On Being a Tortoise
found at search.tb.ask.com
“I was the tortoise.”
My father announced this at the dinner table one day, after one discussion led to another, and ultimately to Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene. My father, Stanley, was a man of few words, except when he was telling a story. When he was telling a story, he was always animated and dramatic. Enthralling, really. But when it came to matters of personal relations, he spoke in short sentences. Sentences that weren’t always direct, but were simple and gruff, and contained all of his otherwise unexpressed heart. “I was the tortoise,” was all we’d get, but it was enough. Everything I had observed growing up told me that Aunt Betty, Uncle Gene and their offspring were hares, and we were tortoises.
Aunt Betty had been a beauty in her youth, and was pampered and adorned just enough to fetch a prize husband, which she did. Uncle Gene had piercing good looks and an animal air, and was a college graduate poised to “climb the ladder.” When I became consistently conscious of him, he had already become an extremely successful executive, a “six figure man” in the late nineteen sixties, of what company or in what business my little six or seven year old self never understood, but all the rewards of which were easy enough for me to grasp. Aunt Betty wore furs, large gemstones and outfits no one else wore, except in glamour magazines or on television. Uncle Gene wore polo shirts, checked blazers, and pinkie rings. He had the trapped energy of someone with some place more important to be. He spoke even less than my father, and, when he did, with far more menace. His yellow eyes, black hair, which was all over his arms, at the opening of his collar, even in his ears, and his rumbling voice, used so rarely and always in short bursts, made him seem always ready to pounce, like some kind of hairy, full-bodied raptor. I had as little to do with him as possible, and he seemed glad of it.
My father, though moody and sometimes brusque, was, I was later to understand, the softest member in his family growing up. This, and his lackluster energy to make something remarkable of himself were the two strikes against him. Since he “wasn’t college material,” the next best thing was a job with a handsome uniform, authority and a pension. He became a cop. And as he was an extremely good looking and a jaunty, Bogart-esque fellow, that handsome uniform served him well when he approached a pretty, caring, demure and capable woman, my mother, who, to her discredit, was the daughter of immigrants. My father’s mother, Gussie, or “Gus” for short, was herself an immigrant, but it didn’t count somehow because she was born on the boat coming over. She had not a lick of an Eastern European accent and fancied herself a woman of the times. And while her first husband (an immigrant) killed himself during the Depression and left her a struggling widow with two young kids to feed, within 2 years time she was remarried to a successful dentist, living in a splendid Grand Concourse apartment, with sunken living room, dining room, eat in kitchen, and two large bedrooms. Her second husband Seymour was born in this country, the son of furriers. Gus and Seymour lived a very comfortable life, a steep rise from the small Harlem tenement where Gus lived with her two children, and Betty and Gene surpassed them. So when my father brought home the soft spoken and unassuming daughter of an immigrant seamstress, Gus looked her up and down, told her that she would be joining a family of a certain caliber and said “I hope you can live up to it.”
Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene invited us to attend a couple of the swank parties they threw at the Spindle Top, a private club and restaurant at the top of a New York City building. My sisters and I were always dressed in our best clothes, and warned to behave like little ladies. What this meant for me was that for the 3 hours or so that we were there I said hardly a word, and just stayed to the outer edges of the scene taking it in with big eyes. I remember, once, Uncle Gene, loosened by whiskey and the satisfaction of success, gave some kind of short toast with wide sweeping gestures, and Aunt Betty floated from guest to guest wearing a white turban that matched her striking white dress. I don’t know if she ever spoke to my sisters, who were older and suitable playmates for my cousins, but she never said a word to me in those years. We would visit them at their homes in Morris Plains, New Jersey and Natick, Massachusetts, often greeted by the barking and highly temperamental “Thor,” a snarling German Short-haired Pointer, usually on a chain just short enough to keep him from actually reaching us but long enough to make it frightfully questionable every time, and then ushered into custom homes with chic décor and noticeable amounts of purple and navy blue. By contrast, we lived in a development where all the homes were virtually identical. Our downstairs floors were pressed linoleum, and something that wasn’t quite wood paneled our family room walls. And yet, we all felt like it was a palace. Our wonderful claim to membership in a thriving suburban town and a huge change from the compact Bronx apartment where we had lived before. It was a home of our own, warm and familiar, just large enough for my sisters and I each to have our own bedrooms, and to find, inside and out, places of absolute solitude to dream.
