First Love

                                                                            

I have the feeling this one of Dad's stories might already have made it to one of my earlier blogs Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon or DjinnfromtheBronxTwo. But it's worth a run on the current blog, I think. Dad went through a phase in his writing; everything in the present tense a la Damon Runyon.


When I am twelve years old, I attend a Greek parochial school.  One day, the principal invites a guy named Jim Londos to the school.  Jim is the new wold wrestling champeen and the most famous an in the Greek community.

We do not have an auditorium in our very small school, but Mr. Londos comes to each of our classes in turn.

He is no bigger than me, me only twelve years old, but he is sure wider.  He looks powerful enough. He is.  In fact he lifts his almost three hundred pound opponent off the ground, spins him around and hurls him to the canvas.  The opponent does not arise.  As Miss Kouri, our mythology teacher explains, he is not like a guy called Antaeus, who grows stronger each time he is thrown to the ground.  In this ancient fight, Hercules had to hold Antaeus up in the air to strangle him.  The guys wonder what Jim Londos will do if his three-hundred pound enemy gets up off the mat. Opinions are divided.  Half believe strangling would be o.k.

Naturally, all the guys become wrestlers.  There are a couple of sprains and bruises and a few broken bones.  The principal gets a lot of extra attention from the parents, especially the mothers.

I do not indulge in this sport, as I have great concern over getting hurt.  In fact I will never get into a match if this classmate, named Achilles, does not challenge me in front of Winnie.

Now, Winnie is not just any girl.  All the guys fall over each other, jump off cliffs, do battle with each other just for one of her glances.  In fact it is only because she comes into the classroom in the first place that my classmate, Achilles, challenges me to a match.  I cannot refuse for there is Winnie.

I have no hope at all.  Miss Kouri relates how the first Achilles gets dipped into the magic river, Styx, while his mother holds him by the heel, so he can't be killed, unless he is wounded in the spot covered by his mother's hand.

Of course, we hear that some guy named Paris shoots him in the heel with an arrow so Achilles dies.

This modern Achilles looks as strong as if he was the original.  I do not have an arrow.

Right away, he gets a scissors hold on me, which means he wraps his stubby legs around my waist and squeezes I think I am going to die.

"Leave the kid alone," says Winnie.

Now I know I am going to die.  If Achilles does not kill me, shame will.  It bugs me, first of all, that she refers to me as "kid". He is no older than me, only bigger--and dumber.  Worse, I realize that the buttons on my fly are undone.

I hope he kills me before she notices, but I make one last try. I lift him still attached to me by his legs, whirl him in a small arc, and his head hits the iron support of a nearby desk.

He falls like an ox hit by a mallet.

Achilles gets three stitches in his head. I get five good whacks from the principal with a wicker rod.

Winnie smiles at me. 

I am in love for all time.

Celui Qui J'Attends Viendra" (The One I Wait For Will Come)--Words from popular song of yesteryear

I have begun to read dad's stories more closely in preparation for these transcriptions. This one really touches me and it is hard to think of dad being so, sentimental. But there you are, a sentimental tale. In letter form.

Sergeant William Morrison
434 Elm Drive
Poughkeepsie, New York USA

Mon Amour,

No, you will not return.  I live now in the words of the songs we listened to together, and the precious memories of our love.  If this letter reaches you in America, do not feel you have to answer.  Think of it as your last French lesson and a reminder of the happiness we had together.

When they told me you had gone, I looked up at the Parisian sky.  They say Le Ciel de Paris n'est pas longstemps cruelle. . .The Parisian sky is never cruel for long.  It is a lie.  I walk now under the bridges of the Seine so as not to see the sky, those same bridges where we looked at each other, ". . .les yeux dans les yeax. . .our eyes meeting. . . deux couers qui sourient.  Two hearts that were smiling. One smiles no more.

