Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. What
Speaker 1: if this letter contained my father's final confession? What if
Speaker 1: it was a compendium of his Trustiendas, the word my
Speaker 1: Cuban mother had adapted as a more resonant way to
Speaker 1: describe secrets. According to her, every person carries at least
Speaker 1: one frstenda from a place in the heart, or such
Speaker 1: secrets thrill the day and deep in the night. Perhaps
Speaker 1: these plastenders were more like dark thoughts that had been
Speaker 1: in the cobdwead corners of his mind. Once I knew
Speaker 1: about these truss standers, would it make me like Icarus
Speaker 1: flying too close to the sun and dropping from the sky.
Speaker 1: Would it be like opening Pandora's jar, or, as it
Speaker 1: was later mistranslated, her box of woes and releasing them
Speaker 1: to the world. Reading about my father's troubles in his
Speaker 1: hand might make them my own. I was afraid to
Speaker 1: know everything about him, and yet I was too curious
Speaker 1: to leave his secrets alone. That's Judy Bolton Fasman, journalist,
Speaker 1: essayist and author of the memoir Asylum, a Memoir of
Speaker 1: Family Secrets. Imagine receiving a letter from a parent, A
Speaker 1: thick envelope that might just explain everything, a letter that
Speaker 1: might answer a lifetime's worth of questions, and the persistent
Speaker 1: sense that there are mysteries and secrets at the core
Speaker 1: of your family's life. And then imagine what happened to Judy.
Speaker 1: Before she had a chance to open the letter, she
Speaker 1: received an urgent request from her father. Please destroy the letter,
Speaker 1: I sent Burnett without reading, and she did. She respected
Speaker 1: his wishes and watched his words go up and smoke.
Speaker 1: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
Speaker 1: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Asylum was the
Speaker 1: iconic address of my childhood. Everything revolved around there. It
Speaker 1: was a small house. It was a three small, three
Speaker 1: bedroom colonial. It sat on the corner of Asylum Avenue
Speaker 1: and Ballard Drive, and I want to say that it
Speaker 1: sort of sat on the corner of desperation and dreams
Speaker 1: as well, my father's desperation, my mother's dreams, and vice versa,
Speaker 1: and those two were often in competition and often clashed,
Speaker 1: those two aspirations. I also lived across the street from
Speaker 1: a magnificent field that belonged to a small Catholic women's college,
Speaker 1: and I would watch and this was in the nineties sixties,
Speaker 1: and nuns were still in their habits, and I would
Speaker 1: watch the nuns mostly in pairs. They were, they were
Speaker 1: never alone, kind of almost float across the field. And
Speaker 1: of course there's my mother's, you know, total dream of
Speaker 1: an American house. And she was so proud of Asylum
Speaker 1: Avenue for having a built in vacuum cleaner. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is something that she would have never dreamed of
Speaker 1: back in Cuba. This is a West Harford, Connecticut. Describe
Speaker 1: your father, Harold. Harold was much older than my mother Matile.
Speaker 1: He was intimidating, he was strict. He had been in
Speaker 1: the navy for five years during the Second World War,
Speaker 1: and uh, he sort of treated his kids like little soldiers.
Speaker 1: Sometimes he had his very quirky ways about him. He
Speaker 1: was also very smart, and I knew that even at
Speaker 1: a young age. And I also intoud that he had
Speaker 1: done a lot of living, although I don't know if
Speaker 1: I would have articulated it that way back then, but
Speaker 1: he had done a lot of living before I was born.
Speaker 1: How old was he when you were born? He was
Speaker 1: forty two, which is not old by today's standards. But
Speaker 1: I was born at the end of nineteen sixty and
Speaker 1: my mother was twenty five, so there was quite an
Speaker 1: age difference. There was even a cultural gap. There was
Speaker 1: a generational gap, you know. He was always much older
Speaker 1: than all the other fathers when I was growing up.
Speaker 1: But I didn't feel that lad. I didn't. You know,
Speaker 1: he wasn't tired, he was energetic, but he was very
Speaker 1: stern when he went to teach night school. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was like a party in our house. You know.
Speaker 1: My mother would put on Cuban dance music. We would dance,
Speaker 1: we would have a TV dinners, you know, the whole thing.
Speaker 1: It was almost like a celebration. And he was very
Speaker 1: strict about our bedtimes. He was, you know, he even
Speaker 1: at one point would shout to eight year old me,
Speaker 1: would bang on the door, Navy shower, don't waste water,
Speaker 1: Navy shower. And the navy shower was that you would rinse,
Speaker 1: you would turn it off and then you would soap up,
Speaker 1: and then you would rinse again. That was the navy shower.
Speaker 1: And it was actually terrifying to think my father was
Speaker 1: on the other side of the door screaming Navy shower.
Speaker 1: He also served in the Navy during World War Two.
Speaker 1: He was an officer, and uh, I think that that
Speaker 1: gave him some gravitas and it, you know, made him
Speaker 1: very American. He had served his country and he was
Speaker 1: very proud of that. I should also say he was
Speaker 1: also a rabid Yale football fan. I mean, his his
Speaker 1: life revolved around Yale football games. He had a very
Speaker 1: prodigious memory and he memorized every single fact about Yale football.
