We Never Told Read online

  It had never occurred to me to plan for life after college. I was supposed to graduate with an engagement ring on my finger. But no one had asked me, so I had to think up what to do next. Where were the most eligible men? Harvard. I applied and was accepted. It was like going from famine to feast. One week, I had eight different dates. And the biggest surprise was how the work was easier at Harvard. It seemed that Connecticut College was always trying to prove it was as good as any Ivy League school and Harvard had nothing to prove so didn’t need to make its students jump through ridiculous hoops. There was plenty of time to enjoy my cousin Wiley when he came to visit. He was working at Merrill Lynch in New York.

  We went to Hayes Bickford, a cafeteria in Harvard Square and instead of sitting down after he’d gone through the line and paid for his dinner, Wiley carried his tray right out the door onto the sidewalk. Still laughing, we sat at a table and ate our chocolate pudding and mac and cheese. “I don’t blame her for running away,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Aunt Violet.”

  “You mean because she was so ashamed of hurting Marv Bernstein?”

  “He might have been disappointed but he wasn’t hurt.”

  “How could he not be hurt?”

  “Why would he be hurt?”

  “Because she jilted him.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “She did.”

  “You mean you think she dumped him?”

  “Yes. He was under the thumb of the daughter.”

  “Amy? She told you Amy bossed him around? Did you ever meet Amy?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “Of course. She was in the grade ahead of me. She used to go out with my brother’s friend.” He picked up his ramekin and licked out the remaining chocolate pudding. “She’s like Marv. A lamb.”

  “But she didn’t like my mother, right?”

  “I don’t know. She never told me she didn’t like her. She’d never talk trash about someone’s aunt.”

  “Was she sorry that my mother broke up with him?”

  “Your mother didn’t break up with him.”

  “Yes she did.”

  “No. She didn’t. He broke up with her. You never heard about the ring fight?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see that diamond ring?”

  “Yes. It was bigger than my thumb nail.”

  “Didn’t you wonder what happened to it?”

  “I figured she just didn’t want to wear it anymore.”

  “No. He demanded it back. She wasn’t going to return it, said he’d given it to her and it belonged to her.” Wiley tapped a Kent out of his pack and lit it with his lighter made of white enamel with a Playboy bunny in the center. He inhaled and blew out a perfect smoke ring. “Dovey Lee convinced her to give it back.”

  “Are you saying Marv Bernstein broke up with my mother and not the other way around?”

  “Yes, Cuz. That is what I am saying.” He offered me a cigarette then lit it with his lighter. He was the only person I knew who had a key to the Playboy Club. “My Dad played golf with Marv Bernstein,” he said, “and my mother played bridge with his wife who died. Everyone at Highland Acres knew Marv just couldn’t go through with it.”

  “You mean those women she played bridge with knew he broke up with her?”

  “Of course they did. They were the ones who fixed him up. Sally Tepper was his late wife’s best friend.”

  “But why did he wait so long? Why did he let my mother send out invitations?”

  “Inertia?”

  “Inertia! You don’t have inertia about something like that.”

  “Well, from what I gather he thought your mom was after his money.”

  “So it was Marv, not my mother?”

  “You didn’t wonder why she ran away?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  At first, it seemed reasonable and even frugal that Annabelle would make a wardrobe for her return to the stage but as the years went by and Maestro did not phone and the dress forms wore a continual parade of garments that were never actually finished, Annabelle lost her luster and her pose as a diva began to sag though she continued to practice, booming up and down the scale until the house shook.

  Seymour’s complaints about Annabelle escalated year after year. It was as if he was helpless in the face of an inexorable force. “What does she need all that fabric for?” he said. “I told her do not buy any more fabric but she buys it anyway. Spends a fortune. Clutters the place up. Bobbins and whatnot. It’s everywhere. She doesn’t cook. She doesn’t take care of the garden.”

  “Tell her to move out.”

  “Can’t have an intelligent conversation. She’s a master of trivia.” He used me as a go-between. “Go ask Annabelle to join us.”

  “Why should I ask her? You ask her.”

  “Go on. Ask her. She’s upstairs. Go ask her.”

  I stood at the foot of the stairs and screamed up, “ANNABELLE! Wanna go out for dinner?”

  My father said, “Tsk!” and made a disgusted face at me as she called down, “NO!”

  I dreaded going there. Annabelle was angry because now when he complained about money it was justified. He’d lost his job. The federal government agreed with independent film producers and independent theater owners that the five major studios formed a monopoly. MGM, RKO, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox were all owned by theater corporations that produced movies for their own theaters so a small place like the Strand in Woodbridge could never show a first run picture staring Clark Gable or Ava Gardner. MGM movies were shown in Loews theaters, Paramount in Paramount Theaters. The government demanded that the theater corporations divorce from the Hollywood studios so Loews was forced to cut MGM adrift. Now the Hollywood studios were on their own without the flow of money from their parent organizations. When I asked my father why he lost his job he said, “Because Metro is going to buy pictures rather than make them.” He meant that MGM could not afford to produce movies any longer and had decided to buy films from independent producers. It was the end of the studio system. My father’s job had become obsolete.

