I felt safe in the back of Uncle Dave’s old light green, four-door Plymouth. My mother and I occupied the entire back seat, and I had the “catbird’s seat.” I could not see anything, as my head was well below the window line, buried in my mother’s lap. This was luxury. This was living. This was comfort. This was safe.
We drove from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn by street routes, down Linden Boulevard, and eventually picked up the South Shore Parkway into Malvern, Long Island, the home of my Uncle George (Dave’s brother) and Aunt Fay.
It was a strange twist of fate for me, being on occasion Hopalong Cassidy when I had my “Hoppy” outfit on to be driven by the “Sheriff” of New York. You see, my Uncle Dave, following graduation from law school, had some tough times, as he told it, making it as a lawyer. So, the Sheriff’s Job was his vocation, along with helping Grandma Lena at Derman Furs in Flatbush, N.Y.
There were a few periods when I felt safe as a child, but the drive in my Uncle Dave’s Plymouth was one of them. I think it had to do with several things: I do not remember my father being in the car with us. Also, I loved my Uncle Dave and always felt good in his presence, which is how he made me feel. All my mother’s brothers had a way of stooping low and listening to me, paying me the utmost attention as if I counted. I did count, of course, but very few in my life allowed me that feeling.
I will qualify that this was not a numerical factor but a relative one. If I had allowed more weight to my mother and father than others, the proportionality of the result would not have been in my favor: I still felt unheard. I suppose the ride in Dave’s Plymouth was not where I was being heard, but feeling safe and secure in my world was paramount.
I was in the eye of my parents’ hurricane amidst a storm without warning. Life to me was a tumultuous hurricane of outbursts and bitter family feelings that probably arose from being trapped in a life that was not exactly what they had dreamed of. Each was the other’s nightmare. Neither my mother nor father wanted to be there as a family any more than my father wanted me. While my mother was not happy with her marriage, she wanted me most of the time.
My father married my mother (as his brother Fred later told me in his last years) to enter my Grandmother Lena’s fur business. Until then, my grandmother pushed away my mom’s suitors so my mother could be the mom in Lena’s household, as Lena was the breadwinner.
As a result of Lena running the business, my mother became the one to raise her three brothers. She had helped put two of them through college, one of whom, Herb, would go on to medical college and the life of a respected and prominent doctor, and the third, George, into business. The further result left my mother out in the cold concerning any aspirations she might have had beyond the kitchen.
Following my parents’ marriage and my father’s entry into Derman Furs, my father was fired by his new mother-in-law six months into his new position. Here he was, now also living, along with my mother and me, with my grandmother who just fired him, a wife he married into the business, and soon the birth of a son he did not want.
Additionally, with the commotion of my birth, my father chose to bring home the daughter he had earlier abandoned, initially to her mother, his first wife, and later to institutions, all the while not maintaining any contact with her whatsoever.
My mother’s point of view, as shared with me in the last years of my father’s life by my cousin Joan, was that it was okay to bring my half-sister into our home, but that she had requested a small amount of time to pass. She felt I had just been born and preferred that he bond with me for a quick moment. Not only did he refuse, but once my half-sister joined us, it was like living in Cyprus with its Greek and Turkish halves.
My father ignored me while doting on my half-sister, while my mother tolerated her at best. As young as I was, I became the only male, emotionally speaking, in my mother’s life while being scorned by my father. My half-sister was kind and attentive to me, so by the time she left us at age 12, when I was about 4 years old, I felt my second taste of betrayal. My four-year-old, who couldn’t understand why she had been left, felt betrayed and abandoned.
