Wendy and the Lost Boys (4 page)

Their dreams seemed on track to fulfillment until June 4, 1941, when George was taken to Harbor Hospital in Brooklyn with severe stomach pains. His appendix had ruptured, and the infection spread throughout his abdomen. George developed peritonitis, and he died on June 12, 1941, at the age of twenty-nine—four years before the first safe antibiotics were generally available, drugs that would transform appendicitis from a deadly disease to a dangerous but manageable occurrence.

Though Jacob Wasserstein, George’s father, was still alive, Lola despised him as a ne’er-do-well. It was Simon Schleifer who took George to the hospital and who identified his son-in-law for the death certificate. Simon arranged the funeral service on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, just a few blocks from the apartment where, a dozen years earlier, George began the American chapter of his brief life.

Lola buried her husband and two years later, on June 26, 1943, married his brother.

Desire and expediency coincided with ancient tribal dictates. Deuteronomy 25:5–10 of the Torah, or Old Testament, mandates Jewish men to marry the widows of their deceased brothers. Referred to as the law of yibbum in Hebrew, the custom is followed in other clannish cultures and is generally known as levirate marriage, after the Latin levir, meaning “husband’s brother.” The custom grew from primal necessity, the urge to preserve the family and stake claim to immortality. The rule traditionally comes into play when the widow is left childless; the firstborn of her new marriage “belongs” to the husband who died, so his line can continue. The implication is profound: without children there is no hereafter.

Morris didn’t have a chance.

He was twenty-one years old while Lola was at least twenty-five and possibly twenty-eight, either way a mature woman, the mother of two, who radiated the tough sex appeal of a movie siren. They tried to hide their courtship from the children, but it couldn’t have been easy. Their sexual connection was palpable. Throughout their marriage they couldn’t sit next to one another in the movies without kissing and squeezing each other’s hand.

Sandra, Lola’s older child, was six when their relationship shifted. She was away at camp when she found out Lola had married her Uncle Morris. When she received the telegram, she wondered whether she was supposed to call Morris “Dad” now. (The answer was yes.)

Within a year Morris and Lola had their first child. They named her Georgette, after George. Morris called his firstborn “Gorgeous.” This would become a source of annoyance for Wendy. She thought it meant her sister was pretty and she wasn’t, even though they shared similar, strong Wasserstein features.

Wendy didn’t know how Gorgeous became Gorgeous:

After Lola delivered the baby girl, the doctor came to the waiting room to tell the young father. “Congratulations, you have a beautiful little girl” filtered through Morris’s damaged hearing as “It’s a boy.” He telephoned the family, with the news and then went to see Lola and the baby. When he asked to see his son, she screamed, “It’s a girl.” Morris paused, adjusted, smiled at his baby, and said, “She’s gorgeous.” The name stuck.

They were on track to become yet another American-Jewish cliché, enmeshed in family, enjoying the abundance they’d earned through suffering and resilience. Both the business and the children were thriving. Sandra had a cute nickname, Sandy, and was enrolled at P.S. 206, the public elementary school right across the street from their apartment on East Twenty-second Street. Abner was developing as a bright, handsome little boy.

Almost every weekend, Lola and Morris took Sandy, Abner, and Georgette for Sunday dinner in Brighton Beach with Lola’s family, including her parents and brother, Henry. They gathered at her sister Gucci’s home, where she lived with her husband, Max Kaufman, a furrier, and their two sons.

Gucci helped their mother, Helen, prepare gigantic meals, beginning with chopped liver or gefilte fish, continuing with chicken soup loaded with kreplach or noodles, followed by vegetables doused in schmaltz, a piece of chicken (meaning half a chicken per person),
and
a hunk of meat. The groaning feast was completed with Helen’s special pistachio cake, every nut ground by hand.

SANDRA AND ABNER IN SIMPLER TIMES.

Simon Schleifer grew so fat he wore a girdle.

Lola decided she was not going to be tied to the kitchen like her mother.

