I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Read online

  It was the Great Depression, and yet I never remember wanting for anything. I guessed I was the most privileged child in elementary school, because not only did I have beautiful clothes but I also brought the best lunches in my pail: yummy sandwiches, homemade cookies, and fresh fruit. But I had no idea how privileged I was, since my parents and their friends, all part of the well-to-do Hyde Park Jewish community, didn’t talk about money. Mostly of German heritage and entirely irreligious, this insular community didn’t call the clergy at its high Reform temple “Rabbi” but rather “Doctor.” Services at Congregation Sinai were a once-a-year affair on the High Holy Days for my family, and I had never heard of a bar mitzvah. Ours was a proud cultural and intellectual tradition that wholeheartedly embraced the lushness of Christmas.

  Mother might have had to be dragged to temple, but she went all out for Christmas, preparations for which began in September with a trip to the gift show to buy her wrapping paper. The sunroom became the most exciting room in the house from October through December, as she filled it with enough Christmas materials to rival Santa’s workshop. My mother turned wrapping each and every present (and there were a lot of them) into a grand art. She even went so far as to dip the tips of plastic straws in gold sealing wax and tie them in the middle so that they popped open to look like a huge, magnificent chrysanthemum. That was only one element of the production. There was also the cookie baking that started in November. Mother sent to Dallas, Texas, for the elaborate forms for our sugar cookies, which, along with fruitcakes, handmade popcorn trees, and lebkuchen—German gingerbread snowy with confectioners’ sugar—were gifted to friends.

  Mother never cooked—she was too busy smoking—but we always had the most marvelous food. Like all her friends who were married to doctors, lawyers, retailers, and business owners, she didn’t work but ran a household maintained by competent persons. In our apartment on the top floor of 1218 Madison Park, we had a cook and a second girl, who for seven dollars a week lived in, sharing the large maid’s room outfitted with two Murphy beds. (On Thursday nights, the cook’s day off, we delighted in a Chinese-food feast pedaled over from a small local shop.)

  My mother wasn’t a terrific eater. She was basically an eater of sweets, through she wouldn’t admit to it. Our cook, Martha, who had a terrible drinking problem but was a divine baker, filled Mother’s afternoon coffee klatches with schnecken, German sticky buns, and fragrant cinnamon toast that complemented the warm and civilized low part of the day. As sure as four o’clock came every afternoon, so did the rolling tray.

  Daddy, on the other hand, loved food so much that he couldn’t walk into a grocery store without practically buying out the place. He never met a double lamb chop he didn’t adore. Although he was diabetic and supposed to restrict his diet, how many courses we consumed at home! Every night the candelabra illuminated a blue-and-white china relish tray whose compartments were filled with bread, chutney, cottage cheese, celery, carrot sticks, olives, and our own bread-and-butter pickles. We did a lot of pickling in the fall, and the big crocks of brine and marinating Kirby cucumbers sat in the pantry throughout the year. Once we sat down, out came soup, hot bouillon or cream of mushroom garnished with a dollop of whipped cream, and egg timbales. Sometimes herring, in sour cream or German style with beets.

  A natural lefty, I found it awkward when the main course of meat, vegetable, and potatoes was served from a large silver tray on my left by the maid. Although my teachers at school allowed me to write with my left hand, at home I was taught how to serve myself and eat with my right. I struggled through many meals until I mastered using a fork in my left hand and knife in the right. Etiquette demanded nothing less.

  There was always bread on the table, homemade yeast rolls accompanied by butter balls rolled to the right consistency with wooden paddles and topped grandly with a piece of parsley.

  To round it off, dessert. Profiteroles with custard, rhubarb-and-strawberry pies, baked apples with sour cream, homemade cookies—linzer cookies, sandies, butter cookies—really anything as long as it wasn’t store-bought. Heaven forbid. Even though my father’s diabetes prevented him from truly indulging in candy or sweets (though he was known to ruin a perfectly good box of chocolates or a beautiful cake by plunging his hand into it for just a fingerful), he wouldn’t tolerate anything less than homemade.

