LEARNING AND LUNCHING ON MANHATTAN’S LOWER EAST SIDE

Although many New Yorkers live in one of the four boroughs of New York City called Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, it’s usually the fifth (or first) borough — Manhattan — that most people think of in connection with all the investment banking, legal and corporate shenanigans, theater, opera, music and other entertainments that originate in New York. Manhattan is also the part of New York where many movie stars live when they aren’t making movies, unless they live in Montana because they love ranching, or London because they love British rock stars, or tax havens because they love hanging on to as much of their oodles of money as they can. (Residents of New York City are triple-taxed — by the federal government, by the state, and by the city.)

However, that’s neither here nor there, so let’s move on — but not before noting it’s out-of-sight expensive to rent or buy an apartment at market rates in Manhattan these days, and that all those folks making the big bucks in finance, law, corporate shenanigans, and entertainment may have something to do with it. Deep-pocket demand outpacing supply, and like that.

There isn’t much supply left in Manhattan because it’s a sardine-shaped island positioned between the East River and the Hudson River, with its tail pointing into the Atlantic Ocean (and toward the Statue of Liberty) and its nose up in Washington Heights and Fort Tryon Park, pushing into Riverdale. The very first settlers, down at the tail, were of course the Dutch, who upon landing bought it from the resident Indians for $24 in flashy trinkets and named it Nieuw Amsterdam — or so the story goes that all New Yorkers learn in kindergarten or first grade. But the Dutch pretty soon got taken over by the English, who renamed their new property New York and began to build.

Flash forward to now. The reason demand for housing outpaces supply is that there’s no land left to build on, it’s getting harder and harder to build up higher and higher, and it costs more and more to do it. So. Back in the mid-19th century, however, there still was land, and the wealthy built north — up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park, leaving what was south of them for the hungry and desperate immigrants sailing across the ocean to find a better life for themselves. These people, first from Ireland and Germany but soon from Eastern Europe, began piling up in what we now refer to as “the lower East Side.” When you look at a map, that’s near the tail end of the sardine, on the right.

Initially, the houses there were one-room affairs built side by side. Unfortunately, this mode of construction soon became inadequate for the needs of the immigrant population, and responsive real estate investors then developed the idea of the apartment house — five-story multi-family buildings with footprints not much larger than those of the one-room houses they were replacing. These new five-story buildings were called “tenements,” and when built in the mid-1860’s were thought a great improvement over jamming ten or more people into a one-room structure.

But the multi-family buildings continued in use until 1935, by which time they were considered places to move out of as soon as one could. In any event, in that year municipal fire regulations banning the use of wooden staircases put an end to their occupation as dwellings. However, they were not destroyed because the shops on the ground floors — which didn’t rely on the staircases for access — could stay open, thereby paying for maintenance of the buildings.

Accordingly, most of them still survive, now modernized and brought up to code inside, although from the street they look much as they must have looked around 1900. Today, the Lower East Side is a place to enjoy pricey shopping and eating in historic buildings. In addition, one of the original tenement buildings — 97 Orchard Street — is now the Tenement Museum.

[The legend, which isn’t very clear in the photograph, reads: “This 1863 tenement was home to 7,000 immigrants. They faced challenges we face today — making new lives, raising families, working for better futures. Today it houses the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which presents the history of immigration. through the personal stories of generations of newcomers who built this country.”]

Visiting the Tenement Museum is an interesting experience, not only for out-of-towners who wish to learn something of the economic and social history of the city, but also for children born and raised in comfort and privilege, or relative privilege, who may have no idea what kinds of hardship their grandparents and great-grandparents endured in order to provide the next generation a somewhat better life than they had had.

And so when a few weeks ago I was invited to accompany two young children and their father on a trip to the Tenement Museum during one of the last fine Sundays before the arrival of cold weather, I was glad to accept.

Unfortunately, one is not allowed to take photographs inside the museum. But there is a gift shop with many books of pictures, memorabilia and other trinkets for sale. Here are some of the books:

If you’re nowhere near New York and therefore unlikely to visit the museum, all of these books may be purchased online at: shop.tenement.org

There are also less instructional souvenirs, probably not worth the money — but little people do have big eyes. And it all does go to support the museum:

The museum offers eight hour-long tours, each focused on a different aspect of immigrant life in New York. One of the daytime tours is designed for children; that was therefore the one we attended the morning we went. It was about family living conditions at 97 Orchard Street.

First we met with an attractive young woman who said her name was Ellen. She spoke with the children on the tour as if she were a third- or fourth-grade teacher. (She had a blackboard, and asked the children to imagine this and that, and said “Good!” a lot.) Ellen explained the house we were in had been built in 1863-64, and had five floors, four apartments on each floor, and three rooms in each apartment. At some point in the 1920s, two toilets were installed on each floor, and pipes brought cold running water to each kitchen sink. But before then there had been no running water in the house. The only water pump was in the back yard behind the house, so all water had to be hauled upstairs in pails. The pump was next to four wooden latrines with doors. We were able to see all that as we exited, after the tour.

[Although the children didn’t hear this in the morning presentation, another tour leader in the afternoon told us that the proximity of the latrines to the well water resulted in frequent deaths at 97 Orchard Street from infant diarrhea. This second tour leader also took us up one flight of stairs, now lit but originally entirely dark and then lit by a single gaslight on the wall. The stairs were no wider than two feet from wooden banister to wall. Think of that when you learn, in the next paragraph, how many people used them to go up and down in the dark, or near-dark, several times a day.)

After writing 5-4-3-2-1 on the blackboard (for number of floors, apartments per floor, rooms per apartment, and toilets per floor in one building), Ellen asked the children how many families lived in the building. Those who knew how to multiply five times four called out the answer: Twenty! One of the adults accompanying the children on our tour then asked the average size of the families. Ellen told us that when the house was built, there were about six or seven people in each family, but later there could be as many as ten children, meaning twelve people per apartment. That meant there must have been between 120 and 240 people using the very narrow dark stairs every day — to go work or school, or to use the latrines, or to bring water, coal and food up by hand.

Ellen then asked the children to imagine that they and their parents had lived in Italy on a farm, but their parents had decided to come to America because they heard life could be better here. They could bring only one suitcase with them. What would they put in it? Would it be hard to leave everything else behind? And how would they feel in a big city, when all they had known was farm life?

After those discussions, we went to visit one of the ground floor apartments, furnished as it probably was in 1916. There we were greeted by “Victoria” — played with brio by an actress in period costume impersonating a fourteen-year-old Jewish immigrant girl from Greece. “Victoria” had been living in this apartment for three years with her family. They had arrived in 1913. She had nine brothers, but she was the only girl. However, her mother had a big belly again, so perhaps there might be another girl. Victoria was very chatty (in her strong persuasive accent), but only in response to our questions as Italian immigrants just off the boat and wanting to know something about life in America.

“Victoria” explained how ten children and two parents could sleep in three tiny rooms when there was only one double bed in one of the rooms. (The parents and the very youngest ones slept there, in the bed and on the floor.) The older brothers slept on the floor in the other room, wrapped up in rug-like pieces of cloth with a thick nap on one side. She — the only girl — slept in a similar rug-like wrap, but apart from her brothers, on the small kitchen floor.

“Victoria” also told us that children in America had to go to school till they were fourteen (this was 1916), but when she had arrived three years before they had put her in kindergarten because she didn’t know English. When she became fourteen she had only reached second grade. But her father said that was enough school and now she had to work. So she helped him make aprons three days a week, and helped her mother three days a week with all the work her mother had to do to wash and clean and cook for a family of twelve. However, one day a week was for herself. On that day, for a penny, she could see a moving picture with her girlfriend. She explained that it was a series of pictures that moved and told a story, but without words, so you didn’t have to understand the language. There was music, instead. And for another penny, she could buy an ice-cream. And for a nickel, if she saved up for it, she could once in a while ride far away to a beautiful place in the north called Central Park that was like being in the country.

Someone asked “Victoria” how much rent her family paid for their nice apartment. She said it was on the ground floor, so it cost more than the ones upstairs because it wasn’t as hot in summer and they didn’t have to bring everything up and down the stairs. That’s why it was twenty dollars a month. The ones on the top floor were only ten dollars. She also tried to impress on us how expensive it was to light the gas lamp in the kitchen: it cost 25 cents to turn on the gas meter.

We never did get around to asking about baths, or how to earn money — other than by selling from pushcarts, which was how many newcomers began. But our visit with “Victoria” was enough to give the children on the tour a vivid idea of how different her life was from theirs. She did add at the end, though, that her father was hopeful they could move north to Harlem soon, where there were more Jewish people who spoke Ladino, which was their language in Greece. Most of the immigrants at 97 Orchard Street spoke Yiddish.

After we thanked “Victoria,” said goodbye and left, Ellen offered us an astonishing additional piece of history. The real Victoria — on whom “Victoria” was modeled — did soon thereafter move to Harlem with her large family, and then later to Long Island, where she married and had two children of her own, a boy and a girl. The boy eventually became an astro-physicist who worked for NASA.

Lunch was an entirely different experience. We walked to Katz’s Delicatessen — established 1888 and verifiably kosher — at the intersection of Houston and Ludlow Streets, about four blocks away. There, as the menus printed on the paper placemats proclaimed, one could find sandwiches, on rye or “club” bread, of hot corned beef, hot pastrami, hot brisket of beef, roast beef, tongue, turkey, salami, bologna, liverwurst, chopped liver, garlic “knobel” wurst, or any combination thereof — as well as platters of any of these things — all with dill pickles and pickled tomatoes on the side. Also available were five kinds of hot knishes, potato kugel, noodle kugel, chicken noodle or matzo ball or split pea soup. Still looking? You could have a plate of lox, eggs and onions. Side dishes of steak fries, home made potato salad, coleslaw, macaroni salad and baked beans. Hot dogs and hamburgers for the kids. Seconds for anyone who had room for more.

Thirsty? No problem! Choose from Dr. Brown’s soda, celery tonic, cream soda (or diet cream soda) draught pitcher beer, Katz’s own seltzer, a New York egg cream, or one of the usual fizzy things — orange soda, root beer, cherry or grape soda, Pepsi (or diet Pepsi), 7-Up (or diet 7-Up).

Then — if you’re a bottomless pit — you could also order dessert: “New York cheesecake,” carrot cake, sponge cake, chocolate cake, one of the assorted fruit pies, or a “seasonal” cake.

[I’ve left out the “tossed green salad” (which I bet no one orders) and the assorted juices, hot or iced tea and coffee. Don’t hold it against me.]

But don’t think it’s a snap to order any of this. Remember the movie, “When Harry Met Sally?” Remember the scene where Sally fakes an orgasm over a sandwich and a lady at the next table (actually the director Rob Reiner’s mother) tells the waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having?” Remember that? That was filmed at Katz’s.

Maybe because of the movie, maybe because the servings at Katz’s are huge, maybe because Katz’s is the last of its kind — you have to FIGHT for a table:

We got lucky. As I pushed my way towards one of the few places against the wall where waiter service is available, the skinny little guy who lets people have one of them decided he liked me. He said it aloud to our small group, “You can stay here. I like her!” I blew him a kiss. “A kiss yet!” he exclaimed, wiping his hands on his Katz’s apron. “Extra pickles for the table!”

[You see? Sex — if you can call it that — works everywhere!]

Did I mention the servings were huge? Yes, I did. But I have pictorial evidence as well. I ordered a bowl of pea soup and half a liverwurst sandwich on rye. The half a sandwich was at least three inches high. Here’s the liverwurst I had to take out of it before eating it open-faced. [One of the younger members of our party ate the half slice of rye bread I didn’t want, but nobody was interested in the extra liverwurst.]

