Months later, I invited friends and family to join Robin and me in the new garden. Sitting on the new stone terrace, we sipped tea under our cherry tree, the area that we now called Tuscany. Tuscany was only a few feet from Versailles, complete with our new circular pond, lavender border and topiary chicken.
15.
My Family Finds Itself
Toronto Island, 2003
MICHAEL HAD BEEN AT THE FARM for almost a year. We all missed him, but there was no denying it. Home had been more peaceful, our emotional life more stable.
When neighbours asked “How’s it going without Michael?” we’d say something along the lines of “It’s hard having him away from us.” But to those in our inner sanctum, we could be less circumspect. “It’s good having him gone for a while. We’re all more relaxed.”
The year had been a time of healing. Robin and I barely bickered, had more fun. We travelled together, took Sarah to Paris. We invited people over to our house more often. I had dinner parties again. Sarah relished all the attention we lavished on her. I got back to reading literary fiction.
I was reclaiming myself during the year, probably more in need to do so than Robin or Sarah. I longed to see myself as someone other than a mother of a disabled child . Though that was not the image I presented to the rest of the world, much of my identity had turned to raising Michael. I had lost bits and pieces of Linda over the years.
On a sunny August morning while Michael was still away, Sarah and I were rifling through family photos on the table under the cherry tree in the backyard. Golden orange Baltimore orioles were flying past, heading to our next-door neighbour’s feeder. Our dog Bear was lounging sleepily at Sarah’s feet. I knew what a treasure this jewel-like moment with my daughter was.
“Grandma looks so beautiful in this picture,” Sarah said, holding up a yellowing photo with ragged white borders. “Look at her long curly hair, and that bathing suit! She looks so happy. How old do you think she was?”
I took the photo into my own hand and stared at my mother. I had seen this picture before, but never looked with such concentration. “She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen,” I said. “But I’m not really sure. You’re right about how beautiful she was — and happy.” I knew so little about my mother’s youth, I realized. I assumed this was taken before she met my father. I wondered if she really was as happy and carefree as she looked. Was it before her mother got sick or was she, like me in my unhappy hours, pretending?
I hoped she really was happy. I thought back to the day that my anger towards her began to dissipate, the first time I actually saw joy on her face. “Sarah, have I ever told you how much you helped me with Grandma?”
“What do you mean?”
“My relationship with Grandma was really different than the one we have,” I said. “We weren’t always close.” I had never told her about the “I love you” moment between her and my mother in Florida. I didn’t think she needed to know the problems I had with my mother, nor did I want her to see her grandma in a bad light.
“I knew Grandma loved me, Sarah, but she wasn’t good at showing it,” I said. I described the long-ago birthday when she jumped up from playing Lego with Michael, ran up to my mother and announced “I love you.”
“Grandma said it back to you, Sarah, and that was a pretty special moment. I’m not sure I had ever heard her say those words before.”
Naturally, Sarah was shocked. “I love you’s” were tossed easily to one another in our family, and she didn’t remember the time in Florida. Even if she had, she most likely wouldn’t have had any idea how momentous it was.
“You unlocked Grandma’s heart, Sarah. My relationship with her improved from that day on. The following week she told me she loved me, too. I owe you for that. I’ve never thanked you.”
We talked a bit more about my mother, then Sarah asked, “Why do you think it was so hard for Grandma to say I love you?”
“I don’t really know,” I said. “I’ve thought it might have something to do with her own mother. Maybe she never said, ‘I love you’ to Grandma, either. ”
I continued looking at the photo of my mother on the beach, smiling and flirtatious with the camera. She really did look carefree. But I knew looks could deceive. What was going on with her mother at home during the time of the photo? How old was my mother when they sent my grandmother off to Eloise? It was time to clean out the last bit of cobwebs in my family tree.
“Hi, Steve. It’s Linda Rosenbaum. We had spoken a while ago about my grandmother in Eloise. You offered to help me should I decide to look for her records.”