One song will always be ours.  I play it over and over and over again, and I forget.  He will come.
Nothing but belles espoirs, wishful thinking.  Il m'appporta des fleurs. Il me dira des histoires de voyages. You carry flowers.  You tell me wondrous tales of your travels.  Tout si bon.  Everything will be wonderful.  As when we first met, Paris was liberated and it was always. Dimanch toute la semaine. Sunday all week long.  You came with your child-like smile and I said to myself, his eyes caress my being.

You spoke early words of love to a hungry heart.  Le couer qui s'ennui.  You spoke to me of nonsense.  As the song says, Il me dira de bavardes.  It was too soon and I should have known.  I knew I would answer in the only way I could. Je responderais que je t'aime. I will answer with love.

You will not come. Never. Paris is free but le ciel est sombre.  My sky is dark.

                                                                                                           
Mademoisele Mireille Jourdan
43 Place de la Vendome
Premier Arrondissement
Paris, France

Forgive me for having read your letter to Bill.  I am his mother.  Yes, he returned--not his physical self, but his effects.  It was cruel that you were not told the truth at his unit headquarters.  William was killed in a Jeep accident on his way to Paris.

I have known about you for many months.  Bill wrote volumes of you. He spoke about remaining in Paris after the war.  Among his effects was a letter to me, in which he talked of his plas.  I enclose the letter, which belongs to you more than to me.  Take it with my sadness for my son and someone dear who touched him briefly with love.  

Bill is always in my heart, as you are.  I thank you for the happiness you gave my boy.

Samantha Morrison


Dearest Mom:

This letter may not be a surprise to you.  You know how many times I wrote to you about Mireille. Now that the war is over I am taking my accumulated leave in Paris.  I have official permission and access to a Jeep and will be on my way as soon as I can.  I am going to ask Mireille to marry me.  I don't know what Army policy is towards soldiers marrying overseas, but it makes no difference  We will be together regardless of any policy.  If it is possible, I will bring Mireille home  If not, I will remain in France.  I will be the man of her favorite song, "Il e'apportera des fleurs".  I will bring her flowers and we will look forever into each others eyes, two hearts that are smiling where the river is a mistress and her lover is Paris.

La Seine est une amante, et son amant est Paris. 

Love,

William

The Face in the Mirror

My mother died over 42 years ago, two thirds of my lifetime  ago.  It has been a long time since I had intense thoughts of and feelings about her. The touchstones of my existence, generally shared by a mother, I met alone. My youthful relationship with her was generally strained for reasons, never to be known fully and so I met those life transitions without much thought about her absence. I long ago was helped to realize that the reasons for her visible dissatisfaction and restrained rage was not due to my failings as a daughter, but to whatever inner torment she could not share even with her husband. And I have come to see her as the human being she was, married at a young 18, with a deep sadness neither spouse nor child could assuage.  She softened with illness. Perhaps, had she been given the time, age would also have softened her.

I am twelve years older than she was when she died. My trip to New York has brought her to my mind in a way that has never been the case before.

Maybe it is that I have softened with age. It surely is more than one person in the last month, from my Aunt Teri to my cousin Carol, to friends of Facebook, to readers of these pieces, have remarked on how much I look like her.

After all, it was said before, that I look like my mother. It is, perhaps, that I wasn't so eager for it to be the case. And now, having come to an understanding of the realities of life, and their vagaries, I now am embracing that possibility. What was the name of that old book, "My Mother, My Self"?  I read it when I was in my 20s. I don't think I grasped the relationship of me to her, or her to me. I think that when she died I was angry that her emotional distance could never be resolved. Door closed. Right?

Prompted by the observations of others that I look like her, that this face, my face, reflects some part of what she was, this time, I seem to be embracing it, even if part of that means I inherited a tendency toward weight.  When my mother was young, she had an 18 inch waist. Well, that's something I never had!!!!

