VII

Family Contrasts

MY FATHER WAS ONLY nineteen when he left Dartmouth in the spring of 1933 and returned to the unhappy home that now consisted of his mother and sister. He knew that he would soon be expected to get a job in order to help support his mother and that he would also be expected to go on living under her roof; he had every intention of fulfilling the first expectation and no intention whatsoever of fulfilling the second. Ozzie used his connections to help his younger brother land a position as a junior accountant with the Fiduciary Trust Company in Manhattan. The young accountant’s responsibilities at work did not interfere with his gambling and pursuit of girls, often in the company of old Poly Prep friends who had also been obliged, as a result of the Depression, to go to work instead of finishing college. My dad and his friends were never out of work during the thirties; their families may have lost a good deal of money in the stock market crash, but the Old Boy Network (or, in my father’s case, the Young Boy Network represented by his brother) gave them entree into the straitened job market.

When he turned twenty-one, like Ozzie before him, the young-man-about-town moved out of his mother’s house and was free to devote himself to having an extremely good time. For my father, the thirties amounted to a lengthy, basically carefree parenthesis, a bridge between his college years and the war. In his early twenties, the shy “Fat” turned into a handsome young man, with a ready laugh and a charm that was rooted in his genuine interest in other people. On the whole, he preferred the company of women to that of men (a trait he would exhibit throughout his life). Women were drawn to him, but they tended to see him as a friend rather than as a lover; he lacked the streak of callousness that piques erotic interest in women in their twenties. (In my early twenties, I introduced my father to a male friend who obviously wanted to be something more. “Of course you’re not interested in him that way,” Dad said with an ironic laugh. “He’s too nice. I know the signs.”)

Like many of his contemporaries, he felt no urgency about settling down during a decade that began with the Depression and ended with the imminent prospect of war. In the spring of 1940, when Hitler’s troops were storming through France and the Low Countries, my father was only twenty-six. While the gathering war clouds propelled some young men into hasty marriages, many others saw the coming conflict as a good reason, as well as a perfect excuse, to put off any serious decisions. It was sensible, as well as more fun, to keep life provisional and uncomplicated. “By the time of Dunkirk, you had to be an idiot not to know we were going to be in the war sooner or later—and probably sooner,” Dad recalled. “If you were going to be sent to god-knows-where, maybe to be killed, why would you get married? Well, some guys thought otherwise. They got married because they wanted something to hang on to, someone to come back to. I was pretty immature then, and I was happy to have another reason not to settle down. Actually, it sounds awful, but I looked forward to the war. I thought we should be in it, that fighting the Nazis was something important to do.”

Ozzie, twelve years older than my father and as settled down as he was capable of being, also viewed the potential disruption of war with an equanimity that bordered on enthusiasm. The navy, eager to draw on my uncle’s special mathematical skills, commissioned Ozzie and assigned him to an elite unit charged with the responsibility of breaking Japanese and German codes. He was stationed in Washington and Honolulu, with occasional top-secret trips to London. The suspension of international bridge tournaments for the duration of the war did not hurt Ozzie’s finances: high-stakes poker games with admirals and generals replenished his coffers (though only a fraction of his winnings made their way to Aunt Mary in Dallas). “I never had as much fun in my life as I did during the war,” Ozzie said. “Don’t let anyone who had a desk job tell you how much he hated the war, what a terrible sacrifice it was to be away from home. Code analysis was fascinating work, but officers with dull jobs loved the war too. How else could they get to be away from their wives and be praised for serving mankind? Sometimes at the poker table, raking in the money from admirals and two-star generals, I’d wonder how the hell guys who had so little talent for bluffing could expect to win a war. I asked Eisenhower that question the one time I met him during a game, and he said, “That’s why we have men like you to break the enemy codes—so we don’t have to bluff.” Ozzie’s story about meeting Eisenhower in London may be true, since Ike’s enthusiasm for bridge was legendary. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe would certainly have wanted to meet the bridge celebrity and would certainly have had no trouble inveigling him into a game.

My father’s war, like everything else about his life, was less colorful than Ozzie’s. Legally blind in one eye as the result of his teenage accident, he was deemed unfit for combat. In 1942, however, he was selected for Officer Candidate School (like Ozzie, on the basis of his mathematical aptitude) for noncombat service. In early 1943, he was posted to Chicago, where he worked as an administrator in the Quartermaster Corps until the end of the war. By virtue of its position as a railroad and meatpacking center, as well as its strategic location between the two coasts, Chicago played an important role in the mammoth effort to supply the troops in both Europe and the Pacific. While allocating meat tonnage was hardly as glamorous as breaking Nazi and Japanese codes, my dad’s years in the army gave him far more satisfaction than his accounting jobs had in New York. “I fought the Battle of Michigan Avenue,” he observed, in typical self-deprecating fashion, on his Dartmouth twenty-fifth reunion questionnaire. Still, my dad also remembered the war years, even before he met my mother, as a happy time in his life. “You had the sense that what you were doing mattered—to your country and the world,” he told me at some point in the late sixties, when America and American families were being torn apart by the Vietnam War. “People my age look back to our war with nostalgia because it was a time—the last time, I think—when everyone was pulling together on behalf of a cause greater than themselves. The war made us who we are; it was the turning point for our generation. It can’t be that way now; I personally don’t see Vietnam as a just war in the way I saw World War Two.”

—

THE WAR years would also prove to be a turning point in the flight of the Jacoby family from its Jewish past. In 1944, both my father and my aunt Edith followed their brother in marrying Irish Catholics—and Edith became the first Jacoby actually to convert to Catholicism. My aunt, whose earlier marriage seemed to pose an insuperable obstacle to a second union sanctioned by the Church, had nevertheless been romantically involved with the devout Ted Faller for several years. When Edith’s ex-husband, “that wretch, Feeney,” conveniently dropped dead and made her a widow in the eyes of the Church, she joyfully converted and promptly married Ted. Granny Jacoby disapproved of the conversion—and said so—but did not object to Ted as she had objected to Ozzie’s choice of Aunt Mary. With her characteristic maternal solicitude, she told Edith, then in her late thirties, that she was lucky to have found anyone willing to marry her.

