Fraud on the Court Read online

  Once, when I was six, I suffered a lapse in attentiveness to my mother’s mood. It was a lesson I would never forget.

  As usual, I was trying to figure out how something worked. This time it was one of my toy trucks, a masterful piece of machinery with actual working suspension. I was running it across the floor when I discovered that as the truck passed over the joiner between the living room carpet and the kitchen tile, the wheels would bounce up into their wells, absorbing the shock. Delighted, I decided to add extra weight to the bed of the truck by hauling some cargo. The cargo turned out to be another one of my toys. Lost in fascination, I ran the truck back and forth, back and forth, determined to understand.

  Boots was not as charmed by the truck’s inner workings as I was. Before I could react, she leapt from her seat at the table and hurtled toward me.

  “If that’s all the more you care about your toys,” she said, “then let me just finish breaking them for you and get it over with.”

  With that, she brought up her foot and stomped it violently back down, crushing the truck and cracking the cab from the bed.

  She returned to her seat at the table, and I gathered up my toys. With tears in my eyes, I fled to my room where I held my shattered truck to my chest and cried quietly into my sleeve.

  * * * * * *

  Adela was not well suited to life as a salesman’s wife. She had no driver’s license, little education, and an extreme distaste of going into public without Al accompanying her. If we needed groceries while he was gone, the neighbor came and drove us into town. If we had an appointment to keep, the neighbor was there to help out again.

  During these times, Glenn became a focus for all of Boots’ restlessness. She mothered him with desperate attention: bathing him, feeding him, sleeping next to him, and all behind closed doors whenever possible so as to shut out any intrusion I might make onto the relationship. When her moods slipped into darker places, that’s when she sought me out, switch in hand, wearing out the fit of temper on my back, buttocks and slender legs. When she was done, I was once again left alone.

  As I entered school, I was thrilled to find a place where I could escape, and more importantly, a place where effort and ability was equated with predictable reward. My teachers, for sure, found my restless energy and inquisitive nature a bit of a burden in a school environment where children were expected to look straight ahead, answer only in turn and work in consistently focused silence. Until I entered seventh grade, all of my teachers passed me by in an unremarkable parade of tightly pinned hair, tightly pinched expressions and tight-lipped remonstrances to sit still and pay attention. And yet every report card went home with the highest grades.

  Despite the pervasive signs of a child with a very troubled home life, the don’t-ask, don’t-tell deeply southern mentality of the 1950’s kept teachers and school officials from making any inquiries. If the parents chose not to attend any of a student’s sporting events, awards nights, school plays or otherwise, that was none of anyone’s business. If the student bore bruises and welts that occasionally made it into the light of day, the problem was easily solved by looking the other way.

  That is, until the year that Eleanor Berger came to town. Mrs. Berger, the school’s new seventh grade teacher, was a northerner of all things. Twenty-one years old, progressive and strong willed, it’s a wonder she was ever hired at all. She brought with her strong liberal notions that were vastly outside of the box, especially in the deeply conservative south. She shocked the educational community by introducing sex education as part of the curriculum in her classroom, an unprecedented move in 1965, at least outside of her home state of New York.

  But hired she was, and she entered my life like a breath of fresh air. It was during that seventh grade year that I began to truly hate the South and the closed minded, secretive culture which had evolved there. Elle Berger came in, clear eyed and curious and enthusiastic and, in one year, changed the course my life was destined to take.

  Mostly, what she offered me was simply encouragement and support. When Mrs. Berger looked at me, she truly looked at me. When I was out of line, she let me know. But when I excelled, or showed particular skill, she was also generous with her praise.

  She refused to accept that my parents could be simply left out of the school equation like an unnecessary appendage. I don’t know to this day how she did it, but she got Al and Adela Chalek into her classroom for a rare parent-teacher conference, attempting to ferret out of them the nature of my home life. When it was clear that she would make no inroads on that front, she became even more supportive of me, both in and out of the classroom.

  I remember the day I earned the rank of Eagle Scout. It was extremely rare then for a scout so young to achieve the honor. Despite the hours of commitment I had made, and the importance of the event, I knew that neither of my parents would attend.

  So I invited the only other person whose opinion mattered to me. I asked Mrs. Berger if she would come to the ceremony.

  “I’d be honored, Michael,” she responded.

  So on that evening, when I walked off of the stage having received the ultimate scouting rank, it was my teacher’s proud smile and shining eyes that greeted me, and whose memory I carried with me throughout the following long and lonely years—years in which despite my every effort, I could do no right, and Glenn could do no wrong.

  * * * * * *

  It bears mentioning that by the time I was ending my elementary years, I had managed to both infuriate my mother and marginally shut her down, by ferociously denying her final attempt to bathe me when I fell extremely ill at the age of nine with an illness known as Bright’s disease. It was an illness that attacked my liver and kept me bedridden for eight full weeks of third grade.

