by Ann Huber
Herm slept on a sofa-bed in the living room of our three-bedroom apartment while his parents stayed in a motel on Decarie Boulevard near Ruby Foo’s much more elegant accommodations.
Our two families shared meals at home since Herm’s family never violated their commitment to eating kosher food. We sat at a folding table that had been set up in the living room. The yellow Formica and aluminum kitchen table was too small in a crowded space. My mother and grandmother prepared their Romanian specialties, including stuffed cabbage, breaded chicken, pickles, and eggplant salad. For dessert, my mother made her chocolate chiffon swirl cake. She was not much of a baker, but she had mastered that one cake.
We did all our sightseeing in Herm’s parents’ car. My parents never owned a car. I am sure I was not the best tour guide since we had arrived in the country only five years earlier, and English was my third language. We took them to the top of Mount Royal, a vantage point from where you could see the city rise out of the St. Lawrence River, and took lots of pictures. In those days, no skyscrapers dominated the skyline. One could see the grain storage silos and flour factories on the edge of the water, where two years later Expo ’67 would be built. We also walked around Beaver Lake on which Montreal children and adults alike come to skate during the winter months.
Although the visit was short, just one week, all seven of us—my mother, father and grandmother, Herm and his parents, and I piled into their car (no seatbelts back then), and spent a day driving up to the town of St. Agathe-des-Monts, a popular summer retreat in the Laurentian Mountains. The town lies on a large lake, Lac des Sables, on which many French and English speaking families, many Jewish people among them, built pretty summer cottages that dotted the evergreen-rich shoreline.
It was a lovely late summer day, with a chill in the air so common at that time of the year, rich with the fragrant smell of pines. Summer is so short in Canada. We brought along our own picnic lunch and strolled down a tree-lined path in one of St. Agathe’s parks. In a surviving 8-millimeter home-movie, taken with Lenny’s movie camera, our two families are making our way together toward the photographer. Herm is walking alongside me, with his arm comfortable around my shoulders. Suddenly, Moishe reaches over and plants a juicy kiss on my cheek, the first of many more to come.
“My plan worked,” Herm still boasts. His instincts were good. Unbeknownst to me, a plan to end our relationship when it had barely begun had been lurking in the background. Over the summer Herm’s parents had become increasingly concerned about the “catastrophe” of their son getting involved with a girl just before starting college. Finally, they insisted he break it off. Deftly avoiding conflict, he repeatedly assured them that he would break up with me before starting college. Then, as college got closer and closer, he slyly explained to his parents, “I can’t just break up with her in a letter or over the phone. I can only manage this in person.”
What I also didn’t know yet was that Herm was born an expert nagger. His brother used to call him “the nag” and make fun of him. “Ich vil drivin!” (“I want to drive!” in Yiddish), was reportedly such an oft-heard whine when he was a 10-year-old that Lenny while driving would finally let him sit on his lap holding the steering wheel. It took me some time to realize that, as gentle and people-pleasing as Herm seems to be, he has an uncanny way of relentlessly nagging, until resistance is futile and he gets his way. His parents never had a chance in this debate.
During the brief visit, our two families shared backgrounds and values became apparent, as did the obvious joy on our faces. In his next letter, Herm wrote, “The week I spent in Montreal, I think was the nicest week I’ve ever spent.” Ever a romantic, he enclosed part of a composition written by one of his classmates for their yearbook:
It was then, when the shapeless Indefinite hugged the earth, that we touched. Our hands, our lips, our hearts met and fought solitude. When the sky lost its eyes, we saw. We looked at our teardrops and laughed. We heard the footsteps of Love when night kissed the day, so we knew that the battle was won; we were one.
Needless to say, Herm did not break up with me.
Chapter Ten
THE COURTSHIP CONTINUED
FOUR MONTHS LATER, my mother and I once again boarded a Greyhound bus for the nightlong torture-ride to New York. Herm and I had seen each other twice in the previous six months, including the late August visit one on my turf. It was time to see whether we could maintain the same level of attraction on his turf.
