593 Riverside Drive - 6. Chapter 6

We were all busy – Papa with Herbert at work, Mama giving a piano lesson, Howard at NYU, Lewis at Columbia, and I was in my room reading law homework – when Ella quietly let herself into our apartment. It was late afternoon in late October, and she had a key, just as she still had one to my grandparents’ apartment right down the street. We all had keys to that, though we didn’t have one to Ella and Joe’s duplex on Central Park West. But Rosa was almost always there, and if it was her night off, Joe’s father was home to let us in. He was ninety and pretty dotty, but he could still open the door.

When Ella let herself in, my mother’s student was working pretty well through a Chopin polonaise, and I was stretched on my bed. My door was open because I liked the music, but I didn’t hear Ella. When the music stopped, I heard voices but figured Mama was talking as part of the lesson. Then I recognized Ella’s voice, and it sounded upset.

Now Ella was rarely upset. Like us, she saw no reason for raised voices. Different opinions were welcome, but they were expected to be met with respectful counter-arguments and then discussions before compromises were reached. The biggest surprise Ella had given any of us was when she married Joe Spingarn, two years earlier.

Joe was an old family friend, slightly past Papa’s ten year guideline, and that wouldn’t have applied to Ella anyway, since she was thirty-five. Joe was forty-nine and still a widower, six years after his wife had died after childbirth. The baby survived, and Joe had been supervising his and the boy’s older sister’s upbringing when he ran into Ella on the beach in Asbury Park.

When my mother’s student didn’t continue to play, and instead, I heard the front door close and Mama and Ella go on talking, I realized I was only being rude by not going into the music room. I found my loafers since my parents didn’t like my walking around barefoot, especially in front of company, made sure my hair was reasonably combed, and slipped through the shared bathroom, coming out right behind the piano. Mother was still in the chair where she preferred to sit while teaching, and Ella was standing near the keyboard, where she often sang from while reading the lyrics from the sheet music. They both turned to me, smiled, and went on talking, so I knew something was happening, and it was important. Normally, Ella kissed me and sometimes made a fuss over whatever I happened to be wearing, especially if she hadn’t seen it before, but not that afternoon. And just by listening, I could tell it was about Joe.

Ella had left him, but I couldn’t immediately figure out why. She seemed to be talking about six or seven things, all on top of each other, none of them making sense, and I’d never heard her like that before. She was always calm, full of good reasoning, and theirs seemed to be a magical marriage. They’d had a wonderful, two-month summer courtship then had gone off on their honeymoon in a new, chauffeured Cadillac sedan. When they came back, three weeks later, Joe moved his family from their house in Jersey City, where he also worked, to a huge apartment on Central Park West. It was just south of two of my favorite museums, the New York Historical Society and the Museum of Natural History, and that gave me even more reason to visit when I wasn’t in school. Besides, Joe’s daughter, Laurette, had recently finished private school and was trying to decide if she wanted to go to college, so I was turned to for advice.

I didn’t really know Laurette any better than Ella had known Joe, but I’d hear my parents talking about the family, occasionally, especially after Joe’s wife Anna had died. Still, it was in the same casual way they spoke about a lot of people – and they seemed to have a large number of friends. Some were from family, some from business, and others from our loose and often only lightly religious German-Jewish community. Families with sons were always looking for daughters to marry them to, and families with daughters were after those slightly older businessmen, even if they had to go as far as Erie, Pennsylvania, to find them. That’s what Mama and Ella’s oldest sister had done, but even she had finally persuaded her husband to come back to New York after their children were grown. Somehow, Ella and Joe had decided to do that on their honeymoon.