As for this first of the final trio, well, it has a very special place in my heart. As you will understand.
INSTALLMENT 44 11 OCTOBER 76
THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER, SERITA R. ELLISON
On Sunday the 10th of October, I committed the final outrage against my family. I spoke the eulogy at my Mother’s funeral. The family will never speak to me again. I can handle that.
When I say “my family,” I mean, mostly, my Mother’s side. The Rosenthals. Who resemble in more ways than the mind can readily support, the brutalizing members of the Sproul clan in Jerrold Mundis’s current and brilliant novel, GERHARDT’S CHILDREN. They remind me of the first line from Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
And prime among that unhappy family’s myths was the one that Harlan, Serita and Doc’s kid, Beverly’s brother, would wind up either dead in an alley somewhere, having come to a useless end…or rotting away his old age in a federal penitentiary. That I became a writer of some repute and became the first member of either the Rosenthal or the Ellison family to get listed in WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, confounds them to this day. To them, I am like the snail known as the chambered nautilus, that has a shell with rooms in it. As the nautilus lives its brief life it moves from room to room in its shell and finally emerges and dies; thus, it literally carries its past on its back. To the family, I am still a nine-year-old hellion who took a hammer to Uncle Morrie’s piano. (The fact that this never happened, that Morrie never owned a piano, does not in any way invalidate for them the essence, the canonical truth of the legend.)
It is probably no different for anyone reading these words. All families form their opinions of the children early, and so we spend the rest of our lives in large part paying obeisance to shadows who neither care nor in fact have any power over our reality. It is thus for all of us, no matter how sophisticated and cut-loose we may be from the familial spiderweb.
To them, I am a nine-year-old chambered nautilus; even though I ran away from home at the age of thirteen, grew up, and have barely spoken a dozen words to my sister in the past ten years.
But there was still my Mother, whom I supported in large part during the last years of her life, picking up the burden, when I was financially able, from my Uncle Lew and my Uncle Morrie and from Beverly’s husband, Jerold.
My Mother had been terribly ill for many years. To my way of thinking, she wanted to die on May 1st, 1949, when my Father had his coronary thrombosis and died in front of both of us. He was her life, her happier aspect, and she became—in any sensible not even exquisite sense—almost somnambulistic.
In August she had the latest of an uncountable number of strokes, followed it with a full-sized heart attack, and was taken into the Miami Heart Institute. She knew the end was on her and she let me know that was the sum of it when we talked long distance.
She lay there getting worse and worse, and finally, forty-five days before the green blips went to a flat line on the monitor, she was down from one hundred and twenty pounds to forty-one pounds, her lungs were filled with fluid, her brain had swollen so her face was terribly twisted, her leg was filled with blood clots, her blood sugar had risen to an impossible level, she ran a temperature in excess of 102° constantly, she was blind, paralyzed, and no oxygen was going to the brain.
Blessedly, she was in deep coma.
She never recovered consciousness. They kept her on the IV and the monitoring for a month and a half. She was a vegetable and had she ever come out of it would have been an empty shell. I begged them to pull the plug, but they wouldn’t.
The greatest fear my Mother ever had was that some day she would wind up in a nursing home. She thought of them as hellholes, as repositories for discarded loved ones, as the very apotheosis of rejection. She begged us never to put her there.
Shortly before she died, the Miami Heart Institute held one of their “status meetings” and decided she was “stable,” that is, she needed custodial care. And so they wanted her out. They suggested we get her booked into an old folks’ home. They used another phrase. They always do. But it was a hellhole, an old folks’ home.
Beverly, my sister, who had gone through the anguish of the last six weeks down there, was forced reluctantly to find such a place. On Friday, October 8th, 1976, the day my Mother was to be removed from Miami Heart and carted by ambulance to the hellhole, though she was in deep coma and could not possibly have known what was intended for her dead but still-breathing husk, she chose to expire at 5:15 a.m.
In some arcane way, I’m sure she knew.
