My mother Elizabeth, who somehow knew the backstories of people’s lives without engaging in gossip or malice, told me Mrs. Epstein was not raised to be a woman. Her father believed she was a genius and he didn’t want to hold her back. She was supposed to be the physics world’s answer to Marie Curie. So she never learned how to keep house or dress attractively like the women in the Faculty Wives Club. She just studied and was brilliant.

         Elizabeth knew how to do all the things women were supposed to do, including getting dressed up. She had that Irene Dunne/Greer Garson kind of good looks – she’d managed to keep her figure even after three Caesarians.  But she didn’t have much time for Faculty Wives. She was a teacher and an artist with a large family consisting of her professor husband, four children and her parents. With Grandma supervising the kids and various cleaning ladies our household was well organized and reasonably clean.

         Mrs. Epstein was Professor Epstein and Doctor Epstein as well. I wish I knew her first name so I could look up her academic papers, but in those days children did not call their friends’ mothers by their first names. The abstracts of the scholarly papers of her husband, Saul T. Epstein are on the internet with titles such as Time Dependent Impulse Approximation and Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. I know his name because she called him that when she talked to her children. But they called him Daddy, and he called her Dear.

          Mrs. Doctor Professor Epstein, whom we will call Mrs. Epstein from now on for simplicity’s sake, went on to graduate work at MIT and her life was unfolding according to her father’s plan until she met Saul. Wham! Torrid romance among the slide rules and the girl genius in training became a wife and mother of three children, my eleven year old friend Joanne, aka Anniejo, and her little brothers David and Peter. 

         Our neighborhood was full of old houses, both fancy and plain, and Epsteins’ looked like the top two stories of the Addams Family mansion had been sliced off and plopped on the ground, Mansard roof and all. There were no curtains in the windows, just roller shades, and hardly any furniture downstairs, just a long wooden table with chairs around it. Also a piano with a bench for the boys who banged the keys and sang improvised comedy songs of the seven and nine year old variety. Since my brothers were about the same age, I experienced this behavior as normal and entertaining.

          Occasionally Mr. and Mrs. Professor/Doctor Epstein stepped out for the evening and since I was thirteen, I babysat. This consisted of enjoying the first half of a slumber party with the boys and Joanne. There was no TV and no couch and no rugs on the floor. The whole place was surprisingly clean- it was like dust could find no place to settle, so it flew out the front door like Mary Poppins. What might once have been a second parlor was now a study with two roll top desks covered with papers which must never be touched and two  wooden rolling chairs which the boys raced around the empty living room. The sole wall decoration consisted of telescopic photos of the cosmos – gorgeous blown up shots of nebulas, galaxies and clouds of stars gleaming in the dark vastness of the universe.

         Upstairs in the bedrooms, the boys had bunk beds. Standing on the top one they’d painted a flying saucer on the ceiling. It was a good one too, with aliens looking out the windows and waving hello. When I babysat, the boys ran around nonstop until they dropped and had to be steered staggering into their beds. Then Joanne and I hung out. She was grown up for her age, and fun to talk to. She had long blonde hair and blue eyes like mine and looked nothing like the rest of the family, with their thick dark hair and brown eyes. She said her Grandma was blonde.

         Joanne had a special friendship with Bill Chasen, who lived across the street and was also eleven. His dad, Dr. Chasen, was the head of the Physics and Astronomy Department. The Chasens lived in a three-story Victorian mansion with porches, balconies and an enormous attic. Inside that elegant exterior Mrs. Chasen created the most beautiful and welcoming house I’d ever seen, full of shining wood floors, oriental rugs, actual art on the walls, comfortable furniture, and the mouthwatering smell of perfect brisket. She could mix Martinis. “Bea Chasen knows how to entertain,” my mother said. Grandma poached her cleaning ladies.

         I dog sat for them when they went to Mexico, and explored the whole house at my leisure. I never touched things though, because Mrs. Chasen would have noticed. She liked to smoke and had a lot of lines in her face. She carried her hand-blown blue glass ash tray in her hand as she walked, explaining what Mitzi the cocker spaniel needed. She didn’t look very happy.

          My mother Elizabeth didn’t have time to worry about being happy. She taught hands-on art at Pound Junior High, on her feet all day in high heels, girdle and stockings, and was so tired when she got home that she collapsed across the bed in her good clothes and slept until dinner was ready. “I like a three-ring circus,” she said. She was a Gemini.

         But Mrs. Epstein was different. She laughed all the time and hugged her kids, and she didn’t appear to worry about anything. She could barely cook – it was store-bought potato salad, hot dogs and baked beans at their house, but they were Hebrew National dogs with mustard, and squirted deliciously when you bit into them.  Sitting at the table while the boys banged the piano she would join in, clapping and shouting with them, which made them even more excited. On Saturday afternoons they played cards and board games and slapped the table and everybody cracked up laughing.

         Of course, when Professor Saul T. Epstein was around we had to be quiet or play outside, as everyone understood that he was thinking deep and important thoughts and should not be disturbed in his process. His wife was happy about this as well because the two of them shared the joys of the highest reaches of astrophysics, abstract and abtruse thinking, and she understood exactly what he was up to. She dressed like a disheveled schoolgirl, wearing cardigans with occasional moth holes and somewhat wrinkled white blouses coming untucked from pleated plaid wool skirts, on her feet brown oxford shoes with little girl socks. Her legs were unshaven and her eyebrows unplucked and she got her hair cut at the same barber who did her boys. She never wore lipstick to go to church because she didn’t go to church, or to synagogue either, for that matter. She worshipped at the church of the giant mystery of the cosmos, and she was genuinely happy.