The second image is much later, late fall of 1989. My dad is propped up in a different bed, a hospital bed. He is thirsty, making short, gasping noises that emanate from his cancer-ravaged lungs. The large black male nurse, a would-be actor who had given me his 8 × 10 headshots, just in case my dad makes a miraculous recovery and goes on to direct another TV movie, hands my father a cold root beer. My mom keeps him supplied with a constant stream because that has always been his go-to soft drink. My dad sips it through his straw urgently, deliciously. Unlike many years later when my mother bites into Dominick’s croquembouche, the root beer is not a reason for my dad to stay alive. At this point, he does not have a real reason to stay alive. To him, I am certain, it is simply proof that he is alive.
My parents met at summer camp in 1936 when they were both fourteen years old. Camp Mohican was the boys’ camp, Reena was for girls, and both camps straddled a lake on the New York–Massachusetts border. My mom won awards for Best Archer and Best All-Around Camper, which used to make her blush because she didn’t like being remembered as such a good girl, but now she’ll boast about it, saying, “Well, I was very good at everything.” My dad won Best Performer in the Camp Play. Other than that, his biggest claim to fame was that he almost got kicked out one summer because he and his younger brother, George, snuck into a rival kid’s cabin around five o’clock one morning, kidnapped him, tied him, naked, to a flag pole, and then waited for reveille to be blown so the whole camp would come out to stand at attention and see the kid’s penis, which was probably not standing at attention by that time.
When they met, my father’s name was Seymour (usually called Sye) Gushen. It changed to Steven Gethers a few years later when he resisted the opportunity to go into the family business—a leather tannery—and decided to become an actor, perceptively realizing that the Cary Grant roles he sought were not going to come to guys whose names sounded like a Hebraic sneeze. He took the name Steven because he wanted to keep the same first letter of his given name. To keep the same surname initial, he borrowed his new last name from his family’s housekeeper’s boyfriend, Johnny Gethers, a black man from South Carolina.
The housekeeper’s name was Louise Trotty and my father met her when he was thirteen. His mother was quite ill—she died a year or so later—and his father sent him out on the Brooklyn streets to the employment agency to have them recommend a few housekeeping candidates who could clean, cook, and deal with a dying woman. Louise had just arrived from South Carolina and was waiting at the bus station when my dad passed by. She was young herself, only twenty-five, probably not truly equipped to run a Gushen household comprised of a domineering father, a bedridden mother, and three young children. But she and teenage Sye started talking, she needed a job, he convinced her to head home with him, and she not only helped raise him, his brother, and his sister, she later helped raise my brother and me. Years after we were grown, she went on to also help raise several of my young second cousins.
In the early days of my parents’ marriage my dad was a broke and often out-of-work actor. Ten years after the fortuitous bus stop meeting, Louise would come to the newlyweds’ apartment in Stuyvesant Town, a postwar middle-income apartment complex in Manhattan, to clean the place. She adored my dad; thought of him as her own son in many ways. So she’d work for half a day and, instead of taking money for her labor, she’d leave my dad twenty bucks because she knew he needed it. Later on, she lived with us for years, first in a move to the New York suburbs and then in Los Angeles. She provided solace when needed (as a baby I can remember her letting me play with her fake pearl necklace, which would snap apart and then back together, a never-ending source of great delight), discipline when called for (as an older child, I remember her swatting at me and my brother with her shoe to keep us in line), and she made certain foods I still dream about: crispy, perfect fried chicken; ice box pie with slices of frozen bananas and peaches; meat loaf with hard-boiled eggs placed strategically throughout the middle of the loaf, which I always thought was something magical; and chocolate pudding, the remains of which I was allowed to scarf up while the chocolate skin was just beginning to harden.
As a result of her arrival in our lives, and the ensuing name change, I have a strong suspicion that I am one of very few Caucasian Gethers living in the United States. This is because in the early eighties, as a present for my dad, I bought one of those let-a-retired-school-teacher-research-your-family-history-and-put-it-in-a-cheesy-leatherette-binder mail-order books. It listed every Gethers in America and a number of them had names like Alfonia and Vernell. Fine names all but a far cry from Chaim and Schlomo. I recently met an African American Gethers but didn’t explain our name theft. He said, “Distant cousins,” and we both shrugged and smiled.
Judy and Sye/Steve got married in 1943 when they were twenty-one and my dad was home on a brief leave from the army. A portent of the way he’d go through life, my dad insisted they honeymoon at the ritzy Essex House, on Central Park South, in Manhattan. They checked in on August 23, 1943, the day after their wedding. There was a note waiting for them in their room, number 1608, from the managing director of the hotel. It was addressed to Corporal and Mrs. S. Gushen and in it the M.D. promised to do everything in his power to guarantee “a delightful stay.”
Lovely fake leather book with all living Getherses in the United States, circa 1983
Names from my fake Family Tree. I feel particularly close to Vernell and Alfonia Gethers.
