One thing that constantly astonishes me is the human refusal to absorb knowledge. Pets are different. Granted, dogs and cats have a narrower range of things they need to pick up on in order to live happily ever after. For them it’s mostly: Where do you usually put my food bowl? How do I let you know when I need to relieve myself? Which places are unsafe when I’m wandering outside? And: What’s the most effective way to make you scratch my ears? But they sure do learn those things quickly. And once they learn them, they don’t forget them.
We humans are capable of taking in important information, of course. But we also tend to reject any fact we’d rather not know. Instead, we prefer to listen to someone who either reinforces what we already believe or shows us the easiest possible path to (a) money, (b) happiness, or (c) immortality. I don’t think that necessarily makes us inferior to our four-legged friends, because they have something of the same tendency. It’s just that in their case, instead of piling on the greed and lusting for eternal life, they tend to go for food and pats of affection. I must admit that I find both of the latter desires a little more palatable.
I can say this with great certainty as well: The older we get—and this applies to humans, cats, dogs, and giraffes—the more like ourselves we become. If someone is fearful at age thirty, by eighty he or she will be cowering under the bed at the faintest creak in the floorboard. If nervous when young, fingernails will be chewed down to the bone by coffintime. Crankiness will turn into downright meanness. Masochists become more self-flagellating, and sadists become more de Sade–like. Relationships become warmer or more abusive. Age doesn’t change us. It simply reinforces what and who we are before it decides to take everything away.
The third and final thing I will stake my rep on is something that took me a long time to understand. All the great writers and thinkers tend to bring everything back to history. Shakespeare, Faulkner, Euripides, all the South Korean factory workers who write the James Patterson novels—if they agree on anything, it’s that the past casts an inescapable shadow over our present and future. I don’t think it’s quite that simple, however. It’s not history that makes us what we are. I’m not who I am because of some vague link to Henry the Eighth or de Soto or some thirteenth-century rabbinical scholar. I think the past we’re linked to is much more immediate than that. It’s family. It’s our own flesh and blood that shapes what we think and what we feel and who we are. That’s what shackles us to the past. It’s our family we can never quite get away from.
The further I move into adulthood, the more I see that life often becomes about three choices: re-creating one’s family, running away completely from the idea of family, or reinventing and creating a totally new kind of family.
When I met Anna, though, I wasn’t doing any of those things. I was mostly in a state of puzzlement and indecision about my parents and my brother. By the time it was appropriate to introduce them to Anna, I was a little less indecisive. In fact, I was dreading the sit-down because I’d recently come to a conclusion about them.
My family was completely crazy.
Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. Almost all families are crazy, something I first realized when I was still in grad school and interning at a local animal clinic. A woman brought in her dog—a three-legged boxer—to be put to sleep. She was nervous, and probably guilty and definitely sad, already feeling the loneliness that was sure to overwhelm her once the dog was gone. So she started talking to me. Because she and the dog had been together for so long, almost twenty years, he was part of her family, so that’s what we talked about: her family.
She was a lovely woman, soft-spoken and gracious, although she told her story very quickly, probably because she was so anxious about her dog. She said she had recently turned sixty, and on her birthday she’d made a big decision. She’d been estranged from her brothers and sisters for decades. Most of them had adjusted to the situation—it had become more a question of benign neglect than outright hostility. But one brother, eight years younger than she, never let go of the anger he felt toward her. They hadn’t spoken in over twenty-five years, yet she still sent him a Christmas present every year. He never sent her a thank-you note, never responded in any way. When she turned sixty, she decided that enough was enough. She was old enough to do what she wanted—and what she wanted was to stop sending a yearly present to her wretched, spiteful younger brother. So the Christmas before I saw her and her dog, she hadn’t sent him anything. And two weeks after the holiday, she received the first note from him she’d ever gotten. She said she could quote it word for word, and she did. The letter said:
Dear Jennifer:
Every year I throw your Christmas present to me in the garbage. But fuck you for not sending me one this year.
Your brother, Daniel.
When she finished, she shook her head, hugged her dog to her chest, and burst into tears. I told her it was okay to cry, in fact it was a good thing, and then I put the boxer to sleep.
* * *
My family was probably no crazier than most. It’s just that their insanity was, so to speak, closer to home.
The odd thing about them wasn’t really that they were so screwed up. What I couldn’t figure out was how it had all gone so wrong, because at one time we all seemed like such a happy group. We were what a family was supposed to be. But by the time Anna was about to step inside the ring, that image had proved to be, like so many images from childhood, far more illusion than reality.
My father rarely spoke—at least to me—about anything in his past. His military experiences, his education, his girlfriends before he met my mom. I could probably dredge up a few tidbits and images and maybe even a full anecdote or two about my father’s past, but that’s about it. And he never spoke about his own family. His mother died when he was fourteen years old and that is, literally, all I know about her. I don’t even know my grandmother’s first name. He never mentioned it. Of course, just to prove that I, too, can show an utter, all-too-human lack of interest in information gathering, I have to admit that I never asked.
