Thanksgiving at the St George Hotel
Nov. 27th, 2013 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThanksgiving is a rebuke, a reminder that the storylines I use to make sense of the Universe are not, in fact, universal narratives.
Personally? I hate Thanksgiving. Hands down, it's my least favorite holiday. Even before Walmart began riding the turkey gobbler's backdraft, I saw it as a celebration of two of my least favorite things: gluttony and hypocrisy. Gluttony because you're supposed to eat and eat and eat until you burst, and you're supposed to eat turkey, which -- let's face it -- is rather flavorless, and dressing, which is -- yuck! -- crumbled, spiced bread, and mashed potatoes and casseroles with the consistency of pap. These are not inherently yummy dishes.
Hypocrisy because you had to hang out with relatives, which in my case has always been akin to descending into a venomous snake pit only without the reassurance that God will intervene when one of them bites. And adding insult to injury, not only do you have to hang out with these poisonous perps, you also have to pretend you feel affectionately toward them. Ick.
These days, it seems to me, Thanksgiving is also a celebration of cognitive dissonance. Since the U.S. may be the most cognitively dissonant nation on the face of the planet, this really does make it the perfect American holiday. I mean -- you're pretending to feel grateful for your multiple blessings. Really, though, your covetousness has been tuned to a feverish pitch thanks to all those Walmart commercials pitching 35-inch LCD TVs for $350. Right now, you only have a 28-inch LCD TV and it's seriously impacting all you could be distilling from The Shahs of Sunset... You're not grateful for your blessings at all. You're resentful because your blessings didn't come with a higher price tag.
Other people, though, have sane families. Well. If not sane families of birth, then at least sane families of choice with whom they choose to spend the day. For these lucky people, I imagine, Thanksgiving is a genuinely pleasurable occasion.
###
My earliest memories of Thanksgiving are of the St. George Hotel somewhere in Brooklyn. My great grandmother Anna Nachman spent her dotage there. Anna Nachman was immensely wealthy -- her husband had something to do with a process that made dynamite explosions more efficient. I used to believe that he'd been one of the chemists, but 20 or so years ago it occurred to me that as one of the chemists, he wouldn't have made any money off the process at all. No, no, he had to be one of the financiers.
Old Abe Nachman died long before I was born, and Abe and Anna's daughter Henrietta ("Etta") was always a no-show at these Thanksgiving functions.
When my mother was 16 years old and my aunt Annie was nine, they came back from their respective public schools to the little house on Lefforts Avenue one afternoon to find exactly half the furniture missing and Etta, their mother, vanished.
She never came back.
For several months they and my grandfather, mild-mannered, kind and intellectually prepossessing Alfred Lord Tennyson Vogel, had absolutely no idea where Etta had gone. Eventually, it turned out that Etta had defaulted to Miami Beach, Florida where she'd gotten a job as a piano player in a cocktail lounge. This is just a little bit like the plot of East of Eden, and it may be one of the reasons why the Elia Kazan movie -- though not the novel itself -- moves me so deeply every time I see it.
Etta was a pianist who was apparently pretty talented. The family tells a story of the time when young Etta, before her marriage, was engaged as a piano player on a trans-Atlantic voyage. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff was a passenger on this ship, and one evening Etta amused herself by playing several of Rachmaninoff's difficult piano concertos. (Rachmaninoff wrote piano music to show off his oversized finger span apparently.) At the end of her recital, an ancient, shriveled creature was wheeled up to the piano. It was the famous composer himself! "You do me great honor," he wheezed.
Personally, I'm inclined to think this story is apocryphal. It seems highly unlikely to me that a young woman would be hired as cruise ship entertainment in the 1920s. Confabulation, of course, is the family curse. But confabulation is not lying, so there may be a seed of truth in the story somewhere.
Whatever the truth of the family legend, Etta had Issues, as they say now. How else to explain how a beautiful and wealthy young woman reached her late 20s in the 1920s without being married?
Enter my grandfather.
###
In the last decade of his life, my grandfather wrote an autobiography. I was in my late 30s when I read it. After checking to see what he wrote about me, I skimmed the rest. I suppose he was a good writer, but I had no patience with his airy, evasive approach to the huge dysfunctionality of his own life.
Alfred's father had been a sidewalk stock trader. Both grandfathers were rabbis from Poland. They lived with the family, and neither one could speak a word of English, so Alfred grew up in a polyglot house. I assume he spoke some Polish. Of course, his last name "Vogel" is German. Originally, the name had been Ptaszek, which means "little bird" in Polish.