I couldn’t finish the bowl of thick homemade split pea soup or my share of the table’s steak fries either, and I’m not a dainty eater:

[The children’s father, who did manage to knock off nearly all of his hot pastrami sandwich on rye, bottom right of photo, explained he had only had a banana for breakfast and that was why he was able to finish.]

So were we sated? Ho-ho-ho. Passing up Katz’s New York cheesecake (under other circumstances tempting), we trotted across the street for artisinal ice-cream. Made in a “laboratorio!”

Thought I was kidding, didn’t you? Where else would a “gelato” be made artisinally, but in a “laboratorio?”

Decisions, decisions! So many flavors to choose from!

But eventually each young person got a plastic dish of two small scoops for $4.25 (plus tax), and gustatory happiness was complete. (I understand their father later explained the principle of inflation whereby “Victoria’s” ice cream cost a penny and the laboratorio’s gelato cost 425 times as much — but I wasn’t there to hear the explanation, so wouldn’t dare paraphrase. I’m sure you more or less understand the gist of it already.)

Then we waddled back to the Tenement Museum for another hour-long tour, focussed on economic issues. (It was from this second tour leader that I obtained the information provided earlier about one-room houses being replaced by “modern” tenements in the mid-nineteenth century.) We visited a second-floor apartment as it looked when occupied by its original German tenants in 1865, and there heard about the limited social support structures then in place for a family with four children when the father took off for parts unknown. After that we moved on to one of the last apartments occupied, in 1935, after electricity had at last arrived, and cold running water, too. There was a framed photograph of FDR on the wall here, and a radio looking very much like one I barely remember my parents owning when I was a small girl, and even a bathtub — although the tub was in the small kitchen, covered by a slab that served as a table when the tub was not in use; when a bath was contemplated, the slab needed to be removed and the tub filled with water heated in pots on the gas-fired stove.

But I’m sure after all that food at Katz’s, you’re in no mood for more sociology and economics. So I shall leave you on Orchard Street, gazing up at the fire escapes that were a feature of every New York apartment house, even when I was growing up:

And if you want to pick up a few more books in the museum shop before calling it a day, here are three somewhat lighter in content than the ones we looked at earlier in the day:

Don’t tarry in the shop too long, though. I forgot to mention it’s quite a walk to the nearest subway. Also it’s not so easy to find a taxi if you wait till four in the afternoon. That’s when the day guys go home and the evening drivers are just coming on duty.

But if you get out on the street and wave your arms wildly, maybe one will stop for you. Especially if you’re 83 (even if you don’t quite look it), stand straight, smile while you’re waving, and have pretty good legs. Blowing the driver a kiss as he seems to be slowing down for you can’t hurt, either. Good luck!

WHEN DOES “OLD” BEGIN? — A GUEST POST

[Although I’ve begun to think of people in their 60’s as “still young,” I realize that’s just a matter of perspective. There was a time when I thought 50 was “old.” Here’s a piece by Martha Mendelsohn, a New York-based writer colleague of mine who’s at least twelve years younger than I am. It first appeared in the Winter 2011-2012 issue of Persimmontree, an online magazine of the arts by women over sixty, as a response to a request for short pieces about “The Next Step.” I enjoyed reading it when it was published there, and felt it certainly also deserved a place in a blog about getting old in a world where most other people, who appear to be getting younger every year, have begun to treat you as if you’re somewhat older than you still feel. I should add that Martha has curly streaky-blonde hair, probably wears a size 2 or 4 and looks damn good — not just “for her age” but for any age.]

******

ACCEPTANCE

by Martha Mendelsohn

The members of my book group were downing the dregs of the Manchego and wine when L. cleared her throat: “This may sound like a weird question—but do I look okay?”

Surely that was a rhetorical question. “You look more than okay,” we hastened to reassure her. With her twinkling blue eyes and deep dimples, L., at 68, was still an undeniably attractive woman. “Because as soon as I got on the subway,” L. continued, “a man, who couldn’t have been under 50, offered me his seat.”

A groan of recognition arose. It seemed that all of us recent Medicare recipients had been subjected to this particular brand of public transportation gallantry, and none of us appreciated it. Maybe we could no longer take the subway steps three at a time, but we went to the gym, chased after grandkids, and still worked. We were not about to throw ourselves under the train tracks for these unwanted acts of kindness, but we deemed them offensive.

J. was the most outraged. She had spent much time and money having the quotation mark between her eyebrows and other signs of age erased, but that didn’t stop a passenger from insisting she take her seat on the crosstown bus. Someone suggested: “Next time, just say, ‘Thanks, but I’m not pregnant.’”

I find myself thinking that the only time anyone should cede a seat is for a pregnant woman or any passenger, whether 19 or 90, with an obvious infirmity. Why shouldn’t an obviously still-mobile person of a certain age be allowed to remain standing? I was on the bus with my husband when a not-so-young woman bolted up, begging him to take her seat. (He acquiesced reluctantly.) “This man plays eight hours of tennis a week,” I informed her, even though in truth it annoyed me how much time he spent on the courts.

For now, hoping to head off seat offers, I hide my under-eye pouches behind sunglasses. But I encounter other affronts: At doctors’ offices, I routinely am called “hon,” “sweetie,” and “dear.” Will the time come when I feel grateful for such endearments and those thoughtful riders willing to yield their seats? Will I ever reach the point where “pushing 70” doesn’t sound like it refers to my mother?

The next step is to accept my age. To accept the seat.

******

[Martha has also written a page-turner of a YA novel which is scheduled for publication in April 2015 and may be pre-ordered at Amazon. It’s called The Bromley Girls and is about a Jewish girl’s experience with latent anti-semitism as a sophomore at an exclusive and expensive girls’ private school in Manhattan in the 1950’s. If there are young readers in your extended family and circle of friends, you may want to check it out.]

EIGHT NON-TRADITIONAL WISHES FOR A HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

[I just couldn’t resist.]

DEAREST OF MEMORIES

Bill and I have finally completed our major intellectual undertaking of the year. To be entirely accurate, I have. Bill fell away after six lengthy chapters. (There were eighteen all told.) I speak, of course, of getting through Ulysses, that 644 page behemoth of a book in which James Joyce commemorated forever June 16, 1904 in the lives of three Dubliners — Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. We did not undertake this effort alone. There was an eight-week class, and a wonderful professor, and lots of support from extracurricular sources enumerated in some detail in a previous post about Bloom defecating in his outhouse.

But did I really read all clotted 644 pages carefully, scout’s honor? Um, no. However, where I skimmed, I skimmed judiciously, certainly putting in even more time than I had anticipated. And as it has now clogged up two whole months of my life, if I ever pick up that book again, which I very well may, it won’t be to read it from cover to cover. Once you know the lay of the land, so to speak (as I do by now), you can dip in and out where it pleases you.

So what will I remember after all this labor? The same passage I remembered after I read it at twenty: Molly Bloom’s memory of the day sixteen years earlier when Leopold proposed to her on Howth’s head above Dublin and they made love for the first time. She was eighteen, he was twenty-two. (It’s the final passage in the forty pages of stream of consciousness which constitutes the last chapter of the book.)

Does this mean I haven’t matured at all in sixty-three years? Perhaps. But I like to think I will remember that last part of Molly’s soliloquy now, together with Bloom’s memory of the same event, not because it’s sexy (my reason at twenty) — but because that day on Howth’s head remains the dearest of memories for both husband and wife at the close of the book, although it is now far in the past and their marriage is fraught with current and unresolved difficulties.

It may be that as a lady getting on in life I am more optimistic than a younger person might be about the power of dear memories to hold people together. But there it is. I am that lady. Also — point for my side — Molly ends with a single word: Yes. Which has to count for something.

******

Leopold’s memory comes while he’s having lunch: a gorgonzola cheese sandwich with mustard, cut in strips, and a glass of burgundy wine:

(p. 144)

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun’s heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion’s head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines fain brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you’ll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet-sour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nanny goat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Many pages later, Molly’s memory comes in bed, in the wee hours of morning, as she reviews her day, her life, her youth [she feels old at 34]:

(pp. 643-44)

….the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know of…[here Molly considers her boyfriends and kisses and experiences in Gibraltar, where she grew up] ….and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

*****

I wish us all such memories, when our hearts were going like mad.

A KIND OF HEAVEN (A REBLOG)

[When TGOB was new last November, this was the fourth piece I posted. Everything in it remains true. Bill and I are now one year older than when I wrote it, but we’re still here. Keep your fingers crossed…. ]

*****

If I’m lucky, our cat Sasha may push back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrive silently at my side of the bed, miaow once to announce her presence, and wait for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful, with a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

Silly girl. She thinks she needs an invitation. I inch back a bit towards Bill to make more space between me and the edge, and pat the mattress. “Hi Sasha. Hi sweetheart. Come on. Come on up, Sosh.” I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She thinks about it. She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the two bowls against the wall; head for the Shaker-style set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window. There she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no. This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants. Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — then collapses against me. Her head is towards the foot of the bed, but at just the right horizontal meridian for me slowly to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

After a while she gives a half-turn so that my hand can do her belly, a paradise of angora down. Claws in, her paws manipulate me. She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher. I obey, a lover wishing only to please. All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr. She is happy.

I am happy, too. I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other against my midsection — all of us warmly wrapped in quilt, conjoined, our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever. (Don’t say anything. I know, I know.) And sometimes, since neither Bill nor I need jump to the ring of an alarm, it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours. Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.

MY THREE-MINUTE ENGAGEMENT

It was October 1994; I was again between husbands. (Between second husband and Bill, to be precise.) In other words, I was at liberty. And working at a very large law firm, second largest in Boston.

This law firm (I name no names) was so large, for Boston, that it occupied many floors of a building a whole square block around. There were so many floors it took three or four minutes for the elevator to get from the top one to the lowest. The firm employed upwards of 300 lawyers on those floors, plus 400 in support staff, not counting the mail room. Also pertinent to this story is that many of those 700 people sort of knew who I was. Not because I had done such extraordinary things in court (I hadn’t), but because I was the only woman in the firm with a New York accent. Unlike anyone else who worked there, I sounded as if I’d come right out of a Woody Allen movie.

Levity aside, you didn’t have much spare time for lolly-gagging around if you practiced law at this big firm. But you had a little bit. It was still before cell phones and working from home. When you finally did get to leave, you were relatively free of the office and law for a while. Which is how I was able to take an advertised walk with a Boston Park Ranger through the Emerald Circle of Boston’s municipal parks on the first Saturday in October. I did it to knock myself out so I would be too tired in the evening to indulge in self-pity, all alone by the telephone.

While dutifully admiring nineteenth-century statues of important historical figures on the Boston Common, I fell in with another walker; she was about my age, also divorced with two grown sons, and also living in Cambridge. (A social worker, but you can’t have everything.) We went home together on the Red Line. Just before I got out at the Harvard Square stop, she asked how I felt about Mort Sahl. He was coming to Cambridge for a two week run at the Hasty Pudding Theater on Holyoke Street. Would I like to go with her the following Saturday night?

In all candor, I felt nothing for Mort Sahl. By then I had seen him in performance three times. First with a blind date, when I was very young and he was still unknown; next with first husband, when I was not yet thirty and he was very famous; last with second husband, when I was not quite middle-aged and his career was not quite gone. So I’d had plenty of opportunity to decide he wasn’t my type. In spite of that, I agreed to go. It wasn’t as if I had anything better to do next Saturday night.

