Mosaics: a memoir of childhood

Ten years later, when her health broke down and she was taken to the hospital, she became characteristically violent. She screamed obscenities at the doctor, tried to bite the nurses, bit herself and spat blood at the attendants. Tranquilized and forcibly tied down, she was declared mentally incompetent. She was going out of life as she'd gone through it: aggressive and abusive, violent and self-destructive, alienating everyone who was trying to help her.

Character

I inherited Rube's dark complexion, flat feet, hay fever, carefulness (though not meanness) about money, and capacity for hard work. (He worked full-time till he was seventy-eight.) If my paternity was somewhat dubious, there was no question about my mother. Though I loathed her, I knew I looked like Judy. Like her I was neat, organized, energetic, and compulsive, as well as short-tempered, impatient, critical, and intolerant. I had the natural idealism of youth, but my parents had made me deeply cynical and aggressive.

I completely rejected their values: their religion, family ties, genteel conformity, and sexual puritanism. Except for Nana, I never met an adult I liked, respected, and trusted till I went to college. I didn't want to be anything like my parents, their family or their friends, my school, dance, and piano teachers, or the boorish counselors at camp. I was strong-willed and defiant and, though I didn't realize it, determined to do everything the hard way. I never learned how to get along with people, could never flatter or court. Confrontational rather than tactful, I rebelled against all authority and was fired from many jobs.

As a child I accepted Judy's endless beatings as an inescapable part of my life. There was no one to complain to about them. Rube was powerless to oppose her and condoned them by his silence. My teachers were too remote and impersonal. I felt relatives wouldn't believe me and would side with Judy. I never thought of going to the police, or tried to take revenge with poison or a knife. I didn't want to be sent to the dreaded boarding school or to an orphanage. I believed, after surviving the physical and psychological equivalent of Marine basic training, that I was free to live my own life. Friends with kind, loving, sacrificial parents had incurred a huge emotional debt and lifelong burden, but I had no emotional obligations. I'd never have to write, call, or see Judy; would never have to support, visit, or care for her.

Her beatings never broke my will or stopped me from doing whatever I wanted to do. They never made me eat all my food, keep quiet in the morning, go to Hebrew school, or practice the piano; never prevented me from teasing Ken, misbehaving in school, or fooling around with girls. All they did was stiffen my resistance, make me hate her and wish she were dead. In some ways I resembled the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who "attributed his passion for destruction to the influence of his mother, whose despotic character inspired him with an insensate hated of every restriction on liberty."