Dirty Genes

CHAPTER 4

  Abra and Beth were in training all day at the conference on Friday. They attended sessions during the day and in the evening had supper with Abra’s old friends from her USC doctoral program. On Saturday, they continued with training sessions but turned down offers to have dinner. They had made a reservation at Azalea’s, one of Abra’s favorite Charleston restaurants. Over their first glass of wine, they chatted about the conference, and then Abra moved the conversation to the real reason for their dinner.

  “It’s time, Beth. At last. It’s time for me to tell you about my past. You knew the day would come when I would tell you my secrets. Well, this is the day. I am so sorry that I hid my life from you. I just couldn’t tell you all the awful things in my life. Something terrible happened this week. It’s why I was late getting here.” Once she started her confession, Abra found that words gushed out on their own. She felt like a Catholic sinner at confession.

  “My parents aren’t dead like I’ve always told you. I have a brother and a sister or just a brother now. My sister died this week. I saw an article about her in the New York Post when I was at National waiting for my plane to come here so I changed my plans and went to New York to see her funeral, but I didn’t actually go to the funeral. I went to get a glimpse at what happened since I left in ‘90 when I went away to Jackson. I saw my parents and my brother. They didn’t see me.” She snickered as she said, “I felt like a stalker.”

  They stopped to eat and chat with the waiter about how good the grouper was, but all that was just a diversion before they could get back to Abra’s revelations.

  “My parents are alive. My dad’s physically disabled. There’s something wrong with his back and he’s completely bent over. He’s been on disability for that forever. He’s also what we experts would consider a slow learner, or maybe mildly mental retarded. He can handle everyday mental activities, but not much more. He didn’t graduate from high school. He worked as a loader putting newspapers on trucks until his back went out. He was relatively normal when he married my mom.” She drew out every syllable in the word “relatively.”

  As she spoke, she recalled a picture of Jacob lying on the couch. Her memories were often based on photographs she hadn’t seen since she left home, but were permanently etched in her mind. She didn’t know why her grandmother wanted to record the squalor of the Ginzberg hellhole and its unsmiling occupants. The few photos she took outside the house were of Abra being honored at school ceremonies. There were no pictures of vacations because there were no vacations. There were no pictures of trips to the zoo because there were no trips to the zoo. The family stayed inside and watched TV, except for Abra who stayed inside and studied.

  Jacob really was a couch potato. As she recalled pictures of him over the years, she saw how he had grown heavier and more bowed. She always thought of him on that same green tweed sofa. It got so filthy over the years. No one ever thought of getting a new one or re-upholstering it. When it became too badly worn, they covered it with an itchy wool afghan her grandmother had knitted.

  Abra remembered that her father often had this blank expression on his face like he was bored. But Abra didn’t think he was bored, she thought he didn’t have any mental activity going on. When he wasn’t watching TV, which was rare, he just stared into space. As she thought of her father, she realized that she had no idea who Jacob Ginzberg was. With all her psychological training, she didn’t understand him, probably because she had never wanted to. She didn’t want to recognize that her father, the source of half her genes, was mildly mentally retarded.

  “Jacob’s passion was my mother Miriam. He doted on her like she was a child. He certainly never doted on any of his kids. He ignored us most of the time. I think he was happy that Miriam married him and had sex with him, well at least three times. Although he had trouble walking, he was always serving her meals and helping her with the little cleaning they did. I did most of the cleaning and believe me that wasn’t much. The place was a pigsty. Maybe that’s why I’m so compulsively clean now. You always made fun of me for cleaning our room all the time. You said college students aren’t supposed to clean their rooms. That was true if they came from clean homes. That dorm room was my first clean environment.

  Jacob always talked to Miriam about their TV programs. Did she like the new characters on the soaps they watched all day? Did she like what happened on the different sit-coms they watched all night? Did she like the guests on Geraldo or Oprah? The TV was always on, not as background, but as mental sustenance. They watched everything, even quiz shows where they didn’t know the answers or even understand the questions. They followed all the soaps, and knew everyone’s life problems on General Hospital and All My Children. They watched Oprah even when she had politicians or authors on discussing concepts they couldn’t begin to comprehend. Other than me, no one read a book or a newspaper. No one discussed world events. No one asked me what I studied in school. For them, the world only existed on TV.