Still, she remained the baby of the family, dependent on her big brother for advice and on her mother and sister for comfort. Lola used her mother and sister as baby-sitters, often leaving Sandy alone with them in Brighton Beach. Sandy had warm memories of those afternoons, watching the women cook, basking in their uncomplicated affection, so different from Lola’s thorny love. In this period of tranquillity, Lola may have been lulled into believing that fate had extracted a heavy enough toll. The war was pervasive, but it didn’t take Morris away; he was exempt from the draft because of his poor hearing. The horror abroad was reaping benefits for Wasserstein Brothers. The company prospered as a supplier to Reynolds Metals, under contract with the government to manufacture decoys for U.S. aircraft. The ribbon makers produced streamers that contained a hairpin-width line of aluminum foil. These strips trailed several hundred feet behind the airplanes and tricked enemy radar, which detected the foil in the ribbon and directed anti-aircraft fire there, instead of at the planes.

For Lola, however, there were no exemptions from the fragility of existence.

No one could pinpoint when or exactly how the next round of trouble began. No one knew precisely how Abner got sick. Georgette heard he’d gone ice-skating and come down with a fever; maybe it was polio, something burned his brain. An uncle told a cousin that George’s death was the cause; the shock had precipitated damage to Abner’s immune system—an unlikely theory, since the child was only a year old when his father had died. Someone else said the fault lay with a cousin visiting from California; the cousin had meningitis and infected Abner. Scarlet fever was mentioned as the culprit. Wendy understood that her brother had contracted encephalitis.

Whatever the source, by the time Abner was about five years old, he began having violent seizures. Lola would scoop him up in her arms and place him in a baby carriage to subdue him. His speech stopped developing normally; he would become frustrated as words took longer to emerge. The family tried to adjust. “He would have fits,” recalled Irving Redel, who worked for the Wasserstein brothers for many years. “Morris would bring him sometimes to the business. Everyone knew him. It wasn’t something you would shout in the streets about, but it wasn’t a secret.”

As a child, Georgette grew impatient with her older brother’s long silences, and she interpreted his impulsive bursts of speech as bossiness. His behavior became more disruptive.

Lola and Morris began looking for cures for Abner. They consulted specialists and began visiting schools and institutions, even traveling to California, a huge trip at the time, for experimental treatments.

Overwhelmed, they sent Sandy, age nine, to a boarding school in Florida, where she would stay for almost two years. For Sandy the exile to Florida became yet another loss to absorb. Unable to make friends in this strange place, she stayed alone in the library and read, developing the selfsufficiency she would exhibit for the rest of her life.

Then, news from Poland: Lola’s sister Hela and her family were confirmed to be dead, shot by Nazis in their own yard.

Lola became pregnant again. On December 25, 1947, Bruce was born. Later, this would become a family joke: Bruce and Jesus Christ—the Messiahs, holy Jewish sons—shared a birthday. But in real time Bruce’s birth meant that Morris and Lola were now raising four children—Sandy returned home that summer.

Abner became increasingly difficult to handle, but Lola never discussed her son’s problems much with the family’s growing network of cousins and in-laws. This was partly her nature and partly the times. It would be years before children with emotional or mental disabilities would not be regarded with shame.

By the time Wendy was born, Abner was gone. Lola and Morris had enrolled him in the Devereux School, a progressive institution for mentally disabled children. The school had been established in 1912 by a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Helena Devereux, who believed that “slow” children could be taught, not just to read and write but also the “skills of daily living.” The family took monthly outings to Philadelphia so the children could visit their brother. The sight of his siblings, however, provoked Abner to have seizures. Georgette dreaded the trips. She was prone to carsickness, and the drive seemed endless. She and Bruce fought most of the way in the backseat, and then she would throw up.

Georgette believed that it was her fault he’d been sent away. “I think they did it for me,” she said. “He was crushing my spirit.”

Morris and Lola stopped taking the children to see their brother. For several years Abner came home for holidays, but these visits became awkward ordeals. His siblings saw him as a stranger.

Abner came home once or twice after Wendy was born, and then he disappeared from his siblings’ lives, even from conversation.

