Apartment at Lenox Square

Uncle Jerry died six weeks ago at his place down in Florida. His housekeeper found him in bed, in his pajamas, propped up with pillows. His eyes were closed, and a magazine lay open face down on his chest. He looked as though he were asleep, she said.  He was 92 years old.

We called him “Uncle Jerry,” but his real name was Jerold. Jerold Lipstein. He wasn’t our uncle but was our great uncle, our grandmother Nana Rubin’s older brother. I was named for their younger brother, Julius, who died in childhood. I go by “Jules.”

None of us grandnieces and grandnephews saw much of Uncle Jerry growing up. I am not sure we saw him at all after Aunt Bridget, his wife, died nearly 15 years ago. Uncle Jerry and Aunt Bridget lived in Port De Lys – the “old smokestack city” – in a luxury apartment building on Lenox Square, just west of downtown. Then they retired to Florida. They had no children of their own, but they doted on Nana and Grandpa Rubin’s four children, especially my mother, Esther, who was the oldest.

My folks made several trips to Florida after Uncle Jerry died. They arranged his funeral. They wrapped up his financial affairs. Most of the work was simple and had gone smoothly.

For reasons no one could understand, Jerry and Bridget had held on to the Port De Lys apartment – for decades! – including all the years they were down in Florida, even after Bridget’s death. They paid the rent every month but seldom made it back to visit.

Our folks asked if the older grandnieces and nephews would travel to Port De Lys to see what was up with Jerry’s apartment, and what it would take to close things out. Everybody was pretty busy with their lives and it turned out that I was the only one who could find the time to make the trip.

*

Jerry and Bridget were remembered for never joining the family for the Jewish holidays, but instead for making an appearance at Thanksgiving. They would show up late, after everyone had sat down to eat. They would barrel through the front door, letting themselves in after a heavy knock, moving through the house with loud-voiced greetings of ‘hello,’ ‘hello,’ ‘hello,’ ‘hello.’ Their autumn wear was a commotion in its own right, consisting of matching tartan plaids and woolen tammy hats.

They looked like a geriatric, overweight, Jewish Scots Guard.

‘We’ve just stopped by for a quick hello,’ they would say. ‘We can’t stay. We’re running late.” They would explain that they be having their holiday meal with friends at some lodge. It always was the same story. They would name the names of couples they would be joining. The grown-ups seemed to recognize the names but none of us kids ever heard of them. Meanwhile, Uncle Jerry and Aunt Bridget remained in constant motion, never removing their plaid capes. They worked their way around the dinner tables, shaking hands of adults, and pinching the cheeks and patting heads of children whose names they never really came to know.

They would pause before each child and, with a ceremonial flourish, hand them a thick, shiny, silver dollar. When they had completed the circuit, they picked up momentum, in tandem formation, Jerry in the lead, and moved toward the front door. He would pull the door open and, before exiting and with the door wide open, the two would turn toward the assembled family as though they were about to take a bow. Instead, they would wave farewell, and make good their escape, waving and disappearing into the night to a chorus of ‘Happy Thanksgiving!’ and ‘drive safely!’”

*

My only vivid and personal recollection of Uncle Jerry was of a brief outing when I was eight years old. My mother took me out of school to accompany her on a short visit to Florida. It was down and back, just the two of us, not my father or my two younger sisters, flew down, arrived late afternoon, overnight and back home the following evening. Aunt Bridget was scheduled to be released from the hospital later in the week. She could not come home, for now at least, as she needed skilled nursing care. Uncle Jerry asked my mother’s help making arrangements for a nursing home.

I was left alone in Jerry’s and Bridget’s condo that morning while my mother and Uncle Jerry met with the nursing home officials. They stopped in to visit Aunt Bridget at the hospital, too. When they finally returned to the condo, the three of us went out to lunch at an old-style delicatessen, one with a glass counter for take-out but also tables served by sore footed waiters. The deli had the playfully memorable name “Shmegegge’s,” which I later learned is a Yiddish nonsense word that means “nonsense.” It was in easy walking distance, two long blocks from the condo. It shared a small suburban strip center with a discount tobacco store and a beauty salon.