  Once at a dinner party at a friend’s home, Father took a dig at the quality of the dessert served. “In our home we don’t serve cake from Askow’s,” he teased the hostess, referring to a popular Hyde Park bakery and embarrassing all.

  No one would ever have accused my father of being easy. His photographic memory and obsessive newspaper-reading habit resulted in encyclopedic knowledge and confidence that provided a lot of ammunition for arguments. He spoke his mind whenever and however it directed him. Indeed, my father was the only Republican of all their friends. In the 1936 presidential election, Franklin D. Roosevelt received more than 95 percent of the vote in the Jewish 24th Ward, leading the president to call it “the best ward in the whole country.” Father, so devoted a Republican that when he died my mother received a letter from President Nixon, truly loathed President Roosevelt.

  Mother—my brilliant father’s intellectual peer, who was loved by many and feared by even more for her caustic tongue—saved the mortified hostess who’d made the awful mistake of serving bakery cake by giving it right back to him.

  “Well, Harry, at least they don’t wear short sleeves to dinner,” she said, rolling her big blue eyes and breaking the tension.

  Mother was referring to his peccadillo regarding long sleeves, which he hated so much he had them removed. Mother bought him beautiful shirts from A. Sulka & Company, only to discover when he lifted his arms at a dinner party to cut his prime rib that his cuffs had disappeared. No matter that the shirts came from the preeminent haberdashery, whose loyal customers included the likes of the Duke of Windsor, Clark Cable, Gary Cooper, and countless Rockefellers. He had all their sleeves lopped off.

  Clothes were never a big part of Father’s agenda. My mother was forever coaxing him into buying a new suit, but the extent to which my father shopped involved sneaking into Abercrombie & Fitch to buy the same coat with raglan sleeves he’d owned in another tweed and Brooks Brothers for light blue button-down shirts (of course with the sleeves off) that he felt were perfectly fine for all occasions—even fancy dinners and business meetings.

  While he wasn’t crazy about clothes, he did love his heavy, dark brown British cordovans, which he kept at a high shine. Whatever train station, airport, club, or man on the street he happened upon, he stopped to have his shoes shined. Many a shoeshine boy was tipped very highly. He also owned one of the very first automatic shoe polishers, in which an electrically powered soft red ball rotated and buffed the shoes. He simply adored a perfect shine. I think it made him feel tall, thin, and very well dressed.

  His love of shoes over clothes might have stemmed from his weight problem (after all, no matter how heavy you get, a new pair of shoes will always fit). He refused to take insulin, opting to control his diabetes by dieting. Daddy’s weight went up and down like a yo-yo. Periodically he restricted himself to consommé and coffee, proudly demonstrating how much he’d lost by the newly freed holes in his belt. Then he went back to gorging on triple-cut lamb chops. Even his cordovans couldn’t trump a good meal. He managed to get through all of World War II in only two pairs, because my mother traded our shoe rations to Mr. Kline, the butcher, so we could get Father his lamb chops and maybe a nice roast beef.

  Whether because of my father’s appetite or my mother’s good hiring, our house always smelled as if we were expecting the doorbell to ring. And more often than not, it did. My very social mother and father had a lot of parties where there was lots of good food, lots of drinking, lots of screaming.

  Dressed for bed, I silently watched the raucous cocktail hours where plenty of highballs, martinis, and
even the occasional manhattan were consumed. People say Jewish people don’t drink. Well, these did. I marveled at the glamour of my mother and her friends having a merry old time in their strapless dresses with brooches pinned to the cleavage. (Nowadays everybody under fifty wants to be nude and everyone over fifty covered up like a nun. Whenever I put a strapless evening dress on an older client and hear, “Oh, no, no, no. I have to have sleeves,” I remember all the bosoms and arms of those voluptuous women of my childhood.)

  After cocktails the party moved to the dining room, where the table was covered in one of my mother’s beautiful linens. Mother adored table linens, which she purchased from a man who came to the city once a year with stock specially ordered from Europe. They were embroidered often with flowers, sometimes fruits, in many colors. The theme was carried out in two Steuben horn vases at each end of the table and a large boat-size vessel in the middle filled with flowers or fruit or both, which my mother arranged herself. Every night we ate on linen place mats with matching napkins, but organdy cloths were for big parties.

