My Lost Summer

Jerry Orbach was my fourteenth birthday present. He was the booby prize for having my long dreamed-for summer plans high-jacked.

I’m a July baby, a Cancer, and my birthday celebrations were coincidental with summer vacation, sunny days and sandy beach picnics. When I was young, pre-school, this was just fine. Daddy’s break from work in the City was always during the first two weeks of July. We would cram into the green Dodge for a road trip, driving up and down the Hudson River valley, becoming familiar with its mountains, caves and parklands. The summer I was five, Santa Claus bounced me on his lap and jovially serenaded me with a birthday song on a visit to Santa’s Village. When I was seven, we spent two weeks bunking in at a working family farm – my party was held next to the mud-bottomed swimming hole and I learned to milk a spotted cow. I drank the warm milk and ate slices of homemade cake.  I loved my summer birthdays.

We moved to New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City, when I was in third-grade. It became evident that in this new world, summer protocols were different. Most of the kids I played with during the year had plans, made months ahead by their families, to go off to sleep-away camp for eight weeks. By early July, the streets were empty and the days, eerily quiet. My city-bred parents who had believed that moving to the suburbs would be enough fun for any kid, were forced to rethink the next year’s plan and find a camp they could afford to send Stevie and me to for the summer. Otherwise, they realized, my mother would become our chauffeur and Daddy, our sometimes playmate. Or, more than likely, we two kids would kill each other out of boredom.

Overnight camps were how suburban parents got a break from the tyranny of their children. Starting mid-April, The New York Times listed summer camps in the back pages of The Magazine Section. Postage-stamp sized photos accompanying each classified ad, promised rustic lakefront cabins,  lush tennis courts and riding rings for prices comparable to a European tour. My parents, rightfully sticker-shocked, asked among their friends and learned of Wel-Met, a camp that was favored by left-leaning, Jewish, labor-friendly urban folk. It was a bare bones operation, staffed with wannabe social workers and with an affordable tuition. Black painted cardboard and tin footlockers were purchased at Sears for my brother and me and our underwear, socks and tee shirts were counted and name-tagged. Stevie, and I were put on a Peter Pan bus filled with city kids we didn’t know.  We motored out of lower Manhattan and were deposited on the western side of the Catskills for a summer in the great, green outdoors.

My usual birthday excitement paled in comparison to the exhilaration of being away from home, among a new group of potential best friends. I was no longer the not-so-fashionable, four-eyed, gap-toothed klutz, surrounded by and excluded from the in-crowd.  At Wel-Met, I reinvented myself and became one of the cool kids. For six weeks each summer, I was – at last - who I knew I was meant to be.

The camp was located in Narrowsburg, on the crook of New York State’s westward arm. Across the Delaware lay exotic Pennsylvania. The locale was rife, we were told, with old German Bundists, no friends of the immigrant offspring populating the camp. That all added to the mystique, the “you vs. them” mindset. Echoes of war-time anti-Semitism glued our summer friendships even tighter.

I learned to swim, build a lean-to in the woods, cook a meal in an open fire-pit and make friends, temporarily, with my little brother. Perched on wooden benches circling Friday night campfires, our counselors, a ragtag group of exotics from all over the world, told us stories of campers kidnapped by a local, Jew-hating maniac with the scarily evocative name of “Cropsey”. With their guitars strapped over their shoulders, the staff taught us the folk songs and the anthems of the labor movement. Instead of crooning about Clementine and her over-sized shoes, we warbled about the union girls who weren’t “afraid of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raids.” Pete Seeger and The Weavers were our rock stars, Joe McCarthy and Hitler, our enemies.

Best friends were made, practice boyfriends crept up to our cabins at night, and major crushes developed on staff members, both male and female. Summer camp was my heaven – school was an interruption tolerated for nine months so that I could experience six weeks of bliss each year. As well, I got a camp-issued birthday celebration in the mess hall with everyone singing “Happy birthday, dear Ellen”, followed by a vanilla-scented, raspberry-filled sheet cake to share with my bunkmates.

Like any other establishment, Wel-Met had its own hierarchy – based on age, since what else do children have to use as bargaining chips? The older you were, the more freedoms you had. Each age-based Unit built on the sports abilities, social awareness, and wilderness skills of the previous ones. At the end of every summer, the staff sent home reports to our parents of our progress through the ranks. The culmination of the Wel-Met experience was to become a Pioneer, one of a group of elite campers who were fourteen years old or had finished seventh grade. Being a Pioneer meant living in semi-permanent tents set apart from the rest of the camp, having more privileges and most importantly, contact with the opposite sex. Pioneers were the camp’s peerage; our left-wing, egalitarian politics counted for little - we all bowed their superiority, their ultimate coolness. Summer in the Pioneer Unit with its guarded secrets and ceremonies, was like joining a regal cult.