Attention, those of you not yet adults in the early 1960s: Run, don’t walk, to Wikipedia to look up Mort Sahl. His photo there will show you a tall, dark-haired man with a devilish grin. You’ll learn he was born in 1927, had been married twice by the time of this story, was the first ever American performer to make it in stand-up comedy discussing current events and politics. He was especially popular with East and West Coast intelligentsia — who jammed themselves into smart clubs on both coasts whenever and wherever he appeared, if only to say they’d seen him in action.

You’ll also learn how he would stroll to the mike so casually, wearing his signature sweater, with signature rolled-up newspaper in hand — and then let fire into a hot packed room. He was swift, sharp, biting, bitter. And merciless. In 1960 Time Magazine called him “Will Rogers with fangs.”

My new friend brought another friend to the performance; I never did catch this one’s name. The nameless friend had long streaming grey hair, flowing garments and practiced some kind of spiritual balance therapy with pyramids, algae and crystals. Definitely not my type, either.

We accordingly chose a seating arrangement that allowed new friend and nameless friend to coo at each other till showtime, leaving me to case the room. Judging by the scatterings of silver heads and wispy white beards, we were an aging group. No young folks at all. And plenty of empty seats.

Then the theater dimmed, the stage lights went on, the feature attraction strolled out to the mike. He was still wearing a sweater, still carrying a rolled-up newspaper, still tall. But the dark hair was grey, the grin querulous, the quips tired and forced.

And soon a new disquiet emerged from his discourse: the end of his twenty-four year marriage. How he’d tried, how much it hurt, why it shouldn’t have ended. Mort Sahl without fangs. The audience stirred restlessly. Two or three got up to go. Didn’t he realize? Didn’t he care? My type or no, I began to feel bad for him. How could he humiliate himself like that? Shut up about the lost wife already and start snarling.

But he didn’t. Or couldn’t. On and on and on he went, laboring past the absence of response, the awful silences. Until it was over. A few feeble claps. The doors opened. At last: a breath of fresh air.

I ruminated all weekend. About the fleetingness of fame, aging men and their lack of resilience. About what really matters, and what doesn’t. By Monday morning, I had come to a decision. I was going to write him a letter. Monday night I did.

What do you write an aging comedian whose sun seems to have set?

October 10, 1994

Dear Mort Sahl:

I was at the 7 p.m. show last Saturday, very pleased to be seeing you again in your red sweater still doing your thing to a gratified audience. What was particularly pleasing for me has to do with an evening at the end of summer 1952, when I predicted your future to my date.

In August 1952, I was fresh out of college, an insecure little girl from the East whose parents had just moved to L.A. with daughter in tow. (No, I didn’t resist, which tells you something right there.) On that evening I was brought to a so-called party at someone’s apartment by a physically unprepossessing blind date (short! and with a big nose!) — the son of someone my mother had met at a beauty parlor. He was in training to do psychotherapy. Our disenchantment with each other was mutual; I never saw him again after that.

Among the other guests was you, sitting on the floor, looking unkempt, unshaved and somewhat ragged, and holding forth to the assembled with what I took for (and may well have been) venom and rancor about practically everything but especially the under-appreciation which you had been accorded in San Francisco, from whence you had just come in a state of apparent destitution. During the interstices of your performance from the floor, my date whispered that you were the current boyfriend of still another guest, who was putting you up and feeding you while you purportedly tried to get on your professional feet in L.A.

It was very hot. I was wearing — with maximum discomfort — that summer’s requisite outfit for the upwardly mobile: a waist cincher, a strapless bra that felt as if it were sliding down, two scratchy crinolines, a heavily quilted off-the-shoulder Anne Fogarty dress with a circle skirt and three-inch wide belt that dug into the ribs and also made gas, because it prevented the proper digestion of dinner. In addition, I wore several pounds of makeup which were threatening to slide away in a flood of perspiration if we didn’t get out of there soon. Not surprisingly, I did not feel benign.

“A loser,” I pronounced to the date with finality as we made our getaway. “Now there’s someone who’ll never amount to anything.”

****************

Well. I first went to see you perform (for money) in New York, in the company of husband number one — about four or five years later, I think. It may have been at the Blue Angel. Husband number one dragged me. The sweater wasn’t red yet, the crowds were huge, you were too quick for most of the audience and at times, to my chagrin, too quick for me. Husband number one, who was able to keep up, thought you were great.

The second time I saw you perform was again in New York, during one of your later renascences, but with husband number two. I dragged husband number two. The sweater was now red, you were much mellower, and mercifully slower on the draw. No more semi-automatic attack weapons. I could keep up. Husband number two, the unwilling attendee, thought you were great.

This time, newly resident in Cambridge, I and a 1950′s-vintage lady neighbor I had recently met decided to go together. (No dragging.) But she dragged still another lady I did not know. Both ladies turned out to be into crystals, green algae, and the like. I don’t know what the two ladies thought. I thought you were great.

If it weren’t for the presence of the two ladies, who began clamoring to get to Chef Chow for Chinese food as soon as you walked off, I would have come back stage to tell you so. (I probably would also have talked about survivors, and change, and process, and heavy stuff like that, if you actually have real conversations when you’re off stage.) But I couldn’t and therefore didn’t. Hence this letter.

I’ve never written a fan letter to anyone before, and probably never will again, but it seems unlikely that either of us will last another forty-two years, so here it is.

[I’m also sorry that you are lonely sometimes and that the end of your marriage hurts you so much — inappropriate as such remarks may be in a letter of this kind.]

If you ever come back to these un-Hollywoodlike parts, and feel like getting in touch, please do.

Take care and be well.

Nina Mishkin

***************

I put my home address on the letter and mailed it. I had done what I could. A summary judgment motion was waiting in my office. It was Tuesday morning, I was only half done, and the whole thing, with supporting documents, had to be filed by 4 p.m. Friday. Or the client would be in the soup, and I’d be out the door.[Those were the fun days of my life! The pay was pretty good, though, if you could stand the pain.]

I made it. No soup, no door. And not a peep out of Mort Sahl, either. When I had time to think about him again, I wondered if my letter had ever reached him. I’d sent it to the theater, not knowing where else it should go. Was that like the Black Hole of Calcutta?

Oh well. It was a pretty good weekend, all things considered: Hairdresser, shopping, pistachio ice cream in bed. But not for the lawyer I shared a secretary with; he was slaving away his Saturday in the office. [Yes, we did that sometimes. Correction: more than sometimes.]

Let’s say this lawyer’s name was Jim. It wasn’t, but let’s say anyway. If my phone were to ring when I wasn’t there, the call would go to our secretary. And if she wasn’t there but Jim was, he’d be the one who picked up. (Thinking, no doubt, it was for him.) That Saturday, my phone did ring. Jim answered, and put the message on our secretary’s desk. Come Monday, she saw it before I did.

Did she ever get busy! Soon every secretary on our floor knew what was in my message. Then the news flew, like wildfire, to other floors. Don’t legal secretaries have anything to do except gossip (as one of them put it) about “lawyers in love?”

By the time I showed up at 9:33 (after three minutes in the elevator) and saw the yellow sticky now squarely centered on my desk, I must have been the last to know what Jim had written on it:

Nina –

You got a call from Mort Sahl. He’s at the Charles Hotel, 864-1200. Call him Monday if you don’t see this before then.

Jim (Saturday – 2:20 p.m.)

Oh, Mort. Why the office? I gave you my home address! Couldn’t you have asked Information for that number instead?

I closed the door before I dialed. (Yes, I was nervous.) The hotel switchboard connected me.

The familiar voice was cautious: “Hello?”

I explained who I was.

The voice warmed up. “That was a great letter!”

Me: Glad you liked it. (This was true.)

He: You’re a lawyer?

Me (evasive): Mmm.

He (skipping over the lawyer part): A really great letter. I’d like to see you.

Me: I’d like that, too.

(Awkward pause.)

Me again: Will you be here long?

He: Flying out this afternoon.

Me (disheartened): “Oh.”

He (encouraged by the disheartened “oh”): “But I’ll be back. We’re doing another show in the East in December. Maybe then?”

Me: Absolutely.

He: Okay.

Me: Okay.

He: Bye, then.

Me: Bye.

Well, what did you expect? Romeo and Juliet?

Important Rule of Life: It’s not enough for news to travel, it has to change and grow as well. At one in the afternoon when I got back into the elevator for lunch, the head of my department was in the elevator, too. This dour lady lawyer had always disapproved of me. She didn’t like that I sometimes laughed. She considered my remarks about the environmental problems caused by underground storage tanks insufficiently serious. But today her thin face was wreathed in smiles.

“Nina!” she cried joyously as the elevator doors closed on us. I thought she might be going to hug me. “Congratulations! I hear you’re engaged to Mort Sahl!”

That’s probably the high point of this story. It’s all downhill from here on. Beginning with the three whole minutes in the elevator it took to get myself un-engaged. Dis-engaged? You know what I mean. So maybe I should stop while I’m ahead. But I’d be lying if I let you think I didn’t watch The Boston Globe and The New York Times like a hawk for the next two months. However, if Mort ever came East again that year, it got by me.

Ah, don’t fret. There is a happy ending. Three happy endings actually, if you take the long view.

The dour lady lawyer who headed up our department began to look on me more favorably.
Two years later, Mort Sahl found a new wife.
Seven years later, I met Bill, who’s more my type.

Also, Mort was right. It was a great letter. And we both still have that.

LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU, MAYBE

The topic for today is “Jewish Haiku,” which I found nicely typed out in a folder of keepers stashed away in the front drawer of my father’s desk, where I’m not usually prone to go looking. Until I did. And there they were.

Given that my shortish-term memory is going the way of my energy level and the perkiness of my behind, I cannot now recall when or from whom I originally received them, and certainly hope I don’t wake up tomorrow morning to an offended email from the donor reminding me. (As happened with the flashmob performance of “Ode to Joy” a few weeks back.) Be that as it may, their presence in the keeper folder means at one time I found them irresistible. And what do you know? I still do.

However, to post, or not to post? That is the question.

If you’ve never had Jewish guilt or what is known stereotypically as “a Jewish mother” (not all Jewish mothers are), if you don’t know about mohels performing ritual circumcisions on the eighth day after birth or about bar mitzvah ceremonies for boys at thirteen (“Today I am a man”), or that observant male Jews cover their heads with a (usually black) Yarmulke, or that Yom Kippur is the annual Day of Atonement, or that lobster (or any other shellfish) isn’t kosher and therefore mustn’t be eaten, or that food is very important at all times, or that the worst is almost always certain to happen, or that after a death the family sits shiva at home for five days to receive friends and not be alone with their grief — then you probably won’t get what’s going on here.

On the other hand, I’ve already just explained most of the important stuff. So let’s give it a try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Drop out whenever you’ve had it. Don’t be shy about asking questions. But please don’t ask for more. By the time you get to the end, I’m sure you won’t want to. There comes a point when enough is enough.

***************

JEWISH HAIKU

***

After the warm rain

the sweet smell of camellias.

Did you wipe your feet?

***

Looking for pink buds

to prune, the old moyel

wanders among his flowers.

***

Today I am a man.

Tomorrow I will return

to the seventh grade.

***

Testing the warm milk

on her wrist, she sighs softly.

But her son is forty.

***

The sparkling blue sea

reminds me to wait an hour

after my sandwich.

***

Tea ceremony —

fragrant steam perfumes the air.

Try the cheese danish.

***

Lacking fins or tail

the gefilte fish swims with

great difficulty.

***

Yom Kippur — Forgive

me Lord for the Mercedes

and all that lobster.

***

My nature journal —

Today I saw some trees and birds.

