the least bit surprised.  She always knew he was smarter than he thought he was.

The sister’s life did not depend on his, but then she always thought he’d be somewhere she could reach him. He could be a great comfort . . . and he could be a painful cyst. Either way, he was there. She always knew he might precede her into the void. She just never believed it.

So odd to be the sister whose little brother has died. 

Rejecting the Father

Few people knew of my family as well as the denizens of Saranac Lake, our hometown in upstate NY.  We were eminently recognizable, especially to our fellow congregants of the First United Methodist Church.

There was no missing us.  Every Sunday, with the consistency of a Swiss train, we arrived for services.  Unlike that Swiss train, we were never on time. We were wont to arrive ten to fifteen minutes after the minister made his welcoming address.  The choir would be putting away hymnals, the congregation rifling through prayer books looking for the Apostles Creed, and we would make a grand entrance.  All nine of us. 

Each week, the same usher, an elderly man with a large red mole that sat like a laser pointer on the top of his bald head, would lead us to the nearest empty pew, and each week, Dad would ignore the designated bench and lead the way to one closer to the altar.  That way we could parade by the entire congregation.  Dad would step deliberately, serenely, looking neither to the right nor to the left, fixing his gaze on the cross and squinting his eyes in pious prayer.  His children would follow him like biblical offspring – Carla, David, Helen, Alfred, Elizabeth, and John – the issue of his begetting – and we always made a scene. I scolding the young ones in harsh whispers, the youngest ones squealing and climbing onto the back of the pew, the middle whining about someone picking on her, and others cowering close to mom, who had brought up the rear. 

I was perversely proud to be part of the disruption.   These people were my posse.  An exclusive club to which only a Swett could belong.  Long after I knew it to be untrue, I believed that to be a Swett was to be superior in every way. We were imbued with God’s favoritism.

Until I was eleven, which is when I learned that things were not as they appeared.

I was in  7th grade when against the advice of my English teacher, I read Exodus, which made me dizzy.  I began to piece together the German, Italian, and Serbian fragments I’d been hearing all my life,  the hushed despair as telegrams arrived, the silent brooding.  Reports of my grandmother’s mysterious trip to Vienna when I was a toddler. I knew they were Jews. But it never occurred to me . . . . 

 “God is love,”  my dad insisted. And I believed. But how does a loving God . . . ?

My mother was a deeply good person.  She never denied Jesus, and she never rejected Christianity. When I was little, she told me about the adored sister she lost to meningitis and the beloved brother who died of anaphylaxis. She agreed with Daddy when he explained that God took innocents to be with Him as a reward for their goodness, that they were happily in Heaven reaping their rewards. 

But this new information was unjustifiable.  God is love, but God permits genocide? 

I read the book in a single Friday night then spent Saturday processing the revelation.  I cornered my mother as she stood at the stove frying our weekend breakfast pancakes.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“About Hitler.  About the camps.  About Europe. . . .”

“What’s to tell?  I lived.  Not interesting. “

The next day, when my Sunday morning alarm rang, I pulled the covers over my head and burrowed more deeply into my pillow.  Dad knocked on my door, and the sound was muffled, but I heard and did not respond.

“Come on, Carla. It’s getting late.”

“Go away,” I called through the door.  “I’m not going.”

“My father laughed. “Of course you are.”

“Nope.  I’m done with church.”

“Stop being ridiculous.”

I got up and opened my door.  Dad had already descended to the landing of the grand stairway that was right outside my bedroom.  I stood at the doorway and watched him for a moment. He was waiting for me, examining the snow on the roof outside the small window.

I shuddered and addressed him in a near-whisper.

“I am not going, Daddy.”

He got very quiet.  I knew what was coming.  I had experienced it a few times, and I often watched my younger brother endure it.

 The belt. 

Dad pivoted, climbed the half-flight of stairs, and went to his bedroom.  I ducked back into my room, back under my covers.  I was a big girl.  He would leave me alone if I held my ground.

But he didn’t. 

Dad entered my room and dragged me out of bed, out of the room.  I tried to escape by bolting downstairs toward the front door, but I tripped on the third step and fell onto the landing.  Dad was already there and stood over me, staring, the belt poised.

I could not take my eyes off his knuckles. 

Suspended above his head, poised to strike, the knuckles were ominous. Bulging, red, striated by the bleeding cracks wrought by repetitive frostbite. His oversized, gnarled hands, scarred by physical labor, yellowed from cigarettes trembled under the strain, misleading in their appearance.  I knew those hands as the ones that soothed my night fears when he rubbed my head as he chanted the Canterbury Tales in sing-song middle-high English.  I braced myself and looked at his face.  He seemed about to cry. I sighed. He was not the kind of man who would beat a child for disagreeing with him.

