Barnegat Bay - 27. Chapter 27

The war, of course, changed everything. We all enlisted, even if we didn’t have to.

“You’re a doctor,” the Army sergeant told me. “And you’re nearly forty, and you have three kids. You have to register, but you don’t have to go.”

“Actually, I do.”

He just looked at me.

“Well, at least they won’t put you on the front lines. You’re too valuable for that.”

And so were the rest of the guys. By the time the war began, they were thirty, Al and Spence were lawyers, Mike and Larry had some law and businesses classes, and they’d been running their company for eight years. Among the guys, they had six children.

Claire and Spence had a daughter, Gina and Al, a son and daughter, Larry and Barbara, two daughters, and Tony and Mike, a son – named Anthony, of course. As Tony put it, “The boy never had any other chance.”

Al, Spence, and I went in as Army lieutenants – because of my medical training and their law degrees. Spence was still working for Claire’s family business, but Larry was practicing tax law.

“No sense working at the poor end,” he said, when he finished law school after only six years – two years ahead of his plans. “Besides, now Gina wants to go to nursing school.”

Barbara wanted to go, too, and my mother had something to do with that. “If you’re going to be nurses,” she’d encouraged, “you may as well get all the training. Being practical nurses is good. Being licensed is better.”

Gina and Barbara did that – and after having two children each.

“Are you sure you want to?” Al and Larry asked their wives.

“It’s not that hard,” Mom again advised. “I had three.”

“But you had us five years apart,” I tried to casually mention. “And you were older.”

“And I started thirty-seven years ago – before women even had the right to vote. I also had to teach your father things Al and Larry already know.”

“It’s true,” the guys admitted. “Though usually, thanks to your mother.”

“We had a little to do with that,” Barb and Gina protested.

“Me, too,” Tony put in.

“I was lucky,” Claire said, smiling. “Spence was already trained.”

“Again, her doing,” Spence allowed, pointing to my mom.

I looked at Mary next, waiting for her comment.

“You’re perfect,” she admitted, grinning wider than Claire. “You always have been. Sometimes, it’s maddening.”

And everybody laughed.

Even with their degrees and extra classwork, the Army still only let Larry and Mike in as specialists – above privates but well below lieutenants. Even below sergeants. The guys considered joining the Navy for higher ranks, knew better than risk the Marines, and finally enlisted with the rest of us. But running their company gave them needed management skills. So Mike went to San Diego, to coordinate troop movements, and Larry was sent San Francisco, to organize shipments of food and supplies. After their abbreviated three weeks in boot camp with me, Al and Spence went to Washington, to work for the War Department – Al in contracts and Spence in litigation. For three-and-a-half years, none of us went near a battle zone, for which our families were silently grateful. To even whisper anything aloud would be unpatriotic.

I gave physicals the entire time, stationed in Manhattan, and was even allowed to live at home after my training. That let me continue my housecalls, though in the evenings.

“You don’t have to do all that walking,” Dad advised. “You could open your office for a few hours after dinner.”

“Some people can’t come in,” Mary reminded him. “Or their children are already too weak.”

“Well, if Doc gets sick from working too hard, he won’t be helping anyone.”

“I’ll tell you when I’m even tired,” I promised.

“Which means never,” Dad scoffed. “You’ve always had more energy than three people.”

In addition to Mom teaching and Mary running my office, they also volunteered part-time for the Red Cross. Mary supervised bandage rolling out of the brownstone, and Mom organized packing and shipping, both of the bandages and care packages. Dad also helped care for other volunteers’ children in our basement.

When we bought the brownstone, we expected the top floor would continue as a playroom. But Mary quickly discovered that letting Ann play in the basement meant both keeping her nearer by and offering fewer steps to run up and down. Something that helped even more was Spence suggesting we put in a small elevator. He and the guys installed it.

It wasn’t much bigger than a telephone booth, and you could only fit two people in it, even when one was a child. But that meant it tucked nicely at the far end of the hallway, close to the backyard. It started in the basement but was so slow, we all found it faster to check on Ann – and soon Oats – by using the short flight of stairs. That was one advantage of the basement’s low ceiling.

“I like the top floor better,” Ann said, when we first moved her downstairs. “The basement’s dark and a little stinky.”

“It’s fine,’ I assured her and everyone else. “We scrubbed it down, and the kids get to play in the garden half the year anyhow.”

The advantage of that was we could watch them out any rear window – but especially from my examining room.

The top floor was also no longer available for play. A year-or-so after Claire and Spence got married, they offered an idea to Mary, me, and my parents.

“We don’t mean to invade,” Claire started. “But since we’re here almost every weekend anyhow...”

