George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

  Their daughter was born just a few months after they’d settled in Richland. They called her Lydia Ellen, an American name that still paid secret homage to their (dead) mothers, Lyudmilla and Esther. They mistakenly believed that they’d wiped their hands of everything that came before their arrival in Richland, New York.

  Mendel’s grandfather Pinchas Bultmann arrived in the New World sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century. He was fed up with the anti-Semitism he’d lived with daily in the Ukrainian shtetl where he grew up, always fearful of being drafted into the czar’s army, and may also have been tired of his wife, Raisa, whom he gladly left behind when he emigrated. No more Jew haters to harass him! No forced service in an army that despised all of his kind! No wife for him! He settled first in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, of course, working alongside other newcomers in a kosher pickle factory. His job was to fill the jars with pickles and then pour liquid over them. He didn’t much care for the briny, dillish smell of the factory, and after he moved on he never ate another pickle in his life. He also worried that constantly submerging his hands in the brine would injure them. He’d been a tailor in Vinkovitz and looked forward to taking up that profession again. Plus he just didn’t feel comfortable living and working around so many other people just like himself. He stayed in the city only long enough to meet and marry Perla, also a greenhorn, also from the Ukraine, whose family hailed from Minkovitz. Vinkovitz Minkovitz: none of their descendants believed that part of the story. Whether he ever gave another thought to Raisa, whether Perla knew about his previous marriage, or why he chose to marry (bigamously) again, nobody ever knew. Or if someone did, no one told his grandson Mendel.

  Pinchas and Perla wandered up through the Hudson Valley but couldn’t find a town that suited them. They stopped for a few years in Rome, but Pinchas’s tailoring business couldn’t quite support Perla and himself, let alone his baby son, Avram. In 1914, shortly after Avram was born, the family moved to Rochester, where business improved significantly. Indeed, after he finished high school Avram went to work for his father, first to learn the business and then to build on Pinchas’s good-enough success as a tailor. Together they opened a series of dry-cleaning establishments in the city.

  When he was twenty-six, and almost solely on the urgings of his parents, Avram married Mina, a very nice American-born Jewish girl he’d met at the Leopold Street shul, the Rochester synagogue his parents belonged to. What everyone who knew her was struck by was that Mina, who’d been raised in an orphanage and never knew the identity of her parents, enjoyed her life so much. She whistled when she was happy and hummed when she ate something she liked. She looked like the heroine of a fairy tale. She was an inventive and instinctive cook. She loved going to the movies. She was an excellent dancer. Her many kindnesses to elderly members of the congregation were legendary. Her father-in-law, Pinchas, adored her, and Perla was effusive in her affection for the young orphan. Having no known relatives of her own, Mina quickly developed a keen interest in Bultmann family history and lore. She spent a lot of time interviewing her in-laws, asking them about their childhoods in the Ukraine and their journeys to America. In pursuit of her new passion for her husband’s genealogy, she bought large sheets of butcher paper and began inking in an elaborate family tree. Letters filled with requests for details of births, deaths, marriages, and other relevant or interesting details flew from Mina in Rochester to the large extended family of Bultmanns who were still in that part of eastern Europe that was variously Russia, Germany, Ukraine, and Poland, and to that much smaller group who’d left their homes for what they hoped would be greener pastures: the Fienbergs in Israel, the Coopersteins in Argentina, the Manns in London’s East End (they’d shortened their name soon after arriving in the 1920s), the Bultmanns in Sydney, and the Litwaks in Johannesburg. There were so many letters going out that Mina had a separate line in her monthly household budget for stationery and stamps.

  And the results of her queries were impressive. Mina had to allocate more money in her budget to purchase more supplies. She accumulated so much information that she began papering the walls of what would become Mendel’s bedroom with the family tree. As the 1930s ended Mina started to notice that responses from the German/Russian/Polish/Ukrainian branch of the family slowed down to a trickle and then stopped altogether. This lack of communication became increasingly worrisome. From South Africa to Australia, from Palestine to Buenos Aires to London, the extended family, but especially Mina, the keeper of the genealogy, fretted.

