Don’t keep your hair too long. She told me that you look younger with short hair. Just keep this hairstyle.
Julia was with us at that time, and she couldn’t help laughing and saying, Mrs. Kauzel, you have always surprised me. Later, Julia said in the living room that your mother had said something similar to me. If I wore new clothes, she wouldn’t even express her love for it, and she would ask me where I bought it or how much I spent.
That year, I urged my mother to have a long talk with me many times, vividly and meticulously telling her stories about her childhood and her father’s decades-long travels in Europe. She told me that when they just crossed the Atlantic, they didn’t have a plane to pack their clothes and put them in a steamboat suitcase, which was like a wardrobe with a drawer for an old-fashioned steamboat trip. There is still a box face label in one of her closets today to return their boat names.
In the following years, after ABC travel gradually became a regular way to Europe, they were still more willing to choose the most famous passenger ships at that time, namely, the ile-de-france, the Queen Mary or a beautiful Italian passenger ship named Milangelo. My mother told me that they also stayed at the Spanish Stair Hotel in Rome, the Ha Silei Hotel or the Paris Athena Plaza Hotel after my father’s career as a doctor made them able to afford more expensive and elegant hotels than in the past in the 1950s and 1960s.
One night, she told me about a dream in which she was sitting at a table in the lobby of Athena Plaza Hotel.
I’m alone there. I don’t know anything. I think I’m waiting for your father
In her dream, she kept thinking about all kinds of problems, compared with which room they should choose to stay in. Where did she put her passport? Her father was delayed by something. She said that she had been sitting in the lobby for three days.
On the third night, when my father arrived, she finally got up and went to their room. My father had changed his clothes for dinner, and my mother said that he would return it and I would help him adjust his tie. Then they went downstairs. A French doctor’s wife was waiting for them in a funny-looking car outside the hotel.
The dream was so real, she said, and she told herself that I should have had this dream before, and she asked me if I had the same experience.
I told her many times that I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn’t help thinking about this place. I must have been here before.
Yes, that’s right. She said that the only part that disturbed her in that dream was the strange experience of waiting for her father in the lobby.
The other night, she told me about her experience of grow up in Douchez, D. C., which, although it is a Jewish neighborhood, is close to an area where many Irish rich people live.
President Kennedy’s mother, Rose Fitzgerald, lives in Mount Ashmont, a mile away from our district. In winter, she will take her father in a two-horse carriage and pass in front of us.
When I was born, my home was still a gas lamp, and our street was also equipped with gas lamps. At night, a man riding a bicycle would light the street lamps one by one with a long pole.
She said that she remembered how excited she was when she installed the lights.
My mother’s father was a dentist. She was very busy when she was born. Two years later, he came to the United States from Russia. He entered Tufts in 1898. My eldest mother followed him to the school on Saturday to help him clean his office. If he also made an appointment on Saturday, she would pass the tools he needed by the dental chair.
We took a bus. His office is on Trimonte Street, not far from the famous Jordan Marsh department store.
That shop is now closed, but it was the most familiar landmark in the central business district of the city for more than a century.
My grandfather died at the age of nine and worked as a dentist until he was over eight. As far as I know, he was a passionate socialist, but he never talked to me about his political beliefs. He read mostly 19th century British and American novels, and a set of leather Charles Dickens novels in his room. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I introduced him to reading David Copperfield, an orphan in the foggy city outside Pickwick. He allowed me to take it home and read it at summer night, and then gave me all the sets.
My grandmother is a very beautiful woman. She grew up in Budapest and was deeply influenced by the Austrian-Hungarian music system at the end of the 19th century. I remember listening to her grandmother when I was five or six years old. I told her grandmother to play the happy waltz and light opera dance music on the piano in the living room. It was her decision to let my mother play the piano. Later, my mother gradually fell in love with the piano and gave it up. It was a pity.
However, my mother’s early experience of immersion in music, especially chamber music, left a deep imprint on her married life. I remember when I was young, my mother left Vicky La Chu at home to play her childhood music. Her favorite song was a romantic piano quintet by Robert Schumann No.44. When I was sitting in the kitchen with her, she would hum that song from the beginning.
After graduating from Latin school, my mother went to Wheaton for a small women’s school, which is about an hour’s drive from South Boston. She was a freshman in Wheaton, and her parents moved from Douchez, D.C., to Brookline, a fashionable suburb. Two years later, her brother entered Harvard. The big story happened that her brother didn’t become a classmate with my father, and my father went to Brookline’s house for Sunday dinner at the right time, so my father met my mother.
They got married when their father was in court. At first, they didn’t have a public marriage news, because her grandmother looked down on her father’s family. From the perspective, her father’s family was not much poorer than theirs, and it was much more vulgar and uneducated, so this became the only reason why her grandmother opposed their marriage.
Once my father told my grandmother that she was worried about whether I could support myself by getting married at this poor time, but I told her that we had got married in New Hampshire and calmed my grandmother’s mood. When everyone agreed to hold another ceremony at the Rabbi’s house, she accepted all this.
In order to make my father meet Eugene Bleuler, they finally went to Switzerland on their honeymoon. At that time, luxury hotels were beyond their calculation.
We stayed in the cheapest hotel and spent every penny carefully, said mother, but those days were the most heart-warming time of my life. I was so proud of your father and he was so handsome.
She told me that they would walk along the lake for a long time in Zhiwa.
In the past, he used to wear a hat, which you would see in old movies. When strangers passed by, he would lift the brim of his hat to greet them.
After they arrived at Dr. Bleuler’s nursing home in Boghazby, Zurich, the doctor took us to his home, which was in a beautiful town outside the city, and we stayed for dinner with his family.
Mother said that they stayed in Zurich for a few more days than planned because of Dr. Bleuler’s generosity and kindness to his father.
When examining the patient, he invited your father to participate in the discussion with other doctors
Once my father put his mind on those doctors’ observation, Dr. Bleuler took me everywhere to visit various districts in Zurich.
She said that at the end of the day, he took me into an ice cream shop and bought me a chocolate ice cream. At that time, he was already a respected old man, but he was still so kind to me. Before I came to pick up the handkerchief, he leaned over and picked it up and handed it to me.
Knowing that they were on their honeymoon, Dr. Bleuler also suggested several places he thought Switzerland was worth visiting.
We went to Interlaken, crossed the lake by those boats and took a direct mountain train. We stayed in Lausanne for a few days and then went to Paris to meet Pierre. Can you imagine how excited I was about all this?
However, as far as I know, their marriage has not always been so leisurely and peaceful, or to put it another way, although I wanted to believe that my parents’ marriage was perfect like many children when I was growing up, the fact was not the case. This mother talked about her life in Switzerland in nostalgia for a few weeks, but a few months later, she surprised me by saying that she had loved another man twice after marriage. The first time was when she was married for eight years, and the second time was when she was in her forties.
The first man’s name was Bedecker Alper, who was his father’s best friend when he was a big boy. He was charming and handsome. The man was not handsome, romantic and well-off. His family also made him own a car. His mother said that it was a convertible. When he pursued her, he would give it to his father. His father was a resident in Boston Psychiatric Hospital for six weeks at a time, so his mother got closer and closer during that lonely day.
She admitted that knowing that her father was working with a group of pretty nurse attracted her mother’s words, which was even more difficult for her to accept. Her mother suspected that her father didn’t flirt with them, but later her mother learned that the truth was not flirting.