“And since your guest room is getting a little small,” Spence overlapped. “For us and the baby...”

“We were wondering if you’d let us convert the top floor to an apartment.”

“Other people are doing that.”

“We’d pay for it, of course.”

“And pay you rent – you haven’t let me give you anything for years.”

“That’s because you take us to lunch every Sunday,” Mom admonished. “And that’s now nine people.”

“The little ones don’t eat much.”

“And we’d keep doing it even if they did – we look forward to it.”

“You don’t have that much money,” my father cautioned.

“You don’t know what we have,” Claire teased.

“Besides,” Spence went on. “We don’t pay Claire’s parents rent, either. We live in the carriage house for free.”

“It’s my father’s trade for putting my brothers through law school.”

Claire’s brothers were also quickly assigned to the War department, though her younger one – who specialized in trial work – was stationed in London.

“He’s the one we worry about,” Claire’s mother admitted. “From everything we see in newsreels.”

“And read in the papers,” her husband added.

“There are shelters everywhere,” Claire reminded them. “And basements.”

“And the ‘tubes’ – their subways,” Spence put in.

We were learning so much from movies.

“That still doesn’t make me feel better,” Claire’s mother finished.

Despite that, and maybe because of our educations, we all made it safely through the war. Though it took till the summer of 1946 before we gathered again on Barnegat.

Gina, Barbara, Tony, and their kids had used Claire’s family house there as their summer home. Mary sometimes left our children there overnight – when they insisted – but most of the time they slept over the store with her – we’d rebuilt the storeroom and turned half of it into a second bedroom. But they’d much rather be with everyone else at Claire’s, and Claire’s parents had wisely moved out.

“We don’t need more than a cottage anyway,” her mother insisted, so they bought one a few houses down. My parents also stayed on Barnegat in the summers, though at Mom’s childhood home. She and Dad had bought that after her parents died.

“I miss them, of course, but it’s hard to be sad,” Mom admitted. “Dad lived to eighty-nine and Mom to ninety-three. And they had such good lives.”

“And eleven great-grandchildren to bake cookies for.”

Grandma never stopped making her special, extra-thin, Viennese sugar cookies. She’d send everyone back to New York with bakery boxes full of them.

The family bakeries never closed during the war, either. When flour and sugar were rationed, my grandmother and aunts simply rearranged their recipes, and their customers barely noticed.

“Actually, we like them when they’re not so sweet,” several of them claimed.

After the war, everything slowly came back to normal – though so many things began to change. For one, Al and Spence met a lot of other lawyers in Washington, and so rather than Al reopening his small office and Spence going back to the lumber yards, they set up an office of their own in New York. That soon expanded to let Claire’s brothers in.

“Among us, we’ve got taxes, contracts, trials, and litigation covered,” her older brother explained. “People won’t have to go anywhere else.”

“And we’ll cut our expenses. That’s always an advantage, starting up.”

Claire also considered law school. She saw an opening in suburban real estate and thought it might be profitable.

“No one wants to stay at what I worked so hard to build,” her father complained, if lightly.

“That’s not true, Dad,” Claire insisted. “I’m not going away. If Spence could go to law school on weekends, so can I.”

“You have two children – and one just a baby.”

She and Spence had a son in 1946.

“We’ll manage.”

“She can take some of her classes by mail, as well,” her younger brother advised. “They’re making it as easy as possible for the GI’s.”

But Claire ran the lumber yards full-time till 1952, when she finished her degree. And her family never sold the businesses. They only expanded.

She and her brothers hired – and trusted – their managers to continue their father’s work, and their older sister – who still insisted, “I only want to stay at home and be a mother and wife,” looked in on the yards at least once a week. It was easiest for her, since she and her husband still lived in Toms River. Claire and Spence were mainly in New York.

The other thing that happened in the fall of 1952 was Ann was ready for college.

“Now how did that happen?” I asked. “It seems only yesterday I delivered you.”

“I really don’t want to hear that again, Dad. It’s icky.”

“It’s biology,” my mother corrected.

“But it’s so... personal. And I don’t like that picture in my mind.”

“You think we’re so old,” Mary said, laughing. “Time goes by very quickly.”

“You don’t even know,” my mother added. “I always think I’m thirty-five till I accidentally see myself in a mirror.” At that point, she was seventy-five and still had almost twenty years to go.

My dad was nearly as lucky. He made it to ninety-one. One night, he simply went to sleep and didn’t wake up.

“I think the stairs did it,” my mother said after the funeral. “Though he said they always kept him healthy.”

