Broadway Baby (13 page)

Scene XV

Th
ey were driving to Julie’s high school graduation: Curly behind the wheel, Tula beside him, and Miriam and Sam in the backseat. Julie and Ethan were already at the high school.
Th
ey had just started down Webster, a narrow one-way street, when someone trying to pass them, horn blaring, drove them right up onto the sidewalk. Curly honked back long and hard, and the other car screeched to a halt.
Th
e door flew open; the man jumped out and ran toward them. He was extremely tall, heavyset, and he staggered a little as he ran. “Oh great,” Curly said, “a fucking lush.”
Th
en he told them all to stay put and lock the door behind him. Miriam’s mother kept repeating, “Oy Gott, oy Gott.” Next thing they knew Curly and the man were shouting; what was said, they couldn’t tell, because now the windows were rolled up and the doors locked. All at once, Curly swung and hit the guy square in the face, and the guy collapsed. Curly jumped back into the car and they hurried off. By the time they turned the corner onto Park Street, the man had gotten to his knees and was touching his nose and cheek, feeling for damage. Blood ran from Curly’s knuckles, down the back of his hand, staining the starched cuff of his shirt and dripping onto his tan slacks.

Miriam had seen flashes of his anger. She had always sensed the possibility of violence just under the surface of their testy day-to-day relations; she felt it, too, when he’d lose his temper at the kids over a forgotten chore, a not adequately respectful tone of voice, or any kind of trouble they got into. She felt it in the way he’d roughhouse with the boys, hurting them sometimes inadvertently. Sometimes he’d pretend to lose control so convincingly that she thought he had. Most of all, she’d felt and feared it on those nights (which now thank God rarely happened—she could thank Stuart for that) when she would turn away from him in bed, when he would throw the covers off and leave the room, or worse just lie there brooding, saying nothing.

Curly kept repeating, “Son of a bitch. Goddamn son of a bitch.” He told Sam that all he was doing was protecting himself, protecting his family. He hit first because the schmuck was drunk and twice his size and he wasn’t going to give him any advantage. Better not to fight than fight, he said. Walk away if you can. But if you can’t, always throw the first punch.

Sam leaned over, one hand on Curly’s shoulder. He was staring amazed at the bloody knuckles. He said, “Drunk stops a man on the sidewalk. Says, buddy, can you tell me where the other side of the street is? and the man says, over there.
Th
e drunk says, I was over there and someone told me it was over here.”

“Enough, Sam,” Miriam said. “Leave your father alone.”

Th
ey drove the rest of the way in silence. Curly kept flexing his bloody hand, cursing under his breath; the boy stared out the window; Miriam found it hard to breathe, her heart was racing; the incident had come and gone in a moment, and the day now looked as peaceful as it had just minutes ago, but she couldn’t let it go, that violence; its aftershock went on inside her.
Th
e roughhousing at home, the stifled angers, the frustrations, everyone in the family so often, too often, in each other’s way, who knew why, or what to do about it, and every moment it was getting worse.

T
HIS WAS 1964.
Th
e speaker at the graduation, a local politician, spoke about the dangers Julie and her classmates would be facing in the years to come: the doomsday clock, the power of the Soviet Union, the rise of communist regimes around the world. He said that we’re a peaceful country; we are slow to anger, but once provoked we would crush the enemies of freedom with an irresistible force. Sooner or later, he said, each and every one of us will be called on to defend our way of life. We were heading into a time of national sacrifice.
Th
e more he spoke, the more Miriam could feel the world around her growing large with rage, and the more it grew, the smaller she and her children seemed inside it.
Th
ey were small and growing smaller. At any moment, they might disappear.

It was Julie’s
first night home from Antioch during fall break. She was out with friends, and Miriam was straightening up her room when she came across her diary, the gold lamé one Miriam had given her as a high school graduation present. It was unlocked and open on her desk. Miriam knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help herself. She’d always wondered what college life was like and she could get no details from Julie who brushed her off with “It’s just college, Ma, nothing to write home about.” Just college! Who knew what opportunities Miriam would have had, what kind of life she might have led, had she been able to go to college? She’d have married someone like Frankie, someone with ambition and talent. Why, she might have become a professor herself. A professor of theater!

Julie had no interest in theater. Maybe that’s why their relationship was always bristly and tense, why Julie had always been so unavailable. Julie’s subjects were sociology, political science, and history, subjects Miriam found depressing. Where was the music in that? It didn’t surprise her to see words like “injustice,” “cold war,” “communist,” and “communism” reappearing on the pages she was scanning; but words like “pigs” and “honkies,” “sit-in” and “rally” made her slow down and read more carefully. Julie had joined the Communist Party. Julie had become a radical activist against the war. If the administration didn’t change course soon, she and her cohorts would take more drastic measures. Julie’s boyfriend (Julie’s boyfriend?) was black.
Th
ey were living together.
Th
ey were “fucking”—that’s the word Julie used, “fucking!” which she described in disgusting detail. And then Miriam came across a passage about her and Curly—Julie couldn’t wait to tell “them” the truth, so they would see her for the person she is, not the girl of their fantasies.
Th
eir whole little racist world was based in fantasy. Her mother’s especially. She couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces when she told them the truth.

