Stuffed (15 page)

You look like you lost weight,” people would say to Granny when they ran into her. But she hadn’t. She just went up, up, up, a woman who couldn’t say no to a fine mouthful, who saw the potential to make every bite the best. When she came to the store, she’d start out French with the
Filet
de Truite au Sauce Mousseline
my father had the chef run under the salamander. She would eat the delicate fish with just the right amount of creamy bronzed sauce on each forkful. Then she’d whiz to Warsaw for the Chopped Chicken Livers with Chicken Fat, which she’d meticulously spread to the corners of her toast. Then back to France via Spain for her favorite soup, Jellied Madrilène, a cold consommé flavored with fresh tomato juice and served with a slice of lemon. “For protein” Granny traveled to China and the White Peking Duck with Coconutted Sweet Potatoes. She gnawed bones with delicacy. Like my father, she worked them over, brittled them good, scranching and craunching, and when they were stark gray and gristle-free, she’d eye the bones on other people’s plates and say, “You’re not leaving those, are you?”

October 26 was Granny Ethel’s birthday, and on the closest Saturday to it, she’d throw herself a party. All six grandchildren, their parents, and a herd of friends and relatives took over the Terrace Room of the Hotel New Yorker on Eighth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. There would be a floor show. We could order anything we wanted. The orchestra would strike up “Happy Birthday” as a cake was wheeled in. Then the master of ceremonies would invite anyone who wanted to perform up to the microphone. My sister and I were the only ones that went. Every year we’d get up and sing the same song: “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” And every year we’d bring the house down by substituting the word “Yankees” for “home team” in the last verse:

For it’s root, root, root for the
Yankees
If they don’t win it’s a shame
For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out
At the old ball game!

In 1976 the Hotel New Yorker was sold to the Moonies, but until then it was the largest hotel in New York, with twenty-five hundred rooms, thirty-five chefs, and twenty full-time manicurists.

Granny wore a corset called an all-in-one. It included a bra, waist cincher with stays, and knee-length girdle. Satin ribbons hid the garters. It was engineered with reinforced seams. The all-in-one pressed everything in so tight her back was pleated. Granny preferred to have her clothes made. At my sister’s wedding she wore a blue lace dress that matched her eyes. And on her head, a tiny blue pillbox with a blue dotted veil. Her wrists were loaded with bracelets, ropes of pearls looped her neck. Later that evening one of my mother’s friends who’d never met Granny before said, “That’s the woman you told me was so gorgeous? She’s not gorgeous. Audrey, she’s old and she’s fat.” Mom told me this in disbelief. I was shocked too. Granny was a great beauty. All of us knew that. But when I look at the pictures of her in my sister’s wedding album now, it’s possible to see her without myth.

The older Granny got, the whiter her long hair was at the crown. But the ends of it stayed chestnut. That hair dated her like the rings of a tree. I liked to think Jacob Volk had known those ends, that he had touched the chestnut part, that I was seeing hair he had seen.

That picture in my sister’s wedding album turned out to be Granny’s last. She died in what was then called Doctor’s Hospital on East End Avenue. Cancer of the bladder. The family story was that before she married Charles, she’d flown to Washington for an abortion and the doctor nicked her bladder. That resulted in a condition that forced her to go to the urologist twice a week to get her bladder pumped. She believed this is what gave her cancer. Everyone who gets cancer thinks they know why. Maybe she was right. I don’t know. I do know that when she got slim, it was the way no one wants to get slim. It broke our hearts to see her lose her appetite. Sturgeon sandwiches withered on her bed tray. Ice-cream sodas warmed and went flat. Tea was too much. “Ethel, you lost weight!” Friends tried to cheer her when they visited, but that was no longer what she yearned to hear.

My father was powerless. He’d stand over her bed and say “Mother? Mother?” She’d roll her head and groan. There was nothing anybody could do.

“Promise me something,” he said while we waited for a cab in front of the hospital.

“What?”

“If I’m ever suffering like that, promise me you’ll kill me.”

“I could never do that.”

“There’s nothing to it. You inject an air bubble between my toes. The coroner will never find it.”

“I couldn’t do that, Dad.”

“You have to, Patricia Gay. Promise me.”

“Okay.”