My mother died long before the internet. There are so few remnants of her privately, and none, therefore, publicly.  I didn't even know there had been an obituary--my father handled it all that November. She died on the Monday of Thanksgiving week, the 25th. There could be no funeral or burial on the Thursday or Friday, the holiday weekend, so the one day wake was held on Tuesday and she was buried on Wednesday. I don't recall having a say in how things went down, nor did I think to ask why we couldn't wait a week. I remember only being stunned, not that she had died, that was a foregone conclusion for many months, but by the abruptness of her body's dispatch, and the forever shift of the world for my father, and me.  The only decision I recall making is what she would wear in the coffin, the outfit she had worn at the wedding of a friend of mine, just a month before.

Turns out there was a very short obit, another item I was given during my May trip, yellowed, glued to an envelope of my Aunt Rita's things. She too, would die, way too young in the 1980s.

So, what's the point?

Me June 10, 2016

Turns out, there is something of her still in this world.

The face in the mirror?  It is mine. It is hers.  It is ours. In me, she is still very much here.

The Ice Bucket of Townsend Avenue

I have always had strong memories of my parents' apartment on Townsend Avenue in the Bronx.  It was on the fourth floor of a five floor brick walk-up, a one bedroom facing the back alley and another bricked apartment building. I have tried to explain to those who did not know me then, for I lived the first 16 years of my life there, that the overall decor of the place was 1950s nightclub. It was organized in earth tones and curtains, complete with a bar built by my father. Pretty much the only people who were allowed into this incongruous space were my mother's sisters, in laws, and respective children, for birthdays and holidays awash in the latest cocktails. We kids, of whom I was the eldest, a very serious only child, were relegated to the bedroom, which was, when I was old enough, entirely my own. It too was brown and beige and full of curtains covering both built in and makeshift closet space. And lots of shelving for books. And mirrors along the one long wall in front of which was a Hardman and Peck upright piano.  I had begun to play the piano when I was nine and until I was 17 I was intent on developing an incipient talent, until it became a chore rather than a pleasure.  My parents had the Castro Convertible in the living room.  It was magical at night, when the drapes were closed and my father's international music accompanied by his mandolin blared over the cacophony of idle, inebriated adult conversation. In the day time, it was more library, as mirrors and bookshelves again covered the free walls, with just a touch of decay, for these old Bronx buildings were not well maintained any longer and they were infested with roaches no doubt survivors from pre-historic times. No one I knew lived quite as we did.

But for all the photographs I had (many were lost in a leak in my old garage where Dad had stored them) there seemed to be virtually none of us in that apartment. When I was in New York in May, my cousin Carol brought along boxes of photographs of my mother, my father, her mother, (who was an inveterate photographer I am delighted to say) my Aunt Teri, in whose apartment we assiduously pored over them. And among these photos were two that were taken on Townsend Avenue. To be sure, they only capture a tiny portion of the living room--these were fairly large apartments built in pre-war days--but finding them, my parents in the place and manner which was--well, as I knew them when I was so young, there was something, validating, something I needed to confirm what I remembered.

There is my father, about 47 in 1965, when I was 11 (I assume I was in the bedroom with my cousins when this picture was taken, I see a child's bottle on the stained glass like table-- we had three or four of those on which cocktail glasses were placed), looking classic movie star in his suit and tie, and my dramatic mother, maybe about 39, black Irish, so fair of skin, with nary a freckle and dark long locks that she always kept up when I knew her, wrapped in a hair rat and dressed in her characteristic unique style, complete with a recently gifted cigarette holder. They are at the bar. Oh, and yes, you see those curtains behind them?  We had a kitchenette, not a galley kitchen, so all of the appliances, the refrigerator, the sink, the stove, and in a little cubby hole built by dad, a black and white television, were lined against the wall covered by the curtain. My mother would slip in and out, allowing no one else (except my father) behind that curtain while she engaged in her culinary or serving ministrations.