I should know the names?

***

Like a bonsai tree,

your terrible posture

at my dinner table.

***

Beyond Valium is

the peace of knowing one’s child

is an internist.

***

Jews on safari —

map, compass, elephant gun,

hard sucking candies.

***

Coroner’s report —

“The deceased, wearing no hat,

caught his death of cold.”

***

The sparrow brings home

too many worms for her young.

“Force yourself,” she chirps.

***

Jewish triathlon:

gin rummy, then contract bridge,

followed by a nap.

***

The shiva visit:

So sorry about your loss.

Now back to my problems.

***

Our youngest daughter,

our most precious jewel, hence

the name, Tiffany.

***

Mom, please! There is no

need to put that dinner roll

in your pocketbook.

***

Seven-foot Jews in

the NBA slam-dunking!

My alarm clock rings.

***

Concert of car horns

as we debate the question

of when to change lanes.

***

Sorry I’m not home

to take your call. At the tone

please state your bad news.

***

Is one Nobel Prize

so much to ask from a child

after all I’ve done?

***

Today, mild shvitzing.

Tomorrow, so hot you’ll plotz.

Five-day forecast: feh

***

Passover — Left the door open

for the Prophet Elijah.

Now our cat is gone.

***

Quietly murmured

at Saturday services,

Yanks 5, Red Sox 3.

***

A lovely nose ring —

excuse me while I put my

head in the oven.

***

Hard to tell under

the lights — white Yarmulke or

male-pattern baldness?

***

(Yes, enough.)

IN DEFENSE OF TALK THERAPY

I save things that seem important: old photographs, records of the past I might want to revisit, writing that speaks to me. Sometimes I forget about these saved things for years and then come upon them by happenstance while looking for something else.

As was the case yesterday when I was rummaging around in the front drawer of my father’s French Provincial desk (a North Carolina copy, not an 18th century original), which is practically useless for real work but decorative enough to keep in the living room to put a lamp and framed family photographs on. (Also one of the cats likes napping on it in the evening.) Its thin middle drawer contains, among a few other folders and envelopes, a binder of articles that at one time or another I thought keepers — including a review by Joan Acocella of several books about psychiatry that appeared fourteen years ago in The New Yorker. (May 8, 2000 issue.) It was called “The Empty Couch: What is lost when psychiatry turns to drugs?” I had to drop everything I was doing and re-read it at once because, like Acocella, I am a member of the talk therapy generation.

I have at times made fun of my years on the couch, or on an expensive chair — expensive in terms of hours sat on, not initial cost. Called myself the Queen of Therapy. (Woody Allen is King.) Have even dropped at least one light-hearted reference in this very blog to “the Hungarian,” the first of the two shrinks who you could say — not quite literally but not exactly metaphorically either — saved my life. He was the one who called me “honeybunch,” which may not have been quite in keeping with the ethics of the profession, but was what I then certainly needed to hear from somebody.

In fact, I probably owe the existence of my two children to this ebullient representative of the “paprikash of Europe” (his own term for Hungarian men). It’s also an accurate summary of my emotional life to say I haven’t been able leave a husband until I had a shrink, and haven’t been able to leave a shrink until I had a husband. (You figure that one out: Bill is both.)

Like many things in my life, and in the lives of others who have lived as long as I have, talk therapy seems to be on the way out. It is time-consuming, expensive, participatory — and to those who haven’t experienced it (or haven’t paid for it out of pocket, as most of us in the old days did, going without other things to afford it), it may seem self-indulgent and too self-referential. Medication, by contrast, is a quick fix for symptoms, once the doc figures out the formula that works. Moreover, insurance companies love the biomedical approach: one, two, three and skidoo — out into the world again, seemingly good as new. And what insurance companies love (and pay for) is what insureds get.

Acocella’s review considers how we reached this point, and the merits for certain kinds of patients of each approach. But she, like me, clearly tips in favor of talking oneself back into balance, unless one is seriously ill. And because I feel I should atone somewhat for my occasional levity about what has helped me get through some very rough times, and also because she is eloquent, I am now going to turn the lectern over to her. She states the case for an approach to life’s problems that I hope will not entirely disappear:

For many people of my generation, especially women, psychotherapy is not so much an issue as a history, a language in which they learned to speak of themselves, and of life. This fact has been widely deplored. Psychotherapy, people say, has taught women to think of themselves as victims. It has made them narcissistic, turned them in on their own minds rather than out into the world, where the men seem to be living. True enough, of some therapies. In others women — and men — have learned to stop being victims and to act in the world…..

What do we think about psychotherapy? I don’t mean for inpatients. (They clearly need it; their lives are wrecked.) I mean for outpatients, the walking wounded — us. For some, it’s damaging. Even when it’s good, it’s very expensive, but compared with the church and family of yesteryear, whose loss it is trying to make up for, it’s a bargain. (In the church, you tithed, gave ten percent of your income. As for the family, it kept women at home. What was the cost of that?)

And when it is good, it is something hard to find in life, a moral dialogue. [One of the writers reviewed says of one of her therapists that with him talk] “was not only the means to a therapeutic end, but … the central source of moral meaning itself.” …. [T]he truth is that a talk about moral meaning cannot not be therapeutic, if by therapy we mean not just symptom relief but a chance for a serious life.

The matters that people discuss in psychotherapy — whether they are really answerable for their lives, whether they should place their own welfare over another’s — are the things that people in the Bible were trying to decide. They are the big questions, right? For patients in serious distress, pills are useful, but they cannot provide, don’t aim to provide, what psychodynamic therapy has at its core:…“a sense of human complexity, of depth, an exigent demand to struggle against one’s own refusals, and a respect for the difficulty of human life.”

The italics at the end are mine. I like to laugh as much as the next person, but I have never wanted to be numbed into accepting what was, when what was was of my own making. You can choose to swallow something someone gives you, not feel the pain, and giggle. Or you can demand the right to struggle against your own refusals. Life is difficult, but if you choose not to experience it, not to work your way through the difficulties — can you say you’ve really lived?

MORE FROM MORGENBESSER

Sidney Morgenbesser’s paradoxical words as he was dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) are not the only ones he’s known for. Here, from Wikiquote, are some of his less bitter remarks. (Remember, he was a professor of philosophy.)

**************

During a lecture, the Oxford linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin made the claim that although a double negative in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. To which Morgenbesser derisively called out from the audience, “Yeah, yeah.”

Asked by a student whether he agreed with Chairman Mao’s view that a statement can be both true and false at the same time, Morgenbesser replied, “Well, I do and I don’t.”

During campus protests of the 1960s, Morgenbesser was hit on the head by police. When asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly, he responded that it was “unfair, but not unjust. It was unfair because they hit me over the head, but not unjust because they hit everyone else over the head.”

When challenged why he had written so little, Morgenbesser fired back: “Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?”

Morgenbesser described Gentile ethics as entailing “ought implies can,” while in Jewish ethics, “can implies don’t.”

When asked his opinion of pragmatism, Morgenbesser replied, “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”

Asked to prove a questioner’s existence, Morgenbesser shot back, “Who’s asking?”

A student once interrupted him to complain, “I just don’t understand!” He responded, “Why should you have the advantage over me?”

****************

What I take away from all this is that I think I wish I’d known Morgenbesser, but maybe it’s better that I didn’t. I’d be afraid of what he’d say to me. I’m no philosopher, and I already don’t understand anything.

Is there anything more than anything for me not to understand? If there is, I’m sure Morgenbesser would have found it. And then where would I be?

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

From Sidney Morgenbesser, Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, noted for his wit.

He died in August 2004 of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

IS GOD PUNISHING ME BECAUSE I DON’T BELIEVE IN HIM?

MY MOST-READ POST IN CERTAIN COUNTRIES!

It was called “My First Bra(s).” I put it up because it had been cut, for reasons of length, from an essay of mine about the summer I turned thirteen which was published in The Iowa Review last spring, and I didn’t want it to sink without having had its chance to be read.

Sixteen of its first readers clicked “like.” I recognized all sixteen: fifteen faithful followers of my then four-month-old blog and one woman who identified herself as a friend of a follower. Thirteen women, three men. Mostly they lived in the U.S., UK, and Canada. All but one were native English speakers, and the one was perfectly bilingual. The women who left comments thought it was sweet, tender. One spoke of it as commemorating a lovely bonding experience between mother and daughter.

I expected that after a few days it would gently fade away. Boy, did it not! Except — curiouser and curiouser (as Alice in Wonderland might have said) — whenever it subsequently showed up in the stats, one or at most two views at a time, a Moslem country would also show up on my viewer map. A different country each time, but almost always one where women are generally hidden away in the home and well wrapped up when emerging on the arm of a husband, father or brother for necessary purposes.

What was it about my sweet little piece that had such appeal to (presumably male) readers in burqa-wearing countries? I read it again. Had I used a “dirty” word? I found nipples, young girl, budding breast, delicate tissues, baby breast, fragile tissues, precious daughter. Is that so exciting? So productive of tumescence?

In certain parts of the world, apparently yes. “My First Bra(s)” is now my fourth most popular ever piece of TGOB writing, if we don’t count “Home Pages/Archives.” [The first three are “Roger Angell on Life in His Nineties,” “About,” and “Why Blog About Getting Old?”] Those parts of the world where it has won such favor are probably the places where every martyr gets twelve virgins and eighty orange trees in heaven, but not much here on earth until marriage or martyrdom — except for what may be found on blogs emanating from the corrupt and shameful West, to be relished privately in the dark of night.

So I am running “My First Bra(s)” again — at what I assume is the unspoken request of its surreptitious fans. I have even provided a photo:

Unfortunately, the photo is of a garment three cup sizes bigger than the “first” bra referenced in the piece. That one has gone the way of all delicious reveries. Sorry, fellas. Best I could do. If the photographed garment is too “mature” for you, just close your eyes and don’t look until you’ve scrolled down to where the magic begins!

**************

MY FIRST BRA(S)

My mother had promised: When we got back to New York from the beach resort where we were spending the summer, I could have a bra. I was just thirteen and still only a little beyond flat-chested. But there had been bouncing. And teasing. And embarrassment. It was the summer of 1944.

My mother didn’t make promises easily, but those she made, she kept. In September, we went to Best & Company, a department store she felt she could trust for what she called “such an important purchase.” The saleswoman in Misses’ Lingerie looked me over doubtfully, shook her head and gave my mother a little card from the drawer under the cash register. “Come back in a year or so,” she said to me.

The address on the card was that of a small shop on Madison Avenue in the Seventies. We waited on little gilt chairs until someone could be with us. There was a pale pink brochure on the round glass-topped table next to my chair, which I read. Brassieres could apparently be fitted to the requirements of, or could be custom-made for, the client with extremely large breasts, or pendulous breasts, or just one breast, or no breasts. The brochure was silent as to the needs of the very young client.

However, the white-haired corseted lady who finally emerged from behind the floor-length pink curtains that divided the anteroom from the rest of the shop seemed absolutely delighted to see me. “Exactly the sort of client we love,” she cooed. “A young girl with happy problems, easily solved.” She ushered us past the pink curtains into a large mirrored alcove shielded by more pink curtains. There I was instructed to take off my blouse, drop the wide straps of my slip, and remove my undershirt. My mother sat on yet another gilt chair, holding the blouse and undershirt and looking anxious. She did not know what all this was going to cost.

