Batterie de Cuisine

“Wouldn’t it be fun to start again? I could buy all the new stuff that’s out there now and really get it right.” Brushing my hand over a soft new dish towel, I sighed.

The shopper standing near me, bemused by the display of small kitchen utensils nodded. “I know – I feel the same way. I can’t even give my old stuff away to my kids – they don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

Kitchens and the tools and instruments they embrace have played an important role in my life. Cooking is a way for me to express myself, and the cutting boards, pots, pans, knives and whisks I’ve collected, are my canvas and brushes.  My batterie de cuisine has been curated over forty years of baking, braising, and basting my way through five or six different kitchens.

When I was in college, sharing a room and working in the cafeteria for extra money, I bought my first cookbook – the blue-covered New York Times edition that Craig Claiborne created. I had no kitchen but loved reading the recipes, imagining dinners I would prepare when I moved out on my own. Beef stew with Red Wine and Herbs sounded so much better than the brisket I had grown up eating; Poulet Marengo trumped chicken fricassee handily, I imagined.  In the drawer of my built-in dorm desk, I had a black-handled paring knife, chopsticks lifted from a nearby restaurant and a tea-strainer – the beginning of a kitchen collection that I treated with the same regard masterpieces are awarded “Wouldn’t it be fun to start again? I could buy all the new stuff that’s out there now and really get it right.” Brushing my hand over a soft new dish towel, I sighed.

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The shopper standing near me, bemused by the display of small kitchen utensils nodded. “I know – I feel the same way. I can’t even give my old stuff away to my kids – they don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

Kitchens and the tools and instruments they embrace have played an important role in my life. Cooking is a way for me to express myself, and the cutting boards, pots, pans, knives and whisks I’ve collected, are my canvas and brushes.  My batterie de cuisine has been curated over forty years of baking, braising, and basting my way through five or six different kitchens.

When I was in college, sharing a room and working in the cafeteria for extra money, I bought my first cookbook – the blue-covered New York Times edition that Craig Claiborne created. I had no kitchen but loved reading the recipes, imagining dinners I would prepare when I moved out on my own. Beef stew with Red Wine and Herbs sounded so much better than the brisket I had grown up eating; Poulet Marengo trumped chicken fricassee handily, I imagined.  In the drawer of my built-in dorm desk, I had a black-handled paring knife, chopsticks lifted from a nearby restaurant and a tea-strainer – the beginning of a kitchen collection that I treated with the same regard masterpieces are awarded in a museum.

After I graduated, I moved into an apartment with college girlfriends. We three twenty- year-olds each held shiny new keys to a third-floor walk-up. “A gas range, a full sized fridge,” I crowed, as I looked around our new home, imagining menus for meals I would create. I began planning how I would outfit the dingy rental kitchen, as Alice and Linda checked out the windows, and ceiling lamps.

“Sure, Ellen, go for it.” My roommates, both art majors had little interest in anything that didn’t involve linseed oil and sable brushes. They continued assessing the light sources.

With whatever spare funds I had, I bought spatulas, long-tined forks, cast-iron skillets and pastry cutters from thrift shops. I purchased inexpensive equipment, acquiring cake pans and cookie sheets, cutting boards, and more knives. The gaps in my collection were filled in with pots given out at local banks for opening new accounts, and stuff I pilfered from my mother’s home in New York. Some of the things I took from her kitchen had sentimental meaning like the red bakelite handled sandwich grill with which she made golden brown, melted cheese and tomato sandwiches, and the metal juicer used to squeeze oranges for a breakfast treat when she had the time. Others were simply things Mom no longer used in her life alone as a widow. “I don’t have room for this,” she lied to me, handing over the large turkey roaster. She had accepted that her days hosting family dinners were coming to an end.

