In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

67 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218930.c05 Five Beyond 7002 Growing up at 7002 Ridge I felt connected by stories and other knowledge, connected to forebears and a past, though I would not know the true story of John Henry for some years. Such a connection is not an inconsiderable thing: the places where you walk take on greater meaning; the people whom you see acquire added dimensions. Some of the connection was tangible: many of the people from the past still surrounded me, inhabiting space that was also mine. I lived with my mother, Bee, and my grandmother Myrtle Belle; uncles and aunts walked around the neighborhood; Bee’s youngest brother, Urban, lived in another apartment at 7002 until he took his family off to suburban Connecticut around 1950. The Seventy-Fourth Street house, though no longer in the family, still stood and great boats still blew their foghorns on The Narrows, where Great Uncle Harry had sailed with the wind. On alternate Sundays, Bee and I would share a meal with the de Caros near Prospect Park, riding two buses or two trains to get there, sometimes huddling in the dark of night in a cold doorway waiting for the B34 bus to take us home. The trip to see them never lost its flavor of exoticism—the trains and stations of the IND subway were so different in design from the older, far-more-familiar-to-me BMT and promised some other reality (originally built by different, private companies, the transit authority still maintained the BMT and IRT as separate lines; the city-built IND ran as a separate line too). Or the buses would take me through neighborhoods of scrunched-up little houses with asbestos siding—so unlike the neat brick exteriors of my own Bay Ridge—or stores with signs in Hebrew letters, nearly another world. The Sunday meal itself would be festive, as though my father’s death in the war had been forgotten; it seemed to me to take place in the distant past, for I had no recollection of him. We would start out in the double living room of the Greenwood Avenue house, where my mother Beyond 7002 68 had been staying when news of my father’s death arrived, and the adults would slosh back a pitcher or two of Manhattans and talk and indulge me as I did imitations of the TV giants of the day, such as Milton Berle or Jackie Gleason. My grandmother, Anna, would be bustling in the kitchen while my grandfather, the original Frank, mostly sat by himself a little apart from the rest, by then mostly lost in a cocoon of deafness but always attired in a suit and silk tie. I might slip away to the dining room to filch slices of salami from a table gradually filling with condiments and utensils or upstairs to the rooms of my aunt Frances, who never appeared as soon as everyone else and would still be “getting ready”; an intriguing, slightly sensual Maxfield Parrish print hung over her mantel, a painting of hers in progress might be on her easel, the aroma of perfumes and powders hung in the air like unknown spices. I probably did not know the word boudoir, but her living space bespoke it, even the big, old Underwood typewriter she brought home from her office added to the mystique. Back downstairs, in the afternoon, we would march (a total of eight or ten of us, including my grandparents, my aunts and their husbands, Bee and I) into the dining room for the elaborate meal, usually an Italian feast of antipasto and spaghetti and pasta shells with homemade tomato sauce and glasses of wine all around; although occasionally the menu would be more Germanic, with Sauerbraten as the centerpiece. The soups, often thickly delicious cream of chicken or a clear broth with floating peas and dumplings, echoed north European flavors. The heaping plates of dismembered roast chicken seemed more American, yet the meat had a wonderful oily moistness that I never tasted anywhere else. For dessert we usually ate American ice cream, sometimes served with long-handled, ice cream parlor spoons probably left over from the Menkhoff konditorei. How my Germanborn grandmother had learned to cook such exquisite Italian food I never wondered until much later. My mother told me that my grandfather had taught her. Did all Italian men walk around with this innate knowledge of their native cuisine? Were sex roles so...

Share