My father’s family and my mother’s family lived almost exactly on opposite sides of town. Both houses were in middle class neighborhoods that bordered wealthier suburbs. Both were large, three-story, Victorian style, turn-of-the-century houses with porches and quarter sawn oak woodwork. Both were homes to extended families, kept together by post-war housing costs and thick Italian blood.

The similarities end there.

Dad was the baby of seven children: four boys and three girls. The boys all married and moved away; the girls married but remained in the house. When my father came home from the war, his sisters told him to forget about going to college and get a job to help support Momma. Since their father had died of a heart attack while my Dad was overseas, Dad obliged. (He met my mother at his new job, so I can’t complain although I still feel badly that he didn’t get to become an engineer.

My father’s house had three floors, a sunroom off the master bedroom, and a grand staircase that split in two at the bottom with half going to the foyer and the other half going to the kitchen. The house had never been remodeled in 1950’s kitsch like my other grandparents’ was, and the aunts kept it well-appointed with antiques from their travels and plush carpets and drapes. But the biggest difference between the two houses was that my maternal grandparents’ house existed in our eyes for the sole purpose of indulging us, while my paternal grandmother’s house was a place where you learned that Children Are to Be Seen and Not Heard. It was a house filled with grown ups engaged in grown up pursuits, like cocktails, cigarettes, talking about their careers, and entertaining important friends. We were loved but only tolerated. We would never have had the nerve to ride down the oak banister the way we did at the other grandmother’s house. None of my father’s sisters allowed us to look through their sewing box for the right piece of satin to make a Barbie wedding dress as my mother’s sister regularly did. I doubt they had a sewing box, since his sisters had a dressmaker while my mother’s sister was a dressmaker.

The aunts supported my grandmother, as they regularly reminded everyone. My grandmother was born in Italy and spoke little English, (except she could communicate to you that you ate too much and were getting fa)t. Her earlobes had slits that seemed to reach to her neck from the heavy gold earrings she wore each day. The house held the three, sometimes four, women, and their various spouses, who, in a confusing plethora, were all named “Ed”. Aunt #1 married an Ed who died after a few years, and later she married another Ed, who died in a short while after that. Aunt #2 married her Ed, and they’re still together at 87 and 91. Aunt #3 found her Ed, the Colonel, who was mainly called “Red” (for his hair and to help with the “Ed” confusion). In addition, Uncle Louie named his child “Edward”. That was a lot of Eds to keep straight when you are five.

They were more Americanized than my mother’s family, despite the fact that my maternal grandmother had been born in New York City and my paternal grandparents had come straight from Italy. They wore sophisticated suits and hats, and Aunts #1 and 2 worked at the same insurance agency. Aunt #1 wore a little pointed hat with a feather to work each day. She was very independent and kowtowed to no one. She sent us a postcard from Russia once and my mother was miffed that she didn’t even know Aunt #1 was out of town. She was very proper and gave expensive gifts like hand-knit Irish sweaters and dollhouses with working lights, until you turned 16 when, the aunts decreed, all birthday gifts were to stop because there were just “so many of us girls”.

Aunt #2 was small and wiry. She was known to follow you around until you finished your glass of ginger ale, take it out of your little grubby hand, wash the glass and put it away before you could ask for more. Shoes were to be removed before entering aunt #2’s bedroom, which was carpeted with a carpet so crimson that the room seemed to pulsate like a heart, which scared me from entering it so my shoes remained on. She was always cleaning and in a pissed off mood because of it, but she still addressed everyone as “lovey”. Her Ed was very active in the Elks and she loved playing queen to my uncle’s king. They were a very social couple, going to dances, fundraisers, and cruises. My parents were their fill-in couple, the ones they called when someone cancelled at bridge, or a table had to be filled out for a dinner dance. I think my mother enjoyed the chance to dress up and leave us five kids for the night, but could only take so much of Grand Poobah of the Elks stuff.