My goal, my dream, was, of course, to spend my fifth summer at Wel-Met as a Pioneer. After that I would be a counselor. My life would be complete. In the winter of 1960, I started reminding my parents of the deposit they needed to post in order to hold my place among the other royals slated to spend their summer in pup tent palaces. I was especially anxious to make sure that my six-week escape was insured – life at home was becoming very stressful. My brother and my parents were constantly fighting over almost everything. His behavior both in and out of school was beyond my parents’ understanding. I couldn’t wait to get away from the mess that was home.

May 1 was the deadline to send in the check securing my place among the other Wel-Met princes and princesses. I wrote notes for my parents, reminded them during conversations at dinnertime and left no opportunity for them to neglect their responsibility – writing a check to guarantee my bunk in a Pioneer tent. My summer plans were set. I would enter the kingdom. Perfection.

“Ellen, Daddy and I need to talk to you,” my mother announced one early June night. Stevie was banned to his room and we three sat down at the wrought iron, Formica-topped kitchen table.  My father explained that, although he had sent in the camp deposits for both my brother and me, he hadn’t realized that the deadline for the Pioneer Unit was earlier than the cut-off for the rest of the camp, and he had, in fact, missed it. I wouldn’t be able to go to camp that summer.

I’m sure that I reacted badly to this most unexpected announcement, but, I knew that crying and foot-stomping wouldn’t change the course of the coming summer. I was not going to be a Pioneer with all my summer friends. I went off to my room, licking my new and very unfair wounds. My parents had failed me.

Several weeks later, Daddy came, as he often did at the end of the day, to sit on my bed and say good-night. He handed me an envelope. In it were three tickets to the new off-Broadway hit, The Fantasticks, starring a young handsome baritone, Jerry Orbach. “Mom and I want to take you out for your birthday and to a special dinner,” he told me. I knew nothing about the play and I was still angry at having to spend the summer in New Rochelle. I grumbled and accepted his offer ungratefully. “I’m so sorry,” he spoke softly, “I know how disappointed you are.” I turned to the wall, and he walked out, quietly closing my door.

Stevie went off to camp, and I spent that summer at home, sulking and making my parents feel guilty for what I believed their lapse. They did what they could, taking me in to the City, planning day trips when they were free and trying their best to cheer me up. Begrudgingly, and I hope, because I really did recognize what an effort they were making, I rallied. I succumbed to their loving attention, luxuriated in summer dinners without the usual shouting matches, and, as well, whole-heartedly enjoyed a Sunday matinee performance of The Fantasticks. Not surprisingly, I developed a sweet teenage crush on the handsome romantic lead, though that was hardly a substitute for forever missing a chance to make out with some fantasy Pioneer boy in the Catskills.

More than thirty years later, I was eating a lobster roll at the beach, celebrating my birthday with my husband and fourteen-year old daughter and telling them the story of my own unhappy fourteenth summer. The saga of my lost dream unfolded and mid-bite into a chunk of lobster, I realized that what I had understood to be my parents’ careless mistake in missing the deadline for my dream summer had, in all probability, not been an error at all. Through the prism of memory, in a “eureka” moment, I knew why I had never been a Pioneer.  My parents simply hadn’t had the money to send two kids to camp. They’d made a choice, at my expense, to send my troubled brother away for the summer, believing that I could manage at home. Perhaps they felt it was best for him, for them, or for all of us to have a break from the stress of living together – a summer free from yelling at each other and from the almost constant level of anxiety we were used to living with. They understood that he needed camp more than I did.

I never went back to Wel-Met. By the following July, I had moved on and was hanging around with a group of friends who stayed in New Rochelle for the summer. I’d saved my baby-sitting money and was able to get a junior membership at one of the beach clubs lining Long Island Sound. I met some cute boys and was almost popular.

 Some years later, I did apply for, and was accepted as a Wel-Met counselor for the summer following my sophomore year in college. That June, as I was thinking about what to pack for my return to Narrowsburg, my father died unexpectedly. With a heavy heart, I knew I couldn’t leave my mother alone for six weeks. I wrote a letter to the camp directors and forfeited my position. As I dropped the envelope in the mail box, I understood that part of my childhood was disappearing.

