March 9—At bedtime, Alexa crying about angels and Yuri. I find out Robbie has told her he is an angel. Then she says he is sleeping. I worry about how many explanations she has heard.
March 10—Alexa says Yuri in hospital and I say no otherwise she would visit him and I would be with him. She seems to understand this and says, “He has died” but I think I can tell her eyes are looking for what it means.
March 13—Putting on her socks, Alexa says they are too small and are the baby’s. “Yuri is in hospital.” No, I explain. If he were, we would be there with him. “He has died, but he’s happy,” she says. Yes, I say. “Can we bring him home again?” Oh god, if only we could.
March 13 (cont.)—Last night I lay in bed trying to fall asleep and I wondered with great pain what little Yuri must have thought those last horrible days and those moments he was dying. It breaks my heart to consider he saw only strange faces leaning on his chest, trying to resituate him. How I pleaded for them to let me come in—perhaps if he could have seen his mother, however cloudily—heard my voice. But in reality he was alone in his last moments. What must have been going on in his mind?
Yuri’s death tormented my mother. It tormented my father as well, but I have no record of his pain.
Later in the month, she went to Geneva for work, hoping that being out of London and having something to do might distract her.
March 21–23 I give my speech—rather well. Meet old colleagues at weekend conference. Shaking as I walk in. Forcing myself to “act normal.”
24–28 Geneva. Role playing and I long to scream and cry.
Early April—Alexa must have dreamed about Yuri or remembered the last time she saw him in hospital. She said, “Yuri…I kissed him and said be better.”
I still think of all old and new emergencies. How often I sang to him the words, “And if you take my hand, all will be well when the day is done.” I really believed I could protect him always.
Am answering all the letters and cards which were sent. It’s more than painful.
Sue said that she called my mother often during this time because she sensed something was wrong. She became more worried as each call continued to be ignored. “One afternoon your mother finally answered,” she told me. “I asked, ‘How have you been, how’s Yuri?’ And she blurted out, ‘He’s dead.’ ” Sue’s voice began to wobble. “We spent the next three hours on the phone. She just talked and talked about Yuri. Her description of your father holding his body was just awful.”
At one point during their conversation, my mother abruptly began talking about a film in a cheerful voice. Sue was confused. A moment later, my mother apologized and explained, “George came into the room. He doesn’t like to see me like this.” Sue thought that my father felt my mom shouldn’t be dwelling on Yuri’s death or “maybe he just didn’t want to hear it again. I went out almost immediately to see her, and she talked through what had happened, the absolute nightmare of it.” The one person who understood her grief didn’t want to hear about it, and wouldn’t share his. Both of my parents must have been dissecting the events surrounding Yuri’s death, finding ways to blame themselves and obsessing over what they could or should have done differently. My mother needed to share her pain, but my father made her bear it alone.
His parents came to visit a few months later. Instead of providing help or comfort, Irene attacked my mother. My mother shared one particularly terrible exchange with Sylvia.
The second night she cornered me and said, point-blank, without any thought that it might hurt, ‘How could you let the doctors murder your son?’ She is an amateur health nut and really believes that the penicillin treatment caused his suffering and death. God, the pain and incomprehension that welled up inside me.
My mother was haunted by her mother-in-law’s accusation. “The last time I was at the doctor’s, I found myself breaking down and asking whether my sweet Yuri should have been given penicillin. Please dear one,” she begged Sylvia, “mum’s the word about this unreal episode as I could never bear to tell anyone else—my mother, even George, how troubled I have been.”
My parents were isolated from each other, barely communicating about the tragedy that was possessing them. My mom was “troubled” by the idea that one of her decisions contributed to her son’s death, but she didn’t want my dad to know that she was thinking such things or that his own mother’s insensitivity contributed to her pain. What awful feelings to be alone with. Did she try to tell him or make him listen, or did she worry that my father hadn’t wondered about the penicillin, and that if she suggested it, he would suddenly conclude that she was guilty? Swallowing her grief, and having to act happy not just for her daughter but for her partner, who was supposed to support her, had to have been another kind of death.
As I learned more about this time, I wondered if this was when my mother began relying on her childhood ability to perform as an adult, to act like a person who was happy instead of one overwhelmed by misery. Her reaction to my father’s death years later might have been fueled by everything she hadn’t been able to say or do when her son died. After containing her feelings for so long, she had an opportunity to finally let them out. If she’d been able to speak about Yuri, maybe my father’s death wouldn’t have been as destructive as it was. She’d have only been dealing with one death, not two.