  Now my mother didn’t spend her days and nights sitting on the couch. She sat on a chair at the kitchen table adjoining the living room. That was so she could use the ashtray on the table as she chain-smoked one cigarette after another while keeping her eyes on the TV. Thanks to her that house was like a smoke-filled bar, enveloping everyone and everything in lung-clogging smoke. I get short of breath just thinking about the air pollution in that small apartment. Even the EPA would declare apartment 2A a toxic environment.

  Miriam was definitely retarded. I’d say her IQ was 60 to 70. Her oral language was hard to understand even when you were around her for a long time. She had lots of articulation substitutions and developmentally her language was like a 7 or 8 year old. She also had the tip-toe, forward leaning gait that we see with some forms of neurological impairment. Her brother had the same characteristics so I know that her disability was genetic. He died young. I don’t really remember much about him, just the walk. I can’t remember his name. Isn’t that terrible? He was my uncle and I don’t remember his name and I don’t care.

  I would go for days without talking to Miriam or even looking at her. When we talked, it was about what I had to get at the store or what I had to do for the kids. We never talked about me and my life. Well, I didn’t have much of a life. I just had school which I devoured.”

  She had difficulty picturing her mother even with the photos her grandmother had taken. She tried to stay away from her mother because of the cigarette smoke and because of the disdain she felt toward her. No, she felt blinding hatred toward her. She wasn’t sure how her parents felt about her. She thought that maybe her father liked her, but she knew that her mother hated her, probably because she was intimidated by Abra’s intelligence. Abra was an alien who was so different from everyone in the family. She knew that they all needed her. They needed Abra like drowning people need a life raft. You don’t love a life raft.

  What a reverse situation. Most families are made up of normal people with one disabled person. Not Abra’s. Her family was made up of disabled people with one normal person. She was the oddity.

  “Everyday life in the Ginzberg house was filled with eating and watching TV. When my parents interacted with Rachel and Noah, they screamed. They never talked in a normal tone of voice. They never said kind words to them. They never smiled at them. When they spoke to me they used a normal tone of voice, but I never got kind words or smiles, not even when I brought home perfect report cards.

  I know you’re thinking how’d they get married. I’m sure their parents arranged it. They wanted them to have companionship in life like everybody else. They knew that they wouldn’t be meeting anyone at school or at a bar or at work. They both had menial jobs when they married. My mother’s parents were fairly well off and they made a big wedding. I used to look at their wedding album all the time. I couldn’t believe these happy people were my parents. My mother looked almost pretty in her frilly, puffy wedding dress and her lacy veil. It was a gaudy wedding dress that
you’d see at a Polish or Mexican wedding. My dad looked sorta handsome in his white tux, with tails no less. I suppose everyone looks good in wedding pictures.”

  She visualized the photos from the album. Were those really her parents? They were dancing and cutting the multi-tiered cake. There was a great photo of Jacob with his foot raised high about to smash the wine glass, the culmination of a Jewish wedding ceremony. Then there was the picture that she looked at most often - the romantic kiss at the end of the ceremony. Tall Jacob held short Miriam in his arms, dipping her back and giving her a juicy kiss. It was like a kiss from an old time movie. She couldn’t recall seeing them kiss other than in that picture. The only time she recalled seeing them touch was when they posed for pictures and Jacob put his arm around Miriam.

  “They had me first. I developed early in all areas. My grandmother Joyce, my dad’s mother, kept a baby album with all my milestones. She was so proud that Jacob and Miriam produced a normal baby. Not only a normal baby, but a smart baby. She talked about how I started to say full sentences when I was just over a year old, how I could count to 20 at age 2. I started to read the very first day of school. I probably would have read before school but there were no books at home for me to read. I always got A’s and was on the honor roll. I marvel at how well I did at school without any stimulation at home. We always talk about how kids need to have an educationally supportive home to do well in school. I certainly didn’t have an educationally supportive home. No books, no trips to museums, no stimulating conversation, no encouragement to do my best academically. Just people watching TV all the time. How the hell did I do so well in school? How did I become one of the smartest kids in my class? I really can’t explain it.

