Once Upon... A Storyteller's Memoir

Chapter Nine: Voice

Scheherazade who knew her power as a storyteller, offered herself in marriage to the Sultan, and spoke to her sister, Dinarzade, when they were alone, “My dear sister, I want your help. When the Sultan receives me, I shall beg him to let you sleep in our chamber, so that I may have your company during the last night I am alive. If he grants my wish, be sure that you wake me an hour before the dawn, and speak to me in these words:

‘My sister, if you are not asleep, I beg you, before the sun rises, to tell me one of your charming stories.’

Then I shall begin, and I hope by my storytelling to deliver the people from the terror that reigns over them.”

*

As a new teacher, I did not envision that the art of storytelling alone could reverse years of deprived education in that community, but I knew I had touched a chord and created a deeper bond through the spoken word art, vastly different from reading aloud from a book. But just because I'd learned how to communicate more effectively with my students, did not mean I knew how to teach them past the basics.

Whenever I gave a written test or assigned a composition, I saw failing work and knew I'd failed. By the end of the school year, at least one third of the all-white faculty left, as school violence increased.

During summer vacation, David and I traveled to the Boston area, his hometown, for a long stay with his mother and to meet his family. I was able to visit many of them through the porches and staircases at the back of his mother's building—each of the three floors were occupied by family members in a tenement they called the "Grand Hotel."

From his mother and uncle, I came to understand the abusive nature of David's early childhood, about his father who beat his mother and even David for crying in his crib. I learned how his grandfather threatened his brutal father and forced him to leave town, how David's grandmother continued to bring Jewish families over from war-torn Lithuania, where Jews had been at risk over the centuries from Russians, Soviets, Poles, and Germans.

One night, around his mother's kitchen table, I listened to terrifying stories told by the aunts in Yiddish, of the sudden, ruthless attacks and rape of women in their village or shtetel, back in the old country of Lithuania. They told of these tragic events as if they had just taken place, with renewed, scandalized weeping and dramatic gestures.

Though I didn't speak Yiddish, I understood the events; I certainly could not escape their emotional impact. Both my parents spoke German in the home; both born of German immigrant families who arrived in the late 19th century—I knew enough German to recognize Yiddish words. So, when one aunt told of a Polish man wrapping the long hair of a Jewish maid around his arm, as she mimicked the action and wept, I understood in every sense, what had happened, that I was vicariously experiencing the generational trauma of wanton rape and anti-Semitism.

*

The Sultan's murderous behavior caused the greatest horror in the town, where nothing was heard but cries and lamentations. In one house was a father weeping for the loss of his daughter, in another perhaps a mother trembling for the fate of her child. Instead of the blessings that had formerly been heaped on the Sultan’s head, the air was now full of curses.

*

How to survive and escape the cruelty that men perpetrated on women of all races and cultures remained an appalling issue, yet I saw one way out that summer: by revealing it. Removing layers of repression, my own silence wore thin, by listening to others, by daring to speak out, to tell primal tales.

Yet the ancient stories also told of the wounded male, his need to recover and heal. While David was never violent to me, his impatience and quick temper hid a discomfort, an unresolved pain.

David admitted to me, "My father made me his scapegoat: A slap to the back of my head, a punch on the arm, or a kick in the rear. Anything would set him off, a dropped fork, an open window. He disappeared from our lives when I was seven."

Returning to the city to begin the 1967 school year, I continued in my position at Portola JHS. But I could no longer justify my lack of teaching skills for students who needed better literacy instruction, even though no administrator held me accountable as long as I maintained control of my classes.

Visiting the school library during my prep, across the hall from my classroom, I discovered that students who acted out in my English classes were open and friendly without the pressure of grades. I approached and inquired of the fulltime school librarian how I could qualify to become one myself. As she described the one-year Master's Degree program in Library Science at the University of California, Berkeley, I began to plan a new career.

It looked as if I was to spend my entire life in a classroom, from first grade in the Catholic mission school near the Mexican border to the rarified halls of the UC-Berkeley campus. The pull to return was strong; I was so close to this final year of higher education and a fulfilling profession. It was also true that in 1968, in spite of the cultural revolutions of the 60s, women still needed to prove their credibility with degrees and diplomas—there was no entry other than earned merit. I had already invested sweat equity, hourly wages, loans, and years of study to achieve social status, to realize my innate potential.

It was crucial that I continue to press on, to find my voice. If another college degree would make me overqualified, at least I would have an impressive resume—for a woman.

As my career plans began to take shape in 1968, my parents' marriage came crashing to its inevitable conclusion. Both sons gone, they had appeared to have come to an agreement or accommodation to create a comfortable home and lived alone in a rustic, rented home in Los Altos Hills, an exclusive community set in the forested hills above the town of Los Altos. They had assembled the outer trappings of success as they approached mid-life, but Dad continued in his alcoholic habits and Mom managed to live in denial.

One night, the hallway phone rang in my second floor flat in the city.

