All Things Being Relative

My mother had five brothers which left me with five uncles all of whom bequeathed me with cousins. I have faint memories of a few going back over sixty-five years ago when I last saw them. Soon after, a family argument estranged my mother from her brothers and left me cousin-less.

Even as I write this I’m aware it is a lame rationalization. I had ample time to re-cousin myself, and didn’t. In fact after moving to Los Angeles my mother developed a correspondence with some of her sisters-in-law. But, alas, they were now on the other side of the continent and I was erasing my New York past for no good reason I can now think of.

There was one cousin whose picture had found its way into our family album. I was on the monkey bars with my older brother and cousin, Mildred, about twice my age, was pulling up her dress. Did she have any designs on my brother? Had they already played doctor? Such questions belong to a fevered imagination.

This much I know…… whenever my mother referred to Mildred, down through the years, she was always quick to add that she “never got married.” Over time, I referred to her as Mildred-Who-Never-Got-Married and that is how she is now known.,

Along the way I started thinking about this from Mildred’s point of view. I imagined her overthrowing her bourgeois beginnings, living a Bohemian life in Greenwich Village have fallen from grace on the Grand Concourse. I saw her as Thoroughly Modern Millie in a long term liaison with a jazz sax player who blew in and out of town like Be Bop riffs.

Or maybe she opened an art gallery in SoHo where she hobnobbed with the Minimalists until disappearing in a white canvas. Then emerged as a buyer for the United Nations gift shop and traveled the world snatching up Ghanan masks, Japanese netsukes, Oaxacan woodcarvings and Tlingit baskets. On top of the world, she scared men as the one consenting adult.

Watching a ballgame recently, as if for the first time, I marveled how the outfielder settles under a fly ball. From the crack of the bat he gauges the trajectory. Maybe Mildred stuck out her mitt and muffed her chance, never having experienced that confluence of being well-met. Timing is all.

More likely, her preference was not for a man at all. She probably snared whom she wanted, roaming her own ground, having turned her back on expectant eyes long ago. There are multitudes of Mildreds out there and she found hers. A family secret then; hardly a raised eyebrow now.

About twenty-five years ago when I was diagnosed with some neurological condition my doctor asked if there was any family history. I called one of my aunts in the Bronx whom I hadn’t spoken to ages. After identifying myself as my mother’s son, I asked about my cousins, including Mildred. She immediately said, You know, she never got married.

My Brother Was An Only Child

…..for four years. Then I was born and probably ruined his day and every day after that. I don’t know why I was their favorite. I wasn’t particularly cute or cuddly as far as I can recall. Maybe he bit my mother nursing or just came into this world at the wrong time. My brother, Arthur, was born two months before the market crashed in 1929 under Herbert Hoover. Maybe they took it out on him while I got credit for Franklin Roosevelt.

Recently I wrote about my father; how safe I felt with him and equipped I was going out into the world. I doubt if my brother would agree. He lived a short and unhappy life which ended at age 33. I'm going to try now to step into his shoes and put words in his mouth.

My first memory was being forced to hold the crayon in my right hand. It didn’t feel right. I was also too tall and sent to the back row. I couldn’t see the board well and read slowly. I never got any stars and one day I wet my pants. My first grade teacher, hit me and Mom came to school to complain but she also yelled at me for being left-handed with bad eyes and tall and probably dyslexic though that word hadn’t been born yet. But Norm was right-handed and colored inside the lines and finished his vegetables.

Mom was loud and took up all the air in the room. Dad was too quiet and didn’t shut her up. Maybe he was afraid of her like me. He wasn’t home much. He worked late and didn’t eat with us. He wasn’t there to help with my homework. I got Cs and Ds in class. When Norm started school the teachers compared us; I couldn't wait to get out of P.S. 99.

They sent me to a vocational high school because I flunked most tests. But I heard music, saw movies of Dixieland and Swing bands. This was my world. Nobody could come in. I heard Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa on Decca records and walked to their drums. Metronome and Downbeat magazines were my textbooks. Tunes ran through my head; Hot Lips Page drowned out the subway noise. I argued with myself over Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw and moved in stutter steps to Charlie Parker’s riffs.

Dad was too slow, too cautious behind the wheel; I'd be his opposite. He didn’t know tools. If I’d only had the tools I could fix things. I left home without them. Dad was no hero to me. He didn’t press against the world, didn’t show me how to dazzle women, didn’t make trouble. I needed to make some trouble.

On my last night there was music in my head. I had a few drinks and drove my Austin-Healy through a wall on a mountain road to find the sounds on the other side.

When the police knocked on my door at 4 AM to inform me of my brother’s fatal crash I had to break the news to my parents a few hours later. My father’s response was that he died the way he lived. He meant recklessly. I heard the disappointment in his voice that Arthur never met his expectations. My idealized father dropped a few notches in my estimation. He was merely human, flawed like my brother and all the rest of us.

In an odd turn which can only happen in a small town like Los Angeles my brother had a crush on a jazz singer whose career he would follow. Among his possessions were a stack of her recordings. I credit Arthur with especially good taste. Her name is Ruth Olay and thirty years after his death I was introduced to Ruth by Peggy who had known her since the fifties. I now count her as a dear friend. She is more than a link; she's a vivacious, gifted, funny and politically conscious woman who has no memory of ever meeting Arthur. Yet he and I were both drawn to her. He passed along his ear for jazz; his portal to the other side and my portal through to him.

Conversation Between Him And Me

Him: My sister-In-law is staying with us for a few days. 

Me: Is that good news or bad news? 

Him: I enjoy her …….. 

Me: … for the first hour and a half? 

Him: Right. When I visit relatives overnight I always stay at a motel. I like my privacy and expect others do, too. 

Me – That’s because you didn’t have any pajama parties as a kid. 

Him: I didn’t even have any pajamas. 

Me: Now they call them sleepovers. In our day I can hear mother saying, “I never heard of such a thing.” Besides we were so poor…,.. 

Him: How poor were you? 

Me: We were so poor I slept on the kitchen chair. 

Him: Who had chairs? The floors was too good for you? 

Me: We rented out the floor to pay the rent. I lived on the fire escape. 

Him; I was raised on day-old bread and dented cans and thought everyone was. I miss fire escapes. 

Me: I’d go out there and pick up the hockey games from Montreal …. except they were in French. 

Him: The window with the fire escape was the most important thing about our apartment… cross ventilation. My mother didn't mind the four story walk-up, no incinerator, but it had to have cross-ventilation. 

Me: Right. My mother had a love/hate relationship with air. There were two kinds of air; the dreaded draft that caused all disease and fresh air that cured it. 

Him: We must have had the same mother. 

Me: Wisdom traveled well in those days