Life Is Not a Stage (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

The Faith of a Child

P
lease, can I go home?”

When I got the news of my father’s death, I asked for a leave to travel back to Indiana. His funeral was to take place in two days. I had just been cast in the lead in the last national touring company of
Oklahoma!
We were set to open the next night in New Haven. It was the big break, a dream come true for an eighteen-year-old girl. It had come only months after I had moved to New York City to study theater and hopefully to find work.

At the first opportunity during the rehearsal, I had gone over to Jerry White and Richard Rodgers. The director and the composer were seated in the audience of the empty theater in New York. “We don’t have an understudy for you yet, and the place is sold out,” Mr. Rodgers told me in sympathetic but no uncertain terms. He was
the
Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the legendary duo behind such other Broadway classics as
The Sound of Music
,
The King and I
,
South Pacific
, and
Carousel
. Jerry White told me about all the publicity they had done. There was a lot riding on this first performance. They went out of their way to tell me how bad they felt about the situation. It made me feel even worse, which almost immediately manifested in a painful medical problem that made me wonder if there was some divine payback as a consequence for my actions. Strange how the mind works, but I’ll get to more on that later.

Ironically, I knew that this dilemma, as gut-wrenching as it was at that moment, was within the natural flow of an improbable, sometimes horrific, and often miraculous young life. Despite the abandonment, neglect, and poverty I experienced as a child, I had an abiding faith I would do better than just survive. I knew with absolute certainty that everything was going to be okay in the end. I felt the undeniable presence of a guiding and protective hand from a higher power above. This gave me a sense of optimism, as if my spirit were still free in spite of my circumstances.

As I look back on that time, I wish I could recapture the unswerving faith of that child. Unfortunately, my doubts grew with time as life circumstances and relationships became more complicated and challenging. Thankfully, my spirituality remained intact and prevented me from the kind of nihilism people often develop in that situation.

That I was standing on the rehearsal stage with this legendary composer was, in my mind, a miracle of sorts. Only a few years earlier, when the conditions around me were at their worst, I would escape from my house to go to the local movie theater. Musicals like
Easter Parade
were my favorite. I would sing and dance on the street all the way home, mimicking the tunes I had just heard.

I decided at a very young age that performing was what I wanted to do. To make it happen, more was required than just natural talent. To go beyond singing in church or in the shower, a performer needs an endless supply of grit, determination, and a passion for performing. If I was having a bad day or things were just not going my way, these qualities helped keep my priorities in focus and made me more tenacious in my commitment.

For many reasons, it would have been impossible to tell Mr. Rodgers that my family came first and they would have to get along without me. Mr. Rodgers’s “the show must go on” mentality was not to be violated.

Naturally, I felt tremendous guilt about the situation. But secretly, deep down inside, there was a sad truth. I was relieved that I didn’t have to go to the funeral. True to character both in life and now in death, the situation with my father, Joseph Henderson, was both complicated and problematic.

“Gal, rub my back,” my father had said to me one of the last times I saw him alive. Since I was the last of his ten children, he called me “Gal” rather than rattling off the long list of names of all of his girls to remember it.

A dirt-poor tobacco tenant farmer, my father was nearly fifty years old and my mother twenty-five years younger when they married. Both of my parents were from Kentucky and each came from very large Catholic families. One plausible explanation why my father married so late was that he had spent years taking care of his immediate family. That responsibility also turned him into quite an accomplished cook, something I’m sure would have given him a more successful and fulfilling career than growing tobacco and tomatoes for the canning factory. We maybe never had all the delicacies, but he sure knew how to whip up a great vegetable soup from whatever was handy or plentiful.

By the time my next oldest sister, Babby, and I were born, my father was getting close to seventy. The family had moved across the Ohio River to a small farm in Dale, Indiana. One of my earliest memories from that time was going out to the fields to “worm the tobacco.” And if you ever had to worm tobacco, you wouldn’t forget it either! First of all, working with tobacco is very gummy. The resin sticks to the little hairs on your arms and it felt highly unpleasant when anything would brush against us—our skin became like Velcro. My brothers and sisters and I would have to inspect every leaf. When we found the green, two-inch creatures holding on to the back sides of the leaves with their many legs, we’d pick them off, pull them apart, and throw them on the ground.

One day, my brothers said that they’d give me a dime if I bit the head off of one of the worms. I did it. I got the dime. It tasted as you might expect, but it was worth it. I went out and bought some candy with it. They also challenged me to do things like carry a big canister of coal oil from the little store. We used it to fuel the lamps that lit our house at night. I was competitive in nature even back then. The canister must have weighed more than I did at the time, but I dragged it for the required distance. The end of the dares officially came another day when they asked me to swing from one rafter to the next in the barn. I fell and almost killed myself, and that sure scared the heck out of them.

During my early childhood, we moved from that farm to another farm, and to a successive number of homes (possibly to evade the landlords due to unpaid rents?). Finally, we ended up in a small house in Rockport, population 2,400. By then, most of the other eight children had grown up and moved out of the house, my older sisters having married and my brothers gone off to the war. In the end it was just Babby and me. She was three years older and sported a short dark Buster Brown hairstyle of the time. Babby’s real name is Emily, which was what I called her then. The nickname Babby came much later. In our early twenties, we were goofing off role-playing from a wonderful film we had just seen called
The Little Kidnappers
. The young actors had Scottish accents, and we loved the sound of their voices. So I played the “Grandmommy” with my faux Scottish brogue, and Emily was the baby, pronounced “Babby.” Babby has stuck to this day, but mercifully not Grandmommy!

