CHAPTER ONE
Growing Up in Revere
Elliot and Jason, 1940.
Parents love to tell stories about their children. What they don’t realize is that their children are listening. One of the earliest stories I remember my mother telling about me—a story she often repeated to her friends—was of taking me to the park in the baby buggy in cold weather, when I was about a year old. “Other babies’ cheeks would turn a healthy, rosy color,” she would say, “but Elliot’s would become ashen, and his lips would turn blue. He was such a sickly child.” As a preschooler, every time I heard her tell this story, I could feel her embarrassment that I wasn’t the beautiful baby that other mothers had. It made me want to apologize.
I was born in 1932 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a slum city just across the Mystic River from Boston. Chelsea was brimful of junk-yards, rag shops, and oil storage tanks. When I was three years old, my family moved to the adjacent equally slum city of Revere. Nestled between the Suffolk Downs horse track and Wonderland, a greyhound racing track, Revere was teeming with small-time gamblers, bookies, and assorted Runyonesque characters. Its major industry was gambling. But the saving grace of Revere was that it was on the ocean and had a good swimming beach and a boardwalk, with a real, honest-to-goodness wooden roller coaster. My advice to young people is, if you have to live in a slum, make sure it’s on the ocean.
While reminiscing about his boyhood in Brooklyn, comedian Sam Levenson once told Ed Sullivan, “We were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor.” That’s touching, but it was not my experience. We were poor, and we knew it. I have vivid memories of going to bed early and hungry so that we could ward off the cold in our unheated home by covering ourselves with blankets and overcoats, of stuffing my shoes with cardboard to cover the holes in the soles because we couldn’t afford to have them repaired, of never having new clothes but always wearing whatever my older brother had outgrown. I remember our family moving in the middle of the night because we were in arrears in our rent. I remember my parents’ bitter quarrels about money and my father’s failure as a provider.
My father, Harry Aronson, had emigrated from Russia in 1909, when he was eight years old. He quit school at the age of thirteen and began peddling socks and underwear from a pushcart in Boston. Eventually, he earned enough money to open a small dry-goods store, where he still peddled socks and underwear, but from behind a counter. My mother, Dorothy, was the eldest of ten children, all of whom were born in this country. Her parents had also come from Russia. Her father, Ben Feingold, a tailor, gradually moved up to the middle class by opening a tuxedo-rental store (“Feingold’s—The Best One!” was the store’s logo). Her brothers worked hard to put poverty behind them; they became doctors, dentists, chiropodists, and small-business owners.
My parents married in 1927. My mother felt she was marrying beneath her on two counts: My father never got past the fifth grade, whereas she prided herself on having graduated from high school, and he was a greenhorn, whereas she had been born in America. But she was already twenty-seven—in those days almost too old to find a husband—and at least Harry was the well-to-do owner of a dry-goods store. He even drove a late-model car. Shortly after they married, he acquired a second store, and so for a while they lived comfortably. My father was proud of having worked his way up from selling goods in a pushcart to owning his own stores. Their first child, Jason, was born in 1929, shortly after the stock market crashed; I, in 1932; and our sister, Paula, six years later.
In 1935, at the height of the Depression, my father lost his stores, and the bank foreclosed on our home. We became destitute, living in poverty until well after America entered the war. Our house was intellectually impoverished as well. Neither of my parents was interested in ideas; they never discussed politics, music, art, history, or current events. In spite of my mother’s pride in having finished high school, I never saw her reading a book. The only books in our house were the Old Testament and some Hebrew prayers. My mother’s major form of entertainment was the daytime soap opera, especially Helen Trent; Our Gal Sunday; and Just Plain Bill, Barber of Hartville. My father’s major form of entertainment was gambling. Unfortunately, he was a compulsive gambler who would bet on anything from horses to dogs to baseball to how many cars would pass by the corner of Shirley Avenue and North Shore Road within a three-minute window.
My mother never forgave my father for our descent into poverty. She blamed it on his gambling and on his being a poor businessman, because he refused to fire his employees when the store was losing money and habitually extended credit to dead-beats. “As soon as they made any money, they shopped at other stores so they wouldn’t have to face you!” she would accuse my father. “Besides, how could you have paid an employee when your family was going hungry?”
My father attributed our poverty to the Depression—to the fact that his blue-collar customers had lost their jobs and needed help. Once, when I was about ten, he tried to explain his point of view to me. “What else could I have done? They were my only customers. They didn’t have money! If I didn’t give them credit, I’d have had no customers at all. And how could I fire anyone who worked for me and depended on me?” That was why, he said, he eventually couldn’t pay his rent and lost the stores. I was not sure whether my father was a victim of the worldwide Depression or whether he would have survived financially if he had been a better businessman—one who didn’t gamble.
My parents’ descent into poverty caused my mother enormous shame and embarrassment. Her husband’s older brother, Aaron, managed to keep his store; her father, Ben, managed to keep his store; why couldn’t her husband? I can barely imagine how difficult it was for her to accept charity, but it was the only way we could survive. And I can understand why she was always so worried and angry: It’s Massachusetts, it’s bitterly cold in winter, you can’t heat the house, you have three small kids, and everyone is hungry all the time. Once in a while a relative would drop in with a bag of apples or oranges, which was a real treat. But I mostly remember my mother putting aside her pride and standing in line for the weekly handouts of bread and cereal at the welfare station across town. We went there together; I, age three, would ride in the stroller on the way there, and walk alongside her on the way back with the stroller filled with supplies. I don’t know if I remember those walks or if she created my memories with her stories.
My mother used to tell one story that epitomized the humiliation she felt during those years. My father’s oldest brother, Uncle Aaron, and his wife, Goldie, both worked in Aaron’s store. It was 1937, the year I started school, and my mother took the trolley car to their store in East Boston to buy school clothes for Jason and me. At the counter Goldie wrapped the clothes in a bundle. Taking them, my mother said, “Goldie, we can’t pay now, but I promise we will in a few months.” Goldie grabbed the bundle out of her hands and said, “You can have these clothes when you pay for the last bundle you bought from us.” My mother was dumbfounded. She told and retold this story a lot, acting it out—how Goldie snatched the bundle back from her, put it under the counter, and stood there resolutely with her arms folded across her ample chest. My Uncle Aaron, a meek little man, would witness the scene silently, not daring to overrule his wife, avoiding my mother’s gaze. My mother would always end the story by saying, “You know, there was nothing in that bundle for me, and nothing of great value—just a few things for the children—a shirt, pants, some socks.” She would make a meal out of that story, which underscored the fact that my uncle was still in business when my father wasn’t, how she had to take that long trip on the trolley for nothing, the humiliation she suffered at my father’s hands. She apparently didn’t notice that she was faulting my father for the same generosity she expected Goldie to extend to her.