  Although she did not attempt to “help” me in this way as frequently as she did Glenn, on occasion throughout my middle childhood she would accompany me into the bathroom at night. Without dwelling on the details, her assistance was of a type that left me feeling ashamed and violated.

  I tried several times to let my father know how I felt about these instances. His response was always harsh and dismissive.

  “Your mother has never shown you anything but loving care,” he told me. “Your ungratefulness is disgusting.”

  Despite my sheltered and repressed childhood, my awareness grew that it was inappropriate in the extreme for my mother to be running her hands along my body, up into my crotch, lingering with the soaping and scrubbing as she did so. On that day when I was nine, I decided I’d had enough. I was feverish, and miserable, but not so far gone that I couldn’t fight her off. This time I was old enough and strong enough to make it clear that she might get away with beating me and verbally abusing me, but never again would she touch me in that way.

  I think that her attempt was partly motivated by several fights that took place over those eight weeks. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Betsy Jenkins, had graciously taken it upon herself to nightly tutor me after school to keep my academic progress on track. I looked forward to her visits with joyous anticipation.

  My delight was a thorn in Adela’s side. She mentioned several times, in angry outbursts, that I was a horrible child for loving another woman more than I loved my own mother. She accused me of being ungrateful and cruel.

  In the midst of all of this, Adela lost the will to maintain the family “secret” any longer. Looking back, I think she must have been waiting for the opportunity to let me know of my adoption, and that somehow Alex had prevented it.

  One day, I unwittingly opened the door for her. It was on a warm fall afternoon shortly after my illness. I had dared to take a rare break from the confines of my room. Oil painting was my newest hobby and the natural light was much better in the kitchen. Adela was also in the kitchen, standing at the sink peeling potatoes. While I was painting, I started talking to her.

  One of my classmates at school had just revealed to us that he was adopted. The concept was a new one to me. I knew almost nothin
g about adoption, and new topics and concepts were a challenge I rarely turned away.

  So I told my mother what was on my mind. Tilting my head at the numbered canvas, brush in hand, I mentioned to her what I had learned.

  “There’s a kid in my class today who told us that he’s adopted,” I said.

  “Hmm,” Adela replied, without turning around. “Well, you know that you’re adopted, too.”

  With no preparation, no backward glance, she dropped this bomb into the empty conversational space. She continued to peel and slice and stare out the window, the metallic scrape of the knife now the only sound in the room. What she was thinking at the moment, I can only guess.

  I, however, was dumbstruck. The paintbrush shook in my hands. I no longer saw the canvas, or the kitchen, or my mother. The rest of the evening disappeared into the shadows while I wrestled with the implications.

  When my father returned later in the week, I confronted him in the hallway. He still had on his hat and coat, and his briefcase had just been settled at the door.

  “Mom says I’m adopted,” I told him.

  “That’s true,” he responded. “We adopted you when you were an infant.”

  There didn’t seem much else to say.

  Once the secret was out, Adela delighted in mentioning my adopted status at regular intervals. It became another way for her to abuse me, lashing out verbally with results as painful as any physical beating.

  By the end of that school year, I had developed a pronounced stutter that would follow me for the rest of my life. It certainly did nothing to endear me to my already critical parents. And while many experts debate the exact causes of speech disorders such as mine, I have no doubt that it was induced by a type of post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the constant verbal abuse that Adela dealt out to me.

  Chapter 2

  When I was in high school, Alex took a job in the Chicago area. He was originally from Illinois, so it was a natural place for us to relocate. The move to Illinois was another empowering factor in the eventual course of my life, although I didn’t realize it until much later. At this point I was starting to throw myself into sports, running on the track team with great success.

  While Adela’s power somewhat waned over my life as I became a teenager, Al’s grew in strength and intensity. In Chicago, his new job put him more frequently at home. And where Adela’s force had been oppositional and violent, Al was simply an impenetrable wall around me whose boundaries grew ever more confined.

  Alex Chalek was a trim, athletic, handsome and supremely self-controlled former soldier who couldn’t let go of his militaristic concepts of authority and discipline. He was not a tall man, but he chose to focus on pursuits that required no significant height advantages. He was an excellent golfer, a master at chess, a mean poker player, and one hell of an authoritarian at home with his wife and children. I always thought that one day, with my excellent grades and my continued success in sports and civics, Al would finally discover a reason to be proud of me, since success was a trait he valued highly. The wished-for approval never happened.

  Instead, except for when I was at school and sports practice I was treated like a juvenile delinquent. Without any provocation, the family decided I wasn’t to be allowed out of the house unsupervised. Whereas my fellow classmates were stretching their wings, borrowing the family car, going on dates and to school dances, I was banned from all such activity. It was not unusual for Al and Adela to leave the house on their own date and still hire a babysitter for me and Glenn. By the time I was in high school, the babysitter’s presence was an obvious slap in the face. And then, at the end of my eleventh grade year, Al also went to my track coach and convinced the man to cut me from the team. I don’t know how or why, he just did it.

