I find one image of Mom particularly arresting. She’s dressed almost entirely in white—white shorts that show off her long and graceful legs, a sleeveless white sweater pulled over a dark short-sleeved jersey that highlights the darker color of her long, wavy hair, which is pulled behind her so that what you see, at first glance, is the whiteness of her teeth and the radiance of her smile. She’s standing on a beach chair, her right leg ramrod straight to stay balanced, her left leg slightly bent, her white outfit even whiter than the foam of the waves gently splashing against the shoreline behind her. She is slim, even elegant, and looks exactly her age—twenty-six years old, youthful but not young, a woman who seems to know herself and her place in the world.
I cannot see her as others might. I cannot separate this woman in white from the woman waving at me in the stuffy banquet hall at the St. Eugene Little League annual awards ceremony. Is she beautiful? I doubt that others would say so. Her chin is too long, her forehead too high, her cheeks too prominent, her mouth too wide. But Mom’s sum always added up to more than her parts. She created an impression that lingered long after she had left a room.
So, too, with the photo of her in white. This image—more than the jaunty ones of her sporting a flower in her hair, or the formal ones where she’s dressed to the nines in a new suit, or the silly ones where she’s mugging for the camera—this is the image that makes me wonder why there are no shots of the teenaged Beth Cohen. She and the camera understand each other: She’s not afraid to reveal herself to its lens, she’s not the shy girl in the back whose face always manages to end up blocked by someone’s shoulder, she’s not the unfortunate girl in front whose eyes always close as the flash goes off. It’s hard to believe that she acquired her photogenic qualities in her mid-twenties, that the camera didn’t find her just as appealing as a teenager.
That’s one reason why, as I sit at my desk on a blustery Baltimore day in March 2006, staring at the collection of images arrayed before me, I’m acutely aware of what’s missing rather than what’s there. Granted, my grandparents couldn’t afford to buy a loaf of bread some days, let alone a camera and film. George Eastman’s little Brownie brought affordable cameras to a mass market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it took a long time for that mass market to pull out those Brownies and snap everyday events. In the 1920s and 1930s, much more than today, photographs largely served as memories; for those clinging to the bottom of society’s ladder, why remember the hardships of daily life?
Mom turned sixteen just six days after Franklin D. Roosevelt took over as president and announced his New Deal, declaring famously that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” My grandparents’ fears made a longer list, and their worst days lay ahead of them. For most poor families like theirs, the idea of creating a photographic record of their lives, or their children’s lives, was an unattainable luxury, beyond their reach as well as their imagination. So I suppose it’s not surprising that I find no photos of Mom sprawled on the floor, reading a book or playing with a friend. But what about the special occasions? Her birthdays? Her high school graduation? Her yearbook photo? Why weren’t there any photos of the family together? Surely my grandparents had friends who might have taken a photo of the four of them at some event and given them a copy.
No, nothing like that. Of the dozens of old photographs that we found in Mom’s apartment, only two predate 1942—a studio shot of Mom at four months old, dressed in a frilly, fluffy dress and lying on a shag rug that resembled an oversized bird’s nest, and an undated one of my grandmother that appears, from her age, to come from sometime in the 1930s. That they exist at all, though, that they survived to the end of the century, is evidence that someone had thought them important enough to preserve.
But no shots of Annie. Discarded to keep the secret, or had they never existed in the first place?
The boxes contain only two documents suggesting that Beth Cohen had a life before 1942: her birth certificate and her high school diploma. To the unsuspecting (which once included my siblings and me), even those documents don’t appear to belong to her. The birth certificate heralds the arrival of one Bertha Cohen. Not Beth, not even as a middle name. Just Bertha. The high school diploma makes the link between the newborn Bertha and the Beth we all knew. It proclaims that one “Bertha Beth Cohen” had completed the degree requirements of Detroit Northern High School in January 1934.
Even now, I smile at the memory of unearthing these documents in the days after her funeral. We had just come back from burying Beth, only to find out that she was…Bertha. Well, not really, I suppose. She had called herself Beth, so who cared if she neglected to mention that she had banished her birth name in favor of one she chose for herself? She wasn’t the first child of immigrants to do that, certainly.
When I first saw the name Bertha on her birth certificate, I didn’t think very hard about Mom’s deception. Frankly, her motivation seemed transparently clear: What schoolgirl would want to be Bertha if she could be Beth? But now, going through the bits and pieces of the things she left behind, I wonder: If she got rid of her name, did she also get rid of her past? Is that why there are no photos before 1942, no mementos, and no evidence of the life she shared with her sister?
My high school friends call me Steve, but my family calls me Steven, and sometimes I feel like two different people. It’s Steve or Lux at school—except on the basketball court, where Coach has stuck me with the unfortunate Lefty—but as soon as I walk in the door, I’m Steven. I don’t understand Mom’s obsession with names, but if she had her way, she would eliminate every nickname on the planet, as if nicknames were some sort of identity theft to be stamped out. The only family nickname she tolerates is Sashie, perhaps because she’s not Sash’s birth mother and didn’t name her Marsha in the first place. Michael is never Mike, and Jeffery is never Jeff, and God forbid, I’m never, ever, Steve.
