Screening Room (15 page)

I have nothing to say to Nate’s fantastic stories.

“Being Duchess transformed Lila’s life. Before Memphi, Lila was one of the most timid Jewish women on the planet, one hundred percent
shemevdik
. The year she was Duchess, she met all the high muckety-mucks of Memphis, some of whom I wouldn’t care to break bread with, but that is not the issue. She and Alfred were invited to all the parties, and she absolutely
blossomed. Naturally, she remained the soul of southern charm and good manners. Later, she was invited to join the Memphis Garden Club. Can you imagine that? The Memphis Garden Club. She became head fund-raiser for B’nai B’rith, yada yada yada. You know all the rest. Within a month after Alfred left her, a half-dozen men were on their knees. Lila being Lila, she wouldn’t consider any suitors for another two years.”

Today, I am visiting my brother John in Collierville, about twenty miles southeast of Memphis. Several years ago, a live-in girlfriend persuaded him to buy this huge house, large enough for her and her two dogs, for her several children, and for their boyfriends and girlfriends. After John and his lady had a spat, she and her entourage moved out, and now John lives in this huge house alone. Although he misses feminine company, he actually prefers solitude. John has my father’s natural inclination to crawl into a hollow tree trunk and not be disturbed. Some of the other sons inherited my mother’s sociability, or at least her nervousness and volatility. From my mother I also received a compulsive need to make to-do lists and a general impatience with the world. From my father, a reflective side, an interest in books.

My mother, a Garretson, was the daughter of an uneducated self-made man and an icy, college-educated mother who wouldn’t kiss people, including her own children, for fear of catching germs. Although Mother’s father, Dave, possessed a warm and affectionate nature, he was always working like a demon in a box factory, trying to compensate for his lack of education, and he was unavailable. Consequently, Mother felt unloved growing up. When we watched movies such as
Swiss Family Robinson
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Mother would always comment on the devotion of certain characters to each
other. Later, when reading our school papers, she would suggest themes of loyalty and love. She craved touching and other physical demonstrations of affection. She was the source of passion in the family, the spurting artery. If we children withheld secrets from her or didn’t return love to her in sufficient quantities or forgot to lavish her with attention on her birthday, she would get a hurt look and sulk about the house. Like a twenty-four-hour weather station, she was constantly broadcasting her changing emotions.

My father was not able to give my mother the caring she pined for. His detachment was the quality that most injured my mother. Yet even during their worst moments, Mother and Dad respected each other. He valued her bold wrestle with life. She valued his intelligence, his integrity. Dad had an enormous knowledge of history. He read and read, mixing such books as Churchill’s three-volume account of World War II with spy novels by John le Carré—all of which he kept to himself. Every once in a while, as the six of us sat at the dinner table, a historical question would arise, we would turn to Dad, and he would quietly come forth with a flood of information and insight, Mother looking at him with admiration.

Mother also adored Dad’s low-pitched sense of humor. Upon insistent request, Dad would tell one of his ten-minute jokes, which he called “shaggy dog stories.” A shaggy dog story had no single punch line but was instead a series of amusing events connected by a loose narrative. I remember one story Dad called “The Cooshmaker.” An extremely brief synopsis would go something like this: At the beginning of World War II, a guy read in the papers that the navy badly needed men and would take any former servicemen back at their old rating and rank. This guy told the navy recruiters that he was formerly a “cooshmaker first class.” No one had heard of this position. The fellow went from one navy department to another, and at each place
the officers were too embarrassed to admit that they had never heard of a cooshmaker, so they sent him on to the next department. But they finally had to take him in as a cooshmaker, and he was assigned to a ship. One day an admiral comes aboard the ship and points to the cooshmaker standing by himself and asks, “Who is that man?” The captain replies that he is a cooshmaker first class. The admiral says: “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a cooshmaker. Can he give me a demonstration of his specialty?” The captain asks for a demonstration. So, the cooshmaker gets some metal and a blast furnace and a crane. With the crane, he lifts up a cylinder of molten lead and drops it in the water. The captain asks: “What does it do?” The cooshmaker replies: “It went
coosh
, and I can have another one up in fifteen minutes.”

