DEAR DAD,
Now that your wife of sixty-eight years is beside you once more, all our promises to you and to her have been kept. Her funeral mirrored yours. Her college photo blown up and placed beside her plain pine coffin, as yours was. She had guts, had gone to the March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, had been outspoken in ways that you had never had the courage to be, had gotten a PhD despite a husband and four small children at home and a full-time job.
We had doubts that we would be able to make a memorable funeral for her, as she was not colorful like you and, as you well know, we had more complicated, darker ambivalences toward her than toward you; but, as it turned out, hers was ‘terrific’ (as you would say).
After the hired Rabbi’s short prayers, and other comments by attendees, I read from the interview I did with you both for Love in the Second Act – a different part from what I’d read at yours. At yours I read about the Blue Grotto. Here’s what Shirley got:
Me: ‘Did you think there might be a better world, particularly after World War Two, after everybody had suffered so much? Didn’t you think that people might have learned something?’
Mother: ‘We’ve lived a better life than I ever dreamed I would. When your father made $2,000 a year we saved. One thing we don’t talk about … that we had a good sex life.’
Father: ‘Terrific.’
Mother: ‘Sex is an important part of the whole equation.’
Mother: ‘We always had … have fun together too.’
Father: ‘We had fun. Didn’t we?’
I nod. We did have fun, roller skating, playing archery at Jones Beach in winter, all bundled up, with the wind howling.
My father gets to his feet. ‘As a unit. I don’t think I ever did anything alone.’
Mother: ‘I don’t think I did either, except professional things. I think we’re lucky, we had and have the same major interests.’
Me: ‘So on all levels, Mom, you were, and are, good partners?’
Mother: ‘However, when I come back, I’m going to be an athlete.’
I’m rendered speechless by this.
Father: ‘A what?’
‘An athlete.’
I find my words again, enough to ask: ‘And what about you, Dad, when you’re reincarnated?’
‘I expect to spend a lovely time with her in heaven.’ He laughs.
Me: ‘Any regrets?’
Mother: ‘We should have been rich. The other thing we enjoyed was traveling. We first went to Europe in ’62. We were old by then, we were forty. We borrowed from my retirement.’
‘We had ten weeks.’
‘Eight weeks. We got to Italy and I schlepped him to the Blue Grotto because I remembered the pictures in my geography book.’
Laughter, snivels, sighs.
This time there was no Broadway musical at the graveside. Instead, Maggie’s husband David playing heart-wrenching music on his violin – a nod to Shirley’s mother the classical pianist, and to her grandfather, a violinist in Tzarist Russia and later in America. Finally, and I thought of you, the movie-lover, Nancy’s tribute followed:
Yesterday, Maggie and I were driving around New Jersey preparing for today’s memorial. Per usual, our conversation included scraps of film trivia. Maggie, our esteemed movie director, taught me the term for a film script in progress. It’s called ‘A Treatment’. So here is Mom’s final Treatment, for:
Shirley and Bill Greenwald: The movie
Location: 1 Washington Square Village, Apartment 16B.
Score: ‘Finian’s Rainbow’ is playing loudly.
On the kitchen counter The Ellis Island Immigrant Cookbook is open at page 96 where the recipe ‘Aunt Sarah’s Unstuffed Stuffed Cabbage’ is ‘Submitted by Shirley E. Greenwald, New York, New York.’
The mixer is going and the fragrant smell of chocolate wafts through the apartment. Perfect, chewy brownies are about to be baked.
Meanwhile, Shirley is out on the terrace watering her thriving pots of bright red geraniums.
Bill is shuffling down the hallway to the front door. It creaks open and he picks up the NY Times.
Cut to: Shirley seated in the living room in her red chair. She’s wearing her striped shirt, blue pants, Ferragamo loafers, and is reading through her red glasses.
