Chapter 3
I HAVE FEW MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER WHILE WE LIVED IN MIAMI. When she was home and not sequestered in her bedroom, I’d hear her move swiftly through the house making sliding sounds over the terrazzo. Rather than lifting her feet she skated room to room so her bedroom slippers wouldn’t fall off.
I have many more images of my father, even though he wasn’t home much.
But when he’d show up it was fun and exciting, even as I felt mostly ignored.
I can still see him making Jiffy Pop, sliding the pan back and forth over the burner as the kernels machine-gunned, the foil swelling until he stabbed it with a fork, steam blasting out.
He’d spirit us away to Shorty’s Bar-B-Q where we’d have baby back ribs and corn on the cob at a picnic table, sawdust on the floor.
I loved Royal Castle, eating cheeseburgers, drinking birch beer.
Dad would bring us barrels of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and hoagies in thick buns with delicious meats, cheeses, and shredded lettuce.
One Sunday morning when I was four and it was too hot to fish, my brothers and I were in the kitchen that Mom decorated in greens and yellows because they didn’t show the dirt.
I’d heard her telling our maid Lutilla that while I was sitting at the table spooning tomato soup into my mouth, wishing I could drink it out of the bowl. When I did, I spilled too much.
On this occasion, my brothers and I were eating Frosted Flakes when Dad walked in, sunglasses in hand.
“Come on, Boo Boo Bears,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s get into the car.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
My brothers and I climbed into his Karmann Ghia convertible, white with a tan interior.
It was early but already scorching, the Miami sky pale blue like a swimming pool, and no breeze.
As we drove, I pointed out water trickling across the hot pavement ahead, wondering how that was possible when it hadn’t rained in days.
The shimmering ribbons moved as we did, never getting closer. Dad said they were heatwaves that created mirages. He explained the illusions weren’t water or anything we could touch. A metaphor for life, I’ve always thought. No point in chasing something you can’t catch. But that’s never stopped me.
We pulled over at a Shell service station, and Dad parked in front. He left us in the car, the silver keychain gently swinging in the ignition. Inside, he talked to a man behind the cash register, handing him a crumpled dollar bill. When Dad returned, he yawned open the trunk.
Nearby was a big white freezer, Crushed, Cubed and Block ICE. Pay inside in blue letters. Opening the square door to a cloud of thick fog, he pulled out three blocks of ice, the biggest I’d ever seen, loading them into the trunk, where they slid and thumped during the drive home.
Filling the wading pool, he arranged the blocks of ice in the grass, reminding me of polar bears at the zoo.
My brothers and I would freeze our backsides before jumping into the water to thaw.
While this was going on, the screen door thudded shut, my mother emerging from the house.
She was in a sailor dress that reminded me of a bib worn the wrong way, a big straw hat shadowing her face.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” she said, her sandals clacking past Dad.
I could feel her unhappiness and the tension between them. My grandmother G.G. lived within walking distance, and Mom announced she was going there for lunch. They were extremely close, much to my father’s annoyance. He resented G.G. and anyone who adored her.
Some of my earliest memories are of Mom and G.G.
going shopping or sitting in the yard, drinking iced tea under a shade tree, talking, laughing.
They’d take my brothers and me to Matheson Hammock Park for swimming and picnics.
When G.G. babysat we’d sally forth on treasure hunts, filling a picnic basket with whatever struck our fancy.
Flowers. An intact leaf skeleton. A bit of sea glass. A perfect shell. A coconut.
She’d surprise us with unusual toys like the Etch A Sketch filled with “magic” aluminum powder that made it possible to draw pictures by manipulating two plastic knobs. I discovered that the transparent screen was glass when I cracked Jim over the head during one of our fights.
Everything G.G. gave us was instructive, like the gravity-defying toy car that used suction cups to climb walls.
The Wooly Willy taught us about a magnet’s attraction to the metal chips we dragged with a wand.
I made impressions of my finger pads in Silly Putty, wondering the purpose of the loops and whorls.