Speaker 1: He was also in alum Yale football almost defined him
Speaker 1: and almost defined my childhood in many ways. And also
Speaker 1: his father, Your grandfather was right, yes, which was very
Speaker 1: unusual because my grandfather graduated with the class of nineteen
Speaker 1: the Sheffield School of Engineering and he was an immigrant
Speaker 1: and he my grandfather basically fiddled his way through Yale
Speaker 1: in that he had he got a musician's Union card
Speaker 1: and he played in a lot of society the orchestras
Speaker 1: as a student to earn his tuition. What do you
Speaker 1: think your father's obsession with Yale football was about. I
Speaker 1: think that it was it came down a bit from
Speaker 1: my grandfather. My grandfather wanted nothing more than to leave
Speaker 1: behind Ukraine where he was from. Here he came and
Speaker 1: he was two years old, so he was very, very yad.
Speaker 1: He probably didn't really have a memory of Ukraine, but
Speaker 1: he wanted to be an American. Our name was americanized Bolton.
Speaker 1: He himself, after graduating from Yale and working as the
Speaker 1: city engineer city civil engineer for the town of Behaven,
Speaker 1: had a society orchestra with another Yale graduate. But you know,
Speaker 1: my grandfather was always on the other side of the door,
Speaker 1: looking in, so to speak, like I always picked to
Speaker 1: him being on the other side of a glass store
Speaker 1: looking in on parties that he would have never been
Speaker 1: invited to unless he was actually playing the music for
Speaker 1: the parties. My mother, she came from Havana. She immigrated
Speaker 1: to the United States in and she came here as
Speaker 1: a twenty three year old young woman looking to finish
Speaker 1: her schooling because the University of Havannah had closed, and
Speaker 1: she came to Brooklyn and nted her room from some
Speaker 1: cousins of her father's and had a hard time of it.
Speaker 1: She wanted very much to work at the United Nations
Speaker 1: as a translator, and that didn't pan out for her,
Speaker 1: so she typed forms and she typed invoices at a
Speaker 1: watch factory, and the first winter that she was in Brooklyn,
Speaker 1: she caught pneumonia because she just you know, she she
Speaker 1: came from a tropical climate and was not used to
Speaker 1: the bad weather. My mother was also a person who
Speaker 1: lived in her fantasies, and living in her fantasy she
Speaker 1: missed a lot of what was happening in real life.
Speaker 1: And one of the stories that she told was that
Speaker 1: when she was a student at the University of Havana,
Speaker 1: she was taking a test and she heard gunshots and
Speaker 1: this president of the student body had died of the gunshots.
Speaker 1: Battista's henchman got him. Well, she was telling this story
Speaker 1: to a friend of mine who was doing a project
Speaker 1: on immigration. And mind you, I'm over forty years old
Speaker 1: when she's telling this story, and suddenly something clicks and
Speaker 1: I start as she's as she's talking, I'm googling dates,
Speaker 1: and I realized that her dates don't line up, none
Speaker 1: of it lines up, And I realized she never attended
Speaker 1: the university. If I am, she made that all up.
Speaker 1: So do you think that some of your profound desire
Speaker 1: to know your parents, particularly your father, but really both
Speaker 1: of them. Stems from this feeling that you had as
Speaker 1: a kid that it didn't all add up, that they didn't,
Speaker 1: you know, actually seemed to be who they were saying
Speaker 1: they were in part. In part and also when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, I thought they were, you know, the
Speaker 1: most glamorous couple in the world. No matter what went
Speaker 1: on during the week, no matter what, you know, rouse
Speaker 1: they got into. On Saturday night or early Saturday, you know,
Speaker 1: early early Saturday night, it all stopped. My mother was
Speaker 1: all glammed up to go out. She was beautiful, and
Speaker 1: my father was in khaki's in a sport coat, and
Speaker 1: off they went to you know, eat dinner with friends,
Speaker 1: or to go to a show or whatever they were doing.
Speaker 1: But every Saturday night they went out. Every Saturday night,
Speaker 1: we had a babysitter. That was a boundary they put.
Speaker 1: And they didn't have very many boundaries in that house,
Speaker 1: I can tell you. So when you talk about Rowse,
Speaker 1: what was the marital tension between them like and and
Speaker 1: what did it encompass? You know, what was your sense
Speaker 1: as a child of what that was about. It was
Speaker 1: mostly about finances, and they were my mother was very,
Speaker 1: very disappointed that my father was not the older Yale graduate,
Speaker 1: more established, uh kind of guy in his career that
Speaker 1: she had hoped he would be. She was looking for status,
Speaker 1: she was looking for security. She had grown up very
Speaker 1: insecure in Havana, and uh, she was looking to my
Speaker 1: father to provide her that security and that financial stability.
Speaker 1: And you know, we weren't poor by any means, and
Speaker 1: you lived in a nice suburb, but she wanted very
Speaker 1: much to keep up. I remember them fighting about bills
Speaker 1: that came in from a store one day, and she
Speaker 1: looked at me and said, we're going out. She didn't drive,
Speaker 1: so we took the asylum Avenue of Us about two
Speaker 1: miles blessed, and we went to Lord and Taylor and
Speaker 1: she bought the most gorgeous suit at Lord and Taylor.
Speaker 1: And I remember her whipping out that green card with
Speaker 1: the white lettering, and you know, she was mrsk Harrold
Speaker 1: Molton at Lord and Taylor. So in part it was
Speaker 1: to to get back at my father, and in part
Speaker 1: it was to be the Mrs k Harold Bolton that
Speaker 1: she always wanted to be. There was a dangerous quality
Speaker 1: to her. She was wiley. She was just a wily survivor.