At that luncheon, I witnessed for the first time the culinary spectacle of a pastrami sandwich stacked on rye to what for me had been previously unimagined heights. I also was amazed to learn there are places where matzo ball soup and potato pancakes are served any time, and not just on the Jewish holidays. This hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility. I also recall marveling at bright green half sour pickles, submerged in brine, served in deep stainless-steel bowls at the center of each of the tables. What astonished me about the pickles was that they constantly were replenished as a matter of hospitality. You could have as many pickles as you wanted.

I loved everything about that luncheon, except the plate of macaroons Uncle Jerry carried back to the table from the counter as we were finishing our lunch. I don’t like coconut.

During lunch, I happened to be looking at Uncle Jerry when he opened his mouth wide and took a big bite of his sandwich. He washed it down with cream soda that moments before he had carefully poured from a can into a small clear water glass of the kind you might see at a cafeteria style restaurant. Uncle Jerry noticed that I had been watching him. It was the only time I recall him making eye contact with me, or addressing me, and me alone, directly. To my surprise he knew and called me by my formal name, “Julius,” the name of his brother of blessed memory. He spoke to me with a voice whose tone was that of instruction from an elder conveying matter-of-fact truth.

“Julius,” he said, “you gotta live.”

*

I was able to catch a direct commuter flight to Port De Lys from Algonquin City. It was past 7 p.m. (8 p.m. eastern time) by the time I collected my checked bag. I was hungry. I went directly to a highly regarded home-style restaurant called City Kitchen. The special was pot roast red wine ragout, with parsnip fritters on the side and apple cake a la mode with hand churned ice cream for dessert. Everything was delicious, tough to beat when served piping hot (including the cake) on an October night with cold rain beginning to fall. 

I wanted to get an early start on my assignment, so I turned in early. I stayed at the Park Terrace Hotel, on the other side of Lenox Square from the apartment. It was nice but, like Port De Lys, a little down on its luck.

After a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, buttered toast and coffee, I walked to Uncle Jerry’s apartment. The rain clouds had cleared, the air was fresh, the sun was bright, and the sky deep blue.

*

The apartment was on the 12th floor (second floor from the top) of a building called the Alois. It dates to the 1920s, back when Port De Lys, for a Midwestern city that wasn’t Chicago, had something to show the world.

I brought the extra set of keys Uncle Jerry entrusted to my mother. I also had been in touch with the building manager. The doorman was expecting me.

The apartment door opened into a spacious vestibule, with a cavernous living room and dining room on one side and a hallway leading to a study, a half bath, and two bedrooms with baths on the other. A galley kitchen stood off the dining room, separated by a swinging restaurant door. Behind the kitchen were maid’s quarters, a laundry room, another small bath and, finally, a fire door and stairs at the back of the apartment.

I spent the morning drifting, floating, and poking around the apartment, going through closets and cabinets, shelves, boxes, drawers, and suitcases. My main mission, as I understood it, was to look for things of interest to the family but also to put aside papers that might have to do with property, things such as land deeds, tax bills, bank or brokerage account statements or insurance policies.

My mom, her siblings and all the cousins had established a chat group through which I would report my progress. I took pictures with my phone so everyone would have a nice record and a good idea of what I was seeing.

I texted preliminary findings, supported by photos, shortly after noon:

“The apartment carries a mothball smell from having been sealed away from the living world for decades. The rooms are appointed with post World War II, department-store quality furniture, higher end. The walls are decorated with quality reproductions of significant 18th century European landscapes. The rugs are very nice Orientals, also reproductions, though not much in demand. Collectible vases, deco lamps, and bric-a-brac on occasional tables are scattered throughout. Nothing rare or especially valuable. But they are not bad. There are no books. My recommendation is to give the furniture and decorative pieces to a well-run charity thrift store – they typically are efficient in picking up donations.”

“I found a green footlocker in the study. As you will see, it is filled with black and white snapshots. There are hundreds and hundreds of them. They are neatly organized in inch tall stacks held together by disintegrating rubber bands. 

“I haven’t found any important papers, although there are plenty of electric, gas, water, credit card, and insurance statements and invoices going back more than 50 years. Uncle Jerry and Aunt Bridget appear to have saved and never thrown out a free pen or pencil in their lives. Drawers are choked with cheap writing utensils carrying all kinds of advertising – Arctic Zero Coal and Ice, Ace Radio Repair, the Broadway School of Chiropody. There are file cabinets stuffed with canceled checks, dry cleaner tickets, grocery lists, and medical prescriptions.”

