NOTES ON A CELEBRATIONMoon Over Miami

THERE were no wedding pictures. Her father was dying and the occasion-this wedding in Brooklyn-was not as festive as it might have been. Still, some friends were in attendance and there was dinner after. There might even have been a little drinking, although this was during Prohibition, in the fall of 1920.

Now, half a century later, the couple is still together. This, tradition tells us, is a fact worthy of celebration. Fifty years of marriage-a phenomenon. What does one make of that? How can we begin to understand? . . .

A celebration there was. Three weeks ago, a golden anniversary party. This time, plenty of pictures, a lot of friends (70 or so), and, to be sure, plenty of drinking. The husband and wife, Nathaniel and Lillian Aaronson, are grayer now, slightly heavier now, retired now. They have different friends-retirement friends who are their neighbors on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. And they have children and grandchildren.

The party was in the Imperial House, one of those refrigerator-like edifices Norman Mailer talked about in his report on the '68 Republican convention. The Aaronsons' two daughters and sons-in-law had rented a couple of large rooms off of the building's glittery lobby: one room for drinking and, as they say in Miami Beach, noshing; the other for a big sit-down dinner of roast beef and string beans and potatoes and cake. . . .

But all this was to come with the evening. During the day, one of those coolish Miami November afternoons this resort's residents never advertise, the party's guests of honor were cooped up in their Seacoast Towers apartment, trying to rest up for the night ahead, waiting for the planes to arrive with all their relatives from up north.

The Aaronsons' two children, my mother and my aunt, had arrived a day earlier, to help make the "arrangements." Now came the others. Around lunchtime of the big day, I arrived, one of the two grandchildren (out of five) who were able to come. After checking into my hotel room down the Avenue, I went right to my grandparents' apartment with my mother, knowing that my grandparents needed time to take a nap but also knowing that my grandparents, like the family they have created, are not all that good at containing themselves. I was not to be disappointed.

When we got there, my grandmother Lil was sitting at her desk, wading through the many cards from friends and well-wishers, explaining that she had heard from people "all over the world." ("Look," she added for evidence, "Here's one from Philadelphial") She has big, bright eyes and a screamingly raucous laugh. She seems to bounce in her chair.

Nat, my grandfather, sat on the couch across from the desk, by the window overlooking the shuffleboard courts, the swimming pool, the beach-his haunts on normal days. He seems to be a tall man (although he really isn't), perhaps because he is still so fit and dapper. Bright blue shirt, ruddy tan face, white hair combed back. He is much quieter than my grandmother, a little hard of hearing now, and is very good with a cigar. You might say he plays George Burns to his wife's Gracie Allen.

My mother wandered around the apartment looking at the various oil-paintings-all the work of my grandmother, who has been taking an art class for the past three years. I sat on the other end of the couch from my grandfather. As soon as preliminaries had been taken care of, he offered "to get me a girl." He took a puff on the cigar. "We got a lot of widows here, Take your pick-we got all ages, anywhere from 60 to 92. . . ."

"Shush," said Lil from the desk.

"They've got plenty of money, too," said Nat. "Just tell me the one you want and I'll have her checked with Dun and Bradstreet."

I laughed. My mother cracked up.

"Listen," my grandfather went on, grinning, moving in for the kill. "It's been done."

Perhaps to change the subject, my grandmother pointed at the wall next to the desk, on which she had taped up dozens of certificates bearing the legend: "A contribution in your name has been made to . . ." "Would you look at all that," she said to me.

I looked, but I was much more curious about the fifty years of past. How did my grandparents meet?

What was it like in the twenties?

How did it last?

"Sure I remember how we met," said Lil.

Nat laughed and said, "I think she picked me up somewhere. . . ."

"Oh, you, " said Lil, waving a hand at him. "No . . . actually, I knew his brother. One day he brought your grandfather over to meet me, when I was sitting on the front stoop."

They were married six months later. The Jazz Age was beginning. "We were the gayest of the gays during the Prohibition era, tootsie," said my grandmother. "We always liked parties, you know? And did we go to speakeasies! . . ."

"They used to dunk the cases of beer in Sheepshead Bay to prove it was fresh off the boat," said Nat.

"Oh, I remember," said Lil. "There used to be a place called The White Horse. They had the best food you could get for a little money-$1.25 maybe. But drinks were two dollars; they'd bring them in little demitasse cups. . . ."

My grandmother had two younger sisters who lived with the newlyweds. "We had two little girls before we had our own two little girls," Lil said. My grandfather worked as an accountant, but the Crash came and nearly wiped him out.

"You might say I was one of the few guys who didn't jump out of windows," he said, smiling. "There used to be a joke: a guy walks into a hotel, asks for a fourteenth floor room and the clerk says, 'Is that for sleeping or for jumping?'"

