Chicago, and Marge ran their hotels day-to-day with a heavy but effective hand. Marge took great pride in her business acumen, and their relationship, half marriage and half business partnership, created a formidable team. Morrie, Marge, Lynn, and Joel lived in the penthouse of the Shoreland Hotel, which seemed palatial when I visited. As a teenager, Joel would use ten towels to dry off after a bath.
Freed from the constraints of watching over the Carroll Coal Company, Sam hit his stride as a businessman. He began a chain of profitable nursing homes and offered family members financial participation. I believe Sam hoped that spreading ample profits among the Bellows would promote the family concern and togetherness that he, too, prized from their days in Lachine. His wife, my aunt Nina, was a woman of ambition andenergy, but in an era when having a working wife reflected poorly on a husband’s ability to provide for his family, Sam forbade her to work outside the home. Nina, who came from a family of rabbis, prevailed at home. My cousins Lesha and Shael were raised in an observant Jewish household, and Sam rarely intervened.
Jane married Charlie Kauffman, a dentist who treated the Bellow family and, reportedly, possessed minimal technical skill. As a young husband, Charlie, bored by his marriage, led a double life. He went through the motions of domesticity but spent many hours gambling with shady characters. Jane was, by all accounts, a smothering mother to her children, Larry and Bobby. Anita derided Jane’s germ phobias and her custom of boiling oranges before peeling them and wiping the rails of my cousins’ crib with chemicals more harmful than any germ they might encounter licking them.
I did not live in Chicago after 1946 and had almost no relationships with my Bellow aunts, uncles, or cousins. I was used to the generosity of the doting Goshkins, all childless, who sent birthday presents and candy on Valentine’s Day. My aunts Ida and Catherine stayed with us when they visited New York to attend the theater and Catherine offered to take me to any restaurant I named, although I always chose the Automat. I was hurt by the lack of attention I received from the Bellows and asked Anita why my rich uncle Morrie never sent me anything for my birthday.
Our years in the Hudson Valley anchored the only domestic life I had with my father after the divorce. Saul got a job teaching at Bard College and I summered on or near campus foryears. At first he lived in a carriage house on the estate of Chanler Chapman, a wealthy local character who was related to the Astor family. Saul attended parties at the mansion house and must have been treated as a celebrity because he had to explain the word lionize to me when he used it to describe how he was treated there.
Ted and Lynn Hoffman, whom I already knew from Salzburg, lived on campus and often looked out for me. The Hoffman girls were too young to be of any interest, but I delighted in Ted’s wit and infectious laugh. Curled up in a big chair in the Hoffman living room, I spent hours poring over the joke books Ted bought me. During Saul’s second year at Bard, he shared the house with Ted during the week because Lynn had an editorial job at the Viking Press and stayed in Manhattan. Lynn told me that her presentation to the Viking marketing department about The Adventures of Augie March was interrupted by the delivery of an elegant package from California. John Steinbeck had sent his manuscript East of Eden in a hand-carved wooden box. It so impressed everyone that she could not turn their attention back to Saul’s novel.
In fair weather we played volleyball or swam at the Bard pool. In foul we played basketball in the gym, where Sasha taught me to shoot the ball with one hand, since Saul knew only the old-fashioned two-handed set shot of his youth. Keith Botsford, a flamboyant character who attached himself to Saul for decades, lived on campus with his then wife, Ann. Saul,
Freed from the constraints of watching over the Carroll Coal Company, Sam hit his stride as a businessman. He began a chain of profitable nursing homes and offered family members financial participation. I believe Sam hoped that spreading ample profits among the Bellows would promote the family concern and togetherness that he, too, prized from their days in Lachine. His wife, my aunt Nina, was a woman of ambition andenergy, but in an era when having a working wife reflected poorly on a husband’s ability to provide for his family, Sam forbade her to work outside the home. Nina, who came from a family of rabbis, prevailed at home. My cousins Lesha and Shael were raised in an observant Jewish household, and Sam rarely intervened.
Jane married Charlie Kauffman, a dentist who treated the Bellow family and, reportedly, possessed minimal technical skill. As a young husband, Charlie, bored by his marriage, led a double life. He went through the motions of domesticity but spent many hours gambling with shady characters. Jane was, by all accounts, a smothering mother to her children, Larry and Bobby. Anita derided Jane’s germ phobias and her custom of boiling oranges before peeling them and wiping the rails of my cousins’ crib with chemicals more harmful than any germ they might encounter licking them.
I did not live in Chicago after 1946 and had almost no relationships with my Bellow aunts, uncles, or cousins. I was used to the generosity of the doting Goshkins, all childless, who sent birthday presents and candy on Valentine’s Day. My aunts Ida and Catherine stayed with us when they visited New York to attend the theater and Catherine offered to take me to any restaurant I named, although I always chose the Automat. I was hurt by the lack of attention I received from the Bellows and asked Anita why my rich uncle Morrie never sent me anything for my birthday.
Our years in the Hudson Valley anchored the only domestic life I had with my father after the divorce. Saul got a job teaching at Bard College and I summered on or near campus foryears. At first he lived in a carriage house on the estate of Chanler Chapman, a wealthy local character who was related to the Astor family. Saul attended parties at the mansion house and must have been treated as a celebrity because he had to explain the word lionize to me when he used it to describe how he was treated there.
Ted and Lynn Hoffman, whom I already knew from Salzburg, lived on campus and often looked out for me. The Hoffman girls were too young to be of any interest, but I delighted in Ted’s wit and infectious laugh. Curled up in a big chair in the Hoffman living room, I spent hours poring over the joke books Ted bought me. During Saul’s second year at Bard, he shared the house with Ted during the week because Lynn had an editorial job at the Viking Press and stayed in Manhattan. Lynn told me that her presentation to the Viking marketing department about The Adventures of Augie March was interrupted by the delivery of an elegant package from California. John Steinbeck had sent his manuscript East of Eden in a hand-carved wooden box. It so impressed everyone that she could not turn their attention back to Saul’s novel.
In fair weather we played volleyball or swam at the Bard pool. In foul we played basketball in the gym, where Sasha taught me to shoot the ball with one hand, since Saul knew only the old-fashioned two-handed set shot of his youth. Keith Botsford, a flamboyant character who attached himself to Saul for decades, lived on campus with his then wife, Ann. Saul,
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