In 1970, I was married for the first time. Wedding shower luncheons planned by wannabe bridesmaids provided a slew of interesting, but often useless pretty things for my kitchen. Cousins gave me shrimp cocktail servers, fondue pots and forks, coasters and sets of gold-rimmed espresso cups. In-laws heaped on the designer dish towels and tablecloths. GIfts piled up; thank you notes went out. “We so appreciate the crystal goblets you sent, Aunt Ruth. I know how much we’ll enjoy using them,” I wrote. After the nuptials, those fragile, ornate glasses stayed in their box, stored in a closet that we never opened.

Months later, following an awkward dinner with my new in-laws, I left their New Jersey house with an impressive, slightly used, heavy stainless steel, dutch oven - still one of my favorites. Bea, my mother-in-law, stopped me at the door. “Take this with you,” she muttered, handing me a shopping bag.  Her other daughter-in-law had inadvertently “un-koshered” it when cooking dinner as a surprise for her husband’s family. Laura had made the mistake of buying supermarket chicken instead of going to the kosher butcher.

“I can’t use this unless I bury it for a year,” Bea huffed at me. “It’s yours.” It seemed, according to their rabbi, that only a year-long backyard interment could re-establish the pot’s state of purity. In Bea’s narrow eyes, there should be no eternal forgiveness for cooking trayf in a kosher pot, no legitimate un-koshering. So, it came to me, the apostate. And, it stayed with me, after my not unwelcome divorce, as did anything else I could claim as “my kitchen stuff”.

“Do you know a good realtor?” I asked my friends as I began to search for my own apartment. Starting out again alone was scary and exciting – something I hadn’t anticipated, but happily managed. I rented a two bedroom place, not far from where I worked. Aside from a parking space, a washing machine in the cellar and the absence of a  cheating, always-stoned husband, its most impressive asset was a large kitchen. There was even a dishwasher – something my mother never had in her house.

Drawer space was limited, but there was a pantry for storage. With the help of a friend or two, I built a pegboard wall-unit on which to hang my small utensils. I arranged the tongs and graters, the strainers and scissors, by color, size or purpose, appreciating my display as much as any museum installation. My cookbooks, now a modest collection, along with a few well-thumbed Gourmet magazines took up a shelf that my brother’d built for me, next to a shiny, white, wall phone.

My mother bought me my first good knives when she traveled to Germany in the early 70’s with my aunt.  I was, by this time, the heir-apparent to my family’s tradition of producing good cooks, and the two women wanted to bring me something special from my mother’s first trip to Europe. Mom was not a good gift-giver. She had always found it hard to choose the right present for people, never confident that what she offered was what the recipient wanted. But this time she’d gotten it just right.  With a little help from her travel companon, my Aunt Lillian, she’d found a Henckel's knife store in Munich. “What knives should I get for a new cook,” she asked the clerk. “My daughter – she loves to cook.”

“A paring knife, an eight-inch cook’s knife, a long bladed meat slicer for roasts, and a serrated knife,” advised the German knife seller. The serrated knife’s handle broke some thirty years later; I still have and use the other three. They are not as good as the knives I’ve bought on my own – the Sabatiers and the newer Henckels are superior, but I instinctively reach for the battered, brown handled knives my mother gave me. I  want to think she knew they would fit my hand best.

When I remarried, in the mid-1980’s, my husband Ernie and I bought a century-old house with a kitchen that badly needed a make-over. We pulled down cupboards, replaced countertops and together, created a modern, workable space for me to create meals for our small family. Remodeling is an expensive investment in the future, and there was no money left for new toys. Out of necessity, my old pots and pans, well-worn utensils and the dented, warped baking sheets I’d collected, claimed space in the new cabinetry, continuing their yeoman’s work.

Ernie is most appreciative and supportive of my definitely non-kosher, mostly inventive cooking. When I create something especially to his liking, he lavishes it and me with his greatest compliment – “I would pay money for this.”  Unlike my mother, Ernie does gifts very well, Over the years, he has given me beautiful pots, knives, dishes and even a nifty new “gourmet” stove, which doesn’t always work as well as it should. I gleefully use all my newer toys, but find myself still reaching for some of the old pots, pans, and spatulas I used when I found out that cooking and providing wonderful meals truly is the fastest way to most people’s hearts.

