Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty
As far as I know Mom didn’t discuss Dad’s suicide with anyone in Utica’s Jewish community. When I was in my late fifties, I began wondering if she talked about it with anyone, anywhere. In early 2018, I asked her sister, Freda, the one she was closest to, the one she would have been most likely to confide in. Aunt Freda said Mom had never brought up the subject.
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The summer after Mom died, I asked Phyllis Silverman, Marty’s widow and one of Mom’s closest friends. She, too, said Mom had never raised the subject. Not for the first time I berated myself for failing to ask a question of Mom when she was alive, lucid, and willing to talk. In search of answers from the material I did have, I reread the transcript of the conversation I had had with Marty in 1985, when I was trying to learn more about Dad. And there it was, the answer to the question I thought I’d never asked: did Mom acknowledge the truth about Dad’s death out loud, ever, to anyone?
The subject had come up at the end of a lengthy conversation. Marty and I had talked about a wide range of subjects including Dad’s upbringing, the genesis of his and Marty’s friendship, their history, Dad’s time in Okinawa and at Hebrew Union College, his courtship with Mom, his family’s disapproval of her, Aunt Sylvia, Dad’s worries about finances, his depression, and how Mom had handled it. It turns out that when Mom called Marty on March 8, 1974, to tell him Dad was missing, she all but used the word suicide.
“In her first phone call to me she was distraught,” Marty said, “and yet she was sort of angry at him for doing this at this particular time.”
“Do you remember what she said?” I asked.
“Something like, ‘your friend has gone and disappeared on me.’ Not, ‘Elliot’s done it.’ ‘Your friend.’”
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