Don't Get Left Behind

I didn't run away the first time. Mother did. I was only six weeks old, just a newborn swaddled in cloth. The supermarket was just at the bottom of the hill, only a few blocks from our apartment in Riverdale. I'll never know what happened next. I do know that Mother left the store, taking her groceries home, but she left one package behind.

Mind you, she was busy. And adored. She had started working for Conover's Cover Girls, a leading model agency run by Harry Conover, then the fashion czar of New York. The job was the gateway to fame, stardom, and fortune. She modeled sable pelts, feather boas, silk brassieres, hats, bathing suits. She was close friends with Lauren Bacall, who also started her career as one of Harry Conover's Cover Girls, and always ran late to auditions. Maybe that was why, in the bustle of juggling grocery parcels and a budding career, something had to get overlooked and left behind in the aisle of a supermarket.

Unfortunately, that something was an infant. And, most unfortunately, that infant was me.

When I asked her about it years later, at least her answer was honest.

"I just forgot," she said. But I never did.

It would not be the last time she left me someplace. When I was five years old, perhaps the earliest age a parent can legally send a child away, I was enrolled in Mrs. Hunt's Boarding School, a depository for errant children, in Cedarhurst, Long Island. My memories? Pulling up to the brick building in a taxi, dressed in a suit and tie, the late spring snow dusting over the windshield in flakes that quickly disappeared.

Mrs. Hunt was the headmistress, and she scared me. Even at that age I could recognize an attractive woman, but her blue eyes were cold, austere, and judgmental. My mother and I sat across from her at her desk, my legs dangling from the seat. Mrs. Hunt listened as Mother told her how I had become a difficult child at home.

The problem was, I was listening too. Apparently, I was a naughty, unloving, unmanageable boy. This was news to me. I wanted to speak up. She's lying! But, being five, I was not adept at personal representation. So I just sat there, and soon I was watching the taillights of her taxi disappear through the windows. I chased after her, and when I knew she was not coming back and I could not catch her, I hid under the yellow flowers of a forsythia bush, already in bloom in spite of the late snowfall. As I had yet to learn the finer intricacies of covert operations, I was soon discovered, picked up under the arms by Mrs. Hunt, and ferried through the dorm, which for some reason smelled like burned toast, and into a quaint room. I watched the heavy door close behind me.

The truth was, I wasn't a bad kid. I just missed my father. And imagining him coming to rescue me, wearing the maroon Woolrich coat he always did when we went fishing, the hood hanging back over his shoulders, got me through my days. When was he coming to get me?

At night, I cried myself to sleep at Mrs. Hunt's, staring at the ceiling. My mother was wrong about me, and I knew it. If I had known more about her past or had the ability to understand that she was doing her best, it would have been different. But I was a five-year-old; my emotional maturity and deep sense of empathy were less than developed.

Your Body Can Do Anything You Put Your Mind To

The truth is, Mother was not suited for parenthood, a predilection that was not her fault. Her own mother had died in front of her, suffering a stroke in a shop the family ran in Brooklyn. Her untimely death left my mother, Greta, and her older brother, Eli, to fend for themselves. They had their father, my grandfather Alexander, but he was a radical eccentric, an intellectual, and a drifter. And after my grandmother's death, drift he did.

Alexander was disabled, so it's amazing he drifted so far, landing on that pirate boat off Costa Rica and living for a time on a Navajo reservation. As a young child he developed a bone disease, osteomyelitis, and his legs never grew. His disease was difficult to treat professionally. So he treated it himself, most unprofessionally: On his shin, there was deep open wound that revealed his faulty bones. He'd take out his pocketknife, flip open the blade, and start carving away at his shin bone, eliciting a terrible odor that reminded me of rotten meat. I don't know why cutting up his own leg caused such a foul smell or why it was therapeutic, but I do know it happened. I assure you. I saw it.

As odd as he was, Alexander was an inspiration. To compensate for his failing legs, he followed an intense muscle-building regimen for his upper torso, which came to resemble that of a Greek god. He was so strong he could perform an iron cross, a gymnast's maneuver in which he suspended himself between two steel rings with his arms held horizontally. And yet he couldn't even walk on his own. To steady himself, my grandfather used a shillelagh, a cane made from dark hardwood, which doubled as a cudgel to threaten anyone who disagreed with his Bolshevik politics, which was just about everyone.

He was hardly a nurturing soul. Once, I remember Flight, our springer spaniel, jumped up on the nightstand and ate my grandfather's dentures, then washed them down with a delicious black slipper. Grandpa was pissed. Shillelagh in one hand raised for battle and the surviving slipper in the other, he hobbled spastically after the frightened dog, frantically whipping the air with the footwear.

"I'll kill that fucking mutt," he said, expectorating brown spittle from the Ivanhoe tobacco curled up in his lip. In his frenetic effort to attack the dog, he lost his balance. But the poor dog lost much more. Terrified, Flight sprinted toward the second-floor window and, true to his name, jumped out. (The dog survived his fall, but he ended up with a limp, just like Grandpa.)

Grandpa was caustic and unpredictable, but he was a dreamer, and his mind swirled with energy and fantastic ideas. He was an amateur mason and liked working with stone, and one of his many cockeyed ideas was to invent a doghouse made from concrete. If he could prefab the design (God knows how), he calculated a massive fortune would follow. Not surprisingly, the cement doghouse never made it to market, but his own personal adventure stories were so riveting, they would inspire my own wayward travels. I remember him describing the way he converted his Model A Ford into a camper, retrofitting the back into his own sleeping quarters in which he caravaned across the country. I can almost see him stopping at those Navajo reservations, regaling the Native American chiefs there with tales of his travels and teaching them herbal remedies found in nature, or, more likely, the Yiddish theater. During the Great Depression he'd arrived in Los Angeles and, with his knowledge about the body and his own natural strength, helped found Muscle Beach. Then he was off to Central America. I never learned how he found work as a cook on a pirate ship, but he did tell me they smuggled mahogany out of Costa Rica. His was a wild life, but as he explored the world, Mother and Eli were left at home to fend for each other.

There Are All Different Kinds of Heroes

Before he disappeared to trek around the world in search of adventure, Alexander left the custody of my mother and her brother, Eli, to a handful of relatives, who shuffled them between their homes like playing cards. The pride of the family was Eli, who first lived in Jackson Heights with Uncle Louis. Uncle Louis worked part-time as a masseuse in the Catskill resorts, never went anywhere without a cigar in his mouth, shot craps in his basement, and possessed the family gene that made him sharply critical of everyone except himself. A cast of cantankerous characters-Cousin Paul, Uncle Max, Cousin Herbie, and Monroe, each a bit eccentric in his own special way-also helped raise my mother and Eli for a while. Not having a family or place of their own left its mark. Eli and my mother rarely had their own clothes as children, always the recipients of hand-me-downs from the cousins and other family members. My mother dreamed of a better life-or at least clothes that were her own-for herself and Eli.

Soon, she would dream only for herself.

My uncle Eli graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and, since the war had begun, he was promptly shipped out to one of the farthest outposts: the South Pacific theater.

With her mother gone and her absentee father wandering the country in his camper, my mother's closest family member was Eli. He raised her as best he could. Back in New York, along with her relatives, she eagerly read his letters from the front. Shortly after the letters stopped, the military car arrived with the navy's regrets from Washington. There had been an attack. He had been on a destroyer, working as a lieutenant. It was a dangerous assignment, considering Japanese destroyers owned those waters. Inevitably, a kamikaze pilot had attacked them.

Inside their boat, the sailors were rocked, scrambling to put out fires and keep the oncoming water from sinking the ship. Eli was down in...