My father was often unemployed for months at a time; when he was able to find a job, it was temporary and often involved manual labor such as highway construction for the Works Progress Administration. Late one night I woke up to go to the bathroom. Still groggy, I passed the kitchen and saw my father in tears, sitting alone at the table, his head in his hands. I can only guess how defeated he must have felt at having been reduced to doing manual labor after years of owning his own stores. But that was nothing compared to the misery of not having a job at all, and so he did whatever he could. For a while he worked as an insurance agent, going door to door selling nickel-and-dime life-insurance policies to poor people, but after Prudential caught him having embezzled two hundred dollars, which he promptly gambled away at the racetrack, he was fired. (My father saw this as borrowing the money, which he thought he would quickly repay after the next race, when his horse would surely win.) His father-in-law, Ben Feingold, paid Prudential the money so my father wouldn’t go to jail. To pay off that debt, my father worked at Feingold’s, delivering tuxedos. He hated the job, mostly because he hated working for Ben, who would constantly remind him of how he had saved him from prison. But jobs were hard to come by, especially for unskilled former merchants who had narrowly avoided prison on charges of embezzlement.
My father’s money problems were only half of his troubles; the other half was my mother’s nagging him incessantly about their money problems. She never let him forget that by losing his stores and our home, he had deprived her of her feeling of security and, along with it, her pride. She often reminded him that she could have married Max Pincus, who, as the sole owner of a successful hardware store, was “sitting pretty.” The dinner table was their battleground. My parents had monumental fights, and night after night they followed the same pattern as if it were choreographed. She would badger him; he would erupt in anger, slam his knife and fork onto his plate, and storm out of the house, trudging off to hang out with his friends in the card room at the Elk’s Club or Mike the Barber’s—not that Mike actually gave many haircuts; the three barber chairs he had in the shop were primarily a front for the gambling in the back room. (Much later it occurred to me that my father might have been using the fights as a vehicle to get to Mike’s.) He would not return home until long after we kids went to bed. When he was employed as a day laborer, he needed to leave for work long before Jason and I woke up to get ready for school. Thus, we would usually not see him again until the next dinnertime, when the nagging and anger would often pick up where it had left off. As soon as my mother’s nagging would begin, Jason would give me a bleak “here we go again” look, and we would hunker down until the knife and fork would clatter and the door would slam. We would then continue with dinner, but with a lump in our throats.
How often did these incidents replay themselves? Three times a week? Three times a month? I do not trust my memory. The scenes were so dramatic, and traumatic, that they are emblazoned on my mind with a vividness that makes them seem as if they were a daily occurrence, though I am reasonably certain that’s an exaggeration. What I do know, with hindsight, is that once the cycle got started, it was hard for them to break out of it. If my mother felt an overpowering need to vent her pain and frustration at my father, I’m sure she figured that the best opportunity was dinnertime while he was seated at the table, temporarily immobile, with his napkin tucked into the top of his shirt and his fork raised toward his mouth. From my father’s perspective, I’m sure he felt anguish at his own failure and at having fallen out of the middle class. He almost certainly didn’t need to be reminded of it, much less of Max Pincus, let alone at dinnertime, when—as he frequently said at the top of his lungs—he expected to have “a fuckin’ moment of peace and quiet at the end of a hard fuckin’ day.”
“You think you had a hard day?” she would shout back. “How do think it was for me, having to walk three miles to the welfare station with all the neighbors watching?” At that he would launch himself out of the house in anger, staying away until after my mother was asleep, leaving her no opportunity to get to him until the next dinnertime. And then the cycle would repeat.
Naturally, as a child, I didn’t understand their dynamics. Looking back, I am convinced that whatever love my parents may have felt for each other in the early years of their marriage had been bleached out of their relationship by the time these battles began. Yet I suspect that, deep down, they had some empathy for each other but lacked the ability to communicate in ways that might have been supportive rather than overflowing with blame, self-pity, and vexation.
When the war began my father finally got a job as a semiskilled factory worker. The pay wasn’t great, but the work was steady. On the side he worked as a small-time agent for a big-time bookie in the numbers racket, taking bets from fellow factory workers. His money woes diminished, but not his quarrels with my mother.
I was a painfully shy child and adolescent. In school I never volunteered to speak up, and when called upon I stammered and blushed and was barely able to respond to the question being asked. One afternoon, when I was in third grade, the teacher became angry at the class and ordered each of us to write “I will not make noise in class” fifty times before she would allow us to go home. I wrote about thirty of them when my pencil broke. I was too scared to ask the teacher if I could sharpen the pencil, so I sat there quietly as other children handed in their papers and left. I dreaded that I would be stuck there forever and imagined my mother, frantically wringing her hands and pacing around in our kitchen, wondering where on earth I could be. In desperation I tried to gnaw a point on the pencil with my teeth. It wasn’t working. Finally, I summoned all my courage, walked up to the teacher’s desk, held up my pencil, and murmured, “May I please use the pencil sharpener?” She snatched the pencil out of my hand, scrutinized it, and snapped, “Just as I suspected. You bit off the point just so you could have an excuse to disturb me.” I stood there, mute, too mortified even to defend myself. That was decades ago, and it still makes me cringe to remember it.
In contrast, Jason was a star. In the Feingold family there were a lot of uncles and aunts, and all of them awaited his arrival, their first-born nephew, with great anticipation. They were young adults, not quite ready to begin families of their own, so Jason immediately became their special toy. What a great little kid he was: bright as a penny, strong, vigorous, joyful, and a natural entertainer. And the more attention he got, the happier and more self-assured he became. I remember their happy kvelling over him: “Sing, Jason! Dance, Jason! Show Uncle Leo the picture you drew, Jason! Knock on wood, he’s a regular Norman Rockwell!” They fawned all over the little bastard.
Did I resent my big brother? You bet I did. At family gatherings, on the playground, everywhere we were together, his charisma ignited the atmosphere and highlighted my own inadequacies. In the summer of ’39, when I was seven years old, the Feingold family organized a Sunday picnic by a lake in eastern Massachusetts. All my uncles and aunts were there. Jason and I were having fun throwing a baseball around, feeding each other pop flies and ground balls, when a few of our uncles came over, announced that they were going to rent a rowboat to go fishing, and invited Jason to come along. Not only were they not inviting me, but they were depriving me of my one playmate. Desolate, I meekly asked if I could come along. Uncle Mike said that he was sorry, but there wasn’t enough room in the boat and, besides, I was too young to enjoy fishing anyway. My eyes filled with tears; I tried hard to hold them back, but to no avail. Uncle Nat said, “Aw, let’s let him come; we’ll make room.” And so I went.
We were on the boat for about two and a half hours. It was pretty boring, but at least I got to be with my brother. When we arrived back at the shore, Uncle Herbie asked, “Well, Elliot, did you have a good time?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I guess it paid to cry,” Uncle Eddie remarked.
“Sha! Let him alone,” said Uncle Leo. His perfunctory kindness came too late. I was heartsick and wished I hadn’t gone.
