MIXED PERIODS - LOVE’S TWISTS, TURNS and SLAPS

OCTAVIO and MOLLY

When I was five my mother took me to a resort in Moodus, Connecticut for a summer vacation. According to Wikipedia, the village of Moodus, about halfway between Boston and New York, was known in its 1930s and 40s heydays as the "Catskills of Connecticut" and drew guests from both cities enchanted by its rural atmosphere. 

Moodus was a few years after my parents divorce, my father having left her for another woman, so maybe we were holidaying on his alimony dime. We picked up two important friends there; Octavio Linares, stepfather in waiting -- and blonde and gorgeous 18-year-old vacationing stenographer, Molly, with whom I fell instantly  in love. 

Linares was a handsome Cuban, now American, who Flamingo-danced as a hobby. In his real-life he was CEO of a Castile Soap company wholly owned by a Russian-Jew, Albert Moldavan. Moldavan was a millionaire. But also a communist.  That affiliation was apparently the bond between them.

Mother and Octavio hit it off. They wed not long after, a civil marriage which must have horrified my mother’s father, an orthodox cantor. However, Grandpa was obviously more broadminded than many of our Jewish co-religionists. He opened his house to us after their union.

At least for me the new marital arrangement was a pretty easy change. Sort of like the way I saw a flat tire changed on Dad’s Chrysler. The flat was pulled off, rolled away and gone. The spare went on and now we were drivable again. From my point of view this marriage was even better than Mother’s first because Linares paid more attention to what I did.  I liked that even if he was a bit strict. 

Not long after our Moodus vacation, the three of us, Mother, Octavio and I, moved into the fifth floor of an apartment house on West 85th street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Moldavan owned the building.  Linares managed it. Moldavan was a revolutionary with verve. He idolized the Russian Revolution and wrote a book, “When the Red Fog Lifts”, extolling its virtues. But he also had strong free enterprise leanings. He kept a Rolls Royce on his estate in Oyster Bay where we visited from time to time, and practiced successful capitalism, his idealism apparently confined to the future. Come the revolution. 

A few years after they married, my new stepfather Octavio tired of handling tenant complaints and moved us downtown to London Terrace, a block square luxury high-rise complex in the Chelsea area. This was an excellent counterpart to my father’s upper-class domicile on Sutton Place in the east-side 50s, but also the beginning of the end of my brief encounter with living high above the depression fray. London Terrace had numerous amenities including a swimming pool in which I swam daily, and a play area on one of the roofs of its fourteen-entrance attached hive, all connected by walking tunnels running under the buildings used for getting to the pool, and to reach the shops and bank clustered at the Ninth Avenue end of the complex. 

I was very fond of Linares, and he of me. He was strict but fair, and I needed a father to steady me. He also coached me in realism, refusing, for example, to buy me the 14-inch two-wheel bike I wanted because it was a good fit, insisting I go for 18 inches to propel me into the future. I learned how important keeping up with the world was because every evening after work he tuned the radio to Boake Carter’s Philco Evening News. I knew nothing of Carter, a colorful conservative commentator, but his voice captivated me. 

After mother and Octavio were together four years, misfortune revisited. My new dad tired of us and ran off, back to Cuba, with his secretary. The last thing I remember of our time together was discovering my mother crying in the large walk-in closet in their bedroom after happening upon indisputable slap-in-the-face evidence of Linares’s intimacy with his new amour. Our days sheltered with him beneath the umbrella of a communist/capitalist millionaire ended. Things for mother and me went from nice to difficult over the years that followed. 

During all this time, Molly, mother, and I had remained close friends, although, personally, I had not fully recovered from my own face-slap betrayal, which was that right after I tumbled for her in Moodus she had thrown me over completely and married one Julie Pincus to whom she had already secretly, at least to me, been engaged when we met. Julie, when I came to know and like him, was a large and gentle man of Polish extraction with a kind round face and body of a bulky football-player, who managed a movie theater on Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn. Not long after their marriage they had a son named, like me, Bobbie, and five years my junior. 

Molly and mother’s friendship was strong over the ensuing years, at least until she made mother cry. 

After Linares left, mother and I were impoverished wanderers and moved annually in pursuit of three-month rental concessions common in those depression years. After several hopscotching years mother was momentarily without options. Her younger brother, Sam offered to shelter us.  We moved in with Uncle Sam, his wife, Dora, their only child, and cousin Alan, a year my junior. Alan was required to share his room with me. 

The crowded arrangement, uncomfortable for us all, may have been worse for Alan, who suffered from sibling rivalry and cooked-up mean tricks to make that point, for example placing open safety pins between my bed sheets where they lay in wait to surprise-stab me. Alan’s ambition was to be a baseball player and he believed a steady diet of spaghetti and chocolate pudding was the way to stardom. This low-cost diet may have been a blessing for my uncle, a drummer who was unemployed for years during this period.  As the depression gained steam live entertainment had been dropped, never to return, from all the New York Movie houses including the Brooklyn Albee at which he played. 