I considered how I dealt with grief and realized I didn’t have much experience actually feeling it. I’d never been as sad as my mother and didn’t know how torturous it was to hide such despair. But there had been times after my mother died, such as when I visited the drugstore where I’d once worked, when I’d erupted in tears. I hadn’t been aware of my pain, but I also hadn’t been able to muffle it when it arose. Like my sister, I thought I was good at compartmentalizing. But as I spent more time with my parents and my memories of them, my feelings would seep out and reveal I wasn’t as skilled as I believed. I constantly had nightmares where I screamed at my father or followed my mother through the house begging to be seen. I’d wake sweaty and tangled in the covers, pulsing with rage and gasping for breath. And once, after I’d gotten my nails done, I started crying because my manicurist insisted on zipping up my jacket for me so I wouldn’t mar the polish. That simple act, and the smile and pat that accompanied it, made me feel taken care of, looked after, and my reaction showed me how desperate I still was for maternal attention.
In 1975, my father received a six-month assignment in Kuwait, and he and my mother were separated for part of it. While they were apart, they continued to write to each other. After a visit to Kuwait, my mother wrote:
Dearest Love,
Here we are “at home” but as home is where the heart is, it’s very empty without you. Already—no not already, but the moment I left your side, I’ve missed you…
…My future awaits your nearness. Do love me soon. I kiss all of you.
He replied:
It’s been ten days since you left. The first few days seemed to drag out forever. I became very restless and depressed. Yet I really couldn’t get myself to get up to do anything. From morning to night seemed like such a long time. Somehow this state is beginning to change a little—although I don’t know whether to ascribe it to just getting used to the realities of life here or whether I am beginning to think about the fact that I’m not going to be here much longer…
…I wish I could hold you and crush you against my chest—I miss you very much.
These letters prove that their love was still there, even after the tragedy that had ravaged them. They seemed to be trying to close the distance Yuri’s death had placed between them. The following year, my father was made the senior vice president and area head for the Middle East and Africa division, and the bank moved them back to Boston. My mother didn’t want to leave and told Sylvia that she felt Yuri was in London. But she didn’t have a choice; she had to follow her husband.
&n
bsp; My parents bought a town house on the flat of Beacon Hill. It was a new home, but Yuri lived in my mother’s dreams and more often in her nightmares. She put framed pictures of him on dressers and chests but my father moved those pictures to drawers. I’d see those photographs a few years later but could not see what my parents did—the child they hadn’t been able to save.
Though my mother missed London, she was relieved to return to Boston. She was closer to her mother and Sylvia. She could keep working for the Sierra Club and be with old friends. Boston was normal and known, a place where things went well, where her son might not have died.
For my father, Boston meant new professional opportunities and being back with his Ukrainian friends. He enrolled Alexandra in Sunday Ukrainian classes at the local Orthodox church. He hadn’t been able to teach her Ukrainian because he wasn’t around enough to speak it to her, and my mother couldn’t reinforce the lessons in his absence.
But Alexandra hated Ukrainian school and tried to stay home every Sunday. Our dad made her go anyway and forced her to review what she’d learned while she squirmed and told him that she was bored. When he was traveling, which was often, Alexandra fought harder to stay home because she knew our mom would cave and let her.
My father was furious when he discovered my mother’s delinquency. She’d agreed to raise their children as Ukrainians before they’d gotten married; her refusal, whether the result of laziness, compassion, or defiance, was a betrayal. But his anger did not lead to change. Alexandra stopped going, and I was never sent; my father’s heritage, which he’d so badly wanted to share with his children, never became ours. When he moved to Ukraine a decade later, he went to a place that was important only to him, where no one in his immediate family could even ask for directions.
Sue and Martin, and their children Sophie and Joseph, visited my parents soon after they’d returned to America. Sue said they had “the most fantastic time,” eating lots of seafood, exploring the city, and watching their daughters play together, but my mother was still devastated about Yuri. Every night, she made Sue stay up with her while she guzzled brandy and “went over what happened, talking about it all again and again, and speaking of how critical your father’s parents had been of her.” Sue had the impression that my father still didn’t want to hear my mom speak about their son or her persistent miseries. The one person who understood and listened to her terrible pain, my mother told Sue, was her own mother, Helen.
My parents’ Hungarian friend Lili was the only person who remembered my father ever sharing his own pain. My dad agreed to join her for dinner shortly after Yuri’s death, and Lili “had no idea that he was coming with such devastating news. It was awkward,” she told me, “because at that particular moment, my sister was there with her husband. If I had known, I would have said ‘Don’t come tonight.’ ” My father “just poured out his heart” to her and her guests. “He told us the whole story. He wasn’t crying, but he was destroyed.”
Perhaps my father silenced my mother because her anguish was a reminder of his own. Instead of engaging, he retreated into himself. If my mother had been allowed to talk about Yuri ten nights in a row and then again on the eleventh, she might never have started speaking so often of her tragedies. Being silenced may have convinced her that no one ever listened to her or could understood all she’d lost.
During Sue’s visit, my mother confessed that she and my father wanted to have another child but were struggling to conceive. Her periods were irregular, and she believed that was a physical manifestation of her grief. One evening, as Sue went to check on Joseph, she heard my parents’ voices in his room. From the top of the stairs, she saw they were kneeling at his crib and watching him sleep. His eyes still on Joseph, my father whispered, “We’ll make another one, won’t we?”
