My mother, Mabel, was a small young woman with dark blonde hair. She was serious and old beyond her years. I intuited that early on. I didn’t think of her as pretty, but she was, very. She was restrained, contained, tentative in expressing joy. I once described her as being like a peony bud that just wouldn’t open. She was ever anxious to please, and just ever anxious.
We lived on Battery Avenue, the battery being part of the defense of New York Harbor. We were adjacent to Fort Hamilton A privet hedge camouflaged the chain link fence of the fort. The space between these two barriers was the perfect size for a small child to have her own path. During the war there were wounded soldiers in the hospital near the fence. I loved to walk there and to get candy from the soldiers. The privet was not so dense as to prevent my mother from watching me as we walked to the park
One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the cold floor of our apartment, looking at a cloth book of the Star Spangled Banner and waiting impatiently for my mother’s father, my Grandpa. He was the person I most adored. He was a captain in the Merchant Marine and thus an ideal fantasy figure. We were all accustomed to waiting for his next arrival…and next departure. I already associated him with the best of times. In between those times we received occasional telegrams from distant ports, treasured yellow bits of paper with a few expensive words.
I realized much later that one of the reasons good times descended upon us when Grandpa was in town was not associated with any big festivities, although there were feasts of delicatessen and beer and laughter at the kitchen table. That was not customary. Our regular fare tended to be spare: a chop, a boiled potato, canned peas or string beans with jello or canned peaches for dessert. The boring fare was my father’s choice; he regarded garlic as a communist plot and was suspicious of interesting food. When Grandpa was there, the table was covered with open waxed papers with liverwurst and ham and Liederkranz cheese and sliced onions and rice pudding for me. What else he brought was my father’s good behavior. I realized years later that my father was afraid of him, not just because Daddy had deflowered sweet Mabel, but he sensed that my Grandpa could kill him.