Page 30 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
and the Manhattan Beach neighborhood are located about as far from Manhattan as they can be without being outside New York City limits. Manhattan Beach bore an upscale name and apparently knew it. While most of Brooklyn had streets and avenues commemorating num- bers, letters, and sometimes compass points (for example, the intersection of East 17th Street and Avenue L), Manhattan Beach, which was then populated primarily by Eastern European Jews or their descendants, had an aristocratic English air about it. The streets in that small and exclusive part of Brooklyn were, moving alphabetically west to east (and not count- ing the intervening Ocean Avenue, which we will meet again): Amherst, Beaumont, Coleridge, Dover, Exeter, Falmouth, and Girard (which we will also meet again), all the way to Pembroke. (It should not escape the careful and knowledgeable reader that the first and last named of those streets bore the names of the author’s college alma mater and that of his
wife’s. This fact, however, is merely coincidental, so far as I can tell.) Aunt Beatrice lived with my uncle, Aaron Simon, and their daugh- ter, Avis, in a particularly beautiful brick center-hall colonial home at 414 Hampton Avenue, between Coleridge and Dover Streets. Aunt Bea- trice had been a nursery school teacher and, according to my mom and other less prejudiced witnesses, was a woman of beauty and infinite taste and charm. (Sadly, she suffered a stoke when I was quite young, and I can only recall her as someone who was confined to a wheelchair, com- pletely paralyzed on one side of her body and barely able to speak.) When I was a young boy, my parents would take me to visit her virtually every Sunday, and, in a gesture that I prized, she would reward me with
a gift of four quarters.
Uncle Aaron was a Russian émigré who was an inventor and a suc-
cessful entrepreneur. Maintaining his connection with the country of his birth, he commissioned the painting of a mural of a sleigh pulled by three horses in full gallop in the snow, which he located at the foot of the stairs that led to the basement playroom, which contained a ping-pong table. In later years, much as I loved to play ping-pong with my dad and would try to rush to the table in the basement to start a match, I would always be slowed down by that troika.
• 12 •