I hated the image my family had of me, largely because it was accurate. One Saturday afternoon I went to the movies. The serial they were showing that month was based on the comic-book character Captain Marvel, who in everyday life was Billy Batson, a meek, nerdy teenager. When danger arose Billy would shout the magic word “SHAZAM,” and in a puff of smoke he would be transformed into a big, strong, tough superhero. Unlike Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman, Billy Batson wasn’t born super. He couldn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, he was not more powerful than a locomotive, and, if you shot him, the bullets would not bounce off—they would kill him. That’s what made the character so interesting to me: Billy had to transform himself, and his transformation was always temporary. I arrived home from the matinee, infused with Billy Batson and Captain Marvel. I tied an old bath towel around my neck as a cape, got up on the third step of the porch of our apartment house, stretched my right arm out in front of me and my left arm behind me, shouted “SHAZAM”—and leaped bravely off the porch. I landed awkwardly and sprained my ankle. I limped into the house, and my mother said, “What did you do this time?”
A few days later we went to a family gathering, and as I limped in one of my aunts asked, “What happened to Elliot?” An uncle answered, “He thought he was Superman and tried to fly by jumping off the porch.” “Elliot . . . Superman?” said another. The whole group burst into laughter. I tried to explain that I wasn’t trying to be Superman, only Captain Marvel, but they weren’t listening.
Jason would have been a tough act to follow for any younger sibling, let alone a klutz like me. At school, where I was forever three years behind him, the teachers knew me as Jason’s little brother and assumed that I was like him. I was a pretty good student in elementary school and junior high school, but I lacked the star quality that the teachers seemed to expect. I could read the disappointment on the face of my first-grade teacher as she discovered that I wasn’t as quick, wasn’t as charming, wasn’t as bright, and wasn’t as assertive as Jason, and, in the jargon of the schools, didn’t have the “leadership skills” that he did. None of this, of course, was Jason’s fault. I never consciously held it against him, but at times I envied his charisma and wished I didn’t have an older brother. But, even as a child, I was all too aware that my inadequacies were my own and would have been there even if my brother had never existed. Although I was overshadowed by Jason, I knew that if that shadow were magically removed, I would have been revealed as a shy, uninteresting kid with mediocre talents.
But regardless of my flashes of envy and jealousy, I loved and admired him. He loved me too, and showered a lot of attention on me. It was Jason who showed me how to dribble a basketball and how to throw a football with a perfect spiral. It was Jason who informed me that excessive masturbation would not cause blindness or hair to grow on the palms of our hands (common fears among novice masturbators at the time). It was Jason who taught me how to appreciate the subtleties of a ride on the roller coaster. And it was Jason who taught me how to throw, catch, and hit a baseball. When I was very young we played on a diamond that was strewn with lumpy soil, pebbles, and weedy grass—a far cry from the manicured lawn and smooth surfaces of Fenway Park. A sharply hit ground ball on our diamond would often take unpredictable bounces. My natural tendency was to try to field a grounder by positioning my body to the left or right of the ball, so that if it took a strange hop it would not hit me in the face. Jason would have none of it. Hour after hour, he would hit me ground balls until I learned to overcome my fear and put myself in the direct path of the ball. This skill that I learned as a boy paid great dividends in adolescence, when my ability as a ballplayer became a major source of gratification and, in those awkward teenage years, just about my only source of self-esteem.
Most of all, though, I loved having Jason there to lead the way, offer advice, and fight off bullies. “Just wait ’til my big brother gets ahold of you—he’ll kick the shit out of you, you big ox!” I’d yell to some older kid who was tormenting me. And kick the shit out of them he did. We were the only Jewish family in our tough neighborhood, which was made up mostly of working-class Irish Catholics who were virulently anti-Semitic. Indeed, most of the neighborhood kids behaved as if Jason and I were personally responsible for the Crucifixion. Jason was a big, strong guy, so they gave him plenty of room. But I, being skinny and rather frail, bore the brunt of their hatred of Jews. I was frequently faced with the choice between fighting and running—between feeling brave but getting beaten up, and feeling cowardly but remaining unbloodied. Jason was around to protect me enough of the time to earn my gratitude and resentment. It was nice to have a bodyguard. It was degrading to need one.
And I sure needed one when walking home from Hebrew school, which was located in a small Jewish enclave on the other side of town. Jason graduated from Hebrew school when he was thirteen; after that, I was on my own. In fall and winter it was dark when I walked home, and so I was forever trying to find creative routes, zigzaggy paths that would take me away from the greatest areas of danger. But in spite of my best efforts, I was frequently waylaid, pushed around, and occasionally roughed up by gangs of teenagers shouting anti-Semitic slogans at me. I remember sitting on a curb after one of those incidents, nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, feeling very sorry for myself—and wondering how it was that these kids could hate me so much when they didn’t even know me. I wondered whether they had been born hating Jews or had learned it from their parents and priests. I wondered whether, if these kids would get to know me better (and discover what a sweet and harmless little boy I was), they would like me more. And if they liked me more, would they then hate other Jews less? I wish I could say that being the target of bullying made me a more empathic kid. I wish I could say that my experience goaded me to spring to the defense of smaller kids when they were being pushed around. Spring to their defense? Hell, no. So eager was I to distance myself from other targets that I actually joined the bullies, determined to convince the bigger, tougher, more aggressive kids that I was closer to them than to their victims. I took no joy in taunting weaker boys. It was my feeble attempt to buy an insurance policy against being taunted myself.
When I completed Hebrew school at last, my mother suggested I go out and earn some money to help the family. I could begin, she said, by doing what Jason had done at my age: going around to various drugstores and asking if they needed a soda jerk. Jason had worked in a drugstore for three years. (I followed in his foot-steps literally—same schools, same teachers, same attempted jobs.) “But none of the stores have ‘Help wanted’ signs in the window,” I protested.
“There’s always room for a good worker,” she replied, instructing me to go inside and inquire about work anyway. For me, this was an excruciating assignment. I did it, though, and was promptly rejected by four different stores. When I came home and told my mother that there were no job openings, she said, in a derisive tone, “Yeah, and I know how you asked. You probably said, ‘You don’t need any soda jerks or anything, do you?’” It was a cruel thing to say, but she wasn’t far off.
Finally, I did manage to land a job in the produce department at the Elm Farm Supermarket. My job was to keep the shelves stocked, spray the vegetables to make them look good, and sort potatoes and onions into five-pound sacks. I thought I was doing my job pretty well, but I was fired after a few months because I didn’t know how to look busy when I had nothing to do and all of the five-pound sacks that I filled were about a quarter pound over. “That costs the corporation money,” the manager fumed. And so, at fourteen, I already felt like an abject failure. So young, and yet so untalented!
