Intimate Wars (2 page)

 

I WAS BORN IN PHILADELPHIA in 1946, on the cusp of what would always be known as the “baby boom” generation. I shared a bedroom with my parents in a two-room apartment on East Tioga Street with my father's mother living down the hall. The bedroom window looked out onto another four-story brick apartment building, rows of which defined our young middle-class neighborhood.

When I was a baby still in my crib, I would watch pigeons roosting on the windowsill. I heard them cooing and clucking while I writhed in pleasure at the touch of my parents' hands oiling me, their lips gently passing over my body. This paradise was lost when I grew old enough to tell my mother that I liked the way Daddy played the drums. The thrusting of my father in intercourse, my mother's body rising up to meet him, must have sounded like rhythmical music to me. But the idea that I had witnessed the primal scene shook them. I was
given my own space, my parents self-banished into a foldout bed in the living room, and my acquaintance with solitude began. I don't remember whether or not I missed the comfort of my parents next to me. But the separation was the beginning of a lifetime of aloneness in the form of both retreat and punishment.

Most summers my family would take day trips to Rocka-way Beach. One of my mother's six brothers lived there, and we spent many lazy, fun days at the ocean. The highlight of these days was always the moment when my father took me in his arms to the water. He would hold me tightly as I laughed and jumped at the oncoming waves.

We would take winter trips to Florida. Once my father and I were in a pool and he playfully held me underwater, but he held me there too long. I felt I was drowning and had to push against his hand with all my strength so he would let me up to breathe. He let me surface in time, but I never again trusted his judgment or ability to protect me—in the water, in my home, or in my heart.

Even in my dreams, I was alone. My first nightmare went on to recur throughout my childhood. I walk along a beach, barefoot in a light summer dress. The sky is dark and foreboding and the ocean rises beside me in an enormous, pulsating, threatening wave. It is the color of old meat, and the cresting water creates patterns of stark white veins. I keep walking, my bare feet making patterns in the sand as the wave rises high with tension beside me. It never breaks, but the fear of it causes me to wake in the night.

 

I WAS THE ONE AND ONLY occupant of my mother's womb. She used to show me an old photo of herself at eight months pregnant, vainly telling me, “No one knew I was even pregnant, like you weren't even there.” But oh, she so much
wanted a daughter, a reincarnation of her own loving mother, who was her protector and ally against her six older brothers, and who died when she was seventeen. And so I became my mother's daughter, sister, mother—and her competition for my father.

Born in 1917, my mother was the youngest of seven children and the only girl. She came of age when not much was expected of girls except to get married and have children; her own mother had left the marital bed after finally giving birth to the little girl she'd always wanted. But my mother inherited a love of music, and a frustrated desire to compete, excel, and perform. She wanted to be on the stage so much that she had one of her brothers convince my grandparents that she could travel with a dance troupe when she was sixteen. “Good girls” did not go on the stage, but her parents finally gave in.

Her dream was short lived. The chorus line finished their contract after two months on the road, so her small taste of freedom and spotlights ended. She went back home to fulfill her biological destiny.

I felt my mother's thwarted ambition, along with her ambivalence. She may never have had the ability to realize her own dreams, but the need to exert influence was there, and when I was born, it was transferred to me. Her ambition for me was so basic a component of our relationship that it influenced my very name. “A star is born—Meryl Holly” reads the first page of the baby scrapbook she made for me. She gave me that middle name because she expected it to be my stage name; she intended to mold me into a performer. I changed my first name to the more powerfully androgynous Merle—French for “blackbird,” I later found out—as soon I was old enough to understand the significance.

She was a good mother according to the mores of the time, but as a child, I couldn't bear the degree of power my mother
had over me and the lack of wisdom with which she wielded it. She exercised the ultimate power of
no
, withholding her approval and love when it suited her, and more importantly to me, preventing my father from expressing his own love and approval.

We moved to the second floor of a small redbrick two-family house in Northeast Philadelphia when I was six years old. Every night I would wait at the top of the stairs for my father to come home from work, excited to see the top of his fedora hat, which led to his six-foot-two frame, then that invariable smile coming up the stairs to greet me. He would sweep me up in his arms, hold me a foot away, search my face as if seeing it for the first time, and say, “How's my little girl today?”

“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” my mother's voice would call from the back end of paradise. “Do you want to know what she did today?” With a slow, well-practiced disengagement, my father would put me back on the ground and walk to the dining room to prepare for dinner.

As the youngest of seven children and the only girl, my mother was forever “Baby Ruthie.” My father, needing the security of her dependency, reinforced her immaturity, so that by the time he died she could not write a check or pay a bill. After a child's fashion, she was stubborn, competitive, demanding, and full of rectitude. For this reason it was always she who bore the brunt of my frustration when my will to do what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted, was thwarted. I experienced the boundaries of her parental rule as a cruel fortress that I could not escape, and my rage toward her grew as I did.

My father was the parent I always wanted to be with, the one that I most related to and wanted to be special for. Like my mother, any dreams he had for himself had to be deferred
and ultimately denied. Because of my grandfather's refusal to work, my father had to leave school at age fourteen, selling balloons in the street to help support the family. His older brother died at twenty-one from a long struggle against rheumatic fever, increasing my father's familial responsibilities even more. The week of my uncle's death there was a funeral workers' strike in New York City. As a result, my father was forced to dig his own brother's grave with the help of a few friends.

Leaving school at an early age prevented my father from achieving personal or professional actualization, but in his youth he dreamed of being a major league baseball player. He was good enough to be sent down to Florida to train in the minors, and eventually made it to the tryouts for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the end he failed to make the cut. But my father had the Hoffman business gene, and by the time he married my mother, he owned a toy factory. After a fire destroyed the site and inventory, he spent the rest of his life working as a salesman for various companies.

