My mom’s generation isn’t getting any younger. Among the people I grew up with, the Chorvinsky family always held a special attraction. Alexei was the caretaker for The Old Soldiers’ Home retirement community on Columbus Hill. We had the run of the grounds: the woods, an immaculate lawn, a pond where we could swim if you didn’t mind wading the first few feet in brown muck. Most importantly, of all the adults that inhabited our post-World War Two idyll, Alex Chorvinsky was the only one I ever encountered who wasn’t a quivering, fretting neurotic.
Why this was so, I can only conjecture. I know that Alex had a mild, lugubrious temperament, but why was everyone else filled with such foreboding?
Let me guess: The Russians had The Bomb, Communism was taking over the world, anti-Semitism ran rampant, Washington DC was a Jim Crow city, and Senator Joseph McCarthy chased after liberal, left-wing intellectuals. “Other than that,” my younger brother Tim liked to say, “what’s the problem?”
My adult career in the military took me all over the world, so I was the least social of Our Gang. The kids who moved only a few miles from Oxburg to work in Virginia or the District— like my cousin Ricky “Jimbo” Barber— still attended gatherings at The Old Soldiers’ Home.
We grew up. Our parents aged appreciably, but four couples— including my folks— regularly played bridge, once a month, at each other’s homes. Preceded by brunch at a fashionable eatery, these card games spanned four decades.
There was once a major snowstorm, stranding mon père and ma mère in the glorious white-out of Oxburg, while the others examined the winter wonderland from their picture windows in Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Laurel. “Who’s got the cards?” asked my mom. Each family set up a bridge table. Mom dealt the hands. Tim and I, just in from shoveling snow, wrote down what was in each. Telephoning the other players, we told them what they had, east-west or north-south. Then my mom got on the phone with Gertrude Chorvinsky, while Aaron Rappaport spoke with Louise Minsker. It took all afternoon, but they made their bids and played out the hands over the phone.
Bridge was that important to them.
Of course, that time, they skipped the mandatory brunch. So I didn’t have to hear my mom say:
“I swear! For thirty years, Ritva Rappaport has done this! She orders more than anyone else— ham and eggs, waffles, sausage, grits— leaves half of it on the plate and then announces, ‘Well, everybody! I know what! Let’s split the bill!’ Poor Louise Minsker, who only orders coffee and a muffin, has to pay a sixth of Ritva’s meal… I ask you, is that fair?! ”
I sigh. “You know who you’re dealing with,” I point out. “It’s not like it never happened before.”
Nerds, our parents took us to plays at the National Theater downtown in the 1960’s. If we mentioned to our classmates that we had been to see a live drama, a stage production, and enjoyed it, they looked at us like we were from another planet. One summer evening, after the show, a group of us children and parents— Our Gang— descended on O’Donnell’s Ice Cream Parlour off East-West Highway in Chevy Chase.
In spite of having almost no money, my parents sprang for things like theater tickets, coats and ties for Tim and me, a party dress for my sister, ice cream sundaes with Our Gang. We were not to be culturally deprived.
That night, given the assignment of adding up the bill, dad got each family father in turn to plunk his amount on the table. Collecting assorted paper money and loose silver, dad toted up the total and added a 5% tip. That’s what you tipped in those days, five percent.
“They’re so friendly at O’Donnell’s,” dad told my mom that night, before bed. “They all waved to us as we were leaving, some with both hands. I waved back!” Taking off his pants, he emptied the pockets… Dollar bills and change, the ice cream parlor bill, all nestled in dad’s pant’s pocket where he had absent-mindedly shoved them. White as a sheet, he said, “Honey, I forgot to pay at the register.”
The very next morning, mom had him drive to O’Donnell’s and pay the bill.
On another visit, Talmudic scholar Alexei Chorvinsky ordered a coffee sundae from one of the plump, young, southern waitresses. Diligently, she went behind the glass and chrome counter and began preparing this concoction. Ten minutes later, she came to our table in tears. “Every time I pour in the hot coffee,” she cried, “the vanilla ice cream melts!”
