The House on West 56th Street

As a kid, I felt closest to my mom’s side of the family, and every summer brought the eager anticipation of spending a week at my maternal grandparents’ house. My two younger brothers felt the same way. We each got a week to ourselves, to be the focus of fond overindulgence. The wait seemed unbearable, and we would have fought to see who would go first if my mother hadn’t devised a system wherein who went first in one summer went last the next, and so the three of us rotated, taking our turns.

On a lot barely more than a tenth of an acre, my grandparents’ house on West 56th Street was in an old residential neighborhood on Cleveland’s near westside. It was set near the street where, as a child, I would draw comfort from the humming sound of cars traveling over the brick road. Beside the house ran a cement driveway that ended in a double car garage in the corner of the lot. From the garage a paving stone walkway led to the house and ran between a small garden area and a larger one. Between the larger garden and the house, there was a patch of lawn with a cherry tree in the middle, a tree whose thick side branch stuck out like it was signaling a right turn. It was propped up with a wooden support. Although my grandfather loved food gardening, there were only a few rows of vegetables planted behind the lawn because he grew most of his produce in my father’s suburban garden. All the rest of the cultivated ground was devoted to rose bushes. My grandfather thought of himself as a no nonsense, practical man, yet he couldn’t deny his love for roses and crammed his backyard with a hundred bushes.

If you could look through a magic glass into the past, you might see me on a warm summer day, a light and nimble child climbing the cherry tree up to the blue heavens and the highest branches, there to compete with the birds for the sweetest cherries while below, in a cantilever metal chair, my grandmother would be sitting, perhaps shelling peas or snapping green beans. Sitting in my tree top perch, I listen to the bulky window air conditioner, noisily grinding away and profusely sweating in its labor to cool my Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Joe’s upstairs apartment. Looking the other way, I see a floral sea of rose blossoms and the open garage awaiting the return of my grandfather and my Aunt Katie’s cars, with them being off at work during the weekday. In the garage, my grandfather had something that no one else I knew had. He had a pit dug in the floor on one side of the garage, bricked up around its sides, a pit big enough for a man to climb into so that, if a car was positioned over part of pit, the man could work on the underside of the vehicle. Something different to fascinate a child, something that you could see from the heights of the tree, beyond the roses, something that yawned like an open grave.

The house itself was constructed in the early 1920s. My grandfather, a carpenter, was proud to say that he built it himself, although he would add that he had “the coloreds dig out the basement.” Although a kindly man, he had very biased view of the world, a view in which all the races and ethnic groups were set in a hierarchical order with his group, the Germans, at the top. You can guess whom he placed on the bottom. He also subscribed to the typical antisemitic stereotypes. He had been raised in German-speaking community in what is now an independent Serbia when it was then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He had a low opinion of Serbs, always referring to them as lazy because, in the morning, they arrived in the farm fields long after the Germans had started working. He seemed to have a high opinion of Hungarians based on their martial demeanor when he served with them in WWI. He had no problem when his oldest daughter married a Hungarian American. But he didn’t like it when his youngest daughter, my mom, married a Slovak American. Decades afterward, my father could muster up resentment when he recalled his initial reception into the family. But they got along went enough for my father to be called in when there was an electrical problem in the house.

I don’t know who wired the house. My grandfather knew nothing about electricity. When my father – who wired our house—was called in to fix an electrical problem, he would always complain that the wiring was terrible and if my grandfather didn’t do something the house would probably end up burning down some day.