I felt shy about exposing my budding breasts. Even my mother hadn’t seen them recently. But the white-haired lady didn’t seem to find them peculiar. “Lovely,” she murmured, running the tips of her fingers softly around the sides. “These are very delicate tissues,” she explained to my mother. “One must be so careful to protect them from bruising and strain. Lack of proper care at this age can result in irreparable damage and a lifetime of regret.” I wondered if lack of care in Russia was the reason my mother was so floppy without her brassiere. Was she now enduring a lifetime of regret?

The white-haired lady measured me with a pink silk tape measure and jotted notes on a small pink pad with a small silvery pencil. She felt each baby breast gently to gauge its circumference, and jotted more notes on the pad. Then she slipped away for a few minutes. Before I knew it, she was instructing me how to center each breast in the AA-cup of a beautiful pink silk satin brassiere. “There is a right way, and a wrong way,” she said. “Now you are one of the lucky young girls who knows the right way.”

When I was hooked in, she had me turn around, inspecting me as if I were a work of art. “We’ll need to take a teensy tuck in the left cup,” she told my mother. “Nothing to worry about. Many young girls need it, on one side or the other.”

My mother nodded, inquired the price, bit her lip, and said we would take two. The white-haired lady looked pained. “But my dear!” she exclaimed. “She needs at least two more for night wear. Are you really going to permit your precious daughter to damage those delicate young tissues while she sleeps?”

So it was that I became the owner of four AA-cup pink silk satin brassieres at the beginning of my second term of high school. My mother worried aloud all the way home on the subway about what my father would say when he heard what she had paid. But they couldn’t be returned. The left cup of each of them had been custom fitted especially for me.

I never wore the extra two to bed. For at least a year I had been playing with my nipples under my pajama top every night before I fell asleep, and it didn’t feel as good through the silk satin. Besides, I didn’t care if my fragile tissues got bruised; I was sure I was destined to be a dud in the looks department anyway. I just wanted not to bounce when I walked. To generate enough laundry to allay maternal suspicions, I changed brassieres every day instead of every other.

By the following year, I had developed sufficiently to go back to Best & Co. The four now outgrown pink silk satin bras went to the Salvation Army, where perhaps they found a second young wearer with delicate tissues. Or perhaps not. You never know with those custom-fitted items.

I suppose you could say all that about “happy problems” and “precious daughters” were the good old days. I’m not sure what was so good about them. Except that they’re fun to post about. And hopefully to read about too.

**************

SKARA BRAE: MY KIND OF PLACE

Bet you’ve never heard of Skara Brae. Don’t pretend. You haven’t, have you? I hadn’t heard of it either, until I found it in this book with a really dumb title.

I mean, come on. 1001 historic sites you must see? Before you die? Like The Smolny Institute? (p. 669) Or The Bank of England? (p. 290) Or Old Melbourne Jail? (p. 926) And if you don’t manage to get to them all by deadline, then what?

But after a day of windy rain and robo-calls and waiting in doctors’ offices for probably unnecessary checkups and/or “procedures” (the bane of an older person’s existence — if the older person has health insurance, that is), and after the cleaning ladies have canceled at the last minute and you discover the car has about a quarter of a cup of gas left on which you may just possibly manage to coast into the nearest gas station on a wheel and a prayer — after all that, stress builds to a point where Skara Brae, the one thousand and first site in the book with the dumb title, begins to seem like heaven on earth.

This is what 1001 Historic Sites says about it (after telling you it’s in Orkney, Scotland):

Five-thousand-year-old homes with evidence of orderliness and comfort

This Stone Age village was buried beneath sand dunes for centuries until a huge storm blew the sand away, around 1850. What was revealed gives a vivid impression of ordinary life more than 5,000 years ago. Despite their great antiquity the houses are remarkably uniform, so much so that they have been likened to a ‘group of prehistoric council houses’ ….

Built of stone, the houses would have been roofed with turf or thatch. Their wooden doors opened off an underground maze of narrow passages …. Each house, however, had one spacious main room, measuring about 20 square feet (6 sq. m.). The fitted stone furniture inside included two box beds, possibly one for the man and the other for the woman and their children. The family would have slept on heather or bracken, under blankets of animal skin, and the stone floor would have been made more comfortable with strewn furs and skins.

The Skara Brae families had ornaments and used cosmetics, and each house had the same regulation two-shelf stone dresser, apparently placed to display precious objects to visitors. Stone shelves and cupboards were built into the walls. In the middle of the room was a hearth for burning peat. There are small cells that seem to have been lavatories, with drains, and one of the huts was apparently a workshop….The people of the village kept cows, sheep, and pigs, grew cereal crops in their fields, went hunting, and gathered shellfish. The occasional stranded whale would have been a blessing. At about 2,500 B.C.E. sand dunes began to encroach on Skara Brae and the settlement was abandoned.

Orderliness, comfort, ornaments, cosmetics, toilets. Fragrant heather mattresses, leather blankets, fur rugs, heat. Steaks, lamb chops, bacon, oatmeal, oysters. A workshop for weaving things from sheep’s wool or practicing a prehistoric reed instrument. What more could you want, after you’d grown your crops, hunted, gathered your shellfish and displayed precious objects to visitors? There was probably also plenty of sex. I don’t know why the editor of 1001 Historic Sites thinks the man slept in one bed, the woman with the children in the other. I would have put the man and woman together in one of the two beds, and all the children in the other, where they could giggle and play games in the dark under their leather blankets while their parents disported themselves, quietly, across the spacious main room.

The occasional stranded whale I would pass on. It would also be nice to have a few books to put on those fitted stone shelves. But I won’t carp. Even without the books, Skara Brae sounds like a welcome change from electronic devices pinging, telephones ringing and the washing-machine breaking down just when there’s no more clean underwear. (I bet they didn’t even wear underwear in Orkney five thousand years ago, clean or otherwise.)

All right, so maybe Skara Brae isn’t for permanent relocation. But a nice vacation?

And then those sand dunes came along 4.500 years ago and ruined everything! Why do these things always happen to me?

THOSE WERE THE DAYS

[A story.]

I’m quite certain Paul came with me to Andre de Renski’s housewarming party in October 1960 because back then I never went anywhere, except to work, without Paul. Although I have no specific recollection of whether or not he gave me a hard time about putting on his grey flannel suit (which I had bought for him back in our honeymoon days) in order to attend this event, he would have eventually agreed to come – preliminary objections or no — so as not to jeopardize my paycheck, which was, in a manner of speaking, our paycheck.

I do remember that it was Frauke, Andre’s nineteen-year-old German secretary and showroom receptionist, who came to the penthouse door to greet us when we stepped out of the elevator. She was looking delectable in an emerald green taffeta cocktail dress and high heels; the dress swished as she clicked her way across the polished wood parquet floor. She apparently had gone home to change after work; in the showroom, she always wore a slim skirt and cashmere sweater, with a string of pearls.

As we entered the living room, I introduced her to Paul; she then introduced us to her escort, who was sitting in a yellow brocade wing chair. A polite, neatly combed man in a dark suit. His name was Matthew Holmes (as he reminded me when we met again sometime afterwards). I found out later Frauke had already been living with him for at least a couple of months, although they were not officially a couple and gave no indication that his accompanying her to Andre’s party was anything other than a social accommodation. I probably offered him a civil smile. Then Andre hurried over and swept us away.

Andre was a new client of Pagel & Cohen, the ad agency where I had recently been hired to write copy. He had come from Paris in August to introduce a French silver company to the American market. Why he had invited me and Stan Epstein, the art director who was designing his advertising program, to his housewarming was not clear. Stan thought it might be only an outburst of youthful good spirits. However, Norm Pagel and Herb Cohen, who ran their eponymous agency together, decided it made good business sense for us go.

So there I was in my one really good dress, a black cashmere knit bought at a small intimidating shop on Madison Avenue during the previous post-Christmas sale. When I was well girdled, as now, it was very becoming; I felt chic and ready for anything. Unfortunately, Paul and I spent the whole evening talking to Stan. The other guests were all French businessmen and two Frenchwomen who did something for Vogue, a seemingly self-contained francophone group I didn’t feel sufficiently secure in spoken French to approach.

We left early. Paul and I hadn’t been getting along for some time, and I ‘d been looking forward to this Friday evening housewarming as a way to delay the onset of the weekend’s bickering. But there was just so much Stan and I could say to each other that we hadn’t already said in the office, and Paul wasn’t helping. As we stepped into the elevator, Andre rushed over again, this time clutching a bottle of Pommard, which he thrust into my hand. He said he was tellement desole, so very sorry, that we were leaving before we’d had a chance to chat, and that he wanted us to have something to enjoy over the weekend. He may not have meant both of us; the word you is singular as well as plural in English. He gave me what could have been a deeply sorrowful look. Although French, he had Slavic eyes. I didn’t thrust the bottle back, a serious mistake. The invitation to the housewarming had already sent up Paul’s antenna. We argued about what the Pommard meant, or didn’t mean, all the way home on the crosstown bus.

The Pommard may have meant what Paul suspected. During a meeting with Herb, Norm and Stan the following week, Andre pulled me to one side of the conference room on the pretext of showing me some ideas he had roughed out for future ads. “We must have lunch,” he whispered urgently.

“Didn’t you forget something?” I whispered back. “I’m married.”

His eyes looked tragic. “You can’t even have lunch?”

I consulted the Hungarian about this whispered invitation during my next visit to his office on East 86th Street. I had been seeing him two evenings a week for over a year. He did have a proper name, clotted with linked consonants and therefore difficult to pronounce, but I found myself unable to use it except when writing out checks in payment for treatment. Naming him might have turned him into a regular human being who used branded toothpaste and wore pajamas and maybe even yelled at his wife now and then. If compelled to bring him into a conversation, as when explaining to Paul why I might be late getting home after work, I always sidestepped the linked consonants by referencing his nationality. And when I was by myself, he needed no name. Where in the Old Testament do you find the name of God?

The Hungarian did not disapprove of lunch with Andre, if it stayed lunch. However, he did believe the patient should make no major familial changes during treatment. He may also have had some reservations about the veracity of my accounts of unhappy married life; after all, it was Paul who had initially obtained his name from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and insisted I go see him, to find out why I was evading my marital responsibilities by taking too many naps on weekend afternoons.

“Ma, honeybunch,” he said to me now. The ma was not actually a Hungarian word. It had become part of his permanent vocabulary in Italy, after he climbed over an Alp to escape the Soviets when they invaded Hungary. (He had a romantic past.) “A little flirtation is not so terrible. It might cheer you up. Make your husband more attentive.”

My husband was attentive enough, actually. Although he refused to fritter away his creative years by earning a living (at thirty-eight he was still waiting to be discovered as a great playwright), I had no complaints about Paul’s horizontal skills. When we darkened the room so that I could pretend he was someone else, he brought me off regularly. Of course, I wished I didn’t have to pretend.

“More than lunch is not an issue,” I said, sidestepping further discussion of Paul’s amatory style with what I hoped was charm. “You think I’d risk losing my job by messing around with a client? Then I wouldn’t be able to pay you!”

My preparations for the approved lunch consisted of cashing a birthday check from my father and buying a fitted black wool boucle suit at Henri Bendel. Paul knew nothing about the check because it had been mailed to the office. He’d been without paid employment since we’d come to New York three years before, and my father was no dummy. I had never worn anything so expensive. Just buttoning the jacket cheered me up. Paul didn’t even notice the new suit.

Andre was double-parked in a bright red Alfa Romeo convertible in front of the building on Madison Avenue where Pagel & Cohen had its offices. There was a Longchamps in the lobby, but chain restaurants did not figure in Andre’s universe. Top down, we drove six blocks to The Brasserie, where he double-parked again.

“Won’t you get a ticket?” I asked.

