Gilbert, Arthur and Anna Schacht, my uncles and aunt 

When I was a child, looking through a family album, I remember asking my mother why there was a face cut out of a photo of a little girl in a frilly dress standing next to my mother’s two brothers, Gil and Artie.

“Why is your face cut out, Mommy?”

I forgot the exact brush-off, but it was clear that my mother did not want to talk about it.

Every time I'd look at the album I would see that cut-out face and wonder about it, but I stopped asking after awhile because I never got an answer. I figured there was some strange vanity issue; maybe my mother’s eyes were crossed in the photo or her hair was messed.

Finally, when I was grown up and had mostly forgotten about the photo, my mother must have realized I should know her secret. She sat me down one day and said “That cut-up photo is of your Aunt Anna, my older sister. She lives in an institution in New York. She's very old now. She has schizophrenia.”

My mother described a serious mental illness where people heard voices and saw strange things, and couldn’t separate reality from fantasy. My aunt had many electric shock treatments -- the protocol of that time - and they calmed her and changed her behavior, but didn’t cure the problem.

But why had she been cut out of the photo? Why did my mother never mention this before? I still didn't understand.

“Because people are ... were ...  ashamed of having mental illness in the family” was the answer. “Uncle Gil visits her. I send clothes.”

I already understand shame. My father was a gambler and my mother was ashamed of that, too. I was coached thoughout my childhood to say he was in “real estate.”

My mother talked wistfully about when she was nineteen and accompanied Anna to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. A comedian named George Jessel flirted with my mother and wanted her to appear in his aquatic show the following year, but Anna wouldn’t behave and that possibility fizzled.

My aunt had many “tantrums” and my mother was often the target. Anna was a reporter at The Brooklyn Eagle for awhile, but eventually she was diagnosed, and sent away.

My grandmother, who moved from New York to live with us in Miami, never traveled back, so I assume she didn’t see her daughter again, and she never talked about her.

But I wanted to meet Aunt Anna, and I did.

When I was recently separated from my first husband, my mother and I traveled to the middle of Long Island to the house where Anna lived with an Italian family. She did some chores, and had a room and I assume that the caretakers got paid by the state to care for her.

Anna looked like a question mark on legs, with the most severe case of osteoporosis I had ever seen. Or maybe a crooked bird: tiny, with a small nose and a white crest of curly hair.

But she had lovely, clear eyes and a gentle manner. I could see the resemblance to my mother.

“So nice to meet you,” she said to me. Her spinal curvature made her as small as a child as she reached for my hand. And then, a beat later, “Are you from the moon?”

"No."

“Do you have a trunk?”

Did she think that I was an elephant?  No, she wanted to escape, to run outside and hide in the trunk of my car. Have me be her accomplice, freeing her finally to live in a world that had been forbidden for so long. I could see us driving off,  a skewed Thelma and Louise.

The family that housed her said that she always wanted to escape. As a younger woman she had gotten as far as Manhattan, hid out for a month, and had even found a job.

Her arms looked like they could snap at the slightest touch; something was wrong, and we surmised that maybe she wasn’t fed enough. And not long after she was moved to an institution farther out on the island.

My mother and I visited her there. Anna shared a room with several others. She was offered supervised trips and entertainments on the lawn. She looked better than before. The attendants said she was cooperative and loved to eat.

When I was leaving she whispered in my ear once again, “So nice of you to come. Do you have a trunk in your car.”

The last time I saw Anna she was placed in a smaller old-age facility in Brooklyn. She was frail but as always polite and soft-spoken. And yes, she asked “Do you have a trunk?” It must have been her way of feeling hope, something she never gave up on in her sheltered, difficult world. 

She died in her eighties, institutionalized since she was in her early thirties. 

I felt connected to her perhaps because we both had auburn hair, and were writers. I realize how life gives all of us lucky breaks and not-so-lucky ones. There but for the grace of God, and all that.

Anyway Aunt Anna, I’m not the least bit ashamed of you. You were sick in a time when there was little help or support. And you may have been my mother’s secret, but I’m writing about you now for many to see, with your sweet young face showing under a pretty bow. 

And you finally found that escape you were seeking.