Missing Murray

By Maxine A. Goldblum

This book was primarily written as a history of my life with Murray for my family and friends. It begins with with first thing I can remember and goes through my growing up until I meet Murray at the beach over a game of Scrabble. It chronicles our lives through the tumultuous engagement ring purchase, tragic death of our first daughter, adventurous world travels, and Murrays mysterious illness which lead to his untimely death at the age of seventy-four. The book ends with my experiences learning to live as a single woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491707678

Maxine A. Goldblum

Maxine A. Goldblum has been writing since she was ten years old when she completed her first story, The Secrets of Bandit Roland. She had an OP ED essay on “Forgetfulness” published in the New York Times. After moving to Florida in 2006, she began writing “Missing Murray” during a Writers Circle class given at the Kravis Center by novelist and playwright, Julie Gilbert. This book was written for all her children, grandchildren and friends who knew Murray . She was married for forty-seven years, and has four children and ten grandchildren. Maxine spends her life between a house in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida and an apartment in Manhattan. When she is not pursuing her new passion of playwriting, she spends time visiting her ten grandchildren in New York and Connecticut.

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Copyright © 2013 by Maxine A. Goldblum.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-0766-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-0767-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013916698

iUniverse rev. date: 10/18/2013

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Part One My Beginnings—The Formative Years

Part Two The Teenage Years—(Growing Up is Hard to Do)

Part Three Meeting Murray—A Chance Encounter on the Beach

Part Four Mr. & Mrs. Murray Goldblum—The Exploits of a Happy Couple

Part Five The Beginning of the End—Murray’s Final Days

Part Six The Single Life—Learning to Live Alone

Part Seven Memories of Dad—He Taught Them so Well

TO MURRAY

My renaissance man, who could never find enough

hiding places for all the books he bought . . .

I would also like to dedicate this book to my seven wonderful children who gave Murray and I ten fantastic grandchildren who now fill my life with much joy and happiness

Thank you

Michael, Ann, Emma and Nathaniel; Laura, Aden and Matty; David, Joanne, Jesse, Mollie and Sherman; Chuck, Tirzah, Navah, Mia and Malena

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F irst and foremost, I would like to thank Julie Gilbert, whose Writers Circle class at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, began my career as a serious writer. This book could not have been completed without Julie’s encouragement and professional help. I am forever grateful to my good friend, Linda Gale, for her suggestions in editing the final draft, and Michelle Feldman for sending the last photos to the publisher.

Many thanks to Mars Alma, George Nedoff and Anne Barcelona of IUniverse, my publisher, for their help in putting the book together.

PROLOGUE

I t was a beautiful day in July of 2005. The sun was streaming through the windows of Room 510 in Mt. Sinai Hospital. Propped up in his blue and white hospital gown was my seventy-four year old husband, Murray. His hair was fuzzy around his bald head that morning. The soft brown eyes I’d grown to love were bright and alert. His strong aquiline nose stood out defiantly from his pale face. His lips were cracked and covered with the ointment his nurse put on earlier that morning. I shook my head at the sight of all the tubes coming out of his body. The oxygen nose clip, which he always took out of his nose, lay lifelessly on his pillow. When he saw me come in, his eyes perked up with a knowing wink. This will be a good day , I thought. Maybe now the doctors would finally find out what was wrong. There had been so many tests with nothing conclusive.

Two of my four children were sitting on the window sill. Michael, my eldest and most serious son sported the beard he grew at college. It seemed to give him almost a rabbinical look. His wavy brown hair barely touched his shoulders. Managing his architecture firm and worrying about his father had definitely taken its toll. His deep brown eyes looked very tired that day, and his six-foot lanky frame sagged while sitting on the window sill.

Chuck, seated next to Michael, was my youngest. He was the same height as his older brother, but different in temperament. Everybody loved Chuck. He charmed his teachers all the way through elementary school. His brown eyes always had a mischievous twinkle. He definitely had his father’s knack for picking stocks which proved helpful in his business as a financial planner. Today, however, the twinkle in his eyes was replaced by the dark circles below. His wife was expecting their second child any moment. Having to be in the hospital for his dad and taking care of things at home were beginning to takes its toll.