My father and I did not have a lot to say to each other. We did a few father-son things: He took me to Fenway Park in 1946, where, for fifty-five cents, we could sit in the center-field bleachers and watch the Red Sox play ball, in the era of Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, and Dom DiMaggio. He taught me how to drive a car, and did it with a degree of patience that astonished me. We lived in the same house for almost seventeen years, and I can recall only one serious conversation between us, the one in which he told me his version of how he lost the stores. He never told me about his childhood, his education, his relationship with his brothers and sisters, or his hopes and aspirations for himself or for his children. All through my adolescence I used to have recurring fantasies about taking long walks with him, during which we would talk deeply, earnestly, and lovingly about important things. The setting was almost always bucolic: a meadow, the woods—places we never visited in reality. When I was in my fifties these fantasies became nightmares. I would awake in a cold sweat, unable to forgive myself for having asked my father so little, for knowing so little about him. Why didn’t I ever ask him about his life? The simple truth is that I believed I was of little interest to him, and I sensed his constant disappointment in me. “Why can’t you be more like so-and-so?” he would say, always of some kid who had three jobs and a newspaper route, and never missed a violin lesson. “Why are you always wasting your energy playing baseball and basketball?” In those days Jewish parents believed that any activity that was unproductive intellectually or financially was a total waste of time. Children should be working to earn money, studying to get ahead, or practicing the violin to become Jascha Heifetz.
But on a deeper level, I didn’t ask my father questions because I was afraid of him, of his brooding, punitive presence that could easily erupt into wrath. Whenever he was angry he seethed more ferociously than anyone I had ever seen. Years later, watching the actor Lee J. Cobb fuming, clenching his fists, and losing his temper in the film Twelve Angry Men, I exclaimed, “Oh, my God—that’s my father.” Although my father never actually punched me, he often shook his fist at me in a way to make me fear he would, and his anger was almost always disproportionate to the crime. “Ikh vel dir bald geybn a flyask in punim s’zol shoklen dayne tseyn,” he would say in Yiddish (“I will give you such a smack in the face that it will loosen your teeth”). He was the designated family punisher. One beautiful spring afternoon I got caught up in a baseball game, and the next thing I knew I was already a half hour late for Hebrew school. So I decided to keep playing and then hung out with the guys so that I could get home at exactly the time I would have normally. Unfortunately for me, the school called to find out where I’d been. Busted. My father put the phone down and erupted, pounding his fist on the table.
“What the hell is the matter with you? We don’t have enough troubles without your adding to them?”
“But Dad! All the other kids were . . . ”
“I don’t give a shit about the other kids. You are not like the other kids, and besides they are none of my business. If you ever do anything like this again, there will be hell to pay!”
Between his disappointment and his anger, I knew he didn’t think highly of me. If he loved me, I was never sure of it.
But then there was the night of the concussion, when I was about fifteen. While going for a rebound in a basketball game, I was hit on the top of my head by an opposing player who had a cast on his arm—which he was effectively using as a weapon. I was knocked out for thirty seconds. When I came to, I sat on the bench for about five minutes, felt better, and played the rest of the game. Hours later, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by the sound of my own groaning. I had an excruciating headache. My brother, who slept in the same room, went to wake up our parents. But when I tried to explain to them what had happened, I could produce only gibberish. My thoughts seemed clear enough, but they came out as meaningless sounds. I felt I was speaking through somebody else’s mouth. It felt eerie. But I wasn’t scared; I knew I could think clearly. But the look of anguish and horror on my parents’ faces frightened me.
My father turned to my mother and in an agonized voice said, “We’ve lost our son.”
I wanted desperately to calm their fears. I mustered all the concentration I could and, with what felt like superhuman effort, I exclaimed, “Aahhhmmmawwwrrrlllwrrride!” It was my sorry attempt at “I’m all right.” It could not have been less reassuring. Fortunately, after a few hours, the aphasia subsided, and I could explain to them what had happened, whereupon they immediately started blaming me: “How could you have been so stupid to keep playing after you were knocked out?” Yet for years thereafter, whenever I thought back on my childhood and wondered (as I often did) about whether my father loved me, the memory of his voice saying “We’ve lost our son” never failed to reassure me. A touching story . . . yet it also shows that if I have to reach that far into the bag to come up with evidence of my father’s love or concern for me, I had good reason to feel insecure about my place in our family.
In 1949, when I was a junior in high school, my father was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. One day he mentioned that he was worried about losing weight and might see a doctor; three months later he was dead. He was only forty-seven. In the weeks leading up to his death, more than ever I yearned to talk to him, to learn from him. There were all kinds of things I needed to understand. Mostly, what I wanted to know was my father’s own story—his history. Yet even though I knew he was dying, I could not speak to him. I didn’t know how to ask. I feared his impatience and anger. My father had always been worried and preoccupied with earning a living; now he was worried and preoccupied with dying. He didn’t seem to have any time for what I feared he would have regarded as idle chatter with me, but I never bothered to find out. I sat by passively and made all kinds of excuses for not asking him what I so desperately wanted to know. I didn’t feel important enough, end enough, to ask him questions when he was well; how could I possibly intrude into his thoughts and wishes now that he was sick?
I drove my mother to the hospital every evening to see him during visiting hours. I would come up to the room with her and say hello, but then, unable to think of what else to say to him, feeling awkward, and wanting to give them privacy, I would drift over to the window and remain there, looking out, for the duration of her visit. One evening, shortly before his death, when he realized that he was not going to recover from his illness, he began to talk openly to my mother. Oblivious to my presence, my father expressed his regret to her that he was dying so young, leaving the family without any money in the bank or any source of income. He particularly regretted leaving his children financially vulnerable. He wasn’t terribly worried, he said, about “the baby,” his eleven-year-old daughter, Paula, because he felt she would eventually find a husband who would take care of her. And he certainly wasn’t worried about “the big guy” (Jason, already in college, whom he described as “a real go-getter”). But, he told my mother, he was deeply concerned about “the little guy” (me) because he felt that without his support and constant prodding I wouldn’t amount to much. His remarks stung, but I pretty much agreed with his deathbed assessment of my future.
Ten years later I was at a going-away party that my friends were throwing for me. I was happily married, I had just received my Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford, and I was about to head east to take a position as an assistant professor at Harvard. I got drunk and walked outside. It was a particularly beautiful night; all the stars were out. I remember crying as I looked up at the stars and told my father that he could now rest easy; I had already achieved so much more than he could ever have imagined. This was an odd thing for me to do. I must have been very drunk, because I don’t believe in an afterlife, much less in the possibility of communicating with dead people. But I longed for him to know that “the little guy” was on a path where he might eventually amount to something, after all.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said that from the moment we spring out of the womb, we are “doomed” to freedom. What did he mean by “doomed” if not that freedom is heavy, that we pay a price for it in suffering and loss? We do not become free at the moment we are born. For some people it doesn’t happen until they are well into middle age, because a man is not totally free until his father dies. For me, that freedom came at age seventeen, and I still remember, along with the grief and despair I felt at losing him, a surge of liberation from his disapproval, disappointment, and anger. At the time the relief I felt blindsided me and evoked intense guilt and confusion—you are not supposed to feel relieved when your father dies. Years later I came to understand those feelings. A dark presence had been lifted from my world.
Yet, all my adult life, I have wished I had been able to know more about my father. I have wondered whether, if he had lived to a ripe old age and seen the success his goofy boy made of his life, he would have been proud of me at last, talked about his own feelings at last, told me the story of his life at last. But perhaps his death freed me to become the man he feared I never would be.
