The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  But I couldn’t. And because my memory was different from hers, our alignment as sisters was threatened.

  * * *

  “I got ahold of Dad’s journals,” Lara told me later that fall. She was calling regularly to see if I had finally recovered my own memories. “Last weekend, you know, when I went home. After Mom and Dad were asleep, I searched the basement. They were sealed shut in cardboard boxes labeled with your name on them. Among boxes of your childhood stuff.”

  “You went through my stuff?” The old rage welled up in me, calling up the times Lara had broken into my room and read my diaries. I used to go wild—it was as if she’d broken into my mind.

  “They’re his diaries. I didn’t take any of your stuff.”

  “He was going to give them to me! He told me so!”

  “Helen, listen, you won’t believe what he’s written in here. I took them to Kinko’s for photocopies—there’s a million pages.”

  “How could you—?”

  “Don’t worry. I put the originals back—no one will know. Besides, it’s not like he confessed to anything in writing.”

  I’d known about my father’s journals for years—he’d shown them to me one night in his office the summer after my first year of college. We were holed up there while my sister was rampaging through our house on one of her marathon tantrums. We’d spent many hours like that, my father and I, joined in our helplessness and anger. His office was quiet and free of my sister, and we’d feel like temporary deserters from a long and dirty war.

  It was on one such evening that my father had taken out several big loose-leaf binders from a locked cabinet. He opened them for me and paged through them. They were impressive for the sheer quantity of words, miles of ink running across the pages. “One day these will be yours,” he said. “I am writing them for you.” I felt honored by my father’s confidence. He was tight-lipped and did not divulge much. But he had poured himself onto these pages, and he had written them for me.

  “You had no right!” I told Lara.

  “What do you mean? After what he did to us? He’s the one who violated us! We were babies!”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “It doesn’t give you the right to go through his private journals.”

  “Jesus, Helen, how can you defend him? Why are you protecting him?”

  “Look, he’s my father too! I mean, I’m trying to be open-minded, Lara, but I don’t know. You’re asking me to believe that he raped us when we were babies, and—”

  “I’m not asking you anything! I’m telling you. It happened. He did it. I remember it. I was there, and so were you. You don’t have to like it, but you can’t deny it forever.” She hung up.

  * * *

  How do you choose between members of your family? Lara and I had swung from one extreme to another, and in our family, you always had to pick sides. The stakes were too high, the feelings too intense, the accusations too violent. You couldn’t just float above the crisis. One way or another, you were going to be dragged into battle—as if opposition was the only way we could show our love for one another.

  twenty-two

  My loyalty to Lara was instantly restored a few months later. Apparently in the midst of her crisis over her recovered memories, Lara had been sending inquiries to various international organizations, hoping to learn more about our family. Now in March 1992, she received a bombshell: a packet of documents from a rabbi at Yad Vashem in Israel proving that we were Jewish and that we had dozens of family members who had been killed in fields, ghettos, and camps in Eastern Europe. This discovery knocked the wheels out from under us, and Lara’s allegations of child abuse now took a backseat to the Holocaust. Although her recovered memories would haunt her for decades, she stopped trying to convince me that I had shared her experience.

  Instead, for the next year Lara and I spent hours on the phone, trying to understand the enormity of the secret that our parents and aunt had kept from us all our lives. In August, we traveled to our parents’ hometowns in Eastern Europe and found witnesses who led us to the sites of mass shootings in the woods outside their villages; we went to Israel to meet with the rabbi who had sent us the pages of testimony. The story that emerged was overwhelming, and I wanted to write a book about it.

  But given my parents’ and aunt’s insistence on silence, writing about my family was complicated. I spent the next few years agonizing over whether I even had the right to tell their story. By 1996, four years into the project, I was finally on a roll, which meant that I could string together two or three sentences before having to stop, play a dozen games of solitaire on the computer, and worry about my mother’s likely reaction to what I’d just written. I figured my father would be okay with it (I’d shown him sections, and he said he didn’t care whether people knew he was Jewish), but I was pretty sure that my mother would flip out. It was Zosia who insisted on keeping the secret, and my mother was terrified of doing anything against her sister’s will. Just as I was now terrified of doing anything against my mother’s will.

  I had been living with my partner, Donna, for two years by then, and she was supportive of the project. But it was my sister who really championed my writing of the book. “You can’t worry about what Mom and Dad think,” Lara said. “They’ve lied to us our whole lives. You’re thirty-eight years old! You have a right to your own voice—your own truth.”

  In what was shaping up to be a battle between the old generation and the new, I felt lucky to have Lara, the star psychiatrist, on my side. She was even more zealous than I. Not only did I have the right to write my memoir, she insisted, I also had the historical obligation to do so. “Your book will be a testament to the lives of our grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins!” she said. “It’s kind of ironic, don’t you think, that by denying their own past, Mom and Dad are actually participating in covering up the Holocaust?”

  I enjoyed this brief tour of grandiosity provided by my sister—it was a welcome respite from my usual state of drowning in guilt over my project. I needed Lara. I’d even given her a copy of my very rough manuscript for safekeeping. Now, instead of blaming each other for our little-shop-of-horrors history, Lara and I could finally join together in blaming Hitler for our shattered parents’ lies.

