by Lee Siegel
This was too much for my mother to tolerate. Thanks to my father’s run of good luck when the real estate market was booming, they were only a few years away from paying off their original mortgage. Taking out a second mortgage would rob them of equity that would be available to them in their retirement. It would endanger them for a second time, placing a sword over their heads much like the Draw.
But my father was insistent, exuberantly making his case. He was itching for a second chance. It was several years since he had replaced the Electra with a new model. The sleeves on his suits were beginning to shine with wear. His shoes were buckling in at the toe.
It wasn’t just the pressures of his past and an escapist imagination that were driving him toward yet another disastrous decision. The artist in him, the pianist and the uncompleted painter, needed freedom from restraint. His human wealth required just enough money to remove the encumbrances on his spirit. Out of the welter of self-destructive impulses came these healthy promptings that he could not have been aware of or able to put into words, but that were as much a part of him as his guilt and self-doubt.
He possessed another superlative quality, too. He was kind. Other men, the men he had worked with in real estate, got rewarded for their coldheartedness, and often for their dishonesty, while he, Monroe Siegel, who had never hurt and would never hurt anyone, had to groan and stumble through life simply because he could not operate at a similar distance from his feelings. Did not kindness deserve an income?
After several months of tense calm, during which my father continued to sleep in the den, his new plans pushed their marriage into its terminal phase. This time there was no hushed whispering in what was now my mother’s bedroom, followed by her screams and my father’s retreat. The fighting occurred all over the house, at all times of night and day.
The last thing my father wanted to happen was my mother leaving him. For all his excitement about his idea, a few days, or even a few hours of objection from my mother would have convinced him to back down. Amid my mother’s yelling, my brother and I could hear him saying, Maybe you’re right, and, We could wait a while if you want. He was clearly about to reverse himself. But whenever he seemed to yield, my mother escalated her attacks on him.
She was not going to let the opportunity pass. The very fact of him wanting to take out a second mortgage was the proof of my father’s detachment from reality that she needed in order to finally say goodbye to him. Her nerves had rejected him a long time ago, then her flesh. But her conscience needed something more solid.
She instinctively knew that she required an error of judgment so plainly rooted in my father’s character that she could console herself with it in times of regret, or on those occasions when someone lifted a reproachful eyebrow as if to say, “You reap what you sow.” Most of all, she had to have irrefutable proof of my father’s lack of responsibility to his family so that she could present it to Menka, whose opposition to her divorce from my father must have reminded her of his opposition to her desire to become an actress.
For those reasons, my father’s openness to her objections incited her to greater fury. She was not going to permit him to escape back into the marriage by complying with what she wanted. What she wanted was no longer anything that he could give her.
In my mother’s eyes, the qualities that he thought warranted a dispensation from the world’s hard consequences—the qualities that once assured her they would have a future together—were the gates of hell. Behind my father’s kindness, she saw denial, weakness, selfishness, and vanity. His plea for her to have rachmones she regarded as a challenge to her existence, a death threat. Once he left their bed, everything was over. His sojourn in the den was her Purgatory.
Or so I imagine.
* * *
Within months of my father proposing a second mortgage, my mother asked one of her cousins, the husband of one of Menka’s nieces, a high-flying divorce lawyer in Manhattan, to file for divorce and get my father’s name off the deed to the house. It was a tricky process, but he was a skillful lawyer. Not long after that, my father was out of the house and my mother and Angelo were openly involved, though Angelo did not move in for a couple of years, until his and my mother’s divorces were finalized.
Did my father know about Angelo and, if he did, was that the true motive behind him wanting to take out a second mortgage? Would the new burden of debt, in both his and my mother’s names, have proved her commitment to the marriage if she had agreed to it? The material constraints it would have imposed might have guaranteed her fidelity, or at least her caution.
The son of Sicilian immigrants, Angelo had grown up in a strict Catholic household in industrial Paterson, New Jersey, about twenty minutes away from Paramus. Defying his family’s working-class suspicion of intellectual pursuits, he resolved to become an educator. Not just a teacher, but an educator. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college. He was also one of the few Italian Americans of his generation to earn a Ph.D., which he received in the field of education.
As soon as I learned from my mother that Angelo was going to supplant my father, I plotted with Paul Dolcetto, who claimed to know about these things, to kidnap Angelo from his elementary-school parking lot and break his legs with my Louisville Slugger—Go, Lee-boy! You can do it, Lee-boy!—thus persuading him to reconsider what he was doing to the castle and the royal family. But I came to my senses.
* * *
My mother told me that she liked Angelo because he took everything in stride. With his steady, observant eyes, he did create a calming effect. He had a naturally broad chest but delicate features: arched cheekbones and thin, flared nostrils. A chain smoker, he suffered from a persistent cough. The delicate facial features atop his broad chest seemed precarious when he coughed, like a pyramid of crystal champagne glasses balanced on a wobbly metal table.