In the early thirties Nat packed up the family and moved to Washington, D.C., where he put his remaining assets into a wholesale paper goods business.

"We moved," said Lil. "We had to make all new friends. We came here four years ago, we had to do it all again. You know, in making friends in a new city, you can't always be yourself. You have to accept their idiosyncracies. . . ."

"They have to accept ours, too," interrupted Nat.

"Yes," said Lil, "But the younger people-the ones who are only in their sixties-accept us. We've always had what I call the 'young approach.'"

Are any of the old Washington friends coming down for the party?

"They all sent their regrets," said Lil.

"You know, they're not well enough to make the trip," said Nat. "Many of them are not?in too good health. . . . "

THE marriage wasn't all smooth going. Lil said: "We had many fights. We'd throw each other out the window. We always wanted to kill each other. But every time we walked out, we walked back."

Both of them were children of Russian Jewish parents. Lil's father was a successful merchant; he sold and repaired sewing machines. Nat's parents were poor. His father died when he was six, and his mother, who never learned English, had to work as a peddler to survive. She also had to send three of her seven children, including Nat, to an orphan asylum for six years.

At the asylum, Nat learned how to play the cornet and was in the orphanage band. After he got out, he worked as hard as he could to help support his mother.

"I played for outdoor movies they used to have on broadway-not movies, we called them 'stills'-and we got a dollar a night for blowing our heads off."

Then, two years with the Ringling Brothers circus. He'd travel around-"like the hippies do now"-starting in New England, then up to Canada, then all the way down to Florida.

"You'd go to Florida," he said, "and you'd be out of a job. So you'd join up with the minstrel show going north. At least with the circus you'd have a berth-filthy as it was-on a train. With the minstrel show you had to travel in wagons-and they didn't have paved roads at that time." He laughed at the memory. "That was a lot of travelling in those days . . . just like the kids who travel around now. . . . You know, history comes back."

History comes back. . . . Unlike my grandparents, I know nothing of front stoops and Stock Market Crashes and travelling around with a circus. And yet, the gulf does not seem so wide. The time that separates me from them is not oppressive. Is it clutching at straws to believe that some landscape in this universe is not eroding? I hope not.

My grandparents had to take their nap. I got up to leave, and, as I did, my grandfather expressed his hope that I would avail myself of the ample alcoholic refreshments there would be at the party. Before I could answer, my grandmother laughed, closed off the conversation with a wave of her hand, and said, "Listen, toots, if he belongs to my family, he drinks. "

II

AN EVEN cooler, Miami night. Cars slither up and down Collins Avenue, making those whoosh sounds that cars seem to make only when there is a beach nearby. Inside, big flower arrangements, place-cards, mounds of chicken liver, egg rolls, glasses clinking, uncles running around flashing Instamaties, loud laughter, embraces.

Endless drinking. Nat has to abstain-his stomach has been upset lately. My grandmother, almost jogging around in her long silver-white dress, helps herself. So do I. So do my mother, my three uncles (all of whom are named Sidney), my aunts (Bert and Dot and Frances), and my married cousin Andy. Drinks in hand, we admire a collage of black-and-white family pictures leaning against the wall. Someone says that one of the little babies is me. There is a snapshot of my grandparents; the thirties; they look like Bonnie and Clyde.

My uncle Sid Lotenberg-married to my grandmother's youngest sister-is red faced and wild. As my grandmother's friends arrive, he tells each one she is lovelier than the one before. They love it. During a lull, he leans his head my way and says, "I'm drunk as a coon."

Two old men come over and introduce themselves. One says, laughing hysterically, "Too many old people here. . . . Let's kill a few!" The other gestures towards my hair, which is long, and says, "If I could do it, I would. After all, it's the style-so what the hell?"

I am gassed. A woman grabs my hand and says, "Your grandparents are so happy you could come."

"But I'm so happy I could come," I answer, but she doesn't hear or understand and walks back to the liver and the olives.

Almost eight-thirty. The strolling accordion player breaks away from "The Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," plays a fanfare, and the march into the next room for dinner has begun. The family staggers towards the long head table. The accordion player plays "Here Comes the Bride"; my grandparents enter. A boozy standing ovation. As Lil and Nat take their seats the music switches to "The Old Grey Mare." Some of the assembled join in.

Dinner is anything but "sit-down." I don't think either of the guests of honor stayed in their seats for as long as five minutes at a time. Table-hopping like you've never seen. A woman walks over to my mother. "Lil tells me you are going to India tomorrow," she says.

"Yes," my mother says, "I am meeting my husband there."

The woman goes on: "Talking about India is like talking about Israel. You have to see it to believe it. It's an experience you yourself must have. . . . When you step over bodies in the street-that's poverty . . . terrible, terrible . . ."

