Double Exposure

I was the one who remembered everything. That was a family legend from early on. But I don’t remember this snapshot; as far as I can recall, I never saw it when I was growing up.

The photograph came to me in a text one morning when I was sitting here at my writing desk, typing on my laptop, surrounded by stacks of cardboard boxes full of pictures and letters—several lifetimes’ worth of memorabilia that I am trying to sort into a family history, or some sort of memoir. That’s my father, beaming into the camera, and that’s me at his feet, beaming up at him. My father’s sister, my Aunt Ettie, stands just behind him. On the left is Ettie’s daughter, my cousin Bonnie. On the right, my mother, laughing and looking very pregnant.

It was Cousin Bonnie who found the picture, in one of Aunt Ettie’s old albums, where it seemed perfectly ordinary and innocent, a happy family tableau. The occasion was a birthday party for my father, Bonnie said. On that page of the album, Ettie had written in red pencil, in big block letters, surprise!!

What is your first memory?

In 1895, two French psychologists, a married couple, Victor and Catherine Henri, sent out an international survey to ask that question. The Henris received more replies than they’d expected: 75 from Russia, 35 from France, seven from England, six from America. One respondent claimed to remember as far back as the age of six months. Others said they couldn’t remember anything before the age of eight. Most people’s first memories went back to the age of three.

A few years later, Caroline Miles, an instructor in psychology at Wellesley College, asked 100 students the same question. On average, their memories also went back to the age of three. Another psychologist surveyed students at Mount Holyoke and Yale and got the same result.

In Vienna, Sigmund Freud read these reports while he was writing what became his most famous book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which he published as a monograph in 1901. The year before that, he had published The Interpretation of Dreams; a few years later came Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Psychoanalysts call those three titles, in order of publication, the Dream Book, the Mistake Book, and the Joke Book. Why did you dream that dream? Why did you say that? What made you tell that joke?

Freud analyzes early memories in the Mistake Book, and there he identifies a paradox that still interests scientists who study the brain, however much or however little they regard Freud. “I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia—that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives—and fail to find in it a strange riddle,” he writes, in A. A. Brill’s translation. Why are our first memories so brief, so fragmentary, like snapshots without captions? And why don’t they go back any further? Why not all the way back to the beginning? In other words, why are we all amnesiacs? Many of our earliest experiences must have been intense, and even though we have forgotten them, as Freud notes, those experiences “have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person.” Rather, “they have left a definite influence for all future time.”

Somehow, our first memories are forgotten but not gone.

In his Mistake Book, Freud writes that we all forget what was going on in those early snapshot-like scenes for the same reason that we all make Freudian slips. Something must have been happening during those moments, something emotionally charged, some crisis we are trying to forget. The handful of images that do stay with us are only substitutes, stand-ins—“screens,” as he puts it, “for other really significant impressions, whose direct reproduction is hindered by some resistance.” We hardly know ourselves, we are prey to all kinds of forces and motives that we don’t understand, and “it is probably due to these same forces that the understanding of our childhood is generally so very strange to us.”

Freud began analyzing himself at the age of 43, when he was writing the Mistake Book. Most of his first memories were purely visual, he reports, “comparable to stage settings.” Many of them were images with just a little bit of movement and sound captured along with them. (Today he might have compared them to Apple’s “Live Photos.”)

Freud describes one scene that had often come back to him over the years, a memory from the age of three going on four. “I saw myself in front of a chest, the door of which was held open by my half-brother, twenty years my senior. I stood there demanding something and screaming; my mother, pretty and slender, then suddenly entered the room, as if returning from the street.”

After puzzling over this memory, Freud says, he interviewed his mother. Among other things, she told him that when he was three, and she was pregnant with his baby sister, a nurse was caught stealing things. His half-brother, Philipp, told on the nurse and got her fired.

Now Freud remembered a little bit more. At the time of the incident, he had asked Philipp why the nurse was gone. His brother (“evasive and witty, as he is to this day”) said something maddeningly vague. From Philipp’s answer, he got the idea that his brother had locked the nurse in the chest. (There may be some wordplay here that doesn’t translate, involving a German pun on the phrase his brother used: “boxed in.”) Little Sigmund concluded that his brother had locked their mother in the chest, too.

That is why he was screaming.

I’ve always been the family memory keeper, as I said, and I can remember the New York apartment in the snapshot Cousin Bonnie sent me. That’s where we lived when I was three years old, the year my brother was born. Decades later, I was able to take a paper napkin at dinner one evening and sketch the layout of the place for my parents, although we had left Manhattan before I turned four.

