Alina

By Michael Davidson

Alina is the true story of a beautiful and seductive woman seemingly born out of time and place to a culture inundated with pitfalls she was inherently unable to navigate. As a child she survived sexual molestation only to find herself in the grip of a lifelong untreated bi-polar condition. This is an account of the thoughts and feelings of a woman who suffered through silent alternating periods of depression and a sense of omnipotence that eventually led her to the door of a psychopath. The author reveals an early childhood dominated by a controlling and abusing grandfather, a chaotic relationship with her first husband and father of her first two children, a comparatively stable relationship with her second husband ending in a sudden violation of trust, and a brutal eight-year involvement with the father of her third child. Alina’s story illustrates a fundamental flaw in the nature of three men who sought to fulfill their needs through the willing participation of a woman unaware of her own, and her desperate attempt to free herself from an existence that had spiraled into hell. It is also a story of blind courage, resiliency, and a search for love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635681390

Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (1991) and several books of poetry.

Book preview

Prologue

The 1938 black Buick was eight years old as it crept at a calculated pace along the rain-soaked pavement. It was an early fall morning, and the heavy mist had turned to a light persistent rain. The car eased around a corner at Pacific Avenue, hesitated, and picked up speed, leveling off at a brisk twenty-five miles per hour, as it made its lonely way south on San Fernando Road toward the Glendale train station. The man behind the wheel stared through the windshield at a nebulous black-and-white world while the hypnotic sweeping motion of the windshield wipers encouraged his mood, and the geometric patterns of light reflecting haphazardly off the water in the street offended his sense of order.

Although three passengers accompanied the man, he did not encourage conversation while the car was in motion. And though the man’s wife and daughter observed the custom of silence as if Moses, in an afterthought, had jotted down an eleventh commandment. The dark-eyed little girl sitting next to her mother in the backseat of the car was not so inclined.

Go faster, Tata

Whether the child actually sensed the retarded pace of the automobile from her disadvantaged perspective in the deep nap of the rear seat or was simply expressing her anticipation at meeting her father for the first time, we could not know as to her persistence.

Hurry, Tata.

The man watched his grandchild through the rearview mirror. His expressionless eyes switched from the child to the street and back again only to find the little girl now watching him watch her. For a long moment their minds fell together absent of thought, and something passed swiftly between them, satisfying to him, less so for her.

She’s anxious, the mother said, sitting beside her child. More and more Silvia had felt a need to justify her daughter’s irreverent behavior toward her grandfather. Feeling encouraged by the outpouring of conversation, the plump little woman sitting next to the man, said, We almost there, child.

The little girl smiled at the sound of her grandmother’s voice and, without shifting her gaze from the face in the mirror, said, Faster, Tata, faster.

The recently constructed Glendale train station appeared forlorn and abandoned in the drizzling rain. Clouds hung low over the San Gabriel Mountains retarding the sunrise, and a single lamp glowed beneath the arched entrance to the pueblo-style building. Tata parked his car on the dark reflecting asphalt in front of the station, and the little girl stood up on the rear seat while silence anticipated the sound of an approaching train—but there was no approaching train. It had come and gone, a fact clear to all but the child.

Train, Mama. Silvia pulled the little girl to her lap.

Go see, Tata, Silvia said

Train is gone, he replied.

Vã rog, Tata, said the plump little woman.

Tata picked a felt hat off the seat beside him, placing it squarely on his head. Slowly he removed himself from the automobile and made his way toward the entrance to the station. After he had vanished from sight, Silvia said to her mother, Bunica, what time was the train supposed to be here?

It gone, I think.

The child began to sense her mother’s anxiety. Daddy’s train, Mama. Where Daddy’s train?

The child’s grandmother turned in her seat. Give to me.

Silvia helped her daughter over the seat back, and the child settled deep in her grandmother’s lap. The long drive home was uneventful and, but for the child’s humming, was without conversation.

The Grandparents

One

Luca Seriantu had passed beneath the shadow of Ms. Liberty in 1907, a young man of eighteen years. Luca had shared an aft belowdeck cabin on the American freighter New Jersey with his sixty-four-year-old uncle, Vlad, who contracted pneumonia on the cold and wet passage across the Atlantic. Covertly enterprising by nature, Luka kept a low profile during his stay in New York City and learned to speak and write English while serving a tool and die apprenticeship. Six years after he had arrived, Luca left New York City under the name of Grigor Popitescu. Uncle Vlad did not recover from his illness.

