Threads of Life

Chapter 3-1

Now that I’m writing my life story, I’d like to be able to tell you that I received the unusual name Auden because of my parents’ love of the famous British poet, W.H. Auden, who was born in England and moved to America and published a million poems and essays. And I’d like to be able to tell you that I inherited the poet’s gigantic brain and gift for snappy alliteration. But that would be a lie. Sadly, there was no literary endowment intended in my naming, and any quality approaching talent I may have can only mean that I actually learned something from the thousands of books I’ve read—although my primary objective each time I opened a book was to avoid doing other things.

* * *

In university, I actually took a twentieth-century literature course that featured Auden’s poetry and a book he had written called Nones, which turned out to be an impenetrable mystery, at least to me, from its title to its last word. I can’t recall any of it. What I do recall is that there were a couple of artsy girls in the class who sometimes smiled at me. I told them I was named after the poet and that he was a relative. This bit of information had no effect on making me more attractive to them; in fact, it had the opposite effect because they avoided looking at me after that and, in retrospect, I probably should have said that Mick Jagger was my uncle.

Nones Later that year, I deluded myself into thinking that because my name was Auden, I probably had an innate ability to write poetry. I wrote half a poem titled “The Wire Above the Abyss” but then abandoned the exercise when I couldn’t find a suitable rhyme for “tightrope.”

* * *

The truth is that Simon and I were named after my mother’s parents, Simon and Audrey, who died in Farber’s Pharmacy at Church and Wellesley when the roof, under five feet of snow, collapsed on top of them.

* * *

They were on their way to the Bloor Street Theatre to see Blue Skies, a Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire movie, and stopped to buy medicated nose-drops for Abbey, who seemed to suffer from one long sinus infection from age five to fifteen, when finally, three Brandes women took her to Mount Sinai Hospital to have her deviated septum repaired. According to the doctor who performed the operation, the inside of the poor kid’s nose looked like Lombard Street in San Francisco.

Blue Skies* * *

I always had an affinity for my Aunt Abbey, who’s my older equivalent in suffering from an inescapable comparison to a far more attractive twin. During Brandes family weddings, bar mitzvahs, sweet sixteens, Abbey and I would always gravitate toward each other until we were seated or standing side by side outside the main party room. We never said very much. She would ask me about school, and I would say I was doing fine, and I would ask her about her health, and she would say she was doing fine, and that was it, and then we sat in silence, like we both needed our twin to restart the conversation.

* * *

But back to where I left off. When Simon and I graduated from Greenwich Park Public School, no one on the faculty remembered that he had beaten the snot out of two kids and had received a lengthy suspension. Simon was awarded a trophy, the Stover Cup, named after a former principal, for athletic and academic excellence and the promotion of school spirit. He received the award as part of a year-end ceremony in the gymnasium, which my parents, grandparents, and two Brandeses attended. Simon delivered a short speech, which he had written and rewritten with my mother’s help. He thanked everyone in attendance, including the janitor and school nurse. And then he thanked me. For helping him with his slap shot (at his insistence, I stood in goal without moving while he fired shots past me), his jump shot (I sat on the grass behind the basket and when the ball came near me, kicked it back to him or, if I was in a bad mood, which was often, down the street so that he had to chase it) and for getting up with him at five a.m. for his cross-country training (when his stupid alarm went off, I would swear at him before going back to sleep).

Simon’s athletic accomplishments were not insignificant. He helped Greenwich Park win three inter-school basketball championships, five tennis championships, and four all-city track meets. He broke the under-twelve record for the mile run, long-jump, and triple-jump, and his records stood for the next eight years before every record in every event was held by a black kid named Ian White, who later became an athletic star at the University of Toronto but who would break his leg just before qualifying for the Los Angeles Olympics, and then gain a tremendous amount of weight and drop out of track.

Simon’s academic accomplishments were equally impressive. He finished public school with a ninety-nine percent average and achieved the third highest marks in the province in standardized testing in English and math.

And me? If it wasn’t for Simon and his insistence on including me in his activities, on singing my praises when really there was nothing to sing about, I would have floated through public school, average in every way, unnoticed and unmissed by students and faculty alike.

* * *

In high school, Simon’s star shone even brighter and he became the youngest captain of the Westbury Secondary School basketball team, which for the first time in history beat powerhouse teams from North Toronto and Lawrence Park and came within a missed lay-up at the buzzer by a guard named Scott Shelton from winning the City Invitational.

