TRAVELLING WITH CRAZY PEOPLE
A memoir and guidebook
The first rule is never travel with a junkie. But if you must, and there may be good reasons why you must, don't let him or her have the keys to the rental car. If that can't be avoided, be sure you take the maximum insurance they provide. Ignore those consumer magazines that tell you the rental companies are ripping you off with their per diem charges. When your junkie/alcoholic partner rips along the fenced center divider of the Dan Ryan Expressway in anguished frustration after failing to score, or blinded by the grief of discovering he was "burned," or just because he's loaded, you'll be really relieved to simply drop the car at Hertz Express Dropoff with its whole left side mangled and without a word.
The first trip I ever took was with my mother to New York. I was four. She'd left me in a day-care nursery school in L.A., the city of my birth, while she'd gone ahead to N.Y. in pursuit of the man she'd loved before she married my father, the man who was to become my stepfather. The man's name was Dick. Coincidentally, that was my father's name, tooShe secured the attention (inasmuch as that was possible) of "Richard the Second," as I came to call him, and then came back and got me.
We don't know how long I lived in the nursery school. Several months. Six? My real father, Richard the First, took me a few times on outings -- he'd been released from the loony bin he'd fled to shortly after the shock of my birth. I remember being ill aat that school with constant diarrhea. Mrs. Stottmeller, who ran the school, was very kind, and it was she, in one version my mother has told me of the story, who finally wrote and said that if my mother wanted to see me alive, she'd better come get me.
I don’t think I expected my mother to return. When my Alzheimer aunt was confined in a nursing home recently to mend a broken hip, I visited her several times a day talking a great deal about "When you go home next Friday." I even put a sign up over her bed. She's blind but the staff could read it, and I thought it would affect their behavior and thus her feelings: "Mae is going home on Friday August 16th." My peculiarly poignant concern with my aunt’s frequently expressed terror of being abandoned probably comes from my own experience.
I don't remember the occasion of being reunited with my mother in L.A., but I do remember how happy I was on the train we took to New York. It sang across the country while I ran up and down the aisles, singing too. According to my mother, I was a small-for-my-age, golden colored, rosy cheeked cherub with dark curls and enormous, attentive, bright brown eyes. I was, my mother says, a pixie. I was a showoff but eager to be entertained, too, a good audience. I was precocious with a big vocabulary. My real father told me that on one of our outings he took me to Salka Viertel's house. She was the doyenne in L.A. of expatriated German intellectuals. He said I wandered confidently among these people, and once, when I had disappeared, he found me in the back yard, standing on a chair, chatting seriously with Thomas Mann.
A woman on the train, no doubt to calm me, taught me Brahms's Lullaby in German. It was 1944, wartime. What an odd little scene: this sweet lady and Jewish me singing together in German on a train of what I enjoy imagining to be soldiers on leave, lonely wives, anxious or grieving parents.
The crazy person on this particular trip, in my opinion, was my mother, Tiby (Tie-bee). Running after Dick. I like to think she was the most beautiful woman on that train. She was incredibly lovely -- as I remember her and as she appears in photos taken at that time. She was pale with a tendency to freckle, and she wore her silky dark hair in a '40's long pageboy or pulled back in a dancer's knot, a widow's peak above her tranquil forehead. Her face was oval and symmetrical with mild, almond shaped hazel eyes like sad doves. She had narrow hips, beautiful breasts, broad shoulders, and "passionate legs." One admirer, she told me, called them that. From delicate ankles sprang an adequate length of lower leg and then these blossoms, these hard, round calves. She wasn't tall, 5'3", but she wasn't "stocky." Because of the calves and the shoulders and her feminine soft slimness she had a kind of Daliesque attenuation about her which attracted attention she never perceived as admiration, only as boring lust.
She got those legs from dancing. She had been a dancer with Martha Graham and a specialty dancer in the movies. She had a gentle, soft voice and a passive manner. Her only physical flaw was at her fingertips. She was a lifelong nail biter and chain smoker and her fingers formed almost stubs, somewhat yellowed at their ends. She was ashamed of her hands and tended to hide them. Later, she was able to stop the nailbiting, but after years of piecework in garment factories, her hands were gnarled, scarred, square and masculine.
On the train with us were the "Comrades." We were surrounded by my mother's crowd, Socialist Workers Party members, Trotkyists, on their way to a convention in New York. They were young, drunk, and happy, and they all thought I was really cute.
I don't remember America at all through which we passed. I remember drinking too much orange juice and vomiting with the rocking and pitching of the train. I remember my lovely mother, the smiling adult faces. I remember the lullabye lady, her perfumed, lilac blue wool elegance as she held me.
My mother's dancing career had paused for my birth and then came to a full stop with the commitment -- required of her by her conscience and by my stepfather -- to the Class Struggle.
She'd been made interested in the Movement by her brother, Sol. And then, laid up by an injury during one of the Graham group's teaching stints at Bennington, in a dormitory she read "The Revolution Betrayed," by Trotsky and was converted. After she married Dick, she laid aside her petit bourgeois dancing ambitions and became a Worker and a Revolutionary. During the day she labored in garment factories as she was assigned to do by the Party, sewing linings together for suits and talking Union to her fellow workers, Union and Socialism, recruiting for the Party when she could. In the evenings she attended seminars studying the philosophy of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Or else she attended socials and parties held weekly or even more frequently at which there was a lot of drinking. Alcohol seemed, to me, the very soul of the SWP. There was dancing, flirting, more at these functions held, ostensibly, to make "contacts." They showed prospects the joy in revolution, what fun friends you could have, and they gave the Comrades a chance to play together, to cut loose from the grinding study and drudgery and poverty of their lives.
Whenever I talk about the Party, I'm talking about what I saw and heard. Childhood friends say my view is tainted, stained, by what my stepfather, always a controversial figure, said about it. So my peculiar SWP...
His name was Richard Sterling Fraser. His mother stamped him like a piece of jewelry; she was a fine woman who wanted him to be fine. She was the first white child born in some western Indian territory or other. He was raised in Calexico, right on the Mexican border of California, by his schoolmarm mother and three sisters. His father was shot and killed dramatically defending a friend's store during a holdup.
Dick Fraser was adorable. He looked like a delicate and sweeter Robert Ryan (a particularly fine-tuned villain in the movies of the 1950's). Dick lacked the mean lip curl, but had the same sly, quizzing twinkle. He wore wire rimmed glasses, was a fragile intellectual with a wonderful jaw, great cheekbones. He'd been a musician, and early, played in the San Diego Symphony, but during the depression he became a hobo, riding the rods beneath the freight trains. During my childhood in New York he'd entertain me whenever he was home on leave from the merchant marines -- which he'd joined to avoid the draft -- by telling me stories, with the structure of stories in books, enchanting, with their hobo slang, about his adventures with his pal, Whitey, catching trains, running from railroad bulls, tricking the authorities, stealing food, living in encampments.
He was a spectacular joke teller. You didn't even need to understand the jokes he told to the Comrades (I usually didn't; I was too young) to feel how funny they were. You didn't even need to speak English to appreciate the way he'd drawl some lines, caress some words, tasting the vernacular. His voice was pleasantly pitched, a little higher than most men's, and made for irony.
And some dame he met on a cross country bus converted him to Trotskyism, giving him an excuse to be judgmental and aggrieved for the rest of his life -- when he was sober. When he was drunk, oh, he'd be happy, charm you, smile and tease and flirt. Until he started crying over the sacrifices his path demanded of him.