Since I first got my hands on these pictures, I have been pouring over them, remembering that's the room in which I concluded there could be no Santa Claus because we didn't have chimneys, but only thin hot water pipes, that that is where the Christmas trees my dad brought home for decoration never measured up to my mother's specifications, where they were amused at me cavorting in a tiger costume, for Halloween, perhaps? Where I did my grammar school homework sitting on the floor using one of those stained glass tables as a desk, and looking forward to being able to watch "The Adventures of Superman" at 4:30 p.m. They were already in repeats by then. Memories of every kind flow back. Good. Not so good. Sad. Happy. I stood at the bar talking on the phone to Virginia Rohan, one of my best friends at Mt. St. Ursula, all worked up that Emma Peel  of the Avengers (and Diana Rigg, the actress) had left Steed because her husband, Peter, had finally been found in the jungles of Africa. My mother, who was not overtly affectionate to me, once let me lean against her, when neither she nor I could sleep, both of us on the floor, watching the Channel Nine Late Late Show, while dad slept on the Castro bed.

And then today, as I was considering how I wanted to write about these photos, and their re-discovery, I noticed the ice-bucket on the bar. In one picture, my mother is in front of it. In the other, she is behind it. I suddenly remembered. I had that bucket, still. Here, in California. That object was in the same photograph as was my mother. It took on, as objects do historically and personally, a sudden and intense meaning. A connection directly to her. To them.  Did I still have it? I thought it might have finally gone the way that things do, to the trash heap, even things of sentiment. I had confiscated it when my father died in 2008, if not before. But now, in 2016, did I still have it somewhere? It became urgent to know. And then I found it in the back of a kitchen cabinet.

The last bit of Townsend Avenue of them, and me, so many years ago. The building on Townsend Avenue is long gone. My mother died too young in 1974 of a virulent cancer. Dad died at a ripe old age, but still too soon, in 2008.

I broke into tears of thanksgiving, and loss. The bucket from our night club apartment is now prominently displayed on my pass through bar counter,  51 years and three thousand miles away from its original spot. I think it will be there for a while. Maybe it's time to use it again. And toast to them, my parents.

Some Regrets

That is the title of the next short short story from my father. When I was very young, I was leafing through the many books in our tiny Bronx apartment on Townsend Avenue when I found a photograph of a long haired, young, blonde girl wearing a bathing suit top and a grass skirt. She looked at the camera, or perhaps it was the young, but slightly older than she, man behind it, with affection. I asked my father who it was. He told me her name. Louise. She was someone he had briefly known, long before my mother was introduced to him, during the War, while he was waiting for assignment out of Spartanburg, South Carolina. He spoke of her with a fond tone. I did not ask much more. It seems he wrote about her when he returned to writing back in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a story in progress, still being edited, with cross outs. He wrote on it, "Edited copy--somewhat". Perhaps it would have been developed more. But here it is. With my idea of his edits.

SOME REGRETS

After the war, I made several trips to the south on military business.  Each time I neared Spartanburg, South Carolina, I got that urge to call.  I wondered what she looked like; whether time had been kind to her extraordinary beauty; whether life had thickened the loveliness of her youthful perfection; whether her long blood hair, luxuriant and golden, that shimmered in the light of a friendly sun, was now tied into the obscuring sadness of domesticity.

We spent several months of week-ends together, in the early part of 1943.  Se lived in a little village, some fourteen miles by bus, out of Spartanburg.  Her name was Louise. She was barely 18.

Each week was a kind of repetition of the last one.  She paraded me before the block long Main Street, usually to the ice-cream parlor, where the town youth gathered.  Everyone knew I was her "gentleman caller", her shiny, new second lieutenant.  Sometimes we walked on the thick, soft, browning pine needles in a quiet oasis of sli shedding trees.  We held hands, sometimes necked in the fashion of the day.  There were no serpents in this forest, and I sought no further knowledge.  It is kind of an idyllic memory partly enhanced by time, essentially true.  She was a kind of elf innocent in a long ago era of innocence.

