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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Why, almost 50 years later, is my mother still protecting the man who abused us both?
Apr 29, 2003 | My mother idolized her father, Chaim Melech Rifkin. Before I was born she painted his portrait in oils and hung it on the wall in the dining room next to the one she did of herself. He had small deep-set eyes like my mother's. In the painting he wore a fedora, the crown dimpled to the touch of thumb and middle finger, the brim dipped over his aquiline nose and closely cropped gray mustache. His skin was luminescent, as if lit from within. My mother's face had that same radiance. For her self-portrait she had gazed into the mirror and painted soft reddish curls heaped atop her head. The red of her hair was echoed in her lips, only the shade was a deeper crimson, like blood.
I called him Zeyde, the Yiddish word for grandfather. He was old by the time I knew him, short and frail looking, a yarmulke on his head. We lived with Zeyde and his third wife, Celia, in the upstairs of a brick two-family house in the Bronx, which he bought when my mother was 7. Celia was a tall, robust woman who towered over him. Her thick jowls set her face in a fixed frown.
Soon after their marriage Celia and Zeyde stopped getting along. They slept in different rooms. Celia had the large bedroom with two single beds in the back near the bathroom. Zeyde slept in a little room at the front of the house, right above the stairs.
At dawn he would pray, sitting in a hard chair facing the sun-glazed window. Fixed on his forehead over his yarmulke was the black square box and leather strap of his tefillin. The box looked hard against his skin. One leather strap continued in a spiral tightly wound down his arm and ending in his palm where it was wound again and again. In his left hand he held a prayer book. I thought he was tying himself up to God.
One afternoon Zeyde called me into the little room. He was lying on his side on top of the borscht-colored bedspread. He patted the bed in a space next to him, gesturing for me to lie down. I didn't want to. I wasn't tired and I hated naps. But I was 5 and did what I was told. Lying down on my side with my back to him, I could see his worn leather slippers side by side on the floor. Large oxygen tanks for his asthma stood in a corner. His bubble-gum pink teeth smiled scarily out of a glass on the bedside table.
He brushed his hands lightly over my eyes as if to shut them. I closed them and pretended to sleep. I seemed to lie there forever, and then I felt his hand beneath the elastic of my slacks. I closed my eyes tighter. His fingers moved beneath my underpants and down in between my legs, tickling me. I squeezed my eyes shut, afraid to open them. Zeyde was being bad. Me too. I felt sticky where his fingers were. Finally, he took his hand away. Then he took my wrist in his hand. His grip was strong, not like an old man's. He put my hand inside his zipper, closed my fingers on rubbery flesh. I pulled my hand away, my heart pounding. He grabbed my wrist again. I yanked away. Because I let him touch me he thinks it's my turn to touch him, I thought. "I think I hear Mommy calling," I lied. The sound of my voice broke into the air like an alarm and I ran downstairs.
I never told my mother. At first because I didn't flee the second he touched me, and then later, during my adolescence, the secret became a weapon I imagined hurling at her self-righteousness. She thought she knew everything. Over and over I'd imagined her devastation when I told her about the father she worshiped.
In my mother's eyes, her father was a man of God, full of rules. Forty-nine years later, the episode had taken on a dreamlike quality. I needed to test it. I needed to ask my 86-year-old mother about Zeyde before she became too old or ill to respond.
I picked up the phone. I couldn't look her in the face.
"I've been thinking about my childhood," I said. "There was a time I never told you about, a time when Zeyde touched me. You know, inappropriately."
"Yes, you did," she said, not missing a beat, not sounding surprised. I was floored. I was certain I had never told her. I remembered telling my brother once, many years ago. Perhaps he told her. But I didn't want to get into an argument.
"I don't remember ever telling you," I said without accusation.
"Well, that's how important it was," she said. "You don't even remember."
I gripped the telephone receiver, staring at a frayed edge of the rug. This is how it had always been. She had a way of turning the tables on me. I held my breath. Talking to her felt like blowing up a balloon -- in the split second that it took to gather another breath, the hot air rushed back down my throat choking me. I realized how much I had wanted her to be surprised, to be sorry. I wanted her to ask me how I felt. I waited, hoping she'd renege and take my silence for a reproach. But there was nothing, and the silence became a hole into which I disappeared.
"Did he ever do it to anyone else?" I asked finally. "Did he ever touch you?"
"Yes," she said. Her tone was neutral, with a slight hint of defiance. I stared dumbly into space. How could she adore a father who had done that to her? How could she live in his house and leave me alone with him unprotected?
"How old were you?" I asked.
"I don't know. Around 4."
"He touched you?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"It was Friday night. He called me into his bedroom and asked me to turn off the light. He was reading the newspaper on his bed."
I tried to feel grateful that she was being candid with me. "Did you go into his bed?"
"No, I was on the floor."
"How did you feel?"
"I probably liked it," she said. Why was she letting him off the hook?
"You weren't frightened?"
"No."
"Did it happen more than once?"
"Yes." The mother I knew was becoming a stranger. I heard myself asking questions as if I were a social worker taking a case history. Inside I was curled up in a ball.
"How many times?"
"I don't know."
"Did he ever touch your sisters?"
"I don't know, I never told them. You have to understand men in those days were very -- what's the word? Repressed. They hardly had sex because their wives were always tired. They didn't know what they were doing. They didn't think children remembered anything."
I was flabbergasted. Repressed? I would say he wasn't repressed enough. She was 4 years old, for god's sake. "You didn't think it was wrong?"
"I knew it was wrong. But I must've liked it. Don't you have anything more important to do? You're making too much of this. You're lifting the rocks and looking under them."
My eyes fell on the tangle of wires falling from the TV and I felt myself waver in my old habit of giving in to her. Then, I felt my insides churn and I wanted to scream. I said, "I don't think I'm making too much of it." I wanted to pummel her. I wanted her to break down. "Did he ever want you to touch him?"
"No."
"Did you ever see his genitals?"
"No. He probably turned in such a way so I couldn't see him. He rubbed up against me."