"Kate, he's thrown me out," Mom cried, her voice trembling.

"Calm down, Mom. Just tell me what happened," I said, reluctant to listen.

"We were in the sunroom, talking." She gulped. "He threw me against the wall and told me to get out. He's never hurt me before, ever. There's a bruise on my shoulder where I hit the wall. Oh, Kate, I can't go back there."

"Don't go back! Where are you?" I asked, realizing that this was new type of crisis for them.

Mom had fled to the Caravan Inn, a motel on El Camino Real, the old highway on the San Francisco Peninsula—had driven her own car, packed a small bag in a rush to leave. I reassured her that she was welcome to stay with us or my brother, Mike, who was married with young children and also lived in the city. I counseled her to stay put, away from her house at all costs. Terrified, she agreed. No sooner had I hung up when the phone rang again. It was Dad.

“Well, I've finally done it. I sent your mother packing.” Dad did not apologize. "She was driving me nuts with her attempt to manipulate me. She treats me like a child. I can't live with that or her anymore. It's over."

“Dad, but she just called and she's frightened." I told him the gist of her phone call without giving away her location. I was hunched on the sofa in the living room, wiggling in discomfort on the scratchy upholstery, pressing the phone receiver to my ear as if I might miss a word, thinking of what best to say.

"There's no need for her to be afraid. Good god! She's lived with me for almost thirty years." Dad sounded like the voice of reason.

"But you've never shoved her into a wall before. She's horrified that you did."

He sighed. "Just tell her to give me a couple of days to find a place and move out. She wanted this house and she can have it. I want out of this marriage."

"I will, Dad. I'll let her know."

As a confidant to both my parents for many years in spite of our disagreements, I was not fully aware of the vital role I'd played between them until those back-to-back phone calls. Not surprised at the collapse of their marriage, but relieved, I phoned Mom to tell her she'd soon be able to go home. True to his word, Dad found an apartment and Mom kept the house for several months, complaining that Dad had broken his vows, his promise to share their "Golden Years" with her when we children had gone.

In many ways I could empathize with Mom: Dad had attempted to train himself to be stable, to make future plans, renew his marriage vows, while at the same time strenuously drown his overwhelming struggles in a bottle of vodka.

By this time, in my mid-twenties, I had come to view my parents as immature and unstable, rather than threatening. Perhaps it was teacher training and my experience in junior high school with extremely volatile students that I was able to remain calm and listen, knowing that anger or accusations would only escalate the situation. It was a role reversal made easier by habitual suppression, of never talking back.

In another abrupt move, Dad requested that the Jesuits at the University of Santa Clara arrange for a transfer to a foreign campus, claiming he could no longer stand to live in this country—he wanted distance. Accustomed to Dad's highhanded moves and the fact that he’d fled many times in the past, I did not find his need to run unusual or irrational: Jesuits had universities, parishes, missions worldwide.

Within weeks, he'd signed a contract as faculty to the Jesuit's Fu Jen University, Taipei, Taiwan, to manage a business program, a capitalist showcase, off shore from mainland Communist China during Mao's violent, destructive Cultural Revolution. Just before Dad left for overseas, he came to visit me in the city. Perched on the edge of a daybed in the living room, he looked uncomfortable and subdued, not bothering to take off his trench coat.

"It's best this way," he said. "Your mother doesn't want to accept that our marriage is over. With me across the Pacific, there will be no doubt, and no contact."

"I'm glad for you, Dad," I said. "We've all grown up and left home. We're on our way. This is your grand adventure, so much ahead of you—you're only fifty, the prime of life."

I stumbled over my words, sensing the awkwardness of a child sending her father off to a future without his family. For me, there was no sense of abandonment, only the reprieve that this disaster of a marriage was over, that my parents could no longer hurt one another or us. I had no way of knowing then that Dad was gay and had fought since youth to curb his sexual preferences, that he'd tried to hide it from society, to conform to a married, family life, to repress and repress until he was flattened.

Excited for my own future, I applied to graduate school at UC-Berkeley, submitted to an in person interview, and was thrilled to be admitted. In August 1969, David and I moved to Berkeley for the year, having agreed that since I'd supported him financially to earn his teaching credential, he'd teach full time so I could pursue my Master's in Library Science.

We rented a modern, mini-townhouse on the Southside, so I could walk to classes in historic South Hall, an elegant, red brick building, the last vestige of the original university, built in 1873 in the French Second Empire style. I was in the first graduate cohort to occupy the newly restored 19th century, spacious hall, with twenty-five-foot ceilings and exquisite wood carvings and panels, set in the looming shadow of the clock tower, the famous Campanile.

While student protests and riots, even massive confrontations between students and police, took place on South Hall's doorsteps at the heart of the campus, tear gas fumes hanging in the air, I learned antique methods of cataloging, bibliography, reference, and most importantly, storytelling.

###To be continued...

“Scheherazade” by Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823 - 1903).