I don't enjoy these memories. He never molested me (that happened in daycare); he never hurt me. He just didn't like me. (The stranger did. I was still only four. He was a grown up man. How did he know I needed a daddy?) Why did I call Dick daddy? I asked my mother that a while ago and, shocked, she said, "You did?" She said, "I never told you to do that."
"Why did I do it, then?"
"I guess you wanted to have a daddy like everybody else?"
Like the multisiblinged Catholic kids I played with. I even followed them to church, went to confession, "Bless me father...." A priest came to our apartment, knocking, wondering why the parents of such a pious child never came to mass. "We're non-believers, " my mother told him gently. She didn't say I was a Jew.
Dick Fraser wasn't a Jew and he certainly wasn't a non-believer. He worshipped Trotsky, Marx, world revolution. He worshipped the WorkingClass. He and all the other Comrades had taken vows of poverty and obedience -- though not of chastity. After the war ended and he returned to my mother, he worked full time for the Party in Newark and had a steady girlfriend there.
Why didn't my daddy like me? Well, for one thing, I look exactly like my real father, his rival, a man he knew and detested. My mother says from earliest childhood I even had some of my father's mannerisms. And then, a true Revolutionist is not supposed to have a family; shouldn't even have a home. He's supposed to give his life to study and struggle. His weakness made him fall for my mother, and her weakness had made her marry Richard the First and have me.
Dick Fraser always gave me the feeling that I was wrong, morally, intellectually wrong and could never be right. When I began to like things other kids liked, he remarked on my petit bourgeois tendencies. That was his way of putting you beyond the pale, to call you petit bourgeois. I knew what the Revolution was going to do to people like me.
But I'm jumping ahead. Life is a journey, and we're in 1944,45,46, at my beginning. Dick went off to sea and my mother waited for his leaves when he brought back bottles of French perfume and silk scarves,, and stockings, brandy, and the moon. He took her out dancing and shopping. Once he bought her $1500 worth of dresses in one day. $1500, in 1945!
I remember one of those dresses. It was turquoise wool jersey with a fitted bodice and a slightly gathered skirt. It had short sleeves and big shoulders and a keyhole neckline. Here's the thing, though: It had tiny silver stars. Not sequins. Silvery, pronged metal, they formed a border of rows at the neckline and a border around the sleeves and they covered the belt, and scattered themselves over the bodice and skirt. She wore this at night to go out with him. In Paris, he'd exchanged a carton of Camels for a gigantic bottle of Joy perfume, so she had the scent of roses and jasmine behind her ears, at her wrists, on a piece of cotton in her bra. She leaned over to kiss me goodnight, and that was my first experience of beauty.
My second occurred the following day when, groaning, they sent me out for Pepto Bismol. I walked to the drugstore early on a sunny autumn afternoon in Manhattan. There were trees with glowing yellow leaves which fell and were caught in golden, circling clouds that danced in front of me, leading me along. I heard the Elevated Train rattling and heard a melody, saw a vision? 'way, 'way down the street, of a tiny carousel and celebrating children.
From age four on I spent a lot of time walking alone or else rambling with other kids the streets of Manhattan. Unlike my friends's parents, my mother never seemed to worry about where I was, where I'd been. She never had a babysitter for me at night, and I don't remember being afraid, not then. It was later, back in California, that I spent lonely nights under my bed or in my closet barking like a dog to scare away intruders.
As for the molestation, my mother handled it well.
He was the janitor, the "custodian," they called him, at the daycare I attended, still four years old, "Church of All Nations" (where I also experienced my first joy of food. Their gingerbread with lemon sauce has never been equaled, even by me, trying very hard). He was a white man, thin, and he wore gray and smelled like cleaning products. We children had a nap-time every day. We lay on cots in what seemed an enormous and high ceilinged room. To me, we were hundreds of children sleeping in rows.
I'm a lifelong insomniac. I can't sleep in the daytime unless I'm very sick. I secretly brought toys to bed -- two scotty dogs, one black, one white, mounted on magnets. I was endlessly impressed by the silky way they invisibly repelled each other or else clung, through a sheet of paper, so that you could make the top one skid along, seemingly unaided, by stealthily pulling the bottom one beneath the paper.
I was horribly bored; naptime took forever; I was restless. I went to pee. Only for that was I allowed to leave my cot. He was waiting for me, day after day. With conversation, candy, and eventually with his penis, when he dragged me into one of the stalls, when he came against me and down my leg. I know I resisted him. Because when I ran he grabbed the sash of my dress, tore it, I fell and cut my chin which became infected.
He gave me another infection, one that itched; a bladder infection? Monilia? Trichemoniasis? He'd warned me not to tell, but I couldn't help scratching. My mother asked what was the matter. She, who made so few demands on me, ever, had made me promise always to tell her the truth. I told, and she took it well, calmly questioning me.
She took me to a doctor who looked and acted like all my mother's other friends, solid self-reliant working women. She examined me and asked if I had bled. I hadn't. She prescribed a medicine that turned my urine purple. I was removed from the nursery school which, my mother told me years later, had refused to believe her story. The trauma was minimal and my memories are more or less intact because the adults around me were concerned, believing, loving, and they took care of me. And there was no ambiguity in the situation: This was not a relative or beloved family friend.
We lived first at 17th and 3rd Avenue, where a neighbor family had five or six kids. My mother indicated that anyone who had so many kids was was undoubtedly a poor dupe of a Catholic whose church commanded her, in her poverty, idiotically to procreate. When I visited their apartment and they asked if I wanted to hold the baby I didn't, but I recognized it as an honor being offered me, so I said yes. I took the bundle, ignorantly letting its drooping, heavy, bald head dangle -- to everyone's astonishment as they rushed to catch it. How could a five year old not know how to cradle a baby?
The mother of this family was absentmindedly kind to me as she was to all children. There was a song popular around that time called "Don't Fence Me In." ("Give me land, lots of land with the starry skies above. Don't fence me in." ) In her crowded apartment she sang it, without any consciousness of irony, constantly. I sang "Give Me Five Minutes More" to my mother when she leaned out the landing window to call me in as the darkness came. Sometimes at night my mother sang to me,
"Sweet and low, sweet and low
wind of the western sea.
Low, low, breathe and blow
wind of the western sea.
Over the rolling waters go
Come from the dying moon and blow
Blow him again to me
While my little one
While my pretty one
Sleeps."
We moved. Maybe it was when my stepfather came back from his Merchant Marine voyages. We gave the old apartment to Comrades -- with whom, fifty years later, my mother swears it still remains.
Our new place was at 22nd and Third Avenue, and from my bed I watched the Elevated train pass by, with, in its yellow windows, the profiles of passengers. My room was a screened off passageway, but it was larger than the one I'd had before. My mother had gotten a job at a place that manufactured oilcloth dolls. I had cowboys with little yellow vests, pompom-ed clowns, ballerinas, dozens of dolls lined up side by side on my shelves. I could play with them or just contemplate them and feel rich.
The bathroom, off the living room, had a window you could climb out by stepping on the toilet, and there was a private rooftop, a small, enclosed expanse on which someone had left wooden plant boxes in which I grew marigolds. I could drop bags of water on my friends on the sidewalk, two flights below.
