Happy Anniversary Mom
written Friday, December 7, 2007
This is the date my parents planned to marry but they postponed it to the next day because President Roosevelt said this date will live in infamy. They didn’t want to marry on the date which will live in infamy. My mom had just turned 23 and my dad had just turned 29.
She had had a lot of boyfriends in Rochester before she came to NYC to go to nursing school. The stories of her boyfriends were one of the stories she told when I came down with something and had to spend the whole day in bed, and we were up in the country, there was no radio or TV to divert me. She would move me into her big double bed which faced the window giving out onto the driveway and the road. And lie down next to me and tell me stories. The story of how she met daddy. The story of the doctors at the hospital she dated before she met daddy, and how the nursing students had a curfew, so the doctor would turn on the siren to bring her back in time for curfew and how much she loved racing thru the Manhattan streets with the siren blasting away.
And she told me about her boyfriends back in Rochester before she came to New York. The boyfriends were all named Max. One took her to the country club and dancing and in his convertible. The other took her to classical music concerts and they talked about books. I think that was the Max who worked at his father’s hardware store. And when I was very little girl and she went back to Rochester to see her dad and visit her relatives, I remember walking with my mom somewhere in Rochester and suddenly a man was in step with her, very happy to talk to her. And this was one of the Maxes. This was before I knew about her boyfriends. All I knew was a very eager young man, who seemed to like my mom a lot, was delighted to see her and talk to her. I am sure she introduced me, “this is my daughter Annie,” but he only had eyes for her. Everyone else we had seen was a relative, and they were very interested in Marion’s daughter and the new addition to the family. But Max was only interested in Marion.
He was perfectly willing to forget about me. And Marion seemed like she was half into forgetting about me and half into remembering me. I’m not saying my mother was embarrassed, but there was something inexplicable about her emotion when she was with him. She didn’t act the same way she did when she was with her relatives. She was a different Marion. She was not the Marion of her family, but Marion, an independent attractive girl who had been this guy’s girlfriend, and she was half in one, half in the other. I don’t know if she was constrained because I was there, or she was constrained because she was now wife and mother. Max was perfectly willing to forget it, but Marion wasn’t.
I was very interested in the very eager dark-haired young man, clearly so enthusiastic about my mother, and who talked to her in that intimate way as if I did not exist and was so overjoyed to see her.
I realize now he is the only one of my mom’s former boyfriends I ever did meet. The Max of the country club allure I never met. The doctors who put on their sirens to give my mom a thrill I never met. Neither did I meet her New York boyfriend, the guy she had been dating when she met my father. Altho because his father owned a store on 5th Avenue which sold pianos and organs, I can see the store window in my mind occasionally.
My father never mentioned his previous girlfriends to me, altho sometimes we would go to the ballet or a concert at Carnegie Hall, or something, and he would point at a woman in the third row and say “that is the woman I wanted to marry.” And I would look at her, and be so surprised. She wasn’t one bit pretty like my mom. She looked like a short dumpy woman not attractive and not particularly friendly. “All the boys wanted her,” my dad would say, “she didn’t choose me.” And I would be so surprised at this femme fatale of my dad’s circles before he met my mom. She looked like some classic Jewish New Yorker, a type I never felt that comfortable with. My mom was a long legged beauty athlete from Rochester, and my dad's former inamorata looked like she didn’t know what a tennis racquet was. My dad would have awe in his voice when he pointed her out to me, as if the guy who could land her was so much better than him. And I guess you could say that was the only one of my father’s former girlfriends that I ever did meet.
Altho I don’t know if Edna Pincus ever was a girlfriend, or he just had a crush on her from afar. He certainly pointed her out from a distance to me.
She didn’t look like a girl my mom’s boyfriend Max from Rochester would give a second look at. And whatever her mystique was it didn’t carry to me either. And part of me knew my dad was lucky he had not succeeded in landing his dreamboat. She looked like someone I would feel uncomfortable with.
It’s odd now that my dad never talked very much about his bachelor life before he met my mom. It’s almost as if it were a former life in a former lifetime. He had been to Mexico on his sabbatical and brought back from it a mandolin and whole lot of tiny black and white photos. And he taught me how to order eggs and toast in Spanish.