At first, when looking at the picture, I saw just what Bonnie saw, the warm family scene. But then I had one of those uncanny moments when the mind seems to slow down and come to a complete stop. It was as if I’d begun to lift a box that looked light and found it was so loaded that it might almost have been nailed to the floor. Something was wrong. The toddler in the photograph, the toddler who was me, did not look three years old.

I texted Bonnie, “I’m very interested in the date.” She texted back a picture of that whole page of the album. There it was, in the same neat red block letters: “uncle jerry’s birthday. april 5, 1956.”

My brother, Eric, was born on May 3, 1957. Thirteen months later.

What a strange feeling it was to stare at the snapshot and see my mother in that maternity dress, and to sense the excitement in the room, which must have had at least as much to do with the baby that everyone was expecting as it did with my father’s birthday.

More texts. No, Bonnie said, she didn’t remember a lost pregnancy. She did remember the dress she was wearing, a hand-me-down from Cousin Judy.

Cousin Judy died years ago, but I emailed my cousin Lainie in Toronto. She didn’t remember a lost pregnancy, either. Neither did my cousin Janet in Bethesda. My cousin Barry wrote back from Tucson: “Thank you for sending the picture. I loved seeing the pure joy on everyone’s faces. Unfortunately, I don’t have any recollection about a lost pregnancy. I was 11 at the time and if your mother played the subject down, it’s not surprising that my mother would have followed her lead. As awful as such a loss must have been, your parents didn’t wait very long to try again.” Naturally, they all assumed that I wouldn’t remember the loss either, even though I was always the one who remembered everything.

I do remember our mother saying something to me about a lost pregnancy—but only once, and only very obliquely, very glancingly. My brother, Eric, told me that she’d said a little more to him. The baby had been a girl. Her name would have been Elizabeth. That’s why he is called Eric.

Somehow, though, our mother had managed to give each of us the impression that she suffered a miscarriage early in the pregnancy. This snapshot said otherwise. If she was that far along, she probably went into labor. The baby would have been stillborn, or died at birth, or soon after.

Back in the ’50s, parents often accepted a loss like that in stoic silence and moved on. And my mother and father were both deeply, painfully private people. They kept many family secrets.

Staring at the snapshot took me back to one of my earliest memories, one of those free-floating, undated scenes that are usually hard, or impossible, to explain.

My mother and I are alone in that apartment. I’m sitting on the living room rug. She sits in a chair off to the left and across the room. She can’t be more than a dozen feet from me, but she seems terribly far away. And a record is playing.

She often played records for us when we were little, and I remember lots of them. Most were made for children, though they were not without a few dark chords. In Tubby the Tuba, the tuba wanders off by himself and sobs because he never gets to play the melody with the rest of the orchestra. In Peter and the Wolf, the duck gets swallowed alive.

In this scene, the song that’s playing is bouncy and sugary sweet. What was it? I used to remember. It might have been “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” It might have been “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”—a hit from the early ’50s. Anyway, something upbeat. But the atmosphere in my fragment of a memory is dismal and scary. The brightness of the song combines with the darkness of the mood to bring on a sense of horror.

That’s all: just that vague impression of my mother in her chair across the room, the nubbly oatmeal-colored rug, the song, and the horror. Horror is not too strong a word to describe what seems, in memory, like a three-second film clip from Bergman or Hitchcock.

I used to wonder whether that was just a dream, a scene from a half-remembered nightmare, although it felt very real. Now, looking at the lost snapshot, I thought I might understand it.

Given that there was no television in that apartment—our family wouldn’t have one until the ’60s—it’s easy to imagine that a young mother who needed some time alone might have played a few of those records to distract her toddler at a difficult moment. Back then, my father was a young engineering professor at Columbia, ambitious, driven, working hard toward tenure, often on the road. My mother would have been alone a lot with her firstborn, age two. What else could she do to keep me entertained and buy herself a few minutes alone with her grief? And it’s easy to suppose that despite her best efforts, after a loss like this, a death in the family, I might have picked up on her mood.

All of that made sense. Still, my mother was long gone, and my father, too. There was no one around to tell me, Yes, it’s true, that’s probably what happened.

After brooding over the snapshot, I arranged a Zoom call with a memory researcher at NYU, Cristina Alberini. I wanted to ask her about an experiment that she performed in her laboratory.

