Sherry with her, my mother might have been different. Okay, maybe she wouldn’t have been fun or kind or had a sense of style. But she could have been emotionally savvy enough not to need MapQuest to find her way across a room to hug her grandsons.
My mother had very little to say on the subject of her own mother other than “I hardly remember her.” The times I pushed for more information, all I got was “I have almost no memory of her.” No memory? The only memory she ever dug up for me was: “One time we heard her screaming at the top of her lungs. My father and I went running into the bedroom. She was holding a stocking in her hand, and she screamed at us, ‘My last pair of stockings, and I got this huge run!’ Then she went right back to screaming.”
Eventually, I stopped asking my mother, but that was when I was ten or eleven, old enough to take aside some cousins nearer to my mother’s age and ask them about the woman I thought of (withbizarre familiarity) as Grandma Ethel. Cousin Marcia told me she’d heard that someone had seen Ethel in a nightclub in Miami Beach wearing serious jewelry in the company of an Italian-looking guy. However, further inquiry by Cousin Danny led to finding out the man was Ethel’s husband, Sidney Nachman, of Nachman & Company, distributors of wine and spirits. Cousin Naomi made a few calls to Florida and learned the Nachmans had no children. About ten years later, Cousin Marcia told me that her best friend from high school, who’d moved to Coral Gables, had sent her a clipping of Sidney Nachman’s obituary from the Miami Herald : Nachman is survived by his wife, Ethel, and a sister, Rita Umelitz of Creve Coeur, Missouri.
And that was—almost—that. Although my mother never told me, I heard from assorted cousins that she knew Ethel was alive and well and wearing serious jewelry. However, she made no attempt to contact her mother. Maybe she was waiting for Ethel to make the first move. That never happened.
Just before my twentieth birthday, a half year after Jonah and I were married, we were on a flight to Miami for the wedding of one of his camp friends. I’d had a couple of vodka tonics to dull the sound of the engine (it was only the third or fourth plane ride of my life, and I was still terrified). In a what-the-hell mood, I said, “Hey, we’ll be in Miami. Maybe I’ll try to find my grandmother.” I waited for Jonah to say, “Are you crazy?” When he didn’t, I asked, “Do you think I’m crazy?” He said no, not at all, but I should be prepared for someone who was a total bitch and who would refuse to see me—and don’t forget I’d made a hairdresser appointment at the hotel at four-thirty on Saturday.
Finding her wasn’t as easy as it would be today; we were in the pre-Google era. But after an hour at the Miami Beach public library that Saturday morning, Jonah and I discovered Ethel Nachman had married Roy O’Shea, a man who owned several Honda dealerships in South Florida. The O’Sheas definitely had an active social life. As we sat looking into the microfilm viewer at newspaper photos of parties and benefits, Jonah kept saying, “I can’t believe how muchshe looks like you!” I kept saying, “Oh my God!” I also said, “Do you think my mother remembered what she looked like and saw the resemblance and that’s why she always held back with me emotionally?” Jonah said, “Everything doesn’t need a psychological explanation.” We went back to the microfilm and discovered that in the mid-eighties, “gregarious and charming socialite Ethel O’Shea” was high on a list to take over as the new host of a local late-
morning TV show, Talk of Miami . Ethel got the job. Ethel was a hit. Within a year, Roy O’Shea was history.
I didn’t get up the courage to call her—not that I had her unlisted number. But while I was at the hairdresser, Jonah called the TV station, said he was Jonah Gersten from the Yale School of Medicine and that Ethel
My mother had very little to say on the subject of her own mother other than “I hardly remember her.” The times I pushed for more information, all I got was “I have almost no memory of her.” No memory? The only memory she ever dug up for me was: “One time we heard her screaming at the top of her lungs. My father and I went running into the bedroom. She was holding a stocking in her hand, and she screamed at us, ‘My last pair of stockings, and I got this huge run!’ Then she went right back to screaming.”
Eventually, I stopped asking my mother, but that was when I was ten or eleven, old enough to take aside some cousins nearer to my mother’s age and ask them about the woman I thought of (withbizarre familiarity) as Grandma Ethel. Cousin Marcia told me she’d heard that someone had seen Ethel in a nightclub in Miami Beach wearing serious jewelry in the company of an Italian-looking guy. However, further inquiry by Cousin Danny led to finding out the man was Ethel’s husband, Sidney Nachman, of Nachman & Company, distributors of wine and spirits. Cousin Naomi made a few calls to Florida and learned the Nachmans had no children. About ten years later, Cousin Marcia told me that her best friend from high school, who’d moved to Coral Gables, had sent her a clipping of Sidney Nachman’s obituary from the Miami Herald : Nachman is survived by his wife, Ethel, and a sister, Rita Umelitz of Creve Coeur, Missouri.
And that was—almost—that. Although my mother never told me, I heard from assorted cousins that she knew Ethel was alive and well and wearing serious jewelry. However, she made no attempt to contact her mother. Maybe she was waiting for Ethel to make the first move. That never happened.
Just before my twentieth birthday, a half year after Jonah and I were married, we were on a flight to Miami for the wedding of one of his camp friends. I’d had a couple of vodka tonics to dull the sound of the engine (it was only the third or fourth plane ride of my life, and I was still terrified). In a what-the-hell mood, I said, “Hey, we’ll be in Miami. Maybe I’ll try to find my grandmother.” I waited for Jonah to say, “Are you crazy?” When he didn’t, I asked, “Do you think I’m crazy?” He said no, not at all, but I should be prepared for someone who was a total bitch and who would refuse to see me—and don’t forget I’d made a hairdresser appointment at the hotel at four-thirty on Saturday.
Finding her wasn’t as easy as it would be today; we were in the pre-Google era. But after an hour at the Miami Beach public library that Saturday morning, Jonah and I discovered Ethel Nachman had married Roy O’Shea, a man who owned several Honda dealerships in South Florida. The O’Sheas definitely had an active social life. As we sat looking into the microfilm viewer at newspaper photos of parties and benefits, Jonah kept saying, “I can’t believe how muchshe looks like you!” I kept saying, “Oh my God!” I also said, “Do you think my mother remembered what she looked like and saw the resemblance and that’s why she always held back with me emotionally?” Jonah said, “Everything doesn’t need a psychological explanation.” We went back to the microfilm and discovered that in the mid-eighties, “gregarious and charming socialite Ethel O’Shea” was high on a list to take over as the new host of a local late-
morning TV show, Talk of Miami . Ethel got the job. Ethel was a hit. Within a year, Roy O’Shea was history.
I didn’t get up the courage to call her—not that I had her unlisted number. But while I was at the hairdresser, Jonah called the TV station, said he was Jonah Gersten from the Yale School of Medicine and that Ethel
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