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Elliot and Jason, 1940.
Parents love to tell stories about their children. What they don’t realize is that their children are listening. One of the earliest stories I remember my mother telling about me—a story she often repeated to her friends—was of taking me to the park in the baby buggy in cold weather, when I was about a year old. “Other babies’ cheeks would turn a healthy, rosy color,” she would say, “but Elliot’s would become ashen, and his lips would turn blue. He was such a sickly child.” As a preschooler, every time I heard her tell this story, I could feel her embarrassment that I wasn’t the beautiful baby that other mothers had. It made me want to apologize.
I was born in 1932 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a slum city just across the Mystic River from Boston. Chelsea was brimful of junk-yards, rag shops, and oil storage tanks. When I was three years old, my family moved to the adjacent equally slum city of Revere. Nestled between the Suffolk Downs horse track and Wonderland, a greyhound racing track, Revere was teeming with small-time gamblers, bookies, and assorted Runyonesque characters. Its major industry was gambling. But the saving grace of Revere was that it was on the ocean and had a good swimming beach and a boardwalk, with a real, honest-to-goodness wooden roller coaster. My advice to young people is, if you have to live in a slum, make sure it’s on the ocean.
While reminiscing about his boyhood in Brooklyn, comedian Sam Levenson once told Ed Sullivan, “We were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor.” That’s touching, but it was not my experience. We were poor, and we knew it. I have vivid memories of going to bed early and hungry so that we could ward off the cold in our unheated home by covering ourselves with blankets and overcoats, of stuffing my shoes with cardboard to cover the holes in the soles because we couldn’t afford to have them repaired, of never having new clothes but always wearing whatever my older brother had outgrown. I remember our family moving in the middle of the night because we were in arrears in our rent. I remember my parents’ bitter quarrels about money and my father’s failure as a provider.
My father, Harry Aronson, had emigrated from Russia in 1909, when he was eight years old. He quit school at the age of thirteen and began peddling socks and underwear from a pushcart in Boston. Eventually, he earned enough money to open a small dry-goods store, where he still peddled socks and underwear, but from behind a counter. My mother, Dorothy, was the eldest of ten children, all of whom were born in this country. Her parents had also come from Russia. Her father, Ben Feingold, a tailor, gradually moved up to the middle class by opening a tuxedo-rental store (“Feingold’s—The Best One!” was the store’s logo). Her brothers worked hard to put poverty behind them; they became doctors, dentists, chiropodists, and small-business owners.
My parents married in 1927. My mother felt she was marrying beneath her on two counts: My father never got past the fifth grade, whereas she prided herself on having graduated from high school, and he was a greenhorn, whereas she had been born in America. But she was already twenty-seven—in those days almost too old to find a husband—and at least Harry was the well-to-do owner of a dry-goods store. He even drove a late-model car. Shortly after they married, he acquired a second store, and so for a while they lived comfortably. My father was proud of having worked his way up from selling goods in a pushcart to owning his own stores. Their first child, Jason, was born in 1929, shortly after the stock market crashed; I, in 1932; and our sister, Paula, six years later.
In 1935, at the height of the Depression, my father lost his stores, and the bank foreclosed on our home. We became destitute, living in poverty until well after America entered the war. Our house was intellectually impoverished as well. Neither of my parents was interested in ideas; they never discussed politics, music, art, history, or current events. In spite of my mother’s pride in having finished high school, I never saw her reading a book. The only books in our house were the Old Testament and some Hebrew prayers. My mother’s major form of entertainment was the daytime soap opera, especially Helen Trent; Our Gal Sunday; and Just Plain Bill, Barber of Hartville. My father’s major form of entertainment was gambling. Unfortunately, he was a compulsive gambler who would bet on anything from horses to dogs to baseball to how many cars would pass by the corner of Shirley Avenue and North Shore Road within a three-minute window.
My mother never forgave my father for our descent into poverty. She blamed it on his gambling and on his being a poor businessman, because he refused to fire his employees when the store was losing money and habitually extended credit to dead-beats. “As soon as they made any money, they shopped at other stores so they wouldn’t have to face you!” she would accuse my father. “Besides, how could you have paid an employee when your family was going hungry?”
My father attributed our poverty to the Depression—to the fact that his blue-collar customers had lost their jobs and needed help. Once, when I was about ten, he tried to explain his point of view to me. “What else could I have done? They were my only customers. They didn’t have money! If I didn’t give them credit, I’d have had no customers at all. And how could I fire anyone who worked for me and depended on me?” That was why, he said, he eventually couldn’t pay his rent and lost the stores. I was not sure whether my father was a victim of the worldwide Depression or whether he would have survived financially if he had been a better businessman—one who didn’t gamble.
My parents’ descent into poverty caused my mother enormous shame and embarrassment. Her husband’s older brother, Aaron, managed to keep his store; her father, Ben, managed to keep his store; why couldn’t her husband? I can barely imagine how difficult it was for her to accept charity, but it was the only way we could survive. And I can understand why she was always so worried and angry: It’s Massachusetts, it’s bitterly cold in winter, you can’t heat the house, you have three small kids, and everyone is hungry all the time. Once in a while a relative would drop in with a bag of apples or oranges, which was a real treat. But I mostly remember my mother putting aside her pride and standing in line for the weekly handouts of bread and cereal at the welfare station across town. We went there together; I, age three, would ride in the stroller on the way there, and walk alongside her on the way back with the stroller filled with supplies. I don’t know if I remember those walks or if she created my memories with her stories.
My mother used to tell one story that epitomized the humiliation she felt during those years. My father’s oldest brother, Uncle Aaron, and his wife, Goldie, both worked in Aaron’s store. It was 1937, the year I started school, and my mother took the trolley car to their store in East Boston to buy school clothes for Jason and me. At the counter Goldie wrapped the clothes in a bundle. Taking them, my mother said, “Goldie, we can’t pay now, but I promise we will in a few months.” Goldie grabbed the bundle out of her hands and said, “You can have these clothes when you pay for the last bundle you bought from us.” My mother was dumbfounded. She told and retold this story a lot, acting it out—how Goldie snatched the bundle back from her, put it under the counter, and stood there resolutely with her arms folded across her ample chest. My Uncle Aaron, a meek little man, would witness the scene silently, not daring to overrule his wife, avoiding my mother’s gaze. My mother would always end the story by saying, “You know, there was nothing in that bundle for me, and nothing of great value—just a few things for the children—a shirt, pants, some socks.” She would make a meal out of that story, which underscored the fact that my uncle was still in business when my father wasn’t, how she had to take that long trip on the trolley for nothing, the humiliation she suffered at my father’s hands. She apparently didn’t notice that she was faulting my father for the same generosity she expected Goldie to extend to her.
