by Susan Jacoby
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A HALF-CONTINENT away from his mother and sister, the youngest of the Jacoby siblings was also embarking upon a relationship with a Catholic (albeit a far more lax Catholic than the spouses Edith and Ozzie had chosen). For Bob Jacoby, the provisional life of the Depression and the war years would end soon after he met Irma Broderick. They had known each other for about three months when they were married on July 1, 1944, with the world still at war but an end in sight. The importance of what they didn’t know about each other (“just about everything,” according to Dad) paled by comparison with their desire to start a family in a world where, in the wake of the successful Normandy invasion, the conclusion of the war in an Allied victory had become a near-certainty in the minds of most Americans. At thirty, my father was finally embarking upon his adult life. At twenty-three, my mother was starting over.
My mother, like my father, had a secret that carries no stigma today. She was divorced—a fact of her life, like so much about my father’s life, that I would not discover for many years. She had married, over my grandparents’ strenuous objections, only to leave her feckless young husband when she realized her parents had been right about his character. Fortunately, this brief, unwise union produced no children. Unfortunately, my mother and her first husband had been married in a Catholic ceremony, which meant she might forever be precluded from remarrying within the Church. My parents were therefore married in a Lutheran ceremony. My grandparents preferred to see my mother married in any church rather than before a justice of the peace, so the couple went around Chicago from one house of worship to another until they found a minister who wasn’t fussy about religious provenance. Their first choice had been a particularly beautiful Episcopal church frequented by Chicago society, but they were frostily turned away after a brief inquiry into their backgrounds. My mother’s description of this pragmatic shopping tour for a church, and my Broderick grandparents’ equally pragmatic acquiescence, is entirely consistent with the ambivalent messages that would later characterize my religious upbringing.
At the wedding, the groom was in uniform and the bride wore a rose peau de soie street-length dress and an orchid corsage. I didn’t know that my mother had been married twice until 1966, which turned out to be a big year for the revelation of secrets on both sides of my family. My seventeen-year-old brother was the one who made the discovery; one of his favorite pastimes, when he was home sick from school and Mom had left the house to do various errands, was sifting through my parents’ private papers to see what interesting information he could dig up. (As the reporter in the family, I was quite chagrined that I had not thought of employing such sneaky tactics myself.) On one of Rob’s fishing expeditions, in the type of discovery scene frequently written into the plots of soap operas, he hit pay dirt—my mother’s ancient divorce papers. Like most people, Mom had failed to destroy all of the evidence of her youthful indiscretions. As far as my father was concerned, the secret of my mother’s divorce was hers to tell or not tell as she saw fit—just as my mother regarded the secret of Dad’s Jewish origins as his private property. And by the late sixties, divorce was a secret with limited shock value. Had she been a member of my generation, my mother later said, she would probably have lived with her first husband for a few months and broken up with him, leaving no stain on her record.
Like so many men and women who married during the war—and far more hastily than they would have in a more settled world—my parents would probably never have met each other in peacetime. They exemplified one of the unanticipated side effects of the war—a substantial increase in the number of mixed marriages cutting across geographic, ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries. Most of these unlikely couples, like my parents, managed to stay married in spite of differences in their backgrounds that might well have posed insuperable obstacles to their happiness in a less mobile, more tradition-bound era of American history.
My mother’s status as a divorced woman who could not be married within the Church certainly made it easier for her to marry a Jew and easier for her parents to accept the marriage. Dad did not have to go through the rigmarole of Catholic marriage counseling or promise to raise his children as Catholics (as Ozzie did when he married Mary McHale). And my Broderick grandparents, partly because my mom’s marriage to a Catholic had turned out badly and partly because they genuinely liked my dad, regarded his Jewishness as a relatively minor detail. If Mom’s first marriage were ever to be annulled by the Church, she and my father could be remarried by a priest. And if she remained an outcast from Catholicism, well, my grandparents were more concerned about their daughter’s happiness in this world than in the next. They were not entirely sanguine about the situation, however, for they urged my mother to seek a Church annulment of her first marriage when my brother and I came along. The annulment was granted, some years before my father’s conversion, on grounds that my mother and her first husband had never intended to have children (one of the few grounds for Catholic annulments in those days). It was rumored that my grandfather had paid a bribe to someone in the Chicago Archdiocese in order to grease the wheels, but my grandmother Broderick denied this. “Your gramps could have done it without my knowing,” she acknowledged, “but I don’t believe it. It’s true that we—especially he—wanted your mother to be able to receive the sacraments again, but I don’t think he would have paid good money for it. It wasn’t that hard to get an annulment if you never had children and you and your former husband agreed to say that you never intended to have them.” My grandmother may or may not have been right about what actually happened, but I don’t think Gramps would have hesitated for a moment to pay someone off in order to make things right between God and his little girl. And if he didn’t do it, he probably enjoyed creating the impression that he was rich enough to bribe God’s representatives on earth. In any event, my parents were remarried by a priest after her annulment but before his conversion.
