The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  Donna was in charge of dress selection, which she accomplished in less than a week: we both wore white linen, though mine was a little tunic-thing you might find on a schoolgirl in the British colonies, while Donna’s was longer, graceful and flowing. We had our rings custom-made by a metalsmith with Paul Bunyan fingers, whose shop was in the belfry tower of a church overlooking Copley Square. Donna wore flip-flops for the wedding, or maybe she went barefoot—I forget.

  It was easy to come up with a guest list: at the top were my sister and Jess; Donna’s brother, the minister; Victor, our opera singer friend who had set us up two years ago; my young Italian cousin Nina—Renzo’s daughter—who had just come out as lesbian; and a handful of close friends in the area. As it turned out, a few guests canceled: Donna’s colleague from work backed out because she couldn’t hack the whole gay thing. And my sister and Jess were last-minute casualties of Lara’s mood swing over my writing.

  Considering everything else that was going on that spring, our wedding went really well. The food was out of this world; our friends made us feel special; our vows actually meant a lot to us (including our promises to be patient, to seek help when we needed it, and to take the dog out even when we didn’t feel like it). Lara’s absence was palpable, but not devastating. I was beginning to see that I could survive without her.

  twenty-three

  I didn’t speak to Lara again for two and a half years. It was my mother who begged me to reconcile with Lara, and I finally agreed to go home for the weekend after Christmas in 1998. By then, my book had been sold and was scheduled to be published in February.

  Lara and Jess were already at my parents’ house when Donna and I arrived the day after Christmas. The house was mercifully filled with golden retrievers—my parents’ dogs, my sister’s, and now ours—and their wriggling, happy bodies relieved much of the tension. After a mandatory cup of tea and piece of linzer torte, Lara and I decided to take the dogs for a romp on the golf course, leaving Jess and Donna to themselves.

  We took two cars so we could fit all the dogs in, and I followed Lara’s Toyota hatchback down Natchaug Road, the same route we used to run twenty years ago when we were both home from college. New houses had popped up where small farms and woods used to be. There was a new traffic light at the corner of Cromwell, where I had once hitched a ride with Suzanne Murphy in the seventh grade, certain that we would be raped and murdered, but in fact we’d been safely dropped off at her house half a mile away. I turned right at the light and followed Lara’s Toyota up the hill. It was comforting to see Lara’s car ahead of me, as if I were behind her on skis, following her tracks without having to think. We parked at the golf course, and as we opened the car doors, the dogs hurled themselves out into the icy air, overjoyed to be galloping across the snowfields. My sister and I both smiled—the automatic pleasure in seeing our dogs running with wild abandon. My dog had pulled a tree branch from the nearby woods and was now proudly prancing around with it, chest out, head high, tail wagging like a flag. Lara and I started walking side by side along the perimeter of the course.

  “You look good,” I told her.

  “You too.”

  The dogs raced back and forth across the fields, circling back every so often to make sure we were okay. We threw sticks for them to fetch. As usual after a period of absence from Lara, she was friendly and fun to be with, and I felt foolish for having been so afraid to talk with her for the past two years. And also as usual, we did not say a word about what had caused our rift in the first place. Instead, we talked easily about our day-to-day lives, work, friends, activities. To my surprise, Lara already knew that my memoir was due to come out six weeks later. A friend of hers ran an independent bookstore, and kept Lara posted.

  “When are you going to tell Mom and Dad?” she asked as we walked back to our cars.

  “Once I get the advance copy in my hands,” I said. “It doesn’t seem real yet.”

  She pumped me for more details, but I told her I’d rather not talk about it, and she let it go. When we returned home, we found Donna and Jess talking in the TV room. Years earlier, when I’d left Donna and Jess together, Jess had told her the story about Dad sexually abusing Lara. “I wouldn’t leave your dog alone with him,” Jess had warned her.

  “Your family is scary,” Donna had told me afterward. I’d smiled, as if this were a point of pride; if you were going to have a crazy family, you might as well go for broke.

  Of course, you would never have known it, to see Lara and Dad together that evening as we sat around the fireplace. She and my father talked about medicine, music, science, you name it. The strange thing about our family was that we didn’t just love each other; we genuinely liked each other. We liked being together. If you’d looked at the four of us—Dad, Mom, Lara, and me—that holiday weekend, you’d have thought, What a happy, loving family.

  After my book came out in February, I did not hear from my mother or sister again for nearly three years.

  * * *

  My dad was the only one who seemed to be okay with my having revealed that our family was Jewish, and that our parents had survived the Holocaust. I’d sent my parents an advance copy of After Long Silence as soon as I received it from my publisher after Christmas. I’d attached a note to my parents saying that I loved them, that the book was written out of love, and without any intention of hurting them. I told them that they need not read it, but that I simply wanted them to know that it would be published soon and I did not want them to feel hurt.