In fact, Ted was passionately in love with my aunt. The most successful member of a huge Irish-American family, charged with the responsibility of caring for dependent relatives, Ted was nearly forty when he met Edith. He was so devout a Catholic, and so wrapped up in his duties to the rest of his family, that he seemed destined for a lifetime of fussy bachelorhood. But when he spotted my aunt in Macy’s executive offices, he fell in love for the first and last time in his life. In her mid-thirties, the dark-haired, long-limbed, full-bosomed Edith was not a conventional beauty, but she projected a liveliness and sensuality that had always attracted men. And Uncle Ted, used to women who expected men to take care of them, was impressed by a woman with the brains and energy to work her way up to an executive job in a man’s world. Any man who would take on a lifelong relationship with Granny Jacoby, Uncle Ozzie once pointed out, had to have been head over heels in love with her daughter. Already accustomed to supporting his own relatives, Ted cheerfully added my prickly grandmother to his list of dependents and relieved my father and Uncle Ozzie of any further responsibility for her financial support.

Edith was every bit as much in love with Ted as he was with her. He was the only person in the world who could soften her sharp tone and bring a warm light to her eyes, and he was the only man who received her unqualified approval. Their mutual devotion never wavered, even though both were deeply disappointed when Edith, already in her late thirties at the time of the marriage, proved unable to bear children. Temperamentally, they were opposites. Edith generally regarded pleasure as an indulgence (if not a sin): she dressed plainly, resisting Ted’s desire to buy her fashionable clothes, furs, and jewels; set a frugal and unappetizing table (though Ted loved fine food and wine); and allowed herself to spend money freely only on travel to religious shrines and the art capitals of Europe (she was happiest when she could combine the two pilgrimages). One form of pleasure she did not disdain, however, was sex: the physical attraction between these unlikely characters, who touched each other tenderly at every possible opportunity, was obvious. Their relationship was a source of bemusement and amusement to the other members of the family, who had long considered Edith a prissy spinster (in spite of her youthful divorce). Moreover, Ted’s obvious physical passion for his wife represented a real departure from the repressive sexual upbringing inculcated in Irish Catholics of his generation. I always thought, though I never dared ask my aunt to confirm my suspicions, that Edith and Ted must have broken the laws of the Church by having premarital sex—a mortal sin—during the period before Feeney’s death. The romance that began in New York flourished more freely during the war in Washington, when both Edith and Ted took leave from Macy’s to serve their country in the military. Ted, as was natural in view of his executive status, became a high-level procurement officer, and Edith’s assignments as a Wave lieutenant also drew on her retailing and personnel administration experience at Macy’s. Hundreds of miles from his family and hers (for the first and last time in their lives), these two extremely serious and conscientious people were free, like nearly everyone else after working hours in wartime Washington, to have fun.

When Ted was in his seventies, sex with Edith was still so important to him that he put off lifesaving prostate cancer surgery because it would have rendered him impotent. (At the time, impotence was inevitable after prostate removal.) Ted could not, as Aunt Edith once told me with a mixture of pride and guilt, “bear the thought of never having marital relations again.” I have never seen a better illustration of the opacity, the ultimate mystery, of enduring love than the bond between my aunt and uncle—two souls who, had they not found each other, would have been condemned to the special hell reserved for those who live on the margins of other people’s lives: Old Maid Edith. Ted-Who-Should-Have-Been-A-Priest—and wasn’t it a shame that he had to take care of his brothers and sisters instead of following his true vocation, but the Lord must have His reasons….

—

A HALF-CONTINENT away from his mother and sister, the youngest of the Jacoby siblings was also embarking upon a relationship with a Catholic (albeit a far more lax Catholic than the spouses Edith and Ozzie had chosen). For Bob Jacoby, the provisional life of the Depression and the war years would end soon after he met Irma Broderick. They had known each other for about three months when they were married on July 1, 1944, with the world still at war but an end in sight. The importance of what they didn’t know about each other (“just about everything,” according to Dad) paled by comparison with their desire to start a family in a world where, in the wake of the successful Normandy invasion, the conclusion of the war in an Allied victory had become a near-certainty in the minds of most Americans. At thirty, my father was finally embarking upon his adult life. At twenty-three, my mother was starting over.

My mother, like my father, had a secret that carries no stigma today. She was divorced—a fact of her life, like so much about my father’s life, that I would not discover for many years. She had married, over my grandparents’ strenuous objections, only to leave her feckless young husband when she realized her parents had been right about his character. Fortunately, this brief, unwise union produced no children. Unfortunately, my mother and her first husband had been married in a Catholic ceremony, which meant she might forever be precluded from remarrying within the Church. My parents were therefore married in a Lutheran ceremony. My grandparents preferred to see my mother married in any church rather than before a justice of the peace, so the couple went around Chicago from one house of worship to another until they found a minister who wasn’t fussy about religious provenance. Their first choice had been a particularly beautiful Episcopal church frequented by Chicago society, but they were frostily turned away after a brief inquiry into their backgrounds. My mother’s description of this pragmatic shopping tour for a church, and my Broderick grandparents’ equally pragmatic acquiescence, is entirely consistent with the ambivalent messages that would later characterize my religious upbringing.

At the wedding, the groom was in uniform and the bride wore a rose peau de soie street-length dress and an orchid corsage. I didn’t know that my mother had been married twice until 1966, which turned out to be a big year for the revelation of secrets on both sides of my family. My seventeen-year-old brother was the one who made the discovery; one of his favorite pastimes, when he was home sick from school and Mom had left the house to do various errands, was sifting through my parents’ private papers to see what interesting information he could dig up. (As the reporter in the family, I was quite chagrined that I had not thought of employing such sneaky tactics myself.) On one of Rob’s fishing expeditions, in the type of discovery scene frequently written into the plots of soap operas, he hit pay dirt—my mother’s ancient divorce papers. Like most people, Mom had failed to destroy all of the evidence of her youthful indiscretions. As far as my father was concerned, the secret of my mother’s divorce was hers to tell or not tell as she saw fit—just as my mother regarded the secret of Dad’s Jewish origins as his private property. And by the late sixties, divorce was a secret with limited shock value. Had she been a member of my generation, my mother later said, she would probably have lived with her first husband for a few months and broken up with him, leaving no stain on her record.

