December 10, 2005--Saturday Story: "Hello You Beautiful People, You."

“Hello You Beautiful People, You.”

That’s how Aunt Madeline would greet us when we came by for a visit and to take her out to dinner. In the family, she was not known for showing so much affection, actually quite the opposite as you will see, so this effusiveness was unusual, actually unprecedented.

Thus for some time we assumed (1) she wanted something from us (she was notorious for taking advantage of people) or (2) she was happy we were taking her out to dinner because we always paid the check (she was notoriously frugal; actually, cheap; actually, a miser).

We assumed the latter because if we took her out to eat she would be able to have something other than chicken (with the skin removed) and string beans (without butter or margarine)—what she ate on literally all other days. There was a deli a few blocks from her where she could buy a whole roasted chicken for $5.50 and they would throw in, for free, a quart of soup. The free soup was the clincher. She would eat the soup and chicken over three days and then buy a replacement.

When we came over, we would typically take her out to Minerva’s, an upscale version of a Greek diner on The Highway (Kings Highway) where she would order maybe meat loaf or lamb chops or even a flank steak. These came accompanied by a huge salad, potatoes and vegetables, a basket of soft rolls, and dessert and coffee. A bargain, considering nothing on the menu cost more than $9.95. Madeline would eat less than half and take the rest home in an assortment of Doggie Bags. She could thus supplement her daily piece of chicken for at least the next three days.

Best of all, we would pay; though once or twice she offered to leave the tip, which we allowed, but needed to add to surreptitiously because she left only a crumpled-up dollar for the “girl,” who was at least 65.

Since Madeline worked all her life as the office manager for her brother Ruby and appeared never to have spent any money at all except on the chickens; four times a year hair cuts at a barber school, also on The Highway; and once a year a new pair of sweat pants, sweat shirt, and sneakers (her basic wardrobe), she was reputed to have amassed untold millions. How many constituted untold was the subject of considerable speculation.

Family lore had it that she not only had her first dollar but also the first share of Con Edison stock ever issued, the initial share of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and maybe even the initial offering from IBM from when they were still in the business machine business—manufacturing calculators and such. If true, even if she never bought another share of anything, those first issues would by now have split and split and split and split and split so she must have thousands of shares of each of these, and who knows what else; and thus must be worth, well, untold millions.

All we knew was that her bathroom towels were ancient and in literal shreds, and she never spent more that $2.50 for a haircut. So if she didn’t have all those legendary millions, she at least could have afforded a TV without a coat hanger for an antenna and could have bought two new sweat suits a year. And could have left the girl a two-dollar tip. She also could have added potatoes to her daily diet of chicken and string beans.

She was famous as well for taking full advantage of her brother Ben. He lived in his mother’s house, unmarried (yes, that too), was a school teacher, also never seemed to spend whatever little money he earned (except during one extravagant moment when he bought himself a Patek Phillipe watch), and was very susceptible to doing Madeline’s bidding.

At the risk of being indelicate, but to illustrate, Madeline had a notoriously “weak stomach” (perhaps as the result of her unique diet) and often was “irregular.” She refused to take any form of laxative and so periodically needed an enema. For this she had a huge rubber hot water bag with a nozzle attached. When she required its services she would call Brother Ben, who lived nearby, and he would come over to administer it to her! This qualified as “taking advantage.”

Additionally, since Ben owned a car and Madeline of course didn’t, she would call on him frequently to chauffeur her around—to visit her cousin Toby in New Jersey, to open another savings account at a downtown bank that was offering an extra quarter point interest or a free coffee pot, to visit their brother Ruby in Great Neck on Long island, or just to drive her to Manhattan Beach where she loved to take long walks on the boardwalk. He was always, silently and passively at her service. And in spite of the fact that he was arguably Brooklyn’s worst driver she called on him often.