The truth was that he was holding it all in. Ten years after taking up with my mother, he was dead of a heart attack. Angelo’s Irish-Catholic wife had lost her mind, in a tempest so destructive that a New Jersey judge took the unusual step of giving Angelo full custody of their three children. He had whisked them away, without a second’s hesitation or doubt, to the alien sanctuary of my mother’s split-level house. Angelo handled stress with a Sicilian sense of fatality.
So while he busied himself in the kitchen, cooking delicious southern Italian dishes like braciole, my mother applied herself to his children in her characteristic way. Regarding them as obstacles to Angelo’s loyalty, she demonized them by pretending that they were pawns of their mother.
Trying to preserve himself for his children, Angelo maintained his outward serenity in order to spare himself and turned a blind eye to my mother’s cruelty toward them. When my mother caused the children to cry by feigning disgust with something one of them said, or by disparaging his two daughters’ appearance, Angelo would put his long arms around Lola and the wounded child, say, There, there now, and try to calm everyone down. This made his children hopeless. On their daily visits to our house, they moved around like wraiths, which left Lola with a satisfied gleam in her eye. Angelo, a gifted cook, returned to the kitchen shaking his head yet smiling to himself as he worked.
With me, Angelo practiced the same careful self-preservation. After my initial belligerence toward him, I weakened, as I always did before men who seemed to possess a strength that my father lacked.
He was not like my father, who was good at bursts of enthusiasm with me—cheering me on, racing slot cars, watching movies—but bad at the long haul of talking with me and trying to figure out who I was. My whole immersion in the world of high culture, of books and classical music, had gone almost unnoticed by my father. Monroe was too beset by professional and personal difficulties to be able to focus on the specifics of my life. He tried to make up for that with shows of affection. Hugging me and kissing me, he would tell me how smart I was, how funny, how cut out I was for great things in the world. Then he would withdraw wearily in
to himself and disappear in plain view.
Angelo, eager to establish harmony in the house, detected my hunger for someone to share my passion. One of his first gestures was to buy me The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry—the first edition, now out of print and a collector’s volume. I was over the moon. His communion with me touched me deeply. That book and I became inseparable. Its gossamer-thin pages, crowded with words that could not be reduced to words, dense with intuited meanings that conferred a special distinction on the person who apprehended them, lifted me above all the desperate whispering, shouting, and conferring around me.
Occasionally I would read a poem to Angelo. He would listen intently, wait until he caught my eye, and merrily raise his eyebrows to display a bond with me. I don’t think he ever connected with the poetry because it would have required him to abandon his cheerful detachment. But he enjoyed watching me grow closer to him.
I loved reading him one particular poem, written on the occasion of a young boy’s birthday. He listened to the last stanza with an affable smile:
Happy Birthday, Johnny,
live beyond your income,
travel for enjoyment,
follow your own nose.
However, my mother soon grew threatened by my attachment to Angelo. She began to reel him into her conflicts with me. Whenever this happened, he darkened and pulled back from me, as if something familiar deep inside him was striding forward to crush the life out of his heart.
As the place where blood and oxygen meet and are exchanged—the inside achieving equilibrium with the outside—the heart makes for a good Armageddon. I had no awareness of Angelo’s fears, of course. As he maneuvered to preserve himself for his children, I shrugged him off and began to move away from him, as I had with my father.
* * *
Living with just my brother and me, my mother was free at last. But she was not happy. She had only one close friend, who, busy with her own family, could not ease my mother’s loneliness and despair. She belonged to no clubs or groups. She had no money. She could not turn to either of her parents for support. Menka was of course out of the question, and Rose’s support consisted mostly of not offering any resistance.
My mother was ill-equipped to become the person she wanted to be. In the same way, there are people with no aptitude for math or science who dream of becoming doctors.
The distance between what my mother wanted and what she had the capacity to get for herself made her decision to leave my father all the more brave in her own eyes. It certainly didn’t lack for courage, or prudence. Whether my father would have been able to get a second mortgage or not, the state of mind that made him resolve to do so would have jeopardized all of our futures. He had already demonstrated how irrational desperation was making him by using the money I had received for my bar mitzvah, including savings bonds meant to pay for my college education, to try to appease Albatross in his negotiations with them.
My mother felt she had no choice but to push my father out of the house. Yet she had not fully reckoned with the consequences. It had not occurred to her to weigh the difference between unhappiness within a marriage and unhappiness outside it. This is not to say that I think she should have stayed with my father. It is merely that there is only so much people can do to be happy, no matter what they think they should do.
* * *
Shortly after my father left the house my mother had a nervous breakdown. She raged and wept. The bedroom became her home within our home. It was convalescent room, crisis center, and bunker all in one. Reaching her breaking point in the course of the day or night, she would run into the bedroom and slam the door. Then she would lock it. She would stay in there, probably lying in bed, sobbing and wailing, sometimes for hours at a time.
I was sixteen when her implosions began, not old enough to drive, though old enough to flee the house toward the sanctuary of my friends. But so long as she was in crisis, I couldn’t leave her. I withdrew to my room, where I maintained a vigil beside the anguish pouring out of the room next to mine.
