“Call her,” Sash says. We’re at her kitchen table in Pennsylvania, scrutinizing Mom’s photos, trying to remember who’s who. “I told her you would want to talk.”
“I’ll try her now,” I said.
Medji enjoys a reputation as a fount of family lore, but it’s not my family’s lore, and I haven’t seen her in years. Medji caught the West Coast migration wave early, moving to California in 1953, not long after I was born. Whenever she came into my orbit, her feistiness and her eccentricities—to my youthful eyes at least—made her stand out in my somewhat staid universe. Plain and simple, she was a bit of a character.
The raspy voice on the telephone is just as I remember it.
“Your mom called me to come over and babysit, some sort of an emergency,” Medji begins. “She didn’t say what the emergency was.”
When was this? I ask.
“I was maybe thirteen or fourteen,” Medji says.
A quick calculation puts us sometime in the fall of 1946. Medji was born in 1932, and she was babysitting for Mike, who was born in June 1945.
“That’s right,” Medji says. “He was about a year old, I think.”
Medji’s family lived a few blocks from the apartment where Mom and Dad had moved after Dad’s return from World War II, and Mom often called on Medji to babysit. A reliable fourteen-year-old girl was a godsend to a woman with a year-old baby, a part-time job, and (by late 1946) two step-children, Evie and Marsha, ages ten and six, old enough to be a handful but not old enough to take care of their baby brother. The girls had spent the war with Medji’s family, and that’s how Mom and Medji got to know each other—Medji, then about eleven, would usually be around when Mom picked up Evie and Marsha (as everyone called her in those days) for Sunday outings.
Medji was surprised to see Mom’s parents when she arrived. “That was unusual,” Medji says. “Her parents were in the bedroom, and the door wasn’t closed. There were a lot of legal papers on the bed.”
Leaving Medji in the living room, Mom rejoined her parents behind the bedroom door. Medji couldn’t make out what the three adults were saying, and she got the distinct feeling she shouldn’t ask. The conversation was hushed, the tone urgent. “Your mom had to take some papers somewhere. She seemed pressed for time. She had to get somewhere by five,” Medji recalls.
Medji says she wasn’t trying to listen to the muffled voices, but several times, a name floated from their lips to her ears, something like “Chana”—the pronunciation was Yiddish, with a hard “h” at the beginning.
“Do you know Annie’s Hebrew name?” Medji asks.
“No,” I say, “but it’s on the burial record. Hold on.”
I pull out the folder, and the name soars off the page.
Chana.
Finally, a shard—more like a flake—but Medji’s story had enough substance, enough specificity, to call it evidence. What she had overheard is the first confirmation that at least by 1946, Annie’s condition, perhaps Annie herself, had become a topic to be discussed in private—provided, of course, that the Chana of that urgent conversation was, in fact, Annie.
Medji is recalling events sixty years past, events that she says she hadn’t thought about for decades. I want to embrace her account, but the archeologist needs to test the data.
“Tell me about the apartment,” I say. “How many bedrooms did it have?”
Medji describes what she remembers: one bedroom for the children, and a converted sunroom where Mom and Dad slept. (That also squares with Sash’s memory.)
“What else did you see in the room?”
“Papers were being unfolded and folded on the bed. There was a metal box, big enough to store the papers,” Medji says.
“What did you think they were talking about?” I ask.
Medji says she could only guess. “I thought someone was sick. I didn’t hear anyone refer to a sister, but I assumed it was a sister of either your grandparents or your mom, because why else would they be so upset? They called her ‘she’ and ‘Chanaleh.’”
“Chanaleh?” I reply, puzzled.
A diminutive, she says, not a nickname exactly, but a term of affection for a girl named Chana. “The only time I ever heard about Chanaleh was that day. Your mother was heartbroken, your grandmother was heartbroken.”
That poignant image opens the door to a sensitive question. I ease into it. “You had a good relationship with my mother,” I say, “even though you were fifteen years younger. That’s what I always thought.”
