If this had turned out to be a normal Memorial Day weekend Gilda and I would be in Colorado at the Allenspark Lodge outside Denver attending a First Cousins weekend to celebrate the life of Lily Weinrich who passed away in April 2019. She was 93.
Lily was the youngest of four Gerson sisters and an elder brother. The only one born in the United States, she was, in my estimation, the prettiest of the Gerson sisters.
Like my mother, Sylvia, she had three children. Like her, a boy followed by a girl followed by a boy. Vicki delivered two boys. Pola, the oldest sister, never married.
I don’t know where Lily’s family lived at first. My earliest recollection is a house at 8 East Drive, Garden City, Long Island, that they moved into in the early to mid 1950s. From the front yard you could see the newly erected Roosevelt Field shopping center built on the airstrip where Charles Lindbergh took off on his historic non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic to France on May 20, 1927.
The house was a split level ranch with a large side and back yard on which Lily’s husband, Ben, built a patio with pastel colored cinder block tiles. The basement had two levels. In the lower level Ben erected an HO-gauge model train set for his children that I envied.
My family always seemed to be spending part of most weekends with Aunt Lily and her family, at our house or theirs. The ride from Brooklyn to Garden City on the Belt Parkway and then the Southern State Parkway took about an hour. When we would arrive in the afternoon my father would invariably shuffle off to an unoccupied bedroom for an hour’s nap.
Often my brother, sister and I would sleep over in Garden City. If the sleepover came after a visit by Lily’s family to Brooklyn, all six children would be packed into the back seat. Actually, five sat on the bench seat. The sixth and youngest, Steve, would lay across the shelf in front of the rear window.
Lily reveled in relating the time a toll taker counted the children in the car and asked if they were all hers. She coquettishly smiled and said she loved her husband.
When we stayed over at Aunt Lil’s we usually took a bath after a hard day of playing. My cousin Mike, a year younger than me, and his sister Linda, three years further down the line, bathed with me until their mother observed her daughter displaying an unsettling interest in Mike’s and my anatomies.
Invariably we never packed toothbrushes before our sleepovers. Lily’s pragmatic solution was to squeeze toothpaste onto our forefingers and instruct us to brush.
The Gerson sisters were unique. Not in the way they stayed connected for more than eight decades. Not in the sibling rivalries and disagreements, some of them petty (e.g., who made the better Thanksgiving turkey), that pitted one or more against another. Nor in the conflict with their older brother, the foursome unified against Sol, for decades.
What distinguished each of them was their dedication to work outside the home. They were no Rosie the Riveter filling in for assembly line workers drafted into the military during the Second World War who went back to the homemaking front at the war’s conclusion. They became accomplished members of the labor force, the married trio working as partners with their husbands in their respective family enterprises.
Lily’s husband operated a men’s clothing store, the Loyal Men’s Shop, a few doors down from the Apollo Theater on 125 Street in Harlem. Ben moved his family to Garden City in the 1950s, but the tiresome commute to Manhattan prompted him a decade later to jump on an opportunity to move his store to the suburbs—the far suburbs. He planted his renamed young men’s store, Ben’s, along the main drag of Bayshore, in Suffolk County, Long Island. The family moved into a white colonial home in nearby Brightwaters.
A few years later, in early 1967, Ben didn’t wake up one morning. Widowed in her early 40s, Lily became the sole proprietor of Ben’s. My brother Bernie, by now licensed to drive, and I used to travel out to Bayshore several times a year to update our wardrobes with more modish clothing, apparel our father invariably found incompatible with his taste. Arguments would ensue, he’d swear he wouldn’t pay Lily, we would keep the clothing and the next time we saw her during a holiday or family get-together, she would admonish Dad for being a fashion Luddite.
At the store one day a stray black dog, perhaps a cross between a German shepherd and a hound, ambled in and promptly adopted Lily. She named him Zeke. He was her constant companion for about a decade. One day he went out and never returned. Lily accepted his departure as gracefully as his entrance into her life.
She closed Ben’s in the early 1980s, relocated to Manhattan, to an apartment on East 80 Street between First and York Avenues, and worked as a bookkeeper, mostly for a jeweler.
She became a family conciliator. When Gilda and I balked at my parents’ plan to swap one of our cars for a larger car my father no longer wanted, Lily smoothed over our differences. After decades of the four sisters excluding contact with not just their brother Sol but his three sons and their families as well, Lily bridged the divide after Sol passed away. Many a weekend she would ride a bus to Middletown, NY, to assist Paul, Sol’s youngest, in his jewelry business. The reconciliation became official with the sons’ attendance at Gilda’s and my wedding.
Perhaps as a byproduct of running a store that catered to a young clientele, Lily retained an ability to relate to younger generations. When she heard of her great-aunt’s death a year ago, our daughter Ellie wrote, “I have the fondest of memories of spending time with Lily, especially with (cousin) Ari that one day we went to museums with her. I also remember having some lovely conversations with her when I first graduated from college and moved to NYC.”
On the day of the New York City blackout August 14, 2003, I walked from Park Avenue and 55th Street to Aunt Lily’s apartment. She was a cool and collected 78-year-old. I stayed a while until Gilda connected with me for the trip back to White Plains.
Her son, Steve, eventually with his wife Grace, lived with Lily in Manhattan. They all moved to Kansas and then to New Mexico.
The last years of her life, as the last of the Gerson siblings whose parents emigrated from Lodz, Poland, in 1920 and 1921, were spent in declining mental acuity. She passed away in her sleep April 1, 2019.
Her children Michael, Linda and Steve had planned the cousins weekend as a celebration of her life. As a young adult Lily had hoped to become a nurse. She took courses at Mount Sinai Hospital. Her cancelled memorial weekend is another casualty of COVID-19.
