Largely true, and certainly heartfelt. Ultimately, though, I found the shame and stigma explanation to be unsatisfying. Obviously both were real factors, but they seemed more context than explanation. Sure, if you grew up in a household of lowered voices and furtive glances, if you absorbed at a young age the idea that certain subjects were taboo, then yes, it’s fair to say that shame lies at the root of the silence, promotes it and nurtures it. But that particular scenario didn’t fit the facts as I came to understand them.
Annie wasn’t a secret when she went to Eloise. She had spent twenty-one years in the neighborhoods where Mom grew up. Even if Annie had trouble getting around on her misshapen leg, she still must have accompanied her mother to the market, gone with her sister to the playground, talked to other kids on the street. People must have seen her, met her, known her. If Mom felt ashamed of her sister, she had lived with that shame for a long time. Keeping Annie a secret after twenty-one years—making her into a secret—wouldn’t be easy. Had there been a moment, a specific time and place, when Mom made her decision? Or was it gradual, never actually decided, but a fait accompli that took hold as Annie’s commitment to Eloise became permanent? Or was it not even Mom’s decision, but rather the wish of her parents? Had they enlisted Mom in the conspiracy of silence, or had she enlisted them?
And what about my father? Had he kept the secret, too? Surely Mom had told him about Annie. But Sash said, no, I bet he didn’t know. That was inconceivable to me. How could my parents have lived under the same roof for thirty-eight years without something about Annie landing unexpectedly in Dad’s lap, just as the cemetery’s letter had landed in ours?
Thinking about the strain of keeping the secret, I found myself with a certain admiration for Mom’s ability to maintain the facade all those years. It required stamina and focus, yet surely it must have taken its toll. Had she wanted to tell us, to unburden herself? Or was it not a burden at all, but rather a projection on my part, the result of seeing too many movies and reading too many psychological novels?
The other pages arrived the following week, six in all, a single document titled “Routine History” that told, in one narrative sweep, the devastating circumstances that led my grandparents, Hyman and Tillie Cohen, to seek the commitment of their youngest daughter to Eloise Hospital, an institution for the mentally ill operated by Wayne County, the county that includes Detroit.
The narrative was like a Rosetta stone. The more I studied it, the more information it yielded about Annie, her condition, my grandparents, my mom, the family’s history. Much later, when I knew more, I would understand the richness of its detail. But on that initial read, what stood out were two sentences about Annie that flung me back to Mom’s apartment in the spring of 1995: “She screamed during the night, kept wanting to get up, and seemed to think she would die if she stayed in bed…. patient was so difficult to manage that the family couldn’t get any sleep and were ‘all going crazy.’”
So Mom feared that she was becoming her sister. That was why, during that awful day at Botsford, she kept repeating to me, I can’t stay here. It’s the wrong place for me. You don’t understand. Mom saw Botsford as her Eloise.
That didn’t make sense, of course. Mom was only supposed to spend two weeks at Botsford. But panic isn’t necessarily rational, and besides, we didn’t know the circumstances of Annie’s commitment. Maybe she was supposed to have gone home after just a few weeks, too.
Why didn’t Mom tell us about Annie? By keeping the secret, Mom had walled herself off, suffered her fears alone. If only she had said, “Look, I had a sister, and I saw her fall apart to the point that my family sent her to a mental institution, and that’s why I’m so scared right now,” then she wouldn’t have been reduced to saying “I can’t stay here. You don’t understand.” We could have understood. We would have understood.
As I recounted the story to friends over the next few years, though, their questions made me realize that I really didn’t understand. Gradually, it became clear to me: Just as Mom needed to keep her secret, I needed to find out why she kept it. Unless I understood the secret, how could I come to terms with the anguish of that day at Botsford, when I defied Mom’s wishes and left her no choice but to commit herself to a psychiatric ward?
“I’m leaving the documents on the table here,” I announced, “if anyone wants to read them.”
