Family

That's my family. Protestants made everyone wear tops at the beach in Ocean City where we resorted. It's obvious that my mom needed to. I think she looks pretty cute. My sister (Nancy) looks like she just ate an alum sandwich. I've got the best smile of the lot. I tell the curious that my mother was just rescued from the surf. She's covered with starfish that attacked her. Out of the water, now, they're all dead and they conveniently gripped her suit till the camera clicked and then they all fell off onto the sand.

My father was born in Bethlehem on Christmas day. I thought he was cheated. I told him so. My secular instincts outweighed thinking about spiritual honors. I calculated that in terms of the loss of a number of presents each year of his childhood.

At least his parents didn't name him Jesus. That's reserved for Spanish mothers. Jews come close; some boy babies are named Emmanual. Manny is less formal.

Two of my father's brothers had biblical names. One was Benjamin, another Joel. If my father was born in Manayunk he might have been stuck with Manny. But if he came from Erdenheim or Conshohocken or Chalfont or Harleysville or Cheltenham Village he could have been left off easy with a name like Bill or Jeffrey or Ryan or Teddy. His father's name was LaRue and another brother was Geuting (mercifully called Guy). It's no surprise he got stuck with Herald. Not Harold but Herald as "hark the herald angels sing." His other brothers were spared the grotesque; they were named Kenny and Bob. He had one sister: Eleanor.

The family fortune evaporated when his father died in an accident. Others made millions from the cancelled partnership. He was not to be an orphan hanging around the house for an interminable time. Shortly after his father's death he eloped.

My mother was the oldest of eleven children. Her father's parents came from Ireland. They settled in Wyndmoor, just over the border at the northwest edge of Philadelphia. None of the boys in successive generations was named Wynn nor any girls named Winnie. Her father was self-employed. He was a blacksmith and when he died (1940) that sort of trade still had some clients. I remember very little about him except seeing him lifting drinks with his cronies on other porches in the neighborhood. The only time I saw him at his own house was at his wake, stretched out in a box for all to see. I was six, in the tender years and never had seen a corpse before. It was a scary episode, but his condition was, in my limited way of thinking, incomprehensible and when I thought about it later-on I also thought about the possibility of avoiding it altogether. At least I rationalized a self-imposed assurance that this sort of thing doesn't happen to kids. Consequently, I didn't spend a lot of nights pleading with God to spare me forever. A few, perhaps.

My parents' marriage didn't please his mother. Maybe it was too soon after the death of her own husband. She might have wanted the boys around the house for some prolonged support. She got cheated out of a church wedding where she could make a proper appearance. That Irish commoner background might be unsatisfactory. None of the above? All of the above? Moms are hard to please. I do know that the mother-daughter-in-law relationship was always somewhat indifferent. Pity!

They were married in 1927. The stork delivered Nancy in 1931 and I fell off the cabbage truck two years later. So Nana didn't have any ammunition to fortify her displeasure. A shot-gun wedding it wasn't.

My mom cooked better than anyone in the known world. If she had been ambitious she could have been a dietitian. She could have run the kitchen at the Ritz Carlton or the Barklay. Duncan Hines might have wooed her.

Dinnertime was treated like High Mass. Everyone was expected to be present. "Put on your tie." We, the kids, never left our place at the table until excused. Today children are as often as not up and away from the table without so much as a leave.

In the poorest of times, in the great depression, we always had dessert after dinner. If the meal was meagre, we would still have dessert, maybe a custard, or jello, or rhubarb or junket. On better days she would make a pie: lemon meringue. Or maybe pineapple upside-down cake, apple, peach or pumpkin pie. Or rice pudding, apple brown betty, tapioca or candied baked apples. There was no end to variety, either with dessert or with the meal itself.

Tabletalk was an adjuctive property at the table to be digested as naturally as the food. Plans were announced. Inquisitions were certain.

"Did you do your homework?"

"Where were you this afternoon?"

"How did you cut your knee?"

"Who were those kids I saw you with?"

Orders were given. "Tidy up your room" and "I don't know how many times I told you..." were as common as the sunrise.

My father had occasional stories. He might tell a little joke or a tale. He might have a job for me to do that would interfere with my own agenda. Protest was useless.

The time comes, maybe too soon, when empty seats are found at the table. It's the first harbinger of the certainty of death.