As my brothers and I sat on our big blocks of ice, I watched Mom’s blue dress and white collar disappear behind stucco walls and green bushes. Dad wasn’t smiling.
Dad returned to the air-conditioned house, the screen door screeching like a cartoon bird and banging shut.
G.G. was my father’s mother, and he had as little to do with her as possible.
She loved and enjoyed Mom, who didn’t come home the rest of the day.
By late afternoon our ice had melted away, and Dad reappeared to fire up the grill.
He cooked a sirloin steak that my brothers and I devoured, fighting over the bone.
My father wasn’t affectionate or demonstrative, and certainly not a disciplinarian.
He didn’t raise his voice but spoke deliberately as if stating his case before an appellate judge.
But when he was around, he fed and entertained us.
I associate him with delicious food. That might have been a factor in my developing a life-threatening eating disorder years later, resulting in my being hospitalized.
Mom hated to cook, and barely tried. I don’t remember a single meal she served while we lived in Miami except for chicken cacciatore that she’d make with canned mushrooms, spaghetti sauce, and dried oregano from the spice rack.
We’d eat it night after night. But even making that was rare, as unhappy as she seemed.
When she was around, she spent a lot of time picking up and cleaning. She’d wipe fingerprints off the refrigerator. Usually they were mine no matter how many times she’d tell me to touch only the handle.
“Kinder sind so ein trost,” she’d say in German.
Children are such a comfort. That’s what my great-aunt Tilly would lament when Mom was a child in Chicago and dropped food on the rug. If it was strudel, she wanted it anyway, holding out her hand for the apple filling and broken pastry.
“Du bist verrück, mein kind!” Aunt Tilly would laugh at what a crazy child Mom was.
By the time I was five, she was either gone from home or in her bedroom most of the time.
The housekeeper didn’t come in anymore, and neither did the babysitter.
There was no one to grocery shop, heat up soup, make sandwiches, or do anything else.
Sometimes I had to scrounge, eating raw hamburgers and hot dogs from the freezer.
I was aware that my parents were having problems. On one occasion, I heard Mom screaming hysterically in the kitchen where John was sitting in his high chair.
Then a door slammed as she shrieked and cried.
When I tried to check on her, Dad ordered me to return to my room.
I was frightened by how aggressive and unkind he seemed.
Later I found out that Mom had spilled hot bacon grease on herself.
Grabbing the diaper or “baba” John held for comfort while sucking his fingers, Dad roughly wiped her hand, the top layer of skin rolling off.
Shoving her into their bedroom, he shut the door, telling her not to come out until she “got hold” of herself. I remember feeling scared.
My father’s demeanor was unnerving. He’d look right through me as if I were made of air.
I don’t remember him hugging or touching my brothers and me hardly ever.
He didn’t ask about our feelings or seem to care if we had them.
Even when he whisked us away on fun outings or bought presents, there was a disconnect that made me feel wilted and empty.
By the fall of 1961 he was having a meltdown while sleeping with his secretary, a cheap-looking woman I’ll call Shirley.
The affair wouldn’t last, and I’ve often wondered if it was a way of escaping his dysfunctional marriage with my mother.
I remember their fights, her crying while he remained mostly silent.
He wouldn’t engage, and that was one of the most frustrating things about him. If he was reading the newspaper and my brothers and I started squabbling, his answer was to rustle the pages.
“Sam, why do you just sit there and allow them to fight?” Mom would say. “They could kill each other, and I don’t think you’d even notice.”
She’d push her auburn hair off her face, sometimes with shaky hands. Her skin was as pale as marble because she didn’t like the sun, and I’d detect the fear in her eyes.
Don’t show it. Don’t show it.
I knew what happened if you did. It was a red flag for Dad. He was bullied most of his young life, and to him fear was weakness. It was the scent of blood to a predator.
“They just want attention,” he’d say from behind his newspaper, speaking slowly, logically like an attorney to a client. “Eventually they’ll learn that the way to get attention is to be good.”
