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.

April Fools' Day 1958

On April 1, 1958, I was twenty-four years old and working in the public relations department of United Fruit Company on Pier 3, North River, New York. The North River was the Hudson, and the street Pier 3 was on was West Street at the tip of Manhattan. The pier was razed when the World Trade Center was built; the location is now called Battery Park City.

It was lunchtime. I was the only one in the office to answer the phones. Shortly after noon, the phone rang. The caller said he was Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, also known as the Black Eagle of Harlem. I had heard of him-everyone had heard of him. He was an infamous arms dealer, who, it was said, could provide not only the arms but also the armies of soldiers of fortune who knew how to use the arms, including cannons, aircraft, gunboats, and other matériel necessary to wage, and win, wars. Colonel Julian himself was a fighter pilot and soldier of fortune who had made his first big mark on his profession during the Ethiopian War. He so impressed the late Emperor Haile Selassie that he was given the contract to create the first Ethiopian Air Force, supplying the planes and training the pilots. He once challenged the German ace Hermann Goering to an aerial duel. He was smart, tough, and cool.

I have to admit I was impressed-me, talking to the Black Eagle of Harlem.

Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian

He told me he asked the switchboard operator to connect him to the president of United Fruit Company, and she explained that the president was based in Boston and she thought he should start with me. He asked my name and said, "Tom, I would appreciate it if you would assist me in getting an important message to your president." His voice was cultivated, with a hint of a West Indian accent.

He explained that he represented some people who had a large amount of money in Cuba. He told me that Castro had placed a ceiling on what people could spend in that country, and that Cuba was in the process of converting from one kind of currency to another. I knew about the situation: The Batista regime had printed enormous quantities of paper money during its last few months in power; much of the money had been hoarded or expatriated by profiteers. Castro's plan was to switch from green currency to money printed in bright pink. The profiteers' money would become worthless, and hoarders still in Cuba would not be able to convert to the new paper without explaining how they happened to have so much hidden away. Nor could they make any large purchases.

Colonel Julian said that the people he represented wanted to sell their green currency to United Fruit Company, and we in turn would be able to distribute it through our weekly company payrolls on the island. I asked him how much money was involved. He said the amount was a hundred twenty million Cuban pesos, which at that time was traded at par with the American dollar. I took a deep breath. A hundred twenty million dollars is a lot of money now; it was an enormous amount of money then. He added that there would naturally be a substantial discount on the transaction: His people were willing to sell at a fraction of the money's face value.

I told him I would get back to him and then called Boston. At first, I was told the company had no interest and then that management wanted to think it over. A little while later, I was called back and told to turn down the offer.

Probably the element that made up management's mind was the risk. If it became known that United Fruit was involved in a plot to undermine the Cuban economy, who knew what consequence might follow? It was even conceivable that Castro would expropriate the company's land holdings and throw us off the island. Far-fetched, but possible.

Besides, the Cuban economy had already been turned into a house of cards under Fulgencio Batista, and all that remained was for it to collapse. History does not always make the fine distinctions between causes and their effects, and when Castro uncovered the real state of the country's finances, many economists in the United States were quick to say that Castro himself was responsible. But United Fruit knew that Batista and his cronies had stolen the guts out of the country, and doubtless realized that it would be too risky to involve United Fruit Company as an accomplice to the final act, despite the opportunity for profit.

I got my final call early the following morning. Before I had the chance to give Colonel Julian the company's answer he told me the thought had crossed his mind, after we had spoken the afternoon before, that perhaps I had not taken his message seriously because it was April Fools' Day.

I told him that had not been the case, but the company had decided to turn down his offer. He thanked me very graciously, and that was that.

I have often wondered since whether his friends were able to unload their money, or if they were stuck for a hundred twenty million dollars.

Happy Birthday, Rocco

Rocco would have been eighty years old in a few days. It is hard for me to imagine what my friend would be like now or even what he'd look like because we were both so young when we met. It all happened so many years ago. . . . But Rocco had a profound effect on my life.

