Otto Lubbenberg was gifted with foresight. Even before Hitler rose to power, Otto became increasingly uneasy.  Anti-Jewish feeling grew stronger every year, making business dealings in his native Berlin more and more difficult.  Otto’s suppliers became unreliable.  His customers thinned out.  Even old friends from his gymnasium, whom he’d known all his life, made themselves scarce.  

In 1935, Otto transferred the family business of corset and girdle manufacturing to his brother, George, in London and liquidated all his German holdings. Then Otto and his wife, Trudl, boarded the S.S. Normandie at Southampton and migrated to America.   

The couple settled in Manhattan in an airy apartment on 110th Street and Riverside Drive, not far from Columbia University in a neighborhood that was quickly turning into an enclave of educated European Jews.  

Adrift in a new country, far from family and without children to raise or factories to oversee, Otto became despondent.  He wrote regularly to George and tried to insert himself into the American brassiere and girdle market, but his heart wasn’t in it.  He wandered listlessly around Manhattan, stopping at specialty corset shops on Madison and Lexington Avenues to  sketch competitors’ designs so he could forward them on to George.  But Otto had no entrepreneurial instincts.  His interests lay elsewhere, and, in 1944, when he turned fifty, he officially retired, leaving all the Lubbenberg business matters up to George’s good will and judgment.  

The Lubbenbergs and my parents were close friends who had met abroad many years before coming to America.  My mother was fond of telling what came to be known as the “pot roast story.”  Standing at the butcher’s counter on Broadway and 87th Street one day in the fall of 1939, my mother heard a distinct and familiar voice.  

“Olga!  It’s Olga!  The red-head!  How are you?  How are you?”  

Before my mother could turn around and get her bearings, Trudl Lubbenberg grabbed her in an enthusiastic hug.  Hands, words and squeals of delight flew about as the two women established that they now both lived in Manhattan, a bare ten city blocks apart, my parents having recently emigrated as well.  Both women frequented this particular butcher because he was said to have the best cuts of beef on the entire West Side.  There was only one roast left in the store that morning.  My mother, who’d been next in line, bought it and insisted that the Lubbenbergs come later that evening for dinner.  The two couples renewed their friendship over spinach, mashed potatoes and a delightfully tender pot roast.  

My birth coincided with Otto Lubbenberg’s retirement which may have accounted, at least in part, for all the time he lavished on me.  I dubbed him “Lubby” when still a baby, and the name stuck to the point where he and Trudl were thereafter referred to by most of their circle as “The Lubbies.”  

He was my slave, my confidante, my protector, Dutch Uncle, Sugar Daddy, personal shopper and friend.  Every child should have a Lubby.  In his eyes, I could do no wrong.  

Until I began elementary school, Lubby stopped by at our house at least once a day.  He called my mother every morning, sometimes twice.  She was always curt with him, which made me angry.  The phone rang and I could tell immediately from her tone if it was Lubby.  

“Yes, what is it?  No, not now.  All right.  Oh, then stop at Cake Masters and get me a rye bread.  Sliced.  With seeds.”  

“Why are you so mean to him?” I asked.  

“He has too much time on his hands.  He gets on my nerves.”  

Several times a week, Lubby would appear at our door, a rye bread under one arm, a treat for me under the other.  Our housekeeper would answer the doorbell as my mother was generally seated in her habitual white easy chair talking on the phone, her red hair obscured by a cloud of smoke from her Lucky Strike.  

I was always thrilled to see him. He would stand in my bedroom, a helpless giant, this tall, dignified European in a double-breasted pin-striped suit, starched white shirt and balding head of curly, salt and pepper hair.  

“Here, Lubby.  Come sit with me,” I’d say and spread out the coloring book I was working on.  “Come look at the pictures.”

“I can only stay a minute, darling,” was the invariable response, and yet Lubby would stay for at least another thirty minutes holding his top coat over his right arm and balancing his Homburg on the palm of his left hand.  Except for meals, Lubby seemed never to sit down.

Whenever I was sick with cold or flu, measles or mumps, Lubby would call and check in.  

“Tessalein, what can I bring you?” he would ask in his ponderous heavily-accented English.     

“Two Archie and Veronicas, one Jughead, if it’s new, one pad of drawing paper, a box of Crayolas-- the big one, Lubby, please.  Some orange slices, too?  No, no magic tricks, thanks.  OK, see you later.”  

Lubby was excessively fond of magic tricks.  There was a specialty store on Third Avenue where he bought every manner of gag and magic junk imaginable.  When we visited him at his apartment on Riverside Drive, he performed the tricks with great ceremony for my brother  and me.  We knew enough to pretend to be astonished, but Lubby was a terrible magician, much too slow in his movements for sleight of hand.  We always saw the Ace of Hearts disappear up the sleeve of Lubby’s white shirt, most often getting momentarily snagged on one of his onyx cuff links.  

