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A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children – Part IX

In 1970, another tragedy fueled another uprooting.

Only four years after relocating to Scottsdale, AZ, and finding a sudden surge of interest in his art, Herma’s husband died suddenly the day after Thanksgiving.  “It’s time,” Mama declared, “for a rapprochement! ”  She bullied Alfred into moving them across the country, to a house less than a five-minute walk from Herma’s.  Four of the kids were still in school — the youngest, in fact –was still in middle school, but she was undeterred.  Once she had moved, her mother and father followed, and soon thereafter her younger sister Ruth with husband Fred as well.  The family reunited and began life anew.  Yet again.

If Charlotte and her sisters had been paid by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, they could not have been more effervescent spokeswomen for the state. None of them had any desire ever to return to the gentle greenness of the east coast; they were delighted with the dry warm winters, the fragrant springs, even the blistering summers.  Visiting Connecticut in the ’90’s, Mom declared, “I feel so closed in.  I can’t see the sky.  Too many trees!”  Arizona suited her. “When Hitler threatened us, I begged my father to let me go to Israel with B’Nai B’rith, but he insisted I come to America with the rest of them.  This is my consolation prize,” she would exclaim, reveling in an Arizona sunset.  “This is Heaven!”

Herma, right, and Charlotte in 1975 with my firstborn – Both adored their grandchildren.

Then, in 1974, her world threatened to unravel once more.  Both Ruth and Herma were diagnosed with cancer, and Herma died in 1979.  This time Charlotte had polished her armor.  After her beloved Herma left her, she very quickly absorbed the loss and buried herself in her professional development.

After a rough start — in a middle school where the principal was put off by her accent — Charlotte found work in Scottsdale and taught not only Biology but Special Education as well, for the next 25 years; after she died in 1999, the school auditorium was full to bursting with students, teachers, alums, who came to say farewell to a most beloved, greatly revered teacher and friend.

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children, Part VIII

When my youngest brother, nearly 14 years my junior, started first grade in the late ’60’s, against my father’s wishes, Mama went back to school.  She wasn’t sure the purpose yet — she was only sure that it was way too late to consider med school — but she wanted to further her studies in biology.  She loved the science, loved academics, loved the intercourse with teachers and fellow students she’d excelled at at UVM.

For the next two years, she managed her wifely chores, drove children where they needed to be, battened all hatches, and then traveled — in wind, rain, snow, sleet or dripping humidity — the fifty miles from her home to the State University of NY at Plattsburgh, where she would attend her classes only to drive home to do her homework, conduct research, do whatever was necessary in order to finish the degree while she cooked and cleaned and tutored her children through their homework.  She was almost intolerably proud of herself when she finished.  I didn’t appreciate the feat then, but I do now, and more with each passing year.

Armed with her new degree, she decided to go back to work.  Doing what?  She had come to realize she was a gifted teacher, and she loved teenagers; she decided she would be a science teacher, and in no time she secured a job at Lake Placid High School.

But Alfred was unhappy about that.  Miserable in fact.  By applying pressure, by being petulant, by punishing her in myriad little ways, he got her to quit.  In the middle of a semester.  Any aspirations of pedagogy in the Northeast were dashed.

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children – Part VII

Charlotte never went back to med school, though I imagined she would have liked to.  Being mother of seven children had supplanted any career goals, but she was clearly restless.  When I was in high school, our long, dark waits were enlivened by discussion of whatever books I was reading, whatever books she was reading, whatever cultural event we had managed to take in.  We looked at collections of Impressionists and Expressionists, listened to classical music, and we argued about what was better, what was strong, what stank.  From her I learned to dissect literature and analyze characters; from her I stole a profound love for words and music.  I never got her facility with science and math, and she never really understood what drove me, but we both looked forward to those discourses.  We were two lonely women encaved in our New York State tundra (we lived in a small town in the Adirondacks by then), finding commonalities through the arts.

Nested against Mt. Pisgah, deep in the woods over the Village of Saranac Lake, NY, our former home (the larger one, furthest left) is now an apartment complex, listed as “the historic Larom-Wells Cottage in Adirondack guideboooks. (Photo by Barbara Maat)

Our ties deepened over the years as we battled new storms.  Some required what seemed at the time like simple adjustments. My oldest brother was diagnosed with diabetes; another brother had multiple learning disorders.  But others caused major upheavals. Dad fell from a third story roof while installing storm windows one Thanksgiving, and he was unable to work for months; Mom went out on the truck for him, and I held down the fort at home.  Two years after Dad recovered, an unlicensed, drunk driver rammed into Mom’s car, and she was hospitalized just inches short of death’s door, remaining in bed and incapacitated for the better part of the next three years.

