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about by the family. With his heavy brass ruler always prominent on his desk, always at the ready, always an intimidation. How many times had it cracked down on his children’s hands or backsides? I never wanted to know.
    I did know that during World War II he had hung a map of Europe over his desk and moved pins of different colors to track the Nazi offensives. And it was whispered that at that time he had attended Bund meetings around the corner. This area was New York’s Germantown, after all. No conversation had ever occurred between us, but two remarks from Christmas Eves past still stung.
    I was a young teen in my prized red velvet dress, daringly scoop-necked and with a flared, scalloped skirt. For a rare moment, as I had looked in the mirror, I had dared to drink in my dazzling beauty. Soon after we arrived, Rolf said to my mother, “Isn’t it time she lost her baby fat?” Followed by, “At the rate she’s growing, she’ll be too tall for a girl.” He had skewered me where I hurt most.
    For years I had slept in a tight ball, lest I grow in the night, when my guard was down, and I had never ever dared stretch in the morning. All to no avail. I grew and grew. I had perfected the art of compression by sticking out my pelvis, standing with my weight on one leg, and jutting my head forward. As for shoes, by wearing ballet shoes—fortunately, “in” at the time—and ripping the heels off my penny loafers, I could reduce my problem by half an inch. Now, in a flash, Rolf had turned “dazzling” into fat and gawky.
    The following year, once again in my red velvet dress, I wore my ballet shoes. This time Rolf pronounced to my mother, “Those bedroom slippers make her legs look fat. Proper girls wear proper shoes with proper heels.” I couldn’t win. I wasn’t meant to. The message was: Our
lives were a mess, while their lives ran like the clocks Rolf collected that ticked and gonged in unison.
    This Christmas Eve, there is still no conversation. Rolf speaks. I listen. His communication, delivered in a guttural accent, still thick after decades in America, is to the point: “I hear you are planning to marry someone by the name of Greenberg.” There follows a list of reasons why that cannot happen: the shame I would bring upon my family and my self; I would not be accepted in respectable homes, or clubs, or resorts or . . . He is on a roll. At some point Fred enters the room and stands at attention beside his father.
    As a boy, Fred had socked me and broken my nose. I was four and had beaten him to the front seat of our car. When I was five, he proposed to me while we were fooling around on my bed. That pretty much ended our conviviality. He soon joined my brother, Norden—yes, named after the aforementioned White Hunter—in tormenting me, whenever and wherever. Fred and tears, that became the drill.
    However, he sank to his nadir when I was in college and he asked me to set him up with my friends. The first turned out to be a feckless mischief-maker who, after he dumped her and moved on to number two, wrote him that he ought to know I was a lesbian. Fred told his mother, who, naturally, rushed the news to Poor Lolly, no doubt ending with, “What do you expect when you send your daughter to Bennington?” My brother, designated as the preserver of family virtue, dutifully confronted me during his next visit home and told me that such behavior would irredeemably destroy my reputation and chances for the future. He was terse and performed his task well. In shock, I stammered my innocence. No more was said.
    Now, two years later, Fred socks it to me once again, this time for heterosexual waywardness. Like a good foot soldier, he echoes his father in detailing the life of estrangement and shame I can look forward to, not to mention the shame I will bring to the family. Lesbian or marrying a Jew, the verbiage is pretty much the same as