Replacement Child

by Judy L. Mandel

  I had been on three disastrous dates in the past couple of weeks with men I met on the site when David and I struck up a conversation online. His emails were sincere and funny, so I decided to meet him. I dropped Justin off at my friend’s house and told her, “This is absolutely the last date I’m going on.”

  We planned to meet at a local restaurant, and when I saw David waiting outside for me, I was relieved that it seemed he had been truthful in his online profile. He had a full head of dark hair, a kind, handsome face, and he looked fit in his red sweater. At dinner, David seemed a little nervous, and it took a while for him to start talking. I thought it was cute that he was sort of shy. We exchanged the first date preliminaries, much like a job interview. Where we worked, details of our kids, status of our relationships with our ex-spouses. When he talked about his sons, I could see how devoted he was to them and to doing the best for them, which further endeared him to me. We agreed that divorce was a complicated thing for adults, and even more confusing for the kids who have no vote in the outcome.

  After dinner, we made the evening last a little longer by taking a walk and talking more. We weren’t running out of conversation—a very good sign, I thought. By the end of the evening, we had been laughing quite a lot.

  After three failed marriages, I was being very careful about whom I got involved with, so at the end of this evening, I held out my hand to shake his. David looked hurt and asked if he could kiss me good night. It tickled me to be asked, and we kissed in the parking lot quickly. It was enough, though, to recognize a spark of passion between us.

  I tried to stay objective as we got more seriously involved, remembering my earlier therapy sessions that pointed to my propensity to throw out reason when I fell for someone. I looked in my self-help books and found the notes I made about why I had chosen the wrong mates in the past.

  I told myself I didn’t want to get married again since I was so bad at it. My primary responsibility, I felt, was raising my son. David and I had conversations early on about how neither of us was looking for a long-term relationship. He was so newly divorced and still in the throes of adjusting. In fact, we didn’t even meet each other’s children for quite awhile. We dated on the off weekends when our ex-spouses had the kids, negotiating our schedules so they coincided. Then, of course, it all changed when we fell in love.

  I had made long lists of the traits of my three past husbands and corresponded elements of my childhood to my choices. It had been an awakening for me to recognize the similarities in the three men that I had thought were so different. They were all very critical of me, something I didn’t see myself until friends pointed it out, about everything from what I wore to my cooking. They all shared an insecurity that manifested in putting me down in some way. Each one was emotionally distant, not wanting to talk about feelings or issues between us. All but one had trouble showing affection.

  By the time I met David, I was prepared to put all that self-work to good use. It was a lot to track in a new relationship. I mentally went through my checklist as the relationship evolved, and it was passing all the preliminary screening. We talked openly about how we felt about our past. David was accessible and honest. He was the most stable person I had ever been involved with and had been at the same insurance company for twenty years when we met. And although he was shy at first, once he opened up, he made me laugh more than anyone I had ever known, and we had an immediately strong connection.

  Now, Justin fills the house with the exuberance of a teenage boy. His friends are in and out, his music is sometimes too loud, and his clothes and belongings are scattered around the place. And even when I complain about some of it, I have to admit that I love it. All the ragged edges of his growing up, and even the small annoyances, make it real, and make me part of his life.

  I can’t believe that this is his senior year in high school, and that next year he will be off to college. It doesn’t seem possible that time has passed so quickly. This fall, we took a few trips to visit schools in upstate New York, Boston, and Amherst, Massachusetts. The trips together reminded me of how it was when it was just he and I, after the divorce from his father, my third husband. We were quite a team when it was just us, for six years, before I married David. Justin and I took lots of road trips back then, to visit friends in Pennsylvania, family in Washington and in Florida. By the age of six, he was a practiced traveling companion happily seated either beside me or in back, depending on his size at the time, singing along with me to “Truckin’” or “Friend of the Devil.” He learned how to use maps to help me navigate, and he was patient when I got lost. Now he’s applying to schools and writing essays. I’m mostly writing checks.