  For the junior prom, I was given rare permission to attend the dance and was even promised the use of my otherwise neglected driver’s license. I was to be allowed to drive myself and my date, unsupervised. By the time the night arrived, Al had changed his mind. We rode to the school with him chauffeuring us and me climbing miserably out of the backseat in full view of my classmates. Al drove off with a loud warning to be ready for pick-up at curfew. I ducked my head in shame as we passed by the other students.

  When I objected to the tight reins that Al kept on the household, and on me particularly, he would draw himself up to his full (although meager) height and let me know that if it were his strict Russian immigrant father raising me, I’d find myself kneeling on dried rice or beans for hours while I learned to repent of my rebellious ways. Instead, I was lucky to be treated as lovingly as I was.

  “After all,” Adela would here interject. “Didn’t we buy and pay enough for you? Show a little more respect.” Sometimes, she would mention that their money could have been better spent on more rounds of artificial insemination. Then Glenn might have had a biological sibling instead of just me.

  Here their eyes would meet, briefly, and Al would return to his dinner, or his paper. And I would return to my good soldier routine, with answers of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” and I would bury myself in studying for the extra classes I was taking throughout my high school semesters and summer terms. While I studied, Al and Adela would fret over Glenn’s failing grades and whether he might be held back again. The marked difference between my school performance and Glenn’s did nothing to improve my relationship with either my brother or our parents.

  When we arrived in Chicago, I got my first look at my own birth certificate—the amended one standardly issued for all adoptees—and noticed a discrepancy that sparked a question I immediately regretted asking.

  Adela pulled out the certificate and gave it to me so that I could go in and register for classes at my new high school. I looked over the document, and asked about why June 1953 was listed as the day the document was registered, over a year after I was born.

  Her reaction was instantaneous, defensive and cruel. Instead of answering my question, she said,“ You know, if I could ram you back up in your mother’s womb I would do it.” I decided then and there that I would never ask her again about anything pertaining to my birth.

  Instead, the extra classes I took during high school became central to a new plan for emotional survival. Since school was the one thing I was allowed to pursue without hindrance, I pursued it with every spare moment of my time. By the end of eleventh grade I had only one class left to graduate.

  In addition to dedicating myself to this accelerated schedule, I had also found a way, despite the clear obstacles, to sneak in a steady relationship with a girlfriend several years older than I was. Her name was Susan. She had an apartment in Wheaton, a town about thirty miles away from where I lived. Together we planned for me to enact a grand escape. I finished my last credits in the summer term of 1969, and in August I received my diploma.

  That same week, after months of premeditation, it was simply time to leave. I grabbed a hidden suitcase from under the bed, shoved in as many clothes as it would hold, grabbed a few papers and my ID, and crawled out the window. I left the sleeping household behind, never to return. For the next five months I was a seventeen-year-old fugitive, lying low in Susan’s apartment and biding my time until the day I turned eighteen. To my knowledge, the Chaleks never sought me out. But I wasn’t taking any chances. I kept a constant eye out for notices in the paper and I avoided all sightings of the police.

  * * * * * *

  If there was one thing life had taught me up to this point, it was that academic pursuit was the path to success. So, although jobs were plentiful in Chicago in the 70s—really, all you had to do was walk into the plant and say “I want to work”—I decided to go to college. A year of hard labor in the factories had convinced me that it wasn’t the future I desired.

  I had taken the ACT and SAT in high school, with good results, and those scores plus my high school GPA easily gained me acceptance into the University of Illinois. I started living on campus during the week, traveling home to be with
Susan on the weekends.

  By my final year of college, Susan and I were married. Instead of being a wonderful new beginning, though, it was more of a final death knell for our relationship. It’s the mark of many years of distance and gained wisdom that I can look back and say that my previous experience of “family” had ill prepared me to be the husband that Susan wanted.

  I didn’t know what a strong, healthy, intimate adult relationship should look like. I certainly hadn’t been taught that at home. Susan needed an emotional connection. She wanted children. Her vision of marriage and the reality of what I could offer were so far apart that it drove us both to distraction. She started drinking. A year later, I left.

  After my bachelor’s degree was completed, it seemed natural to think about going to grad school. I was certainly comfortable as a student. It was one of the few things at which I had always excelled. So eventually, I found myself back in the classroom, working and studying just like always, leaving little time to think about life, failed families or loneliness.

  Sometimes I would call Glenn. Especially after I turned eighteen, I couldn’t help the curiosity of wanting to know how things were going, if anyone missed me, where they all were. Eventually, in 1973, Glenn and the family moved back to Florida. I lost touch even with him. I never once spoke to Al or Adela.

  I had one cousin, too, that I called regularly. His name was Joe. He was a good twelve years older than I, and he was included in the adult circles at family events and holidays. He was a much more regular and reliable source of information than Glenn, even though Joe was married and in the process of pursuing a career. In fact, in 1977 he invited me to spend the holidays with him and his wife. He made the mistake of telling Alex and Adela, however, and Adela proceeded to object vehemently. She told him that I was a bore and would do nothing but ruin the entire holiday for them.