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Song is Blue Roses by Banshieva Melodica. Click to play.

My mother found my father the day he died. He was crumpled in a ball at the bottom of the stairs that led from the screen porch to the backyard and garden of the house he had built for his family. My mother did not use the four letter word. Instead she said: "Orelle please call an ambulance. Your father is hurt and in a bad way. I don't think he's breathing." She waited for the doctors at the hospital to tell my mother the bad news we already both knew.

We had been arguing that morning, my mother and I. I was recently divorced which in those days was considered rather scandalous even when there were no children involved, both parties were ill suited for one another, and the marriage was less than two years old. The argument went on hold. I asked to see my father even though I knew his body would not be cremated. He is buried in a cemetary just outside Los Angeles. I go there to visit his grave and have taken Masada there. Sometimes she brings flowers. I finally planted a miniature orange there. It is not traditional, but it just seems appropriate.

Then again, you would have to know my father. The first I remember of my father was on a hot summer day in 1932. My mother came back downstate to claim me from my grandmother who had raised me for the past year. My grandmother (my mother's mother) had taken custody of me when she found out my mother went to the fields to pick beans to help support my father who was completing his studies at Cornell University's College of Engineering. My grandmother considered bean picking beneath a respectable Bechstien and that no Bechstien child, not even a baby Bechstien whose last name was Shejnrubin should have to live with a bean picking mother.

I would learn later that my mother paid a portion of my parents' rent in beans and traded the beans that were her salary for other food with the neighbors, and of course ate tons and tons of stringbeans. I probably ate them too though I had no memory of it. What I remembered was my grandparents' apartment and an endless parade of old people, both Bechstien and Shejnrubin coming by to check up on me.

Then one day my mother arrived. I do not know why I was afraid of this tall slim stranger in a rose jersey drress with a matching jersey blazer. Only her sun tan and a few broken finger nails testified to the fact that she had been harvesting strawberries recently. Her hair was short and curly and she smiled and asked how I was doing. I clung to grandma's skirts, petrified. Perhaps I had been told or overheard about the evil creature, Habiba, who kept a good Jewish boy imprisoned in the nowhere land of rural Ithaca, New York. Perhaps I heard bad things my grandmother said about her eldest daughter who had had a child her last year at Cornell.

It took much tears and convincing to get me to go with the stranger to the train station. It was going to be a very very long train trip. I realized this as we left New York and were soon in the wilds of Pennsylvania. I asked if we were going back to Ithaca. My mother told me we were going to California. Daddy had a job there and we were all going together.

We met daddy on the platform of Union Station in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Daddy had taken the milk train south and the train stopped at small stations where farmers' sold their wares. Daddy looked like a playboy in dress pants, a butter yellow cotton sweater, and a pale straw hat with a brown and yellow silk band. On the train, daddy opened his bag and drew forth a cucumber which he deftly slit with a pen knife. He salted it and gave half to me to eat. We ate cucumbers, tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, and strawberries all the way into Ohio.

In California, daddy settled us in a trailer with a grove of orange trees behind it. He helped my mother put in a garden and added editions and an indoor toilet and large bath. He even built a second bathroom when he realized that with three daughters, girls needed more bathroom space.

To his credit my dad never longed for a son though his two youngest children are my brothers. He enjoyed the company of his girl children every bit as much as he liked the boys. When Ophira, my oldest younger sister, and I begged for a puppy, my dad put us in the car and took us to the pound over the hills in Los Angeles. He took us in the cat room. He said that cats made better pets than dogs and then asked the lady working the cat room to show us cats that would make a good pet for a household with four children, two of them quite young. We returned with a basketful of black and white cat whom my father named Dinah. Though money was tight, my father took Dinah to a vet to be spayed. He explained that Dinah had probably had kittens already and that she would have way too many for us to place. My dad made me do the multiplication of four or five litters of five kittens a piece. I still remember Dinah with her stitches. Ophira made her a "get well soon" card and we taped it to her bed.

