1968

Sidney sat down on one of the chaise lounges around the public swimming pool. He carefully chose his seat to leave an empty chair between himself and a woman dressed in an old fashioned summer dress of a kind rarely seen anymore, except on the very old, and a light sweater that he would have said was completely unnecessary, as it was a very warm day and she was sitting fully in the sun. Lemi heaved his yellow bulk onto the end of the chair and laid his head on Sidney’s lap, sighing as Sidney began to scratch his head. The woman was crocheting very rapidly with a tiny needle and cotton thread in a shade of pale pink that Sidney associated with Easter. On her other side, several of the chaises were occupied by a group of women, who were somewhat younger, and chattered loudly in a mixture of English, Yiddish and German. The crocheting woman rarely looked up from her work, although Sidney saw her smile blankly when the group next to her laughed particularly loud. Every so often, the one nearest to her would turn and offer her a hard candy or a handful of grapes, but each time, the older woman shook her head silently and held up her work as an indication that she could not risk handling anything that might stain the delicate thread.

Sidney watched for several minutes, turning back and forth to keep an eye on Rebecca who was swimming in the pool with some other children. He felt confident that she was safe. The child swam like the proverbial fish and had no fear of water. He felt this was his doing because, when she was younger and they still lived in Manhattan, he would take her to the public pool near their apartment building to escape the oppressive summer heat. The pool was always crowded with noisy, aggressive teenagers who made serious swimming impossible, so he would stand in chest deep water facing the side and hold the child, who was barely more than an infant at the time, so she could splash in the water protected from the boisterous youths playing Marco Polo. He had been hesitant when Frieda, the child’s mother, insisted they should move to the suburbs but he had to admit it was better for the child, and this was a much nicer place for her to swim. Most of the children at the pool were around the same age, and it was all safe and clean.

Sidney turned back to study the women busy with her work. Her fingers moved very quickly and he could see she was making a fancy, openwork glove. The perfect lacey stiches seemed to form by themselves, an impression that could only be conveyed by those who were truly skilled and who had years of practice. He realized the woman had caught his eye because there was something in her manner that reminded him of his own mother. She was old enough to have perhaps been his mother’s younger sister and, while they were not physically similar, there was something about her movements, the way she held her head, that was familiar to him but that was different from the other women sitting nearby who were more similar in demeanor to his own wife. After a moment, he realized that the crocheting woman could not follow the conversation going on around her. The other women’s efforts to include her seemed to make her uncomfortable, even as she longed to be a part of the group. She was clearly older than them, which no doubt contributed to her awkwardness, and also seemed less sophisticated.

He decided to take a chance.

“It’s a lovely day,” he said, in the deeply Slavic dialect of Yiddish his mother used. The words seemed awkward to him. It had been many years since he had spoken in this way. Janie, his mother-in-law Rebecca, and her many relatives spoke a dialect that was closer to German and laughed at his southern pronunciations. In fact, he hated their elitism, born of the fact that they came from a town near Warsaw, and he came from the so-called Little Poland. It was the main reason, Janie’s parents opposed their marriage, although their disapproval vanished quickly enough when he began to make some money.

The woman was deep in her work and seemingly oblivious to what was going on around her. When he spoken, she whipped around to look at him, her eyes wide with joy and recognition.

“Are you . . . a Galitizianer?” she asked.

“Yes,” Sidney replied, the words coming more easily now. “Are you from Tarnopol?” he guessed.

“My late husband,” she said, putting down her crocheting. “I was born in Bukovina.”

Sidney tried to compose a mental picture of the border region of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. The maps had changed so many times in his lifetime and, although he had taught this material many times to his students in world history, he had trouble imagining the current situation.

“Romania?” His own birthplace was now in the Ukraine. He sometimes wondered whether this made any difference at all to the people who might still be there who could have had some connection to him and even to his little granddaughter, playing carefree in the bright blue swimming pool.

The woman shrugged and smiled.

“Time passes us by,” she said sadly. “Only death stops.”

This had the feel of a proverb he thought he had heard before, perhaps in a dream populated by all the people he had once known who were like this woman.

“I’m Enya Bronshteyn,” she added, speaking more conversationally now.

“Zidney Vajntrub,” he said, giving his own name the Galician pronunciation. Sidney was, of course, an American addition, but no one even remembered anymore that his real name was Zachariah.

“And this fellow?” she asked, indicated the large yellow dog who was now dozing in the sun, his head still in Sidney’s lap. Sidney smiled, recognizing the caution of a rural person and the ancient superstitions of a lost world. “He’s not a Ruggenvulf, is he?”

It took Sidney a moment to recall what this term meant and a further moment to determine an appropriately reassuring answer. The woman feared Lemi, with his curious fur and the pale eyes of a wolf, might be some sort of supernatural creature, a werewolf perhaps.

“Lemi? No, he is a real dog. I saw his mother and father.”

“A loyal companion then.” She smiled shyly now, ashamed of her fear. Her movements made Sidney think of a young girl, not this elderly woman who was so out of place with her handwork and old fashioned clothing. People do not lose their essential self, he thought, and the old really do die young.

“Is that your grandson?” he asked, indicating a boy a little older than his granddaughter wearing green swimming trunks.

“My great grandson. His name is Theodore.”

“A fine boy. His parents . . .?”

“His mother is my granddaughter, Nina. The father, he’s a professional man, an accountant.”

“That’s my granddaughter, Rebecca,” Sidney told her, pointing to the little girl who was now sitting on the edge of the pool talking intently to Theodore who was in the water. 