“And maybe there are things we don’t know about Uncle Jerry. At the very back of the center drawer of the pedestal desk in the study I found a folder. It contains a large business envelope containing newspaper clippings. They date from the early 1970s. The stories report on grand jury proceedings looking into possible contractor fraud by a construction company doing work for the Lilly County Highway Department. The investigation had something to do with defective concrete. Uncle Jerry is identified in the news stories as a bookkeeper for the contractor and a witness subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury.”

"I know I haven’t been here long, and I hope not to disappoint anyone by saying this, but I think I’m close to wrapping up. I don’t think we have found anything special, worth hanging onto. There is no need to rush, but I would be ready to go, any time.”

My cousin Chet, the oldest son of my mother’s brother, Lester, immediately messaged the group. He was a good egg, but also the most emotional of my generation of cousins, a quality that he invariably put on display, this occasion being no exception:

“What do you mean?” he asked conveying a sense a shock through his digital message. “We should be just getting started. We have work to do. We’re about to turn a page, end a chapter, and in many ways close the book on this family’s history. Jerry was the last of the last.”

“There is nothing like this apartment anywhere in the world,” he wrote. “It’s as though Uncle Jerry and Aunt Bridget stepped out to the corner store for a quart of milk when Gerald Ford was president and never came back! All that’s missing is a table radio turned on at low volume and a smoldering cigarette in an ashtray. And what about all of the photos? We need to preserve them until our folks can go through them.”

“I understand and agree with you on the photos,” I wrote back. “I will arrange to ship the trunk to you, Chet. If someone else wants to make the call on letting go, that’s fine with me. But I think you need to speak now. All this stuff being hidden away for decades in this apartment. Nobody seemed to miss it. The people in the pictures may be ancestors, some of them, anyway. Do we know who any of them are?”

*

Everyone else seemed satisfied as the screen of my phone went still. A wail of sirens rose and fell as a firetruck and ambulance passed by on the street below.

I messaged the group:

“I want to say a word about Aunt Bridget. There are lots of ladies’ garments, kept in the chests of drawers and closets of the second bedroom, and personal items stored in hat boxes and in a bedside table. There is a Crucifix above the head of the bed. I spent a considerable part of the morning in this room. I bet this was where Aunt Bridget slept. We may not know some things about Uncle Jerry, but we knew almost nothing about Aunt Bridget. We know she was sweet. Regarding their famous Thanksgiving appearances, I recalled more of Aunt Bridget’s participation in giving the children the gifts of the silver dollars. I remember how she kneeled and took each child’s face into her chapped hands. She would draw near with her smiling powdered face with red lipstick. She would say with a slow, carefully enunciating voice: ‘You take good care of that coin, young man, and, remember, your Uncle Jerry and Aunt Bridget love you.’”

I debated raising an uncomfortable subject. I had the sense even as a child, a time when Jerry and Bridget had been married more than 40 years, there was a less than accepting sentiment within our family regarding Bridget, along the lines of, “She’s Catholic, you know.”

I decided not to bring it up, to let it go.

After Aunt Bridget died, which was not long after my childhood visit to Florida, I heard that Uncle Jerry lived a party life. He stayed full time at the condo. I remember my dad saying, ‘Jerry is the cock of the rock’ down in Florida,” whatever that meant. He showed me a photo of Jerry wearing a novelty bowler hat covered with sparkling blue foil, held on with an elastic chin strap. He was hugging a giant bottle of champagne at what could have been a New Year’s Eve party, a lone male hemmed in by a scrum of dolled up women wearing low cut dresses, decolletage revealed in abundance, all smiling for the camera, everyone seemingly ecstatic. Woo!”

“You gotta live,” I thought to myself.

*

 Cousin Chet said he looked through the photos a couple of times over the years. He said he searched for connection in the faces through family resemblances. Years later, the water main on his street broke and flooded his basement. The photographs were damaged beyond recognition.

I visited Chet two summers ago. He brought me down to his basement and pointed to the cleaned up, dried out, slightly warped foot locker, to which the ruined mass of the photos’ remains had been returned. The foot locker had been raised onto sawhorses, as though set on an altar. There, I believe, they remain at peace, safe from rising waters.

​

("Apartment at Lenox Square" by Eddie Roth first was published in September 2024 right here in the Eddie Roth Reader.)