I swore to myself that if I ever had a daughter, I’d make sure she wasn’t tyrannized by beauty. Life would be different for her. She would never wonder, Am I gorgeous? Not because she was or wasn’t, but because it wouldn’t matter
.
I’d devalue gorgeous. Gorgeous would be a fact of life, a nonadvantage. Brains, wit, drive, and kindness, waking up every morning wondering, What’s next?—who needs gorgeous if you’ve got all that? Gorgeous would be neither a plus nor a minus, just there, like the Great Barrier Reef. My girlchik would never have good days or bad days based on makeup. She’d never enter a room less confident thanks to her hair. Beauty would be a nonissue. The plan was simple: If I never told her she looked good, she’d never wonder if she looked bad.

Then I had a daughter. A daughter!

“Look!” I showed my husband her toes in the delivery room. “They’re like fringe! Did you ever in your life see anything so gorgeous?”

Everyone who came to the apartment saw the toes. They were all the same length, straight and perfectly shaped. “Aren’t they like little pink piano keys?” I said to everyone. “Doesn’t she look like a Sarah Bernhardt peony? Did you ever see anything so pink?” I praised her earlobes and her navel. I praised her ankles and her chin. Her nostrils, her dark eyes, her thighs. I was out of control, couldn’t help myself. What difference did it make? She couldn’t understand. I called her Polly after my Gloria Swansonish grandmother. I allowed myself to revel in her beauty. I told myself when she started to speak, I’d stop. Then I couldn’t. She was too gorgeous. To test my objectivity, I invented the Looking Game. I still play it. When Polly’s back is turned, I say to myself: I am looking at this person for the first time. What do I think? And then, when she turns around, I look at her as if she’s a stranger, as if I’ve never seen that face in my life and am forming a first impression. Always I am struck by her gorgeousness. It never fails. And along with this observation comes a great, dam-breaking, mother-lode flood of love. It’s the gorgeous-love connection, the gorgeous-love one-two. And it was realizing this recently that suddenly I understood: Gorgeousness in my family is love. Saying “You are gorgeous” is saying “I love you.” To love someone, no matter what they look like, is to see them as beautiful.

I don’t love my children because they’re gorgeous, even if they’re gorgeous because I love them.

Ettie Volk Stavin, a self-styled pioneer in marriage and family therapy

LORNA DOONES

Over time in a family anything is possible. Fourteen years after Jacob Volk’s sisters tried to steal his children from Granny Ethel, she forgave one of them. Ethel and Aunt Ettie became best friends. They requested that when they died they be buried side by side, each with a deck of cards so they could play in the afterlife. Ettie and Ethel loved this idea. But two years after Ethel died, Aunt Harriet dug her up, and Granny settled down permanently in her daughter’s plot.

Aunt Ettie had thick blond hair that looked blown back by a cyclotron. She had the long Volk nose that dips into your mouth when you laugh. Her bearing was regal. Her breasts were heroic. Once when we were sharing the back seat of a car, her beads broke. I started scrambling on the floor. “Don’t worry,” she said. “My bosoms are so big, they’ll catch them.”

She dressed in layers of black scarves and chiffon. She was heavyset, but all this filmy cloth gave her the appearance of fluttering. You knew when she entered a room. Nine months a year, she draped five sables around her neck, each one biting the tail of the one in front. Most of the time she looked as if she were about to have tea with a European expatriate who’d lost his title in a revolution. Sometimes she was.

If Granny had me for an afternoon but found something else to do, she’d drop me off at Aunt Ettie’s. Aunt Ettie didn’t have food for kids, but she could always scare up a few Lorna Doones. We had the Classics Illustrated
Lorna Doone
by Richard Doddridge Blackmore. Dad came home one Saturday with the first 103 issues, his way of exposing us to literature. We would read the Classics and get hooked. We’d segue from comics to the real thing. Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Bret Harte, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Lorna Doone
was one of my favorites. But I failed to see how a captive seventeenth-century English maiden from windswept Exmoor related to the cookie. Lorna Doones were good. They were buttery and unpretentious, a poor man’s shortbread. You could nibble them around the raised Lorna Doone logo and make it interesting. Aunt Ettie would give me three on a plate and a glass of milk. Then she’d sit across the table in her subway-tiled kitchen on West Eighty-sixth Street and drink tea out of a glass with cherry preserves on the bottom.

Aunt Ettie had three sons. Cecil studied philosophy at N.Y.U. Maurice became a dentist, like his father. And Steve hopped freight cars and went around the country with a program called the CCC developed by Roosevelt to employ people during the Depression. Aunt Ettie made me laugh. But the reason I liked being around her was she had a quality I attributed to men. She was direct. There was no subtext. You didn’t have to worry about double meanings. She was easy to talk to. She’d seen and done so much, she didn’t pass judgment. Aunt Ettie was emotionally streamlined. Passing through water, she would cause the least disturbance.

