Asylum, a Memoir of Family Secrets by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Author:Judy Bolton-Fasman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mandel Vilar Press
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Silent Symphony

Grandpa Bolton died on a bone-cold day in January of 1980, and my father cried for his father, the model immigrant, the hero of family lore. He cried for his father’s guidance, for the letters that walked him through creating a household budget. He cried for the sentimental poems Grandpa penned that declared his love of family or that celebrated Yale touchdowns. He cried that Grandpa’s topcoat was too small for him or my brother, but fit me perfectly. He cried because he would never eat Grandpa’s matzoh brei again.

He cried because he was no longer anyone’s son.

When my father retreated into his small, spartan closet to drink, I knew, even when I was nineeen, that he took with him precious memories of life with his parents—memories as bright to him as the light of day. His quiet, tamped-down behavior was in contrast to the aggressive drinker mode I knew when I was younger. One cold night, when we were all embattled in the house, he drunk-drove us to the mall, and a terrified woman jumped out of his way as he hit the curb. Another time, he frightened a gaggle of my friends as he drove us home, inebriated, from a bar mitzvah.

Sometimes he was a silly drunk. “POTS,” he yelled, saying the word STOP backwards as he ran a stop sign. He wiggled his fingers as if communicating in some crazy sign language.

After I grew up, Dad’s life was still as circumscribed and cramped as that closet. During football season he took his transistor radio, tuned to WELI, into that tight space. It became his habit to sit on the floor amid the golf shoes he no longer wore, the cabana shirts, along with the moth-eaten jackets my grandmother had once picked out for him at J. Press. The bottle of vodka under the kitchen sink migrated with him to that closet. He sat in a coffin-like darkness and drank until he passed out. My father was tired. He was sixty plus years old and his memories overwhelmed him.

After my father’s death, discovering the essence of K. Harold Bolton became more urgent for me. Cleaning out his closet, I thought I had that chance when I stumbled upon his own father’s unpublished autobiography, simply titled “My Memoirs.” It felt like the find of the century, a sunken treasure chest. I cleared away my father’s shoe trees and dug out the manuscript, carefully handling the yellowing legal-size loose-leaf sheets. There within that book would be the truth, unbidden and rare. A truth that might finally reveal some of the mysteries my father had kept to himself, and that I felt were my birthright to know. I sat on the floor of the closet with the manuscript the way my father had sat there with his bottle of Stoli.

Grandpa began his life story slowly, with sections on his fondness for making apple cider, harvesting ice, and growing up in the Connecticut countryside. There was Grandpa driving his father’s horse and wagon, delivering milk, or fetching firewood.

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