The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  * * *

  It wasn’t until Lara and I were in our thirties that we tried to find out more about our family history. Lara sent letters to various international organizations, and one day in 1992 she received a packet of documents from a rabbi in Israel. Jackpot, he wrote. He enclosed pages of testimony from survivors describing how each of our relatives had been shot or gassed or starved in ghettos and camps by Germans, Ukrainians, and Poles during the war. Lara and I were stunned to discover that we were not Catholic but Jewish, and our parents were Holocaust survivors with huge families—dozens and dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins we’d never even heard of—all of whom were Jews, and all of whom had been killed.

  Ironically, just as Mom and Zosia had been bound together by their lifelong vow of secrecy, Lara and I now forged our bond as the younger pair of sisters determined to discover what the older pair were hiding. Over the next few months, we interviewed hundreds of survivors and historians and rabbis and shrinks and anybody else who could shed light on our family.

  At first we kept our research a secret from our parents, who, by then, were in their midseventies. But in May 1992 Lara and I sat down with them and told them about our discovery, and as anticipated, they didn’t want to talk about it. Or at least, not at first. Two months later they finally acknowledged that we were Jewish and told us more about how they had survived. The revelation was a watershed in our family; we began to dismantle the walls between us and see each other in a new light. Lara and I finally began to understand the unspoken forces that had been acting on us all our lives.

  But throughout our childhood and into our thirties, before we learned the truth of our past, Lara and my parents and I seemed locked in a script of madness from which we were helpless to escape.

  1965

  A few weeks after Lara started seeing a psychologist, my mother told me they’d made an appointment for me to see the psychologist too.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “Well, the doctor felt that he should do some tests on you too.”

  “But I’m fine,” I said.

  “Of course you’re fine!” My mother smiled unconvincingly. “Dr. Johnson just wants to learn as much as he can about our family,” she said. “So that he can help Lara.”

  “What if he thinks I’m crazy?”

  “No one’s crazy,” my mother said. “How could you say such a thing?”

  “Well, Lara’s… um…”

  My mother’s face turned fierce. “Don’t ever use that word!” she said. “Where did you hear that?”

  I shrugged.

  “We’re trying to help her,” my mother said in a kinder voice. “Don’t you want to help?”

  Lara wanted to maim me, and “help” wasn’t exactly what I wanted to offer her in return.

  “She’s sick, darling. We all have to help her.”

  * * *

  My mother drove me downtown to Dr. Johnson’s office and sat in the waiting room while I went into his office. He had a round, moist face with thick caterpillar eyebrows above horn-rimmed glasses. His hair was slicked back with Brylcreem. I tried not to look at him because he was definitely creepy.

  “Have a seat.” He smiled nervously, running one hand over a pad of lined paper on his desk. “I just want you to relax.” He picked up a pen and put it down.

  “Now, to start with, I’m going to show you some pictures, and I want you to tell me the first thing that pops into your head. Okay?”

  I nodded. My heart was pounding so hard I was afraid he could hear it.

  He pulled out a stack of white boards with black splotches all over them. He held one out on the desk for me. “Now, just look at this, and tell me what you see.”

  I knew exactly what I saw. “A monster,” I said.

  He nodded. “Uh-huh.” He placed the board facedown and scribbled something on his pad. “Okay,” he said. He held up another picture. This time the monster was even bigger and scarier.

  “A monster,” I said.

  One of his giant eyebrows shot up. “Mm-hmm.” Again he wrote something on his notepad.

  When he held up the third card, the monster was practically leaping off the board at me. I bit my lip. This was not looking good. I figured three monsters in a row meant I was certainly very disturbed, possibly crazy. “A house,” I said.

  His lips twitched as if he might speak, but then he clamped his mouth shut. I was afraid he might be on to me. “A house,” he finally said.

  I began sweating. The monster had an enormous hairy head and sharp ears. Its mouth was open, and it seemed to know I was lying.

  “Can you show me the house?”

  “Right there,” I said vaguely, pointing to the picture.

  “Where? What do you see?”

  “Um, here’s a door,” I said, pointing to a part of the monster that was clearly a foot and not a door. “And, um, here are the windows.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Johnson said. He laid the card facedown and wrote on his pad before holding up the fourth card.

  I couldn’t believe he was showing me another monster. No one saw so many monsters. They would lock me up for sure.

  “It’s an Easter basket,” I said.

  He must have shown me a dozen cards, and every one of them was a different-shaped monster. I told him I saw a sunny day, a boat on a lake, a tree with songbirds, a friendly dog romping in a meadow, anything to sound happy and well-adjusted.

  Finally it was over. He got up and opened the door to the waiting room where my mother was reading her latest New Yorker magazine. She stood and smiled at the doctor, who said he’d call her later.

  She thanked him and we walked out. My scalp felt tingly and my mouth was dry. My mother took me home. I never heard about Dr. Johnson again; Lara stopped seeing him too, and in all the years since then, we’ve never talked about him. I wonder sometimes what Lara saw in those Rorschach images, and I wonder what I would see in them today. I never found out how I did on the test. At the time, I was afraid Dr. Johnson would pronounce me unfit to be my parents’ child and I would be taken away. I didn’t dare ask my mother; I just waited to see what would happen next.