The “blemish” of my mother’s mildly wild youth may have been a psychological plus from my father’s perspective, because it balanced out what he saw as the far greater liability of his being a Jew. In Bob Jacoby’s eyes, my mother was a catch. His knowledge that she had a certain amount of “experience,” had suffered a certain amount of hurt and betrayal, may well have been a plus. At thirty, my dad was not looking for a virgin (in the emotional or physical sense). He was looking for a woman strong enough to bring out the best in him, to help him overcome his weaknesses. This my mother was eventually able to do, even though she had no idea of the full extent of those weaknesses when she married him.
My Broderick grandparents were part of the package. Any reservations they had about acquiring a New York Jew for a son-in-law were overcome by his obvious adoration of their daughter. “When she was young, your mother became involved with men who took advantage of her, who didn’t give her the love and respect she deserved,” my grandmother told me. “Your dad was different. The way he looked at her, you knew he thought of her as a prize. And the proof came later, when he had to choose between gambling and his family and he chose his wife and children.”
Part of the emotional fit between my parents was the space my Broderick grandparents filled in my father’s heart. It is not hard to imagine what their unfailing love meant to my dad, coming as he did from a family whose fractious members were in the habit of cutting one another off for months, years, or eternity. My grandfather Broderick had his faults: he was an old-fashioned Irish patriarch, steeped (like his contemporary, Joseph Kennedy) in the traditional Irish Catholic dichotomy between good girls and bad girls. When my mother displayed a broad streak of rebellion for a well-raised Irish Catholic girl of her generation, Gramps had no idea how to deal with her. He was a man who was used to getting his own way, and he wanted nothing more than to push my mother back into the mold of a good Catholic girl, but there is no possibility that he would ever, for whatever reason, have cut his child out of his life.
My grandmother treated Dad like another of
her children. “I think of him as my son, not as a son-in-law,” she would say. It was as natural for my grandmother Broderick to praise as it was for my grandmother Jacoby to criticize, and I noticed the difference at a very young age. In particular, my mother’s mother was always telling Dad what a wonderful father he was to my brother and me, something that must have been especially meaningful to him in view of the parental neglect that characterized his own upbringing. Two months after their wedding, my mother became pregnant with me. Couples who married near the end of the war, when nearly all of the news was good (with the exception of the relatively brief Battle of the Bulge), saw no reason to wait to start their families. The baby boom did not begin officially until 1946, when most of the veterans returned to civilian life, but my parents got a jump start. I was born on June 4, 1945, 363 days after D-Day. Before I was three months old, the war would be over.
My parents were both happy at my arrival, but happiness was too mild a word to describe Bob Jacoby’s response to fatherhood. I recently enlarged a snapshot of the two of us, taken when I was about four months old. I am already posing, looking head-on into the camera, but Dad, holding me in his arms, is in three-quarter profile because he can’t take his eyes off me. In the tiny snapshot, I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but in the enlarged photograph, I see a mesmerized look of undiluted love that takes my breath away. If a woman is lucky, she sees something evocative of that look, something that makes her feel safe and cherished, on the face of a man who loves her as an adult.
Right from the start, my father assumed child-care duties—changing diapers, heating bottles, bathing me—that were performed by few other fathers of his generation. “I don’t think your grandfather, in his entire life, ever changed a diaper,” my grandmother Broderick said. “Not that he didn’t love his children, but it never would have occurred to him to be the one to get up when they cried. I never saw anyone as crazy about his kids as your dad was about you and Robbie.” Needless to say, my mother received no special praise for doing the things that mothers are expected to do for their children.
More important than what my father did was the way he understood the mind of a child. My earliest memories date from age three, when my brother was born and my mother later returned to the hospital with severe anemia and, I suspect, with what would be called depression today. My brother was born in October, and Mom, who had not really regained her strength after the difficult birth of a baby weighing nearly eleven pounds, collapsed and was readmitted to the hospital a few months later. I was terrified because I was sure my mother was going to die; my grandmother’s attempts to convince me otherwise were unavailing, because I had not been allowed to see my mommy. In those days, hospitals never permitted small children to visit, but my father was resourceful, and he understood that nothing but the sight of my mother would assuage my anguish. One day, Dad came home early and led me by the hand to a vacant lot strewn with broken bottles and dog droppings but with a clear view of Mom’s room in the small Harvey hospital where she was being treated. He positioned me on his shoulders, and then my mother stuck her head out the window and waved and blew kisses. She couldn’t keep the window open long, but my dad stood there holding me until dusk fell and the lights went on, enabling us to see my mother appear once more behind the glass. That night, I slept without nightmares. For the rest of my mom’s hospital stay, Dad took me every day to wave good night to her from our position in the vacant lot.
I am still not certain how my father, starved for affection and attention throughout his childhood, learned how to love and how to show love. “There was a natural goodness about your dad” was my grandmother Broderick’s explanation. “Some people, when they don’t get what they need as children, keep back the same things from their own children. Bob wanted you kids to have what he didn’t. I don’t think he ever deliberately did a mean thing to anyone in his life.”