I still have dreams of my perfect summers around the campfire, embraced by friends, singing labor-organizing songs. The nights are warm, the days, lovely and languorous. The woods smell deeply of pine with overtones of laundry soap, Prell shampoo and adolescent lust.  And I know that someday, when I am older, I will be a Pioneer.

The Letters

       The letters have languished, long unread, piled in a two-tone lavender shoebox, hidden in the back of one closet or another. It’s been nearly 40 years since they were opened, absorbed, and put in a drawer.  My father wrote them to me when I went away to college, when long-distance phone calls were three-minute, major budget items and stamps cost a nickel.

         I went off to Boston to get my degree – the maximum 200 miles my father would tolerate – and promised to write frequently. My parents did likewise. Mom wrote to me perhaps four times during my freshman year, but Daddy made up for her lapses. I received letters from him at least once each week, often, more frequently than that.

         I had left the house on Victory Boulevard. knowing I would never return to live there. Family life was difficult with my brother and parents fighting almost all the time. Stevie’s problems – anger, hyper-activity, anti-social behavior, drug use – were not things that my middle class Jewish parents understood. Oh, they tried. They sought answers from the school, from doctors, from psychiatrists, but got little comfort. Today he would probably be diagnosed and put on meds, but in the 1960s, that was not the protocol.

         The troubled relationship with his only son pained my father. I believe that it also affected my parent’s marriage. Somehow, most likely because there was no other safe outlet, during my teenage years I became my father’s confidant. He knew enough to shield me from the most intimate of his worries, but on long walks with him after supper, he would talk about his sadness and feelings of inadequacy in not being able to help his son. He encouraged my going away to college, but was clearly worried about paying my college tuition.

         The letters he wrote to me during my first and second years away at school were filled with these concerns, interspersed with gossipy tidbits about family friends, movies and plays he and my mother had seen, and a smattering of political wisdom. I kept them all, along with the rare few from my mother, in a bottom drawer of my dorm desk. On the nights when I couldn’t sleep, when the homesick beast hovered too close, rereading them comforted me.

         In June, after my sophomore year, my father died a tragic, but maybe not-so-accidental death. I grieved as much as I would allow myself, put the letters in a Capezio shoebox and hid it on the back of a closet shelf in my mother’s apartment.  Some years later, Mom suggested throwing them out when she moved to a new condo. “You don’t want these old things, do you?”

         I grabbed the shoebox from her hands, angry at her suggestion. “Yes – of course I do. That’s all I have left of Daddy.” I took the letters back with me to Boston and stored them, pushed way to the back on shelves in closets wherever I lived. The lavender box took a beating, and I taped its corners tight. Finally, the letters landed in their present home. They’ve been stored on a closet shelf in the house I live in with my husband and where we brought up our daughter, not far from where I went to college. I’ve never looked at them, but knowing they exist has comforted me. That is, until one dreary summer day, five years ago.

         My daughter came home from college and, in a moment of weakness she decided to help me tackle some chores I had been avoiding for years. “Let’s go through all your old pictures and junk,” Perrine said to me one rainy morning.

         I sighed heavily, “Really? Are you sure you want to do that?” She did.

         We came upon the letters and I explained that they were from Peter, as she always referred to the grandfather she never knew.  One by one, I opened the yellowing pages, written between 1964 and 1966 while Daddy had a few free moments at work. He scratched them out on six by twelve inch pads of scrap paper a printer friend dropped off when he visited. The letters, in blue ballpoint ink, were filled with my father’s rushed, but legible penmanship, written at quiet times in his “place”, neither a proper office, workshop or atelier, but a little bit of each. I read them aloud.

         They were eerily alike. Phrases like “today was a good day” or “we had a tough time last night” describing what went on with my brother, were repeated frequently. There were references to my father’s jewelry business limping along. The trendy popularity of costume jewelry turned 47th into a glittery wasteland of forgotten precious metal, where one-man operations like his, were taking a beating.

         Since money was tight, in one letter he suggested that I limit my calls home to once a week. “The last phone bill I got”, he wrote, “was for an astronomical $7.00!” He counseled me to be selective about dating boys who often had “other ideas” and reminded me to study hard in preparing myself for a career as a teacher. Along the way, there were references to the loss of his hero, JFK, to the war protesters he supported, and to Lyndon Johnson’s rocky presidency.

         “Mama, you’re crying.”

         “Not really – It just makes me sad that you never met him. You know, I never truly got what he was saying in all these letters. He struggled so with Stevie and with money problems. And he missed me so much! I was too young to understand it.”

