In-Laws: a Family Tale of Betrayal

On Monday, while showing off during a workout, I fell and bruised a rib, proving the adage that “pride cometh before a fall.” It shook me up enough to delay the essay I’d planned to post.

Instead, below is a revised and expanded post I published last summer. It will be new to most of you and I believe worthy of another read for the rest.

Alfred

I was seventeen when my grandfather Alfred Roberts died. I knew him as a confident man with an acerbic sense of humor. He was not a doting grandfather, not affectionate with either actions or words. I sensed that he cared for me, but was not eager to be close.

My keenest memory of him was his singing along with the radio during a ninety minute car ride to the Jersey Shore. I was about fifteen, and it was just the two of us. His singing voice was terrible, like the croaking of contentious frogs.  

My impression then was that only someone with great self-respect would sing both so badly and so freely. Now I wonder if he sang to avoid uncomfortable silences, which I might have tried to fill with uncomfortable questions.

Alfred’s letter

In April of 1953, Alfred, age forty-six, sat down to write a sealed letter to his three sons (my father and my two uncles.) Two weeks earlier, Alfred’s wife of nineteen years, Betty Block Roberts, had died at the tender age of thirty-nine from asthmatic complications.

Alfred instructed his attorney to give the letter to his sons (then sixteen, ten, and eight) upon his death. It is a testament to Alfred’s grief that he had a sense he might not survive Betty’s death for very long.

“When you read this letter, I will be dead. I cannot know whether you will read it this year or next year or twenty years from now.”

Alfred asked his sons “not to grieve too hard for me” because his nineteen years of marriage to Betty had given him a greater portion of joy than he ever could have hoped for.

Writing the letter in the immediacy of his grief, Alfred had no expectations for future joy. His true life was now over and whatever came next would be a lesser version of living.

Betty Block and her family

Alfred met Betty Block through her brother Mel who was Alfred’s roommate and best friend at Penn. Betty was one of three children of Alexander Block who had created a health and beauty aid company, Block Drug, which by 1953 had become large, profitable, and very valuable. ¹

Alfred graduated from Harvard law School, married Betty, and was brought in to the Block family business. It was vitally important to Alfred that the Blocks saw him as deserving of his position based on his abilities and not just because he was a son-in-law. Here’s how Alfred put it in his letter.

“I was given the opportunity to prove myself, and fortunately I was able to help make [Block Drug] an even greater success than when I entered it. So, instead of being the husband of a rich wife, I was able to make a career of my own and retain my self-respect.”

The patriarch of the Block family, Alexander, viewed Alfred as the bright new penny who had come shining into the family and the family business.

In the picture below, Alfred is the tall, handsome one in uniform to the far left with Betty sitting below him. He’s next to his father-in-law Alexander. His two brothers-in-law complete the back row.

In his letter to his sons, Alfred wrote about his love for the Block family.

“Your dear grandfather [Alexander, the patriarch] and grandmother Block were not my “in-laws” ---they were another affectionate set of parents. They could not have treated me better, although I am afraid they did than their own sons, your uncles Mel and Leonard.”

That last sentence was an unintentional prophecy.

A Sucker-Punch

Betty died in April 1953 and Alfred wrote his letter a few weeks after. A few months later, in June, Alexander Block died. Alfred had lost his protector.

If Alfred had noticed that he had been favored over his brothers-in-law Mel and Leonard––“treated me better…than their own sons” ––they must have resented it like hell. They had years and years to build up that resentment.

After their father Alexander died, Mel and Leonard seized the opportunity to kick Alfred out of the company. They bought out Betty’s one third stake, which had been inherited by her sons, not Alfred. The price turned out to be very advantageous for Mel and Leonard.

The relationship between the Roberts and Block families came to a sudden and complete halt. I only have one side of the story, but I know that my father and my two uncles felt that their two Block uncles had treated their father Alfred very poorly, especially given that he was a recent widower and obviously in a state of great vulnerability and sorrow.

To add to the poignancy of the rift, my father’s best friend growing up had been his first cousin on the Block side, Leonard’s son Jimmy Block.

Tragedy

I’d have loved to have known my grandmother Betty. Her death was a terrible loss to Alfred, to her three sons, including my father, and to her future grandchildren, including me.

The avoidable tragedy, however, was the family rift. For Alfred, the relationship with the Block family went well beyond Betty. In his letter in the wake of Betty’s death, Alfred wrote:

“Family relationship[s] is the rock on which your whole life may depend…You have… an important relationship with your cousins and Uncles and Aunts on the Block side. You may likely all be in business with each other, try to work together without jealousy or bickering or envy as Uncle Mel, Uncle Len, and I have always done.”

It comes near to breaking my heart when I think of how confident Alfred was that the closeness between the Blocks and Roberts would outlast Alfred’s own demise, the time when his letter was to be opened and read by his sons.

And then I consider that Leonard and Mel Block did not deserve a scintilla of Alfred’s generous faith in them. I can’t say that they were bad men but in this instance they behaved as if they were indeed men of low character.

Posterity

Letters like the one I have from Alfred are an incredible gift to future generations. They help explain where you’ve come from. They help to explain the lives and behavior of your parents, grandparents, and older relatives.

At first I questioned why Alfred decided to withhold the letter until he died, even after all his sons had become adults and had families of their own. But now I think it was a good decision. To properly interpret such a solemn letter, being older is better.

As well, when people write for posterity as Alfred did, they tend to write with great thought. So the best of their candor and wisdom are likely to come through.

Alfred’s Life, Post Betty

To complete Alfred’s story in brief, he bounced back to become the founder of his own health and beauty aid company, Roberts Proprietaries, which was relatively small, but successful.

He married twice more, to women very different than Betty. They were both blonde beauties. Betty, a brunette, always remained his true love.

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Question for the comments: Feel free to comment about the post but, also, what’s your most embarrassing self-inflicted injury? I’ll reveal mine in the comments.

1. Alfred came from a well-off family, but his father Samuel Rottenberg’s legacy was being a leader of the Jewish community in Brooklyn rather than building a fortune.

In my post, My Family Story of Generational Wealth, I wrote about Samuel Rottenberg and the Applemans, my mother’s family. I also covered a bit of the same ground about Alfred and the Block family as I do in today’s post.