  When Avram and Mina read what little there was about the concentration camps in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, it seemed beyond belief that such things existed. Mendel was born on December 27, 1944; when he was a month old the Russian army liberated Auschwitz, and Mina and the rest of the Bultmann clan finally had to accept a new reality. She knew now why her letters hadn’t been answered. The relatives left behind in the shtetls of Vinkovitz and Minkovitz, most of Pinchas’s childhood friends, distant relatives he’d dredged out of his memory for Mina’s butcher-paper family tree, seemingly even Raisa, his wife, his real wife, everyone he’d ever known, had most likely died in Janowska concentration camp. It appeared there were no more Bultmanns in eastern Europe.

  The Rochester Bultmanns were in shock, in denial. Pinchas and Perla died of it, Avram believed, one after another, before Mendel turned one. Mina and Avram’s joy at the arrival of their son was overwhelmed by the tidal wave of grief and loss. Mina took a thick black crayon and obliterated the names of all the family members who were gone, something she greatly regretted doing in the years to come. The wall next to Mendel’s crib was a record of a lot of death and the names of the few relatives who’d escaped Eastern Europe before the war. Mina never took the sheets of butcher paper down. It was a far cry from the Mother Goose wallpaper a different sort of family might have chosen for a child’s bedroom.

  Mina went a little crazy. Though she’d never met any of the relatives who’d perished, she kept seeing pleading messages from them on license plates around Rochester. A billboard on the side of the road would signal a desperate account of starvation and hardship that only she could see. She believed that on page 27 of every book there was an encrypted description of the endless deaths of Bultmanns young and old. Finally, after she’d refused to eat, couldn’t sleep, stopped washing herself or taking care of Mendel, Avram took her first to the rabbi, who told him to take her to Strong Memorial Hospital, where the doctors treated her depression, somewhat successfully, with electric shock therapy. They couldn’t, however, ameliorate her sadness, which seeped through the Bultmanns’ house like a noxious odor. Nothing would ever cure that.

  Mendel and Lydia met each other when they were twelve years old. Syracuse University implemented a summer program for “gifted and talented” kids, those who’d scored high on the standardized tests every seventh grader in the state of New York had to take. They spent two weeks living in a dorm, all expenses paid, taking introductory classes, and spending the evenings sitting around in seminars with real professors and real college students, talking about themselves and what they were studying, or else going to concerts, watching movies, and playing board games.

  They met again almost a decade later, the first week of grad school at Columbia, at a reception to welcome new students. When the head of the psych department introduced them, Lydia looked at Mendel, who looked back at her. They spoke at the same time: “I know you. You’re the one who talked all the time” (Mendel) and “I know you. You’re the one who never said a word in the whole two weeks” (Lydia). It turned out, although they came to it from very different undergraduate majors (Mendel, statistics, and Lydia, biology), that they were both interested in studying behavioral psychology. From that moment on they were inseparable.

  Their choice of careers was the right decision at the perfect time. Skinner boxes, teaching machines, programmed learning, behavior modification—they were all drifting down into the public’s consciousness. The s
eminal paper by B. F. Skinner, “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching,” was assigned in three of the four classes they took their first semester of grad school. They were stunned by his insights and believed that behaviorism was the answer to every problem, from education to relationships to combating Nazism to teaching rats to run through mazes. Mendel and Lydia started publishing papers in their second year of grad school, when Skinner’s essay had sunk well and deeply into the marrow of their bones. They began with letters to the editor. Then on to op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, and L.A. Times, many dealing with improving teaching, others with suggestions for efficacious parenting techniques. “Efficacious” was one of their favorite words. Their first jointly written paper, “Schedules of Reinforcement and Classroom Management Strategies,” appeared in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. They were off to the races.

