O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU (Part Two)

I don’t remember being especially close to my brother when we were young, but for sure we were not close as young adults, or anytime beyond that.  I decided to dig deeper into the past, looking through photographs and letters that might provide clues as to what happened, and why.

I see a beautiful infant boy loved by his parents and grandparents. Hundreds of black and white photos in a shelf of albums capture the family warmth and affection, the busy everyday life, and the natural settings in parks, at beaches, and in backyards where our family gathered, relaxed, and celebrated, all captured by my dad and uncles with their Rolleiflex cameras.  I hovered over my baby brother when he was in his carriage or in my mother’s lap.

We spent summers with our Zausmer grandparents (our mother’s side) in Glen Cove on Long Island Sound, at a spectacular manicured public park and beachfront donated by J. P. Morgan. Stu and I were two of seventeen cousins. Throughout the summer our aunts and uncles with their kids showed up for weeks at a time, thanks to my grandparents’ open door policy. If you were family, you were “in,” no matter how crowded. After dinner, we caught fireflies in Mason jars while the adults chatted quietly into the warm night. We slept on the carpeted floor in Grandma and Grandpa’s room with the only air conditioner in the house. We giggled ourselves to sleep while Grandpa and the uncles watched wrestling matches or “You Bet Your Life” hosted by Groucho Marx and the aunts helped Grandma clean up the kitchen mess after a day of endless food service.

My dad’s parents, the Weiners, lived in the next town over from Linden and also maintained an open house/open kitchen for all the family. Elizabeth was an industrial city with a coastal port instead of beaches, and no amenities except for Warinanco Park, designed by the Olmsted firm that also designed Central Park, just as impressive even on its smaller scale of 206 acres. Despite its splendor, we preferred to hang around the backyard while Grandpa tended the tomato plants, pruned the apple tree, or polished his dark green ‘52 Nash, and the adults sat in Adirondack chairs wiling away summer afternoons with conversation and lemonade. The excitement escalated when two more cousins arrived from Boston after their eight hour trip, adding a pair of allies to run around and annoy the adults.

Aside from family visits, we often took the half-hour train ride into New York City to the Bronx Zoo, Broadway, or the Museum of Natural History. We thrilled at putting coins into the slots near the little windows filed with sandwiches and desserts at the Horn & Hardart Automat and releasing the goodies on display. The Hayden Planetarium was a stellar experience, literally.

When it came to pets, Stuart and I had a special connection.   When I was seven and Stu was four, we found a stray kitten roaming in the yard and begged our mother to let us to keep her. She relented, “but only if you don’t ever bring her in the house!” We locked her in the storage area under the porch each night to keep her safe, fed her milk and bits of table scraps, then let her out before we went to school. She always returned at supper time. Each night, we tucked her into her corrugated box, a sweet little creature we treated tenderly. Before she was full-grown, she decided to move on, escaping to the woodlot across the street and evading our attempts to find her.

In 1954, when I was ten and Stu was seven, our Zausmer grandparents rented a garden apartment in Miami Beach. I traveled separately from New Jersey to Florida with my grandparents in their Buick Special, stopping at roadside motel courts along Route One. Grandma set up her electric hot plate to percolate coffee and fry up eggs from local farms, everything strictly kosher. My mom and brother flew down on Eastern Airlines the next week. Stu and I walked over to the big resort hotel across the street each morning to hang out at the fishing pier. The Boston Braves baseball team, booked there during spring training, took a liking to us. Stu and famed pitcher Lew Burdette became buddies; family legend has it that my brother caught a fish on Lew Burdette’s fishing rod.

A few years later, we acquired a dog from a local litter, a black mixed breed, and named him Charlie. We were responsible for walking and feeding as my parents were still not interested in taking care of animals. He grew quite large and strong and dragged us along the sidewalk on his leash.  Our parents decided that he had to go back to the pound. My mom took a photo of us lovingly caressing Charlie before she drove him away for good. What the photo does not show are the burning tears running down our cheeks. The loss felt deep—it was nothing like our kitty running off to be free.

On to the summer of 1958, when I became involved with a boy I met at a YMHA dance. I was moving forward into my teen years. Stu was barely out of single digits. Our three year age difference began to matter and our common childhood interests drifted. I left for college in 1962, leaving Stuart to get through high school without a big sister in the house.

