Click here to download the transcript from Ashes in the Closet.

So, it's a few weeks before Mother's Day, 1979. And I'm twelve. And my father decides that he wants to get my mother something extra special this year. Now holidays are already a pretty big deal in our house. A lot of hours in front of the fireplace and my mom would make a gourmet meal. I think part of it was that I wasn't born until my father was forty-six. He married late so he'd been looking forward to these moments of domestic bliss for a really long time.  

But the other thing is that it was always just the four of us. My brother Todd, my parents, and me. We had no extended family to speak of. My mother's parents had both died when she was twenty-one, before I was born, and her brother and sister lived far away, much different lives. My dad's father also died long before I was born but his mother and his two sisters actually lived fairly close. They were in New York City, which was just a little over an hour away from where I was raised in Fairfield, Connecticut. I guess it's just twenty minutes down the 95 from here. But except for one visit they made when I was seven, one of my father's sisters and my grandmother, we never saw them. And I would ask my dad, "Why not? Why don't they ever come out and visit us?"  

And he would say, "Well, they don't interest me." Which I'd heard him say actually about some of our neighbors and some of the parents of my friends. And he was a book critic at the New York Times for many years, very well read and many of these people didn't, you know, pass some kind of intellectual muster. And his parents weren't educated and they were very working class so it kind of made sense. But it seemed like a very cold thing to say about your own family. But he was never cold with us. You couldn't sit next to him on the couch without him putting his arm around you and until I was way too old for this game, every day he would ask me, "So, who loves you?"  

And I would say, "Oh, the postman, the mailman."  And finally, answer, "You do, Daddy." And now here he was, bringing home this Tiffany's catalog and wanting to pick out with me some special present for my mom. He used to like to really consult with me and everything and he would even actually read his book reviews aloud sometimes to me, which I was really flattered by as a kid until I grew up and became a writer myself and realized that it's just helpful to read it out loud to someone who's alive, you know? (Inaudible) Anyway, he seemed to really value my opinion. Especially anything when it came to my mother. So, he really liked these gold earrings that were shaped like sea urchins that were very elegant but I thought were kinda conservative for my mom. She's a modern dancer and sort of more Bohemian. But I could see that he was going for, you know, particular kind of really respectable and kind of traditional present. Something that would belong in that, you know, bright blue Tiffany's box. So, I said, "Oh, they're beautiful, I'm sure she'll love them."  

So, Mother's Day arrives and we go into the kitchen to present this gift. And he sits down at the table and he puts the little box on the table and he's all excited and he says, "Sandy, Sandy, come over here and sit down."  

But my mom has her back to us because she's standing at the stove making dinner because, even though it's her day, nobody else has offered to make that beautiful bourguignon. So, she doesn't see the present and she says, "Well, wait a minute, I'm cooking."  

And he said, "Well, just turn off the stove for a minute and come and sit down."  

And she's like "I can't turn off the stove. I'm sauteeing mushrooms and they'll will be ruined."  

And she still doesn't turn around and so he says, "Well, you know, fine then!" And she can hear from the tone in his voice that he's mad and so finally she does turn around and look but now he's got the box in his hand so she still doesn't see it. And he throws it across the kitchen floor at her feet and yells, "Happy Mother's Day!" and storms out of the room.  

And she looks at me like as if I understand what just happened. I had no idea. And for the record, actually, she didn't really like the earrings but that evening was pretty much ruined. So, I went up to bed and I'd been asleep for a while, about an hour, and my mom comes bursting into my room, waking me and I shoot up in bed and I think she's gonna say, "The house is on fire!"  

She's like "Blissy, Blissy, where's the baloney?" 

 "The baloney?" Every evening before my dad went to bed, he would have a baloney and cheddar cheese sandwich on rye bread with a single beer. I'd helped her put away the groceries that day and I said, "Well, you know it's in the fridge?  

"Where in the fridge? Bliss, where?" 

"In the meat drawer, probably." And she's running back down the hall. So, I lie back down into bed but I can't fall to sleep again. I'm thinking like, "She woke me in the middle of the night for baloney?" So, I get up and I go downstairs and I come around the corner into the kitchen and I see my mom kneeling on the ground in front of the open refrigerator door. And there's broken glass and mayonnaise and ketchup on the floor and like jars of peanut butter and olives scattered across the kitchen floor. And she's crying and my dad's nowhere in sight and I look past her and I see that every one of the shelves in the refrigerator has been pulled off. And I'd never before seen my father raise his hand in anger. I'd never seen him lose control. It was shocking and frightening. My mom starts saying, "It was right there in the meat drawer. He just didn't look. He never looks. I just can't take him anymore. He gets so crazy and irrational at times." I'd heard her kind of talking about leaving him before and saying he made a much better father than husband. And it would always just strike me speechless with fear. And as much as I believed that my father really loved my brother and I dearly, her kicking him out of his life- out of her life - seemed as good as kicking him out of our lives too.  