Speaker 1: She actually ended up getting her master's degree without ever
Speaker 1: having gone to college. She told the registrar there that
Speaker 1: there was absolutely no way to get her transcripts from Havannah.
Speaker 1: And you know, in those days, Havannah was really locked up.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was the embargo, and nobody was getting
Speaker 1: through the embargo. And she basically told them, it's locked
Speaker 1: behind the Iron curtain. I can't get those transcripts. We
Speaker 1: don't have any sort of diplomatic relations with Cuba, and
Speaker 1: you'll just have to take my word for it, and
Speaker 1: they let her in. I was very, very attached to her.
Speaker 1: There was something very alluring and compelling about her. When
Speaker 1: I became a teenager, the dynamic change. But when I
Speaker 1: was a little girl, she was sort of the permissive parent.
Speaker 1: I don't think they wittingly did this, but they almost
Speaker 1: played good cop, bad cop with each other. And she
Speaker 1: was always the one that I ran to for comfort,
Speaker 1: and in turn, she ran to me for comfort. We
Speaker 1: comforted each other, which is not always the healthiest relationship
Speaker 1: to have with your eight year old, but that's the
Speaker 1: way it was. And I just adored her. And when
Speaker 1: she would threaten to leave the family or run away,
Speaker 1: or she couldn't take it anymore. I mean, it devastated
Speaker 1: me every time. Judy is not alone in her experience
Speaker 1: of her good cop bad cop parents. She has two
Speaker 1: younger siblings, a brother and a sister. Harold doesn't really
Speaker 1: understand little kids in general, let alone his own. Too
Speaker 1: young Judy, her dad seems kind of scary. In fact,
Speaker 1: she's scared of him. The summer that Judy is nine,
Speaker 1: her mother and Matild gathers up her and her siblings
Speaker 1: and they go to Miami, Matild's extended family lives. But
Speaker 1: to complicate matters, not only does Matild not drive, but
Speaker 1: she doesn't fly either. She's terrified of airplanes. So they
Speaker 1: take a train. Matild, Judy, and her siblings. As a
Speaker 1: train departs, they see Harold recede into the background. Twenty
Speaker 1: four hours later, we arrived in Miami. My sister had
Speaker 1: motion sickness. My brother, he was very little, so I
Speaker 1: don't sure what was happening with him. He was he
Speaker 1: was acting out. He missed my father. I knew I
Speaker 1: was terribly homesick. I had never met people like my
Speaker 1: mother's family. They were so different than the Boltons of Behaven.
Speaker 1: They were brashed. They were emotional, and they spoke Spanish,
Speaker 1: and I spoke a little bit of Spanish because that's
Speaker 1: how I communicated with my maternal grandparents who did live
Speaker 1: in Connecticut. But I have to say that first summer
Speaker 1: that I went to Miami and that we lived in
Speaker 1: Miami for almost three months, that was the first time
Speaker 1: I really realized that I was Latin x in some ways.
Speaker 1: I realized that my mother came from Cuba, from really
Speaker 1: another country. And the thing that I remember most about
Speaker 1: that summer was my mother's relatives and a lot of
Speaker 1: Cuban ex pats that lived in her cousin's apartment building,
Speaker 1: gathering every night to try and catch arrant airwaves from
Speaker 1: the television to see Fie Delcaster Talk, and they were
Speaker 1: just sent on seeing him. They would fiddle with the channels,
Speaker 1: they would fiddle with the rabbit ears for a man
Speaker 1: they hated so much, they absolutely had to see him.
Speaker 1: And during that period of time, there's no word from
Speaker 1: your father, none. Well, I knew that they had had
Speaker 1: a fight and that she was going to leave him.
Speaker 1: My Bolton grandparents sent us money, which my mother kind
Speaker 1: of pocketed, and we stayed sort of in a very
Speaker 1: run down shabby hotel across the street from my mother's
Speaker 1: cousin called the Royal Hotel. I'll never forget it. I'll
Speaker 1: never forget the the owner of the hotel, because I
Speaker 1: would go to the front desk almost every day and
Speaker 1: asked if I had had a letter from my dad,
Speaker 1: and she would say, I don't think he's gonna write you.
Speaker 1: You know, I was looking for Basically, my dad was
Speaker 1: a very prolific correspondent, even when I was a little kid.
Speaker 1: He sent Birthday cards and Valentine's cards in the mail,
Speaker 1: which was just an absolute thrill and also reflected that
Speaker 1: formality that he had, and he sent the sugariest literally
Speaker 1: Valentine's cards. And I was basically missing him and lonely,
Speaker 1: and I was looking for a Valentine's card in the
Speaker 1: middle of July and I never got it. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back. During this long, lonely summer, Judy scrambles up
Speaker 1: dimes and tries to reach her father to no avail
Speaker 1: via pay phone. Eventually, after about three months, he does
Speaker 1: come to make up with her mother and collect them all.
Speaker 1: At first, he insists that they're all going to fly
Speaker 1: home together, but Judy's mother simply cannot fly, so back
Speaker 1: on the train to West Hartford they go. Once she's home,
Speaker 1: ever curious about her parents, Judy begins to do what
Speaker 1: so many people who into it that there are secrets do,
Speaker 1: She Snoops. I always spot of them as glamorous in
Speaker 1: some way. And I always wondered about my dad, so
Speaker 1: much older, living the life, a full life before he
Speaker 1: had me, And in some ways I found evidence of that.