Though girls were not basmitzvahed in those days, my father saw that each of his children learned Hebrew, and we often went with him to synagogue. One time I got angry at having to sit in the women's section. He had no answer but asked me if it was better going and sitting in the women's section or not going at all.

My father also wanted each of his children to return east to Cornell for college. I can remember working hard in high school to make my father's dream a reality. Ophira was a bit too boy crazy for all of this and I am to this day not sure why Odera never went east. The Bechstien counsel paid for a good deal of my education and my father supplied me with some monies out of a "secret fund" for my room and board.

I remember the train ride back to Ithaca which reminded me of the train ride I made west as a very young child. I was very lonely and homesick the first few weeks of my freshman year. I wrote to my father often asking him for advice on choosing major and on coursework and life in general. More often than not he said I needed to make up my own mind. He said this even when I became engaged my senior year. Only then, he insisted I finish my education. I was working on a BA in chemistry. I had two good friends in my major. My fiancee was in ILR and prelaw. He would be going to Columbia Law School in the fall. I would teach school in the New York Metro area.

It would be two years before I could go west. Sometimes two years can be a very long time. After my marriage, I commuted from Manhattan to White Plains leaving my sleepy student husband to get himself up for classes. I made dinner for Robert and corrected student work while he studied. I did not mind my job but Robert claimed I was unsupportive of him and his studies. Then the fights began, complete with the namecalling that brought back less than pleasant memories of the schoolyard. I began to dread going home.

Finally, I could stand it no longer. I walked out on my husband. I found a rental in White Plains and moved in. I enjoyed the quiet and walking to work. I did not tell my employer or my parents. Robert told his. They tried to get me to go back. They suggested counseling. Do not ask me where I got the good sense to stand my ground. At twenty-four, I found myself divorced on grounds of desertion. I wrote my father and he told me "We all make mistakes, Orelle. At least you got out early and cut your losses. Now you need to tie up the loose ends. You are young. You have a career. You have plenty of time to start over and decide what you want if you don't know." The court had tied up all the loose ends. I tied up the last two, letting the school district know my new address and taking back my maiden name. My father approved of this last move.

In the summer of 1954, I returned home to see my family. Ophira was a student at UCLA and Odera, my youngest sister, was finishing up high school. Like me, she planned to go east. Caleb was just starting high school, and Naphtali was in sixth grade. We had a reasonably good few weeks together. My mother was not pleased with my divorce. Odera asked me why I had not come home after my marriage disintegrated. I told her I had work and students I cared about. Sometimes you don't just lick your own wounds.

Then came that terrible morning that my mother found my father dead at the bottom of the stairs. It took a long time to get back to normal. Sometimes three weeks is a long time and no we were not entirely normal but it was mid August and school started two days after Labor Day. There was my father's will. There were finances to be transferred and posessions to be divided and the garden to be tended. My father would not want the garden neglected. Dinah was still with us and she too needed attention. My father would not want his kitty princess to go without.

Odera decided to stay with mother and not to go east to Cornell. Ophira said she did the right thing. I was undecided. One evening after the others had gone to bed, my newly widowed mother could not sleep. We sat on the screen porch. She kept looking through the door as if my father would climb the stairs from the garden and enter. Then she said: "David was very very proud of the way you handled the divorce. He would want you to go back to your teaching job. It would break his heart if you didn't."

To this day, I don't know what to think. I was in a daze as I boarded the train for New York. Hardly a day goes by even now that I don't think of my father and what he would think of this or that. I hope to meet him again some day and I hope it is like our first meeting, only he will not be a stranger in a yellow sweater on a train platform, but he will still carry with him a bag of wonderful surprises. I hope the nearly fifty years we have been apart will melt away in a few moments. Fifty years can be a very long time. Daddy I still love you.

Orelle Z. Marantz
1-27-02