My father never knew his mother or anything about her. Where memories should have been, my father filled the holes with fantasies and confabulations. My father wove myths, lies, and fantasies throughout his life. I knew that as a child but had to relearn that lesson several times as an adult. I could write pages detailing the numerous tales he told, but that is not the focus here. Self-deception is how he coped with conflicts and inflated his wounded ego.
My mother was the oldest of two children born in 1925 to Elizabeth and Otto Schneider, residents of Nuernberg, Germany. At nineteen years old she married Erich Ansteeg, reportedly a member of Hitler’s SS. My mother said he was cruel and violent. They divorced a little more than two years later. Less than a year after the divorce, during the Allied Occupation of Germany, she married thirty-two-year-old Staff Sergeant Henry Riley, a member of the U.S. Army. In a war-ravaged country with no luxuries available, my mother, a talented seamstress, sewed her wedding gown out of a silk parachute that my father got for her.
Ansteeg fathered my oldest sister, Elizabeth. Liz suffered from polio, and my mother turned to Harry (Henry) for medical treatment that was unavailable to German citizens. Soon after their marriage, the Army transferred Sergeant Riley back to the U.S.A. with his new family, and sometime after that, he was discharged.
I know from talking to my (second) cousin that my father took his family back to Newport where they briefly stayed with his cousin. They disappeared without explanation. Gordon got up one morning, and my father and his family were gone, and his parents and aunts and uncles refused to talk about it. That was the last time my cousin saw or heard from my father (his first cousin). When we talked about it many years later, Gordon and I could only speculate about what might have happened. My guess is that he was caught sexually abusing Liz or one of the younger children.
Harry reenlisted in the Army in 1950. Over the next few years, he was stationed in the San Francisco Bay area where Marie and I were born, and Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. He re-enlisted in the Army Reserves and was stationed in Germany after my grandfather suffered a severe heart attack. My sister, Erika was born in Nuernberg. Upon his return to the U.S., Harry was still enlisted in the Reserves assigned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Funny thing. When we returned to Newport in the 1960’s, my father always insisted that he had no family. I discovered decades later that we had cousins and their families living just a few blocks from us! I cannot explain that.
My father worked as a janitor and maintenance man. He had a full-time day job and worked nights cleaning offices. Even with two jobs, we barely scraped by. We did not have a telephone, but someone had given my father a black and white TV set with a snowy image. That TV with its rigged antenna held a central position in our living room.
My father’s poverty must have been a bitter disappointment to my mother. She came from an affluent German family who managed to hold on to their business until 1944 when the Allies bombed it. After the war, my grandfather became quite wealthy as a painting contractor and rebuilding Germany made that a most lucrative enterprise.
Mom could never accept her diminished social status. She didn’t lie like my father, but she bragged about stupid things to the point of embarrassing us. Her most frequent boast was about how we were going to be millionaires after our grandparents died. Mom had no way to foresee the events that would unfold between 1963 and 1968. She never experienced anything during her last years except pain, humiliation, and bitter poverty.
In 1963 I reported the sexual abuse I suffered by my father. My mother did not believe me even after my father confessed to ‘carnal knowledge with a minor.’ My mother became cruel and degraded me. My mother encountered a former friend while standing in a checkout line in a grocery store. She said to the friend, “That’s the hussy that lied about my husband.” I was but twelve years old. Other times, she referred to me as “the hussy who stole her husband.”
After my father went to prison, my mother quickly turned to drink, and severely neglected her children. We were eventually all placed in foster homes and institutions. My mother followed her new man to Pennsylvania where she thought she had friends and where she died June 23, 1968, of a heart attack. She was only 43 years old.
My mother had several harrowing war experiences, but these too are fodder for future stories. She was not evil. She simply could not cope with the consequences of choices that she made under very trying conditions, and her brother and parents were no help. As far back as 1959, Mom wanted to leave my father, but her parents would not hear of it. Of course, they had no way of knowing what he was doing to their granddaughters, and I doubt if my mother would ever have admitted the truth to them. More than anything, I pity my mother.
dottieriley 