By Victor Greto
REHOBOTH BEACH — “I’m glad they’re gone,” Molly “Brucie” Jacobs says of the four potential homebuyers who have just left her oceanfront house.
“There was a lot of negative energy there.”
Despite the wall-length view of the ocean, rolling just a few yards from the back deck, some of that energy may have come from the house itself. It’s a mess of packed boxes, its beige carpet streaked with black smudges, its kitchen counters littered with odds and ends.
Or maybe it’s from Brucie’s own mixed feelings about selling a piece of her childhood, a childhood which she has tried to chronicle in “Secret Girl,” a memoir about her relationship with Anne, a mentally retarded sister her parents didn’t tell her about until Brucie was 13.
Her father bought this home when she was a little girl, and her family sometimes vacationed here. He gave her the house before he died in 1997.
Brucie, 52, has lived here fulltime for four years with Gary Adams, a house builder she met in New Mexico. They are moving to Georgetown, where she will continue painting, writing and exorcising the demons that have etched her weary, enigmatic face.
Brucie’s memoir reports how, at the age of 38, she finally met Anne and tried to make sense of the family secret.
The book doesn’t tell all of Brucie’s story, though.
The emotional intimacy Brucie tried to build with Anne would not be enough to save Brucie later, when she watched one of her two sons die. She plunged headfirst back into depression, alcohol — and, later — writing, to soothe the pain.
In “Secret Girl,” Brucie re-imagines her younger sister’s life, and she parallels Anne’s hidden life of familial neglect with her own. Imagined scenes are based on hundreds of records compiled over the 45 years of Anne’s life in institutions and halfway houses.
“I can draw upon what I know of her as an adult, and my own experience of how it feels to step uncertainly into an unknown world, unsure of what minefields lie ahead,” Brucie wrote in “Secret Girl.”
“Part of what memoirs are about is speculation,” says Brucie’s editor and mentor, Anya Achtenberg. “We were working from incomplete memory, half-truths, what people tell us, what people suspect, and this is very strong in her life and in this book there are many underlying tensions and stories.”
But “Secret Girl’ doesn’t include the perspective of family members.
The book is “largely imagined,” says Sally Jacobs, Brucie’s sister and Anne’s twin. She is a reporter for the Boston Globe.
“Great parts of it are untrue,” Sally says. “Myself and my mother have told her that. It’s made up and self-serving and caused a great deal of pain for a family that already has gone through a lot of pain.”
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Brucie seemed to have had it all.
She was born to an upper middle class life in Baltimore. Her father, Brad Jacobs, was an editorial page editor at the Baltimore Evening Sun. Her mother, Molly, was a social butterfly and fundraiser for various city institutions.
The family vacationed in Europe, and even lived in England for a year while her father was a foreign correspondent. Brucie attended a private boarding school and received a degree in Asian Studies from Cornell University.
She went on to earn a law degree at Columbia University, married a man she met in law school, and for six years successfully practiced corporate and securities law while raising two boys.
She also drank a lot, sometimes with her husband, but mostly alone. She had started in her teens.
As a lawyer, Brucie never felt like she fit in, especially at the office.
“I wanted to be with my kids,” she says. “I wanted to write. I was drinking heavily.”
So in 1992, after she turned 38, she quit — both her drinking and her job.
Shortly after that, Brucie told her psychiatrist the family secret.
“I told him that I’d known about Anne since I was 13, rarely spoke of Anne and had minimal contact with her,” she wrote. “She lived her life, and we lived ours. When I finished, the expression on Dr. Bergman’s face was the picture of disbelief.”
While Brucie’s family suffered with the secret, institutionalization of a handicapped child was not unusual for the time, says Harriet Ainbinder, a Wilmington child psychologist.
“The idea was that if you have a retarded child, you didn’t want any one to know about it,” she says. “It was difficult to care for the child, so you put them out of sight and out of mind, and then didn’t tell the children.”
There were many things children were not told then, including whether one was adopted, Ainbinder says.
Brucie decided to go meet Anne, who was 35.
Her memoir starts there, with Brucie driving to meet Anne, the car full of presents – a box of candy, sweat pants, shoes and earrings – for the sister she’d never met.
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Anne was born in May 1957 with hydrocephalus, an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid around the brain that enlarged her head. Doctors predicted she would not live a year. If she did, she would become mentally retarded.
When she survived, her parents decided to institutionalize her.
In “Secret Girl,” Brucie’s creation of conversations between her mother and father, between Anne and her doctors and nurses, all are done to make sense of a stack of records, Brucie says.
The scenes tend to reflect a lingering affection for her father and hostility toward her mother:
When the nurse has left the room, the tension over what to do with Anne hangs in the air.
“It’s unfair,” my mother bursts out, slapping her leg in frustration. “Damn doctors, can’t they do something?”
“Molly, stop it!” my father snaps, “they’re doing all they can.”
But he feels it, too, feels it bitterly….
“Why us!” my mother says.
Although the secret was hard for Brucie and Sally, it likely was worse for Anne, child psychologist Ainbinder says.
“For the child, even a retarded child, she would know a touch, a person, a face, something would make an impression,” Ainbinder says. “And to have nobody come and visit you has to be horrendous.”
In the book, Brucie says that, unlike Anne’s roommate and others staying at the halfway house, Anne had no family pictures on her bureau, no signs that she had a family.