Lost Voices

The voices I remember aren’t the right ones. I can recall the tones and timbres, pitches and cadences, the favorite phrases and assertions of many people – even some casual connections, people of questionable importance to me. In dreams, I hear my people talking. And, when I wake, those voices are still with me. Yet, the two most essential, most longed-for ones are missing from my dreams and from my waking memory.

I can’t remember the voices of either of my parents. My father died long years ago – I was twenty then - but my mother’s passing is only a decade behind me. These two voices, the most important ones in my early life, the ones that should be hard-wired into my auditory synapses, are gone. Last night, lying in bed on the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death, I was running through a catalog of family members and listening for my past. Amid the chattering ghosts, I hoped I might hear my mother’s voice. Her often-repeated phrases reverberated, but, soundless - just pale words, hanging silently in the air.

“Ellen, comb your hair. Put on some lipstick.”

“What are you making for dinner?”

“Have you heard from your brother? Have you heard from Stevie?”

Aunt Isabelle, the wife of my mother’s only brother, is one voice I still clearly hear as if she were speaking aloud. Her gravelly, smoker’s utterances often carried behind them a hint of laughter – sometimes a giggle, occasionally, a more earthy chuckle. The promise of adult humor or something darker was present, as well. There were times when her voice turned cool – even cold – when she was displeased or wanted to exert control, but mostly, her declarations were gracious and welcoming.

Her teacher voice, practiced and honed by many years in the front of a middle school classroom, led discussions at our holiday dinners. She never struggled for colorful words and her narrative skills were legend. Well-constructed anecdotes looped together to make her points. Her own mother once suggested that Isabelle and her husband, my quiet, always proper Uncle Johnny, develop a radio or even TV talk show, based on the engaging, humorous stories that Isabelle retold so adeptly to underline her opinions.

“Who do you think actually killed JR?” Isabelle asked in a mock-serious tone, one Thanksgiving.  “Ellen, Joanie, any guesses?” That I never watched that season’s blockbuster hit TV show Dallas, a cultural touchstone, hadn’t ever crossed my aunt’s mind.

At the other end of memory’s dinner table, was my Uncle Johnny, soft-spoken and precise in his choice of words. No hint of a Bronx upbringing or his LawnGuyland adulthood was heard when he spoke. His syllables were plummy, clear and clean - measured tones that played a calm counterpoint to his wife’s more volatile verbal acrobatics. “Isabelle, my dear…,” he’d begin, and gently redirect the discussion, especially if it approached the off-color jokes that we children were hoping to hear.

Dropping in and out of the tableau of my maternal relatives was the chattering magpie Barbara, my mother’s cousin, and her soft-spoken, mostly silent husband, George.

“You kids – out of the way…”, Barbara would bark out at us.

“George, get the platter. The turkey’s about to come out.”

“You need the electric knife. Where did you put it?”

“Yes, hon,” George would softly reply, “is there anything else you need from me? Does anyone need a fresh drink?” He’d smile sweetly at all of us, anxious to be helpful. Occupying himself with finding the knife or cutting a lemon to freshen someone’s drink, he’d attempt to stay clear of his wife’s busyness.

The eldest of them all, My Aunt Lillian with her imperial demeanor, and voice to match, would occasionally deign to join us, escorted by silent Uncle Leo. “Isabelle, how nice of you to have us. How kind of you to send your son to pick us up at the station,” she’d intone. “Leo, here’s my bag,” she’d say offhandedly, handing her purse to him, and her coat to Isabelle.

Even more infrequently, we’d be joined by Lillian’s secretive, elitist sister, Aunt Pauline and her husband Uncle Michel. Michel’s voice just barely hinted at his Parisian birth and retained in it, as well, a slight nod to an Eastern European ancestry. As with Aunt Isabelle, there was a laugh hidden somewhere behind his speech, or maybe just the whisperings of the intellectual cynic who never got over a love/hate relationship he cultivated with the mythical pre-war Europe he’d left as a child. “No, Ellen, I won’t ever go back to Paris. It’s not the city I left, though it had plenty of problems then, of course. But, I still miss it.” He never told me any more about those mysterious, dangerous worries that he guardedly kept unspoken.