Alberini and other neuroscientists are still trying to understand the phenomenon that Freud called infantile amnesia. Almost nobody accepts Freud’s theory that we’re pathologically repressing all those years of memories. (That’s an awful lot of pathology.) Many researchers believe that babies’ brains are still too immature to form and store lasting memories. Other researchers think babies do form the memories but can’t retrieve them. In their view, many of our earliest memories get misfiled, so to speak. We carry them with us, and yet we can’t find our way back to them. If so, that would help resolve the paradox that worried Freud from the beginning: why our first years matter so much, why events that lie so far back in the past can have the power to shape our moods and our behaviors for the rest of our lives.

In her experiment, Alberini put a very young rat in a cage. The cage was divided into a light room and a dark room. If the young rat left the light room and set foot in the dark room, it got a shock. An adult rat would learn a lasting lesson from that experience: don’t go in there ever again. But after half an hour, the young rat began to forget about the shock. By the next day, the rat seemed to have forgotten it completely.

Alberini waited a while. With some rats, she waited for a couple of days, with others, for a couple of weeks—and weeks in the life of a young rat are like years for a young human. She put the rat back in the cage. She let it mosey around, without giving it a shock. Then she put it in a new cage (using cages of different sizes and shapes), and there she gave it a shock.

Now, no matter the cage, the young rat learned the lesson with impressive rapidity. It remembered the lesson for a very long time.

Apparently, the memory of its bad time in the dark room had returned. Wandering in the old cage and then getting shocked in the new cage had brought the lost memory back. “The combination was like dynamite,” Alberini said. “The memory came back crystal clear.”

That’s the short version of her experiment, which is just one in a long series. Alberini is trained as an immunologist, a molecular biologist, a neurobiologist, and a psychoanalyst. Her studies take her deep into memory’s molecular machinery. During critical periods in the early development of the brain, sensitive epochs in our infancy, we learn to see, to hear, to acquire language. Alberini believes that there is also a critical period when we are learning to learn. That is the focus of her research, she explained. She is exploring its biological basis in remarkable detail. “I think in a very scientific way,” she said. “And psychoanalysis was not based on science. It was based on patient notes, and a lot of experience with many different patients. … I want to connect science with psychoanalysis.”

At the end of our interview, I told Alberini that I had a personal story I wanted to share. I told her about the lost baby, the record, and my memory of horror. I didn’t go into the details, just the bare facts about that first record.

Then I came to the second part of my story: another memory. This is the part that reminded me of her experiment with the rat in the light room and the dark room.

It is three years after the loss of the baby. Now I am five. We have moved from that apartment in Manhattan and over the George Washington Bridge to a tiny starter house in Hillsdale, New Jersey. But in our new living room, the pictures on the walls haven’t changed. The massive black stereo hasn’t changed. The same nubbly oatmeal-colored rug.

On one of my first days of first grade—it is the week of Sunday, September 6, 1959—I walk home from school. As soon as I reach our front door, my mother leads me into the living room and puts on one of those records. She frames this as a happy thing to do, as in, Let’s take a trip down memory lane together. Remember this one?

Suddenly, I am upset. That same sense of terrible desolation.

Thanks to all my rummaging in the boxes from the attic, I now know exactly what was going on there. On that same Sunday, September 6, my mother’s father died. In Jewish tradition, he would have been buried the next day, on Monday, September 7. On Tuesday, September 8, a hot day that I remember well, my mother walked me to register at George G. White Elementary School. She was trying to hide her loss from me, just as she had probably tried to hide the loss of the baby. I can remember exactly where her composure threatened to break, poor woman: when we reached the corner of Cross Street and Magnolia Avenue, and came in sight of the red-brick schoolhouse, and her voice, for just a moment, quavered.

When I walked home after one of those first days of school, I remember the sense of flurried false cheer in her voice as she greeted me at the door, and how she hurried me straight into the living room and put on the record. A sort of iron cheeriness. And I remember which record it was. I hate to describe it here—just telling the plot is like uncorking a toxic time capsule from the ’50s and smelling foul air. The record she chose to play told a story about “a little Indian boy” who wanders off from his village and gets lost in the forest and can’t find his way home. The boy climbs a hill and pounds on his tom-tom to call for help.

I sat on that same old grayish-white nubbly rug, and listened. “The little boy beat on his tom-tom faster and faster …” As the tom-tom beat more and more frantically, I got as upset as the child in the story—that same sense of fear, horror, terrible desolation. Probably I began to cry.

My mother snapped at me in vexation. “Oh, Jonnie! It’s just a record!”

Alberini listened sympathetically to my tale of two memories. For both of us, I think, the temperature of the Zoom call had changed. Now I wasn’t the interviewer, and she wasn’t the interviewee. I wasn’t the science writer, and she wasn’t the scientist. I had plunged into emotional terrain. I felt like a patient consulting a psychoanalyst.

