Riding Fury Home Read online

  After the abortion, more electroshocks. She had one after the other—until they had given her eighteen. But she was not cured. In fact, she was more severely depressed than ever. They could do no more for her because electroshock was the only treatment at Carrier Clinic. That fall of 1958, she was transferred to a private mental hospital in upstate New York, about two hours from our house.

  Chapter 4. University Heights

  BEFORE SHE MET MY FATHER, my mother was feeling age pressing against her with its looming horror of spinsterhood. At twenty-seven, she was living in her parents’ attic. She had moved back home after a brief, failed marriage to her college boyfriend. Since her return, she had immersed herself in photography, spending hours in the basement darkroom she’d set up during high school.

  One day, her sister, Rita, called. “Gloria, come to dinner tonight. Monte is bringing this guy Abe over after the Rutgers football game.”

  “Nah, I’m in the middle of a good book.”

  “Oh, come on, Glor! He’s supposed to be a nice guy, and really smart. He’s getting a doctorate in chemistry.”

  My mother pushed herself against her own reluctance. “Oh, what the heck, okay.”

  After that, Gloria and Abe started going out. They had quite a bit in common: Both were children of Jewish immigrants, both were first in their families to go to college, both were science majors and lovers of music and art. Their dates evolved from awkward to companionable. They wandered the Museum of Modern Art, went to free concerts in Central Park, sometimes splurged on the symphony. He made no moves to kiss. Neither did she.

  When Abe met Gloria, his experiences with women consisted of a few disastrous interludes during his military service in World War II. Short, terribly shy with girls, and cerebral, he’d met his first girlfriend on weekend leave from the army. He’d gone to a concert and fallen asleep, and was startled awake when an attractive, young woman in the next seat poked him and smiled. They started dating. Once, they took a boat ride up the Hudson River, necking against the deck rail, wind in their hair. He felt wildly exhilarated, dizzy almost. But when she wrote and suggested he rent them a hotel room for the night, he was so terrified he never wrote her back.

  He met another woman as his unit was in training to ship out to Japan, and they became engaged. There was one condition: She insisted that he wear Adler’s Elevated Shoes to pump up his height. He went as far as going to the shoe store and trying them on. As he clomped around the store, the thought of living like that was humiliating. I’d be living a lie, he said to himself. When he told her he wouldn’t wear them, she called off the engagement. He left for Japan with a stunned heart.

  With Gloria, Abe didn’t run into the same problems: At five foot two, she was slightly shorter than he was, and she’d been married, meaning she’d had sexual experiences, and could show him what to do.

  Gloria pondered: Here was Abe, a nice guy, a decent, educated guy. As someone to marry, he seemed her best bet. She knew he was shy, and a virgin. She invited him to her attic, where she lit candles and put Frank Sinatra on the portable record player. She took his hand, and they rolled onto her twin bed. The act was simple and quick, without lingering foreplay or delighted exploration.

  A few days later, Gloria blurted, “So, what are your intentions? What do you plan to do with me?”

  Abe stared at her, and then stammered, “Well . . . um . . . I guess I’ll ask you to marry me.”

  “Okay,” she said. It was done.

  A few weeks later, during a classical concert, Gloria stared over at Abe in the dim light of the hall, assaulted by a panic of second thoughts. His head tipped forward as he nodded, half-asleep, his glasses having slipped partway down his nose. What the hell have I done?

  The next weekend, she drove alone to a Jewish resort in the Catskill Mountains where singles gathered. She flirted with men over breakfast, at the pool, in the bar at night. But she found no one that she felt any real connection with, and she returned home, resigned.

  GLORIA DIDN’T WANT A BIG deal made about the wedding, her second. They invited no friends, and had no reception. Their only witnesses were her sister, Rita, and Rita’s husband, Monte, Abe’s younger sister, Sophie, and both sets of parents. Afterward, the group ate dinner at a nearby restaurant.