  So it wasn’t exactly happy news that a baby was on the way. Lizzie was an accident, the result, Lydia knew, of the way the birth-control pills made her feel and how she’d too frequently, as it turned out, “forget” to take them. Once Lizzie made her unfortunate presence known, Mendel and Lydia took a morning off from working on their dissertations and were married at the city clerk’s office. They celebrated their wedding by going home to their apartment and getting back to work on their respective dissertations: Lydia’s on appetites and aversion in young female rats and Mendel’s on purposive behavior in maze-running rats. Lydia hated to take time off to see her obstetrician; she was now at the stage of analyzing her data and—finally!—writing up the results. She was forced to postpone the final revisions on her dissertation when the baby she hadn’t particularly wanted decided to be born. Mendel was less unhappy about the whole situation, Lydia believed, not only because he hadn’t been physically inconvenienced from the moment egg and sperm connected but also because his mind hadn’t been compromised during delivery, when the doctor gave her scopolamine without fully explaining to her what its effects would be. She didn’t like not being able to remember what went on while the drug played havoc with her mind.

  After Lydia came home from the hospital, she realized just how tied down she’d be to this endlessly shitting, spitting-up, and crying baby. How would she ever get her work done? Mendel was fortunate in that he could go to the lab early in the morning and not come home until he’d written great sheaves of his thesis, which was often very late at night. Lydia found the whole situation unbearable. After some discussion, Mendel put signs up in all the dorms at Barnard, and they finally assembled a group of young women who’d rotate in and out of the apartment and Lizzie’s young life, feeding her, changing her, and, depending on their own personalities, rocking her, cooing or singing to her, or ignoring her.

  Mendel and Lydia were the stars of their class. They were wooed by Brown, Yale, Berkeley, and the Universities of Texas and Michigan. In May 1975, when Lizzie was not quite two, they moved to Ann Arbor and began the work that would bring them fame (at least among the other behavioral psychologists of their era).

  Whenever she approached the front door of the house she grew up in, Lizzie often thought that when the real estate agent first saw Lydia and Mendel, she must have chortled in glee. Those years spent getting their PhDs from Columbia? Forget it. These were two small-town kids from the underpopulated vastness of New York State who wouldn’t know a copper pipe from a plumber’s snake. Did she have a house for them? You just bet she did.

  The place she sold them was a mess but presumably had, in real-estate speak, good bones. (Lizzie learned this terminology only later, when she and George were looking for their own house to buy.) It had been for sale for so long that every agent in town contributed fifty dollars every time they showed it to a potential buyer who didn’t bite at the opportunities it afforded and declined to make an offer. By now the kitty had enough money to pay for a lavish vacation for some fast-talking and persuasive agent—which were the primary characteristics of the woman who showed it to Mendel and Lydia.

  It was the only wood-frame house on the block. The others were solid and substantial fraternity and sorority houses in their varying architectural styles. Directly behind it was the Kappa Kappa Gamma house. Next door on the right, if you faced the Bultmann home, were the Chi Omegas, all blondes from the better suburbs of Detroit and Cleveland. On the left was the Pi Beta Phi house, with girls smarter than the Kappas and less blond than the Chi Os, from different but equally affluent suburbs. Directly across the street the Sigma Alpha Mu brothers played endless games of HORSE, went through many kegs of beer, and threw Frisbees with abandon.

  The house had been, and continued to be for all the years her parents lived there, a fixer-upper. Perhaps the agent had described it as “a handyman’s dream.” If she had, it was clear that Mendel and Lydia either didn’t know what that phrase meant (highly unlikely, as its meaning was self-evident) or that they misheard and/or didn’t pay any attention to the words. Pretty much everything was in terrible condition. Lizzie knew this because pretty much everything was still in terrible condition for the whole eighteen years that she lived there. The edges of the linoleum in the kitchen were peeling; Lizzie still remembers when, at age ten or so, she tripped, fell, and on the way down hit and chipped part of a front tooth on the edge of a counter. This was a tooth that George had been pleased to get his hands on and had done a wonderful job of repairing.