  * * *

  What happened next was family therapy, but that’s not what it was called. We called it Taking Lara to the Hoffman Children and Family Center, where we were all going to help her get better. We were all ferociously unhappy, and incurable, of course, but the psychiatrists kept working on us with their trowels, trying to make us grow up properly in the garden of mental health.

  My father directed all of this. I have no idea how he shopped for our shrink or how he found the Hoffman Center. Mainly, I think, he wanted to send my mother and sister to therapy, but he didn’t trust them to do it right; he needed to be there to get the record straight. And they said I had to be there too, which bothered me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, why did I have to go? “You’re part of the family,” my mother explained. At the age of eight, I bit down hard on that nut of indisputable fact, and did as I was told.

  Every Friday afternoon my mother picked me up from Glenwood Elementary School. I had been granted a weekly early release for “dental” reasons, my mother told me in a hushed tone. Under no circumstances, she said, was I to divulge the real reason for my absence from the third grade on Friday afternoons. To my amazement, my teacher, a fierce woman with flaming orange hair, never so much as batted an eye at my dental excuse. No one in Glenwood Elementary School went to therapy, I was quite certain.

  My mother always dressed up for our Hoffman Center appointments. She wore one of her tailored Italian dresses from the forties. She’d also combed her eyebrows, powdered her cheeks, and applied her Cherry Blossom lipstick. I wore whatever my sister had outgrown: the boxy jumpers my mother had sewn, Lara’s old button-down blouses, her pathetic socks. I carried my books and baseball glove under my arm and climbed into the backseat of my mother’s Dodge Dart.

  We drove to St. Mary’s, a private girls’ school where my parents had enrolled Lara i
n the seventh grade, to protect her from the cruelty of public school kids. Now she trudged out from the stone building in her navy-blue uniform, plaid book bag thrown over her shoulder like a sack of bones. She flopped onto the front seat and brooded the whole ride downtown.

  Schenectady was a hardscrabble town back then. Ragged apartment buildings leaned against one another, windows boarded up, doors hanging off hinges. People sat on the front stoops with empty eyes, smoking and drinking from bottles in paper bags. I stared out the window of our car as my mother steered us through the broken streets. I was shocked by this other world, dark and dismal and foreign. Surely these people needed help more than we did?

  My mother parked behind my father’s blue Chrysler New Yorker at the Hoffman Center. Entering the building seemed to drain the color from our cheeks and the strength from our bodies. My father, in his usual gray business suit, was already pacing slowly up and down the waiting room, staring at the drab carpet as if measuring the weight of each footfall. My parents exchanged a few words in Polish.

  When the door swung open, we traipsed in, heads bowed. The social worker, Miss Jameson, tall and pear-shaped, with hips that looked pneumatic, closed the door behind us. Mom and Lara sat together on a little couch in the middle of the dimly lit room, and the rest of us sat in chairs around them. Our psychiatrist, Dr. Grokle, was a shriveled woman with dark whiskers. She sat calmly in a wingback chair, her long black-and-gray hair wound up in a frizzy beehive. It wobbled slightly when she turned from my father to my mother and Lara, and it looked a little sinister, as if it might be concealing something.

  At first I thought family therapy might work to my benefit: I was hoping that a professional psychiatrist would remove my sister from our house and lock her up somewhere. My mother, of course, would sooner drink lighter fluid than lose Lara to an institution, so I did not voice my hopes to her. Between my father and me, I sensed an illicit understanding, but once when I mentioned that I wished Lara were gone, he said nothing. No one ever asked me my opinion in family therapy.

  My father started each session by recounting the family’s transgressions of the past week. He had memorized the entire chronology of misery—our mopiness, our disrespect, our bickering, our violent outbursts, our personal failures. Nothing got past him. Sometimes he consulted his notes scribbled on blue-lined paper from Woolworth’s. But most of the time he could recite the entire week’s melodrama from memory. I was usually missing from my father’s list of psychological crimes, which I attributed to my deceptively angelic character. He focused primarily on Lara, whose outbursts were our ignition switch, and on my mother, who couldn’t hit the brakes. Mom and Lara must have felt like a car wreck, to hear their behavior reduced to my father’s score pad. Although we knew it was coming, his recital still felt like a fresh crash every week.

  “Now,” my father said at the beginning of one session, crossing his legs so that one of his size-twelve shoes dangled just above the other. “Last Friday night, Lara picked a fight with Helen. When Maria intervened, Lara started fighting with her. This went on till after midnight. Lara would not take a Valium. And Maria would not put her foot down; she would not send Lara to her room. I had to be the one to—”

  “That’s not true!” Lara said. She burst into tears. My mother leaned over and stroked Lara’s shoulder. My father glanced at the shrink, his eyebrows raised as if to say, See what I mean?

  Dr. Grokle maintained her look of quiet concern.

