by Barbara Fischkin
Objects. Objects. Objects. I need to drop objects into my writing. This advice keeps popping into my brain, as I write a second chapter about my cousin, Bernie Morris. For this writing tip, I credit Sands Hall, a teacher beloved by many. Sands may have worded it differently but in my mind’s eye I hear her saying: “Objects. Use your objects.”
The placement of objects in fiction, or nonfiction, typically makes sense. A comfortable chair is usually placed in a corner and adorned with a throw pillow. A kitchen counter always has a coffee pot. Objects, however, can do so much more for a piece of writing. Objects illuminate characters. They illuminate the tale itself.
And so, in regard to objects, stay tuned for a martini and a shot of Scotch. They will appear at the symbolic “happy hour” of this piece. Morning is another story, another object is needed. In this case it will be a blue-and-white-striped men’s seersucker robe. The kind one might wear over pajamas—or on its own, on a hot day. Spoiler alert: A children’s version is included.
Two Seersucker Robes
I am close with several of my first cousins. Cousin Bernie, though, was the only one to visit our family when we lived in Hong Kong, 1989-91. My husband, Jim Mulvaney, was the Asia bureau chief for Newsday, Long Island’s daily newspaper, which then had the foreign bureaus it now lacks. As a former Newsday reporter, I freelanced for a magazine or two, tried to write fiction, and went to a lot (a whole lot) of parties. Parties at over-priced restaurants, parties in luxurious flats, parties on expansive junks sailing the South China Sea, all often financed by rich corporations attempting to distract homesick expat employees. Journalists were often invited, as well. They were more fun.
Writers without traditional gigs have been known not to write much while living in Hong Kong. Too many of those parties. I was no different. I also had a toddler son, Danny, to raise and in the midst of this I slowed down enough to become pregnant and give birth to his younger brother.
In many ways it was the perfect time for cousins to visit. I don’t blame the others for not showing up. Unlike Bernie, and his wife Joanie, my other cousins had little children of their own. Unlike me, they had real jobs. From anywhere in the United States Hong Kong was a long, expensive plane ride—and an arduous one. Newsday sprung for business class for its employees, their spouses and children. But the largesse specifically excluded cousins.
Joanie, much younger than Bernie, had registered for a cooking course in Bangkok. A stopover in Hong Kong made sense. Bernie and Joanie wanted to meet our son, Danny, who at two-years old was already a world traveler. He was born in Mexico City and had flown throughout Latin America. He met kids in a Guatemalan orphanage and sheltered in a Marriott Hotel from an attempt to overthrow Manuel Noriega in Panama. By the time Bernie and Joanie arrived in Hong Kong, Dan had visited a bleak Beijing post-Tiananmen Square and a dowdy Shanghai, a city decked out in a slightly moth-eaten cheongsam. In the Philippines, Lea Salonga—who had starred as “Miss Saigon” in London and was due on Broadway— took Danny in her arms on a small stage in the lobby of the Manila Hotel and held onto him through several songs.
Cousin Bernie and Joanie knew that if they wanted to meet Danny, they had to come to him. Indianapolis wasn’t on his itinerary.
Danny and Cousin Bernie were already pals on “the morning of the robes.” My aging cousin lounged on a couch downstairs in our Newsday-financed Tai Tam Road duplex, dressed in a favorite robe of blue-and-white-striped seersucker. I watched as Danny gazed at Cousin Bernie and then walked upstairs to his bedroom. I followed, curious but baffled.
Danny opened the door of his toddler closet and removed a hanger from the back that held his own seersucker robe, an identical miniature version of the one Cousin Bernie wore downstairs. I had forgotten about that robe. It likely was a relic from the childhood of my husband Jim or his younger brother Patrick. It was the kind of family heirloom that is received with joy and forgotten in a closet.
Dan put the robe on, over his own pajamas.
I followed him downstairs as he took a seat next to Bernie on the couch. Dan as Bernie’s mini-me. Danny and Bernie sat still, quiet and content, happy to share this connection.
For me, this small event, propelled by two accidentally similar objects—the robes—illuminated “family,” as much as anything could. It reminded me why, as a child, I had been so drawn to Cousin Bernie, the professor first from Moorhead, Minnesota and then Indianapolis, Indiana. Bernie was interesting. Bernie was fun. With his roundness, baldness and glasses he did not immediately present as a charismatic figure. But charismatic, he was.
I wish I could say the relationship between Danny and Bernie continued. It didn’t. A year later we went home to Long Island. Joanie continued to take cooking classes in Thailand. But Newsday had ended its presence in Hong Kong. As we were preparing to leave Asia, Dan stopped talking and stopped initiating age appropriate skills. He was diagnosed with late onset autism, cause unknown. He no longer seemed like the kind of kid who could go up to his room to find a seersucker robe. Today, at 37 and still autistic and nonspeaking, he is much improved in many ways and might actually do something like this.
But that was then.
And back then people knew too little about autism. Today, they still do not know enough. But they know more. Back then, even Cousin Bernie, a psychology professor whose mother had schizophrenia, could not explain to me what had happened to Dan. He researched autism, told me that what his mother had was something else and that schizophrenia and autism were not related in any genetic iteration. I am not sure he believed this.