  I TAKE A notebook and pen down to the family room to continue my research for the book I have decided I want to write. My parents’ notes to me have an urgency now, almost insisting that I pay attention, that I try to tell the story. I’m still wondering whose story it will be: theirs or mine.

  I have three storage boxes full of writings, clippings, and photographs to go through. There’s also a musty leather suitcase chock-full of my parents’ things. Sitting in the middle of the floor, I surround myself with the loot and start looking through it. Today’s mission, I decide, is to find out something about my parents’ lives that I didn’t know.

  My parents seemed to have sprung to life at the time of their meeting. Before that time, their individual histories are sketchy for me. Partially, that may be because the fire took away any photos of them as children. I don’t recall seeing even one picture of either of them before they were together.

  My mother and father were introduced by my mother’s brother, Arty. He and my father were best friends in high school. My father was sixteen when the Depression hit hard, and he left school to take a job to help his family, but he and Arty remained friends. Arty had a little sister, Florence (my mother), and when she turned eighteen, my father noticed that she had blossomed into a lovely young woman.

  My father told me the story of how he asked Arty to introduce him to his sister time and time again and how Arty refused, telling him he was not her type. My father didn’t give up.

  “I have two steady jobs, I’m industrious, I’m supporting my family for God's sakes. And let’s face it, I’m adorable,” he kept insisting, until one day, he talked Arty into inviting him for dinner.

  It was a gray, rainy Friday evening in April. The few cars on the road, bulbous and glistening, crackled through the slick streets, kicking up spray from their whitewall tires. The town bustled with people walking home from work and school. On Friday night in a Jewish neighborhood, most everyone rushed home to make dinner for Shabbat at sunset.

  My father wore his best clothes—clean white shirt, dark tie, pressed black dress pants, spit-shined shoes. He walked in to the small brick building and up the two flights to the apartment that housed Arty’s family: his mother, Hermina; his father, Desher (David in English); brothers, Henry and Eddie; and his beautiful sister, Florence.

  Before ringing the bell, my father took a moment to collect himself. When the door opened, he swaggered in with a quick smile, but he backed up two steps at seeing the three brothers flanking my mother. With dark soft curls and wide expressive green eyes, my mother was the family jewel.

  Nodding to them, he offered his hand to her, which Eddie intercepted.

  “Very nice to meet you. I’m Al Mandel,” he said, shaking Eddie’s hand, moving on to Henry and finally my mother, who averted her eyes.

  Before dinner, my mother lit the Sabbath candles, saying the blessing by heart. Wearing a shawl over her head, she waved the heat of the flames upward toward her face. Her mother and father looked on with pride, keeping their eye on my father, who couldn’t keep his eyes off my mother.

  The cacophony of conversation was a mix of English, Yiddish, and Hungarian. My father tried to answer the parents’ Hungarian questions in Yiddish and tried to keep up with the brothers’ banter in English. My mother took pity on him and began to tr
anslate. Soon, they had made up a blend of English, Yiddish, and Hungarian that got them laughing, and the brothers staring suspiciously.

  I know this hybrid language well. They spoke it all through my childhood when they didn’t want my sister and me to understand.

  At dinner, my father fit in a few jokes, in both Yiddish and English, careful to keep them clean. He got some laughs, but Papa Desher remained stone-faced.

  Dinner was a traditional Sabbath meal, with a freshly killed chicken from the neighborhood kosher butcher, roasted potatoes, green beans, and Hermina’s home-baked challah bread. Nearly the same exact meal was then being served at my father’s own house. In fact, he had gone to the butcher that afternoon for his mother.

  He hated watching the slaughter. The chicken’s neck was stretched across the chopping block to be severed quickly and completely, causing the least amount of suffering possible, according to Jewish law. Then the chicken would still move without its head, sometimes actually running for a moment, before it dropped. The carcass was hung upside down to let the blood drain out into a pan placed below the open cut of the neck. My father always looked away.

  When they finished dinner, my father gave Arty a serious look and flicked his head toward the front door. Outside, they sat down on the stoop to talk and smoke.