I whispered desperately, “I won’t do it. I can’t.”

“Silly girl. Just get ready.  God will forgive you.  God is love.”

“No, he’s not,” I screamed at him.  “If God were love, mommy’s family would still be in Vienna. They’d still be Jewish. They’d still be  –”

Now, Dad’s face reddened and glistened with anger. His temple throbbed.  His April blue eyes darkened to a sinister gray.  I was sure the thrust was coming, so I jumped back,  thinking to break away. He caught me, and we struggled, locking one another in a desperate kind of wrestle hold.  If either of us let go, we would likely both fall down the steep stairs, undoubtedly to our deaths.   I held my breath and silently submitted.

He relaxed.

He calmly grabbed my shoulders and righted us both on the landing.  His face calmed.  The light returned to his eyes.

I heard my mother call us from the kitchen,  “Breakfast is getting cold.”

Moving Day

I was nine in 1957, when my father wrenched us from our Longmeadow, MA, home and relocated us to Saranac Lake, NY. The trip, in those days, was a long one.  None of the endless interstates we now take for granted existed.  The journey took us along country roads through western New England, and we meandered into the Adirondack High Peaks area by way of Brattleboro, Rutland, Ticonderoga. 

In truth, we didn’t meander.  Our makeshift caravan – a small, rented truck and a white Pontiac Chieftain – was far slower than that. Each of the vehicles inched its way north, groaning beneath the weight of the burden it carried: our lives. 

Dad had extended the truck’s driver and passenger seats with boxes, crates, and books, which he covered with blankets and pillows on which my 6-year-old brother David and our 3-year-old sister Helen could luxuriate. The Pontiac resembled a Grapes of Wrath conveyance, windows and doors straining to hold back a tsunami of small furniture, pots and pans, household goods; a bicycle and a tricycle strapped to the exterior. Mom, 8.5 months pregnant with her fifth child, drove the car, and I rode shotgun . . . wishing for a gun.  It was my job to wrangle and entertain 15-month-old Alfred, restlessly climbing, relentlessly squealing, refusing to sit still.

After stopping for dinner in dark, cold Rutland, Dad adjusted the blankets and pillows in the truck so that David and Helen could sleep. Mom and I did the same for Alfred in the backseat of the car.  We still had a long way to go.

Instead of sleeping, Alfred wailed and screamed and climbed back and forth between the car’s seats, using my shoulders as a diving board, pulling my hair, prying at the door in attempts to jump out. Mom never stopped driving.  Dad had no way of knowing what was going on in the car, and she could not risk losing sight of the truck. When I finally managed to wrestle Alfred down, force him into my arms, and wedge a bottle into his mouth, I sang, rocking him, till he passed out. 

It began to snow, and Dad stopped to put chains on the tires. Our destination was yet four hours away.

“Don’t you move, Carla,” my mother hissed when Alfred was finally asleep.  I bristled at the menacing tone, unempathetic to the fact that she was monstrously pregnant, hardly able to fit behind the wheel of that car, robbed of any residual patience for a petulant tween or a perseverating toddler.

For four straight hours, I sat with the pressure of that large little person on my lap and a growing pain in my coccyx. 

The temperature dropped to -46º.  Wind swirled in a cacophony of winter wonders, and the snow danced blizzard-like about us.  Neither mom nor dad could see five inches ahead of them, but they drove on.

Anyone who has traveled the North Country through dark winter mountain nights knows how treacherous that drive was, how close we likely came to oblivion. 

We arrived in Saranac Lake in the wee hours of the next morning. 

Dad’s truck haltingly crawled its way to what he remembered was the road that led to the cavernous house he had rented, nearly careening off a railroad bridge in the process. As soon as he righted himself, he stopped.  We all stopped. 

Mom rolled her window down a bit.  Dad yelled to be heard above the din and rage of engines and wind, “Don’t turn the motor off.  We’ll never get it started again.”

He dismounted from the truck to look around with his flashlight. More blowing snow reflected back at him as he walked a few feet in every direction and then stood at the foot of a hill, squinting and grunting. 

Helen began to cry.  Worried that we might wake people in the area, Dad opened the truck and lifted her out of the warm bed.  The cold stung her, and she wailed again. 

“I think this is it,” he finally said as he absent-mindedly put Helen down next to him. 

Suddenly the air was pierced by a howl more terrifying than any banshee or dybbuk could have emitted.  It was Helen’s. She was standing barefoot.  On icy pavement. At 46 below zero.

I placed Alfred on the seat and jumped out of the car to scoop her up and put her back into the truck. Dad grunted again and returned to his driver’s seat.  Mom motioned to me to put my now-squirming little brother back on my lap.

We continued the last three-tenths of a mile to our new home, and two days later, Mom taught us to ski down the hill we had climbed.