  The humid summer air was stifling as Gloria and Abe checked into a Newark motel on their wedding night. Fans were blowing in the lobby. It wasn’t until they got to their room and unlocked the door to a blast of heat that they realized their terrible error: They’d never checked whether the motel was air-conditioned. They turned on the ceiling fan, which circulated the steamy air round and round.

  Just before clicking the bedside light off, Abe had reached over, tentatively, and touched Gloria’s shoulder. “It’s too damn hot for anything,” she said. He pulled his hand back. They lay on their backs in the motel bed with the lights out, naked and sweating.

  Sleep was impossible. The hours ticked by. In Gloria’s chest, a heavyweight gathered. She thought of her mother’s bitterness about being stuck with a husband she considered an uneducated Polish greenhorn, and beneath her. She hadn’t made her mother’s mistake: Abe was bright and educated. But she felt no spark. His insecurity, the thing that had made him so reachable, now repelled her. Rage at her stupidity collected along with her sweat.

  At 4:00 AM, Gloria announced in the sweltering dark, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” They threw back the sheet and gathered their things. For their honeymoon they were going to Tanglewood in Massachusetts, where the Boston Symphony played outdoor concerts.

  They rented a housekeeping cabin in a row of dilapidated motel bungalows. For their first dinner, Gloria was inside making a salad as Abe leaned over a hibachi on the cabin’s porch, grilling a steak. He stepped inside for a moment to grab a potholder. As he came back out, he caught a blur of movement. A scruffy mutt was trotting across the lawn, steak in its mouth. “Shit!” he yelled. This thing is just going from bad to worse. His shoulders sagged with yet another failure

  The best moments of the honeymoon were the concerts, the great swell of music uplifting them. The worst were their nights in bed. My mother offered my father no further assistance after that first time. She lay there, waiting for him to act, her frustration that he wasn’t satisfying her more and more apparent. Gloria’s angry disappointment and Abe’s sense of inadequacy pooled in the bed’s hollow between them.

  After the honeymoon, they moved into University Heights, where, as a GI, my father was eligible for married-student housing. Two-unit wooden cottages formed a rectangle around a common grassy area. In the evenings, they gathered with the other chemistry students and their wives, dipping cubes of French bread into pots of fondue, and getting smashed on alcohol my father distilled on the sly in the school lab.

  The congeniality of their community did nothing to warm my parents’ private life. They had furnished their new place in part by borrowing an interior decorator friend’s professional discount to purchase a high-quality bed and couch. The bed was comfortable, but each night, they turned away from each other to sleep. After a celibate year, they decided it was time for a child, and they made the effort. Gloria became pregnant with me.

  GLORIA’S YOUNGER BROTHER, Marvin, was the person she loved more than anyone else. Marvin was living an artist’s life as an apprentice at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s school of architecture. Since childhood, he and my mother had been artistic oddballs. As teens they went together every week into New York City and bought cheap standing-room tickets at the Metropolitan Opera House, visited Manhattan art museums, or lined up for two-for-one tickets to the ballet and Martha Graham.

  Just two weeks after giving birth, my mother left me with my father for ten days and went to visit Marvin. It was the first of her leavings of me.

  Dad had just completed his PhD and was home full-time before starting a new job. He quickly learned how to diaper me, rock me, and bottle-feed me. Like a duckling, I imprinted the smell of his neck, t
he feel of his hands, his voice singing me lullabies.

  Two months after that visit, Marvin was killed by a drunk driver. After the funeral, relatives and friends filled my grandparents’ house for the week of sitting shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, but my grandparents would not speak the name of their only son, or allow my mother to, either, as if naming him might shatter their hearts in a million pieces. The grief that filled my mother flowed through the bottle she held to my nursing mouth.

  As my parents were driving home from the week of sitting shiva, my mother burst out, “Abe, you must go back to school to become an architect!” For once, my father found his voice, and refused. “Absolutely not, Gloria, that’s crazy! I can’t become Marvin.”