Who was this child? Had she always thought this way? Had she always believed these horrible things? Was this, this anger and contempt for everything her parents represented what lay behind her often blank expression, her remoteness, her “independence”? Why hadn’t she and Curly ever seen or guessed what had to have been stirring all these years inside their daughter?
Th
ey were close, Miriam and Julie, weren’t they? Hadn’t she given Julie all the mothering that her own mother withheld from her?

And now what? Should she show the diary to Curly? Oh God, to think what he might do. Maybe she could talk to Julie herself; maybe mother to daughter she could get through to her, show her how this was just a phase, that she was ruining her life. But when she tried to imagine talking with Julie about such intimate things, such sensitive things, she couldn’t picture it. She wasn’t a racist, no, but that didn’t mean she had to give her blessing to her daughter’s . . . no, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it by herself. She and Curly both would have to sit her down.
Th
ey were still a family.
Th
ey’d have to work this out together.

“Curly,” she called downstairs, “Curly, come up here. You need to see this.”

C
URLY WAS HOLDING
the diary when Julie got home.

“Shacking up with schvartzas?” he shouted. “Overthrowing the government? Is that what we sent you to college for?”

“You had no right to read my diary,” Julie said.

“No right?” Miriam said, “We’re your parents.”

“Well, you don’t own me. I can do what I want.”

“Not in this house,” Curly said. “Not as long as you’re under my roof.”

“How could you do this to us?” Miriam asked.

“I’m not doing anything to you. I’m living my life.”

“And what we think,” Miriam sobbed, “what we care about, what other people think, that doesn’t matter to you, does it?”

Julie lunged for the diary and Curly pushed her back. He raised his hand to hit her, but Miriam caught it. “Curly,” she cried, “don’t hit her. Don’t you dare hit my daughter.”

She threw herself against him to hold him back.

“I’m not your daughter,” Julie said.

“You’re damn right, you’re not,” Curly shouted. “Get your things, get out. Go back to your schvartzas. You’re no child of ours.”

Julie ran up to her room, up the stairs past Miriam’s mother who was coming down.

“Oy Gottenyu,” she said. “You spoiled that girl, you ruined her. It serves you right.”

Miriam looked at her mother, just looked at her, her eyes bright with hatred. “Look what you’ve done to me! Are you happy now, you bitch, you fucking bitch?”—that was what Miriam wanted to say, but did not. Without a word, Miriam ran into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Th
e old woman hobbled back upstairs, panting, saying “Oy Gottenyu, oy Gottenyu.”

And it was over, staged like a scene in a musical, a tragic musical about abandonment, betrayal, revenge, though without the score, without the singing and dancing.

B
EHIND
C
URLY’S BACK,
Miriam wrote Julie every week. At first she wrote long letters about the importance of parental respect and how she and Curly had lived a lot longer than Julie and knew a thing or two about the world and how to live in it. Experience ought to count for something. And her experience had shown her in no uncertain terms that the world today just isn’t ready for interracial romance. It may not be right, it may not be fair; in a perfect world, we’d all be color-blind. But the world is anything but perfect, and you have to live in this world, not a dream world of commendable ideals, if you want to get ahead. Julie never wrote back. And Miriam’s letters got shorter. She told Julie she loved her and only wanted what was best for her. She said you may think your friends can substitute for family, but only your family would be there for you in a pinch. Eventually, all she sent were cards with news of Ethan and where he was performing and the reviews he had received. She never stopped believing, not for a second, that her daughter, her only daughter whom she missed so much, would come around to her way of thinking. Julie just needed to grow up a little bit, to learn a little more about life.

Maybe her mistake was to name her Julie in the first place. Maybe the name fated her to this, who knew? So maybe now she should think of her as Chava, the wayward daughter in the new hit musical
Fiddler on the Roof,
her banished waif; maybe that would make the heartbreak somehow less unbearable, at least while she listened to the songs or sang them to herself—for a little while, at least, she could be Golda, not Miriam, and her pain might then be singable, made beautiful by the songs, songs she couldn’t sing without becoming even more determined that her daughter never forget her mother, her family, her past. She would always be there for her; even now the door was open. It would never not be open, through thick and thin, in good times and bad. Every birthday, every holiday, any time she had a little extra, she sent a greeting card with “I love you” written on the bottom, and a check inside, a check Julie never cashed, and Miriam never stopped sending.
Th
at’s what a mother does.
Th
at’s what a mother is. Tradition. Tradition. Just like in the song.