Last year my book Charity Case and Other Stories was published (Exeter Press, Boston, 2011). One of those stories was "Rocco." It was the most difficult one to write. I have received more mail about it than about any other story in the book. Last winter I was invited by a literary group to a talk about and read something from the book. I chose the Rocco story. My wife, Joan, suggested I read another story. I wanted to read Rocco. She was right; I was wrong. I'll never make that mistake again. I could barely get through it before my voice cracked and my eyes filled with tears. Somehow, I managed to finish the last two paragraphs in a voice that did not sound at all like my own...

Horsemeat

My doctor at Mass General Hospital (who treats me for one of my many health problems) recently told me that a blood test revealed very low iron. She advised me to make an appointment with my PCP (primary care physician) who would “treat” my iron deficiency. I like, respect, and obey her despite the fact that she is just about half my age, and all of my children are older than she is. I got over age and gender issues long ago when I realized what a great doctor she is. This is a young woman who was born to be a physician. But—you knew there was a “but” coming—I know what my primary care physician would do if I went to him. He, too, is a very fine doctor who would order more blood tests and possibly other kinds of tests, and in the end I would wind up taking more pills (I already take too many for a variety of conditions). I am tired of taking tests. So I decided against running to my PCP right away. Instead, I would try to raise my iron level on my own.

I read a lot of the literature on iron and discovered that good sources were green, leafy vegetables; legumes; iron-fortified bread and certain cereals; red meat; beef, calf, and chicken liver (my source specified “cooked liver”—how else could you eat it?); prunes and prune juice; and blackstrap molasses if you have some around. Also oysters.

The problem with some of those foods is that they have unpleasant or even harmful side effects for a man my age. For example, red meat is not good for my cholesterol, for which I’ve taken a pill each day for the past twenty-five years and just hope it does not rot out my liver. Beans can have an unpleasant effect on digestion as can prunes and prune juice. Then there are the oysters, and we all know the effect oysters have on men . . . and some recent research says perhaps on women, too.

Reading further, I discovered that horsemeat is a wonderful source of iron and it is low in fat—a lot lower than beef. However, I also discovered that horsemeat is not sold in the United States for human consumption. I checked in my Stop & Shop, Shaw’s, and Market Basket, and called around to butcher shops in all sorts of neighborhoods. Some were nice to me when they said they did not carry horsemeat. Others just hung up. One can buy oxtail, brains, and pig’s feet, but not horsemeat.  

I was a kid during WWII, but I remember meat rationing and some talk of feeding Americans horsemeat. People were outraged and disgusted at the thought. They even suspected certain butchers of mixing horsemeat in with chopped beef.  

In a way, this aversion to horsemeat is understandable because most Americans don’t see cows, pigs, or lambs, but many have come in contact with horses through books, movies, songs, and even mythology. When I was growing up, horses pulled carts of fruits, vegetables, ice, coal, and even garbage in certain neighborhoods. Media has certainly played a big part in giving the horse a special place in the American animal kingdom. Just think back to Black Beauty; Flicka from the movie My Friend Flicka; The Pie from National Velvet; Rocinante from Don Quixote; Silver, the Lone Ranger’s horse; unicorns; Pegasus, the mythological winged horse; the centaur, the fierce-looking half-man, half-horse of fable; Gene Autry’s horse, Champion; Trigger, Roy Rogers’s horse; Tonto’s Scout; Mr. Ed, television’s talking horse; the songs “Back in the Saddle Again” and “The Old Gray Mare”; and Zorro’s Tornado. There were even the mythological Mares of Diomedes, which fed on human flesh. Currently, there is the book, stage play, and movie War Horse.

So, one can understand why most Americans cannot bring themselves to eat horseflesh. Not so, however, in other countries including France and Germany, where people love horsemeat. But Europe was a long way for me to go to get a low-fat, iron-building meal.