Grigor arrived in Detroit, Michigan, drawn by Henry Ford’s siren call for mechanics and machinists needed to maintain his ultramodern and innovative assembly line. He established residence at the Lampley Hotel a block off the Campus Margius Hub in downtown Detroit on East Park Street, and took the electric train to Highland Park where he applied for employment at the Ford plant. Grigor was stunned and intimidated by American ingenuity as he watched Model Ts pop off the line running, one after another. While waiting to be called to the plant, he signed on as maintenance man at the Lampley Hotel, and soon the maintenance man from Brasov, Romania, was holding hands with the house cleaner from Sibiu. At thirty-one, seven years his senior, Ioana Radu fell in love with Grigor Popitescu, and as petting gave way to penetration, Grigor lost interest in Henry and his Model T Ford.

Ioana Radu had entered the United States as did Grigor, via Ellis Island, but would never have left her beloved Romania, except for the unexpected death of her mother and the urging of her mother’s sister and husband that she join them in America.

Grigor had not fared well with American women. He thought they were unnaturally independent, and tall. In Ioana, he found the perfect mate. She was not only shy and culturally subservient, but appeared unmotivated to learn the English language.

Grigor discovered an ulterior comfort in being Ioana’s window to the American culture and gained a visceral pleasure looking down on the little woman from his own respectable height of five foot four inches. Her name, of course, would have to be changed. He would call her Magda.

Changing his name had been a difficult compromise. Grigor had always suffered from monumental pride in an imagined Roman heritage and the relentless fear that he was but a dirty little Gypsy boy. Although shrewd and ambitious, in his vulnerable heart Grigor was insecure, and felt like a small man in a large foreign country.

Both thrifty by nature, Grigor and Magda kept their jobs while stuffing the mattress with hard-earned American currency. And while Magda dreamt of marriage and children, Grigor had dreams of California. He instinctively felt the asylum of having his back to a wall and looked forward to the comfort of the unassailable Pacific Ocean. In August of 1915, Grigor and Magda Popitescu arrived in St. Louis, Missouri.

Two

Neither Grigor nor Magda was secure in their sexual lives. Magda had never been with a man before Grigor, and feared masturbation since being told by her mother that the pernicious pleasure would seal the fate of her children. And though she had no idea what her mother had meant, she’d imagined little children walking around busying their genitals in public unable to control themselves. She was horrified when Grigor suggested she take up the practice.

Grigor had first experienced female felicity in a Bucharest brothel when he was fifteen years old, but American women continued to intimidate him. Secretly he fantasized about them and would busy himself for a lifetime desperately trying to imagine that forbidden juncture of their lengthy thighs. In the meantime, there was Magda, and soon Magda’s life became pregnantly complete.

The prohibition hypocrisy in American society wasn’t in full bloom until 1920 when the country ratified the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. For many, Grigor included, prohibition was never a consideration. He could not fathom the interdiction of alcohol, and although not prone to alcoholism, the fermentation and consumption of the grape was a family tradition. In a way prohibition served Grigor well.

It created for him a reasonable foe, one he could not only rant and rave at, but could actually scheme against.

By 1915, the Conservative Progressive movement, led by the home-loving and ballot-less Women’s Christian Temperance Union, was gaining national influence. Grigor, always sensitive to American societal expectations, would not risk being ostracized. His personal progressive movement against prohibition included a two-bottle leather harness rigged beneath his wife’s full skirt. The occasional undergarment would serve the Popitescus until the repeal of prohibition in 1933.

Segregated law came to St. Louis in February of 1916. Negros were herded into the Grand Prairie Neighborhood just east of Old North St. Louis on the premise that their presence would be detrimental to property values elsewhere. It worked for Grigor.

Now twenty-seven years old, Grigor was finding it difficult to obtain employment in his field, which fluctuated between machinist and mechanic. He was employed at the St. Louis Register in Old North St. Louis maintaining a printing press, and was soon running errands for the news writer, prompting the self-proclaimed title of journalist.

The United States of America officially entered the Great War in 1917. Grigor would not attend due to his lack of citizenship, but would become a US citizen in 1921. In 1918, Magda and Grigor brought a little girl into the world. They named her Silvia.