My cousins, whiny, nasal, giggly Cari, her husky-voiced older brother, Allan, Isabelle’s son, Bobby – a slight hesitancy, a little uncertainty in his utterances, and Joanie with her warm, practiced, almost syrup-like sentences made up the rest of our small family on my mother’s side.

I can, too, recall my brother’s childhood voice – listening to him painfully practice the ancient chants for his Bar Mitzvah or yelling at my parents.

“Where’s my stuff?” he’d demand of my mother.

“Stay out of my room, damn it.”

His voice was an integral part of my life for nearly forty years. The influence he held over me was powerful and though I haven’t spoken to him in the many years he’s chosen to stay away, if he were to call today, I’d know instantly who was on the other end of the line. As little as a “hello” and my heart would fall, as I’d recognize his New York accent.

My father’s family and their speech patterns were less polished, except for the careful articulation of my other Aunt Isabel, Uncle Max’s wife. She was a Yankee, from a patrician background, and, having started her adulthood as an actress, had created a lovely, mellifluous manner of expressing herself. Max whose declarations were often mistaken for those of his younger brother, my father Peter, spoke with remnants of their childhoods on the edges of Polish-Russian pale. Yiddish, Polish and some Russian were the languages they shared growing up, and Max, though well-read and of a surprisingly sophisticated literary inclination, carried a suitcase of those mongrel cadences with him throughout his long life. To my second-generation ear, I thought he and his brother, my father Peter, simply sounded like every other old Jewish man in New York.

Their younger brother, Sidney, whined. My dad, in whose workplace he “borrowed” some space, referred to Sidney as a “schnorrer” – a moocher and a cheapskate. His pleading, wheedling words were always asking for something.

 “Pete, can you spare a few bucks?”

 “Is there a leftover half a sandwich?”

 “C’mon – you gotta give a guy a break.”

And finally, there was Aunt Ruth, whose self-appointed role in life, was to hold the family together. Her throaty voice pleaded and cajoled her errant brothers to remain close, “Mama would have wanted that,” she’d say to no one in particular, trying to hide her Brooklyn sing-song, hoping that someone would take heed. “Come by and have some tea and cake.”

I am able to lie in bed in the darkest parts of the night, ignoring my husband’s light snoring, recalling my family chattering and challenging each other. But I still can’t remember my parents’ voices. I know that if I heard even an exhalation of their breaths, a simple syllable, I would call out. I know their utterances are hidden somewhere in my auditory cortex and maybe one day, I’ll figure out how to access them. Until then, I take comfort in remembering the unconditional love and promise of security that was carried in those lost voices.

We'll Talk About it Someday

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“You have to go with her, Ellen, into the city. She needs to empty the safe deposit box before the obituary is in the papers, before the insurance company sees it.” I didn’t truly understand what Mr. Katz, friend of my father’s and his lawyer, was hinting at. From the living room, I heard the murmur of the friends and family who were in my house looking somber, hovering around my mother. “We’re here, Syl,” my Uncle Johnny said, in his quiet, measured voice, his arm around his grieving sister.

I was barely twenty. Just the day before, on that bright, early June Thursday, I had gone into the city with my father. As I usually did when I joined him for a “day with Dad”, we had our breakfast at the 3^rd Avenue Automat and after, I walked with him to 47^th Street. I schmoozed and flirted with the other old men for a while, then left my father’s workplace mid-morning, to explore nearby bookshops. “I’ll be back for lunch,” I called with the door swinging behind me.  Before it closed, I looked back. My father raised his head and stared at me, then pantomimed a kiss.