At the Port Authority Bus Terminal my mother and I transferred to the Philadelphia bus and traveled along the New Jersey Turnpike, which lived up to its reputation as an unsightly and smelly route. It ran along numerous pig farms not to mention oil storage and refining facilities. It is still the major throughway between New York City and Delaware. Fortunately, it has now been divided into two roadways, with a separate one for trucks, which reduces the likelihood of being killed by one. Whenever I mention to anyone from out of state that I live in New Jersey, inevitably, I’m asked, “What exit?” I have yet to figure a short way to answer that question because we live in Western New Jersey, twenty miles west of the turnpike.
Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station was much grander than Atlantic City’s bus station. The view was breathtaking. The arrival gates were more distinctive and emptied into a vast terminal, lined with multiple-story columns reaching for a high domed ceiling. There were many important-looking people crisscrossing the ornate lobby. Most were more formally dressed than Canadians. Also, coming from Canada, my mother was particularly surprised by the large number of African-Americans in the crowd. It was the height of the civil rights movement. Canadian television news had been filled with the politically charged and violent reverberations of the marches in Selma and Washington. My mother was scared.
Like other Canadian teens, I was just as enamored of the Kennedy presidency as teens in the U.S. and strongly supported the civil rights movement. However, older Jews, such as my parents and future in-laws, all too familiar with prejudice and racial violence, were frightened by the rise in unrest. It wasn’t easy for my mother to get comfortable walking around the city.
Herm met us at the station, where we had a heart-felt and joyous reunion although I felt shy for the first few minutes. He then took us to our motel on City Line Avenue across from the Bala Cynwyd Shopping Center, near his parents’ apartment on the corner of Euclid Avenue, not far from the busy intersection of 54th Street and City Line Avenue. Once again, as he had in his letters, Herm tried to persuade us to stay with his family, but my mother would never dream of imposing and insisted on a motel.
Herm picked us up to go to dinner at their apartment, a three-story rental building in a neighborhood of mixed housing, including single homes. Their apartment was one flight above a tailor shop, quite small, but bright and modestly and tastefully furnished.
We entered through the small living room, furnished with a sofa and armchair, the cushions of both covered in plastic, an iconic decorating feature of the time. The sofa was tucked under a large window on the street side. On the opposite side, the living room opened into a dining room, dominated by an oval table and chairs with plastic covered seats, also home to a birdcage for Herm’s parakeet Mickey. Diagonally to the left was a small kitchen and to the right were two bedrooms and a bathroom. Moishe and Pesche’s bedroom was surprisingly furnished with an art deco, gray lacquer bedroom set. Herm and Lenny shared the other small bedroom, with twin beds on either side of a night table.
Highly polished silver candlesticks sparkled on the dining room table and chandelier lights twinkled into the brightly lit room. Everything was impeccably clean, and delicious smells wafted in from the kitchen.
We shared a wonderful meal prepared by Pesche. She was a great cook and introduced me to new Jewish foods, like chicken soup with “knadelach” (matzo balls), a mainstay of Eastern European Jewish cuisine quite different from the Romanian fare I had grown up on. The conversation between my mother and Herm’s parents was live
ly, but neither Herm nor I said much as we surreptitiously surveyed each other, communicating with meaningful glances and facial expressions. I was dying to touch and hold Herm but I behaved myself, confident we would have time the next day.
Herm borrowed his parents’ car to drive my mother and me on our first day back together, of course, touring some of Philadelphia’s popular sites. We drove down City Line Avenue, all sharing the front bench seat of the Chevy—my mother couldn’t sit in the back? We made our way to West River Drive where Herm pointed out the crew clubhouses lining the banks of the Schuylkill River and ended at the Philadelphia Art Museum. He pointed out the original museum was chartered for the 1876 Centennial World’s Fair but was not completed until 1928. Its famous steps would later be featured in the Rocky movies.
On the steps of the Hubers’ apartment, winter, 1966.