The two-story house was shared by my grandparents and my unmarried Aunt Katie, all living on the ground floor, and my Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Joe, who lived upstairs. When you entered the house from the back door you had your choice of going straight ahead down into the basement or to the left down a narrow hallway leading around to the kitchen. As a child, I thought the basement was spooky. You flipped a switch at the top of the stairs and a bare light bulb created a circle of light in the center of basement. The basement looked “dug out.” To your left was a crawl space cluttered with baskets that my Aunt Carolyn, a florist, used for flower arrangements. To a child, the white baskets, in the gloom, suggested a boneyard of jumbled skeletons. At one end of the crawl space was brick wall with vertical vents that to a child’s eye made the brick into prison bars. A drain was in the middle of the floor, and, although now it only was fed by water from a perpetually leaking wash machine on the other side of the room, I could imagine times earlier in the century when my grandfather slaughtered chickens down here and hung them upside down so that the blood could dip down into the drain. There was also a primitive shower and dryer along the long the wall with the washer, although lines of clothes were often strung up to dry down there. There was also a side room that was a “root cellar, a room that, as summer gave way to fall, would be lined with jars of vegetables and fruit that my grandmother canned. Reassuring to me, at the far end of the basement, behind the furnace, was a work bench that ran the length of the wall, with a vise attached and behind it a peg board decked with tools, everything illuminated by a shop light, a light that, to me, made the space glow with the love, protection, and competence that I associated with my grandfather.

If you went to the left instead of downstairs, you would make your way around to a cramped little kitchen with a dinette table pushed against a wall, and along the back of the house a counter with a sink, the counter filled with African violets, all pushed up toward the window. The flowers were a passion of my grandmother. Off the kitchen was a bathroom that was short on elbow room, a place containing an old, out-of-fashion toilet, tub and sink, all veined with hairline cracks in their porcelain. Staying at grandma and grandpa’s house meant hearing the rapid slap-slap-slap of my grandfather’s straight razor against the sharpening belt and smelling the suds of his shaving soap.

Off the kitchen were stairs that curved around and led to where my childless aunt and uncle lived. We were allowed to play on the stairs but not in their upstairs apartment. My Aunt Carolyn liked her place clean, tidy, and undisturbed.

The kitchen also led to the dining room and, to the side of it, my Aunt Katie’s bedroom. Through an arch, you went into the living room with its television, chairs, and a davenport beside which were built-in shelves with Hummel figurines. Off that room was my grandparents’ bedroom, a room where my mother was born. The room was strange to a child because instead of a full bed there were two twin beds pushed to together. My mother explained, “Your grandmother is sick and tosses and turns and your grandfather has to get up early in the morning for work.”

As far as my memory goes back, my grandmother was sick. My mom said that her mother had arteriosclerosis and an enlarged heart. Long after her passing, I referred to my grandmother’s heart attacks when talking to my Aunt Carolyn, her oldest child. “Heart attacks?” she scoffed. “She was having nervous breakdowns.”

Grandma was an anxious, often irritable woman that dominated her husband who seemed meek under her hectoring. My grandfather became a naturalized American citizen; my grandmother never did because, my mother explained, she was too panicked to take the test. She suffered too from gall bladder problems. As a middle- aged woman, she was scheduled to have the gall bladder removed, but on the morning of the scheduled operation, my grandfather arrived at the hospital to discover she was missing. She had gotten dressed and taken a bus home, never to return. Her passion was for weekly movie going, and she had a favorite seat. When the theater’s roof leaked over that favorite seat, she sat in the seat under an umbrella.

To me as a child, she was just a loving grandmother who hugged me, saying with feeling, “die Freude meines Herzens” (my heart’s joy), a grandmother who would make me fried baloney upon request at nine at night and get my poor exhausted grandfather off the davenport so that he could drive to a gas station to buy me the red pop that I wanted, who let me eat all nine cupcakes in one sitting from the package home delivered by the Hostess bakery man.

She didn’t drive, but that didn’t matter because the stores on Storer Avenue were within easy walking distance, and she would take us kids on her visits to them. When we got older, we were allowed to go by ourselves. This shopping was a special treat because, out in the suburbs where we lived, there was very little commercial development that you could walk to.

As you walked the sidewalk down toward Storer, the first business you encountered was the auto body shop on the corner. Its garage doors were always open to the summer air and inside was the loud clamor of hammers on metal, and rough looking men held torches and sent arcs of orange spark flying into the air. There was a darkness in its depth like the darkness of the mechanic pit in my grandparents’ garage. There would be a dark future connected to that shop, a darkness that enveloped my favorite aunt. But on those childhood summer days, I gave the body shop scarcely a thought and hardly a glance.