With a delightful Gallic smile he opened the door on my side. “C’est la vie!” Then we dodged oncoming cars and circled the Alfa Romeo to the pavement. He took my arm to descend The Brasserie’s stairs. “Beautiful suit,” he said.

We had Beaujolais and steak tartare (a first for me), which the waiter prepared tableside with many flourishes. Desultory chitchat about the silver campaign soon segued into more personal matters. He was twenty-seven (he said), divorced, a father; his little girl was in France with her mother. His English, underlaid with the merest soupcon of delicious French accent, was from England, where he had gone to school. He was delighted to learn my parents were Russian; he himself, though born in Paris, was the grandson of Polish aristocrats, ousted from their castles during some late nineteenth-century Polish brouhaha. We were therefore both of Slavic blood. I said my parents considered themselves Jewish. Aha! he exclaimed. We were more alike than I knew. He had a Jewish grandmother. He leaned towards me. “I find you fascinating,” he said softly. “Tell me who are you. I want to know everything.”

Tell me who are you. It had been such a long time since anyone wanted to know. I wasn’t used to wine at lunch. Whatever slid out of me, about myself and my ill-advised marriage, it must have been too much.

“You poor darling,” he murmured gently when our tiny espresso cups were empty. “You deserve so much better. I want to make it up to you.”

How does one respond to that?

He paid the bill. Outside in the bright fall sunshine, the Alfa Romeo sported a ticket on its jaunty windshield. I said I would walk back to the office. (I needed to cool my cheeks.) He nodded, deftly removed the offending ticket from view, and slid into the driver’s seat. “Be warned,” he said. “I am going to court you as no one has ever courted you.”

“Andre! Don’t be silly!” I started to giggle.

He signaled and began to pull out into traffic. “Yes, and I will never know how many other men are courting you.” He looked back at me, we stared at each other for a moment and he added, “Of course, you will never know how many other women I am courting. It will be so-o-o exciting!”

I think he blew me a kiss, but it’s hard to be sure. My head was throbbing with wine and compliments and the noise of traffic. Then the little red Alfa Romeo was gone.

What nonsense, I thought as I wobbled the six blocks back to work. Who wants to be one of a gaggle of women being courted at once? Divorced or not divorced, I thought, he must not know anything about real life. All the same, it had certainly been fun. My life needed some fun. How I wished I were free to play!

Alas, I was not. Back at my desk and sober again, I did risk/benefit analysis. Andre was young — two and a half years younger than me — and probably undependable. He pleased; he diverted; he inspired no real desire. Then there was Paul’s temper. What if he found out? Would he hit me? Divorce me? Adultery was grounds in New York. Would I also lose the Hungarian if Norm and Herb found out and fired me? I didn’t have even emergency cash of my own. I was walking around with five dollars in my wallet for weekly subway money; all the rest of my pay went to Paul. Where would I be without a job and, worse, without the Hungarian?

The upshot of these ruminations was to table thoughts of Andre for now and do what I could safely do. The following Friday I used twenty-five dollars of the contents of my pay envelope to open a savings account in a bank near the office. I explained the shortfall in net salary to Paul as an increase in social security withholding. He didn’t like it, but since he didn’t get paid himself anymore he had no basis for questioning it. In the wrong things he trusted me. Although I no longer thought that marriage, especially a bad one, was necessarily forever, I wasn’t actually planning to leave him, especially given the Hungarian’s ground rules. On the other hand, how could it hurt to build myself a private little nest egg, just in case? After all I was the one who was doing the earning. I kept the bankbook deep in the zippered inner compartment of my handbag, below a thick wad of Kleenex.

It took what seemed a long time for my secret account to grow. In the meanwhile, I went on — more or less uncomplainingly — with my domestic weekend routine: cleaning our two-room apartment near Needle Park, dragging a shopping cart five blocks down Broadway to the A & P and then back again, cooking a week’s worth of the indigestible meals that Paul remembered from his mother’s kitchen and loved so well. (Kartoffelglossen was a particular favorite.) Paul did most of the talking when we were in the apartment together. If I ventured to disagree about something, his response was always, “I am King in this house!” That would have made me Queen, I guess. But if I had dared mention it, he would certainly have stalked, aggrieved, into the other room. On such occasions, I did fall back on pleasant reveries of Andre. He might not have been appropriate second husband material. But why not a sort of stepping stone to the next part of my permanent life? These were, of course, just reveries and could comfortably co-exist with making no major familial change. Understandably, I didn’t waste expensive therapeutic time discussing them with the Hungarian.

In any event Andre’s promised courtship was not really getting off the ground. His social recreation seemed for now to consist mainly of successful pursuit of the Four Hundred. You could read in Cholly Knickerbocker’s column about his many evenings out with young ladies bearing last names associated with banks, railroads and manufacturing empires owned by their fathers and uncles. Once he even showed up in Walter Winchell’s column as “that dashing young Frenchman who’s taking Café Society by storm.”

Nonetheless, it soon became apparent to Herb and Norm that he preferred dealing with them through me. When he didn’t pay his bill on time, which was more and more often, they began sending me over to the showroom to collect. “Hello, hello,” sunny blonde Frauke would sing out from under her impeccable beehive of hair as I stepped from the elevator. “How nice to see you!” She sat alone at a glass-topped reception desk, looking both friendly and gorgeous. Andre’s office was in the back. I never saw a customer at any time I was there, and sometimes wondered what the two of them might be up to by themselves all day long. I even chaffed Andre about it once, while he was writing out a long overdue check for three thousand dollars to Cohen & Nagel.

“With Frauke? That’s nonsense. She’s just a child.” He tore the signed check out of the ledger and handed it to me. “Besides,” he added, “she has a perfectly nice American boyfriend. Matthew I think his name is. He does law, doesn’t he? Why would I want to interfere with that?” Then he walked me to the door, his arm around my waist. “But how are you?” he asked. “Still with that awful husband, yes? You must come to a party anyway. Next week, without him.”

I knew from Frauke that Andre had begun to give many parties now that he had his penthouse tastefully decorated. So I didn’t take this invitation as a particularly personal gesture; he was simply being hospitable. But I decided to go anyway, if only to show I was still his friend despite his laissez faire attitude towards invoices. I told Paul that Herb and Norm wanted me there because it was good for client relations. Although Herb and Norm knew nothing about Andre’s invitation I was sure that if they had known, they would have wanted me to accept. Paul was not happy to dine alone on leftover sauerbraten, but if you’re going to set yourself up as King of the House, you deserve a certain amount of payback. Besides, it would be lovely to put on my good dress again and get out of the apartment for an evening.

There seemed fewer francophones in attendance at this party. Then I saw across the room, in the middle of the gold brocade sofa, a lady having her hand kissed by several gentlemen. I cornered Frauke, in some respects a fountain of information, and inquired. Frauke explained. The lady was a princesse de France. But France was a republic, wasn’t it? “Oh, she lives in New York just like the rest of us,” added Frauke, who was in possession of the addresses and phone numbers of every guest. “It’s only her blood that’s royal. Two-hundred year old blood.” She was leaning against the mantelpiece, on which there were now two neat stacks of parking tickets. “Don’t laugh,” she cautioned. “Andre’s careful not to offend.”

Andre himself introduced me to the other guests: I was his lovely and brilliant copywriter, he said, and a very good friend. I met a stout balding Zenith executive who told me, in slightly German-accented English, that I was extremely charming and he would like to do something for me if I would let him. I met the quite attractive personnel director of Equitable Life who put both his hands on my upper arms while confessing that his third marriage, to a French countess, was on the rocks but as he couldn’t afford to do anything about it they were chained together for eternity. I met an editor of Modern Bride, fortyish and redheaded, who said she was over the moon for Andre and wanted to know all about him; she seemed to think I was an authority. I went to an empty space near the drinks cart for a breather.

“Hello again,” said Matthew Holmes, who was standing there.

I must have looked blank. “The housewarming? Frauke’s friend? I see I made a great impression.”

Ah, the polite male escort. “Yes of course! Please do forgive me.”

“Forgiven.” We exchanged names a second time. His gaze turned towards Frauke’s blonde beehive as it made its way from one group of Andre’s guests to another. Then he asked where Paul was. My own eyes were following slender graceful Andre as he glided here and there, bestowing and receiving cheek kisses; I wished he would glide in our direction. “Paul hates these things,” I said, finally. Matthew Holmes glanced back at me. “So do I.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Looking out for my interests.”

“Your interest looks as if she can take care of herself.”

“I’m sure she can. That’s what worries me.”

“Oh?”

He changed the subject. “Why are you?”

“Why am I what?”

“Here.”

“Work.” (The easiest answer.)

“This is work?”

“Norman Pagel thinks so.”

“Then I guess you could call it that.” He had a pleasantly normal sort of voice. I thought he was probably a native New Yorker. Like me.

“Tell me,” I asked suddenly. “Do some of these people strike you as weird? As if they’re living in some other world?”

“Ah, you’ve noticed.” Now he turned back in my direction.

“I don’t understand what Andre sees in them.”

“If Andre’s your client, I can’t tell you.”

“Andre’s Norm’s client.”

He shrugged. “Same difference.” After a moment’s thought he relented somewhat. “You see that?” He pointed to a small gold-framed photo of a young woman taken outdoors against a cloudless blue sky; it was on the end of the mantelpiece closest to us, away from the parking tickets.

“You mean his sister?” I said.

“Is that what Andre told you? He told Frauke she was his cousin, who died several years ago. Half an hour ago I heard him tell that redhead” — he lifted his chin in the direction of the editor of Modern Bride — “that she’s a married woman in France with whom he’s hopelessly in love.”

I didn’t like this information. Or that Andre was not coming over to the drinks cart. Didn’t he realize I couldn’t wait till the end of the party for him to have some time for me? My watch said 10:00. “I have to go,” I said. “There’s work tomorrow. Nice talking to you.”

“My pleasure.” He made no move to walk me to the door, and I didn’t expect him to. By the time the elevator reached the building lobby, I had stopped thinking about him. The woman in the gold-framed photo was another matter.

The next time I was sent to the showroom with an unpaid invoice, I tackled the question head on.

“Andre, do you really have a sister?”

He was having trouble finding the company checkbook ledger among all the papers on his desk. “A sister? Yes, of course. Why?”

“And a pretty cousin, who died?”

This question seemed to surprise him. “People talk too much.” Was he annoyed? He began pulling out drawers and rummaging in them briskly. Then he slammed them all shut without replying yes or no. “Listen, darling,” he said. “This is a bad time. How about you come back tomorrow and we take care of the tiresome money then?” He rose to walk me out without waiting for an answer — depriving me of an opening to inquire, coquettishly of course, if he were by any chance hopelessly in love. No great loss. I already suspected what I would hear: “Only with you, darling, only with you.”

The agency was going easy on Andre’s increasingly delinquent payment history. They had just nabbed a big new account which was occupying all their attention: a German beer about to invade the United States and Canada with a huge advertising budget. I wondered why two New Jersey guys named Cohen and Nagel who had been at least in their thirties during the height of the Third Reich and by now were certainly aware of what had gone on there, were so eager to do business with citizens of the German Republic who were once probably Nazi officers. But I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. Providentially, Herb decided he would do all the beer copy himself; he said he wanted to keep me free for “soft” products, of interest to women.

Then the Hungarian bought a house for his family (they had been renting in the Bronx) and moved his practice to an office with a separate entrance at the back of the house. The house and office, he said, were bullet-proof; they had been built by the Mafia. I never did understand his pride in this feature of the purchase, unless it had to do with his early days in Hungary during the war. All the same, I followed him without hesitation to his new fortress in Forest Hills. It meant riding the E or F train there and back, and not getting home again until well after 9 p.m. That was okay with me — it meant less time with Paul, more time to daydream on the long return ride two evenings a week.