  No one from my home ever went to teacher conferences so none of my teachers ever saw my parents. When Rachel and Noah started into the special ed classes, social workers and special ed teachers made home visits. They saw the hellhole where we lived. I’m sure they shared what they saw at the Ginzbergs with the other teachers at school, and I’m sure I was the topic of many discussions in teacher lounges over the years.

  I’m a living argument for the nature side in the ever-popular nature-nurture issue. Somehow I got smart genes that made it possible for me to thrive despite my impoverished environment. I must have been a mutation because four of the five Ginzbergs got dirty genes. That’s how I think of my family. I got the starched, sparkling clean jeans and they got the dirty wash. Go figure.”

  She visualized a photo of herself when she was a senior in high school that prompted a vivid recollection. She was standing next to Mr. Boyers, the principal, who was presenting her with a plaque for being editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. She wore a pink sweater set and a long gray skirt, her uniform for all the senior events where she was honored. Her outward expression was always the same, a wide smile. But if you peered into her eyes you would see a confusion of emotions, mostly discomfort and a feeling of not belonging and a need to escape.

  She twirled her wine glass and said, “When I was a senior, I was at the awards program and Mr. Boyers, the principal, was making a speech about me. How I was in the top 5% of the class, had 2 scholarships, and was one of the best editor-in-chiefs that the school newspaper ever had. Of course, my parents weren’t there. I wouldn’t let them come even if they wanted to. I knew that they would never come to anything at school. That was the place where they failed. That was the place that was totally alien to them. I didn’t want them there. I didn’t want anybody to see them. God, it would have been so humiliating and shameful if anyone saw them. My grandmother, Joyce, and my grandfather, Hal, were sitting in the front row. They were beaming with pride. My grandfather was fumbling with the camera while my grandmother noisily sobbed away.

  Although my face was plastered with a smile, I felt shame. Shame for where I came from and who I was. You’re probably thinking that I should have felt pride in overcoming my home life and achieving such success, but I didn’t feel pride. I felt shame that I was produced by two defectives. Mr. Boyers was going on and on about how I should feel great pride in my accomplishments. The unspoken message was that I had overcome huge obstacles. Everyone at school knew something about my home situation, but no one ever discussed it with me. Here he was now strongly intimating that I should feel pride in what I had attained considering my terrible home life. I wished he would shut up and just let me be like everyone else. After the presentation, he spoke with me and my grandparents and said that I was an angel for what I did for my family. He just about called me a martyr. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t run away from home then. I had to take care of them, but that didn’t make me an angel or a martyr, it made me a slave.”

  Beth interceded, “No, you’re wrong. You could have run away or you could have rebelled. Many kids would have. You could have put your needs first, but you didn’t. You were being the good girl, which you’ve always been Abra. I can’t emphasize that enough. You’ve always done the right thing. You’ve always been concerned about moral issues. For 18 years you were faced with Sophie’s choice, which child to save. For 18 years, you picked Rachel and Noah and after that you picked yourself. There was no good choice. But that was the right choice based on your survival.

  You are basically an emotionally strong person, and that was what got you through those 18 years. Other kids with less stability and inner strength would have turned outward by acting out with drugs or sex, or turned inward by becoming depressed or self-destructive. What is so unusual about you is that you were born with high intelligence AND a strong inner core. Your mental health is unbelievable. You don’t smoke or drink, well other than an occasional Pinot Grigio. I’m sure you never took pot or drugs, at least not in your four years at Jackson.”

  Abra commented, “I must be the only 34 year old Ph.D. who never smoked pot. I did get some second-hand pot smoke though. Remember Drew that guy from grad school who showed me good sex? Well, he always smoked pot after we had sex. I suppose I ingested enough from him. Does that count?”

  “No, it has to be first-hand. And you’ve never taken psychotropic drugs. No anti-depressant, no anti-anxiety. Even with all your worries about people finding out about your past and you still didn’t need drugs. Have you ever taken anything other than aspirin?”