Grigor had a secret, and incredibly, it was documented. Baptized at birth, his baptismal certificate rested deep in the archival bowels of the First Orthodox Romanian Church of Bucharest, witnessed by a young devout priest, Dimitrie Normati, who was, unfortunately, also a stickler for details. The Extras stated unequivocally that Grigor’s mother, Paraschiva, was a concubine, living with Mitru Gaspar, a violently jealous man who cut her throat after discovering her relationship with Grigor’s father, Leonerd Izraila.

In a way, Grigor never fully recovered from his bastardly beginnings. It was not the circumstance of his mother’s untimely passing, nor was it her nonmarital status to his father, that permanently stained his psyche, but the fact of her adulteress behavior.

Three

Magda’s world did not go much farther than the walls of her apartment, while Grigor lived in two worlds of equal value, one deceptive and one secret. The authoritarian model Grigor employed with his young family would serve his personal needs for the rest of his life, and secrecy gave power to its domestic expression.

But for her absolute subservient behavior, Magda might have questioned Grigor’s paternal interests sooner. Her breasts, naturally large, had become monumental, and a focus of her husband’s attention. Grigor would frequently suckle his wife’s breast prior to Silvia’s feeding, claiming a responsibility for assuring the quality of the product. Magda often allowed Silvia to go unchanged, acquiescing to Grigor’s request that whenever possible he do the chore. Magda was, at first, delighted by the attention her husband lavished on her and the child. As Silvia developed, Grigor continued to care meticulously for his daughter’s bodily needs, and soon, an unrest so deep it had yet to stir at consciousness was born in Magda. When it did stir, it was immediately and instinctively rejected. Eventually the stirring took the form of a mother’s thought, and Magda was frightened beyond any fear she had ever known before.

It would be two years before Grigor was able to procure employment as a tool and die maker at Dierdorf’s Tool and Die on Cambria Street, thus ending his career in journalism. Magda’s choice of lifestyle was, by nature and circumstance, severely limited. Grigor had assumed control over every aspect of their relationship save one; he could neither limit nor control the love Magda felt for their daughter.

In June of 1919, Magda’s son Luca was born to his fateful existence. Once again Grigor was the proud father, but for more vicarious reasons. Magda had fallen completely in love with her new son, and as Luca grew, what Magda had anticipated became a reality; her husband’s preoccupation with diaper changing had been limited to their daughter.

Four

In 1920 Grigor moved his family to the Soulard Neighborhood, several blocks south of Old North St. Louis. Soulard had been the sight of a widely attended Farmer’s Market since 1840, but in 1896, a tornado had destroyed the site. It was rebuilt with city funding and the new sheds were bigger, and better stocked than the originals. Every Saturday morning Grigor took his wife and children to the Market. Petre had just begun to walk and his four-year-old sister held his hand steering him in their mother’s wake among the tables full of fruits and vegetables. It was a much-anticipated event for Magda, and she would remember it as the happiest time of her life.

Silvia was five years old when Grigor informed Magda that it was time for the child’s first enema. When Magda objected on the grounds the child was not constipated, he told her it was a preventative measure and a family tradition. Magda had the memory of her own mother administering an enema to her when she was fourteen years old. The dread she had felt for the procedure had successfully postponed it for three days until she could no longer bear the ache in her belly. She remembered the experience as the most shameful of her childhood.

As Grigor laid a board across the bathroom sink, Magda once again verbalized her objections. They were met with silence. She watched close to panic while her husband unveiled the orange rubber receptacle already plump with warm water. He hung the object of shame on a convenient hook above the toilet and ordered Magda to fetch the child. Magda then performed the most courageous act of her life. She ignored her husband and went directly to her bedroom and locked the door.

The next few years passed slowly for Magda as she experienced chronic bouts of melancholy. The children, however, appeared to be happy and healthy, contenting themselves in the way that children do. The family spent a week in the summer of ’29 on a farm owned by Mr. Waterman in Suffix, Missouri. The children loved the horses and played for hours in the piles of loose hay. It was October of 1929, and fortunes in America, both figuratively and literally, were about to assume radical and permanent change.

Due to the war effort, Grigor found himself well compensated in his profession, and he opened a bank account at the American National Bank in Midtown. Of all of Grigor’s secrets, finance was the most surreptitious. Not even his banker knew his financial worth. When the Dow Jones Industrial Averages fell from their lofty height of 385 points in October of 1929, Grigor’s net worth suddenly quadrupled. And when the averages later bottomed out at 41 points in June of 1932, he would become furtively opulent. Though a family myth would persist that Grandpa made his money running booze during prohibition, it was only a myth. Grandpa made his money in gold.

