Screening Room (10 page)
Authors: Alan Lightman
“You can’t do that, Princess Jeannie,” said Phil. “I don’t have insurance.”
Even though exhausted from lack of sleep, Mother refused to stop during breaks and practiced alone in a corner while everyone else rested and drank sodas. As each performance loomed on the horizon, she became more and more jagged.
When she began hyperventilating and fainted in the middle of a rehearsal, Phil threw up his hands and called my father. “I am only a dance teacher, you understand.” Dad raced over from his office. Meanwhile, Mother revived, staggered to her feet, and asked to continue with the rehearsal. “Absolutely not,” said Phil. They argued. Then Mother realized that she was causing a scene, and she fled to the dressing room. “I’m not paid enough to coddle these people fulla stuffin,” said Ursula, slamming down the keyboard lid. At which point my father arrived. After conferring with Phil in hushed tones, he approached the closed door of the dressing room and began talking sweetly to Mother, as he had in their courtship.
My mother and father had been married a dozen years. By this time, both of them knew they were grossly mismatched as a couple. They were both well-educated Jewish southerners from good families, but beyond that there were few points of contact. For the next thirty-five years, until my mother’s death, through storms of depression and a suicide attempt, solo sailing trips by my father to escape from his life, neither asked the other for a divorce. My mother couldn’t bear the shame, and my father had long ago learned how to live in the absence of air.
“Come out, honey,” my father entreated. “I’m going to take you home.”
“Why are
you
here, Dick? I’m in the middle of a dance rehearsal.”
“Honey, you’ve gotten yourself riled up the way you do.”
Three days later, at the performance, my mother danced flawlessly. Many of the family members were there, lured to this dubious precinct of Memphis by the promise of a wet bar at intermission. Jeanne has a gift, said Lennie. She looked at my father, understanding everything. Yes she does, said Dad. She has a gift.
M.A.’s screening room is long gone. As is M.A. himself, felled in late 1958 at age sixty-seven while attending a bridge tournament in Detroit. But that was only his physical shell. According to Nate, M.A.’s
phasma
still walks his old house, poking around in disheveled closets, whispering to Aunt Lila as she dozes in her bedroom upstairs. M.A.’s
phasma
, in fact, could easily have gone back in time and haunted Papa Joe, M.A.’s father and my great-grandfather. Fathers are doomed to haunt sons, who are doomed to haunt
their
sons, but the
phasma
can do all the haunting for everyone.
Papa Joe was the first Lightman in America. From immigration records, we know that he was born in a little town near Budapest, in Hungary, arrived in Boston in 1881 at the age of sixteen, and soon moved to Nashville, where there was a large Jewish community and a new synagogue called the Vine Street Temple. Other aspects of his life are shrouded in mystery. In particular, no one knows with any certainty why Joseph Lightman came to America in the first place. A great-aunt once said that he came to the United States to flee conscription in the Austro-Hungarian army. Another ancient relative tells the story that Joseph Lightman entered the New World by accident. According to this version of history, he was working as a mess boy on a trade ship that plied the waters of the Adriatic Sea. The captain of the ship had
a lady friend in Boston and, on one of his commercial voyages to Foggia, simply kept going around the coast of Sicily, west through the Strait of Gibraltar, across the Atlantic, and on to America, bribing the crew with liquor and stolen boots.
There are reliable accounts that Joseph dreaded machines of all kinds and refused to ride the electric trolleys in Nashville, preferring to go from A to B in a horse-drawn carriage. Given his phobia, no one knows how he first got from Boston to Nashville. Or why. There were certainly Jewish populations in Boston and New York. But if Joseph Lightman had not gone to Nashville, then he would not have met Fannie Neuworth. And if Joseph had not met Fannie Neuworth, then M.A. would never have been born. It stands to reason, therefore, that if M.A.’s
phasma
indeed went backward in time to visit Joseph, its first order of business would have been to make sure that its creator was created. But all of this is speculation.
The only member of the family who remembers Papa Joe firsthand is my ninety-year-old father, still living in his house next to M.A.’s old place on Cherry. “He was the first,” says my father, now almost deaf, unable to move about without his walker, and often unable to attend family gatherings. Although suffering from these and other infirmities, Dad never complains, and until a few years ago he regularly embarked on arduous sailing trips and exchanged appreciative glances with young women. He still has a full head of hair, silky and white. These days, his principal occupation consists of reading crime novels in his mechanized chair in the den or in the upholstered wingback chair in his bedroom. There he sits now, while I lean forward in the corner chair my mother used to inhabit. The room smells of medicines and talcum powder. Despite his age, Dad has the memory of an elephant. Name any film made from 1940 to 1985, the year he retired, and he can tell you the director, producers, and major actors. “
Grandfather came from some little town near Budapest,” says Dad. “After settling in Nashville, he started selling fruits and confectionary. Then he opened a saloon. It was an odd business for a man who never took a drink.”
Uneducated but on fire to make good, Joseph managed to get himself certified as a notary public and then elected as a magistrate of the Nashville courthouse. People called him Squire. According to family stories, women were so enamored of his good looks and foreign mystique that they stood near the courthouse, under their parasols, hoping he might glance at them and tip his hat. By this time, Papa Joe had changed his allegiance from Franz Joseph of Austria to Grover Cleveland of the United States of America. But, my father recalls, he still spoke with a guttural German accent, playing musical counterpoint to the soft drawl of the South.