  “Tylenol.”

  “ I think you present two aspects of the nature-nurture issue, intelligence and mental health. Genetically, you’re gifted in both. Someone needs to write an article about you, but obviously keeping you anonymous.”

  Abra asked the waiter for coffee. Her confession was draining her and she needed some stimulation. “I need to think about what you’re saying. You always see different aspects of things I never considered before.

  Let me finish my confession. I need to keep talking or I’ll clam up again. Let me tell you about Rachel and Noah, my secret siblings. I don’t think there were any baby albums for them. I don’t remember seeing any. It must have been apparent early on that they were developmentally delayed. I think everyone realized that Rachel and Noah were clones of Miriam, only cognitively more severe. I really don’t know why they had Noah when it was obvious that Rachel was retarded like my mother. Someone should have had the good sense to tie her tubes after Rachel was born. Since they didn’t have any more kids after Noah, I assume she did have her tubes tied or maybe they didn’t have sex anymore. Who knows? Everyone always says that they can’t imagine their parents having sex. Well no one in their right mind could imagine Jacob and Miriam having sex. I know that people of all cognitive levels have sex drives, but I really never saw any evidence of that in my parents. There was no physical affection between my parents and the kids. But my grandparents were affectionate, but mostly with me. After they retired, they came over every day, except when they went to the race track, and when they came in the front door, they would say, ‘Where’s our kisses Abra?’ And then they would cover me with juicy kisses. When they weren’t looking, I’d wipe the saliva off my face. r />
  They didn’t do this with Rachel and Noah. Maybe because Rachel and Noah didn’t ask for human contact from them, only from me. They were always climbing on my lap and putting their arms around me. Sorta like octopus arms around my neck. I let them do it. Strange, they kissed me most of the time, and once in a while they kissed my grandparents. They didn’t kiss my mother or father.”

  In the few pictures of Rachel and Noah as babies that Abra could recall, they were cute. With what she knew about child development now, she could recall the pictures of them with poor head control well past the time when it was normal. She could recall pictures of them sitting and not walking when they had full heads of hair and must have been two or three. She most vividly recalled their school pictures. They always had these goofy smiles showing off their crooked teeth. No braces for these kids even if the family could have afforded it. They were retarded and no one much cared about how they looked.

  “My grandparents – my dad’s parents - helped take care of everyone. They lived in the apartment building next door and after they retired, they were always at the house. As I got older, I took on more responsibility. Or really they made me take on more responsibility. You can’t imagine what I had to do as a young child. I must have been 6 or 7 when I was changing Rachel and Noah’s diapers and feeding them. They always had behavior problems so I was always trying to make them sit down and eat or stop throwing things or stop screaming or stop biting. I developed good behavior management skills at an early age. Maybe that’s why I’m so good at working with E.D. kids. As they grew older, their behavior problems got worse, especially at school. There were always social workers and psychologists and teachers coming to the house and telling us the type of behavioral program we had to set up at home so it would be consistent with what was being done at school. I tried to do what they told us, but of course, the rest of the family had no idea what they were to do. They didn’t understand contingencies and reinforcement.

  As I grew older, I became more and more responsible for everyone. How I hated coming home from school. I knew I would have to be everyone’s nursemaid. I had friends at school, but I never saw anyone outside of school. I certainly never had a friend over to the house. The few times I went to visit other kids at their homes were painful. I hated seeing how normal people lived. I hated seeing parents running a home instead of a kid. I hated seeing neat, clean apartments. I hated seeing mothers coming home with their arms filled with bags after they shopped.

  In 9th grade there was a girl named Isadora who tried to get close to me. She had a single mother who was the ultimate hippie as you could probably tell from Isadora’s name. She was named after the dancer Isadora Duncan. Her mother was a wannabe dancer who made her living as a waitress at a popular neighborhood diner so everyone knew her. I went over to their apartment maybe five or six times. It was almost as dirty as ours, but in a beatnik cluttered way. Her mother would show videotapes of Isadora Duncan dancing and we would all dance along. That’s the extent of my dance lessons. I really was a klutz. I still can’t dance.