  Instead, they petitioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design them a house, asking for one of his scaled-down models adapted for the middle class. They wrote to the elderly Mr. Wright using the combination of my mother’s maiden name and my father’s surname, in the hopes that “Bachman” would remind him of their connection to Marvin. He was absorbed in work on the Guggenheim Museum, but eventually responded to their request for a modest design, “My dear Wilsons: I suppose I am still here to try to do houses for such as you.”

  When the plans arrived, my parents sent several letters, pleading for changes to make it less expensive. Finally, new plans removed a basement, and they felt they could proceed. They had already bought a plot of land in Millstone, a tiny colonial-era New Jersey town not far from American Cyanamid, the company where my father had begun work as a research chemist.

  My parents hired three Italian masons, two Dutch carpenters, and a German father-son crew of electricians. They rented an apartment right around the corner from the lot. My mother did the bookkeeping for the project—switching the materials for one wall of the main living room from brick to cement blocks to fit their budget.

  On nights and weekends, my father climbed a scaffold and sealed and stained the mahogany boards the carpenters had erected that day. Now and then, he paused and looked down at the two story-high living area, overtaken by awe. Holy shit, I’m doing this, creating a work of art! Incredible, I’m part of it!

  DURING THE YEAR THE HOUSE was under construction, Gloria met with a psychiatrist. She felt hopeless with failure. Her sorrow was leaden, the weight of her disappointment like stones in her belly. As the futility of her marriage became more and more obvious—there would never be any passion—she told herself, Let’s not pretend anymore. Since they had a child, she had no intention of leaving.

  One day, she said to Abe, “Let’s stay married, but live like brother and sister.”

  Abe stared, mouth open, numb with hurt. The shock of this truth, so stark. A memory came to him: He was fifteen, working at Cohen’s Rumanian Restaurant as a busboy, where his father worked as headwaiter. A waitress beckoned to him as he was walking past her with a tray. She leaned close and whispered, “Your mother is not so good to your father.” He understood this to mean that his mom had stopped having sex with his dad, who for years had been sleeping on the couch.

  Abe thought about leaving Gloria, but he couldn’t imagine losing his only child. When his mother had kicked his father out of the bedroom, his dad had stayed. The shame of his failure burned in his chest. Already withdrawn, he stayed, and retreated further.

  As the construction of the house neared completion, my mother arranged to sell her sister Rita their double bed. She planned to replace the marital bed with two twins.

  On moving day, my parents set up the twin beds in a house of mahogany and glass, a house of beauty and light, filled with estrangement and regret.

  Chapter 5. Millstone

  OUR ULTRA-MODERN HOUSE, with its flat roof—wedged between two pre-Revolutionary colonial houses—looked as out of place as my Jewish parents felt in this small town, populated largely by the Protestant descendents of Dutch settlers. Only fifty miles from teeming, multicultural Manhattan, the center of 1950s Millstone, all four blocks of it, was frozen in a colonial time warp, oblivious that it was poised on the edge of changing demographics.

  Along the uneven slate sidewalks there still remained white wooden hitching posts for horses, while the town boasted the oldest working blacksmith shop in the United States. Directly across from our house on Main Street stood the Hillsborough Reformed Church. In its front yard, the town’s namesake rested in the grass—a waist-high gray boulder with a hollow depression in its top for grinding grains. A bronze plaque read: “THIS MILLSTONE WAS FOUND ON THE JACOB VAN DOREN FARM 1000 FEET SOUTH OF THIS CHURCH, ON THE SITE OF A LARGE INDIAN VILLAGE.” The plaque left unnamed that village’s native people, the Lenni Lenape. Of their disappearance—whether they were massacred, relocated, or died from exposure to European germs—nothing was ever said.

  IN SMALL-TOWN MILLSTONE, GOSSIP flew like dandelion spores, yet the burn of history went unspoken. My parents had purchased the vacant lot in 1953, two years before the house was built, since Frank Lloyd Wright always required that a structure be designed for its site. In Millstone, they discovered a prime lot right in the center of town. The property had a blackened hole, the charred remnants of the basement of a historic inn that had burned down in 1928.