From the other side of the continent, I could see her nodding. “Your mom and I had a special relationship, based on understanding and compassion,” she says. “I begged her to come to California, and she wanted to, but it never worked out. But we stayed close. She was a very private person, but she also was an angel. Once when my mother was sick, your mom took a day off work and stayed with her all day and night.”
“So if you were close,” I ask, “why didn’t you ask my mom about Chanaleh?”
She doesn’t answer right away. Maybe she hasn’t thought about it; maybe it’s hard to put her thoughts into words. Then she says, “I guess I felt I had heard something I wasn’t supposed to hear. I didn’t think your mom wanted to talk about it.” She hesitates. “I was fourteen. It never came up again. I didn’t think it was my place to bring it up.”
Not her place. Mom didn’t need to recruit members to the cone of silence. The culture did the job for her.
“What about Eloise?” I say to Medji. “Do you remember hearing any talk about Eloise that day?”
“No,” she says. “But that doesn’t surprise me.”
Why’s that? I ask.
“Having someone in Eloise was a double shame,” she says. “You had a relative who was mentally ill, and everyone knew you were poor. Eloise was where the poor went. You would hide your head in shame because it was a disgrace. A terrible disgrace.”
Shame. Stigma. Disgrace. How often those words closed a conversation about Annie and mental illness, how quickly they came to the surface when I mentioned to friends or strangers that I was trying to understand why my mother had made her sister’s existence into a secret, and why she had not only kept that secret, but guarded it, nurtured it. Was shame at the root of it? Perhaps it was. Perhaps Mom had grown up with such profound feelings of humiliation that when Annie went to Eloise—a departure that Mom could not have predicted—Mom decided to put as much distance as possible between herself and those feelings, if not to exorcise them, then to conceal them.
Medji’s story, however, suggested that something more than shame was at work here. Secrecy could be maintained by speaking in Yiddish or in whispers; the rules of polite conversation allowed adults to have discreet conversations. But if Mom were hiding her head in shame, wouldn’t she want to meet with her parents in secret—at their apartment, which was nearby, rather than in her own apartment, in front of Medji?
On the other hand, maybe I was assuming too much. Maybe this “emergency”—or whatever had caused Mom’s urgent call to Medji—didn’t leave time for careful arrangements and private meetings. Or maybe my grandparents had received something that had alarmed them—a phone call, a letter—and had descended on Mom’s apartment unexpectedly. But what could have caused such urgency? Why did Mom need to deliver papers somewhere by 5 P.M.?
I remember from the Eloise records that in the mid–1940s, Annie had spent time at a hospital in Sault Ste. Marie, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, for reasons that weren’t stated in the documents. Looking at the file, I notice the date of Annie’s return to Eloise: October 3, 1946. Was that the “emergency,” or just a coincidence?
Another lead to pursue, another reminder of how important it was to obtain the rest of Annie’s records.
Eloise closed the door of its psychiatric hospital for good in 1979, another casualty of the mental health revolution that emptied most of the nation’s public mental hospitals, and the county has been dismantling the place ever since. By 2006, only four
of its seventy-five buildings remained, and its signature smokestack with the letters E-L-O-I-S-E marching down its spine—the backbone of a decaying corpse—had a date with the demolition ball as well. It’s hard enough to get my head around a hospital that was home to nine thousand mentally ill, infirm, and homeless people at the time that Annie was admitted, but getting my arms around a ghost town seems even harder.
Eloise’s legacy and history rests in the hands of a tiny band of preservationists, former employees mostly, who call themselves the Friends of Eloise. Jo Johnson, chairman of the Westland Historical Commission and the engine that keeps the Friends running, tells me on the phone that the group meets on the third Tuesday of each month. I tell her I’d like to attend; I’m hoping the group will provide a route to finding someone who remembers Annie, or perhaps cared for her.
“I’ll put you on the agenda,” Jo says.
