Melvin Beylis Died

by E. Marmer
posted Mar 31, 2015

I heard from my mother that Melvin Beylis died.  I’m using fictitious names for privacy, so this man I remember with fondness is going to be named Melvin Beylis.    The last time I saw Melvin was close to 30 years ago, and, before that, was when I was a teenager. But my memories of him from that time, and indeed from my entire youth, are as vivid as the most intense memories can be. As vivid as memories are when they are of someone who epitomized a time and place for you. Melvin did that. He and his wife Myrna epitomized my life in the Bronx, in the 14 story building that seemed to my young eyes to tower above the shorter apartment buildings and townhouses lining Bronx Boulevard.

Melvin always had a glint in his eye and a warm chuckling smile for me. His voice was barrelly and resonant, though he didn’t talk much. But when he did speak, his accent sounded vaguely exotic to me, a deep rumbling of a way of speaking that was so comforting and familiar, yet foreign in some way. I think his slightly darker skin tone and saucer sized brown eyes added to this notion that he was exotic. I couldn’t know then that what I was hearing was simply a mellifluous Bronx accent. A more sing song version of the hard pronunciations surrounding me on all sides, but flowing out of Melvin with their edges just ever so smoothed off, and sprinkled with his one of a kind giggle. His dark, caramel giggle.

Melvin’s receding dark hair was slicked back with the natural hair oil most men allowed to accumulate back then, to the apparent approval, or at least with the toleration of their wives and girlfriends. He seemed big and tall, despite rounded, stooped shoulders, and enough extra weight and body hair to look a bit like a shuffling bear. Someone that you wanted to hug, especially when you saw that warm smile and heard that mirthful sound emanating through parted teeth. But my best friend, Laura, told me, by her face and body posture, that her father was not as warm as cuddly as he appeared. She seemed almost a little afraid of him, in a respectful way, the same way I felt about my own father. And so I didn’t hug him, or dissolve into unguarded affection, even though he seemed so inviting. And when I hung back, I could sense the affirmation from Melvin: yes, that’s the right distance.

I could also sense but not articulate the ways Melvin was different from my father, Bernie, who had a jauntier and harder edge – who seemed more “hard-boiled” – or how Myrna was different from my mother Shirley. Myrna’s hair was a difficult to describe warm brass color, somewhat poufy if not bouffant, and highly sprayed – the kind of hairstyle that gave you no clue as to the wearer’s age, and which she could carry, and indeed did, for the rest of her life. Myrna spoke as someone with not a shred, not a hint, of any self-doubt. Someone who owns a space as soon as she walks into it. Someone whose voice modulates from sarcasm to authority to sly wit, but never falters or softens. She conveyed a confident, unassailable assessment of the facts at all times, never a gentle questioning or exploration. In contrast, my mother Shirley was less apt to offer a viewpoint or perspective, and only did so to be sociable. She spoke with the same accent, and with some measure of steadiness, but next to Myrna she seemed more understated.  Indeed, her two steps forward one step back way of making herself understood seemed practically genteel, and a bit at odds with Bernie’s gruff but good-natured swagger.

It’s surprising to me to realize now that they all had the same Bronx accent. They all said “ar-right” instead of “all right” and “draww” instead of “drawer.” They all said, “prahhl-ly” instead of “probably” and “beeyoo-ti-fuhhl” instead of “beautiful.” But they all sounded so different from each other, anyway, merely from the added ingredient of their individual attitudes, their different handling of words and emphases. And perhaps because my own parents were too familiar to me, too much the norm, I never realized that they too spoke with the same dialect. The same rolling and pitching and dropping out letters and merging of syllables. The same accent I must have had, realize now I still have, when I’m spending long hours with my sisters and the conversation gets animated. If it weren’t for Melvin and Myrna, and the study of them that living across the hall allowed, if it weren’t for remembering their immutable and undeniable patterns and their warmth – for there was occasional warmth and mirth even in Myrna, behind the caustic surety – I might have never understood just how much I lost.