The offer was still good. The first step would be to find out if the records even existed. “I’ll get back to you.”
Steve had made essential contacts at Wayne County Probate Court while researching Annie’s Ghosts. A longtime investigative reporter and editor for the Washington Post, Steve’s sleuthing eventually revealed who to speak to and what specific files to ask for.
Two days later, Steve called back. “They’ve located a file of Esther Koenigsberg. It must be your grandmother. They were used by the judge to have your grandmother declared insane.”
Declared insane? Though this was the legal word used for all mental illnesses that required hospitalization, nothing short of a Molotov cocktail was exploding in my brain upon hearing it. Up to that moment, I had assumed my grandmother was what we today call clinically depressed. Based on the little we knew, my sisters and I thought she never recovered after one of her sons died. Hearing the word insane, even though the legal term might have embraced the diagnosis of depression, made me worry there might be something more.
Being depressed made sense. Never recovering from such a tragedy made sense. Being depressed wasn’t the same as being declared insane, though, at least not the way we think of insanity today.
“There may be very little in the files. Don’t get your hopes up, but if you’re lucky, you may at least get a diagnosis.”
Since they wouldn’t be medical records, I didn’t expect much. I wondered whether I could possibly trust anything doctors said in the files, anyway. Psychiatry was in the Dark Ages then. We still were, but we’d come a long way. Nevertheless, I wanted to find out whatever I could. Once I had made the decision to look for her records, I became determined to make my grandmother a real person, not just a story I trotted out on occasion.
Steve explained that I needed to contact the Wayne County Probate Court’s office in Detroit’s City-county building. I called Detroit the next day and got the ball rolling. I sent in my fifty dollars, then tucked thoughts of my mother and grandmother away. Having worked in a bureaucracy, I didn’t expect anyone to be in a rush to fill my request. My grandmother had been dead more than forty years.
A week later, a large manila envelope arrived in the mail. Wayne County Probate Office was typed in the upper-left-hand corner. I was home by myself and didn’t know whether to look at the records alone or wait for Robin to come home. Sarah was in school, but even if she were home, I didn’t know if the records contained anything I’d want to share without vetting it first.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the dining-room table. I pulled out the envelope’s contents and quickly leafed through a thick wad of thirteen printed forms with signatures, stamps and information that had been hand-typed into the printed pages.
I stopped abruptly on one of the last pages in the packet. I saw my mother’s handwriting. It was unmistakable. It was her signature, the one I had seen her use all her life — signing thank-you cards, sick notes to my teachers, letters to me away at school. She had a very distinctive handwriting. It read: Belle Rosenbaum, daughter, age twenty-four.
Was she twenty-four when her mother was sent away? I searched on the sheet for a date. August 8, 1935, it said. But when I looked more closely at the sheet, I realized it wasn’t the first date listed in my grandmother’s committal papers. The page I was looking at was a review of her condition. She w
as recommitted on this date. A quick look through other pages revealed that my grandmother had been committed in 1931, four years before. My mother was twenty when Esther Koenigsberg, her mother, was sent to Eloise. The photograph of my mother on the beach that Sarah and I were looking at would have been taken around that time.
I was heartsick for my mother. Children don’t send a parent to an institution without trying every other option first. To commit had to be a last resort. So what had my grandmother been like leading up to this date? How many years had the family been living with her while she was ill? I had to presume many. Otherwise, how do children reach the conclusion: “We have no choice. We have to have our mother committed.”
I was crying by that point, wondering if I should have waited for Robin to come home before looking at the papers. It was such a personal sorrow, though. Who else could possibly understand my layers and layers of feeling, going back to the day in 1956 when I answered the phone and the woman on the other end said, “Belle Rosenbaum, please. I’m calling from Eloise Mental Hospital.”