We lived above a restaurant whose owners painted every few months as a way of fumigating. When that happened hundreds of cockroaches, brown and big as dates streamed into our place. Their entry was most dramatic when they came crawling up through the kitchen sink drain and darkly scuttled across the white sink. I was terrified of them. My mother, however, several times, at the sight of them, delighted me by striking an arched and sultry Spanish dancer's pose, stamping her feet and singing, "La cucaracha! La cucaracha! Ya, no puede caminar..."
Another problem with the new building was that "bums" slept on the stoop (that's what the other kids called them, kids who, if you didn't know their names, you addressed as "sonny" or "girlie"). And if you didn't make sure the downstairs door latched when you closed it, the bums (and I'm sure I was very properly and utterly shamed and humiliated by Dick Fraser for using that word) came in and pissed in the foyer, and it stank.
On 22nd street my friends were a brother and sister, Catholics again. These kids catechized me. Well, the little boy gave me some kind of instruction I don't remember and then went directly to the quiz:
Him: "Okay." He gestured at Manhattan, the erector set of the Elevated tracks casting their velvet cross-hatch on Third Avenue, making it huge, and the A&P, and the deli, and the layers of brick and plaster, and the pale skyscrapers beyond, and the parks with their statues and sandboxes. "Who made the buildings?"
Me: "Men made the buildings."
Him: "Yeah, but who made the men make the buildings."
Me: "The Bosses made the men make the buildings."
They took me to their church, the one near our playground, Stuyvesant Park. Peter Stuyvesant was our jungle gym. You reached up and grabbed his bronze wooden leg, hauled yourself scrambling and pulling until you stood triumphantly beside him on the pedestal. If you were really brave (and I was, once or twice) you could climb up his body and sit on his shoulders, saddled on his neck, your legs dangling down so you could drum your heels on his bronze chest. In church, as I've said, I confessed. I said I'd stolen a dime from my mother's purse. The priest told me not to do it again, and I never did -- not until lifetimes later, and then it wasn't money or her purse. It was her medicine cabinet, and I snitched her Seconal.
My mother sent me off to summer camp to save me from the city heat and because she worked all day and what else could she do with me? The first camp was a collection of splintering dark bungalows with cots in them, and it's only memorable because I woke up one empty country night in terror of my own death. I must have been five or six when I suddenly realized, on that night, that there could be a stop to consciousness and with it came the beginning of the lifelong heartpounding, the "No!" we scream while the whole universe just says, "Sorry. Yes."
I must have started crying, because the counselor who oversaw us, a young woman who couldn't have been more than 17, came to find out what was eating me. Whispering, I told her, while the other children remained unworried little lumps under their blankets. She put her arm around me and with convincing certainty she told me about heaven. This probably predated my churchgoing. She didn't talk about Jesus or tell me I had to be good, although she did teach me the "Now I lay me down to sleep." I was a happy child but an increasingly nervous one.
The other summercamp I remember was Midwest Camp on Lake Michigan, a play and study camp for Party members. In the photos I still have, my mother was glamorous and tan in a gold two piece swim suit. The pictures are black and white, but I remember that suit. Dick was scrawny and fish-pale in his loose trunks, wearing his wire rimmed glasses, grinning and drunk. And I, at 7, was a jolly tiny skeleton with a pointy face, pigtails, and a black smile absent of teeth. I was overjoyed to be there, because my parents were there and because the teachers at PS whatever had discovered lice in my hair. So my mother had to sit with me for what felt like hours, picking and killing nits. We sat together under a little tree, my lightweight dark hair spread on my shoulders, my mother wielding a black comb with teeth so fine it seemed like a solid little wedge, but she was careful when she raked my scalp and hardly ever hurt me.
My mother wasn't physically affectionate. I never sat on her lap, rarely got hugged or kissed. So the physical sensations of being cared for, touched, that summer are vivid to me still. While she worked, we talked and sang together.
That was the summer of my first crush, too. Alan Hansen. In the photo he looks about 19, 20. A fragile Nordic blonde, fine featured, let's face it, like Dick Fraser. But his eyes were blue, blue, blue, blue. In the picture he has an unselfconscious James Dean affect. This is 1947. His wife stands beside him. She was kind to me while I hung endlessly around him as he worked on his car day in and out with a ravishing intentness. I'd sit and watch and what? Rattle on to him. In my raggedy hanging bathing suit, all boney and lousey-headed and toothless, transfixed by his beauty. For the end-of-camp-party-and-skit-night, I wrote a comic song about him that I performed out loud. My mother told me, years later, that he eventually left his wife for someone else, and she killed herself.
LAKE MICHIGAN WITH THE TROTSKYISTS
Third Rule: Sing
It's not remarkable that I wrote a song. There were songs everywhere. There was such singing, it seems, in all the radical movements. I discovered later that kids in the despised C[ommunist] P[arty] shared our hymnal which was filled with glory. And I mean glory. In English, Spanish, Italian, and German. The lyrics were dramatic, cried out against injustice and called for bloodshed and revenge: "Los Quatro Generales, mamita mia, seran vengado!"(the four insurgent generals, we shall avenge them), "Whirlwinds of danger are raging around us!" Or we celebrated triumphs: "Avanti populo, a lara scosa, Bandiera Rosa! Bandiera Rosa!" (rise up and raise the scarlet banner)
We all sang all the time it seemed. Before, after, every meeting or event. We stood to do it and sang loudly, beautifully. The union songs were not usually so gorgeous, but they were soulful. "You Can't Scare Me I'm Sticking to the Union," and "There Once Was a Union Maid" ("who never was afraid/ of goons and ginks and company finks/and the deputy sheriffs that made the raids.") I guess "Casey Jones," a very long story, was my party piece:
The workers on the SP Line to strike sent out a call
But Casey Jones the engineer he wouldn't strike at all...
Casey becomes a scab, but as fate would have it,
"Casey's wheezy engine ran right off the worn out track."
Which was one of the reasons the guys were striking; the equipment was unsafe. Casey is killed, but,
When Casey got to heaven right up to the pearly gate,
He said I'm Casey Jones the guy who pulls the SP freight.
"You're just the man," said Peter, "Our musicians are on strike, you can get a job a scabbin' any time you like."
The angels won't tolerate scabs, however, and "they promptly fired Casey down the golden stair." It was in the last verse I shone.
Casey Jones, went to hell a flyin'
Casey Jones, the Devil said, "Oh, fi-ine!
Casey Jones, get busy shovelin' sulfur
That's what you get for scabbin' on the SP Line."
Somebody, Dick Fraser, probably, had taught me to go up an octave on the second part of the Devil's "fi- ine." It knocked 'em dead.
The most beautiful song to me was The International, the revolutionists anthem.
"Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye wretched of the earth.
For justice conquers condemnation, a better world's in birth."
I think it was and is still so beautiful to me because of the great ache of belief and commitment that rang in the voices that sang it.
But my favorite was "Joe Hill." As I said, I was an insomniac. I sang myself to sleep most nights. "Joe Hill" was always the song I started with, and it can still give me chills. It was written about a famous union organizer, speaker, and song writer.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me
"But Joe I said you're ten years dead."
"I never died," said he.
"I never died," said he.
"The copper bosses killed you Joe
They shot you Joe," says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man"
Says Joe, "I didn't die."
Says Joe, "I didn't die."
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes
Says Joe, "What they forgot to kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize."
"From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill
Where working men are out on strike
That's where you'll find Joe Hill.
That's where you'll find Joe Hill."
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
alive as you or me.
"But Joe," I said, "You're ten years dead."
"I never died," said he.
