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with a mission.
(Very serious about it … maybe funny to others … wasn’t trying to be funny …
) And there would be, in all actuality, without metaphor, a different drummer—a very very extremely different drummer—and the different boy found the different drummer’s drumming in short order and then great changes took hold. Hence, the march of a lifetime ensued.
    Everything enlarged. Beginning with the house. They moved to the best part of town, to King’s Point, long considered the most prestigious corner of Great Neck—albeit to a relatively new and modest subsection therein. This was summer 1956; the property at 21 Grassfield Road cost $52,000; houses here were built on lush berms and set far back from the street. Now there were five bedrooms, including Margaret’s on the lower level near a laundry facility and a smallish den which would become a sanctum most hallowed (and often forbidden)—the place a certain mind’s eye pictured whenever feats were performed in the outside world that had been born and practiced endlessly down there. Anyway, this would be the last family home they would all know together.
    Stanley Kaufman’s career in costume jewelry had obviously alsoenlarged, though not without struggle and frayed nerves and ongoing dreams of escape and hopeless irritability attendant. He would eventually call this house—sturdily spread, tri-leveled, prefab-sided, with attached two-car garage, on enormous lot—“the best investment of my life.” His job responsibilities were by now more than commensurate with his talents—besides fully engaging his bright business acumen, he was even designing KARU product lines of earrings and pendants and such. Still, however, working with his father and his father’s partner gave him much
tsouris,
much doubt. “The truth is, I had just bought the house and things were terrible downtown. You’ve got to understand—at no time in all the years I was with my father did I ever have any feeling of security. I had to be a very, very conservative person because I could be out of a job at any moment. These two men were at it almost every day of the week—‘We’re gonna break up this goddamned business!’ I’d not only hear it at the office, I used to drive home with my father maybe three days out of five and it was always a rehash. I thought,
Forget it!
It was awful. Nothing pleasant about it at all. So the commitment of the new house came with the headache
of Can I sustain this?”
    Chaos at work required perfect o-r-d-e-r at home—order unimaginable, thus unachievable, in a household where three young children grew and cavorted. And so, too, the rages enlarged. Janice took/accepted the brunt. Stanley, the otherwise good and loving husband and father, would have to vent and rant for years to come. (Was there no aspect of his world that he could control?! How he tried-picking out furniture and decor for the house, selecting clothes for Janice and the kids, shopping for groceries, designating basic tasks for all—but damned if the results ever turned out exactly as he wished.) His frustrations and furies were to be a Grassfield Road continuum. His wife heaved her sweet deep sighs and patiently understood—she once wrote a poem and handed it to him and left the room—
    “I’m wishy washy, dull as can be;
    No one asked you to marry me.
    But you liked those traits and gave me a boost;
    For that I let you Rule the Roost….
    If I choose something that I like to wear,
    You say, “No. Wear this.” As if you care.
    But other times, I don’t know why,
    You’re so indifferent, you make me cry.
    Now try to be nice—let’s not fight,
    Tell me, which dress should I wear tonight?”
    The children, however, could not abide the storms. They witnessed their father carping at their mother, wishing she could stop him, knowing that she wouldn’t. “For the most part,” Michael remembered, “she just took it. Here was this fragile little woman—I was amazed that she