Travels With Aunt Ethel

It’s been 42 years and the Swiss chalet music box still works. The woman in the green satin skirt twirls and hops. Her white apron has barely yellowed; her lace cap sits atop her head at a jaunty angle. I have most of my souvenirs from that trip: postcards from Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-Upon-Avon, miniature Limoges plates from a shop along the Champs-Elysées, and a green velour jacket, child size twelve, trimmed with edelweiss. The summer I was eleven I toured Europe with my sister Nancy, then fourteen, and my elderly Aunt Ethel. The truth is, I thought Aunt Ethel was old but in retrospect, she couldn’t have been. She was probably in her 60’s, young from my current vantage point. She had never married, never had children, and had no idea how to cope with two kids abroad.

It was the summer of 1963, back in the days when people dressed to board an enormous airplane that would ferry them across the Atlantic. I wore white gloves, white anklets with black mary janes, a loden green party dress with white rickrack, and a white headband to hold back my hair. I was growing out my bangs. Nancy, ever more sophisticated, wore a powder blue knit suit, pearls, and heels. Her hair was permed. The heels had been selected for the occasion from our Uncle Mitchie’s shoe store. They looked fashionable, but one of the heels broke off as we crossed the Logan tarmac. Nancy was already limping when we turned to wave at our parents and our six year-old brother.

We sat three across with Aunt Ethel in the middle. The heel had hours to set in the glue that a stewardess found. Aunt Ethel wasn’t a real aunt. She was a family friend without a lot of relatives of her own who had been my grandfather’s administrative assistant and then moved on to do my father’s billing. She spent every holiday with us and traveled to some exotic destination every summer. This particular summer, my brother was home with a sitter, my father had been invited to speak in Copenhagen, and Nancy and I would accompany Aunt Ethel for thirty days as her “thank you” for always being part of our family.

It was five months before Kennedy’s assassination. America was full of positive energy and youthful spirit. My mother also wore white gloves, as well as fitted jackets with calf-length skirts. On a second honeymoon with my father that July, she explored the Scandinavian countries and came back from Paris with her hair redone in Jackie’s style. The only thing missing was the pillbox hat. It probably never occurred to my mother that Aunt Ethel wouldn’t figure that a child’s legs could become heavy and tired after wandering through the cavernous rooms at Versailles, or that the walk through the Louvre to view the Mona Lisa could feel like ten miles.

Too bad Aunt Ethel didn’t know that she could humor me with a chocolate croissant in the Tuilleries or a teatime scone with clotted cream in Piccadilly. In the late afternoon, I still need a snack and a pause to catch my breath. She reacted by deciding I was a “child without animation” and extolled the virtues of my older sister who was enchanted with the brocade walls in the palaces and the sculptures in the museums. Aunt Ethel’s frustration with me only encouraged my stubbornness. I refused to get excited about the sparkling chandeliers in the Paris opera house. Maybe the strolls we later took in the Swiss hilltop village of Gstaad, the train ride through rock hard ice toward the Jungfrau peak, and the colorful gardens in Lucerne were more age appropriate for me.

Aunt Ethel’s Tanta (Aunt) Leontine and her cousins Roger and Robert Lou (pronounced Roberloo) whom we visited in Paris formed my most lasting impressions. Less than twenty years after World War II, Tanta Leontine spoke rapid French while she described hiding under her mattress as German soldiers shook the locked wrought iron gate to her apartment building. A fledgling French student, I picked up words here and there, but Roger was an effective translator. While occupying Paris, it would only be a matter of time before the Nazis destroyed the lock to that gate. As very young boys, Roger and Robert Lou were smuggled safely with other Jewish children to homes in the countryside.

Sitting by the flickering candlelight around Tanta Leontine’s dining table was my first exposure to war stories. I was incredulous that such small children had been sent away from their parents for long periods of time. Back in America that fall, I became engrossed with the “Diary of Anne Frank”. My introduction to the Holocaust and the shocking shooting of our President while I was at school during a sunny Friday afternoon, let me know that the world didn’t always make sense and in fact, it could be horrible. I watched that November day as adults huddled in hushed, tearful groups.

Sometimes my sister and I feel guilty that we giggled about Aunt Ethel’s dowdy dresses, her sensible shoes, and her lack of lipstick. She whetted our appetite for travel particularly when she gave us some independence by letting us roam the Rue St. Honore on our own as long as we promised to tightly hold hands. During a morning when she shopped without us, she bought a globe for her charm bracelet. Years later before she died, she gave me that golden globe. By then I had backpacked through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. She understood that in spite of my childish impatience during our trip, she had inspired me to study history, other cultures, and begin to understand that life isn’t always pristine.