I was more interested in the general store across Storer Avenue from it, a store owned by Helen, a thin woman, and Mary, a heavy one. Early in my childhood Mary died, but my grandparents continued to refer to it as Helen and Mary’s. It was a place where grandma would always buy us snacks. Next to that store was Johnny the Butcher, with his glass cases displaying cuts of meat and his shelves stocked with cartons of lards. Dangling from his ceiling racks were processed meats in their casings, types of salamis, salty treats that we kids devoured greedily.

West 56th Street abutted Storer before continuing further down the avenue, so that where it halted it formed just two corners. On the corner across the street from the body shop was a store that I suppose you could call a five and dime. It was operated solely by an old lady with thick glasses who had to bring your money up to her nose to discern its denomination. She never smiled and rarely said more than a word or two. As kids we seldom went there because it seemed like the old woman was always staring at you. Unlike Helen and Mary’s and Johnny the Butcher, this place was only referred to by my grandparents as “the corner store with the old lady.”

We didn’t go east on Storer very often because in that direction there was little to interest a child, just businesses like bars and hardware stores. But occasionally our Aunt Kate took us to the ball parks down that way, and we stopped at the Creamery where you could buy ice cream cups to be eaten with short flat wooden spoons. There was also a rack of comic books; I can remember being excited when, along with the DC comics, featuring Superman and Batman, there was something new, new superheroes more vividly drawn – Marvel Comics!

West on Storer was a shoe store where we got our Buster Brown shoes and a bakery where we were treated to cream horns. It was also the direction we walked to go to Szep’s Flowers, my aunt’s shop, Carolyn Szep boss and sole proprietor. On a summer day, you could find my aunt creating arrangements in the back of the shop. She might be working with a helper, perhaps Francis, who was a gay man and like one of the family. Or it could be her husband Joe, who did the deliveries. After his heart problems, my Uncle Joe could no longer work in construction and was reduced to helping my aunt. The most common grunt work was taking green tape and wrapping green sticks to flower stems so that the flowers could be inserted into the Styrofoam within baskets, creating floral displays for weddings and funeral. This was a task simple enough for us kids to help with. When my uncle did the taping, he often blundered into my aunt’s wrath: “Joe, you broke another stem with those big clumsy fingers of yours! Those flowers cost money, you know!”

Despite the diversions of local shopping, days with Grandma often grew boring and as the afternoon approached supper time, we waited eagerly for Grandpa and Aunt Kate to return from work. Grandpa was good for a hug, a warm smile, and sometimes a back rub although his hairy sunburnt forearms scratched your back and his lap was itchy because he would have changed into wool dress pants. My grandfather had no leisure wear. He had his work clothes, which included bib denim overalls, and he had his Sunday church clothes, which were a button up shirt and wool pants. When the shirt and pants got too worn for church, they became his afterwork clothes.

Happy as we were to see Grandpa, we were beyond ourselves waiting for Aunt Katie, mom’s unmarried sister. We waited on the front porch, a favorite place for us to play. It was our fort from where we fought off Indians, enemy soldiers, and monsters. Often our battles spilled over onto the small lawn and ended by the huge oak tree that grew from the city frontage to the house. The porch floor was painted a deep forest green. Its roof was held up by pillars, and the balustrade was topped with planks wide enough that you could walk or sit on. We would leap off them when my aunt’s car pulled into the drive, running to meet her.

Aunt Katie came out to my parents’ house every Saturday and stayed the night. She made us Jiffy Pop popcorn and watched television with us. She danced with us as the waltzes and polkas played on the Lawrence Welk variety hour. After our Saturday night baths, she put the bonnet of her hair dryer on us and dried our hair.

During our week at our grandparents’, she would take us shopping at the department stores in downtown Cleveland and buy us all the things our little hearts desired. Monday and Thursday the stores were open late. Tuesday was movie night when we walked to the Lyceum where there always seemed to be a new Jerry Lewis movie playing.

Wednesday, Uncle Joe and Aunt Carolyn would take us to see the mammoth cargo ships docked down by the banks of Lake Erie. As I’m sure my aunt appreciated, it was something that you could do for free. My uncle always addressed his nephews in a childlike voice with comic pronunciation: nephoo Dale, nephoo Wayne, nephoo Gary.

Aunt Katie was our favorite aunt.

