There are several ways a person can disappear. I did so by learning to walk softly.
When it was warm, my mom would hang our laundry to dry on clotheslines in the backyard of our faded brownstone on South 3rd Street. Cold weather meant the groaning lines created an obstacle course in the entrance and dark hallway of the first floor. I became an expert at dodging the partly frozen, hanging pants and shirts. But even then, I would usually get a few drops of icy water on my head as I made my way to the kitchen from the living room.
My father had rules for us. If we were drinking something, we were strictly forbidden from making that reflexive sighing sound many people make after taking a satisfying swig. When we were dragooned by him to help clean up the cluttered backyard, he insisted we call it "policing the yard." If we had to relieve ourselves, we couldn't call it going to the bathroom or restroom, we had to call it "the toilet." As in, "I have to go to the toilet." On my first day in a new private school, I stood up and asked the teacher if I could go to the toilet. All around me I heard the sound of my classmates laughing. I didn't try to explain myself, but I never called it that again.
My mother generally didn't like us going outside by ourselves. But one morning, I woke to a commotion coming from across the street. I went out to the stoop with my mother, and we saw two men running out of the gas station across the street. The owner came running out seconds later, firing a pistol at them. After things calmed down, we went back inside.
My brothers and I looked forward to visiting the TV station where my father would opine on social and political issues every night after the news on WNEW-TV. We would wear baseball caps for the outing—at my mother's urging—and the staff would jokingly call us the Abend gang. The station was always cool in the summer, and afternoons buzzed with excitement. I loved standing in the darkness on the periphery near the black electric cables coiled on the floor, watching my father sitting behind the broadcaster's desk, adjusting his tie and bathed in bright light before filming began.
Some nights he'd debate Congressman Ed Koch, who later became the mayor of New York. In the hallway, there was a water fountain that had the coldest water I'd ever tasted. I'd put my mouth directly on the spigot and drink until I burst. One of the women who worked there once gently told me it was rude to put my mouth directly on a public spigot other people also used. I nodded in agreement. But as soon as she was gone, I put my mouth back on the spigot.
In 1981, my father was put on trial by the State of New York for tax evasion. Although he was acquitted, his lawyers were never paid. The day of the acquittal, we were sitting in the living room in a celebratory mood. I put on one of my father's tweed jackets, placed his pipe in my mouth, sat in his armchair, and proceeded to imitate him answering questions in the courtroom. At age seven I had a striking resemblance to my father, and my parents sat back and chuckled at my mimicry. My mother, who didn't give compliments frequently, said I was "the money," and I basked in their admiration.
The lower floors of the house were my father's domain. He loved books and had them stacked everywhere in the basement. He had a habit of blowing his nose and then wiping his fingers in the pages of the books. I stopped opening up any of his books no matter how enticing the title was.
My father spoke and raised money for Irish groups allegedly connected to the Irish Republican Army. For years, fundraisers, gunrunners, and fixers connected to the "cause" slept in a spare room downstairs, as they passed through on their way to Ireland.
In the bowels of our brownstone was a dirt floor cellar. It was pitch black and home to a small army of rats and large flying water beetles. We were all terrified of going down there. When the mood struck, my father would have sword fights with me and my two brothers using wooden sticks in the basement. We would attack him simultaneously, and if we were lucky, would force him to begin retreating down the stairs of the cellar entrance. Once he began descending those stairs, we never pursued him.
Ted Kavanaugh, the WNEW News Director and the one responsible for hiring my father, spent a few months living in our attic, which was generally off limits to us. When he moved out, I snuck upstairs and discovered Kavanaugh had left behind a battered paperback titled "How to Pick up Girls." Having never spoken to a girl I wasn't related to, I was surprised someone would leave behind such a valuable resource.
My father brought a large watermelon home one day, which he took to the backyard to carve on a chipped plate gingerly resting on an old cinder block. He extracted the juicy red center and told me to bring it to my mom. "Give her the heart because she is my heart," he said.
