CHAPTER NINE
THE RED TABLE
My office is a studio about 150 feet from my house, but the two structures are surrounded with so much foliage that one is barely visible from the other. I spend most of my day in the office, writing all morning and seeing patients in the afternoons. When I feel restless, I step outside and putter over the bonsai, pruning, watering, and admiring their graceful shapes and thinking of questions I should pose to Christine, a bonsai master and my daughter’s close friend, who lives only a block away.
After my evening bike ride, or a walk with Marilyn, we spend the rest of the evening in our library, reading, talking, or watching a film. The room has large corner windows and opens up to a rustic redwood patio with lawn furniture and a large redwood hot tub surrounded by California live oak trees. The walls are lined with hundreds of books, and it’s furnished in a casual, California style, with a leather “back rest” chair and a sofa with a loose-fitting red and white cover. Standing in one corner, in stark contrast to everything else, is my mother’s garish, faux-baroque table, with a red leather top, four curved black and gold legs, and four matching chairs with red leather seats. I play chess and other board games with my children on that table just as seventy years ago I played chess on Sunday mornings with my father.
Marilyn dislikes the table—it matches nothing else in our home—and she’d love to get it out of the house, but she gave up that campaign long ago. She knows it means a great deal to me, and has agreed to keep the table in the room, but in permanent exile in the far corner of the room. That table is tied to one of the most significant events in my life, and whenever I look at it I am flooded with feelings of nostalgia, of horror, and of emancipation.
My early life is divided into two parts: before and after my fourteenth birthday. Until I was fourteen, I lived with my mother, father, and sister in our small, shoddy flat over the grocery store. The flat was directly above the store, but the entrance was outside the store, just around the corner. There was a vestibule where the coal man regularly delivered coal, and therefore the door was unlocked. In cold weather, it was not uncommon to find one or two alcoholics sleeping on the floor.
THE ENTRANCE TO THE FAMILY FLAT OVER THE GROCERY STORE, CA. 1943.
Up the stairs were the doors to two flats—ours was the one overlooking First Street. We had two bedrooms—one for my parents and one for my sister. I slept in the small dining room on a davenport sofa that could be turned into a bed. When I was ten my sister went to college and I took over her bedroom. There was a small kitchen with a tiny table upon which I took all my meals. During my entire childhood I never, not once, had a meal with my mother or father (aside from Sundays, when we had dinner with the entire network of the family—between twelve and twenty people). My mother cooked and left food on the stove, and my sister and I ate our meals on the small kitchen table.
My friends lived in similar places, so it never occurred to me to wish for a nicer apartment, but ours had a unique and persistent horror: cockroaches. They were everywhere, despite the efforts of exterminators—I was (and am to this day) terrified of them. Every night my mother put the legs of my bed in bowls filled with water, sometimes kerosene, to stop them from climbing up into the bed. Still, they often fell from the ceiling into my bed. At night, once the lights were out, the house was theirs, and I could hear them scuttling on the linoleum floor of our tiny kitchen. I didn’t dare to go to the bathroom at night to pee, but instead used a jar I kept by my bed. I remember once, when I was about ten or eleven, reading a book in our living room when a giant roach flew across the room and landed in my lap (yes, cockroaches can fly—they don’t often do it but they sure can!). I screamed and my father ran over and knocked it to the floor and stepped on it. The sight of the squashed roach was the worst thing of all, and I ran to the toilet to throw up. My father tried to calm me, but he simply couldn’t understand how I could be so upset over a dead bug. (My roach phobia is still there, in hibernation, but has long been irrelevant: Palo Alto is too dry for roaches and I haven’t seen one in half a century—one of the great bonuses of California life.)
And then, one day, when I was fourteen, my mother told me, almost casually, that she had bought a house, and we were going to move very shortly. The next thing I recall is walking into our new home on a lovely, quiet street only a block from Rock Creek Park. It was a large handsome two-story, three-bedroom home with a knotty pine recreation room in the basement, a screened-in side porch, and a small lawn surrounded by a hedge. The move was almost entirely my mother’s project: she purchased the house without my father ever taking time off from the store to see it.
When did we move? Did I see the movers? What was my first impression of the house? What was my first night there like? And what about the enormous pleasure of saying adieu forever to that roach-infested flat, to the shame, and filth, and poverty, and the alcoholics sleeping just inside our vestibule? I must have experienced all these things, but I recall very little. Perhaps I was too preoccupied and anxious about transferring to the ninth grade in a new school and making new friends. Memory and emotions have a curvilinear relationship: too much or too little emotion often results in paucity of memory. I do recall wandering through our clean house and our clean yard in wonderment. I must have been proud to invite friends into my home, I must have felt more peaceful, less frightened, better able to sleep, but these are mere assumptions. What I do remember most clearly from that whole period is a story my mother proudly told about purchasing the red table.