  * * *

  That spring, I was invited to give a short reading with friends at a fund-raiser in Boston for a small press. I was nervous—still afraid of my mother’s wrath if she were to find out I was writing about our Jewish identity.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be great,” Lara said over the phone. “What section of the manuscript are you going to read?”

  “I don’t know, Lara. It’s just a mess of rough draft pages, and I’m scared. I don’t want to read anything about Mom and Dad or being Jewish. I don’t think I’m ready to put that out there.”

  “Then just read the few pages about us as kids,” she said. “You know, the part about how crazy we were, and our fights, and going to family therapy and all.”

  So I polished up the section and read it at the fund-raiser, and I thought, Well, that wasn’t so bad. I told Lara all about it the next morning, during our debriefing.

  “Way to go!” she said. We high-fived over the phone. She asked me to send her a copy, so I popped the seven pages in the mail.

  A few days later she called me up excitedly. “Helen, this is fantastic! You have to publish it!” I was thrilled, of course, that she liked my writing. But I still didn’t feel ready to publish anything. I was having enough trouble just writing the damn thing.

  Lara, however, had already thought it through. She’d even found a publisher for me—a professor at her university was putting together an anthology of essays by adult children of Holocaust survivors. “Your piece is perfect, Helen—don’t change a word, just stick it in an envelope and send it to him.”

  It took me another week to work up the nerve to send my seven-page essay to the professor. The day after I dropped it in the mail, Lara called. I could tell from her
voice that something bad had happened, and I knew immediately it was about my writing.

  “Listen, Helen, um… I’ve been thinking. You know that piece you wrote about us when we were kids? Well, you gotta change some things in it. I mean… I’m a psychiatrist here, and… I have a reputation and all—”

  Oh shit, I thought. Here we go. It was as if some part of me had been expecting it. All these years that I’d been relying on Lara’s support of my writing, I seemed to have forgotten this—her tendency to flip. I kept doing that, forgetting the parts of my sister that she and I both needed to forget, in order to fuse our relationship. It’s what my family had always done—just sweep the bad parts under the rug, and poof! return to Happy Family. Rinse and repeat.

  “Helen, you’ve got to take out that part about me hearing voices as a little kid. I mean, that’s psychotic, and that would really hurt my career.”

  “Okay,” I said carefully, “I could take that out.”

  “And you also have to take out the part about me being anorexic. That’s really loaded; that could ruin my reputation. And also about my nighttime checking—the whole OCD thing.”

  I tried to sound calm, but I could hear my heart banging in my ears. “Lara, you told me to send it out without changing a word!”

  “I know,” she said, “but I’ve had a chance to think about it some more. And you have to take that stuff out.”

  “But all that happened ages ago! We were just little kids!”

  “It doesn’t matter, Helen. This is my career!”

  How could this hurt her career any more than her near-fatal suicide attempt seven years ago? She’d been a resident at the same hospital where she now worked as a psychiatrist; she’d overdosed on Tranxene and vodka and landed in the ER. Certainly that could have put a crimp in her career, yet her teaching hospital had welcomed her back with open arms. She’d risen through the ranks as a beloved and respected colleague ever since.

  “Lara, the whole point is that our family was a disaster!” I said. “The Holocaust didn’t just affect Mom and Dad; it affected all of us. I mean, if we were a perfectly happy family, we wouldn’t have wound up in family therapy in the first place. It wouldn’t make any sense! I have to show that this family has serious problems, to get us into that room with the shrink.”

  “Well, you could make me bulimic,” she said. “But not anorexic.”

  Seriously? I thought. Bulimia is okay, but anorexia isn’t? I said nothing. Okay, I thought, I can work with bulimia.

  “Well, how about this,” Lara said. “Why don’t you be the sick one? Why not just write yourself as the one with all the childhood problems?”

  I actually considered it. After all, who really cared? I wanted to please Lara. “I guess I could do that,” I said.

  But then I realized it would pose narrative problems. “I can’t have Character A grow up to be Character B,” I said. “I don’t think that’s going to work.” Besides, I explained, it would blow the whole purpose of memoir—if I made stuff up, then it would no longer be memoir, but fiction. I’d lived my whole life in my parents’ fiction, governed by lies and secrets and half-truths. I needed to write something that was my own truth.

  “Well,” Lara said, “I’m just telling you that you can’t put that stuff in about me.”

  * * *

  Less than a week later, I received a letter from my father. We heard from Lara about your intention to go ahead and publish our life story very soon.… He went on to accuse me of destroying my family for my own personal glory. Exposing my parents as Jews would undo them. My mother would flee to Rome, he wrote, and since he hated Italy, he would have to relocate to another state. In effect, I would be forcing my parents to separate and leave their home, their state, and their country. What I was doing was immoral, he said; my conscience would never forgive me.

  And then, in his final sentence, he suggested that perhaps if I changed their names, all might be well.

  I sank to the sofa. I had feared that my writing would somehow kill my mother—irrational as that seemed—but here it was, irrationality confirmed. I was condemned by the two people I worshipped most, and I hadn’t even published anything yet.