Then I remembered the Harvard Faculty Club story told to me about twenty years ago by a man who was manager of the Club for twenty-five years. His name was Charles Coulson. Horsemeat had been on the menu of the Faculty Club for more than a hundred years. Not much of it was sold, but the faculty would not allow him to take it off the menu. He would buy ten pounds a month, and most months he would throw away ten pounds. Occasionally, they would get an order for a horsemeat steak, and his chef would have to disguise the meat’s bluish cast with a dark-brown gravy and try to get away with cooking it well done. He said one old professor, a Nobel Prize–winner, would order it every two or three months along with another entrée. He would never eat the horsemeat: He just wanted to make sure it remained on the menu and that members and club staff knew he was the one who ate it.

One day Mr. Coulson received a letter from the Midwestern meat packer that delivered it to the back door of the Faculty Club every month, advising him that they could no longer deliver the horsemeat to the Club because the eighteen-wheeler trucks could not negotiate the narrow streets of Cambridge. The letter also informed him that the minimum order was being changed from ten pounds to twenty-five pounds, and if he wanted to get his horsemeat each month, he would have to arrange for pickup of the twenty-five pound package at an unloading platform in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Coulson told his bosses at the Harvard Faculty Club that it looked to him as though they could finally take horsemeat off the menu. He told them it did not sell and the old professor had recently died. They told him to go over and pick up the package at the appointed time and place each month.

After a few months of picking up the horsemeat, Coulson got to know the truck driver and asked what else was in that big truck. He was told it was all horsemeat—thousands of pounds of it. Coulson then casually asked who his customers were for all that horsemeat. The driver replied, “Mr. Coulson, I have three customers for all that horsemeat in the Boston area—the dog track, the zoo, and the Harvard Faculty Club.”

I remembered that story and also that the Faculty Club finally gave up serving horsemeat, I believe in the mid-eighties. So even if I wanted to, I could not get a horsemeat steak there. Even if they still had it, they don’t let just any Tom, Dick, or Harry into the Faculty Club. And I certainly was not going to travel to France or Germany for a horsemeat sandwich or a horsemeat hot dog.

So I continued to eat my liver whenever I could get it, ate red meat (cholesterol, be damned) more often than usual, more beans, prune juice, iron-fortified bread and cereal, and even more raw oysters.

God knows what all that did to all my other “numbers,” but my iron level rolled back from the red line to normal, and I did it without having to see my PCP.

My Father's Hands

My father died thirty years ago. He faced his imminent death very well. I hope when my time comes, I can handle it as well as he did. In fact, he may have dealt with his death better than he did anything else in his life. For the year it took for him to die, knowing that he was terminally ill, he waited for death calmly and bravely. I was told he never said anything like “Why me?” He never once complained about pain—although he had pain—or expressed any fear of death.  Perhaps he welcomed death because his life was very unhappy, a lot of it of his own doing. He had problems with alcohol and gambling. In fact, the last thing he did on this earth—just hours before he died—was to place a bet with his bookie, Charlie Numbers, over the phone from the hospital. He never had any money. Never owned a house or a car or had a good job despite his intelligence and good humor.

My father and I were estranged for a good part of my life after I reached age eight or nine. Before that, I thought he was a good dad and better than most fathers in our neighborhood. I didn’t see much of him, but when I did I remember the only thing I really didn’t like was his breath. I didn’t know what the smell was; I later discovered it was beer and whiskey and cigarettes, all of which contributed to his death. I also didn’t like it when he took me into Brady’s Bar and Grille on the corner of the street where we lived—I was four or five—and he sat me up on the bar. The bar was always wet with beer, and the wetness would seep through my short pants. I was afraid that people would see it and think I’d wet my pants. Even worse than the wet bar was the bathroom at Brady’s. The handwritten sign on the door read “Used Beer Department,” which says it all. It was a foul place. I can’t begin to describe the smell. I’ve been in a lot of really dirty bathrooms all over the world, but Brady’s was by far the worst.

As I grew older I became less tolerant of my father, cared less about him, ignored him whenever I could, and eventually became very angry at him. In my twenties I moved away to another city, and we rarely spoke or saw each other, sometimes for years. My children did not know their grandfather.

