My Father's Lover

And My Brother's Friends

When my mother, at age 81, moved from her apartment in Queens to an assisted living place in Washington Heights, I brought home three cartons of family photos for storage, but I postponed exploring them until years after she’d died.

This one shows my brother Russ with friends in St. Albans, Queens, where we lived for the first four years of my life. My parents, along with a few other Jewish Communist families, had bought houses in the neighborhood in an attempt to stem white flight by setting an example. Right on! But after four years, we moved away because my parents were separating (the separation lasted just a year, though the antagonism lasted forever). By then, Russ was the only white kid in his second-grade class at school.

I was too young to have any memories of the neighborhood, but I know from family lore that his closest friend was named Gary and that two older kids who hung around with him were named Bobo and Skeeter. I figure that Gary is the kid standing right next to Russ, and Bobo and Skeeter are the tall kids, though which is which, I’ll never know . . .

The next photograph shows my father’s lover, Lori, who lived right downstairs, one door over, in our garden apartment complex in the late 1950s, after we’d moved from St. Albans.

Shortly after Lori moved in, she gave birth to a boy, Stevie, who had cerebral palsy. Then she was abandoned by her husband.

Sometimes I would babysit for her while my dad was with her. I remember how Stevie would twitch riotously when I spoon-fed him ice cream, and then he’d smile and beam for more.

I could tell that my father was crazy in love with this woman; he was much more present with her than with any of us. And I loved her, too, and her baby boy — whom my mother and I drove one summer day to a truly gothic place Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. I was maybe 8 years old, and I vaguely remember asking my mom: How could Lori be leaving Stevie at this place? Like, for good?

Then again, there were so many unanswered questions floating around in the car that day that I probably just kept my mouth shut.

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These brief illustrated stories are among many others in MY STUFF, VOLS. 1, 2 & 3, my new book (coauthored with Mikhail Horowitz and Carol Zaloom), which you can buy (pretty please) for only $15 with free shipping by clicking here to the Alte website.