  They knew about my family. I suppose from the neighborhood gossip that her mother picked up at the diner. Her mother tried to get me to talk about my family and was always asking if she could help out in any way. I knew she was trying to be nice, but I couldn’t accept it. There was also another problem. Isadora was boy crazy and was ready for sex at 14. I wasn’t even ready for sex at 22. All she wanted to talk about was boys and sex and all I wanted to talk about was books I read. I had absolutely no interest in boys and sex. I enjoyed reading about sex in books like East of Eden, but my interest was vicarious. I really was abnormal for a 14 year old girl. I just couldn’t accept whatever these nice people had to offer. I stopped seeing Isadora and stopped going to her apartment. My only contact with her after that was writing about her when she performed in the high school musicals. I suppose she was good. I don’t know. I never went to any of the musicals.

  One of the reasons I did so well at school was that was where I was happiest. I loved school. I loved my teachers. I loved learning. I loved using my brain. I loved the success I achieved there. School was the only place where I got positive reinforcement for who I was and who I was at school was not the same as who I was at home. I think back to how I was always smiling in school. Everyone thought that I was the happiest, sweetest girl, but I was a Jekyl and Hyde girl. At home, I never smiled. No one smiled. I was a robot doing what I had to do.

  I never did extra-curricular stuff until high school. I was a good athlete, but couldn’t join any teams. I would have loved to have joined Scouts, but that was out of the question. I couldn’t go to meetings. My parents also said that we didn’t have money for a uniform. My parents and grandparents always said that I was needed at home.

  As a freshman, I stood up to my parents for the first time. I insisted that I be allowed to stay after school with the other kids. That was my first step toward leaving home. I worked on the school paper. That became my refuge. I loved the kids on the staff. They talked about intellectual things that I had no idea existed in the real world, like nuclear disarmament, global warming, gay rights. They read Time magazine. I thought that was the most intellectual magazine in the world. Every week I would get the most recent issue from the school library and read it from cover to cover. To me, Time represented a thinking person’s bible. It represented what I wanted to be intellectually. When I was a senior, I became the editor-in-chief of the paper. Those were my happiest memories of high school, bringing out the newspaper every week.”

  Abra pictured the issues of the newspaper, the Tribune. She would read each article over and over. She knew about every event that took place at school. She knew about the football games, track meets, science fairs, and dances, but she never attended any of them. She loved the editorial staff meetings when the kids talked about world affairs or what was happening locally. They introduced her to the world outside of 17th Street and York High School.

  “As I got older, my grandparents started talking about plans for the future when they were gone. Neither of them had graduated from high school. They had been too poor and had to go to work early on. They wanted me to go to Queens College and become a teacher. To them, that was like going to Harvard and becoming a doctor. Then I could get a good job with lots of time off so I could take care of the family for the rest of our lives. I remember them saying that I had to be responsible for everyone for the rest of my life. They’d say, Abra, you have to be the head of this family when we’re dead. I was 14 and they were laying out my life for me all the way to my grave. I knew that I had to escape. I couldn’t be shackled to these people and waste my life. I had dreams and they weren’t to take care of my family. My dreams were to be an independent professional woman who would wear lovely clothes and travel and have sophisticated friends and live in a lovely apartment. Anything but living at home with the Ginzbergs.

  We lived in a big apartment building. Our apartment was in the back of the building. It was U shaped and you had to walk through a long courtyard to get to our front entrance. There was a big hallway with mailboxes and doorbells. You had to be buzzed up, but the door was usually propped open. We lived in 2 F on the second floor. Up 2 flights of unlit stairs on thread-bare carpeting. We had a three bedroom apartment with one bathroom. My parents had one bedroom, Rachel and Noah shared one, and I had a tiny bedroom that was my refuge. The apartment never got any sun. It was always dark. That’s how I remember it, dark and crowded with people and furniture. I don’t know why we lived on the second floor when my parents couldn’t negotiate the stairs. Why didn’t they move down to a first floor apartment? Maybe that was one of the reasons they rarely left the apartment.