Later, a little past noon, I got off the elevator on the 9^th floor of the jeweler’s building. I sensed something was wrong. The uniformed elevator operator had been oddly distant, I’d thought – not his usual chatty self.  After a morning of browsing the new paperback book section in Brentano’s, hungry, and looking forward to ordering my favorite sandwich of ham, Swiss and tomato on a hard roll from the deli, I faced an opened door to Dad’s workplace. Strange. Doors were always locked in the jewelry trade.

Hesitantly, I stepped into my father’s new place. The odor of fresh paint made my eyes water.  My uncles were there. Odd.  My father’s best friend, Matty, was by the window. He turned and walked towards me, hands out, reaching for my shoulders. He put his arm around me – he’d never done that before - and told me my father was “gone”.  He said he’d fallen from a window.

That all happened yesterday. The funeral was planned for tomorrow. “What?”  I turned toward Katz.

 “You have to go with her, Ellen.”

 “Yeah, I can. We’ll go. But why such a rush?”

“It’s about the will. I’ll explain it to you and Stevie later.”

I looked around for my brother. He was outside, talking to a cousin, maybe getting high. Useless. My mother was sitting on the couch, surrounded by her friends Bea and Estelle, Thelma and Rose, looking glassy-eyed and pale. I heard, “Sylvia, take this.” Dr. Peckins put something in my mother’s hand, looking even greyer and older than he usually did.

On Friday, I managed to get my mother into her car – how she was able to drive into the city is still a mystery. “Ma, we have to get to the bank before it closes. You know how to get there?” She did. We parked the dark red Impala, and went into the vast, two-story lobby together, holding hands.

“My mother needs to go to her safe deposit box,” I told the clerk. He took her key and led us into the low-ceilinged bowels of the Manhattan bank. “Sit here. I’ll bring it to you,” he said over his shoulder as he walked toward the vaults. He returned with a grey metal rectangular box and, with his key and the one my mother had handed to him, showed her how to open it.

“So,” I said, “what’s in it?”

My mother was distracted, not answering. She lifted the hinged top, and together, we peered in. There were birth and marriage certificates, some official looking papers, and an envelope with a little cash in it. When she lifted it all out, on the bottom, was an old manila envelope, and inside was a yellowed, much-folded document.

She handed it to me.

“What? Is this something special?”

“Open it carefully.”

Elaborate Old English lettering covered an oversized paper. I read “United States Naturalization Certificate”. Further down, I saw my father’s name, written in an unusual format: Pinchas (Peter) Manes. “What is this?” I asked, not entirely understanding what I was holding. “Daddy was born here.”

“No”, she paused, “he wasn’t.”

“But it says that on my birth certificate. I’ve seen it – Father’s Place of Birth: Brooklyn, NY.”

A little, niggling memory bubbled up.

“Stevie’s doesn’t though, does it? His says Daddy was born in Poland. You two told us that that was a clerical error – how the hospital got it wrong.”

“It was wrong -  on yours.”

“Did you lie?”

My mother was silent for a minute, then, looked down at her tensed hands. “It was right after the war. No one was sure about anything. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be an immigrant then.” She put all the papers and the cash in her bag, and pressed a button on the table. The bank clerk reappeared, took the now re-locked box and returned it to the vault. We went home.

When I was growing up and had asked my father about his childhood, he was never forthcoming. He told Stevie and me about how his parents had come here, from what was then Poland, and now was part of Russia, and not much more.

“Bubbe and Zayde came at different times. First, my father came with Gussie my older sister.”

“Who? You have an older sister?”

“I do. I don’t see her anymore.”

“Why?”

“Not now. I’ll tell you another time. She was, ...difficult. The two of them came here to find work and a place to live. Then they sent for Bubbe and the others.”

“Were you born here?” one of us asked. Daddy shifted in his seat, pushing his reading glasses up on head.

“Yes. So, Bubbe came with the other children – your Uncle Danny – you met him once, Aunt Ruth, and Uncle Max. Uncle Sidney wasn’t born yet.”

“And Bubbe brought the silver candlesticks and the Passover cups, right, Dad?”