"I never died," said he.
Joe Hill's brand of immortality is what my parents offered me instead of heaven, and it was impressive. I just didn't think I was up to it.
My mother was patronized and loved. She didn't seem to know how to act, socially, and blundered sometimes, saying things too loudly that were inappropriate. It seemed to me she was always having to be gently set straight. And then she was wishy washy, changing her opinions according to whoever spoke most forcefully. It took me till now to recognize that what she said, for the sake of harmony in the moment, didn't always accord with what she continued (even against logic, even against force should it have been offered) stubbornly to believe.
I don't know whether Myra was at that summer camp, but Myra Tanner Weiss, not my mother, was my early role model. I saw her frequently at gatherings and meetings and she always noticed me, respectfully questioned me, listened to what I said. She had a crisp, serene confidence. She was beautiful, small, brownhaired. In discussions she made statements and asked clear questions, often ironic ones, implying that she knew the answers. She wore gray and brown and navy blue, straight skirts, tailored dresses. And trousers, like Marlene Dietrich did, and she looked like Dietrich. Really. But clear-eyed, no poses, ever, no nonsense. For years she was the Party's candidate for Vice President of the United States. The Party ran people for office in order to educate the Masses. They weren't exactly fomenting revolution, but they were planting seeds. And then, when the revolution came, the plan was, they'd tell everybody what to do.
Myra would have been good at that. She was a passionate speaker, authoritative, clear. She was a feminist, and that made things rough on her at times. Within the Party, I'm told, she was described by the heirarchy as "strident," and "seductive." The Party wasn't anti-feminist, but "The Woman Question" was a low priority, and most of the men were quite naturally exploiters and disparagers of women. Except for Murray Weiss, Myra's brilliant, kindly, unfaithful husband.
Dick Fraser liked to flirt, to tease the ladies, and to me the affection in his tone always sounded like ridicule. He insisted that my mother keep her hair long. My mother's work was as hard as his, and her Party commitments, if anything, were more demanding, but during the 12 years he lived with us and the household revolved around him, he never undertook any of the boring chores. He worked, he wrote, and he presided over and lectured to our guests on whom my mother waited, whom she served. And he had love affairs.
Back in New York, my real father, Richard Lapan, who'd moved there, too, came to take me out a few times and bring me little presents. He's written his own autobiography. It's peopled with suicidal screaming wild hysterics -- his parents, his five sisters, his friends, wives, and lovers, and of course, himself.
He was a wirey little man, charismatic, and genuinely fascinated by other people. Like my stepfather he was elaborately self-educated. And like my stepfather he hated the rich, despised their posh settings, was enraged by their hypocrisy. But he trod a fine line, because he socialized with them and benefited from their largesse, staying in their houses, eating their elegant food (which bored him; talk was his dish), even driving their cars. So he antagonized them, baited them, slyly accused them to their faces, then abused them by repeating behind their backs the witty and unanswerable ripostes he'd nailed them with.
During the depression he was a writer in a special program of the government's Works Projects Administration. And at that time he mixed with and made friends with culture-hungry millionaires like Huntington Hartford. He stayed at the Hearst Castle, hung out with Marion Davies and other writers and artists and movie stars. He was the kind of person who couldn't like you unless he knew your griefs and saw you suffer for them. Well, we're all like that, aren't we? But he was exceptionally good at uncovering those things. He had a sort of pose as a naif, but he also was capable of endless real wonder, and that opened things up for him.
He was boyish till he died at 78. He and his sisters had been extras and bit players in movies as kids. Then he became a studio electrician, then a thief -- and got locked up for it, then a pretty good flyweight prizefighter ("Tiger Kelly. Nobody'd root for a little Jew.”), then, for a short time, a screenwriter. His first marriage was to Ryan O'Neal's, (the movie star's) mother, Patricia. He was married five or seven times. I never got it straight. I'm his only offspring because he got a vasectomy, during an argument, to spite his fourth wife who was Catholic. He told me he brought home a document she was required to sign, as his spouse, permitting surgery. She called his bluff and signed it. He said at that point he had to go through with it or lose face.
My mother was his third wife. He insisted she get pregnant. Then he realized what that meant and told her to get an abortion. He was a bully. With his boxer's fist he'd broken a sister's jaw, permanently damaging her face. He told me my mother was the only wife he'd never hit. "She was so good." She never argued. But she didn't get the abortion. She'd decided she wanted the child. Before I was born, he became delusional, thinking the baby was black, that he was black, and then, when I arrived, thinking the baby was the iceman's because my brown eyes started out, as babies' do, blue.
Eventually he was institutionalized for awhile, as had been most of his family. But he was on the loose when my mother decided to move to New York, and he sued her for custody, telling the judge she was a Communist (he'd been a Stalinist and a Trotskyist himself, but he was through with that). The judge gave my mother full custody and ordered him to pay child support which he did, my mother says, from time to time.
He came to New York not long after we moved there. With his mendacity, charm, and intelligence he could get almost any job anywhere. He bullshitted his way into technical writing, learned it, and did it. He was a botanist at an arboretum in Brooklyn for a while.
I remember some of his visits. He took me to the Bronx Zoo. And one day he took me downtown somewhere. In my memory it will always be Fifth Avenue. He was in a good mood and burst into loud song as we strolled down this big street. In his pleasant tenor voice he exulted,
Some think!
The world was made for fun and frolic.
And so do I!
And so do I!
Harken, harken, music sounds afar!
Harken, harken, music sounds afar, funiculi, funiculai.
People turned, stared, smiled. When I finally saw Gene Kelly do his thing in the movies I saw a huskier version of my father and heard my father's voice.
I was too young to be embarrassed. I was thrilled. The world, as it often does for children (and sometimes for adults, too), sprang open another door, let me glimpse an attitude, a style it would also tolerate. Funiculi, funiculai. You could believe in and propagandize simple joy. I realize now that my father was probably manic depressive. I know he was crazy, and for most of my later life I've feared and been ashamed of this genetic craziness (it infected his whole family). But at five I just saw freedom in it.
My father has said that my mother told him that Dick Fraser turned sour after each of these visits. "And Laurie's so puzzled," she said. "She doesn't know what she's done." So he discussed it with his shrink, who, he said, advised him to stop seeing me. And he did. For about five years there was no contact at all. I think that was bad advice. Years later when I was permitted to visit (by the grace of the courts) my little daughter, I remembered what it was like to have a feckless parent demonstrate a different way to be in the world, and so I wouldn't quit, although it was hard on everyone, including her. Just as I had needed to see Richard (as I eventually called him), she needed to see me. I didn't quit. And it turned out to be a good thing in the end. I don't think my daughter was ever able to doubt that I loved her. But I didn't realize my father loved me until now, after his death, when, to write this, I've had to stop and contemplate the events and evidence of all the years. I didn't know it until now.
In 1949, when I was eight, we went back to Los Angeles. The Party, it seemed, thought my stepfather would be well employed organizing at Hughes Aircraft. He didn't want to leave, but my mother says she was sick of her life in New York. All, she says, she did was work. And
she wanted to get Dick away from his girlfriend. She had actually requested the transfer from the Party higher-ups.
"What," I ask now, "would be so different in L.A.?"
"My family was there," she says.
And mine was, too. Mine too.
When you travel, don't you find that there are some trips that seem as if they were just meant to be? The decision is contemplated, and the ticket price drops. The rental car is upgraded. The hotel shoots you into a suite. The weather is exactly what you packed for. You find the best restaurants, meet the most fascinating people, and never miss a connection unless you do so only to make a better one. That was this trip to L.A. in 1948.
