Replacement Child

by Judy L. Mandel

  “She’s not like Donna,” my father would say. “Donna was something very special.”

  “But she’s a sweet girl,” my aunt would defend me.

  I’m not sure my father ever forgave me for being here when Donna was not.

  The only time I remember my father ever speaking of Donna was when we talked about planning his own funeral. He was in his eighties then, nearly fifty years after Donna’s death. We were sitting out on the porch at their condo in Florida. He was playing solitaire with the deck of cards he got on the first plane trip down years before. The sun was low in the sky, giving the room a luminescent glow. I needed to talk to him about any plans he and my mother had made—I struggled to find the right way to say—for their final arrangements. I wanted to be sure I knew what he wanted when the time came. I fumbled around with the words until the quizzical look on his face relaxed and he seemed to understand what I was getting at. He stared down at his cards spread out on the table, a losing hand.

  “I want to be cremated,” he told me. “I want to burn like Donna had to burn. My poor girl—she must have suffered so much in the last moments, knowing she was burning to death and no one was coming for her. I often think of her dying from the outside in—slowly losing consciousness.”

  It was the only time I ever saw my father cry.

  chapter thirteen

  1957

  AFTER THE SETTLEMENT with the airline, my mother saw a chance to get us out of urban apartment living and insisted on building our suburban house with some of the proceeds. I was three when we moved to the blue house with white shutters and a two-car garage.

  “It’s a lot of money just for a place to live,” my father said.

  “This is not just a place to live; it’s a place to raise our girls in a better environment—out of the city.”

  My mother talked about the prospects of a house a little every day, until one day she suggested they take a drive. By this time, my father was getting used to the idea.

  Rutgers Road was under development, with a few houses built and several under construction. The developer met them at the end of the street. He was a fire hydrant of a man, his belly dipping slightly over the belt of his worn jeans.

  “We’ve got one we just poured the foundation for,” he told them. “You can pick all the appliances and finishing for this one yourself. A real custom job. Nice, solid construction on these houses here.”

  Every Sunday we went as a family to see the progress on our house. We watched it grow: first, a square hole in the ground, then the wood framing, and, finally, the paved driveway. My father took pictures with his box camera hanging from his neck in the brown leather case. He inspected every corner of the building and seemed satisfied each time that he “approved” the next phase. Hands in his pockets, he looked up toward the top of the framed roof and nodded his “okay.”

  My mother picked out all the gold appliances, the yellow vinyl flooring for the kitchen, and the pink tile in the bathroom. The Formica countertops came only in gray.

  The house was on a quiet street that looped around to form a horseshoe. It didn’t connect to any other street in the small suburban town; anyone driving into our street either lived there or was visiting someone. The neighborhood was spacious and open, with a half acre for each of the single-family homes. It was a far cry from our apartment in Elizabeth. My mother said she liked it because it was safe.

  “There’s no traffic at all,” she told my Aunt Maxine on the phone when she described the house. “And the kids can play in the street here. Best of all, we’re twenty-five miles from the nearest airport.”

  I had my own room, but I wanted to share the big room with Linda, so they put two twin beds in there for us. One of our windows looked out on the street, the other on a smaller roof overhanging the garage.

  My earliest memory there involves a makeshift tent made from a blue tarp that my father used to collect the fall leaves. He would drag them to the edge of our backyard and burn them in a metal trashcan.

  I was no more than four. Bruce and Robby, a couple of kids from the neighborhood, were visiting us with their parents. Bruce was just my age, very small and skinny. Robby was a few years older, so we did whatever he said.

  We were outside behind the garage in the back of the house, far from the adults who were gathered inside in the living room. The tarp lay discarded on the ground near us. Robby was just beginning to be curious about the differences between boys and girls and cajoled me into pulling down my pants to show him. Everyone was always telling me to do that at that stage of my life, since potty training was not far behind me, so I saw no problem with it. That’s when the spark of his enterprising scheme hit him, and Robby figured that the kids in the neighborhood would pay a nickel—maybe even a dime—to see me do that too. He supposed some of them would pay to have Bruce do the same thing. He said he would share his bounty with us if we would go along. Robby hooked up the corners of the tarp from one edge of the garage roof over to the top of the rain gutter on the nearest corner of the house. He positioned Bruce and me inside and went out to hawk the show to the neighborhood.

  There was a line of kids extending from our backyard to the street, and the show had only just begun when I heard my father’s booming voice. He ripped open the tent door to find me standing nonchalantly with my pants around my ankles. The look in his eyes was one of disgust and seared through me, defining a shame that I did not know existed until that moment. He grabbed me under his arm like a football, carrying me out and screaming at the kids to “get the hell out of here, go the hell home now! Not you, Robby, I want to talk to you!”