Nathan had long ago made a separate life for himself in his own bedroom. We were not able to console each other. My mother was responsible for this impasse. An only child, she was threatened by the possibility of an alliance between siblings. She could not conceive of sharing our love. We had to exist as two distinct streams of loyalty.
But competition between Nathan and me was the minimum of what my mother was trying to stir up between us. She sought our complete estrangement from each other. You are my favorite, she would whisper to me, sometimes within earshot of my brother. I love you the most, you know that, she would say, with that gleam of sardonic defiance in her eye.
She might well have repeated the same sentiments to my brother, though from the way he regarded me with hatred and alarm, I doubt it. To make the wedge between us permanent, she would tell me, this time in his presence and without the pretense of hiding it from him, that I was smarter, better looking, and more popular than he.
This was as absurd as it was cruel. I was mostly doing poorly in school, while he was not, and though we both required braces, my teeth, unlike his, looked like wartime rubble. I also had a stubborn cowlick that you could have hung me from.
If I was more popular, he had a sense of self-possession that I mostly lacked. What little self-possession I had I hungrily extracted from books and movies. There in my imaginary world, I invented a way to survive and constructed an ideal alternative self. I possessed two selves: a self-hating one that had no rational basis for loathing himself, and this invention of a grandiose one whose exalted stature was imaginary.
Nathan and I both had to contend with our mother’s tumultuous sorrow each in his own way. He grew closer to her but at the same time managed to keep his distance. I moved in the opposite direction. For all my resentment of her, I could not bear to hear my mother suffer. From time to time I’d leave my room, go to her door, jiggle the doorknob, and knock gently, asking her if she was okay. Go away, she would say, let me alone. Yet she would say it in such a way, with such a desperate, pathetic whimper, that my inability to escape was guaranteed.
* * *
With my brother occupying his own forbidding space, the haywire sexual energy of both my parents gravitated toward me. In her early forties, my mother had coal-black hair, dark brown eyes, and a youthful figure. She really did look a lot like Loretta Young. As she began to lose control of herself, and at the same time to feel penned in by her new life in the old house, she turned to me.
I would be eating a snack in the kitchen after coming home from school. Suddenly she would appear in the kitchen doorway, wearing a new pair of tight jeans that she had squeezed herself into. Sometimes she would be wearing a yellow baseball cap that she had just bought. How do I look? she would ask me, leaning provocatively against the wall.
Something in the metamorphosis that she had been counting on had misfired. All of her changed, not just the part of her that she wanted to change. The old tendency to pity herself for the way life had limited her became a new tendency to pity herself for the way life starved her desires now that they had become unbound. No longer did she behold my sicknesses and injuries and cry, Why is this happening to me? Now she saw my youth and my gratifications and she cried, What are you doing to me?
Whatever there might have been in her that was reenacting Menka’s seductiveness with her, or taking revenge on my father, or simply losing her grasp on reality as she related to me the way she wanted to relate to other men, she had become, in some strange permutation of her personality, a jealous rival for the life that she wanted to live and that I seemed to be living.
My adolescent brain was having a difficult time absorbing my new, seductive mother. When I closed my eyes to try to sleep at night, images of girls and of sex mixed with the sight of her in those tight jeans, wearing her sexy little cap, leaning against the wall.
* * *
Fortunately I had begun dating. This had the effect of stabilizing me, to
some extent. Tina Durrell was the name of the girl I was seeing. She was not my first crush, but she was my first girlfriend.
The more I looked to Tina for the emotional stability I was deprived of at home, the more I thought I loved her. Meanwhile, Tina mistook my reliance on her for a type of gallantry. This was because I expressed my dependence in the form of wanting to please her, by making her laugh, by encouraging her in her passions—she was a champion swimmer—and by consoling her in her endless conflict with her mother, who was given to manic flights and was raising Tina by herself after being left by her husband.
Ministering to other people’s needs like this was a capacity I developed: the ability to soothe, reassure, and uplift people the way I wanted to be soothed, reassured, and uplifted. The difficulty came when I expected them to return my ministrations. I had fallen so completely for Tina because she did return my solicitousness toward her.
The upset at home had inflamed my skin, causing psoriasis to break out all over my body. I was ashamed of the gross unsightliness that started out as an itch that I scratched and scratched, until it became a red patch, then a red bump, then a small red dot. As I worked at it with my nails, the red dot began to bleed, finally cooling off and drying into little circles of pink and white scabs. On broiling summer days I would wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts to hide my wounds.
The first time I took off my clothes with Tina, my desire for her conquering the shame I felt over my body, she ran her fingers over the scabs. I love your pink dots, she said. She made me feel good about myself. I trusted her.
I lost my virginity with her one afternoon in my mother’s king-size bed when my mother was out substitute teaching. I told her that I loved her while we were having sex, and I kept telling her, and I kept asking her to tell me that she loved me. She obliged in a low voice, dramatically, and with great delight, as if she was responding to my deepest emotional need, and not having sex with me at all.