We agree to meet an hour before the Friends arrive so she can show me the small museum of Eloise memorabilia on the ground floor of one of the remaining buildings, now used to house several county offices. She is distressed at the county’s lack of interest in taking care of an institution that was such a landmark in the lives of so many people. “It’s all about money,” she says. “It’s cheaper to knock it down than to preserve it.”
Even their monthly meeting takes a hit. “We start at six P.M., but we have to be out by seven because that’s when the security guard’s shift is done,” she says. “The county doesn’t want to pay him to stay later.”
She says I’ll want to see the 1982 history of Eloise written by the hospital’s personnel director, Alvin C. Clark, as well as a book of photos collected by a former nurse at the general hospital, published in 2002. Jo cautions me that she doesn’t have any patient records. I’m well aware of the state’s laws by now, and how hard it is to get those records. Nonetheless, this also distresses her. “When people like you call about a relative, I want to be able to help them,” she says. “Sometimes, if the person died at Eloise, I can find the name in the list of death records. But often, I have to tell them that I can’t help them, and it breaks my heart.”
At Sash’s kitchen table, we’re brainstorming about who else could have known, and who had the opportunity to know. It helps to think about Mom’s life as divided into four distinct eras: before Annie’s hospitalization in 1940; the war years, when Mom goes from single woman to wife, while still living with her parents; the postwar years, when Mom and Dad strike out on their own, eventually buying a house in the deepest corner of Northwest Detroit, as far away from the old neighborhood as you could get without actually leaving the city; and after 1950, when Mom became a fixture in her new neighborhood and Annie became a fixture at Eloise.
The period from 1940 to 1943, immediately after Annie’s hospitalization, seems like a crucial one. In those first few years of Annie’s treatment, there must have been a possibility that she would improve, that the Eloise staff would declare her well enough to be sent home. As long as that possibility existed, it would be hard for Mom to pretend that Annie didn’t exist. It wouldn’t work anyway—too many people in the neighborhood knew the truth. Finding these people, the ones who knew Mom and her family before Annie went to Eloise, is my top priority.
Also on my list: people who should have known, given their close relationship with Mom or Dad. That category included Fran, a woman who worked at the shoe store with Mom during the war, and who later married Dad’s first cousin, Hy Donofsky. Fran and Hy own the title for the most photographed couple in Mom’s collection from 1943 and 1944, when the young couple was still dating. Hy had died years ago and I didn’t know Fran’s last name, but I had found an old phone number in Mom’s address book and, with that clue, had tracked her to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Even if Fran didn’t know about Annie, she might be a path to some of Mom’s other friends.
Then there was Dad’s side of the family. He had a sister and two brothers, all three alive and all in relatively good health. They were spread out around the country—Texas, Oregon, North Carolina. I couldn’t imagine one of them didn’t know something; if they didn’t, that would be evidence of just how tightly the secret was held.
Who knew? Who didn’t? Both questions needed to be answered for a complete portrait. The artist’s challenge was mine as well: To get the composition right, I had to master the negative space as well as the positive, to paint what was absent as well as what was present.
“I was thinking we might see a ball game,” Dad says.
A ball game? He has never taken me to one, or even suggested it. We just don’t do those sorts of father-son outings. We don’t ride bikes or play catch or go camping. Heck, we hardly go anywhere, except sometimes to Kensington Lake for the day, and we always get there late. A ball game? Now that I’m fourteen and taking the bus downtown to Tiger Stadium by myself, he wants to take me to a ball game? What’s this about?
A more typical teenager’s reaction might be irritation or indignation, but I’m too surprised to say anything other than “Gee, Dad, thanks, but are you sure you can get the time off?” Getting time off was always the issue, not whether he wanted to be close or loved me. Dad’s hours at the furniture store didn’t exactly mesh with the baseball calendar. He worked Saturdays and Sundays, every week; those were his big days, the days when he could sell enough to make his commission for the week, and if he didn’t make commission, he didn’t make any money.