Bruce, who was three years old the last time he saw his brother, chose to ignore his existence, even though numerous family photographs included Abner. “There was one picture with a boy there,” he said, “but I didn’t know who it was.” Bruce developed an inability to deal with painful matters; as an adult he became known for his secrecy.

Lola and Morris continued to visit Abner on his birthday and a few other times during the year. They talked about him less and less. Abner ebbed from the family tableau; the children accepted the transformation of their brother into a ghost.

Before Wendy turned two, Lola became pregnant one more time. When she left for the hospital to deliver the baby, she promised the children she would be home soon, with a new brother or sister.

Instead she returned empty-handed.

“The baby lived for hours and just died,” said Georgette. “That was the way my mother presented it. The baby had a hole in its heart. I remember being on the phone and saying, ‘My mom had a baby, and the baby died.’ She just came home and went on going.”

Morris and Lola formed a tacit agreement to make things simple for the children left at home. From then on, there would be one set of parents, Morris and Lola, and four siblings: Sandra, Georgette, Bruce, and Wendy. The family Wasserstein was in place. The rest, so far as the children were concerned, was supposed to be history.

L
ike George, and the relatives left in Poland, Abner had disappeared. Yet unlike the others, he remained a distant presence, a hovering reminder that past and future have a way of converging, and that secrets are hard to keep.

SANDY, MORE MOTHERLY WITH HER YOUNGER
SIBLINGS THAN LOLA WAS, HERE WITH
BABY BRUCE IN CARRIAGE.

Two

A BROOKLYN CHILDHOOD

1950-63

When siblings describe growing up,
it often sounds as though they were raised in different households from one another. Sandy, the eldest Wasserstein child, grew up in a different universe. As a little girl, she listened to grandparents speaking Polish and Yiddish and watched her grandmother prepare homemade kreplach and grind her own meat. Sandy’s early years were spent in the hardscrabble world of the new immigrant, during a catastrophic world war. These hardships were compounded and personalized by the family’s losses.

During those difficult years, Sandy had to rely on a mother whose philosophy of “go-go” didn’t allow time for tenderness, whose survival instincts didn’t include empathy.

Her father was steadfast. True to obligation and inclination, Morris always treated Sandy as a daughter. She called him Dad and meant it. Still, she was well aware of the father who had died, and she resented having her early memories expunged from the record. Those memories included her brother, the one who was imperfect and had to be sent away.

Compare her experience with Wendy’s. Sandy’s baby sister was born into prosperity and a family structure that had stabilized. Their grandparents were out of the picture; the Old World and its travails were remote. Abner was a stranger in a photograph.

The summer after Wendy was born, Georgette and Sandy returned from camp to find yet another dramatic change in the Wasserstein household—only this one was pleasant. While the older girls were gone, the family had moved from a modest home to a three story, eighteen-room Dutch Colonial house on Avenue N—a palace compared with the apartment Sandy lived in as a baby. On the top floor there was a maid’s room, though the Wassersteins didn’t have a maid. Two bedrooms had terraces. The basement was outfitted with a billiards room, where the family put a Ping-Pong table. Downstairs there was another room with a bar and taps for beer, leading the children to fantasize that the former occupant had been a gangster during Prohibition.

For almost thirteen years, Wendy would live in this sprawling house, situated at the intersection of two tree-lined streets. In Brooklyn, as in Wloclawek, a corner house was a sign of prosperity.

Understandable that Wendy described growing up in Brooklyn as her Camelot, a time of innocence, while Sandy generally chose to pretend that her childhood had never happened.

“In retrospect, I realize that our eyes were always focused on Manhattan,” Sandy told a reporter in 1984. “I used to go to the Art Students League in midtown Manhattan every weekend. I’d shop at Bendel’s or Bloomingdale’s, but I’d never even been to downtown Brooklyn.”

Like her mother, she remembered what she needed to remember.

As firstborns often do, Sandy paved the way for the younger ones, a task that carried more weight when the eldest was also the first family member to be born in the United States. She became the pivot, the child with secret knowledge of the adult world, who acted as interpreter and protector for her siblings.