A large, good-natured woman who doted on us kids and spent freely to make us happy. As a child we basked in her attention and affection. There were only hints that something was wrong. When my aunt was a young, she became seriously ill with pneumonia. My grandparents called a doctor to the house. He examined her and confided to her parents -- according to my mother – that there was nothing more he could do because she lacked the will to live. In elementary school, she was always punished for using her left hand to write, and she never graduated from high school. Once, though, in the back seat of her car, I found a paperback copy of The Art of Loving by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. When I asked her what the book was about, she said, “It’s about what makes people tick.” I didn’t know then that some quiet people are like time bombs: tick, tick, tick.

One Saturday evening, instead of visiting to spend time with her nephews, she brought a guest to dinner: one of the rough looking men from the body shop down the street from my grandparents’ house. I don’t know what my parents thought of him, but he made me feel uncomfortable. He wanted to take us kids ice fishing the following morning, but we said no. We had to go to church. I was still a believing Catholic at that point.

With the arrival of the new boyfriend, my aunt began losing weight, a lot of weight. She had always been very heavy and seemed like a big, overinflated balloon. Now, slimmed down, she no longer looked like our childhood’s aunt. She got rid of her old boxy Buick that seemed somehow to match her old physique, and bought a smaller, sportier car.

Then my memory becomes blurred, probably because of changes in my own life. One Sunday, I walked into our church, dabbed my fingers in the holy water and made the sign of the cross. But instead of saying to myself, “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” I unthinkingly said, “One, Two, Three, Four.” In that moment, I realized churchgoing had become a meaningless ritual to me. I no longer believed and thereafter refused to attend services, angering my earthly father who was drinking more and becoming increasingly abusive.

The culture was changing around us. While he was getting incensed over rock music and the antiwar protests that he was seeing on television, I was upstairs, laying on my bedroom floor with headphones on, lost in the sounds of this new group, The Doors, and discarding the Beatles for The Rolling Stones and their new album, Their Satanic Majesties Request.

1968. In the proceeding presidential election year, my father voted for Lyndon Johnson, and I can remember sitting on front porch that year and telling my friends that people should vote for Johnson. But by 1968, I vehemently opposed the war and the president who was waging it. In the streets, protestors chanted:

Hey, hey, LBJ,

How many kids have you killed today?

Back then, I didn’t appreciate the tragedy of a figure like Lyndon Johnson. So when Sunday, March 31, came along and I tuned in to hear his nationwide televised speech, I thought, well, he’s going to deliver another come-let-us-reason-together bullshit speech in support of the war. Then the political bombshell: his announcement that he would not be running for another term. Now I had hope, hope that this announcement would clear the way for an antiwar Democratic nominee. I wasn’t about to “get clean with Gene,” as the media put it in describing the so-called dirty hippies who were supposedly flocking to Gene McCarthy. I favored Robert Kennedy over McCarthy who I felt was a protest candidate who couldn’t win in November.

Whatever positive feelings I was beginning to have about my country were shaken when just days later, April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated. They had slain the dreamer, as the press put it, echoing Genesis and King’s famous March on Washington speech.

But hearing Robert Kennedy speak, just hours after King was shot, speak so movingly to a black crowd stunned by the news, hearing his ability to connect with the anguished crowd, I was more convinced than ever that he could lead the country out of the darkness of war and division. I was overjoyed when he triumphed in the California primary. Then, June 5, 12:15 am, while exiting through a kitchen after his primary victory speech, he too was shot down. As he lies on the tile floor with blood pooling about his head, in an iconic photo, he seems to be staring off into the nightmare of history. Shortly after, I’m marching in a school gymnasium with my class, practicing for the high school graduation ceremony, thinking that, with all that’s happening in the country, we’re engaging in another stupid, meaningless ritual.

In that year, 1968, over 40 Americans were being killed every day in Vietnam.

In August of that year, police were rioting and beating protesters at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and the convention had become a scene of pandemonium. My father and I were constantly arguing about the war and the protestors. He was always drunk; mom was always crying. We kids were trying to keep out of dad’s way.

Now I was in the streets with the protestors, chanting –

Two, four, six, eight,

Free the Panthers!