We left New York just after Christmas. I had learned that Santa was my mother and had begged her for a sled. A year earlier on one of our outings to snowy Central Park, Richard had asked some boy on a hill if we could borrow his and then had propelled us both rather recklessly down a wickedly steep incline without learning first how to stop. It was a stunning ride that ended in a harmless tumble. I'd craved a sled ever since.
My mother told me it would be pointless to buy one. In California it only snowed in the mountains, far away from where we'd be living. But with two weeks remaining to us in Manhattan, there was my sled under the Christmas tree. And that day my mother took me to Stuyvesant Park which had turned miraculously white overnight and she dragged me on my sled around the icy path, in the empty frosty morning, over and over again, around and around until I'd had enough.
My mother is a remarkably un-manipulative person. But she used her Jewishness a few times in New York to get special treatment. She had undercut the super of the 17th Street apartment (who was selling rentals) by going directly to the owner and wishing him "Gut yontiff," describing, in Yiddish, her awful situation, her abandoned baby in L.A. Now, her Jewish boss's son was driving to Arizona and needed another driver. My mother didn't tell the boss her husband was a goy, and we rode to Tucson with this fellow singing "California Here I come." There was nobody crazy on this particular expedition.
In Tucson we stayed a while with Dick Fraser's younger sister and her family. He was a young, retired army officer. She was adorable. There was a baby and my cousin Brucie, about six years old, who must have had some kind of speech impediment. He talked constantly, but no one could understand him until I turned up. I liked him and acted as translator for the week or so we were there. Brucie must have been immensely relieved to finally communicate. I wonder what it was like for him when I left. I never saw any of them again.
Brucie showed me the desert in the enormous middle of which they lived. We just rambled. You could look in every direction and only see more desert. I fell on a cactus and had to have millions of needles removed from my ass -- by Dick. A replay of the nit experience and almost as pleasant, if painful. But he was such a jokester; he kept me laughing through my tears.
It must have been odd for him to be there in this big bright nowhere with no politics, where his role shifted and he became a brother, an uncle, a father. He played the family man for a while really for the first (and last) time. He drank, it's true, but he had nothing to prove and so talked only about regular things like sports and was happy.
My mother's freckles ran together into a tan. She'd been gaunt; she gained weight and wore bright lipstick, turquoise necklaces, peasant blouses, became a glorious creature.
We all got to shoot guns at tin cans. I loved the guns, their complicated weight and serious smell. I was proud that I could withstand the kick, thrilled to hear the ping and see the flight of the hit target and feel the triumph. It's one of the first skills I remember mastering and one of the easiest.
Here's one last scene from our life as an American family. The three of us were leaving Arizona, driving down a desert highway, singing. (memory's ultimately dreamlike: Where did we get the car? Where did we leave it? We arrived in L.A. on a train....) I wore one of those kids' cowboy hats made of pressed paper or cheap felt. I adored it. The car windows were wide open and suddenly, with a gust, the hat lifted and blew out, a quick blur in a second of loss. The hat was weightless, made to fly, and in that second, my throat aching with tears, I realized I'd expected heartbreak to come somehow, all along, so my mother spoke my thought when she said, "Well, that's that." But Dick Fraser put on the brakes and asked me if I wanted him to get it. Stunned, I nodded. He pulled over and ran off into the sagebrush, caught and brought it back. He handed the hat to me through the open window, the sun gleaming on his spectacles, his expression serious, as if, for once, for him, individual desires mattered. As if mine did. When I remind my mother of this incident she says, "Well, he was drunk. He was always sweet when he was drunk."
My grandfather (my "Zaydee") was the man in my young life who loved me, who made me know that for him I was intrinsically and inevitably lovable.
My grandparents had visited us in New York, and I recognized them at once when we arrived at the outdoor patio of L.A.'s vast and shining Union Station. We'd left the snow and were bathed, here in this tropical courtyard, in sunshine and surrounded by gorgeous red pointy poinsettias. Grandpa, always in a suit, was pot-bellied, white-haired, balding, smiling with his pale, smart blue eyes that didn't go at all with his absent, awkward manner, his apologetic, faulty English. I know it can't be so, but as I recall the first thing he said to me was he asked me what I wanted, what I would like, best, to have right now, to celebrate my arrival in Los Angeles. I was eight. I asked for a chocolate ice cream soda, and he took us all to a drugstore and bought me one.
Well, it wasn't as good as the ones in New York to which Coca Cola syrup was always added, so that they almost made you wince with their intensity and sweetness. And I can't deny there was a sense of loss, right then, tasting that bland drink -- my intro to L.A. Sensations would never again be so sharp; we'd come to the land of soft edges. Nothing would ever be so vivid as the language, the life, the architecture we'd left. All was blunted, smogged over, and still is. And no life will ever be so pure as the one I left in New York. Because with my Grandmother ("Bahboo") entered ambiguity, a different worldview, provocative and disruptive. But with my Grandfather came love, and with all of them, including my Aunt Mae and Uncle Sol, and my two cousins, Eve and Miriam, eventually came a sense of safety and (and this is both happy and sad) a sense of an identity.
In L.A. we lived briefly in a quaint, tiny cabin within a Hollywood court. Our things must have remained packed, because I remember enacting for hours little stories with "dolls" made of geraniums which grew in all the crannies of this little place. It was silent and pleasant there, and the dolls and my fingers smelled clean and full of possibilities like California.
We acquired a cat, a lanky, fluffy, terrified gray stray. "Smokey" was somehow caught and brought inside and remained under the bed it seemed like forever while we wooed her. We brought her untouchableness with us when we moved to Ocean Park, to a ramshackle apartment in a wooden complex of odd shaped stairs and rooftops, a seaside slum, really, right next to a oneway alley called Speedway and about 50 feet from the beach. Smokey donated blood to the enormous flea population, so that the pale, ragged linoleum in the kitchen seemed to have an animated pattern -- which attacked you when you stepped on it. I'd try to leap across it to get to my bedroom just beyond. The fleas got worse when Smokey gave birth in a closet off the kitchen to 6 kittens. Obviously she was only afraid of us; she didn't mind male cats. I just trailed in sand.
I wore a swimsuit under my clothes, and when school let out at 3 a bunch of us kids went to a beach playground near my house, swung on rungs until our blistered hands became completely calloused, climbed, did tricks. Then we'd go to the Ocean Park Pier, and, with nickel-sized slugs we collected, we played all the games in the arcade, tossing balls into graduated slots, and so on. I'd sometimes try the finer, doomed, manipulations, yanking levers that controlled glass encased claws, going after teddy bears and jewelry. On Saturdays I returned with real money and went to one of two theaters that flanked the pier's entrance, the Dome and the Rosemary. I usually went with neighbor kids who made fun of my New York accent (which I quickly lost) and my colloquialisms ("Hey, she doesn't just thank you. She thanks you a million times!") They were Midwesterners or Southerners. They called a couch a "davenport," a pen a "pin," and couldn't pronounce words ending with -ing, saying "sometheen," "anytheen," "notheen."
