Oral History

The past is obdurate -- obstinate, unyielding, intransigent -- reflects Maine schoolteacher Jake Appling in Stephen King's engrossing new novel 11/22/63 each time he emerges from the pantry of Al Templeton's diner and finds himself transported to a 1958 world of soda shops, tail-finned automobiles, and sock hops. Knowledge of the future is no guarantee of one's ability to alter events -- even to produce a more desirable outcome, such as preventing a drunken man's brutal slaying of his wife and three children or the cold-blooded assassination of the nation's thirty-fifth president.

In fact, concludes Jake, after his initial attempt to set things right, to spare the lives of the Dunning family, as the cohort of individuals ultimately impacted by his idealistic intrigues expands, so proportionately do the obstacles strewn in his path seem to multiply.

The problem -- the sobering reality that shadows Jake like the ubiquitous cigarette smoke of a bygone era before staggering him with a hacking cough -- is that "life turns on a dime." Every act has a consequence, no matter how insignificant it might appear -- even a butterfly flapping its wings on some distant continent. While time travel is a fantasy -- in spite of this kingly tour de force, which almost convinces us otherwise as the master weaves his mesmerizing and artful tale -- the labyrinthine confluences that have brought each of us to the present are not.

For example, my father Bert was adopted by his aunt, Rae Schewel and her husband Ben at the age of two when his birth mother was abandoned by his father and left without resources. Pride and self-delusion deterred his surrogate parents from ever disclosing his origins, and it wasn't until he enlisted in the Air Force upon graduating from college that he learned he had been born in St. Louis and that he had an older sister who had grown up in an orphanage.

He met my mother Helene at the home of one of his Lynchburg aunts -- Lily Schewel -- a kindred spirit whom he persuaded to host a mixer for him and all the Jewish girls enrolled at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Helene was in her second year there, having transferred from Carnegie Technical College in Pittsburgh at the behest of a cousin-in-law.

Lily was rotund, jovial, effusive, and apparently more inclined to entertaining than Rae, which was surprising since the latter was surely determined that her son meet and marry a nice Jewish girl. While Lily's culinary expertise paled in comparison to Rae's, she could call upon the services of her "help" -- to use the current vernacular -- Eloise.

Out of four eligible candidates, only two showed up: my mother and her roommate, Elaine.

"Don't get too excited. I think he's already taken," said Elaine, having heard whispers that Bert was engaged to a Savannah belle, Bobbie, whom he had squired while working in a furniture store there, prepping for immersion into the family business.

Some weeks later Elaine invited her current beau to Lynchburg to escort her to a fancy holiday soiree and instructed him to bring a companion for Helene. When the friend backed out at the last minute, Elaine implored Helene to call Bert, whose impending marriage must have been merely a rumor, as he had been sighted at a dance in the arms of another Macon coed, Patsy.

"I've never asked a boy out and I'm not going to do it now," said Helene, hands on hips, valiantly asserting her sense of propriety. "You have to," insisted Elaine. "Otherwise I'll be stuck alone with my date." She dragged Helene to the pay phone adjacent to their dorm room -- life turns on a dime -- and strong-armed her into dialing the number.

Oral history doesn't reveal if it was love at second sight, but the subsequent courtship was as swift and decisive as the proverbial whirlwind; within a year, the two were married and planning to settle in at the Columns. Helene had every good intention of ambling across the Avenue to Randolph-Macon to complete her degree, until Bert called her one day while she was visiting her parents in Pennsylvania and informed her that the starter Cape Cod he had just purchased on Greenway Court was probably too far for a pedestrian commute.

The perspicuous Mr. King also tells us that the past harmonizes. Twenty-four years later I signed a contract for a trim split-level abode on Club Drive while my first wife Betty was similarly absent.

"What do you think attracted him to you -- besides your incandescent charm, stunning good looks, and smoldering sex appeal?" I asked my mother. "I was a good dancer," she says, "and he liked to dance."

With two fractured marriages in my rear-view mirror, I profess the utmost admiration for those couples for whom "till death do us part" is no hollow slogan, including my parents, whose fifty-three year union was a more a testament to perseverance than patience -- at least from the perspective of an innocent bystander rudely exposed to overheated shouting matches. My father had a volatile temper that could erupt like a thundercloud -- and just as quickly subside -- while my mother was no shrinking violet, having endured a childhood dysfunctional enough to elicit this tribute from one of her aunts: "You are strong like your father."