Never-the-less, for a few years there, while Tim and I were in junior high school, we went to O’Donnell’s at least once a week. Came the time my dad was given the assignment of recording everyone’s order. Borrowing pencil and paper from the cashier, he wrote
1 banana split
2 strawberry sundae
3 fudge bar
4 ice cream chocolate sundae
5 marble ice cream cake
6 butterscotch sundae
7 hopscotch pecan sundae
8 coffee ice cream cake
It seemed to take forever for the girls behind the counter to fill our order. “What’s going on?” my dad kvetched, impatient, as always. So Tim and I trooped over to the counter and asked the young ladies— who were at most five years our senior— “Gimme the word! What’s goin’ on?”
“Well,” gushed a rosy-cheeked young darlin’, peach complexion and starched white uniform, a line of sweat across her brow. “You ordered so much! It’s takin’ forever to prepare it all.”
“Uh, wait a minute,” said Tim.
I was the one, chit in hand, who had to return to the table and explain, sheepishly, that the O’Donnell’s staff was in the process of preparing one banana split, two strawberry sundaes, three fudge bars, four ice cream chocolate sundaes, five servings of marble ice cream cake, six butterscotch sundaes, seven hopscotch pecan sundaes and eight portions of coffee ice cream cake.
We were poor. Money was tight. No one was laughing. Tim acted as our intermediary during the process of deconstruction: Many scoops of ice cream were angrily dumped back into cardboard vats. Wedges of ice cream cake were put back on cardboard platters and returned to the freezer. Mortified, the rest of us sat at our table and wished we’d never even heard of O’Donnell’s. We ate what they served us— it tasted like ashes in our mouths— paid our check and never, ever went there again!
That was my dad.
At least I have fonder memories of Alex Chorvinsky! Since my folks were No-wheres-ville and he had two sons of his own, he and his wife Gertrude nurtured me. A pottery fanatic who threw beautiful vases and urns on the wheel, Gertrude wasn’t opposed to letting Tim and me try our hand at pouring clay into molds, coming up with your proverbial coffee and beer mugs. It was fun! Painting, painting, painting on glaze, we would accompany her to the community kiln where, on Thursdays, the staff fired shelf after shelf of earthenware.
Alex liked to chatter with me in Hebrew, which was a joke, since Tim’s Hebrew outclassed mine by a mile. We also discussed religion, the dietary laws, Jesus Christ and the nature of Christianity, shiksas and why little Jewish boys’ penises stood erect in their presence. (“Samson and Delilah is what we today would call a destructive relationship. She uses Sam to further her own career, but she doesn’t really care about him as a person. Sam likes the seduction, but finds the consequences completely our of proportion. If Delilah really cared about him, she’d help him escape or at least barter his freedom with whatever resources she had. Probably, that would have meant sleeping with X number of tribal leaders among the Palestinians… Once a prostitute, always a prostitute. So watch out!”) Cerebral, Alex made sure these discussions were available to his sons, to Tim and to me. The exact opposite of my dad, Alex was someone totally free of inhibitions. After a hellish childhood in Russia, as well as fighting in the Second World War and Korea, nothing that North America could offer scared Alex in the least.
In my last year of high school, an Explorer Scout— which was a pretty rare animal, since almost everyone else left scouting behind at puberty— I participated in the Greater Washington Area Scout Olympics. Big deal! You signed up, you were in the event. Knowing my dad, Alexei Chorvinsky insisted I spend that three-day holiday weekend at his house. He drove me into the District to compete in the swimming contests. I was signed up for crawl and backstroke. Where my dad would have brought me nearly to tears with caustic, “humorous” remarks, denigrating my abilities, Alexei simply said, “You’re a swimmer! Go get ‘em, tiger!”
He didn’t hang around to watch. In retrospect, I realize he felt it might throw me off my stride. Changing into my swimsuit in the men’s locker room, I discovered, amazingly, that I felt good about myself. Since I was lifting weights in front of our fireplace every morning, I had the muscles. Alexei and Gertrude thought I was great. They loved me. That was enough.