When my orders came to leave, I asked her not to come to the bus station, but she insisted  She clung to my hand.  We sat in the Spartanburg depot. She sobbed continuously, her blue eyes reddened by the salt of her tears.  I am embarrassed, ashamed now, of this feeling.  These were the tears of Niobe. There was nothing, I felt, that entitled me to this sorrow.  There had been no great part of her that I could take and little I was free to give.

We did not embrace or kiss.  She held on to my hands up to the time I mounted the bus.  I watched her small disconsolate figure from the window of the departing bus, an empty ache gnawing at my breast.

She wrote to me for four years while I was overseas--treasuries of charmingly misspelled sentences that described her worlds of expectations and her need to see me again, accentuated by rows of X marks to indicate the kisses she could not deliver herself.

For these precious memories I am grateful.  But I do wish I made one more stop in that little village, just fourteen miles by bus out of Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? A Take on Francois Villon's Famous Title By my Father

I might have mentioned in other blog entries that my father wrote short stories featuring a character named "Myra" who was a thinly disguised version of my mother. Here is a short short one.


Deciding what to keep and what to relegate to the yard sale pile is always a source of contention for Myra and me.  She has a simple philosophy. If it has no immediate use, dump it.  Terse. Laconic. Succinct.

My reverie is interrupted.  I hear Myra's voice from the corner of the dusty attic  Clearly she has discovered another of my treasures to dispose of.

"What's this," she says, holding up an album that has been carefully wrapped in plastic and tied with a string.  I recognize it immediately.  My heart skips a beat.

"Nothing important," I reply.  I don't know why I lied.  After all, it is nothing ore than an autograph album from an elementary school ceremonial.  It was our custom in those days, to inscribe some epigram of farewell in one another's book.  Today was graduation day. We were going on to High School.

Myra undid the string, sat on an orange crate, and began leafing through the album.

Perhaps it wasn't guilt. I felt that something private, something sacrosanct, was being invaded.

It was important, perhaps the most important:  The written exchanges of farewell was a rite of passage and the end of childhood years.  It was more than a matter of self-image, on how many students wanted to exchange amenities with me.

"Who was Estelle Abrams," came the voice from the orange crate.

"A mousy little girl," I said.

"Were you really?" added Myra.

"Really what?" I answered.

""The cleverest, she wrote, 'to the cleverest in the class.'"

I did not answer.

"And Selma Rabinowitz?" Myra followed up.

"Certainly not mousy," I admitted.  'Don't do anything I wouldn't do,' Selma had written.
Selma had grown to a challenging presence during school.  A daughter of Eve with all the primordial attributes intended by the Creator. But she hadn't been Elise.

These are reflections of memory matured by the passage of time.  There is no possibility of comprehension by the mature mind of the unexplored internal world of youth; of boys awakening from the slumber of childhood, thence to an epiphany of beauty that comes once in a lifetime.

On that day I suffered the importunities necessary to the ritual. All else was peripheral, wearisome. I was waiting for Elise.



The class comedian and curse of the perpetually hysterical Miss Hurley, who taught Geography, made his mark.  What he wrote and what Oscar Schaeffer scribbled eludes me as of no consequential. Harold Steckel, fat and elliptical in shape, plagiarized Shakespeare, to wit:

"Is this a dagger which I see before me?" hardly appropriate to a graduation ceremony.  Bernice Cohen held my hand between her overly warm palms.  Still, Elise did not come.

"Honey," came the voice from the orange crate.  "Who was Elise?"

"Just another girl," I said.

I remembered the shy, tentative approach, her album offered to me as if she anticipated rejection. I do not recall what I wrote.

"Goodbye is a very sad word," was her phrase in mine.

"Honey?" came the voice again from the crate.

"Yes, Myra."  I held my breath.

"Was Elise pretty?"

"She was, Myra."

"Prettier than me?"