It was a vividly sunny day in July 2000, six weeks after the documents had arrived from my Lansing contact, and I had brought the envelope to a family gathering in the hills of southern Vermont. The reunion was a kind of tribute to Mom: At her funeral, we had talked about making sure all the children and grandchildren continued to get together, even though Mom was no longer around to provide the glue. We hatched the idea of renting a house for a week somewhere; the West Coast branch agreed to come east for this first round, and southern Vermont won the location lottery. Sixteen of us—siblings, spouses, and children ranging in age from eleven to thirty-one—signed up for the trip.
I had briefed Sash, Mike, and Jeff by phone soon after obtaining the Lansing documents, and I discovered that not everyone had the same level of interest. Sash and I were at one extreme, wanting to find out more; she thought I should chase all leads, wherever they went. Mike was skeptical, suggesting that the records offered more chance for misinterpretation than insight; he felt we could never know enough (or learn enough) to understand the choices that Mom made. Jeff was somewhere in between, curious but not quite as captivated as Sash. (When I talked later to Evie, who wasn’t part of the Vermont group, she questioned the wisdom of digging around in the past, asking aloud whether we wouldn’t be better off to leave well enough alone.)
After that round of phone calls, I wondered whether I should just leave the package at home. This was planned as a vacation, not a conference on family skeletons; if I wanted to share the records, maybe I should just mail everyone a set. But that felt even more activist, an intrusion rather than an invitation. Finally, I opted for openness. The contents of the envelope belonged to the family, not to me, and they should be available to anyone who wanted to see them—Sash, Mike, Jeff, their spouses, and their children. I would put the documents on the table, and people could choose for themselves what to do. This family was strong enough and close enough to handle the surprises.
The weather was too good to spend time indoors, so the envelope mostly made the rounds in the evenings. Some people read everything; some took a quick glance and moved on. Toni, Mike’s daughter and a newly minted psychologist, spent the most time poring over the documents and giving me her thoughts about Annie’s condition and Mom’s motivations. She left Vermont wanting to know more.
I was pretty sure that her dad didn’t agree. He didn’t say much, and when he did, he seemed wary, almost pained. While we’re seven years apart in age, Mike has never made me feel like his “little” brother. When he went off to the University of Michigan, he would invite me to Ann Arbor for weekend visits, and if his roommates ever complained about a thirteen-year-old hanging around their apartment, Mike never let on. He always watched out for me, and it distressed me to think that I was causing him any discomfort.
What I didn’t expect, as the week wore on, was that the family would expand to take in a new member. But that’s what happened. As people dipped in and out of the records, as the debates flew about what we knew and what we didn’t and whether we should be digging around in the past, Annie gradually became a part of the family consciousness. She was no longer just a name on a hospital record. She was no longer just “the secret.”
Attached to the photocopies of the records I had brought to the reunion was one last note from my Michigan contact: “Enclosed please find the information sent me regarding Annie Cohen…. It may help to know that there are many stories like yours where relatives were forgotten or ignored. I do hope this gives you some peace.”
The note’s kindness, its attempt to suggest that I was seeking “closure” and that the information in thes
e pages would help provide it, provoked just the opposite reaction in me: I wanted to find out more. I couldn’t write about all the “forgotten” people, but I could write about one. And in writing about Annie, about her life before Eloise and about her life at Eloise, perhaps I could give some of those other callers—the “five thousand,” as I now thought of them—an idea of what their relatives had experienced.
Ever since I first heard about the secret, I thought the most interesting question was: Who knew? Now, as I reflected on the records in front of me, that seemed like the wrong question, or at least the wrong direction. Who knew was interesting, but not nearly as interesting as when and why and how Mom decided to make Annie a secret.
