Audition (3 page)

It wasn’t his fault. First of all there was the stock market crash of 1929, which brought the Roaring Twenties, with all its luxury and indulgences, to an abrupt end. This was followed by the decade-long Great Depression. But what really doomed my father’s business was an actor named Al Jolson.

The Jazz Singer
, starring Jolson, was released in 1927 and was a show business miracle. The pioneer “talkie” revolutionized the motion picture business. Not only did the era of silent films end almost overnight, but also, more gradually, did the market for live shows. As more and more vaudeville halls were converted into movie theaters, my father’s once-flourishing business sputtered. Therefore I didn’t go home from the hospital in Boston wrapped in my mother’s fur stole, which by then had been sold, nor did I travel in one of the four cars, all of which were gone, nor was I ensconced in a crib in the big house in Newton. Instead I was brought to a modest two-family house in Brookline, also a suburb of Boston, but not nearly as grand as Newton.

Still, it wasn’t a bad place in which to grow up. Brookline, when I was a child, still had some fields where you could even see a horse or two. It had a small shopping center called, then and now, Coolidge Corner, with a bakery, I remember still, named Dorothy Muriel’s, where you could buy yummy cupcakes. It also had one movie theater and, when I was older, I could walk there. The first time I went to the movies alone, I saw Daphne du Maurier’s classic,
Rebecca
, in which the formidable housekeeper Mrs. Danvers burned down the ancestral home known as Manderley. I was scared to death and loved it.

My father, meanwhile, had to close his agency in Boston because he couldn’t pay the rent. He was reduced to selling acts or small shows to out-of-town theaters which hadn’t yet switched over full-time to movies. He also began to book banal industrial shows put on by organizations like the Massachusetts Shoe Manufacturing Association. Not very glamorous, but it helped pay the bills.

When I was five or six my father had another miniroll of financial success. Though vaudeville was dead, the era of nightclubs had risen from the ashes, and he became an instant and talented nightclub producer. His first show, staged for a Boston club called the Lido Venice, featured a female impersonator from New York and what my father promoted as “a Chorus of Lovely Debutantes.” Actually they were young girls he’d recruited from local dancing schools. The first two-week run was a smash. The second was over the top.

My father persuaded Evelyn Nesbit to appear at the Lido. She was the ravishing young woman whose affair some years before with the famous architect Stanford White had led her millionaire husband, Harry Thaw, to shoot White dead on the roof of Madison Square Garden. Nesbit had only two accomplishments going for her, my father wrote later in his memoir. One was that her picture had been on the front page of the
Police Gazette
as well as every newspaper in the country. The other was an ability to draw crowds. And draw them she did, reciting “The Persian Kitten,” a popular parody of the time, onstage to virtually every Bostonian, including the mayor and the chief of police.

When my father was producing and directing these shows, he would often take Jackie and me to the rehearsals, where the performers would make a big fuss over us. The dancers would sometimes twirl me around until I got dizzy with pleasure. Then my father would take us for hot dogs on buns, which he loved and so did we.

But the good times didn’t last. The Lido was sold, and though my father went on to produce a show at the Cascades Room in the Bradford Hotel, the ripple effect of the Great Depression caught up with him. The hotel chain that owned the Bradford went out of business. So, once again, did my father.

He soon began, as they say, to “take to the road.” In search of business, he toured all over the eastern seaboard, with a traveling road company of some twenty performers and musicians jammed into four cars. On the main car there was a big sign that read “Stop. Look. And Listen.” At one point he went hundreds of miles north with this moving caravan to Toronto, and then to Nova Scotia, to try to find a paying audience. Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for weeks. As a result, when I was a child I barely knew my father. I have a vague memory of him coming back from one of these northern trips carrying matching white coats with hoods for Jackie and me. They didn’t fit, and my mother scolded him for wasting the money.

