I drafted this story days before we got the sad news that my cousin Eric Bercovici died in Hawaii on February 9. His memory is a blessing.
I’m from a small family and have always felt close to my aunts and uncles. Now save for my aunt Babs who lives in Florida and I see far too seldom, like my parents they are all gone.
My parents were each the middle child of three, and both had strong bonds with their siblings and stayed close despite geography, and sometimes politics. But of them all, the one I knew least will always loom largest in memory – my father’s older sister Frances who died tragically when I was 7 or 8.
Whenever I tried to ask my dad or my uncle Stevie to tell me more about their sister, their eyes would tear up at the mention of her name. They were both very close to Fran, and my mother too adored her. This is what I know and remember about my beautiful aunt Frances.
In the late 1930s when Fran’s son Eric was a toddler, she was to take him cross-country by train to join her husband in California where they would live. Fran she asked my mother, who was newly married to my father, to accompany her.
I don’t know how many days those two young sisters-in-law and their curly-headed charge traveled on that train, or what adventures they may have had, but I know my mother grew very close to Fran on that trip, that she thought of Fran as the sister she never had. I sense on that journey they coveted their time together, knowing they would soon be living very separate lives on separate coasts.
As a little girl I remember Fran’s visits east. Whenever she came to New York she stayed at the Sherry Netherland, and I think of her whenever I pass that grand old Fifth Avenue hotel. I remember once my mother and I were having lunch with Fran in the elegant hotel dining room when my mother took me to wash my hands. When we got back to the table I found a menagerie of little glass animals set up on my plate.
And I remember packages from Fran arriving in the mail. Once a large box arrived with a lovely brown dress and a separate white pinafore for me, and underneath it in the box, wrapped in mounds of tissue paper was a beautiful doll wearing the same brown dress and white pinafore!
Fran was a beautiful, elegant and gifted woman and an accomplished writer, though I was too young to know that. But I knew she was someone very special, that she had a special grace. Last winter we visited my still curly-headed cousin Eric and his wonderful wife Chiho in Oahu, and talking with Eric about Fran then was bittersweet for us both.
Years ago I was shopping in a crowded department store with my mother when an elegantly dressed woman walked towards us. As she passed I caught the strong scent of her perfume, and then I saw that my mother was crying.
“She’s wearing White Shoulders.” my mother said through her tears. “That’s what Fran wore.”
Danny, me, Eric, Chiho
– Dana Susan Lehrman