When my brother-in-law Jerold called to tell me Beverly had just advised him of Mom’s death, he asked if there were any arrangements I particularly wanted.
“Only two,” I said. “Closed casket, and I want to read the eulogy.”
From that moment till Sunday at the funeral services, my family trembled in fear of what I would say. They knew I was no great lover of the clan, and they were terrified I would make a scene, depart from protocol in a way that would humiliate them in front of friends and relatives. They gave very little thought to my feelings about my Mother. But that’s the way it always is, I’m sure, with all families, with all deaths.
I flew all night Saturday and got into Cleveland (where my Mother’s body had been taken, so she could be buried beside my Father) at 6:30 in the morning. I drove to Beverly and Jerold’s house and when Jerold asked to see the eulogy I’d written, which was almost the first thing he said to me, thus indicating the obsessiveness of their concern about “crazy” Harlan and what he might do, I lied and said I hadn’t written anything, that it was to be extemporaneous, from the heart.
The relatives began arriving, and with the exception of my Uncle Lew, who has always been the coolest and the most understanding of the clan, they all circled me warily as if I were a jackal that might at any moment leap for their throats.
At the funeral home, Rabbi Rosenthal seemed equally uneasy about my participation in the ceremonies. It was Succoth, the Jewish harvest holiday, and just a week after Yom Kippur, the holiest of the holies. Thus, certain prayers that are usually spoken at funeral services could not be spoken; alternate words were permissible, but few, so very few.
Rabbi Rosenthal is no relation to my family. His name and my mother’s maiden name being Rosenthal is just coincidence. Like Smith. Or Jones. Or Hayakawa. Or Goetz. Or Piazza. He’s a fine man, the Rabbi Emeritus of Cleveland Jewry, a strong and familiar voice in Cleveland Heights and environs. He has been for many years. But he didn’t know my Mother.
My family felt themselves honored to have pulled off the coup of Rabbi Rosenthal attending to the services. My family thinks in those terms: what looks good…social coups…fine form and attention to protocol. As you may have gathered, I am not concerned with shadow, merely reality.
Nonetheless, he advised me he would speak the opening words and then would call on me.
Before the main room with the pink anodized aluminum casket was opened to the attendees, the immediate family mourners and their spouses and children and grandchildren were taken to a family sitting room to the right of the main chamber. Jane Bubis, Beverly’s best friend, bustled around. Morrie met old chums from Cleveland. My nephew Loren and I insisted on seeing Mom. Everyone told us not to look, that she had withered terribly, that we should “remember her as she had been.” They always tell you to “remember” someone as “they were.” Bear that phrase in mind. The nature of the outrage I committed against my family is contained in my pursuit of that admonition.
Loren and I insisted.
It didn’t look like my Mother. It was a cleverly constructed mannequin intended for some minor wax museum in an amusement park. The embalmers and cosmeticians had done as good a job as could be done, I’m sure; but it wasn’t my Mom. She was already gone. This was a stranger. But I cried. Pain that clotted my chest and made me gasp for breath. But it wasn’t my Mom.
The service began, a
nd when Rabbi Rosenthal called on me, I walked up to the lectern, trailing my hand across the casket foolishly to establish some last rapport with her.
I pulled the pages I’d written from my inside jacket pocket and though there was no appreciable movement in the people sitting in front of me in the main chamber, the agitation I caught with peripheral vision, from the family seated in the side viewing room, was considerable: the frenzied trembling of small fish perceiving a predator in their pool.
Understand something: my sister and I have never been friends. Eight years older than I, she was always distressed at who I was, what I was, what I did. (I have long harbored the fantasy that I was actually a gypsy baby, stolen from the Romany caravan by an attacking horde of Jewish ladies with shopping bags.) Beverly is no doubt an estimable human being, filled to the brimming with love and charity and compassion. I have never been able to discern these qualities in her, but she has many loyal friends and if an election were to be held among the relatives, as to which of us could safely be taken into polite society of an evening without worry about a “scene,” my sister Beverly would win in a walk. Though they take a (to me) somewhat hypocritical pride in my achievements and the low level of fame I’ve achieved for the Ellison family, it is a public pride, not to be confused with actually having to get near me. I can handle that, too.