Her father, Jack Parish, a handsome man with heavy jowls and a gentle smile, may have been strong, but in other respects he was, according to his brother Abe who spied him hanging out at the pool hall, "a poor total loss." Jack's first retail men's store in Altoona, Pennsylvania, folded in 1929, when my mother was four. Abe, a successful overall manufacturer, set him up in business again, promising to hand over complete ownership in good time. Three years later, seeing that Jack was still just drawing a salary, two brothers-in-law, Hyman and Iz Brody, proprietors of their own thriving department store in Indiana, Pennsylvania, packed Jack off to nearby Kittanning and agreed to guarantee his credit for yet another "Parish Men's Shop."

Jack barely made a living. Probably his heart wasn't in retailing. His true passion was baseball, at which he was apparently proficient enough to star on a semi-professional team and garner a minor league contract offer. When his bearded Orthodox father forbade him from accepting it -- playing (or working) on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath, was heresy -- Jack found good use for the manual dexterity that had enabled him to scoop up ground balls and smash line drives by altering his customers' suits.

Could Jack have exaggerated his athletic prowess? A World War I veteran, he was fond of brandishing a rusty sword he had swiped from a fallen enemy soldier during the ferocious Battle of Argonne Forest -- a fanciful tale, my mother learned years later. Jack had fallen ill shortly after making landfall, and had spent the duration of his tour of duty confined to a hospital far from the front lines.

Years of poor hygiene caught up with Jack suddenly and sadly at the age of sixty-five. He went to a traveling dentist to have thirteen teeth pulled, was administered a heavy dose of sodium pentathol, suffered a presumed heart attack while unconscious, and, turning blue, grievously expired -- pure 1950's Alfred Hitchcock sensationalism. My parents were vacationing in Mexico -- courtesy of General Electric Appliance Company -- when they received the appalling news.

Helene's mother, Rae Parish -- stout, buxom, always a little unsteady, but soft-spoken and kind, at least to her grandchildren -- was psychologically fragile, and her husband's futility most likely pushed her into manic depression. She suffered two nervous breakdowns in the early years of her marriage, the first coinciding with Jack's first store closing and the second with the family's relocation from Altoona to Kittanning. Although this was generation when couples clung together in spite of discord, disillusion, and mutual disgust, she considered leaving Jack, but, after consulting with her adolescent daughter, decided that he lacked a support system and would be devastated by a divorce.

Her parents' emotional and financial turmoil, while traumatic and deep-seated -- she remembers so much eighty years later -- were like an anvil of adversity for Helene, fashioning a character resilient and flinty. She loved her Curtain Elementary School and piano teacher in Altoona, from which she was summarily uprooted when her mother was initially institutionalized and farmed out to her Aunt Fanny and Uncle Max Finkelstein in Greensburg; it was a year of torment.

Her cousin Sara Louise showed her how to write her name in script -- it wasn't taught at Curtain until the fourth grade -- but that didn't help her with the rest of her schoolwork nor enable her to escape the wrath of the "horrible teacher" who humiliated her in front of the class by scolding: "You wrote your name, stupid."

After a brief respite back in Altoona, Jack's new venture took her to Kittanning, another disappointment. "My parents didn't give a shit where I went," says Helene, in an uncharacteristic burst of profanity. This time it was a two-room amalgamation of eight grades -- four on either side of a hallway. A better school was a couple of miles away across a bridge, where she could have transferred had she not been daunted by the long trek home for lunch. "Why didn't anyone think of packing my lunch?" she asks rhetorically.

In Kittanning she hopscotched from one residence to another, from the Applewood Development to Water Street to North McCain Street to Locust Street, as the family chased upward mobility or had a rental property sold out from under them. When Rae's father, Pa Brody, dangled a carrot of $5000 for her to build a house of her own, she consulted again with Helene, eleven at the time, and then spurned the offer, stubborn pride, in retrospect, trumping common sense.

