part-time jobs to keep himself afloat. Once, when he was reminiscing about how hard up he was in those days, he described how he used to go to Ratner’s, the old Jewish dairy restaurant on the Lower East Side, sit down at a table, and tell the waiter that he was expecting his girlfriend to show up at any minute. One of the chief lures of the place was the celebrated Ratner’s dinner roll. The moment you took your seat, a waiter would come over and plunk down a basket of those rolls in front of you, accompanied by an ample supply of butter. Roll by buttered roll, Gil would eat his way through the basket, glancing at his watch from time to time, pretending to be upset by the lateness of his nonexistent girlfriend. Once the first basket was empty, it would automatically be replaced by a second, and then the second by a third. Finally, the girlfriend would fail to appear, and Gil would leave the restaurant with a disappointed look on his face. After a while, the waiters caught on to the trick, but not before Gil achieved a personal record of twenty-seven free rolls consumed at a single sitting.
Law school, followed by the start of a successful practice and a growing involvement with the Democratic Party. Idealistic, left-wing liberalism, a supporter of Stevenson for the 1960 presidential nomination, Eleanor Roosevelt’s escort at the convention in Atlantic City, and later a photograph (which I’ve owned since Betty’s death) of Gil shaking hands with John F. Kennedy during a visit to Newark in 1962 or 1963 as Kennedy said to him: We’ve been hearing great things about you. But all that turned sour after the Newark disaster, and once Gil left politics, he and Betty packed it in and moved to California. I didn’t see much of them after that, but for the next six or seven years I gathered all was calm. Gil built up his law practice, my sister opened a store in Laguna Beach (kitchenware, table linens, top-quality grinders and gadgets), and even though Gil had to swallow more than twenty pills a day to keep himself alive, whenever they came east for family visits, he looked to be in good shape. Then his health turned. By the mid-seventies, a series of cardiac arrests and other debilitations made work all but impossible for him. I sent them whatever I could whenever I could, and with Betty working full-time to keep them going, Gil now spent most of his days alone in the house, reading books. My big sister and her dying husband, three thousand miles away from me. During those last years, Betty told me, Gil would plant love notes in the drawers of her bureau, hiding them among her bras and slips and panties, and every morning when she woke up and got dressed, she would find another billet-doux declaring that she was the most gorgeous woman in the world. Not bad, finally. Considering what they were up against, not bad at all.
I don’t want to think about the end: the cancer, the final stay in the hospital, the obscene sunlight that flooded the cemetery on the morning of the funeral. I’ve already dredged up enough, but still, I can’t let go of this without revisiting one last detail, one last ugly turn. By the time Gil died, Betty was so deeply in debt that paying for a burial plot was a genuine hardship. I was prepared to help, but she had already asked me for money so often that she couldn’t bring herself to do it again. Rather than turn to me, she went to her mother-in-law, the infamous woman who had allowed Gil to be thrown out of the house when he was a boy. I can’t remember her name (probably because I despised her so much), but by 1980 she was married to her third husband, a retired businessman who happened to be immensely rich. As for husband number two, I don’t know if his departure was caused by death or divorce—but no matter. Rich husband number three owned a large family plot in a cemetery somewhere in southern Florida, and my sister managed to talk him into letting Gil be buried there. Less than a year
Law school, followed by the start of a successful practice and a growing involvement with the Democratic Party. Idealistic, left-wing liberalism, a supporter of Stevenson for the 1960 presidential nomination, Eleanor Roosevelt’s escort at the convention in Atlantic City, and later a photograph (which I’ve owned since Betty’s death) of Gil shaking hands with John F. Kennedy during a visit to Newark in 1962 or 1963 as Kennedy said to him: We’ve been hearing great things about you. But all that turned sour after the Newark disaster, and once Gil left politics, he and Betty packed it in and moved to California. I didn’t see much of them after that, but for the next six or seven years I gathered all was calm. Gil built up his law practice, my sister opened a store in Laguna Beach (kitchenware, table linens, top-quality grinders and gadgets), and even though Gil had to swallow more than twenty pills a day to keep himself alive, whenever they came east for family visits, he looked to be in good shape. Then his health turned. By the mid-seventies, a series of cardiac arrests and other debilitations made work all but impossible for him. I sent them whatever I could whenever I could, and with Betty working full-time to keep them going, Gil now spent most of his days alone in the house, reading books. My big sister and her dying husband, three thousand miles away from me. During those last years, Betty told me, Gil would plant love notes in the drawers of her bureau, hiding them among her bras and slips and panties, and every morning when she woke up and got dressed, she would find another billet-doux declaring that she was the most gorgeous woman in the world. Not bad, finally. Considering what they were up against, not bad at all.
I don’t want to think about the end: the cancer, the final stay in the hospital, the obscene sunlight that flooded the cemetery on the morning of the funeral. I’ve already dredged up enough, but still, I can’t let go of this without revisiting one last detail, one last ugly turn. By the time Gil died, Betty was so deeply in debt that paying for a burial plot was a genuine hardship. I was prepared to help, but she had already asked me for money so often that she couldn’t bring herself to do it again. Rather than turn to me, she went to her mother-in-law, the infamous woman who had allowed Gil to be thrown out of the house when he was a boy. I can’t remember her name (probably because I despised her so much), but by 1980 she was married to her third husband, a retired businessman who happened to be immensely rich. As for husband number two, I don’t know if his departure was caused by death or divorce—but no matter. Rich husband number three owned a large family plot in a cemetery somewhere in southern Florida, and my sister managed to talk him into letting Gil be buried there. Less than a year
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