Like so many men and women who married during the war—and far more hastily than they would have in a more settled world—my parents would probably never have met each other in peacetime. They exemplified one of the unanticipated side effects of the war—a substantial increase in the number of mixed marriages cutting across geographic, ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries. Most of these unlikely couples, like my parents, managed to stay married in spite of differences in their backgrounds that might well have posed insuperable obstacles to their happiness in a less mobile, more tradition-bound era of American history.

My mother’s status as a divorced woman who could not be married within the Church certainly made it easier for her to marry a Jew and easier for her parents to accept the marriage. Dad did not have to go through the rigmarole of Catholic marriage counseling or promise to raise his children as Catholics (as Ozzie did when he married Mary McHale). And my Broderick grandparents, partly because my mom’s marriage to a Catholic had turned out badly and partly because they genuinely liked my dad, regarded his Jewishness as a relatively minor detail. If Mom’s first marriage were ever to be annulled by the Church, she and my father could be remarried by a priest. And if she remained an outcast from Catholicism, well, my grandparents were more concerned about their daughter’s happiness in this world than in the next. They were not entirely sanguine about the situation, however, for they urged my mother to seek a Church annulment of her first marriage when my brother and I came along. The annulment was granted, some years before my father’s conversion, on grounds that my mother and her first husband had never intended to have children (one of the few grounds for Catholic annulments in those days). It was rumored that my grandfather had paid a bribe to someone in the Chicago Archdiocese in order to grease the wheels, but my grandmother Broderick denied this. “Your gramps could have done it without my knowing,” she acknowledged, “but I don’t believe it. It’s true that we—especially he—wanted your mother to be able to receive the sacraments again, but I don’t think he would have paid good money for it. It wasn’t that hard to get an annulment if you never had children and you and your former husband agreed to say that you never intended to have them.” My grandmother may or may not have been right about what actually happened, but I don’t think Gramps would have hesitated for a moment to pay someone off in order to make things right between God and his little girl. And if he didn’t do it, he probably enjoyed creating the impression that he was rich enough to bribe God’s representatives on earth. In any event, my parents were remarried by a priest after her annulment but before his conversion.

The “blemish” of my mother’s mildly wild youth may have been a psychological plus from my father’s perspective, because it balanced out what he saw as the far greater liability of his being a Jew. In Bob Jacoby’s eyes, my mother was a catch. His knowledge that she had a certain amount of “experience,” had suffered a certain amount of hurt and betrayal, may well have been a plus. At thirty, my dad was not looking for a virgin (in the emotional or physical sense). He was looking for a woman strong enough to bring out the best in him, to help him overcome his weaknesses. This my mother was eventually able to do, even though she had no idea of the full extent of those weaknesses when she married him.

My Broderick grandparents were part of the package. Any reservations they had about acquiring a New York Jew for a son-in-law were overcome by his obvious adoration of their daughter. “When she was young, your mother became involved with men who took advantage of her, who didn’t give her the love and respect she deserved,” my grandmother told me. “Your dad was different. The way he looked at her, you knew he thought of her as a prize. And the proof came later, when he had to choose between gambling and his family and he chose his wife and children.”

Part of the emotional fit between my parents was the space my Broderick grandparents filled in my father’s heart. It is not hard to imagine what their unfailing love meant to my dad, coming as he did from a family whose fractious members were in the habit of cutting one another off for months, years, or eternity. My grandfather Broderick had his faults: he was an old-fashioned Irish patriarch, steeped (like his contemporary, Joseph Kennedy) in the traditional Irish Catholic dichotomy between good girls and bad girls. When my mother displayed a broad streak of rebellion for a well-raised Irish Catholic girl of her generation, Gramps had no idea how to deal with her. He was a man who was used to getting his own way, and he wanted nothing more than to push my mother back into the mold of a good Catholic girl, but there is no possibility that he would ever, for whatever reason, have cut his child out of his life.

My grandmother treated Dad like another of her children. “I think of him as my son, not as a son-in-law,” she would say. It was as natural for my grandmother Broderick to praise as it was for my grandmother Jacoby to criticize, and I noticed the difference at a very young age. In particular, my mother’s mother was always telling Dad what a wonderful father he was to my brother and me, something that must have been especially meaningful to him in view of the parental neglect that characterized his own upbringing. Two months after their wedding, my mother became pregnant with me. Couples who married near the end of the war, when nearly all of the news was good (with the exception of the relatively brief Battle of the Bulge), saw no reason to wait to start their families. The baby boom did not begin officially until 1946, when most of the veterans returned to civilian life, but my parents got a jump start. I was born on June 4, 1945, 363 days after D-Day. Before I was three months old, the war would be over.

My parents were both happy at my arrival, but happiness was too mild a word to describe Bob Jacoby’s response to fatherhood. I recently enlarged a snapshot of the two of us, taken when I was about four months old. I am already posing, looking head-on into the camera, but Dad, holding me in his arms, is in three-quarter profile because he can’t take his eyes off me. In the tiny snapshot, I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but in the enlarged photograph, I see a mesmerized look of undiluted love that takes my breath away. If a woman is lucky, she sees something evocative of that look, something that makes her feel safe and cherished, on the face of a man who loves her as an adult.

Right from the start, my father assumed child-care duties—changing diapers, heating bottles, bathing me—that were performed by few other fathers of his generation. “I don’t think your grandfather, in his entire life, ever changed a diaper,” my grandmother Broderick said. “Not that he didn’t love his children, but it never would have occurred to him to be the one to get up when they cried. I never saw anyone as crazy about his kids as your dad was about you and Robbie.” Needless to say, my mother received no special praise for doing the things that mothers are expected to do for their children.

More important than what my father did was the way he understood the mind of a child. My earliest memories date from age three, when my brother was born and my mother later returned to the hospital with severe anemia and, I suspect, with what would be called depression today. My brother was born in October, and Mom, who had not really regained her strength after the difficult birth of a baby weighing nearly eleven pounds, collapsed and was readmitted to the hospital a few months later. I was terrified because I was sure my mother was going to die; my grandmother’s attempts to convince me otherwise were unavailing, because I had not been allowed to see my mommy. In those days, hospitals never permitted small children to visit, but my father was resourceful, and he understood that nothing but the sight of my mother would assuage my anguish. One day, Dad came home early and led me by the hand to a vacant lot strewn with broken bottles and dog droppings but with a clear view of Mom’s room in the small Harvey hospital where she was being treated. He positioned me on his shoulders, and then my mother stuck her head out the window and waved and blew kisses. She couldn’t keep the window open long, but my dad stood there holding me until dusk fell and the lights went on, enabling us to see my mother appear once more behind the glass. That night, I slept without nightmares. For the rest of my mom’s hospital stay, Dad took me every day to wave good night to her from our position in the vacant lot.