If she was precocious enough to advise her mother on such serious matters, is it not surprising that she considered herself old enough to appropriate her parents' car for underage joyrides -- prompting one of Kittanning's finest to observe, five years later when she became legal, how well she drove for someone who had her license for only two months?

The past harmonizes. Helene had a cousin, Burton Parish, who like Bert Schewel was adopted by his aunt. Both Helene and Bert had grandfathers, Pa Brody and Pa Schewel, who were widowed and subsequently remarried. All nine of Pa Schewel's children were borne of his first wife. Pa Brody fathered three of his eight by his second wife, Dora, a classic evil stepmother, whom the first five (which included Helene's mother Rae) branded "the old lady."

Both Helene and Bert were only children; their grandfathers' progeny yielded a plethora of first cousins who served as surrogate siblings. None of Helene's lived with her in Kittanning, yet she forged lasting bonds with the Brodys of Indiana, Donald, Milton, Leonard, Morton, and Bobby, sons of Hyman and Iz; Barbara and Buddy Silverman of Newcastle, children of Aunt Rose; and Sara Louise and Buzzy Finkelstein, with whom she spent that "terrible year" in Greensburg. I met them all, and some of their children, for the first and, for most, the only time at my Bar Mitzvah fifty years ago.

She was probably closest to Sara Louise, who with her big blue eyes and perfect nose was, she says, "the most beautiful girl I ever laid eyes on." Helene thought she would be on "easy street' when she married Lou Rose, whose father owned a chain of elite ladies' clothing stores called The Bon Ton. She received the shock of her life -- that is until all three of her children would one day deliver the same joyless tidings -- when she called Aunt Fanny years later and Sara Louise answered the phone with the stunning announcement "I just left my husband." It seemed that Lou's trips with his female buyer had progressed (or regressed) from business to pleasure.

Sara Louise's brother Herbert, nicknamed Buzzy, was eleven days older than Helene, and, "Boy, did he lord it over me," she says. A "real devil," he teased her mercilessly, ignoring her pleas to "be nice." Remembered as a condom salesman, he died in his early fifties, a victim of mental instability and drug abuse.

His mother Fanny -- a more harsh, stocky, infallible, and intimidating version of her sister Rae -- was the matriarch, "the boss," of the Brody family. When Jack Parish died, she took command, instructing helpless Rae that she would bury him in a family plot in Greensburg, where she could join him when her time came -- a grand design she could not consummate from the grave as my grandmother now rests beside my father in a Madison Heights cemetery. Aunt Fanny's domineering demeanor roiled her own marriage; referring to her husband Max, she issued this order to Sara Louise: "Don't you dare cry at his funeral."

While Helene's high school years were more placid, suffused with routine transitory friendships, intermittent romantic entanglements, and surreptitious smoking experimentation, she never wholly embraced Kittanning, her sojourn there too peripatetic and too perilous for her ever to regard it as a cozy refuge. Would the anchor she longed for be found south of the Mason-Dixon line?

As gloomy as Kittanning was, at least it was in the north, where the rich dark soil of Western Pennsylvania far surpassed in beauty and fertility the muddy red clay of Central Virginia, where chefs seasoned their concoctions with something besides salt, fat, and Crisco, where one could buy a drink in a restaurant, and where motorists knew the purpose of an accelerator. One of Helene's uncles probably articulated her own sentiments when he characterized her provincial hometown as not just "the sticks" but "the stinks" -- a rather severe condemnation when one considers that Kittanning was no urban mecca and that Helene's parents were now living in a house that faced the railroad tracks.

Such pseudo-sophisticated disparagement stemmed from a culturally-ingrained stereotype of the south which highlighted bogus and illusory disparities. Helene says she was amazed to see black moviegoers excommunicated to the balcony, yet acknowledges only one black in her high school class, whom she felt sorry for because she had no friends. And it didn't take long for her to adopt the local mores and avail herself of low-priced domestic help. I suspect the 1940's discriminatory practices which prevented Bert from purchasing a home in a certain Lynchburg neighborhood because he was Jewish were not confined to the south.

Helene admits there were moments in those early days when she regretted asking Bert to that dance. He was absent much of the time, working six days a week, figuring out the furniture business, navigating a maze of six employed family members, and, always a raconteur, after hours holding court, cocktail in hand (strictly byol), at the old Blue Dahlia on Bedford Avenue or at Oakwood Country Club.