  “Well, what do I do now?” he asked his friend. “Can I ask her out now? Is it okay?”

  “You’ll have to talk to my father first, then you can ask her.”

  Desher had retired to his easy chair with his pipe. He was stoking it when my father walked in. Somehow, the right words came out, and Desher gave a nod of his head, a wave of his hand.

  “Go back out on the front stoop and I’ll send Florence out,” Arty instructed.

  In a few minutes, my mother appeared. She smoothed the apron that covered her Sabbath dress, looking down at her sensible black shoes. My father offered his hand to help her sit beside him on the step.

  “I like your family,” he said, grinning.

  My mother rolled her eyes, took his hand, and said, “They’re not easy, that’s for sure. But they’re mine and they mean well for me.”

  “I know, I can see that. That’s why I like them so much.”

  They sat and talked about movies, about the new singer they just heard, Frank Sinatra, until they heard:

  “Flurrrrennnce . . . in!” Desher, standing at the front door, yelled in his thick Hungarian accent.

  IN THEIR WEDDING photo three years later, my father stands tall in his tailed tux, looking proud to have snagged this beauty. My mother is in her white Belgian lace dress with the forty buttons up the front. Her flowers are drooping slightly in the one-hundred-degree heat of August 8, 1937.

  chapter eleven

  JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)

  7:40 AM

  AFEW BLOCKS AWAY from my family’s home, at 611 Broad Street, Captain Thomas John Reid was getting ready to pilot American Airlines commuter Flight 6780 from Newark to Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo and back again that evening.

  Just a month before, Captain Reid flew to Japan for American Airlines on a mission to return Korean combat veterans. A plane on a similar mission crashed in British Columbia, killing thirty-six people. He tricked fate once.

  He was experienced, with 7,062 hours of piloting, and the fog and frost of the day didn’t pose a problem for him on this short flight. Maybe he was thinking about his new baby that was on the way, or his mother-in-law’s birthday party that night.

  chapter twelve

  DONNA WAS AN only child for five years before Linda came along. She was the nucleus of the small family, the sun around which all revolved.

  After the crash, a scrapbook of letters written by all her second-grade classmates was given to my parents as a tribute. Letters like “Dear Donna, I know you are up in heaven now. We will miss you, but we know you are happy.” Or “Dear Donna, I hope they have your favorite vanilla cupcakes in heaven.”

  We had at least one thing in common: We both loved picnics in the park with my mother. My mother had a way of making an ordinary outing into an event, so I know how Donna felt when they spread out a quilted blanket on the expansive green lawn and unpacked her favorite snacks. I bet my mother invented her grape cone for Donna before me. That was when she would spiral aluminum foil into a cone around her fist and then fill it to overflowing with green or red grapes. She made the bottom into a handle of sorts, so I could carry it around and play while I ate the grapes. I was a fidgety child who couldn’t sit still for very long, which was another reason for the grape cone, but it doesn’t seem likely that Donna and I shared that restless trait. The image I was always given of Donna was of a perfect, calm, and obedient girl.

  My mother would bring a grape cone with her whenever she got a call from school that I was sick. I always felt calm as soon as she came into the school nurse’s office.

  “She’s not feeling well, again, Mrs. Mandel,” the nurse would say.

  I wouldn’t look at the nurse, who suspected me of faking. She interrogated me every time I got sent into her office, at least once a week when I felt sick to my stomach and on the verge of throwing up.

  My mother didn’t ask questions. “Let’s go, honey,” she’d say. “We’ll go visit the ducks.”

  I’d get up silently and take her hand, avoiding the nurse’s gaze. My mother’s blue Dodge Dart was parked right in front of school, and I hopped in the front seat. This already made it a special day since I usually had to sit in the back.

  We’d drive down Springfield Avenue until we got to the center of town. At the bridge, we turned left, passed the white gazebo, and drove along the riverbank until we got to our special spot with the park bench. By that time, my stomach had settled down and the nausea had subsided.