MOLLY AND JULIE

Life was unbearable for me living with my cousin. So, it was a blessing when my old love, Molly, and her husband Julie, visiting us at Sam and Dora’s one afternoon, asked mother if she might be interested in applying for the tiny attic walk-up unit which had just been vacated above their ground floor Brighton Beach rental apartment. 

I had just reached seventh grade when we moved to this cozy flat. Mother and I dined on a bridge table on the stair landing next to the kitchen and surrounded by two garret rooms, a living room for mother, a bedroom for me. 

The move was good for us all, right down to Bobbie Pincus and me. Bobbie needed help in his school work and I was able to provide it.

Fortunately I was by this time over my infatuation with Bobbie’s mother, Molly, and I actually learned a little about real sex during our stay there when he and I discovered a pack of condoms on the under-shelf of a bed room table while chasing their marvelous pup, Deep Stuff, around the apartment. The truth is I was already knowledgeable beyond my years because, during our many moves, my mother, in her unsuccessful quest for a permanent partner, had vocalized coupling sounds I could not avoid with more than one temporary beau. One of them, during our stay in Brighton, was broadcast engineer for the weekly New York Philharmonic radio show.  He was so warm and interested in me that later on I contemplated electrical engineering as a potential occupation, thus illustrating the role of affection in career cybernetics. 

The name DELUXE, spelled out in light bulbs on the tiny marquee of the movie house Julie managed, was a misnomer. It was distinctly not luxurious. We kids, talented in calling a spade a spade, called it “the Dump” as in “Hey, let’s go down to the dump,” a Saturday afternoon invitation to the gang to find entry dimes and see the latest double feature, plus the next chapter in the serial. 

The DELUXE could not rival the air-cooled Oceana, not far away in Sheepshead Bay, larger, considerably costlier at 25 cents, and a refuge on hot days. The banner draped around the Oceana’s large marquee sported a running portrait of ice-capped mountain peaks overlaid in large letters, “Air Cooled.” It didn’t play serials, but was a refuge for hot customers with enough money to enter. Regardless, the tiny DELUXE provided Julie, hence Mollie and Bobbie too, a steady and secure living in those precarious times. Despite occasional disruptions in its offerings I participated in unbeknownst to Julie.

BMT line trains ran periodically above Benson Avenue outside the DELUXE, passing  between the Ocean Parkway and Sheepshead Bay stations. The on-screen dialogue became a jumble of incoherent noise every time the EL train track noise outside fused with the film track inside. But our major attractions were serials like Buck Rogers and Zorro. Their scripts were decodable in our imaginations even when scrambled to adult ears. 

We usually entered the DELUXE at a random moment in the double feature, often remaining, for a second go-around in order to see the serial episode again. For mischief we occasionally (not too often, to avoid getting caught) left the theater in a flurry after tossing into the aisle a smoldering stink bomb, an inch or two of cellulose nitrate film filched from the trash outside, wrapped like a party prize in a piece of newspaper, lit as we scrammed, leaving behind a stench to challenge the remaining patrons’ survival instincts. Perhaps I should be abashed at my participation in juvenile misbehavior, but I choose the more liberal view that children’s brains need to be molded into morality, and mine was not yet there. 

SAM AND MOLLY

A momentous decade moving yearly from one apartment to another passed before I saw Molly again. The nation had banged its way out of the depression and through WW 2. I grew to young manhood. And then came three weddings in close progression. One preceded by turbulence. 

My mother was made happy again through her marriage to Michl Gibson, my second and last stepfather. Fran and I were the only guests. The wiitnesses. A licensed clerk officiated, standing on a raised platform in a pink fluorescent lit fuchsia room, a colorful refuge nestled among the institutional grey chambers and hallways of the New York County Municipal Building. He read out the legalese marriage phrases. Pronounced them man and wife. Paused. Gazed. Then, clearly intent on creating a special moment solemnly stepped out of character. In his best New York accent he intoned “Well, the best of luck to yiz.” In hindsight this was a touching departure from the normal humdrum of civil service business. But dippy youthful Fran and Bob snickered inwardly at the seemingly comic incongruity. 

Soon after Mother and Michl married I was the groom at a wedding, Fran’s and mine, I thought made in heaven. It was a marvelous party. The ceremony performed by a serious duo, my deceased grandparent’s dear friend, Reverend Eskowitz was the Cantor and principal performer. And the chorus: My Uncle Henry Gold, an authority figure there to preach wise words about life. Henry was a double threat. A psychiatrist and an orthodox Rabbi. Recently widowed he had recently moved from Dallas, and was not licensed to perform weddings in New York. A fortunate excuse to include Reverend Eskowitz. 

The symbolic ritual was a mystery to Fran and me, but the traditional ceremony under a trellised “Chuppah” went well with just a few diversions. Uncle Henry said important words, lecturing us on the seriousness of the marriage vows. Cantor Eskowitz, raised on his toes, readying himself to sing the ceremony. A surprise move. He reached under his gown; extracted an object from his pocket. Momentarily confused, we understood when he tapped it against his teeth. His tuning fork. The reverend needed an A note to launch the chant. We almost fell prey to our youthful funny bones. But tightening intertwined hands we squelched the laughter that would have insulted his beautiful singing. 