Though my parents never said as much, I understood that we were the humble cousins in the story. I don’t know if my aunt and uncle saw my mother and father’s quiet nodding and expressions of interest as proper humility, but I saw them for what they were: acts of graciousness. For I was pretty sure that Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene weren’t very nice. They’d peer at me as though I was something to be tolerated, as though the entire visit was something to be tolerated, and, somehow, I felt that my parents knew it, knew that Betty and Gene weren’t very nice and believed they were better than Betty’s uncultured and underachieving brother and his quaint but suitable wife. But my parents pretended otherwise. Everyone was pretending. Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene pretended that that were happy to be there, and my parents pretended they were happy to host them. I watched my parents, who had no use for luxury, who would have just like to have had more breathing space financially, and perhaps a safer and less soul depleting job for my father, attend to any and all of Betty’s commentary, opinions and narratives about good connections, good taste, sophisticated circles and exotic cruises with patience, and kind, if feigned interest. I listened as my mother punctuated Betty’s narrative with the required utterances.
One day, we learned the bad news that Uncle Gene had lost his job in the economic recession. As a man in his 50’s so high on the ladder, we were told, he was having difficulty finding anything remotely like his previous position. It seemed inconceivable to me that anyone would have had the nerve to turn Uncle Gene down; he was that scary. My sisters and I listened solemnly to our mother’s updates: Aunt Betty had to sell this and that piece of jewelry, and Uncle Gene had to take a job beneath him, selling cheap merchandise from China. On a couple of occasions, Aunt Betty came to our house, bringing with her Benetton sweaters, French perfumes and other items, and I watched as she lay things out for my mother’s inspection, explaining the quality and assuring her that $25 for this or that was a bargain. I was older then, and sat in on the proceedings as an additional prospective buyer, gauging my mother’s assessment of whether something was worth buying or would actually be useful, even though we had little cash to spare, and taking my cues from her. And so, after stealing a glance at my mom, and seeing the, “Yes, that would be all right” face, I’d say, “I’d like that, Mom.” And the deal would be struck.
In the many, many years that followed, my father would occasionally give his sister money outright, as any loving and decent sibling would do. Even if he had been disinclined, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t, my grandmother made sure to remind him, “That’s what a brother does!”
A man who at his retirement age never cleared 30,000 dollars salary, and who never received one generous gesture from his sister when she and her husband were living large, gave his sister money to get by, and they never spoke of it. Nor did any of us, for my mother explained the humiliation for my aunt and uncle, to be the poor, dependent relations – a humiliation that did nothing to soften them up or make them take much interest in us. Betty referred to me as Little Lisa, and I was pretty sure she had forgotten my actual, name, Elisa, if she ever knew it. Gene never addressed me, except once at the lunch following my grandfather’s funeral when he saw me watching him put his napkin on his coffee saucer and explained to me that it was a technique to absorb any possible spillage and thereby prevent any drips of coffee on his shirt. No, wait, there was also the time when I was five and he drove my mother and me to a local clinic after I split my chin open falling on the hard cement in their basement during a visit. As the doctor stuck me with the anesthetizing needle and I screamed and wailed, Gene burst out with “Oh come on! Act like a big girl!” (I remember thinking in response, “I’m five.”) Aunt Betty’s comments to me were limited to those absolutely required by circumstance. We ran into trouble when a specific utterance wasn’t indicated, and where, for others, some ease or warmth would have normally filled the space. On one occasion where we found ourselves together at the sinks in the ladies’ room of a restaurant, she said, “You shouldn’t wear your hair long like that. Your face is too big for it.” Then she dried her hands and left.