  Against all the rules of their department and the university at large, Lydia and Mendel made good use of their students, particularly their PhD students, to attend to different parts of the house. When she was old enough to realize what was going on, Lizzie wondered whether her parents accepted these students as advisees every year based not on any academic qualifications or interests but solely on their household cleanup, paint, and fix-up capabilities. There was the student whose dissertation was on the optimal height of urinals in K–6 schools who happened, perhaps not so coincidentally, to be the son of a plumber in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He certainly knew the difference between a copper pipe and a plumber’s snake. Over the years there were one or two frustrated fine arts majors who would happily paint the rooms, especially as Mendel and Lydia couldn’t care less what color the walls were and thus left the choice up to them. Sometimes the interior of the house would be painted every year and sometimes a decade or more would go by before a student who’d majored in studio art as an undergrad showed up. Oh, there were amateur but capable carpenters, very occasionally a bricklayer, and once someone who actually knew about reroofing houses. It was amazing who ended up studying with Lydia and Mendel.

  Still, the house suffered mightily from old age and neglect. It looked scary from the outside, and Lizzie knew that even kids her own age were loath to look at it as they walked by. Halloween brought very few trick-or-treaters, although Lizzie and her longtime babysitter Sheila had great treats for those who did make it up the uneven steps and across the sagging porch to the front door. Some years there were none. (The student/bricklayer hadn’t been particularly good. Perhaps that was why he’d gone into psychology rather than become a mason.)

  Whenever Lizzie made a new friend in school, she’d try to prepare them for the sight of the house, but it still came as a shock to many of them. She remembered the first time Andrea came home with her—they were in the second grade—and Andrea’s astonished gasp at the sight of it.

  Lizzie’s bedroom, however, was a comfort to her. When she was thirteen, a grad student chose to paint each of the four walls a different shade of pink. Despite the fact that Lizzie had never been particularly fond of pink, she loved the result. And her room was at the rear of the house, so its two windows faced the back of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. The Kappas had a screened-in porch that ran the entire length of the house, and every fall and spring the new pledges would practice the sorority’s theme song out there. Lizzie would lie in bed, year after year, listening to them harmonize.

  “Kaaa pa, Kaaa pa, Kaaa pa Gaaa muh,

  I a
aaaammmm so haaapy thaat I aaaam uh

  Kaaapa, Kaaapa, Kaaapa Gaaa muh,” and so on.

  During the nights of the Great Game, when the boys were otherwise involved with her body and Lizzie was tired of reciting poetry, she’d silently hum it to herself, over and over. It passed the time.

  * Sheila *

  Sheila came into Lizzie’s life this way: Dr. Lydia Bultmann, in a very bad mood, was grocery shopping. She was in a terrible mood for a couple of reasons. She hated shopping. She couldn’t stand being lumped together with the unwashed masses wandering the aisles, and the manipulative marketing of the advertising agencies annoyed her intensely. Plus she just couldn’t abide waiting in line. By this time in their lives, the Bultmanns had plenty of money, but Lydia had from the early years of their marriage (when she and Mendel really had very little money) always feared it would run out. She still only bought the store brands and whatever was on sale, which made for uneven meals. In the past she’d just ask one of her grad students to pick up the basics, which in Lydia’s mind were milk, hamburger, coffee, cereal, cigarettes, and bread.

  But she could no longer ask a grad student to run to the store and shop for her. The dean, who had perhaps received a complaint or two from one of the students who, over the years, had plumbed, painted, roofed, or otherwise worked on the Bultmann house, had sent out a strong message reminding the faculty that their grad students were not their personal servants; they were to lay off asking them to do anything that was not relevant to their schooling. Lydia took great offense at this. It meant she’d have to take even more time away from her research and find someone to take care of three-year-old Lizzie while she and Mendel were at work.