He was such a bad driver in fact that it took him ten attempts before he was able to obtain a driver’s license. The first time he took the driving test he failed because he went the wrong way up a one-way street. The second time because he drove on the sidewalk when asked to make a U turn. The third time because he couldn’t manage to parallel park in a 50 foot space. The fourth time because he nearly decapitated the Motor Vehicles inspector when he was asked to stop to let him out of the car, driving off before he could get out, dragging him along up the block as he clung desperately to the open door. But when he took my father’s advice and left a $20 “tip” on the inspector’s car seat, he passed the test in spite of that day running over and crushing three metal garbage cans.

Thus he was available at Madeline’s beck and call. And beck and call she did.

On one extra humid summer day she telephoned to tell him she wanted to go to the beach to cool off (no AC for certain) and he should pick her up in 15 minutes, which he dutifully did. They were driving down Ocean Avenue toward Coney Island when they get snarled in traffic. Madeline became impatient and even hotter and told him to get off the Avenue and drive over to Ocean Parkway. And to do it now!

As commanded, he made a quick left turn onto Avenue P and promptly slammed into a car coming up Ocean Avenue in the other direction, reportedly saying, “What’s he doing over there?”

“Driving where he should be,” she growled.

Fortunately there was no damage and they continued on to the beach.

But the next week Ben received a letter from Madeline’s lawyer (Cousin Chuck the legendary personal injury lawyer who once got a $5,000 settlement for a client who he claimed developed an ingrown toe nail from being squeezed into too tight a seat on the D Train) saying she was suing him for negligent driving. Seeking $25,000 in damages!

It did go to trial some years later and Madeline did collect $10,000 (Chuck took half plus expenses). But all along, and thereafter, Ben never wavered in his services, be they chauffeuring or colonic irrigation. He was that kind a person, and she remained relentless in her demands.

She even managed to find a way to take advantage of my mother. After her hysterectomy, Madeline, who was not married at the time, said she needed to stay with us for a few days, after the hospital, to fully recover. So she moved in, slept in my mother’s bed (beside my father), and remained for two months. In bed the whole time, insisting she was too weak to get out of bed to eat or go to the bathroom.

Saint that she was and is, my mother accepted this as part of her lot in life (there was quite a long list of these “lots”) and duly bathed Madeline in bed, brought and emptied (yes) the bed pan, and served her three cooked meals a day (plus snacks), again in bed, in an attempt to build her strength and, in truth, to get her for God sakes out of the apartment!

But it was not working. Madeline seemed to be getting weaker by the day, moaning, “The pain, the pain” ceaselessly. Even my mother reached her wits end and told my father it was “either her or me.”

He thought about it for awhile. And a week later he told his sister, “Enough already,” giving her two days to get ready to leave, which she did, four days later. Ben then (who else?) drove her home and he then took over the feeding and bed panning for an additional month. But at least my mother, more or less, had her husband back.

Conditioned thus to think about Madeline as insatiable in taking advantage of anyone willing to allow it, we were reluctant to get too involved with her as she grew older and began to manifest some real (as opposed to predatory) needs. There was evidence that her heath required more attention than occasional commiseration. She, as you might imagine, had the cheapest version of a health plan which meant that none of her doctors stayed in the plan, much less the country, for more than a month; and so it was always a matter of starting new relations with a string of general practitioners who served as reluctant intermediaries between Madeline and the expensive medical tests and specialists her deteriorating condition required. We were moving beyond “The pain, the pain” to “Why? Why? Why? Why is this happening to me? Look at what I eat. Not one drop of fat. I only weigh 97 pounds.”

So slowly, reluctantly we got drawn into her life. Deeper and deeper. And that’s when we began to truly love each other. It got so intense that at my father’s funeral, Madeline, in a voice that could stop traffic or funeral services, got into a fight with my wife Rona’s mother, claiming that Rona was actually her, Madeline’s daughter. This was not just rhetoric or grief but an expression of what Madeline had come to feel about us. And us about her.

Everyone thought she had figured out a way to take advantage of us when in fact we were taking advantage of the love she felt for and expressed for us. And so her “Hello you beautiful people, you,” her signature greeting, was both genuine and something we couldn’t get enough of.

