Ingrid Katarina Hamster

As bright as Jerry was, his choices in his private life were not always the best.
Like many men, he was drawn by the seductive nature of my mother, Ingrid,
who knew how to flirt like nobody's business, and was very beautiful and witty.
The two met while both were married to other partners. My mother's version of
it was that Jerry was working as an optometrist, she went to have her eyes
examined, they looked into each other's eyes and were madly in love. They kept
the affair going until both were finally divorced and could marry.

Ingrid was a classic narcissist. She claimed she descended from aristocracy,
that her maiden name was Hamstars (after a German actress) rather than her
real last name, Hamster. When I enrolled in pre-med, she already sent letters
to relatives in Germany stating that I was a doctor. When her looks faded with
age and self-abuse, she became increasingly despondent and angry. I believe
she was somewhat psychopathic, as she didn't seem to have empathy,
conscience, or emotional capacity beyond what a six-year-old would exhibit.
She was charming and disarming, and no one guessed at what really went on
at the Rogoff establishment...

Soon after the marriage, Gordon, her 10-year-old son, found her after she had
slit her wrists in a suicide attempt while intoxicated. This was barely a year
before I was born.

So, I was born. We moved to Fairfield street in Detroit. Life became
a series of dramatic incidents...Ingrid had a severe drinking problem. Gordon
was shuffled about between his father and our home. I became isolated from
other children, as it is never easy to be social when you don't know whether it's
"safe" to bring someone over for company.

We did have some moments of hilarity. The two of them were like a slap-stick
comedy at times. One moment I fondly remember was, well, my first Pap Smear.
My parents picked me up from the hospital and I was unusually quiet. Jerry had
one eyebrow raised in his rear-view mirror and asked "Hey, you're awfully quiet
back there. Did it hurt or something?"
To which I mumbled "Yeah, kinda."
My mother indignantly exclaimed, in her German accent, "Ach, Vell, it never
hurt ME!"
There was a moment of silence in the car, then Jerry said with a flourish:
"Here we have the difference between Cripple Creek and the Grand Canyon..."

He got a purse whacked on his head as we drove off into the sunset, laughing
hysterically.

Ingrid was also physically ill, with ailments ranging from tuberculosis to diabetes
that was induced from pancreatitis...a result of heavy drinking. She never
admitted she was an alcoholic, in spite of repeated admonishments from her
physicians. My father never divorced her out of an ingrained sense of responsibility
towards sick people, and probably because he did love her in spite of her very
narcissistic and vengeful way of being. Also he felt that the courts would have
made me go with my mother in those days, though I do believe there was
substantial legal and medical proof that she was unfit for parenting.

The only time we all got along as a happy family was on our summer vacations,
since Ingrid could not drink and was being entertained. She was an artist and
painted flowers we brought for her from the Eastern Market. This was because
she was mostly housebound.

She stopped drinking the last year of her life, and was reduced to a pathetic
woman that had lost all of her teeth, most of her hair and needed a walker to get
around. She had her first and only painting exhibit planned at the Scarab Club in
Detroit, and seemed to begin to look forward to artistic recognition.

Sadly, she died before she could enjoy her art show. She had a cerebral hemorrhage
and was in a semi-comatose state during which my father asked her "Do you still
love me?" She answered "No." Even in a coma, she still could fight. Then she
instructed me to tell my dog to take the garbage out. After about a week of this,
she slipped into a complete coma and began to show signs of kidney failure...
she filled with fluid and it was seeping through her skin. One afternoon, while the
nurse was mopping up her weeping skin, I noticed she was starting to show signs
of Chene-Stoke's breathing.
I knew she was going to die very soon. I told the nurse and my father to stop
talking and that this was it. My father and I told her we both loved her when she
drew her last breath. Jerry bent his head in sorrow as I watched her with a
clinical detachment as her skin color changed from a jaundiced yellow to a
greenish hue. Ingrid died on December 29, 1979 -the day before my twenty-first
birthday at the age of fifty-six.

 I went and celebrated my birthday by getting very drunk at a party. I remember
coming home from the party trying to feel some grief for a parent that had just
died, but I felt nothing but a strange relief. The war was over.

I wasn't sad about her passing, I felt bad for my father, who would watch "Benny
Hill" with his root beer in hand. The house seemed so quiet all of a sudden...

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