Samuel Rosenberg's Daughters

Missing Men: A Memoir
by Joyce Johnson

Joyce Johnson's classic memoir of growing up female in the 1950s, Minor Characters, was one of the initiators of an important new genre: the personal story of a minor player on history's stage. In Missing Men, a memoir that tells her mother's story as well as her own, Johnson constructs an equally unique self-portrait as she examines, from a woman's perspective, the far-reaching reverberations of fatherlessness. Telling a story that has "shaped itself around absences," Missing Men presents us with the arc and flavor of a unique New York life - from the author's adventures as a Broadway stage child to her fateful encounters with the two fatherless artists she marries. Joyce Johnson's voice has never been more compelling.

Chapter 1

I once had a husband who started obsessively painting squares - three squares in shifting relationships to each other on what appeared flat ground, colored emptiness. He explained to me that the negative space in his work was as important as the positive, that each took its form from the other. What interested him most was the tension between them. I remember being fascinated by his concept of negative space, though negative seemed the wrong word for something that had so much presence.

I was still young then, too young to look at my history and see how my life has shaped itself around absences - first by happenstance; ultimately, perhaps, by choice.

Toward the end of her life, when I thought my mother's defenses were finally down, I asked whether she remembered her father's death, which occurred when she was five years old. "Oh, yes," she replied brightly. "He was in a trolley car accident, and we never got the insurance." Then she looked at me with the glimmer of a crafty smile. "You've asked me too late. I've forgotten everything."

She had never spoken of what it was like to grow up without a father. In fact, she seemed to lack a recollected girlhood, except for one memory she was willing to call up: the Victory Garden she'd tended during World War I, when her family was living near Bronx Park. Her garden was at the top of a long hill. When she was in her nineties, her mind kept wandering back to that sunlit patch of earth, and she would marvel over and over that the carrots she grew there were the sweetest she'd ever tasted. Otherwise, except for her singing, which had pre-dated my arrival into the world, it was as if my mother's life and memories had begun with me.

"I have a trained voice," I'd sometimes hear her tell people. In a bitter way, she seemed proud of that fact. On the music rack of our baby grand was an album of lieder by Schubert, her favorite composer. Once in a while, when one of my aunts induced her to sing, she would reluctantly sit down on the piano bench to accompany herself, and her voice would sound to my astonished ears like the performances that issued from the cloth-covered mouth of our wooden radio. Whatever was "classical" was welcomed into our living room, but if you switched to the wrong station and got the blare of a blue note, my mother would give it short shrift. "Popular," as she dismissed all music that was not classical, was "dissonant" and therefore no good, with an exception made for melodies from certain Broadway shows. For months she dusted and cut out her dress patterns humming "My Ship," a song from Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark. She even decided to teach it to me, though it was really too difficult for a four-year-old. "My ship has sails that are made of silk," I remember singing shyly for my aunts and my father, with my mother prompting, "The decks are trimmed with gold," in her radio mezzo as I faltered.

When I was older, I learned that she had actually been serious about her singing, with ambitions of performing Schubert on the concert stage; at some point, though, she had simply given up. The family didn't want her going on tour, she told me, and besides, there had been no money for further voice training. But perhaps her need and will to sing hadn't been strong enough. I never felt my mother was passionately musical - or passionate about anything except the rarefied, lonely life she envisioned for me with her at my side - effectively shutting out all other relationships - as she guided me toward my destiny of early success.

Her singing may really have been a means to ends other than music itself - a way of setting herself apart as "special," a possible escape route from the blight that had descended upon her sisters. Most of all it may have represented her sole bearable connection to the cultured, artistic father she scarcely remembered, the one thing she had from Samuel Rosenberg in the way of a birthright, which she would pass on to me - not as a gift but as an obligation to be lived out, on her terms.

I was once shown a photograph from another century of a slender, bearded young man. It was right after my grandmother died, when the wall around the past briefly became permeable. "This is your grandfather Samuel," Aunt Anna said, before snatching the picture from my hands as if she just realized she'd committed an indiscretion.

I'd seen a man with bleak, grief-stricken eyes, one hand on an open book as if distractedly keeping his place, the other clenched into a fist. I was sixteen, I had questions. My mother and her older sisters had always told me I was like him - like him in that I'd inherited the talent he had for writing. They'd said he was a poet and a scholar, the descendant of a long line of eminent rabbis in Warsaw. At the age of thirty-seven, he'd died of some illness. That was the story.

I asked my aunt what illness he'd died of. She fell silent, then in a terse, matter-of-fact way let me hear the truth. On April 12, 1908, my grandfather, who had injured his hands in some factory and been out of work for a while, had turned on the gas and killed himself. "Don't tell your mother I told you."

A few days later my mother uncharacteristically took me into her confidence: she and my aunts had found some writings of my grandfather's among my grandmother's papers, and they had burned them. Burned them? I remember feeling bereft and estranged, as if something that should have been mine had been stolen from me. "Why did you do that?" I demanded, sure that part of the answer was the suicide my aunt had forbidden me to mention.

My mother seemed startled that I would care so much, that I would suddenly have such interest in someone I'd never known. "They were private," she said. "They were not for anyone to read."

But poems are written to be read. I knew that at sixteen. I wondered whether she'd lied to me about burning everything. Years later I searched her papers for some yellowed pages with lines in Yiddish or Hebrew, but found nothing in my grandfather's hand.

My mother died with three suitcases still lined up under the piano, exactly where she'd put them in 1984 when she'd moved into her last apartment. In the days when suitcases were called valises, the flaking brown leather one had accompanied my father on business trips to Patchogue or Asbury Park; the blue-and-tan pair had vacationed in the Catskills or in Florida with my mother's older sisters. She, the sole survivor of that generation, had ended up their custodian, as if my father and my aunts had one by one gone off on their holidays, forgetting to bring their luggage.

Although she'd always been house-proud, she didn't seem to care that the suitcases spoiled the look of her new living room. She needed to go through them slowly, she told me - slowly and with care. "But, Ma, what on earth are you looking for?" I'd ask her. "For something of value," she'd answer cryptically, as if she expected to find a misplaced diamond or stock certificate.

I didn't press her for details. If I probed, I knew she'd pull back altogether or I'd get that glassy smile of hers as she deliberately threw me off track. I was in my fifties now, but since my teens, I'd had difficulty talking to my mother without a filter of ritualized politeness, and I was still careful to reveal only the things about myself that she might find acceptable. Our conversations had little content. I had the feeling that was the way she wanted it. When it came to the adult stranger who was her daughter, she preferred not to deal with too much reality.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Joyce Johnson is the author of three novels, including The Night Café. Her other books include Minor Characters, which was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958.