When I got out by the pool, I discovered my classmate Greg Monroe from Oxburg High holding a clipboard. “Yeah, I’m one of the officials,” he told me smugly. “I see you’re signed up for the main event. One hundred meters freestyle.”
“It’s a sprint,” I told him. “One hundred meters is a sprint.”
“You don’t stand a chance,” he sneered. “Look over there at that big, black gorilla. He puffs in your direction and you’ll be drowning in his wake! Ha ha ha ha ha! “
“Yeah, sure, okay, Greg,” I replied. The guy was a prig. I figured he wouldn’t have a kind word to say to me.
Expecting me to get upset, he gave me a strange look when I didn’t. I walked away. Participating in the event didn’t require me to let Greg Monroe badmouth me, so I figured I could just as well skip that part.
The black boy was monstrously impressive. All sinew, he was almost six feet tall, built like an eel.
“I’ll go for it,” I thought, my sense of adventure quickening.
We competitors jogged in place, did our bending exercises and mounted our blocks. There would be two other heats, but I competed in that first one, against the enormous black fellow.
When they fired the starter pistol, we hit the water. I only took four breaths the length of the pool. That’s how I made up for short arms, I spent more time stroking and less time pivoting for air. Even so, I could see that the black boy over in the far lane was yards ahead of the rest of us. At the turn, I caught a glimpse of him rising up out of the water. I kicked off the wall and swam like my life depended on it. When I clocked in, the scout leader taking my time smiled and said, “Unless someone swims faster in the other heats, you’re number one.”
“Oh, hey, tha’s no good!” the black boy was wailing. “Nobody told me I had to swim two lengths. I thought this pool was a hunnert meters! I been robbed!”
I kept out of it. Greg was in there arguing that the black dude had a right to a do-over: “Let him swim in one of the other heats!”
“We already have six swimmers in each,” the coach complained. “Those kids have a right to their dreams, too, you know!”
They decided the black man had completed his swim in that event.
The other two heats were an anti-climax. The kids were a lot smaller, younger and had considerably slower times.
As I mounted the podium and received my medal— even with his mistake, the black boy came in third— I was on top of the world.
I almost broke my hand clocking in during the backstroke, but in that event, I was awesome. It was my specialty. Nobody swam backstroke like “Windmill Kevin.” Tim had said, “Whatever happens, you’ve got the backstroke stoked,” and I did.
I finished with two first-place medals. Driving me home, Alexei was pleased. When I showed them to my dad, he gave me a crooked smile and said, “What are they made of, tin? Maybe you can win a medal cutting the grass for a change! Whoo-hoo! Kevin’s won a medal, ain’t he somethin’ !”
There’s a reason why I beaned him on the head with a hammer at the age of eight. Not wanting to spend time in a boys’ reformatory, I ignored the jerk.
“Let me see those!” Tim exclaimed. “Dynamite! I knew you could do it! Makes me proud to have you as my bro’!”
*
My mom actually talked to Gertrude and Alex Chorvinsky by cell phone from California while I horsed around with starfish and sea anemones at the J V Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Half Moon Bay outside San Francisco. That was a month ago. Alex was scheduled to have an operation on his intestinal tract. No one wanted to talk about it. Cancer? How bad was the problem? Also, the doctors worried about Alexei’s ticker. Was his heart strong enough for an operation?
Now, we return from California and Alex is dead. Poof, he’s gone. We’re all in shock.
Ritva tells us Alexei will be buried at King Solomon’s Memorial Cemetery in Olney. Let’s face it— screw military honors at Arlington Cemetery— King Solomon’s is the place for our community’s machers to be put to rest. King Sol’s is an Equal Opportunity provider. First requirement, the customer has to be dead. Second, that their estate can afford a burial.
I loved Alexei. With extreme delicacy, mom asks me if I’ll attend the funeral.