In the mid-1920s, skillful investors had been buying into the now infamous investment trusts on Wall Street. Akin to modern mutual funds, the investment trusts were the channel by which public savings were funneled to the market. When the crash came, gold soared. In 1924, Grigor had begun buying shares in the Homestake Mining Company. The investment was not so much shrewd as it was consistent with his conservative nature. When the market fell, Grigor’s investment was suddenly amplified by a mind-boggling 500 percent, net worth thirty-two thousand and change. It was a fortune.

The Dierdorff Tool and Die Company went down the proverbial tubes, and Grigor, true to form, claimed poverty while practicing glum facial expressions nightly in the mirror. Unwilling to expose his wealth he bartered his services as a handyman until he was able to gain part-time employment at Stanislav’s Garage in Tower Grove. Meanwhile, on the home front, both children proved to be good students, and in 1933, Silvia, a pretty, gangly, and slightly bowlegged young lady, entered the local high school. Luca, a handsome boy of eleven, unaccountably developed behavior problems, and three years later, after Silvia had graduated from Lauren Beck High School, Luca refused to attend, opting to spend his afternoons at Hyde Park smoking cigarettes and drinking the wine he’d pilfered from his father’s private stock. Grigor decided a change of scenery would be prudent.

On an Early Tuesday morning in August, Grigor, Magda, Silvia, and Luca boarded the Central Pacific to Sacramento, California, and ten days later, they stepped off a Southern Pacific Railroad car in Los Angeles.

Five

They would come to be known as condominiums and townhouses, and with parlor walls in common, it sat like a giant Siamese triplet. Conceived in 1896 at 951 Park View Avenue at the corner of Tenth Street, the double-storied citadel-like structure was still in its prime when Grigor arranged to rent the center third of the building. It was 1933, prohibition had been repealed, the stock market had begun its recovery, and the Popitescus were secure in their new home.

Seven days after arriving in the City of Angels, the family had taken to consuming their meals on the front steps of their home while awaiting arrival of their furniture from St. Louis. It was the tenth of March, and the sun was about to plunge into the Pacific Ocean. Magda and her daughter stood to enter the house and prepare the evening meal when the concrete steps under their feet began to vibrate. Magda immediately sat down clinging to Grigor while Silvia cowered against the front door. A deep rumbling came rolling in from the south while the entire structure behind them shuddered. A windowpane fell gracefully from the second floor, detonating on the sidewalk in a shimmering explosion. Silvia screamed, and for a moment four virgin minds went numb in preparation for death. After the shaking ended and their survival appeared likely, the small group of earthquake neophytes opted to remain on the concrete steps until late evening.

There was an unconcealed social disparity concerning the lives of Silvia and Luca. Silvia had not been allowed to date through high school. Graduating and moving to Los Angeles hadn’t changed that. Now eighteen and a working girl, Silvia’s eyes began to roam. When she fantasized being with a man, there was always an accompanying feeling of agitation, and the ensuing emotional struggle was severely frustrating to her.

A girlfriend had taken her beneath the school bleachers one afternoon while in high school and introduced her to the art of masturbation. Her mother had caught her touching herself in the bathroom and dutifully revealed the incident to her father. Grigor subsequently told his daughter it was better she gratified herself than allow a man to touch her.

Luca had always been sexually curious, and though Silvia had blocked it from her consciousness, he had assumed the role of gynecologist many times when they were children in St. Louis. Now fifteen and in high school Luca had a girlfriend, and her name was Geraldine.

It was not unusual for Luca to entertain in his second-floor bedroom on Park View Avenue. Geraldine was not as academically competent as her boyfriend, and Luca took genuine pleasure in helping her with her homework—for a price. One evening he decided to elicit payment and had successfully removed Geraldine’s sweater. As he went to work on the second layer of clothing, he noticed the dark and silent form of his father pressed against the wall of the hallway outside his room. Surprised, and then angry, Luca, without a word, proceeded to restore the confused young woman’s sweater.

Grigor experienced his son vicariously, as an extension of himself, and took overt pleasure in the boy’s extroverted social disposition. He found it difficult to deny him, and in behavior completely out of character, lavished material possessions on Luca in an effort to satisfy his own occluded needs. Fifteen-year-old Luca was by nature gregarious and popular among his peers. He would successfully complete high school in Los Angeles, and it was toward the end of his final year that he became aware of a subtle aversion toward his father. The feeling began to manifest in abhorrence of his father’s touch, but he never came to realize the incipiency of his feelings.

