My
father’s departure in January 1942 has always seemed in
my memory to mark a major divide in my childhood. Before he
went away, I can easily recall happy, if fleeting, memories.
After he went away, I can retrieve happy memories only if I
make an effort to do so…. In the summer of 1943, when
I was just 6, my mother decided to send me to a summer camp
in the Berkshires. I remember hating this camp: for much ofthe
time, I recall being lonely, frightened and homesick, and relating
my misery to the sadness of the war…. In remembering,
I have at times had a sense that I actually told my mother,
when she came on Visiting Day, that I was terribly unhappy and
that she must take me home. I know that I wanted to tell her
this, and I have been angry at her in retrospect because she
did not realise how abandoned I felt. However, it is clear from
the many letters she wrote to my father about my camp experience,
that while she did send me to camp partly because she was busy
working…and partly because she did not have satisfactory
household help, she picked the camp with care, and sent me there
mainly because she thought I needed a break from the heat of
a New York summer. She missed me very much herself, and it is
clear that I gave her no indication of my unhappiness. In early
August, she wrote my father: “I got a long letter from
Debby today ...She is having a wonderful time, can now float
on her tummy and back, and takes long hikes. I think that in
spite of my loneliness, camp has turned outto be an excellent
affair and I am very glad I did it”….
The
incident that stands out most clearly in my memory is the fear
induced in me by a harmless movie called The Canterville Ghost,
which involves a comic ghost who walks through walls. This comedy
was for me transformed into horror: when our apartment was remodeled
in 1944, and one wall was bricked up, every night for months
I lay in bed, terrified that the horrible Canterville Ghost
was about to slip through the bricked-up wall and attack me.
But while I remember this fear quite vividly, I did not recall,
until I read the correspondence, the fears that seem to have
been most directly related to the war, to my love of my father
and to my worries about his safety. For example, in 1942 I could
not sleep at night: “Debbie was so enchanted with your
letter this morning ... That child loves you almost too much
for her own good (so does her mummy). As a matter of fact her
concern for you has caused me to speak to Dr Bader about it.
He has ordered a prescription of luminol to be given her every
night to calm her down. She gets up at two and three in the
morning and comes in fully awake to ask how you are, when you
are coming home, are you in danger. Not only does it awaken
me and disturb me, it means she isn’t getting a full night’s
sleep herself. Dr Bader talked with her and decided on the rather
drastic step of the luminol. God isn’t this a world! When
five year olds have to have sedatives!”My most unhappy
memories concern my father’s return, in December1944.
I remember the acute anticipation and joy I felt, and then the
let-down, when he was abrupt and unfriendly to me, and appeared
far more interested in my year-old sister, whom he had never
seen before.
During
the war itself, I had idealised him. My mother’s letters
to him and his to her about me, and even the letters I sent
to him myself and those he sent to me, indicate that although
I was only 4½ when he left, I loved him deeply, missed
him, and worried about his safety. But I remembered a flawless
pre-war Dad, who would take me…on jaunts to the zoo in
[New York’s] Central Park and on to the Oak Room at the
Plaza Hotel. He returned as a deeply troubled, angry man. And
he remembered an exuberant 5 year-old, not a shy, gangly 7 year-old.