Between Two Days: A Fictional Remembrance

By Rory Lance

Written in two parts, Between Two Days recounts two days in the life of a mother. As we trace the events of each day, we journey through the life that was lived between them. Between Two Days was written as a way to remember and immortalize the authors late mother beyond the traditions of a headstone. What was my mother like as a child? became one of the many questions Rory Lance tried to explore as he faced her final days. Using the many stories he was told throughout his life, he wove together a tale that presents a child he never knew as the single most important influence of his life. Between Two Days gives us a detailed look at how childhood and adulthood are profoundly blended together. Rory Lance felt that the best way to honor his late mother was through the art of story telling and that with every turn of the page his mother will live again in the mind and hopefully heart of the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503575363

Rory Lance

RORY LANCE is an accomplished character actor with experience in both the musical and legitimate stage and numerous film and television projects throughout his career. In addition to his work as an actor, he has spent much of his career teaching and introducing young people to the joys and challenges of live theatre. He has directed over forty theatrical productions, including the first ever high school production of THE PRODUCERS which went on to receive seven awards from the NATIONAL YOUTH THEATRE. Rory's original solo adaptation of DEATH IN VENICE has been performed successfully at the 2012 United Solo Theatre Festival winning the Festival's prestigious award for Best Period Piece.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Rory Lance.

Library of Congress Control Number:   TXu 1-937-277

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5035-7535-6

               eBook           978-1-5035-7536-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Cover Photo

235 East 4th Street, NYC

Rev. date: 06/04/2015

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Part One Saturday, April 14, 1928

Part Two Monday, December 30, 2013

Dedication

I dedicate this story to my parents, whose continual love and support exposed me to all those experiences that have fed and nurtured my passions throughout my life.

photo%20part1.jpg

Fannie Hoffner (right) with her older sister Esther and younger brother Jerry around 1930.

Part One

Saturday, April 14, 1928

1

She woke up looking at the same image that had greeted her each and every day: the intricate designs of the painted-over tin ceiling. These ceilings were standard in most of the buildings that populated the Lower East Side of Manhattan that she called home. She studied the area in the corner that had been the site of some earlier flood-like catastrophe, so that the paint was perpetually peeling. She wondered how many layers of paint had been used to cover over the ceiling again and again over the many years since the building had been built, long before her family had ever decided to move there.

She had started life in another apartment much farther downtown on the corner of Norfolk and Rivington Streets in the heart of New York City’s Lower East Side, the meeting place for all of Eastern Europe’s immigrant population in 1920. The Rivington Street apartment was a small dwelling that could no longer service the needs of the growing family of David and Pauline Hoffner. So with the addition of their newest child and David’s recent ability to find steady employment through the Bakers’ Union, he decided to move his family about a mile uptown to 235 East 4th Street.

The new apartment had a number of advantages. It was bigger with pretty much the same layout as most apartments throughout the immigrant colony of lower Manhattan: an entrance into a large kitchen with a small bedroom off to one side, a living room off to the other side, and a small front room off the living room. This new home had two major features that set it apart from the one they had left on Rivington Street. It was on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, giving David the security that he would not be disturbed while he slept during the day; since his assurance of steady work was completely dependant on his willingness to work the night shift. But most importantly, in caring for a family that included four girls and eventually two sons, their new home had a bathroom in the apartment. No more sharing with the neighbors the small unkempt bathroom down the hall. By the time she lay awake staring at the peeling patch of paint, she had lived at East 4th Street for eight years and it was the only home she had ever known.

It was still too early for her to stir even though she was going to have what had become her favorite kind of day, a Saturday out with her sister Esther. These monthly, Saturday outings had become what she looked forward to the most, but it was still much too early to wake and get ready because her sisters were all still fast asleep at this early hour of a beautiful, sunny, Saturday morning. All four sisters slept together in the small bedroom off the kitchen. Two twin beds against two perpendicular walls serviced the four girls, Mollie and Esther, the two oldest, shared one bed head to toe while the two younger sisters, Rebecca and Fannie, likewise, shared the second bed.

As Fannie, or as her Papa liked to call her, Fagela; Yiddish for little bird, stared at the peeling ceiling she wished someone would make a sound so she could get up and start her day without feeling guilty about waking her sisters on an early Saturday morning. Her parents slept in