I should have been an expert at knotting ties. We went somewhere. Anywhere! I had to wear a tie. I had suits that had to be worn when we went to visit, when we went shopping, when I appeared at the houses of friends. I had short-pants suits. I had knickers suits. I had trousers suits. I had the worst ties imaginable. They were picked by others.

I raise my hand. "I have to go to the toilet."

"Put on your tie."

I dressed for school. Whether in shorts, in the hated corduroy knickers or (at last) in long pants, my shirt was tucked in and I knotted up my tie. It was the same for Sunday drives, for dinners out at restaurants recommended by Duncan Hines or not. Adolphe Menjou wore ties. I wore crappy neckwear that clowns like Ed Wynn tied 'round their collars on burlesque stages.

When I was a little boy my father drove an Essex, a car that few people have any recollection of these days. The Essex died before I could examine it. For a while we were pedestrians. One day pop went out to pick up the "new car." My sister and I pressed our noses to the window anticipating the arrival of the "new car" that would sit in front of our house. Nancy was excited; she had told her girlfriends we were getting a new car.

Automobiles have always raised suspicion about their owners. There were no Packards on our street of row houses. Packards were in Chestnut Hill and other places of great affluence. Idle chat about a man's worth was partly dependent on the size, make and model of his car. He was doing alright if his Ford, Chevy or Plymouth was clean, handsome and not too old.

An ancient Nash chugged to the curb. It lacked the shine that paint had if not too many summer suns lay upon it. My sister was annoyed. (Get it out of there; that's my pop's space.) The door opened. My father stepped out of the oldest and ugliest car on the block. A car is a car is a car, I say. That's what my father said. So did Gertrude Stein, I suppose. A car...is a car...

But Nancy saw it differently, the great depression notwithstanding. She recoiled with horror and she cried "What will my friends say?" Her friends' daddies didn't have cars. Her demonstrations were annoying to the rest of the family. These hystrionics soon dissipated.

The Nash, built before I was born, was a characterless box on tires that, even when not quite fit, would still be able to take my father on frequent trips to Pep-Boys (for new parts) or to Leech's auto graveyard (for second hand ones). He would take me along on those trips that women would eschew. My own attention would be divided between watching my old man's expertise at driving and peeping out the window at the outside world. As much as my sister despised the old Nash I came to like it. It had window shades. It had flower vases that my mother occasionally filled for Sunday drives and my dad diplomatically emptied on Monday mornings. And it had hand straps to assist passengers in and out. Lee Edelman told the men at my father's lodge that it was designed by gynecologists.

It was a car and a lot of people on our block didn't have cars. My sister and my mother were status oriented and in our condition it would be more appropriate to say dream oriented and the old Nash didn't fit their tastes. Packards and Lincolns belonged in Chestnut Hill.

I liked the trips to the parts shops because I could snoop around. Afterwards my pop would stop at Nora's or Jimmy Thompson's, saloons, or at the Republican Club for a beer or two and some chat with pals and I would be served up a "Shirley Temple." I felt like a big-shot.

The old Essex, the old Nash and later a more acceptable '37 Ford, nicely chromed and shiny grey, took us to visit the relations. We visited aunts and uncles, and grandmothers with a regularity that testified that my parents were emotionally close to their siblings. That's a nice attitude. I had over thirty aunts and uncles, including spouses, and a lot of cousins. In those days of visitations children were seldom left to solitary boredom because there were sanguinary peers to keep the day from being dull. Tables were set for sumptuous meals after all the newsy stuff about family and other natter. Kids were excused. They were shooed outside or to upstairs rooms. "Go play."

My father liked his in-laws. He relished those trips to my mother's family as much as those to his brothers' homes. Mom was less enthusiastic about mixing with her mother-in-law than he with his. This might have been a response to attitudes fostered (or supposed) because they had run-away to get married. Maybe they had been cut out of the will.

Sunday drives were compulsions with purpose. Life would be stagnant if there was no place to go. If there was no place to go we would go for a Sunday drive to nowhere in particular which was really somewhere my mother had plotted to herself and revealed only after we got into the car. We would go to the designated place and if it looked interesting she would say it was time to leave. It's a paradox; she was a back-seat driver who sat up front. Nancy and I would sit in the back and fidget and battle. That sometimes got a transfer and I would be "punished" and have to sit up front. (Good move.)