Herm enjoyed showing us around and I enjoyed listening to his soft voice as we drove through Fairmount Park; he explained that the park was host to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, a grand celebration of 100 years of American independence as well as cultural and industrial progress. It was the first major World’s Fair in the United States and introduced Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone to the world.
We continued gawking at the beautiful old buildings and Civil War memorials with little understanding of their relevance, but impressed nonetheless by them and the charming Japanese pagoda with its gardens. Downtown, we drove around City Hall, atop which nobly rested a statue of William Penn; this was Philadelphia’s tallest structure, which no other building was permitted to surpass in height, at the time. Herm pointed out the Franklin Institute and the Philadelphia Library, another majestic structure. “I spent many days at the library when I played hooky,” he explained. We also paid our respects to the Monument to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs.
The following day, when we were finally able to spend time by ourselves, we walked through Fairmount Park, holding hands and really feeling comfortable in each other’s company. As we strolled through the park, Herm took pictures and related many of his early adventures there. “I broke my arm climbing on Pegasus,” he told me, referring to one of the enormous bronze statues remaining from the World’s Fair, surrounded by other equestrian heroes of various wars and revolutions.
“Did I tell you I was bitten by a dog when I was three years old?”
“What? How did that happen?”
“There was a dog running loose. When I tried to pet him, he bit me.”
“So, what happened?”
“The police came and searched for the dog. They couldn’t find it, so, there was no way to know whether it was rabid. My mother had to take me to the hospital for a series of 21 shots in the abdomen. That was the only known cure for rabies then.”
On New Year’s Eve, we had dinner with our parents again but afterwards Herm and I left to go to a movie in Ardmore, one of the wealthy suburbs on Philadelphia’s famous “Main Line.” I wore a pretty, store-bought, white wool dress that stopped just below my knees, despite the frigid night. Herm kept his arm around me as we made our way down the deserted streets of Ardmore. Few people were out despite the holiday. The Ardmore Theater, a Beaux-Arts building opened in 1926 and served as a movie house until 2000. We saw a James Bond movie, Thunderball with Sean Connery. I can’t remember much about it because, as was often the case, we were romantically occupied in the last row of the theater. After the movies, we sat in the car, in the Bala Cynwyd Shopping Center parking lot directly across from our motel, and ushered in our first new year together, keeping close to keep from shivering to death. There was no other place to go for privacy.
Cozy New Year’s dinner with Moishe, Pesche, Netty, and Herm,
winter 1966.
The time I spent in Philadelphia ringing in 1966 with Herm was surreal for me. I felt like I was in another world, where the rules were different. Certainly, the landscape was new, but also there was no school, none of my familiar friends. I was free to shed the previous five years of emotional turmoil and become someone else, someone I recognized as my true self. Herm and I were still essentially strangers, learning about each other and carefully feeling our way into a deeper relationship. Herm talked about how self-conscious he felt about speaking in public, due to a long struggle with stuttering. I tried to support him, knowing how it felt to be the object of ridicule, and reassuring him that he rarely stuttered with me. I confessed how isolated I felt in Montreal and how much I appreciated his kindness and gentleness, as compared to the shallowness and macho attitudes of the other boys I had met.
In the summer of ’66, my mother and I returned to Atlantic City for another beach vacation. Herm met us there, accompanied by his father. Netty had always loved the beach, which is why she pressed for Atlantic City in the first place. And I had many memories of Haifa’s white beaches on the Mediterranean Sea. In Haifa, it was often just my mother and I, sitting on the sand, waiting for the gentle waves to come crashing over our legs. Light-skinned, I invariably spent many a night with yogurt on my back to calm the sunburn.
Herm’s father, Moishe, did not love the ocean and made a hilarious sight on the beach. Sitting tucked under an umbrella, with a hat, a white long sleeved shirt, and a long towel around his legs to protect his very white skin, he still managed to turn into a beet every day, his face totally flushed. But, he was a good sport about it.
With my mother on the beach in Haifa when I was 5.