Our relationships with Betty and Gene’s offspring were also less than ideal. In the early years, Janice and Glenn seemed to enjoy my older sisters, with whom they could play games and have adventures roaming the neighborhood. I was too young to be of interest, and, worse, I was ridiculed and excluded by Janice and Glenn wherever possible- a quiet, sensitive mouse of a little girl who was a tag-along, detracted from their cool and needed looking after. My sisters, each a bit younger than Janice and Glen, respectively, were relieved to be considered worthy and I envied them, wanting to be worthy as well. As the years went by, however, whatever connection there was between the four older cousins waned, and once Gene lost his job the full family visits ceased altogether. Betty came by herself, when she did come, and we were never invited to their home again. My mother explained this was because Betty would not be able to afford to host us in the way she would have liked.
Still, the past had its hold on me. I wanted so badly to have an aunt who actually cared about me, and with whom I could find some common ground. In my mid-twenties, I called her up and asked if I could drive out to visit with her. She accepted, and out to New Jersey I went. For hours we chatted, drank coffee and even shared her cigarettes, something I did in a desperate attempt to connect with her, and which was particularly bizarre seeing as how she had recently been diagnosed with emphysema. I put on my best impression of a hard-boiled person, making small talk peppered with cynical observations. It must have worked because she actually expressed some surprise that I turned out to be so interesting, and she insisted I stay for dinner. The elation I felt at her acknowledgment was short-lived, and in retrospect stung as pathetic. I had achieved a false stamp of acceptance, without my aunt having any idea of who I actually was. I never saw her again. She did not want to be seen at my wedding with a portable oxygen tank and died not long after.
Misfortune in that family continued. My cousin Glen had once been a handsome little devil, who knew how to charm my grandma, and get away with everything, until Gene sent him off to a military school to teach him discipline. It was a failed experiment. Glen had the misfortune of being a soft-hearted boy trying to disguise himself as a hard-ass to survive in his own family, and military school only worsened his hell. He did manage to marry someone he loved deeply, and work as an electrician for many years. My parents, with the happy hope that Glen at least would be close with us, even hired him whenever they needed an electrician. But Glen carried his own demons. He smoked like a furnace and put impulse purchases and drugs before his lovely wife and children. His wife left him, and he left us, after my father had to turn down his request for money. My father turned Glen down, not because he refused to support Glen, but because he had already exhausted his small savings helping Glen out once before. And so we lost Glen, who after that had nothing further to do with us, whether through indignation or shame, and who died alone from emphysema and lung cancer a few years later.”
Betty was gone, Glen was gone, Janice was gone, to California to start a new life, and Gene was living with a woman whom we’d never meet and only vaguely knew of. My grandmother had died shortly after Betty’s death, which was such a heavy blow to her, and was not alive to see Glenn follow too soon. We had no contact with Gene after that, and learned of his passing after the fact, each of us filled with a wordless sorrow.
So, when my dad declared, “I was the tortoise” and then glanced around the table to see if we got it, we quietly nodded. He had reached the finish line, without fanfare, and, yes, with a small measure of satisfaction but, more importantly, with good will and a soft heart. We had all won, really. We were all tortoises. We had family, love, hard work, steady, modest achievement, and gratitude. Everything that could be good about people I learned from my watching my parents make that slow and ultimately far-reaching journey together. But, now, some 25 or so years later, I think that maybe my father wasn’t talking about a race against his sister’s family or even about a race at all. Maybe he was finally free to reject out loud the voices in his head telling him that anyone who wasn’t a go-getter, anyone who delighted in simple things, who wasted time daydreaming about fantastic adventures he didn’t actually want for himself, who didn’t “climb the ladder” and who was content to end each day at home with his family and his books, was a bit of a stooge. Maybe he was trying to tell us that it’s not even about whether fast and flashy are better. It’s about where you’re heading that matters.
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This really touched me.
I’m glad. It had been waiting a long time.
I liked this very much. It had the feel of an earlier era somehow. The characters are vividly drawn. There is an overall feeling of sadness, which makes sense when by the end they Gene’s family is mostly dead. What happened to the sister?
She is still out in California, and has two kids, of which we know very little.