Monthly Archives: May 2012

Farewell to Great Gossip and a Fondness for Cigars

David Heymann died last week.  He was my friend, my colleague, my tireless cheerleader.

I was working as his editor on his last book, a tribute to the Joe DiMaggio/Marilyn Monroe love story, and he called me just minutes before he collapsed to talk about the book.  It was nearly finished; we had only the last chapter to fix, and he had all but “I dunno — maybe 15 or 16 pages” ready to roll.  His death was sudden, and when his friend Francesca called me to tell he he had died, all I could think was, “But he promised he’d call me tonight.”

I will ever hear the echo of that last conversation, will have in my ear the sound of his belabored breathing on the other side of the phone line, his gravely voice signing off with, “Okay.  I’ll talk to you later.  I’ll call you tonight. Is around 9 okay?  I just wanna get this thing done.”

It’s a good book, perhaps his best; he was so careful, meticulous about the details, wanting everything to be right so that the book honors the memory of two people for whom he had a clear admiration and, especially, the name of DiMaggio’s poor, lost son, who died the same year as his father.  He fussed over the three of them, worried about every little word he said of them; they were his children.

Working with/for David was an adventure, and being his friend was a daily revelation.  As his wife Bea once told me, “Life with David’s never boring!”  I wrote a farewell piece for my company DAPTD’s’s blog, and I’ll share it here.  http://daptd.com/home/2012/05/17/farewell-to-great-gossip-and-a-fondness-for-cigars/

DAPTD will miss you, David.  But I’ll miss you more!

Round Lake, An Adirondack Meditation

photo by Neil Van Patten

Pristine mountains, primeval sea of freshwonder
Embrace me now, where once –
(Never mind that now; begin again.)

Loons sigh in the distance, and
An osprey dances for his food
On a finger of fair sky
The color of blueberry popsicles,
The kind that made your tongue and teeth turn
Blue so that your mother didn’t like you to eat them.
(Funny – thinking about blueberries makes me smell blueberries. . .)

Perhaps the smell is not a memory but rather the
Ripening of real fruit that populates my island.
Or do I smell the outhouse
That periodically belches chemicals.
(. . . and how omnipresent the unseen humans really are!)

I wish I could paint, draw, re-create this verdant vision.
Alas, imprisoned in words, I am powerless,
Can merely, only stare in awe and wonder
At the multitude of textures
In the layers of mountains.
(Who’d’ve thought – so many shades of blue and green?)

The clouds soar by, laughing at me as they play.
At times they’re great white whales
Charging through the endless oceans.
In a moment they’ll be clowns in acrobatic performance,
Gymnasts hurtling over cushioned bars.
Look – one sailing just overhead has fused
With others and has formed a mammoth hand
(Like my father’s!)

Shielding me from the fiery and persistent sun
Which acquiesces to the threatening cloud.
And in the cool shade
A deerfly returns to bite me.
(Ouch!)

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children – Part IV

American life was strained from the beginning.  Americans in general and Jews in particular were not as welcoming and protective as the family expected them to be; adjusting to life in Accord, NY, and then in Kingston, was a perpetual challenge.  The business Papa’s brother promised to set up took far too long and cut far too deeply into their reserves, and Charlotte couldn’t find a cello teacher who could stay even a step ahead of her.  News began to come from Europe about those who had not survived: slowly, the family learned that three of their mother’s siblings and their father’s favorite sister had perished, and so had Thea Matzner and her entire family.  They slogged on, and Mom even managed to prevail against all odds; she was accepted into a premed program at the University of Vermont, a miraculous achievement considering she had been enrolled in three different high schools in the mere two years she had been in America, and she had had to take SATs a full year earlier!

UVM offered unexpected solace and belonging at a critical moment in Mama’s life

Then, in 1943, the long-awaited son, the light that had brought life back to his parents’ eyes, Hannes Edward died in yet another freak accident at the age of 15.  Charlotte once again took on the mantle of blame — she had been away at college and had not been there to do . . . what? . . . anything.