My parents separated for a couple of months in the late 1970s. By that time, my brothers and I were all grown, finished with college, and launched on our own wandering paths. My parents never called it a separation. Mother simply said that she was going to New Orleans to visit an old girlfriend. For the first few weeks, Mother and Dad didn’t write or call each other. Then my mother wrote my father about an old beau she’d run into who had married a Catholic girl and converted from Judaism to Catholicism, then divorced her and married a Jewish lady and converted back to Judaism. Half of his children were Jewish and half Catholic. Dad replied with a funny cartoon drawing of my mother leading one of her dance classes and twirling about like a small tornado. Soon, Mother moved back, bringing with her some new recipes from Antoine’s and Galatoire’s.

It is a Sunday afternoon, and I am alone in the house I grew up in.

When the air conditioner went haywire this morning, my father departed for cooler locations. I remained. I wanted this heat. This heat is the true flesh of the South. It is part of the pace and the manners and the patience I’d forgotten. In physics, heat is motion and speed at the molecular level, but in humanity, and especially southern humanity, heat is slowness, deliberation, grace, a rounded kind of courtesy. I want to roll in it and taste it. I’ve stripped to my undershorts, and the sweat slowly drips down my bare chest and legs. In this heat, an ice cube melts in three minutes. The air has a thickness.

It is unimaginable that people could work in this heat. And indeed, outdoor construction in Memphis comes to a near halt in June, July, and August. Just a few summers ago, eight people perished from the heat in Memphis. One of the victims was a sixty-seven-year-old woman from New Jersey, visiting for the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. She expired at a recreational vehicle park near Graceland. Northerners are unprepared, even though some travel brochures warn that “summer heat is brutal in Memphis.” As it is in Birmingham and Oxford and New Orleans. It could be argued that the main character of Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love” is not the man or
the woman who meet in the restaurant, but the crippling heat of the South.

Aunt Rosalie, when her memory was good, used to regale the family with stories of attempted romantic adventures in the scorching summers of the 1940s. Before going out to stroll or to park along Riverside Drive, couples would drive to an “ice house” on Union and procure a big block of ice. This they would chip through the evening, pressing the melting pieces against their sweaty cheeks and bare arms. It took a twenty-pound block to get through an evening. When two amorous couples shared the same car, each pair would require their own cache of ice, one in the front seat and one in the back. On Sundays, with the ice house closed, couples would buy Coca-Colas in the filling stations and hold the cold bottles against their foreheads. Some summer evenings, Rosalie says, young people went swimming in their underwear in the little lake at Chickasaw Gardens, now populated by Tudor-style mansions and Spanish colonial haciendas. The bathers could vaguely see other similarly clad couples sitting on the far edge of the lake, faint patches of white in the dark. Even late at night, the temperature could be in the nineties. Young women swooned in the heat, their dates mistakenly thinking they’d been overcome by love.

Letting the sweat trickle down my body, I amble though the house. We children spent most of our time in the den, with its knotty-pine walls and shelves full of my father’s history books and a locked liquor bar. On Saturday nights, when our parents were at a party, my brothers and I would lie on the floor of the den watching television while Blanche cooked us hamburgers and french fries, the house smelling deliciously of hot cooking oil. The den was the site of some parental battles. Mother used to get so mad at herself for gorging in the middle of the night, she once asked Dad to lock up the ice cream in the fridge in the
liquor bar and hide the key. The next night, in that crazed state she got into, she ransacked the house while everybody was sleeping, found the key, and wolfed down an entire quart of pistachio ice cream. Then she got furious at Dad for not hiding the key well enough. That night, he hid the key really well. Next morning, she was in a foul mood, saying terrible things to everybody, and she snapped at Dad for hiding the key
too well
. “Honey,” he said, “where would you like me to hide the key tonight?”

