Jacob was a man of intense and unanimous personality. Not without having lived agonizingly through each of his convictions, he faced untamed changes of his ideas and acted upon each of them with all his energetic enthusiasm and uncanny nature; and when they failed him one by one, he was forced to begin afresh. This had been a task that challenged him relentlessly throughout his life. It seemed to him that there had never been or would be an end to all these savage conversions in his life, writings, teaching, and swings of his moods.
When his first book failed, he was so disturbed that for a long time he did not touch his typewriter. He refused to write on computer or even to try it. That failure was more than what his heart could endure. Then the consoling and encouraging words of his editor brought back all images he had from himself to the surface and he began writing again. His first book was a good piece of work, but it did not have the blood and the passion, as his editor had told him, in it. Even since then, a vigorous blood had gushed through his veins, He learned that without that sense of intensity, there would be no importance and suggestiveness in the words he would put on paper.
During his life time, now fifty three, not many people had influenced him to the point that would cause him to change direction. From the only few that shaped his personalty, there were these two women who had played a big role in his life; Diana, his wife of twenty six years, who had taught him passion, endured his occasional attitude, supported him even when he did not deserved it, encouraged him even when she needed it more, and stayed his admirer even when things were not agreeable. And his mother, who had passed away five years ago. Marie, this big, sturdy, German woman, who was only two years old when her parents had immigrated to America, was a monster by any standard of humanity. Jacob had witnessed as a child the infliction of loathsome cruelty and humiliation by her mother upon the people around her. She loved her son, Jacob, more than her daughter, Helena; and was not ashamed to say it or to show it. In fact, Jacob had been the only person she had ever favored and treated with kindness. Even Jacob's father, Max, who was born in America from German parents, was always the target of his mother's rude conduct.
When Jacob left home, the small city of Levittown in Pennsylvania, at age twenty two for his graduate study to a University in Philadelphia, Marie treated her husband and daughter, Helena, who was two years older than Jacob, even worse. Until Jacob called her on the phone one day and told her that he had changed his last name.
"What the hell you're talking about?" Abruptly she said.
"It's no big deal, mom. I didn't change it completely. I kept the last part of it. Dalheimer was hard for everyone to even pronounce. I change it to Heimer."
"You've disgrace your family and your father's name. I'm so ashamed of you!" Marie was screaming rather than speaking.
"Mom, how come my father's name is now important to you? You always made fun of our name and thought we should take your name!"
"Really! If you wanted to change name, why didn't you take my maiden name?"
"People have always called us Heimer anyway. What is so big deal about it?"
During that long, agonizing conversation with his mother, she told him that she would never speak with him as long as she lived, and she didn't. His father could not do anything about the dispute between his wife and son, for she would inflict too much pain and torment on him. After that incident of shortening his name and fighting with his mother on the phone, any time Jacob wanted to see his father and sister, he would meet them in a restaurant or his apartment if they were in Philadelphia. His mother never allowed him to enter the house as long as she lived.
To Be Continued
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