Lola had two ways of describing Sandy. One was
strazac,
the Polish word for “fireman,” which Lola interpreted as a general in the Polish army. The other
shtarker
, was Yiddish for a strong person who takes charge.

When Wendy was born, Lola put her thirteen-year-old
shtarker
in charge of the infant. It was Sandy who decided the baby should be named after Wendy Darling, the character from J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s story,
Peter Pan.
Already exhibiting executive savvy, Sandy kept the responsibilities she liked and delegated tasks she didn’t want, such as diaper detail. She paid Georgette a fee to change Wendy.

Apart from dirty diapers, Sandy enjoyed the baby, who was so much younger that their relationship was more like that of mother and daughter, without the tension. Sandy treated her sister like a doll, dressing her up in Bruce’s clothing and taking her to high-school sorority meetings.

They avoided the sisterly squabbling that took place between Sandy and Georgette, who were closer in age. As oldest, Sandy had superior status, including the privilege of her own room, with a terrace, while Georgette had to share a room with Wendy.

Sandy was a perfect big sister, equipped with adult know-how but still one of the children. She was attractive and could be intimidating, having inherited Lola’s hauteur as well as her high cheekbones. Georgette was shy and not always at ease around her confident older sister. But the little ones worshipped Sandy.

The younger children would always associate Sandy with a feeling of being protected from Lola’s erratic behavior and with tenderness that wasn’t Lola’s to give. It was Sandy, not Lola, who put Bruce and Wendy to sleep with bedtime stories.

Their big sister seemed to know everything, including the words to every song ever written—at least those written for the Broadway stage. She loved to sing and taught her younger siblings everything from silly camp medleys like “Cannibal King” (“We’ll build a bungalow, big enough for two, big enough for two my honey . . .”) to the musicals that she loved. Name a show tune from the 1940s or 1950s, by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Lowe. Sandy could belt it out in a voice that was surprisingly sweet for such a strong-willed girl. She might miss a note, but she never forgot a lyric. She knew the scores from all the hits:
Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls, Call Me Madam, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me Kate, The King and I.

The sing-alongs made a lasting impression, even on her brother Bruce, who would not be known for his sentimentality. Throughout his life his favorite song remained “Some Enchanted Evening” from
South Pacific.

Sandy never lost her grip on her siblings, but they didn’t share the same roof for long. The tough times for the Wasserstein family had drawn to a close just as Sandy was making her escape. Her education had been accelerated via the tracking system established in the 1920s by the New York public schools, to push children who were high achievers. The “Special Progress,” or SP, system remained in place throughout the 1960s, as a way to manage the huge influx of Baby Boom kids into the system. It was common for students to skip one grade; the truly ambitious like Sandra Wasserstein skipped two. She was graduated from James Madison High School in 1953—in Brooklyn—and left for the University of Michigan that summer, just before her sixteenth birthday.

S
ituated in her expansive house, having survived heartache on heartache, and not one to fuss over housekeeping, Lola sought new outlets for her vast reserves of energy. While the Wasserstein brothers toiled in the ribbon factory and expanded into textiles and then real estate, their wives turned similar drive into their products: the children.

The competition among the sisters-in-law was fierce. Top performers in this hotly contested race were Lola and Florence, Jerry’s wife. The goal was to see whose children provided the most bragging rights. No penalty for slight exaggerations. That was all part of the game.

Florence had the home-court advantage: She was native-born, raised in Manhattan’s Yorkville section, the Upper East Side’s predominantly German neighborhood, where Jewish families were rare. Like Lola, Florence had five children, but all of hers were home and accounted for.

Aunt Florence would provide marvelous material for the extended gag that Wendy would concoct from her Brooklyn childhood:

On quiet afternoons at my family’s house in Brooklyn, when my brother, Bruce, would be taking my sister [Georgette] for a mop ride and plotting openly to boil my blubber for oil like Moby Dick’s, Aunt Florence would casually ring up to say hello and to inform us that “guess what,” her son, our cousin Alan, had just finished reading and memorizing the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

“That’s wonderful, Florence! Did he enjoy it?” My mother would always do her best to sound enthusiastic.