  We lived on my parents’ disability checks and money that both sets of grandparents gave us. My mother’s parents were rarely around, but they gave us money regularly. They lived in Florida and came up to New York once a year. My dad’s parents kept the family going. They worked for the city of New Y
ork doing menial jobs. They didn’t make much money, but they had job security which to them was the most important thing about a job. My father was an only child and my mother’s brother had died so there were no uncles or aunts to help out. It was just our happy little nuclear family with two sets of grandparents.

  The kids were in special ed classes and were constantly going to doctors. They had lots of health problems. Rachel was allergic to everything and was covered with rashes and was always sneezing and wheezing. Noah had petit mals and it was hard to find the right meds for him, but eventually they were pretty well controlled. There were always social workers and nurses coming to the house. As I got older, I took on more household responsibilities. I filled out forms, talked to the social workers and psychologists and teachers, and all the people who got us through life. I remember early on reading the psychological and medical reports on Rachel and Noah. My SAT vocabulary improved tremendously from those reports. I learned words like idiopathic, noncompliant, dysfunctional. Words that weren’t part of a high school kids’s vocabulary.

  Ya know, now we have so many kids in the schools who do the same for their parents who don’t speak English. We have these little kids going with their parents to the doctor and translating their parents’ ailments. I functioned pretty much the same way, only it wasn’t because my parents and siblings couldn’t speak English. It was because they were too cognitively limited to deal with the outside world. I was the great communicator.”

  She recalled the looks of condescension, abhorrence, and mostly pity that the outside world gave her when they realized how cognitively impaired her family was. She unsuccessfully tried to forget a particularly humiliating experience she had when she took Miriam to the doctor. Cynical, bitter Dr. Weisberg was the family physician. He was fat and had these bushy gray eyebrows that partially covered his eyes. He reeked of cigarette smoke and had cigarette ashes scattered across his chest. Even in those days doctors knew that smoking was lethal, but Dr. Weisberg could not heed the advice, “doctor, heal thyself.”

  On one of the many trips she made with her mother to Dr. Weisberg, he asked with exasperation, “What’s wrong with her now?” He did not look at Miriam. He never looked at Miriam. He addressed Abra as if she were the parent and Miriam the child.

  Abra answered, “She says that it hurts when she pees and sometimes there’s blood in her pee.”

  Dr. Weisberg asked, “How frequently does she urinate?”

  She translated for her mother, “How often do you pee?”

  “A lot.”

  Abra said, “But how much?”

  Abra couldn’t make Miriam understand that Dr. Weisberg wanted a specific number of times in a time frame. He examined Miriam vaginally while 12 year old Abra cowered in a corner trying to look anywhere but at her mother’s exposed vagina. She recalled the tears trickling down her cheeks and her resolving to stop them so no one would see her shame for Miriam and herself. After poking around, Dr. Weisberg concluded, “It’s probably another bladder infection. Take this cup and have her urinate in it. Then give it to the nurse. I think she gets these bladder infections because she wipes from back to front instead of front to back. She gets shit in her vagina. I’m not sure she even wipes. Teach her how to wipe when she pees. She needs to keep herself cleaner. Tell her to take a bath more often. She’s schmutzik. Like an animal. Fey.” He shook his head as he looked away in disgust. This was a doctor saying that her mother was dirty like an animal. How she despised him. She wanted to scream in his face. “You’re the animal. You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to treat people nicely.” But of course she was silent.

  Abra took Miriam to the bathroom and told her to pee in the cup. She couldn’t manage it so Abra held the cup and watched with horror as Miriam’s urine soaked her hands. Abra carefully washed her hands and then used three disinfectant packets to meticulously cleanse every inch of the skin on her hands. She washed the outside of the cup and brought it to the nurse. Teaching her mother how to wipe, that was the depth of humiliation. She couldn’t share this experience with Beth; it was too painful to verbalize this horrific event to anyone.

