FRESH YARN presents: The Christmas Secrets... by Valerie Ahern

FRESH YARN presents:

The Christmas Secrets
By Valerie Ahern

On Christmas Eve 1997, my brother Paul and I were back in our hometown, Austin, and we went to his friend's family home. Several of us sat around that night, discussing the holiday and our various traditions. One guy, who I'd never met before, said to my brother, "Your family's not very traditional, is it? I mean, your parents aren't even married."

I scowled at the ridiculous statement, waiting for Paul to put this rude person in his place. But instead, my brother just nodded. He recounted the story of how, about five years earlier, it had occurred to him that he didn't know anything about his own parents' wedding, so he asked my father when and where it had taken place, and my father told him...it hadn't. This was news to me.

With great difficulty, I tried to hide my shock. My cheeks were hot, my head spinning through the reel of my life, as I tried urgently to incorporate this new fact into everything else I'd ever been told. My parents never celebrated an anniversary, but I always thought that was because they were just not very sentimental. And come to think of it, I'd never seen any wedding photos or heard any mention of the event, either. I suddenly felt like such an idiot, not having put this together. And now to be informed of my lovechild status by my brother's friend's sister's boyfriend? Humiliating.

I spent Christmas Day seething. As WASPs, my family's approach to conflict was not to discuss it. The bigger the problem, the less discussion it deserved. So something like this? Not a word. Actually, we aren't even really WASPs. My father is of Irish Catholic descent, and my brother and I were raised in sort of a generic, non-religious, vaguely counter-cultural way, rejecting a lot of traditions -- apparently including marriage. All that with an added dose of WASPy non-communication.

So, in true faux-WASP style, I avoided mentioning this historical discrepancy to my mother, much less unleashing the grilling she deserved. I figured now that it was out in the ether, and my brother knew that I knew… well, I thought she might get around to telling me the story. I certainly did not expect what happened a couple of Christmases later.

In 1999, on the last night of my holiday trip to Austin, my mother and I were alone in the kitchen. I was about to leave the room, when she stopped me.

"Yes?" I said.

She hesitated. "There's just something I... I want to tell you. It's really hard. I don't know why it's so hard..."

This was not like my secretive mother to build up to any statement with that. I knew this had to be big. I wondered if it had something to do with her phantom wedding. I sat down across the table from her. "What is it?"

"I was always told never to say this to anyone, so I guess it's just ingrained in me, but lately I've been wondering, am I just going to take it to my grave?"

What...what?

"My parents' families are both Jewish."

Ho-ly shit. I had to let this sink in. If her "parents' families" were Jewish, then she was, which would mean... I'M JEWISH??!!

Suddenly being born out of wedlock was on the back burner. And, it appeared, I was owed about 232 Chanukah presents.

She went on to explain that when she was a kid and her family left New York City and moved to Pasadena, around 1945, they reinvented themselves. They started celebrating Christmas, and never revealed to their new friends any information about the family and culture they'd left behind.

I tried to sound as understanding as I could, knowing it was very hard for my mom to tell me something like this. But it just didn't make sense. Why did she deprive me of this knowledge for so long? Granted, it might've been a little inconvenient when we lived in a backward, Baptist-only town in West Texas when I was a kid, but now that I lived in L.A., and had many Jewish friends whose cultural identity seemed very important to them, this is something I really would've liked to have known. Sooner.

The next fall, when my mother was visiting me in California, with the veil lifted from our family tree, she told me this story:

She had happened to be watching the E! True Hollywood Story about the movie Dirty Dancing a few days before. The main interviewee was a woman named Eleanor, who'd written and produced the movie, telling the story of how she made it happen, how the coming-of-age tale of a Jewish teen in the Catskills was such a personal story for her. As she talked about her childhood, some old pictures of her family were shown, including one of her mother and father.

My mother, watching this, recognized the picture. She had the same one in her own album. It was her aunt and uncle. She realized the woman being interviewed was her long-lost first cousin Eleanor.

I was so excited to hear this. I'd never had a relative in show business before! My mom figured I would find this interesting, and that would be it. But that was not at all it.

When I returned to my office, I immediately looked up Eleanor in the Writers Guild Directory. She was listed there, repped by someone at CAA. I wrote her a letter, saying that I was the granddaughter of Harry, her uncle, and that my mother was her first cousin, and had recently seen her Dirty Dancing documentary, and that I was working as a writer myself, and was very proud to know that there was such a successful writer in my family. I sent the letter to her in care of her agent.

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.