The moment the show was over, my brother and I rushed off to Lubby and Trudl’s bedroom where, in a highly polished art deco night table, dozens of cartons of individually wrapped boxes of Chicklets were stacked in their slender blue and white packages.  We had blanket permission to take a pack each time we visited.  The sheer quantity of chewing gum was, to me, a staggering display of wealth.  

Lubby chewed Chicklets as a substitute for the cigars he’d given up a few years earlier.  He was the only person I knew who could keep several pieces of chewing gum in his mouth without ever moving his jaw.  To this day, when I smell peppermint, I think of him.   

Often Lubby arrived at our house around five in the evening when it was time for my bath.  My Nana would be in the kitchen, preparing dinner.  My mother was usually on the phone, my father not yet home from work.  So, until the age of six, Lubby presided over my bath during the week.  

“He what?” a friend asked recently.  “He bathed you?  That’s outrageous!”  

“Why?”  

“Did he wash you?  Did he touch you?  That’s sick!”  

“No, it wasn’t sick.  He just kept me company is all.”  

I was amused by my friend’s indignation, by the perversity she imaged.  All I could remember was Lubby in his white shirt and tie seated on the closed lid of the toilet, The Wall Street Journal untouched in his lap, carrying out my imperious commands.  

“Duck please, Lubby!  No, no that one!  The little duck.”  

Lubby would no sooner pick up his newspaper then I would demand a sponge or my wooden boat or my sea horse.  He sat docile as a child until I was through playing.  Then my mother would appear with a huge towel and Lubby would be dispatched to the living room to wait.  

As I grew older, I wondered why my father, whose energy and drive were equaled only by his exacting demands for respect and attention, didn’t seem to mind the fact that Lubby spent so much time with me.  Once, during a school break, after I came home enraptured by the movie “The Red Shoes” that Lubby had taken me to see at Radio City Music Hall, my father threw down his New York Times and hollered:  

“Enough about Lubby!  Some of us have to work for a living!”

He stormed out of the living room.  I remember feeling upset, but secretly relieved that my father hadn’t launched into his “Great Deprivation Speech.”.  My brother and I knew it by heart.  It was all about how my father had come from poverty, left school at fourteen to help support five siblings and a widowed mother, was self-made in every way and so on and so on "'ad infinitum"--one of the many Latin phrases my father was fond of throwing around.  

When I was twelve or thirteen, my mother told me Lubby was sterile.  Trudl knew this before she married him, my mother added.  This information sent me into spasms of speculation.  Why sterile?  Had Lubby had a series of wild affairs with dubious women when he was young contracting one of those dreaded venereal diseases I’d just learned about in Sex Education?  Didn’t Trudl care?  Wasn’t she jealous of my mother and me and the way her husband doted on us?  Did the women ever discuss it?  They seemed so close.  

Lubby sent my mother bouquets of fresh cut flowers every Friday.  He likewise took her to lunch at “La Grenouille,” a very fancy restaurant, whenever she made the time for him.  I imagine Trudl knew these things, but said nothing.  And my father, a volatile and jealous man if ever there was one, never said a word about the attentions my mother received from Lubby, although the flowers Lubby sent always stood in a vase on our piano near the flowers my father brought home on Friday nights as if my mother wanted silently to compare the two arrangements.  

All in all, theirs was a complicated world with subtle rules of conduct that eluded me then as they do today.   Regardless of the dynamic, the two couples were friends for over fifty years.  

As I got older, I developed a sense of “noblesse oblige.”  Much as he spoiled me, I felt his devotion and was grateful for it.  Lubby was the only adult I knew who loved me unequivocally.  It behooved me to reciprocate in whatever way I could.  This reciprocity took a variety of forms:  Every few months, Lubby picked me up after school, first grade, junior high and so on, and we spent the afternoon together.  Sometimes, we visited his stock broker and I watched yellow numbers march across a screen high on the wall while Lubby checked on the status of his investments.  Then we might stop at Carl Fischer’s Music Store on Madison Avenue and together crowd into the soundproof booth to listen to the latest recording of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” or Schubert’s “Impromptus” or Schumann’s “Carnival.”

Often, Lubby would take me along when he visited one of the bespectacled old manuscript dealers in their dusty digs on Manhattan side streets to inspect a rare letter, musical manuscript or an example of the Zionist memorabilia he collected.  It was fun to watch Lubby negotiate the price of a Theodore Herzl essay, or a Mendelssohn letter.  Lubby’s eyes would glint with eagerness, his customary passive demeanor would disappear, revealing a shrewd negotiator not above raising his voice or making a dramatic exit to prove a point.  