My father was often unemployed for months at a time; when he was able to find a job, it was temporary and often involved manual labor such as highway construction for the Works Progress Administration. Late one night I woke up to go to the bathroom. Still groggy, I passed the kitchen and saw my father in tears, sitting alone at the table, his head in his hands. I can only guess how defeated he must have felt at having been reduced to doing manual labor after years of owning his own stores. But that was nothing compared to the misery of not having a job at all, and so he did whatever he could. For a while he worked as an insurance agent, going door to door selling nickel-and-dime life-insurance policies to poor people, but after Prudential caught him having embezzled two hundred dollars, which he promptly gambled away at the racetrack, he was fired. (My father saw this as borrowing the money, which he thought he would quickly repay after the next race, when his horse would surely win.) His father-in-law, Ben Feingold, paid Prudential the money so my father wouldn’t go to jail. To pay off that debt, my father worked at Feingold’s, delivering tuxedos. He hated the job, mostly because he hated working for Ben, who would constantly remind him of how he had saved him from prison. But jobs were hard to come by, especially for unskilled former merchants who had narrowly avoided prison on charges of embezzlement.
My father’s money problems were only half of his troubles; the other half was my mother’s nagging him incessantly about their money problems. She never let him forget that by losing his stores and our home, he had deprived her of her feeling of security and, along with it, her pride. She often reminded him that she could have married Max Pincus, who, as the sole owner of a successful hardware store, was “sitting pretty.” The dinner table was their battleground. My parents had monumental fights, and night after night they followed the same pattern as if it were choreographed. She would badger him; he would erupt in anger, slam his knife and fork onto his plate, and storm out of the house, trudging off to hang out with his friends in the card room at the Elk’s Club or Mike the Barber’s—not that Mike actually gave many haircuts; the three barber chairs he had in the shop were primarily a front for the gambling in the back room. (Much later it occurred to me that my father might have been using the fights as a vehicle to get to Mike’s.) He would not return home until long after we kids went to bed. When he was employed as a day laborer, he needed to leave for work long before Jason and I woke up to get ready for school. Thus, we would usually not see him again until the next dinnertime, when the nagging and anger would often pick up where it had left off. As soon as my mother’s nagging would begin, Jason would give me a bleak “here we go again” look, and we would hunker down until the knife and fork would clatter and the door would slam. We would then continue with dinner, but with a lump in our throats.
How often did these incidents replay themselves? Three times a week? Three times a month? I do not trust my memory. The scenes were so dramatic, and traumatic, that they are emblazoned on my mind with a vividness that makes them seem as if they were a daily occurrence, though I am reasonably certain that’s an exaggeration. What I do know, with hindsight, is that once the cycle got started, it was hard for them to break out of it. If my mother felt an overpowering need to vent her pain and frustration at my father, I’m sure she figured that the best opportunity was dinnertime while he was seated at the table, temporarily immobile, with his napkin tucked into the top of his shirt and his fork raised toward his mouth. From my father’s perspective, I’m sure he felt anguish at his own failure and at having fallen out of the middle class. He almost certainly didn’t need to be reminded of it, much less of Max Pincus, let alone at dinnertime, when—as he frequently said at the top of his lungs—he expected to have “a fuckin’ moment of peace and quiet at the end of a hard fuckin’ day.”
“You think you had a hard day?” she would shout back. “How do think it was for me, having to walk three miles to the welfare station with all the neighbors watching?” At that he would launch himself out of the house in anger, staying away until after my mother was asleep, leaving her no opportunity to get to him until the next dinnertime. And then the cycle would repeat.
Naturally, as a child, I didn’t understand their dynamics. Looking back, I am convinced that whatever love my parents may have felt for each other in the early years of their marriage had been bleached out of their relationship by the time these battles began. Yet I suspect that, deep down, they had some empathy for each other but lacked the ability to communicate in ways that might have been supportive rather than overflowing with blame, self-pity, and vexation.
When the war began my father finally got a job as a semiskilled factory worker. The pay wasn’t great, but the work was steady. On the side he worked as a small-time agent for a big-time bookie in the numbers racket, taking bets from fellow factory workers. His money woes diminished, but not his quarrels with my mother.
I was a painfully shy child and adolescent. In school I never volunteered to speak up, and when called upon I stammered and blushed and was barely able to respond to the question being asked. One afternoon, when I was in third grade, the teacher became angry at the class and ordered each of us to write “I will not make noise in class” fifty times before she would allow us to go home. I wrote about thirty of them when my pencil broke. I was too scared to ask the teacher if I could sharpen the pencil, so I sat there quietly as other children handed in their papers and left. I dreaded that I would be stuck there forever and imagined my mother, frantically wringing her hands and pacing around in our kitchen, wondering where on earth I could be. In desperation I tried to gnaw a point on the pencil with my teeth. It wasn’t working. Finally, I summoned all my courage, walked up to the teacher’s desk, held up my pencil, and murmured, “May I please use the pencil sharpener?” She snatched the pencil out of my hand, scrutinized it, and snapped, “Just as I suspected. You bit off the point just so you could have an excuse to disturb me.” I stood there, mute, too mortified even to defend myself. That was decades ago, and it still makes me cringe to remember it.
In contrast, Jason was a star. In the Feingold family there were a lot of uncles and aunts, and all of them awaited his arrival, their first-born nephew, with great anticipation. They were young adults, not quite ready to begin families of their own, so Jason immediately became their special toy. What a great little kid he was: bright as a penny, strong, vigorous, joyful, and a natural entertainer. And the more attention he got, the happier and more self-assured he became. I remember their happy kvelling over him: “Sing, Jason! Dance, Jason! Show Uncle Leo the picture you drew, Jason! Knock on wood, he’s a regular Norman Rockwell!” They fawned all over the little bastard.
Did I resent my big brother? You bet I did. At family gatherings, on the playground, everywhere we were together, his charisma ignited the atmosphere and highlighted my own inadequacies. In the summer of ’39, when I was seven years old, the Feingold family organized a Sunday picnic by a lake in eastern Massachusetts. All my uncles and aunts were there. Jason and I were having fun throwing a baseball around, feeding each other pop flies and ground balls, when a few of our uncles came over, announced that they were going to rent a rowboat to go fishing, and invited Jason to come along. Not only were they not inviting me, but they were depriving me of my one playmate. Desolate, I meekly asked if I could come along. Uncle Mike said that he was sorry, but there wasn’t enough room in the boat and, besides, I was too young to enjoy fishing anyway. My eyes filled with tears; I tried hard to hold them back, but to no avail. Uncle Nat said, “Aw, let’s let him come; we’ll make room.” And so I went.
We were on the boat for about two and a half hours. It was pretty boring, but at least I got to be with my brother. When we arrived back at the shore, Uncle Herbie asked, “Well, Elliot, did you have a good time?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I guess it paid to cry,” Uncle Eddie remarked.
“Sha! Let him alone,” said Uncle Leo. His perfunctory kindness came too late. I was heartsick and wished I hadn’t gone.
