Name Sharers

I had two Aunts Isabelle and each was mother to one of my two cousins Joan. My mother’s brother John and my father’s brother Max married women with the same first name and fathered daughters whom they both named Joan. During the early years of World War II this was, apparently a name growing in popularity. There was almost no contact between these name-sharers. With the exception of my father’s funeral, my brother’s bar mitzvah and perhaps my parent’s marriage, they never crossed the in-law barrier.

The two families couldn’t have been more different. Max and Isabel – she opted for the straightforward, egalitarian spelling without the Frenchified “le” at the end, were dyed in the deepest shades of red, card-carrying members of the Communist Party.

One “l” Isabel was born into an old Southern family: her grandfather was Mark Twain’s closest friend and boon companion. I know little about her early life in rural America. Sepia photos show that she was quite beautiful, with bobbed hair and lovely, expressive eyes. Stage acting in small theaters, with a hopeful eye towards a Broadway career, drew her to New York City.

How she met my Uncle Max, a Polish-Jewish immigrant is a story I never was told. Fleeing the Tsarist army draft, he arrived with his family at Ellis Island in 1923. He was apprenticed as a hat-maker and in time, became a union organizer for others in the trade. Not an unattractive man when young, he was small in stature, with the build of a nearly in shape lightweight boxer. By the time I knew Uncle Max, his nose had been broken and badly healed. It propped up his gold wire-rimmed glasses and he sported an upper plate of false teeth.

Max, Isabel, their first-born Joan and her brother Mike lived somewhere on the upper West Side of Manhattan in a fifth-floor walk-up across the street from an active livery stable. The apartment was a dreary colorless mess of old furniture, piles of papers and hundreds – maybe even thousands of books in English, Russian and Polish. Aside from a few pieces of folk art, and a large old Royal typewriter there was nothing of beauty in that railroad flat they inhabited.

My cousin Joan was five years older than I, and a budding beatnik. Blacks and browns were the colors of choice for her no-nonsense wardrobe. Thick glasses balanced on her slender nose, her straight dark brown hair mimicked he mother’s now pure white bob and she trod the New York streets in flimsy ballet flats. Oh, how I lusted for a pair of those!

Joan was a top-notch student at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. A math whiz, she was playing with computers when they still were the size of industrial kitchen freezers. Glibly articulate, my cousin would ramble on about cool jazz or China and the Cold War, impressing everyone with her brilliance. She and her friends hung out at libraries, art theaters and dark little coffee shops in the Village. They circulated petitions, posted flyers and joined marches protesting the plight of the disenfranchised workers of the world. She had little interest in talking to me – her bourgeois, younger, suburban cousin - when the families visited and we were forced to play together.

Being invited for holiday dinners with Max and Isabel, as Joan always called them – no Mom and Dad for her – always brought groans of ‘Oh, no, do we have to?” from my brother and me. Cooking, setting a table and hosting comfortable evenings “en famille” were not part of any Communist Party protocol. Isabel’s lame attempts to prepare the Thanksgiving turkey were always trumped by Max’s proletarian appetizer of chopped eggs and onions. Dessert was predictably ice cream and Entenmann’s cookies. The only redemption was that they lived along the route of the Macy’s Parade and we had front row seats for the spectacle.

Across the Triborough Bridge, out in Roslyn, was the suburban outpost of the other Isabelle who proudly brandished the extra, sophisticated “le” at the end of her name. She and my Uncle Johnny lived in a modest, but beautifully decorated home next to one of the great Long Island estates.

Aunt Isabelle grew up in Connecticut, the child of an eccentric Wasp and a more or less absentee, perhaps alcoholic Jewish father. She was smart and energetic, cute as a button and knew she wanted a better life. Trained as an English teacher, and working at her first job, she met my handsome uncle in the late 1930’s. He joined the Army and she followed him to Texas where he was posted in the Intelligence Service.

As a military wife, she socialized with other young homemakers, learned the niceties of entertaining and became a gourmet cook. After her beautiful daughter Joan was born, they returned to NY, bought a house in a new development near excellent schools and had their second child, my cousin Bobby.

John who grew up in the home of his beloved, but poor immigrant Grandmother was driven to complete his education on the GI Bill. He aimed his sites high for a career in the corporate world that promised a lifestyle far removed from his childhood home in a Bronx tenement. He and Aunt Isabelle made a good fit with the tennis and country club set of young Long Islanders home from the War. Money would not be a problem in their lives.

This attractive, accomplished family seemed to do everything right. Joan was their showpiece. Like her father, she had lustrous black hair and pale, lightly freckled skin. Her pert, upturned nose and slight build reflected the images in magazines of a real American beauty. She practiced her piano diligently, did well enough in school and had the charm thing down pat.

Joan went to one of those Long Island colleges/finishing schools and dabbled in teaching, traveling and charming everyone she met. She was her Daddy’s darling and she focused her energy on little else than pleasing him. Joan’s young adult life seemed filled with trips from her Manhattan bachelorette apartment to Long Island on the weekends, interspersed with jaunts to far-flung vacation spots around the world. Her career devolved from private school teacher to office temp.

