The Scent of Cut Marigolds

Fowler Street Synagogue

Eulogy Celebrating the Life of Lucy Vovk-Tzel, Beloved Congregant

Rabbi Mortimer Schindler Presiding

December 7, 1979

The family asked that I say a few words this morning regarding the affection Lucy and Ethan held for each other in life. It is not for us to know what transpires after death, yet it is fitting and pleasing to g-d that we should celebrate her life, and the inspiring story of Lucy and Ethan.

Leora means ‘the giver of light’, and Eitan means ‘steadfast’. There could be no more fitting names for these beautiful souls whom g-d brought together in 5696, or 1936 in our Common Era. Those who knew Lucy when she was young have described her as one who spread joy among all she met. Lucy was truly ‘a giver of light’.

Lucy’s sons asked that I share a little with you of the brilliant story of this giver of light and her rock, the steadfast Eitan. Ethan Vovk, a decorated veteran of World War I, was more than 20 years Lucy’s senior. ‘They were inseparable,’ one of their mutual friends told me.

Their first son, Bernie, was born in the summer of ‘37, followed several years later by Al, and then, in 1951, the baby Lorin Kim (Kimzula as Lucy called him). Lucy doted over all her children, but everyone knew that little Kimzula, named for her favorite Rudyard Kipling novel, was the apple of her eye. ‘The handsomest boy in Worcester,’ she used to say.

And then tragedy struck. Ethan's short bout with pancreatic cancer was, by all accounts, extremely painful, yet he lived up to his Hebrew name, bearing the pain with steadfast determination. ‘He was the most inspiring man in my life,’ Bernie told me.

Lucy’s family remember Lucy for her joy, for her warm, caring heart, for the way she carried the torch of eternal fidelity she bore for their father long after he perished. Indeed, it is fitting, given this undying love, that Ethan’s portrait should stand beside Lucy’s before the bimah this morning.

This is a time of mourning. And yet death is also an opportunity to celebrate a life well lived, and to join in the light, and the joy, and the brightness of this life we were all so blessed to have known, one which touched many of our small community in meaningful ways.

So let us bask in Leora’s light, and in Eitan's steadfastness. It is not for us to know where these two wayfaring souls now reside, or whether they have been reunited, but let us remember the joy and the light they brought to each of us in life.

Lord of all, as we say our final farewells, we commend Leora into your loving arms. May the lord be her possession, and may she rest in peace.

Amen

*****

March 18, 1980

Dear Ma,

After you died, this quiet morning came. I sat at my kitchen table, chin resting on my thumbs, breathing in the cigarette smoke which had adhered to my calloused knuckles and meaty fingers. The radio was tuned to KVOD.

‘After the miserable reception of his first symphony in 1897, 24-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff fell into a deep depression. Dr. Nikolai Dahl used hypnosis to help Sergei overcome the fears and depression which had kept him from his work, and over the course of the spring and summer of 1901 the composer finally began writing again, eventually creating the Piano Sonata No 2 in C Minor, Opus 18, which he dedicated to Dr. Dahl. When the Sonata premiered to glowing reviews on November 9, 1901, the composer himself performed as soloist to the accompaniment of the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. Here now is the London Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Andre Previn, performing the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s famous Sonata, Moderato in C Minor. This Decca recording was made at Kingsway Hall, London on March 30, 1971.’

My coffee had grown cold. The cigarette smoldered, untouched, in the brass ashtray. Vladimir Ashkenazy tolled the famous bells, rumbling ponderously into the arpeggio, while London Symphony’s powerful strings emerged, as though from a slumbering wood, with a sentinel embrace of dissonant, rising melody. Picking up Nes’s letter, which had lain unopened in its envelope for the past several days, I felt the bell tones awakening something corpuscular behind my eyes.

Your grieving boy,

Kim

*****

February 18, 1980

Dear Kim,

It's been hard since your mother passed. Maybe you are experiencing the same somnambulance l am. I have lost a sort of drive to keep going in my life, even in the simple things. I was never much of a cook. Now even fixing myself a bowl of breakfast cereal (which is what I have taken to consuming, for the most part, whenever I do eat anymore) has become a chore. I find that I cannot even wash the dish I ate from. Dirty bowls and spoons have been piling up in your mother’s kitchen. In fact, even walking out to the yard to collect the paper has been too much, which explains the rather bizarre encounter I had a little over a week ago, which has subsequently changed my life for the better.