I knew he had this other family and he didn't see them and maybe I would grow up and not be smart enough or interesting enough for him. So, I said, "You know, God," for when I finally found my voice, "Well, what got into him? I mean, he wanted to make it a really special day. He got you those special earrings from Tiffany's and everything," and she looked up at me and I could see that she actually had some idea. 

 She said, "Well, you know, his mother died and it's Mother's Day and I think he's feeling kind of guilty."  

I said, "Grandma died! Daddy's mother died? When?"  

She said, "Well, back in September."  

I said, "That was nine months ago, how come nobody told us?"  

And she kind of shrugged her shoulders and said, "Well, you didn't really know her." Well, not through any fault of my own. But she'd said enough and she sent me back up to bed and I went back upstairs, trying to figure out what to think of this news. I got into bed and clutched my pillow to my chest and said, "Grandma's dead, Grandma's dead!" And trying to work up some emotion. But, you know, I didn't know her. I'd only met her once and I didn't even have any other grandparents so I wasn't even really sure what I was missing. But what made me most upset was that I had been cut out of this moment in my father's life. And I couldn't imagine losing my own mother and here his mother had died nine months ago and I didn't even know. I wasn't even invited to the funeral. So, the next morning I'm watching the cartoons with my brother and I say, "You know, Daddy's mom died, Grandma died." 

And he said, "Yeah I know. It sucks."  

"Well how did you know?"  

He said, "Well I found another box of ashes in the closet in Daddy's study." I knew exactly what he was talking about; it was, like, right next to the box of ashes of our Grandfather. I just didn't know that he also used to sneak through the house because that was the only way you learned anything. So, that was pretty much where my father's family stayed - was in the closet. Nobody ever came out again and they didn't really come up in conversation and I never learned the source of this bad blood until my own father was dying of prostate cancer twelve years later and it came out that there was some kind of secret from his childhood that my mom said would explain a lot about him that we needed to know. 

But before we had a chance to get together a medical emergency sent him to the hospital and the next time we assembled it was around his hospital bed and it was this horrible day when he just had terrible waves of pain that were wracking his body and he was screaming out, "Help, help me!" like he was drowning in it and after what seemed like an eternity but about an hour of watching this my mom finally bullied this nurse to knock him out with morphine and so we all went outside. We were kind of trembling after witnessing the suffering.  

We sat down near this stone wall across from being in front of the cancer institute, this gorgeous September day and my mum said, "You know, I think I'd better tell what the secret is." So, she takes a deep breath. She said, "Your father is part black."  

"Well, that's it?" 

"Yeah, that's all." 

We'd known that there's a secret for a couple of weeks. I thought it was abuse or some horrible crime so this seemed actually, you know, kind of cool! So, we asked a couple of questions. "Well, how black is he?"  

She said, "Well, he was mixed. And both of his parents were also mixed, they were Creoles from New Orleans." And, actually, they didn't look black either, nor his sister Lorraine, and that's why they didn't come out and make that one visit but his other sister Shirley was more brown-skinned and she married a darker-skinned man who was actually a lawyer for the NAACP and eventually became the head of the NAACP for the whole western part of the country, which is why they never came to see us when we were being white in Connecticut. So, that did answer a lot of questions but, of course, it raised many more.  

Among them, you know, "Why? Why did he make this decision? Why was it a secret?" But the next day a tumor broke through the wall of my father's bladder. That's what had been causing all the pain. And he had to have emergency surgery and he ended up living for another month but he was never lucid again. And then he died. And so we had no chance to talk about it. So, for the last fifteen years, I've been on my own trying to figure out his motivation, whether it was because he was born in 1920 in the Jim Crow South or when he moved to Brooklyn in 1927, the black kids picked on him because he looked white and the white kids they knew his family was black and they ostracized him too. Or was it that he didn't want his own children to suffer the same pain and confusion that he had? Or maybe, as it was suggested in this "New Yorker" profile that kind of outed him publicly, maybe it back in 1996, that he had made a Faustian bargain that he had betrayed his family and himself to some degree to further his ambition as a writer. You know, I will never know for sure. I suspect it's a little bit of all those things.  

But I do know that it wasn't coldness that I think my father felt towards his family as I had suspected when I was a kid. A few weeks before that Mother's Day when he ransacked the refrigerator, he'd written an essay that appeared in the Home section of the New York Times. He used to do a column for them and it was an essay that he hadn't run by me. And it was about, the focus of the essay was in defense of irrational behavior on the part of parents and his argument was if parents were not crazy sometimes then where would we get our poets and our novelists from? But it was really a kind of meditation on his own parents, his relationship to his parents and his childhood. And he wrote, "Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I realized how much I missed them and what they meant to me." And he wondered now that he had kids himself, how we would look upon him after he was gone. And then he wrote, "Do they understand that after all these years of running away from home, I'm still trying to get back?" 

Thank you.