Burning the Days Read Free

by the Saturday Evening Post.
    This marvelous uncle, when I was no longer a child and had gone off to school, came home one day complaining he was dizzy and was put to bed. He was sent to the hospital—“I don’t think they operated,” my aunt said vaguely—and a month or so later he ran off with his secretary. My mother, telling me the news, explained that he was ill, had a brain tumor, and had been taken to an asylum. In fact he and the secretary were in his mother’s house on the shore, though not long afterwards, perhaps in some way close to the invented story, he died. I do not know where he is buried.
    Families of no importance—so much is lost, entire histories, there is no room for it all. There are only the generations surging forward like the tide, the years filled with sound and froth, then being washed over by the rest. That is the legacy of the cities.
    “You know what Poppa’s father was?” my mother asks.
    “He had a linen factory,” replies my aunt.
    “He was a brewmaster.”
    No, no. They argue on about him and the uncle, the dentist or photographer, who came to visit in the early 1900s but didn’t like America and went back to Europe.
    “To Frankfurt,” my aunt says.
    “Moscow,” corrects my mother.
    The tree is only dimly outlined, the arbor consanguinitatis. Their father as a youth lived with his grandmother because his parents were divorced, and he was sent to America because of some business with the serving girl. And so, blindly, he escaped the wars and the wave of unparalleled destruction that came with them. In America he married a woman whose mother, my great-grandmother, had been married to a Polish prince named Notés.
    “A prince?”
    “Maybe he was a general,” my mother concedes. “Anyway he was important.” In her seventies she was still handsome andhaughty, woe to the unsuspecting waiter or shopgirl. A stylish charcoal portrait done when she was in her forties—fine features, faint rings below the eyes, long graceful neck—was still very close to her appearance. She read the newspaper every day, including all the advertisements. Each day she walked two miles.
    My mother first saw my father, a photograph of him, at any rate, in the newspaper. She was eighteen. Later, entirely by chance, they were introduced. Her parents liked him very much, her mother especially. They were married in Baltimore in 1924. It was in the morning. They came back to Washington and had lunch and the new groom left for New York to go back to work. He returned a month later.
    I was the only child, born early on a June morning of the hottest day imaginable and delivered by a doctor who I later fantasized might have been William Carlos Williams—the time and location are about right—but who was in fact named Carlisle. The evening brought relief from the heat in the form of a terrific storm. I would like to think I somehow remember it and that my love of all storms proceeded from that first one, but more likely I was sleeping, wearied from the passage, my young mother—she was twenty-one—weary too, but immensely happy for everything that was over and all that lay ahead. Thunder shook the windows, the rain rattled down. The year was 1925, the hospital, Passaic General.
    Among my other uncles, one owned a factory that made acoustic materials. This uncle, Maurice, was tall and sardonic and had a waxed moustache. At one point he also had a racy convertible, a Cord, parked, in my memory, at an angle to the curb on the street in New York where we lived, a crosstown street, then as now exceptionally wide. He was an engineer of some kind. He and my aunt Sylvia had met in Atlantic City, but the factory, which failed in the Depression, was near Philadelphia and it was there that they lived. They had a house, a maid, cars. They went away every summer. The sisters never visited, they hated him so.
    “He never really did anything after 1932,” my aunt said of him.
    “A lowlife,” my mother