On other pages of my grandmother’s records, I found a diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. So painful to read, I kept trying to determine whether the term was meaningful, made up to fit some bureaucratic guidelines needed for a committal at that time, or ersatz scientific musings of doctors who didn’t really understand mental health as we do now.
What added to my confusion was this: they were quoting my grandmother in English, explaining what she was saying, stressing her incoherency, her loss in train of thought, her confusion. What language had my grandmother used to speak to the doctors or nurses? Wouldn’t she have been speaking Yiddish, her mother tongue? Had she learned English while in America? I was doubtful. So many women in her generation hadn’t. She was fifty-six when committed, according to the documents. She had come in her thirties to America. She took care of a brood of thirteen children and never worked outside the home.
I couldn’t imagine that my grandmother was English-speaking. So if not, were doctors really able to understand what she was saying, even with a translator? I had no one to ask.
I read on. “Her thoughts are dominated by thoughts of persecution, centering on her own family and at times including the whole Jewish race.”
“Voices distrust and suspicion.”
“She attempted suicide a year ago, and threatens to kill her grandchildren because they are unkind to her.”
“Constantly afraid of people — especially afraid of men, thinking some one is going to raid her home. Refuses to live in a home where men present. Refuses to live in Detroit because ‘people’ here are going to raid her home.”
“She says she must die to satisfy the people in America so there can be peace. She is rambling and incoherent in her speech.”
“At some time or other she or her husband had some conflict with the Federal Government by making prune whisky.”
Awful, awful stuff. I didn’t want to believe any of it. I wanted to think my grandmother was saying “I’m gonna kill those grandchildren of mine” as hyperbole, as mothers do when they’re sick to death of their ungrateful offspring. I wanted to believe the prune whisky business was a real altercation with “authorities.” This was Prohibition time. Slivovitz, what they called “prune whisky” in the records, was a common drink of Jewish immigrants. Maybe my grandfather, though dead at the time of her committal, really had been caught making it home years before. And the term “prune whisky” didn’t sit well with me either. No one would translate slivovitz into prune whisky. It’s slivovitz.
But I couldn’t pretend the records were a sham, as was my first instinct. And why should I? My mother and aunts wouldn’t have had my grandmother committed unless something was so wrong that they absolutely couldn’t take care of her. Whether it was 1930s psychiatry or not, the words I read had to mean something: “She cannot meet the vicissitudes of everyday life, and requires institutional care. Recommendation: committal.” The papers, dated 1931, then again in 1935, 1938 and 1939 were signed by five of my grandmother’s children, including my mother.
Reading all this, I momentarily feared that I might be betraying my mother’s wishes and grandmother’s privacy. Yet, by uncovering these documents, I was pulling my grandmother’s life out from the shadows, bringing a mythical grandmother, lost to time, history and secrecy back into the family where she belonged. She had to be part of someone’s memory, if only mine.
I wanted to tell my mother, as I so often had with my own children, “Everything’s all right. It’s okay.” Her mother was sick. As I had said to Sarah’s birth mum when we first spoke on the phone. “Who’s to judge? Why does fate send someone one way, the next another?” We are all dealt hands. At that moment, with my grandmother’s records spread out on the table in front of me, I realized my mother and I were very much alike in some ways. Life threw us each a curveball. We weren’t sure what to do or how to do it. We were both flying by the seat of our pants, trying to do the best we could for our children, not knowing exactly what that was.
The records about my grandmother exposed something else about my mother, giving me a probable explanation for why she criticized her daughters so much about our looks, our grades, our boyfriends, our careers. She cared deeply how the rest of the world saw us, and by extension, herself. Perhaps she had never been able to completely free herself from the shame she felt about her mother.
It was time for another piece of family history to be put in place.
Robin and I had always told Sarah that we wanted her to wait until she was at least eighteen before meeting Denise. That day was now three weeks away. She was eighteen and ready. Denise let us know early on that when Sarah was ready, she would be too.
