by Lee Siegel
Here, as in just about everything else worldly and practical, my mother had the advantage over my father. They were both sentimental people, but my father was sentimental, period. My mother was too adept at manipulating her emotions to allow them to have the last word over her.
My father often talked about a traumatic event that occurred when he was a child. He grew up in a recently constructed white colonial in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburb just outside New York City. His family had a dog, a German shepherd named Rex, that they sometimes kept tied to a tree in the yard. My father loved him. One day someone cut the rope and made off with the dog. Whenever my father recalled what happened, his face took on a kind of stricken wonderment.
I never knew whether Rex was taken before or after the death of Monroe’s father, but marveling over the mystery of the missing dog, again and again, was Monroe’s way of grieving over his father while trying to suppress the memory of his father dying. My mother, on the other hand, was indifferent to animals. Perhaps it was because she could not perform for them.
In those moments when my mother berated him, my father would cry: Hab rachmones! which is Yiddish for “Have mercy!” My father knew about four words in Yiddish, and those were his two favorites.
* * *
My mother’s increasing unhappiness with my father turned her into a different person. She screamed at me over my slightest infraction. Modest requests that I made, like being permitted to stay up a little later, or asking her to drive me to a friend’s house, or even to allow me to have a friend over for a visit, she denied me with a gleam of malicious defiance in her eyes. Discontent with my father’s slowly worsening situation at his job seemed to bring out the Menka in her. I fell into the category of disappointing child. It was around then that she began to get physical with me in her anger, something I had never experienced with her before. It made me wonder whether she was telling the truth when she said that Menka only hit her once.
She never hit me in the face. She hit me on my arms and legs, preferring to slap me on my bare legs whenever she burst into my bedroom and caught me partly dressed or naked, in which case I hurriedly threw my blanket over myself in mortified rage.
In these scenes with my mother, which started when I was about fourteen, I surrendered to hysteria, sobbing and struggling to breathe, the way I had learned to give myself up to fever when it arrived with all its accompanying luxuries of care, attention, and dispensations from my everyday obligations. My only defense against my mother was to implore her in this way to mother me again.
Instead she yelled and continued to slap me. Her eyes flashed with Menka’s malice, and also with defiance of her own self-loathing. This made her hate herself even more, which fueled her defiance, and on and on, until she whirled away. She disappeared into her bedroom and slammed the door. I was left with red marks on my legs and arms.
During my mother’s slapping fits, I would pretend to be standing outside of myself. I invented an inner voice that I called the Old Man. The Old Man would comment on the scene with detachment. “She is hitting you,” the voice would say. “She is trying to scratch you. She is screaming at you. She is leaving the room.” By transforming these scenes into a kind of living story, I felt that the world was witnessing what I was passing through. Imagining that I was commenting on my experience for other people, the way my cherished authors wrote for other people and for me, made me feel less miserably alone. The ability to lose myself in the parallel worlds I found in books, and especially the joy I felt in coming up with my own ideas about life, became my deepest consolations. From that time on, intellectual reverie established itself as my favorite mode of escape from painful events and thoughts.
* * *
My father bore the brunt of my mother’s rage. She spit at him and tried to scratch his face. They became less like people and more like acting and reacting inanimate objects repeatedly colliding with each other in space. In my horrified eyes, material worry reduced them to scrimmaging chunks of matter themselves; to things. As if in an effort to recover his humanity, my father often fled from my mother’s wrath to the den of our small split-level house. There he spent hours listening to his modest collection of recordings of jazz pianists: Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner. Garner he prized above all the others.
What distinguished Garner was his percussive left hand. While other pianists used their left hand to seek out complicated chords that added depth and dimension to the melody, Garner’s left hand supported his melodies with a constant rhythm. He caressed, stroked, or pounded the piano with it. There was a joy to the way the steady, percussive left hand made the melody buoyant, propelled it upward. It was a joy that seemed to rise from Garner’s loins.
Garner began to play the piano at the age of three and never learned to read music. When he was eleven, he started playing on riverboats traveling the Allegheny River, and by fourteen, he was performing in nightclubs. For him, playing the piano was seamless with existence itself; his work was his life, and his life was his work. Somewhere my father shared Garner’s joyous self-fulfillment. You could see it in his glowing face when he sat down at home to play the piano, an old stained and nicked dark brown spinet that we kept in the den, a narrow room just down a flight of stairs from the kitchen. Perhaps this simple fulfillment explains why Monroe was so happy whenever he returned from a modest gig in a cavernous banquet hall somewhere. Even giving lessons seemed to cheer him. He didn’t seem to register the fact that he was scarcely making enough money to support us. He was playing piano. This is partly what drove my mother into her violent frenzies.
A depressed person, my father was easily transported out of himself by strong appeals to his senses like Garner’s music. His depression was rooted in the fact that pleasure filled his head with dreams of happiness and success. Once life imposed its demands, rigors, and restrictions, he retreated with sadness into himself. He needed the self-affirmation that pleasure briefly affords. Without that, life was just too hard for him, and he almost automatically resigned himself to setback and disappointment.