They did. I arrived in 1977. I didn’t know that my parents’ joy was mixed with sorrow, that I shared my crib with a ghost, or that when my parents looked at me, they saw the threat of unbearable pain.
As a child, the only cause I could find for my father’s viciousness was myself. The “why” of his actions expanded when I learned more about a story my mother had told me when I was young. She’d admitted it was a lie when I was an adult, and when other people shared their own very different versions of it after she’d died, and after I better understood the effects of Yuri’s death, I finally gained a bit of insight into his rage.
I have bright scars all over my scalp. I can’t see them, but hairdressers always ask me about them. I tell them what my mother told me. When I was one and a half, I collided with a metal lounge chair as I crawled through the living room and “cracked my head open.” My mother wept in the cab that took us to the hospital as blood soaked through the towels she’d wrapped around me.
Sometime in college, when I was briefly in Boston for a holiday, I came home late and slightly high on Ecstasy. Feeling friendly, I decided to chat with my mom instead of rushing past her door like I usually did. I chirped mindlessly about my classes and roommates, then stumbled into a story about my most recent visit to a hair salon. The colorist had asked about my scars, and I’d told her about cracking my head open.
I wasn’t sure that my mother was listening until she turned to me and said, “Did we never tell you the truth?”
“The truth about what?”
She whispered, “We didn’t want you to be afraid of cats.”
I said, “What?”
She took a long sip of wine and told me what really happened. When I was an infant, I’d been attacked by Krupskaya, the Siamese cat my parents had had for years. I’d backed her into a corner thinking we were playing, and when she’d gotten scared, she’d lashed out, latching onto my head with her hind feet, shredding my skull and severing part of an eyelid. My mother was in San Francisco for work at the time. When she returned to Boston, I was back from the hospital and bandaged up.
People spoke low on the television. Its yellows and reds flashed across the walls of her room. I touched my head reflexively. “What happened to Krupskaya?”
“She was gone by the time I arrived. When I asked your father where she was, he said, ‘You don’t want to know.’ ” Her eyes widened as she waited for my response.
“You don’t know what happened to her?”
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
I stared at her. “You have no idea?”
She shook her head so vigorously that her glasses almost slid off.
This story felt different from the ones she usually told. It didn’t have a tidy ending. The look on her face, expectant, nervous, made me suspicious.
I called Alexandra the next day. “Do you remember what happened to Krupskaya? Were you there?” She would have been six at the time.
“I might have been at school. I remember being told to stay away from the cat while you were at the hospital. She was alive, and some adult was with me, maybe a babysitter. Dad probably had her put down. Krupskaya,” she clarified, “not the babysitter.”
“But if he’d put her to sleep, he would have said that. He wouldn’t have been all ominous…‘You don’t want to know.’ ”
“What else would he have done?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He could have done lots of things.”
Krupskaya came up while I was in Chicago with Chrissy and Arlene. We found a picture of her in a photo album. As Arlene cooed over the picture, Chrissy said that “Krupy” had been the most darling cat.
“She was not darling!” I screeched. “She ate my face!”
Chrissy told me to quit being so dramatic. “She didn’t eat your face. It’s right in front of me. It’s still there.”
I told them what my mother had told me and asked if they knew what happened to Krupskaya.
“I heard they put her to sleep,” Arlene said.
“I thought your mother was there,” Chrissy said. “Yo
ur mother told me your father bashed the cat to death against the wall.”
“He bashed her against a wall? In front of my mother?” I’d imagined many ends for Krupskaya, but never one so violent. “She told me she was away on a business trip, but she didn’t say if my dad was watching me or a babysitter.”
Arlene tapped her finger on the table. “The babysitter wouldn’t throw the cat against the wall.”
Krupskaya also came up when I spoke with Sylvia. At first it seemed like a non sequitur. I’d asked if my mother ever spoke about my father’s temper, and she responded by asking if I remembered Krupskaya.
“I don’t, but I know that she attacked me. My mom told me she was away when it happened.” I said that my father wouldn’t tell my mom what he’d done, and I shared the different stories I was juggling: that my father had killed the cat in a fit of rage or had her put to sleep.
“I think the violent one is accurate. Anita was covering for your dad. She took you to the hospital. Krupskaya was gone when she came home. She told me what happened, and she was very upset about what had happened to you as well as what happened to the cat. She was shocked by what he did, how he did it.”
I leaned forward. “How he did what?”
Sylvia smiled weakly and looked away.
My mother had probably been aware of my father’s fear and rage; she’d tugged at his feelings for years and could have been frightened to see that when they unfurled, they were as big as hers, or bigger. Something had stopped her from telling me the truth. She told me that they didn’t want me to be afraid of cats, and we did get another one, a Siamese we named Mischa, who was swiftly declawed. But maybe it was my father she hoped I wouldn’t fear.
My Dead Parents Page 20