The story of Mrs. B
After one knock on the unlatched apartment door, I stick my head in and call, “Hello?” Mrs. Braverman shouts from the depths of her galley-style kitchen, “come in, come in!” She’s wielding a bread knife that’s as long as her arm, attempting to open a package of cookies. As she stabs at the silver cellophane, she tells me she’s just had lunch with her daughter at the Continental. She looks up and says, “My daughter. The jewel in my crown.”
In an apartment without a fireplace, Mrs. Beatrice Braverman has constructed two false mantles, to create an appropriate place of honor to display the pictures of her family and friends. In addition to the formally framed photos that line the faux mantles and ring her living and dining rooms, she also has informal snapshots tucked into the edges of the paintings and mirrors that dress the walls.
Each time I see Mrs. B, I am taken aback by how tiny she is. In her prime she barely topped 5 feet tall, but after nearly 89 years of living, she has diminished to a stooped 4 feet 6 inches. Standing next to her, I feel like a giant. Her hair is a meticulously teased cloud the color of apricots that frames a minimally wrinkled face. She wears a pair of red, pointy framed glasses balanced on her nose, that are attached to a rhinestone chain around her neck that is primary for show, as I’ve never seen her take them off her face. A former smoker, her voice is low and gravely and when she laughs, it is a throaty cackle.
She waves me towards the dining room table and says, “You can sit there or there, take your pick.” She encourages me to take a cookie, bought specially for this interview. “Don’t be shy, better you eat them than me!” She looks like a child sitting at the grown ups table as she fixes her eyes on me, folds her bejeweled hands in front of her and says, “anyway, so what do you want to know?”
She starts at the beginning, recounting the basics. Before she tells me her age, she points a crooked finger and says, “Don’t tell anyone, no one in the building knows how old I am.” She was born on November 17th, 1917 to orthodox Jewish parents, who had each emigrated from Russia when they were teenagers. She winks and says, “Not bad for almost 90, huh.” Her family ran a small grocery store on the corner of 30th and Norris in the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia. They lived over the store, and she started working there to help her parents after school and during the summers when she was 7 years old. She had one older brother who didn’t get married until his thirties, which was scandalously old for those days. Her father died of a heart attack when she was 16 years old, she and her mother continued to run the store until she got married in 1937.
Mrs. Braverman remembers the old days of her neighborhood fondly as a place where neighbors could be found sitting on wide porches, catching the air on spring evenings or walking the boardwalk that marked the beginning of Fairmount Park along 33rd Street. A geographic victim of white flight in the 1950’s and 60’s, the facades of the once grand rowhomes are now scared, broken, burnt or missing altogether. In her day, only doctors, dentists and lawyers could afford to live on Diamond Street. Patting her chest, she says it makes her heart hurt to drive past her old home.
“I went to high school during the depths of the Great Depression, but never knew what it was to be poor.” Whenever she needed anything, her mother would point at the register on the counter and tell her, “Whatever you need, take.” Most days she and her friend chose to walk the 25 blocks to school at William Penn High School for Girls, to save the bus fare that cost 8 cents for one person to ride and 15 cents for two.
As with many local grocery stores in those days, they had an account book stashed under the counter, so that local families could pick up a loaf of rye bread (9 cents), 3 Kaiser rolls (5 cents) or a quart of milk (12 cents) on credit between paydays. “We never lost a penny, it was a more honest time than the one we live in today. But one day, when I was just 11 years old, a man came into the store with a gun, pointed it at me and demanded the money in the register. I mechanically handed it over, but 70 years later, I still remembers the fear I felt having a gun pointed at me.”
As she’s telling me the stories of her youth, I begin to drift into the past with her. I can see her as a young woman, walking arm in arm with her girlfriends down Norris Street or splitting chocolate wet nut sundaes (20 cents) with her crowd at Flaumer’s, at the corner of 33rd and Ridge. Just as we’ve both fully slipped into 1934, her phone rings. The volume is set to high, and I finally know the source of the phone I often hear while waiting for elevator. When she comes back, the magical fog that carried both of us into her memory has cleared.
She apologizing for the interruption and clears her throat three times. She moves back into the past, this time to recall her life with her husband. They met when she was 19, while playing tennis with a girlfriend at the courts in Fairmount Park. She didn’t find out until after their third date that he was only there to pick up girls, but by that point it didn’t matter, a year later they were married. “A friend once asked me if I really loved my husband or if I had married him just to escape the family business.” She pauses for a moment and looks off down the hallway as if he is in the next room and might have overheard her, before stating in a loud, clear voice, “I was very much in love with my husband.”
She remembers him as a doer, a man of the world. He took her to museums, plays and concerts, and opened her eyes to the broader world outside of the neighborhood. He introduced her to a number of firsts, including her first ride in a car, her first ride on an airplane and her first taste of crispy bacon.
Stan Braverman was a mechanical engineer, and soon after they got married, the couple started a business together at 1424 Race Street. It was a heating and cooling company; he handled the labor while she ran the business end. They bought the building for $9000 in 1939 and once again lived over a store. In 1942 she gave birth to her only child, a daughter. Soon after, World War II started, Stan went to work for the defense department and they closed down the business for the duration.
After the war, they restarted the business and moved it to 812 N. Broad Street. The Braverman family moved to a tree-lined residential street in the Northeast. Mrs. B lived in that house for more than 44 years. When Stan died in 1996, she moved back into Center City to live in her current apartment, realizing only after she was settled that she never liked living in the suburbs, despite the fact she that had had good neighbors.
At this point she starts to shift uncomfortably in her chair and says, “I don’t mean to kvetch, but honey, I’m starting to get tired. I’ve always believed that if you cry, you cry alone. You laugh, you have friends. My friend Ruth always said that. But with Ruth, I could tell her anything. We were friends for 60 years and talked everyday until she died ten years ago. She would have cut her throat for me.” She flaps her hand at the air, clearing the wisps of memory away. I apologize and pick up my things. As she walks me to the door, she worries that she hasn’t told me anything I can use. “Feel free to make things up, I’m sure you can make me more interesting than I actually am.” I assure her that she has given me plenty as I walk out of the apartment.
When I’m three steps away, she sticks her head back out the door and says in a loud whisper, “by the way, I did have a lover.” She shrugs, “but he wasn’t family, and in the end, family and dear friends are everything.” I step closer, hoping for juicy details, but she closes the door and that’s all I get.
