Essays
The Lie That Binds
© Sande Boritz Berger
Shortly before she passed away, my 99-year-old Aunt Irene asked if I would continue the upkeep of her sister’s grave. Something she had done for decades− since the bleak November morning, when Jean, her name was Jean, fastened her chestnut hair into plastic rollers, ordered lamb chops from her butcher, then hanged herself with the belt of a chenille bathrobe—an item from her brand new trousseau. She had been married ten days.
“Of course,” I said, and we finished our lunch locked in a hammering silence.
I closed my eyes and remembered the white organza dress I had worn to the small wedding held in a dimly lit Brooklyn restaurant, and how Aunt Jean squirted seltzer to erase the chocolate I’d drooled over the collar. It was just like her to stop in the middle of her own wedding celebration and tend to one of her many young nieces or nephews. It was the last time she touched me.
During the days and weeks that followed, I heard the strange word suicide whispered in the middle of the night. But barely eight years old, I thought my parents were pillow-talking about some naughty neighbor named Sue, with the last name—Aside.
The year was 1951, a time of post-war jubilation. Our family, following many of our closest cousins, packed up and said our farewells to Brooklyn, taking up residence in what became the second promised land: the wide-open-spaces of south shore Long Island close to beaches and the beautiful Atlantic. But now my grandparents and adored relatives like my two great aunts were no longer a jubilant skip or hopscotch away. Visiting meant nauseating car rides on rutted, unpaved roads causing me to throw up in the backseat, my face wind- whipped while flapping out the window. Family gatherings became less frequent and less spontaneous. Maybe that was why Aunt Jean, already in her forties, had quickly decided to try her hand at marriage. She was brave, then, to become a bride—to up and leave her brother’s, (my grandfather’s) majestic home and the family’s lucrative knitting business and place where she had worked since the age of sixteen.
For her husband, she chose an affable blue-eyed man whose forearm bore the indelible stamp of Auschwitz. His name was Max, a Polish Jew, who she knew briefly through business, and who was not, at all, reticent when it came to recounting the horrors and turbulence in a world my aunt had deserted thirty years prior. I vaguely recall his warm cheer while he responded to the many rapid-fire questions I asked while perched on his lap—my fingers tracing the blurred gray images emblazoned under his shirtsleeve. With heads barely touching, Aunt Jean and Max formed a loving arc above my choppy bangs and pigtails. They cuddled me, rocked me, as though I were their own. And always wishing to please, I gave in to what I imagined to be their fantasy. For, by the time she married, my aunt was too old to bear children.
Then, like a random flurry in April, Aunt Jean vanished from my life. I was left with a hazy feeling of responsibility that haunted me day and night. What could I have possibly said or done to have caused her disappearance? Had I behaved badly while she babysat on her few visits to our home right before the wedding? Always a finicky eater, perhaps I had refused her specialty flanken dish and roasted potatoes.
Desperately needing answers, overnight, I became a champion eavesdropper, trying to decipher the strange, broken Yiddish our family spoke mostly around the kinder.
I was shaped likea beanpole, which enabled me to lean into dim-lit rooms and hide in the creases of evening shadows. I stood all alone and listened to the tribal sounds of my family’s grief: wailing, muttering, shushing always followed by loud, almost comical nose-blowing. But the only truth was the vivid imagination of a young child left to fill in the blanks—a child, whose suffering multiplied inside a fragile shell of the unknown.
Day after day, for months, years, while my mother primped me for school, I asked the same question hoping to break the secret code: “Mommy, tell me, where is Aunt Jean?” And on the days my mother responded with more than a shrug, she said my aunt and her new husband had gone on a “far away” trip. Some long honeymoon, I thought silently. And why never a postcard to her favorite little niece− me− the one she called shana madele?
Eventually I became sullen, then furious at both my aunt and her new husband for abandoning me so easily. They had to have been the biggest fakers. Then, one night, on a sleepover at my cousin Franny’s house, just blocks from where I lived, I was enlightened by her younger brother, Richard. Uninvited, the six-year-old came galloping through the bedroom wearing his cowboy Dr. Denton’s and a homemade noose around his neck.
“This is how Aunt Jean died,” Richard croaked between several giddy yaps, jumping on and off the bed while I lay frozen in horror. Everything clicked. Floating fragments of a naïve hope settled on the swirling lavender carpet, instantly banishing the lie. I learned what so many others had known for months, over a year. Soaked in sweat and shivering with fear, I begged to be driven home.
In the weeks that followed, my parents offered more outright denial. But now, at least, there were discussions—a hinting of Aunt Jean’s previous illness and undiagnosed depression. More family secrets are revealed: There was a younger brother who had decided to remain in Vilna in the 1920’s while all his siblings fled to America. During the war, he, his wife and young daughter were murdered when, during the high holy days, the Nazis set their synagogue on fire.
Of all the relatives, my aunt took this news the hardest. She stopped eating, became depressed and was plagued with hallucinations. One day, while working in my grandfather’s factory, sewing gold fleur de lis crests on a slew of cardigans, her entire body began to quake. She started mangling the sweaters, stamping on them, as though they were an army of twisted, poisonous snakes. Later, she pleaded with my grandfather to remove the crests, believing they were Swastikas.
It became convenient to hurl blame on Aunt Jean’s new husband for perhaps sharing too many stories of the Holocaust. The family surmised these tales triggered her survivor’s guilt and touched off each new bout of depression. Everyone had a theory—most disturbing, that my aunt had not been prepared for her husband’s sexual advances. Could she have felt repulsed or defamed, caught in a trap of humiliation and knew no other way out? After not hearing from her, all morning, her younger sister, Irene, went to Jean’s Brooklyn apartment where she found her hanging. Irene closed the bathroom door, and ran from the apartment and into the street screaming for help.
As I got older, I hated that our family’s shame about Aunt Jean’s death served to eradicate all memory of her. It was as if she had never really existed. Hadn’t she, as a warm loving person, deserved some measure of reverence? For too long a time, they shared a lie about her death rather than celebrating the fact that she’d lived at all. Ten years later, my grandfather bought a family plot for himself and, at least, fifteen remaining relatives. It was over forty miles away from the cemetery where his sister was lay buried− a place that was rarely visited.
Some time ago, I began thinking about Aunt Jean as I hadn’t since childhood. I’d just gone through a divorce and in my despondence, I wondered about my aunt’s final motivation—the spiraling that might have thrust her towards ending her life. Would I just snap one day after bringing in the dry cleaning or stacking the dishes? I had always feared that suicide was an event that happened randomly to a person, like a car accident or the other whispered nemesis, Cancer, and that the act of taking one’s life was not a conscious choice. But unlike my aunt, I had the luxury to talk aloud about the fears brought on by isolation.
Fifty years have passed since Aunt Jean’s death, though at times, even I slip and call it her “disappearance.” Before our visit ended, Aunt Irene handed me all her “important papers,” neatly bundled in thick, pink rubber bands. She asked me to please hold on to everything. I have so many questions I would still like to ask, but the words stay stuck deep inside my throat. As I tucked the papers in my handbag, a thumbnail photo of Aunt Jean spilled from a plastic holder onto the vinyl tablecloth. I held it very close to my face; “oh, how beautiful, she was,” I said, glancing up at Irene.
My aunt heard me though our eyes never meet.