Reb, who is married to Sam, one of the bounciest men alive, is one of my grandmother's closest friends. When Lil was paralyzed by arthritis one day this year, Reb sat up all night talking with her, keeping her company. She and Sam are younger than my grandparents; their love for my grandparents (and vice versa) is overwhelmingly apparent-and real. Reb came over to our table and reminisced a bit.

"I taught in Harlem during the depression," she said. "Then in a middle-class school, in Jackson Heights. Some of my black students were brilliant, some not. They kissed me goodbye-each of them-every single day. And now-something has happened. I get letters from friends who still teach-little six-year-old attack them in class. . . ."

Dessert has come and gone. The final rites-toasts and speeches-are about to begin. Sid Lotenberg, at the end of the table, is the emcee. He stands up, attempts as best he can to get a semblance of quiet, and asks the crowd, "Does anybody know what was happening in 1920?"

A woman yells out, "I was born" Laughter and cheers.

My uncle Sid gives a run-down of the history of the twenties, concluding with; "and then there was the so-called Stock Market Crash."

Near silence. "So-called?" someone shrieks.

"I want to read a few telegrams . . ." Sid went on.

"Eisenhower's dead!" yells out an other uncle.

There are a bunch of "joke" gifts, those somewhat obscene things one finds at novelty shops. Sid has to present them, for the friends of my grandparents who put them together wished to remain anonymous. It is difficult to hold the crowd. One of the gifts involves, a prophylactic. Lil points to her husband, who has not been following the presentation, and yells, "He doesn't even know what one of those looks like!"

The poem printed inside one of the anniversary cards is read. My grandmother leans over, grabs my arm and says, "Listen to that. You could make a lot of money writing those." A long telegram is read next and when the name of the correspondent is revealed, Lil booms out, "Who's he? "

Finally they out the big "wedding" cake. Nat and Lil kiss. It is a long kiss, and she shuts her eyes. The accordion plays "Here Comes the Bride" again and many stand up to toast.

My grandfather makes a speech: "In fifty years of marriage, it's the first time my wife and I are sitting in the same room and I have a chance to talk. . . . I'd like to say in the few years since we moved to Florida, we've been very fortunate to meet some very nice people who've made some very fine friends who have contributed a lot to make our life happy here. . . ."

A friend stands up and reads a poem composed by some of my grandparents' crowd for the occasion; it ends with "We love you." Lil seems about to cry. "We'll never forget, never!" she calls out.

"Neither will we." answers Reb from across the room.

"If we live to our fifty-fifth," says Lil, "you've all got another party coming."

MY grandmother stood up to make a speech, concentrating particularly on the work she has done for ORT (a charity for the development of Israel) in Miami. She concluded by saying, "And whenever someone sends a contribution to some other organization, I just want to bury them!"

"Dear!" cautioned my grandfather.

"Don't bury me, Lil, don't bury me," shouted a woman in the back.

My grandmother's mood suddenly changed. "I just hope God will spare us all, so that we can continue to live."

People got up from dinner. Some started to leave. For others there was dancing and a bar. A woman walked up to me; she was from Chicago. It was hard to make conversation.

"Did you vote in the Senate election last week?" I asked.

"Sure thing."

"Did you vote for Stevenson?" I asked.

"What? I loved the father-you think I wouldn't vote for the kid?"

Another woman, who had been dancing and was about to leave, came over. She said, "You know, you see us all dancing and living it up-well, we love to do that. We're old now and we don't mind a bit if the young people, like the sixty-year-olds, see us letting our hair down. . . .'"

The room for dancing had doors on one side that led out to the patio and the swimming pool. By the pool, I could look up and see all the tall, dwarfing white towers of Miami Beach. I wonder what I felt. Something indescribable. A plastic pool, plastic towers, but, high up, real stars. And, past the pool, a sudden drop to the beach itself. A big golden orange moon hanging above the ocean. Fierce waves crashing.

My mother, cousin, aunts and uncles were all outside now. Sid Lotenberg, in shiny tuxedo, and my mother, in a long dress, danced around the pool. He sang an old Rodgers and Hart song, "Isn't it Romantic?," as they performed what seemed a fine imitatation of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

"Isn't It Romantic? . . ." Well, it was. There was something here that was permanent, that would be permanent. My grandparents, my family, the whole crowd spoke to me of something I had misplaced during the course of a college education. Something I am willing to believe in, something I perhaps desperately want, something I don't quite yet have. My grandparents truly were people to celebrate about.

It was getting late. Sid and my mother stopped dancing. Aside from the family, few guests remained. My mother looked around and said, "Why don't we all go and walk on the beach?"

"Hell," said an uncle. "That's sickening. Just look what this town has done to the beach."

"No," said my mother, insisting. She kneeled down and glided her hand across the water in the pool. "When you get past all the crap, it's still there."