Cold War Summer
Let’s drop a bomb.
Why shouldn’t we drop a bomb?
Now is the time for it
While we are young
Let’s drop a bomb.
Suzy Cohen’s mother’s voice boomed out at us through her kitchen window as we played
in her rocky back yard. Suzy, her brother Robert, my friend Ellie and I were playing “statues” – a game which
required you, once “frozen” by a rival team member, to remain absolutely still
until someone from your team animated you with their touch. Gladys Cohen was a Pine Valley
She terrified me.
This was 1962, the summer of the 17 year
locusts, the last summer of my life without structure or responsibilities. It
was a time of surreal calm, sandwiched between the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the
assassination of JFK when the children of Pine Valley
With
uncoiffed graying hair and a voice like Ethel Merman, Gladys Cohen was very
different from the other women in this neighborhood. First, she worked, side by side with her
husband in a relatively successful sign painting business. None of the other
mothers did that. Second, she spoke her mind in a booming voice. None
of the other mothers did that either. Their role models, Marilyn Monroe if they
were trashy, Jackie Kennedy if they were classy, spoke in tiny breathy voices
that men had to move in close to hear.
My
mother was more the Jackie than the Marilyn type except that in addition to
being soft spoken arm candy for my father, she was an aspiring domestic
goddess. Our newly built split level home was always immaculate and a full
course dinner fit for a king was routinely served on green Melmac dishes at
6:00 sharp every night. My father was a furniture and appliance salesman and
had decorated the entire house in the French Provincial style and stocked the
kitchen with the latest time-saving electric gadgets so that it looked every
bit as staged as the model house that my parents had fallen in love with two years
before when they sold their post World War II brick row home and traded up for
their piece of the American Dream. My
mother, always the over-achiever ( she had given up a scholarship to the
University of Pennsylvania to marry my father – women, after all, weren’t
supposed to be smarter than their husbands)
actually refused a dishwasher when my father offered her one because she
thought allowing a machine to do the dishes would somehow be cheating. She was
smart enough to permit him to buy her a huge stand alone freezer, making her
the envy of her appliance hungry peers,
who poured through our back door into our basement with their monthly meat orders wrapped and carefully
labeled to be placed on their self-assigned shelves.
If
the women (except for Gladys of course) seemed like cardboard cut-outs from Good
Housekeeping magazine, or pale imitations of Donna Reed or June Cleaver, at
least they were a constant presence in our young lives. The men, on the other
hand were a complete mystery, shadowy figures who came and went at will,
drifting in and out of our lives like the Lone Ranger.
I
can still picture the three of them, an unlikely trio: Bill Rosenzweig, the silver-tongued salesman
who stood five feet six and talked out
of the side of his mouth, Freddie Gorman, the tall, ruggedly handsome plumber with the mysterious
eyes and Dave Braverman the young Philadelphia lawyer –who wore expensive
suits and had a degree from Princeton . These
three very different men were the proud owners of three successive split levels
on Grace Lane ,
and fathers of nine of the children who vied for their attention as they stood
in a tight circle near the end of our asphalt driveway on a hot summer night.
“Hey
Bill,” I heard Dave, say pointing to our house. “I think they made your roof
red so the Commies will know where to bomb first!” The men laughed and laughed as if this were
the funniest thing they had ever heard and I had nightmares for months.
Years
later, I would learn that what Freddie, Bill and Dave had in common was the fact
that they were all cheating on their wives: my father with a woman he met when my
own mother’s Chevvy had hit the would-be mistress' Pontiac
in the Thriftway parking lot.
Bill
Rosenzweig abandoned his family for good on November 11, 1963, two weeks before
Kennedy was killed and everyone’s lives, not just my family’s were turned
upside-down. It took a few more years
for the truth about their husbands to be revealed to the Mrs. Gorman and
Braverman. My mother later told me that my father had blind-sided her -making love to her the very night before he left -- as if everything was as it
always had been.
No wonder she remained immobile, in bed, for the next sixteen months.
In
the days that followed my father’s departure,
as the news of his infidelity spread through the neighborhood, I watched
in still silence as the women of Grace Lane, came marching one by one through
our back door and into our basement to retrieve all of their steaks and chicken
parts from my mother’s freezer. Perhaps they thought that being left was
contagious. Or maybe they were afraid of my mother, now a beautiful single
women, adrift among their ( soon to be revealed as ) philandering husbands.
She, as well as her now fatherless children, became pariahs, shunned by the
community that had once embraced us.
And
during that sad, fearful winter of 1962, only Gladys Cohen, wearing her peculiar costume
and singing her portentous songs, strode up our driveway, knocked on our front
door, and offered her support to my devastated mother.