In tennis, Simon was unbeatable. Because he was used to running long distances, he had more stamina than any of his opponents. And he had a fluid, almost too relaxed forehand that generated a crazy amount of speed, and a sweeping backhand that made every ball look like it was going out before it dropped just inside the baseline and kicked high in the air, and a serve with so much spin on it, it would sometimes bounce over an opponent’s head and against the back fence. His game looked like the product of thousands of lessons, but he had taken very few and learned to play by hitting balls for hours against a wall at public school or while our parents played mixed doubles at the Long Acre Tennis Club, where all of us were members.

The tennis coach at Westbury was an older gym teacher named Mr. Hopper, a not-so-secretive anti-Semite who told his then star player, Paul Delaney—who Simon easily beat during try-outs without losing a game—that he would rather lose his job than put a kike on his tennis team. Mr. Hopper didn’t realize that Paul, nicknamed Del, besides really liking Simon, had no idea what the word kike meant, and asked Simon if it was his surname because that’s what the tennis coach kept calling him.

When Mr. Hopper posted the names of the students who made the team on the gymnasium door and Simon’s name wasn’t on it, Simon called my father from the payphone in the school cafeteria and told him what had happened.

“How does he know we’re Jewish?”

“He just knows.”

“And you’re sure he used the word kike?”

“I’m sure.”

“And you should have made the team?”

“I beat everyone on the list.”

My father came to school that afternoon with a very lawyery letter on Parr, Athole & Athole stationary, threatening a lawsuit and restitution for pain and suffering, and some very embarrassing publicity. A meeting was held in Principal Cober’s office where Paul repeated to everyone, including Mr. Hopper, whose arms and legs were shaking the whole time, what the tennis coach had said to him.

On the way out of the office, Paul said, “I still don’t know what a kike is.”

“Ask your parents,” Simon said.

Simon was given a spot on the tennis team, now coached by a younger teacher, Mr. Bailey, who knew very little about tennis but did know he should treat all the kids equally. Mr. Hopper was forced to take unpaid leave until the end of the first semester. He had to provide Simon with a written apology and take sensitivity training as a condition of reinstatement.

The Westbury tennis team ended up winning every tournament, singles and doubles, for the next four years, and Simon had a personal winning streak of thirty-eight matches, including a stretch of thirteen sets without losing a game.

* * *

Mr. Hopper’s anti-Semitism made my father loopy. Up until that time, he had felt fully and anonymously assimilated. Simon and I didn’t have bar mitzvahs, we didn’t attend Hebrew school, and we didn’t celebrate any of the Jewish holidays. My father’s parents, who lived in Florida, had long ago changed their name from Trillberg to Triller, and our only connection to Judaism was because of the Brandes family and their ever-occurring family functions—weddings, bar mitzvahs, Chanukah parties and, now that the older Brandeses were really old, funerals and shivas, where my father, Simon and I stood in silence, holding prayer books with Hebrew writing in them that none of us could decipher, while the other men prayed.

shivasMy father was an atheist who enjoyed taunting the more religious factions of the Brandes family. When Lou Brandes, who attended an orthodox synagogue every Saturday and whose two sons were Rabbis living in New York, visited our house wearing a yarmulke, my father told him he was entering a God-free zone and that if he wanted to come in, he had to take off the silly little doily he wore on his head. And when my family attended a baby naming service at Beth Tzedec Synagogue, he offended the baby’s grandfather, Jack Brandes, by telling him right before the service started that he looked forward to praying to the big empty space above our heads.

My father assumed that our teachers, neighbours, and non-Jewish friends thought we were the same as them in every way. “How would that teacher even know we were Jewish? Do our kids have ‘I am circumcised’ written on their foreheads?”

That evening, one of Simon’s girlfriends came to our house and as she was removing her jacket in the front hall, my father bolted out of the den to where she and Simon were standing and asked her if she knew what religion we were.

“You’re Jewish, I think.”

Simon had gone out with both Jewish and non-Jewish girls. The Jewish girls were usually surprised by, and then attracted to, my family’s lack of identification with anything Jewish, and the non-Jewish girls, like the one he was going out with now, didn’t seem to ask or care about our religion.

“Did Simon tell you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So, how do you know?”

“I don’t know. It’s sort of obvious.”

“How is it obvious?”

The girl’s face turned red. She managed to say, “I don’t know” one more time before Simon mercifully interrupted.

“Dad, we’re going downstairs,” he said and led her away by the elbow.

I was watching from the top of the stairs and my mother was peeking out of the kitchen doorway.

“You see?” my father said.

“See what?” my mother responded.

“They need us to be Jewish more than we need to be Jewish.”