“Yes, of course,” I tell her. “Alex was a great friend of ours!”
Telephoning Maria Dexter to discuss theater tickets, mom gets caught unawares when Maria asks, “Have you heard the news about Alex Chorvinsky? He died on the operating table! They were operating on his colon and his heart stopped.”
“Oh, yes,” chirps mom, surprised that Maria Dexter would know. “He was a very dear friend. His uncle built our house.”
“Pardon?” asks Maria.
“His uncle was a Russian immigrant. In 1927, he was a bricklayer at the construction firm that developer Julius Lapidus contracted to do the foundations and bricklaying for the dwellings in Oxburg. Of the 60 original houses, ours was number 16. Before that, Oxburg was a gopher patch.”
“Wha-at?” asks Maria. She lives in Chevy Chase. “Listen, are you going to the funeral? When is it?”
“Tuesday at one o’clock at King Solomon’s.”
“Is Kevin going? Because I’ll need someone to drive me!”
…
“You want to go to Alex Chorvinsky’s funeral?” asks my mom.
“Oh yes! Richard and I were very friendly with Alex at the bridge table.”
One hundred and twenty people at every game, saying you know someone from the bridge circuit doesn’t signify undying kinship.
“Well, okay, you can go with us.”
“Richard will drive me over to your house. Kevin can drive the three of us to King Solomon’s. Richard can’t attend. He has a bridge game on Tuesday afternoon.”
I’m not exactly jumping up and down for joy. This is all about Maria. We’re in mourning. We intend to pay Alex our last respects. It’s not a social occasion. I understand Maria can’t drive, but why is she horning in on something that really has nothing— nada—to do with her? Alex was not a close friend. Maria is not Jewish. The prayers are recited in Hebrew. The graveside service is extremely regimented and includes such esoteric activities as shoveling dirt onto the casket. There’s very little gossip. It’s a sad occasion.
“Oh, I want to go!” insists Maria. “I do have a three o’clock doctor’s appointment, but I’m sure Kevin will get us back to my place before three. Actually, he can drive me straight to the hospital. It’ll save me taking a taxi.”
“What? What? What?” I rant as soon as mom tells me the news.
“Be nice! She means well.”
The next morning, mom tells me that she’s not going. “I just realized that I cannot stand for that long. I’ll be keeling over. There’s only one row of seats for the immediate family. Everyone else stands on the grass. I can’t do that.”
“I’ll go. I’ll represent the Feingolds.”
Mom calls Maria. Tells her the news. Claims I’m not home. “No, I just can’t stand up that long. First, you have to park two or three blocks away and walk. Then, only the immediate family is provided with chairs, since they may be so overcome with grief, they cannot stay on their feet. The rest of us gather around the grave site while the rabbi conducts the service… No… I’ve never experienced that. They aren’t doing a commemorative service indoors… They don’t have that… Of course I know the routines at King Solomon’s! Half my friends are buried there!”
After 20 minutes, mom gets off the phone. “Maria claims she went to Larry Kapinski’s funeral and there were 40 seats. She says the organizers put down wooden planks to form a walkway to the grave. She says barefoot young black boys in white shirts and black slacks threw carnations as people approached the grave. A Jamaican calypso band played Ha Tikva. Afterwards, kosher wine was served to the mourners in silver goblets and the celebrity rabbi autographed their printed programs. The guests received goodie bags filled with Larry Kapinski’s two manias, citrus fruit and barbecue utensils.”
“Why do I somehow doubt this narrative?” I ask.
“She wanted to know if Larry Kapinski’s estate was bankrupt, since he was buried in a plain pine box. I had to explain that Jewish burials stipulate a plain pine box for everybody.”
“Maria doesn’t know anything,” I grouse.
“When I told her I couldn’t stand for 20 minutes, she offered to telephone King Solomon’s and demand that they provide me with a chair.”
“Yeah. Right! What did you say to that?”
“I told her not to bother. I told her I’d made up my mind and I’m not going.”