Speaker 1: I found a picture that unfortunately no longer exists, of
Speaker 1: him in literally a pith helmet and flowing khakis, and
Speaker 1: in the back of the picture is written Guatemala two.
Speaker 1: And that forever piqued my interest, so much so that
Speaker 1: later on I would go on to write my m
Speaker 1: F a thesis about that and about him. Sometimes when
Speaker 1: we stumble upon something that has meaning, even if we
Speaker 1: don't know what that meaning is, somehow like its shimmers,
Speaker 1: it takes on this kind of weight to it. There
Speaker 1: was something about Guatemala, as if it pertained to your
Speaker 1: dad that you had a feeling about. Well, it was
Speaker 1: so far away, and it sounded so exotic, and my
Speaker 1: parents were very social in those years. My parents had
Speaker 1: very loud, raucous joyous parties. Um. They were friends with
Speaker 1: a lot of Latin X people in the Hartford area
Speaker 1: and there was a lot of um singing. Someone inevitably
Speaker 1: brought a guitar to my parents house and my mother sang.
Speaker 1: She had a beautiful singing voice, and her song of
Speaker 1: choice was usually Juan Panama. And I remember, you know,
Speaker 1: watching those parties almost from the top of the stairs,
Speaker 1: or at least trying trying to listen in. And I
Speaker 1: think that added to the whole romance and the whole
Speaker 1: curiosity of who my parents were. And at that time, coincidentally,
Speaker 1: I was reading a series about a detective girl who
Speaker 1: happened to be named Judy Bolton, which throwed me to
Speaker 1: no end to see my name on the cover of
Speaker 1: a book. So I think I also took on that
Speaker 1: persona and had a little bit of fun with it.
Speaker 1: They're becoming Judy Bolton, girl detective. Exactly when Judy is twelve,
Speaker 1: a young woman around nineteen years old comes to visit
Speaker 1: and so begins the Summer of Anna. Anna just sort
Speaker 1: of literally showed up in our lives. Um. There was
Speaker 1: really no context for her, but we you know, my
Speaker 1: brother and sister and I loved her dearly. We She
Speaker 1: was just a lot of fun. And when Anna was around,
Speaker 1: my father was so much more relaxed and and happy.
Speaker 1: You know, the guy who made us drink skin milk,
Speaker 1: let us get SODA's. You know, we could do all
Speaker 1: sorts of things. We could have sugary cereals because Anna
Speaker 1: like them. So whatever Anna liked, she got from my
Speaker 1: father and as a consequence, that spilled down to us
Speaker 1: and we could sort of share in her in her bounty.
Speaker 1: What was your understanding, if any of why Anna was
Speaker 1: visiting you. Anna was staying with a local family, and
Speaker 1: she was supposedly an exchange student. But you know, my
Speaker 1: mother was very suspicious of her, very jealous of her.
Speaker 1: She was the cause of a lot of tension in
Speaker 1: our house. She would, you know, tell my father you
Speaker 1: love her more than you love your children. You're in
Speaker 1: love with her. I mean, she didn't quite know what
Speaker 1: role to put her in. Was she some of the
Speaker 1: had crush on Could he have been a child of hers?
Speaker 1: That he father in ga a model? She just you know,
Speaker 1: looking back on it, I realized that she was confused.
Speaker 1: But Anna was staying locally with a family in West Harford,
Speaker 1: and she was introduced to my family because my father
Speaker 1: had spent time in Guatemala and she consequently spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time with us. We took her to Behaven,
Speaker 1: she met my grandparents, and she also met my father's
Speaker 1: best friend and his family, and we frequently went to
Speaker 1: their house for the weekends too. Tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about your father's best friend. Felippe and my father
Speaker 1: became friends through Philippa's brother, who my father met when
Speaker 1: he was studying at the Wharton School after the war.
Speaker 1: Philippe was the person that my father visited often in
Speaker 1: Latin America or traveled with in Latin America, and they
Speaker 1: were very very close. And even though Philippe lived probably
Speaker 1: a good two hour derive from West Harford, I placed
Speaker 1: him in Westchester. We went to this them, you know,
Speaker 1: probably every six weeks. The two families were very close.
Speaker 1: The two wives actually got along very well, and my
Speaker 1: father and Philippe were always huddled in a corner talking
Speaker 1: and we just assumed that, you know, they were just
Speaker 1: close traveling companions and close buddies, and we really didn't
Speaker 1: think about it, but Philippo had an American mother and
Speaker 1: el Salvadoran father, and he grew up mostly in El Salvador,
Speaker 1: with boarding school in the United States. My mother had
Speaker 1: always wanted me to go to a Jewish school. My
Speaker 1: father grew up in a totally assimilated family, even though
Speaker 1: my grandfather's father was a rabbi. She used to joke
Speaker 1: that when the first time she had her own kitchen,
Speaker 1: you know, when she moved out of her parents house
Speaker 1: and she was married, she made a poor groast. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's true or not, but that's what
Speaker 1: she used to say. They were very, very They did
Speaker 1: not observe anything. They barely went to synagogue or to
Speaker 1: tell both. And my mother grew up among the Safari
Speaker 1: community in Havana, and she grew up very traditionally. She
Speaker 1: went to a Jewish school, as most Cuban Jewish kids
Speaker 1: did in her generation, and she was a believer and
Speaker 1: my father was not. I think that was the strict
Speaker 1: dividing line. And when she had finally had enough of
Speaker 1: me being in public school, I think the thing that
Speaker 1: really threw her for a loop was that they were
Speaker 1: teaching a sex education and she just could not abide that.