The fact is, I was still absorbing the surprise of the lost snapshot. The discovery made sense of an impression I often had when I was growing up that a third sibling was missing at our kitchen table, that my parents should have had a girl besides my brother and me, that a girl could have helped soften my father the engineer. A girl might have kept my mother company through all the years when my brother and I were so focused on our father. Whether or not any of us spoke of her, or remembered her, I think we all felt the loss of Elizabeth.

When neuroscientists think about infant amnesia today, they sometimes talk about the trick that helps memory athletes remember long series of unrelated objects. Mnemonists build themselves what is known as a memory palace. They put this here and that there. Then, when they walk through the palace, they can find each of the objects they want to recall, in the same order they set them down. They have placed all those disconnected objects into a framework, a context.

That may be something like what we do as infants, when we are learning to learn. During our first years, we begin to figure out how to locate our memories in a grid of space and time, a grid like a city’s, a vast invisible structure of here and there, of now and then. Until we do that, we can lay down our memories, so to speak, but we have no clue how to find them again, unless we happen to stumble into the same spot. Then the second experience can bring back the first. (In the jargon, this is called “alleviated forgetting.”)

My own free-floating, half-forgotten memory from the age of two and a half was restored when I was five, as my mother and I sat there in our living room. For each of us, at that moment, the room would have felt as dark as the forbidden room in one of Alberini’s cages.

“I see you nodding,” I said to Alberini at last. “So this doesn’t sound totally off the wall to you.”

“Right,” she said. Her experiments were completely in agreement with my tale of two memories. “They will be part of you,” she said. “They’re going to be very important to you. They’re going to be very important to you for the rest of your life.”

I am 70 now, with two grown sons of my own. For almost 20 years, I’ve taught science writing at Columbia. Since finding the snapshot and figuring out what it meant, I often hear one of those old tunes playing in my head. Sometimes it happens when I leave a seminar and step outside onto the campus. If it was a good class, I hear the bright and jaunty melody from Peter and the Wolf when Peter marches off into the woods. If I have doubts about the class, or if I’m just tired, I hear the deep sobs of Tubby the Tuba.

Part of the structure that holds my memories in place must be narrative, as my older son, Aaron, pointed out in an email the other day when I shared all this. “We remember more when we can interrelate memories,” he wrote, “and one of the ways we do that is by making them a series of events in a story. So it’s not that you’re the one writing the memoir because you remember more. It’s that you remember more because you were more interested in telling the story of your life.”

Today my younger son, Benjamin, sent me a late poem by W. S. Merwin, “Still Morning,” which begins

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age …

When I was born, my parents were living in their first apartment, at the corner of 111th and Broadway. I live at the corner of 103rd and Broadway.

I live eight blocks from my crib.

Recently, a strange thing happened. I was scrolling back through my texts with Cousin Bonnie, looking for a good copy of the snapshot. The pictures that she had sent when she and I texted about the date were not of the best quality. So I scrolled back a little further, and then a little further still, hunting for the picture that she sent me on the day when she found the snapshot in her mother’s album.

I was astonished to realize that I had made a mistake. I was the one who had found the snapshot. And I found it five years ago. According to a long email to Bonnie, which I now barely remember writing, I came across it while rummaging through the boxes that my brother and I had retrieved from our family attic. The print was loose, I think, in a pile of other stuff.

I had forgotten all about that by the time Bonnie texted me her picture of the page in Aunt Ettie’s album. And I think Bonnie had forgotten it too. It’s almost as if we had been conspiring with my mother to forget it.

And now I can’t find my own copy of the print.

So was that first memory real, my memory from the age of two and a half? The other day, I got up from my desk and sat myself down on the rug, which happens to be a hand-me-down from Bonnie. I turned the pages of a large album with wooden covers. My mother shared this album with me more than once when I was growing up. She must have begun it while living at 111th and Broadway, if not before, judging by the age of the snapshots. With every page I turned, no matter how carefully, the pictures popped loose and slid off onto the rug.

It was just as I remembered. Not a single picture of her pregnancy in the spring of 1956, when my mother was carrying Elizabeth. Many, many pictures from May 1957, when she came home from the hospital and introduced me to my baby brother.

If my mother had included even one snapshot from the time of her lost pregnancy—if she had glued in a picture of my father’s surprise birthday party, for instance—then I would have to suspect that my ancient memory was false, that it was only a memory of a memory. Then it might easily have formed when I sat on my mother’s lap, and she turned the pages of this very album, and shared the story of that loss. Because she didn’t share it, because she never talked about it, because she tried so hard to bury the story from us, and possibly from herself, I believe the memory is real.

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