I guess he’s just not a story teller. Practically every time we went walking in midtown Manhattan some man would run into him and say “Leon!” totally delightedly and my dad would be totally delighted to see him too and they would talk a little. But my dad never bothered to tell me the story of how and when they had been friends. He would turn happy amazed face to me and say “we were friends 20 years ago.”
When he took me ice skating at Wollman Memorial Rink in Central Park and taught me how to ice skate, this was when we still lived in Manhattan, he would always run into one of his students. “Mr. Wilensky!” they would say all excited. And he would introduce me to a beautiful young man, and he would say “this is my daughter Annie, can you take her around?” And I would hold the boy’s hand while he helped me ice skate around the rink.
When you are a little girl there is nothing as beautiful thrilling and exiting as a beautiful teenager. I was far more exited meeting my father’s students from Seward Park High School then meeting his dowdy former inamorata in the auditorium of Carnegie Hall.
These were dashing young men of romance.
My father left a whole life behind when he moved to the hinterlands of Queens, almost as much as my mom had when she left Rochester for New York. My father was every inch a New Yorker, a Manhattanite, he had never lived anywhere else. Our neighbors all came from Brooklyn or from the Lower East Side but my dad had grown up playing on the rocks in Central Park, had gone to City College and Baruch College, and had an apartment of his own on Riverside Drive, way high up. All of Manhattan had been his world. He played tennis in Central Park, went to Carnegie Hall and on his first date with my mom took her on walk around the reservoir in Central Park.
In fact his first date with my mom was for a concert at Carnegie Hall. My mom’s best friend at nursing school, Ruth, who was also from Rochester, was dating a guy. The guy’s friend was Leon. Apparently there were 4 tickets for the concert at Carnegie Hall that night, and Ruth asked Marion if she wanted to go with her boyfriend’s friend. Marion said sure.
Marion was available that Friday night because her boyfriend, where they had steady date for Friday nights, decided to teach her a lesson. He felt that Marion did not show enough interest in him. So he decided to pique her interest. He would not call her for their Friday night date, that way she would miss him and be excited to see him the following week. So dateless Marion accepted the blind date with Leon, the friend of her friend’s fiancé.
Leon got home from school teaching on the lower east side. It was Friday night after long week of school teaching, and the long trip on the subway to get home. He decided he was comfortable at home and did not want to get dressed up, take the subway and go to Carnegie Hall. He would just not show up. But at the last minute he changed his mind, decided he wanted to go anyway, and arrived at the concert late. Obviously the blind date was a success because I am here now writing this. After the concert he took her for a long walk around the reservoir. My mom said they discovered they had so much in common. She fell in love with my dad “because of his vocabulary, he sounded so educated." And that night she wrote her dad she met a wonderful man.
Two weeks later they married, they had had 3 dates. Her boyfriend had apoplexy. He had kept her waiting for two consecutive Friday nights now, the two Friday nights she went out with Leon. When he called her to say “let’s go out Friday,” she said “I can’t, I’m getting married.” Raymond was very mad, he had made her do without him, so she would be enthusiastic about him. He said “you can’t marry him you just met him.” “I am marrying him” Marion said. “How can you be so impetuous!” he said. Raymond must have had quite a vocabulary himself. Who calls the woman who jilts him “impetuous”! It is a word I have never once used in real life, and would never consider using at the height of emotion.
Exit Raymond, who she didn’t marry. Enter Leon, who she did. They married on a Friday morning at City Hall, she wore a suit. He took her to Longchamps afterwards for lunch. Then they went to her apartment, she had just started to share with her friend from nursing school, and got all her stuff. And moved it to Leon’s apartment on Riverside Drive. Then because he had tickets for Carnegie Hall that night, they walked to Carnegie Hall and walked home again.
Everyone forbade my mother from marrying my father after only 3 dates. Raymond the jilted lover said she is not allowed to do something so impetuous. And her parents wrote her she is not allowed to do this.
But she did and 15 months later I was born. I have the letter she wrote to my dad in the hospital the day after I was born (she sent it to me on my birthday last year). She said the nurse had brought the baby out to her that morning, and she had gotten a chance to take a good look at her, and the baby had a chance to take a good look at her. And baby must have liked her because she did not scream. And then she had her breakfast and read the New York Times. And there was a review of the concert at Carnegie Hall that night. And how did Leon enjoy it? and who did he get to take with him to it?
The day I was born my mom was sitting up in bed writing to my dad about the concert at Carnegie Hall.
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