David, physically my tallest son at six-foot-two inches was leaning against the wall next to the window. He was the first to lose his hair. Later in life he began shaving his whole head which I told him on many occasions was not flattering; but who listens to their mother. He always claimed that he was the true middle child because he was the middle son and Laura didn’t count because she was the only girl. He is the son who runs the family commercial real estate business. He had a calming effect on Murray when business dealings were heated.

Laura, my very independent daughter, was curled up in the lounge chair next to the bed. She was holding Murray’s hand and softly caressing it. She just had a haircut, and her brown straight hair fell softly on her shoulders. She looked so vulnerable trying to cheer up her father with news of her new baby. Aden was truly her miracle child because when she reached the age for forty, she decided to wait no longer for the family she always wanted. She went ahead, found a fertility doctor and the rest is history. The most moving experience for me was being in the delivery room at Aden’s birth. I was holding one of Laura’s hands along with my daughter-in-law, Joanne, as we shouted, push, Laura, push! A few moments later out came a beautiful black haired little boy. He was a big boy for such a little girl to deliver. I remember thinking as the nurse was cleaning him up that he looked just like a Japanese sumo wrestler with his protruding little belly, black hair and dark eyes. Aden is very special to me because I actually witnessed his coming into this world.

When I entered the room, they were all talking together. However, they stopped when they saw me. Michael was holding a black three ringed binder in which many pages were filled with information he and his siblings had taken from the internet. Through the whole time Murray was hospitalized, all the children scoured the internet to discover what they could about Murray’s condition. In the local hospital in Connecticut, nothing was found. He became steadily weaker and it was decided to move him to Mt. Sinai in Manhattan where there were more facilities to detect what was happening. They kept copious notes on every procedure in this binder. One of the tests discovered that he might have the early stages of Shays Drager disease. It is a form of Parkinsons which has no known cure. Some of the infectious disease physicians thought he could have picked up a parasite in South America where we had been vacationing in January. However, after numerous blood tests, nothing showed up. It was all very frustrating for us, but especially so for Murray.

They waited on that sunny day, as on all other days, for the doctors to make their rounds. They were ready with their questions. I think the doctors must have dreaded coming into Room 510 because of all the questions from my children. It was certainly a room they didn’t just stop in for a few short minutes.

This day was like all the others. Lots of questions and lots of we’re still testing answers. There were so many doctors: cardiologists, neurologists, infectious disease specialists, residents. Doctors from India, China, South America along with the American trained specialists. Then there was the endless parade of vampires clothed in Lab Tech white uniforms, taking blood. They were running out of veins to puncture. I often wondered if Murray would run out of blood to give. My heart went out to this shell of a man I married forty-seven years ago. Having to rely on another person for all his needs was terrible for him. Helpless was not a word in Murray’s vocabulary, but helpless he was—not even able to get out of bed for anything any more.

When the doctors finally left and the children went off to work, I climbed carefully into bed with him. I put my arms around him and kissed him gently on his greasy parched lips and asked, What did you ever see in me? I certainly wasn’t beautiful. I wasn’t well read and you were such a great reader. I played tennis. You played chess. I read magazines. You read books.

Ssh, he said softly as he looked down at me. I’ve always loved you, kid, because you made me laugh.

At that moment, as the tears welled up in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks, I knew I was the luckiest woman in the world.

