A Book of Great Worth (29 page)

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The family circle gathering was that Sunday and gave me my first appreciation of the word “anticlimactic.”

Everyone was there, even cousin Florence from Florida, even paroled cousin Meyer – apparently there were no known felons in the family so he was free to associate with us. The spirits of my grandfather, Joseph, and his brother Abraham, if they were about, would have been pleased, perhaps even proud, to see the large gathering of their children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. Joseph and Abe had come to America alone and with nothing, and just look at what they had started.

But they might have been dismayed to see the hole in the centre of the family circle.

People were happy to see Meyer and Florence – despite
Meyer’s indiscretions and those of Florence’s former husband, they were loved members of their own clan, the children of Abe – but the cousins of both clans were less than enthralled with Henrietta and her children. No one knew her, after all, and there were few points of common interest. Though she seemed ordinary enough, the circumstances of her life were certainly worlds apart from those of her New York relatives. Everyone was on best manners, approaching the far-flung cousin and making polite conversation. Then they moved on.

Henrietta was wearing a loose-fitting almost colourless dress, much like the housedresses my mother wore on cleaning day, and stockings with crooked seams and high heels that thrust her already awkward body forward, making it appear as if she was constantly about to topple over. This impression was augmented by an impressively large bosom for a woman so otherwise slender. In her mousy brown hair, which covered her head like a tumbleweed, she’d pinned a paper flower and she’d sprayed herself with a perfume that smelled as much like dead meat as anything.

This smell also clung to Uglik and Toogl – re
dubbed Arthur and Emily – thus reviving my fantasy that they gnawed on whale blubber as a snack. Instead, I watched as they consumed huge portions of chicken, dumplings, salad and
challah
at the sit-down dinner, and potato chips, pretzels and soda pop the rest of the day. Arthur wore new dungarees and a polo shirt, new U.S. Keds sneakers. His black hair was pomaded and brushed till it gleamed but refused to stay in place. He was painfully ordinary and shy, a seven-year-old boy of little interest to me, and, despite my mother’s admonition that I was to pay special attention to him, for the most part I ignored him. For most of the afternoon, he sat on the floor in a corner shuffling a deck of bubblegum baseball cards I’d given him, old ones or seconds I had no need for. Emily, though, had overcome her initial shyness and fallen in with two grandchildren of her own age. Dressed in almost identical pink frocks with ribbons, making it hard to tell which one was Emily, the three of them spent the afternoon chasing each other under the tables and chairs, shrieking.

Naturally, there was much talk of Glicka, especially among the children of Abe. She had been their beloved, if only half-remembered, baby sister, but there was little their niece Henrietta could add to what she’d already written in her letters, which my mother had circulated. She herself, after all, had never known her mother. Cousins Barney and Ben and Murray and Florence and the others asked questions about Glicka that Henrietta couldn’t answer, but she asked none of her own. She had read her mother’s diary – which she had neglected
to bring with her from Princess Anne Island – and ap
parently was satisfied with that. Nor did she appear to have much interest in her aunts and uncles and cousins.

No one asked Henrietta what had become of Armand Larocque, their fur-trading brother- or cousin-in-law, or Rose of Sharon, his second wife, nor was there any mention of brother Abram or the unnamed sister, as much their long-lost niece and cousin as Henrietta. Nor was the recently deceased Constable Dumont much in people’s thoughts or conversations.

People did ask about life in the North, of course. But when they learned that Henrietta and her children did not live in an igloo or ride around on a dogsled, they soon lost interest.

For several hours, people milled around at the party without actually connecting, speaking to each other without listening. I could see from the frown on my mother’s face that her original estimation of Abe’s side of the family had been reconfirmed, and that she was disappointed with the closer group of her in-laws. Even my favourite, Uncle Henry, usually so gregarious, was unusually reticent. He loved to do magic tricks for children, pulling pennies from their ears and noses, but I didn’t see him performing for Arthur or Emily. It was as if, in the presence of something at once so foreign and so familiar, Uncle Henry had become discombobulated – a delicious word I had recently learned from my sisters. The rest of the family seemed equally stricken.