Because Aunt Ettie liked to travel, she kept a packed steamer trunk in her hallway at all times. She had a deal with the
Bergensfjord.
If a stateroom was still available or if someone canceled at the last minute, she could have it at half price. She could be at the pier in thirty minutes.

Every year Ettie went around the world on the
Bergensfjord.
She went to London. She went to the Pyramids. She went to zee Kasbah. And when she came back, she came back with stories. Once she sailed with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “What are they like?” We couldn’t wait to know. She laughed and told us, “At night the Duke dresses up like a girl!” Was it a costume party? Did she see him in his kilt? Was the Duke a cross-dresser? Once, a woman’s husband died mid-Atlantic, and “they kept him on ice” because his wife was in a bridge tournament and couldn’t let her partner down. Aunt Ettie wore costume jewelry on these cruises. She didn’t want to worry about her good stuff. “On me they think it’s real,” she’d say. She carried a black sack filled with coins, modeling herself on John D. Rockefeller, who used to give away dimes. “I tip everybody,” Aunt Ettie said. “And everybody likes me.”

She was worldly in another way too. She separated twice from her husband Nathan, the dentist. After Nathan died, she met Mr. Weiss on a cruise and married him. She was attracted to the idea that Mr. Weiss wanted them to be married yet independent. She thought that was forward-thinking. But what independent wound up meaning was that Mr. Weiss wanted to go Dutch. Ettie divorced him.

Separation was unusual at the time. Divorce was unheard of. This gave Aunt Ettie a strange kind of elevated status. Her advice on love matters became hotly sought. Who knows better how to save a marriage than someone who’s loused up two? Ettie knew things other women could only guess at. She had a fresh vantage point on the complexities of human nature. She understood what were then called
drives.
I thought of Aunt Ettie as the Colette of the Upper West Side.

She had lots of friends. Her apartment was big. She had several regular card games, and afterward she’d serve blackberry brandy. A recurrent theme began to surface. A friend would stay late, and sitting on Aunt Ettie’s horsehair love seat, she’d have another brandy. Then she’d reach for the tissues on a Moroccan tray and say, “Ettie. My husband—I think he’s philandering. What am I going to do?”

The first question Ettie asked was always the same: “Do you want him?” (Aunt Ettie told me once that she was the only woman she knew who didn’t want two men.)

“
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeees,
” her friend would say.

That’s when Aunt Ettie would reveal her Orchid Trick.

“First, send yourself an orchid,” she’d begin. “Leave it in the icebox. Put on your best dress. Go out before he gets home. I don’t care where you go. Go to the movies, go someplace, sit on a bench, but go. When your husband comes home and looks in the icebox, he’ll see the orchid. Then he’ll wonder, Why is there an orchid in the icebox? Next he’ll wonder, Who gave her the orchid? Get home very late. He will have been sitting up in the window waiting for you. He’ll be watching through the blinds and stewing. Take a long time getting out of the cab. When you get to the bedroom, he’ll be in bed pretending to be asleep. Hum lightly under your breath. Sigh a few times while you get undressed. Make it obvious, though, that you’re trying hard not to wake him up. He will not dare ask you where the orchid came from or where you were. A guilty man never dares to ask. Leave orchids in the icebox a few more times. Act happy. You probably won’t need to spend the night out again.”

Aunt Ettie said the Orchid Trick never failed. She’d invented it for herself and said it “rekindled the flame.” I like to imagine her leaning into her fridge with a stripe of light bouncing off the glass eyes of her sables, placing a purple cattleya in a clear plastic box next to some farmer cheese. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’d tucked a card in too: “For my darling Ettie, Thank you for last night.” Or “Ettie, ‘A lute whose lending chord is gone is what I am without you.’ ” Or “Sweetheart, your emerald eyes have pierced my heart.”

My sister was the first one from our generation to have a baby. We took Aunt Ettie to meet her great-great-niece Elizabeth. Ettie held the baby and said, “She’s named after a queen, and she holds her head nobly like a queen.” Actually, Elizabeth wasn’t named after Queen Elizabeth at all. She was named after Ettie’s best friend, Granny Ethel. But “holding her head nobly like a queen” was a fresh compliment. And from then on, whenever we held Elizabeth or talked about her, we’d say, “Doesn’t she hold her head nobly like a queen?”

Lana Turner and Gloria Swanson get ready for a party.