Wendy and the Lost Boys (5 page)

She was a devout individualist. When other mothers teased their hair into bouffants, Lola chopped hers off into a severe helmet. While other prosperous 1950s housewives took care to keep their homes immaculate, Lola didn’t mind a mess.

She was ahead of the times with her attitudes toward diet and exercise. There would be no platters of Old World dumplings and stuffed cabbage for her children, and no New World canned foods either. Frozen french fries were allowed; they could be baked. As other mothers filled out, Lola got slimmer. She and Morris walked miles, hand in hand.

Weight was a constant topic of discussion. Georgette was praised for being svelte, living up to her nickname of Gorgeous. Bruce and Wendy managed to grow chubby despite the fresh vegetables their mother had delivered to the house in crates. Lola had many theories about nutrition; her children couldn’t bear to watch her eat—or rather, drink—breakfast, a mixture of soft-boiled eggs and orange juice. She insisted on feeding Bruce steak, as though he were a prizefighter being primed for the heavy-weight championships. She didn’t cook so much as roast and broil, chop and arrange, priding herself less on cuisine than on original presentation, like topping salads with kiwis and grapes. For Sunday brunch she served bagels, lox, and cream cheese, then criticized the children for being plump.

Lola emphasized wholesome foods and slender physiques, but the family dined regularly at Lüchow’s, the German restaurant near Union Square known for its groaning platters of sauerbraten, Wiener schnitzel, and dumplings, accompanied by the music of an oompah band. Lola insisted on telling the musicians that it was one of her children’s birthdays, even when it wasn’t.

“I would have to sit there, head up, chest out, beaming with pride and confidence as they played ‘Happy Birthday’ on their accordions just for me,” Wendy remembered. “Is it any wonder that to this day I have a terminal fear of men wearing lederhosen and tiny feathered caps?” Her embarrassment led Lola to designate Wendy the shy child.

Unlike the headstrong Bruce, who constantly rebelled, Wendy was conciliatory. After Lola mortified the children by showing up at school wearing a hat with cherries hanging from it, they cut off the cherries. Wendy felt so guilty she convinced Bruce to confess. They told their mother, “We just want you to be normal.”

Perhaps in reaction to Lola’s lack of sensitivity, Wendy became hyper-empathetic, even to inanimate objects. Every night before going to sleep, she said good night to each of the cadre of dolls and stuffed animals that slept with her. She rotated their positions on the bed so none of them would feel excluded.

Watching her little sister tend her make-believe flock, Georgette predicted she would grow up to be a happy housewife with “bologna arms” and many children. She promised Wendy—whom she called “Sweetsiebud”—that she would be happy but warned her not to marry someone dull in the insurance business.

L
ola pushed and prodded her brood. She heard Ethel Merman sing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in
Annie Get Your Gun
and changed the lyrics for home consumption. “There’s no children like my children,” she would say.

When it came to education, Aunt Florence might have set the standard, but Lola was not intimidated.

She didn’t know better—and had no choice—with Sandy, who was educated in the New York City public-school system. Sandy’s high school, James Madison, provided a solid education, but the Wassersteins had moved up in the world. They now lived in Midwood, the Brooklyn neighborhood on the affluent side of the Flatbush border. Lola owned a fur coat, and the family spent the Christmas vacation in Miami Beach. In keeping with their new status, they sent Georgette to private school.

She attended Brooklyn’s Ethical Culture School, an offspring of the Ethical Culture movement founded by Felix Adler, son of a rabbi who became a humanistic reformer, whose motto was “Act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in thyself.” The school was a proponent of progressive education. The teachers there encouraged creativity and selfexpression, at a time when these were radical ideas. The students planted seeds and wrote poetry. Art was considered as important as arithmetic.

This soft touch was fine for their daughter Georgette, but Lola felt that a boy needed something more rigorous. She also wanted Bruce to have a Jewish education, in deference to her late father. Simon might have scoffed at religion, but he’d spent most of his adult life as a Hebrew-school educator. He avoided synagogues, except for holidays and special occasions, yet it wouldn’t have occurred to him to eat pork—or to have a grandson who wasn’t educated in Jewish teachings.