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children – Part III

As Charlotte, my mother, entered her teens, the person she most admired kept aloof of her.  Eldest sister Herma, five years her senior, was consumed with her social life.  Her best friend, a girl named Thea, daughter of my grandparents’ closest friends the Matzners, would arrange trysts for Herma, standing lookout when she would meet a boy. Herma’s attentions turned to her piano teacher, a Serbian painter named Borislav Bogdanovich, and it was certain her parents would disapprove, so she relied on Thea to provide cover.  But Thea’s own love life intervened, forcing Herma to confide in her younger sister. There began a life-long conspiratorial relationship, a bond neither Charlotte nor Herma ever grew out of, fortified by tragedy.

Herma and Tonka, by Borislav Bogdanovich
The Bogdanovich Collection
http://www.bogdanovichcollection.com
annatheab@aol.com

Herma and Borislav were married and had a gorgeous child Anthony (Tonka), in whom the sun rose and set for both of them.  Before he was two, the child died in a freak accident.  In later years, whenever Herma told the story, she told it with Charlotte in the room at the time witnessing her horror; when Charlotte told it, she was nowhere near.  In either case, Herma very nearly succumbed to her loss, and her marriage suffered as well.  But history intervened, and there was no time for self-absorption or meandering through the stages of grief; Hitler necessitated yet another move.

Pregnant with her second child, Herma helped Borislav assist her father in making arrangements to get the family out.  Thanks to a network that depended on Borislav’s Serbian ties and aided by Papa’s French connections and multiple relatives already in America, the family was able to emigrate fairly swiftly, and, in 1939 all but Papa arrived in New York; he went to Cuba, where he stayed until he had transferred his Polish citizenship and could gain entry to the U.S.

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children – Part II

Charlotte, Age 12, With Cello
The Bogdanovich Collection
http://www.bogdanovichcollection.com
annatheab@aol.com

When Charlotte, my mom, was not quite six, the family uprooted and moved to Zagreb.  Though he was a civil engineer with advanced degrees from the University of Vienna, Papa found that his Jewishness impeded employment; he had turned to sales and opened a new territory in Croatia, representing several European textile manufacturers. He subsequently opened a wholesale store and a textile mill, and he began to prosper.  Life seemed good.

When comparing herself to her sisters, Mama (center) described herself as oversized and clumsy, a boyish blunderer; but none of the photographs from the time attest to that image.

Charlotte considered herself grotesquely large and healthy in contrast to her sisters. Thea had always been wan and delicate, prone to illness; now there was Ruth, two years Mom’s junior, who was so sickly, as an infant she had required a transfusion, which she got directly from their father, who lay on a gurney, connected to her by the tubing that carried his blood the short distance to her little thigh.  Ruth officially took over as Papa’s darling, so Charlotte studied cello and played team sports in order to protect her position as the son her father didn’t have.
In 1927, the family finally did add a son — Hannes Edward — but Charlotte did not denounce her throne; she was the designated “son” and took on all the responsibility attached to the role. “I was the one,” she would whisper, as though her brother might be in the next room listening, “with perpetually scraped knees from climbing trees.  They kept Johnny wrapped in cotton wool, but not me.  You know what I loved to do?  There was a pecan tree in our yard in Zagreb.  I found branches that would hold me just so, and I would sit in that tree for hours reading.  I read all of The Three Musketeers there, then I would climb out of my tree and challenge my dog, King, to a duel.”

The world turned upside down in 1932, and it did not right itself for a very long time.  In January of that year, Thea, just five months shy of her 12th birthday and a ballet prodigy, having only recently recovered from a near fatal bout with scarlet fever, was struck with meningitis and died.  Charlotte, who had prayed for illness, had been profoundly jealous of the attention her sister received, was devastated and blamed herself for the tragedy, convinced that her parents would have been far less afflicted if it had been she and not Thea who had died.  She told me, “I used to go to the cemetery and sit on Thea’s grave for long conversations.  I was only ten.  It was a great weight I carried on my shoulders.”

My grandmother was undone, and her health deteriorated in multiple ways, leading to conditions that eventually addicted her first to morphine and then to alcohol.  “Papa went a little berserk,” Mom would mutter, as though admitting it were tantamount to denunciation.  He became ultra-religious and drove his family to near insanity with his obsessive adherence to details he hardly believed in.  Charlotte became more committed to her cello; though she longed to dance, she couldn’t — it was a realm that belonged to Thea, and besides, she believed that no one would “think of giving a roly-poly girl ballet lessons.”  But she was a talented musician and studied religiously, eventually performing often in concerts and recitals.