Speaker 1: So she enrolled us in the local yeshiva. I was
Speaker 1: there for six, seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, and in
Speaker 1: my last year there in ninth grade, there was a
Speaker 1: community of Lebovic educators that came to teach us in
Speaker 1: the school, and I became very mesmerized by the community.
Speaker 1: I loved that there was an embracing community. I loved
Speaker 1: that they were so kind to me, and it just
Speaker 1: seemed to be an oasis from my family life, where
Speaker 1: everything is just so tense and you know, my mother
Speaker 1: constantly upset and my father trying to do something about it.
Speaker 1: So that was the weird part of my education. I
Speaker 1: left the yeshiva as an ultra Orthodox Jew and my
Speaker 1: parents were having none of that, and they would not
Speaker 1: let me go to a boarding school, a Jewish girls
Speaker 1: boarding school in Brooklyn or in Providence, Rhode Island. And
Speaker 1: I said, well, I only want to be with girls.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be in a classroom with boys.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, here are you two choices. Mrs
Speaker 1: Porter's School, which I didn't think that I would be
Speaker 1: a very good fit for Mount Saint Jose's Academy, the
Speaker 1: local Catholic girls school. And you know, I was a teenager,
Speaker 1: so I had a bit of obstinate streak to me,
Speaker 1: and I said, and I thought I would last there
Speaker 1: two weeks, and that they would they would give in
Speaker 1: and send me to the school I wanted to go to.
Speaker 1: I said, I'll go to Mount Saint Joseph Academy. And
Speaker 1: it was definitely a strange situation at first, but I
Speaker 1: really ended up liking it. And at that time, the
Speaker 1: nuns were younger and they were out of their habits,
Speaker 1: and they were very social justice minded, and I just
Speaker 1: I loved being around them. I loved the support, I
Speaker 1: loved the female energy. And by the end of that year,
Speaker 1: I had sort of not only just acclimated, but I
Speaker 1: had sort of found my way to a Judaism that
Speaker 1: was not as extreme and uh something that I could
Speaker 1: feel that I was still very Jewish but not alienating
Speaker 1: my family, which was it was very hard. That was
Speaker 1: very hard when I was observing Shabbat and wouldn't eat
Speaker 1: their food and only ate cold food on their plates.
Speaker 1: So it was a hard time and I couldn't sustain it,
Speaker 1: and in the end I didn't want to sustain it.
Speaker 1: I made friends and I loved it, and I taught
Speaker 1: my friends about my religion, and they taught me about
Speaker 1: their religion and I never had to go to religion
Speaker 1: class uh with with them. I got to sit out
Speaker 1: and study hall with the Protestants and it was just,
Speaker 1: you know, it all worked out, and the nuns were
Speaker 1: very accommodating. We were a uniform at the mount and
Speaker 1: there was a patch with a cross inside a crown,
Speaker 1: and I did not have to wear that patch. I
Speaker 1: did not have to wear that cross. And do you
Speaker 1: think judy that you know, sort of the drift towards
Speaker 1: ultra orthodox Judaism had to do with, to some degree,
Speaker 1: either differentiating yourself from your parents and your family, or
Speaker 1: a sense of order. You know that there are rules
Speaker 1: and rituals to follow for absolutely everything. Um was that
Speaker 1: a source of comfort? I think it was both those things,
Speaker 1: but I think above all, it was like a community
Speaker 1: that I felt I was embraced by. It was a
Speaker 1: sense of belonging. There was no judgment, and I really
Speaker 1: liked that. I really and I needed that. I was
Speaker 1: sort of a lonely kid, and beginning at that time,
Speaker 1: my mother was really having a hard time watching me
Speaker 1: grow up. And I was embraced by that community and
Speaker 1: I just it was very compelling to me. We'll be
Speaker 1: back in a moment with more family secrets. Though Judy's
Speaker 1: mother has a hard time watching her grow up, that's
Speaker 1: inevitably what she does. She finishes high school, and she
Speaker 1: goes off to college, and then she begins to have
Speaker 1: panic attacks. These panic attacks begin to govern her life,
Speaker 1: as panic attacks often do. First one I had was
Speaker 1: when I was nineteen. Um, I had little many ones
Speaker 1: looking back on it, but that one seemed to be
Speaker 1: the one that I'd like to describe as taking hold
Speaker 1: of me. That was the one that divided my life
Speaker 1: into her before and after, I was never the same again.
Speaker 1: And I remember, as clear as as I remember, you know,
Speaker 1: this morning I was visiting a boyfriend uh down in Baltimore.
Speaker 1: He was in college there, and I was going back
Speaker 1: the next day, going back home for the summer, and
Speaker 1: I was very upset about being separated from him because
Speaker 1: I would have to deal with my mother, who by
Speaker 1: that time was really my jailer. She really didn't let
Speaker 1: me do anything. She only let me which is kind
Speaker 1: of ironic. She only let me go out with this
Speaker 1: boy and be with him all the time, which there
Speaker 1: wasn't a lot of safety in that if you think
Speaker 1: about it from the perspective of a parent. And I
Speaker 1: remember waking up in the middle of the night. He
Speaker 1: was sleeping sound late, and I was gasping for air.