Scene XVI

In the middle of the night, her mother was shuffling to the bathroom when she slipped and fell, breaking her hip. Even Miriam now realized her mother needed more care and supervision than they could give her.

A few weeks later, after Tula had entered rehab, Miriam decided to break the news to her that she would not be coming home, that they had found her a nice place in a nearby nursing home.

When Miriam arrived at the rehabilitation center, her mother’s door was closed with a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on it. Miriam opened the door a crack, and her mother yelled go away—she was sitting half-naked in her wheelchair while a nurse standing behind her held up one of Tula’s arms and sponged it down. With every stroke, loose swags of flesh swayed back and forth, like sheets on a clothesline, and Miriam shuddered.
Th
e nurse said it was bathtime and she’d bring her mother out in a jiffy when they were through.

Miriam took a seat in the waiting area beside the nurse’s station.
Th
e only magazines strewn on the table were on car racing, gardens, or cosmology. She picked up the one with a picture of outer space on the cover, its subject as far away as possible from a human body, and thumbed through it, trying to shake the image of her mother’s naked arm, its sagging drapery of flesh. She read about something called dark matter which, “though unseen, makes up more than 90 percent of the mass of the universe.” Outside the waiting area, she could hear one of the nurses on the phone, not wanting to be noticed, her voice soft but tense with what it was trying not to sound like, saying, “Honey, listen to me, honey. Honey. Honey. I am not your mother. I Am Not Your Mother.” Starlight, Miriam was reading, has to bend around that invisible dark matter, warping itself in order to be seen. “So even after we factor in the distorting effect of time and distance, the light-years of light-years that light has to cross to reach us, the visible shapes we see inside our giant telescopes look nothing like the shapes they are.”

On the wall facing Miriam, there was a picture of a white shark hanging next to a muted television on which Miriam saw an aerial view of a funeral procession or a rally—fists were shaking in unison, and if the sound hadn’t been muted she would have heard voices chanting, but all Miriam could hear around her was a gauze of medical talk and the occasional soft laugh or cry, and the nurse saying over and over, honey, honey, listen, honey, no you listen, while on the screen she continued looking up at the mass of people who were seething down below the camera like a cell seen under a microscope or, Miriam couldn’t help but think, like a dense coating of flies on something dead.

Th
en suddenly a red car, a convertible, was on the TV screen; it was driving itself down a city street and a black man was running after it and, all at once, he leapt into the air and floated feet first down into the driver’s seat and drove away, right to left, as if into the open mouth of the bright white shark.

Th
e writer of the magazine article described dark matter as a black canvas on which the visible universe is painted.
Th
at metaphor, the writer said, captures best what he called the para­doxical relationship of gloom to glitter. Miriam wondered if the canvas couldn’t also be the painter, the unseen the conjuror of the seen, as if the 10 percent that didn’t hide were being imagined by the 90 percent that did.

Dark matter. She was not his mother. She refused to be his mother.

“Here she is,” the nurse said cheerily, wheeling her mother, “fresh as a daisy. Time for exercise.”

Miriam followed them down to physical therapy where, as usual, her mother refused to participate.
Th
ey were surrounded by the old, the damaged, the infirm, all working with therapists at different stations in the room. One old woman was looking quizzically at her hand as if it wasn’t hers, as it tried to squeeze a yellow ball over and over, only the tips of her fingers twitching while the young black therapist encouraged her the way a mother would,
though she was not her mother,
almost singing, “
Th
at’s it, Lois, come on now, girl, you can do it, like you did yesterday.”

And nearby a man wizened to his very bones held fiercely to the rails of a small track down which he took unsteady small step after small step, like a toddler crossing wet stones—he was followed by another woman who held her hands out ready to catch him if he fell. Everywhere inside the room, the young, the healthy, the fortunate, were helping the old, the sick, the hobbled—everywhere the old, eyes burning, were pushing back with all their might inside their bodies against the dark matter their bodies had become.

Miriam found it beautiful to watch, and strangely hopeful: the room was like a vision of a world, a real world where terrible things did happen, yes, but where the sick desired only to be well, and where everyone who wasn’t sick was caring tenderly for everyone who was. But her mother refused all help or comfort, her silence the darkest matter, an impossible density nothing could get around without distortion, broken only by her saying—when Miriam told her about the nursing home and how beautiful it was and how often she would visit—“You are not my daughter, I don’t have a daughter, “ saying it over and over, as if she knew that Miriam would carry those words and that voice, inside her ever after, beyond rehab and nursing home and funeral, no matter whom she spoke to or where she went, that voice reverberating in her voice, reverberating in the ones she loved, the ones who loved her.

Th
e distorting effects of time and distance. Nothing the shape it was.