  The double humiliation of losing his wife and losing his job made it impossible for him to be with his pals at the Society of American Magicians, all of them prominent in their professions as doctors, architects, and lawyers. They loved the glamour he exuded and liked to imagine him bedding the lovely young creatures who came into his office. For the annual magic show, he was able to persuade famous actors to participate. Jimmy Durante one year and Joan Crawford the next came up on stage to volunteer to be fooled. Seymour never told any of his fellow magicians that he was divorced or that he lost his job. It was easier to stay home and avoid those hearty extroverts.

  He became active in local politics. When a developer threatened to build apartments close to his house, he circulated petitions, wrote opinion pieces for the Standard Star about how the rural quality of New Rochelle kept house prices up, how people moved there precisely because there were no apartment buildings. Neighbors got together to plan resistance strategy. I went with Seymour to a neighborhood meeting. He didn’t know any of the people. His was a downtown life, Times Square, Broadway, and Sardi’s. Now life had brought him to this meeting where he had to ingratiate himself without the aid of card tricks. He couldn’t think up one word to say to the people standing near us. None of them knew he was a friend of famous movie stars. Perhaps all they saw was an elderly man with pink New England cheeks, a fringe of gray hair, and uneasy hazel eyes, standing with a young woman who was probably his granddaughter. The people who did pause to introduce themselves moved on quickly. It hurt to see my father so awkward. We walked home without speaking. Several months later, earth moving machines arrived, trees were felled, foundations laid and ugly apartment buildings came out of the ground and changed forever the bucolic quality of the Wykagyl section of the city. The woods behind his house where there was once a brook became a housing development with fake colonials on
a grid of new streets named for the murdered trees, Elm, Maple, Beech.

  He puttered around the house dressed in plaid flannel shirts and old shoes, stubble on his cheeks. He raked up leaves in the yard and neighborhood children, who called him Uncle Sy, jumped in the leaf piles.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When Lyndon Johnson became President after Kennedy was shot, he started “a war on poverty.” Johnson made money available for the “culturally disadvantaged,” a veiled way of referring to black people. The city of Cambridge wanted some of that federal money and hired me to write grant proposals.

  In order to qualify, we had to include in our planning the local people who would use the new services. They were to sit on the board and voice an opinion. My boss and I went looking for suitable candidates in the housing projects. I had never been anywhere near a housing project. Ugly brick buildings with trash strewn everywhere and iron bars on the lower windows, I would have held Mr. Sarkisian’s hand if I’d had the nerve. We pushed open the graffiti smudged entrance door, saw the out of order sign on the elevator, and headed up narrow stairs to the third floor. Mr. Sarkisian was a small man with rashes on the backs of his hands and edging his scalp. He intimidated no one and was therefore excellent at his job. He was in charge of distributing United Fund money to the various non-profit agencies in the city of Cambridge.

  When a stout black woman opened her door, I was surprised to see a well-furnished tidy apartment. I ignorantly thought people who lived in housing projects had nothing, like people who live in refrigerator cartons. The woman welcomed us into her living room where eight other cheerful women were waiting to meet us. Mr. Sarkisian knew a few of them because they were active in Cambridge politics. I was afraid of black women because of the maids who preceded Ruby. From preschool to grade five, Joan and I were tended by women who tore branches off the maple tree and switched our bare legs, washed our mouths out with soap, and dug the ends of combs into our scalps when they yanked our hair into pigtails. I felt apprehensive in this housing project meeting. There was a television, a new sofa, nice carpet, lamps, a separate kitchen, window shades that went up and down, an air-conditioner, and a bathroom with a toilet that flushed. Far from wearing rags, the well-fed women who greeted us wore good clothes. I was confused about what poor meant. The hostess gave us coffee and cookies. Maybe they noticed that I was frozen with fear, because they didn’t put me on the spot. The few times they spoke to me, it was with kindness.

  They took us for a tour of the building and spoke about how difficult it was to keep glass off the playground. Now I realized what poor meant. It didn’t mean the children didn’t have swings, it meant the city didn’t bother to sweep glass from under the swings. All of the women had four, five, six children. I’d expected shame and cringing but found the opposite. They were outgoing, bighearted, and confident. They patrolled the hallways to shoo away the drug users; they fixed the plumbing, they nailed broken doors. For the first time I understood the word sheltered. It meant the kind of ignorance that I had. At the same time I resented having to pretend that these women were poor compared to the world’s poor and even compared to Hazel Greenstone, my own grandma, when she was young and living in a shack in New Mexico and had to ride for miles to get the Cavalry vet to fix her sister’s broken arm.