My father was a big and powerful man in the eyes of a little girl, but by the time I reached high school age I had surpassed him in height. He had dark eyes and a nice smile, and he was considered to be a handsome man of strong Irish stock. Both of his parents and their families happened to travel together on the same boat from Ireland to America, but met only after they were settled in their new country. He had been bald since his late twenties, with only fringes of hair on the sides, so he was never without his favorite hat. The worn-out fedora had a ring of dried sweat from his being in the hot sun while he tended the fields. He smoked a pipe, and his clothes, which were never so clean to begin with, were pockmarked with burn holes from embers that would fall from his pipe when he fell asleep in his chair. As he dozed off, his suspenders would sag and his dime-store eyeglasses would go down the bridge of his nose.

I could see the good in my father, but his alcoholism had a devastating impact on himself and his family. When he wasn’t drunk, he could be the sweetest, kindest man. He could stay sober for weeks and months, and remarkably, sometimes for a whole year. During those tranquil periods, he would get us up to go to mass every Sunday morning. He loved to read, especially books about Wyatt Earp and the Wild West and Abraham Lincoln.

He was also a man full of considerable wisdom and advice, which he’d share with Babby and me in a repetitious manner that made it stick. When we heard that familiar tone in his voice, we would roll our eyes and say under our breaths, “Here it comes again.”

“Gal, now, you know, you have to be careful,” he would tell us. “You’ve got to watch your reputation and your character. We don’t have much money and we don’t have many material things, but you’ve got a great reputation and a great character. People can take your money and your possessions, but they can’t take your good reputation and your character.
You give that away
.”

Perhaps, in the final analysis, his words to us had more impact on us than we could have imagined at the time. It is one possible reason among others why, despite the harsh poverty and other difficult circumstances, all ten of his surviving children (one of my siblings died before I was born) went on to lead very productive lives. I’ve used what I have learned in my life and as a parent of four children myself to look back and understand both my father and my mother with a clearer perspective. The sadness and disappointment I had in my early years diminished gradually with time. It has made it easier to regard them not just with forgiveness and compassion, but also with a degree of awe and admiration.

My father was dealing with a terrible disease, although it was hardly recognized as such back in the 1930s and 1940s. I know his condition really bothered him. But what could he have done short of abstaining? There were no twelve-step programs or other social services in our community that addressed this problem. Alcoholics Anonymous was only just getting started at the time.

When he was drunk, all hell would break loose. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old when I first noticed that there was something terribly wrong. At that time, we were still living on the farm. One night, I heard my mother yelling at my dad. I snuck close by the door and looked in through the crack. My mother was standing by an ironing board, shaking her finger at him. My father was sitting in a chair in his long underwear. He looked so sick and so sad. Then he started to cry. Seeing my father in that condition was devastating. It just about killed me.

My mother, too, would drink with my father from time to time. On Saturday nights, they’d go uptown to a saloon. Babby and I would be outside waiting on a bench for them to come out. Invariably, once home, they’d get into a fight. I worried about my older sister Ilean, who was out on a date with a new boyfriend. “Ilean’s going to be home soon,” I’d say, going into the kitchen where they were yelling at each other. “He [the boyfriend] is going to hear you. He won’t like us. He won’t like Ilean. Please don’t fight.”

“Think nothing of it,” my mother snapped back in her customary rhetoric. “We’re fine. Just say your prayers and go to bed.”

My mother was not an alcoholic. She had more self-control. I think she went along with it just to try to cope with him. As crazy as it appeared to me, maybe it was their form of relaxation, a form of self-medication against the pressures and strains of their life together. They didn’t have the skills to channel it in a healthier way. Nevertheless, when my mother was drunk, usually on beer, I learned to stay out of her radar range. Years later, when we’d go out to a fancy restaurant, I’d cringe every time the waiter would ask her what she wanted to drink. “Bring me a beer. In a can.”

If things were not interesting enough, my father was also a moonshiner. He made a corn whiskey that was popularly known back then as white mule. During the years of Prohibition, my father told my older sister, “Pauline, gal, if anybody comes asking if we’ve got any white mule, tell ’em, ‘Yeah, it’s standing there way out in the pasture.’” He also brewed his own beer.

When my father would go on a binge, Babby and I would find empty bottles everywhere, in the house and piled in the garage. He could have a beer or two without a problem, but once he got a whiff of hard liquor it was all over. It was hard to say what would set him off. I once asked the great comedian Jackie Gleason about this issue when we were having lunch one day, and he brought up the subject of his problems with alcohol. “Yeah, I drink a lot,” he admitted. I asked him if there was any pattern to when he got drunk. He laughed. “No, any excuse will do. A leaf has fallen from the tree. There’s a cloud in the sky. Better have a drink.”

When my father would go on a toot, Babby and I would take turns taking care of him. In this state, he would beg us to go uptown and get him a beer. We would walk into a bar, I’d ask the bartender, and most of the time they obliged. But we found that the best way to slowly get him off the stuff was to give him a protein cocktail of whiskey with milk and a raw egg.

“Come on, Daddy, you can’t keep doing this,” I’d tell him, imploring him to straighten up. Lying down on the sofa as he did for days on end, he looked sick and melancholic. In response, he sounded almost sweet and apologetic. He would tell me what most drunks say. “Oh, Gal, it will be okay. Now don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”