When I got the news that he had died, I felt nothing. I remember thinking that I should feel something. A couple of days later, looking down at his frail body in its coffin in a New York funeral home, I still felt nothing. For the next couple of hours on that first day of his wake, I walked up to the coffin with visitors, including the bookie, Charlie Numbers, who made it a point to tell me that my father’s last bet “ran out of the money.” I began to feel guilty about not feeling even the slightest bit of sadness. I started to wonder what was wrong with me that even standing in front of the body of the man who gave me life, I felt no emotion, no sadness for a wasted life, no relief that it was over . . . not a single tear.

When the funeral home was closing for the night—about nine o’clock—I walked up to the coffin for the traditional last look of the day, and I noticed for the first time that my father’s hands looked very small. They were folded across his waist, with Rosary beads entwined in his fingers. I had never seen him in that position in life and certainly never saw Rosary beads in his hands. His hands looked so small to me—almost half the size of mine—and I thought back to the time when his hands did not look small to me. In fact, they were nearly twice the size of mine. He took my small hand in his, when I was about five years old, as we crossed Liberty Avenue, a busy Brooklyn street, with two sets of trolley tracks, heavy trucks, passenger cars, and even horse-drawn carts. The year was probably 1939. I remembered that day and the feelings I had. I felt very safe holding my father’s hand. I didn’t have to look both ways as I was taught to. I had my hand in his, and I knew that he would do the looking for both of us.

I remembered another day, a couple of years later. I was about seven or eight and was getting washed and dressed to go to school. It was cold outside. And inside. We had to boil water in large pots on the gas stove. Three pots produced only about three inches of water in the bathtub. That morning, my father came into the bathroom as I was about to put the cold cloth to my face to wash my face and neck. Without saying a word, he took the facecloth from me and held it tightly in his hand for a minute, or maybe two, and then he switched the facecloth to his other hand and held it tightly. When he handed it back to me, it was warm. My father made his hands cold so I could put a warm cloth to my face. I had forgotten about those two incidents involving his hands until I looked down and saw them. Those two memories reminded me that there was a time when he cared about me more than he cared about the things that drove us apart.

Looking down at those hands and remembering those times, I felt very sad. I cried for the first time, as a son should do when his father dies.

"The Tree Nobody Wanted"

[This is my Christmas story, The Tree Nobody Wanted, which I'm posting online. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the eBook version will be available on Kindle and other platforms for the holiday season. If you're new to this site, please tell me what you think of the story. And please consider the hardcover as a great Christmas gift for loved ones. It is available at tommccannbooks.com at a 50 percent reduction from the cover price.]

The Year is 1946, a year after the end of World War II.

The place is Brooklyn—the poor side, the tough side: Brownsville.

The time is Christmas Eve. The Christmas tree sellers have turned off their lights and gone home. The lots are empty, except for a few forlorn trees that nobody wanted.

An eleven-year-old boy is sent out to pick through those trees and bring one back to the apartment where his Nanny has raised him since infancy.

What follows is part fable, part remembrance, part miracle.

It’s a story of family values—even if “family” means a boy and his grandmother; a story of hope in hard times and great happiness growing from small things; a story of youth and age, rejuvenation and rebirth. It is a story of things that are not supposed to happen, but do. That’s part of the miracle.

Above all, it’s a love story—of a special kind that is the other part of the miracle.

Katharine Hepburn

Joan and I read a lot of books. We buy a lot of books, in the course of a year—hundreds. When we are finished with them, we save some, give some away to friends and family, and then throw some away. To some people, to throw away a book is sacrilegious, but we know we’ll never read or refer to some of them again, and others are just plain bad books. We have a place in Boston and a house on Cape Ann, and each has a lot of bookshelves. She and I almost never read the same book, and we try to keep them apart. In addition to keeping our books separate, each of us tries to keep together books that are related either by subject or author. I recently decided it was time to clear out some of the books to make room for others, which are piled on desks, tables, and chests of drawers.

