Barbara’s Aunt

by Eleanor Lippman

Barbara was my friend during our elementary and high school days. Her parents owned one of the many small mom and pop businesses along Wyoming Avenue; their family like the others lived in the two-story houses behind and part of their stores.

Barbara was my favorite friend but her father’s store was NOT my favorite store on Wyoming Avenue.

B. Bogaslovsky’s bakery was the best of all of them. I loved walking past the bakery and inhaling the delightful smells coming from what was currently in their ovens.

Along the back of her father’s fish store were huge cement tubs – tubs larger than the laundry washing tubs in the basement of my parent’s house. Her father was a fishmonger and fish, still alive, filled those tubs, fish that were sometimes so large they could hardly turn around, so they remained listlessly in place, miserably attempting to swim. The front of the store held a few bins of fresh and often wilted produce. The store always smelled like fish and sometimes when we walked in, we would see the remains of a fish on the large cutting board, cut open and gutted, fishy eyes watching us. Her father used massive and dangerous looking knives to do the work. Going from the store to the family residence in the back was always frightening to a little girl like me.

In contrast, the kitchen behind the store where the fish found new homes was the hub of Barbara’s family life. Once there, it was easy to forget about the fish, the sorry looking produce and the butchering knives on the other side of the door. The kitchen was always bright, warm and smelled of good things cooking. Barbara’s two older brothers passed in and out and sometimes stayed to talk to us as if we were real people and not kids.

Our group of close-knit friends like to stop and visit that warm and inviting place on our walk home after elementary school because we knew that freshly baked cookies were often waiting for us. Barbara’s mother quickly found out which of her cookies I preferred and, I think, after a while, made sure there was a plentiful supply. How did she know? Once, as we tumbled through the doorway from the store to the kitchen, Barbara’s mother was removing a tray of cookies from the oven. She was visibly upset because she had been waiting on a customer and the cookies baked longer than she intended. On one side of the baking sheet the cookies were too brown and some were slightly burned. She coaxed the cookies off the sheet onto a cooling rack and when they cooled, she separated the burnt ones to discard. I told her I liked the dark and overly browned ones better and she gave the plate of them to me. We had a special bond after that because I found those over baked ones tastier than the others. I could always find a few waiting for me.

Barbara’s family, like so many families in our neighborhood, struggled to make ends meet. We were all accustomed to wearing hand-me-down clothing, darned socks and patched underwear, and clothes that we either had to grow into or were sometimes too small. Sometimes the girls even had to wear their brother’s hand-me-down white dress shirts as blouses and the argyle socks meant to be stylish with boy’s knickers.

Funny how boys never had to wear clothing meant for girls.

Shortly before we transitioned from eighth grade at Clara Barton Elementary School to ninth grade at Olney High School, we knew stopping at the fish store after school would be a thing of the past, as the high school was in a different location. And, Barbara told us her family planned to move. Usually that meant relocating to Oxford Circle, a post WW II new housing development further northeast than our old established Philadelphia neighborhood. Moving to Oxford Circle meant Barbara would have to transfer to a different high school. Happily, we learned her family would be moving to a row home just a few blocks away and Barbara would not be cut out of our lives.

The fish store closed for good. Barbara showed up every day at school wearing new store-bought clothes. Finally, she told us the family had settled into their new home and she invited a few of us to visit after school.

The brick row houses in Feltonville, as our northeast community was called, were constructed shortly before and after the depression in 1929. A particular construction pattern occurred; the houses facing the wider streets were large, those built along the narrow streets were smaller because each house was narrower. From the front, all of the homes in the neighborhood looked pretty much the same. Some houses were constructed along streets so narrow they were effectively one-way meaning when vehicles were parked on one side of the street, motorists had to drive carefully to avoid hitting the curb on their left or the parked cars on the right — those houses very, very small inside.

A half a dozen or so of Barbara’s friends and I followed her home from school that day. We approached her front door expecting to see the familiar faded and threadbare furniture and worn wooden kitchen table and chairs from their old house. After all, the fish store on Wyoming Avenue was hardly the most prosperous store in the area.

We were speechless when she opened the door. The house was huge. Thick, soft beige wall-to-wall carpet, something we had only seen in movies, flowed from the entry to the living room and dining room and onto the stairs leading to the second floor. Everything was new.  The house was decorated in soft muted blond colors, our footsteps made no sound. Each window had drapery in addition to the familiar Venetian blinds that covered the windows in our houses.

No aroma of freshly baked cookies.

Barbara knew she had stunned and surprised us. She invited us to go upstairs to her bedroom.

By this time, we all felt as if we had been transported into a palace. None of us had ever seen a house so new and so lovely. Plush wall to wall carpets were things people dreamed about. Nothing from their old house was there. Even the smell was new and fresh.

Barbara’s bedroom was decorated like the rest of the house. A blond nightstand separated her two twin beds and, in addition, each bed had a nightstand on their far side. Three nightstands in one room! The lamps by each bed were cut glass, delicate and feminine. We flopped on the beds and looked around. Soon we removed our shoes to better appreciate the thick carpet. Her bedroom was probably larger than my parent’s large bedroom in my own house. At first, no one could believe what we saw and we were strangely silent. We knew Barbara was enjoying this. Soon we were flooding her with questions and she laughed and refused to answer most of them. After we became bored with her keeping quiet and refusing to speak, so we slipped into the usual teen-aged girl after school topics, chattering away as we had in the past. We forgot the brand-new quilted bedspreads, the tasteful pictures on the walls, the newness and freshness of everything.

Sandy picked up an eight by ten framed photograph of a young woman that faced Barbara’s bed.

“Your mother was very beautiful when she was young,” Sandy said.

Without stopping to think, Barbara replied, “That isn’t my mother.”

She briefly furrowed her eyebrows and a strained look came into her eyes. She had said something she had not planned on saying.

The photograph traveled from girl to girl and each one of us admired the beautiful dark haired, dark eyed lady and we all agreed she looked just like a younger version of Barbara’s mother.

Barbara did not say anything for a while. She took the photograph, stared at the face, and returned it to the nightstand.

“This is my mother’s sister.”

She looked at each of us directly into our eyes and asked if we could keep a secret. Of course, we all nodded yes.

“After my mother’s sister died, my mother inherited her estate. I never met my aunt. She lived in Alaska.”

What a story, we all agreed.

Quietly, Barbara said, “My mother’s sister worked as a prostitute along the Alaskan frontier. Don’t you ever dare to tell anyone.”

We were speechless.

I kept Barbara’s secret for nearly fifty years until I visited Alaska in the summer of 2000. I traveled to Anchorage, the starting point for a bicycle tour around the state. While in Valdez, I visited a local museum and as I was searching through the books about Alaskan history and Alaskan oddities, my eyes fell on a book about Alaska’s frontier prostitutes. I remembered Barbara’s aunt when I picked up the book. Inside, along with the text, were dozens of photographs, some faded and some blurry.

I looked at each one, but never found the photograph for which I was searching.

Barbara’s secret was secure.

Until now.