  Everyone scattered quickly. Bruce just picked up his pants and walked home with the rest of the crowd. I don’t know if his parents ever knew what had happened that afternoon. What I remember most is that this incident was the beginning of my unsavory reputation with my father. Although he outwardly blamed the older boy, I felt his disapproval and that he deemed it somewhat my fault. I was some kind of a bad seed. My mother was the one who had the talk with me. She was very calm and assumed I was an innocent victim. She made it clear what I should and should not share with the public, and boys in particular. None of us ever spoke of it again.

  I STARTED FLYING when I was four. Giving in to a force I felt pulling at me to lift myself out of the here and now, above it all.

  At the time, I wasn’t aware that I could not fly. My confidence in my ability to leave the earth was absolute. If only I could find the right material. The right colors to lift me away into flight. From what?

  My mother’s scarves were easy to find in the top drawer of her dresser. I’d watched her wrap them in fashionable knots to dress up a plain knit dress or cotton blouse. She used the accessories to seemingly expand her wardrobe beyond her modest budget. They buoyed her, and I thought they could do the same for me.

  I tied four of the most luxurious, rainbow-colored silks together, pulled the corners tight around my neck, and jumped off the back porch. The eight concrete steps felt like an eight-story building.

  The wind suspended me. I held my breath. My heart pounded in my chest, and I defeated gravity for a moment—before it claimed me.

  The ground slapped my body flat. Blue, green, red, silk splattered over me. But I had glimpsed freedom.

  chapter fourteen

  2005

  DOWN IN MY basement, going through the suitcase full of memorabilia, I keep thinking the next photo I turn up will be one of my parents at five, or seven, or ten years old, but none ever materializes.

  There are precious few of them as a couple before the accident. I love to look at their faces in those few photos of them— before. Before they were grabbed by tragedy. Before the unimaginable happened.

  In one photo, my parents sit casually on a blanket in a park. Most likely, it’s Warinanco Park in Elizabeth. My mother sits in front of my father, her hand behind her to hold his. They look like someone had just surprised them with the camera. Maybe they were kissing and th
e photographer thought to embarrass them. They look so playful. The affection between them in the picture surprises me.

  The only remnant of her unmarried life that I find in my mother’s belongings is her high school autograph book. The blistered, brown charred book holds evidence of my father’s romantic side. In 1934, he wrote in it:

  To Flurry;

  There’s a word in every language

  To everyone is dear;

  In English ’tis forget-me-not

  In French—la souvenir.

  Al

  That must have been just after they met, and when he was on his best behavior with her. On the opposite page of the book, he later wrote another note:

  To Flurry (my Wife)

  May the rest of your days be happy ones—with me!

  Your lover, Al

  My father wrote poems to my mother for almost every occasion, and she kept most of them. They must have reminded her of the boy she fell in love with, even when she may have lost her faith in that love. His writing was his most intimate expression of the affection that he must have felt but had limited capacity to show. After the accident, just before I was born, he wrote:

  Darling,

  It’s been so very, very difficult

  To speak my every thought;

  To speak of all the heartache

  That fate to us has wrought.

  To lose so much and yet retain

  Your love, so dear and true;

  Has held my faith together—

  Has helped to see me through.

  You’re the essence of my being,

  My moon and star and sun;

  Please remember sweetheart

  We’re not finished—just begun!

  I love you, Al

  There is so little physical evidence of their early days together that I have to rely on the stories I was told.

  When they were first married, my father had his milk delivery route in the morning, the pharmacy job in the afternoons. He would leave the house at 4:00 AM every day, whistling, as always. He’d hop in the small white dairy truck to make the rounds with fresh milk and cream on cold winter mornings and sultry summer dawns, remembering the special orders and the ones that needed to pay up.

  My father’s pharmacy job is legend. Firstly, there was the story of him running bootleg whiskey all over town. Then, later, he helped the owner discover that an employee was stealing from him by collecting on credit from customers and not turning in the money. He came home every night with stories of the people on his route and his encounters in the drug store.

  My mother was the hands-on caregiver for her mother, who, during the early days of their marriage, lived with them in their small apartment. Her care was difficult because of diabetes and later a colostomy. There were daily insulin injections and the tending to the colostomy for years, not to mention keeping a kosher home for her strictly orthodox mother. When Grandma Schlesinger died, “after hanging in just long enough to hold you in her arms,” my mother swore she would never keep kosher again. “Too many dishes; too damn much trouble!”

  Later, when my mother developed diabetes in her sixties, the memory of caring for her mother was what fed her fears. Her mother eventually had her legs amputated, and my mother vowed she would “go out of this world with all the parts God gave me.”

  A photo I come across in the pile is of my father strolling down a New York City street with his sister Bess. It shows the happy-go-lucky version—a man I wish I had known. Dressed to the nines in a dapper pinstripe suit, he would be bouncing each step on the balls of his feet, barely touching the ground. Looking at his carefree younger self, I’m glad my father had no premonition of what was to come.