Why not just rename the family "Byrd?"
It's amusing to think that some progressively inclined Ellis Island employee didn't want to deal with the outrageous consonants of the Polish surname but didn't want to rob my grandfather's family entirely of ethnicity.
I think I would have liked my great grandfather Abraham Vogel. Abe became involved in an anti-hat movement in middle age. Seriously! He founded something called "The Anti-Hat League", which got some mild press play -- I read an article about it in the New Yorker archives. By all accounts, he was a vigorous, humorous man and a great card player. Culturally sensitive too as this descendent can infer from the names he gave his three sons: Herbert Spencer Vogel, Alfred Lord Tennyson Vogel, and Richard Wagner Vogel.
But of course, Abe was a hustler and a swindler, and two of his sons grew up to be hustlers and swindlers too. Uncle Herb and Uncle Rip were both Harvard Law School graduates who were later disbarred for financial improprieties. Until they were disbarred, Alfred was considered the failure in the family. He was a handsome, passive, dreamy, unworldly young man who went to Russia right after graduation from college to view the Revolution for himself.
He wrote about his early relationship with Etta in his autobiography. She had sex with him. I can't remember now whether that was his first sexual relationship. He wrote a rather Ruskin-like passage about his horror of encountering pubic hair for the first time, I remember that.
Anyway, Alfred married Etta because Etta pushed to be married. He became a high school English teacher, teaching at Seward Park High School for 45 years until his retirement in the early 1980s. I'm told he was universally beloved.
I should feel more kindly toward my grandfather than I do. I don't because of an incident that my mother told me about over and over again, so often, in fact, that I have an actual physical memory of the incident although it took place decades before I was born.
Etta turned out to be crazy. And maternity increased her craziness. She used to beat my mother and my Aunt Jane with wire coat hangers. One time, when my mother was about seven, Etta was beating her and my mother somehow squirmed loose and ran into the living room where Alfred was sprawled on the couch reading a newspaper.
"Help me, Daddy!" she screamed.
Alfred took one look at her and then pulled the newspaper up over his face, pretending to be asleep.
###
One might argue that Etta did her daughters a tremendous service by disappearing so abruptly from the Lefforts Avenue house. (It might have been nice to leave some of that furniture.)
But love is a complicated emotion, and my mother was Etta's favorite child. My mother was the one who'd inherited Etta's musical talent, you see.
Lynn, my mother, was a child prodigy who played the violin. Etta had big dreams for her that included Julliard and the career as a professional musician that Etta had never managed to achieve for herself.
Lynn sabotaged those dreams by going to a concert at the Brooklyn Museum one night and meeting my incredibly handsome father.
Even before my mother met my father, there'd been problems. She acted out sexually, apparently. I can't remember how I learned this. Seems unlikely my grandfather would have written about it in his -- pubic hair reference notwithstanding -- highly bowdlerized version of his life. Maybe it was one of the secrets my mother confided in me as she lay dying.
The chronology is unclear here, but I'm pretty sure my mother got knocked up with me before Etta pulled her vanishing act. Which means I was the proximal cause of her disappearance.
###
The Thanksgiving dinners at the St. George Hotel always devolved into competitions over who loved Great Grandma Anna Nachman the most: the mongrel offspring of her errant daughter Etta (Alfred was a Polish Jew, after all, and Polish Jews were greatly looked down upon by German Jews) or Anna's sister Gertrude, her offspring and their offspring? Often this became a shouting match over who visited Anna Nachman most often in the nursing home in which she was stored between major holidays.
Placental blood is the thickest type of blood of all, though, and Anna left her entire fortune to her only child with small bequests to her grandchildren. I remember my mother bought her first car with her share of the loot. I don't remember much about the car except that it was bright purple, a weird color for a car I knew even at the age of six, and my mother seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time finding parking places for it. Sometimes she would be out all night.
I can't remember the exact date when my Aunt Jane got the phone call -- was it the late 1970s or the early 1980s? Anyway, Etta had been picked up as a vagrant, wandering the streets of Miami Beach smeared with excrement, rummaging in garbage cans and muttering to herself. Apparently, she had signed away her Power of Attorney to a Cuban gigolo and he had emptied her bank accounts forthwith.
I have no idea how the authorities got my Aunt Jane's phone number. My Aunt Jane is not necessarily the craziest sister of the three crazy Vogel Sisters, but she's the one with the weakest self censor so her craziness has always been most apparent. She'd always been the daughter that Etta had ignored because she didn't have as much musical talent as Lynn, my mother. In practical terms, this meant that she didn't get beaten and tortured as much as my mother, but, of course, to these poor girls, beatings and torture equaled maternal LUV so Jane was always deeply resentful of my mother.
