Volume 3, Number 7 April 2010
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“A tour de force”
—New York Times
“Bob Sanchez is a consummate writer.”
—Kaye Trout’s
Book Reviews
Life irrevocably changed
BURNED:
A Memoir
By Louise Nayer
270 pp. Atlas & Co. $14.00
Reviewed by Jane Woodward Elioseff
At the conclusion of her startling memoir about a flash fire and its aftermath, Louise Nayer tells us that she and her elder sister are twin souls because “we share an experience that can’t be easily understood by others.” She believes they are like the Japanese and Korean victims of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who are known as hibakusha—explosion-affected people.
Nayer recounts her childhood grief and the gradual healing, professional recovery, and the restored marital intimacy of her maimed, depressed father and severely disfigured mother in such unflinching detail that she evoked in me acute memories of missing my own mother when my parents began taking vacations away from their children. I also remembered the courage it took for me to meet strangers as a crippled teenager, and the resolve needed, later on, to be physically intimate without drinking alcohol.
In July of 1954, Herman and Dorothy Nayer, a successful Manhattan physician and a top administrative and teaching nurse, rented a seaside cottage in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, taking with them their two young daughters and the girls’ nineteen-year-old babysitter, Della. This was the Nayers’ first vacation as a family. On Cape Cod, Anne (six) and Louise (four) were overjoyed when they realized that neither parent would be leaving them to go to work. Weezie had spent all day in nursery school since she was two.
After a week of games with the girls in the evening, Dot and Hank drove to Provincetown to see a play and visit friends, leaving Della to oversee delivery of a new tank of propane and the relighting of the pilot light on the basement water heater.
When the adults arrived home after midnight, there was no hot water. Hank, feeling amorous, was not inclined to make a trip to the basement. That would involve going back outside, entering through a door in the ground, and climbing down a rickety ladder into the dark. Dot snatched a flashlight and a book of matches. Hank followed her, both already in their nightclothes.
Nayer writes that her mother was annoyed her husband didn’t take charge.
That’s why she moved so fast, like a locomotive that my father couldn’t stop ...”Point the flashlight here,” she said . . . He wasn’t listening to her; he was trying to smell something, to take his time . . . He was a medical officer for the New York City Fire Department . . . [M]y father was trying to remember words, echoes of phrases . . . about pilot lights, gas heaters, testing the pipes with soap bubbles.
”Hank. Come back from dreamland. This is where I need to light it.”
“Wait a minute, damn it, will you. Let’s look at this together,” but before he could get the words out, my mother . . . had already turned on the valve and lit the match.
There was no federal standard before 1968 requiring an odorizing additive to give flammable household gas a distinctive smell. Some states had such laws in 1954, but not Massachusetts.
Nayer’s parents survived the explosion, both very badly burned and each with injured hands. The face of Weezie’s lovely English rose of a mother was burned down to the bone and for a time Dot was not expected to live.
Doctors and nurses on Cape Cod delivered around-the-clock care to Hank and Dot and then went the extra mile. When it was possible to transfer the Nayers from Hyannis to Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan, the twenty-six Japanese women the press dubbed “the Hiroshima Maidens” were awaiting facial reconstructions in that same hospital.
The Nayers’ relatives and friends, and their neighbors in star-studded Peter Cooper Village, as well as people with whom Hank and Dot had worked, rallied around them. When the small plane from Hyannis Port landed at Idlewild, New York City firemen in red cars and ladder trucks were waiting to greet the Nayers and escort the ambulance into the city.
Dot endured all the pain of a burn victim and the stress of many, many operations to rebuild her face and improve her other injuries. Hank remained depressed and demoralized many months after the fire. With one useless hand and scars, he sat at home in a darkened room, assuming he would never practice medicine again.
Nayer tells us that for the nine months she and Anne lived on a farm near Sherburne, New York, with her mother’s brother and his wife, everything about her parents was fading away.
I didn’t want to care any more. Caring ... lodged in my body and made me sick—just as it took too much out of my father, who wanted to float away without scars. If my mother hadn’t risen from her deathbed, if she hadn’t begun to act, our whole family might have dissolved like fluid from an eyedropper, our DNA spreading into a vast sea.
At age forty-two, Nayer, a married professor of English living in San Francisco, began experiencing panic attacks whenever she had to drive across a bridge. In Burned, she describes herself as a child who walled off fear or translated fear into anger. But when she’d reached the age her mother was when the explosion occurred, fear had so deeply invaded her life that her husband ran out of sympathy: “I don’t want to live with a mental health patient. Get some help!”
Getting help included weekly psychotherapy, researching and writing this memoir, and hypnotherapy. Over time, the combination of treatments worked.
Both Dot and Hank lived productively into their nineties. Nayer dedicates her memoir to her greater family and to “all the children of the world whose lives have been irrevocably changed in one night.”
Jane Woodward Elioseff is a writer/editor living in Houston. She is also a consultant with Blue Horizon Funding.
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