  The ducks sensed our arrival and clustered at the river’s edge. They scrambled for the few pieces of bread I’d throw into the river.

  My mother would be beside me, bundled in her brown quilted car coat with the fur collar. Her oversized pocketbook was filled with bread for the ducks and snacks for me.

  There’d be a sandwich with two slices of bologna, on white bread cut in quarters, with just a touch of mustard. The grape cone would come out when she saw I couldn’t sit still any longer. Then sometimes a package of Twinkies to share.

  “Nerves,” our family doctor said about my constant stomachaches.

  “What kind of nerves can an eight-year-old have?!” my father said.

  The doctors in New York City didn’t know either. They made me drink chalky white liquid and wait hours for it to run through me in order to take X-rays. Or they’d pump me full of the stuff from the other end.

  My parents were convinced that my stomach problems were caused by my worry over Linda. There was some truth that my illness coincided with her hospitalizations. My mother always pointed to the comment on my kindergarten report card that “Judy carries the world on her shoulders.”

  Or maybe I just wanted to feed the ducks with my mother— have her all to myself for a change, sit in the front seat and have my own grape cone. And every once in a while, have my mother put her arm around me and give me a squeeze.

  Other than our love of picnics, and my mother, it didn’t appear to me that Donna and I were anything alike. The portrait I was given of Donna was painted with small, deliberate strokes. Her image took shape through layers of stories, sideways glances, and quivering sighs. I was told that when Linda was born, Donna felt the baby was brought home from the hospital just for her. She took my mother’s lead and held Linda with loving care, begging to feed and diaper her. My mother said it was Donna’s nature to envelop her new baby sister in her love, and to instinctively know that her parents had enough love to give to both their girls. There was never a moment of jealousy, according to my mother. Linda was her new playmate, her cherished baby-doll.

  On a day not long before the crash, she asked my parents if she could bring home a new friend for dinner one night. They agreed,
and when the evening arrived, my mother said she was shocked.

  “She never mentioned that her new friend was a Negro girl. That just wasn’t done back then.”

  My father might have used a different word, and was probably much more alarmed. But it was their first sign that their daughter might be there to teach them something.

  People called Donna “ahead of her time” or “too good for this world.” Maybe she would have changed it.

  “She was such a special child,” my mother said. “She had a kindness within her, a quality that made everyone want to be near her.” Donna was their “little angel.” The comparison between us was unspoken, but always present. My father would admonish my mother for spoiling me, catering to my selfish nature, for example, by buying me a balloon at the checkout counter at the grocery store or the new toy I saw on TV.

  The angel legacy was reinforced by actual documentation. Eleanor C. Delaney, the principal of Woodrow Wilson School 19, where Donna had attended second grade, wrote a condolence letter to my parents, published in The Elizabeth Daily Journal: Donna will always be, to you and to all of us who loved her, the Donna of yesterday—sweet, lovely, unspoiled. She will always be, to all of us, a child we love who will be forever fresh and young and innocent.

  Her outstanding native ability could have made her disliked by children who had less ability, except that her sweetness, unselfishness, and genuine consideration for others prevented her from ever wanting to monopolize the scene—as she could have done so easily. It was your influence which kept her unspoiled in spite of her unusual native gifts of attractiveness, intelligence, and everything it takes to make a wonderful girl.

  I could imagine my parents’ disappointment at having that angel replaced with a mere mortal. When I was a toddler, our family would often get together with my Aunt Maxine. The adults would sit around the dining room table and talk for hours while they sipped coffee and nibbled on cheese or prune Danish. My mother would get out her matching coffee cups and dessert plates and would be sure the percolator was full. Linda would sit at the table and listen to the retold family stories. My cousin Henry and I were close in age, and we would play with Tinkertoys or Lincoln Logs in the living room, in view of our parents. My Aunt Maxine told me they would watch me play and compare me with Donna. Did I share the same way? Did I play as intelligently, or show the same empathy that she would have?