In the summer of 1954, Aunt Bella and Uncle Charles spoke to one another for the first time in thirty-five years. It was a momentous but unhappy occasion.
Bella was my grandmother Rachel’s younger sister. Everyone agreed that Rachel was the most beautiful of the two sisters, but Bella was the most loved.
I never knew my grandmother, for she died before I was born. I only know what my mother said, that Rachel had been the most wonderful woman in the world.
“Your grandmother was my best friend,” Mother used to say. “We had no secrets from one another. I told her everything. All my friends just loved to be with her. She was the life of our parties.”
Even at ten, I suspected there might be another side to this story and I hoped fervently that my mother would not expect to be the repository of all my secrets. Daddy had a slightly different perspective on the magnificent Rachel.
“When I married your mother,” he explained, “I inherited your grandmother and a French poodle, who peed on the carpet. It was all or nothing.”
One afternoon I told Mother that I had been watching Heaven, and Grandma had just gotten into a taxi and would be here shortly. I thought Mother would be pleased to hear this, but she just began to cry, so I abandoned that particular storyline.
Aunt Bella was all I knew of my grandparents. She adopted me with all the warmth of her generous heart. Bella was a plump lady with a huge bosom, curly gray hair, and a deep suntan who always carried the fragrance of sunshine and strong perfume.
She made an annual pilgrimage to Miami Beach in the winter. When she returned to New York, she would breeze into our apartment, wearing her mink coat and size 18 polyester pants, loaded with guava jelly and hand-harvested seashells. She allowed me to call her “Gram” just like Suzanne, her own adored granddaughter, who was two years my senior.
We were a tight-knit family in those days, a matriarchy as Suzanne and I used to say when we reminisced in college. Bella was its center. We would celebrate Pesach and Rosh Hashanah at her long dining room table, gorging on plump turkey and three kinds of cake. It was Bella who persuaded her husband to buy Silver Lake, the bungalow colony in the Catskills, where the whole family gathered year after year for summer vacations.
I was afraid of Bella’s husband. Uncle Max was a huge bear of a man with dark black eyebrows and a bald head. He was always yelling, often at Suzanne and me, but even more often at Bella, who either ignored him or gave as good as she got. Suzanne called him Zaida, to distinguish him from Uncle Charles, Bella’s first husband, who was her real Grandpa.
It took me a long time to figure this out, for the concept of divorce was unfamiliar to me, and it seemed unfair for Suzanne to have four grandparents to spoil her while I had none. Suzanne’s mother, Lucinda, was Bella’s older child by Charles. She was a slim, pretty woman who wore halter tops, and spent much of her summer playing Mahjong under the apple trees with like-minded friends. Lucinda was either an indulgent or an indifferent mother. At age ten I could not tell the difference, but I knew that Suzanne was permitted freedom that I could only dream of.
I had been born late in life to parents who had given up the hope of having children, and as an adored first child, was guarded with devotion. Lucinda bought me my ice skates and took me to Rockefeller Center over the strong protests of my mother, who was certain that I would break an ankle. Lucinda convinced my mother that even a ten-year-old needed time alone.
The men in our family are more shadowy figures, perhaps because my most vivid memories are of those long lazy summers when the daddies only came for weekends.
Uncle Charles and his second wife, Sophie, came to the Catskills for two weeks every summer and stayed at the Rosemont Hotel down the road so Lucinda and Suzanne could visit. He was a gentle, white-haired old man who was reputed to be the rich owner of a successful jewelry business. He never came to Silver Lake for fear of meeting Bella, to whom he had not spoken for thirty-five years.
“Why won’t Grandpa Charles talk to you?” I asked her, one day.
“Because he’s an old fool,” she told me. “Never forgive, never forgets.” Then she changed the subject.
My curiosity, however, was not appeased so I sought out Suzanne, possessor of all worthwhile knowledge, and posed the question again.
“I’ll tell you,” she offered, “but don’t tell your parents. They’d probably be shocked.”
“Of course not,” I promised solemnly.