Today’s headline, Feb. 20, 2012: ‘Europe Stock Rally Faces a Perilous Road’. And Wednesday’s Food Page, her favorite: ‘Wild Oats’.
Cut to: Shirley and Bill strolling arm and arm. They’re heading to eat a ‘heavenly’ dinner in their new favorite restaurant.
Final Shot: A beautiful Manhattan sun setting into eternity.
The End
We took turns to hoist a shovelful of almost black dirt, heaved it onto the pine coffin that had been lowered into the deep pit. One after another, we approached the pit to drop our single daffodil onto the earth-spattered coffin. A chill, wild wind, almost a tempest, suddenly blew up. Unequipped with winter coats, the Florida relatives were shivering, so we hurried back into the black limos that sped through Queens into Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, to my apartment (since yours, the place for every tradition over forty years, is no more) for food and sitting shiva.
For as long as I can remember you’d always quoted to us at important moments your favorite line from the 1946 film with Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, George Brent, and Natalie Wood (who was then a little girl): ‘Tomorrow is forever.’ And now, Daddy, at long last, it will be.
Your daughter
Smell of Spring in the air, stink of piled garbage bags awaiting pick-up
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Kindly cancel W & S Greenwald’s subscription to your newspaper. Please note that W & S Greenwald, my parents, had the NY Times delivered to their door for at least forty years. Before that, they bought and devoured it daily over another thirty years. Reading your newspaper was the first thing each of them did every day. The only reason for cancellation, in their minds, would be death. And now it has come to both.
A. Gold, daughter
Tugged by wet wind. My kitchen floor freshly scrubbed, smelling like pine
DEAR LILY,
I was told that your bones will soon be removed from your grave and ‘washed in wine’, after which they will be returned.
What does this actually mean? Will a service accompany this ritual? I’ll be arriving on Hydra around the 18th. Have been upstate with Nancy and in a few hours will be taking a bus back to New York. I’ll be carrying another of the plants grown from the little shoots Nancy cut from your Hydra climbing roses that she’s nurtured upstate until now. I’m hoping to root it in my new little ‘patch’ garden given to me by my New York building after ten years on their waiting list. Nancy will pack it and instruct. Shall report.
Sending washboard sounds of cicadas from upstate.
Alison
Through my keyhole I spy Mussolini’s lion cub with its orange pelage licking off the silvery lining around the ‘SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL’ coir door mat
CHÈRE ALISON,
Yes it’s true. Lily’s remains will be exhumed, and her bones washed in wine at some point decided by her family during an ‘odd’ year (a nine, three, five, etc.). Her wine-washed ‘ivories’ won’t be made into gambling dice (as she, you, and I used to joke) but will be returned to the grave. If invited, we must bring rosemary, bring Ophelia. ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembering. Pray you, love, remember.’ I’ll bring Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, of course.
As Lily always cautioned you with narrowed green eyes, ‘Baudelaire was right when he said, Only when we drink poison are we well.’ She knew the siren song of inebriation would never stop calling you. She and I want you to stay alive. And so would Thor, I’m sure.
Please take care of yourself.
Ruffe
DEAR ALISON GOLD,
Were you once Alison Greenwald? I hope I’m not being foolish in my hope that you might remember me. The last t
ime we were together, I drank champagne while bidding you goodbye along with a group of your friends and your parents, in your cabin as you were about to cross the Atlantic for the first time on the old Queen Elizabeth – I believe it was its final voyage to Europe. You, your beautiful sister Nancy, and your tiny son, Tom, were sailing, you wearing red and blue stripes, four sheets to the wind. I, your short, blond, ex-Catholic sidekick from third grade, who no longer believed in the Transmigration of the Soul, was five sheets to the wind giggling with your kid sister Peggy.
You may recall that I helped match up pairs of mittens while providing ‘knock-knock’ jokes, hanging out with you at your Lost and Found after I’d visited it to look for my lost bus pass (which you found). We got to telling jokes. So many dark winter afternoons in that minuscule room beside the school’s furnace.