If I could recreate the world that Mom and Annie inhabited in the spring of 1940, I might have a shot at figuring out when Annie became a secret. And if I could understand that, I might have a shot at understanding Mom’s reasons for hiding her. It was so unlike the woman I knew, or thought I knew. That woman, the one who had raised me, did not invent stories. She had no patience for lying or cheating. She had relished the investigative stories I had done; we had talked more than once about the burdens of secrecy, the unhealthy effects of guilt and deception.
But before I could reinterpret Mom’s life, I needed to know more. If I could find people who lived in Mom and Annie’s old neighborhood, if I could talk to Mom’s friends from the 1930s and 1940s, if I could exhume any information on Annie’s life at Eloise or track down anyone who knew her, I might have enough threads to re-stitch the narrative.
I had only a dim awareness of the intricacy of this tapestry. Without Mom or Annie to interview, I would need to rely on others to guide me; their suggestions on how I might understand the context for Mom’s motivations and Annie’s life would take me down many disparate and not always connected paths (as well as some blind alleys). Pursuing the secret would ultimately lead me back to the beginning of the twentieth century, through Ellis Island to the crowded streets of Detroit’s Jewish immigrant communities, through the spectacular boom of the auto industry’s early years and the crushing bust of the Depression, through the wartime revival that transformed the city into the nation’s Arsenal of Democracy, through the Holocaust that brought a relative to Detroit and into my mother’s secret, through the postwar exodus that robbed the city’s old neighborhoods of both population and prosperity.
The secret also was bound, inextricably, to the history of Eloise. I somehow grew up in Detroit without any knowledge of this vast institution’s significance. In 1940, at the time of Annie’s admission, Eloise was a sprawling complex with more than nine thousand residents (not all of them mentally ill) and seventy-five buildings, as well as its own police force and fire department, a farm, a dairy, a cannery, and even a piggery. This was the grand age of massive public mental hospitals, the era when treating the mentally ill became a cause rather than an obligation, the era before the development of medications that fundamentally altered the mental health system. Eloise prided itself on being in the forefront of the profession’s newest practices, but behind the ivied walls of the leafy campus, many thousands of patients languished for years, decades, even lifetimes, warehoused more than cared for.
Count Annie among them. She had lived at Eloise for more than thirty-one years—longer, I imagined, than anyone assigned to her care—and her time there straddled a revolution. When she arrived in 1940, the nation’s public mental institutions were reaching the zenith of their influence in American life, with nearly half a million people on their wards; when she died in 1972, those institutions were dying, too, swept aside by medical advances, legal challenges, and another generation’s moral reexamination of how best to care for the mentally ill.
What had Annie’s life at Eloise been like? Had the staff been able to bring back the “outgoing bubbling person” of the year before Annie’s commitment in 1940? Or did she remain “withdrawn and seclusive”? Did she really not have visitors for “years,” as the Northville doctor noted in 1972, and what did he mean when he wrote that she remained largely—it was impossible not to wince at his word choice—“irrelevant”?
What about my grandparents? What had it been like for Hyman and Tillie to care for a child with a permanent disability, before Medicaid, before Social Security? What kind of toll did it take on them, to see their daughter’s descent into paranoid behavior and then to give her up to strangers at a hospital eleven miles away? They owned no car to make such a trek; as far as I knew, neither ever learned to drive. A bus line must have served Eloise, but it would have been a time-consuming and complicated business to get there. My grandmother, in particular, always struck me as somewhat frail. How had she managed to see her daughter?
But, of course, I wasn’t thinking of my grandparents as they really were, but as I remembered them. For me, they are like the image you see after pressing the pause button on the DVD remote: frozen, fixed in time. In 1940, my grandfather would have been fifty-three, younger than I am now. But I see him only as a lonely, broken man, unable or unwilling to engage in the world around him. I see my grandmother as a housebound Bubbe, her hair whiter than the snow that covered the ground during Detroit’s icy winters. Could I capture a real sense of what they had gone through?