Jane was just overjoyed to find her mother in a weakened, dependent condition and took over her care for the next 20 years or so. Taking over her care meant expensive legal wrangles with the Cuban gigolo who was not going to give up the old Gringa bitch's money without a fight, and then installing Etta in a series of apartments with a series of caretakers. Jane was an adjunct Professor of English at a fairly respectable institution of higher learning, and I think a lot of her own considerable salary was deployed to Etta's care as dynamite fortune inheritance dwindled.
My mother, for whatever reason, refused to understand this and kept maintaining that there were vast sums of money that should be her's that were being wasted on that monster's care.
Of course, I never met Etta. I have a photograph of her somewhere in my California storage unit. She was a handsome woman, very Teutonic looking -- of course, they always say the German Jews were the most chauvinistic of all Jews until Hitler came along.
I do seem to have inherited her belief that leaving is the best way of dealing with difficult situations. I used to fantasize about it so often when I was dealing with a family. I will just vanish. You will never see me again. I will reinvent myself in a different place.
###
I don't think Etta physically abused Annie the way she physically abused Jane and Lynn. Nonetheless, Annie's nickname for the small house on Lefforts Avenue where the three sisters grew up was always "The House of Usher."
I spent a fair amount of time there as a kid too. My mother had parenting standards! She was fine with leaving me at age six alone by myself for a night, but if she was going to stay away any longer, she made arrangements with Grandpa Alfred. I became quite the little pro at navigating the IRT subway ride from upper Westside Manhattan into deepest, darkest Brooklyn.
The House of Usher is maybe a mile away from the Brooklyn Museum. One day last summer, I dragged the unprotesting Max and the good sport Liza to see it.
I don't know what I was expecting to see. Maybe it would be empty with the windows all boarded up and some ill-defined vapor of pure evil pouring forth from it. But, no, it was just an ordinary, unremarkable little house in which its current occupants almost certainly lived ordinary, unremarkable little lives. They're probably defrosting their turkey right now, possibly popping off to the Associated for some last minute sweet potatoes, planning a pleasant, family Thanksgiving.
Personally? I hate Thanksgiving. Hands down, it's my least favorite holiday. Even before Walmart began riding the turkey gobbler's backdraft, I saw it as a celebration of two of my least favorite things: gluttony and hypocrisy. Gluttony because you're supposed to eat and eat and eat until you burst, and you're supposed to eat turkey, which -- let's face it -- is rather flavorless, and dressing, which is -- yuck! -- crumbled, spiced bread, and mashed potatoes and casseroles with the consistency of pap. These are not inherently yummy dishes.
Hypocrisy because you had to hang out with relatives, which in my case has always been akin to descending into a venomous snake pit only without the reassurance that God will intervene when one of them bites. And adding insult to injury, not only do you have to hang out with these poisonous perps, you also have to pretend you feel affectionately toward them. Ick.
These days, it seems to me, Thanksgiving is also a celebration of cognitive dissonance. Since the U.S. may be the most cognitively dissonant nation on the face of the planet, this really does make it the perfect American holiday. I mean -- you're pretending to feel grateful for your multiple blessings. Really, though, your covetousness has been tuned to a feverish pitch thanks to all those Walmart commercials pitching 35-inch LCD TVs for $350. Right now, you only have a 28-inch LCD TV and it's seriously impacting all you could be distilling from The Shahs of Sunset... You're not grateful for your blessings at all. You're resentful because your blessings didn't come with a higher price tag.
Other people, though, have sane families. Well. If not sane families of birth, then at least sane families of choice with whom they choose to spend the day. For these lucky people, I imagine, Thanksgiving is a genuinely pleasurable occasion.
My earliest memories of Thanksgiving are of the St. George Hotel somewhere in Brooklyn. My great grandmother Anna Nachman spent her dotage there. Anna Nachman was immensely wealthy -- her husband had something to do with a process that made dynamite explosions more efficient. I used to believe that he'd been one of the chemists, but 20 or so years ago it occurred to me that as one of the chemists, he wouldn't have made any money off the process at all. No, no, he had to be one of the financiers.
Old Abe Nachman died long before I was born, and Abe and Anna's daughter Henrietta ("Etta") was always a no-show at these Thanksgiving functions.