The living room. Southern homes from the 1950s had gracious living rooms that no one set foot in—beautiful oriental rugs, embroidered chairs, and porcelain vases, all to be admired from an adjoining room but not to be disturbed by actual people. The only soul who entered the living room was the colored maid, to dust off the antiques. But during the year that my mother was dying of cancer, she insisted on spending evenings in this living room. All through that winter and spring and even the summer, she wanted a fire going in the marble fireplace. Dad would trudge in with armloads of wood from the backyard. Mother, wearing a bathrobe, her lush wavy hair gone from the chemical treatments, lay on the Queen Anne couch staring into the fire while the rest of us tried to talk about anything except what we were thinking.

My parents’ bedroom. Here I find the little metal table where my mother used to sit typing books for the blind on her Braille typewriter, an unusual machine whose keys created raised dots instead of ink. The paper was thick and beige-colored, like a manila folder. As I remember, each letter of the Braille alphabet is given by a particular pattern of raised dots, with a maximum of six dots in each pattern. Mother transcribed textbooks into Braille, and occasionally romance novels, all on a volunteer basis. She typed away feverishly on her own self-imposed schedules and deadlines, demanding of herself that she finish so many pages per week. When she fell behind schedule, she
typed through the night. Every couple of months, she would take a finished manuscript to be proofread by Miss Starks, a blind woman. I sometimes accompanied her. Miss Starks, an elderly lady with white hair and garish, outsize jewelry, lived alone. Her apartment was chaos. She knew exactly where everything was, but the place twisted and jangled with oddly placed objects and clashing colors. Miss Starks would run her hands over Mother’s face, and sometimes mine, before offering us tomatoes from her garden. When Miss Starks found mistakes in the manuscripts, Mother would correct her errors with a small wooden tool that pushed the wayward dot back to a level position. If Mother made too many mistakes on a single page, she would throw it out and start over. When I was growing up, discarded pages of Braille lay scattered everywhere about our house. I sometimes imagined a blind family moving in, feeling their way along the walls from room to room. Every once in a while, they would stumble upon a discarded Braille page and sink to the floor reading it, like a secret message from our family to theirs. Then, when they inevitably encountered the mistake, a nonsensical jumble of dots, a heated discussion would follow. Sometimes they got confused, sometimes they scoffed at the clumsy work of my mother, and sometimes they reinterpreted the mistake as a completely different word that gave the book a deep and mysterious meaning. I can almost hear the sound of the keys as Mother presses them with her fingers.

I walk up the stairs to my old bedroom. A bookcase still holds my dusty copies of Borges and Kafka, slim volumes of poems by Eliot and Frost, a folder of my own juvenile stories and poems. Near the dormer window is the large closet that served as my boyhood laboratory. In that alchemist’s den, I hoarded capacitors and transistors, spools of wire, photoelectric cells, Bunsen burners and Petri dishes, test tubes and beautiful glass funnels and flasks. I had two groups of friends, the artists and the scientists.
The artists read unassigned novels and poems, acted in the school plays, reacted impulsively to people and events. The scientists relished math, built gadgets, demanded logical explanations. I loved the dark and mysterious back alleys of the arts, but I also loved the certainty of science, the questions with definite answers. At times, I could feel something flip in my mind as I switched from one group of friends to the other.

Downstairs to the kitchen. Fifty years ago, Blanche stood in this kitchen teaching my brothers and me how to dance to gospel music. In a lovely voice she sang:

And as she sang, she swayed her enormous hips back and forth, jostled her shoulders with the perkiness of a seventeen-year-old girl, and clapped her hands from side to side. We were enthralled, and we began imitating her, four little boys in their pajamas shaking and gyrating to soul music. Then my mother walked in. She threw one glance at Blanche, put on her own record, and proceeded to give us a lesson in the jitterbug.