My parents were by now an oddly matched couple. My mother was practical and somewhat depressed. She had a lot to be depressed about. Not only were there financial worries, but she had a child who was already being diagnosed as backward. Furthermore, four years before my sister’s birth, my parents had lost a son. His name was Burton, and I was evidently named after him as both of our names started with a “B.” He died from pneumonia at the age of fourteen months. I never heard my parents talk about him, but I remember when my grandmother died, I went with my mother to visit her grave. Next to it was a tiny gravestone that read “Burton Walters.” My mother knelt and cried.

So there were my mother and father, married with two young daughters. My mother, greatly loving to her daughters, but a practical woman without time for a lot of fantasy in her life. My father, just the opposite—a kind of poet who read all the time, seemed to live in his own head, and had a hard time showing affection. I don’t remember ever trying to hug him, even after he came home from a long trip.

My father’s only escape, throughout his life, was playing cards. Mostly he played pinochle and gin rummy. He played for money and usually lost, in part because a lot of his cardplaying friends were in on the secret of his half blindness and, it was said, would often discard to his fake eye to confuse him. But he was compulsive about playing cards. To keep him home at least one night a week, my mother agreed to have his cardplaying sessions at the apartment, usually on Friday nights. His friends would come over, and the house would smell of cigar smoke for days.

My mother, who never liked to play games, would nag him about his gambling and complain that he was risking much-needed money. I understood her insecurity and apprehension. I, myself, never liked to gamble. But it would take me years to appreciate my sensitive and gifted father and the extraordinary effort he made, in spite of the gambling, to support us during those hard times, only to be met at home with criticism.

I do have some sporadic memories of my father taking my sister and me out and giving my mother some well-earned time off. Besides those wonderful rehearsals at the Lido Venice, he sometimes took us into Boston to ride on the Swan Boats in the Public Garden. And to Boston’s Chinatown for chicken chow mein. But those are rare recollections. I was very much my mother’s daughter. She was so soft and loving to me. I used to tell her that when I grew up, I would buy her a beautiful house right next to mine. I never did. I can’t tell you how much I wish I had.

How did my mother truly feel about my father? I just don’t know. She took good care of him and cooked all his favorite foods when he came home—steak, french fried potatoes, made, of course, in those days from scratch, frankfurters and baked beans. She always gave my father the tenderest part of the steak. She brewed the tea he drank. She never used a tea bag.

I know my father admired my mother’s dignity and elegance. He often said so. She must have realized that his admiration meant he was sensitive and intelligent. He had not even graduated from high school, but he had read many of the classics, could quote from Shakespeare, and when he was home, read me to sleep with stories about Greek gods. To this day I have a library of my father’s books. They are almost all first or limited editions.

But did they love each other? I can’t remember my parents ever kissing in front of us, or hugging or even having a laugh. Would they have stayed married today? I don’t know. I only know they stayed married for nearly sixty years, until death parted them.

If my mother was judgmental about my father (he often said she saw the seams and not the satin), to Jackie and me she was unfailingly kind and patient. If she and my father went out with friends, which was rare, she made sure we had the same sitter—an elderly, wiry woman, nicknamed “Dotey,” who brought us soggy cookies she had made and herself smelled of cookie dough. Other than with Dotey, my mother never left us. She dressed both of us beautifully, sometimes alike (which I hated), put big taffeta bows, the fashion of the time, on our carefully brushed hair, cooked every meal herself, washed and ironed every day. In her spare time she made wonderful hats for herself. I remember her sewing bright red cherries on a big black straw hat. She modeled it for us. I tried it on, too, and it came down over my eyes. I was delighted.

To be with my mother was my greatest pleasure, even though I was the recipient of her complaints, usually about my father. She didn’t have many friends, mostly because she didn’t play cards or the later rage, mah-jongg, and she was afraid to drive. Her closest companion was her sister, Lena, but Lena lived in another suburb, Dorchester, and had two young sons. She couldn’t come to Brookline very often, although some Sundays she would drive over and pick us up to visit with her and my grandmother, who lived with her.

But most nights after she had cooked dinner my mother, Jackie, and I sat at the kitchen table. My sister would sit silently, lost in her own thoughts, as I talked about my day at school. My mother, after listening and kissing me, would then often discuss my father, the lack of money, and his absence when she needed him. It did not seem odd to me that I was her confidante, but looking back now, I realize I was never young.

