Dear Ethel,
I lost your ring.
It was the only thing of yours we had, other than the letters you and Julius exchanged. The contents of your apartment were confiscated and never returned. Years later, a lawyer gave us your wedding ring. You had small hands and the thin gold band fit perfectly on my pinkie finger. One night during my shift in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit it disappeared, probably came off with my latex glove and into the biohazard trash. One moment it was there, warm against my skin, and the next it was gone.
I was 19 when I fell in love with your son. You had been dead for 13 years. I wasn’t a red diaper baby so his surname didn’t ring any bells. He was simply a handsome, curly-haired campus activist. A few months later, someone told me that Robby was your son.
That explained things I hadn’t understood about him—an emotional holding-back, a concealment that was out of sync with the share-everything ethic of our Sixties’ New Left subculture. I studied newspaper photos of you, your dark-rimmed raccoon eyes just like Robby’s. He has your small hands too. I didn’t tell him I knew, believing that the secret was his to share when he was ready. When I moved into his bedroom on the first night of our new life together, he told me about being a three-year-old whose parents were taken from him by the government. He had never spoken those words aloud before.
Over the five and a half decades since that night, you have been a ghost in my life.
For many of those years, you and Julius were our secret, shared only with Robby’s older brother and his wife, our lawyer, and a few red diaper baby friends who recognized the surname of his adoptive parents. Robby and I carried your legacy into the next generation with our children —Jennifer Ethel and Rachel Anne—telling them your story from their earliest years.
Having been executed, you belong more to history rather than to our family. I never had the opportunity to argue with you about which Haggadah to use at the Seder. I imagine you and my mother agreeing that Robby’s hair was too long and disapproving that we encouraged our children to use our first names. Robby and I would have rolled our eyes at both of you, with the mixture of love and exasperation reserved for close family.
There are no photos of you in our family albums. The few images we have—your high school graduation portrait, a snapshot of you and Julius at a park—come from unknown sources. They are framed on a shelf, next to pictures of my parents and Anne and Abel Meeropol, who adopted your sons, nurtured and raised them for you. I’ve studied these photos, searching for fragments of your person in our children, grateful for Rachel’s dark-rimmed eyes and Jenn’s thick wavy dark hair.
Having been executed, you have been defined by others. I’ve had to use my imagination. I picture arriving at your lower east side apartment laden with Chanukah presents, leaning down to embrace you and handing you a grandchild while I take off my coat. As I nursed my babies, I imagined you rocking my sweet Robby as an infant, chasing him around the room as a toddler. The press characterized you as a cold person. But Robby is a gentle, deeply kind person; those qualities are nurtured and developed in a person by good parenting. I love you for that.
There are things I wish I could ask you. Impossible things, like did you love Meryl Streep playing you in Angels in America as much as I did? Could you imagine saying the Kaddish for Roy Cohn?
You were 37 years old when you were electrocuted, younger than my daughters. I turn 80 soon, old enough to be your mother, grandmother even. How can I love you, a ghost, a family member I never met, never hugged?
Because without your ring, without family photographs of shared vacations at Coney Island or Wellfleet, without memories of Seders and birthdays, all I have are imaginings and ghosts.
Love,
Ellen
Ellen Meeropol is the author of the novels Sometimes an Island, The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest, and guest editor for the anthology Dreams for a Broken World. Essay and publications include Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Writer Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Guernica. Ellen is married to Robert Meeropol, younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