  One afternoon, several years after we moved into our house, elderly Mr. Brezniak, a Slovak, who felt a common bond with Dad as an outsider, told him the story of the old inn’s fire. Dad and the old man were alone in his little grocery store, but even so, Mr. Brezniak looked out the front window to make sure no one was about to enter, and lowered his voice.

  One early morning before dawn, he was driving down Main Street in his truck, loaded with vegetables that he grew on his farm on the town’s outskirts. As he drove past the inn, orange flames lit the dark sky. Several men were dancing around the incinerating inn, roaring with laughter, their heads flung back. He thanked God they were too caught up to notice him witnessing their act of destruction. The vacant and decrepit inn had been bought by a Jewish couple who were renovating it. They were just about to move in and reopen the inn for business. Those men were making sure no Jews moved into town.

  No one attempted to burn our house down. But one morning, during the year our house was being built, my father found these words scrawled on the dust of his trunk: “Dirty Jews—Get out of town.”

  My parents never spoke to me about the hatred someone’s finger had etched onto Dad’s car. Just as I never told them that now and then on the school playground at recess a boy would come up to me and hiss, “You Jews killed Christ!”

  We had our own defense. Unlike our neighbors’ colonial houses that brightly faced the street with their open-shuttered windows, our house was set back from the road. A long curved driveway led to the front of the house, where a windowless cement-block facade squatted fortresslike against the intruding world while the back of the house opened to acres of light and green.

  On that back side, an open living space was framed by a two-story wall of floor-to-ceiling glass, interspersed with several tall French doors leading to a patio. From within, the view shimmered with green foliage: A lawn edged with mulberry, apple, and pine trees sloped to a woods of tall black walnut trees, maples, and oaks. Through the middle of the woods, a path led to the river, where we had a dock and a tethered rowboat.

  It was a life facing nature, turned away from community. My parents played classical music on the Heathkit record player my father had assembled. Every night, in order to go to sleep, I needed my lullaby: Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 played full blast on the living room hi-fi so I could hear it in my bedroom. I lay in bed with my door open as the record spun, washed by the rhythmic beat of the violins, their frenetic optimism lulling me.

  Even at five, I sensed that we were different from our neighbors, and that difference seemed better. We were more elevated and cultured, and I felt lifted, wrapped in the protection of superiority.

  We had lived in the house two years the day it all shattered. The day my mother held my father’s rifle to her head and pulled the tr
igger.

  Chapter 6. School Days

  WITH MOM GONE, EACH day after the school bus dropped me off there was a gap of two unsupervised hours before Dad arrived home from work. Dad’s first attempt to cover that gap was to hire thirteen-year-old Judy Gifford to baby-sit me. It didn’t last a week. For the first couple days, I went over to the Giffords’ after school, but I didn’t like their house because it smelled like cat pee and Judy’s younger sister was mean and teased me.

  Dad then said that all I had to do was stop over at the Giffords’, a half-block from our house, and report to Judy my plans, and after that I was free to go home to play by myself. Although I was barely seven, having to check in with Judy offended me. If Mom wasn’t there to take care of me, I would allow no one else to. I can take care of myself, I thought fiercely. For several days, I didn’t show up at Judy’s, running from the school bus straight to our backyard. She gave up the job in disgust, and my father relented.

  We made a new arrangement. As soon as I got home, I went into the front hall, where the black rotary phone sat on an end table, and called my father at the lab. Once I checked in, I would go up to my room and play with my plastic palomino horse, making up elaborate tales while I cantered him over my bedspread.

  As time went on, my father arranged for me to stay after school with different families who had kids my age. For a while, I went to a family out on River Road after school, but Dad stopped letting me go there after the father was charged with shooting his rifle at some neighbor kids who were pestering him.

  Over time, I stayed with quite a few families. I watched the mothers.