-->
-->
“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 3rd Avenue Automat and after, I walked with him to 47th 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 9th 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 16th 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?