He never trusted the elevator, with its little cage and flimsy expanding gate. But after he reached eighty, he also rarely went below my office or above the third floor. And in his last years, the furthest outside he went was to the garden.

“Anything I want to see, I can watch on television.”

My mother quietly disagreed and often went out to do half our family shopping.

Claire’s parents didn’t live quite as long as mine, but like their own parents, they lived into their eighties. They were healthy, too, even after Claire’s father gave up driving in his late seventies.

“I can’t understand the new equipment,” he complained.

“He likes a stick shift.”

“And there’s too much glass.”

Still, he walked the almost-mile to the Toms River lumber yard, so he could “Make sure of things.”

“Be nice to the old man,” the managers advised their employees. “If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have jobs.”

“We should have an oil painting done and hang it in the office,” Spence suggested. Claire, her sister, and their brothers laughed.

“He wouldn’t sit still long enough.”

“And he’d think it was stuck up.”

“There never was much fancy about Dad.”

“He’s a very practical man.”

In the same way Ann’s going to college snuck up on us, the next thirty years slipped past. Weddings. Funerals. Birthdays. Graduations. Anniversaries. Christmases. Less important holidays. Endless ordinary parties. And always summers on Barnegat. Our collected eleven children all married and had kids, and suddenly there were twenty-two children and almost as many grandkids. We haven’t made it to great-grandchildren yet, but it’s expected.

The law office was eventually passed on to its once junior partners. The bakeries and lumber yards stayed in our family but were often also managed by others. Tony went on to get a doctorate in education and eventually became a high school principal.

“Something I never wanted,” Mom reminded us. “And I could have done it with just a Master’s.”

“I thought about becoming a lawyer,” Tony admitted, laughing. “But we have too many in our family.”

“You should be rewarded for that,” Dad praised.

And in the same way Mom knew the limits of her ambitions, and despite so many people around her going to college, Mary never wanted to take even the easiest business course.

“I was never much of a student.”

“I don’t know why,” Claire refuted. “You’re always learning things. And you’re often teaching them to us.”

“But I don’t have to think about grades. That’s the thing I hated most about school. And the tests.”

“And she hated a lot about school,” Claire agreed, gently making fun. “Well out of proportion.”

Instead, Mary continued to run my office and took over handling my accounts after Dad died. Plus she helped supervise the third of her aunt’s business she’d inherited. The other two-thirds went to the women who’d long managed the Toms River and Asbury Park stores.

Both my brother and brother-in-law also survived the war. My brother had his college degree, so went in as a specialist, but my brother-in-law had only high school.

“I didn’t see much need for anything more, and my family didn’t have the money anyway.”

“That’s why we all went to CCNY,” Larry said.

“Too far away.”

Mac was raised near Coney Island.

He began working in his father’s restaurant before he was ten – “and there’s a definition for child labor” – and slowly graduated from folding napkins, filling salt and pepper shakers, and resetting tables to washing dishes, bussing them, preparing food, cooking, and finally to becoming a waiter.

“I learned the business the same way my father did. Then I taught Ben.”

“At least, he didn’t have me folding napkins,” my brother said. “The diners only use paper.”

“But he refilled their dispensers. And the mustard and ketchup containers.”

“And the salt and pepper shakers. So basically, Mac took a college grad and turned him into a ten-year old.”

After Mac’s first diner on Long Island did well, he bought a second, about five miles away, and put Ben in charge.

“I really wanted to be an accountant,” Ben reminded us, “like Dad. So that’s what I studied. But you all remember there was no work – not even with Dad.”

“He would have had to fire Irv or Vince.”

“And there was no chance of him doing that.”

“And there’s always grunt work in the kitchen.”

Despite their backgrounds, they both avoided being Army cooks – “Just about the most hated job there is,” – but not by much. “That was my original assignment,” Mac said. “Then they discovered I was better at scrounging food.”

He was in Italy, moving with, but mostly behind, the troops, and Ben was, unseemingly, in Alaska. “On the outer edge of our defenses.”

He said it a bit more rudely. His job, also, had nothing to do with food.

“Mostly I tracked our base’s accounts and tried to stay warm. Jesus, I’ve never been so cold. Even in what they called summer.”

Both of them were happy to come back to Long Island. Meanwhile, Lily and Mac’s sister Jeanine, ran the diners.

“We found them in as good shape as when we left,” Mac had to admit.

Lily simply gave him a smile.

“OK, you improved some things,” he conceded. “But not all.”

“No,” Lily agreed. “And we missed you.”