“Gram never wanted to marry Grandpa in the first place,” she confided. “It was when they were still living in Pinsk, but her parents insisted. Gram always found him boring. After they came to New York, she had my mother, and she met Zaida and fell wildly in love with him. She asked Grandpa for a divorce, but he refused. He said she was his wife no matter what she did, and he’d never let her go. So, Gram moved out and went to live with Zaida.”
“But they’re always fighting,” I protested.
“Doesn’t matter,” Suzanne said. “She’s crazy about him. That’s how they show they love each other.”
It seemed peculiar to me, but Suzanne was twelve and therefore more experienced than I in matters of love.
“Anyway,” she continued, “he still wouldn’t divorce her, so she got pregnant and had Uncle Ben. Then he had to let her go.”
“You mean,” I whispered, “that Uncle Ben is a bastard?”
“Well, he was for a while,” she said, “until they married. Charles never forgave her. He still loves her, you know, even though he’s married now to someone else. That’s the reason he won’t see her, or speak to her, ever.”
I thought about poor Uncle Charles, and about Bella, daring to have a baby with someone who wasn’t her husband. In my opinion, Bella had gotten a bad bargain. Sweet, kind Uncle Charles struck me as much easier to live with than fiery Uncle Max. Love must be peculiar and unpredictable.
The summer of ’54 is frozen in my memory, perhaps because it was the last of the family summers before we drifted away from one another. There is a picture of the three of us; Gram, Suzanne, and me, taken just before a berry-picking expedition. We are dressed in shorts and halters and are balancing large pots on our heads. The fields were wild that summer, filled with berries, daisies, and black-eyed Susans. We always returned with our pots full and our mouths purple, and Gram would make hot bubbly pots of jam, enough to last a lifetime.
Suzanne and I explored the flower fields together, she led, and I followed. I accepted her authority unquestioningly. I did not envy her abundance but stayed close to her, hoping that some of it would be mine. I also learned to be alone that summer, finding my secret spots and working diligently on “Scarlet Vermillion and Lavender Rose”, my first novel, loosely modeled on “Gone with the Wind.”
We all lived together in The Big House, a white clapboard structure with green shuttered windows and a large communal kitchen downstairs. Mother, my brother, and I shared a room across the hall from Lucinda and Suzanne, next door to Gram and Zaida. There were no secrets in the house, for the walls were thin, and arguments, as well as reconciliations, were common knowledge.
Lucinda did not seem well that summer. Even I noticed that she was pale and listless. Suzanne confided that her mother had something called an aneurysm and might need an operation in the fall. Neither of us knew what that meant at the time, except that Lucinda was not to be bothered by the two of us misbehaving.
On Labor Day, as we were packing to leave, Lucinda called for Bella.
“I can’t breathe, Ma. It hurts.”
We all ran to her room.
“Where?” said Bella.
Lucinda pointed to her chest. She was breathing quickly and shallowly. Her face was sweaty with a faint bluish tinge.
“Call the doctor!” Bella barked at Max. He ran for the phone.
“I want Daddy,” said Lucinda. Tight-lipped, Bella nodded at my mother who
left to find Charles.
“Ma,” said Lucinda, “I don’t feel well.”
And then she died.
When Charles arrived, Bella was on her knees sobbing. Suzanne was shaking Lucinda, trying desperately to wake her.
“Oh God, she’s gone,” my mother said.
Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she was trembling. I ran to her and
held her hand.
“Not my child,” cried Charles. “It should have been your bastard, not my child.”
Bella turned and looked at him. Zaida started toward her, but she motioned him away. Slowly, brokenly, she rose to her feet.
“Our child, Charles,” she said. “She was our child.”
Then she opened her arms to him. He came without hesitation, and they stood holding one another and sobbing for what seemed like a very long time; two sad, old people, mourning the one person they had both loved.
Things changed after that. We were never a family in quite the same way. Gram and Zaida sold the bungalow colony. Suzanne and I grew up. When I was in college, Bella and Max moved to Miami Beach and a few years later, Max passed away. I saw Bella for the last time when she was in the hospital, suffering from congestive heart failure. She was in her 90s, thin and shriveled and dying, but she was still suntanned and smelled of sunshine and her signature perfume.