  “My grandparents were training me to run the family when they became infirmed or died. They wanted me to care for my family for the rest of my life. They were always saying, ‘When we die, you have to be responsible for the family. You’re the only one who can do this. When you’re at work, you’ll hire someone to stay in the house to take care of everybody.’ This curse hung over me. I thought of it constantly. I thought of how I would escape. I wanted a life for myself. I didn’t want to be unselfish and devote my life to my family. There’s the word – unselfish. I’m the first to admit that I’m selfish. I put myself before my family. If I hadn’t, I think I would have committed suicide or become a robot, just living day to day without thinking or feeling anything. My life would have been a waste, a total and complete waste of an existence.”

  After the third cup of coffee, Abra said, “I’m all talked out. I can’t talk anymore. Well, what do you think? Do you think I’m a cruel, selfish person for running away from my family, for leaving them to fend for themselves? I knew that as long as my grandparents were alive, they would help, but since they died I have no idea who helped them. Obviously they made it. The kids were in group homes so they weren’t with Jacob and Miriam. Thank God. I noticed that their home address was different. Somehow they moved from Queens to someplace in Brooklyn. I think from the address that they’re near the beach. They made it without me. That at least makes me feel better. It confirms that I made the right decision. Beth, did you suspect any of this? Did you know?”

  “Yes. I knew your parents weren’t dead because a number times you referred to them in the present tense. Once at the beach you said my father IS a smoker, not WAS a smoker. Another time you said my mother loves Oprah. She’s God to her. I knew you didn’t want to talk about them so I didn’t challenge you. I so wanted to have you share your past with me. It really hurt that you didn’t.

  I had no idea you had a brother and sister. That’s quite a surprise. Abra, your story has changed how I see you and I’m not sure what the picture is. I always looked at you as a woman of mystery. You exuded this sense of the exotic because I knew there were secrets that you had. But let me ask you the obvious question, did you become a psychologist because of all this?”

  Abra nodded her head. “I’ve thought about this question for years. Yeah, I’m sure part of the reason I went into psych was because of my family, but there’s more. I suppose I naively thought that I would be able to understand myself if I became a psychologist and more importantly get validation for the decision I made to leave.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well, I think my training helped me understand myself better, but it hasn’t helped me with the moral issue. That’s a different ballpark. Did I do the right thing then? Should I have done something for them for these past 16 years? I still don’t have convincing answers.”

  Beth said, “How about the retardation? Is it genetic? Have you isolated the possible syndrome?”

  Abra answered, “It must be genetic. When I learned about genetics in high school, I came to the conclusion that the Ginzberg family had dirty genes. Over the years, I’ve checked into different possible syndromes. I’ve never found one that fits their characteristics. Up to the time I left, there hadn’t been any genetic studies of the family. There may have been some since I left but I seriously doubt it. They wouldn’t understand genetics and would never cooperate with any testing. You know we Jews have lots of genetic glitches like Tay Sachs. But it’s not any of these. Maybe it’s all that inbreeding over the centuries of living in ghettos.”

  Beth leaned forward and asked, “The obvious question is have you ever been tested genetically?”

  “Never and won’t. I will never have kids so it’s not an issue.”

  “Let me psychologize. I think your family history explains why you’ve never had a lasting relationship with
a guy. God only knows, you’ve had so many chances, but you’ve always ended a relationship when it got serious. Remember David? He was perfect for you and crazy about you, but you abruptly stopped seeing him. You never really came up with a reason for doing that. Now I know why.”

  Abra nervously asked, “Do you think less of me now that you know?”

  Beth grabbed Abra’s hands and held them tightly. “No, I think more of you. I can’t imagine living the life you did. I grew up in a happy, loving home so I can’t begin to understand what you went through. I have no idea what I would have done, but I think I would have done what you did.”

  They paid the bill and left the restaurant. It was a warm, starry night so they walked arm in arm along the water at Battery Park. The full moon created trails of rippled water. They looked out at Fort Sumter marveling at the tranquility of this night as compared to a night over a hundred years ago when the Civil War shooting began. They made idle chatter about the weather, the city, Clay’s progress in kindergarten, and Beth and Tom’s attempts to adopt a child. Suddenly they realized how tired they were and headed back to the hotel. When they returned to their room, Beth said, “Tell me about Miss B. It’s funny. I’ve never been able to call her Edith either.”