When my mother was 16 years old and my aunt Annie was nine, they came back from their respective public schools to the little house on Lefforts Avenue one afternoon to find exactly half the furniture missing and Etta, their mother, vanished.
She never came back.
For several months they and my grandfather, mild-mannered, kind and intellectually prepossessing Alfred Lord Tennyson Vogel, had absolutely no idea where Etta had gone. Eventually, it turned out that Etta had defaulted to Miami Beach, Florida where she'd gotten a job as a piano player in a cocktail lounge. This is just a little bit like the plot of East of Eden, and it may be one of the reasons why the Elia Kazan movie -- though not the novel itself -- moves me so deeply every time I see it.
Etta was a pianist who was apparently pretty talented. The family tells a story of the time when young Etta, before her marriage, was engaged as a piano player on a trans-Atlantic voyage. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff was a passenger on this ship, and one evening Etta amused herself by playing several of Rachmaninoff's difficult piano concertos. (Rachmaninoff wrote piano music to show off his oversized finger span apparently.) At the end of her recital, an ancient, shriveled creature was wheeled up to the piano. It was the famous composer himself! "You do me great honor," he wheezed.
Personally, I'm inclined to think this story is apocryphal. It seems highly unlikely to me that a young woman would be hired as cruise ship entertainment in the 1920s. Confabulation, of course, is the family curse. But confabulation is not lying, so there may be a seed of truth in the story somewhere.
Whatever the truth of the family legend, Etta had Issues, as they say now. How else to explain how a beautiful and wealthy young woman reached her late 20s in the 1920s without being married?
Enter my grandfather.
In the last decade of his life, my grandfather wrote an autobiography. I was in my late 30s when I read it. After checking to see what he wrote about me, I skimmed the rest. I suppose he was a good writer, but I had no patience with his airy, evasive approach to the huge dysfunctionality of his own life.
Alfred's father had been a sidewalk stock trader. Both grandfathers were rabbis from Poland. They lived with the family, and neither one could speak a word of English, so Alfred grew up in a polyglot house. I assume he spoke some Polish. Of course, his last name "Vogel" is German. Originally, the name had been Ptaszek, which means "little bird" in Polish.
Why not just rename the family "Byrd?"
It's amusing to think that some progressively inclined Ellis Island employee didn't want to deal with the outrageous consonants of the Polish surname but didn't want to rob my grandfather's family entirely of ethnicity.
I think I would have liked my great grandfather Abraham Vogel. Abe became involved in an anti-hat movement in middle age. Seriously! He founded something called "The Anti-Hat League", which got some mild press play -- I read an article about it in the New Yorker archives. By all accounts, he was a vigorous, humorous man and a great card player. Culturally sensitive too as this descendent can infer from the names he gave his three sons: Herbert Spencer Vogel, Alfred Lord Tennyson Vogel, and Richard Wagner Vogel.
But of course, Abe was a hustler and a swindler, and two of his sons grew up to be hustlers and swindlers too. Uncle Herb and Uncle Rip were both Harvard Law School graduates who were later disbarred for financial improprieties. Until they were disbarred, Alfred was considered the failure in the family. He was a handsome, passive, dreamy, unworldly young man who went to Russia right after graduation from college to view the Revolution for himself.
He wrote about his early relationship with Etta in his autobiography. She had sex with him. I can't remember now whether that was his first sexual relationship. He wrote a rather Ruskin-like passage about his horror of encountering pubic hair for the first time, I remember that.
Anyway, Alfred married Etta because Etta pushed to be married. He became a high school English teacher, teaching at Seward Park High School for 45 years until his retirement in the early 1980s. I'm told he was universally beloved.
I should feel more kindly toward my grandfather than I do. I don't because of an incident that my mother told me about over and over again, so often, in fact, that I have an actual physical memory of the incident although it took place decades before I was born.
Etta turned out to be crazy. And maternity increased her craziness. She used to beat my mother and my Aunt Jane with wire coat hangers. One time, when my mother was about seven, Etta was beating her and my mother somehow squirmed loose and ran into the living room where Alfred was sprawled on the couch reading a newspaper.
"Help me, Daddy!" she screamed.
Alfred took one look at her and then pulled the newspaper up over his face, pretending to be asleep.
One might argue that Etta did her daughters a tremendous service by disappearing so abruptly from the Lefforts Avenue house. (It might have been nice to leave some of that furniture.)
But love is a complicated emotion, and my mother was Etta's favorite child. My mother was the one who'd inherited Etta's musical talent, you see.