Bernie visited us again on Long Island but he seemed to keep a distance from Dan, as if my son’s decline reminded him too much of his own mother’s descent into mental illness. I tried to explain to Bernie that autism in more recent years was viewed as something different from mental illness—as a neurobiological communication disorder. I don’t think this registered with Bernie. What did register is a tantrum Dan had, which I believe was caused by his frustration at being unable to communicate. Bernie saw this—and I remembered that he had told my mother he could not visit his own mother because it was too difficult to see her frustration with the way her life had changed. I never blamed Bernie for the new distance he kept from Dan.
Instead, I concentrated on the morning of the seersucker robes.
How Much Scotch Do You Want In Your Martini?
By the time Bernie and Joanie visited us in Hong Kong, Joanie had been sober for years. Like many in the same boat, she would be a recovering alcoholic all her life. A person who might, at any point, fall off the wagon. Even now in her eighties she worries about this. Four other truths are connected to this. 1- Joanie got herself sober. 2 – Cousin Bernie helped. 3 – Maybe Joanie could have done this without Cousin Bernie. 4 – Maybe not.
Now, back to those promised “happy hour” objects. A martini and a shot of scotch. Demonstrating not only the usefulness of objects in writing but also my conviction that even sad tales should include bits of humor. For review, please check out my first chapter about Cousin Bernie .
In summary: From Indiana Cousin Bernie called our family in Brooklyn, said he had fallen in love with a younger woman, a rare-book librarian—that would be Joanie—and hoped that my father, his uncle, did not mind that she was not Jewish. Not only didn’t my father mind, he was thrilled. He had given up on Cousin Bernie, already in middle age, ever finding a wife, any wife, let alone a young good looking one.
I was a teenager when the engagement was announced. Soon, my parents and I flew out to Indianapolis for the wedding. A day or two before the ceremony I watched Joanie, in awe of her sophistication. She sat on Bernie’s lap, a martini in hand, charming her many intellectual friends. She was the ultimate beautiful shiksa , the Christian woman we young Jewish girls were taught to fear and admire. They might steal our boyfriends. Fortunately, Joanie was only “stealing” Cousin Bernie, who was far too old for me—and a first cousin. So admiration triumphed over fear. It was only years later I learned about martinis being Joanie’s downfall. She told me she had avoided having a child with Bernie because she knew she would not be able to stop drinking during her pregnancy.
There was also that lighter side to this hard story, one I only learned about recently. It involves those objects, the martini and the scotch. From the first of two assisted living facilities—where Joanie has lived with the man who became her partner after Cousin Bernie died—she told me that Bernie had tried to control her drinking by mixing some of her drinks himself. Best I can guess, his “mad-professor” plan may have been to slowly wean her off the sauce so that she would unknowingly be drinking what today would be a “martini mocktail.”
“Except,” as Joanie told me. “Bernie knew nothing about alcohol. He used to ask me ‘how much scotch do you want in your martini?’” To honor Cousin Bernie’s memory, I have pondered this question, perhaps with undue seriousness. Well, the object can propel the story.
I Googled to see if ever there was a martini made with scotch and, indeed, there was. Bernie didn’t have the Internet but he did have research skills. I wonder if he looked this up somewhere or other, if he had consulted fellow academics or tripped over the Kingsley Amis classic “Everyday Drinking” in which the author explained that Scotch replaced Vermouth during the Blitz in WW II.
From the heavens, I believe Cousin Bernie is reading this thinking that maybe Joanie is his equal when it comes to free-range. I feel him sending a message to me that I have left out too much. Left out Joanie as the heroine of a story in which I made him the hero. The truth is that their life together makes its own great story, if not a book. Along with teaching, cooking, identifying rare books and running a bed and breakfast they mentored many, including the girl they took in as a foster child. She’d already had a hard life. Her own mother was an alcoholic. Cousin Bernie and Joanie tried so hard to help her—I heard the stories. It did not work out. She died too young— from alcoholism. “Joanie, can I write about her?” I asked, as we ended a recent phone conversation.
“My life is an open book,” she replied.
And so was Cousin Bernie’s.
Which is perhaps why I hear Cousin Bernie calling again from the heavens: “You left out Scott.”
Scott Evenbeck was the founding president of what was once called New Community College, the first community college to open in New York City in forty years. It is one of the 25 schools that make up the City University of New York, better known as CUNY. As a writer for the CUNY Chancellor’s Office, I was assigned to interview President Evenbeck for a university-wide magazine feature “New On Campus.” In checking out this new president’s biography, I noticed that for years he had taught and worked as an administrator at the same Indiana university as—you guessed it—Cousin Bernie.
Graciously, Scott Evenbeck ushered me into his new office.
I am not one to beat around the bush. “Did you know Bernie Morris,” I asked him.
President Evenbeck stopped in his tracks and smiled.
“He was my mentor,” he told me.
“He was my first cousin,” I replied.
“He also always brought me bagels when he came back from New York,” he said.
“From my neighborhood bakery,” I replied.
Written with thanks to the objects: The martini, the scotch and, of course, the two seersucker robes. Oh, and also a postscript object: The bagels.