Maggie's Plan and the Easy Devolution of Life, Boundaries and Old Fashioned Story Telling

 There was hope that this film, well reviewed by critics, and recommended by a friend mutual to Len Speaks and me, would finally conquer the spate of films well reviewed by critics and recommended by friends that were just awful. Hello My Name is Doris, The Meddler and The Family Fang.

I report thusly. I didn't hate Maggie's Plan. I even kind of liked it. So, here's the story. Maggie (played by Greta Gerwig) is a thirty something single working at the New School in Manhattan who wants a child but has no romantic prospect. She has singled out a mathematician-pickle maker (yes, yes, that's what he is) friend, Guy (Travis Fimmell) to be the donor of sperm. He suggests the usual method of delivery. She declines, preferring a messy self injection in her bathtub. As this chapter of her solo life is about to unfold, she has met an adjunct professor of anthropology, John (Ethan Hawke) also at the New School, who fancies himself a novelist, but whose incipient talents appear to be a matter of indifference to his wife (Jullianne Moore) a rather famous professor at Columbia. In fact, John unknowingly interrupts the sperm injection  by appearing at Maggie's apartment so that further chapters of his novel (a thinly disguised lament on his married life with Georgette, his wife) may be praised unflinchingly by Maggie. On this is their quickie relationship built, and Maggie forgoes self insemination for the usual kind with her adjunct professor whom she also marries leaving the older Georgette in the proverbial dust of her older age. Maggie and John have a child who it is suggested might be Guy's mathematically inclined progeny-so that the injection of his sperm might not have been a-miss. This avenue is left unexplored in the movie.  But Georgette, and John's two children by their marriage, are still very much part of John and Maggie's life, well, more Maggie as she becomes the soccer mom Georgette never was and John could remain an absentee father.  Maggie realizes after her daughter is about two or three that her marriage to John was based on the flimsiest of premises, that John isn't much of a writer, but he is very much self absorbed, and hatches the plan of the title to give him back to Georgette, with whom she has developed a solidly cool friendship. Georgette and John it turns out are really perfect for each other as ships passing in the night who happened to manage to have two children who will probably end up in a years long unsuccessful therapy (that could be another movie entirely).

So Maggie sets it up that John will meet up "by chance" with Georgette at a conference in Canada. And that faithfulness will once again go by the boards (that's my take) and the ships will collide over anthropology talk and snow bound rebound romance. And so it happens. Oh, yes, What was wanted was not really what was wanted and the ships, so to speak, are righted.

In the old days of movies, everyone would have been punished. Not that I am suggesting I want this to have happened to Maggie, Georgette et. al. I am a creature of the generation in which I live, and so, as I said, I found the film distressingly enjoyable. Distressingly, because everything about it just proves we are living in a cesspool of moral confusion. No boundaries. Feel it. Do it. Three kids? Good luck to them. This is our world. There are no bright lines. And doing what is right? Like not having affairs on a spouse? Like delaying gratification?

What bothers me? It is that I am so immersed in the ambiguities of my society, of everything around me, I actually am NOT bothered by the fact that these people have no rules or respect for other human beings such that they recognize the destruction they wreck.

The old movies? Well, they were full of it too, right?  I mean, it was never boy meets girl, girl marries boy and they live happily ever after. Fact is, boy met girl, boy married girl, they had children who heard them fight night after night their whole lives, but "stayed together " for the kids. That wasn't better was it?

I'm thinking that maybe what was better is that there were rules, and rights and obligations. The weakness of those times was that there was a pretense that no one ever failed and that caused too many heartaches, but at least there was some ideal, some things that were transgressions, that weren't, shall we say, a good idea.

There is nothing to guide us anymore. Well, there is, but that seems rather, how shall we say, amusingly outre.

I guess it would be too boring for Maggie to meet a nice guy, get married, form a little society with two and one half children, and celebrate her 50th anniversary. It wouldn't make much of a movie these days.  But I think I just might watch "How Green Was My Valley" tonight about two heroic people who fell in love but did not break up families to indulge themselves.