On the days my father taught at Jersey State College, he would sometimes bring us with him. We would swim in the pool and then shower in the locker room. After the shower, my father would have each of us canvas the toilet stalls, taking as much toilet paper as we could carry. When it was time to go home, he would bum a ride from one of his students.
One day when we were with him, he asked a female student I didn't recognize for a ride home. We stopped at a park first instead of going straight home. My father told my brothers and I to go play while he talked with her. I had come back to get something when I saw my father kissing her. They didn't notice me, and I quickly walked away without a word.
One Sunday, my father had taken my brothers and I to a junkyard to scavenge. Somehow my brother had come into possession of a goldfish imprisoned in a plastic bag with murky water. He was sitting on my father's shoulders clutching the bag tightly, while my other brother held my father's hand and I trailed slightly behind. We passed a bodega where several inebriated men were standing outside, drinking from slim glass bottles and talking loudly.
As we passed, one reached his hand up behind my father and pressed a lit cigarette against the plastic bag. As he did so, he made eye contact with me and put his finger to his lips, the universal symbol for keeping quiet. My heart was pounding, but I stayed silent. My father never said a word, and we just kept walking.
When I was eight, I was in the kitchen reading when I heard my parents arguing in the hallway. My father's voice was becoming louder and louder, and my mother's voice was taking on a pleading note. I knew where this was headed. I walked into the hall and said to my father, "You know, you're going to hell." But I used Gehinnom, the Hebrew word for hell. He looked at me, surprised at my interference. I was afraid I would get the beating this time, but the moment passed. Later that night, my mother came over to me and said, "You made me very happy today," and hugged me.
A few days after my ninth birthday, I was standing outside in the front of the house. My mother came over and said in a low voice, "I'm going to be doing something very difficult soon, and I'm going to need your help." I said "Of course." She told me we would all be leaving—she called it escaping—my father soon. I had four siblings at that point, and the youngest was one years old. The next day, we waited until my father had gone to work and then flew to Washington, DC, where my grandfather lived.
We only packed a change of clothes for each of us and some diapers. My siblings seemed happy for the trip and the opportunity to stay at our grandfather's house. His house was on a hill in a residential area and had a giant, well-manicured lawn ascending the hill. Apart from crickets, we weren't used to the quiet of DC. compared to the constant din of South 3rd Street. Inside, it was air-conditioned and cool. Everything was perfectly ordered and smelled of moth balls and furniture polish. We were afraid to disturb anything.
After a week at my grandfather's house, my mother told us my father was going to be coming to DC to try and get us back. We quickly left our grandfather's house and checked into a cheap motel nearby. My grandfather claimed ignorance as to our whereabouts when pressed by my father. He spent weeks in DC trying to find us, and we moved from one crowded motel room to another in an effort to elude him. He finally gave up and went back to the brownstone in Brooklyn. He stayed there until his death at age ninety-nine.
The rest of us went to live in another part of Brooklyn.
I only saw my father a few more times after that. He had my siblings and I over to the brownstone for a weekend while custody was being hashed out between my parents a few months after we left him. He took my brothers and I out on a short excursion and left my sisters, aged three and one, alone at home. When we got home, my mother was apoplectic. That weekend jaunt was enough for the judge to decide my father was never to have us over at his house again.
When I was ten, he came to my private school unannounced and demanded to see me. The principal seemed afraid of him and had me brought to the library where my father was waiting. I was surprised to see him and didn't say much. He kissed me, which was unlike him, and showed me a silver dollar he'd acquired as I squirmed on his lap. That same summer, he visited me in upstate New York where we were spending a weekend at a bungalow colony in the Catskills with friends of my mother. He took me to a nearby field, and we both hunkered down on a hill as he taught me how to fire a .22 caliber rifle.
Years later, my mother would say, if we hadn't left the good doctor when we did, we would have been unrecognizable.
I still listen for footsteps. Especially at night.