I hated the image my family had of me, largely because it was accurate. One Saturday afternoon I went to the movies. The serial they were showing that month was based on the comic-book character Captain Marvel, who in everyday life was Billy Batson, a meek, nerdy teenager. When danger arose Billy would shout the magic word “SHAZAM,” and in a puff of smoke he would be transformed into a big, strong, tough superhero. Unlike Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman, Billy Batson wasn’t born super. He couldn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, he was not more powerful than a locomotive, and, if you shot him, the bullets would not bounce off—they would kill him. That’s what made the character so interesting to me: Billy had to transform himself, and his transformation was always temporary. I arrived home from the matinee, infused with Billy Batson and Captain Marvel. I tied an old bath towel around my neck as a cape, got up on the third step of the porch of our apartment house, stretched my right arm out in front of me and my left arm behind me, shouted “SHAZAM”—and leaped bravely off the porch. I landed awkwardly and sprained my ankle. I limped into the house, and my mother said, “What did you do this time?”
A few days later we went to a family gathering, and as I limped in one of my aunts asked, “What happened to Elliot?” An uncle answered, “He thought he was Superman and tried to fly by jumping off the porch.” “Elliot . . . Superman?” said another. The whole group burst into laughter. I tried to explain that I wasn’t trying to be Superman, only Captain Marvel, but they weren’t listening.
Jason would have been a tough act to follow for any younger sibling, let alone a klutz like me. At school, where I was forever three years behind him, the teachers knew me as Jason’s little brother and assumed that I was like him. I was a pretty good student in elementary school and junior high school, but I lacked the star quality that the teachers seemed to expect. I could read the disappointment on the face of my first-grade teacher as she discovered that I wasn’t as quick, wasn’t as charming, wasn’t as bright, and wasn’t as assertive as Jason, and, in the jargon of the schools, didn’t have the “leadership skills” that he did. None of this, of course, was Jason’s fault. I never consciously held it against him, but at times I envied his charisma and wished I didn’t have an older brother. But, even as a child, I was all too aware that my inadequacies were my own and would have been there even if my brother had never existed. Although I was overshadowed by Jason, I knew that if that shadow were magically removed, I would have been revealed as a shy, uninteresting kid with mediocre talents.
But regardless of my flashes of envy and jealousy, I loved and admired him. He loved me too, and showered a lot of attention on me. It was Jason who showed me how to dribble a basketball and how to throw a football with a perfect spiral. It was Jason who informed me that excessive masturbation would not cause blindness or hair to grow on the palms of our hands (common fears among novice masturbators at the time). It was Jason who taught me how to appreciate the subtleties of a ride on the roller coaster. And it was Jason who taught me how to throw, catch, and hit a baseball. When I was very young we played on a diamond that was strewn with lumpy soil, pebbles, and weedy grass—a far cry from the manicured lawn and smooth surfaces of Fenway Park. A sharply hit ground ball on our diamond would often take unpredictable bounces. My natural tendency was to try to field a grounder by positioning my body to the left or right of the ball, so that if it took a strange hop it would not hit me in the face. Jason would have none of it. Hour after hour, he would hit me ground balls until I learned to overcome my fear and put myself in the direct path of the ball. This skill that I learned as a boy paid great dividends in adolescence, when my ability as a ballplayer became a major source of gratification and, in those awkward teenage years, just about my only source of self-esteem.
Most of all, though, I loved having Jason there to lead the way, offer advice, and fight off bullies. “Just wait ’til my big brother gets ahold of you—he’ll kick the shit out of you, you big ox!” I’d yell to some older kid who was tormenting me. And kick the shit out of them he did. We were the only Jewish family in our tough neighborhood, which was made up mostly of working-class Irish Catholics who were virulently anti-Semitic. Indeed, most of the neighborhood kids behaved as if Jason and I were personally responsible for the Crucifixion. Jason was a big, strong guy, so they gave him plenty of room. But I, being skinny and rather frail, bore the brunt of their hatred of Jews. I was frequently faced with the choice between fighting and running—between feeling brave but getting beaten up, and feeling cowardly but remaining unbloodied. Jason was around to protect me enough of the time to earn my gratitude and resentment. It was nice to have a bodyguard. It was degrading to need one.
And I sure needed one when walking home from Hebrew school, which was located in a small Jewish enclave on the other side of town. Jason graduated from Hebrew school when he was thirteen; after that, I was on my own. In fall and winter it was dark when I walked home, and so I was forever trying to find creative routes, zigzaggy paths that would take me away from the greatest areas of danger. But in spite of my best efforts, I was frequently waylaid, pushed around, and occasionally roughed up by gangs of teenagers shouting anti-Semitic slogans at me. I remember sitting on a curb after one of those incidents, nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, feeling very sorry for myself—and wondering how it was that these kids could hate me so much when they didn’t even know me. I wondered whether they had been born hating Jews or had learned it from their parents and priests. I wondered whether, if these kids would get to know me better (and discover what a sweet and harmless little boy I was), they would like me more. And if they liked me more, would they then hate other Jews less? I wish I could say that being the target of bullying made me a more empathic kid. I wish I could say that my experience goaded me to spring to the defense of smaller kids when they were being pushed around. Spring to their defense? Hell, no. So eager was I to distance myself from other targets that I actually joined the bullies, determined to convince the bigger, tougher, more aggressive kids that I was closer to them than to their victims. I took no joy in taunting weaker boys. It was my feeble attempt to buy an insurance policy against being taunted myself.
When I completed Hebrew school at last, my mother suggested I go out and earn some money to help the family. I could begin, she said, by doing what Jason had done at my age: going around to various drugstores and asking if they needed a soda jerk. Jason had worked in a drugstore for three years. (I followed in his foot-steps literally—same schools, same teachers, same attempted jobs.) “But none of the stores have ‘Help wanted’ signs in the window,” I protested.
“There’s always room for a good worker,” she replied, instructing me to go inside and inquire about work anyway. For me, this was an excruciating assignment. I did it, though, and was promptly rejected by four different stores. When I came home and told my mother that there were no job openings, she said, in a derisive tone, “Yeah, and I know how you asked. You probably said, ‘You don’t need any soda jerks or anything, do you?’” It was a cruel thing to say, but she wasn’t far off.
Finally, I did manage to land a job in the produce department at the Elm Farm Supermarket. My job was to keep the shelves stocked, spray the vegetables to make them look good, and sort potatoes and onions into five-pound sacks. I thought I was doing my job pretty well, but I was fired after a few months because I didn’t know how to look busy when I had nothing to do and all of the five-pound sacks that I filled were about a quarter pound over. “That costs the corporation money,” the manager fumed. And so, at fourteen, I already felt like an abject failure. So young, and yet so untalented!