After the war, Ben found the corporate work he wanted, and over the years, he completed an MBA. “Just so you’re both not one up on me,” he joked. Lily had gotten her Master’s, earlier, which let her run one of the small, town libraries. They always encouraged us to “move to the suburbs, too.” But Mary and I preferred the city.

Gina and Al did, as well. “I don’t want to get on a train to go to work,” she said. “I’d have to get up at four in the morning.”

“When we need to go somewhere,” Al kidded, “she’s ready two hours ahead of me. I get up just in time not to be late.”

“Or only slightly.”

“Never more than a few minutes.”

“You can’t run a hospital that way.”

“Which is why I’m my own boss.”

“Well, one of a group,” Spence amiably corrected.

“And not a very picky one.”

“Except when we’re playing golf.”

Barbara, Larry, Tony and Mike did move to the suburbs, but not to Long Island. “The North Shore’s a lot like Westchester – at least, where we wanted to live. But we preferred New Rochelle.”

“It’s the same drive from the Island.”

“And the same quick train, though to Grand Central.”

They mainly took that to visit us, or to do something only the city could offer. At the same time they’d bought nearly adjoining houses near the water, Larry and Mike had moved their offices to Westchester.

“Property’s cheaper than in the city.”

“You can buy, not rent.”

“And mortgages are easy.”

“And with so many houses being built, there’s always something to paint.”

“Not to mention offices.”

By the mid-fifties, their company had over a hundred people working and a fleet of new, dependable, Chevy vans.”

“Say what you want about Henry Ford, I’ll go with Chevrolet any day.”

“Please don’t sing. Please don’t sing. Please don’t sing,” Mike begged. “You’re not Dinah Shore.”

Larry opened his mouth and spread his arms wide, like some operatic tenor, but then he laughed and didn’t sing.

“Thank you,” Mike said, then turned to us. “America was asking him to Shut Up.”

When Larry and Mike moved their company, Barbara and Tony changed thier jobs as well. Barbara became the nurse for a new elementary school, and Tony found the high school where she eventually became principal. “It’s good to be out of the city system.”

“Pays better, too,” Barbara added.

“When did either of us do this for money?”

When the guys neared their mid-sixties, they talked about retiring. But, like me, they didn’t.

“We’re still having fun,” Mike insisted.

“But you do like to travel,” Tony said.

“That’s what summers are for.”

“Besides, why go to all the places where we were lucky enough not get shot at in the war?”

Barbara, Larry, Tony and Mike almost always traveled together. They asked the rest of us along, but we mainly preferred Barnegat. We all had houses there anyway – Claire and Spence’s big one shared with Mary and me. Still, early one fall – “After the tourists left,” joked Al – the ten of us did rent a villa in Greece for two weeks.

“This is great,” Mike said. “Like one long Saturday night.”

“Back in the early days. I liked them best when we didn’t have money,” Larry remembered.

“That’s ‘cause you always beat us at poker.”

“What did it matter? We were playing for toothpicks.”

“And I was breaking mine smaller and smaller.”

“Would you give up the money now?” Spence asked.

“Hell, no,” Larry shot. “I wouldn’t know how to live.”

“Though he is generous,” Barbara corrected. “And always overtips.”

“Even when he doesn’t understand the currency.”

There were a couple of health scares over the years, but they were only natural as we got older, and we all stayed in pretty good shape – everyone swam at Barnegat in the summers or drew straws to see who had the privilege to take out the fairly well restored “Oh, Me!.” It’s considered vintage now, and every summer some guy offers me too much to buy it. But we’re not selling.

There was a car accident, too – that never would have happened if a teenager hadn’t been drinking. But by then there were seatbelts and better built cars, even if they were fancier than Chevys. And Al quickly recovered from his injuries.

And now we’ve just celebrated my birthday, and somehow I’m eighty without really knowing how that occurred – any more than I knew how Ann reached eighteen. And she’s forty-nine and can’t explain that, either.

“Maybe I’ve been too happy to notice.”

We never really had to worry about her having two fathers because by the time it might have mattered, there were unfortunately too many divorces, remarriages, and complicated families. Though the couples who married in the Depression, even towards the end of it, seemed to understand the value of sticking together.

And maybe I’ve set all this down as another of my mother’s lessons, extended to those expected great-grandchildren, whether they want to read it or not. They may just think it’s the future equivalent of “icky.”

The gang was always younger than I was, so still are. Mary, Claire, Tony, and the guys only reached their early seventies, and our youngest – Gina and Barbara – just turned sixty-eight.

“I was in high school when I saw this handsome lifeguard,” Gina explained.

“Anyone I know?” Al led.

“No, actually.”

“So she settled for you,” Mike cracked.

And we all laughed.