By roads then familiar we drove on, through grim Sabbath neighborhoods, my father towards the end telling the driver how to proceed, exactly where to turn, until we drew up beside the familiar two-story house. My grandmother, thin-faced and sad but for the moment smiling, came to the kitchen door. She lived with my great-grandfather, a fearsome old man in his eighties from the shtetls in Poland, unshaven and foul-smelling — it was probably incontinence — who mostly remained upstairs. Jacob Galambia was his name, probably a concoction given to him by an immigration officer. Columbia, the neighbors called him. He and my grandmother had come down from Canada, and she had gone to night school to learn English after her marriage and the birth of her children. What her father’s livelihood had been I don’t think I was ever told. He was too ancient to be affectionate and the cruel scratch of his beard burned my face. My father was polite but paid him small notice.
I am speaking offhandedly of a great span of time. This great-grandfather had been born in about 1850. I was taken, a small boy who knew nothing of him, to visit. I may eventually look with some wonder upon a grandchild born in the year 2000 or after. A hundred and fifty years. Worlds have disappeared …
There was also, on this side of the family, a divorced husband — my grandfather — and an aunt, my father’s sister, named Laura. It was at her funeral, years after the monthly visits to my grandmother had ended, that the bard, let me call him that out of respect, confronted and overwhelmed me with his recital of my years. I had watched him being led away from me, like a saddened child.
—
In old age my mother and her sister, widowed and living together, sorted the past, their girlhood in Washington, D.C., where they were born, as their mother had been, the house on Upsher Street, their strict father, the relatives who became rich, the suitors. Major Sledge, who had been in love with Selma, the oldest sister, before the First World War. He was on the White House staff, a major in peacetime, they emphasized. He wanted to marry her and take her to Chicago. Their parents would not give permission. What became of Major Sledge? Neither of them knew.
Of the four sisters, Mildred, my mother, was the most beautiful, also the youngest and most willful. She had a lively girlhood — the dreariness came later — the dances at the country clubs, the embassies, she went to all of them; the Argentine embassy was the best.
“French,” my aunt corrected.
“No, the Argentine.”
They begin talking about the family again, identifying branches on the tree of kinship. Their father had two brothers and a sister. One of the brothers was—
“A photographer,” says my aunt.
“No, a dentist.”
“I thought he was a photographer.”
My aunt, the second youngest, was blonde and liked to laugh. She had been married twice, for a long time to an unsuccessful lawyer who was my favorite uncle. She shined his shoes and made sure he had a haircut. His clientele was impoverished. Counselor, they called him. He drew up contracts and leases, occasionally he handled a divorce. Some of his business was trying to collect rents.
“Who’s there?” they would shout through the door.
When he told them they would yell, “Get out or I kick your ass!”
Short, a bit heavyset, expert at cards and tricks, he also played the piano and wrote songs. His hair was dark and thinning. His fingers were stubby, the backs of them and his forearms rich with silky black hair. He had gone to dental school — it was there he had met my aunt, at the college clinic, while fixing her teeth — but eventually he switched to another field of extraction.
His patience and playfulness made me love him. He and Frances had no children. I was their substitute. My mother and I would take the Weehawken ferry, wide with curved galleries for passengers on either side, the smell of tar and brine in the air, the deck rhythmically rising and falling. My uncle would be waiting for us on the far side in his car, a secondhand sedan. In those years there were factories along the river and farther up, perched on the heights, the sturdy framework of a great roller coaster in the center of an amusement park. We never went to the park but instead to one or another in a series of apartments in buildings of dark brick, often along a steep street. On a couch in the living room I sat entranced as coins which had disappeared with a twist of the fingers into thin air were pulled from behind my ear and aces rose magically to the top of a well-shuffled deck. The piano bench was stuffed with his songs and the magazine rack, I once discovered, had nudist magazines hidden by the Saturday Evening Post.
This marvelous uncle, when I was no longer a child and had gone off to school, came home one day complaining he was dizzy and was put to bed. He was sent to the hospital—“I don’t think they operated,” my aunt said vaguely — and a month or so later he ran off with his secretary. My mother, telling me the news, explained that he was ill, had a brain tumor, and had been taken to an asylum. In fact he and the secretary were in his mother’s house on the shore, though not long afterwards, perhaps in some way close to the invented story, he died. I do not know where he is buried.
Families of no importance — so much is lost, entire histories, there is no room for it all. There are only the generations surging forward like the tide, the years filled with sound and froth, then being washed over by the rest. That is the legacy of the cities.
“You know what Poppa’s father was?” my mother asks.
“He had a linen factory,” replies my aunt.
“He was a brewmaster.”
No, no. They argue on about him and the uncle, the dentist or photographer, who came to visit in the early 1900s but didn’t like America and went back to Europe.
“To Frankfurt,” my aunt says.
“Moscow,” corrects my mother.
The tree is only dimly outlined, the arbor consanguinitatis. Their father as a youth lived with his grandmother because his parents were divorced, and he was sent to America because of some business with the serving girl. And so, blindly, he escaped the wars and the wave of unparalleled destruction that came with them. In America he married a woman whose mother, my great-grandmother, had been married to a Polish prince named Notés.
“A prince?”
“Maybe he was a general,” my mother concedes. “Anyway he was important.” In her seventies she was still handsome and haughty, woe to the unsuspecting waiter or shopgirl. A stylish charcoal portrait done when she was in her forties — fine features, faint rings below the eyes, long graceful neck — was still very close to her appearance. She read the newspaper every day, including all the advertisements. Each day she walked two miles.
My mother first saw my father, a photograph of him, at any rate, in the newspaper. She was eighteen. Later, entirely by chance, they were introduced. Her parents liked him very much, her mother especially. They were married in Baltimore in 1924. It was in the morning. They came back to Washington and had lunch and the new groom left for New York to go back to work. He returned a month later.
I was the only child, born early on a June morning of the hottest day imaginable and delivered by a doctor who I later fantasized might have been William Carlos Williams — the time and location are about right — but who was in fact named Carlisle. The evening brought relief from the heat in the form of a terrific storm. I would like to think I somehow remember it and that my love of all storms proceeded from that first one, but more likely I was sleeping, wearied from the passage, my young mother — she was twenty-one — weary too, but immensely happy for everything that was over and all that lay ahead. Thunder shook the windows, the rain rattled down. The year was 1925, the hospital, Passaic General.