  All I know about their past is from stories sprinkled out over the years like so many bread crumbs. My father’s stories about his childhood had either a punch line or a warning.

  A story my father liked to tell was about when he and his brother Heimi were riding in a carriage and a couple of boys called after them, “Kikes, get out of here.” Heimi, a usually calm boy, jumped from the carriage and “beat the crap out of those boys! We never had any trouble from them again.” This story made me scared of being Jewish, or at least of telling people that I was.

  Heimi had a hole in his heart. When he was a teenager, the family heard that the air in Ohio would be better for him, so they packed up and moved to Akron. The air didn’t prove to be any better there than in New Jersey, and Heimi died anyway. He’s buried “somewhere near Akron.”

  “Life is short” was the lesson from this story. “We have no control.”

  In my favorite photo of my mother, she is wearing her white, wide-brimmed picture book hat that I coveted. She is glancing back distractedly over her shoulder in what I think of as her starlet pose.

  My parents had eight years alone as a married couple before having a child. It was difficult for my mother to conceive, a detail she shared when I was trying to have my own baby. I also wondered if my father’s tendency to be physically distant and unaffectionate had something to do with it.

  THERE ARE A few photos of them when they were a young family of three, with baby Donna. One has my mother, my father, and Donna dressed in their winter coats standing primly in front of their apartment building. The frozen moment of completeness seems as permanent as the building’s brick facade.

  Next to this picture in the album is one of the four of us— Mom, Dad, Linda, and me—without Donna. To me, this is our family, but I wonder what my parents saw when they looked at this photo.

  Photos of my father holding Donna and one of him holding me at the same age show a different kind of father in each. Holding Donna, he has a youthful expression of “look at my baby—she’s mine,” and he holds her away from him. He’s young and trim with his full head of black hair. Holding me, he keeps me close to his cheek with his arm pulling me next to him, a serious expression on his more mature face. His lowered, scrunched eyebrows that I remember so clearly.

  Two other pictures mirror each other, as if the second photo was staged to be an exact replica of the first, creating a photographic continuity of the family. The first is of Donna holding Linda as a newborn on her lap in front of her, arms protectively clasped around the baby. The second is of Linda holding me in the same pose, her pinched, scarred arms tightly around me. Her badly burned left leg sticks out of her skirt in front of her. The love in their eyes is the same.

  It’s a strange comfort to see the two pictures together. One of the only connections I have with my two sisters.

  chapter fifteen

  JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)

  7:45 AM

  MY FATHER PARKED his car behind Goerke’s department store, waved to the attendant, and walked toward Broad Street. Goerke’s and Levy Brothers department stores were the signature stores of downtown Elizabeth. His older sister, Ada, worked at Levy Brothers, and he stopped in to see her now and then. Down the street was Woolworth’s five-and-ten.

  The Rexall pharmacy blinked its neon sign across the street. The Con Edison showroom was full of modern gleaming white stoves and refrigerators. Around the corner, you could listen to 45s in a special booth in the record store before you chose one.

  At the glass door of Goldblatt Jewelers, he stopped to choose the right key from the large set jingling in his pocket, turned the key in the lock, and heard the satisfying click. Standing in the doorway for a moment, my father surveyed the quiet store in the subdued morning sunlight coming in through the front windows. A spotlight on his day. Dust particles did pirouettes in the refracted light over the long showcases.

  Locking the door behind him, my father set into his usual routine. He uncovered the showcases, placed jewelry artistically in the outside windows, and checked the cash register, whistling as he went through his checklist.

  After the store was ready for the day, my father opened and relocked the door, then went next door to Pamel’s Luncheonette for coffee and a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. Pamel’s ha
d a row of red plastic upholstered booths and a lunch counter with a real soda jerk who made sodas to order.

  This day, Rita, the waitress he knew for years, smiled and sat down with him to kibitz for a few minutes while he drank his coffee and had another cigarette before opening the store.

  chapter sixteen

  1959—1964

  AT AROUND AGE five, I dressed like a cowboy and climbed trees. My father began to call me “my son Judy.” Linda was more interested in having a girlfriend over to sit in her room and listen to 45s on her portable record player.

  My father and I played baseball in the backyard until one fateful day—I must have been nine—when he hit me square in the nose while he was showing me how to catch a fastball. At first, he started yelling at me that I didn’t keep my eye on the ball and my glove in front of my face like he taught me. But when he saw that I was bleeding, he came running over. My nose was spurting blood so hard we couldn’t make it stop. My mother heard the commotion and ran out from the kitchen with a towel for my nose and ushered me inside with a stern look at my father. That was the end of us playing baseball and the start of my father treating me differently. Maybe he saw me as suddenly fragile, brought to the reality of my female status so abruptly, and was afraid to hurt me with rough boy-type play—afraid to have another child of his hurt in any way. I only knew that we stopped being pals.