By this point my sister would have severed a few ligaments on the mop ride and I would be wailing that I didn’t want my blubber boiled. My mother would approach us with the unchained wrath of Medea. ‘You goddamned kids! Your cousin Alan just finished the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and what the hell are you doing?”

In a rare moment of sibling solidarity we would answer: “Mother, nobody reads the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
!”

So Aunt Florence loomed large as a standard-bearer for elementary education in the 1950s.

The madcap childhood Wendy wrote about wasn’t far from the truth, though her version was consistently more amusing than real life. Lola’s demands were relentless. Her children all remembered, one way or the other, bringing home a grade of 99 on a report card and being asked, “Where’s the other point?”

As adults they portrayed themselves as a bevy of little geniuses. Actually, they brought home the report cards of smart but not exceptional students, with as many B’s as A’s, and even some C’s.

They did have fun, as they created their New York Jewish version of the American dream. The children watched popular television shows like
Zorro, The Wonderful World of Disney, Bachelor Father,
and
The Millionaire
, a weekly drama that followed the consequences when a rich man gave a million dollars to a stranger. Morris and Lola joined a beach club, where the children swam. On weekends, when Wendy was small, Morris took Georgette and Bruce to the park to ice-skate, ride bikes, and have other adventures, while Lola stayed home with the baby. They learned to play tennis at camp. Lola enrolled the girls in dance class. Morris bought a movie camera, preserving a record, proof that his happy family existed.

They took drives into the country and cultural excursions into “the city,” as outer-borough residents referred to Manhattan. They ate out at Cookys, a famous Brooklyn delicatessen.

In homage to
Lassie
and
Rin Tin Tin,
other television programs they watched as children, they tried to have pets, an alien concept for Eastern European Jews. The experiment was unsuccessful. Wendy would write:

I don’t come from a long line of pet lovers. One of my earliest memories is of my mother, Lola, releasing our pet parakeet into a hurricane. She never explained how the bird flew out of her cage into the storm, but all we children knew it was involuntary. And then there was the time I came home from elementary school to find our newly acquired cocker spaniel on the roof. My mother swore that the dog had climbed up there for the view, but I certainly had never seen Lassie on the roof. The police arrived, and the dog survived and subsequently moved to live with relatives in the suburbs. The last straw was my father driving a cat from our house in Brooklyn over the bridge into Manhattan and dropping her off somewhere near Wall Street, apparently hoping that a generous stockbroker would take her in.

Morris avidly followed the news. He read the
New York Post,
the
Wall Street Journal,
the
New York Times,
and many business magazines. When he helped Georgette study for a seventh-grade history test about World War II, he seemed to know all the answers without looking in a book. When she asked him why, he answered, “For me that isn’t history, it was the news of the day.”

As the only son in residence, Bruce was anointed most brilliant by his parents, most obnoxious by his siblings. He was the know-it-all who beat everyone at chess, read history books for fun, and considered himself the supreme authority on everything—an attitude reinforced by Morris and Lola, who showered him with special attention. On Georgette’s birthday both she and Bruce received Schwinn bicycles, which struck her as terribly unfair. Bruce may or may not have been six years old, as legend would have it, when he began following the stock market and reading
Business Week
and
Forbes.
However, he was young when Morris talked business with him—and listened to what his son had to say; at an early age, Bruce became accustomed to having his opinions treated as worthy of extra consideration. He declared himself King of Bruceania, a make-believe empire he created on family trips to the Catskills, when he and Wendy would pretend to be explorers like Hernando de Soto or Lewis and Clark.

Lola made it clear to her children that they were not to be part of any crowd. Waiting in line was for ordinary folks, not the Wassersteins. Every year, on the family’s annual pilgrimage to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas show, Lola would bypass the long queue and explain to the head usher that the family was visiting from Kansas and had just one day to tour the city. (She chose Kansas because the family had just watched
The Wizard of Oz
on television the night before.) Much to her children’s chagrin, few people said no to Lola, despite her non-Midwestern, Polish accent.