I was eating a bowl of Fruit Loops when the doorbell rang. I had never eaten Fruit Loops before your children came to visit us over the summer of ‘76. Your mother and I had gone over to Landoli’s the night before. She wanted to make sure everything was perfect for their visit. She hadn’t seen them since your former wife brought them out after Marion was born. We went to Landoli’s to fill up the pantry with the sort of things your mother imagined the kids might like. Your mother was a lot of things, son, but a great cook was not one of them. The Fruit Loops spoke to her from the shelf. She picked up a couple boxes. It turned out Marion really enjoyed Fruit Loops, and he ate bowls of the stuff that summer. If your wife had known, I can only imagine what she might have had to say on the matter! I can’t tell you how many times I went back to stock up on Fruit Loops that summer. There were still a couple boxes in the cupboard after your mother passed, and though they’d grown a little stale, they really were pretty good. I wasn't sure what I'd feed myself once they were gone.

I must have looked a sight - I’d not shaved or bathed in more than a week, and I had thrown your mother’s old shawl over my stained sleeveless t-shirt and the same boxers I’d been wearing since the interment. I answered the door thus. It was my widowed neighbor Rosie standing there. I don’t know whether Rosie fell into the sort of disrepair after Saul died which I am experiencing now, but the woman who stood at my door betrayed no sign of spiritual depression or moral exhaustion. And upon reflection, to fall apart in this way, to allow everything to fall apart in the world around one in this way, to give oneself over entirely to the experience of grief, strikes me as a particularly male conceit. I watched Lucy survive and hold her little family together after the disaster which your father had left her (I hope you don’t mind that I am putting it this way). Never in her grief did she give over to despair. Never for a moment (so far as I could see) did she allow herself or her home to fall into disrepair. So, although I was never close to Rosie before, I doubt that there was ever an instant where she experienced the sort of weakness I was living through now.

Rosie let herself in, walking right past me with a trash bag full of old newspapers she had collected from the lawn. ‘You must take care of yourself, Nes,’ she said to me as she brushed past, dropping the trash bag beside Lucy’s kitchen table and surveying the scene of devastation. ‘You go shower while I clean up this kitchen and fix you something to eat.’

It was as though Rosie had simply stepped into Lucy’s old slippers, assumed Lucy’s shape within her house, assumed Lucy’s role within my life, and I wondered, for the briefest moment, whether it had all been some sort of bad dream. Here she was again, in her kitchen, bossing me around just the same as she had ever done.

I went and showered, and I shaved, and ran a comb through my hair, and put on some fresh clothes, and when I came back into the kitchen there was a plate of scrambled eggs with a couple slices of toast and a cup of hot coffee where I customarily sat. The morning paper was folded neatly beside my plate.

Rosie had found a clean dish towel. ‘Sit down,’ she commanded. So, I did. ‘Lucy warned me of the state you’d be in, g-d bless her.' The light pouring through the window over the sink caught Rosie’s auburn hair and alighted on her shoulder.

‘Lucy told me to look out for you. That’s what I intend to do.’

And so it has been, each morning since, that Rosie has simply let herself into the house in the morning, cleaned up my mess, and fixed me some breakfast. On Sunday after shul, she came over and prepared a nice dinner, and she gave the house a thorough cleaning, and we sat in front of 60 Minutes with our TV trays. After dinner she put aside food in little plastic containers in the freezer, which I have been popping into the microwave each night this week. I really don’t know how I would be getting by right now without Rosie. I find that I am looking forward, each morning, to her visits.

Although it was kind of you to notice, I was not at all shocked by the treatment I received at Bernie’s hands since your mother passed. He has always been clear how he feels about me, and if I was surprised by anything, it was the note I received from you afterward, for I believed that all three of you boys were of a similar mind.

Because you asked about my impressions of the service, however, I have included that here. I hope that you do not take offense either to the tone or the content of this passage.

Your good friend,

Nes Tzel

*****

March 19, 1982

Dear Ma,

A heavy card, typed front and back, fell out of the folded pages of Nes’s letter. Setting the pages down, I felt my senses coming back. I pushed myself back from the table, lighting a fresh cigarette. I fixed myself a fresh cup of coffee. I dropped four pieces of Jewish rye in the toaster.

The Opus had concluded, and the commentator was again speaking softly. I took a first sip of the warmly rich, sweet coffee, meditating on the toaster slowly caramelizing the sugars in the rye bread. The commentator’s softly erudite tones, the coffee, the cigarette, the vanilla aromas rising from the toaster, everything was beginning to have its intended, wakening effect.