         I finished reading the packet of letters and refolded them all. The lavender shoebox disintegrated sometime ago, and I placed them back in a heavy manila envelope. I don’t know if I can ever read them again, but they are a part of who I am. In some other-worldly way, I feel my father’s presence in my life. I can almost hear his voice again reminding me as we walk down Victory Boulevard. “It’s getting dark. Mommy will worry. We should get back.”

         These aging letters, a few old Kodak pictures, and the stories I tell her, are all Perrine will ever know of her grandfather, Peter – a man who has always been hovering in the background of her life and of mine.

My Mistake

            The night before I married the wrong man, I lay on a narrow single bed in an upstairs room of his childhood home. Restless and tossing on an uncomfortable, unforgiving mattress, my body struggled to find an easy settling place. June moonlight wiggled around the edges of the ruffled shades, illuminating the hideous green and gold-flocked wallpaper his mother had carefully chosen. Silvery arcs jittered off the highly polished mahogany furniture, keeping me awake. The clock on the table next to me loudly ticked away the night. “This is not a good idea”, I thought, “but I will, I have, to make it work.”  I forced myself to settle down, then dropped into shallow sleep.

            As I approached college graduation in 1968, my options seemed limited – marry someone, become a teacher, a social worker, or a nurse. I chose two from column A. Marriage and a teaching job around the Boston area were my longed-for tickets out of suburban New Rochelle. With two hundred miles between me and home, there would be no seducing me back into the self-appointed, always conflicted role of family peacekeeper trying to mediate the messy dynamics of my family. Noisy, ugly anger between my parents and my unhappy, unstable brother pushed me away from home. My father’s accidental death in 1966 added an unbearable layer of sadness, affecting each of us three in different ways.

            Most of the time my college boyfriend, Elliot, and I had spent together after the first semester of our senior year, was, as they say, “under the influence”. He was a bigger pothead than I, but being high was how we (and everyone we knew) got on. The shaky future, shaded by the nightmare of a remote war and racially and politically fueled urban unrest, seemed distant and just a bit threatening – something we childishly chose to ignore.

            A nice Jewish boy from New Jersey, reasonably good-looking, he seemed to be the, if not perfect, at least an acceptable way out of my childhood. Best of all, we never fought. There was no tension. We grooved to alternative FM Rock stations, laughed a lot at nothing in particular, and chose to turn our dilated stares away from any unpleasantness. We were so far down the rabbit-hole, we couldn’t admit that we were stuck in a tunnel to middle class Wonderland. It was oh-so-easy to keep playing the game.

            The luncheon menu was planned, guests would arrive and that nasty, self-righteous little rabbi of theirs was scheduled to show up by 11:30. I knew I could never face my recently-widowed mother and admit, after all the convincing arguments I had mounted, the hours spent shopping for a dress, and the money she had laid out, that she, in fact, was right. I was too young, and he was the wrong one for me.

            As I moved under the chuppah, I knew I couldn’t mutter “I don’t.” Too many people would be disappointed. I didn’t matter.

           

            On the brisk September day I walked into my freshman dorm on Bay State Road, the expectations for a girl graduate were a degree in a traditional female skill and a diamond solitaire by graduation day. Dates with frat boys were the goal; issues ofBrides Magazine and Cosmopolitan littered the common areas, advising us of how to reach it. College was a mostly pleasant way station for what we believed to be real life.

            I was a coed on the cusp, a baby-boomer coming of age during the convergence of different philosophies and lifestyles. All the “givens” had changed during the time I matriculated. When I went off to Boston in 1964, my mother and I packed my college wardrobe – tasteful wool dresses, pumps and stockings, some skirts and matching sweaters. The world shook, and by 1966 my bras were on the floor of the double-doored dorm closet, my winter coat came from an army-navy surplus store, and I lived in Farmer John overalls.

            At some level, I was insecure and cautious - hedging my bets, maintaining a toehold in both worlds. I went to mixers, met potential husband material, and got messily drunk at toga parties hosted by sweaty, gangly boy-men. Although I dated as much as any of the other girls, I never really found an acceptable boyfriend. Rick, my escape-valve and first lover, was a handsome dark Italian street kid from Jersey City who fought his way into Tufts on a scholarship. With him, I could distance myself from my dorm mates, critiquing and laughing at their traditional values. He was, though, most certainly not someone I could bring home to my family.

            It was senior year and things were looking a little grim. My best friend, Alice, and my roommate Barbara were talking marriage, planning shiny new lives after Boston. What would I do? I shoved Rick aside, and without much thought or insight, latched myself more tightly onto another guy I had just begun dating.