“This really has nothing to do with you or me,” I point out. “This is Maria Dexter horning in. She sees it as a social event. Tea at the duchess’s lawn party and all that good stuff.”
“Well,” mom agrees, “she sure is obstinate.”
“As long as I don’t have to deal with her, I’ll go to the funeral. Without Maria Dexter, thank you very much!”
Mom and I look at one another and laugh. Bitterly.
*
It’s a glorious day, 85 degrees, a cloudless sky. King Solomon’s doesn’t put up signage. You drive around looking for a line of cars parked by the curb, a yellow canopy, mourners. If the funeral you stop to visit isn’t your group, you get back in the car and keep looking. I haven’t gotten much sleep the night before. Hollow-eyed, I drive and drive. Here’s the Vietnamese section. Quân-công. Dáng khen. (“Meritorious military service. Praiseworthy.”) Ah, the Japanese section! My car is dwarfed by a giant pagoda. The Japanese for “Remember Joyously” works best as a butterfly pattern. I turn around at the first roundabout. I pass a bench inscribed
In memory of Aunt Polly.
I find a couple putting flowers on a grave. Latino laborers do maintenance among the headstones. It’s 10:40 a.m. I envision myself driving around all morning and never finding a single funeral! Finally, I actually locate a building amidst the forlorn figures holding bouquets, the rolling hills, botanical gardens, brutal Stalinist social realist statuary, burbling fountains and gray trucks loaded with manure. I park in the parking lot and go inside.
The Melvin Holmes III funeral is discreetly announced by a plaque at the first doorway, but ain’t nobody there.
The Winston P. O’Boogie funeral is similarly announced at the next entranceway, but again, my dance card comes up empty.
This place has no security at all. It’s an enormous building. I wander from hall to alcove to assembly room without encountering a soul. What a relief to stumble upon a real live reception area, with a man on the telephone behind a counter! The young lady assistant looks up the Chorvinsky funeral and marks it on a printed map.
I find the grave and, parking two blocks down the road, I mosey on over. At least half the mourners are over 70, but they are also the cream of our Jewish community. I am gratified to discover familiar faces in the crowd! Mostly it’s Alexei’s extended family, of course, but many of mom’s bridge cronies are in attendance, an entire legion of elderly ladies. Whenever someone fails to recognize me, Ritva Rappaport helpfully explains, “Rose Feingold’s son! Kevin!”
Everybody knows my mom!
Gertrude Chorvinsky is obviously heavily sedated, but when I approach to pay my respects, during a lull, she gives me a bright smile and says, “Hi, Kevin! Is your mom here?”
“No. She doesn’t walk so well…”
“Oy vey, tell me about it!” she chuckles, pressing my arm.
I stand to one side of Gertrude as the lady rabbi pins black cloth on each of the grandsons. All four young men give me sour stares, as if to say, “Who the hell are you?”
“When I finish singing the psalm,” the rabbi instructs, “I want each of you to tear the black cloth. In olden times, after a funeral, people expressed their mourning by tearing the hem of their garments and donning sackcloth and ashes. We use the symbolism of a torn black cloth ribbon.”
The lady rabbi is unknown to me, but then, we have many congregations in this part of Maryland. She obviously knew Alexei, first because she keeps choking up, and second from what she tells us. “Alex had three requirements regarding his death. That he go quickly and not linger. That the weather should be perfect at his funeral. That his friends should gather and pay tribute to him. As you see, he lived righteously and all his wishes have been granted!
“He left us a message: ‘Slow down. Take time to consider the quality of your life. Figure out what is truly important.
‘Awaken to each day, not as a challenge, but as an opportunity.
‘Be slow to anger. Be willing to forgive.
‘Let laughter leaven your loaf.
‘Go forth, in peace, to life.’
“I see him as a role model of what can be done. Not a perfect person by any means, but someone who never stopped striving to improve the human condition.”