  In an effort to qualify for Headstart money, I did a survey of available daycare in Cambridge and discovered that there wasn’t any. I had to explain what daycare was and often the response was, “You mean women would leave their little children all day?” It was assumed that some of the women on welfare did not work because they couldn’t find child care. If they had child care and if they had training they would be able to support themselves. That was the idea behind the Title V money that poured in on us after we submitted our proposal. We started a sliding fee daycare center. Welfare mothers paid nothing, Harvard professors paid a fair price. The daycare center was in a large basement in Central Square. About twenty children enrolled, black and white, between the ages of three and five. My office was a room at the back. Except for chutzpah, I had no qualifications whatsoever for being the director of a daycare center. Nonetheless, I hired two teachers, consulted with dietitians, arranged food service, scheduled visits from social workers, interviewed parents, and gave interviews to reporters who came to see what it was all about.

  Title V was a training program for women on welfare. In exchange for teaching them workplace skills, employers could use their services. A Title V woman was assigned to me. I was supposed to teach Franny to be a secretary. She was about my age, twenty-two, and already had four children. She wore bright red lipstick and fuzzy angora sweaters and pulled her hair back into a ponytail that looked like a shaving brush. When I pointed to her desk and told her to sit there, she was surprised. She thought it would take her years to merit a desk. “No. It’s yours. That’s where you sit.” She sat down at the desk and patted it. “It’s your job, Franny, to answer the phone. There’s a way of answering the phone when you work in an office. You don’t say hello. You say, ‘Good morning,’ if it’s morning, or ‘Good afternoon,’ if it’s after noon.” About answering the phone, I had some real knowledge thanks to Lois at Greenstone Enterprises. I really could help a person learn a practical skill. Maybe I could save Franny from a life with no salary. Because of me, she’d stride the world with her head held high. “Then you say, ‘Cambridge Community Daycare.’ That’s all you say. ‘Good morning, Cambridge Community Daycare.’ Nothing more. Then the person on the other end will say who they want to talk to and mostly it will be me. Then you say, ‘Thank you. May I ask who’s calling?’ After they say their name you say, ‘Thank you’ and transfer the call to my phone by pressing this button here on your phone. Then I’ll pick up and you’ll say the name of the person, and I’ll say whether or not I want to talk to them and if I do, then you’ll press this button and I’ll be connected and then you hang up. I know this is sort of silly because I’m sitting right over there, and all you have to do is put your hand over the mouthpiece and tell me who’s on the phone. But when you go work for someone else, you might be in a separate office so I’m teaching you something that will be useful later on. Let’s practice.”

  I went to my end of the office, sat at my desk and said, “Okay. When your phone rings pick it up and say, ‘Good morning, Cambridge Community Daycare.’ Okay? We’ll practice the rest later. Here goes.” I phoned our number. Our phones rang, and Franny looked at hers as if it were an alligator. “Franny! Pick up the phone!” She couldn’t. So I said, “Okay. Here’s what we’ll do. All you have to say is good morning. None of the other stuff. Just pick up the phone and say good morning.” I phoned again. Franny picked up the phone and said, “Hullo.”

  “No! Franny, don’t say hello! Let’s try again.” All day long we practiced just picking up the phone and saying good morning and by the end of the day she still couldn’t do it. We were girls playing a game and both of us laughed until we had to gasp for air. I was sure she’d get it right eventually, and she probably thought she would too. But the next day was no better than the first and by week two, we weren’t laughing anymore. Franny kept forgetting which button to press so most of the callers got cut off. It was frustrating because sometimes the callers who got cut off were the mothers of kids who were in my care, and that did not inspire them with confidence.

  I tried to teach Franny filing but the concept of alphabetizing things seemed beyond her. Of course, she knew the alphabet, certainly knew A came before G but she just couldn’t connect how that translated into putting files in order. She told me that if she knew there was such a thing as daycare she’d have more children.

  One day, Franny picked up the phone, said, “Hullo,” listened, then put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “It’s for you.”

  “Can you say may I ask who’s calling please?”

  Franny said, “Who’s this?” then said across the room, “It’s your sister.”

  I said, “Thanks, Franny. Pus
h the last button.” She did.

  “Who on earth was that?” Joan said.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said.

  “She’s in the room?”

  “Yes. And how are you?”

  “Listen, Sonya. Daddy’s in the hospital.”

  My heart turned over. “Why?”

  “Because he can’t feel his feet.”

  “What?”

  “He can’t feel them. If he tries to walk, he can’t. And his hands are numb. And he’s lost his appetite. He says nothing has any taste.”

  “But what’s the matter with him?”

  “They don’t know. They’re doing tests on him.”

  “How long does he have to stay there?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “What hospital?”

  “New Rochelle.”

  “How long has he been there?”

  “Three days. I go there every day after work.”

  “Three days? How come you didn’t tell me before?”

  “They kept saying he could go home. Then he’d have another test, and they’d say he can’t go home.”

  “Should I come home?”

  “Can you?”

  “I’ll take the shuttle tonight. Can you pick me up at LaGuardia?”

  When I hung up, I burst out crying and put my head down on my arms. I didn’t expect this to happen but it did. I heard Franny’s chair slide back. Then she was next to me saying, “Sugar, it’s all right.”

  “It’s my father,” I said snuffling and trying to control myself. “He’s in the hospital.”