Nanny

It’s been about six years since the publication of my book The Tree Nobody Wanted: A Christmas Story, which I described as part fable, part remembrance, part miracle. 

Many people have asked me what happened to Nanny after that 1946 Christmas. Two years later, I won admittance to the very exclusive Catholic preparatory school several miles from where we lived in Brooklyn. That chapter of my life is told in my book Charity Case. I was the charity case. The brief time I spent there was the unhappiest experience of my life. I still carry the scars, both physical and psychological. 

That same year, 1948, two major events took place in Nanny’s life. The first was her marriage to Edward Neu, a widower. He was a neighbor, and Nanny knew him and his wife very well. Their son, Warren, was a childhood friend of Nanny’s youngest son, Arthur Lynch. Uncle Arthur became the most important man in my life until the day he died about seventeen years ago. Mr. Neu shortened his name from Neuberger because one of his early employers thought it sounded better, was more memorable, and, of course, was less Jewish sounding. Mr. Neu was in fact a German Jew. He became a very successful furniture salesman at Macy’s on 34th Street. The second major event took place a few months after Nanny married Mr. Neu, when her oldest son, Charlie, died at 44 of alcoholism. I will not even try to describe the effect that had on her.

When Mr. Neu’s wife died, he discovered that she had a bank account with eleven thousand dollars in it. Eleven thousand dollars in the forties was an enormous amount of money. One could buy a two-family house in Brooklyn or Queens for twenty-five hundred dollars, or a new, top-of-the-line Chevrolet for fifteen hundred, and could feed a family of four, with some kind of meat every night for dinner, for about six dollars a week. The eleven thousand dollars came as a result of a common practice in those days among New York housewives: to save a dollar, or perhaps two, each week from their food budget and squirrel it away, either somewhere in the apartment or maybe even in a bank, although many people were still suspicious of banks. This was called “table money.” The wives would never tell their husbands about this, and the money was there to do with what the women wanted. Saving a dollar or two each week and amassing eleven thousand dollars over the years must have taken an enormous effort on the part of Mrs. Neu. Typically, the women would dig into the money if there was a catastrophic illness in the family or to buy a nice walnut or mahogany coffin for a loved one instead of a cheap, cloth-covered pine box. Some of these “table money” women were able to send their sons (rarely, a daughter) to college or even put them through medical or dental school. In those days it was possible to go to medical school for about eight hundred dollars a year. The New York writer Jimmy Breslin, who, like me, was a graduate of John Adams High School, wrote an entire book entitled Table Money.

A couple of years after Mrs. Neu died, Edward Neu and Nanny got together one Friday night and went out to Pisanos Bar and Grill. They evidently enjoyed themselves that night and went again the following Friday and the many Fridays after that, always to Pisanos. Eventually, they announced that they were “keeping company,” which was an expression people used at that time for dating. Pisanos was located in Brooklyn on a little triangle of land under the El on Liberty Avenue and Drew Street in the East New York section. It was a very respectable place as compared with some of the other Brooklyn bars. Most of the space at Pisanos was devoted to the grill room, which was quite separate from the bar area.  Red-checkered cloths covered the grill room tables. Every Friday night, Nanny and Edward Neu would appear at Pisanos at seven o’clock for their hot corned beef sandwiches on Jewish rye and one glass each of draft beer. There was a piano player, and the couple would sit at a table and eat and listen to the music until about nine o’clock, when he would walk her back to her apartment building. They shook hands at the end of the evening. I was sitting on the stoop and saw it. 

When they decided to get married, she was fifty-eight, and he was about seventy. I think it started out as a marriage of convenience—he needed a wife, and she needed someone to support her—but after a couple of years of living together day after day, they formed a genuine affection for each other, and maybe even love. He had retired a few years earlier, and Nanny told me that he had about forty thousand dollars plus a small pension from Macy’s. The forty thousand included the eleven thousand that his wife left him when she died. Forty thousand dollars was a great deal of money. To put it in perspective, the average man in 1948 earned between four and five thousand dollars a year; the average doctor earned between eight and ten thousand.

They rented a small apartment in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, which is a lot better sounding than it actually is. They had a two-room apartment in a small apartment house with about fifteen other families. Mr. Neu, at Nanny’s urging, bought all new furniture for the two rooms, a living room set, bedroom set, and a kitchen table and chairs. They didn’t have a full kitchen, just a stove, sink, and refrigerator against the living room wall. The new furniture came from Macy’s, of course. Mr. Neu bought it on sale and got the former-employee discount on top of the sale price.

They were very happy to have each other. As far as I know, they had only one disagreement. In those days, New York had two tabloid papers, the Daily News and the Daily Mirror. Nanny liked to read both, but Mr. Neu felt that one paper was enough. The price of the paper was two cents for the daily and ten cents on Sunday. Nanny gave in and got used to reading only the Daily News. However, when Mr. Neu died, she went right back to reading two newspapers a day.

When I left “the Prep,” as it was called, after only one term, I was eager to lose my Brooklyn accent and discovered that there was a speech teacher named Robert Sheppard at John Adams High in Queens. Mr. Sheppard was the coach of many all-city public speaking champions, and I decided he was the one who could help me with my Brooklyn accent. However, there was no way I could get in to John Adams since I lived in Brooklyn. I needed a Queens address. I applied, giving them Nanny and Mr. Neu’s address, 101-33 108th Street, Richmond Hill, New York. That address got me in the front door, but my record at the Prep would have gotten me thrown out had it not been for Miss Marie L. Keller, who decided to take a chance on me. 