My father and I did not have a lot to say to each other. We did a few father-son things: He took me to Fenway Park in 1946, where, for fifty-five cents, we could sit in the center-field bleachers and watch the Red Sox play ball, in the era of Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, and Dom DiMaggio. He taught me how to drive a car, and did it with a degree of patience that astonished me. We lived in the same house for almost seventeen years, and I can recall only one serious conversation between us, the one in which he told me his version of how he lost the stores. He never told me about his childhood, his education, his relationship with his brothers and sisters, or his hopes and aspirations for himself or for his children. All through my adolescence I used to have recurring fantasies about taking long walks with him, during which we would talk deeply, earnestly, and lovingly about important things. The setting was almost always bucolic: a meadow, the woods—places we never visited in reality. When I was in my fifties these fantasies became nightmares. I would awake in a cold sweat, unable to forgive myself for having asked my father so little, for knowing so little about him. Why didn’t I ever ask him about his life? The simple truth is that I believed I was of little interest to him, and I sensed his constant disappointment in me. “Why can’t you be more like so-and-so?” he would say, always of some kid who had three jobs and a newspaper route, and never missed a violin lesson. “Why are you always wasting your energy playing baseball and basketball?” In those days Jewish parents believed that any activity that was unproductive intellectually or financially was a total waste of time. Children should be working to earn money, studying to get ahead, or practicing the violin to become Jascha Heifetz.
But on a deeper level, I didn’t ask my father questions because I was afraid of him, of his brooding, punitive presence that could easily erupt into wrath. Whenever he was angry he seethed more ferociously than anyone I had ever seen. Years later, watching the actor Lee J. Cobb fuming, clenching his fists, and losing his temper in the film Twelve Angry Men, I exclaimed, “Oh, my God—that’s my father.” Although my father never actually punched me, he often shook his fist at me in a way to make me fear he would, and his anger was almost always disproportionate to the crime. “Ikh vel dir bald geybn a flyask in punim s’zol shoklen dayne tseyn,” he would say in Yiddish (“I will give you such a smack in the face that it will loosen your teeth”). He was the designated family punisher. One beautiful spring afternoon I got caught up in a baseball game, and the next thing I knew I was already a half hour late for Hebrew school. So I decided to keep playing and then hung out with the guys so that I could get home at exactly the time I would have normally. Unfortunately for me, the school called to find out where I’d been. Busted. My father put the phone down and erupted, pounding his fist on the table.
“What the hell is the matter with you? We don’t have enough troubles without your adding to them?”
“But Dad! All the other kids were . . . ”
“I don’t give a shit about the other kids. You are not like the other kids, and besides they are none of my business. If you ever do anything like this again, there will be hell to pay!”
Between his disappointment and his anger, I knew he didn’t think highly of me. If he loved me, I was never sure of it.
But then there was the night of the concussion, when I was about fifteen. While going for a rebound in a basketball game, I was hit on the top of my head by an opposing player who had a cast on his arm—which he was effectively using as a weapon. I was knocked out for thirty seconds. When I came to, I sat on the bench for about five minutes, felt better, and played the rest of the game. Hours later, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by the sound of my own groaning. I had an excruciating headache. My brother, who slept in the same room, went to wake up our parents. But when I tried to explain to them what had happened, I could produce only gibberish. My thoughts seemed clear enough, but they came out as meaningless sounds. I felt I was speaking through somebody else’s mouth. It felt eerie. But I wasn’t scared; I knew I could think clearly. But the look of anguish and horror on my parents’ faces frightened me.
My father turned to my mother and in an agonized voice said, “We’ve lost our son.”
I wanted desperately to calm their fears. I mustered all the concentration I could and, with what felt like superhuman effort, I exclaimed, “Aahhhmmmawwwrrrlllwrrride!” It was my sorry attempt at “I’m all right.” It could not have been less reassuring. Fortunately, after a few hours, the aphasia subsided, and I could explain to them what had happened, whereupon they immediately started blaming me: “How could you have been so stupid to keep playing after you were knocked out?” Yet for years thereafter, whenever I thought back on my childhood and wondered (as I often did) about whether my father loved me, the memory of his voice saying “We’ve lost our son” never failed to reassure me. A touching story . . . yet it also shows that if I have to reach that far into the bag to come up with evidence of my father’s love or concern for me, I had good reason to feel insecure about my place in our family.
In 1949, when I was a junior in high school, my father was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. One day he mentioned that he was worried about losing weight and might see a doctor; three months later he was dead. He was only forty-seven. In the weeks leading up to his death, more than ever I yearned to talk to him, to learn from him. There were all kinds of things I needed to understand. Mostly, what I wanted to know was my father’s own story—his history. Yet even though I knew he was dying, I could not speak to him. I didn’t know how to ask. I feared his impatience and anger. My father had always been worried and preoccupied with earning a living; now he was worried and preoccupied with dying. He didn’t seem to have any time for what I feared he would have regarded as idle chatter with me, but I never bothered to find out. I sat by passively and made all kinds of excuses for not asking him what I so desperately wanted to know. I didn’t feel important enough, end enough, to ask him questions when he was well; how could I possibly intrude into his thoughts and wishes now that he was sick?
I drove my mother to the hospital every evening to see him during visiting hours. I would come up to the room with her and say hello, but then, unable to think of what else to say to him, feeling awkward, and wanting to give them privacy, I would drift over to the window and remain there, looking out, for the duration of her visit. One evening, shortly before his death, when he realized that he was not going to recover from his illness, he began to talk openly to my mother. Oblivious to my presence, my father expressed his regret to her that he was dying so young, leaving the family without any money in the bank or any source of income. He particularly regretted leaving his children financially vulnerable. He wasn’t terribly worried, he said, about “the baby,” his eleven-year-old daughter, Paula, because he felt she would eventually find a husband who would take care of her. And he certainly wasn’t worried about “the big guy” (Jason, already in college, whom he described as “a real go-getter”). But, he told my mother, he was deeply concerned about “the little guy” (me) because he felt that without his support and constant prodding I wouldn’t amount to much. His remarks stung, but I pretty much agreed with his deathbed assessment of my future.
Ten years later I was at a going-away party that my friends were throwing for me. I was happily married, I had just received my Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford, and I was about to head east to take a position as an assistant professor at Harvard. I got drunk and walked outside. It was a particularly beautiful night; all the stars were out. I remember crying as I looked up at the stars and told my father that he could now rest easy; I had already achieved so much more than he could ever have imagined. This was an odd thing for me to do. I must have been very drunk, because I don’t believe in an afterlife, much less in the possibility of communicating with dead people. But I longed for him to know that “the little guy” was on a path where he might eventually amount to something, after all.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said that from the moment we spring out of the womb, we are “doomed” to freedom. What did he mean by “doomed” if not that freedom is heavy, that we pay a price for it in suffering and loss? We do not become free at the moment we are born. For some people it doesn’t happen until they are well into middle age, because a man is not totally free until his father dies. For me, that freedom came at age seventeen, and I still remember, along with the grief and despair I felt at losing him, a surge of liberation from his disapproval, disappointment, and anger. At the time the relief I felt blindsided me and evoked intense guilt and confusion—you are not supposed to feel relieved when your father dies. Years later I came to understand those feelings. A dark presence had been lifted from my world.
Yet, all my adult life, I have wished I had been able to know more about my father. I have wondered whether, if he had lived to a ripe old age and seen the success his goofy boy made of his life, he would have been proud of me at last, talked about his own feelings at last, told me the story of his life at last. But perhaps his death freed me to become the man he feared I never would be.
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