Free My Old Neighborhood Remembered by Avery Corman Page B

school, and I said some boys teased me about not having a father. Completely untrue. “Do you want to know where your father is?” she asked me, signing. I nodded that I would. “California,” she said. She was often puckish and was so as she told me this, letting me in on something between us. “Don’t tell anybody I told you.” “I promise,” I said.
    California. The shifting stories about how my father died now made sense. The stories shifted because they weren’t true. I couldn’t break faith with my aunt and implicate her. And that was when I came up with my idea of flushing out the truth by rewriting the bar mitzvah requirements and confronting my mother with the complications therein.
    She did not respond immediately. A few days later, I was told to come into the living room and my mother and sister sat across from me, both with grave expressions. My mother began elsewhere, telling me about my cousin’s boyfriend. My cousin, Renee, with whom we lived, was about eighteen at the time and going with a young man who believed, because that was what he had been told, that his mother was dead. He had just found out his mother was not dead, she was alive and in a mental institution. The young man was deeply upset and my mother said she had decided she didn’t want me to be similarly upset some time in the future to discover what I had been told about my father wasn’t true. My father was alive. My father and mother were divorced. He had abandoned his family before my fifth birthday and when my sister was almost twelve. He had run out on us, deserted us, my mother said. He had made no attempt to be in touch with us or send money and he had left us to move in with relatives. He hadn’t sent letters or birthday cards to his children. He had no interest in us. “I told you he was dead because he’s as good as dead,” my mother said. He once was a salesman for a paper company, she told me, but he couldn’t hold on to the job. My mother’s uncle set him up in a shoe store, but he couldn’t run it properly and the business went under. She said he was a bad man. He gambled. He had debts. My mother had been paying off some of his debts to a collection agency, a few dollars a month. The collection agency representative agreed to that because he said it was taking milk from babies. She was still paying every month. If my father cared about me or my sister we would have heard from him and we had not.
    Some of this, revealed in another conversation a few years later, turned out not to be strictly true. My father did leave New York, trailing debts behind. But he did call my mother from somewhere in the South some days afterward and asked her to meet him and bring the children. Making a stand, my mother refused to do so. So it was not exactly abandonment. Thorough editing in this first revelation was not being done by mother, who was going for, what became known in our school studies, as The Main Theme.
    And then my mother added an additional piece of information about my father that was to have a lingering effect on my sense of self and my feelings about my background. She told me he had held up a candy store and was caught. My mother said she received a call to come down to a police station and at the station was a husband and wife who owned the candy store and my father was there. My mother said she got on her knees, crying, begging the couple not to press charges, that she had young children at home and couldn’t have their father in jail and they took pity on her and my father was released. So many questions arose about that incident, including the desperate state of mind he must have been in if the story were true, but the questions didn’t occur to me until I was older. What I came away with was that I had a father who was a bad man who didn’t love his children or he wouldn’t have run off, and didn’t even send us birthday cards,