8
The father I knew had always been sad. He wasn’t so much a depressive by nature as he was a kindhearted, cheerful person who had been beaten down by life. He had married young—a marriage arranged between two prominent Orthodox families—and that relationship quickly turned unhappy. When Susie was six years old, his first wife left while he was away on a business trip. The story I’ve been told is that he came home to their empty apartment to find nothing but his clothes hanging in the closet. Divorce was virtually unheard of in the tight-knit community that made up my father’s world in the early 1950s. Devastated, he fought for the closest thing to shared custody that existed in those days: he had Susie every Wednesday night and on alternate weekends. A short while into his life as a single father, he fell in love with a young woman named Dorothy. Dorothy was twenty-six when they met—an alluring, incandescent creature with bright eyes and an easy smile, and in the few photographs I’ve seen of the two of them together, my father’s face is soft, unguarded, and full of joy.
They set a wedding date and began to dream of their shared future. But my father had unknowingly become a player in a tragedy. Dorothy had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—a death sentence back then—and her family had kept her condition secret from her. My father discovered the truth a few days before their wedding and, against rabbinic advice, telling no one except his best friend and his sister, moved forward with the plan to marry. Dorothy was—many of those who knew them together have told me—the love of his life. She died six months later.
I didn’t know about Dorothy when I was growing up. I didn’t know to what to attribute my father’s unhappiness. Evenings, he slumped in his easy chair watching television. He became sedentary and fat—one of many sources of conflict between my parents—and his belly strained over the top of his trousers. When I was thirteen, his chronic back pain became so extreme that he underwent spinal fusion surgery. He never fully recovered, and he numbed himself with painkillers and sedatives for the rest of his life.
It wasn’t until I was a grown woman, a writer—when I had reached the age my father had been when he had been divorced, then widowed—that I became obsessed with knowing more of what had happened. I was convinced that the loss of Dorothy must be the primary locus of my father’s pain. And so I wrote an article for The New Yorker and painstakingly assembled the crushing details of the brief life he and Dorothy had shared. It felt to me, in the months it took to write that piece, that I was gluing my father back together. This is what I did, what I had always done from the time I first put pen to paper. Tikkun olam. I was trying to repair my broken father. To make him whole.
Perhaps—it occurs to me as I write these words—I am attempting to reassemble my father once more.
My father met my mother in the aftermath of Dorothy’s death. He had moved into an apartment on East Ninth Street in New York City, and my mother lived on the same block. She was vivacious, intrepid, an advertising executive recently divorced herself. The first time they encountered each other—on Shabbos—she was carrying a hammer and on her way to install bookcases in her own new apartment. He should have known, my mother would later say. She wasn’t from his world. She was Jewish, but not religious. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been building bookcases on Shabbos. But after months of dating, dazzled by my father and his exceptional family, she agreed to become Orthodox when they married, and to raise their children in an observant home. My father must have been certain that my mother was his last, best chance.
It took my parents five years to have a child. Five years punctuated by miscarriages, and trip after trip to Philadelphia. Five years in which my mother was approaching forty. In the years my parents were trying and failing to have a baby, my father’s younger brother and his wife had four children. His younger sister already had four children. One of the most important mitzvahs according to Jewish law: pru u’rvu. Be fruitful and multiply.
I thought I understood my father’s sorrow. I had written deeply on the subject, not only in The New Yorker but also in several of my books. Finally I came to accept that I had learned all I could learn. That he had been unhappy was without question. But at least I had been able to build a monument to him, a stack of stories, essays, memoirs, novels that I wrote in his honor—my own, secular form of kaddish. I knew all about his tyrannical, exacting father; his capricious first wife; the loss of his great love; the bitterness of his marriage to my mother.
But there had been something more—something I could never quite fathom. An invisible live wire stretched between my parents and me. Touch it, and we all might go up in smoke. I knew this, too, though I couldn’t have articulated it. I had turned away from fiction, toward memoir, as if a trail of words might lead me there. All the while, I wondered: Why did it matter so much? After all, my parents were long dead. I had survived them. I had built a life. I had a family of my own. Whatever their secrets, they were now buried, lost to history. My latest book was the first of my memoirs that had nothing to do with my parents.
It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself. In the end, it wasn’t words but numbers I stared at disbelievingly on a computer screen that smashed down the door and flooded every corner, every crevasse, with a blinding light: Comparing Kit M440247 and A765211.
All my life I had known there was a secret.
What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.