Aunt #3 came and went. Her husband, The Colonel, was stationed around the world. They brought me a Korean doll dressed in a gorgeous pink satin kimono. When they returned, there often was friction among the sisters. Aunt #3 lorded it over the other two, or so they thought, and then we kids had little if anything to do with them but say hello and kiss them goodbye. When I was sixteen, The Colonel promised to take his two nieces on a trip out West and somehow I got thrown into the package to keep favors even on both sides of their family. It was a wild trip. My childless aunt and uncle didn’t have a clue what to do with three teenage girls, so they took us on a road trip from Texas to Disneyland to Las Vegas. That’ll have to be a separate story, though, but suffice to say that their entertainment consisted of getting us to a resort, dumping us at the pool, then retreating to their room for cocktails. Not a bad thing when you are sixteen and away from home for the first time, but communications got, mixed up, tempers flared, sobbing phone calls were made to home, and my aunt broke her toe when she got up to yell at us to be quiet one night. She had the sheets off our bed and washed and folded before my uncle’s big Cadillac left the driveway to take us to the airport.

All of the aunts had fertility problems, and at age 42, Aunt #2 produced the first and only child, a son. My cousin was three months older than I, and we got along when he wasn’t being smothered by the females in the household. If his mother told him to put a coat on, aunt #1 would tell her it was warm out and tell him not to bother, while aunt #3, visiting between stations, would tell aunt #1 to mind her business, and then my grandmother would ignore all of them and get him a sweater. The child never had a chance. He did have a drum set, though I have no idea how it got past the hawk eyes of the women who tolerated little noise or childhood excess of any kind, and we’d disappear up to his room to bang on it while the adults had cocktails.

My mother, who has a strong sense of propriety, insisted we visited both sides of the family on an equal basis. I don’t think my father really cared. We girls had to be dragged there kicking and screaming, and if it was a holiday, we’d call our other grandmother tearfully and beg that we could come to her house where we would be fed sugar-glazed products until we fell into a coma in front of the color TV. Instead there’d be a long cocktail hour with all the daughters and their Eds in attendance. The sisters would carp at each other while they jumped up and down to tend to their cooking, the brothers-in-law would razz each other over their golf scores, and as the glasses were refilled and the ashtrays filled with butts, the Eds would begin arguing with wives or clashing over politics. We kids would moon around, looking for something, anything to eat. To this day, the smell of Manhattans and cigarette smoke on a summer afternoon brings me right back to that kitchen, sitting on my mother’s lap until the conversation really got going and my mother would send me outside to play.

I can’t imagine living in a house as an adult most of my life with my mother, my sisters and their husbands, and working in small office each day with one of them. It’s a wonder they didn’t all kill each other, or at least throw a highball glass at the nightly cocktail hour. We thought them brusque and crabby, but something must have held them together because after my father came back from the war, the family decided to sell the big house and buy a smaller, easier to keep clean house, a few miles away. My grandmother was miserable there and a few years later, when their old house came on the market, they bought it back from the same people they’d sold it to.

There they remained until my grandmother began doing bizarre things like putting the electric coffee maker on the lit gas burner of the stove.One afternoon she disappeared and everyone came home from work to search the swamp at the end of the road. She was found about five miles away, sitting on a bench, my aunt’s little toy poodle exhausted next to her. The aunts conferred and decided it was time to place Momma in a nursing home. There was a lot of fire left in the old woman, though, and she got kicked out of the first nursing home for kicking an attendant in the stomach. I thought it was pretty cool to have a grandmother who got expelled, so to speak.

The aunts sold the big house along with the massive, carved dining room table and chairs. The hand-painted Italian nativity crèche that filled the entire breakfront was given to a convent and the rest of the furniture and dishes divvied up between the two aunts’ households. Aunts #1 and 2 used the proceeds to buy separate apartments in the same apartment building. They continued to work and travel, and Aunt #3 moved back to the States permanently when The Colonel retired and they bought a townhouse in Connecticut.