PART ONE

My Beginnings—The Formative Years

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Audrey with me on her lap—1933

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T he first thing I can remember as a child was being lifted over my father’s head while he was lying in a big bed. I must have been about two years old, and I really don’t recall much about my dad because he died when I was three of a massive heart attack. The only memory of him was a picture his brother gave to me when I was older. I was told he was quite the ladies man, a quality that no doubt attracted my mother who was a party girl of her day. She had a photo album that had many sepia-colored pictures of her dressed in the fashion of the twenties at the beach and sitting on large convertibles in the company of several nattily dressed gents. I would spend many hours when I was young turning the pages of this photo album and looking at the wonderful pictures of my mom, her sisters, parents and friends. Unfortunately, I would never actually own this book of memories because after my mother died, when going over her apartment, I never found it. She was such a meticulous person in real life. She left a note in her bureau of what she wanted etched on her tombstone. To this day, I don’t know what possessed her to destroy that album.

My mother was a very attractive woman of average height. She wore her brown hair in an upsweep style most of her life. I never ever saw one hair out of place. She went to the Ann and Alice beauty parlor every Saturday morning, where I assume her upsweep was unleashed from the top of her head, washed and repinned. Her eyes were most unusual as one was brown and the other hazel. My sister, Audrey, had the hazel eyes, and I had the brown. She was quite buxom, and had to have her clothes custom made as she could not wear the dresses in the stores. She was quite thrifty, only had five dresses, three pair of shoes, one regular and one rain coat. Her only dressy outfit was a gold sleeveless v-necked floor length knit with a matching coat. She wore this to every wedding, bar or bas mitzvah in the family, stating that she needn’t buy something new for every event since she looked fine in the knit. I always envied her beautiful pink skin. Even in her eighties, she didn’t have a wrinkle on her face. Not like me, who used to lie on the beaches of the Caribbean and bake, covered with banana scented lotion. I can never remember her lying in the sun although she did take my sister and me to the beach where she warned me not to go over my head in the water, "because you could drown!" I had asthma until my teens, and I guess that’s why she warned me of the dangers of swimming over my head. Nevertheless, that was the beginning of my fear of the water. Even to this day, when swimming in the ocean, I will not go out over my head.

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Julie

Julie, as she was known to her friends, was a wonderful person to befriend. She was loyal to a fault and, therefore, had many friends, married and single. She never drove a car and was an avid walker. She would walk from her apartment to downtown Stamford every day. She would go into town to shop at Brown Brothers, for groceries, go to the bank and the local library. She was an avid reader, a habit passed down to my sister. I preferred going to the movies.

She owned a small children’s clothing store for one year and had to sell it because she contracted pneumonia and couldn’t find anyone to help in the store. Then she worked as a salesperson at a local jewelry store. She had a small cadre of loyal friends that she kept throughout her life. I guess looking back, I did give her a hard time. I remember her saying to me on several occasions that she wished I would have one child that would be like me so I would know what she went through raising me. I guess I was lucky because none of my children did the crazy things I did growing up.

Julie, as a mother, was one tough cookie. She insisted that we keep our room neat, which was not my nature. She demanded we finish all the food on the plate, even if I didn’t like it. She wouldn’t stand for my storytelling, punishing me either by denying something I liked or sending me to my closet. I know that sounds terrible, but I really didn’t mind that punishment as I had a walk-in closet in my bedroom and would wile away the time playing with items I’d have stashed in the shoe bag and under boxes on the floor. I had a flashlight so I could see and enjoyed the serenity of my hideaway. The walls were so solid that I couldn’t hear my mother arguing with her sister, Jean, who lived with us. We all shared a three bedroom apartment in the Ambassador Arms, a building that was built by my grandfather, Max Warshow, and two other partners.

My mom had two sisters: Gertrude, called Gert, and Jean, who moved in after my father’s death. They were feminists way before their time. Each of them was a fortress not to be reckoned with. Gert was married to a wonderful man, my bald, smiling Uncle Jack, who wilted under Aunt Gert’s tyrannical ways. They had two children, Sonia and Alan. Sonia was always on the plump side. She was a beautiful child, but Alan was the apple of her mother’s eye. He was her beautiful blonde wunderkind and very spoiled. He matured into a braggart who loved telling embarrassing jokes. Sonia married a soft-spoken gentle man from Mississippi and moved away from her mom. It wasn’t too long before Gert inserted herself into their lives and because she didn’t think