I am still not certain how my father, starved for affection and attention throughout his childhood, learned how to love and how to show love. “There was a natural goodness about your dad” was my grandmother Broderick’s explanation. “Some people, when they don’t get what they need as children, keep back the same things from their own children. Bob wanted you kids to have what he didn’t. I don’t think he ever deliberately did a mean thing to anyone in his life.”

—

MOM WAS the disciplinarian in our family. I remember only one incident during my entire childhood that prompted my mother to speak the words, dreaded in so many households, “Wait till your father gets home.” At seven, I was allowed to walk to a small, family-owned grocery store about five blocks from our home in Hazel Crest, the Chicago suburb where we moved after my dad was fired from his job in the city. Such freedom would be unthinkable for any seven-year-old almost anywhere in the country today. The walk to the store was a much-anticipated treat, because there I would decide how to allot my allowance—fifty cents a week at the time—choosing among comic books, candy, and sets of prominent wax teeth (which we put in our mouths in order to “scare” our friends). The only drawback was that my four-year-old brother always wanted to tag along, and my mother almost always insisted that I take him with me. Robbie and I got along well most of the time—his unqualified adoration of me went a long way toward reconciling me to his existence—but I deeply resented having to take him along on these walks, which I relished because of the absence of adult supervision for the ten or fifteen minutes it took to get to the store. I would run far ahead of Robbie and torment him by pretending that I was going to leave him behind. One day, I had an inspiration. As we passed a creek that lay between our house and the store—needless to say, we were strictly forbidden to go near the water by ourselves—I ducked behind a tree and yelled, “I’m going to jump into the creek and drown myself now. You’ll never see me again.” Letting out a bloodcurdling yell, I produced a scream that faded away on the last notes, “Here I go-o-o-o.” Robbie ran home, crying and telling my mother that I had jumped into the creek and drowned myself. Mom came running, dragged me out from behind the tree, and ordered me home. Her face paled and her lips tightened—both signs that she was furious—but she didn’t raise her voice. “I just don’t know what your punishment should be,” she said. “I’ve never heard of a child scaring her little brother that way. We’ll wait till your father gets home to talk about it.” When Dad got home—there was no happy greeting, because the exhausted Robbie was still napping and I was confined to my room—I heard my mother telling him what had happened in a tone of controlled anger. My father, as usual, lost his temper and raised his voice when he ticked off the possible punishments. No allowance for a month, he told my mother, wouldn’t be nearly enough. Being sent to my room was no punishment at all, because I would just amuse myself by reading. Ditto for not being allowed to go outside and play. Finally—I knew the penalty would be something unusual—Dad came into the room and asked me if I understood why he was so upset about my behavior and why I deserved a serious punishment. Then he delivered an admonition of such gravity—and absent his usual hyperbole—that I have never forgotten either his tone or his precise words. “Your brother loves you, he worships the ground you walk on,” Dad said, “and that’s why he makes a pest of himself. I know you don’t like it when he follows you everywhere, but that’s no excuse for what you did. You knew he was too little not to believe you when you said you were going to drown yourself, and you deliberately frightened him. You used his love for you against him. That’s a terrible, terrible thing to do no matter how old you are.” You used his love for you against him. Both the concept, and the way my father articulated it, were new to me—among several firsts that would embed the day’s events in my memory.

By the end of my father’s speech, I certainly did understand the weight of my offense. I was experiencing, for the first time (perhaps for the only time in my life), what the Catholic Church calls “perfect contrition”: remorse prompted not by fear of punishment but by a genuine sense of the wrongfulness and hurtfulness of one’s acts. In the Act of Contrition recited in the confessional during my childhood, the distinction between imperfect and perfect contrition was expressed in the lines, “And I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all, because they have offended thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love.” Needless to say, imperfect contrition was the more common form of regret. If you were unlucky enough to meet with a fatal accident in a state of mortal sin—without any opportunity to go to confession—only perfect contrition could save you from the pains of hell. Imperfect contrition, however, was good enough for the confessional.

No confessor could have been a sterner judge than my father, who was unmoved by my tears (another first!) and said that “feeling bad” wasn’t enough. “I’ve never spanked you, but I’m going to now,” he declared purposefully. Then he turned me over his knee and gave me several halfhearted spanks on my bottom. When I looked up, he was crying too. “Don’t ever make me spank you again,” he said. While I don’t, as a rule, believe in corporal punishment, I disagree with psychologists who say it’s always bad to spank a child. Since I had never been spanked before, I knew that my father had gone against his own nature by imposing the humiliation of corporal punishment upon me; I knew, in the language of adults, that this was a symbolic punishment appropriate to the seriousness of my crime. Words could never have made the same impression on me. (Needless to say, the spanking would not have made an indelible impression if physical discipline had been a common occurrence in our home. I had already noticed that children whose parents did spank them—and most of my friends’ parents did—seemed utterly indifferent to the humiliation and ran away laughing as soon as the spanking was over.) After my father left the room—he had kissed me good night with the reassuring words that his being mad at me didn’t mean he had stopped loving me—my little brother, who had already deepened my remorse by wailing piteously as he heard me being spanked, completed the moral lesson of the day by presenting me with a mutilated slab of fudge cake. Having decided that being deprived of dessert was too great a penalty on top of the other punishments I had already received, Robbie concealed the cake in his fist upon leaving the dinner table and stored it under his bed (he had the bottom bunk) until lights-out.

That my mother turned over the disciplinarian’s role to my father on that occasion was a measure of her emotional astuteness as a parent. Because she was usually the one who set the limits, and because she had a more clear-eyed view of my character than my soft touch of a father did, she knew that his disapproval would leave a deeper imprint than hers.