  While the guests started on egg timbales topped with caviar, I snuck into the butler’s pantry to sip the dregs of the leftover cocktails collected by the maids. Naughty girl. With the pleasant warm feeling spreading from my chest to my head, I returned to my usual industrious self, darting in between the kitchen and cold pantry to help the cook and the second girl get the huge filet of beef with fresh mushrooms; asparagus with hollandaise sauce; and salad of persimmon, watercress, and homemade French dressing out to the table. I, in pajamas and robe, dutifully shadowed the second girl, in her black uniform and organdy apron, until the last of the strawberries Romanoff or swan-shaped meringues that held ice cream and butterscotch sauce (another favorite) had been cleared.

  Although the members of the dinner party cooed at the cuteness of my playing maid, for me this was no game. The kinship I felt to the people who worked in our house went far above what I felt for many of my parents’ friends. My upbringing, strict and sheltered, demanded that I be seen and not heard, always correct. A life of quiet discipline. As an only child in an often-empty house, I took shelter in the cook and the second girl’s gossip about boyfriends or groused over the guests my father invited to dinner without notice. As cakes baked and sauces thickened, I, a small girl who looked like an angel in precious outfits, listened silently without giving any trouble whatsoever. Little pitchers have big ears.

  The warmth and camaraderie meant I spent most of my youth in the kitchen, but there was another place with an opposite form of protection that had the same strong pull. I found a wholly different companionship in closets, which offered up their private comfort for an endless game of dress-up.

  I began in the closet of my dear, chain-smoking nana, whom we visited every Sunday afternoon. It was the highlight of my week: Auntie Mill, Auntie Emmy, and other ladies gathered over strong coffee and delicious coffee cake to dish on their grown children and husbands, reverting to their native German when the conversation became unsuitable for little-girl ears.

  My mother’s mother provided the spiciest content herself. While her sister, my great-aunt Corrine, who wore her waist-length hair in a regal coronet braid twisted around her head and had the most incredible collection of glass paperweights, was the beauty, my square and nearsighted nana did very well with the men (particularly her type—married doctors).

  She was spunky, and loved men back, though it was hard to imagine her ever having loved my grandfather, who had divorced her and married his Christian Scientist secretary, Lenore, just like in the movies. You took your good manners to see my maternal grandfather, Sigmund Freshman, a stern man who in the mid-1920s had produced with his brother Charles a radio called the Freshman Masterpiece. For many American families, it was their first radio, because it cost only $60—also available as a kit for only $17.50! While competing radios went for $75 to $150, the Freshman’s low price was attributed to the tough, if not ruthless, methods the brothers used to drive costs down. (In our home we had much grander radios, lovely consoles that were nearly pieces of furniture, and we listened constantly to Your Hit Parade, Fibber McGee and Molly, Hans von Kaltenborn reading the news, and, best of all, soap operas like The Guiding Light.)

  My visits consisted of my grandfather’s chauffeur, Otis, a southern black gentleman in a peaked cap, leather gauntlets, and a gray uniform that matched the gray car, delivering me to the restaurant in the apartment-hotel where my grandfather lived with Lenore, where I sat very straight and quiet for the duration of the meal, because Papa did not like girls who wiggled.

  Nana, a cigarette forever hanging out of her mouth, was worlds away. She wasn’t like any other grandmothers I knew. She was fun and expansive—she didn’t go out and about a lot but liked to travel to Europe and Hot Springs, Arkansas (mostly on her alimony)—and she was far from perfect. Her hair, which she kept blond, was the bane of her existence, so she changed styles from week to week, which I found terribly exciting. But what she never changed were the peignoirs she wore on her 1890s figure at all hours of the day and night.

  During the Sunday coffee klatches, I faded into the background of disapproving clucks, clinking cups, and the rich smell of coffee. Then I happily disappeared into her closet.