He was an extremely intelligent autodidact with a book of philosophy always by his bedside. We would share the stories of Sherlock Holmes and recite poetry together. He saw the contours of my fantasy life and entered them, while my mother never seemed to have the imagination or the psychological generosity to move enough out of her own reality to enter into mine.

Beneath his gentleness I knew my father dealt with a deep-seated sadness and rage. He had violent nightmares that shook our household. I would wake up to the sounds of his loud wails and my mother running after him, screaming, “Jack, Jack, stop, stop!” Terrified, I'd pull the covers over my head, curl myself into a fetal position, and try to become as small as possible—invisible—so he would not
come in and kill me. He never entered my room during those times, but as with the wave in my dream, there was always the fear of it.

My mother told me that it was the memory of digging his brother's grave that haunted him, but I never believed that was all of it. Perhaps he felt it was his own grave he had dug as well—his future, his dreams that went down into the red earth with his older brother.

 

BOTH OF MY PARENTS were victims of the dreadful silencing that characterized the fifties. The collective socialization was so powerful that it could not be questioned, and my parents' struggle to communicate and express their individual realities mirrored the political context of the time. Their repression was obvious to me even then. Our family had hired an African American woman named Jane to come to the house to clean once a week. As she went about her chores one afternoon, I asked her if she was grateful she hadn't been alive in the eighteen hundreds, when she would have been a slave. My mother gasped with embarrassment, but I felt that as upsetting or surprising as my question might have been for Jane, my parents' inability to even acknowledge that historical reality and how it was shaping the relationship at hand was infinitely worse. Anything they didn't know how to handle was absorbed into the silence.

School offered little relief from my isolation. On Valentine's Day in the second grade I made as many cards as I could and addressed them all to myself, so that when the class went to the Valentine box to collect our love notes, I appeared to be far more popular than I was.

During the solitary hours I spent in my bedroom I created ways to escape the silence through my rich fantasy life. There, I could be free from the boundaries of my physical self, my
mother's autocratic injunctions, and my father's withdrawals. There I became queen, king, or knight, able to move and manipulate the world to my way of being. No one could touch me.

This internal world of mine first sprang to life when my father took me to the movies to see
Knights of the Round Table
with Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner in 1954. I sat in the front row throwing kisses at Taylor while my father sat in the back chuckling. Alone in my room, I was Sir Lancelot, resplendent on a white caparisoned horse. I was Elizabeth I, exhorting her troops to fight the Spanish Armada at Tillbury, with the words, “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the stomach of a king.” I was Sir Gawain the Pure, searching for the Holy Grail. I stormed the ramparts as Joan of Arc, played by Ingrid Bergman, sword high, shouting, “Now is the time. This is the hour.” I rode with Amazon women, hair flowing wildly behind me as I drew my bow to strike. Unlimited by gender, I was Richard III and Henry V, defending their crowns in battle. I would set the scenes in my imagination and speak the lines aloud.

The ancient Greek philosophers said that to “do philosophy” was to practice dying. Our apartment was blocks away from a large Christian cemetery, and whenever I could I would visit the tombstones, imagining the lives lived, trying to capture the reality of death. I had a feeling that I was a changeling, that I didn't really belong to my time, place, or parents. Where were my troops, my courtiers, my enemies? My demons—anxiety and loneliness—became dragons to triumph over and slay.

 

WHEN I WAS TEN, I discovered another way to break the silence of my childhood: music. It became my crucible, the stage upon which I played out all my competitive and ambitious
drives. It was my family's way of measuring intelligence, talent, and excellence.

My cousin Marilyn embodied that excellence. She was the first child of my Uncle Harry, and displayed unusual musical talent from the age of two. She debuted at Carnegie Hall at eleven, and by her early teens she was an internationally famous violinist. When Marilyn played on the radio my parents and I would sit in the living room listening to the performance in rapt attention, my mother usually crying. Marilyn had the power to do that.

Apart from the discipline her music demanded she was a wild child, never expected to conform to normal behavior. When we went out to dinner at a restaurant, she would pick up the food—big pieces of steak or chicken—in her hands and chew on it in total oblivion to the rules of etiquette. No one bothered to correct her because she was a “genius.”

I witnessed and absorbed her aura of fame and talent and its accompanying field of exemption. The scene after her concerts was always fascinating. Marilyn would stand in the middle of a glittering group of admirers, smiling tentatively, surrounded by flowers. My father would always bring the largest and most beautiful bouquet. Uncle Harry would come over to us and say something about the fact that Marilyn was very unhappy; she was usually unsatisfied with her performances, and would mull over one passage or another that she felt she had not performed perfectly. Everyone around her praised her, but the only praise or judgment that really mattered was her own. It was a powerful lesson in the ways of the internally directed.

I wanted what Marilyn had. I wanted to be able to do what I wanted when I wanted—to be the measure of all things, as it seemed that she was. So I focused my inchoate ambition and desire for recognition on becoming a great concert artist
myself. After many months of asking, crying, and begging for a piano, my parents finally decided to get me an accordion.

I hated that damn squeeze-box; it never felt serious. But I practiced and worked, and in a few months I showed a great deal of natural ability. After my teacher told my mother that it was time for me to get an adult-size accordion, she relented and bought me a piano.

I knew I was very good at it early on. I finally had something special, something that enabled me to stand apart. My mother was not telling the neighbors that I was a genius yet, but I was determined to give her the opportunity. By this time our family had moved to Queens, New York, and after taking lessons there for a couple of years I applied to Chatham Square Music School, a special school to train concert artists. I was twelve when I applied and was accepted.