I Remember Nothing [14]
It’s very sad to look in the bathroom mirror at the end of an evening and realize you’ve spent the last ninety minutes with spinach on your tooth. Or parsley, which is an even more dangerous thing to eat. And that none of your friends loved you enough to tell you.
This is especially painful because it’s so easy to tell people they have spinach in their teeth. All you have to do is say, “You have spinach in your teeth.”
But what can you say to a person who has an Aruba, especially since, until I wrote this piece, there was no word to describe it?
But now that I have come up with the term, I would appreciate your telling me whenever I have an Aruba. Because then I can fix it. Temporarily, anyway.
My Life as an Heiress
I never knew why my mother wasn’t close to her brother Hal. I can guess. It’s possible that he didn’t help out financially with their parents. It’s possible that she didn’t like his wife, Eleanor. It’s possible that she resented forever the fact that her parents found the money to send him to Columbia but made her go to a public college. Who knows? The secret is dead and buried.
In any case, I grew up without meeting my uncle Hal. We lived in Los Angeles, and Hal lived in Washington, D.C., with the aforementioned Eleanor. They were both government economists, and then, in the fifties, they quit. There were rumors of left-wing affiliations. My parents had never been further to the left than socialism, but these were the blacklist years. They knew a dozen people who had named names, and they also knew at least two of the Hollywood Ten, plus several they claimed would have gone to jail, along with the Ten, had there been Eleven, or Twelve. My parents were worried that rumors of Hal and Eleanor’s left-wing affiliations would reach all the way to California and bite them, and apparently that was exactly what happened, although without any real damage. One day in the early fifties they were called into the office of Spyros Skouras, an old Greek who was then running Twentieth Century Fox. Skouras waved a piece of paper about Hal at my mother and said, “Phoebe, vy you a Communist?” My mother explained to Skouras she was not her brother Hal, and not a Communist, and that was pretty much the end of it, except as an anecdote.
By the time I was in college, Uncle Hal and Aunt Eleanor were no longer anywhere near communism, if they’d ever been: they were in real estate, and they were very, very rich. In 1961, when I was working in Washington on a college political internship, they took me to Duke Zeibert’s for dinner. Hal was a sweet, lovely man, and Eleanor was a pistol. She had a longish, horsy face and blondish hair and she loved a laugh. On weekends I would go stay at their house in Falls Church, a splendid new place they’d just built as part of a large development. Eleanor and Hal had no children, but they had lots of houses—they bought them and sold them, without looking back. They owned art, and Chinese antiquities, and Persian rugs, and their house was run, nicely, by a housekeeper named Louise. I mention Louise for a reason, as you will see.
My parents were really not into family—I’d never met my father’s brothers or my first cousins—but Hal and Eleanor were in touch with all sorts of people on my mother’s side of things, and that summer in Washington they introduced me to some of my mother’s relatives who were my second or third cousins, depending on how you count. One was Joe Borkin, a well-known Washington lawyer who was an expert in the family antecedents and couldn’t believe I’d grown up with no idea where my maternal grandparents were born; he told me, and, out of loyalty to my mother, who had no interest in such things, I promptly forgot. Another was Morty Plotkin, a doctor with no bedside