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For Donna
author’s note
This memoir, as well as its predecessor, After Long Silence, attempts to make sense of the secrets that underlie the family in which I grew up. In both books, I have changed many names, locations, and other identifying details to provide a measure of privacy to my family and others, and to underscore that this is my story. I have been careful in making changes to select settings that are consistent with the actual events described. Because different events are considered in this volume, readers of both works will notice that I have changed the geographic setting and other details from those provided in my first volume to better maintain this consistency with the actual events described in this book.
This book also considers aspects of my relationship with my sister and our personal difficulties that did not appear in my first book. Some events recounted had already occurred; some had not. I turn to them now because I have come to understand the extent to which they inform my story.
I have relied on my journals and memories spanning decades in setting out what I have come to remember, believe, and understand about my life. Like all personal narratives, mine is inherently subjective. However intertwined my life is with the lives of others, I can only speak my own truth; I recognize that their memories may vary from mine, no matter how many experiences we share and how much I love them.
predeceased
The light started to seep into the foothills of the Berkshires, the outline of trees barely visible against the dark sky. February 2002: I was driving the Mass Pike to Schenectady to meet with an estate lawyer. My dog, who had come along for support, sat in the backseat with his tongue hanging out, filling my rearview mirror with his blocky golden head.
I’d grown up in a town near Schenectady and had driven this road hundreds of times, with its old-fashioned tollbooths and Pilgrims’ hats on green signs. My mother had taken me and my older sister, Lara, to Jiminy Peak on this road when I was barely old enough to hold a ski pole in a mittened fist. She’d taken us to the Clark Art Institute to gape at giant paintings of satyrs and nymphs. Later she’d driven me to Williamstown to see Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Arturo Ui, and other plays my father refused to see because they were about war and suffering, and he had already seen too much war and suffering. Later still, I’d driven the Mass Pike to college and law school in Boston. The road to the Atlantic Ocean always returned home to Schenectady, like a fishing line cast out and reeled back in, over and over.
The last time I had driven this road was in November—three months before—to attend my father’s funeral. It had seemed, at the time, a transformative reunion. My mother, sister, and I had spent hours talking, crying, laughing, and catching up, and in my little ballroom of wishful thinking, I believed we had regained our footing. But now, heading to the lawyer’s office, I had trouble figuring out what had really happened.
Just six weeks after Dad’s funeral—the letter arrived on Christmas Eve—I found out that I had been disowned by my family. My father had signed a last-minute codicil to his will, declaring me to have “predeceased” him. I’d responded like a dead person: I took to my grave. I made no attempt to contact my mother or sister, and they made no attempt to contact me.
For more than forty years, our family had been closer than fused. My parents and Lara were my cell structure and membrane, my very identity. Yet so much had been hidden from me—shadows and illusions that I’d never understood. I’d spent most of my life trying to decipher the mystery of my family, and I was still at a loss. Perhaps loss was precisely the point of our story.
* * *
When I was growing up, my mother said that our family was held together by the great glue of suffering. World War II had shattered my parents, and they had emerged from the charred remains of Europe with pieces missing. Around these holes they had built our family of four. We loved each other like starved people: we always wanted more.
A Sad and Difficult Time for All of Us
On the day I found out I was disowned, I woke before dawn as usual, slipped quietly out of bed, and stepped over my dog who lay on his side like a toppled Sphinx. I pulled on my gym shorts and T-shirt, laced up my sneakers, zipped up my parka, and went down the three flights of stairs. The streets were empty as I walked to the Y. It was the day before Christmas and the students who often made my building feel like a frat house were gone. Boston was between storms, so the sidewalks were clear, and the wind didn’t hit me till I crossed Huntington Avenue. It was too early for traffic, a nice time to be out in the city, a little before 5 a.m.
I was forty-four years old and feeling optimistic: there was good reason to think that the three-year rift in my family was starting to heal. In 1999, I had published a memoir revealing my family’s true identity and history. The book’s unexpected success proved catastrophic for my mother, and her distress, of course, wreaked havoc for the rest of us. But now, over the past six weeks since the funeral, my mother had started writing to me again, handwritten letters telling me how she was managing now that Dad had died, and hoping that we could repair our relationship. And I wrote her too, telling her about my own grief, and that I loved her, and that I was so relieved to have her back. It was not the first time my mother had cut me off, but it had been the longest and most searing of our separations, and I felt grateful and relieved and lucky and sad all at the same time. At eighty-six, my father had been suffering from Parkinson’s for a dozen years. Although he and I had always been close, Mom’s refusal to speak to me had meant I was not permitted to see him for the last years of his life when he lived at home with her.