The years after that hijacked the early narrative for me. We may have felt connected as siblings in our early family life—the photos do not lie—but I no longer remembered it that way. Stu was not at my Douglass graduation in 1966.  I didn’t attend his Fairleigh Dickinson graduation in 1969. I was already in Boston, seeking my fortune far from New Jersey. He had married and had a family early on, bringing in the first grandchild for both sides of the family in 1968, and soon after moving to Florida.

Our bonds may have loosened somewhat by geography, but that’s not the only reason for breaking off contact. My brother made too many choices that concerned and distressed me, and sadly, alienated us from each other.

Years later, we arranged to see each other at a family event in Florida in 1996. I took our mom to meet with him, and that was the last time we saw him. Stu had a faraway look in his eyes; he seemed to be somewhere else and not just in miles. He seemed preoccupied to me. His accounts of his life and plans didn’t make sense. But our mom, then eighty years old, looked ecstatic, seeing her son after many years of absence. Yet, I remain deeply saddened looking at the photo of their encounter, knowing now that it was their last.

By then, Stu had been divorced for some time and never settled anywhere for long, frequently providing me with yet another new phone number and temporary address. It troubled me greatly that he was living on the edge – of what, I didn’t know. He managed to call me from time to time wherever he was, mostly in the Virginia area until he moved to Florida again. When he asked if he could send me a copy of his medical records because he was moving around so much, I agreed. I have always felt comfortable as the Command Central for the family, just as my Aunt Jean (also a lawyer and a big sister) did when I was young.

When Stu died in 2005, I prepared a eulogy without knowing much about him after we both left home in the early 1970s, and even less about the specifics of his last two decades. I dreaded his telephone calls in which I listened to his hopes and plans that fell apart before they got anywhere. Maybe it helped him to know I was listening . . . that is, until his untimely death.

The story was written and ends there, minus the clarity I had hoped to achieve. But the passage of time has shed a bit of comforting light.

Years after, I read a memoir by an Irish journalist, Nuala O’Faolain, estranged from her alcoholic brother. She reluctantly went to his funeral, dreading the negative picture that she expected to be portrayed, given the serious mistakes she saw as defining his life. When friends and co-workers that she had never met paid their respects and spoke warmly of him, she saw that her brother had established an identity of his own, apart from being an ostracized member of their family of origin. Her image of him based in the past was a ghost of what he had become. It stunned and humbled her.

Like that author, I am compelled to acknowledge that the connection between the sister I thought I was or should have been, and the brother I thought I knew or should have known, did not materialize between us. I struggle with acceptance of the limits imposed by his passing—the failure to make things right during our lifetimes—but this is where my search has to end. And I have no way to know if the course of events would have changed if I had taken the call on that Friday at my law office (see Part One).

I recently found an email that our cousin Bob sent to me shortly after Stuart’s death. It provides clues of who my brother was independently of our relationship, through someone else’s eyes—a perspective that I very much needed. I knew too much about his struggles to survive and save face, a painful burden for him but for me too.

Stu and our younger cousin met from time to time in the south where Stuart worked and Bob performed. Bob wrote about the double dates they’d enjoyed as teens (Stu had a car and he didn’t), and went on to say, “I could also hear how much he wanted to mend his relationships with his family, and how much he loved his children and grandchildren  . . . I told him about how much help Barrie had been to my sister and me when we lost our folks in the late ‘90s. It made him smile – I think that regardless of what may have happened between them, he looked up to Barrie as a big sister . . . .”

I am the last remaining member of my nuclear family – Rose and Julius, Barrie and Stuart. I alone carry the bond of blood and memory that we shared. I stand on valuable terrain with memories of our parents and grandparents, our New Jersey childhood, our pets, our vacations, our summer paradise with cousins. We have a common history and family heritage that will always be a part of us. Stu wrote in my father’s beautifully proportioned handwriting. He inherited the red hair of our gorgeous mom and passed it on to both of his children. He had a cadre of high school buddies and an outgoing personality, unlike me, the study nerd. Remembering his random quirks and traits makes me smile.

When Stuart was born, I became a sister. It is because of him alone that I can make that claim. Thank you little brother.