“Why do they call you that?” she asks me, whenever she hears someone say Steve. “Do you introduce yourself that way?” She always says “that way,” as she fears that uttering Steve aloud would cast a spell that would never be broken.
My ears burn, and I don’t know what to say. Why does it matter so much, this question of identity? I like Steven; I like the sound of it and the extra syllable and that it seems a little less run-of-the-mill. But how am I going to stop people from calling me something else? (If I had that power, Lefty would be the first name to disappear, not Steve.) Beyond that, I’m not sure why Steve annoys Mom so much. But it does.
“If I wanted to name you that,” she declares, bringing an end to the conversation, “I would have named you that. You’re Steven, and as long as I live, that’s what I will call you.”
I reread the letter in the envelope marked “Do not open until after my death.” Written on a yellow legal pad in 1984, and updated twice after the birth of grandchildren, it’s a three-page document that says all Mom’s money and worldly possessions should be divided equally among her children and grandchildren. There wasn’t much of either, so it wasn’t hard or complicated to comply with her wishes. She didn’t list her possessions or give us any special instructions, with one exception: her half dozen paint-by-number canvases. “One request—the paintings on the wall are a part of me. I would like each of you to hang one somewhere,” she wrote.
Guilt and memory collide. As directed, I had taken one of the framed canvases—a drab painting of an English lord’s stagecoach making its way to a countryside castle, all dull grays and greens and browns—but I couldn’t bring myself to actually hang the darn thing. For a couple of years, it rested against the bedroom wall, until I finally stored it in a closet, out of my sight.
I return to the letter. A theme runs through it. “Please live, love and enjoy for me,” she urged in 1984. “Please remain close and watch out for each other.” Then again in the 1989 update: “So I say again, remain close and take care of each other.” And in 1996: “Fulfill my final wish and stay close and be g
ood to each other.”
“Watch out for each other”—what an interesting choice of words. Was she asking us to do what she didn’t do, perhaps couldn’t do, for Annie? What about me? Am I watching out for the family by investigating the past? Would my curiosity disturb the closeness that Mom so ardently desired for us?
As soon as I come into the house, the aroma of oil paint hits my nostrils, and I know Mom’s been back at the canvas again. It’s the early 1960s, which makes me ten or eleven years old, and Mom’s paint-by-number projects have joined bridge and crossword puzzles as her primary leisure-time activities. After months of watching her at work, I ask if I can try it, if she will let me do a piece of the windmill (Was it that one? Or was it the portrait of the girl with the long golden hair?), and I’m thrilled when she says yes, thrilled that she trusts me enough to give me a chance.
She shows me how to hold the brush, how to dip the tip into the paint so that I don’t get too much on the very fine bristles. I’m nervous, worried that I’m going to make a mistake, that I’ll go outside the lines or put color no. 3 where color no. 8 is supposed to go, and that I will ruin the whole thing. I’m not thinking about why she might have taken up this particular hobby, whether it’s some sort of therapy or escape. She’s never been an artist, and I’m old enough to understand that paint-by-number isn’t real art (although not quite old enough to understand that a real artist wouldn’t touch a paint-by-number canvas except perhaps to whitewash it). But at this moment, none of that matters. All that matters is the brush and the paint and Mom sitting nearby, and the magic of making something appear out of nothing, of bringing to life what was hidden in the numbers.
Everyone has a way of coping with grief. Mine is to write.
On the night after Mom’s death, I had found it cathartic, even pleasantly distracting, to plunk myself down at a computer in the hotel business center and pretend that deadline was looming as I banged out a draft of Mom’s obituary for the two local newspapers. In truth, the Free Press obit writer had warned me that it was too late for the next day’s paper, and besides, he said, an extra twenty-four hours would give the family a chance to find a suitable photo, get it scanned, and e-mail it to the paper.
Now I pick up the published Free Press version from the papers on my desk, and one phrase catches my eye: “the only child of…” How did that get in there? The Free Press reporter had wanted to put his own stamp on what I wrote, so he had selected the parts he liked in revising the rest to his taste. Had something gone awry in the handoff? I go hunting for my original, and find it: “A native Detroiter and the only child of immigrant parents…” No, I couldn’t fault the Free Press for that bit of fiction.
I close my eyes, trying to summon up the memory of my night at the hotel computer. I have a vague recollection of thinking that we couldn’t very well use Mom’s obit to announce to her shrinking circle of friends that she had died and, oh, by the way, she had a sister. Mom had told everyone she was an only child, and her obit wasn’t the place to argue the point. It was her obit. Shouldn’t she have the last word?
But still, why did I use the unambiguous words, “only child”? Why not just avoid any mention of it? After years of deadline editing, I knew all the tricks for writing around a troublesome fact. I could have referred to her simply as “the daughter of immigrant parents,” and left open the question of whether she had any siblings. Obits run every day that don’t mention the deceased’s brothers or sisters.