Herm returned to Temple University that fall, and our correspondence continued. He was taking “very hard” courses in religion and philosophy and a fencing class, having been a fencer in high school. In one letter he shared a funny story from his fencing class that I must admit made me a little jealous:
As you probably know, the main target is the chest, more specifically it corresponds exactly to the breast in a girl. So today we practiced just lunging and hitting the target. Since there are 5 boys and 11 girls in my class, it’s almost certain that I get a girl as a partner. Well, I can’t tell you. She had to stand there, and I had to hit the target. I was just about always directly on target. I could see she must have felt it pretty well. Meanwhile, I was so embarrassed, you have no idea. People came in from other gym classes just to see this, and I felt so guilty doing it. I felt just as if she was sticking it out, in front of a large audience, and everyone knew what was going on. Anyway, I probably ripped her bra in shreds, and she better come in with an armor-plated one next time. It’s funny now (& a little exaggerated), but I was pretty embarrassed then.
Later, he shared again, “P.S. I broke in another girl in fencing class the other day.”
Our next meeting was in Montreal, where Herm came for two weeks during his Christmas break. Once again, he stayed in our apartment, sleeping on our living room sofa bed. My parents thought this was quite acceptable, but in retrospect, the inconsistency is glaring. On the one hand, they felt we needed a chaperone. On the other hand, having him in our apartment made it possible for us to spend some intimate moments. My grandmother was appointed our chaperone because my parents were working. However, she was getting pretty old by then, was losing her sight due to diabetes, and was ill equipped to be much of a chaperone. On more than one occasion, we had to quickly change position and reassemble our clothing as we heard her shuffling down the hallway. We couldn’t get enough of each other, even though we were trying to be respectful.
From the start, Herm and I felt an intense emotional connection, akin to the kind of uncontrollable love dog lovers feel when—forgive the analogy, they get a new puppy—like a golden retriever puppy. It makes them smile and stare adoringly, all the time. They can’t get enough of the puppy. They want to hold and cradle it all the time. They want to play with it even though the puppy’s play includes chewing on hands and arms. And slobbering on them. Nothing the puppy does bothers them. That’s what it was like for us, except for the slobbering, of course.
It was such a precious time, made even more intense by our frequent long separations.
Every time we saw each other it was as if years had passed and no time had passed. When it was time to separate, it became unbearable. Our love deepened and matured, until we could no longer stand living four hundred miles apart.
Chapter Eleven
SEPARATE, BUT EQUAL LIVES
WHEN HERM AND I MET, I was attending highly regarded Outremont High School, built in 1956 to accommodate the large influx of immigrant children, many of whom were intelligent and extremely driven to succeed. At Outremont, after I caught the attention of an astute 9th grade teacher with my advanced skills in sewing and cooking, I finally began making strides in school. Fractions were easy for me to transfer to cutting fabric using a pattern and adjusting for size. The same was true for having to adjust proportions when cooking. Based on her recommendation, I was moved out of the “dummy” class into the college-bound one, which immediately boosted my grades as well as my self-esteem. On the down side, all my classmates changed which heightened my stress levels and made me feel nervous about having to meet higher expectations. I bounced from one extreme to another. One moment, I felt confident I could handle the work, but after making a mistake, I worried about whether I was in over my head. At night, I used to reassure myself that the adults must know what they were doing.
Changing classes meant I was an outsider, trying to fit into already existing cliques, once again, leaving behind friends who helped me through my tentative attempts at assimilation. I gained some social skills at this kind of survival, like how to participate in a conversation even if I didn’t understand everything that was being said, but I was hampered by my own feelings of inadequacy. I admire some of the wonderful people I met who did welcome me and did help me fit in, but it was not easy for me. Miss King, my history teacher, spent much extra time teaching me how to research and write a term paper, skills I was never given an opportunity to learn while cooking and sewing. The slow-learners class emphasized practical skills over academic skills. My first history term paper was a huge success—I didn’t fail! I might have even done well, but I had not set the bar high.