Morris and Lola enrolled Bruce at Yeshivah of Flatbush, even though Morris had unhappy memories of his religious education. His brothers had sent him to a Lower East Side yeshiva, but after a rabbi hit him, he switched to public school. Morris hadn’t had a bar mitzvah, the ceremony that inducts Jewish boys into the requirements of their religion. As an adult, with his own family, he saw no reason to join a synagogue, though the Wassersteins did celebrate Hanukkah with latkes and dreidl playing and trips to Ohrbach’s department store to buy gifts. They gathered for seders at Passover. Lola sent Georgette to Hebrew school at the East Midwood Jewish Center; Simon had taught Sandy to read Hebrew. Lola’s own religious education was questionable. At Bruce’s bar mitzvah, she held the Hebrew prayer book upside down.

Given the family’s ambivalent attitude toward religion, Yeshivah of Flatbush was not the obvious choice. The school had opened in 1927 in direct response to the immigration law enacted in 1924, which halted the huge influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. If Judaism were to survive in the United States, the founders reasoned, it could no longer rely on a constant supply of newcomers. The goal at Yeshivah of Flatbush was to produce Jews who would be proud Americans but also true to their faith. This purpose became more determined with the rise of Nazism through the 1930s and was strengthened by the Zionist movement.

The school was kosher and called itself Orthodox, but it was revolutionary in its day. Unlike traditional yeshivas, this one placed equal emphasis on Jewish and secular studies, and stressed Hebrew not Yiddish, considered the language of Jewish exile. Even more radical: girls studied next to boys. The only division came with Torah studies, which were conducted separately.

One aspect of Yeshivah of Flatbush resonated with Lola. Its graduates, male and female, were expected to be superior in every way: they would be as well grounded in their own traditions and history as any traditional
yeshiva bocher,
yet also be trained to compete in the larger world. They were expected to march out of the ghetto into the mainstream, then climb straight to the top.

Graduates became Nobel laureates (among them Baruch Blumberg, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, and Dr. Eric Kandel, the Columbia University professor who won the Nobel Prize for his work in the molecular biology of memory). They also became rabbis, physicians, bankers, lawyers, professors, editors, and at least one jazz impresario (Art D’Lugoff, founder of the legendary Village Gate).

From kindergarten on, students were tracked according to their performance. “By high school there were six classes,” said Gaya Aranoff, a Flatbush graduate who became a pediatric endocrinologist on the faculty at Columbia University Medical Center. “If someone was in the F class or E class, they were branded for life.”

Competition was embedded into the culture. “There was this post-Holocaust desire for the kids to excel,” Gaya said. “That was the message we got in school; that was the message we got at home. Expectations were very high.”

In the Wasserstein home, the family made fun of the vegetable cheeseburgers the kosher school served at lunch. But when it was Wendy’s turn to begin school, her parents sent her to Yeshivah of Flatbush with Bruce. The two of them walked to school together, Wendy trailing a few feet behind her big brother. He embarrassed her by knocking on the window of her first-grade classroom and sticking his tongue out at her. She adored him but also found him annoying—or “annoing,” as she would write in her diary. Wendy was a smart little girl and a passably good student, but she couldn’t spell and had difficulty reading. Later she said she was dyslexic.

“Words in books flew around the room when I tried to read them,” she wrote. “I was convinced that the ‘Fly to Europe’ advertisements on the subway were actually offering tours to Ethiopia.”

Lola took Wendy to reading specialists, and her comprehension improved. At the yeshiva, she made the A track, along with her classmate Gaya Aranoff, the future physician. “She was this plump, cherubic, curly-haired, sloppy kid who had a shy good nature,” Gaya said. Her strongest memory of Wendy took place outside school, on the occasion of Gaya’s ninth birthday. Wendy brought the most unusual gift to Gaya’s party.

“She brought me a denim skirt of hers I had complimented her on,” said Gaya. “After the party, when I was going through the gifts, my older sister said, ‘What kind of a weird present is that? Why would she give you her old skirt?’ I said, ‘But I loved that skirt, and she knew I loved that skirt.’ Wendy literally would give you the skirt off her back.”

Wendy had a very different recollection of the party. Her father—unprepossessing Morris—had indulged himself by buying a Jaguar. The Jaguar had been Bruce’s idea. At age twelve he advised his father to buy a car that would set the Wassersteins apart from the “Cadillac Jews” of Brooklyn. Morris refused to buy a Mercedes or any other German vehicle, so he chose a classy British car.