“What about your own children.”

“My daughter, her husband, they’re both gone now. So it’s just us now, me, Nina and her husband, the boy.”

Sidney nodded. It was a sad story, but many of the old people he knew were lost in time and space, displaced, like Enya Bronshteyn, figures from a place that no longer existed. He felt that she must have been among the small number of old people who rode out the war, the turmoil, and reorganization and were finally located by anxious relatives to be reunited in American suburbs with descendants like little Theodore who were strangers to them. He was surprised to find that this was not the case.

“How long have you been here?” Sidney asked.

“Decades. I don’t remember exactly. Since before the war. We were living in Zalishchyky, and one day my daughter and her husband said, we should go to America. I said, what for? But they insisted it was the right thing to do. My husband was already dead by then, so what could I do. I only had the one daughter.”

Sidney nodded in agreement. He also had only the one daughter, Frieda. It was only natural for the balance of nature to turn one day and the parents to follow the child’s lead.

“We lived in Queens for years,” she went on. “After my daughter died, I was alone in the apartment. Nina insisted I come to them.”

“But surely it’s better to be with your granddaughter, with Theodore.”

She shrugged again, this time in resignation.

“You’re a young man. Me, I’ve lived too long.” Sidney almost laughed. The young view all old people the same. In reality, the difference twenty years makes at 20 or 30 is the same at 60 or 70.

“But aren’t they kind to you?”

“Too kind. Every morning, before she goes to work, Nina says, ‘I’m sorry, Grandma, I have to go.’ I’m her Bubbe, but she calls me ‘Grandma.’” Enya looked at Sidney, seeking confirmation that he understood. “They don’t let me do a thing,” she went on. “I try to dust, do some housework, they take the rag out of my hand. They have a girl who comes in to do that. I try to cook, but they don’t want to eat that kind of food. Nina, the husband, the boy, they’re all American. Theodore eats noodles with tomato sauce out of a can and fish sticks!” She spoke the final words in heavily accented English as if it were a curse.

“So what do you do, to fill the day?”

“I crochet. I make gloves. The Catholic ladies, they wear them to church. The Greek Catholics, too.”

Sidney had not heard that term for many years. The new was not always comparable to the old, and change frequently did not satisfy the way what was customary did. He had rarely thought about such things over the years, but, since he had retired, the past seemed more immediate and Die Pintele Yid, the Little Jew inside, spoke to him more often.

“Nina takes the orders for me, on the telephone,” Enya was saying. “I make what they want, and Nina calls them to tell them. She deals with the money for me. I have a bank account,” she added, the way Sidney might have said he had a space ship.

“Do you spend a lot of time with Theodore?” he asked.

“Not so much. He’s in school. When he’s home, I do what his mother says.” She switched to English. “He vant zanvich, I make. He vant glas milch. Ve go to park, to pool.” She changed to Yiddish again. “He’s a good boy.”

Sidney thought about all this and considered that the ability to change yourself was a blessing. He, Janie, her parents, even his own parents who had been very much like Enya Bronshteyn, had recreated themselves in the image of the Americans around them. He stroked Lemi’s head. The dog was now fully asleep and didn’t stir at his touch. Perhaps it didn’t matter, and it was better to let your former self go.

At that moment, Theodore ran up to Sidney and Enya, spraying her chair and workbag with pool water. Rebecca followed and stood dripping at the foot of Sidney’s chaise.

“Can we get ice cream?” the boy asked hopefully.

“Alvays die ice crim,” Enya said laughing. She began to feel in the bottom of her bag and finally pulled out an extremely ancient change purse.

“Aren’t you two cold?” Sidney asked, directing the question to Rebecca.

“We’re hot!” she said defiantly.

Sidney laughed as well and made a show of reaching into his pockets. He carefully took out his pipe, his glasses which he always carried in case he wanted to read something, and finally two quarters. Before Enya could find some coins, he handed one to each child.

“That’s a lot of money,” she said to him in Yiddish so the children would not understand.

“They’ll only be young once,” he told her. “Can you go to the snack bar yourselves?” he asked, looking at Theodore who was the older of the two.

“Yes. We’ll be careful,” the boy told him, anticipating what he knew the next question would be.

“OK then. Go together.”

Sidney watched them go. They ran, the usual form of movement for the young, but carefully avoided the edge of the pool and the belongings of the other old people watching their grandchildren in the pool. Enya had returned to her work and was crocheting at a rapid pace.

“It really is a lovely day,” she said with the embarrassment that comes from having talked for too long and said too much. “Perhaps next time you’ll introduce me to your wife.”

“Of course,” said Sidney. “She’ll like that,” he went on, knowing that Janie would not like it at all. “She will probably order some gloves.” That much was true.

“Of course,” Enya said. “Any color she likes.”

When the children returned, both old people stood to leave.

“Come, Theodore. Mama vill be vorry.” Enya held out her hand to the little boy.

“Mom, knows where we are, Grandma,” he said, taking her hand as if he alone were responsible for the old woman.

“Can I hold Lemi’s leash, Poppy?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes, but hold him tight. You know the little children are afraid of him.”

“Bye, Becky,” Theodore called over his shoulder.

“Bye, Teddy. See you!”

As they walked slowly home, the child’s eyes alert for any misbehavior on the part of the dog, Sidney wondered if Rebecca and Theodore might meet one day 60 years from now, when the world had changed again, and feel the loss he and Enya did today. He hoped the ease and confidence and certainty they had today would last their life time, even if they hadn’t for him.