The years between 1948, when Dad lost his job, and the summer of 1953, when he got his second chance and we moved to Lansing, were the most difficult time in my parents’ marriage. But I didn’t know—or, at any rate, I didn’t know much. Sometimes at night I could hear them fighting about money, mainly because my father could never keep his voice down in an argument, but when morning came, I would tell myself it had just been a bad dream. I didn’t know anything about my father’s struggles with gambling, or about his futile search for another job (it seemed perfectly natural to me that he would work for my grandfather Broderick). During this period, I am sure that my dad’s lingering shame about his Jewish origins took second place to his remorse for his own behavior (though his conversion to Catholicism addressed both issues).

I have only one memory of my father saying anything about Jews during these years. In the spring and early summer of 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and executed as atomic spies. Nearing age eight, I was very much aware of the case, not only because my parents and grandparents talked about it frequently but because I was already a newspaper reader. My father was extremely upset about the Rosenbergs, and I’m quite sure this was the first time I ever heard him single out anyone as “Jewish.” He would tell my mother that he was afraid Americans would blame “all of the Jewish people” for the treason of those two (like everyone in my world, he took it for granted that both Rosenbergs were guilty). My mother would try to calm him down by telling him that America wasn’t Europe, that it wasn’t “the American way” to blame all of the people in a group for what one person had done. This may not have been the most persuasive argument in a country only a decade away from the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, but it seemed to satisfy my father—until the next news break in the Rosenberg story, when he would erupt again. When the Rosenbergs were executed that June, Dad was relieved, commenting that “maybe now we won’t be hearing the names Rosenberg, Greenglass every night on the news.” My grandmother Broderick, characteristically, could think only about the two boys who had been orphaned by the executions. “I don’t know whether she [Ethel] was guilty or not, I don’t know about these things,” Granny would say, “but I think the judge should have been thinking about those two children before he sent their mother to the electric chair.” When other members of the family would say that the judge had no choice if the Rosenbergs had really “helped give Russia the bomb,” Granny would reply, “Well, I’m not so sure it’s so terrible if they do have the bomb. If both countries have the bomb, then it would be stupid for either of them to drop it.”

My grandmother’s belief that no country would be stupid enough to deliberately use atomic weapons was shared by all of the adults in my family. Many of my classmates at the Ascension School, where I attended first and second grades, were very scared of being killed by “the bomb,” but my parents’ and grandparents’ convictions had insulated me from what was then a widely held childhood fear. Like all school authorities at the time, the nuns at Ascension had a plan for what to do in the event of an atomic attack. If fire broke out, we were, of course, to file outside as quickly as possible—but if an air raid alarm sounded, we were to head for the school basement. The nuns advised us to make sure that our basements at home were stocked with canned goods so that we could survive until the radiation had “gone away.” Radiation, we were told, could kill us even if we couldn’t see it or smell it. This did worry me, because our house in Hazel Crest had no basement. If the bomb was on its way, I wasn’t sure we would have time to make it to my grandparents’ house in Harvey, which did have a basement but was a ten-minute drive away. When I brought the nuns’ advice home to my parents, they told me, in no uncertain terms, that the Russians were not going to drop the bomb because they didn’t want the Americans to drop the bomb on them. “The Russians don’t want their people to be hurt any more than we want our people to be hurt” was the gist of what Mom and Dad had to say—and that made perfect sense to me. Russians had families just like ours, I was told, and Russian parents didn’t want to see their children suffer any more than American parents did. Because we said a prayer every day in school for “the conversion of Russia,” I had a vague idea that Russians didn’t believe in God and might therefore be more likely to start a war. My parents skipped over the whole issue of godlessness and told me that regardless of what religion the Russians practiced, it didn’t mean they weren’t good people. (My parents never suggested that the Russian leaders might not be as good as the Russian people. By the time I started thinking about such matters, Stalin was dead—and I had never really pictured him in my mind. Adolf Hitler, whose image still appeared in countless newsreels, was the bogeyman of my childhood.)

Looking back, I see that the tenor of these discussions about the bomb set my family apart from our neighbors. They also marked the beginning of my parents’ (especially my mother’s) sabotage of the Catholic education they insisted I receive. Yes, the Church was the final authority on faith and morals. But a lot of what the nuns and priests said wasn’t really concerned with “faith and morals”—even though they might suggest otherwise—but was merely a matter of opinion. The godlessness and perfidy of the Russians was one of those matters of opinion. On such subjects, I was told, one’s own conscience and brain were more reliable guides than the pronouncements of the Church. There could hardly have been a more subversive message in the Catholic world of the fifties.

—

MY MEMORIES of this early period of my childhood, before we left for Lansing, are almost entirely happy, and they remain much more vivid than my recollections of the first few years after our move to Michigan. I am certain that I would be a very different person today had I spent my entire childhood in Lansing and Okemos—not only because I would have been separated from my Broderick grandparents at a younger age but because I would not have been so thoroughly exposed to Chicago itself. The city, epitomizing excitement, achievement, and glamour, became a potent presence in my imagination during those formative years.

The relationship between cities and suburbs was very different during my early childhood from what it would become by the time I was a teenager. My parents had moved to suburban Hazel Crest in pursuit of a backyard and better schools, but we still looked to Chicago for shopping, restaurants, culture, and baseball. It was understood that only the city could supply such amenities, and we would have been incredulous had we been told that in only ten years, people like us would take our business to suburban shopping malls (the term mall didn’t even exist during my early childhood) instead of downtown.

To me, baseball meant Comiskey Park, where my beloved White Sox played; culture meant the Museum of Science and Industry; and “going shopping” meant only one thing—a trip to Marshall Field’s (whose founder coined the slogan “The customer is always right”) on State Street in Chicago’s Loop. My grandmother, mother, and I would all dress up in the good clothes (including gloves and, for the adults, hats) that all women wore to go downtown in those days. We nearly always took the elevated train into the city, which was part of the fun. As the familiar skyline came into view, I would become so excited that my stomach started to hurt. The greatest treat of all was just ahead—disembarking a block from Field’s into an artificial darkness created by the network of overhead tracks and the tall, densely packed buildings in the heart of the Loop. As many times as we made the trip, I never ceased to be enchanted by the way the bright lights of the stores dispelled the gloom; this quintessential city image, of lights fighting the darkness, appeared in my dreams and helped form my dreams of the future.