Smash the State!

Somewhere in the background of all this commotion, my favorite aunt was hospitalized after swallowing a bunch of pills, trying to kill herself over a breakup with a man, that man who worked at the body shop at the corner of Storer and West 56th Street. My grandmother said, “What will the neighbors think?” Middle class respectability, I thought scornfully.

Then there was that day, in the fall, that day when I heard the door open, the door to the stairway leading to my upstairs bedroom, and my mother sob my name, “Dale.” I ran to the top of the stairs, and she cried out, in the hollowness of the stairwell, her voice breaking, “Dale, your Aunt Kate has killed herself!”

After the funeral, the family met back at the house on West 56th Street. In the garage, on the trunk of my aunt’s sporty car were the smudge marks in the dust, the marks of where my aunt had felt her way in the dark, making her way between the car and the closed garage door, around to her car door, next to the mechanic’s pit that gaped like an open grave, into the driver’s seat where she started car and waited, waited for the exhaust fumes to fill the garage and exterminate her emotional agony. In the house, I saw her suicide note, sadly misspelled, scrawled on piece of cardboard: “Fairwell forever.”

Back in the house, the mourners had gathered. Mr. Grumbly was their wife-beating neighbor who drank a pint of hard liquor every day. In the fall, my grandfather would always take the onions and garlic from my parents’ garden and braid the stems so that the bulbs could hang from the garage walls and dry. Mr. Grumbly remarked, “It’s a shame about that onion and garlic. It’s all no good now.” No one said anything in response, and I was seething with anger at him.

Later, when I sat alone in the dining room, my Uncle Joe entered, his heavily creased face pulled down with the weight of grief. He spoke to me as he had never spoken to me before. I was not nephoo Dale now. I was 18, someone he could speak to man to man. He told me about my aunt being invited to her boyfriend’s apartment. He went into the bathroom and emerged wearing just a bath robe from which protruded his erect penis. My aunt got up and left. “He only wanted one thing,” said my uncle. I don’t know about that, but I doubt if he was the sort of man who would ever get married, and I doubt that my aunt would have accepted anything less. The breakup and the breakdown.

There are few persons more judgmental than inexperienced adolescents. After the funeral, I turned my critical gaze from the faults of my elders and the political world to my own failings. As my aunt was emotionally drowning, where was I? During all the turmoil leading up to her death, where was I? This person who for all my childhood had put me at the center of her world. Preoccupied with myself, I had never made any effort to reach out to her, to try to understand, to tell her that I loved and appreciated her.

That fall was my first term at Cleveland State. I didn’t study much, skipped classes and fell asleep in the classes that I did attend, and yet I dreaded flunking out of school for fear of losing my college deferment and being swept up in the draft. Somewhere during that term or maybe it was the next, I had a climactic fight with my father, a fight that caused me to leave home in the middle of the night. When I got a driver’s license at 16, my grandfather had given me an old car, a Pontiac Tempest. In the middle of the night, I drove to my grandfather’s, to the now darkened house on West 56th Street and parked in the driveway and crawled into the backseat to sleep until dawn. The next thing I knew my mother was tapping on the window. Driven there by my father, she was trying to get me to return home, and I kept refusing. Then my grandfather appeared and told me to at least come into the house to sleep. That’s how I started living with my grandparents.

My grandparents asked if it would bother me to sleep in Aunt Katie’s old room. I said, no, it wouldn’t. I hoped that somehow it would be haunted, and her spirit would let me know that there was a supernatural world after all. But there’s were only memories of those summer weeks at my grandparents and when we were little and slept in the bed with my aunt and the night my hamster gave birth in the cage on her dresser, and she woke up in the morning and shrieked when she got out of bed and stepped on one of the litter whose hairless pink body had fallen on the floor.

I was enrolled in the co-op program at Cleveland State, meaning that I would be alternating going to school a quarter and working a quarter. This program allowed me to pay for school and to extend my undergraduate draft deferment. The school arranged for your placements, trying to connect the work with career interests. I became a copy boy at The Cleveland Press. I thought that I was pretty grown up. I had wheels and spending money, but I still depended on my grandmother to wake me for work and make me breakfast. One morning the poor, disoriented old lady accidentally woke me an hour early and I didn’t realize it until I arrived at the empty offices.