  Secluded in my own world, the ladies’ clacking reduced to a comforting murmur, I opened the doors of an armoire to reveal Nana’s impressive collection of negligees (my mother bought new ones for her wherever she went shopping). My chest thrilled at the image of all those slinky, silky things. Pearly cream, moody silver, petal pink, they hung in perfect array like impractical soldiers. After running my hand over the delicious materials, I pulled one out by instinct: a white silk negligee that zipped up to an accordion-pleat top.

  In my game of dress-up, there was never any plan or story line. My nana’s negligees recalled the seductive screen sirens of the day, but I wasn’t pretending to be Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, or Norma Shearer. Mine was the methodical enjoyment of an only child. I didn’t even bother too much with the mirror—in fact, I really dislike mirrors of all kinds and am known for leaving the house with my buttons askew and my clothes inside out. The pleasure was simply getting into the garment and seeing what happened. The game was wearing this and that, sensing how the silhouette slimmed with a twisted rope belt or the hem seemed to lengthen with Nana’s satin boudoir mules. The game was putting it all on.

  The game was also private. I never would have thought to parade out before my nana and my aunties, and although they knew what I was up to, I would have been mortified to be caught in the act. Similarly, as soon as my mother went out for the evening, I went straight into her closet.

  Inside my parents’ bedroom, she had two enormous walk-in closets where everything was tidy, tucked away, and inviting. There was soft carpeting underfoot and the smell of lily of the valley in the air, my mother’s scent. The dresses hung on one side and blouses and skirts on the other, divided by a marble-topped dresser with delicate perfume bottles and atomizers gathered on a mirrored tray. Inside its fabric-lined drawers, all manner of treasures nestled: stockings, underwear, and scarves. I inhaled lily of the valley and Joy from empty bottles she kept deep in her drawers after using up all the perfume.

  A staggering number of kid gloves lay immaculate in a “glove drawer,” as though my mother had just bought them and not worn them to drive, have lunch at the Drake Hotel, or go shopping at Marshall Field’s. Even the white kid dinner gloves looked new, thanks to their rigorous cleaning regimen in which they were gently rubbed with a washrag doused with cleaning fluid to remove spots, blown into, periodically turned on a Turkish towel to dry, then smoothed down.

  My mother’s robes took up quite a bit of space. She loved them as much as Nana did her negligees. The minute Mother was in the door, off came her clothes and on went a dressing gown. The lovely ones were worn to dinner. The wraps were for lying down or after the bath.

  I trod l
ightly when I came to her handkerchief boxes for hankies made by nuns living just outside Chicago. Ribbons kept the intricately embroidered quilted satins, taffetas, and linens pressed together nice and flat—and who was I to destroy all of Isabelle’s precious handiwork? Separately, large grosgrain ribbon similarly kept packets of six folded nightgowns. The firm order of so many delicate things made an enormous impression on me.

  The one area I ignored was hats—although it wasn’t easy, since there were so many. My mother and her hats. She adored and wore all manner of them, from fedoras with great big feathers to doll hats with small veils of nylon netting. Many were made by Bes-Ben, run by the fanciful milliner Benjamin B. Green-Field, otherwise known as “Chicago’s Mad Hatter.” One would never have suspected that a man so uninhibited in his use of lobsters, clocks, firecrackers, skyscrapers, doll furniture, and even cigarette packages to decorate his hats was the son of an ironworker. From such humble beginnings, he created a business with his sister Bessie that catered to celebrities such as Lucille Ball and Marlene Dietrich, as well as all of Chicago society. His strange and quirky little hats were perfect for Mother. Changing with the seasons, she wore a cloche covered in cherries with her mink in December and a confection of silk flowers that looked like a wedding centerpiece on her head for spring. My father, crazy for Mother in chapeaus, encouraged her purchases, even though the hats at Mr. Green-Field’s shop on posh North Michigan Avenue started at a pricey $37.75 and went all the way up to an insane $1,000. (Mr. Green-Field was no snob, however. Every summer he held a midnight sale where hat lovers could buy his creations for as little as $5 until 2:00 A.M., when he began simply tossing them out the front door to committed bargain hunters.)