It was not okay with Paul. He declared I had had enough therapy and raised a rolled newspaper at me. As if I were a bad dog, I thought. The following week, his frustration with my reluctance to give up the Hungarian took the form of shaking me very hard as I stood with my back to a kitchen wall. A can opener was mounted directly behind my head. He narrowly missed slamming me against it. What would come next? Slaps? Blows? That’s all I needed, I thought. This was real and it was happening to me. Whatever the Hungarian’s views on familial life changes during treatment, if I was ever going to get out and start over, I had better do it while I was still unbattered and had all my teeth.

I confided in Stan, the art director. He called his lawyer. I was soon in possession of the name of another lawyer, who specialized in divorce and was cheap. I.M. Reddy, Esq. Was the odd name of this person an omen? Heart in mouth, I telephoned for a lunch hour appointment. The address turned out to be a questionable-looking office up a tall flight of narrow musty stairs on West 42nd Street.

Attorney Reddy, by contrast, turned out to be astonishingly short. “Call me Irma,” she said reassuringly, extending her hand slightly upward to reach mine as I gasped for breath at her door. Despite her unimpressive appearance, Irma Reddy was masterful. After I had given her a hundred dollar retainer, prudently withdrawn in advance from my secret account, and then explained the facts of my domestic situation, she knew exactly how to proceed.

**************

You want to know what happened next, don’t you? Of course you do. Let me be brief: Seven months later, I was a genuine divorcee, thanks to a decree from Tijuana, Mexico, typed in two languages and embossed with two red wax seals, from which dangled two glossy red ribbons. Irma was subsequently reluctant to let me go; she proposed dinner and who knew what else afterwards, but I demurred, so what could she do?

Paul, my now former husband, borrowed some money from his mother in Rochester, New York, to pay Columbia University for accrediting him as a New York City high school teacher, after which he vanished into gainful employment in the bowels of Queens.

Andre was let go by his silver company before his promised courtship of me came to fruition but somehow talked himself into a much more exciting job for Philip Graham as a Washington Post correspondent covering events in French Indo-China (not yet Vietnam), perhaps because he was bilingual. He came back to New York briefly a year later. He had become deaf in one ear. (From gunfire?) He pronounced me a “pure” woman and proposed marriage in the subjunctive, conditional on my understanding he could never be faithful. This did not seem like a good idea. He agreed it was probably not in my best interests, and thereupon disappeared from my life forever, although he is apparently still alive as I write this, and can be found on Wikipedia, with photograph. He appears to have kept most of his hair but has lost two and a half years since we knew each other. He is now five years younger than I am.

It may come as no surprise that as soon as Frauke found herself a deeper pocket and moved out of Matthew’s apartment, he called me up. I’d like to tell you we had a happy ending together, but there were only about three dates before it went south.

Actually, we were all pretty much nuts, when you think about it. Except maybe the Hungarian. But he took early retirement about fifteen years later and moved to Clearwater Beach, Florida. His widow still lives there.

S. SHARES SOME FAMILY HISTORY

[A story]

S.’s mother refused to marry his father unless her own mother could live with them. S.’s father must have wanted to marry S.’s mother very much, because he said yes.

S.’s mother was so attached to her own mother because she was all her mother had. When her mother arrived in the United States from Poland, she was already a widow with two very young children. S.’s mother was three. Her baby sister was less than a year old. S.’s mother’s mother, without husband or income, gave the baby up for adoption to a Jewish family from New Brunswick, Canada. After the sisters were grown, S.’s mother tried to get in touch, for her own sake as well as her mother’s. But the younger sister refused to have anything to do with her, and could not forgive their mother for having given her away.

S.’s father was not a religious man. His new mother-in-law was a very religious woman. Although she had lived in the United States since S.’s mother was three, the mother-in-law had never learned English. She communicated with the world, and with her new son-in-law, mainly through her daughter, his new wife. And only in Yiddish. S.’s mother, who S. suspects never cared much for religion herself, kept a kosher home for her mother’s sake. When S. was eight or nine, his father began taking him out to the fights on Friday nights (the holiest night of the week), where they would eat trafe hot dogs (unclean! unclean!) slathered in mustard and relish. “Don’t tell your mother,” his father would say.

S.’s father and S.’s mother’s mother hated each other. When he was really annoyed at her presence under his roof, he called her “KUR-veh.” It meant “whore.” Nothing could have been farther from the truth, but it must have been the worst word for a woman in his vocabulary. He spoke English perfectly well; he used the Yiddish word so S.’s mother’s mother could understand it. For variety, he sometimes also wished cholera on her, also in Yiddish. Since he was the breadwinner, she had no recourse but to make herself scarce whenever he came home from work. S. cannot remember their having been in the same room together more than once or twice, and then never for long.

The family lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where S.’s father ran an Army-Navy store in a rundown neighborhood. The apartment had two bedrooms. S.’s father and mother took the bigger bedroom, and the mother’s mother the smaller bedroom. When S.’s sister was born, they set up a cot for her in her parents’ room. When S. was born three years later, he slept with his grandmother. In the same big bed. He slept there until he was eleven, when he woke one morning with an erection and refused ever to share a bed with her again. Another arrangement was then made for him: the living room couch.

S.’s grandmother adored him. He was the Boy. He was going to be a rabbi. Like her uncle. At least, those were her plans for him. She had a rabbinical school in Poland all picked out. (Had she succeeded in getting him a place there, he would have arrived in Poland just before Hitler’s armies marched in.)

When S.’s father was out of the house working, she would creep into the kitchen to do her own special cooking. (S.’s mother also worked during the day, helping his father out in the store.) He remembers his grandmother rendering chicken fat, to be used instead of butter for cooking fleisch (meat) meals, and giving him special treats of it, salted and smeared on rye bread. She also gave him the chicken necks rendered of their fat to chew on and then spit out. They were called gribenes. His sister didn’t get these treats. His grandmother said it was their secret together. The only other memorable aspect of her cuisine S. now recalls was the spaghetti — boiled and mixed with a can of Heinz vegetarian baked beans.

S. accepted the fact of his grandmother. But the woman he says he truly loved was his mother. “Tatele mein,” she called him when she got back from work in the evenings. “My little man.” But what did he love? He has few memories of her, other than her veneration for learning, her love of opera on the radio, her ardent support for FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, her rejection of makeup, her unending yearning to be reconciled with her little sister, and her great fondness for the state of Georgia, where she had apparently spent several happy years as a child after her mother found a second husband and lived for a time in Georgia with him.

Matters in the apartment came to a head shortly after S. began sleeping on the living room couch. S.’s father put his foot down; pre-marital promise or no, he wanted his mother-in-law out! By then he was able to pay rent for her on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Except how could she live alone? She couldn’t speak English. She was getting old. The solution S.’s parents devised was to send both of their children to live with her during the week. S.’s sister, by then fourteen, would do the shopping and help with the housework after school.

But why did S. have to go, too? To this day, he’s not sure. At eleven, he could have managed in Bridgeport until his parents came home in the evenings. Was it so easy for his mother to part with her tatele mein, her little man? He thinks she simply deferred to her mother once again. There were better Hebrew schools on the lower East Side. And in one or two years, yeshiva — the equivalent of high school for the devout. A wonderful preparation for Poland!

From then on, S. and his sister saw their parents only on Sundays. S. did not do particularly well at the yeshiva. At sixteen, he even took a forbidden Saturday job as an usher at the movies, where he luxuriated in sinful appreciation of what was on the screen. But thanks to the hard work of their parents at the Army-Navy store, both he and his sister were able to go away to college, their tuitions and other expenses fully paid for. (The Polish option was not considered.)

After earning an advanced degree in Spanish literature, his sister subsided into deferential marriage to a tall, well-spoken but extremely religious man who took her away to Canada, where she spent much of her life in motherhood of four children. S. says she was never a happy woman.

S. himself became an M.D. His parents were very proud. Afterwards, however, he married a lapsed Catholic. She was French and charming and had a cute behind. But although she made a nominal conversion to Judaism, when she came to meet the family bearing a dozen roses, S.’s grandmother flung the roses on the floor. S. does not comment further on this incident, or indicate whether his mother apologized for her mother to the bride.

When S. talks about these things, he says his mother, now long dead of Alzheimers, was an angel. But if asked what kind of angel would repeatedly choose her mother over her little son, he squirms. Then he adds that although he can remember very little about his mother as she was when he was growing up, his sister — who shared their parents’ bedroom until she was fourteen — always said she was an angel. Finally he asks, somewhat rhetorically: What choice did his mother have?

A hard question to answer. However, S.’s medical specialty is interesting. Even though he enjoyed radiology best during his medical training, he elected to do psychiatry. Child and adolescent psychiatry. We might also note that although he still understands some Hebrew and Yiddish, his ability to converse in either of these languages has faded. He hasn’t gone to synagogue or temple for years and does not associate with any Yiddish speakers. He calls himself a secular humanist.

One of S.’s sister’s four children was gay. (Her very religious husband never found out.) This son killed himself when he discovered he was sick. Two of her three other children have five children between them. However, her youngest daughter (the one without children) refuses to speak to the other two, and the oldest daughter is not on good terms with her own older daughter.

S. himself is the father of three children, by two wives. His daughter, now in her forties, has many problems and gives him much heartache. She is unlikely ever to marry or have children of her own. The two sons each have a child apiece, but they are very far away and not particularly communicative, and he has very little opportunity to see them.

Although S. can only surmise the degree of torment his mother and father experienced in their marriage, he points out that from their torment came, after much perseverance and additional torment, seven great-grandchildren (and recently two baby great-great-grandchildren). Thus the generations succeed each other. However, what else we can make of what he has shared with us I cannot really say.

Is the pain and suffering of life tolerable because there are also movies, hot dogs with mustard and relish, gribenes and cute behinds along the way? That is a question each of us must answer for ourselves.

HOW I GOT TO BE BORN IN AMERICA

[This piece first appeared under another title in the Spring 2010 issue of Persimmontree, an online magazine of the arts by women over sixty. The editors called it “A Story.” It is a story, about another story. But whatever the title, it’s what’s at the end that counts.]

***

I was fifteen when I learned how my parents had managed to get out of Russia. I found out only because Mr. Mirsky had come to dinner. My mother and father did not usually discuss the past. While I was still a little girl, I did sometimes ask my father why he had left, but I never thought to ask how. I was sure that if you were a grownup and decided to go somewhere, there was no problem about it. You just went.

My father always answered that he had left because of Stalin’s mustache. The mustache scratched when Stalin kissed him.

“Why was Stalin kissing you?” I would demand.

“Because he was my uncle.”

“But Daddy, he wasn’t your uncle!”

“Of course he was my uncle,” my father would laugh. “In Russia, he’s everybody’s uncle. That’s why they call him ‘Uncle Joe.’”

Well, even I knew that was nonsense. Stalin never kissed my father.

Then came the war—the Second World War—and the Soviet Union became our ally. It was suddenly okay to have a Russian last name (although people were still always asking you to spell it). I even stopped wishing my parents had named me Joan or Barbara, and focused on getting the teachers at P.S. 99 to pronounce my first name correctly.

My father met Mr. Mirsky at the Marshall Chess Club about a year after the war. There must already have been early rumblings in the papers of the Cold War to come, but it wasn’t called that yet. In any event I didn’t read newspapers much. By then, I had plenty of homework from Hunter High and spent all my leftover time being hopelessly in love with Leonard Bernstein.