“They don’t care,” my mother pouted to my father.

“No, they don’t,” he agreed. He himself had quickly lost interest in Henrietta. Later, he would pronounce her as unattractive and charmless a woman as he’d ever met, but my mother would always say he was being unfair.

“This is a woman raised by an Eskimo,” my mother would retort.

But wouldn’t that have made her fascinating rather than dull? I wondered. And later, when I moved to Canada myself as an adult, when I traveled to Whitehorse, when I learned more about the North, as Canadians inevitably do, my cousin Henrietta, by then dead and her children lost to me, grew in my estimation. I
would have liked to have met them all again, have an
other chance, and I regretted not having tried harder to befriend them when I did have a chance. Well, I was only a boy myself.

As it turned out, the family circle gathering broke up earlier than we’d expected. The weather was poor, with ice and slush on the streets and more snow threatening, and people began to make excuses early in the evening. They bundled up and disappeared into the Bronx night. Henrietta and her children went home with cousin Barney and his family after an extended goodbye with my mother, hugging and kissing and promising to talk soon, see you soon.

“I owe you so much,” Henrietta told my mother, and that seemed to me to be very much the truth.

“It was nothing,” my mother replied. “No, it was a pleasure.”

My mother was quiet on the long subway ride home, the De Soto having been returned to cousin Ben’s lot. So was my father, although he did deliver himself of one pronouncement, “No, it was duty,” which elicited a dirty look from my mother. Even my sisters, both sophisticated college girls now, with something to say about everything, usually, were quiet. I sat silently between my parents and watched through the window the subway tunnel markers flashing by, imagining I was in a bush plane and they were ice floes.

My mother did talk to Henrietta on the phone, several times, in the weeks that followed, and had lunch with her once, in Manhattan, but she reported little of what they’d talked about at the dinner table. They continued to exchange Chanukah cards for several years,
but that was all. The mystery of how Henrietta had
become aware of my mother and found our address re
mained unsolved.

Henrietta worked at Honest Abe’s used car lot only a few weeks before she found another job, and moved quickly from cousin Barney’s mother-in-law suite. She disappeared into the jungles of the Bronx as deeply as
Florence had into those of Florida, to which she’d
returned after the family gathering. We never saw either
of those cousins again, although we heard a report – second, maybe even third hand – that Henrietta had married again and moved, like Florence, to Florida. And at the next family circle gathering, the following
summer at Uncle Henry’s, the descendents of my fa
ther’s Uncle Abe were not present.

My mother didn’t abandon the idea of the family circle, but she seemed content to allow it to grow smaller.

She rarely mentioned Henrietta again, and the subject of the campaign to rescue her from the wilds of the North and the subsequent reunion became a sort of semi-taboo subject in our household. If someone made a reference to it, my mother would usually look away and my father would shake his head and frown, placing his finger against his nose. If my father had carried a faint torch for his lost cousin Glicka, then it was my mother who seemed to have been smitten and later disappointed with Glicka’s daughter. A few
years later when I, a teenager now, had my first un
happy experience with love, I thought of my mother and Henrietta again – yes, it was as if my mother had been spurned by a lover. But such a thought made me far too uncomfortable to dwell on it for long.

Afterword:

Listening to My Father

I became a writer early in the summer I was thirteen – actually, a couple of weeks before my thirteenth birthday. I remember clearly the precise moment. I had been writing before that, little sketches and simple stories, or pieces of stories I’d abandon after a few pages scribbled in my notebook, but mostly I’d merely been
thinking
about writing.

At this particular moment, I became an actual writer.

I spent that weekend with my father in Atlantic City.