Brucie knew that Sally and her mother visited Anne, but Brucie says she didn’t know how often.
“I knew our sister all of my life and knew her well, and her portrayal of myself is as if it was someone else,” Sally says. The sisters have not talked about the book, which Sally characterizes as “deeply upsetting.”
“I’m sorry to hear she’s upset about the book, but it’s not about her,” Brucie says. “My priority was to tell Anne’s story, and to heighten people’s sensitivity toward other disabled children, their families and the challenges they face.”
Even though Anne had never met Brucie, Anne’s first words, “I missed you, Buddy. How was your vacation?” becomes a refrain whenever the sisters see each other.
“Meeting Anne was like meeting someone who was totally herself,” Brucie says now. “She said what she wanted when she wanted, and she was totally forgiving.”
For Brucie, Anne became “the vital counterpart I’d lost touch with long ago,” she wrote. “She had what the world I grew up in had suppressed in me, what drinking had numbed.”
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Her parents first told Brucie and Sally about Anne while on vacation in 1967.
The news hit both girls hard, Brucie writes, but news of a “secret girl” triggered her own feelings of alienation, especially from her mother.
Brucie immediately recast a story about her infancy that her father repeatedly told. She had laughed about it with her parents.
“Your mother was holding you in her arms over by the window,” Brucie’s father said. “She was rocking you back and forth but she couldn’t calm you down. You were wailing. Mummy was almost hysterical. She saw me, burst into tears, then tossed you across the room.”
He caught her. Asked why she had thrown an infant across a room, “My mother sighed deeply,” Brucie wrote. “‘I think you were hungry, Brucie. You didn’t want a bottle, and I didn’t have enough milk. You chewed so hard on my bosoms, they bled.’”
Repeatedly, records show, Brucie’s parents chose to leave Anne in institutions. A major reason, Brucie read in the records, is that her mother couldn’t handle such a child.
Molly Jacobs declined to comment about her daughter’s book.
“The child’s return to her home is being ruled out by both parents,” Brucie read in one doctor’s report. “They feel they have developed a style of living that does not leave room for Anne. Also, the mother’s stability was brought into question by the father…I feel this questioning is justified.”
Every family has their way of keeping silence about various things, Anya Achtenberg says.
“That shame of not fulfilling expectations stuck with me, those depictions of her mother and father,” she says. “Here’s someone who had a lot of stuff, who became a lawyer, and how it undid her life to be stuck in that culture of shame and silence and pushing for external success.”
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In August of 2000, eight years after she started a relationship with her sister Anne, Brucie went on an African safari in Botswana with her son, Garrit. She and his father had divorced, and her other son was living with the father.
As Brucie wrote later, in a segment of the book “Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul,” a hyena took Garrit “from his tent just after midnight, dragged him into the bush and killed him. Eleven years old, he died quickly, but his small body was left mutilated and torn apart.”
She still hasn’t recovered.
“I need something in my life to keep me sober,” she says now. “In the 90s, it was the kids. But after Garrit died, everything changed.”
She began drinking again, after eight years of being sober, and went into a deep depression. She also felt compelled to write about her life.
After four months in Africa coming to grips with Garrit’s death and dealing with legal issues, “I came home and felt abandoned by my family,” Brucie says.
Although she says Sally wanted to come to Africa to help, Brucie refused. Brucie didn’t want to deal with anyone.
After she returned home, “I went from boyfriend to boyfriend, from hotel room to hospital to hotel room,” Brucie says.
She finally chose to go to a “life healing center” for trauma and addiction in Santa Fe, N.M., where she began to recover.
After she finished the two-month program, she stayed in Santa Fe. There, she met Gary Adams, who remains her boyfriend, while she was looking for a house. She also met Achtenberg at the creative writing classes Achtenberg taught at a local college.
Brucie asked Achtenberg to help her work on the memoir about Anne.
It became more than an editing job for Achtenberg.
“I would keep pushing her to go further into what things really meant, how the people really felt, and she was a glutton for punishment,” she says.
Brucie stayed in New Mexico for nearly two years. During that time, Anne became seriously ill from liver disease.
Brucie visited Anne at the halfway house in Baltimore, three weeks before Anne died from the disease.
But Brucie did not go when Anne died. Sally was there.
“The specter of another death in the family, and all the fear and horror that this churned up in me, had undermined the voice telling me to go to Anne,” Brucie wrote.
Brucie called Anne the day before she died.
Anne’s last words to Brucie were, “I miss you.”
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Anne showed her how to both give and get forgiveness, Brucie says.
“There was no judgment or blame in Anne’s voice,” Brucie wrote at the book’s conclusion, “no shades of recrimination, no backhanded assault on my badness or goodness, my rightness or wrongness, my being there or not. I was simply forgiven.”
But every place else she turns, from her oceanfront home to her family and herself, seems darkened by recrimination and judgment.
“I wrote the book as an avenue for redemption,” Brucie says in the middle of her packed-up home, smoke from her cigarette curling around the hint of a smile on her pained face.
But writing “Secret Girl” may not have been redeeming enough. Her life remains filled with irony.
She continues to drink, even though she is quite aware her sister died of liver disease.
The book has further alienated her from Sally and her mother.
And, ultimately, Brucie, too, chose not to bring Anne home.
“She had a life at a group home and a job, and I wasn’t sure that I could handle her,” Brucie says. “In a way, I made the same decision as my parents.”