Three Unforgettable Relatives

Yesterday I sat through Joel and Ethan Coen’s recently released film, “A Serious Man.” At 1 hour and 45 minutes, it was excruciatingly long. Despite the film’s humorous moments, I found it painful to see a schlemiel of a physics professor in Minnesota, played by Michael Stuhlberg, searching for God as he copes with the demands of a dysfunctional family and no friends to compensate.

Earlier this week, I heard a quote that made me chuckle: “Friends are God’s way of compensating for relatives.” A cursory Internet research failed to yield the source of that quotation. But it occurs to me that the occasional pain and embarrassment inflicted by the mere knowledge that one has bloodlines going to some very wacky people offers a lot more fodder for story-telling than one's friends.

With that in mind, I introduce you to three of my maternal relatives, none of whom are alive to defend themselves:

(1) Aunt Catherine – My mother’s older sister, Aunt Catherine’s real name had been Sylvia. Amid concerns about anti-Semitism while job-hunting during the Great Depression, she assumed the identity of Catherine King, and it stuck.

Catherine was married to Marty, and the two of them and their two kids lived in a garden apartment in Bayside. When Dad learned they were getting divorced, he said that Marty, who worked for Seagram’s, seemed like too much of a schlemiel to be having an affair.

(My reaction was different. At age 8 I’d been deposited in Bayside for the day while Mom and Dad went house hunting, and I thought I was witnessing scenes from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?") Dad later said Catherine was named as the “correspondent” in the divorce papers of her tennis partner and second husband, a guy who owned an industrial cleaning company. When that marriage failed, she titillated the family by reportedly taking up with her tennis coach, a guy half her age.

(2) Aunt Pearl – Her first marriage to Moe, a dentist from Syracuse, New York was annulled after just a few months. Aside from the fact that she been 18 at the time, very beautiful and endowed like Madmen's Christina Hendricks, nobody ever offered me a satisfactory explanation of what really happened. (Dad once alluded to the fact that Moe only wanted the opportunity to “sleep” with Pearl.)

She later married a good-natured guy named Irving who ran a Photostatting business while she worked as a legal secretary. Dad took great glee in telling us that that the boss Pearl idolized had his license to practice law suspended for a period of time, as reported in some professional journal.

A social climber who wanted only the best for her daughter, a kid bright enough to get into a prestigious magnet school before anybody coined the term, Pearl had great marital ambitions for her daughter. These ambitions were tempered only by the fact that her daughter was plagued by facial eczema.

When Pearl ultimately became the mother-in-law of a son-in-law born to a woman who had been the second wife of a well-to-do boss, Pearl was elated. Just one fly in the ointment . . . Pearl was outraged to see her son-in-law watching a Thanksgiving football game on TV when she felt he should be completing his doctoral thesis so that her daughter could give up her job and start making babies.

(3) Uncle Ben – During the Great Depression, Mom’s 2nd oldest brother was a cop in Harlem. He reportedly bridled when his mother insisted that he arrest a guy on the beach in Coney Island wearing a bathing suit that exposed more of him than she felt decent people deserved to see.

Uncle Ben was divorced from the mother of his child, Leon. Feeling a need to make excuses for the scandal of divorce, Mom said that Ben was very young at the time, and that Leon’s mother had lied about being a lot older than Ben.

He once came to dinner at our tiny apartment on 81st street in Jackson Heights, and my brother and I were excited to meet this glamorous dinner guest wearing a holster. I’m not sure whether his trip to Mexico had come in connection with getting a quickie divorce, but I remember he brought Mom a souvenir, silver candy dish.

After retiring from the NYPD, Uncle Ben went to work selling office equipment for IBM, and remarried a sweet woman named Carmen. After she died, he took up playing polo in Prospect Park. Dad thought a guy in his ‘70’s had no business having that much fun. Though he didn’t quite say it this way, I think Dad believed that when Uncle Ben was thrown from his horse, sustaining serious head injuries, he had nobody to blame but his own mishegas.