And so many memories of our adventures stand out as I scroll through time past. I sat at the edge of the Jones Beach Olympic-size swimming pool counting, while you swam over a hundred laps. Or was it a thousand? It seemed like it.
We were together when our airplane lost its hydraulic fluid over Puerto Rico.
As I remember, in the last years I knew you, you were only happy when you were setting fire to the drapes.
Do you still bat for both teams? Do you still have high arches? Do you still wear Pucci underwear? Do you still look like Natalie Wood? It would be amazing if I awoke to a letter from you, even if you are now impersonating an author named Alison Leslie Gold.
Stanley
DEAR AUTHOR GOLD,
If you are not aware, we great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors would like you, as someone we consider one of a dwindling number of protectors of those memories, to know the news that former SS Hauptsturmfürer Erich Priebke, mostly known for his extradition from Argentina to Italy in 1995 where he was convicted of war crimes that included the infamous reprisal slaughter of Italian boys, men, Jews in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome in 1944, who had recently turned one hundred, making him the oldest known Nazi war criminal, died a few days ago. He has been refused burial in his hometown of Hennigsdorf in Germany, also in his adopted country of Argentina.
I have just heard, in Italy too, by the Pope. We wondered if perhaps you might share our joy? If so, perhaps you might write a few words for our blog on this subject?
Louis de Soto
STANLEY!!!!! KNOCK-KNOCK STANLEY!
Yes, it’s me! I’m over the moon to hear from you as I had never stopped wondering what happened to my sidekick, until I heard you’d died in a plane crash in Alaska – and my heart turned inside out. I’ve never stopped missing you and, though I’ve had many friendships of consequence, ours, as a marathon of joke-telling and unending childhood, has never been duplicated. Of course I remember you with your mismatched eyes, our beginning in my Lost and Found, and our many ‘adventures’ as we grew older, though what you write about seems as if it’s from another lifetime. Now I avoid setting fire to the drapes and am as un-outstanding as a tree frog. And am not kidding.
The me that wouldn’t mind a few last hurrahs and one last fishbowl full of vodka thanks you for remembering. Please tell me what’s become of dear You. Are you still funny? Do you ever have thoughts that your sell by date is fast approaching, as I do?
I would give a toe or two to see you again. Would it be possible? Would it crush you to find me boring and aged? If you think you might be able to bear it, I would. For now, I’m about to leave for a visit to the Isle of Hydra in Greece where I stay in a small fisherman’s cottage. In two months I’ll be back in New York City where I am based. My deathbed duties (aunt, mentor, father, role-model, lover, mother) seem to be at an end for the time being as all of the above have passed on. Though I pretty much showed up at my loved ones’ deathbeds, I purposefully did not go to my mother’s when they took her off life-support. My two sisters, whom you mention in your letter, and my niece were beside her. I decided that my last visit with her would be when Maggie and I took her for a haircut; my mother and I had a quiet hour alone in which, when I commented on the passing of time, she told me, ‘You never change.’ Was this a compliment or a rebuff? I will never know.
With no more geriatric duties, I am free to travel anywhere anytime and stay for as long as I like. Please don’t delay in writing back. I’m very excited by the idea of seeing your face. That face from our many hours in the room with lost bus passes, pens, assignment books, gloves, behind the burbling furnace. I’d forgotten that our friendship went on for so long, into our twenties to judge by the adventures you mention.
What happened? I have no idea. Neither why nor when. You seek to identify me with the writer known as ‘Alison Leslie Gold’; these days I’m seeking to do the same myself. An optimist – which I am not! – might say that this is because I’m in the process of becoming a different sort of writer and am betwixt and between until I do.