Speaker 1: I could not breathe, and I was just encircled with
Speaker 1: this feeling of absolute dread and fear. And as I said,
Speaker 1: it divided my life into it before and after. As
Speaker 1: I got older, I realized that my mother was such
Speaker 1: a bully because she was so afraid of the world.
Speaker 1: Her bullying was really born of fear, and she was
Speaker 1: She also had panic attacks. I mean, she didn't call
Speaker 1: them a lot, but that's what she had. H And
Speaker 1: I remember when I was in such desperate straits and
Speaker 1: I just couldn't stop crying, and I couldn't go anywhere,
Speaker 1: and I was so anxious. I just all I could
Speaker 1: do was crouch in the shower and cry. She said
Speaker 1: to me, if you don't stop this, I'm going to
Speaker 1: having you admitted to the Institute for Living. I'm going
Speaker 1: to commit you. And that, of course was my ultimate fear,
Speaker 1: that I was crazy. So she played right into my
Speaker 1: ultimate fear. And I will never forget the way she
Speaker 1: said that to me. Judy graduates from college and her
Speaker 1: panic attacks continue. What plagues her most is the constantticipation
Speaker 1: that she's going to have another one, but she presses on.
Speaker 1: She moved to New York and gets a job in publishing.
Speaker 1: She pursues her fiction m f A at Columbia, where
Speaker 1: she works on a thesis that allows her to become
Speaker 1: closer with her father. She also meets the man who
Speaker 1: will become her husband. They have two children, Anna, named
Speaker 1: after Judy's grandmother, and Adam. My father and I had
Speaker 1: rediscovered each other after I went to Columbia and I
Speaker 1: wrote a thesis called the ninety Day Wonder. The ninety
Speaker 1: day Wonder was a deliberate reference to his service in
Speaker 1: the Second World War. It was a program for college
Speaker 1: graduates who were fast tracked to be officers because there
Speaker 1: were such a need for officers we were going to war,
Speaker 1: and he was a ninety day Wonder and he literally
Speaker 1: was immersed in everything naval for three months and he
Speaker 1: came out and ensign. And at the time I thought
Speaker 1: the term was so blended because it was ninety day
Speaker 1: wonders wonderfully, but after doing some research for the book,
Speaker 1: I realized that it was a bajardive term, and that
Speaker 1: they were called that by the enlisted men or the sailors,
Speaker 1: or whoever they were, whoever were under them, because I mean,
Speaker 1: these guys had to salute twenty three year olds and
Speaker 1: they had socks older than I was. Twenty three year olds,
Speaker 1: so it was a very tense relationship. And I wrote
Speaker 1: a thesis I was then a fiction writer, and it
Speaker 1: talked about my dad and the Navy, and it also
Speaker 1: speculated about my father's time in Guatemala, because by then
Speaker 1: I had become very suspicious. Why was your suspicion level
Speaker 1: rising and rising? What was that about? And also do
Speaker 1: you think that enrolling in an m f A program
Speaker 1: and writing fiction, which is sometimes a way of actually
Speaker 1: getting at the truths that we don't know, was that
Speaker 1: subconsciously an attempt to figure him out? Oh? Yes, I
Speaker 1: mean I I wrote a lot about him. I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of the stories are in a different form
Speaker 1: of matter now because I didn't keep them and I
Speaker 1: didn't include them in my basis, But yes I had.
Speaker 1: I then learned a thing or two about American history
Speaker 1: and about our involvement in Latin America, and I started
Speaker 1: putting dates together, and I was just very very suspicious
Speaker 1: of what he was doing there. What was a Jewish
Speaker 1: guy from New Haven, Connecticut doing traveling throughout Guatemala who
Speaker 1: worked at the United Fruit Company for a while, which
Speaker 1: is a well known CIA front. I would say, hey, Dad,
Speaker 1: you were spy. Martin's like, don't be ridiculous. You always
Speaker 1: make things up. And you know, we would joke about it,
Speaker 1: and we were becoming friends. We had never really been friends.
Speaker 1: You would go out and get beers together. When I
Speaker 1: came home for the weekend, he came to visit me
Speaker 1: in New York and hung out with me and my
Speaker 1: friends in a bar. I mean, we really, we really
Speaker 1: liked each other. This friendship between Judy and her father
Speaker 1: would soon be challenged by his struggle with Parkinson's disease.
Speaker 1: He died in two thousand two. After her father's death,
Speaker 1: Judy sets out to continue her relationship with him somehow.
Speaker 1: To keep him near, she decides to recite the Cottage,
Speaker 1: the Jewish prayer for the dead. According to tradition, a
Speaker 1: child recites the Cottage for a parent every day for
Speaker 1: eleven months. The prayer is recited in synagogue with a
Speaker 1: minion which is a group of ten adults. This isn't
Speaker 1: easy to accomplish, but even on vacations, Judy never misses
Speaker 1: a day. She always finds a minion, and she always
Speaker 1: has cottage for her father. It's also during these eleven
Speaker 1: months that Judy's antennae are really quivering. She is yearning
Speaker 1: to put together the pieces of her dad's elusive and
Speaker 1: mysterious history, and so she consults, as many do when
Speaker 1: trying to uncover truths about those who have passed. A medium.