  Abra loved talking about Edith Benjamin because she got her out of F Street. She aided and abetted her escape to the real world. Without her, Abra probably would have remained with the Ginzberg family, at least for a while until she was able to escape on her own.

  “Ah - Edith Benjamin - my savior! She was my freshman English teacher. Some of the kids made fun of her because she was unattractive, but the smart kids admired her because she was a charismatic teacher who instilled a love of literature in us. I adored her class and would hang around her whenever I had a chance. She shared special books with me. She introduced me to Catcher in the Rye and East of Eden. When the first parent-teacher night was approaching, she told me that she was eager to meet my parents and tell them what a fine mind I had. I had never told anyone about my parents although many people knew. I told her they weren’t coming. She asked why and I broke down and told her all about my family. She was the only person I opened up to in my first 18 years of life. Come to think of it she’s the only person till now that I ever completely opened up to. She became my conspirator in hiding the gory details of my home life. There’s lots to tell about wonderful Edith Benjamin, but I’ll save it for another time. I ‘m worried about her. She has very high blood pressure and medication isn’t bringing it down. I talk to her almost every day. She says she’s doing fine, but I have to visit her and see for myself.

  She still lives in that gorgeous old apartment in Manhattan. Beth, do you remember that wonderful Christmas vacation when we went up to New York City and stayed with her? There was a blizzard and we were snowed in her apartment. New York City was totally paralyzed. We had so much fun with her. Remember that day we stayed in our pajamas all day and tried to read all the titles of the books in her library. The next day we went out in the snow and made angels in the snow in Riverside Park.

  We need to find time to talk and talk and talk some time soon. We’re both so tired and you have to take off early and I’m having brunch with the Nelsons.”

  Beth got into her nightgown and jumped into bed. “I have only one other question to ask you. How do you feel about Rachel’s death?”

  Abra was putting on her sweats and said, “I don’t know. It’s going to take me a while to process how I feel. I did love her, but I loved myself more than her. I don’t know if I feel any grief. I do know I feel relief that one of my wards is no longer haunting me. I should feel guilty about feeling relief, but I don’t. More than anything, I feel fear that people will find out about me. That overwhelming fear haunts me more than ever. As you very well know, I’m a secretive person and I don’t want my secrets to be made public. I don’t want to be outed.

  Hopefully, when I come to your place at Thanksgiving we’ll find some time to talk about that. I’ll use that as my homework assignment. I’ll bring Godiva candies and an answer to your question. And maybe by then you’ll get a baby. I hope so Beth. You should have lots of babies. You and Tom have so much love to give. I feel terrible that we haven’t talked about your adoption plans.”

  At her last visit with Beth and Tom during the summer, they had disclosed that they couldn’t have any more children. They weren’t sure why despite all the testing they had subjected themselves to. There was a low sperm count for Tom and lots of fibroid tumors for Beth. But whatever the reasons, they were determined to have more kids. Since none of the modern miracles of medicine were miraculous for them, they were going to adopt. They had registered with different agencies and had been vetted. Now they were waiting for the child who would complete their family.

  “There’s nothing to talk about right now. We’ve definitely decided not to do a foreign adoption. We have so many kids who need a home here in America I don’t think we have to travel the world to find a kid. We may adopt a biracial or handicapped kid or a biracial and handicapped kid. There are lots available. Nobody wants them. I know you probably don’t understand how we could seek out a handicapped kid when you ran away from such kids, but we want to share our love with a kid who others find hard to love.”

  “Knowing you, I understand. You and Tom are unbelievable people. I could never in a million years do what you’re doing but if anyone can, it’s you two. Maybe when I see you at Thanksgiving, there will be another Newland in your home. I hope so. Whatever makes it possible for you to love such a kid made it possible for you to love me. I wasn’t too different from a handicapped kid when we met. I was desperately in need of someone to love and teach me about the world. That someone was you. For some lucky kid, that will be you again.”

  They kissed goodnight and fell asleep immediately.