With lifelong affection,
Alison
P.S. My son’s name is Thor, not Tom. And my sister who was once known as Peggy is called Maggie. Oh: Remember the Reichian Orgone Accumulator in my parents’ bedroom that we used to laugh about and hang out in? You’ll be amused to know that after my father was dead and my mother had moved into Assisted Living we managed to sell or give away everything from the apartment. Everything, that is, except their Accumulator since the charity to which we donated the unsold pieces wouldn’t take it with them. It was too strange. It remained alone, a box-like aberration in the empty apartment when we shut and locked the door for the last time.
Sat on right ankle during ten-hour flight to Athens. Margot Frank across the aisle, hands folded in her lap, black burrs stuck to the hem of her coat
DEAR SIMON,
Am just arrived on Hydra, and whacked, but I did want to let you know that my mother has died after ten roller-coaster years of illness; also being on a feeding tube for seven of those years. I was not prepared for how both my parents (who were extraordinarily healthy until their late sixties; in fact I don’t remember either ever missing a day of work) would suffer so many hospitalizations and illness in the last decades of their lives.
Our correspondence over these last years (in this time of email and instant messaging) has become a source of nourishment for me. Do stick with me, Simon, let’s keep beating our drums to each other across the miles. Or should I say, sticks on the ice, yours crossing mine.
A kindred spirit,
Alison
DEAR LILY,
There is a blight on geraniums on Hydra but a plethora of overgrown, thorny bougainvillea, the plant you never liked. You always said it belonged in graveyards. Strange to say, geraniums – reds, oranges, whites, all – that hardy flower one simply pushed into earth and flooded with water to grow – no longer appear to bloom on the island.
Arrived at the house parched. Cicada noise is muted; mewing gulls too. The local cats do not look healthy, they stare me down, follow on my heel right into the house; they’re aggressive, unsympathetic. Surely, Lily, I have coarsened. Or is irritation just guilt on ice? One limping cat with a crushed foot known as ‘Olympia’ waits unrelentingly outside my gate, like the man naked under his raincoat at the foot of the Spanish Steps in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. The ankle-swelling has misaligned my knee so that I can hardly walk. Am in pain, especially on steps down (of which there are a lot as you well know).
Fell into my freshly made bed so that the inviting velvety blackness of the Hydra night could come close. Slept like a rock. This morning your crooked house glinted in the dawn light. The sun singled it out, while keeping the monstrous new villas nearby in shade. I could visualize you curled up asleep against the misshapen outside wall. I lay in bed and read much of the day away, listening as a fierce gale began to blow from the south, making the doors, windows, and shutters rattle, causing the canvas awning to snap. It coerced piles of rustling, dead bougainvillea blossoms, whose rich color had drained away, onto everything, even onto my upstairs terraces and into my bedroom studio.
Coffee finished, I got the broom and swept the dead blossoms through the courtyard, past the gate, down the stone steps, though most blew right back in behind me in a whirl.
‘Swim!’ you would command me. ‘Eat garlic, fresh lemons, defrost my borscht that’s covered in ice in your freezer, and down it even if it has been defrosted and refrozen twice. Read Malcolm Lowry again and be reminded of how fortunate you are not to have died of alcoholic seizure under the pine trees at the bottom of your steps. Bring tangerines to the hag living in the hovel below the pines who hides from those neighbors she believes to be members of Golden Dawn, who has never recovered from childhood years of starvation during the German Occupation, because of which her legs and arms hardly grew.’ Or maybe you would simply tell me: ‘Lie back. Your toenails need clipping. Take off your shoes. It’s a new moon, so next we’ll wash your hair in sweet rainwater and I’ll untangle the knots bequeathed to you by your Russian ancestors …’
A Hydra pal stopped by for coffee. He told me that he had spoken to another old lady friend of ours in England whose mind is fading. When my name came up, Elizabeth exclaimed that I was one of her favorite authors: ‘I just love her book In Search of a Cabbage’, she had enthused. He enquired of me, in his British way, ‘I don’t believe I’m familiar with your In Search of a Cabbage.’
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