  “He hates me!” Lara said. Her face was red and contorted, like one of those twisted gourds at Halloween.

  My mother leaned closer to Lara, the two of them in a huddle. “He doesn’t hate you, darling—”

  “He hates me!” Lara said. “He doesn’t understand!”

  “What doesn’t he understand?” Dr. Grokle’s voice was so quiet that no one paid any attention to her.

  “I love you,” my father said haughtily. “But I will not tolerate your manipulative behavior.”

  “All right, Kovik,” my mother said. “That’s enough.”

  “I am simply stating the facts,” my father said. “I am a realist.”

  “You don’t even know what’s going on!” Lara said.

  “I know what I see.”

  “Kovik, let her speak.”

  “He’s a bully!” Lara said. “I hate him!”

  My father sat straight in his gray suit, dwarfing the chair.

  “What is it that you hate?” the shrink said to Lara in a gentle voice.

  “You have to admit that you refused to practice the piano Monday night,” my father said.

  “I had a stomachache!”

  “And you refused to practice the piano on Wednesday.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “She did practice on Wednesday,” my mother said.

  “Not for the entire half hour,” my father corrected. “She barely started the Chopin before storming off—”

  “That’s because you yell at me every time I make the slightest mistake!” Tears streaked Lara’s face.

  “I never yell,” my father said. “But we are paying for your lessons, and you’re just wasting it! If you don’t play the piano, that’s fine—no more lessons! But as long as you want private lessons, you have to practice.”

  “Kovik, let her speak.”

  “Why do you always defend her?” my father said. He turned to Dr. Grokle. “She always takes Lara’s side. This is a typical pattern. I try to point out a problem, but Maria always undermines me. Instead of supporting me, she caves in to Lara. And Lara takes advantage of it. She—”

  “You don’t know a thing!” Lara said.

  My mother passed Lara a tissue. Tissues were free at the Hoffman Children and Family Center. You could have as many as you wanted.

  To my dismay, no one paid any attention to me. Sitting in my chair next to the social worker, feet dangling, I could have been on Mars, for all they knew. Even more disturbing, no one seemed to think that my life was in danger. My father’s reports to Dr. Grokle mentioned Lara’s attacks on me as if they were mere pretexts for a larger battle—as if I were simply the lure that Lara used to get at my mother, and therefore irrelevant.

  I didn’t dare speak of my own terror, because I was ashamed of it. My parents always told me that I was overreacting when I tried to tell them about Lara’s assaults, and I hated myself for being such a chickenshit. I knew that whatever Lara did to me was nothing compared to what the Russians had done to my father in the war.

  Dr. Grokle was a complete disappointment to me, with her furrowed brow and high-rise hair. And Miss Jameson, in a candy-colored dress, just scribbled notes on a steno pad balanced on her eye-popping thighs. I realized that these two experts were never going to figure out how to send Lara anywhere.

  So I kept my mouth shut. My life was directly linked to the outcome of these sessions—who would win and who would lose at therapy, and by how much. I simply hoped that whoever won would be good to me. In my experience, you never got what you wanted by asking for it. You were better off waiting to see what you were going to get, and then figuring out how to deal with it.

  * * *

  Recently I gave a reading at a college. In the women’s room, notices were posted on the walls. The questions were simple and direct: Do you feel safe in your home? Have you ever been struck by someone you live with? Are you afraid that you may be hurt by someone in your home?

  You were supposed to call a confidential hotline if you answered yes to any of the questions. You were not supposed to tolerate living in fear. This was considered domestic abuse, and there were agencies to help you. The idea seemed so strange to me. If I had seen such a sign in my school, would I have called for help? Of course not. Like most kids, I would never have admitted to anyone what happened in our home. Speaking out would be a deadly betrayal of my parents. Besides, they were all-powerful: if they could do nothing, then there was nothing to be done.

  * * *

  It was always dark when we got o
ut of therapy. The four of us marched into the cold night in stony silence. My mother and father consulted briefly about dinner before climbing into their separate cars. Sometimes we went to the cafeteria at Macy’s for dinner, but usually we went to Sears. The food was not as good at Sears, but my father was the store doctor, and we got a 10 percent discount.

  Lara always rode with my mother, but I went with my father because I felt sorry for him; no one would ever choose my father’s company over my mother’s. He was too stiff and awkward, too painfully needy. As we drove through the city streets after those exhausting sessions, neither of us could think of anything to say. My father’s despair was like an animate being riding between us. I always wanted to make him feel better, but the pressure was too great and I remained silent.

  Occasionally, as we sat at a traffic light, he might ask, “Tell me how you are. How is school?” By this, I took him to mean, Are you happy? Am I a good father? I would reply that I was happy and doing well. He always accepted this information at face value, with great relief.

  As we glided north, I would mull over what had gone on in the session. My parents and Lara always tore into each other, and then my parents assured Lara they loved her, and then they’d all rip each other apart some more. Mom and Dad kept batting the word love back and forth like a shuttlecock in a game of badminton. I, for one, was ready to concede the point.