Lies About My Family: A Memoir

Jazzin’ with the Greats

123 jazzin’ with the greats I keep a photo on my bookshelf of me and my father, dancing at my brother Josh’s wedding, October 1995, Hartford, Connecticut . My father’s bow tie is slightly askew, and he’s half-smiling, his right arm around my shoulder and my left hand in his, in the classic ballroom clasp. He’s wearing a rented tuxedo with a pink shirt and a boutonniere. He owns a tuxedo that he inherited from his brother-in-law, my Uncle Walter, but Joshua didn’t want him to wear it. They argued about it. “It’s double-breasted, Dad. It doesn’t match anyone else’s. It doesn’t even fit you right.” “It fits me fine,” he said. “I loved that guy.” When my mother’s sister Toby met Walter, my father tells me, Walter was driving a truck for a slaughterhouse. The job was disgusting, and he hated it, coming home stinking of animal fat, his clothes ruined. My grandmother suggested, “Why don’t you find something else?” So for a long time, he drove a cab. Then, when Charley, his daughter Phyllis’s husband, got out of the military, the two of them bought a truck and made deliveries all over New York City, which Walter knew, from the cab, like the back of his hand. Business wasn’t bad. Toby and Walter lived in a high rise in Flushing Meadows, with Charley and Phyllis down the hall— the name of their neighborhood a cause for great glee among my brothers and sisters and me, whenever we drove out to 124 lies about my family visit. We could tell we were getting close when we passed Shea Stadium and the 1964 World’s Fair grounds, the Unisphere now surrounded by brush and looking sad and rusted. Seeing it, though, would remind me of its heyday, when my father and UncleWalterhadtakenustothefair,wherewewaitedonendless lines to see Disney’s animatronic Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address, and General Electric’s dioramas of kitchens past and future. In the kitchen of the past was a small ice box with a big round motor on the top, and we kids began yelling, “That’s our refrigerator!” because it was just like the one we had at the lake, the cottage having come supplied with Mrs. Roth’s antique appliances. Embarrassed lest the crowd think we couldn’t afford something more up to date, my father explained loudly, “In our summer house, our summer house.” The talk of the fair was a fabulous confection called a Belgian waffle, and I was curious about it but never got to experience one. The wait to buy them was so long and the waffles so overpriced that we went back to the apartment instead, where Toby served us supermarket cookies. I loved Toby and Walter’s apartment. Toby, her hair dyed bright red, would set out cut-glass dishes of cigarettes and candy in the living room, which was decorated with a wallpaper mural of an oasis, weeping willows and palms surrounding a tranquil pool. It was so beautiful. I would tug my mother’s skirt: “Why can’t we have that?” Walter’s favorite avocation was shopping for clothes. The word “dapper” was made for him; he was the only man I knew with a mustache, and even if I never saw him in a straw boater— and I may have—that’s how I picture him. When he and Toby came to visit us in Rutherford, my father would take him downtown to Zimmerman’s, a menswear store run by a friend of his from the temple. At one Zimmerman’s sale, my father bought a beautiful camel’s hair coat, and Walter agonized over a white leather jacket, trying it on, turning this way and that in the 125 jazzin’ with the greats three-way mirror. It would have been perfect for watching football on Hanukkah, when my father, my brothers, and my uncles sequestered themselves in my parents’ bedroom, one game playing on the TV with the sound turned off and a second one on the radio. Walter would wear a special outfit in honor of his favorite player, Joe Namath of the New York Jets: white patent-leather loafers and a matching belt—what’s called the Full Cleveland. But finally he put the jacket back on the rack. White is totally impractical; he could...