We watched swashbucklers and westerns (the latter gave me headaches; my nearsightedness was beginning to cause me trouble and the gunshots didn't help). Then we'd go home and replay the story. Was I the oldest? We were pretty democratic, but I usually had the last word about casting, direction, and what the plot was. Of course, we took liberties with that. The swashbucklers were fun, with swords and odds and ends of finery we found to put on. But I was already a fan of Tom Mix on the radio, had eaten gallons of Hot Ralston and had collected and mailed in the box tops. I was wealthy with spurs that glowed in the dark, rings that glowed in the dark, belts that glowed in the dark. After I dressed up I'd have to step into the closet and shut the door in order to admire myself.
At school I made friends with a cat-faced blonde named Dixie, whose mother, I think now, might have been a hooker. They lived together in a tiny place on Windward in Venice, above the liquor store and dimestore, on a beachfront street originally designed to look like the real Venice with repeating Byzantine plaster arches over its sidewalks. Dixie's mother always wore a stained housecoat and was always asleep or sleepy. They were partially supported by Dixie's brother who occasionally came home on leave from the Navy, got drunk, and beat everybody up. At 9, I already thought sailors were cute, but even though I tried, I could find nothing to admire about Dixie's grouchy, blue-jawed brother.
Dixie taught me how to steal, and I began to see the world -- through her slitted blue eyes -- as a place where you never could tell, you might find something great that wasn't guarded or nailed down. There was a pottery factory which left its breakage and seconds out in a big yard. I filled our dinky apartment with ashtrays, bowls, cups, plates, tureens. I think they may even have been attractive. They weren't kitschy anyway but solid colored pastels in greens, blues, pinks, creamy yellows. We also stole from the big Woolworths on Windward. I don't remember what kinds of things I took there but I took enough of them for my mother (usually pretty slow on the uptake) to begin to wonder. When she finally asked, I told her. I always did that. So she sat me down for a rare lecture. She explained that the Capitalist Millionaires who owned Woolworths wouldn't miss the paltry things I took, and as far as that went I was probably even entitled to them, but there was a danger that I might get caught. Getting caught would be horrible, degrading, and humiliating. So, for that reason, and that reason only, I'd better stop stealing.
All my friends complained of their parents spanking them, screaming at them. I knew stealing would be, for them, a harshly punished offense. I was so touched by my mother's sweet reasonableness, I raced off to Woolworths and stole a brooch for her. It was one bejeweled word. It said, "Mother."
I didn't just steal from Capitalists. It still haunts me that I stole once from another kid at school. She was bragging about a pin she'd gotten, showing it off. It was like a little puppet, a tiny golden man with jeweled arms and legs, articulated at shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, so that he seemed to dance when she walked. It was too wonderful, and I thought I'd die if I couldn't have it. She carelessly passed it around for a big group of girls to admire, and somehow it disappeared. Into my pocket. I don't think I've ever talked about this before. I remember trying to figure out a way to get it back to her or to have it found with no-one the wiser, but I don't think I did it.
It was during this time at the beach I began to feel I wasn't quite right. One of the other kids' mother's in the complex always said to me, "Oh, Laurie, you're such a character!"
What did that mean? Why?
My mother, when angry, would demand, "What's wrong with you?"
What was?
At nine I was having sexual feelings which oppressed me and made me feel ashamed and unique. And I was constantly being told by my grandmother at whose house I frequently stayed, what an awful squalid life I had lived and was living, what a neglected creature I was, what a fool my mother was, what a bum and "shikker" [a drunk] my "father" was. Oy vey. Oy. So I'd come home and see it all as she did. But at home I got my stepfather's version. My grandmother was an evil, venomous, interfering witch.
On one occasion, after spending a summer day at the beach with my cousins and my grandparents, I returned alone to the beachside apartment my grandparents were renting. Standing there by myself in my swimsuit, I had a feeling like none I'd ever had before. I was suddenly aware of the irritating sand and pulling salt on my skin, the chilly air, the sad damp apartment, and the whole dead ugly world beyond. It seemed as if a gritty, sticky, indelible grime was over everything and had always been there. I knew the truth, that life was bleak and bad; I could taste it in my mouth. I heard my cousins approach, laughing, and wondered how anyone could manage that. Why did anyone bother to do anything? I didn't want to cry and I didn't want to live. It only lasted for an hour or so during which I listened, watched, and responded from a nightmare distance. Then it was over. I wasn't to experience this again (although there were other scary mental aberrations) until I was well into my teens. And then it happened again after my daughter was born. And then again, and for longer and longer periods.
One evening I came home from some day trek on a bike with other kids. It'd been a rough one, and I wanted a little sympathy. The leg of my jeans had caught in my bike chain, and I'd been thrown, bruised, abraded. The kids had abandoned me, some strange man had cut my pants loose from the chain with a knife, and I'd had to take a long, painful walk home, by myself, with my crippled bike and bloody knee. Both my parents were home, and they asked me what happened, where I'd been. I didn't know what I was saying when I named the park we'd ridden to, the name the other kids had told me, I said I'd been to Nigger Park.
First I was halfheartedly spanked (they didn't know how to spank me; no experience; they never did it). But even before that was over, Dick began to cry. I'd made him cry by bringing that word into the house. He conveyed through his tears that by saying that word I'd become the embodiment of the forces of cruelty, enslavement, and exploitation he was battling with all his ever-flagging strength, the evil, which, to fight, he'd sacrificed his life and all personal joy. He staggered out of the house, still weeping, and my mother pleaded with me to go after him and apologize for using that word which I hadn't even known what it meant. And I ran! Down the boardwalk, into the twilight, and found him. I called to him, and he ignored me. I trailed after him crying, my wounds stinging, my torn jeans flapping, begging his forgiveness, begging him to come back to the home I'd contaminated with the flowering of the evil that he knew was within me, that I'd poisoned, with that word. He pushed me away and walked on.
I remember that he smelled funny. Somehow at nine years old I knew he smelled of my mother. They must have just finished making love when I arrived with the evil of the Capitalist System dripping from my tongue. They were together. I was alone.
Although my grandparents sometimes rented a beach apartment for a month in the summer, they never came out to Santa Monica ordinarily. But during this period they paid us a surprise visit. They showed up one night when both my parents were out. On the doorstep, my grandmother started in again with her poetic, heavily accented, and so emotional English. She talked about them leaving me alone, abandoning me, what a wicked shame it was. She talked about the squalor, the bad neighborhood, the ugliness. I must have been in a strange mood, because I started yelling at her, telling her to stop talking, to shut up just shut up, saying that it wasn't true, that she was just a troublemaker, something like that. And for the only time it ever happened, my Grandpa raised his voice to me. His English, also heavily accented, seemed sometimes barely serviceable. My grandmother spoke and read Yiddish, Russian, and English. My grandfather was a writer, a magical storyteller, a famous speaker and fundraiser for Zionist causes, the publisher and editor of the California Jewish Voice. But only in Yiddish. In English he mumbled and stumbled. Not this time.
"You don't talk to your Grandmother this way!" he thundered, "You don't do this! You never talk to your Grandmother like this! Never!"
He put me in my place. A place where I felt safe. A place where I was a scolded, naughty child being told quite clearly what was what. I was filled with admiration for him and with something very much like gratitude, and I apologized.
My grandparents owned and lived in a huge rooming house on Menlo Avenue near Vermont and Olympic. Their street was solid with these old mansions whose big front lawns flowed down to tall retaining walls. Along the street, on both sides, waved skinny lofty palms, their tops just fuzzy little dustmops. They must have been forty feet or more high. I loved to lie on my back beneath one or another of them, near the curb of that wide, quiet, unshaded street, my head touching the trunk, and stare straight up to where the impossibly far away fronds sketched themselves on the sky. It gave me a pleasant vertigo, like when you walk looking down into a mirror under your chin.