He talked about us as if we weren’t in the room, and at times I felt certain he didn’t know we were. He didn’t see us, and my impulse was to jump in his lap.
I’m here!
I’m here!
“When are you going to stop applying your logic to us?” Mom said one morning, twisting the belt of her bathrobe. “I wish you’d leave your cold analysis in the office.”
“The law is all there is,” Dad replied in his impenetrable voice.
I eavesdropped while tracing patterns with my finger on the stone floor. As my parents’ fight heated up, I scuttled around the corner like a crab, leaning against the wall, listening.
“Naturally, I don’t expect you to feel the same way, Pat. You obviously have no respect for the law.”
“You’re a monster, Sam…”
I’d heard this exchange before and wouldn’t understand until later that what my father alluded to were three abortions Mom had undergone in Chicago.
Her first was at the age of seventeen when she was dating a Lake Michigan lifeguard.
They had sex in the backseat of his car, and she thought that was safe.
She couldn’t get pregnant unless she literally slept with the person.
Her older sister Alice took Mom to some back room where a doctor performed the illegal procedure. I don’t recall if Mom ever mentioned who got her pregnant the other two times. When she and my father had been married several years, she told him the truth. He turned on her after that.
“If you weren’t so weak, if you had been strong enough to obey the law, maybe then I’d have some respect for you, Pat,” he said in his soft voice, the newspaper rustling. “Murder, I just can’t believe it.”
“I had no choice. Six weeks old… not human yet… The doctor said it wasn’t murder.” Mom was sobbing. “Oh, I wish to God I’d never told you!”
When she cried, so did I, stifling it as I spied from my hiding place. I didn’t know the word abortion then. When I did it would cross my mind that if she’d had three of them, maybe the unborn babies didn’t give up. Maybe they insisted on being here and came back as my brothers and me.
During another one of my parents’ fights, Dad refused to engage emotionally as usual, dismissively telling her to stop being hysterical.
She called him a monster again, and he said she was out of control, stupid, and worthless.
I was hiding in the hallway listening. When his footsteps sounded in my direction, I crept into my bedroom, closing the door.
Moments later, I watched through my window as he left the house, walking across the lawn, his tennis racquet tucked under an elbow.
His shorts and shirt were white like snow against the thick grass and bright sky.
He climbed into his car and drove away, leaving Mom dismantled.
Absenting himself and ghosting were his special weapons.
Most likely what offended him at his core weren’t the abortions she’d had years before they’d met.
He didn’t hold life sacred as best I could tell, and I doubt that the illegality of what Mom had done was the biggest problem either.
He was massively insecure, picked on when he was younger, accustomed to being called a weakling, a sissy.
As a child, my father had a lazy eye and wore glasses.
He was quiet and studious, much smarter than his peers, making him a target.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he played on the tennis team while future Wimbledon champion Vic Seixas was the captain.
Dad was assigned to the dorm for varsity athletes.
He shared a room with a football player who found Dad inconsequential, a wimp.
In the late 1940s, tennis wasn’t the sport it is today.
Men running around in white with wooden racquets wasn’t macho.
My father looked like the proverbial nerdy professor and wasn’t outwardly aggressive.
Every night his football player roommate would stay out late partying.
He’d return to the room drunk and pee on the floor, not cleaning up after himself, expecting my father to do it.
Dad obliged without saying much or acting like he cared.
He would wreak his revenge by mixing green dye into the roommate’s Brylcreem pomade, and a little dab would do him, all right.
Day after day, the roommate’s slicked-back hair got greener, to his bewilderment.
Certain he had a fatal illness, he sought medical care, and no one could determine the cause of the problem.
While this was going on, Dad swapped out the Brylcreem for an untainted bottle, the football player never knowing why his hair was green and then not after a while.
To me this wasn’t funny considering the distress Dad caused. But confrontation wasn’t his style. Sneak attacks like that were his modus operandi.