Lynn, my mother, was a child prodigy who played the violin. Etta had big dreams for her that included Julliard and the career as a professional musician that Etta had never managed to achieve for herself.
Lynn sabotaged those dreams by going to a concert at the Brooklyn Museum one night and meeting my incredibly handsome father.
Even before my mother met my father, there'd been problems. She acted out sexually, apparently. I can't remember how I learned this. Seems unlikely my grandfather would have written about it in his -- pubic hair reference notwithstanding -- highly bowdlerized version of his life. Maybe it was one of the secrets my mother confided in me as she lay dying.
The chronology is unclear here, but I'm pretty sure my mother got knocked up with me before Etta pulled her vanishing act. Which means I was the proximal cause of her disappearance.
The Thanksgiving dinners at the St. George Hotel always devolved into competitions over who loved Great Grandma Anna Nachman the most: the mongrel offspring of her errant daughter Etta (Alfred was a Polish Jew, after all, and Polish Jews were greatly looked down upon by German Jews) or Anna's sister Gertrude, her offspring and their offspring? Often this became a shouting match over who visited Anna Nachman most often in the nursing home in which she was stored between major holidays.
Placental blood is the thickest type of blood of all, though, and Anna left her entire fortune to her only child with small bequests to her grandchildren. I remember my mother bought her first car with her share of the loot. I don't remember much about the car except that it was bright purple, a weird color for a car I knew even at the age of six, and my mother seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time finding parking places for it. Sometimes she would be out all night.
I can't remember the exact date when my Aunt Jane got the phone call -- was it the late 1970s or the early 1980s? Anyway, Etta had been picked up as a vagrant, wandering the streets of Miami Beach smeared with excrement, rummaging in garbage cans and muttering to herself. Apparently, she had signed away her Power of Attorney to a Cuban gigolo and he had emptied her bank accounts forthwith.
I have no idea how the authorities got my Aunt Jane's phone number. My Aunt Jane is not necessarily the craziest sister of the three crazy Vogel Sisters, but she's the one with the weakest self censor so her craziness has always been most apparent. She'd always been the daughter that Etta had ignored because she didn't have as much musical talent as Lynn, my mother. In practical terms, this meant that she didn't get beaten and tortured as much as my mother, but, of course, to these poor girls, beatings and torture equaled maternal LUV so Jane was always deeply resentful of my mother.
Jane was just overjoyed to find her mother in a weakened, dependent condition and took over her care for the next 20 years or so. Taking over her care meant expensive legal wrangles with the Cuban gigolo who was not going to give up the old Gringa bitch's money without a fight, and then installing Etta in a series of apartments with a series of caretakers. Jane was an adjunct Professor of English at a fairly respectable institution of higher learning, and I think a lot of her own considerable salary was deployed to Etta's care as dynamite fortune inheritance dwindled.
My mother, for whatever reason, refused to understand this and kept maintaining that there were vast sums of money that should be her's that were being wasted on that monster's care.
Of course, I never met Etta. I have a photograph of her somewhere in my California storage unit. She was a handsome woman, very Teutonic looking -- of course, they always say the German Jews were the most chauvinistic of all Jews until Hitler came along.
I do seem to have inherited her belief that leaving is the best way of dealing with difficult situations. I used to fantasize about it so often when I was dealing with a family. I will just vanish. You will never see me again. I will reinvent myself in a different place.
I don't think Etta physically abused Annie the way she physically abused Jane and Lynn. Nonetheless, Annie's nickname for the small house on Lefforts Avenue where the three sisters grew up was always "The House of Usher."
I spent a fair amount of time there as a kid too. My mother had parenting standards! She was fine with leaving me at age six alone by myself for a night, but if she was going to stay away any longer, she made arrangements with Grandpa Alfred. I became quite the little pro at navigating the IRT subway ride from upper Westside Manhattan into deepest, darkest Brooklyn.
The House of Usher is maybe a mile away from the Brooklyn Museum. One day last summer, I dragged the unprotesting Max and the good sport Liza to see it.
I don't know what I was expecting to see. Maybe it would be empty with the windows all boarded up and some ill-defined vapor of pure evil pouring forth from it. But, no, it was just an ordinary, unremarkable little house in which its current occupants almost certainly lived ordinary, unremarkable little lives. They're probably defrosting their turkey right now, possibly popping off to the Associated for some last minute sweet potatoes, planning a pleasant, family Thanksgiving.
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no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 06:37 pm (UTC)Hope you and the Judge have a rollickin' time on Turkey Day.