Speaker 1: I kept a journal the year I said the Cottish
Speaker 1: and thought that it would be a book, and thought
Speaker 1: it would be a book that I would eventually write.
Speaker 1: But the book was going nowhere. It was just nice
Speaker 1: insights and you know, memories that would only be of
Speaker 1: interest to my family. And I knew that I had
Speaker 1: to do more than that. I knew it had to
Speaker 1: have an arc. It had to have scenes and action,
Speaker 1: and not just about me going to synagogue every day
Speaker 1: and remembering my dad, which of course is lovely, but
Speaker 1: it's it's not compelling reading. So I consulted mediums, and
Speaker 1: one of them was a man at my synagogue who
Speaker 1: had had in your death experience and started seeing spirits
Speaker 1: around people, and he was eerily accurate. He didn't not
Speaker 1: know anything about me. I had not published anything about
Speaker 1: my dad at that point, and when I came to
Speaker 1: his house, he said, I'm getting to two initials that
Speaker 1: are really important, and A and a kay, which is
Speaker 1: of course Anna my grandmother, and Ken my husband. But
Speaker 1: I'm also for some reason, it keeps sending me to
Speaker 1: the globe and asking me to look up Guatemala, and
Speaker 1: you know, maybe you could have put it together, but
Speaker 1: I doubt it. There I really didn't have any kind
Speaker 1: of Internet presence then, so that deeply impressed me. And
Speaker 1: then I went to someone who's just a Charlottean. Both
Speaker 1: mediums do have one striking thing in common. They both
Speaker 1: hold up four fingers to represent the number of children.
Speaker 1: Her father had had, but Judy was just one of three, right,
Speaker 1: well maybe not. As she and her siblings got older,
Speaker 1: they grew increasingly suspicious about that wonderful summertime visitor they
Speaker 1: once had. Anna was another half sister. The medium's suggested
Speaker 1: as much, and so Judy sets off on a quest
Speaker 1: to find out more. She reaches out to her father's
Speaker 1: best friend, Philippe and asks to come visit, maybe he'll
Speaker 1: know something. Finifa at that point was was an old man.
Speaker 1: When I visited him. I was almost fifty years old,
Speaker 1: and he was in his eighties, and he had an
Speaker 1: apartment in New York City and he also lived on
Speaker 1: a coffee farm or it was. That's what he told me.
Speaker 1: In Elsa and I had been telling a friend, I
Speaker 1: really need to speak to someone who knew my dad
Speaker 1: back in the day, and there's really only one person
Speaker 1: that has the answers, and she said, Sweetie, go find him.
Speaker 1: And I found him on the internet. I had to
Speaker 1: spell his name in a lot of different ways, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't that easy to find him, but I did
Speaker 1: find him. I did persist, and I his name just
Speaker 1: popped up on this obscure list of reunion attendance at
Speaker 1: at the school he went to. So I emailed him.
Speaker 1: I only had his email address, and he wrote back
Speaker 1: almost within minutes and said, it's a miracle I found you,
Speaker 1: or you found me and we found each other. I mean,
Speaker 1: he was just so so thrilled that I had made
Speaker 1: contact with him, and I said that I wanted to
Speaker 1: come visit him. I visited him a few times in
Speaker 1: New York City and I interviewed him, and I asked
Speaker 1: him what my father was doing in Guatemala, what their
Speaker 1: relationship was, and what Felipa was actually doing with my
Speaker 1: father in Guatemala, because he seemed to have he seemed
Speaker 1: to be a big part of my father's life back then,
Speaker 1: and he was very hesitant and secretive to answer any
Speaker 1: of my questions. But he did finally answer, And what
Speaker 1: did he tell you? After maybe an hour and a
Speaker 1: half of chit chat and catching up on family, I
Speaker 1: said that I had come there to ask him a
Speaker 1: question about my dad and him in their relationship, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to know if my father had been in
Speaker 1: the CIA. And there was a long silence. You know,
Speaker 1: it's funny. I don't remember that silence as being necessarily uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: I remember it as giving Felipe a few moments of
Speaker 1: grace to kind of pull himself together. And then all
Speaker 1: he said to me was yes. And I said, what
Speaker 1: did you do there? And he said, I can't really
Speaker 1: talk about it, And I said, surely it's declassified. Surely,
Speaker 1: you know, at that point, I was filling up foyas
Speaker 1: and I wasn't getting anywhere. Surely you can tell me
Speaker 1: a little bit. And he said, your father and I
Speaker 1: believed in the United States and believed in democracy in
Speaker 1: Latin America. And your father was a very noble man,
Speaker 1: and he was a patriot. And you know, we would
Speaker 1: do that dance every time we saw each other. Your
Speaker 1: father was a noble man, he was a patriot. Yes,
Speaker 1: he were in Guatemala. Yes, we tried to overthrow or
Speaker 1: actually they did help overthrow the r vents government. I
Speaker 1: asked him about Anna, and he said, I can't tell
Speaker 1: all of your father's secrets. He just was not willing
Speaker 1: to go that far. One of the things that he
Speaker 1: says to you is insert your father into history and
Speaker 1: you will have the whole story exactly. He was very enigmatic.
Speaker 1: But that's he said that to me a few times.
Speaker 1: So Judy does her best to imagine her father in
Speaker 1: the context of his history. What had he been doing
Speaker 1: and where had he been doing it? What were his secrets.