Mr. Mirsky had emigrated from Russia earlier than my father and mother, while the Czar was still on the throne and it was easy to leave, but had gone to England, not America. (He had even flown in the Royal Air Force during World War I.) Afterwards he had married a rich Argentinian and now lived with her in Buenos Aires most of the time. He was temporarily in New York, at a small residential hotel (confided my mother), so as to make sure that his daughter, who was at Vassar, met the “right” sort of young man. He was trim, rather good-looking for an older gentleman, and had a charming English accent with a faint underlay of Russian and beautiful manners. He always kissed my mother’s hand when he arrived for one of the occasional Sunday dinners to which my father invited him, and he always brought a fifth of Haig & Haig Pinch, which he emptied mainly by himself during the course of the afternoon, after my father had had his habitual single shot and my mother her habitual single sip.

Although I was several years younger than Mr. Mirsky’s daughter, I was consumed with envy of her. Rich mother, distinguished father, Vassar, and her choice of an appropriate husband delivered on a silver platter! I therefore lingered at the table after these dinners, so as to gather every crumb of information that might fall from Mr. Mirsky’s lips about this fortunate young woman. My father was less interested in Mr. Mirsky’s problems with his daughter’s romantic life. His usual discretion and courtesy dissolved by good food and Scotch, he had a dismaying postprandial tendency to reminisce. Always hoping he would be quick about it so we could get back to Mr. Mirsky’s daughter—who after several of her father’s dinners at our house had somehow managed to become entangled with a Life photographer of whom both her parents disapproved—I would stay fixed in my chair (the alternative being greasy pans in the kitchen sink). And so, on one occasion, I heard the following story:

In 1921 my father was nineteen years old and in the third year of the engineering program at the Institute of Technology in Baku. Baku was then still part of “White” Russia. (Mr. Mirsky confirmed this with a nod.) In many of his classes, there was a slightly older, very serious student with round spectacles who never chatted with anyone and was not part of any social group my father knew of. But because they were enrolled in so many of the same lectures, they began to greet each other when they met in the halls, and once in a while they lent each other their notes when one or the other had to be absent from class. Then the Red Army completed its long southward march from Moscow and reached Baku. The solitary bespectacled student disappeared from school.

One day, two policemen rapped at the door of the apartment where my father’s family lived. He was to come at once to the Central Police Station. What had he done wrong? He told his frightened parents not to expect him back. However, after he was dragged to the station and roughly pushed into an office set off from the main room, who did he see behind the large desk in front of the windows? His missing classmate!

“Have a seat,” said the bespectacled fellow, in a not unpleasant voice. “Would you like a cigarette? A coffee?”

Such courtesy! And what’s more, an apology of sorts: The police should not have manhandled him. They were new recruits. Not yet trained. A weary sigh from Mr. Spectacles. What could he do with such peasants? “Please, have a seat,” he urged again. (My father was still standing.) “It is not, of course, a criminal matter.”

Two small cups of bitter black coffee appeared. Bottoms up together! And with the coffee, a modest confession. All the time the two of them had been attending lectures at the Institute together, Mr. Spectacles had secretly been head of the local Bolshevik party cell. With the arrival of the Red Army, there was no longer need for secrets. As my father could see, he was the new Chief of Police.

(How old could he be, my father wondered. Twenty-two? Twenty-three?)

But then, enough with pleasantries! Time for business. Bringing his empty cup down on the desk with a loud clap, the young Chief of Police briskly explained that he had ordered my father brought to him because he was the only student from the Institute he knew by name. Since he was now very busy with his new responsibilities, he had no more time to go to class and would therefore appreciate it if my father could fill him in on a regular basis with what was going on there so he could sit for the exams at the end of the academic year.

“’Appreciate it!’” said my father to Mr. Mirsky. “As if I had a choice!”

And so for the rest of the academic year, my nineteen-year-old father came daily to the Central Police Station after school, trying not to see what was taking place in the main room as he passed through it. He sat nervously on the extra chair in the inner office, where he read aloud his notes of that day’s lectures while his former classmate nodded thoughtfully behind the big desk and, as my father put it, signed orders for execution by firing squad. The small cup of bitter coffee he was offered each time didn’t help.

After a while, he couldn’t stand it any more. It wasn’t just the mandatory sessions in the police station. Life under this new regime was becoming hopeless. He didn’t want to live in fear that the next time the police rapped on the door it would be a “criminal matter.” He didn’t want his family to have to share their apartment, their kitchen, their bathroom with three other families they didn’t know. He didn’t want meals to consist primarily of sandy bread and moldy potatoes, brought back from the countryside by his two sisters on their bicycles. Once he managed to scrape together enough money to buy his mother a pound of butter on the black market for her birthday. He saw the butter, paid for the butter. But what got wrapped up for him to take home was a pound block of ice that melted on the kitchen table as his mother unwrapped it. He had to leave.

Mr. Mirsky shook his head. “1921? Too late. You needed papers for that. No more getting on the train and taking off for Paris or London.”

“Well,” said my father, “I was young. And I was stifling. There was no harm in trying. But not Europe,” he added. “I was thinking America.”

And should he bring his older brother with him? Then there was my mother, just seventeen, whom he had met a few months before. He asked if she wanted to come to America, too. She had to go ask her mother. “If you can get out, get out!” her mother told her. “There’s nothing for you here now.”

With what must have been considerable courage, my father came with three sets of the necessary papers, filled out except for the all-important signature, to his former fellow student, the new Chief of Police—who by now seemed also to be functioning as the de facto head of the provisional government in Baku—and told a brazen lie.

He, his brother, and his half-sister would all very much like to study in Germany during the next semester, he said. There were some important courses there, not being offered at the Institute or the University in Baku, which they felt were necessary to their education. Would it be possible for their departure to be authorized for this limited purpose?

The Chief of Police peered over his spectacles at my father, then looked away. He did not ask anything about these very important courses, or where they were being offered, or if my father or his brother or his so-called half-sister with the different last name spoke German, or when they all planned to return. Instead, after a moment he picked up his pen and quickly signed all three sets of papers.

“Did he know you were lying and not coming back?” I asked.

“Of course he knew,” said Mr. Mirsky.

“Then why did he do it?”

“One good turn deserves another?” suggested my father. “He later rose very high, you know. Very high.” He looked meaningfully at Mr. Mirsky.

“So?” said Mr. Mirsky, leaning forward. “Who was he?”

“You can’t guess?”

Mr. Mirsky shook his head no.

“Lavrenti Beria,” said my father softly.

Mr. Mirsky examined his glass for some time. “That’s quite a story,” he said, finally.

After he left, my father came to find me in my room. “Don’t tell that story to anyone else,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let you hear it.”

“Why not?” I demanded. “Isn’t it true?”

“Of course it’s true,” said my father. “That’s why you mustn’t spread it around.”

“But it’s such a good story,” I protested. “It could even be in Reader’s Digest.”

My father sighed. “Do you know who Beria is?” he asked.

Did I know? What did he think? That I was stupid? Lavrenti Beria was Stalin’s executioner. Head of NKVD, the Soviet secret police agency that later became the KGB. He was responsible for millions and millions of deaths of innocent people. He was a bad bad man. Just looking at his face in the newsreels, you could tell he was evil. That’s what made it a story, for heaven’s sake.

“You never know what they’ll think,” my father said.

“What who will think? Who is ’they’?” He was so exasperating. “You’re not in Russia anymore, Daddy. This isn’t the Soviet Union. You’re an American citizen.”

Our voices brought my mother out of the kitchen. I could see her pale, worried face next to his. Two anxious people standing in the doorway of my room who did not want to hear from me about freedom of speech, or this being a free country, or any of the other things I had learned in Civics. Although they had managed to escape from a place where fear had darkened their lives and were now in a nice three-and-a-half room apartment with good light in Queens, they were both forever alert to gossamer threats of danger everywhere.

“Be on the safe side,” said my father. “Don’t tell.”

They were my parents.

I promised not to tell.

The brother who was supposed to come with my father to America decided at the last minute to remain behind. My mother and father never saw their families again. But they eventually moved from New York to Los Angeles, and later to Palm Springs, where they lived long and relatively tranquil lives under the California sun. By contrast, my mother’s brother and my father’s brother and two sisters in Baku all died before them—one banished to Siberia and an unknown fate during the Kirov purges (for which Lavrenti Beria was responsible), the others succumbing to various diseases after shortened lives of constricted deprivation.

I became a lawyer after college, eventually married, and had two sons—each of whom now has a little daughter and son of his own. That makes seven of us, all American born, who could be said to owe our existence to Lavrenti Beria. He doesn’t get full credit, of course. However, one could make an argument that but for him, we would not exist. Which excuses nothing about his life, except that it’s interesting to think about. On the other hand, it’s highly improbable that our seven lives were foreseeable in the Central Police Station of Baku in 1921, when Beria set pen to paper on the basis of my father’s dubious explanation of his need to take leave of the better Soviet world then in birth. So if I put my professional glasses on, proximate cause just doesn’t figure into it and none of us owes Beria a thing.

What happened to Mr. Mirsky? The problem of the Life photographer soon resolved itself without his intercession; the young man was sent overseas to cover some unsavory part of the world where trouble was brewing. Several years later, when I myself was in college (although not Vassar), I learned from my mother that the daughter eventually met the scion of a publishing company (a choice apparently “right” enough for her parents) and had a very grand wedding. Her father then returned to Argentina and the rich wife and was never heard from again.

Stalin died early in 1953. Lavrenti Beria was soon afterwards either shot in his own house in June 1953 (according to his son) or executed by firing squad in December 1953 after a trial without defense counsel (according to official accounts), whereupon he began gradually to fade from popular memory. That would seem to release me now, finally and definitively, from the promise I reluctantly made my father not to tell the story I had just heard him tell Mr. Mirsky.

But after all these years it’s not, as Mr. Mirsky observed, “quite a story” any more. Not when the name in the punchline no longer inspires fear and trembling in anyone. In fact, it seems to have become quite another story—about a time when I was young and my father was alive, sitting at the dining room table, his eyes shining with pleasure as he told us what had happened when he was young, and life exciting, and the unknown future still ahead.

ON BEING OLD

(Formerly "The Getting Old Blog")

Month: November 2014

WHEN DOES “OLD” BEGIN? — A GUEST POST

ACCEPTANCE

EIGHT NON-TRADITIONAL WISHES FOR A HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

[I just couldn’t resist.]

DEAREST OF MEMORIES

A KIND OF HEAVEN (A REBLOG)

MY THREE-MINUTE ENGAGEMENT

LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU, MAYBE

JEWISH HAIKU

IN DEFENSE OF TALK THERAPY

MORE FROM MORGENBESSER

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

IS GOD PUNISHING ME BECAUSE I DON’T BELIEVE IN HIM?

MY MOST-READ POST IN CERTAIN COUNTRIES!

MY FIRST BRA(S)

SKARA BRAE: MY KIND OF PLACE

This is what 1001 Historic Sites says about it (after telling you it’s in Orkney, Scotland):

Five-thousand-year-old homes with evidence of orderliness and comfort

S. SHARES SOME FAMILY HISTORY

HOW I GOT TO BE BORN IN AMERICA

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ACCEPTANCE

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[I just couldn’t resist.]

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JEWISH HAIKU

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IS GOD PUNISHING ME BECAUSE I DON’T BELIEVE IN HIM?

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MY FIRST BRA(S)

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This is what 1001 Historic Sites says about it (after telling you it’s in Orkney, Scotland):

Five-thousand-year-old homes with evidence of orderliness and comfort

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[A story.]

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