  A week later, I received a letter from my father. I do hurt, he wrote, and chastised me for writing about private matters that were not intended for public consumption. His next paragraph began, So much for ethical squabbling. He went on to praise the book and my writing. He pointed out some misspellings of Polish words. He told me it was a good book, and that he was proud of me and loved me.

  My mother did not respond. I imagine it was then, in early 1999, that my mother’s world must have crashed around her, when she must have decided I was dead to her. It would be another few years before she made it official with the help of an inexpensive lawyer, but it was when the book was first published, I think, that she killed me off in her head.

  All I knew at the time was that she returned the Mother’s Day gift and card I sent her that spring. I knew she had to be out of her mind with rage, because she didn’t simply refuse delivery of my package; she made a special trip to the post office and paid the postage to send it back to me unopened. And to do that—to get in the car and drive to the post office; to write out a new label in her own handwriting with my name and address on it; to bring it to the postal clerk and not care that the clerk would see that a package addressed from Helen Fremont to “Mom” for Mother’s Day was being returned to the daughter unopened—my mother must have been so angry, she would have been unrecognizable even to herself. Mom had always been very big on appearances, on what other people thought. And my book—however filled with my admiration and love for her—had ripped open her façade. At this point, Mom didn’t care what anyone thought about her relationship with her daughter Helen. She even spent the $5.95 for Priority postage to make sure that the package I sent her—a nightgown and letter, all unopened—would be returned to my door.

  I understood, of course, the humiliation of having one’s secrets exposed. I understood the sense of betrayal. But I hadn’t grasped the degree of her distress, or what was at stake for her. By the time I’d finished writing After Long Silence, Mom had already had seven years to come to terms with our discovery of our Jewish identity. During that time, she knew I was writing the book. She knew that I’d agreed to change their names to protect their privacy. She also knew that, with Lara’s encouragement, I had already revealed our discovery to Zosia and Renzo.

  So why, seven years later, in 1999, when my mother was eighty and Lara and I were already in our forties, did Mom have such a violent reaction to the long-delayed publication of my book? What was still so important to her
that she killed me off in her mind, after we were all adults? Who cared whether we were Jewish or Catholic?

  That’s when I began to wonder whether there might be more to my mother’s and Zosia’s story that I hadn’t yet grasped. I don’t think my father knew the whole story either. Uncle Giulio, I suspected, had played a bigger role than I’d thought. After his death in a hit-and-run accident in 1988, my mother and aunt had destroyed all of his personal belongings, documents, and photos, but now I tried to reconstruct what I remembered about him.

  The Count

  I had always adored Uncle; he was gentle and charming, and whenever I visited Zosia in Italy, he seemed to live with us like a very sweet, very polite housemate, his movements small and delicate, quiet as a well-dressed mouse. Zosia ignored him, for the most part, or dismissed him with an irritated flick of her wrist if he got too close to her. He cooked his own meals, ate at his own hours, took a siesta by himself, and spent his days poring over the mountains of legal and heraldic documents in his bedroom that doubled as his office.

  While Zosia spent her summers with my mother, either in the States or in Europe, Giulio spent every August at his favorite spa in Tuscany with his friends. My aunt scoffed at his careful attention to his diet, his digestion, and his grooming. We joked that Uncle was the only true lady in our family, attending to his toilette with greater attention than any woman we knew. Dad dismissed him as a weakling and “unmanly.” Mom treasured him and always said he was born in the wrong century. He was a romantic, she said, and although he was born in 1900, he was better suited to the Renaissance. He was proud of his heritage as a count from a long line of nobility, but Uncle Giulio had been estranged from his aristocratic family for reasons that no one ever spoke of.

  One winter while I was staying with Zosia in Rome, I asked her whether she and Giulio had ever wanted to have more children after Renzo. She looked startled. “Oh yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “There wasn’t enough room,” she said, gesturing to indicate the penthouse apartment in which we were seated, where she had lived with Giulio since the war. The apartment was enormous, extending across half of the apartment building, with two roof-deck terraces, three bedrooms, an enormous living and dining room area, and a separate room for a live-in maid. I said nothing, and she quickly changed the subject.

  * * *

  It never occurred to me in those days that Uncle might be queer. One didn’t talk about sexuality in our family. Many years later, after Uncle had died and I was in my thirties, I finally came out to my aunt as gay. She smiled thoughtfully and said, “You know, Giulio was like that; he would have understood.”

  twenty-four

  November 2001

  My sister called to let me know my father had died. She and I hadn’t spoken since that Christmas of 1998 when we’d gotten together in Schenectady, six weeks before the publication of my book. “There’s going to be a funeral service in Schenectady,” she said. Her voice was cold, a hint of frost. “Are you going to want to be there?”

  I was standing in the living room of our apartment in Boston. My hand on the telephone felt strangely foreign to me. “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I may have to process this in my own way.”

  “Well, I’ll let you know when I find out more details.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. What did it matter? My father was gone.

  “I’ll let you know,” she said in a kinder voice.