During those three years, my older sister and I had also not spoken, and the longer I had been cast off from my parents, the closer she had grown to them. And so, although I felt the enormity of my loss of my father, and although I didn’t know whether my sister and I could mend our relationship, I felt heartened that my mother was finally emerging from her silent rage, and we could begin to be friends again. She was, I thought, starting to soften; she was letting in a little light and warmth through the cracks that my father’s death had opened in her, and I wanted to stand in that sunshine and drink in all the warmth I could. I wanted to beam it back to her tenfold; I wanted her to know how much she meant to me.
* * *
When I got home from the gym, I took the dog out and picked up the mail. Among the bills, I saw a fat business-size envelope from my mother, addressed in her familiar European handwriting. I looked forward to her letters. But when I opened the envelope, I found a typed cover letter on legal letterhead from a lawyer. The letter, addressed to my mother, began, As you know… and went on to say something about signing my father’s will. I pushed it aside and turned to a ten-page stapled document, a photocopy of my father’s last will and testament. I’d never seen this before, and with growing unease, I turned the pages. The paper felt stiff and kept buckling in my hands—it had been folded into thirds, and now seemed to want to fold itself up again. It was a standard form will, and although I had trouble taking any of it in, I recognized my name here and there, together with my sister Lara’s and my mother’s, sprinkled among the numbered paragraphs of legalese.
I didn’t want to read this document; it seemed a violation of my father’s privacy somehow, and I w
as disturbed by this cold, impersonal evidence of his death. But I forced myself to skim a few pages, and I saw that everything in my father’s estate was to be distributed through a family trust equally to my sister and me; my mother was the executor, my sister and I were trustees, and various distributions were to be made… equally to my children Lara and Helen… and in equal shares to Lara and Helen… and so on. The will was signed and dated October 1998.
And then I came to the last page, a single sheet not stapled to anything. The word CODICIL was written at the top in bold letters, and as my eyes trailed down the page, I saw my name in capital letters, repeated in a series of paragraphs that stated: Delete HELEN FREMONT from each paragraph, and replace her with… The final sentence read: For the purposes of this my Last Will and Testament, my daughter, HELEN FREMONT, and her issue, if any, shall be deemed to have predeceased me.
And there, at the bottom of this piece of paper that removed me from his life, was my father’s shaky, Parkinsonian signature. He could barely hold a pen by then; my mother must have helped him. It was dated July 2001, soon after he’d suffered a near-fatal collapse and four months before his death. My mother had now sent me these documents with her own attached handwritten note, saying simply, It is a sad and difficult time for all of us.
Because of the new names of Lara’s partner and, improbably, of her swim coach that “replaced” Helen in the codicil, I felt sure that my sister had been complicit. She was now declared my parents’ only daughter.
* * *
It would take me a long time to understand how my sister could have participated in this. I have no doubt that she did so out of a sense of loyalty to my parents. Our family was built on lies to protect one another from what we believed to be more painful truths. In the end, we got tangled up in our own fictions. Our stories had sharp edges; I was sliced off.
part one
Sisters are a setup. Shot from the same cannon, you’re sent on a blind date for the rest of your lives.
My sister, Lara, and I had a script we were supposed to follow. My mother and her sister, Zosia, had written it, and they were our role models, which is pretty scary when you consider what they’d been through. During the war, Zosia had saved my mother’s life. Or maybe it was the other way around. The stories were twisted and my mother and aunt were bound together in ways that Lara and I didn’t begin to understand, but we did our best to follow for most of our lives. Although Zosia lived in Italy and we lived in upstate New York, Mom and Zosia’s love was formidable, the stuff of legend, built on a mythic past. One day, they told us, my sister and I would have what they had.
But unlike our mother and aunt, Lara and I didn’t have any real wars to test our bond; we had to make up our own. From our earliest years, we liked to go to extremes with each other. We tested our limits, pushed ourselves and each other a little further, a little harder, to see how much we could take. To prove how much we loved each other. Usually these tests of strength took place in the wilderness, far from the comforts and complications of our everyday lives.
In 1990, when I was thirty-three and Lara was thirty-six, we went ski mountaineering in the remote Battle Range of British Columbia. A helicopter dropped us off on a mountain ridge above a wall of ice. The pilot would come back for our group of ten a week later, weather permitting.
Forty feet of snow had fallen in the last three months, and they’d had to dig down to find the entrance to the hut we would use as our base. We hustled our gear inside and went back out for avalanche practice. We were going to learn how to save each other’s lives. After clipping on our skis, Lara and I followed our guide into an unannounced blizzard. The storm had come out of nowhere, and we weren’t going far—just far enough to feel like an avalanche was possible. Then we began the drill, making an imaginary grid in the snow and finding the buried “victim” using our transceivers. The guide timed us. It was hard to see in the swirling snow, and we struggled against the wind, holding the transceivers in front of us as we walked back and forth in the deep powder trying to locate the signal. We weren’t very good at search and rescue, and I could see that the real purpose of the drill was to teach us that we would never survive an avalanche. The guide had come through a few, but despite our years of exercising poor judgment in the mountains, Lara and I had never tripped one.