My grandmother's big living room was fronted by a bank of leaded bay windows, and in front of them were tall bushes, so you saw nothing but green there and heard from early morning till nightfall the pigeons coo cooing.
In that room, where the family celebrated Passover, there was a piano, couches, chairs, a standup radio/phonograph, and on this console always stood a framed picture of my uncle Sol, my grandmother's entirely worthy idol and son. I suppose there were pictures about of my mother and her much younger sister, Leah, who, in those early days, had a room and bath upstairs in that big old place. Peculiarly enough, in the main room, once the dining room of the whole house, on whose floor there was still a non functioning button to ring for servants, there was a Murphy bed -- on which I slept when I stayed there.
There was another fairly large apartment alongside the front door, evidently the original front parlor. It belonged to the Felds, two skinny, aloof refugees. "Grandma was such a snob," my mother says. "She kow-towed to those awful people because they came from a 'good family.'" And in back, behind the giant laundry room, in a small servant's cupboard, lived the elderly silent mother of Mr. Feld, who shared, with no incommodation at all that I could see, the bathroom with my grandparents.
My grandfather's study, off the kitchen, was a favorite place of mine. His battered little desk held a collection of fountain pens in different stages of usefulness. Some were very beautiful with their iridescent, insectlike striations in wonderful colors, the buggy fragile underbellies of their nibs. I loved to fill and try to write with them, clean and try to fix them.
In the kitchen was a big drawer holding my grandmother's button collection, mixed in with costume jewelry, all of which she'd obtained in thrift shops or from my great aunt Vera's or my mother's theatrics. There were red and pink and plaid and transparent buttons, fabric and rhinestone ones in all sizes. There were big glass buttons and ones that looked like braided gold. There were beads and necklaces of amazing lengths in all colors like candy or faceted and sparkling to be wrapped and wrapped around. There were bracelets with dramatic square chunks of ugly polished stone set in etched silver. There was, in this drawer, a hint of the smell of tarnished metal, it smelled to me like mystery, like romantic old stories.
The whisper in the drawer was a shout in the basement. Down the wooden steps that made her worry about me I'd go to open a giant, just huge, steamer trunk filled with costumes. Among the cheap painted fabrics and motley there were lace dresses and flimsy tutus, ballet shoes, and gowns made of satin or tulle or silk jersey with spangles. There were delicate shoes with diamond buckles and heels shaped like sculpture with thin straps of studded suede. And there was the source of the fragrance, a long evening gown, heavy as heartache, of silver, made of a million flattened links as thin as paper. Each time I came to it and put it on I thought that this time it would tell me something or transform me, but it kept itself and gave nothing away except that promise beauty makes that's better than anything real. My grandmother couldn't remember whose it had been.
In the living room, in the piano bench, was a stash of photos, many of my grandmother's family, taken in Russia, mostly in country settings with everyone in their odd old European clothes, arranged in artfully composed groups, leaning on each other and on trees in languid attitudes, not smiling but gathered almost tragically like the dramatis personae of one of those enacted paintings by an old master in which the bad news has just been delivered. I'd often ask my grandmother to name each person in them for me and give me their relation to myself.
There were photos, too, of her and her offspring when they were all young. One I loved was of my uncle Sol about ten years old, in a sailor suit, playing his violin for my mother, eight or so, dancing with a tambourine in a gypsy costume. Then there were the stunning professional glossies of my mother closeup, in dancer's poses, and of the actress, Tante Vera, and clippings and programs.
Also in the bench was a collection of mementos of my grandparents' trip to Europe and Israel. My grandfather had been given it as a gift for raising so much money , and my mother says that for that trip my grandmother put her grudges aside and enjoyed herself. My grandfather was feted and treated as a hero everywhere, by the European and Israeli Jews. The item that interested me most was a program from the Folies Bergere filled with photos of gorgeously decorated semi naked prancing women. The text was French, and it maddened me. I wanted to know what they were saying about all this nudity that justified my grandmother classifying it, obviously, as cultural.
These were my playthings. I also played with the phone on the landing for the tenants to use, one of those heavy black standup ones with a separate earpiece and a speaker like a funnel. I dialed the time and talked to the recording as if we were having a conversation. Or I dialed wrong numbers to hear people say hello. A few times I visited with one of the tenants, a dulled, drinking woman who had one crammed room full of a pink satin bed. She taught me how to play double solitaire on it with her.
My grandmother was usually very busy, cooking, cleaning, grumbling, or provoking my grandfather into yelling contests all in Yiddish, of course. What a shrew she was. He, smelling of cigars and kindness, always seemed to be on the defensive. My mother said her insults and disrespect to him were horrendous. I could tell she hated him. How he felt about her, though, was hard to figure. I gathered he wished she'd just leave him alone. He was usually out with his cronies, working for Israel. He also agented real estate sometimes, not very well. He had kept the family afloat for all those years, except for one period, during the depression, when my uncle Sol, a boy of 17, became first violinist in the L.A. Philharmonic and supported the whole gang. My mother says my grandmother thereafter threw that up to him in every quarrel.
She was bitter about her life and her role and too superior to enjoy hardly anyone, she was so conscious of class, intellect, ability, and appearances. She always looked great -- distinguished, but bohemian and cute. Her hair was silvery silk and she wore it in two braids as a crown over a center part. Into her nineties she still kept her translucent glowing skin and her bright eyes like a baby's. She was small, large bosomed and feminine in the soft way, and flirtatious, just loaded with charm.
She couldn't cook. All her food was dry and hard to chew. Her mandelbrodt was full of nut shells. Her noodle kuegle was leathery. Her meat was juiceless and burnt. She did believe in raw foods, fruits and vegetables and so, kept healthy. Because I didn't like eggs and she thought they were nourishing she snuck raw ones into my hot chocolate. I figured out what she was doing when I gazed into my cup and, horrified, saw snakes and dragons writhing there. She forced you to eat with guilt by reminding you of the starving kids in Europe and saying things like, "Just one more bite for Uncle Sol." If you didn't take the bite you didn't love him.
She had gorgeous crystal serving dishes and gilt cups and cut and etched glassware and wonderful little colored shot glasses which my cousin Eve, the writer, shocked me by remembering and describing in a story perfectly, as "beautiful empty and beautiful full." My grandmother could sew and tat and crochet, and stitch handkerchief hems by hand, and embroider. In 1933, when my uncle Solly was a Jewish violin student stranded in Berlin, she , made exquisite silk neckties my aunt Vera sold to movie stars for money to bring him home.
She bought most of her clothes at thrift shops and fixed them up. She thought pure white was bold and vulgar and soaked white blouses or gloves in tea to civilize them.
She called them all "Duh Goodvill," the thrift shops, and she took me shopping with her sometimes. I'd prowl, like her, and look for treasures. If I turned up something I liked, she'd take the thing, a doll, a bracelet, glance at it suspiciously, glare at me to get the eagerness off my face, and then she'd show it to the proprietor. No matter what price was named it was too much. She'd grimace, shrug, she'd make as if to put it back, driving me crazy, "Feh," she'd say, "I voodn't pay a nickel." She usually got it cheap and taught me to brag about what a bargain it was..