Or her stories.

The stories of her life, including of her three marriages and her lifelong love affair with a married man, which went on during those three remarkable marriages. Remarkable because each of the first two ended within a few months with both husbands committing suicide—one by jumping off the roof of their apartment house; the other by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. We all thought that in some ways she had killed them because after all who could live with Madeline for more than a month or two without wanting to kill themselves? Even death in those circumstances would be preferable.

But then there was Harry, Husband Number Three. All I knew about him before our involvement with Madeline later in her life was from the times he would join her for an occasional dinner at my parent’s house. I knew that he only ate one thing, the same thing every night for dinner, which my mother dutifully prepared—roast beef and mashed potatoes—and that he had been a foot soldier in World War II, discarding his knapsack and trenching shovel, substituting for them a dice table that he carried strapped to his back as he trudged across Italy and Germany. So when his company bivouacked, he would set up his own private casino, legend had it, pocketing thousands in script which he duly sent home to his beloved mother who lived on Eastern Parkway, never realizing script was uncashable in Brooklyn. In a family of glum, pessimistic people, he was the proverbial “live wire,” full of stories and jokes, surrounded perpetually in a fog of cigar smoke.

We learned later that he was the only person able to make Madeline spend money on more than an occasional new pair of sweat pants. As we got to know her, she told us how he insisted on her buying fancy outfits in Macys and A&S so she could look glamorous when he took her out to night clubs, a cruise or two, and even once to Las Vegas! She told us that she would clip price tags from more expensive dresses when shopping and attach them to the dresses she bought since he always examined the labels and tags to make sure she was getting what she deserved, the best; and that he would be proud to have her on his arm. She showed us the frocks, which she still had, and shared photos of them on their jaunts where she did indeed look very glamorous. A very different view for sure than of Madeline in sweat suits!

One time, when flipping through her box of photos (she was the only person we knew where literally every single photo she had was either a picture of her or included her) a picture tumbled out of the pile which was of course of her but an even more different version of her—a naked Madeline, odalisque-like, in the embrace of a man who was both decidedly naked and also totally unfamiliar.

That’s when we began to learn about her even more secret life—as the lifelong lover of Milton Cohen, a married estimator for her brother Ruby’s business. They had taken up when Madeline was in her late twenties, before her first suicidal husband, and their affair, and that is decidedly what it was—all lust and sex—continued until just a few years ago, when Madeline turned 75. It was at all times torrid and their trysts took place in a series of cheap motels across the New York-tri-state area (which to me made it all even more alluring). She “dumped him,” as she put it, because he could “no longer get it up”; and, besides that, he refused to leave his wife for her. She had had it! Though we hadn’t had it at all and couldn’t get enough of her steamy stories. To say the least, to have an 80 year-old aunt so openly sexual was stunning and inspiring. And she was not shy about recounting all the delicious details.

This made our dinners at Minerva’s more and more pleasant and we quickly made a shift in our minds that if this constituted being taken advantage of by Madeline, do so, please! We were so successful in managing our times at Minerva’s, and got more and more comfortable (read less up-tight) about being with her in her sweats and chopped off hair that on her birthdays we began to attempt to lure her to some “real” restaurants, particularly to a heavily mirrored and chandeliered Italian place on Avenue S which reputedly was a favorite among some of the most powerful Brooklyn Families, if you know what I mean.

For her 80th birthday we even got her to put on lipstick before loading her in our car and heading for Guido’s. This happened to be a Friday evening and thus all the tables around the periphery were taken. So they sat us in the very center of the room which had its advantages--when the strolling violinist made his rounds he needed to pass by us, motivating Madeline, in that famous voice (at room-filling volume because she was substantially deaf and of course refused to get hearing aids) to ask him if he knew Begin the Beguine, Harry’s and her favorite song, the orchestra having played it for them nightly during their Caribbean cruise in 1953. But since he didn’t, or didn’t think it was what that crowd in Guido’s had come to hear (preferring Sorrento), he moved by us quickly. And I knew we were in trouble when Madeline growled, “What kind of a stinky violin player is he anyway who doesn’t know Begin the Beguine? Everyone knows it. Even Harry, who couldn’t carry a tune to save his life, he knew all the words.”