“Yeah, and a few other household things. They brought the cow with them – to feed the children. And then they walked, more or less, from Poland to Antwerp where they got a ship to New York.”

“With the cow?”

“No, of course not. They sold it somewhere along the way for the money to buy tickets for steerage.”

There were no stories beyond that. My father never talked about a Brooklyn childhood. He would tell us, now and then, about hardships – his mother’s glaucoma, then blindness, his father’s selfish behavior, bordering on cruelty. My brother and I sensed that there was sadness. We knew we shouldn’t push, and didn’t. Aside from a few amusing anecdotes, one about a canary left in its cage on a radiator on an early October day, I knew nothing about my father’s life before he met my mother. Now, he was gone. And the questions remained, forever unanswered.

As a youngish widow, my mother made an effort to keep in touch with her husband’s family. Occasionally we visited with Aunt Ruth in Brooklyn. She’d give me trendy, wildly patterned, disco clothes that she had “appropriated” from the wholesale shop she worked in on the Lower East Side and want to know if I had any boyfriends yet. “You will – not to worry. You’re a pretty girl, a real shayne maideleh.”

“Sylvia, stay for dinner,” she’d demand. Aunt Ruth would disappear into the narrow kitchen to cook up stereotypically Jewish meals for us. Perhaps she was worried that we’d forget our roots and that somehow, her food would anchor us to a distant world where she believed she had been happy. “Come, watch me, Ellen. This is how Mama, Bubbe, made the stuffed cabbage.” She’d point to a tall cupboard. ”Get the sour salt for me. I’m too short to reach that shelf now.”

 Her next younger brother, Uncle Max, and his, somewhat distant Yankee wife, Aunt Isabel, tried, as well, to include my mother, Stevie and me in their family’s events. They would invite us three – later, in the 1970’s, just my mother and me - up to their book-filled apartment on the upper, then unfashionable, West Side. Every few weeks, our phone in New Rochelle would ring late at night. “Ellen, please pick it up. I know it’s Max. I can’t deal with him now.”

“Hi, Uncle Max,” I’d answer. His voiced sounded just like Daddy’s, and I knew I’d be on the phone for a long time.

“You and Mom,” he urged, “you’ll come into the city on Sunday?”

My mother was shaking her head, gesturing for me to make an excuse.

“Sure, Uncle Max. What time do you want us?” I shrugged my shoulders toward my mother, and made a face. Her shoulders sagged.

“Bring Stevie.” But I couldn’t do that. My barely younger brother, now insisting on being called Steve, had fled from our suburban split-level. He was, I imagined, druggily drifting around upper New York State or camping in the isolated dunes of Cape Cod.

“We’ll see. I’m not sure he’ll be around. You know he’s looking at colleges,” I lied.

On that Sunday, after toying with another tasteless, overcooked roast Isabel had prepared, we all moved from the table set up in the cramped entry hall. Max and I sat by the 16^th floor window of their apartment. My mother, with Isabel, was cleaning up – drying dishes - and I had my uncle’s ear. I asked him to tell me about his childhood with my father in the old country. He removed his hat, putting on the window's sill, next to his cup of tea. “Not now, Ellen, we’ll talk about it someday. It’s hard to think about it just now. Pete wasn’t comfortable…” and his voice trailed off.

“So, Max, Pete wasn’t born here? I was nearly forty when I finally asked him that. Uncle Max and Aunt Isabel were vacationing on the Maine coast and had invited me to spend a day with them.

“No, no. None of us were.”

“Not even Uncle Sidney?”

“He was just a toddler when we came here, but no, not even Sid.”

“Why all the mystery? Why didn’t my father tell us about his family before he died?

“I never understood that. He said he wanted to protect you. From what? I never figured that out. Meshuggeh.”

I paused, trying to put this in some perspective. My uncle continued. “I don’t really know what he was thinking, remembering. We talked about it. He didn’t want you and Stevie to understand how hard our lives had been. He didn’t think you two needed to know about what we had been through.”

“But you told Joanie and Mike!”