My grandfather took me out, too. He took me to MacArthur Park (Westlake Park then), out in little rowboats. Once in a while we'd go to I. Magnin's, a posh department store, all marble, in the Wilshire District. We'd wander through, just looking, and he'd tell me that it was our store, the Babitz family's, we owned it. I knew we didn't but liked to think maybe we did.
He smoked cigars and ate coughdrops, Ludens Honey Licorice or Smith Brothers pure licorice, both delicious. (Once, when I was sick with a cold, he snuck me Benedictine & Brandy with rock candy in it, making me happy and my grandmother furious. He liked to drink. He liked sweets.) On his car radio he played nothing but Arthur Godfrey, this deeply ugly and unimaginably boring man.
My grandfather tried to entertain me, and often, sitting in his car, parked in front of my Grandma's house, smoking comfortably (he sat there a lot alone with the radio on), he'd begin with all the resigned, important pleasure of a true tale teller, "Vunce upon a time...." The silence after this was filled with possibilities, and I always waited, hopefully; this time maybe he'd launch out, go on. He'd start again, "Vunce upon a time...." He never did. He didn't have the English for it.
Prominently displayed in my grandma's living room was a framed print of Seurat's Sunday in the park. In our house, on the wall, we had framed Diego Rivera prints of patient, beautiful, Mexican laborers. Subliminally sick already of the sentimentalising of saintly, straining, muscled Workers, I stared and stared but couldn’t like those pictures. The petit bourgeouis Seurat on the other hand was not polemical, rhetorical, not propaganda. It didn’t proselytize (except on an aesthetic level I was too young to understand). It was an event without an easy explanation. But in and between its luminous dots was a vision of something indefinable and lovely, like the hallucinatory carousel I saw and heard far away on that autumn morning in New York, like the spell in the metal smell of the silver dress, suggesting... Like my grandfather's untold stories. The Seurat had no solidity but made promises you could live on.
My grandmother's name was Lyuba, a Russian name she hated; she said it was a man's name. She called herself Lillian. She’d had an unusually fine education for a Jewish girl from Russia. She'd attended the Gymnasium. She was well read and intellectually curious all her life. She had a collection of thick, scratchy 78's, Caruso, Chaliapin. And she played the guitar and sang to me in a sweet voice. She loved the arts and culture, admired talent, but what she worshipped was beauty. She was a fool for physical beauty which is how she came to marry my grandfather. In his younger days he was just stunning, slim, black hair, steely blue glance.
My grandmother's father was a not very successful merchant in Ekaterineslav in Russia. It was almost impossible to get any other details from her. The emotions her memories brought were too much for her. If you asked, she'd put you off, she wouldn't speak, and then, just from thinking, she'd have nightmares. There had been one tragedy involving a pogrom during which she'd lost some family members and another during the 1905 revolution, when, in her teens, she and her friends were caught spying or smuggling and everyone was killed but her.
Her older sister, Vera, went to England and became a successful actress on the Yiddish stage and sent for her family. Then Vera came to Canada and, after a few years, brought everybody to Toronto where her salon for artists, writers, and theater people became well known for the beauty of the three Pogorelsky sisters who presided. My grandmother was the loveliest with her cheekbones, bosom, luminous skin, witty, snotty attitude.
My grandfather, Abram Babitz, was born in some shtetl. Despised by his stepmother, beaten by his drunken tailor father, he learned early from the dropped comments of his father's Russian customers that he was beautiful and has written that he took comfort, in childhood, from contemplating his own reflection in his father's mirrors.
He came to America via Ellis Island and was working as a finisher in a garment factory in New York when a strike and lockout forced him and a few friends to look for other employment. They went on the road in a horsedrawn carriage, and at Jewish communities along the way, they performed recitations and plays and passed the hat. When they hit Toronto they were adopted by Grandma's family into their community. Grandma told me she went after Grandpa because all the girls were smitten. She said she got him by ignoring him; something no other girl seemed able to do. She got him just to show the world she could.
They married and everybody moved to the Bronx, New York, where Sol, my mother, and Leah were born and my grandmother and grandfather learned to abuse each other. I witnessed her unrelenting nagging. My grandmother told me about his hideous, scary rages. And my mother spoke of his maniacal jealousy. She tells a story of one particular jealous obsession and the accusations which pushed my grandmother to complain to Vera, to bring her husband to the court of Vera, where he was castigated and told that my grandmother was "as pure as the driven snow." Vera talked in such phrases, as did my grandmother; they must have learned their English from the titles on silent movies. My grandmother, on this occasion, informed her husband that she would never forgive him, and promised that when they came to their fiftieth anniversary she would still be as bitter. Apparently the 50th in their world was a major personal and community event. My mother says when they got to the anniversary, Grandma kept her word, refusing to let anything mark the day, proud to have kept her unforgiving outrage burning over all those years.
The family moved again, to Hollywood, when Vera became a contract player at RKO. Vera Gordon was the mother in the silent version of "Humoresque," the aunt in Abie's Irish Rose, etc. But, reader, go rent "The Big Street" with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball. She has a small part as a tenderhearted landlady, and in a short sentimental scene she steals the whole movie and knocks you down in tears.
Vera did okay in Hollywood, and she helped my mother get work as a specialty dancer at RKO (my mom is charismatic, beautiful and muscular in the outrageous mumbo jumbo routines of "She" and "The Last Days of Pompeii"). Sol, with Vera's help, became a contract musician at Fox. Vera even had her own radio show for awhile, modeled after Molly Goldberg's, but she was dying of cancer in her pretty house on Highland when I met her.
I saw her just once and then only had a vague sense of what she had been, she who made pronouncements, conferred blessings, who had guided the ever expanding family to three new countries and four different cities.
I was led through a dark, heavily furnished room full of Victorian knick knacks so captivating I remember them to this day, especially the small, potted trees with jade leaves and semi precious fruits; the branches tinkled slightly, or seemed to, as you passed. We walked up three carpeted stairs into a conservatory with a grand piano, more knick knacks, pictures, and a large gold chaise on which Vera reclined in complicated velvet and satin. At first I couldn't see her well. She was silhouetted by the hazy light that came through a big filmy-curtained arrangement of French doors that gave out into the garden. I was introduced, and she who'd been fat and full of power, reached out her bony yellow arm and beckoned with a shaking hand. She presented a death's head. "Aren't you going to kiss me?" she asked. My grandma shoved me and I did. She questioned me, as grownups will, and then asked what I wanted to do when I grew up. It hadn't really occurred to me before, but in her presence I was suddenly absolutely sure. "I want to be an actress," I replied in a strong, clear voice, wondering, with my newfound and very first ambition, whether, in this diminished state, she could help me somehow with my career. It was a good answer. It made for a good scene. She smiled sadly and patted my hand. "It's very hard," she said. "Very hard. You know, there's a broken heart for every light on Broadway." I swear to God she said this. I told her that I didn't care,.
In that moment I was really changed, because I chose a path. My stepfather had accused me of being a dilettante (an awful thing for an eight year old to be). Now I chose a path that led only incidentally and briefly to the stage. But for six or seven crucial years it sure led me away from Socialism.
Grandma encouraged me in that and in all my ambitions. I wrote poems, songs, drew pictures and was praised by her for anything I did at all artistic. I was "unfortunate, but so talented, so smart," she gasped to everyone. And in response to her criticism -- of my parents and my life with them -- which flowed like a steady refrain through all her talk, like the repeating chorus of a song with different interesting verses, I began to doubt the rightness of my parents views and the inherent wrongness of my self.