Alix Kates Shulman - A Good Enough Daughter

A Good Enough Daughter

A Memoir

Alix Kates Shulman

IN MEMORY OF

Robert Davis Kates (19311989)

Dorothy Davis Kates (19071996)

Samuel Simon Kates (19011996)

Contents

Acknowledgments

For invaluable help, my thanks go to my tireless editor, Cecelia Cancellaro, my agent, Amanda Urban, and those friends and family members who informed or advised me: Eva Eisenberg, Laura Kates Feldman, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Eugene Kates, Linda Trichter Metcalf, Nancy K. Miller, Honor Moore, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ann Snitow, Carol Stein, Lyn Thomas, Charlotte vanStolk, Susan Wittenberg, and Scott York. Finally, I am grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation and Gianna Celli for providing me with a serene month in residence at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy.

With my brother Bob,
in front of our Ashurst house, 1937

Preface

The books Ive written tell me that my imagination sees the basic human drama as a struggle to slash patriarchal bondsPart I: Take Off, Part II: Wise Up, Part III: Freedom. Its not just a feminist plot but an ancient imperative. Long before Simone de Beauvoir gave it a new significance, Jesus said it and Freud said it: Leave thy father and thy mother. Not trash or blame them, as is the fashion nowadays, but simply leave them. Not the bad parents only but the good ones too; it may even be harder to leave the good ones.

In their way, mine were the best of parents. Which is to say, they loved me abundantly, and when the time came for me to leave, which I did abruptly at twenty and seldom looked back, they let me go. Or to put it another way, they raised me to fly away but remained poised to catch me should I fall. I confess, this enabled me to take them shamelessly for granted once I took offespecially since I left my brother behind to clean up after me.

The lawyer who recently drew my will told me that in her experience, no matter what may have gone before, by the time parents reach their end, their children usually come through for them. Though, Ive noticed, not always willingly. In my doctors waiting room shortly after my parents died, I bumped into an old friend. Last year I found out I have severe diabetes, she said. Around the same time, my parents discovered they have it too. Its a terrible thing. All my life I struggled to escape from them, and after I finally got away, were now connected again in this inseparable way. You always were, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue. Not till my parents were dead did I recognize escape as a leap on the long road home. My friend, whose parents were alive, would surely have bristled at my paradox.

I once read that in all literature there are only two plots: someone takes a journey or someone returns home. My other books have all recounted journeys. In this one Im going home.

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i The Birthright

He took away my birthright; and behold, now he

has taken away my blessing.

GENESIS

Bob, me, and two-year-old Johnny,
with Aunt Lil, the lawyer, on our front steps, 1939

Chapter 1

Whenever my parents came to visit me in New York City, I never met them at the airport; even during the years my husband had a car, I let them take a bus or taxi. Yet for forty years, each time I flew to Cleveland, my parents or brother met my plane no matter how I might demur. They did it out of courtesy and love and to ensure that no preventable discomfort could provide me an excuse to stay away. Still, once I wrenched myself out of their lives, nothing they did could bring me back till I was ready. The years rolled by, with some years only the occasional phone call and not one visit.

Now I was backsmack in the center of their lives. But this time my parents car, armed with a car alarm, sat idle in its garage, and my brother Bob was dead. So I took an escalator down to the lowest level of the Cleveland airport, hopped on the convenient Rapid Transit that goes directly to downtown Cleveland and straight out Shaker Boulevard to a stop not two hundred feet from my parents house. The Rapid had been whisking affluent professionals and businessmen from their downtown offices past Clevelands industrial slums back up to their grand Shaker Heights houses ever since the 1920s, when the Van Sweringen brothers built the suburb, along with the fancy shops of Shaker Square, for successful Clevelandersincluding the architect who built for himself my parents house. I used to think the proximity of the house to the Rapid was Moms trump in persuading Dad to sell the modest Cleveland-Heights-style three-bedroom on Ashurst Road where Bob and I grew up (a postage stamp, but sweet, recalled my mother) for this six-bedroom English-style Shaker edifice: any day of the week he had only to step out the front door at five minutes past the hour or half hour to catch a train that would deposit him in a mere twelve minutes on Public Square, a five-minute walk from his office. Some people might have taken longer, lingering at the enticing windows of those great thriving department stores, Higbees and Mays, or (like me) stopping for cashews at the Nut House or for chocolates at Fannie Farmer; but S. S. Kates, born Samuel Simon and known around town as Speedy Sam, was in too much of a hurry to saunter. I saw your dad on Prospect Avenue the other day walking so fast he leaned going around the corner, reported a young lawyer to me admiringly when my father was ninety. The brief memoir Dad composed at eighty-eight begins: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, November 10, 1901, in the kitchen of my parents home, apparently in a rush to enter the world, and the habit of rushinghurryingbeing impatientbeing earlyhas stayed with me ever since. Now I know my father agreed to buy the house for Mom for a weightier reason: Okay, Bummer, he said when the time came, Ill move if that will bring you back to me.