Somehow there must have been a truce with my father because the next thing that I recall I had moved back home. The Winter term 1972 I decided that, for my co-op job, I would work as a boycott organizer for the United Farm Workers. It was only subsistence level wages, but it allowed me to do work that I deemed socially relevant while at the same time remaining in college and out of the draft. I moved in with a pair of guys who were full-time organizers and, at work, met my future wife, who was likewise a full-time organizer. Soon I was engaged and taking my fiancee to socialize with my grandparents at the house on West 56th Street.

Then, the following year, came what for me was a traumatic event. One day my Aunt Caroline approaches my grandfather.

“Pa, Puerto Ricans are moving into the neighborhood and housing values are going down. You have to sell the house,” she says. Before any other color, my aunt saw green, but she knew how to appeal to her father’s prejudices.

My grandfather is taken aback, a pained look on his face as he shakes his head no. But in dealing with his strong-willed daughter, his resistance was only a prelude to going along with her.

“What can we get?” he asks.

She tells him.

“So little?!” he responds, shocked.

“It’s the Puerto Ricans, Pa.”

Thus, it was that my grandfather sold his house. My Aunt Carolyn bought an apartment building in Parma, Ohio, with the intention of she and her husband sharing one basement apartment while, across the hallway, my grandparents shared another basement apartment. But my grandmother died during the transition, and a heart attack claimed my uncle shortly after that.

That house on West 56th had become so woven into my emotional make-up that the years following its sale I had nightmares about it. In my dreams, the dead would be alive, and the living would be dead, past and present and fantasy futures all jumbled. No matter how stoic we try to be in our conscious lives, in our dreams we are the captives of the weaker parts of our nature. Finally, I devised a procedure whereby, before sleeping, I would mentally tour the house’s interior, trying to desensitize myself to the influence that it had over me, and gradually the old house lost its nighttime grip on me.

I can’t remember when my Aunt Carolyn stopped working at the florist shop in the old neighborhood. Sometime not long after she was robbed at gun point and locked in her cooler. Nor do I know when exactly she became a multimillionaire. I guess her husband’s stock market investments paid off. After his death and her retirement, my aunt spent most her time taking luxury vacations around the world until, finally, at the age of 96, the Grim Reaper revoked her passport. Throughout her niece and nephews’ up and downs in life, we could always count her complaining about us not calling her and on her giving us each a ham for Christmas. After years, though, of threatening to disinherit us, she passed on to us her considerable amount of unspent travel money. My grandfather, whose health suffered caring for my ever-ailing grandmother, experienced an Indian Summer in his life, after her death, and enjoyed an active life up until the final few years proceeding his death at the age of 98, always, though, suspicious of the Indian American doctors who cared for him.

My Aunt Katie left behind only a small, fuzzy black and white snapshot of her slimmed down self. My mother had it blown up and framed and placed on an end table in her living room. She told me that every week, when she dusted, she talked to Aunt Katie and let her know what was going on in her niece and nephews’ lives. My mother dies at the age of 73 from complications from colon cancer.

Lyndon Johnson established Medicare and Medicaid programs that now provide health services to millions of people: hey, hey, LBJ, how many lives have you saved today? I’m an old man, and rather than smash the State, I wait for it to deposit my monthly Social Security check.

The house on West 56th Street? One year, my Aunt Carolyn told me that it had been sold and the new owners were renovating it. I fantasized about stopping by, saying hello to the new owners; in my mind I was there and having emotional conversations about what the house had meant to me. But the next time that my aunt mentioned it, she told me that it had burnt down. Looking on Google map, I see only an empty grassy lot, the only familiar feature being the tall oak tree that still stands on the city frontage before the lot. The lot is listed as not currently for sale. It looks the way it must have looked to my grandfather, a hundred years ago, when he first viewed it as an immigrant filled with aspirations and dreams. There’s nothing now to mark the lives that lived there, the drama, the madness and despair, the love, the quarreling, the prejudices, the childhood happy moments, the adult anguishes. There’s not even a ruin remaining for a ghost to haunt.

The End