and she was with me in her endings, the tenacious grip on her ego finally finding its release.
Remembering her town house long before town houses had become a symbol of fashion in our once affluent society. Long before coops condos tax shelters and gentrification had become the sine qua non of our world’s stage.
She had an elevator like in those Fifth Avenue mansions Serge Rubinstein used to ride up and down in thinking out his smart money moves the night before the street opened in the morning..
Long before insider trading became the vogue in the latter part of our twentieth century eighties.
Where the Kaminsky sisters of Berditchev Buffalo the Bronx and Bensonhurst held court at her gardened estate on Avenue T near Ocean Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. She never
stopped bragging about her three sons prowess.
Diminutive a la Leslie Caron’s “Gigi” with the looney tunes of Montparnasse and the Left Bank. Or Irving Berlin’s “Tin Pan Alley” and Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”. Or those gas lighted music halls where David Copperfield and Oliver Twist used to cavort.
She may have thought of herself as an egotist and an authority figure in search of herself.. But her strong will, and steel colored hair combed straight back were somewhat of a tradeoff. She having lost her left breast or was it her right.? a mastectomy twenty years into her yesterdays.
Wasn’t she the first sister who could afford the luxury, as they say of a live in maid, whose name was Clara. And when Clara passed away, she invented Melissa.
She had her children, didn’t she? Three boys from her marriage with a widower, and a girl and boys from his..
Her scenario included a chessboard and pieces alongside the telephone and a summer home in Lake Ronkonkama. What she didn’t have was anyone to boss or lord it over in her aging. Thus she visited her late sister in Southern California..
II
Alvin Malinow had buried that sister, Esther, next to her husband, Curtis, in a simple unpretentious grave site scene at Eden Cemetery. No Rudolf Valentino or Al Jolson Presley affectation. Alvin had seen to that.
What did he care about Aunt Rose’s need for domination over her sister?
Wasn’t it enough for her older brother Uncle Max, to be committed for over fifty years in the asylum at East Islip, Long Island, for doing nothing more than scribbling a “Dear Bill” letter to President William McKinley, who was playing out his life as President of the USA.
“Nothing wrong with your Uncle Max,”said the psychiatrist. “All he needed was emotional support..” thumbing thru the bulky dossier, long before the busy work or the hi tech revolution and the computer printout.... off a 20mg hard drive for memory and storage.
Alvin remembered meeting the sisters at a celebrated birthday luncheon for the aging on Victory Boulevard in Reseda........He was sitting on the dais, introducing an Afro American academia from U.S.C who tried raising consciousness in her prognosis of geriatrics among all of us.
That was Alvin’s mitzvah. And Harry Isenberg, sitting at the sister’s catered table knew time was running out on Aunt Rose’s younger sister.. The energy just wasn’t there as Harry helped her from her chair..
The inevitable arteriosclerosis was weighing her down. Three generations of Malinows would have one more work order.. Two of the mortuary’s dark suited young attendants drove to Shangri-la, Esther’s last domicile before her entombment at Eden...
Harry walked a ways with the sisters, nudging Esther’s elbow as they maneuvered thru the chairs and the tables into the cloak room.
III
He remembered publishing Esther’s younger son letter from Justice Hugo Black whose words and thoughts were his last gesture, before his soul slipped away into immortality at age 85.
He was thinking about the response he published in the “Guardians”
“Perhaps Hugo Black’s life is what it’s all about.. Living on this minor planet, wasn’t fulfillment the modus operandi....thinking... playing tennis.... writing opinions....
The Constitution and its Bill of Rights, curled up in his jacket pocket for constant reviewing..To make it a part of himself...
Alvin was putting on his coat, his pinned I.D. covered by the dangling sleeve. The day was balmy user friendly.. But the society was still self serving and hedonistic . And the middle Kaminsky sister knew her time beyond Santa Monica’s “Shangri-la” was limited..
Noshing in Zucky’s deli.. Walking the mall., Watching the bathers and the sailboats from the Palisades..
The marshmallowy clouds hanging softly under the blue skies of her ceiling........
IV
Alvin Malinow knew the score of our hard nosed times. “Rent your house. Go to the Big Apple.. Get a part time job. Find a wife....”
His humanity unknowest to him had transversed the Continent.. and the family’s Venice Boulevard mortuary. .He had expanded West, breaking new ground on Sepulveda.
And it was on that same Sepulveda, the site of Leo Baeck’s Temple, where Esther’s younger son, found his wife, Estelle.
*******
Who’s to say the Guardian’s own Humanity had not transcended the planet’s own built in limitations, playing out the “Genius of Alvin Malinow’s inevitability”
The Big Apple, 8/15/08...revisited the second day of Passover, April 9, 2009.