She decided to buy everything new and keep nothing from our old flat—no furniture, no linens, nothing except her kitchen pots (those I still use today). She, too, must have been fed up with the way we had lived, though she never spoke to me of her inner longings and feelings. But she did, more than once, tell me the story of the table. After she bought the house, she went to Mazor’s Department Store, a popular furniture store frequented by all her friends, and in a single afternoon ordered everything for a three-bedroom house, including carpets, house and porch furniture, and lawn chairs. It must have been a huge order, and just as the salesman totaled it up, a garish, neo-baroque card table, with a bright red leather top and four matching red leather chairs, caught her eye. She instructed the salesman to add the table and chairs to the order. He told her that this particular set of table and chairs had already been sold and that, regrettably, most regrettably, there were no other sets—the model had been discontinued. Whereupon my mother told him to cancel the entire order and picked up her purse and prepared to leave.
Perhaps she was serious. Perhaps not. At any rate, her move worked. The salesman caved and the table was hers. Hats off, Mother, for an audacious bluff—I’ve played a lot of poker, but this was the best bluff I’d ever heard of. Sometimes I’ve flirted with the idea of writing a story from the point of view of the family that did not get that table. There was some energy in that idea: I would tell the story from both perspectives: my mother’s great bluff and triumph and the other family’s dejection.
I still have that table despite my wife’s lament that it doesn’t match anything in our home. Though its aesthetic shortcomings are apparent even to me, that table holds memories of my Sunday chess games with my father and uncles and later with my children and grandchildren. In high school I played on the chess team, and proudly wore an athletic sweater displaying a large chess piece. The team, consisting of five boards, competed with all the Washington, DC, high schools. I played first board, and, after being undefeated in my senior year, I considered myself the Washington, DC, junior champion. But I never improved enough to play at a higher level, in part because of my uncle Abe, who scoffed at the idea of booking up, especially for chess openings. I recall him pointing to my head and pronouncing me “klug” (clever) and urging me to use my good Yalom “kopf” (head) and play in an unorthodox fashion to confound my opponents. This turned out to be extremely bad advice. I stopped playing chess during my college pre-med days, but the day following my acceptance to medical school, I tried out for the university chess team. I played second board for the rest of the semester, and then, when I began medical school, I once again gave it up until I began teaching my sons, Victor and Reid, who became excellent players. Only in the past few years have I gotten more serious about my chess. I began chess lessons with a Russian master and watched my Internet rating rise. But far too late, I fear—my diminishing memory is an invincible opponent.
If it had been up to my father, we probably would have lived over the store indefinitely. He seemed almost indifferent to his surroundings. My mother bought all his clothes and told him what to wear, even which necktie, when we went out on Sundays.
My father had a good voice and I loved hearing him sing Yiddish songs along with my aunt Luba on our family gatherings. My mother did not care for any sort of music and I never heard her sing a line—that gene she must have passed along to me. On Sunday mornings, my father and I almost always played chess together on that red baroque table, and he would play some Yiddish songs on the phonograph and sing along with them until my mother screeched, “Genug, Barel, genug!” (“Enough, Ben, Enough!”). And he always obeyed. Those are the times I was most disappointed in him and wished so much that he would have stood his ground and confronted her. But it never happened.
My mother was a good cook, and I often think of the dishes she made. Often, to this day, I try to replicate them using her heavy aluminum pots. I feel very attached to those pots. Food tastes better when I use them. My children often covet them, but I am still hanging on to them.
When we moved to our new house, my mother cooked dinner every day, and then she drove the twenty minutes to the store, where she spent the rest of the day and evening. I warmed up the food and ate my meals alone while reading a book. (My sister, Jean, had started at the University of Maryland.) My father came home to eat and take a nap, but our mealtimes rarely coincided.
Blagden Terrace, our new street, was lined with tall sycamore trees standing before large, handsome homes, all filled with children my age. I remember being welcomed my first day there. The kids on the street playing touch football waved to me—they needed more players and I dived right in. Later that day, directly across the street on the front lawn of their home, I saw thirteen-year-old Billy Nolan playing catch with his elderly grandfather, who, I later learned, had once pitched for the Boston Red Sox. Billy and I were destined to play a lot of baseball together. I remember also my first walk around the block. I spotted a front-yard pond with several floating lily pads—that excited me because I knew the water would hold fine pickings for my microscope: swarms of mosquito larvae floating on the surface and hordes of amoebae that I could scrape from the bottom of the lily pads. But how to collect the specimens? In my old neighborhood I would have snuck into the yard at night and stolen a few expendable creatures from the pond. But I had no idea of how to behave here.
Blagden Terrace and environs offered an idyllic setting. No filth, no danger, no crime, and never an anti-Semitic comment. My cousin Jay, who has been my close lifetime friend, had also moved only four blocks away, and we often saw one another. Rock Creek Park was only two blocks from my home with its creek, trails, baseball fields, and tennis courts. There were neighborhood ball games almost every day after school until darkness.
Goodbye to the rats! Goodbye to the roaches, to crime, to danger, and to anti-Semitic threats. My life would now be changed forever. I occasionally went back to the store to help out when there was a shortage of workers, but for the most part I had left those sordid surroundings behind. And never again did I need to lie about where I lived. If only Judy Steinberg, my girlfriend from summer camp, could have seen my new house!