FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

The Christmas Secrets
By Valerie Ahern

PAGE TWO:
A few weeks later, I got an email from Eleanor. She said that over the years a lot of people have written her, claiming to have some connection to her, but when she read the letter from me, she burst into tears. She said she'd known that I existed, but had lost touch with my mother when I was a baby and had never known what happened to our family. She'd thought of hiring a private detective a few times, but didn't know my mom's "married" name, so she didn't know how to look for her. She was so happy to hear from me and to find out that I had a brother.

I wrote back to Eleanor and told her I'd be in New York soon, and we arranged to meet.

But first, I was going back to Austin for yet another Christmas...

It was December 2000, and I was curious whether my brother had heard the news about our newfound heritage. I took him to dinner. Over some queso and chips, I informed him that I was going to visit some of Mom's relatives in New York soon. I asked whether he knew she had some Jewish cousins. He cocked an eyebrow and said no.

We had grown up knowing all kinds of stuff about our father's family, but absolutely nothing about our mother's. She had no siblings, her father died long ago, we met her mother maybe twice, and that was it. She never told us about any other relatives, let alone introduced us. Yes, that was weird, Paul agreed, starting to get more suspicious.

After being the recipient of two Christmas secrets, I had learned how this was done. I thought I was doing it much more humanely than it had been done to me. In this case, ripping the Band-Aid off all at once was not the best approach.

In the car on the way home, Paul asked, "So... how many of Mom's relatives are Jewish?"

I said, "Um... a hundred percent."

"I'M JEWISH??!!" he exclaimed. My thoughts exactly.

I admit I felt slightly superior knowing this one first. Kinda served him right for sitting on the parents-never-married scoop for five years without telling me. But after he got over the initial shock, he had the same question I did -- why would she keep this from us?

I didn't have an answer. I hadn't asked. After all, we're WASPs. Jewish WASPs.

Soon I would be leaving Austin to go to New York, where I planned to meet our cousin Eleanor. I hadn't told my mother about this, and something told me she wouldn't be overjoyed at the news. A few days before I left, I casually mentioned to her that I had tracked down Eleanor through the Writers Guild and had arranged to meet her.

"Really," my mom said, with an "I didn't see that coming" tone.

The next night, she sat me down in the kitchen. "There's something I need to tell you," she said uncomfortably.

Oh no. What now? We're space aliens? You work for the CIA? I was given to you by gypsies? I stared her down with my best you-cannot-shock-me-this-time look.

"I just wanted to tell you this, since you're going to meet Eleanor, in case she mentions it... It's about how my father died."

Ohhh. This one I already knew. Several times in my life, I had asked my mother how her father had died. Officially, all I knew about him was that he was a professional artist whose last home was by the beach in Venice. I have only one picture of him with me, when I was a toddler. In it, he is holding me over his head, smiling up at me, his hair wavy and black, his body strong and lean. A picture can be misleading, but it looked like the quintessential proud grandpa shot to me. Soon after that photo was taken, he died. I'd always wondered what happened. He was young, seemingly healthy, and the few times I'd asked my mother how it had happened, thinking that was an innocent enough question, she'd said "I'll tell you later," which was code for "I'll tell you never." So, I eventually surmised, it must have been some sort of shameful death, most likely suicide. Of course I'd never brought that up to my mom.

"He killed himself," she said, avoiding my eyes.

"Yeah, I kind of figured that's what happened, since you would never tell me when I asked you." Somehow I felt this terrible news was a small victory for me.

"But that's not all..." she went on.

Not all? How could there be more? What could be more final than that?

"He took a couple of people with him."

She explained that in a crime of passion, he had killed the woman he was involved with AND her adult son, then taken his own life. When all the bodies showed up at the coroner's, a call was placed to my mom in Monterey, where we lived at the time.

She told me this in the same soft, stoic tone as she had the previous Christmas secret, as if years of holding this in had spun it down to the bare essence of its meaning, with no emotions connected to it anymore.

I listened as she told me all she will probably ever say on the topic, which wasn't much. She said she'd had to break the news to her mother, who'd long since divorced him, and that his house in Venice was left to my mom and the daughter of the woman he'd killed (which would indicate they were married, not just involved, but I guess she couldn't bring herself to say that).

This time I didn't feel outrage or resentment at the revelation, but rather just sympathy for my mom, with a new understanding of how this tough shell had formed around her, keeping from me these facts that she, for her own reasons, had felt my life would be better without.

About a week later, on January 1st, 2001, I met my cousin Eleanor, her sister Fran, and their husbands. All four of them had been raised in Brooklyn and spent their adulthoods in Manhattan, a world very different from the Texas childhood I had known, and from my California hippie heritage on my father's side. They showed me pictures of my grandfather, and told me how much he loved me. They told me that some of his artwork is in the archives at the Met, and that he had several cartoons in The New Yorker. I was so happy to know these people, and to gain this new perspective. And they were all so loving and outgoing, so fuklempt to meet me.

Since then, I have contemplated the meaning of identity and heritage, and keeping secret information about oneself. At first I felt compelled to "out" myself to my Jewish friends, to let them know that I had this newfound kinship with them. But after a while I realized it hasn't changed who I am, or how I define myself. It's just another interesting patch in the quilt of my history.

On the internet I found an old pencil drawing that my grandfather did in the 1930s. It's called "Two Drinkers"-- two old men in a bar, one staring darkly ahead while the other confides in him. I have a copy of it framed in my hallway. Every time I look at it, I think about Harry, the demons he fought, the creativity he expressed, and the person he was, that I never knew. And I think about the Christmas secrets that my mother tried to spare me, but which I now embrace and am determined not to keep secret anymore.

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