This was the fifties and sixties, the era when day games still ruled on weekends. When 1:30 arrived and the first pitch headed toward the plate, I cheered for my heroes by tuning into WJR radio and Ernie Harwell, the fatherly voice of the Tigers. Ernie took me to the game before I was old enough to take myself; it never, ever, crossed my mind that Dad should be taking me instead. What did cross my mind? That whatever I did when I grew up, I wouldn’t be on commission.
We don’t go to that ball game together. Dad doesn’t bring up the idea again, and neither do I. Instead, several months later, he proposes a father-son activity that gives me a front-row seat at the game he plays. “I’d like you to keep a record of my sales and commissions,” he says. He wants me to keep a ledger so he can see if he’s making his commission. This is strange, crazy—and better than a ball game. Any dad can take his kid to the stadium, but my dad is inviting me into his secret world.
I have no memory of how long I kept that ledger, or what use Dad made of it. I learned a little about the furniture business, and a lot about why we had so much trouble making ends meet. Whether my work truly helped him, or whether it was merely a ruse to spend time together, I never figured out. Whatever his motivation, for a short time when I was fourteen, I felt grown up, valuable, trusted. No one else knew what I knew.
It was our secret.
Back in 1995, when Rozanne Sedler called to ask if Mom had a sister, I could say without hesitation that I couldn’t have been more in the dark, or have been caught more unaware, than when I read about the CIA’s assassination plots against foreign leaders, or John F. Kennedy’s assignations with Marilyn Monroe, or the Reagan administration’s secret Iranian arms deals. If there was a loop, I was out of it, as were Mike and Jeff.
Evie and Sash, however, say they had an inkling. As the older sisters, they had a history with Mom that went back to the 1940s. What did they know? Sash finds it hard to say. “If you had asked me before Rozanne’s call if Mom had a sister, I would have said no,” Sash told me. “But once I heard it, I had this feeling—call it a buried memory—that I knew of a sister once, a long time ago.”
A buried memory? What does that mean? Perhaps she or Evie saw or heard something, but were too young to make sense of it. Or perhaps they saw nothing, but growing up in the apartment with Mom, absorbed a sense of secrecy—a stealthy conversation, adults switching to Yiddish when the girls entered the room, an evasive answer to a child’s innocent question.
But Sash doesn’t remember that happening. She’s certain that the knowledge predated 1946 and her perma
nent move to her father’s home. “I never heard any mention of it after we went to live with Mom and Dad,” she says. “It would have been earlier, when I was really young, which is maybe why the memory is so buried.”
For her, the secret was so well disguised that she didn’t know there was a secret. “What surprised me,” she says, “was not that Mom had a sister, but that she was alive until 1972. If you had asked me, I would have said she died long, long ago.” She had no idea Annie was at Eloise, and neither did Evie, who, like Sash, says she had some vague memory of hearing that Mom might have had a sister. Evie can’t put that memory into any framework, but she’s convinced that if she heard something, then Dad must have known, too. Like me, she finds it hard to believe otherwise.
Evie was eight when Dad returned from the Army in September 1945. Sash was five. Sash is unearthing a memory that has been buried since then. How did it get there in the first place? We make a run at figuring it out.
“What about your mom?” I ask. “Could she have known? I mean, they all lived in the same neighborhood, so even after the divorce, she could have picked up something.”
When I was growing up, I heard the “divorce story” many times, but always from Mom’s point of view—how Dad had wanted custody of the girls, but according to the custom of the times and the wisdom of the legal system, that honor had gone to Esther, who deposited the girls with her mother and left town for Florida, where she found a job and didn’t come back for a couple of years.
In Mom’s retelling, this was the Cinderella story in reverse. As the good stepmother, she saw the girls often during the twenty months that Dad was in the military, taking them to the park or a movie on Sundays, bringing them home to the Cohens’ apartment for an occasional sleepover. Esther…well, Mom didn’t like to speak ill of anyone, but she made an exception in Esther’s case.
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