            Elliot was an acceptable candidate for my future. He had plans – an MBA, a nice home, maybe kids – all things a good daughter should want. I don’t recall that he ever actually proposed, but somehow we ended up engaged. His grandmother’s tiny diamond, having spent many years hidden away from burglars in an ice cube tray in suburban New Jersey, was defrosted and reset into a modern platinum ring.  I happily accepted the mantle of being one of “the promised ones”.

            My mother and brother, still reeling from my father’s recent and unexpected death, did not really like my “betrothed” – a sign I ignored. Running to escape my family’s tragedies, I touted Elliot’s meager attributes like a rabid cheerleader, stayed stoned and planned a hippie-ish wedding. Along the way, I, of course, met his family – another ignored signpost that I was skidding down the wrong tunnel.

            Bea and Arthur were staunchly deluded Nixon supporters.  Elliot told me they owned and managed property in Newark - slumlord was the more accurate term. I was a red-diaper baby who grew up watching my forebear’s muscled arms bolstering the plight of the little guy.  My mother’s side was more genteel – professional careers and academia defined their lives. Nobody, on either side, ever pulled the Republican switch in the voting booth. I never breathed a word about Elliot’s family’s voting record or their Republican bumper stickers to my passionately political, left-leaning family.

            The first time I met my  in-laws-to-be, I hoped to make a good impression. I wore a demure black dress with white collar and cuffs, patent leather kitten heels, and had recently adopted a trendy Barbra Streisand “do”. When Elliot and I approached the front door of the modest grey house, we were met by a hard-faced woman sporting a beehive coiffure and cantilevered bosoms, both defying gravity. She brought us into their living room, where Elliot’s father Arthur’s, first words to me were, “You just get off a horse? A little bow-legged, nu? “.  Caught off guard, I smiled back at him, slipping into a modified ballet pose, one foot in front of the other, to hide my never-before noticed defect.

            After spending a few awkward minutes trying to make conversation while perched on the uncomfortable rolled edges of the plastic-covered furniture, we were told that dinner was ready. Elliot’s mother ushered us from the tight turquoise living room, through an archway, into the adjacent small gold and white dining room. A Versailles Palace-worthy crystal chandelier illuminated the lace-covered table, bouncing light off its plastic protective cloth. We took our seats, making sure that Arthur could have a good view of the TV in the sunroom. He was intent on watching a Sunday football game.

            I offered to help serve. “No, no,” Bea commanded, “I’ll do it. The kitchen is kosher. I don’t want you mixing meat and dairy.” She ceremoniously put on her color-coordinated apron and disappeared. Arthur ignored us, and Elliot fiddled with the place settings. I silently prayed I wasn’t sweating through my dress.

            A few minutes later, our small talk quota depleted, my mother-in-law-to-be pushed her way through the saloon-door entry proudly carrying the main course. A large china platter was placed center-stage and there, leering at me like a hungry, lecherous lover, was a massive and pink, unsliced, boiled tongue.  One end leered at me, the other seemed to have been ripped right from the animal’s throat. The rest of the supporting cast appeared – mustard, olives, pickles, overcooked broccoli and some sort of starch.  Struggling, I smiled once more.

            Our plates were heaped with the company meal she had prepared. Elliot, sitting to my right, hungrily grabbed his knife and fork, slathered mustard over all the food on his plate, and attacked it with gusto. I gamely forced down a few small pieces of the nubby, rubbery meat, trying mightily to push them back far enough to swallow, without tasting or chewing.  “Elliot”, I whispered, as I nudged him under the table, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

            “Hey, Ma,” he bleated, “Ellen hates the tongue.” Embarrassed, and feeling a little betrayed, I sank into my chair. Bea shot me a look, silently went into the kitchen, appearing moments later with a pink Pyrex bowl filled with pasty chicken salad.

            “Maybe you’ll like this better,” she muttered. She plunked the alternative protein on the corner of the table closest to my seat. We finished the meal in almost silence.

            Over the next months, wedding plans moved along, but I knew in the deepest part of me that this marriage had no chance – Elliot and I had nothing more than sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in common. I was, however, too young, too unwilling to stand up for myself, too embarrassed, to know how to yell “STOP.” And so, on a sunny day in June, wearing a white lace mini-dress and a flower in my hair, I squinted into the light and smiled at the photographer.  Standing under the chuppah, I recited my vows with a sinking feeling in my stomach and my fingers crossed under a wilting summer bouquet.

It took three years to undo my mistake.