Getting Out in One Piece

Ben Kagan wishes he could speak to the dead. He wants to tell his Aunt Jean a few things. To thank her, simply that, for what she did for him as a child over sixty years ago.

He sees her now in his mind’s eye more sharply than he can see his mother. Aunt Jean wore, almost always, a modest gray silk shantung suit, Chinese pendant at the collar. He can still smell the peculiar old-spinster odor of that outfit—a bit of cologne, a bit of cleaning fluid, the stale air of her hotel closet—though when he was a child she wasn’t old—maybe forty in 1940, child of the century. Her hair—fine hair, black forever, even when she was fifty and sixty—was rolled into two stiff buns at the sides of her head. From time to time she’d pat the buns. This was hardly hair; it was like a wimple, part of a uniform. He realizes now that he never, never saw her hair loosened, not even at the beach. She seems to him a sort of nun—calm, restrained, severe about her own life but very kind, always trying to mollify, to sweeten the atmosphere, eliminate conflict. A Jewish nun? Well, hardly Jewish, though she’d grown up in a Yiddish-speaking household—during the war she became a Rosicrucian; it was as a Rosicrucian she’d talk to him about God.

Beside the portrait of his mother on the wall of his study he has the portrait of Aunt Jean—a woman who might have been thought beautiful—perfect oval face, high forehead, big wide-set eyes, lovely skin—if she’d cared about what she called worldly things.

If he’s had a productive life, he owes it largely to her. But growing up—we’re talking sixty, seventy years ago—he took her for granted, didn’t appreciate her. His mother made fun of her; he made fun of her himself. For she was such a noodge, Aunt Jean. Jamming him against wall or closet mirror with forefinger, she poked in time to her lesson for that evening:

Poke. Simple B vitamins, please, Bennie. Haven’t I told you what Carleton Fredericks said? And dear, I know it’s hard, but you must stop eating poison. Poke. Sugar and white flour are nothing but poison. Would you eat arsenic if it tasted good? Poke. Do you live to eat or eat to live? It’s too late for your father and mother. I try, but you know what they say about old dogs and new tricks. But you, you young dog, should be able to learn. I know what a smart boy you are. Oh, once in a great while is all right. Poke. You understand me? Are you listening to me?

Oh, he listened, but, laughing inside, he plotted how to get away.

His father was away a lot, not in the war. A lieutenant in the First World War, he was too old to fight in World War ii. Leo Kagan was away in California for months at a time taking care of his old father, was sent out there on full salary by his brother, for whom Leo worked. So Ben was mostly without a father, but three women hovered over him; three women, jealous of one another, poured their love out over Ben and battled one another for his attentions: his mother; her sister, Aunt Sal; his father’s sister, Aunt Jean. He grew to expect it. There were no other children around. He had no siblings. His aunts were unmarried. He didn’t even have close cousins.

“You’re my whole life,” his mother said. Or she’d say, “If anything happened to you, I wouldn’t live a single minute,” implying that she’d commit suicide. At times, even though Ben was alive, she made a dramatic gesture of killing herself, turning off the pilot, turning on the gas, and sticking her head in the oven. Or standing in front of the medicine cabinet deciding which poison to swallow...