As I began to read, my sister began to fall apart. I’m not sure if it was the “inappropriateness” (to her mind) of what I was saying, or the fact that I was crying and having difficulty reading the words, or that the torture she had undergone for six weeks had finally broken her, but she began writhing in Jerold’s grasp, and in a voice that could be heard throughout the funeral home hoarsely cried for Jerold to “make him stop, make him stop! Stop him!” Beside her, her daughter, Lisa, my niece, snarled, “Shut up, Mother!” but Beverly never heard her. She was manipulating her environment, and her lunatic brother Harlan was doing another of his disgusting numbers, desecrating the funeral of her Mother. They finally manhandled her into another room, where her cries could still be heard. And I went on, with difficulty. And this is what I said:
My Mother died three days ago. Her name was Serita R. Ellison. The R stood for Rosenthal, her maiden name. I’ll tell you everything I know about her.
My Mother told me only one joke in her entire life. She probably knew a lot of others, but she never told them to me. I’ll tell you the one she told me.
It’s about these two Jewish fellows who meet on a street in Buffalo, New York. They are related, see, but not close; something like in-laws once removed. And Herschel doesn’t care much for Solly, because Solly is always trying to sell him some crazy thing or get him involved in some shtumie business deal. But Herschel gets trapped coming out of the butcher shop and Solly says to him, “Have I got a deal for you!” And Herschel says, “If it’s as good as that last deal, this time we’ll go to the bankruptcy court hand-in-hand.”
And Solly says, “Listen, you can’t pass this one up. It’s terrific! A friend of mine is having an affair with a woman whose second husband’s brother is married to a girl whose father is in business with a guy whose son is a merchandising agent for circuses, and I can get for you, for a mere three thousand dollars, a guaranteed fully grown, two-ton Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey elephant.”
So Herschel looks at him like he’s sprouted another head, and he says, “You know, you’ve gotta be out of your mind. I live in a fifth floor walk-up apartment with a wife and four kids, and one of them is sleeping in the sink we got so little room. What the hell am I gonna do with an elephant, you dummy?”
And Solly says, “Listen, only because you’re married to Gert, I’m gonna make this a special. You can have the elephant for two thousand five hundred.”
Herschel starts screaming. “Listen you yotz, what is it with you, are you deaf or something. I’m telling you I don’t want, I don’t need, I have no use for a two-ton elephant, not for twenty-five hundred, not for nothing. How the hell am I supposed to get the thing up the stairs? What do I feed it? You could die just from the body heat of a thing like that in a four-room apartment. Get away from me, you moron!”
And they argue back and forth, with Solly constantly reducing the price, till finally he says, as a last resort, “Okay, okay, you momser! You want to bleed me, a relative, you got no heart? Okay! My last and final offer. For you…not one…but two! Two two-ton Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey elephants for five hundred dollars!”
And Herschel says, real quick, “Now you’re talking business!”
When Momma told me that joke she was laughing. She laughed very long and very hard, and I did, too. Not because the joke was so funny, although it’s not bad and she told it well, but because she was laughing. I never saw my Mother laugh very much.
From May of 1949 on, I never saw her laugh at all.
That was when my Father died.
It’s impossible to talk about Serita without talking about Doc. Of course I never knew them when they were young and running around the way young people do, but from what I’m told by members of the Rosenthal family, they were some kind of short, Jewish equivalent of Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. They were in love, and they were nuts together.
When my Father died, I think my Mother’s life stopped. It was twenty-seven years of shadows for her. Just marking time. Waiting to join Doc. If there’s anything good about death, and anything that even remotely lightens the pain of my Mother’s death, it is that finally, after twenty-seven years, she came up lucky and went to meet my Dad, to take up where they got cut off in 1949.