I have about three linear feet of books on Katharine Hepburn. These are books about her, for the most part, and a couple written by her. I have this collection not because I was a great fan of her movies, but because she and I were friends for many years, and I liked her and she liked me. How we came to be friends is a story for another day, and perhaps I’ll tell it here at some point. It all started with a book I sent her that I thought would make a good script for her. She didn’t agree, but I kept a copy of the book and put it in the collection with the other Hepburn books. I was looking through the Hepburn collection the other day, and I found one book that stood out from all the others because of its size. Actually, it’s not a book: It’s a catalog of 250 pages. On the cover is a picture of Kate; the title is Property from the Estate of Katharine Hepburn. It is a Sotheby’s catalog, and it also states that the property will be auctioned off in New York on June 10 and 11, 2004. I picked up the catalog, and the same feeling of anger came over me that I had felt when I first picked it up seven years ago. “Anger” is probably not the right word. I was outraged that the property of the most private person I ever met would be pictured and itemized, next to a suggested price for each item.

Katharine Hepburn spent her entire life protecting her privacy and creating the image she projected to the world. She lived to be ninety-six years old, and toward the end of her life trusted some people to manage her estate including the things she left behind. In my opinion, there was a violation of that trust when these items—many of them very personal—went up for auction. The Katharine Hepburn I knew was not the Katharine Hepburn she chose to present to the world in interviews with people like Dick Cavett and Barbara Walters. The Katharine Hepburn I knew was polite, a good listener (would never interrupt), self-effacing, quietly intelligent, very gentle, fun to be with. I never felt that I was in the presence of a big Hollywood movie star. But she was always a very private person. For a long time I urged her to show the real Katharine Hepburn—the one I and a few others knew—to the world. I suggested she write a book in her own words without any ghost writer or editor. She was certainly capable of doing that. We talked about it at some length. She actually made a couple of starts and finished a manuscript. Of course, it was published and was on the bestseller list. Its title was Me, and despite the fact that I had a big interest in Kate as a friend, I couldn’t finish the book because it was more of the same of what she gave Cavett and Walters.

At one point I even sent her a bunch of yellow ruled pads and a dozen sharpened No. 2 Dixon pencils because that’s the way she liked to write, jotting down what she called “bits and pieces.” She wrote me a letter about it, and I am going to reproduce it here. As you will see, she talks about the “personal, personal stuff.”

Well, a lot of the “personal, personal stuff” about Kate Hepburn’s life was revealed in that Sotheby catalog and subsequent auction. It is now in the hands of strangers. What follows is just a partial list of some of the things in that catalog (descriptions beneath each):

·      Katharine Hepburn’s wedding dress from her marriage to Ludlow Ogden Smith, December 12, 1928. The dress is described in detail, is on a mannequin; the suggested price is between $2,500 and $3,500.

·      A collection of Katharine Hepburn’s passports from over the years. We all know about passport photos, and some of the pictures are very unflattering. She was always very fussy about pictures of her and in life had final approval over what pictures would be released; not so in death.

·      Leather-bound address books with addresses of friends, doctors, agents, etc. Incidentally, my name, addresses, and phone numbers were in one of them that was auctioned off, and at one point, someone called me up and asked, “Who are you?”

·      A group of Kate’s hats.

·      A pair of KH’s khaki pants—single pleat, zipper closure.

·      A sculpted bust of Spencer Tracy, done by Katharine Hepburn, which she liked very much.

·      A picture of Spencer Tracy that had sat on a table next to her bed.

·      A picture of Hepburn with no makeup on, her hair in rollers of different sizes made from rolled-up newspapers and used by her on a daily basis.

·      a brush and hand mirror engraved “KHH.”

·      Her cane and walking stick collection.

·      A Victorian needlepoint runner that was noted as having been in the cottage she shared with Spencer Tracy in Los Angeles. There also was a picture of her standing in front of the needlepoint with a picture of Tracy in the background.

 And on and on for 250 pages.

As I said, it made me angry. Even now after all these years, it still does.