Together, we recite the 23rd Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul;
He guideth me in straight paths for His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
The rabbi then chants it in Hebrew in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. It’s hot. The women wearing perfume are using their programs to swat away gnats. If we must say goodbye to Alex, it’s nice that his rabbi can sing.
Roger, the oldest son, gets up to deliver a eulogy. “I’m sure that wherever my dad Alexei is at the moment, he woke up this morning, read his obit and smiled!
“Humor dominated our household. We would get home from school and dad would have us gather around the piano and sing songs based on the rhymes of Dr. Seuss. Dad wrote the music, Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, wrote the lyrics. I always thought dad should publish those ditties, but he couldn’t be bothered. For him, music was a hobby. He always kept work separate from play.
“He did invent and patent the Wood, Good Mood, Food Hood, a high-end kitchen accessory for stove or grill.
“In 1969, my dad bought me a Dodge Charger. This particular car turned out to be a lemon. Rather than keep pouring thousands of dollars in repairs into the car, dad decided to sell it. How do you unload a lemon when everyone in a 100-mile radius knows who you are? So when we vacationed in the Outer Banks, my dad drove the car, with the car title, down to North Carolina and put an ad in the local newspaper. He spent a couple of days showing the car to the locals, and eventually some poor schmo bought it. Back in those days, pre-Internet, pre-cell phone, sales out-of-state tended to be final. We came back up to Maryland and that was the last we ever heard about the Dodge Charger. ‘Always know who you are dealing with,’ said my dad, ‘and don’t jump to the conclusion that everything is all right, unless you have incontrovertible proof.’
“When it was time to put a new roof on The Old Soldiers’ Home— the building was erected during World War I, after all — dad made sure my cousins got the job. They didn’t low-ball the bid. They did a perfectly reputable job. But there were plenty of other construction firms in the 1970’s who would have loved to get the work. Dad said, ‘If we don’t watch out for ourselves, who is going to do it?’ I think he taught me a lot.”
Roger’s younger brother Morton, my contemporary, tells this tale: “… One day, we had a false alarm regarding a break-in, and a police officer went around checking the windows in our house. He expressed curiosity about the water plant in my bedroom. He told my mom and she told my dad. That night, after dinner, dad asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell him. I admitted that I was growing marijuana in my bedroom. ‘Always be honest with me,’ dad told me. ‘Then I’ll know what to deny in a court of law.’
“Contributions, in lieu of flowers, can be made to the Wounded Warrior Project.”
As those of us surrounding the canopy begin to sweat, I notice that the cologne on the man in front of me is starting to annoy me. The gnats and pollen in the air don’t help, and slowly, incredibly, I find myself getting both dizzy and nauseous. Getting sick isn’t on my itinerary. My dad, a hypochondriac, specialized in falling ill. Mom and I come from a family of schtarkers, you usually have to set off a bomb to sink us. So, as I discreetly, quietly, back away from the gathering and walk to my car, I am quite amazed. I sit in the shade of the car, drinking water from my water bottle. I begin to feel better. I don anew my suit jacket and return to graveside.
No sooner do I arrive, amid a slew of prayers, than I feel deathly ill. Now there’s no getting away from it. I’m reacting to mold. The yellow plastic canopy must have been stored wet, and gotten moldy. In this warm sunlight, the mold is releasing spores. Having been contaminated by mold at a French auberge a few years ago, mom and I are hyper-sensitive. Bathed in sweat, I stumble back to my car. I strip down to pants and undershirt. I lie across the front seat. Gagging, I’m grateful I didn’t eat any breakfast. After a few minutes of dry heaves, I crawl across the road and lie down in the grass in the shade of an elm tree. I close my eyes, as the Mourners’ Kaddish drifts down from the funeral:
“Yisgadal v’ yiskadash sh’mei rabah. B’almah di v’rah chirusei
v’ yamlich malchusei. B’chayeichon u’ v’ yomeichon. Uv’chayei
d’chol beit Yisrael…”
What can I say? This turn of events would not surprise Alexei. He would see the humor in my getting taken ill at his funeral.
*
yustyoking 
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