The end of the ceremony challenged my “put two-and-two together” skills. Predictable considering my scant knowledge of the ritual niceties, but shocking to the few orthodox guests. At the end of a Jewish marriage service, to seal the bond for eternity, the groom breaks, by stamping on it, the wine glass, wrapped in a napkin, from which the pair have just sipped. Eskowitz wrapped it and placed it on the floor. 

I raised my foot. Eskowitz shook his head frantically. No. No. No, the head said as it swiveled in tiny side-to-side arcs. I heard scattered gasps behind me. Saw him pointing prayerfully at my raised left leg. The rules. The rules. The Mosaic rules. Fortunately I got it. The marriage glass must be broken with the right foot, not the left. Fortunately, too, I had been halted in midair. It wasn’t too late. I put my left foot down. Switched and stamped with the correct, the right shoe. We were man and wife. 

Then for the eating. And the dancing. My Uncle Sam, the one mother and I had stayed with years ago when Alan tormented me, was by now a widower, Aunt Dora having died young. Now in his mid-40s he was back on his feet as the “house percussionist” at the Radio City Music Hall. A warm extrovert with a lilting voice and happy smile. He had engaged a small band for the wedding and arranged the music. It was professional entertainment. The dancing was lively. 

Among the guests was Molly. Without Julie, who was working, weekends being his busiest days. Molly and Uncle Sam had not seen each other for many years. He asked her to dance. Again. And once more. They danced up a storm. 

Sam and Molly continued dancing after our wedding. Their new love affair blossomed into plans. Molly to divorce Julie. She and Sam to marry. They shared their happiness with Mother. 

What’s the saying? Mother went Ballistic. Their good news tore old wounds, the broken marriages she had endured! They wanted her to see their romance as stepping stones to a happy future. She saw bricks hurled at Molly and Julie’s household, shattering it as hers had twice been destroyed. 

Fran and I never learned the details of what mother did trying to derail their relationship. But she could be mean and determined. The phone call I received from her told me how stinging her skullduggery must have been. Her sobs masked barely distinguishable, anguished words. “Robert I need you. Molly and Sam, those bastards. They beat me up. I need you to come now!”

It was true.  Molly and Sam had come to her apartment, attacked her, and left in a fury. She was a mess when we arrived. Bruised, trembling and bleak. My uncle, her little brother, had pushed and struck her. Molly had whacked her, scratched her, slapped her. Remains of the kitchen windowsill flower pot mother had thrown at them as they left were scattered across the floor. 

Fran, arm around her, consoled her. I found a broom and began to sweep the soil, shards and lone flower into a heap. Mother, still semi-hysterical mumbled again-and-again “she’s dirt, she’s filthy dirt, moved on to “the pigs, they’ll pay for what they’re doing.” Then, as I swept, she suddenly reverted to normalcy. “Stop that Robert.” she ordered, “ You’re making a mess. You have no idea how to clean dirt. Let me have that.” Soon we were able to leave a calmed victim. 

Not long after the attack, Molly and Sam married (none of us were guests) and embarked on a show-business marriage. Uncle Sam continued to drum away from the orchestra pit for various Broadway musicals, Then, Molly at his side, he toured for many years with the travelling company of Music Man. They remained for long periods in cities along the way, renting apartments as they went, including one at DC’s Watergate. Mollie loved hob-knobbing with show-biz people. It was grand and exciting. 

MOLLY

Cracks in their relationship began to show in our infrequent communications well before Sam reached retirement years. They seemed impatient with each other during our occasional phone conversations. The strain gained visibility after they settled down in Florida away from all the razzle dazzle. 

Mother was now in Florida too. After years apart the three of them had cooled into a semi-cordial social relationship. But I could sense that she never really recovered her devotion to or respect for either of them. She was probably delighted by the problems we had begun to observe in their marriage. 

A wicked queen, Molly now dominated Sam. In phone conversations, when he began to tell us anything she interrupted after a few words and he dissolved into silence. The few times we saw them in person he sat silently, rising only to get something she asked him to fetch. The two of them delighted in recapturing their glory years by pouring over scrapbooks of their show time travels when I visited. But only she was permitted to explain them, interrupting the moment he tried. Sadness lurked close to the surface. 

A few years before Sam died, and the last time I saw him, Joanne, now my spouse, and I visited them in their Florida home. To escape Molly’s earshot, Sam led me outside with a ruse. He wanted to show me something in the garage. When we were alone together he plaintively poured his heart out. Molly would not allow his son, Alan, or any member of Alan’s family into their home. She believed, Sam told me, that Alan was dangerous. She was sure Alan was plotting to get Sam to change his will so that she and her son would have nothing. Most recently she had become convinced Alan planned to poison her. Sam despondently related that he had to meet his own son furtively elsewhere just to see his own son. 

Unable to find the advice he cried out for, I could only commiserate.