She broadened her cooking skills; her mother had taught her how to prepare only one meal: spaghetti. "It will last you two nights," she told her.

She had a mother-in-law, also named Rae (the past harmonizes), who, doting over her only son, was loath to sever the umbilical cord. Little Rae -- she had a sister-in-law, Big Rae Finkel -- was petite, vivacious, loquacious, overbearing, and meddlesome, and imagined her parental role had doubled rather than diminished. Helene wanted to wallpaper her bathroom; Rae insisted she paint it. When the young couple failed to invite her to a dinner party, she showed up anyway.

Helene found solace in a large, vibrant Jewish community which included other newlywed women who had also recently moved to the area. Her best friend was a Philadelphia native, Zelda, whose husband Henry owned a men's store. The two would shop, have lunch together, attend Elk's Club dances, and commiserate over their banishment to this southern wilderness. "I nearly died when she moved away," she says.

Her other outlet was golf, which she took up in 1950 after my sister Donna was born. Having quit the game myself five times, I'm not sure what psychological benefits it offers. Perhaps she inherited enough hand-eye coordination from her bat-swinging father to develop a more competent, consistent stroke than I ever could and thus overcome the persistent embarrassment of hooks, slices, dribblers, and outright whiffs. Certainly it was an avenue to social opportunities, introducing her to a number of lifelong friends, most of whom she has survived.

Helene's true proficiency at this frustrating sport remains a well-guarded secret. Her habitual response to the question, "How's your game?" echoes my own when I am asked about business conditions: "Terrible." As for bridge, a less taxing alternative pastime at her advanced age, she says, after forty perplexing years, she's finally unearthed the secret: "Concentrate."

"Those were the slavery days," says Helene. Here was her family's furniture store well-stocked with washers, dryers, and freezers, and yet she had nary a one. (I'm a little skeptical of this protest of poverty, since our household was the first on our street to own a color television.) She claims credit for Schewel executives driving company cars, which freed up one for her when she finally convinced Bert (and his father) to implement the perk. Her best source of spending money was her father-in-law Ben, who used to slip a few dollars her way when they went to the movies together.

She more than made up for all those years of deprivation. The turning point was 1958, when Bert coughed up enough credit -- $50,000 -- to enable her to build the house of her dreams -- the 3800 square foot ranch I now live in on the corner of Elk and Belfield. The birth of my brother that same year necessitated larger living quarters, and although she claims it was her father's death that precipitated her pregnancy (she named Jack after him), is it not conceivable that she harbored an ulterior motive? She pored over every detail with her architect and contractor -- I'm surprised they didn't wilt under the scrutiny -- while my father, probably content to remain on Greenway Court, kept his eye on business. Although the design is a 1950's relic, this signature creation is convenient, comfortable, and functional, and boasts as one of its prominent amenities one of the few carports in town.

Since Helene is now ensconced only one block away in the elegant duplex she was able to customize from its original cookie-cutter floor plan, she regularly cruises her BMW X-3 by her piece de resistance on her way to a bridge game or the grocery store, and can't resist detouring for a meticulous inspection should she espy a strange vehicle in the driveway -- unannounced intrusions that annoyed my ex-wife to no end, so much so that she finally moved out two years ago. That wasn't the only reason, although it does underscore my poor judgment in nesting us in a house not entirely her own.

Once Helene realized that, with a little feminine persuasiveness, she could have the best of everything, like a Pennsylvania coal miner's daughter who has just won the lottery, she raised the bar on conspicuous consumption. From some mysterious reservoir -- or maybe it was just the product of a burgeoning financial wherewithal -- there sprang to life an exquisitely refined taste -- in jewelry, furnishings, art, clothes, shoes, and accessories, all of which put my minimalistic needs to shame, as she never fails to point out.

Because not only must Helene wear Mephisto shoes, model a Rolex watch, drink Chivas Regal scotch, gratify her sensitive palate at Whole Foods in Charlottesville, have her teeth fixed in Richmond, and travel to Miami for her facial enhancements, so must every other person, especially family members, if they have a modicum of sense.