I had already decided that I wanted to become a newspaper reporter when I grew up, and that was another dream generated during the Chicago phase of my childhood. The city still had many competing papers when I was small. I started reading the ultraconservative Tribune for the baseball box scores and wound up reading the Sun-Times and the Daily News as well, for my grandfather pointed out that these papers provided different interpretations of the news of the day. Gramps took me on a tour of Tribune Tower, where I stared wide-eyed at the huge presses and carefully wrote down one of the slogans engraved on the building, Thomas Jefferson’s: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press that can not be limited without being lost.”

—

CLOSER TO home, there was a neigborhood institution that was as enticing to me as anything in the city. Bowl Center, my grandfather’s bar and bowling alley in Harvey, was the most enjoyable spot in my universe. My mother did not consider Bowl Center an appropriate environment for her children, but she usually yielded to my pleas that I be allowed to watch the ball game there on Saturday afternoons during the stifling Chicago summers. The bar didn’t have air-conditioning—only movie theaters had air-conditioning in those days—but it was cooler than anywhere else because it was dark, illuminated only by neon beer signs (Schlitz: The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous) and the flickering light from the television. Gramps had seen the possibilities of television early on, and each year, the newest model appeared over the bar. Bowl Center had the first TV, the first large-screen TV (large meaning larger than nine inches), and, finally, the first color TV in the neighborhood. By game time at 1:30 on Saturdays, there would be standing room only around the bar. The crowd would remain until the last out, when wives would drift in to tell their husbands, with commanding rather than neutral inflections, that there was still time to wash cars or mow lawns before dinner was ready. It was a family bar, even though the drinking crowd consisted almost entirely of men. They always made a big fuss over me, as the bartender (often Gramps himself, who tended bar only on Saturdays now that his real estate business was flourishing) made me one Shirley Temple after another. I became a true baseball fan during those long, somnolent afternoons, tutored by men who were old enough to remember the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and the legendary Yankee teams of the 1920s. Most of them, like Gramps, were of Irish descent and were gifted storytellers who never tired of talking. They argued endlessly about which team was better, the “Murderers’ Row” Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig, or the fifties’ Yankees of Mantle and Berra. To me, there was only one important point: the arrogant Yankees almost always won. They beat us (“us” being the White Sox rather than the Cubs, because Harvey adjoined the South Side of Chicago) year after year. When the World Series came around, the Yanks proceeded to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers. During the Series, the Bowl Center crowd always rooted for the Dodgers on “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” principle, and we sympathized with the perennially disappointed fans of Dem Bums. My father, of course, had been a Dodger fan as a child, something that surprised the men in the bar, who didn’t know that Dad had grown up in Brooklyn because he didn’t have a Brooklyn accent. (The popular television series titled The Goldbergs fostered a widespread identification of Brooklyn with “Jewish” accents in the fifties—just as the movie Saturday Night Fever would produce an equally stereotypical equation of Brooklyn and working-class Italian-American accents in the seventies.)

One of my mother’s main objections to my presence at Bowl Center was that I was bound to be exposed to bad grammar and vulgar language—what she called “lower-class” speech. In spite of (or perhaps because of) his having been raised in a much better-educated home than my mother’s, Dad had no such objections. Robbie and I would imitate what we heard at home, he told my mother firmly (one of the few times he overruled her on a child-rearing issue), and, in any case, the men in the bar hardly ever cursed when I was around. This was so. Whenever one of them started to use “Jesus…” as a prelude to a curse in my presence, he would quickly turn the curse into a pious utterance by adding the Catholic formula “…Mary, and Joseph.” Once, as my grandfather let out a “Goddammit,” it came out, “Goddammit, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” The strongest epithet I ever heard in that bar was “horseshit,” a word I did use quite frequently on the playground when the nuns weren’t listening (contrary to my father’s prediction).

Those Saturday afternoons were, I now realize, a running history lesson of a particular kind—history from the vantage point of working-class men, then in their forties, fifties, and early sixties, who had grown up in near-poverty, survived the Depression, and lived into an era of prosperity they could never have envisaged when they were young. Nearly all of the men had been born at home (as, indeed, my mother was in 1921), because their parents would never have considered spending hard-earned money on a hospital birth. I heard of mothers who died giving birth because, by the time the family realized something was wrong and a doctor was called, it was too late to do anything. I heard of children who had suffered from scurvy and rickets during the Depression, of frantic efforts to borrow the money for a new drug—sulfa—that was said to save people in danger of death from pneumonia. These men revered Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom they gave full credit for bringing the country through the Depression and the war. None of my grandfather’s customers had been out of a job since 1940, when the economy began gearing up for war. They owned homes and cars, and many of them (like my grandfather himself) could point with pride by the early fifties to the first child in their families ever to get a college education. Although they venerated the memory of FDR, nearly all of them voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. Adlai Stevenson, they said, knew nothing about “the common man.” He was no FDR. He was not even Harry Truman. He was also divorced, and these men subscribed to the notion that “a man who can’t run his own family can’t run the country.” Gramps had known many of his customers since childhood, and he was the most successful among them. Though he and my grandmother had lost their house after the stock market crash, he had enough resources in 1932, when real estate prices hit rock bottom, to borrow money from a bank in order to buy Bowl Center. When Prohibition was repealed, the profits from the ever-reliable bar would enable Gramps to start his own real estate firm. By the early fifties, he didn’t really need Bowl Center (which he eventually sold), but he liked being there, and he enjoyed his position as the most enterprising among a group of men who had all done better than they ever imagined they could. I would often see Gramps take a twenty-dollar bill out of the cash register and slip it to one of his cronies, “to tide you over till payday.”