“Yes – Isabel and I thought it would help them understand the world better. That’s why your father and I didn’t see each other for a couple of years. Pete didn’t want you to hear the stories from my kids. We spoke on the phone a lot, but he’d never bring you to our place to visit.” Max walked back to the rented vacation cottage in silence. His gaze was focused away from me, eastward, toward the sea.

My mother died in 2002. She rarely spoke about her husband, or her now absent son. So many questions, never asked, so much lost history. Aunt Ruth died, then Isabel, followed closely by her beloved Max, and fatuous Uncle Sidney, remarried for the third time, moved to Florida. No one was left.

Some years later, when I was in my early 60s, on their way back to Brooklyn from Maine, I had dinner with Max’s children. My cousins, Joan and Michael, both closer to 70 -  older than me by a few years, had stayed in touch with me, as their father had done for so much of my life. My dining room table was covered with old family photos, the largest of which was a formal studio shot of my father’s whole family. There they stood – my grandparents, Nathan and Frieda, the children, Gussie and her clean-shaven husband standing behind Daniel, Max, my father, Ruth who was holding a child – my cousin Stewart, and Sidney. Who were these people, staring at us from the formal, fern-infested backdrop?

“Joan,” I said, “you know, after Dad’s accident, when my mother was alone, her family wanted me to switch schools and come back to New York to live with her.”

Cousin Michael’s shoulder’s stiffened. He looked at me, lips tightened, clearly uncomfortable. “What accident?” He stuttered. “P…Pete committed suicide. He killed himself. You must have figured that out by now.”

But I hadn’t.

“No, Mike,” I said, “it was an accident. Daddy fell out the window. He was scraping fresh paint that had dripped on the glass and his footing slipped. His friend, Matty, told me that.”

A low sigh.  Mike’s eyes shifted, staring somewhere over my head, towards a window. “I thought Sylvia had let you know. It was suicide – really, Ellen. He had money problems, something with the IRS, and then all that stuff with Stevie. Max and we all knew that your brother and Pete never got along. They were too much alike. Max used to call your brother ‘little Pete” when he was a toddler. He said both of them, father and son, were stubborn, too smart for themselves.” Mike looked over at his sister. She pushed her glasses back up and nodded. The two of them sat back down.

“And nobody thought to tell me how my father died? That I could handle it?” My breath slowed, my fingers twisted in my lap. “Really?”

“Your mother probably didn’t want to upset you. Everyone knew how you had idolized your father – you were his favorite. I think the family – both sides - believed you’d never find out what really happened that day in June.”

I paused, dry-mouthed, trying to put this in some perspective. Without looking at my cousins, I asked, “So, do you know why my father never told me about his past?”

“Not really. Max talked to us a lot about the family. We’d heard all the stories.” My cousins knew about the Russian soldiers taunting young Max and his kid brother Pete, while the two shtetl boys played along the river banks of Belarus. They grew up with their father’s frightening recollections of the pogroms my grandparents and their children had lived through. That Bubbe and Zayde’s marriage was an arranged one, and had never been happy, was common knowledge in their home. And they had met the apocryphal Aunt Gussie “Yeah – he even wrote the beginning of a book about it. I’ll send it to you when I get home.”

On that July day, sitting comfortably in my dining room with my cousins, my world was upended. All that I had believed about my childhood took on different colors. I had rarely talked to my mother about Dad’s death – I felt she had gone through too much already. My brother had, years before, made a decision to extricate himself, disappearing from all his family and friends. I couldn’t ask him what he thought. Is that, I now wonder, why he left? Did he understand what had really happened and couldn’t keep it a secret? Was he, too, trying, in some brotherly way, to protect me?

 I’ve spent the years since, trying to fathom who my father was, and what motivated him. Why all the secrets? And mostly, I want to believe that his choice to end his life, if it really was a conscious decision, was guided by misplaced love, but now I wonder if it wasn’t fear or cowardice.

No one who really could know is left now. My questions will forever be unanswered.

What has that done to me?