In February of 1934, Silvia found employment as an operator with the Associated Telephone Utilities Company. Associated would become General Telephone in 1935. Grigor went to work for the construction company contracted to demolish Old China Town on Alameda Street in preparation for the spectacular $11,000,000 Union Station that would open in 1939. The job led to permanent employment at the American Die Company on North Broadway.

By 1937 Luca had graduated from Jefferson High School and was pumping gas at the Tidewater Service Station on the corner of Alvarado and Twelfth Street. The position suited the young man prophetically, and he commonly spent most of his paycheck on clothing. At nineteen, standing next to his father, Luca and Grigor resembled a before-and-after promotional ad for Harris and Frank Clothiers. Luca looked comfortable and casual in expensive suits. Grigor looked dumpy in everything. Grigor, encouraged by his son, purchased a brand-new 1937 Hudson automobile. The black four-door sedan was more than a means of transportation; it was an important symbol for both men. Luca soon became the primary caretaker of the vehicle, servicing and polishing it on a regular basis at the Tidewater Service Station where he worked. For Luca the car partially filled a black hole of insecurity, but for Grigor the Hudson was clearly an emblem of authority and superiority.

After the voyeur episode in his room, Luca began using the Hudson for his sexual encounters with Geraldine. Geraldine was tall and thin and wore clothing suggestive to Grigor of sexual pleasures he would never experience, her image providing him with endless depraved busy sessions.

Grigor and Magda were not aware that alcohol had claimed an insidious hold on the young man.

One late afternoon in April, Luca, Geraldine, and her best friend Margaret set off for the northern community of Oxnard, California. The coast was beautiful at sunset, and Luca was familiar with the drive through Malibu. They picked up refreshments at a Santa Monica liquor store and stopped off at Point Dume State Beach for an hour consuming both the liquor and the sight of a dying sun. As they proceeded north, Geraldine pleaded with Luca to take the wheel. High on love and alcohol, he could not deny her. Five miles south of Oxnard at Point Mugu, California, while traveling at a high rate of speed the previously eager-to-please Hudson obstinately refused to hold the curve and raced for the edge of the cliff. When it burst through the wooden guardrail, it hung for a long moment, a silhouette in the dying sun, then fell to the rocks one hundred feet below the highway.

Nine days later, Officer Bernard Parker of the California Highway Patrol spotted what he thought to be an anomaly in the tidewaters at the base of the cliff. The two young women were still jammed in the wreckage. Luca’s decomposed body washed ashore ten days later.

Six

Outwardly, Grigor was stoic, but his purchase of two articles after his son’s death implied a shift in his emotional stability. Two months after the accident, Grigor purchased a Colt 45 revolver, loaded it, and put it away on an upper shelf in his bedroom closet. In the fall of the following year, Grigor bought a new four-door black Buick sedan. He would own it, and no other, for the remaining forty-four years of his life.

Magda had died on that day the highway patrol officer found the wreckage of the Hudson, but would impersonate her previous existence until the eventual birth of a granddaughter, at which time she would experience a resurrection. Silvia had perhaps the most peculiar response to the death of her brother. Silvia had a dream the day after Luca and his two companions disappeared. She saw her father’s car winding along an oceanfront highway with Luca at the wheel and four horses with hooded riders racing alongside. Silvia interpreted the dream as a sign her brother was dead. The next morning, she convinced her father to initiate a family search, and they drove south on Pacific Coast Highway for a long and disappointing day. When they reached Oceanside, California, they gave up the effort and returned home.

Within thirty days of her brother’s burial, Silvia met a young Romanian dress designer by the name of George Trepon. She dared to bring him home, relying on their shared ethnicity. Grigor, still working out his grief, willingly embraced the young man into his family, missing the point entirely of Silvia’s relationship expectations. Apparently, George Trepon had missed them too because he was unable to suppress or conceal his sexual preference for young men. Silvia lost the possibility of a lover, and Grigor, in the space of 127 days, lost what he had begun to think of as a second son. In the fall of 1938, Silvia applied as a student at Los Angeles City College.

In September of 1939, the war to end all wars resumed. Somehow, a small man with a broom mustache convinced a sufficient number of Germanic patriots that an unseemly means would justify a glorious end,