I’d tell you how old my Mother was when she died, but as anyone who knew her for more than an hour can tell you, she would rather have had bamboo shoots thrust under her fingernails than reveal her age. She was like that.
She was a good woman, and a decent woman, and had all the right instincts about life, all the usual things people say at funerals; she was also opinionated, stubborn beyond belief, a frequent pain in the ass, and capable of a dudgeon so high it would put the Queen Mother to shame. But God, how she worked for her kids. I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t working. Either beside my Dad in the jewelry stores, or in the B’nai B’rith Thrift Shop, or somewhere. And no matter how much we took, she always came up with what we needed.
I remember once when I was a very little kid—I was not the world’s most tractable youngster—when I did something grotesque and awful; and Mom said, “You’re going to get it when your Father comes home.” No doubt I deserved it. I usually did. And when my Dad got back from work, exhausted and anxious to simply sit down and relax, Mom told him what I’d done and that I needed a good strapping.
Now understand: my family wasn’t that big on corporal punishment. But my Dad took me down in the basement of our house on Harmon Drive in Painesville, and he took off his belt and he did a good job on me.
After a while, I came upstairs, and Mom and Dad were nowhere to be seen. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and through the closed door of their bedroom I could hear my Dad crying. The licking had devastated him much more than it had me. And my Mom was crying, too. She was consoling him, telling him it was the only thing he could do, and together they were solacing each other.
The Rosenthals were a family with a capacity for unhappiness that was awesome to behold, and Mom was a Rosenthal to her shoetops. There was the endless ganging-up of brothers and sisters in ever-changing permutations of the familial equation, with my Mom sometimes allied with Alice and Lew against Morrie, and sometimes associated with Morrie and Dorothy against Martin, and sometimes the hookups were so Machiavellian it was impossible to tell who was mad at whom. But throughout, no matter how affronted she thought she should be, my Mother was a Rosenthal, who would take fire and axe to anyone who tried to harm one hair on the head of her kin. The Russian soul of the Rosenthals, which was so intimately a part of my Mother’s makeup, kept her from tasting unlimited joy in her later years—my niece Lisa was the great exception—they were in
no way like grandchild and grandmother: they were best friends, chums, and the love between them so enriched both their lives that I think Mom’s death is more crushing for Lisa than for any of us—but even so my Mother managed to live to see Beverly well-married and the mother of two good kids, and me safely beyond any possibility of spending my life in jail. She took that to be treasure indeed.
I wish I could tell you more about Serita Ellison, but the sad, sorry fact is that we lived our lives as shadows to one another. We never really understood each other, the dreams never realized, the hopes set aside, the hungers that made us alien to one another. And so at final moments, as I speak of her, I try to hold the important memories; and the one that is richest, most recent is the picture of her in New Haven, Connecticut, in February of last year. I was invited to speak at the Yale Political Union, at Yale University, and I brought Mom up for the prestigious event. She was like a twenty-year-old girl. She was, as she used to put it, “in Seventh Heaven.” Her kid was lecturing at Yale! How she did kvell! What naches! Radiant, like all the suns of the universe. It was snowing so hard in New Haven, and the drifts were so deep, and it was so bitterly cold, I was terrified that a woman in her condition would suffer damage. But she strode around like a cossack, I had to run to keep up with her.
And at my lecture, when I introduced her, she stood up and nodded so regally to all the Yalies that I thought I’d burst from pleasure. And when they brought over my books for her to autograph, she wrote, “Thank you for liking my son’s books.”
Near the end, when she was clearly in pain and knew she was going away, we talked several times a day long distance, and I kept saying, “I’ll come down there.” And she kept saying, “No, I don’t want you to see me like this. Beverly and Lisa are here, and I’m all right.” She was more lucid than she’d been in years; I guess she knew it was all over; and she said to me during what I guess was the last time we talked, though it might not have been the last time, “You turned out all right and I love you.”