Mama had to rely on me in ways no mother wants to be dependent on a child, and she never resented me or ridiculed my mistakes as she had when I was less responsible for her; it was a time of great bonding.  I began to find a way of being released from some of the omnipresent family duties, and she began to realize she wanted more from her life.

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children – Part VI

Mama was not yet 26 when I was 18 months, in Albuquerque, NM

Many of the places Alfred took Charlotte and us children were grossly unacceptable.  We lived in a miniscule trailer, a single space with an awning-ed ledge for cooking designed to be used from the outside, and a sleeping loft designed for a single short person or a pair of slight dwarfs, that they kept in a claustrophobic dustbin of a park outside Albuquerque, NM.  The sounds of coyotes yipping at the moon terrified the young mother left alone with a toddler while her husband traveled for business.  Our apartment in Flushing, where my first brother was born, was a basement flat where water puddled every morning beneath pipes leaking from the owner’s home above us.  Our walk-up in Springfield, MA, was infested with rodents so thickly we had them in the bathtub every morning; I had a special abhorrence for that old Farmer Gray cartoon where he turns on the faucet, and out tumbles a band of skinny mice.  In Deerfield, our 17th Century farmhouse had a hand pump for water and a wood stove for cooking and heat; we were surrounded by acres open fields with the Berkshires behind them, but we had a landlady who chased my two-year-old brother down a hill with her jeep.

Mom was miserable, though she never said so.  I knew because wherever we were I was her companion during those lonely wee-hour watches, but she never talked about it.

She talked about very little; we often just read in tandem or she read to me or I slept while she read.  We didn’t have a television until I was nearly through high school.

In my head, our story was fragmented because everything I knew came from tidbits dropped when she thought I wasn’t paying attention.  I read Exodus when I was 12, and suddenly — I’m not sure how — it became clear to me where my family had been and some of the pain they’d endured.  Mom wouldn’t confirm my suspicions until I had picked a terrible fight with her, and only then would she give me shreds of information about the death of Aunt Sala, her father’s sister, a doctor in Warsaw whom she adored, shot at her clinic when the Nazis seized her clinic and took her patients to Auschwitz; I didn’t learn only about her beloved uncles the hunchback and the opera singer or about Thea Matzner’s family or the other relatives’ fate until the ’70’s, long after I’d grown up.  Specific details of her siblings’ deaths, her nephew’s horrific demise, the loss of her home and music and the many other tragedies she had endured she kept to herself, bottled up, behind the nearly impenetrable wall she’d built around herself.

When I was 8, I had the mumps that led to an earache, the worst pain I can remember before or since. I awoke screaming out of nightmare images of knives piercing my head, of flying monkeys shooting poison arrows into my ears.  Mama brought me a hot water bottle and drew me into her arms.  I don’t know if the heat helped or not, but I do know that it was so unusual for her to hold me at all that I hoped the pain would last a week at least.  She was not one to dispense her love openly; that, too, she guarded against the many fatal forces that lurked about her.

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children – Part V

Charlotte was a survivor.  Accepted to two — two!! — medical schools in a time when women and especially Jewish women were subjected to severe quotas, she eschewed the career path and chose instead to marry my father Alfred, himself the survivor of a tragic life and already the widowed father of a troubled daughter.

Rudolfine and Henri Robinson with my father Alfred Burhans Swett (R), in 1946

Marrying Alfred has always seemed to me a way my mother chose to hide from the sources of her suffering — Europe and Judaism.  He was so foreign to her — descended from 17th Century Puritan and Dutch settlers in New England and New York; his sister was a flag-waving member of the DAR.  Mom could wrap herself in his overbearingly blonde musculature and protect herself and all her offspring from the horrors she’d come to know so well.  Taking on his 13-year-old daughter seemed like a calling, and she plunged into it with obsessive resolve, leaving her sisters and parents on the outskirts of the new village she and Alfred were creating.

Dad’s daughter Dorothy had difficulty living with them, and she went back and forth between their home and his sister’s. Alfred was in flight from his own tragic history, and he went from job to job and place to place with the ease of a wandering Jew.  We lived in eleven homes before I was halfway through fourth grade, and though my grandparents’ home in Queens was anything but stable, it seemed to me to be grounded in a granite that I was for some reason being kept from.