Corporal and Mrs. Sye Gushen a few months before their wedding
At the bottom of the stationery, in a banner, is the hotel’s slogan: Home of the Casino on the Park, where smart New Yorkers dine and dance.
I suspect that my father’s lifelong path of living as well as possible and somewhat beyond his means was because he was a fugitive from his own family.
My dad did not go into his father Irving’s leather tannery business outside of Boston. Instead, he set out to be the next Clark Gable—and as a result of that rejection, my grandpa Irving refused to have anything to do with him. They didn’t speak for years. When my older brother, Eric, was born in 1946, my mother—who revered her father-in-law—decided to take matters into her own hands. She sent Irving a letter, saying he had a grandson and she didn’t want him to grow up without one of his grandfathers. She told him it was time for a reconciliation and invited Irving to come see the baby. My grandfather sent a brief response, the essence of which was: No thanks. Not interested.
Irving Gushen at the racetrack
My father’s family was, on the surface, less bizarre than my mother’s. But only on the surface. All one had to do to see the weirder and darker side was to dig a wee bit deeper into the worlds of my aunts and uncles, my great-aunts and great-uncles and my second cousins. My father fled from them—and there were plenty of things to flee from: hidden alcoholism, pathological cheapness, extraordinary negativity, and self-absorption.
And, just like with my mom’s siblings, there were a few financial transgressions. Or, as they might be called if they weren’t contained within the family circle, fraud.
My father never discussed any of this with me. Ever. But my mom did. She told me that although my father had rejected the idea of going into the family business, when Irving died my dad inherited a third of it. His sister, Helen, and her husband, Jack, along with my dad’s brother, George, and his wife, Hope, inherited the other two-thirds. Soon after my grandpa Irving’s death, my mom said that the Massachusetts foursome came to my dad with a proposal: He had no interest in running or even knowing about the leather business, so why didn’t they buy him out? He’d get some needed money and avoid any unnecessary aggravation that might come with being part owner. My dad quickly agreed and everyone was happy. It didn’t take long to negotiate a fair buyout price. Well, except for one minor detail that was left out of the negotiation. According to my mother, my dad’s siblings and in-laws knew something that he didn’t know: there was an interested buyer for the business and that buyer
was going to pay a lot more than the price my dad had agreed to.
And voilà: a near-lifelong family feud.
* * *
WHEN MY PARENTS got married, their families lived a few blocks from each other in Brooklyn. My mom’s family lived at 251 Montgomery Street, directly across from Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played. My mom was something of a tomboy—I wish that word hadn’t faded from use—and she had baseball cards autographed by almost every National League player from the 1930s. Naturally, her mother, Granny Fanny, threw them all out when my mom got older. Or, as I like to think of it, my grandmother burned up my million-dollar inheritance!
In his early twenties, my dad didn’t want to just change his name, he wanted to separate himself physically from his family—and separate my mom from hers. He wanted to move forward into the future with his wife while both his parents and his in-laws much preferred clinging to the past. The future, for my dad, was all of three or four miles away, across the Brooklyn Bridge, in Manhattan. So after the war—my dad served in the Pacific, where his most harrowing moment came when he tripped over a tent and broke a finger—he yanked my mom along with him to Stuyvesant Town, which had started construction in 1942 and was finished in 1947. The Stuy Town complex had—and still has—8,757 apartments spread out over eighty-nine buildings, from 14th Street to 20th Street and ranging from First Avenue to Avenue C and the East River. All the buildings looked the same and in front of most of them were small gardens protected by chain-link fences and wonderful cement playgrounds, all designed for happy, safe, inexpensive family living. For their parents’ families, though, it was as if they’d moved to Berlin at the height of Hitler’s reign. Manhattan equaled danger. And far worse, separation.
Not surprisingly, my most powerful Stuy Town memories all involve food.
As a very young boy, while my dad was off trying to get acting gigs—he eventually became one of the leads on a soap opera, Love of Life—my mother used to coax me into the kitchen to help her cook. Well, “help” is a bit of a misnomer. What she would do is let me put all sorts of things in a bowl—eggs; eggshells; flour; sugar; toys; mud; you name it. Then I’d gleefully mix it all up and she’d put it in the oven at a robust 350 degrees. An hour or so later she’d call me in, take what she swore was my concoction out of the oven and, lo and behold, it had transmogrified into a delicious homemade cake. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was quite a few years before I figured out that my mom was making the ol’ switcheroo while I was off napping or playing with my blocks. At age two, I was pretty certain I was already a master baker, but at age seven I learned to handle the disappointment of finding out otherwise.
Stuyvesant Town 1949. Paradise for my parents. Siberia for their parents.
I heard my very first swear word when I was around three or four. This incident was also food-related. My mother was still far from being a gourmet foodie, but she was very interested in healthy cooking. I vividly recall a Sunday family breakfast—my mom, my dad, my brother, and me—for which my mom decided to make buckwheat pancakes, which were supposedly better for us than the normal flapjacks. She served it to the three of us—three sensitive guys. We each took a bite and chewed. And chewed. And chewed some more. That’s when my dad said, “This tastes like shit.” I didn’t quite understand what it meant, but I knew it was something naughty. Then he said, “I don’t mean it tastes bad. I mean it tastes like actual shit.” My mom did not take this too well. I remember some crying—but then she tasted her portion. And then, without another word, she cleared the plates. We never had buckwheat pancakes again.