So why didn’t I do that? I really don’t know. Calling her an only child in print, if I knew it wasn’t true, would have rubbed directly against my journalistic grain. So I wonder whether my use of the phrase is an indication that, as of August 1999, I hadn’t truly embraced the notion that Mom had a sister. Since the 1995 phone call from Rozanne Sedler, we hadn’t heard another word about the possibility. We didn’t know whether Mom’s sister had died young or was still alive, we didn’t know the name of the institution that took her, we didn’t know her name. Without a name, she was an abstraction, a wisp, a phantom; she resided in my consciousness somewhere between fact and fantasy, at that place where we put people and events that we do not know, have never had a chance to know, and cannot conceive that we will ever know.
On the day the obits ran, September 3, 1999, I ascended the dais at the modest chapel on the grounds of Machpeleh Cemetery, and looked out at the sixty or so people who had gathered to pay their final respects to Beth Luxenberg. They knew her as a mother, grandmother, stepmother, mother-in-law, friend—but not as a sister. Sister, of course, was never a part of our vocabulary when we talked about Mom.
“As we think about the last year,” I told the crowd, “and how Mom’s chronic lung disease closed in on her, making each breath so difficult, it is easy to forget that this was only one of her eighty-two years. This was not Mom’s life. This was only her death.”
Mike and Jeff chose to talk about the woman they knew personally, the one who lived by certain principles that she had instilled in us: the importance of family, education, hard work, honesty, and generosity. They described how she taught her children to act and think independently; she tried to make sure, as she put it, that “we could stand on our own two feet,” that we could take care of ourselves. She saw our successes—in school, in work, in raising our own families—as proof that she had accomplished her mission.
I wanted to talk about the woman we didn’t know, the one who had been alive for nearly three decades before any of us were born, the one we could only glimpse in old photographs or imagine from family stories. I thought if I could create a portrait of the young and vibrant Beth, before marriage, before motherhood, I could wipe away the final image we had of her. “I only knew Grandma as someone who was sick,” my daughter Jill had said. I wanted to tell Jill and everyone in the chapel—particularly Mom’s grandchildren—about the lively, lovely woman whose life lay ahead of her rather than behind her.
That life, as we all knew, hadn’t been easy. “Growing up,” I said, “she was acutely aware of her family’s poverty, and it forever colored her view of herself and her aspirations. She once told me that she was ashamed of being poor; she felt that her schoolmates looked down on her and the way she dressed. It was hard for her to even talk about it. But she vowed that she would do everything she could to prevent her children from the pain of being poor.”
I reminded the gathering that Mom loved to tell stories, and that she would have been delighted to hear those stories told once more as we closed the book on her life. “Mom desperately wanted to go to college,” I said. “An uncle with some money offered to pay her way. She could hardly believe it. To her, it was a dream come true. But it never came to pass, and she said she never knew exactly why. It was more than a disappointment; it was a loss of innocence. When Mom told that story, and she told it many times, you could see in her eyes that the hurt and betrayal was still there.”
I didn’t name the uncle, out of ignorance rather than courtesy. I didn’t know his name—Mom never mentioned it, and since I had never met any of her relatives other than my grandparents, I guess it had never seemed all that important to ask. Now I wished I had.
“There was a young man who wanted to marry her,” I told the mourners. “His name was Joe, and Mom didn’t mind the part of the story when she told us how ardently Joe had courted her. But there was a hitch. She told Joe, ‘You know I can’t marry you. You’re not Jewish and my mother wouldn’t hear of it.’”
I left out the part about how Joe (whose last name was also unknown to me) was so smitten that he offered not only to convert to Judaism, but to get himself circumcised.
“Then Mom met Dad, her beloved Duke. As she tells the story, and there’s some dispute about the exact circumstances, she was at a wedding and saw him on the stairs, and said to a friend, ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry.’ She got her wish, unlike Joe.”
The rest of my eulogy depended on my first-hand memories. The crowd chuckled at my description of Mom’s po
ker-table habits, how she would win all your money and then lend it back to you so that you could keep playing, saying teasingly, “You can pay me back. I’d rather have you owe it to me than cheat me out of it.”
She always looked out for us that way, I said. I recounted a conversation from October 1998, when she was recuperating from fracturing her pelvis and in so much pain that she couldn’t believe she would ever get better. Talk of death made its way into her conversation. “She told me, ‘I can’t die this month, because it’s too close to Mark’s birthday, and I can’t die in November because Daddy died on November 1, and it wouldn’t be fair to you children to have us both die around the same time.’
“‘Well, Mom,’ I said, ‘you’re in trouble. The family has birthdays and anniversaries in almost every month. So you’re stuck. You’re just going to have to wait for a while to die.’”
Emphysema, and more than six decades of cigarette smoking, had more to do with the timing of her death than my flip comment, I told the crowd. Congestive heart failure doesn’t leave its victims much room for advance planning. Nevertheless, by dying on the last day of August 1999, Mom made sure that she would spoil no one’s happy day.
On the family calendar of significant events, she has August all to herself.
The vivid picture of Mom’s youth that I had crafted for my eulogy doesn’t come close to the reality. Rereading it reminds me of how much I didn’t know then, and how much I want to know now.
Annie's Ghosts Page 4