It was Lara who had talked me into this trip, and I was a little anxious about skinning up a few thousand vertical feet each day. The next morning under clear skies we trekked single-file up a steep ravine, skirting a series of heart-stopping crevasses—freakish blue gashes in the snow that dropped hundreds of yards into darkness. Sweat poured from our faces. Not a sound—just the whistle and whip of the wind, the huff of our breathing, and the hushed swish of our skis moving through deep powder, like giant silencers on our feet.
I liked to follow behind Lara, and imagined that our legs were connected by the same body. When she pushed her right leg forward, mine slid forward automatically, as if invisible strings attached my ski boot to hers. I could sink into her rhythm without using any of my own energy; I could siphon off her. You can really lose yourself like this. Your self actually disappears. Your body is there, a huffing, puffing, pounding machine that slides along with your sister’s. But your mind stretches out, and your spirit soars, and there is nothing that binds you to the earth. A giddy feeling of floating high above the thousands of miles of mountains around you, and for a moment you feel as if you have touched God, that you dwell in the bodiless land of the spirit, whether it’s the wind on your cheek or the blue in the sky or the sharp knives of the peaks in the distance, surrounded by emptiness and snow and the simplest of elements. It’s a kind of rapture, a sort of passionate love affair with the universe.
This was the heady bond Lara and I had shared since childhood. You have to climb to the end of the earth because the middle of your life is too weighed down by trinkets of the mundane, the alarm clock with its rigid hands, the same twelve numbers arranged in the same circle, the same wheels that carry you to this street or that; to this desk or that; to this bed or that. I had found my true north. It was the world away from everything. Lara had brought me here, above the trees, above life. It was as cool and creamy and thrilling as death itself.
Back then, there was no doubt that if an avalanche had come for my sister, I’d have leapt in front of it and pushed her to safety.
But that was a long time ago.
one
Lara and I grew up outside Schenectady, near the snow belt of upstate New York. Winter moved in for good by November and didn’t really start to lose interest until well into April. Summers were short, crisp, and businesslike, so brief as to seem a false memory. By mid-August, you could already feel the air changing, sharpening its teeth. In October, the ground frosted and hardened. Winter storms swooped down from the northwest with a thrilling blast of cold air that you had to bite into, just to breathe.
While our father saw patients at his office and made hospital rounds, our mother cleaned the house and everything in it. And I spent my earliest years stumbling after Lara, who seemed to be in constant motion—flying down the hills behind our house on a sled or a cart, running through the woods, and leaping off the ledges of my mother’s rock garden.
It was obvious to anyone that she owned me. Like most big sisters and mob bosses, she ordered me around, insisted on my participation in her schemes, and, if I balked, she could use brute force to get me to comply. Through her, I absorbed galaxies of information—about climbing trees and Indian wrestling, stick fighting, rock throwing, berry picking, and igloo building. Most importantly, I learned that resistance was pointless.
We were allies: we both loved adventure and action, tests of strength and courage.
We were enemies: we hated each other. I was half her size and a crybaby; she could throw me to the ground with one hand while eating an ice cream cone with the other.
Home Movies, 1956–61
The movies begin in Italy in 1956, before I was bo
rn: two-year-old Lara and Mom and her older sister, Auntie Zosia, are walking through the gardens at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, outside Rome, where Auntie and Uncle live. Mom is walking briskly—short dark hair, very trim; she cuts a smart figure. Auntie Zosia is a curvy redhead, with high cheekbones and an alluring, mysterious face. And there’s Uncle Giulio, daintier than the women, a small gem. He smiles sweetly at my father, who holds the movie camera. An authentic Italian count, Uncle is conspicuously beautiful, slim and sophisticated in his tailored linen slacks, yellow polo shirt, and sporty ascot.
Now Dad must have given Mom the movie camera, because here he is, striding toward us: freakishly tall compared to the rest of them, athletic. His hair is striking—white with a single dark stripe down the middle, combed straight back off his forehead like an exotic animal. He towers over the world, his legs crazy long, his chest and shoulders broad, his waist trim. He looks like some bizarre exaggeration of the ideal male body.
Trailing behind is my cousin Renzo, a gangly thirteen-year-old, dark and handsome with hooded eyes and a bored look on his face. Thirty-five years later, Lara and I would realize that things were not always as we’d been told. Renzo looks more like my mother than like anyone else in these movies, and he certainly doesn’t look like Giulio. For my mother, identity was slippery, and history was a vast game board on which the pieces could be moved, exchanged, and transformed at will. My mother’s survival of the war had depended on such sleights of hand and shifts in identity. For the rest of her life she would continue to rely on the stories she told to stay alive, long after the need for lies was apparent.
The Escape Artist Page 1