Blue Skies

Blue Skies, A New York Memory

Once upon a time, October was my favorite month. Central Park would blaze in autumnal colors and for air crisper than the first bite into a McIntosh apple. I lived for football, Columbus Day parades, the glow of Halloween pumpkins, for the society belles of Park Avenue to promenade in their swankiest frocks. Streetlamps bathed October evenings in golden lights, the streets were awash in hunter green and burnt sienna, and showgirls swathed in fox fur strutted their stuff down Broadway.

Poppa's tuberculosis had taken a turn for the sores in late September. By early October, doctors told us he probably wouldn't make it. Rain had deluged Manhattan for three days and flooded the streets. Although I know it sounds corny, the torrent from the sky was a drizzle compared to tears I'd shed for Poppa.

Mamma insisted I go back to school, but Poppa and the influenza dominated my thoughts. For the first time in my life, I took no pleasure from my studies. When I crossed my high school's threshold, the floors were sodden from the footprints of a hundred pairs of galoshes and wet umbrellas. I remembered whenever it rained, my grandmother, Bubbe Yetta, would repeat the old wives' tale, "Rose, my darling child, close your umbrella. Open an umbrella indoors and misfortune is sure to follow."

There were a hundred open umbrellas lined up at the entrance like a grove of monstrous black tulips. I wasn't any more superstitious than the next girl, but l it was foolish to tempt fate so I closed my umbrella and went to my French class. I should have been concentrating on conjugating French verbs, but my thoughts were on Poppa. A cord bound us more securely than most fathers and daughters as if we were two peas in our own special pod. Our jaunts were often silent ones because speech was unnecessary when people share the same soul. We'd walk through the neighborhood, past old men arguing in Yiddish over a chessboard, past Katz's Delicatessen's just as the smell of their mouth-watering salami wafted through the air.

Music was a family passion. Before Poppa lost every penny in the Crash, our family always took in a musical or concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I'll never forget the magical night we heard the great Rachmaninoff. After watching the master perform with a passion I'd never seen the likes of, Poppa declared that one day I would be his equal. Of course it was just been so much applesauce, but to hear such words from my father's lips meant the world to me

Yes, Poppa was an aficionado of the highbrow stuff, Chopin and Debussy, but he loved popular music too. We didn't have any money and would while away the hours listening to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on our Victrola while Momma and Poppa did a mean foxtrot. As for singers, Poppas special favorite was Al Jolson's jazzy baritone and swore, "Nobody sings like Jolson." Perhaps not, but Poppa did a heck of an imitation, and delighted our friends and neighbors by belting out "I'm Sitting On Top of the World, "April Showers," and "Swanee." "Blue Skies" was his number-one favorite because he admired the sentiment of Irving Berlin's verse even more than Jolson's voice.

No matter how lousy life was, if the world was the crapper, life would get better, things were going to be okay. Times could be bad, the world was on the brink of collapse but Poppa was always smiling, even after the Crash took everything - our house, our savings, and finally, his health.

Consumption had taken a dreadful toll in those last months. It painted his black hair with streaks of gray, lined his handsome face with premature age and robbed him of the cocky strut I loved. He coughed up blood and begged me not to make another visit to the sanitarium. "Darling, please don't come anymore. It hurts me to look at my little girl and see her pain."

I did as Poppa asked but how I wanted to disobey him.

At one o'clock in the afternoon of October 20, 1930, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and looked into the face of my Aunt Zelma. Her brown eyes had filled with tears, her face with grief contorted before she uttered a word. I knew Poppa was dead. My love affair with October ended forever. Everything was lost in an instant and I collapsed onto the classroom floor amid a swirl of colors and lights.