Unlike Lola and her brother, Wendy cringed at the thought of seeming flamboyant. She didn’t want her Flatbush yeshiva friends to think she was a spoiled rich kid. On the way to Gaya’s party, Wendy asked Morris to drop her off a few blocks from the Aranoff house, so no one would see her in the Jaguar.

Wendy’s good-natured exterior covered a complicated mixture of insecurity and self-doubt. Being the youngest child in a large, competitive family would have been enough to contend with. The pressure was compounded by Lola’s belief that survival lay in hiding the truth.

A playwriting teacher would tell Wendy, “There is order in art, not in life,” to which Wendy replied, “Life can imitate art if the artists change the accepted variables.”

Her ideas on this question were forming as early as second grade.

Wendy starred as Queen Esther in the Purim play at the yeshiva. Then she told Lola she was going to be in another play, costarring with a boy in her class named Eddie. For months Wendy talked about nothing else. She and Eddie had been cast as the romantic leads.

Lola bought Wendy a pink velvet dress and set her hair in ringlets the night before the opening. The next day Lola came to school and asked where the second-grade play was going to be performed.

“What play?” replied Wendy’s teacher.

Without missing a beat, Lola said, “I must have the wrong room. It must be one of my other children.” And she left.

Lola might have been demanding, but she was loyal. She could criticize her children, but just let an outsider dare. She waited until Wendy came home to yell at her for fibbing.

Recalling the incident in a letter to a friend, years later, Wendy wrote, “I remember feeling this total embarrassment and unwillingness to accept my own actions.” She said the memory brought back a disturbing sensation, “the sense of running away from myself.”

I
n the summer of 1956, just before Wendy started at Yeshivah of Flatbush, she was preoccupied with Sandy’s wedding. Only nineteen years old, Sandy had fallen in love her second year of college and transferred from the University of Michigan to Syracuse, where her fiancé, Richard Meyer, was going to law school. The marriage was set to take place in the Wasserstein family’s huge living room.

Wendy was five going on six during the planning phase. She was obsessed with her sister’s upcoming nuptials, which seemed like part of a fairy tale. Lola bought Wendy a taffeta dress, with white gloves and pearls. The little girl dreamed of how their house would look, decked out like a castle ballroom; she would be a princess, lady-in-waiting to her sister the bride.

Then, as Wendy saw it, tragedy struck. On the day of Sandy’s wedding, Wendy was bedridden with tonsillitis and a temperature of 104. As the party rumbled downstairs, Bruce and Georgette raced upstairs to her sickroom to report on the excitement she was missing: “Cousin So-and-So had just fallen through the floor while freely interpreting the hora!”

(Later Wendy confessed, “I never saw the hole, I never heard of any broken limbs, but I still choose to believe the story.”)

For the adults the scene must have been much more poignant. In the months before Sandy’s wedding, both her beloved Aunt Gucci and Gucci’s husband, Max, had died. The children weren’t told that Gucci had suffered from breast cancer, though they were dimly aware that Max had had a heart attack. Lola’s philosophy continued to be, “If you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.” So far as Wendy knew, Gucci and Max “went to Europe.”

Two years later, after Sandy’s marriage dissolved and she left the United States to live in London, Wendy broke into hysterical sobs when she heard of her sister’s plans. For the little girl, “going to Europe” meant disappearing forever.

G
ucci’s son, Mitchell Kaufman, was eighteen years old, in his first year of college but living at home, when the second of his parents died. His brother Barry was fifteen, a sophomore at Abraham Lincoln High School. As Sandy’s wedding was being planned, the orphaned boys moved in with Lola and Morris’s family, into the maid’s room on the third floor.

Though Lola did her duty by taking in her sister’s orphaned children, she was still Lola. Dealing with an even busier household didn’t inspire her to suddenly acquire empathy. As usual, she had submerged her own sadness over her sister’s death and expected Gucci’s sons to live by her rules.

Mitch, the older one, found life in his aunt’s house intolerable. Lola’s behavior only made him miss his own mother more. “She wasn’t like my mother at all,” he said. “My mother would cook and clean and take care of things. She was more of a mother.” Lola’s children didn’t eat dinner with their parents but took their meals before Morris came home, in the kitchen.