The Lucille Conundrum

Lucille died of pneumonia last week. After my mom’s father died, she moved to Hemet, California, to be near her sister and her friend Virginia, but her sister died almost 15 years ago, and Virginia moved to Florida a few years after that.

Lucille was cremated, and her ashes were sent to somewhere in Orange County. “Why Orange County?” I asked my mom.

“I don’t know why Orange County,” my mom said. She repeated the last three words as I did.

“What does it matter?” I heard my dad say in the background.*

I said it didn’t matter, but it was curious. Why did Lucille stay alone in Hemet those last years? Why did she refuse to come back up to Los Angeles? Was she having an affair with my grandfather back in the 1940s, when she was hired to be my mom’s younger sister’s nurse?

It’s odd that the only photo I have of Lucille is this one. My mom is standing at the right with the cute white overcoat (this may have been around the one time I know of when Los Angeles had bona fide snow). She’s about eight-years-old. My aunt Barbara, a year older, looks like she could be Lucille’s daughter, but Lucille looked like a goy version of my Grandma Birdie — tall, thin, minimal chin. This photo was taken of Birdie at Santa Monica beach sometime in the 1930s.

On Thursday, I’m going with my mom and her younger sister Judy to Hemet to go through Lucille’s things for photos and anything else “that has a memory,” as my mom put it.

* * *

* This comment was unsurprising. Back in 1994, Dad failed to tell me my grandfather (his father) had been in the hospital for two weeks and was dying. If I may quote myself…

I missed Rosh Hashanah and my first week of film school classes to attend the Telluride Film Festival Student Program. The following weekend, distracted by my classes and the relentless heat, I made a U-turn into a mini-van and gashed up my head. I didn’t want to worry my grandmother, so I ignored the Post-It note on my desk written in black sharpie that shouted, “Call Grandma and Papa!” until my mother came over for the duffel she had lent me two weeks earlier.

Mom pointed at the note, which by now had a dozen other things scribbled around it, and said, “I’ve been meaning to call Sue myself.”

I dialed. Speaking with a brightness that goes in tandem with guilt, I said, “Hi, Grandma! How are you? How’s Papa?”

“He’s at Cedars,” Grandma stammered. “Didn’t Walter tell you?”

I looked at my mother as I said, “No, he didn’t.” Stupidly, I handed the phone to her. They spoke briefly, a conversation that had no relation whatsoever to the news.

“You didn’t know about Aaron?” Mom said cautiously as she hung up.

“Dad didn’t tell me.”

“He’s been there for almost two weeks,” Mom replied as if the length of Papa’s stay had placed the onus on me to be omniscient. “I’ll make sure that Greg and Jon know, in case they don’t.”

Two days later, my younger brother Jon called, voice cracking, asking if I knew Papa was dying. “No one told me he was even sick. How long have you known?”

I phoned my parents. “What were you guys thinking?” I yelled at Mom, who was unlucky enough to have answered. “After what happened with me?”

“I’m not going to call every goddamn person just because my dad’s dying!” Dad raged in the background, as if three phone calls to his three children would lead down a slippery slope to everybody.

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Lucille, memory token, Robyn Weisman, memory, death, conundrum

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Grandma Sue just turned 98 on April 7th (although her birth certificate says she was born on May 2, 1910, and she says she was born during Passover that year, which only ran until May 1, 1910, so this is the subject of a whole ‘nother story), and she still plays bridge, listens to the Metropolitan Opera every Saturday morning during the season, reads The New Yorker weekly, and tries to walk 500 steps a day.

At her birthday party Saturday night (incidentally, my grandfather Aaron, her husband, would have turned 100 years old that night, along with Bette Davis), she attributed her longevity to walking and to not eating potato chips because they’re junk. The attendees went briefly silent, realizing that their lust for the fried potato would be the death of them, but anyway…

Grandma can certainly be repetitive (the usual: Have you been eating? Do you have any friends? Are you putting money into the bank?), but in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that she repeats certain anecdotes to me with regularity.

The most notable one (and the one she has repeated the most lately—although my mind may have just latched onto this one and forgotten some of the others) happened over 90 years ago.

Grandma was seven years old, attending a public school on the Lower East Side. One morning in early November 1917, Grandma’s teacher showed up to Grandma’s second-grade class in a state of euphoria.

“We finally have a homeland!” she told the students. Then she provided an overview of Balfour Declaration, which stated British support for a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

Grandma was terrified. “I didn’t want to be shipped off to the desert. I wanted to stay in New York! I thought they were going to ship all the Jews out there, and I didn’t want to go!”

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Balfour Declaration, memory, memory token, New York, Grandma Sue