What I remember most about those years is spending a great deal of time with adults. They were all interesting to me, and they were all interested in me. My granny, the most purely decent person I have ever known, was the tender heart of the Broderick family. My grammar school was about eight blocks from my grandparents’ house, and, although I was strictly forbidden to walk over there from school by myself, I ignored the prohibition one day when I got into a fight with two boys on the playground. There was a lone Negro girl in my second-grade class, and I had punched one of the boys in the face when I heard him calling her “tar baby” and “nigger.” He responded by knocking me to the ground, and I ran off howling toward Granny’s, without asking anyone for permission to leave. My frantic grandmother met me about a block from her house: the boys had tattled to the nun in charge of the second grade, and she had phoned ahead. By then I was as scared (because I wasn’t quite sure whether I had taken the right street to get to Granny’s house) as I was furious at the boys. I was unable to repeat the terrible word; it came out “nig…” when I tried to say it to Granny. I had already heard that word at Comiskey Park when my favorite player, Orestes (“Minnie”) Minoso, befuddled yet another opposing pitcher with his aggressive baserunning. Minoso, a coal black Dominican who eventually became one of the most popular players in the history of the White Sox franchise, was a provocative baserunner very much in the style of the young Jackie Robinson. Although the home fans generally called out “nigger” to praise Minoso (as in “Look at that nigger fly!”), my father and grandfather instantly informed me that the word was used only by ignorant and uneducated people, and that it was an insult to Negroes (or, as Gramps called them, “the colored”—the polite term for Negroes during his childhood). That was why, I explained to my grandmother, I had pushed the boy in the face. There had been no doubt that the word nigger, used on the playground, was intended to wound and insult the only Negro girl in our class. Granny took me into her backyard, which was filled with vivid tulips of every hue. Granny pointed to her garden and said, “It would be plain silly to say that red tulips are good and yellow tulips are bad. They’re just different colors, that’s all, both of them beautiful. That’s the way it is with colored people and white people. Humans come in different colors, just like flowers. The color of their skin doesn’t tell you anything about what’s inside.” Instead of fighting the next time, Granny suggested, I should explain why the boys were wrong by telling them about the tulips. My mother, when she learned what had happened on the playground, also thought the tulip analogy was a fine way to convince bullies that they shouldn’t use racial slurs. My father, however, declared that “people like that only understand a punch in the face.” “Bob,” my mother said sharply, “she was the one who got hurt and knocked down.” I didn’t know then that my father had been victimized during his boyhood by the same kind of apprentice bigots. Looking back on this incident, I am struck most forcefully by the realization that none of the adults in my life told me that I should have minded my own business and done nothing.

—

IF WE HAD lived in New York rather than in Chicago, the human landscape of my childhood would have been completely different. In 1912, my Broderick grandmother had to quit school after eighth grade so that she could contribute to her family’s household expenses by picking onions for twenty-five cents a day in the farmland still surrounding Chicago. In that same year, with their father’s legal career still flourishing, Aunt Edith and Uncle Ozzie were attending Manhattan private schools and being groomed for Ivy League universities. And although Ozzie and Edith eventually had to make their own way after their father gambled away his legacy, they never lost the aura of entitlement engendered by their privileged upbringing.

By the fifties, Granny Jacoby and Aunt Edith had both relegated the memory of the family’s downward mobility to the unpleasant past. By the time I came to know them, they seemed to regard their prosperous lives (courtesy of Uncle Ted) as nothing more than their due. Only rarely and vaguely did they talk about the Depression or the twenties, when Ozzie stepped in to support the family while his father’s life disintegrated. The occasional allusions to a wealthy past—the unimaginable time when Granny Jacoby was young and Aunt Edith a little girl—sounded like a remote fairy tale, unconnected either to the specific history of the Jacoby family or to any larger social history.

From my father’s family, I could never have absorbed the lessons I learned from my maternal grandparents—that people could not always make it on their own; that life and society could hand out unexpected and undeserved blows; that intelligence and hard work did not always lead to success for those born without educational and economic advantages. As far as Granny Jacoby was concerned, only moral turpitude (her husband’s) could have caused the family’s financial reverses. Otherwise, the Jacobys would have remained where they belonged—on top.

Before meeting my mother, my father had halfhearted intentions of returning to New York when he was discharged from the army at the end of the war. But there was no chance of that after my mother met Granny Jacoby and Aunt Edith: she immediately sized up both women as born meddlers and realized that my father was much better off living a half-continent away from them. My mom was appalled by Granny Jacoby’s constant criticism of my father, who, although he disliked being around his mother, nevertheless still longed for her approval.

Uncle Ozzie was the only member of my father’s family whom I liked when I was a child, but I did not come to know him well until I was an adult and turned to him for help in reconstructing the family’s past. I didn’t really know Aunt Edith or Granny Jacoby either, but what I saw and heard on our trips to New York was enough to convince me that I didn’t want to spend much time with either of them. In my thirties, I would begin to revise this judgment of my aunt as she told me more about her own relations with her difficult mother, but my view of Granny Jacoby is, if anything, harsher than it was when I last laid eyes on her as a teenager.

When we first started visiting Dad’s family in New York, Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted lived in their own house on Staten Island, and Granny Jacoby had a separate apartment. In the fifties, before the opening of the Verrazano Bridge, Staten Island seemed even less a part of New York City than it does now. With its large tracts of still-undeveloped wooded land, the island seemed far less urban to me than the Chicago suburbs. Neither Aunt Edith nor Uncle Ted seemed to have any interest in Manhattan (though Ted still went into “the city,” as everyone called it, to work at Macy’s). They lived in an insular, largely Irish Catholic world—most of Ted’s family lived on Staten Island—and the Church was the center of their lives. We always stayed with Edith and Ted, because my parents couldn’t afford a New York hotel, but Mom and Dad naturally took us into the city on the Staten Island ferry so that we could see the famous sights of Manhattan. Edith and Granny Jacoby never came along. The city was too noisy. Too dirty. Too dangerous. Too expensive. The last point was always made by Granny Jacoby in a tone implying that my father could not possibly afford a carriage ride through Central Park or a lunch in one of the Rockefeller Center restaurants. This attitude toward Manhattan—a place I found even more intoxicating than Chicago because it was less familiar—seemed to me a natural extension of Aunt Edith’s and Granny Jacoby’s killjoy attitude toward everything. In view of the cultural sophistication of several generations of Sondheims and Jacobys, this antiurban posture was weirder than I knew. Edith was a passionate music lover; as a young working woman, charged with the responsibility of supporting her widowed mother, she had scrimped on food in order to buy tickets to the Metropolitan Opera and concerts at Carnegie Hall. Yet she secluded herself in the only part of New York City then separated from the concert halls of Manhattan by a two-hour combination of bus, ferry, and subway rides. She was also an art lover (something I did not know at the time), but she only visited museums en route to or from the Catholic shrines of Europe. As far as Edith was concerned, the great collections of the Manhattan museums might as well have been an ocean away. When Uncle Ted, who did like restaurants and good food, would suggest that they get dressed up and have “a night on the town,” Edith would usually agree in order to please him. But it was easy to see that she would have been happier eating one of her own bland and horrible dinners, reading some inspirational article or book connected with Catholicism (especially the sufferings of Catholic leaders, like Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, under the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe), and going to bed early in order to be up in time for the 8 A.M. Mass she attended every day at St. Christopher’s Church.