One of the ways I occupied myself, during long spells laid up in my sickbed, was to read book after book about the Holocaust. It became an involuntary passion; an escape from my sickness by immersing myself in an unfathomable disease of human nature. A passage in one of the books buried itself in my imagination. An SS officer distractedly mutters to a Jew he finds annoying, Why don’t you just kill yourself? The inmate shrugs his shoulders, finds a corner somewhere, away from the SS man who is no longer even aware of his existence, and hangs himself. My father, broken by his own father’s death, seemed not just to shrug but to nod in satisfaction when he lost his job, and when he began to lose my mother. It was as if he had always expected those things to happen.
* * *
My father and I watched Laurel and Hardy movies on TV together on rainy Saturday afternoons, my head resting on his stomach. Knowing how much I liked to hear the ticking of his watch, inherited from Leopold, he placed his hand over the side of my face so that I could hear the inner motions of the watch. While I listened, he gently stroked my face. Laurel and Hardy made my father laugh so hard that my head heaved up and down on his stomach as he roared. He adored slapstick. The spectacle of physical calamity that had no ill or fatal effects delighted him. We bought a slot car together and raced it at a place in a neighboring town once or twice a month. I was surprised to see how skillfully my father managed the turns at high speeds. Pitching for my Little League baseball team, I could hear him cheering me on, despite the fact that he knew nothing about baseball or about any sport. He was intimidated by athletic contests that fostered hard certainties about who should win and who should lose. Still, I could hear him yelling as I hurled the ball: Go, Lee-boy! Strike ’em out! You can do it, Lee-boy!
Gradually, though, he slipped from my grasp. His weakness, the way he fled from my mother, the fact that he could not fend for himself out in the world—all of that embarrass
ed me. Embarrassment, no matter how much I tried to suppress it, led to pity, and pity, no matter how hard I fought against it, incited my contempt.
* * *
I was fourteen when one afternoon on my way home from school I was confronted by two bullies. I was riding my bicycle near our house on an overpass that spanned Route 17. Our house was situated right off Route 17, which ran north into New York state and south toward New York City. I often walked to the overpass at night and lingered there. When it was clear, you could see the Empire State Building. The soaring obelisk’s spire was illuminated at night. During the day, it trembled in a blue haze.
That afternoon one of the bullies planted himself in front of me. We were all in the same junior high. I used to see them around, always together, always apart from everyone else. They wore denim jackets over white T-shirts: at the time, the outsider’s equivalent of a prep-school blazer.
One was blond, the other had dark hair. They would have been handsome, but nature had betrayed them. The first had dark red splotches on his cheeks, beneath high cheekbones. A giant brown pimple had grown on the fine, aquiline nose of the other.
I could have ridden straight into the boy who stood in front of me, but I might have knocked him into the road and the oncoming traffic. So I braked and stopped. The other boy came up close to me and butted me with his chest. The boy in front of me grabbed the handlebars of my bike and began to push and pull the bike. You’re a stupid faggot, said the one who was next to me. Each of them grabbed one of my arms. At that moment, Monroe drove by in his Buick Electra. All I had to do was wave and cry “Dad!” and they would have given me one final push and slouched off. But the possibility that my father might stop the car, walk over, and try to help me filled me with terror. I had an image of the two boys beating him. So I smiled and waved.
My father, I confessed to them after he had safely passed. The two bullies looked at me in surprise. Faggot, said one. Wuss, said the other. They pushed me a few more times and left. When I got home, my father grinned and patted my shoulder with affection. Your friends look like nice boys, he said. I’m glad you were having fun.
Around this time, my father, a big man, with thinning brown hair, crooked teeth, and bespectacled light blue eyes, was starting to flounder. His large frame began to sag with despair. The experience of my large father suddenly becoming vulnerable haunted me. Yet he proceeded as if his material circumstances hadn’t changed. He had some sharply tailored suits left over from his days in real estate that he liked to wear. He continued to indulge a weakness for expensive shoes, of which he had several pairs. Every year, as he had when he still worked as a realtor, he leased a gleaming new Buick Electra. The car was one step down from the Cadillac he dreamed of but never had the money for. He barely had the money for the Electra, either, but that didn’t stop him.
All these small boosts to his self-esteem belonged to the happy, oblivious piano-playing Monroe. The real Monroe could no longer afford them. One night my mother went into his closet, pulled out several pairs of his shoes, and confronted him. She threw them at his face, one after the other. He stood before her, transfixed by her rage. I hated her for humiliating him, and I hated him for allowing himself to be humiliated.
* * *
Burdened by stress, some people garden or take up photography. My mother went berserk. In these crazy bouts, there was not an impulse that she did not act on. There was not a sentiment that sprang into her mind that she did not express. Ya zig moi, vrog moi, the razor-tongued Menka liked to say in Russian. “My tongue is my enemy.” By means of hysteria, my mother turned herself into a riveting presence. Her hysteria was a plea for help, but it was also how she controlled her environment. Flying apart was how she kept herself together.