Holiday dinners at the home of two “l” Isabelle were wondrous events. She had a knack for hosting soigné dinner parties and prompting clever conversations – even when children were present. The tables were set beautifully with fashionable linens and floral arrangements. Memorabilia, collected from their yearly voyages to exotic destinations was blended with tasteful silver and china to create a stage setting for the perfect holiday meal. The food was perfection – expensive cuts of meat, hothouse fruits and vegetables, sumptuous desserts – all served by Ruthie, their live-in “girl”.

For all the differences between them, the Joans had one important, life-determining commonality. Both my cousins were daughters of very happily married parents. My Aunts Isabel(le) were truly adored by their husbands and had the luxury of long marriages. Oddly enough, neither daughter has been able to create that in her own life; nor, has either had children.

Both Joans presently live in New York City. If they were coincidentally to meet, I imagine they would have no more in common today than they had during our childhoods. It’s not hard to guess which Joan works for a city agency, teaching adult literacy classes and which one is semi-retired, choosing to work glamorous PR assignments when the spirit moves her in order to pay for a cruise or explore some trendy tourist mecca. One “l” Isabel died some years ago, after my Uncle Max took exquisite care of her during a lengthy illness. Similar, loving attention was lavished by my other Aunt Isabelle upon her husband, John, before his death last year.

Do name mates have a karmic metaphysical connection? Not, it seems, in my family. In the early part of the 20th century, Isabel, in one form or another, must have been a fashionable name. Joan was a moniker I heard often when growing up in the 50s and 60s. Probably Joan Crawford or Joan Blondell, maybe even Joan of Arc spearheaded the name’s popularity. Choosing a name for a baby often seems to be more influenced by trends and pop stars than divine inspiration.

I grew up, buffeted on either side of my family by an Isabel/Joan duo. These four women had so little in common, but they manage still to share one thing – a place in my memories, part of my story.

Apology to my Garden

I most humbly apologize to my garden. My intentions are not to ignore you, as I have; rather they are nurturing, loving. I WANT a magnificent, lush, planned, welcoming greenspace. I achingly study magazine layouts and garden brochures that flood my mailbox in the early spring months. I visit Mahoney’s and garden stores every May buying perennials, peat moss and potting soil, but it is all a sham, an unkept promise of commitment.

Gardening is not my métier. Really, I don’t enjoy it very much. I don’t like bugs and slugs, with which my yard abounds. Embedding dirt under my clean fingernails strikes me as counter-productive. Poison ivy, which I have trouble identifying, and DOES grow in my yard, has caused me too much itchy discomfort to want to get into the weeds and vines that threaten to colonize my property.

We live in a Beaver Cleaver neighborhood of manicured lawns, gumdrop hedges and abundant beds of impatiens. The esthetic of 1954, replete with picket fences and flags celebrating a variety of yearly celebrations seems to be the controlling design sense up and down the street. Several mornings each week, hordes of day-workers arrive in trucks hauling massive and noisy grounds-keeping equipment. The quarter acre lots are groomed as carefully as a Robert Trent golf course. Lawn and garden care companies easily meet their yearly profit margin servicing neighborhoods such as this one.

To compound my lack of skill, I married a man whose first job was maintaining a small-town golf course. He learned mowing, weeding and mulching early on, as well as developing a healthy animus towards lawn care. Keeping the grass clipped and manicured is not something he wants to spend much time or money on. A semi-monthly attempt with a push mower satisfies his greens-keeping inclinations and just keeps us from overtly insulting the neighbors’ efforts.

Living under an ancient, massive oak tree has provided us with a relatively cool house in the summer as well as acidic soil and deep shade in the yard. Grass does not grow well and, over the years, we’ve tried to minimize its spread. By planting all varieties of shade-loving plants our hope has been that these will fill in the brownish blemishes indicating spotty grass cover.

Our efforts have been more or less successful with regard to base-line maintenance. Country casual with a hint of vegetative anarchy might best describe the effect. Each year, though, I am less inclined to hunker down and pull out the onion grass that still threatens to overtake the beds of astilbe, bleeding hearts and a host of hosta. I’ve learned that the unidentifiable nasty vine that threatens the side yard has amazing regenerative powers that defy all my efforts to tame it. Clover and dandelions enjoy the proverbial field day around here.

I’ve been trained, like a dray horse, to look at my yard wearing (imaginary) blinkers. Plants that thrive, not the weeds, grab my focus. I have managed not to see the white flowers of the onion grass, the naked areas where ground cover didn’t make it through the New England winter and the leggy spikes of “Things that don’t belong”. Weekly, or so, when the weather is not too awful, I put on my gardening gloves, grab my forked poking tool and attempt to gain some control over my property. I battle with the endless cycle of oak tree detritus – pollen fronds, branches gnawed at by cut-worms, acorns and finally, the leathery leaves of Fall. Cleaning up – with a broom or rake, is a skill set I’ve developed nicely.

I am heartily sorry for my sins against the landscape. Everything I’ve read and heard about gardening promises joys unbridled, but I have yet to tap into that wellspring. I’m doing the best I can or want to do, and hope that the muses and fairies of the woodlands will forgive me. Perhaps they can find a comfortable home in the chaos we’ve provided. I’m thinking and hoping that the perfect austerity of the surrounding houses doesn’t offer them as much of an earthly playground as our feeble and generally unsuccessful attempts at bending Mother Nature’s will.