This post is written for my children, grandchildren, and any potential future descendants. Aunt Mollie was an important person to my in earlier years. She should be remembered.
Mollie was my father's older sister. She was born in 1900, the third of the four children of Isaiah and Eta. She was an extremely private person and never revealed the least personal information about herself. I know nothing of her childhood and I am not even certain that she attended high school. I know that she was for many years employed in the surgical instrument field, where she advanced to a responsible management position and earned a reasonable salary (for those days). She retired early, perhaps in her fifties. She never married nor introduced me or anyone else in our family to a boyfriend, lover, or suitor, though in later life I learned that it had been her constant habit to visit a "Mr Isgin" every Wednesday. Who was Henry Isgin? I believe that he was a fellow worker at her place of employment and I know that when he died he willed Mollie his Long Island City house. That's all I know; I hope that her relationship with him was satisfying.
Mollie's curly black hair never grayed. Her eyes were so dark that there was no visible distinction between iris and pupil. My daughter, who knew her only in her last years, remembers her as small, squarish, and big-bosomed.
Mollie never "moved out"; during my childhood, she lived with her parents and later with Eta only in a small ground-floor apartment at 334 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. When Eta died in 1963, she moved across the river to a her own place at last, a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, where she lived until her death in 1985. She enjoyed the concerts and the theater and her independence. She was a solid New Yorker; like my father, she never learned to drive an automobile. Unlike my father, who was uncomfortable outside his familiar sphere and was averse to travel, Aunt Mollie was an adventurous sort. She traveled the world, usually solo. She was constantly on the move. I heard tell, for example, that she was a passenger on one of the first commercial flights to China (in the 1930s).
In 1952, she offered to take me on a trip to Washington DC. I jumped at the chance. It was my first time out of Brooklyn and quite the revelation: gosh, there were other cities, other neighborhoods in the universe! We stayed at the Mayflower Hotel (gosh, there were hotels!), ate in "restaurants" -- another novelty -- visited the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and even took a boat ride up the river to Mt. Vernon. We heard Harry Truman deliver a Fourth of July address from the base of the Washington Monument. It was exhilarating and inspiring -- a first toe-in-the-water alternative to my very marked provinciality and to the exaggerated caution of my parents. I am sure that I would never "gone away" to college, or relocated to the Rocky Mountain west, or traveled to other continents if it hadn't been that Aunt Mollie introduced me to the world outside the P S 217 schoolyard in my thirteenth year.
Mollie also helped me financially. She wasn't rich but as a single woman with a good income she accumulated enough cash to intervene, generously, at critical moments. In a sense, she was the family banker. She gave me a couple of thousand dollars for part of the down payment on the Hackett Hill property and later held, on favorable terms, the mortgage on my house on 10th Street. When she died, she bequeathed me the remainder of the principal. Although these were not great sums, they were nevertheless very crucial to me and to my family's financial well-being.
Even more important: Mollie admired and, I believe, loved my wife -- which was a very good thing because my own mother was not so positive.
I can't say that I ever had a real conversation with Mollie. She asked little and told less. She was not curious, or thoughtful, nor well-educated -- not even a reader. She was always a little crude and could be critical and blunt (though not to me). To my brother, when he was going through a tough period in his financial life, she said, "Why don't you just get a real job." To a niece, she offered, "Why don't you just lose weight." A true Victorian at heart, she regarded all illnesses as mental and moral weakness.
Mollie was proud of her extraordinary vigor and health. She once told me that she went 40 years without seeing a doctor. She was robust and middle-aged at 84, dead at 85 -- every one of her organs having failed. Loss of mental acuity was the first sign of decay. In 1984, she called my father on the telephone and said, out of the blue, "Pop is here." Dad said, "What do you mean Pop is here. Pop died in 1946." Mollie answered, "Yes, I know that. So why is he here." After that shocking moment, the end came quickly.
I' have never visited my parents' graves, but I'm told that Mollie is buried on my father's right and that my mother is buried on my father's left. So Dad lies forever between the two women to whom he was closest in life.
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