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MOM WAS the disciplinarian in our family. I remember only one incident during my entire childhood that prompted my mother to speak the words, dreaded in so many households, “Wait till your father gets home.” At seven, I was allowed to walk to a small, family-owned grocery store about five blocks from our home in Hazel Crest, the Chicago suburb where we moved after my dad was fired from his job in the city. Such freedom would be unthinkable for any seven-year-old almost anywhere in the country today. The walk to the store was a much-anticipated treat, because there I would decide how to allot my allowance—fifty cents a week at the time—choosing among comic books, candy, and sets of prominent wax teeth (which we put in our mouths in order to “scare” our friends). The only drawback was that my four-year-old brother always wanted to tag along, and my mother almost always insisted that I take him with me. Robbie and I got along well most of the time—his unqualified adoration of me went a long way toward reconciling me to his existence—but I deeply resented having to take him along on these walks, which I relished because of the absence of adult supervision for the ten or fifteen minutes it took to get to the store. I would run far ahead of Robbie and torment him by pretending that I was going to leave him behind. One day, I had an inspiration. As we passed a creek that lay between our house and the store—needless to say, we were strictly forbidden to go near the water by ourselves—I ducked behind a tree and yelled, “I’m going to jump into the creek and drown myself now. You’ll never see me again.” Letting out a bloodcurdling yell, I produced a scream that faded away on the last notes, “Here I go-o-o-o.” Robbie ran home, crying and telling my mother that I had jumped into the creek and drowned myself. Mom came running, dragged me out from behind the tree, and ordered me home. Her face paled and her lips tightened—both signs that she was furious—but she didn’t raise her voice. “I just don’t know what your punishment should be,” she said. “I’ve never heard of a child scaring her little brother that way. We’ll wait till your father gets home to talk about it.” When Dad got home—there was no happy greeting, because the exhausted Robbie was still napping and I was confined to my room—I heard my mother telling him what had happened in a tone of controlled anger. My father, as usual, lost his temper and raised his voice when he ticked off the possible punishments. No allowance for a month, he told my mother, wouldn’t be nearly enough. Being sent to my room was no punishment at all, because I would just amuse myself by reading. Ditto for not being allowed to go outside and play. Finally—I knew the penalty would be something unusual—Dad came into the room and asked me if I understood why he was so upset about my behavior and why I deserved a serious punishment. Then he delivered an admonition of such gravity—and absent his usual hyperbole—that I have never forgotten either his tone or his precise words. “Your brother loves you, he worships the ground you walk on,” Dad said, “and that’s why he makes a pest of himself. I know you don’t like it when he follows you everywhere, but that’s no excuse for what you did. You knew he was too little not to believe you when you said you were going to drown yourself, and you deliberately frightened him. You used his love for you against him. That’s a terrible, terrible thing to do no matter how old you are.” You used his love for you against him. Both the concept, and the way my father articulated it, were new to me—among several firsts that would embed the day’s events in my memory.
By the end of my father’s speech, I certainly did understand the weight of my offense. I was experiencing, for the first time (perhaps for the only time in my life), what the Catholic Church calls “perfect contrition”: remorse prompted not by fear of punishment but by a genuine sense of the wrongfulness and hurtfulness of one’s acts. In the Act of Contrition recited in the confessional during my childhood, the distinction between imperfect and perfect contrition was expressed in the lines, “And I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all, because they have offended thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love.” Needless to say, imperfect contrition was the more common form of regret. If you were unlucky enough to
meet with a fatal accident in a state of mortal sin—without any opportunity to go to confession—only perfect contrition could save you from the pains of hell. Imperfect contrition, however, was good enough for the confessional.
No confessor could have been a sterner judge than my father, who was unmoved by my tears (another first!) and said that “feeling bad” wasn’t enough. “I’ve never spanked you, but I’m going to now,” he declared purposefully. Then he turned me over his knee and gave me several halfhearted spanks on my bottom. When I looked up, he was crying too. “Don’t ever make me spank you again,” he said. While I don’t, as a rule, believe in corporal punishment, I disagree with psychologists who say it’s always bad to spank a child. Since I had never been spanked before, I knew that my father had gone against his own nature by imposing the humiliation of corporal punishment upon me; I knew, in the language of adults, that this was a symbolic punishment appropriate to the seriousness of my crime. Words could never have made the same impression on me. (Needless to say, the spanking would not have made an indelible impression if physical discipline had been a common occurrence in our home. I had already noticed that children whose parents did spank them—and most of my friends’ parents did—seemed utterly indifferent to the humiliation and ran away laughing as soon as the spanking was over.) After my father left the room—he had kissed me good night with the reassuring words that his being mad at me didn’t mean he had stopped loving me—my little brother, who had already deepened my remorse by wailing piteously as he heard me being spanked, completed the moral lesson of the day by presenting me with a mutilated slab of fudge cake. Having decided that being deprived of dessert was too great a penalty on top of the other punishments I had already received, Robbie concealed the cake in his fist upon leaving the dinner table and stored it under his bed (he had the bottom bunk) until lights-out.