My parents had two couples they considered their closest friends. One was a married couple named Teri and Irv who lived in the building next to ours in Stuy Town. They had three children and I was always over at their place for dinner. If I ate there early in the month, we’d have a normal dinner—meat and potatoes and a good dessert. Toward the end of the month, we’d sit at the dining table and out would come peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for all. I never minded but years later I found out why the food followed such an odd but consistent serving pattern: Irv, a gruff high school principal—he always reminded me of Ralph Kramden—was a compulsive gambler. By the end of each month, he’d run out of money and thus Teri couldn’t afford to buy the same level of groceries.
Teri fantasized about going to Japan. Her apartment was decorated in a kind of pseudo-Japanese style and she often wore kimono-type clothes and put her hair in a bun, held together with sticks that looked like Japanese chopsticks, and she sometimes made what then passed for Japanese food: teriyaki. She often talked about one day fulfilling her dream and going there. When I was in college and living in California, fifteen or so years after I’d eaten my last teriyaki beef or peanut butter sandwich at their dinner table, she and Irv finally did save up enough money to live the dream and go to Japan. Before they landed, however, their plane crashed into a mountain and they never made it.
My mother was also in L.A. when word reached us about the crash. My dad was in New York. She and I were both wrecks, sad beyond belief, and didn’t know what to do. So we went to a movie, The Sting. Neither of us thought we could possibly enjoy it but it turned out to be an extraordinary release from the gloom of real life (or death). We walked out practically giddy, went to a Hamburger Hamlet, once a great restaurant chain in L.A., to get some excellent burgers and fries and a few glasses of beer—until that night, I never knew my mom drank beer—and we talked about what had happened, able to reminisce about her close friends without either sobbing or crumbling into silence. The Sting, the sheer pleasure of the movie, provided some perspective and we both saw a glimmer of hope in the future. It was also the first time I’d ever sat alone with my mother and drunk alcohol, and I believe there was an extra added comfort for her that I was now grown up enough to deal with the tragedy as an adult. For the first time, I didn’t have to lean on her for support; I could be the crutch. At least for a few hours. And a few beers.
My parents’ other best friends were Esther and Albert, who also had three kids with whom I was friendly. Esther and Albert both worked in the garment center. Esther was lovely, smart, and soft-spoken but with a will of steel. A fairly high-powered executive in the garment business, she was a slightly scarier version of my mother and with less of a sense of humor. Albert, also a garmento exec, was always puffing on a large cigar and running off a string of jokes—he reminded me of a Catskill or Vegas comedian, a cross between Alan King and Jackie Mason—and he had a secret life that I thought was the coolest thing ever: every Monday night he played the drums in a Dixieland band on Grove Street in the West Village, at a place called Arthur’s Tavern. I learned two valuable lessons from knowing Albert: 1) Being funny all the time does not mean you’re not angry—in fact, it usually means you are angry and doing your best to hide it; and 2) Doing the one thing you really love only one night a week does not equate with happiness; it leads to frustration—repressed anger and frustration: not a recipe for a glorious life.
Esther and Albert were responsible for the next big step my mother took in the food world, though.
Albert convinced my dad that the two families should find a place to summer together—someplace out of Manhattan where the grown-ups and children could all experience nature and breathe some non-city air. So the two men drove up to Central Valley, a forty-minute or so drive out of Manhattan, right near the West Point military academy. While driving around, they accidentally stumbled upon a place called West Point Farms, a restaurant that also had a few guest rooms. The main building was modern but the whole place had a remarkably old-fashioned feel. The owners were an elderly couple—at least they seemed elderly to me at age three; they were probably in their late forties or early fifties—Henri and Barbara Apisson. Henri was an architect in France—he designed their restaurant—and he was Maurice Chevalier–level French: a thick and charming accent; an ever-present twinkle in his eye. Whenever someone complimented him on the food or service, his answer was
always, “Zat’s because everysing we do and make, we do and make weez love.” Barbara was Armenian and she was almost a caricature of a perfect grandmother. In my mind’s eye, I picture her always wearing an apron and bustling around and tsk-tsking anyone who wasn’t being productive; she was small and spindly and brittle-looking but overwhelmingly kind.
Half an hour after meeting Henri and Barbara, Albert and my dad agreed that both of our families would spend a month or so at the farm. On their drive back to the city, my father mentioned how amazingly inexpensive the place was. Albert kind of shrugged and said it didn’t seem that inexpensive. It turned out that Henri, generous gent that he was, determined that my dad was not in Albert’s financial league and, even though they’d never met before, decided my father was a nice guy and deserved a break—so he charged my father half of what he charged Albert.
My Mother's Kitchen Page 7
