“Some special baggage handlers’ trick, I guess,” I said.
How little, then, I knew!
2.
Flying into New York is like dropping from the twentieth century back into the nineteenth. Everything is crowded, colorful, old—and slow. For example, it usually takes longer to get from La Guardia to Brooklyn than from Huntsville to La Guardia.
Usually! On this, our Honeymoon trip, however, Candy and I made it in record time, getting to curbside for the #38 bus just as it was pulling in, and then catching the F train at Roosevelt Avenue just as the doors were closing. No waiting on the curb or the platform; it was hardly like being home! Of course, I wasn’t complaining.
After a short walk from the subway, we found Aunt Minnie sitting on the steps of the little Ditmas Avenue row house she and Uncle Mort had bought for seventy-five hundred dollars fifty years ago, right after World War II, smoking a cigarette. She’s the only person I know who still smokes Kents.
“You still go outside to smoke?” I asked.
“You know your Uncle Mort,” she said. When I was growing up, Aunt Minnie and Uncle Mort had been like second parents, living only a block and a half away. Since my parents had died, they had been my closest relatives. “Plus it’s written into the reverse mortgage—NO SMOKING! They have such rules!”
Born in the Old Country, unlike her little sister, my mother, Aunt Minnie still had the Lifthatvanian way of ending a statement with a sort of verbal shrug. She gave me one of her smoky kisses, then asked, “So, what brings you back to New York?”
I was shocked. “You didn’t get my letters? We’re getting married.”
Aunt Minnie looked at Candy with new interest. “To an airline pilot?”
“This is Candy!” I said. “She’s with the Huntsville Parks Department. You didn’t get my messages?”
I helped Candy drag the suitcases inside, and while we had crackers and pickled lifthat at the oak table Uncle Mort had built years ago, in his basement workshop, I explained the past six months as best I could. “So you see, we’re here on our Honeymoon, Aunt Minnie,” I said, and Candy blushed.
“First the Honeymoon and then the marriage!?” Aunt Minnie rolled her eyes toward the mantel over the gas fireplace, where Uncle Mort’s ashes were kept. He, at least, seemed unsurprised. The ornate decorative eye on the urn all but winked.
“It’s the only way we could manage it,” I said. “The caterer couldn’t promise the ice sculpture until Thursday, but Candy had to take her days earlier or lose them. Plus my best man is in South America, or Central America, I forget which, and won’t get back until Wednesday.”
“Imagine that, Mort,” Aunt Minnie said, looking toward the mantel again. “Little Irving is getting married. And he didn’t even invite us!”
“Aunt Minnie! You’re coming to the wedding. Here’s your airline ticket.” I slid it across the table toward her and she looked at it with alarm.
“That’s a pretty cheap fare.”
“PreOwned Air,” I said. She looked blank, so I sang the jingle, “Our planes are old, but you pocket the gold.”
“You’ve seen the ads,” Candy offered.
“We never watch TV, honey,” Aunt Minnie said, patting her hand. “You want us to go to Mississippi? Tonight?”
“Alabama,” I said. “And it’s not until Wednesday. We have to stay over a Tuesday night to get the midweek nonstop supersaver round-trip price-buster Honeymoon plus-one fare. The wedding is on Thursday, at noon. That gives us tomorrow to see the sights in New York, which means we should get to bed. Aunt Minnie, didn’t you read my letters?”
She pointed toward a stack of unopened mail on the mantel, next to the urn that held Uncle Mort’s ashes. “Not really,” she said. “Since your Uncle Mort passed on, I have sort of given it up. He made letter openers, you remember?”
Of course I remembered. At my Bar Mitzvah, Uncle Mort gave me a letter opener (which irritated my parents, since it was identical to the one they had gotten as a wedding present). He gave me another one for high school graduation. Ditto City College. Uncle Mort encouraged me to go to law school, and gave me a letter opener for graduation. I still have them all, good as new. In fact, they have never been used. It’s not like you need a special tool to get an envelope open.
“Aunt Minnie,” I said, “I wrote, and when you didn’t write back, I called, several times. But you never picked up.”
“I must have been out front smoking a cigarette,” she said. “You know how your Uncle Mort is about second hand smoke.”
‘You could get an answering machine,” Candy offered.
“I have one,” Aunt Minnie said. “Mort bought it for me at 47th Street Photo, right before they went out of business.” She pointed to the end table, and sure enough, there was a little black box next to the phone. The red light was blinking.
“You have messages,” I said. “See the blinking red light? That’s probably me.”
“Messages?” she said. “Nobody told me anything about messages. It’s an answering machine. I figure it answers the phone, so what’s the point in me getting involved?”
“But what if somebody wants to talk to you?” I protested.
She spread her hands; she speaks English but gestures in Lifthatvanian. “Who’d want to talk to a lonely old woman?”
While Aunt Minnie took Candy upstairs and showed her our bedroom, I checked the machine. There were eleven messages, all from me, all telling Aunt Minnie we were coming to New York for our Honeymoon, and bringing her back to Alabama with us for the wedding, and asking her, please, to return my call.
I erased them.
Aunt Minnie’s guest room was in the back of the house, and from the window I could see the narrow yards where I had played as a kid. It was like looking back on your life from middle age (almost, anyway), and seeing it literally. There were the fences I had climbed, the grapevines I had robbed, the corners I had hidden in. There, two doors down, was Studs’s backyard, with the big maple tree. The treehouse we had built was still there. I could even see a weird blue light through the cracks. Was someone living in it?
After we unpacked, I took Candy for a walk and showed her the old neighborhood. It looked about the same, but the people were different. The Irish and Italian families had been replaced by Filipinos and Mexicans. Studs’s parents’ house, two doors down from Aunt Minnie’s, was dark except for a light in the basement—and the blue light in the treehouse out back. My parents’ house, a block and a half away on East Fourth, was now a rooming house for Bangladeshi cab drivers. The apartments on Ocean Parkway were filled with Russians.
When we got back to the house, Aunt Minnie was on the porch, smoking a Kent. “See how the old neighborhood has gone to pot?” she said. “All these foreigners!”
“Aunt Minnie!” I said, shocked. “You were a foreigner, too, remember? So was Uncle Mort.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Never you mind.”
I decided to change the subject. “Guess who I saw at the airport today? Studs Blitz, from down the block, remember?”
“You mean young Arthur,” said Aunt Minnie. “He still lives at home. His father died a couple of years ago. His mother, Mavis, takes in boarders. Foreigners. Thank God your Uncle Mort’s benefits spared me that.”
She patted the urn and the cat’s eye glowed benevolently.
That night, Candy and I began our Honeymoon by holding hands across the gap between our separate beds. Candy wanted to wait until tomorrow night, after we had “done the tourist thing” to “go all the way.” Plus she was still nervous from the flight.