I often think of how different my life would have been if I did not have Nanny and Mr. Neu’s address to use. There would have been no Miss Keller; no brilliant English teacher named Mary Burns (who told me I could write); no talented drama teacher named Margaret Gannon; and no Mr. Sheppard, whom I also write about in Charity Case. Nor would I have met the beautiful, smart, and talented Joan, my wife of fifty-eight years. One day after I had been at John Adams for two years and was turning my young life around from the Prep experience, a classmate came up to me—a particularly obnoxious type—and sneeringly told me that he knew I had used 108th Street as my address and that I didn’t live there. He knew, he said, because he did live there. He said that he was thinking of telling the school that I had lied. I felt his words as sharply as if he’d hit me. He could ruin my life. I suddenly grabbed him by his knitted tie and twisted it hard. He went white with fear. This was the first and only time in my life I threatened another person with bodily harm. He never told. If he had, my life would have been a lot different once again.

I liked Mr. Neu very much. He was very good to me and to Nanny and our family. He was interested in me and what I planned to do with my life. He would always take time out to talk to me and give me the benefit of his experience. When Joan and I graduated from John Adams in 1952, Mr. Neu gave me a twenty-dollar bill, which was a very large gift at that time. It was the first money I ever got that I didn’t have to work for. A short time after that, his health began to fail. He became nearly blind and quite deaf and suffered from a variety of other ailments, which he faced bravely. He never once complained. He died in that two-room apartment in Richmond Hill. It was the first time I saw Nanny cry since she buried her 44-year-old son, Charlie. The first thing Nanny did after Mr. Neu died was to call a rabbi, who came and said Hebrew prayers over the frail body of Edward Neuberger.

Arthur, Nanny’s only living son, was very attentive to her and helped her in every way he could, and there were many ways. I tried to do the same, as did the rest of the family. Nanny was always there for us with her wise advice; she was always cheerful, never judgmental.

When I moved to Boston, it was Nanny I missed most. I called her, every day if I could, certainly every week, and sent her a greeting card for every occasion. Cards meant so much to her. Nanny visited us in Massachusetts. By that time I had four children. Uncle Arthur would drive her up, along with his wife, Martha, and their children, Pat and Dennis.

One day in 1972, Uncle Arthur called to tell me that Nanny fell and broke her hip. I flew down to see her in a Brooklyn hospital. She was eighty-four years old, and it was the first time she had been in a hospital. All of her children were born at home, and she enjoyed remarkably good health up to that point. She was frightened and in a lot of pain, and the doctors were already concerned that because of her age and the condition of her bones—she had osteoporosis—she could be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. One of the doctors took Uncle Arthur and me aside and explained that in all likelihood, “her hip broke and she fell,” not the other way around.

I continued to call Nanny every day, and a few days after the first visit I flew down again. By that time, she had stopped eating and had already lost a lot of weight. She was still in pain, but through it all, she managed a smile and tried to appear positive. We knew she was in trouble, and there was very little we could do. We suggested moving her to another hospital, but the doctors convinced us that they were doing everything possible to make her comfortable and to restore her health to the extent that it could be. I remember on one visit Uncle Arthur, in an effort to get Nanny to eat, cooked a hamburger and a baked potato and brought it to the hospital from his home in Forest Hills, Queens. He carried it to her bedside on a hot-water bottle to try to keep it warm. Joan, too, flew down to see Nanny. When she returned to Massachusetts, she was very upset. She said that through everything—Nan’s age, her pallor, the weight loss—she saw glimpses of a young Nanny. She has talked about that visit several times since.

A steady stream of our New York family and her friends sat at Nanny’s bedside. Her grandchildren—my cousins Pat and Dennis, my sister, Mimi, and I—were especially upset. Nanny had been the best grandmother ever as far as we were concerned. I called Nanny morning and night. The conversations became shorter, but she never complained. She always told me how much she loved me and how much pleasure I had given her both as a child and an adult. She enjoyed watching me grow up, succeed at my career, and raise a family of my own. She sometimes talked about the “old days” and the time we spent together when I was growing up.

I planned to go down to that Brooklyn hospital on a Saturday. I called her at about eight o’clock Friday night to tell her I would be there the next morning. When I asked the hospital switchboard operator for Mrs. Neu’s room, there was a long pause. I waited. I began to think we had been disconnected and was about to hang up, when I heard a voice say, “We know it hurts, Mrs. Neu, but try to help us by rolling over on your side and staying there. . . . Please . . .” The nurses kept repeating things like that. “Open your eyes and try to swallow this pill. It will make you feel better. . . . We know you are cold, and we’re trying to keep you warm. . . . We will get you another blanket. . . . We have to give you this injection, Mae. It will hurt for a second, but it will make you sleep. . . .” And all I could hear was my Nanny moaning and crying out softly in pain. I suddenly realized what had happened: At the precise moment my call was connected to the room, one of the nurses had taken the phone off the hook for the night and placed it on the nightstand, not realizing that my call was connected and I could hear what was being said in that room.

I don’t know how long I held the phone to my ear—ten minutes, fifteen, maybe thirty. I began to cry. When I finally moved to hang up the phone, I remember not being able to see its cradle. I was hearing my Nanny’s voice for the last time, and I knew it. Nanny died that night.