New Orleans

 

I’ve been trying to write about my upbringing and my faith and who I am and where I came from.

And the more I dig, the less I know.

I sent a text message to my uncle.

Me: How did your parents meet?

Uncle: Max was stationed at what was then “Camp Polk,” later became a fort. Was in NO on leave when he saw Lillian working as a salesclerk at a shoe store.

Me: Ah! So they met in NOLA! And she grew up there?

Uncle: oui

I sent a message to my aunt.

Aunt: My mom was walking home from work on Canal Street. My dad was in the army, in special training. He saw my mom and tried to meet her in the street but she ignored him. He following her home to her mother’s house. He knocked on the door and said, “I’m not leaving until your daughter comes out.” It was love at first sight. My mom was really beautiful and my dad was very handsome.

When I get Mom on the phone, I ask her.

She says my grandfather saw my grandmother out shopping for shoes. He tried to talk to her and she ignored him. He continued to talk to her all the way home and wouldn’t leave until she agreed to go out with him. My mother adds that this pattern would continue throughout their marriage. Lillian gave Max the silent treatment for weeks at a time.

I asked Mom when Max knew that Lillian was pregnant. Mom wasn’t sure. “I was a little bastard child,” she said, with a giggle.

Max was deployed, a tank commander in WWII. He insisted that Lillian move to NY. I assume it was to be close to his parents and to his sister.

She wouldn’t need her own mother?

Mom was born in New York while Max was stationed in Europe. She says she was two and a half when he returned.

There is a story, a legend in my family, told to show how parenting took him by surprise. My mother told me. My father told me. Max’s siter and best friend, my Aunt Sid, told me. Shortly after he got home, he took Mom to the bakery. Got something delicious for he and Lillian and left my toddler mother there, not realizing until he got home and Lillian asked for her. She sat in the window of the bakery until he returned. 

Today, Mom tells me that she got mad at him, sometime after he returned from the war. She stomped her foot and told her father never to leave her mother alone again.

And he responded by knocking her across a room. She says, “But I didn’t lose consciousness,” with…

What?...pride?

She was not yet three.

It is one of her first memories.

Lillian packed her two daughters, my mother and her half-sister, and returned to New Orleans. She saw Aunt Sid before she left. Mom remembers Sid defending her brother and also insisting that Lillian protect Mom.

Mom remembers attending a Catholic preschool in New Orleans. Her mother told the nuns that Mom was Jewish, so they made her leave the room when they prayed and she went outside and kneeled to pray anyway.

Mom says that they returned to Max in New York. Because. Love?

She tells a story of a day when she was sick and her older sister, Arlette, was allowed to stay home to take care of her. But her older sister invited friends, had a party and raided the liquor cabinet. Max came home to a house full of drunk teenagers. He lost it. He beat Arlette in front of her friends and called each child’s parents. Mom thinks she was four then.

“I was his punching bag.”

And then, she tells me how she could always count on him and how he had her back. She blames the war and the post-war hero-making that denied soldiers good mental health care.

And I don’t understand. I don’t understand how this is the man she named my brother after. How, until her last day on this earth, Max’s sister wept for him and adored him and made him out to be a hero.

How do victims possess all of the pain and the love in one soul?

How did she survive?

How did she manage not to say anything bad about her childhood until I was nearly an adult?

When I was learning to drive, my father told me that my grandfather beat my mother because she couldn’t get the hang of a stick shift. My uncle told me the same story later but my mother did not.

Maybe she was going to raise us without the knowledge of her pain. Or maybe she was ashamed.

There was a rule in my house, growing up, that if you bit anyone or if you kicked them with the pointy part of your cowboy boots, you would get a spanking. So, we didn’t do those things. And we weren’t hit.

Once, when I was very pregnant with my second son and my first was nearly two, he kicked me. Hard. And I lashed out and swatted his diapered butt. And mom watched.

Did she worry? That I would be like Max?

She took my son to her room and they read and they played, pretending her bed was a firetruck and they were off to rescue people. “Wooooo! Woooooo! Ding! Ding!” he yelled.

She disappeared into a book and make believe and love. And this may have been her recipe for survival.