Other than seeing my uncle march each year with the Elks in the Thanksgiving parade, we saw them infrequently. After living under the same roof for all those years, they had enough of family obligations and went their own ways. I was last with Aunts #1 and 2 at the baptism of my oldest daughter in 1985, when we discovered that Aunt #1 was showing signs of the same senility that robbed her mother’s mind. She kept asking whose house it was and complaining that someone was following her. Soon she too was in a nursing home.

She turned 101 years old this January and has been in the nursing home for twenty years. The doctor said that if you could screw a new head on her body, she could walk out the door tomorrow. Last year, my mother’s sister was in the same nursing home and I took the opportunity to visit aunt #1. At least they told me that the little, wizened body with closed eyes and toothless mouth was my aunt, but it was hard to find in her tiny, wrinkled face the proud, dignified women who took off to Russia alone and weathered the loss of two husbands and supported herself all her life. I haven’t gone back.

Aunt #3 died a few years ago in her mid-80’s, only months after The Colonel died. I’m not sure what she died of, but it seemed she just lost the will to live once her Red was gone. They had drifted away from my other aunt and no one had heard from them until Red landed in intensive care and she soon followed.

Aunt #2 is 91. She’s “become forgetful”, as they call it in my family. When I saw her last year at my mother’s sister’s funeral, she appeared to be perfectly fine, except she kept asking sotto voce, “who’s in the casket?” This at least provided some comic relief amongst the nieces. Her Ed has been in a nursing home for a few weeks with some health problems and this appears to have worsened her senility, so now she’s in a nursing home cross town from my uncle’s. My mother went to see her and found her sitting in the hallway, her purse on her arm like she was waiting for a bus. She appeared to know who my mother was, but then asked for my father, who’s been dead for 13 years. In her head, it’s sometime in the 1950s and she flitted from half-story to half-story like a hummingbird, mentioning names and places my mother only vaguely remembered. After awhile my mother’s head was spinning and she stood up to leave. As she went to hug her, Aunt #2 grabbed her hand in order to admire a ring she was wearing. She clasped my mother’s hand and said very coherently, “It’s a beautiful ring. May you wear it all your life with good health and prosperity.”

As my mother told me this over the phone I got all choked up and began to cry. I hid my tears from my mother who was already upset. Although my sisters and I often griped at how the sisters had outlived their little brother by so many decades, I also remembered how my aunt had cried when she walked into my father’s wake, and she tenderly called him “Billy”, as only an older sister would. She was the last member of the family that had shared both my father’s lifetime and ours. For the few brief seconds that my mother had been relaying some mixed-up story of my aunt’s, I felt like it was like thirty years ago and all these people were in the prime, laughing, drinking, playing golf, and complaining about one another. I remembered what it was like to be a child and to be surrounded by adults who seemed so much larger than life. My father’s generation was the last to enjoy the largesse of post-war America, the last to be able to drink and smoke without guilt, the last to share a roof over their heads because it was what you did to get by, and the last to feel perfectly content to spend a Sunday afternoon around a kitchen table, waiting for dinner to be served, listening to the music of ice tinkling in highball glasses, and the cacophony of too many Eds razzing each other over their golf handicaps. I knew I would never come to any harm as long as their generation stood between me and adulthood.

On those Sunday afternoons, when everyone had started on their second highball and voices were being raised, my mother would send us kids outside to play. I’d always head for the little Japanese maple tree on the front lawn. It’s a small specimen, but just the right height and size for a five-year old kid to climb into. The branches are curved and have nooks perfect for a child to lie in, and the lacy leaves provide a good cover to hide from prying older sisters. A few weeks ago I drove past the house and was amazed that the little tree was still there, pruned into perfection by the people who had bought the house some twenty five years ago. I had always wondered if my father used to hide in the tree when he was a boy because the aunts didn’t like us in it. I never remembered to ask him. Now it’s too late to ask anyone who would.