On our summer trips to New York, I always begged to see pictures of my dad, and the rest of his family, when he was a little boy. At first, I expected Granny Jacoby to bring out boxes of snapshots and photo albums, because that’s what my granny in Chicago did whenever I wanted to see pictures of my mom when she was a little girl. But Granny Jacoby always said that most of the old photographs had been misplaced, left behind during a move from one house to another, or (backing up my father) destroyed in a fire. The only picture of my father that I remember seeing during my girlhood was a handsome formal portrait photograph, taken during his freshman year at Dartmouth. The dearth of family snapshots struck me as just one more incomprehensible peculiarity of my Jacoby relatives.

But there was a family album, covering the period from, roughly, 1895 to 1917. At some point, Granny Jacoby had passed it on to Uncle Ozzie. When Uncle Ozzie and Aunt Mary died, the album wound up in the home of their younger son, Jon, a prominent businessman and financier in Little Rock, Arkansas. It is absolutely typical of the Jacoby style that no one had kept track of this treasure trove of pictures: if Aunt Mary had not been a packrat who saved everything, the album, and the light it sheds on my family’s history, would probably have disappeared decades ago. I first heard about the pictures from Judy Jacoby, the widow of Ozzie’s elder son, Jim, who had been his father’s bridge partner for many years and died of lung cancer in his fifties. (I have always wondered whether Jim’s lung cancer was caused by immense amounts of secondhand smoke—for he, like Ozzie, was a nonsmoker—inhaled at bridge tournaments.) I had never met Jim as a child, but I knew him slightly as an adult because, like his father, he sometimes passed through New York on the way to tournaments. And I had never met Jon at all, though I naturally knew who he was—the only male Jacoby for two generations, as my dad once remarked, who had been smart enough to hang on to the money he made instead of gambling it away. Ozzie’s two sons, and my brother and I, were the only grandchildren of Oswald Nathaniel and Edith Sondheim Jacoby, yet we never met as children. This too strikes me as distinctly odd—a mark not of estrangement but of the carelessness that seems to me both a cause and effect of the Jacobys’ collective memory loss. It simply never occurred to my father or my uncle that their children, first cousins, might benefit from getting to know one another, or that they ought to go out of their way to facilitate such family contacts. When Judy Jacoby told me about the photo album in 1995, I immediately called Jon in Little Rock—the first time I had ever spoken to him—and asked about the pictures. Yes, he said, there was an album filled with turn-of-the-century snapshots. He wasn’t sure who all of the people in the pictures were, but I was welcome to come down and take a look.

—

IN THE ALBUM of yellowing photographs in Little Rock, I finally discover the family images I so wanted to see as a little girl. I already know what my grandfather looked like from the snapshot Aunt Edith gave me after my father’s funeral, but I have never seen pictures of my Jacoby and Sondheim great-grandparents or my grandfather’s siblings, Harold and Geppy. Here is the patriarch, Max, a white-haired man with a bowler hat and trim beard, slim and dapper in his seventies, holding Ozzie and the newborn Edith in 1907. And Sarah Sondheim, Granny Jacoby’s beautiful mother, her still-dark hair piled atop her head, using a cane and walking a ridiculously tiny dog along a river promenade. One of the biggest surprises is Granny Jacoby herself, a young mother with long, dark hair flowing down her back, playing with Ozzie in the middle of a meadow. I never saw her with her hair down or with anything remotely resembling a playful expression on her face. In another picture with her brother and sisters, she smiles even more brightly. I have no trouble connecting the vibrant, youthful Si, Carrie, Mabel, and Adele with the jolly aunts and uncle I met fifty years after this picture was taken, but I find it virtually impossible to reconcile the unbending grandmother I knew with the approachable young woman in the snapshot. Why would she never show me these pictures when I was growing up? Did she, too, have trouble reconciling the images of the young wife and mother with the crabbed old woman she became? Perhaps it was unbearable for her to recall a time in her life when the future still stretched out endlessly, and hopefully, before her—a time when she expected to raise a family whose members would remain as devoted to one another as her own brothers and sisters did throughout their lives. Would I feel differently about her today if she had ever taken out this album and shared it with me when I was a little girl? Would I be more willing to forgive her for the way she treated my father?

Finally, Jon shows me our Jackson great-grandmother’s silver tea service, a testament to the early-nineteenth-century wealth of Eve Jackson Jacoby’s family. Granny Jacoby had been absolutely determined to hang on to the family heirlooms, even when she needed money desperately in the 1930s, and she succeeded in passing them on to her children and grandchildren. But she failed to pass on the memories, and the history, embodied in the photo album. She could have turned those pages with me when I was seven, eight, nine, ten, and told me the stories connected with each image, each person. That’s what grandparents do. Or are supposed to do.

—

IT WAS ALWAYS with a most profound sense of relief that we packed the car and headed for the ferry that would take us back across the Verrazano Narrows. Aunt Edith would promise to say a special prayer every day at Mass to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, until she knew we were safely home. This was not merely an indication of her intense religiosity: my father needed all the help he could get. He was, quite simply, the world’s worst driver—a deficiency attributable not only to his blindness in one eye but to his chronic (and on the road, dangerous) distractibility. He was one of those drivers unable to carry on a conversation with anyone in the backseat without turning his head around. On the way home—the trip always took three days in the pre-superhighway era—I would think about the puzzling behavior of my father’s family for an hour or two, until my fascination with the Burma Shave signs put an end to the questions raised by both my aunt’s and grandmother’s behavior. When we got home, I would invariably drag out our own family snapshots, which included pictures of my mom’s parents when they were young. Their images formed my image of where I came from. I wouldn’t think about the missing faces on my father’s side of the family until it was time for our next trip to New York. But I knew, all along, that something important was missing from my image of both my father and myself.