AGE IS JUST A NUMBER-PART III — Sharon Mark Cohen

AGE IS JUST A NUMBER - PART III of IV

There were stories Lois told that I wanted to hear again and again. I took notes. One interesting anecdote was that, during the war, her mother took her children to Oakland, California, to live with her sister, our Aunt Shirley, and her family. They lived downstairs from George Burns and Gracie Allen’s niece, a deaf mute, for whom Lois babysat. She added, “lives do intertwine.”

Lois said they lived with Aunt Shirley "for probably six months to a year" and then moved in with our Aunt Rose and her husband in Los Angeles for six months before moving back to Cleveland. Shirley and Rose were each later divorced.

Rose and her daughter Joyce came to Cleveland and lived with Aunt Estelle for a while. That was in direct contrast to me, moving once before marriage from an apartment to a house my parents purchased when I was 11 and once again after marriage from an apartment to a large house my husband and I bought in 1981. To me, it’s incomprehensible that people moved so much.

Growing up poor in a broken home and not highly educated, Lois felt she had nothing to offer a man but her virginity, which she lost to her first love before marriage. Before their nuptials, her husband paid for her illegal secret abortion at the doctor’s house, which she described in grueling detail. She joked about how easily she got pregnant, and soon after their marriage, she was pregnant again and had another baby 14 months after her first.

Lois described her husband as a very loving husband and father. She noted that he approved of her playing canasta daily for minimal money. That was when the children were babies, and she and the other young mothers would put the babies down in the crib together and have them sleep while the mothers played.

One day a police officer knocked on her door and asked Lois, standing with a baby in her arms and a toddler at her side, what kind of car she owned. When she told him, he callously responded, “your husband is dead.” The love of her life died in a car crash two years after their marriage.

Reeling in anguish from her terrible loss, she consciously decided not to marry for love a second time. While volunteering at a local hospital, the young widow met a surgeon, and she suggested he join the military. He was a religious Jew and donned Tefillin or phylacteries daily, yet she never became enamored with him, and although she hesitatingly agreed to wed, the marriage was never amicable. That said, she and her second husband had two sons together after he adopted her two older children.

While she considered herself an honest, ethical citizen, my cousin felt she was not a good mother. Yet she schlepped by bus with her four children and the laundry to the laundromat in foreign-speaking countries. Every time her husband was re-stationed, she did all the packing as they moved to 13 locations around the globe.

Of her four children, she confessed that she loves them as much as she can love them. They’re darling, she admitted, and she’s glad she had them.

As the wife of an Army officer, although polar opposites, she was expected to treat her husband as an Officer and a Gentleman. On the bright side, Lois loved army life and entertaining. She frequently threw wild parties using her sterling silver, fine china, and the finest liquor. She even chuckled at the nose job she had when her husband was in the army, for which she paid $4.50.

As her marriage was crumbling with her husband stationed in Japan, she went to see a psychiatrist on base. He suggested she needed to have an affair. She returned for follow-up counseling after doing just that, and his reaction startled her as she learned he meant he was the one who wanted to seduce her.

Not long after, Lois took the plunge, moved back to the states with her four children, and divorced the husband she never grew to love. To put it bluntly, she told me she was miserable for the 14 years she and Jack were married.

That breakup occurred about the time when I first met Lois at her house in Cleveland. My family traveled out west when I was 16 to see family. Lois’s mother, my mother’s eldest sister, was in a nearby nursing home.

We visited my mother’s revered sister so they could see each other one last time (see my blog post, Miss Roselle, dated July 23. 2019). Lois had no recollection of that encounter. Yet, I was able to describe her house and where she sat!

I even remembered the white, frilly blouse I wore with the green and white gingham skirt. That was in stark contrast to Lois's children, similar in age to me, dressed trendier in jeans.

Lois, though not religious, kept the commitment she made to herself to marry Jewish men with whom she would bear children, claiming that was her emotional response to the war. After her childbearing years, she met a non-Jewish man at a bar and dove in again.

The reality set in when she and her younger son joined him on the golf course, and one of his friends made derogatory statements about Jewish people. She said, “excuse, me, you’re stepping on my toes, I’m Jewish,” to which her husband did not defend her. She left him, then and there, at the country club.

Interestingly, both men remarried after being divorced from Lois. Her second husband, who practiced his Judaism so faithfully in the military, married a religious Catholic woman. According to his obituary, he was a retired colonel in the U.S. Medical Corps who died on January 28, 2010, at age 85.

The second time Lois and I met, I was pregnant with my daughter, and we drove up from Pittsburgh with our young son to visit my aunt and uncle in Cleveland. We joined them to meet with Lois, a personal shopper at Saks Fifth Avenue, where we found her working the register. She worked various jobs over her lifetime and retired with a pension after 30 years of steady employment as a top sales associate at Saks. She hailed her employer for after her years of work there ended, she still received a store discount all the years later.

The stories Lois told about her time as an employee of the high-class department store were always enjoyable and entertaining. A size 8, sometimes even a 6, she fit the look expected of Saks employees. Lois loved working there and had a great fashion sense. A dedicated employee, she talked about getting in early to go through the new line of clothing before it hit the floor when the customers came in to shop. She loved selling beautiful, expensive clothes.

What I remember from our 1989 encounter includes her quick wit, beautiful blue eyes, and fashionable dress on her petite frame. Again, she did not recall that meeting. That was after her failed third marriage, broken childhood home life, and sordid other travails in life.

With all that, Lois had a delightful, yet sometimes coarse, demeanor. In 2009 she told me she stopped smoking 22 years ago and plays duplicate bridge six times a week. She was a gal who liked to have fun, yet she was nobody’s fool.

Until her final days, we spoke, and she was still teaching me things. Her forte was grammar and words. She suggested books for me to read and movies to watch.

We seriously covered the grounds when it came to our family history. My mother was the most religiously observant and prolific of our grandfather Papa Harry’s 11 offspring. Lois and I filled each other in on all aspects of the descendants of Papa Harry as we analyzed the lot.