At the age of twelve, I broke my leg skiing at night with my junior high school ski club, at a place called Sterling Forest, just over the border in New York state. The binding didn’t release when I fell. My leg broke in two places; a spiral fracture wound its way up half of it. The ski patrol arrived in a cloud of flying snow. They bound me to a sled and raced with me down the mountain to an ambulance. By the time I got to the hospital the middle of my leg below the knee had swollen to the dimensions of a grapefruit. Numbness was giving way to pain. Orderlies rushed me on a gurney to a table in the emergency room, where a nurse began to cut away the leg of my pants.
Enter Lola. The conscientious, if unwitting, ski-club chaperones had called her to report my accident. I watched her with dread as she stood, timidly at first, in the doorway. Slowly her attention revolved from me to the emergency room’s bright lights and small audience of doctors and nurses. I began to moan to myself. I knew what was going on inside her head.
Paramount Pictures Presents
A Mother’s Ordeal
Starring
Lola Siegel
Introducing
Lee Siegel as “The Son”
With
A crowd of handsome young doctors, any one of whom could play the leading man in Lola’s next feature film, Say You’re Sorry!
Lola enters the hospital emergency room. Her striking brown eyes flash as she looks around for her son. There he is, lying on a table, wearing the same torn and filthy sweater he has been wearing for two weeks. People say Lola looks like Mary Tyler Moore. They are wrong. She is a dead ringer for Jennifer Jones. Maybe Loretta Young. But not Mary Tyler Moore.
LOLA
(touching her stunning coal-black hair as she flies past an admiring young physician)
My son, my son! What have they done to you? What have these vicious ski-club people done to you?
LEE
(clearly confused by his pain)
Mom, please.
LOLA
Oh, my son, my only son!
LEE
(confused and disoriented)
What about Nathan, Mom? My brother?
LOLA
Try not to talk, my darling. (Suddenly she becomes alarmed. Turning to the nurse, she exclaims:) Do you have to cut his pants? They are the only pair he has that are clean and without holes!
LEE
(transformed by his selfish adventure into a thankless child)
Mom, please leave!
(Lola’s heart begins to break. She turns to the doctors and nurses. She bursts into tears.)
LEE
(to the nurse)
Could you get her out of here? Please?
LOLA
What drugs have you given him? This is not my child!
(Lee turns away and moans softly.)
LOLA
(clutching her heart)
My son is in pain. I can’t breathe. Let me sit. Will he be able to walk again? Will he be able to make a living? Oh, I feel dizzy.
THE NURSE
(a vicious, envious little bitch)
You’d better wait outside, Mrs. Siegel.
(Sobbing quietly, Lola begins to exit the room. She stops.)
LOLA
(addressing herself to the evil nurse)
I will be in the waiting room all night, if you need a transfusion. (She pauses. Then she faces the doctors and nurses.) Or a transplant!
Lola returns to the waiting room and lowers herself into a chair. Soon she is brought a glass of water by a young doctor who looks like Keir Dullea in Madame X, the finest movie about a woman ever made, after Joan of Arc. She tells the young doctor, who has exceptionally straight teeth, the story of her life. He is moved beyond belief.
Original behavior, like my mother’s, is hard to resist. If you are dependent on it, as I was on my mother, you experience it as a type of power. And power awes. Whoever is being subjected to power makes no distinctions between the different forms of it. Power that has its origin in strength is indistinguishable from power that has its origin in weakness. I shrank into myself before my mother’s helpless jet streams of emotion. Still, they imprinted themselves on my reflexes.
For all her embarrassing or painful conduct, my mother embodied an attractive a
lternative to my father. In contrast to his weakness, she displayed strength. As my father’s inability to earn a living diminished his power, my mother’s emotional flights dominated our household. My weak, histrionic mother was power incarnate.
My father came home from the office one day with terror on his face. I heard him tell my mother that some of the men he worked with had been taken out in handcuffs. This was nothing new in the Walpurgisnacht of New Jersey real estate. People were getting arrested all the time. As I learned later in my life, the real estate industry in Jersey was rife with the fraudulent sale of trust deeds, forged escrow instructions and forged grant deeds, and the use of nonexistent buyers to purchase properties.
But my father was an innocent. He had strayed from the realm of making music, where he had given and received pleasure. That was the only world that he felt comfortable in. You walk into a room and sit down at the piano. Two other people enter and take up their positions behind a string bass and a set of drums. You play apart while at the same time playing together. No one expresses himself at the expense of someone else. No one can express himself without the collaboration of someone else. Even if you have a dead father dragging on you like cement shoes, you have the safety net of intertwined melodies below you.
Suddenly Monroe found himself in a world of calculating hardness. He found himself in business. Instead of collaboration he encountered collusion.
* * *
My socially uncertain parents rarely entertained, but they once had a small dinner party for a man who I assume was either my father’s boss or someone he worked with whom he had to impress. The honored guest was dark-suited, all starched white cuffs and collar. His watch and cuff links flashed under our tarnished brass chandelier. Under the light, his short, wavy black hair, controlled with gel, gave the top of his head a shiny, corrugated look. His face was genial, fleshy, and tan.
My younger brother was sequestered in his room as usual, obsessed with his coin collection. I wanted to come down, I guess I was about ten, to say good night to my parents.