  We hung up, and I waited to feel something. My father was eighty-six. When I’d last seen him three years earlier, he was already quite wasted from Parkinson’s; he’d had trouble speaking and moving. We’d cut his food for him, but it was hard for him to get it to his mouth. And he had shrunk to a fraction of his size, the Olympic decathlete decreased to a hunched figure of skin and bones.

  Over the years since that Christmas, my father and I had continued to correspond, his handwriting becoming more jittery and illegible with each letter. My mother was caring for him at home, and I was not welcome to visit since the publication of my book. Despite my repeated efforts to reach out to her, the last time I’d heard from Mom was in May 1999, when she’d returned my Mother’s Day card and gift. Other cards and letters I sent her went unanswered. I clung to my connection with my father, yet it was my mother whose love I craved, my mother whose anger I couldn’t bear to face. I kept hoping that at some point she would relent, respond to me, invite me back in. But as the months and years went by, I resigned myself to the fact that as long as he depended on Mom for his care, it was unlikely I would ever see my father alive again.

  * * *

  Why didn’t I just drive to Schenectady and show up at their door? I could have forced my way in, demanded to see my father, whether Mom liked it or not. But in truth, I didn’t have the stomach to stage such a confrontation. It was hard enough to take my mother’s rage from a distance. I didn’t think I could bear to have her slam the door in my face.

  So it could be said that in this way I collaborated in receiving my family’s rejection by legal instrument, delivered via the cool remove of the U.S. Postal Service six weeks after my father’s death. It was I who had chosen to avoid a face-to-face confrontation in our home. Clashing swords was Lara’s style; that’s what she had done all our lives. I was different. I was a writer. I gave and took my blows on the page.

  And in some way, I accepted estrangement from my mother as punishment for having published a book I knew she would object to. Of course, I had waited for her to come around, but over the six years it had taken me to write After Long Silence, I had finally reached the decision to put my book out in the world and just hope for the best. I was, in effect, throwing down the gauntlet, standing up on my hind legs and saying, I can’t remain silent any longer. The secrets are crippling me. Choose me over the secrets.

  It was a risky gamble, and I miscalculated. I lost my mother. And in the package deal, I lost my father too.

  But was it really a miscalculation? I had, in fact, considered the possibility of losing my mother forever. I had hoped that she would rise to my challenge, but I was determined to speak my truth even if she couldn’t join me. Perhaps, painful as my excommunication from my parents was, it was the only way to be free. I was no longer an appendage of my parents, no longer an apparatchik of the family enterprise. Terrifying as it was, I was finally my own person.

  * * *

  So when Lara called to tell me that my father had died, I was not surprised. I was not filled with grief or sadness or rage or relief or remorse or any of the things I should be feeling. All I felt was nothing.

  Donna tried to reassure me. “It’s so complicated,” she said. “It’s like your father has been held hostage by your mother for years. You don’t get to have a simple reaction to his death.”

  I went to work the next day and didn’t tell anyone my father had died, because I was ashamed of my lack of feeling. Here it was, I thought, incontrovertible proof of my psychopathology. All day I observed myself at work. I went to meetings, laughed with colleagues, drafted memos, investigated complaints. I had to remind myself, My father died—to see if anything had changed in me. I called a friend. “It’s okay,” she said. “Give it time. At some point, we should do some kind of ceremony or something—just a gathering of friends here in Boston, something to help you process it.”

  I had trouble imagining a ceremony. Wouldn’t that be awkward? We’d sit around and talk. About what? How could I begin to describe my father, to explain how trapped he was in our family? How trapped I was?

  Six months earlier, Donna and I had flown to Atlanta for her mother’s funeral; Lucy had died suddenly of a heart attack. At the time, Donna was also quite sick—she had endured six months of chemotherapy after a recurrence of cancer, and it had seemed that death was everywhere. Thinking back on Lucy’s death, I was grateful that Donna’s family accepted me as one of their own. But it was disturbing to realize that I had been more welcome at Lu
cy’s funeral than I would be at my own father’s.

  I returned from work the following evening and found a phone message from my mother on the answering machine. Hearing her voice for the first time in nearly three years knocked the wind out of me. Her accent was thicker than I’d remembered, but it was Mom, and her tone was warm and wistful, and I could hear the tears in her voice. “Helen, it’s Mom. We are having a service for Dad on Monday.” Then her voice cracked: “I know that Dad would have loved for you to be there.” She paused, and I could hear her collecting herself. “And so would I.”

  And so would I. I’d been waiting to hear words like this from my mother for what seemed like forever. Now, finally, with the death of my father, Mom wanted me. She wanted to see me, she wanted me there. I burst into tears.

  I called her back, and she picked up on the first ring.

  “Mom! It’s Helen.” The words came easily to me, as if I knew what to say to my mother after such a long time. “I just got your message… about Dad’s funeral. And I want to—”

  “Who is this?” my mother asked.

  “Helen,” I said louder. “Mom, it’s me, HELEN.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m Helen,” I said. A chill crept down my spine. “Your daughter. Mom, it’s Helen.”