“He went into stone contracting around 1897,” says my father. He pauses and adjusts his hearing aid, which has begun to screech. “A few years earlier, he’d married Grandmother, who was also from Hungary. The family secret was that they slept in separate bedrooms. Hers was on the first floor, where it was cool, and his was upstairs, facing the backyard. But they had a great affection for each other. And they did manage to produce two children—my father, of course, and Aunt Regina, whom everyone called Mamele. Mamele is where Lennie got her wild streak. Mamele went into Papa Joe’s old saloon sometime during the war, that would have been World War I, and drank half a dozen soldiers under the table. She was in her early twenties at the time.”
With some money from his saloon and a sizable loan, Joseph bought a stone quarry and began excavating fieldstone, granite, sandstone, and marble. “Grandfather always had stone dust on his clothes. When he came over for dinner, he would first stand
on the porch and pound his jacket and pants, sending clouds of dust into the air. Then he would begin sneezing. His sneezes sounded like a dog barking. Eventually, he would come into the house and sit at the table with an embarrassed look on his face.”
In 1905, Joseph made a trip to Memphis by train, a journey he dreaded, but he wanted to take the whole family to see the sights. Memphis shocked him. At that time, it had nearly the highest crime rate in the country—murders, drugs, gambling, prostitution. The murder rate was seven times the national average. “
Street walkers as thick as wasps in the summer,” wrote one newspaper. Joseph checked into a Downtown hotel with his family and didn’t realize the establishment was a brothel until two days later, when the madam got him alone in the lobby and put her hands on his crotch. An hour later, the family was out on the street with their suitcases, walking from one hotel to the next
looking for a decent place to stay, Fannie begging to go back to Nashville, Mamele wailing nonstop, M.A. a strapping young man of fourteen and spellbound by the Negro women leaning out of second-floor windows in their underwear and smoking cigarettes. At one point, M.A. ventured off on his own, and the family had to go searching for him down narrow streets of grimy frame houses sitting back on barren lots, rows of wooden balconies from which they could hear people laughing and cursing, vacant lots full of trash and scrap metal and broken whiskey bottles, a saloon on every corner. This was the decaying town that Faulkner would write about a few years later. Joseph was robbed the next day, and he departed immediately thereafter, swearing never to come back. And he didn’t. It wasn’t until after Joseph died, in 1928, that M.A. moved to Memphis.
Back in Nashville, Joseph made a name for himself in the construction business. According to his obituary, Joseph Lightman built some of the landmark edifices of Nashville, including the Hillsboro Theater, the post office, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, where he later served as president. Nashville relatives used to say that Joseph’s own house on West End Avenue was a showplace, a large brownstone with graceful arches in front and a stunning roof line.
I open the curtains to let some light into the room. Looking out the window, I can see M.A.’s house in the distance.
“Grandfather felt inferior because of his lack of education. Whenever he thought somebody was trying to put something over on him, he said this thing in Yiddish:
Du kannst nicht auf meinem rucken pishen …
I can’t remember the rest. It meant something like ‘Don’t pee on my back and tell me it’s rain.’ ” My father begins laughing, which sends him into a coughing fit. He reaches for one of the dozen medicine bottles on his nightstand,
and I offer him my glass of water. Then he smiles at me, something he never did when I was a child.
“Your glass or mine?” he asks. “If I wake up tomorrow with the flu, then I was drinking out of your glass. If you wake up in the morning feeling like you’re ninety years old, you were drinking out of mine.” He takes two pills and sips from the glass, slowly and delicately as if tasting a fine wine.
“You’re looking good today,” I say.
“What?” He can’t hear me.
“You’re looking good,” I write on his notepad.
“Thank you.” He continues: “Grandfather’s contracting business did OK until World War I. Then it turned bad.” The sudden shortage of manpower caused the price of labor to skyrocket. Evidently, Joseph was obliged to complete a number of projects negotiated under much cheaper costs, and he went bankrupt. He and his son, M.A., personally had to work in the quarries to pay off the debts. This was just about the time M.A. was trying to get started in the movie business.
I try to picture M.A. wearing work clothes and boots, struggling to push a wheelbarrow laden with stone. Was this humiliating penance a motivating force? Or the source of his strength? Or some other festering thing that later created the
phasma
?
A photograph of Joseph Lightman from around 1924, his debts repaid, shows a baldheaded man with a mustache, dressed in a crisp white shirt, suit, and tie. His eyes possess a quiet dignity. “He was a kind man,” says my father. “He worked
like the devil, but he was kind. He once gave me a BB gun because Dad had given Eddie a gun and Grandfather thought I should have one too.”
My father is tired. I help him into his bed, holding his shoulder and hand. Inexplicably, his hands have remained the hands of a young man, slender and smooth, while the rest of his body has wrinkled and sagged with ninety years of living. After arranging his covers, I kiss him on his forehead. In recent years, he has shown a sweetness that I never noticed before, and he asks about what his sons are doing. He has uttered more words to me today than I can ever remember. Bits of Papa Joe’s story Dad has told me before. I wonder how much I have just now filled in myself and how much he actually said. Has he really been talking? Or instead napping in his chair, as all of us do in this woolen summer heat? I am so accustomed to layering his silence, attempting to create a thickness from gossamer. For a few moments, I listen to his breathing as he sleeps, then walk out of his room.