We moved away when I was 7, and though I remained friends with Laura for many years (our parents making it as easy as they could for us to see each other regularly and for sustained periods), in my new surroundings I began a process of transformation, a washing out, that led me to the wider world, but at a price. In Rockland County, an increasingly settled area known as “upstate” but only 30 minutes from the Bronx, I mixed with kids who spoke differently. Their parents were from other parts of the city, or from New Jersey, or even farther afield, and they didn’t have the hard r’s I did or say “dawwg.” Many of their parents were professionals or college educated, not like my father the cop or my mother who went back to school to become a teacher only after we were all in school full time, and these adults spoke with a loftiness and expansiveness that seemed like a softer music to me. I wished I had understood then that it was blander.   It wasn’t as lively, or, indeed as alive as the way Melvin and Myrna spoke. And, without even realizing it, I softened my edges. In my little 7 year old brain, then 8, then 9, and so on, I mimicked and strained out the harsh sounds in my words before they slipped from my mouth.  I modified. I took two steps forward and one step back.

By the time I was living and working in Boston, my exposure to people from all over the country, first at college and then at law school, had ensured that I spoke, if still recognizably from the mid-atlantic states, not at all the way I did when I left the Bronx. Not at all even the way I did when I first arrived at college and met a boy who wrote home about his new girlfriend’s New York accent. More muting, more conforming, more blending, more sophistication I thought, did me the service of rendering me unidentifiable as a Bronx native. In most conversations with my sisters, ones I have with them when others are around and I’m not completely unguarded, I speak differently from them. I even triumphantly noted a time or two in the past that I have come to lose much of the accent they still possess. The one disturbing blip occurred when I worked in a New York law firm my second summer in law school. I had some trouble figuring out the right poised and measured responses to give to partners when they asked me to take on more work, and this led to a coaching session with the partner looking out for the summer associates. He began his helpful, patiently condescending advice with the apparently sympathetic phrase “I, like you, came from a lower, middle class background.” This he apparently discerned from my inadvertent occasional slip back into harder more “Bronxonian” speech patterns while living in the city that summer, since I never discussed my heritage or socio-economic background with anyone at the firm. I remember my ears burning with outrage and humiliation, even as I dismissed him as a wannabe, a poseur.

In my early adult life, I completely lost touch with Laura, and not just because I lived far away. I ensured the demise of that relationship, first having managed to make her feel increasingly bad whenever we got together by always pointing out all the ways in which our lives and styles had diverged, and then by becoming insufferably self-absorbed, as people who are actually insecure do. It is only now, thinking about Melvin’s large brown eyes and occasional baritone rumblings, and then Myrna’s brash and unflinching assertions, that I remember how I loved the patterns of my childhood. The charm of its familiarity and reliability.   At some point, just a few years ago, I came to understand that when I lost Laura’s friendship I lost something fine and rare, and that her giggling, no doubt a gift from her father, lit me up and made me smile, but it was too late. We had spent our entire adult lives apart, and there was no basis for friendship anymore. There was no longer any basis even 25 years ago, when I told her in an unwelcome phone call that I had heard she had stumbled on her way up the aisle at her wedding, a wedding I should have been at and indeed had been invited to. Far away as we were from each other even then, she could not have understood that I was not trying to point out her awkward moment with intent to diminish her, but was instead lamely trying to reach out, to tell her that I could well imagine her charming giggling at her misstep and the unspoiled and gorgeous and sweet, sweet joy of that moment I wished I could have seen, if only to remember all we shared as children. Even way back then, despite that vague awareness of what I had lost, and that fumbling attempt to reclaim it, I continued moving, if not entirely away from the cradle of the familiar, determinedly insensitive to it. This, I realize now, is a particular thread, a pattern, that repeats and repeats in my tapestry. A tapestry that consequently wasn’t as bold or as lively as I now wished it had been. As I now wish to weave it.

I think of how Melvin and Myrna represented the Bronx to me, how over the years they and Laura grew more cordial and less warm toward me on those occasions when I did see them, and, in Myrna’s case, true to her tell-it-like-it-is nature, barely cordial. And I find myself so very relieved to discover that those hard r’s and stretched out diphthongs are not completely gone, if only I relax and become completely unselfconscious, and that instead of taking one step back after my two steps forward, I can look around, giggle, and simply wonder aloud good-naturedly if I’m out too far.

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Tags

• Bronx accent
• Bronx native
• childhood friends
• childhood memories
• short essays

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