Speaker 1: At a certain point, she contacts Phelippe again. She really
Speaker 1: wants to crack him about Anna. She longs for the
Speaker 1: truth and is pretty sure Phelipe knows more than he's
Speaker 1: told her. But when she reaches out Phelipe is unwilling
Speaker 1: to share more. Well, he hangs up on me because
Speaker 1: I had called him from the Yale Library where I
Speaker 1: was doing research. A reporter friend of mine said, go
Speaker 1: and meet your dad's class notes. You'd be so surprised
Speaker 1: at how illuminating they are. And in addition to reading
Speaker 1: my father's class notes, I also read the class notes
Speaker 1: of his cousin who graduated twenty years earlier from Yale
Speaker 1: that I'm his namesake, man, I'm named after. And I
Speaker 1: don't know what compelled me to to read his class notes.
Speaker 1: I just I just thought it would be interesting. And
Speaker 1: I was there already, so and I you know, I
Speaker 1: had a hotel room for the night, so why not.
Speaker 1: And as I was reading his class notes, I'm reading
Speaker 1: class notes from the early nineties fifties, and this cousin
Speaker 1: of his is talking about going on junkets to Central America,
Speaker 1: and it just hits me that he was the one
Speaker 1: that was my father's CIA handler and the one that
Speaker 1: got him into the CIA, and the one who recruited him.
Speaker 1: I mean, who goes on a junket to Latin America?
Speaker 1: But that's what he wrote in the class notes. So
Speaker 1: I immediately stepped out and I called Felipe and I
Speaker 1: said it was his cousin, wasn't it. And he said,
Speaker 1: I can't talk to you about that. I said, no,
Speaker 1: it was his cousin. I just read it in the
Speaker 1: class notes. And he hung up on me. And that
Speaker 1: was the last time I talked to him. But after
Speaker 1: Philip I died, I spoke to his son, who told
Speaker 1: me that the two of them were also in the
Speaker 1: Dominican Republic, causing me him there. And my father never
Speaker 1: told me that he was in the Dominican Republic. Fast
Speaker 1: forward to March, and we all know what happened in March.
Speaker 1: By this point, Judy has solved some mysteries about her father,
Speaker 1: but so many remain. There is, of course, still the
Speaker 1: mystery of Anna. Judy had ordered a DNA test, but
Speaker 1: it's been sitting around for years. I can't tell you
Speaker 1: how often this happens, and by the time she gets
Speaker 1: around to opening the box, it's expired. She has a
Speaker 1: sort of research trip planned to go to Guatemala. She
Speaker 1: wants to find Anna herself, but a shoulder injury and
Speaker 1: a global pandemic thwart these plans, and Judy cancels the trip.
Speaker 1: There's this um Spanish word that comes up quite often
Speaker 1: in your book, trusty end this. Yes, trust ends. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's a very particular word in Spanish that my mother
Speaker 1: used to hurl at my father. Yes, it has deep secrets.
Speaker 1: They're so deep that they're locked in a storeroom. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just such a great word. It's like
Speaker 1: the deepest kind of secret. Mhm. Judy is thinking about
Speaker 1: trust end us as she continues to reckon with the
Speaker 1: mystery of Anna. Who is she and where is she?
Speaker 1: And more pressing than these two questions, Judy poses another
Speaker 1: impossible question to herself, which is, how can I continue
Speaker 1: to search for a woman for whom there's not enough
Speaker 1: room in my soul. At this stage in Judy's life
Speaker 1: and research and writing about her father's past, she deeply
Speaker 1: believes that Anna is her half sister. She's almost certain
Speaker 1: of this, and yet to know for sure. To dig
Speaker 1: deeper is almost more than she can tolerate. It's the
Speaker 1: trust end us at the center of her story. I
Speaker 1: think I had some solid grounding and some solid facts
Speaker 1: that I uncovered about my dad, and I think this
Speaker 1: mixture of the facts and the speculative nonfiction that I had.
Speaker 1: Mixing them together yielded for me a very profound, unshakable truth.
Speaker 1: I believe. I know my father was in the CIA.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's you know, it's more than circumstantial. And
Speaker 1: I believe that he father a daughter whose name was
Speaker 1: Anna like his mother. Where does this leave you now
Speaker 1: in relationship to your history? And you're right towards the
Speaker 1: end of the book about you know, your mother is
Speaker 1: still living, she's being moved to assisted living, and you
Speaker 1: and your siblings empty out se asylum. You know the
Speaker 1: weight of all that history, being raised in a house
Speaker 1: full of secrets, full of sort of half truths and
Speaker 1: made up lives to some degree, made up narratives. You've
Speaker 1: built a family for yourself that is loving and solid
Speaker 1: and about as far away from the family that you
Speaker 1: were raised in as you could possibly get. Right, I
Speaker 1: think I found the answers to what I needed, or
Speaker 1: the answers to to what I suspected and speculated about.
Speaker 1: And I think that I found the truth, And um,
Speaker 1: I'm very at peace with that that I found the truth.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly's
Speaker 1: a Core is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
Speaker 1: the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
Speaker 1: like to share, please us a voicemail and your story
Speaker 1: could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one
Speaker 1: eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can
Speaker 1: also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And if
Speaker 1: you'd like to know more about the story that inspired
Speaker 1: this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts.
Speaker 1: For my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.