  And then my rage rumbled in—not at my parents, but at Lara, who had called them into the fray. I burst into tears and showed the letter to Donna. She looked shell-shocked as she read it. “What did Lara tell them?” she said, sitting next to me on the sofa.

  “Who the fuck knows?”

  Donna held me and said everything would be okay. She was firmly on my side, and I needed her. Once I calmed down, I immediately wrote my parents back, reassuring them that of course I would change their names and protect their privacy, and in any event, the manuscript was nowhere near completion; the possibility of publication was even more remote. This was true: the book would take another three years to complete. And since I’d never published a book before in my life, the chances of getting the thing published were about as likely as my mother marching in the Gay Pride Parade.

  I also immediately wrote the professor and withdrew my submission, explaining that my family was having a meltdown over it. He called and asked me to reconsider, but I was so shaken, I couldn’t imagine letting him publish the piece. I wasn’t yet strong enough to defy my parents. Even though I was almost forty years old, I still saw things through their eyes, and had trouble relying on my own.

  And then there was the timing of all this.

  In two weeks, Donna and I were getting married. It wasn’t legal in those days, and we’d invited a total of ten guests, including Lara and her partner, Jess. I’d told my parents about our plans in an awkward phone conversation months earlier, and they’d met the news with dead silence. They liked Donna, but they could barely bring themselves to pronounce the word homosexual, much less congratulate me or ask for details. To spare us all the discomfort, I didn’t invite them, and they never said a word about it.

  Now Donna and I were running around, cleaning the house, planning the meal—so many last-minute details to attend to—when Lara called again. “By the way,” she said darkly, “I’m not coming to your wedding.” She slammed down the receiver.

  “Thank God,” Donna said.

  I called Lara back and got her answering machine. “I think you’re right,” I said. “I think it’s not a good idea for you to come.”

  But over the next few days, Lara called and left half a dozen messages begging to attend our wedding: “I really want to be there, Helen. Why are you being so mean to me?” She followed with a postcard, a letter. Please, please, please. Why won’t you let me come? It amazed me that she could not acknowledge what she’d just done.

  Perhaps even more surprising was that I had trusted her in the first place. How many times had she and I repeated this pattern? How old was I?

  She had not changed, I realized; I had. After all, Lara had always been like this—one moment my closest ally, the next my worst enemy. In her mind, she’d done nothing wrong; I was overreacting.

  She continued calling, so I stopped answering the phone. This gave me a sense of safety, a bit of breathing room, although I still had nightmares of Lara showing up at our door, or breaking into our apartment and stealing my writing and journals. I did not return her telephone messages. I did not respond to her cards either. I was afraid of the slightest contact with her, lest I be sucked back into the vortex, like an alcoholic’s first mesmerizing sip of whiskey after a long separation. In that sublime unity with Lara, I would forget the other side of her, the parts that we both preferred to ignore as if they’d never existed.

  So what was different this time?

  For one thing, there was no time. I was getting married in two weeks. Donna was my beloved, the one in whom I placed my troth and trust and faith. Maybe this was precisely part of the problem for Lara: she was losing me.

  And then, of course, there was the problem of my book. I was trying, however ineptly, to feed it, to protect it, to nurture it into existence. This fledglin
g manuscript, scruffy and malnourished, was the voice within me that would not compromise. I could finally stick up for it. And I had Donna to help me.

  Wedding, May 1996

  Our spontaneity surprised us. Months earlier, on an evening in January 1996, when gay marriage was still completely illegal in all fifty states of America, Donna was cooking Country Chicken—a double-barreled cholesterol bonanza with bacon, cream, and black pepper—and I was sitting on the stool in our kitchen, yakking about nothing in particular. She held out the wooden spoon for me to taste. It was so amazingly good, I asked her to marry me. She tilted her head, a sly smile forming. “Okay,” she said.

  “Really?” I jumped off the stool.

  “Yeah.” She threw her arms around my neck, spoon still in hand.

  * * *

  Donna’s foster brother, Frank, was a heretic Presbyterian minister in Kentucky, and she called him first. “That’s wonderful!” he said, and agreed to be our minister. He gave us some dates he could be in Boston, and we picked Cinco de Mayo.

  Neither of us wanted anything big. We figured we’d just invite some close friends, and have a sit-down wedding at home. If we emptied the living room of furniture and stacked it all in the bedroom and on the little deck, we could stretch out the dining table and fit everyone in. Donna planned the meal: she’d make four thousand hors d’oeuvres to start things off. Champagne, and sparkling cider for the folks in recovery. Next she found a recipe for an appetizer of boiled cabbage and lox, in honor of my shtetl roots. Main course: beef tenderloin (everyone we knew ate red meat back then) and potatoes au gratin with haricots verts, in honor of Donna’s French grandmother. I was responsible for the words—writing vows for us to say over the main course, and choosing various friends’ poetry and prose to recite at other points during the meal. Donna would make my mother’s mocha torte (a recipe she’d gotten from an Auschwitz survivor friend), and I’d bake a flourless boule that registered eleven on the chocolate Richter scale.