A reinterpretation on this scale would not be easy, either logistically or emotionally. Daunting would be a better word for it: I would need to rewind the family tape, replay the stories that Mom had told, recover information that might well be lost to death or memory. Such an undertaking would require time and patience; I couldn’t dabble in it. I would need to wait until I could concentrate the bulk of my energy on it.
I also would need family support. My search might take me places that I didn’t necessarily want to go. Delving into families, and family secrets, has its perils. If the search—or writing this book—was going to cause a split, it wasn’t worth it to me.
It helped that I wasn’t seeking to settle any scores or revisit old arguments. Mom and I had been close for much of our lives. It was easy for us to be together, which is one reason why I found it so hard to deal with the neediness that she exhibited during her waning years. I can still see her: Her eyes would fill with tears, and she would look at me forlornly, and say, shyly, “Do you love me? Tell me you love me.” Was her constant need for affection, her repeated requests to hear how much we cared for her, related somehow to carrying the secret?
Pursuing the mystery, I thought, might bring our relationship back into focus and help me to make sense of Mom and the choices she made. If I could do that, if I could understand why she followed a path so much in conflict with the advice she often gave me about life and how to live it, then perhaps I could once again make sense of the history that she and I had shared.
{ TWO }
Looking for Mom
Standing tall: Mom, at twenty-six, on a Lake Michigan beach
It’s the fall of 1964. I’m a skinny left-handed twelve-year-old with a decent curveball, and I’m nervously waiting to hear my name called at the annual banquet of the St. Eugene Little League, where I’m getting a pitching award. The church hall overflows with noise and sweat and the smell of mustard on hot dogs; sounds of backslaps echo across the crowded floor as fathers greet fathers one last time before gloves and mitts and uniforms go into storage until spring.
As I come to the front of the huge room to accept my trophy and shake the league director’s hand, I turn to smile at my mom, the only mom I see—certainly the only Jewish mom—in the vast sea of several hundred male Catholic faces.
My mother does not exist before 1942.
How does a woman live for twenty-five years, and leave only the barest hints of her existence? That’s what I’m thinking as I look through the papers that cover every square inch of my desk and much of the floor around it, the contents of a box that I had brought home after her death in 1999 and left untouched for more than six years. That box, and several more in my brother Jeff’s attic, seem like the logical place to begin my
hunt for Mom and the origins of her secret.
Why, I wonder as I rummage through the memorabilia that she left behind, aren’t there any photos of her as a young girl? What did she do with the books she loved, the childhood letters she received, the souvenirs and trinkets that teenage girls treasure? Where are her report cards from school—or any evidence, for that matter, that she ever set foot in a classroom before receiving her high school diploma in January 1934?
It wasn’t as if Mom went through life like a merciless tornado, unsentimentally hurling aside her possessions. After all, she had saved more than six hundred letters that she and Dad had written to each other during his Army days in World War II. She had preserved even the tersest of his telegrams (“I’m OK don’t worry”) confirming his arrival at bases in Texas, California, Illinois, and Washington State. She had kept every one of the schmaltzy “anniversary” cards they exchanged monthly during their early years of marriage, and yet not a single birthday card from her youth. She had lovingly put together several dozen photo albums chronicling the lives and times of her grandchildren, including a crayon scrawl from an industrious four-year-old’s hand that might generously be called a drawing—and which she displayed as the early work of a future Van Gogh.
But the life and times of the young Beth Cohen? Nowhere to be found.
When we sorted through Mom’s belongings after her funeral, we came across dozens of photos from late 1942 and the spring of 1943—glamorous poses of the newlyweds strutting for the camera, sprawling on beach blankets, leaning across the hoods of automobiles, walking arm-in-arm with Dad down neighborhood streets. She called him Duke, and sometimes called herself Mrs. Duke, and that’s what she wrote in her neat, legible handwriting along the bottom of several black-and-white snapshots. But on most of the photos, much to my frustration, she recorded nothing except the year—including those that feature her friends. No names to give me a head start on my search.
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