No furniture store or catalogue ever contains the exact piece she wants. Desperately seeking some rare lucite lamps to complete her living room decor, at the age of eighty-six, she is prepared to drive two-and-a-half hours to High Point, park a mile from the Market, and wander through acres of showrooms. Why not? She's probably been there more times than I have, and certainly deserves a permanent gold pass.

Helene is having some trouble with her emails -- she sends and receives about six a week -- and is convinced that only the newest Apple Mac can rectify the problem. Every time Sony introduces a bigger television screen, she's got to have it. When bottom-drawer refrigerator-freezers came into vogue, she immediately switched. Exasperated by $4-a-gallon gas, she considered trading her BMW for a Honda with better mileage -- until, after calculating her fuel usage based on her driving 6000 miles a year, I offered to buy her gas for the rest of her life if she paid me the difference in price.

"They missed a few," she said with authority, after thumbing through a book I gave her, One Thousand Places to See before You Die. After having cruised, caravaned, or flown by conventional means to most of them, she hopped aboard the Concorde for an around-the-world excursion, in fourteen days, the only way to travel, she said, managing to duplicate the adventure one more time before sudden tragedy terminated supersonic transport for the foreseeable future.

Her husband's aversion to travel -- except by automobile to Myrtle Beach -- never inhibited her own wanderlust. In fact, having cultivated a fiery streak of independence, after a proper period of grieving, she embarked on the widowed stage of her life with courage and gusto, content to go her own way, rejecting all overtures of male companionship.

Now, she says, her days of international globe-trotting may be over. Her last trip -- two years ago, at the age of eighty-four, to Antarctica -- stretched the limit of her endurance. "It's for a younger person," she said, peering into my sixty-year-old eyes, as she described the turbulent seas of the Drake Passage, the precarious tender transports, the rocky terrain, and the steep shorelines that were too treacherous for her to climb. New York City by bus is still manageable, although traipsing through Times Square at night amongst thousands of other crazed sightseers -- which is where she found herself last month -- can be harrowing. Fortunately, her Dominican grand-daughter-in-law, Patricia, was there to lend her arm for moral and physical support. "I love Nanee!" she texted me.

Yes, Nanee was the name she chose for herself at the birth of her first grandchild thirty-six years ago, Grandma and Nana too indicative of old age, she says, or maybe they just evoked some unpleasant memories.

Besides bridge and golf, Helene discovered another avocation late in life -- philanthropy. Having been advised by her attorney and her children that she could afford to give away a substantial portion of her modest estate without materially impacting her standard of living (or theirs), she proceeded to disburse over fifteen years approximately $3 million -- to such important causes as Centra Health, Randolph College, the YMCA, Amazement Square, the Salvation Army, New Vistas School, the United Way, and the United Jewish Appeal. In recognition of her generosity, in 2002 she was named Philanthropist of the Year by the local Association of Fund Raising Professionals.

In one respect, she hasn't slowed down -- hosting the family for dinner on special occasions, at which the number of attendees seems to shrink every year as more grandchildren move farther from home. Still, she lovingly prepares her Whole Foods extravaganza weeks ahead of time and freezes it, lays out the proper number of place settings in her immaculate dining/living room (always bemoaning the lack of an accurate head count), supervises her "help" with an eagle eye, and never sits during the entire meal.

If she is, in my brother's well-chosen words, "an expert on everyone else's life," perhaps she's earned the right, so remarkably spry is she at eighty-six. While it's tempting to dismiss her unsolicited advice on clothes (Joseph Bank is a cheap store.), furniture (Who picked this color?), and physicians (I made you an appointment in Richmond.) as typical maternal (and mature) presumption, it's difficult to ignore the healthy longevity harvested from her disciplined lifestyle -- no sodium, sugar, butter, eggs, cheese (or flavor) and only one scotch a day, down from two.

Her diet continues to hold top priority in her circumscribed universe. She has forbidden her children to dispatch her to Westminster-Canterbury should she no longer be capable of caring for herself. "The food there is atrocious," she says.

One can excuse her occasional cantankerousness, stubbornness, and reprimands. She never asks for sympathy. Oh, that we all should age so gracefully.