It was eighteen years that Denise and I had been speaking on the phone, exchanging letters or, more recently, emails. I made sure she heard when Sarah lost her first tooth, bought her first hockey skates, kicked a winning goal in soccer and saved her brother Michael from falling into a dangerously big hole.
Since she was fifteen, Sarah had been communicating directly with her birth mother through emails, and every once in a while, spoke to her on the phone. If Denise was calling me and Sarah happened to pick up, she spoke to her on the phone. When it first happened, Sarah immediately pressed the phone into my hand, too nervous to speak, but that soon changed.
Sarah had a strong desire to meet Denise when she was thirteen, but I had suggested she ask Denise for pictures of herself instead, and somehow, that sidetracked the immediate urge. For many years, a large picture of Denise was prominently displayed in Sarah’s bedroom, just as Kira’s once was in Michael’s.
We started making plans for the reunion, all agreeing it should be at Denise’s home in Kitchener, a city roughly one and a half hours outside Toronto.
As with Michael, we spent time talking to Sarah about her expectations of the meeting, any hopes or dreams she harboured. It wasn’t the same as it was for Michael, though, because Denise wasn’t an unknown. We knew so much about her, even the sound of her voice. She knew about us, too. We just hadn’t yet met. Nevertheless, this was a major, possibly life-altering event, as was the phone call I received from Denise eighteen years before: “Hi, I’m calling about the ad in the newspaper.” To which I had responded, “What ad?”
Michael was coming with Sarah, Robin and me to meet Denise. He had been home from The Farm for several years by this time. We were again the Rosenbaum-Christmas family of four. The year away from us had been as good for Michael as it had been for us. He liked being in the country and taking care of animals. He thrived on the outdoor activities, including winter camping and snowshoeing. Though there had been a treatment aspect to the The Farm’s program, we didn’t see major changes upon his return. His mood was good though, he was less preoccupied with Kira and seemed to have a confidence we hadn’t noticed before. He still wasn’t back in school and had not started to work. He was more willing to open channels for both, he said, and was showing a real interest in wo
odcarving. The idea of a remote cabin in the woods, however, remained more appealing than any of these other options.
It felt good having Michael home. He seemed like he wanted to be there, too. As before, however, worry about his future gnawed away at us. At twenty, his ability to look after himself remained markedly limited.
As we piled into the car, I wondered if the trip to Denise’s might be painful for Michael. He’d been so close to meeting his own birth mother, but because of her death, he never did, never would. I worried this might make him sad or jealous. “Mike, will it be hard for you to see Sarah meet Denise since you didn’t get to meet Kira?” I asked.
“No,” he said. I thought our young man of few words was finished, but he then added, “I’m happy for Sarah.” I thought back to the days at SickKids when Dr. Roberts told us we had to “model” emotions for Michael so he could learn words for what he was feeling. Over the years we had been saying things like “You must be feeling angry, Michael,” when someone bullied him at school. “You must be sad, Michael,” when Kira died. “You must be proud, Michael,” when he learned to ski. On his own, right then, he said he was happy for his sister. He probably was. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.
I didn’t say much on the drive out to Denise’s. I had learned over the years, and particularly on the drive back from The Farm, that I didn’t always have to rescue my family from uncomfortable feelings. Sure, everyone was nervous, but we’d survive. Anyway, I knew that once we were at Denise’s I was going to be commandeered into active duty to keep everything moving along nicely.
We drove up to the small, wood-sided white house where Denise was living. “You walk in first, Ma,” Sarah said, virtually shoving me at the door of Denise’s small basement apartment, at the back of the house.
I knocked, and Denise came quickly to open the door, dressed casually, in jeans and a T-shirt. She said hello in her husky voice, then gave me a hearty laugh and spontaneous hug. I moved in quickly to make room for Sarah who was standing directly behind me. Denise gave her an even bigger bear hug. When they eventually pulled apart, they just stared at each other for what seemed forever, but was more likely just a few intense seconds.
Not Exactly As Planned Page 24