Page 322 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
via was a very pretty, very fashionable, very sociable, and very nice woman. Harry was thought to be very wealthy (he was an accountant who invested for himself and clients), very engaging, and also very nice. The Rebells were very important members of the Manhattan Beach community, belonged to the Conservative synagogue, where they were friendly with the rabbi, and were very charitable. They owned a beauti- ful second home on Lake Mahopac and had sent all three of their children to private school (Poly Prep for the boys, Packer Collegiate Institute for Phyllis); also, their children had attended Wharton and Harvard Law School (Arthur), Harvard and Yale Law School (Michael), and Brandeis and NYU (Phyllis, Master’s in Education). They were, in a word, successful.
For my mother, for all of the above reasons, there could not have been a better choice for me to have made; it was a marriage made in heaven. My father probably agreed with my mother, but his only advice to me was in the form of an infelicitous question when he thought that I had been dating Phyllis for too long a period of time, at least in his uni- verse: “Don’t you think that it’s time to shit or get off the pot?”
Although I was not a believer in heaven, I was a bit of a romantic and I wanted to please Phyllis. Little did I anticipate the consequences of my decision to pop the question on the night before the first full day of Rosh Hashanah, to make our new life official just as the New Year was dawn- ing. As there was a holiday upon us, we were both at home in Brooklyn. Thus, when the question was asked and answered in the affirmative, Phyllis and I were at 137 Girard Street, with her parents upstairs but obviously knowing what was afoot. After the affirmation of the engage- ment, Phyllis went upstairs to tell her parents, and, within minutes, Harry appeared at the bottom of the staircase, Sylvia in tow, with a big I-knew-it-all-along grin on his face. Sylvia was visibly pleased as well, but Harry was in what I would later come to know as his silly mode, one in which he clearly enjoyed his humor more than did his audience, a fact that obviously did not register with him. I don’t recall whether I went through the time-honored pas de deux in which the suitor asks the patri- arch for his daughter’s hand, but I would not be surprised to be told that
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