We were a team. Pirate mother and parrot daughter, puppeteer and marionette. My stage mother didn’t give me lessons in piano, or dancing, or horseback riding. She taught me to be seen. Visibility was our Basic Scales, First Position, Stay in the Saddle. It was survival.
CHAPTER 5
Leprechaun
There’s not just love in this story, but luck.
There is both bright luck and dark luck. Bright luck was two parents who loved me. Bright luck was Dr. Martin as my surgeon, and a mother who’d had a hospital career.
Dark luck is not bad luck. Luck can be shrouded and half-shadowed, if its outcome takes years—even half a lifetime—to be revealed. If its origin is pain. My darkest luck was a gift from my three dead siblings. Carole had three miscarriages in the three years between her wedding day and the day that I was born. After such loss, how could she give up a living child?
By the time that Frankenstein was published, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley had already had one miscarriage and given birth to two children. The second—a daughter—died before she was two. Of Shelley’s five pregnancies, only the last survived to adulthood. Is it any surprise that she fantasized the power to revive the dead? Could Frankenstein have been written by anyone but a mother who had lost child after child? A woman for whom the line between life and death had smudged and faded?
* * *
—
My mother wrote this poem sometime in my first two years:
Riva was so ill, my Lord,
And we turned to you to pray,
Though doctors said she would still be gone
Your miracles allowed her to stay.
………………………
So, I end by giving thanks again,
For Riva’s life and miraculous mind.
From our Lord, the Great Creator,
Who is loving, and infinitely kind.
Mom first told me about her miscarriages when I was seven or eight years old. She only explained one of them: it had happened after she’d walked belly-first into a parking meter. I never understood. Did someone bump into her? Did she slip on wet pavement? I began to see parking meters as secret, vicious robots waiting to take down the unwary.
More dark luck: I was born into a generation of Jewish children who were each regarded as an individual revenge on Hitler’s designs. In Germany, I would have been the first in line for euthanasia. Perhaps that was another reason why I was kept out of an institution. I never asked Dad how he felt when I was born, but knowing his pessimism and his kindness, it probably fit with his tendency to expect the worst.
My mother never said whether her lost children had been given names, and I never asked. I suspect they had, if only in the secret mourning book of her heart. I imagine that she said Kaddish for them on Yom Kippur, whispering names only she knew.*
* When Carole worked for Josef Warkany, no one knew that the majority of cases of spina bifida were caused by a lack of folic acid in the mother’s system. By the 1970s, the Centers for Disease Control recommended that pregnant women be given folic acid supplements, to aid in the formation of neural tissue and dramatically reduce the incidence of spina bifida.
I recently learned, from my uncle Lester Horwitz, that Carole was part of Warkany’s research on the effect of vitamins and supplements on birth anomalies. Uncle Lester thought it likely that folic acid was part of their research. I can only imagine how Mom felt when the CDC came out with its findings.
CHAPTER 6
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
After my mother’s magic act, the campaign to institutionalize me abated. Children’s Hospital tilted and yawed and tipped me out its Gothic doors. I was two. I was going home.
* * *
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My little brother Douglas (nicknamed “General MacArthur” for his bulbous forehead) was four or five months old when I was released. I arrived home nearly as helpless as my baby brother; a toddler who’d not yet toddled.
I was small, but the same could not be said of my caravan of medical supplies. My toys and bits of clothing were lost among the medications, the boxes of sterile bandages, adhesives, syringes, the antiseptic and antibiotic unguents. Our apartment couldn’t accommodate the four of us plus my personal infirmary, so after two years of crowding we moved several miles uphill to a house on Laconia Avenue, in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood called Bond Hill. The affluent Jews lived downtown; Bond Hill was a province of shop owners, bookkeepers, and employees of nearby Procter & Gamble.
I was four years old. This is where my own memories begin.
* * *
—
Our red-brick Tudor bungalow stood in the dead-end circle of Laconia Avenue. The house loved sunshine. The stained-glass panel in the front door cast a luminous puzzle across the living room wall. Light was a living thing, shimmering on the bistre varnish of the woodwork, slinking through pebbled glass in the laundry room, and swirling inside cut-glass doorknobs like giant diamonds.
Just as when I’d been in the hospital, I mainly saw my father once the sun went down. He spent most of his time at his office, in a tiny building behind my Uncle Lester’s advertising agency. After dinner, he’d pile his tax returns on the dining room table and sort-of watch TV with our family—at least as much as could be seen from fifteen feet away.
At Children’s, my mother had been a medical expert, but at home, Carole Lehrer was an artist.
My mother loved objects that made the most of that light. Murano vases, engraved brass bells, hand-blown glass animals, gilded Shabbos candlesticks, patinated menorahs. The cabinet in the living room held wedding china rimmed with gold and painted with platinum wheat. I’d wait until no one was looking and pick up her curios, peer through the red swirls of the glass rooster, and let it distort the colors of the rest of the room. I’d polish her treasures with my sleeve and put them down just the way she positioned them, except for the terrible day when I broke a tiny elephant. Its trunk lay snapped in my palm like a lost limb. I prayed that it was possible to heal glass.
She didn’t just collect; she created. Clothing, jewelry, puppets, costumes, elaborate handmade cards. Food that I still remember on my tongue half a century later. Her creativity found outlet in small things, in the permissible, restricted expressions of women with children. Carole’s aesthetic was born out of a love for the fleeting and breakable world.
* * *
—
On Laconia, Doug and I shared a bedroom. I appeared smaller than my actual age and Doug was a big child, so not only did strangers think we were twins, our own family treated us that way. We were given baths together in the tub, facing away from each other, backs resting skin to skin, an imposed modesty that dissolved as we lunged for toy boats and one or both of us peed in the water. I was content to share my room because in exchange I got a person who was mine alone. If I woke up to the slap of my brother’s footie pajamas on the hardwood floor, rather than a nurse shoving a thermometer someplace unspeakable, well then, all was right with the world.