I do know that my father’s father owned a small canning factory on the Massachusetts side of the New York–Massachusetts border. I remember my grandfather as regal, elegant, and patrician, with white hair and a white mustache and a throaty, commanding voice. According to the few things my father told me, and a few more details courtesy of my mother, my memories are accurate as far as they go. But the elegance was affectation, as was the regal demeanor—in fact, my grandfather was a German Jewish immigrant who hadn’t gotten much past the sixth grade. And the throaty voice came from all the cigarettes he chain-smoked. He also, according to my dad, was arrogant, selfish, and controlling. For the last fifteen years of my grandfather’s life, he and my father didn’t speak because my dad didn’t want to go into the canning business. Instead, he wanted to be an actor, which is what he did.
And that’s another thing I don’t know: Why did my dad want to become an actor? Did he need a way to express himself? Did he crave attention? Was he trying to bury his identity under layers of pretending? I could speculate, but that’s all it would be. I know only two things for certain: That at one point he wanted to be Marlon Brando but settled for being the real-life equivalent of the older-actor-soap-opera-guy in Tootsie. And that my grandfather disapproved of acting, the big city, and all forms of rebellion, so he never spoke to his oldest son again once he fled the family business.
My grandfather did reach out to my mother when first my brother and then I was born. When we were kids, my mother would drive us up north to visit him. For some reason she thought it was important that we get to know a really mean old guy who disapproved of and looked down on our father. (Families are like quicksand: It’s very, very hard to drag yourself out of the mire.) But those visits became scarcer when my grandfather became ill. And they stopped altogether when, due to his five-pack-a-day habit, he died of throat cancer when he was fifty-nine years old. I was eight, my brother was fourteen, and my dad was thirty
-seven.
My grandfather’s name was Hymie Getzelman. When my dad graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and started making the rounds as a young actor, he didn’t think that “Sol Getzelman” had that appropriate Cary Grant ring to it, so he reversed his father’s initials and changed his name to Greg Heller. He switched to Heller because he thought that this momentous deciscion represented an escape from the hell of his family. And it wasn’t just Hymie from whom my dad was running—it was also his younger siblings, Ruth and Fred. However my father and grandfather felt about each other, they must have shared a measure of mutual respect, as well as an abiding contempt for the two youngest Getzelmans. When my grandfather died, he left a third of the factory to each of his children, along with a private letter to my dad requesting that he look after Hymie’s second wife, Eloise. The reason he made the request of my dad, Hymie wrote, was because he didn’t think his other two children would give a shit. He was right about that. They soon proved themselves to be a little less than stellar when it came to family ties.
Within a year of my grandfather’s death, Ruth and Fred convinced my dad that he should sell his share to them, since he had no physical or emotional connection to the business. As young as I was, I clearly remember the dinner at our house to celebrate the sale: the slightly melancholy severance, as well as the joy of a rare happy extended-family moment. In this group, severance seemed directly connected to pleasure.
I recall my Aunt Faith—married to my father’s brother, with two sisters named Hope and Charity—toasting the entire family that evening. “I hope this leads us to become a closer family,” she said. “Because nothing is more important than what we’re sharing here today.”
My Uncle Ben, husband to my dad’s sister, also raised his glass and said, “I’ll go further than that. What we have here today … family, people we love, people we can trust … that’s all we have. Nothing else matters.”
Even I was allowed to join the celebration by having a tiny sip of wine, and everyone made a big fuss out of that. I remember the flush of happiness that started at the back of my neck and ran down my spine, making me shiver with pleasure.
Ruth and Fred bought my dad out for a relatively small sum, and at first it was all lovely and fair and very amicable. But what my dad’s siblings failed to mention was that they had already lined up another buyer for the place—a buyer who had made it clear how valuable the factory was. Mere weeks after my father sold them his share, Uncle Fred and Aunt Faith and Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ben closed their prenegotiated deal for the factory and became multimillionaires.
That pretty much ended any hope of regular family reunions. But it didn’t end our connection to my dad’s family; growing up, I watched his rebellion gradually come to an end. Ultimately he returned to his roots, drawn back as if magnetized to a somewhat insipid past. Though he remained an actor for his entire life, he managed to turn that potentially glamorous and ambitious career into something that, as closely as possible, resembled a life spent in a factory that shaped and manufactured tin cans. When he was in his early twenties, he landed a role on a daytime soap opera. It was a good job and a fine start to a career. Except it wasn’t really the start; it was also the end, because he never left. He played the same part for thirty-five years, preferring a steady paycheck to risk or the potential for artistic growth. He also decided, much like his dad, that he didn’t really like or trust the city, so after only a few years of toil in a TV studio on West Sixty-third Street in Manhattan, he moved his wife and two sons to a small town in upstate New York—just opposite the small town on the Massachusetts border in which Uncle Fred and Aunt Ruth lived. He spent four days a week in Manhattan and three days a week plus seven weeks of the summer with us. He also became the creative director of our local summer-stock theater. In over thirty years in that job, I don’t think he ever did an original play, just revivals. He directed and starred in Our Town eight times and The Odd Couple five times; he also played Oliver Warbucks in Annie four times during his reign.
