2002-07-02

My grandfather’s name was Charlie, with gray eyes and no hair on top. He lived off the same street I do, 3 miles down in Bay Ridge. His apartment had a view of the Verrazano’s Bridge, but that view wasn’t there when he first moved in. Since I’ve moved to Brooklyn, my family frequently eats at his favorite restaurant, where he’d take us when all of us piled into the car and made the trip through Staten Island to Brooklyn. It is the best restaurant, but also it’s part of my grandfather.

My grandparents divorced when my mother was very young. Actually, my grandmother divorced Grandpa on the grounds of abandonment. He’d left her to take care of his ailing mother in Brooklyn, never sending any money to support the three kids. He did not sign the divorce papers; they went through without his signature because of the abandonment thing. Since his name was never signed on them, he still believed they were married.

My mother never saw her father after the age of 7 or so until she was preparing to get married. Grandma wasn’t too hot on the idea that Grandpa was going to be at the wedding, but my mother stood her ground and said as long as she was an adult she could choose who to have in her life. Grandma wasn’t really too accepting of Grandpa for most of my childhood. Even though they both sat in the comfy grandparent-type chairs, she in the winged back, he in the rocker, on Christmas morning, she would rarely speak to him and got sour-pussed around her which led to those wrinkles she has around her lips like a smoker although she doesn’t smoke. Raising 3 kids in Newark divorced in the 1950s made her pretty bitter towards him. Generally, I thought she was a big grouch about everything; her treatment of Grandpa got nothing out of the ordinary.

They became friends eventually, when Grandpa first started to have heart problems and was in the hospital frequently. The nurses had taken out Grandpa’s teeth and he could not get them back in on his own. Grandma and Mom were in the hospital room with him when he asked Mom to put them in. She had no idea how to do this and was a little uneasy about inserting teeth into her father’s mouth. Grandma was a denture wearer herself and saw his pleading gray eyes, just wanting the dignity of having teeth while being hooked up to machines, not allowed to smoke and forced to share a room with an incessantly chatty older man. She put them in for him. And from that point forward starting acting like his friend and not a hardened divorcee.

She’d ask him if he’d like refills on drinks or the bowls of goldfish crackers he always had by his side during family gatherings. She’d inquire about his health. She bought him Christmas presents, and sent birthday cards as he’d always done in the years since Mom brought him back into her life. They were good friends. It was much nicer having grandparents sitting in the grandparent-like chairs on Christmas morning who laughed and talked to one another.

When my grandfather died a few years ago, I helped my mother clean out his apartment, sort through his life in the tiny rooms. We went through small closets that after decades of use had so much stuff neatly packed into every possible inch. We sorted things for donation, things to sell, things to give to family. It was long, it was summer time hot. We saw things about him, things he liked to keep tucked away or saved like the collection of buttons I inherited in an old butterscotch candy tin.

When we opened his top dresser drawer, under just two or three recent receipts from the pharmacy was a picture of Grandma. Of her with her head sticking out of a second floor window at their apartment in Newark or maybe the summer house in Long Island. It’s just a window, and Grandma. Her hair is dark black, with a little wave to it. She’s wearing dark lipstick and a small hat is perched on top of her head. This is the picture Grandpa kept in the top drawer of his dresser, of the lady he never believed himself to be divorced from, of the woman he so clearly always loved.