My father had great patience and obeyed all directions given without those heavy sighs of exasperation. On a whim my mother might change our course to nowhere and we would go somewhere else. My sister would stare vacantly ahead. "Are we there?" or, "When are we going home?" I took notes. I saw every tree and rock and barn and gas-pump and windless and stream and cow and sign and every bum on the road.

My sister and I were adversative. She arrived first and expected to be the boss. She would snap useless orders that were unobeyed. I would tease her. She would run to mother for reinforcement...for enforcement.

I hit her once and regretted it. She irritated me while I was raking leaves in the yard. Enough of that and I hit her with the rake. On the teats. My father appeared. Where did he come from? He hit me harder than I can remember anyone whacking me before or since. He mixed advice with the blows. I had done a dangerous thing. I could have ruined her. I was told why girls had teats. He warned me never to hit any girl on the teats. I learned my lesson. If there was a next time, I'd be wiser. Next time, I'd hit her on the head.

Parents are unhappy referees who have to control the squabbles between their children. They often have to arbitrate the same kind of crap that they pulled when they were young. It was logical; they used to be kids so they had experience. When they grew up they had to compromise their own backgrounds. We never saluted them for the wisdom that appeared somewhere between their own childhood and when their judgements took on the stamp of authority.

(LATER RITES OF PASSAGE)

When Roy died, Elizabeth's life as a widow was softened by the nearby presence of her five children and she was not to be without the consolation of family. Her house was pleasant, adequately large, and other relatives lived in the neighborhood. Altogether, her days were not idle and wisely she stayed active in community work. Still, she was a widow: a reduced condition.

Time was the second wave in Elizabeth's disintegration. As her children busied themselves with their own families, their own needs, their own problems and their own priorities, she faded from their attention and was more alone whiling some time on a rocking chair in her quiet parlor or on a rocking chair on the porch. And, newer generations weren't interested in those community projects that hers was devoted to. For lack of the infusion of interest by younger generations, they collapsed.

She often visited her aunt Helen. That was by her initiation. Helen seldom walked the hundred or so steps to her house. But then, Helen (much longer the widow), had ten children and always seemed to have some of them and their children in for a visit and feeding.

Whenever I visited my grandmother I would invariably walk those hundred or so steps to Elizabeth's house and sit and chat with her for a while. I liked her.

There was something else as well that made these visits so worth while when I was younger. It was an innocent adjunct — the property itself — that by its own attraction gave something external to help me grow in appreciation of her because I associated it with her.

A brook ran through the rear of her land. Tadpoles swam there. Frogs croaked and dragonflies and water-insects coursed eccentric flights forever. This place was a treasury of buttercups, of Stars of Bethlehem, of violets, or rhubarb and scallions, of seckel pears and mulberries, of honeysuckle and lilac. A springhouse was down at the edge of the property. It wasn't used anymore except as a cool hideaway on the hottest days.

Beyond the manicured lawn and the garden was a wooded patch whose trails were full of snares laid by my uncles and their cousins and their gang to keep the unwanted from their fort, the bunk where they went to curse and to smoke cigarettes and there they ruled over their little empire. They'd beat up adversaries and their fathers would beat them up in a cycle of those things that were part of earlier rites of passage.

Elizabeth grew old; we grew up. I saw less of her in her later years because I didn't go to my grandmother's house so often. But when I saw one, I saw the other. So it was until my grandmother died. One of Elizabeth's sons was my pal as well as my cousin. Whenever I asked him of her health he would, with a shrug, offer his opinion that she "was a little senile." Older people were often described in their more lonely periods perhaps unfairly as "senile." She couldn't get about much because there was nowhere to go. Her children were occupied more with their own lives. So she rocked on the chair in the parlor or on the chair on the porch more often. For things that the kids were more familiar, she'd forget out of habit.

Elizabeth had died and was buried while I was on holiday in Toronto. I heard the news from an aunt (living at my late grandmother's house) upon my return from Canada. She apologized for not calling me although she knew of my trip and where I stayed. That's alright, I thought, and she was right. I was allowed a good trip not corroded by bad news. Then I walked down the street, a hundred steps or so, and sat on the porch of a now empty house and rocked awhile on an old chair.