I carefully buttered the four pieces of toast, stacking them neatly on a small plate, and returned to the kitchen table. I picked up the card just as Parsley padded into the kitchen. I felt my son standing behind a kitchen chair on the other side of the table, but I didn’t acknowledge him. The little puppet shifted in his padded feet. He glanced, longingly, at the toast. ‘That smells good.’

There would come a time when I would stop to wonder why this boy irritated me so thoroughly. But still mourning you, Ma, feeling, as Nes had written, as though I were living in a waking dream, my small comforts just beginning to do their work, I was in no mood for reflection.

I pushed myself loudly away from the table, slamming my palms on the Formica. I grabbed the letter and the card, and my cup of coffee. I stormed into the living room without ever acknowledging the boy.

I sat at the edge of our tan couch laying the pages, with the small, typed card on top, on the coffee table. I set the coffee cup carefully upon the olive-green leather skiver of one of your old end tables. I felt in my jeans and breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I’d left my lighter on the kitchen table. I pulled open the drawer of the end table and sorted through the jumble of shit in there. A shopping list scrawled across the back of an envelope addressed to you, a pack of playing cards, and a pair of your harlequin glasses. I found a lighter. It musta been one of your old lighters. I lit up and held the typed card to the light of the end table lamp.

Your grieving boy,

Kim

*****

January 3, 1980

Kim,

The memorial scent of cut marigolds suffused every pew.

Someone had erected two tripods before the bimah, one on either side of Lucy’s open casket. One displayed a photo of Lucy I had snapped with Ethan’s camera on that first day we met, in ‘54. Lucy was leaning out the driver’s side window of that new blue station wagon he had bought her. The colorized photo showed her auburn curls falling out of a rayon print scarf of bold orange, gold and red marigolds on a cream field, knotted simply below her chin, green tinted harlequin sunglasses, mother of pearl inlay flashing in the bright morning sun, soft rouge brightening her smiling cheeks, pink painted lips parted to reveal two rows of brilliant white teeth.

The scent of the marigolds on the bimah taking me back to the moment I snapped the photo. She had returned from Landoli’s with some patty melts, you boys in the back seat. It was the first time I met any of you. Ethan and I had just returned from Don’s Mixed Drinks. Ethan was a little loose, and I was wondering, not for the first time during our short acquaintance, what the hell I was thinking, agreeing to work for this man.

‘Goddamn, that woman is a looker,’ Ethan had said, handing me the camera. ‘Get some photos of this gorgeous family, wouldya?’

Lucy had blushed at the compliment, and then she leaned fully out the open window and smiled her luminous smile - it was like she just turned on a light and this amazing smile illuminated the lens. Ethan wanted some pictures with the whole family, but that first one just happened naturally, and I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought it was special because now, 25 years later, here it was again, displayed beside her open casket before the bimah.

The other tripod displayed a sepia photo of Ethan which Lucy thought he must have taken around ‘31, long before I had ever met him - hell Lucy and I were kids in ‘31 - his hair brushed up into a tumbling pile of curls above his arched, tall brow. It could have just as easily been a photo of you or Al today (if you cleaned up). A sort of smile played at the corners of his full lips, gazing into the crowd with the calm, surveying gaze that he favored when he was putting on a heroic air.

I sat in a pew in the second row, a little removed from the bimah, with the other in-laws. We looked on as you boys greeted the mourners who had come to wish her one final fond farewell. I can’t say that I was surprised by the arrangement - her sons welcoming her mourners, while I sat in the second row, beside the other in-laws, and Ethan, who had passed 25 years before, still held the place of her husband before the bimah.

If our family were of any consequence, one might say that Ethan’s apotheosis was complete. In the context of our kikel it felt like just one more small and petty indignity exacted by a set of sons so consumed with filial devotion to a tragic father. One could almost observe the meta narrative playing across the big screen of their stoic gaze, even as the definitive action occurred in our small, peculiar lives.

Does any of this matter, I wondered, in the context of my life with Lucy? Does it change anything between us? Given the finality of death, I thought, I don’t suppose it does. It is not as though it mattered any longer to Lucy. It mattered, in fact, to her sons. ‘Better a living dog than a dead lion.’ And yet, I thought, am I not also alive? Shouldn’t this matter to me? But there comes a time when one must acknowledge defeat, or in any event, that one will no longer fight, and so I instead settled back into myself, and I allowed my carapace to close back over my living core, like a brilliant goldfinch fluttering in a cage, the dust cover thrown over to fool him into sleep.

Your friend,

Nes