And we descended into further trouble, when after Madeline had gulped down her glass of Chianti, she began to notice who was seated at the heavily brocaded tables that rimmed the place—men in shiny suits with substantial pinky rings accompanied by much younger and slimmer women in equally shiny but slinky little things.

“Who are these girls?” she bellowed, craning her head to squint into all corners of the half-lit room. The maitre de was racing towards us.

“I don’t think they are their wives.” He was pawing the air.

“And I don’t think those girls are their nieces.” He was at full trot.

“They look like floozies to me.” He knocked over a tray of empty dishes.

“I wonder what their wives think they’re up to.”

Gasping, he arrived at our table and out of breath and trembling with fear he screeched at Rona and me, “Will you tell her to please shut up!!” We cringed, wondering if we would make it out of there alive.

Straining an almost useless ear toward him, Madeline broadcast, “What? What’s he saying? He wants me to sit up? I’m sitting up. He should get out of my way so I can see what’s going on here. He should only know what’s going on here.”

But then she grew unusually, thankfully silent, remembering and then telling us again about her times with her Milton Cohen. About their candlelight dinners and the things they did afterwards back at the motel. In full anatomical detail. And what his wife must have been thinking he was up to!

So we managed to get through our tiramisu, to even a Sambuca, and to escape in one piece. And as we left, running a gauntlet of beefy men, I even sensed most were smiling.

But soon after that things took a decided turn for the worst. Madeline, who took great pleasure in managing her finances, which included a daily update of her net worth (though substantial, much less than “untold millions”—though she did in fact have Con Edison stock certificate Number 00000007), she could no longer keep her records or reinvest her T Bills. She needed our help with that.

And shortly after that, slipping into a depression as she measured and contemplated her decline, she could no longer get to the deli for her barbequed chicken and free quart of soup, and thus we needed to think about a care facility for her. Which we did. And which she understandably hated (as did we)—in part because it was full of alte cockers and so expensive. We had to pretend that we were paying for it and that it was only temporary, until she “got her strength back.” But she, as we, knew her strength would not return and that we were in a final countdown—how much longer could she, would she want to carry on? And with no real carrying on such as she was used to with Harry and of course Milton Cohen, what then did life mean?

“Why? Why? Why?” this time seemed more than an appropriate question and certainly no longer could be thought of or ignored as a manipulation. We had no answers for this amazing aunt for whom there had been, we now knew, a fitting living answer: “Why? Why? Why?-- Well, because and why not!”

Thankfully she died quickly and in no substantial pain. She was in her own way glad to be leaving now that she had lived beyond all her own unique answers.

And so it was left to us to take care of what she left behind—not much. It was the inevitable sad affair, going through the remains of her life. But in her true spirit, we also had lots of laughs: Not only did she indeed have Con Ed stock Number 00000007, but she also had saved copies of a lifetime of Con Ed electric bills, boxes and boxes of them, thinking who knows what. Maybe that as such a special shareholder she was required to retain evidence of her utility’s viability. And why had she saved all her empty shampoo bottles? Maybe thinking that some day she could collect a deposit for them.

And then we returned to the shoe boxes full of photos, discovering one, just one of someone else—of me as a boy of five, standing in a country stream. The same one my father carried in his wallet—the only picture he ever kept with him.

But then a few other unfamiliar pictures fell out.

Rona at first couldn’t make them out. They were tiny—two-by-two inch squares with fluted edges. Seemingly of someone with a wheel barrow.

A soldier with a wheel barrow. Husband Number Three Harry with the wheel barrow.

What was he doing with that wheel barrow? Where was his dice table?

But then Rona figured it out and began to cry, holding herself and rocking slowly on Madeline’s empty bed—these were pictures of Harry from the War.

And loaded on that wheel barrow were dozens of naked dead bodies piled in a heap.