LOST AND FOUND

LOST AND FOUND

          I yearned for a cousin’s club from the time I could talk. I really didn’t know what that was. I think I thought it meant lots of kids playing, lots of cake and ice-cream, all with your family, all with cousins. My mother went to someone else’s’ cousin’s club she called the Bergs. She never had them to our house. I don’t think I ever knew them. My father had two cousins he hardly ever saw.

          But I had no cousins.  Just a sister two years younger and lots of friends I sometimes said were my cousins. My dad had two unmarried sisters; my mother was an only child. I didn’t want the hand-me-downs; I wanted the real deal. Years went by and things just didn’t change. My mother’s “cousins” died off and visits were made to their families, one by one.

          One year, maybe it was in 1960, one of the unmarried, Aunt Esther, told us that on an unemployment line she met a man, Arnold, and she was getting married. Just like that! Aunt Esther lived it seemed forever in an apartment with her mother and her sister, Nettie, on the Lower East Side, so this was amazing. The aunts worked, came home, rarely went anywhere, and just seemed okay with that. I think there were four televisions in the house and several radios. When we visited Esther was kind and quiet. And loving. That was the nicest thing. She was in her 40’s I think when this happened. She was unemployed. I don’t remember a marriage but there was one. Months later she came to my mother and said she thought she was pregnant; she wasn’t even certain! My mother, who had also been a high school mate of Esther in Seward Park HS, way back when, was very eager to help her sister-in-law out and took her to a local doctor. The doctor thought maybe it was menopause causing the distress, but after testing, Esther was pregnant.

          She and Arnold, who turned out to be a frightening and nutty man, moved to Sherman Avenue in the Bronx, a place we really didn’t want to visit, but did, however infrequently.  My parents helped, mostly with advice. And in 1962, Brian was born. I do not really remember anything about that time. My very only first cousin! Not enough for a “club.” My mom and dad visited them until Brian was about 4 or maybe 6 and then that family disappeared. When Aunt Esther called us, she never revealed where they were and we didn’t see Brian again. We found out she was terrified of this Arnold man and very ill-prepared to take care of this little boy.  I actually think he was sent away for a while. My parents and aunt and grandmother really did not know what to do so doing nothing was the way they went. We went on with our lives, me, graduating high school and entering college, my sister, following.   

          One day, however, Arnold called my father and said Esther had died. He didn’t say where they were living.  He said he sent the body to a lower east side funeral home and as I recall, only our immediate family was there, not Arnold, not little Brian.  My father arranged to have her buried in the cemetery where he and mom would be, along with Nettie and my aging grandmother sometime in the future. 

          And then Arnold and Brian were really disappeared. No calls. None of us could forget him though. I know my parents tried to find him; they even thought of adopting him or at least letting him live with us and have a chance at a normal life if they could. It didn’t happen. We gave up and went on with our own lives. We didn’t know what else to do.

          When computers became something I could sort of understand, I started a search for this boy. I learned about high school lists, about neighborhood information, burial statistics. I looked for clues. In my amateur sleuthing way I imagined the father and the son would be living in the same city, could be anywhere, and so I looked and looked, even looked in the phone books which were becoming like dial phones, obsolete. I believed this because I imagined Brian had no life of his own and was ruled by this crazy, threatening man. I was not wrong.  

          Believe it or not, one day I “hit pay dirt.” In Liberty NY, ironically only hours away from NYC there was a Brian and an Arnold with the same last name.  It could be him.  What did I have to lose? I told my parents who told Aunt Nettie but not my Bube. She wouldn’t understand if this did not prove successful.  “Call, sure, call,” my mother said. “Oh, yes, do,” my dad agreed. And one day I did. When someone answered, I asked, “Brian, Brian Zimmerman whose mother was Esther and whose father, Arnold, is that you?” “Yes, that’s me,” he answered. “Who’s this? Why are you calling me?” I was actually crying into the phone at that point, telling him in between those happy sobs, about our family’s search for him and how he got lost. He actually seemed to know some of this. He said he didn’t have such a miserable life but not a happy one either and he was so excited to be found. He worked in a steel mill, had a foster person who was helping him along, and yes, he had lived near to his father. He understood the fear and angst my family felt in searching for him. But just about a month before, his father had died. Perfect timing. He told me he had lived on the lower east side with the family for a time, ironically, minutes away from the Bronx and then he moved with them to Liberty. He told us his father called him “the Christ child.” He told me his father was strange.  I was horrified. I was sad.

          We agreed the next day that my parents would call him. They did, and I remember all of us were bawling on the phone, Brian too. We made plans to visit. I’d take them to Liberty where Brian was living with his wife and her daughter. What sweet people, and their family became ours. It was for us a reunion of reunions. Eons of love lost, of time that could have changed his life but could not be redeemed, but here we were. My parents and aunt got a nephew; my Bube got a grandson before she died at 102; I got a real-live cousin.  We got to know him and include him in our lives, albeit from afar.

          My Bube, my aunt, my parents all are gone. My sisters and I and our families, live on with these memories.  I visit the parents and Brian’s mom and the rest of them at the cemetery in New Jersey. I tell them about the world, about my life, my children and their children, who do have cousins and a step-family. I tell them my cousin Brian is well and what he is doing. I finally after thirty years or more have a little cousin’s club.