When you?re 16 months old and your father drops dead, you?d think that things couldn?t get much worse. But my father?s sudden death was just my first major trauma. By the time I was 15, I had been battered, molested and locked up and was on the verge of taking my own life. Today, I see how the fall of that first domino led to each subsequent trauma and, in turn, shaped me into a powerful, joyous adult.
Even if he had lived, I?m not sure how much attention I?d have gotten from my father. In the few years she had with him, my mother, a wide-eyed 22, on their wedding day, to my father?s 54, snagged all the fathering he had to offer. She had been a dewy coed as his student at Smith College, an elite American women?s school, trading on her charms while folding her unquenchable needs away in her bobby socks. My father, in turn, had traded on his fame. A composer and two-time Guggenheim fellow, Alvin Etler was a high muckety-muck in the rarefied world of avant-garde jazz. He was a professor at Cornell and Yale before arriving at Smith. His work was featured at one of the first Lincoln Center concerts: Leonard Bernstein directed the New York Philharmonic playing Brahms, Haydn and Etler. As Etler?s wife, my mother had adjunct celebrity status.
I can?t imagine how my life might have looked if my father had lived long enough to have a conversation with me. I might have worn the entitlement with nonchalance, like some opulent hand-me-down perfume. I imagine the doors that would have s...