Arnold and Sydell
They were always “Arnold and Sydell.” Their friends and family referred to them as one, Arnold always before Sydell, maybe just because the syllables flowed better. In terms of rank, Sydell was their voice and the keeper of their charms.
The couple’s respective stature belied their actual size, which was respectively five foot five inches for Arnold and four feet eleven inches for Sydell. Still, Sydell had the ability to fill a room from its threshold, entering like a queen anticipating the roar of the crowd. Arnold followed, wobbling behind her in later years because of an essential tremor, but happy to allow Sydell her glow.
They ate at least two meals a day together for their entire married life. They refused to sit apart from each other at a dinner party, no matter the propriety not to.
Arnold had been a television producer in the 1950’s, producing performances of Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals for United Nations television, and many others, but he left that to write short stories and plays. Sydell taught high school English, so their schedules allowed total interface; since 1960 they were never apart, except for Sydell’s classroom hours.
They did errands together - the grocery shopping, the car maintenance, the AT&T store, and they enjoyed shopping for each other’s clothes. It is likely that Sydell, after almost seventy years of being married to him, never purchased a pair of socks, a shoe, a sweater, or a coat without Arnold. Jewelry, too.
Their favorite restaurants, from Waterlillies in S. Orange, NJ. to Ithaki in Ipswich, MA., knew them as the adorable couple who each wore stylish caps and came often. Again, Sydell would follow the hostess to their table as if she was arriving at the Oscars. Arnold followed, perennially concerned. In his life he never stopped directing, always afraid something would go wrong in the performance, even if it was just a dinner out.
Arnold and Sydell would annoint a restaurant that proved worthy with their weekly loyalty. The staff at Ithaki (thank you if you read this) would call the couple at home to check on them if they failed to appear on a Sunday evening. When Ithaki moved from Ipswich to Danvers, too far for this couple by then in their early nineties to travel, Sydell declared, “we just have to accept that we are now living in the post-Ithaki years.”
Thus began the “Rev’s Era,” the late years of shared margherita pizzas or chicken club sandwiches on Sunday evenings at the family-friendly restaurant called Rev’s with big tv’s over the bar and a staff who quickly learned Arnold and Sydell by name.
Arnold had one lunch there without her after she died at ninety-seven years old this December. Arnold passed a month later.
Arnold and Sydell also had a son, my husband Dr. David Rabin, and two grandaughters, our children, Isabelle and Georgia Rabin. Regarding us, the “Arnold and Sydell” of them was almost impenetrable. They moved through the world together as a solid, not a liquid, and therefore our family sort of bounced off them.
Is all this the mark of a healthy marriage? It would have driven me crazy, and I’m certain I’m not alone. Yet, we are not even a month away from Arnold’s passing, and I can already sense my daughters seeing their grandparents’ relationship as a good memory.
The photojournalist Nubar Alexanian took this portrait of Arnold and Sydell in 2021. They were 94 years old. In the past three years as their frames thinned and stooped, this picture became more and more important to us. Today, capturing all that love and insularity, for better or worse, it is priceless.
Takeaway: Have the picture taken.