Life was good when I was a boy. I had plenty of friends and got to ride my bike to their houses. I was an excellent student and liked my teachers. I never really noticed the odd marital and familial arrangement. My mom was always around, and although my dad was gone half the time, whenever I realized I was missing him I talked to him on the phone in New York. And when he was home he was really home, day and night—available for fatherly conversations and to hand over an extra buck or two for my allowance and to look disappointed when I didn’t live up to his standards.
My mom didn’t work; she managed the household and took good care of her two sons. She cooked and cleaned and paid the bills, but she also threw the football around with me in the backyard and took me bowling and helped me with my homework. When I was six and seven and ten, it all seemed kind of perfect. Everyone got along. Everyone was happy. Everything was exactly how it was supposed to be.
The best part was Teddy. Six years older than I, he was the perfect brother. Handsomer than I was, stronger, and a better athlete, he had girls falling all over him. He tortured me the way an older brother is supposed to; his favorite game was to push me to the ground, kneel on my chest, grab one of my hands, and force me to slap myself in the face, the whole time saying, “What are you hitting yourself for? Are you crazy? Stop hitting yourself,” while I’d be simultaneously crying in frustration and laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing.
But Ted also liked me enough to take me along on some of his dates. When he was sixteen and I was ten, he’d take me to movies with his girlfriend, Sandy. Ted would buy me popcorn and candy and talk to me like I really belonged. Sandy talked to me the same way, so suddenly I became part of a new world of teenagers who were far more sophisticated than I was. Sometimes I’d wander off, maybe to some remote part of a movie theater lobby, occasionally half a block away, just to see how protective my brother would be; he’d always find me instantly and, without making a fuss, guide me back to join the date. He also let me play sports with his peers. (I always had to be the center in football and the catcher in baseball, but I didn’t care; I simply couldn’t believe my luck in getting to join in with the big boys.) He taught me how to play chess because he wanted someone to practice with. And because he read the sports pages religiously, I did, too. Eventually, I even leaped ahead of him with my knowledge of stats and strategy.
What I didn’t realize then was how sometimes leaping ahead isn’t such a great thing, and how roles can change. And how being a hero to your little brother at age sixteen is no guarantee that everything will work out later on. I particularly didn’t realize how my dad’s absence affected Ted.
Whereas I felt special when my dad came back upstate each weekend—his homecoming on Thursday night always seemed like a celebratory event—Ted grew increasingly resentful at the absences and less and less interested in our father’s return. It might have been the age difference. At sixteen he knew a lot more about the world than I did at ten. I remember Ted asking me once if I thought Dad saw other women when he was in New York. I was shocked; he might as well have asked me if I thought our father was actually from Jupiter, had a pod at the back of his neck, and munched on small children in the middle of the night. I shook my head vehemently, to emphasize how crazy that was, and Ted told me that there was at least one other woman he knew of. I started to cry, not loud sobs, but hard tears that suddenly poured out of me, until Ted slapped me playfully and said, “Hey, I was just kidding. How the hell would I know what he’s doin’ in New York?” I looked at him suspiciously, but his smile only grew wider and he said, “Besides, who the hell would go out with Dad?” I stopped crying and life went on and I never did find out if Teddy was inventing the other woman or knew some deep, dark secret. Over the ensuing years, he told me at various times that both sides of that equation were true. Sometimes I was positive he was telling me the truth; other times I thought he was lying. Eventually, I was certain he no longer knew what the truth was, if in fact he
ever did.
By the time he was fifteen, Ted had stopped listening to our mom and seemed to delight in torturing her as only a teenager can torture a parent. He got drunk a few times, and the manner in which he ignored her attempts to discipline him was his way of saying, “You’re not my father, you’re not strong enough to tell me what to do.” He left pot lying around, knowing it would upset her but also knowing that she wouldn’t tell our dad, because it would cause an explosion that would blow the roof off our house. Two or three times I came home from school and found my mom crying. I would ask her what happened and she would only say, “Nothing,” and then hug me tightly.
I was the good child; the more Ted became the bad child, the easier it was for me to look better, and the more I wanted to act better. It soon became obvious that Teddy couldn’t ever get the approval from my parents that I could. By the time he went away to college, he wasn’t inviting me into his life and looking out for me quite as much. Now in junior high school, I still looked up to him. He had all sorts of talents, none of which he valued. He was an athlete and a terrific musician; he was movie-star handsome and could charm anything that moved. But I was the smart one, which is what he wanted to be more than anything. And so, due to a combination of all sorts of things, some coming from within, some pushed upon us by outside forces, some just the natural erosion of all things simple and innocent that comes about with age, my brother and I began to grow apart.
Ask Bob: A Novel Page 3