We moved a lot in those days, usually down. At one point we lived next to a funeral home. Another move took us to an apartment where, because my father was usually not there to help, my mother had to stoke the furnace in the basement. This hurt her back. My mother was sure things were going to get worse, and for a long time they did.

In those days I thought that everybody had a sister who was mentally retarded, that all fathers gambled and were rarely at home. I knew that I had my mother’s love, and I remember her often saying that she wished she had six of me, I was such an obedient and easy child. But in my mind then, it didn’t seem like enough.

Was I jealous of the extra time my mother spent on my sister, whose tears and tantrums she had to control, whom she often had to dress, whose hair she brushed and combed all of my sister’s life? Did I want to be treated like a child and not another adult? I must have, because I remember often coming into my mother’s bedroom when I was about seven or eight, and whining about having a pain in my stomach. Since I was such a good child and rarely caused any trouble, she took these complaints very seriously. She would then leave my sister with Dotey and take me on rounds of visits to doctors who would examine me, take the needed tests, and find nothing wrong.

But I continued to insist that I was in pain. After the doctor visits, mother and I would stop off at a restaurant where I could order my favorite, spaghetti. Bliss. Obviously the stomach pains weren’t affecting my appetite. Finally one bewildered doctor said I should have my appendix taken out. It seemed the only choice. So I did, happily. More attention.

When I got home from the hospital I was even happier because I was moved from my small bedroom in the back of the apartment, which was originally built to be a maid’s room, into my parents’ big bedroom overlooking a gas station. From their bedroom window I could sneak peeks at the gas attendant. Every night after work he closed the gas station and took off his overalls and stood in his underwear pulling on his pants. Exciting view for an eight-year-old!

My incision became infected, causing my mother to lavish even more attention on me. How sweetly sad these memories are. One stands out. When I was in the hospital recovering from the operation, which in those days kept you in bed for almost a week, my mother would take the streetcar back and forth from Brookline to Boston every day to see me. She had to then walk a good ten blocks to the hospital. One night I heard someone entering my room and, thinking it was the nurse, whom I didn’t want to see, I kept my eyes closed. When the person left the room, I finally opened my eyes and saw at the foot of my bed my favorite doll. My mother, worried that I would feel alone, had taken the streetcar at night to visit me one more time. The memory has stayed with me all these years. I can barely write about it even today. It makes me so sad for her.

Another view of my mother and me has also stayed so clear, a memory that goes back more than sixty years. One Christmas I remember saving money to buy my mother a cut-glass perfume bottle, which many women then kept on their dressing tables. My mother had a considerable collection, and I was sure she would want to keep adding to it. I carefully chose what I thought was the perfect one, chiseled in the shape of a half-moon. I wanted my mother to love it and not want to return it, as she did so many of my father’s gifts. She returned his presents so often that he stopped buying anything for her. I have kept this lesson in mind all my life. No matter what anybody gives me as a gift, I say, “Terrific,” and wear it at least twice (before trying to return it).

The day before Christmas, unable to keep my secret totally to myself, I asked my mother if she would like another bottle for her collection. “Not really,” she said. “I have too many already.” I could barely keep back my tears, but it was too late. The next morning I gave her my shiny wrapped present. She opened it, took me in her arms, and exclaimed, “Of all my perfume bottles, this is the most beautiful. It makes all the others look dreadful. I am going to give them all away and only keep this one.” And she did.

By the way, none of these traumas, large or small, seem to have affected my schoolwork. I was an overly serious student. I did my homework on time and got good grades. Someone once interviewed a few of my teachers at the Lawrence School, the small public school in Brookline that I attended. According to my fifth-grade teacher, Miss (Mildred) Gillis, I was “a very serious pupil.” She had given me an A, though she said she was usually “stingy” with her As. She also said that I was “delightful” and a “good writer.” (Where are you now that I need you, Miss Gillis?)