If I had a birthday coming up, or Hanukah was around the corner, Lubby would take me to Saks or to Bloomingdale’s--something my parents never did--and together we would examine the sweater sets or the handbags or the shoes.  He stood holding his eternal Homburg in his hand, an approving smile on his face as I agonized about what to pick, not quite sure what my limits were, yet knowing in my heart he would refuse me nothing.  

The two most notable gifts Lubby bought me on these shopping expeditions were a periwinkle sweater set (I was twelve) and a hunter green suede shoulder bag (fifteenth birthday).  I have never known a man, before or since, so willing to stand patiently by while his female companion touched and smoothed, tried on and took off, handled and fondled and worried the folds out of scarves or gloves in a veritable frenzy of retail madness.  

When all the shopping was done, we adjourned to Schrafft’s on Madison Avenue or Longchamps on Lexington for a snack.  I always had apple pie à la mode and a coke while Lubby ordered a dish of vanilla ice cream and a cup of Earl Grey tea.  He waited until the tea grew cold and the ice cream melted before he touched either one.  Tea with Lubby was a tradition that continued until I married and left New York for good.     

As I matured, our conversations evolved.  Lubby and I would sit for hours in his apartment on Riverside Drive and pore over a letter from Freud to Einstein or from Einstein to Freud.  I needed Lubby’s help to decipher the contents which often enough were not as fascinating as I had hoped and penned in convoluted old German script.  Each item was displayed behind specially treated plastic covers to keep the manuscripts’ ink from fading.  All the albums were stored in cabinets with sliding doors and equipped with dehumidifying devices for preservation purposes.  

Lubby may have had no offspring, but he had an enormous extended family, many of whom lived in England, many in the United States.  All stood to inherit, which could have colored their perception of a man I took to be the most benign human being in my universe.  Many years after his death, I bumped into his niece, Helga, and we spent an hour over coffee at a deli on Broadway.  

“You haven’t changed a bit,” she said and clapped her hands together like a child, while I struggled to recall when I’d seen her last or how old we might have been.   

Helga was one of those women who reach a certain point in life, and then never seem to change.  Not an unpleasant person, but humorless and plain.  We exchanged the usual courteous questions about our respective families.  

“You know, he always loved you best,” Helga said once we’d taken a seat at a small corner booth, ordered coffee and Danish.  

“Who?  Lubby?”  

“Uncle Otto.”  

“Oh, yes, of course.  Your Uncle Otto.”  

“He was a tough one, Uncle was.”  

“Tough?  How tough?"  

“Well, he paid for everything, of course.  Our educations.  All five of us.  Even medical school for me and law school for Paul.  We were always beholden to him.  But what a cold man.  Terribly exacting.  And he never, ever smiled, you know.”  

“Lubby?  Never smiled?”  

“Why?  Did he smile at you?”  Helga’s eyes hollowed out.  

“Well, he smiled when he did his magic tricks...”  

“What magic tricks?  I never heard about any magic tricks.  All he ever talked about were those letters.  Manuscripts and letters.  And how valuable they were.  And how the whole collection was ear-marked for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.”  

“Yes, I heard that from Trudl.”  

“He never let us see his collection.”  Helga reached in her purse, pulled out a tissue and  blew her nose emphatically while I sipped my coffee and stared past her left ear at a blond child of four or five who sat quietly by the side of an older man, her grandfather perhaps, and worked on a picture made of crayon and construction paper.  Soon after, Helga and I parted company.  

After Lubby died in 1981, I received an impressive envelope in the mail from an attorney in New York.  The cover letter stated that the enclosed manuscript by Johannes Brahms had been left to me by Otto Lubbenberg.  Attached, as well, were the manuscript’s provenance and a handwritten note on Lubby’s stationery.  His arching script was achingly familiar.  My heart stopped when I read his message.     

“September 4, 1950.  This manuscript belongs to my little, darling, Tessa Rosenfeld (DRATT, he had added later, in another color ink).  With love always from her devoted Lubby.”  

I lifted the yellowed manuscript out of its plastic cover.  It was a musical score, with lyrics and a full signature by Johannes Brahms at the bottom.  After all the years under Lubby’s tutelage, I knew the value of a full signature.  I struggled to make out the words.  It was a simple love song, a canon, and had been dedicated by Brahms to “a young friend.”

Previously published (in another form) at Higginsville Reader
           

Author's Biography

Tessa Dratt is currently working on a book-length memoir of which "Lubby" will constitute a chapter in one form or another. 

The Brahms letter hangs on the wall of her home in Chicago, Illinois, near the piano.

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