He used to go out of town occasionally on assignments for the newspaper where he worked,
The Day
, which covered the world of the Lower East Side and
the larger Jewish community of New York City and en
virons, some three million people in the larger pool of some ten million. He covered the labour beat and regularly went to the conventions of the men’s and ladies’ garment workers, the largest unions in New York,
which in those days were largely made up of Jews, and of the American Federation of Labor, the umbrella group that brought all the major American unions together.
Those national conventions, which lasted a week or more, were sometimes held in places like Miami or Chicago, but the garment workers preferred to stay closer to home, so Atlantic City was a favourite choice.

This year, he asked me if I’d like to join him for the weekend. Of course, I was thrilled, and on a Friday in June I took a bus down to the New Jersey shore to join him – he’d already been there for several days. School had not yet finished for the summer and I had first to
endure an excruciatingly long day of endless classes be
fore being freed at three and racing home to pick up the small overnight bag I’d borrowed from one of my sisters. It was already packed, stuffed with a few clothes, my swimsuit, a toothbrush and toothpaste in a plastic bag, a notebook and ballpoint pen, and a book to read, a collection of stories by Damon Runyon, whom I was mad for that year, along with O’Henry and Saki and Jack London. My mother, who didn’t get off work until four, had left me a note, which I found on the kitchen table, propped up against the sugar bowl: “Travel safely, dear. Don’t forget to have something to eat before you go.
Listen to your father
” – that sentence was underlined. “Have a wonderful time.” At that stage of my life, I got along well with my father but wasn’t as close to him as I was to my mother, and I suspected that the trip had been her idea, in pursuit of what’s now known as “male bonding,” that she’d persuaded my father into it.

I checked my wallet – my mother had given me a ten dollar bill for the bus fare and spending money, and some change for the subway the night before – and quickly ate an apple. Then I set out.

We lived on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, on the top floor of a four-floor walk-up – it would be three more years before my parents would fulfill their dream of moving back to the country and take us to a house already being built in western New Jersey. I walked west on the parkway to Kingston Avenue and took the subway into Manhattan to the Port Authority Building, the sprawling bus terminal in Times Square, where I caught a bus to Atlantic City. There was a lineup for the bus, crowded with weekend holiday-goers, and I stood behind a kid with a portable radio jangling with rock and roll. He was older than me, sixteen or seventeen, with a slicked-back duck’s ass haircut and a tight-fitting white T-shirt, its sleeves rolled up above his biceps like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
or James Dean in
Rebel Without A Cause
, this kid himself like someone stepping out of movies that would come later;
West Side Story
or
Grease
. It gave me an odd sliver of pleasure standing so close to this kid, whom older people around us were eying with distaste, hoping that perhaps some of these critical people would think we were together, although he was oblivious to me.

That was just the start of the feeling of exhilaration I had all that afternoon and evening, all that weekend, in fact: being on my own, riding the bus, occasionally
glimpsing blue waves as the bus skirted close to the ocean, the rock and roll continuing to pour from the kid’s radio, just across the aisle from me – Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was a hit that spring and it was being played repeatedly on the two-hour bus ride –
joining my father, staying at a hotel, enjoying the bracing view of girls in swimsuits on the beach, eating in a restaurant – I had my first club sandwich on the first night, a steak dinner on the second – and being introduced to people by my father as “my son,” which filled me with a delicious mixture of embarrassment and pride.

This was the first time, I think, that I’d ever been around so many strange adults. Children live in a child’s world – the only adults they know, usually, are parents, relatives, neighbours, teachers – people they take for granted and don’t find very interesting. Now I found myself sitting in the hotel coffee shop with my father and his friends, reporters and low-level union
functionaries, having a late supper – that club sandwich, layers of turkey, ham and bacon on two slices of white bread, the third of brown, quartered on a diagonal, each piece skewered with a toothpick festooned with either a pimento-stuffed green olive or a pickled white onion and a swirl of red ribbon, with crisp french fries, and a tall glass of ginger ale with ice – what a luxury.