I knew Cousin Francis as a grown man. He had moved to Springfield.  His father, M–, the man my mother cursed, must have died. Francis had aunts and uncles in Springfield on his father’s side whom I am glad loved him.

Francis was a sweet loving man. Delightful innocent face with deep dimples. Reddish blond hair. I can say unequivocally that he was a beautiful loving man. We saw him more than once. I suppose three, four, five times. He would come over to our house. He was around.

He brought his blond wife Irene. She was lovely. Very fair-skinned. She was Polish. You may remember my mother had come from Vilna, Poland, which was Russia at the time. There was no love in Vilna, not from the Polish people for the Jewish people or vice versa. The fact that the Polish people had despised Jewish people and set them apart in ghettos made it certain that my mother would resolutely feel the same about Polish people wherever they were and no matter who they were.

My mother was polite, yet it was thick in the air in our house that Irene was not Jewish. That this was a pity was voiced only after Francis and his wife and young daughter Marlene left, as if Francis had wasted his life on this beautiful blond woman who so obviously loved him.

Their young daughter Marlene was also blond and dimpled and a darling, and yet she was subtly cast in the role of an outcast too. Never spoken in their presence, yet so cuttingly there.

I must have been about eleven or twelve. I don’t remember being a participant. I was on the sidelines where, it seems to me, I always was. Did Cousin Francis, his wife Irene and his daughter Marlene, ever know how much I liked them?

You know I would like to tell them now how wonderful they were and that they meant something to me.

Marlene lives. Francis died a long time time ago. His beautiful wife Irene died recently in Florida. She must have been very old. I did not know Francis had moved to Florida. I never knew — or have long forgotten — what work it was my cousin Francis did in his life.

I only know that Irene died recently because my niece Bonnie, the second daughter of my sister Sylvia, the daughter who had her sucked-on-thumb tied to the side of her crib, keeps me up-dated. Irene’s funeral was in Springfield. I also learned from Bonnie that Cousin Francis and his beautiful blond wife had subsequently had two other daughters. I never knew until Bonnie told me. I forgot to ask Bonnie the other daughters’ names.

To be continued…