Screening Room (2 page)

The house was built around 1900, when this part of Memphis, ten miles east of Main Street, consisted mostly of farmland. In
those days, the big houses were owned by the cotton merchants. People said you could always tell a cotton man by the lint on his trousers. In the 1940s and 1950s, many of the power brokers of Memphis and Nashville—mayors and governors, captains of industry—came to this house to visit my grandfather. In recent years, the neighborhood has been chopped up into half-acre lots with fake southern mansions crammed side by side. But this modest monument remains. Soon, it too will be gone.

After a late lunch of fried chicken and pecan pie, we sit in the sun room, not the coolest place in the house but the brightest. Light floods through the enormous picture window, while two upright fans noisily labor at reducing the harsh heat. My grandparents, and then Aunt Lila and her husbands, Uncle Alfred and Uncle Harry—all of whom lived in this house—never bothered to install air-conditioning, strangely reasoning that artificial air would aggravate their allergies. At the moment, Lila is upstairs napping. “We need our beauty rest,” she said at exactly 2:00 p.m., as she does every afternoon at that hour, and walked upstairs to her bedroom. When I first arrived, at noon, Lila took me through the house, her high heels clicking on the polished wood floors. One of the rooms I’d never seen has an elaborate makeup counter and two closets filled with stage costumes, as if a theater company were in residence and only temporarily away.

Still hung over from last night, Lennie sits gloomily on the embroidered couch, wearing one of her slinky 1940s-style dresses and a white flower in her hair. As far back as I can remember, Lennie’s hair has been a wild tangle of seaweed, perennially blonde.

Lennie’s brother Abi reclines on the sofa in the dark living room, within earshot. As usual, Abi ate far too much lunch and is resting in a semi-torpor, like a python that has just eaten twice its own weight in small animals. When Abi was younger, he had
the body and physical power of Marlon Brando. But his muscle has all gone to flab. Now he weighs more than three hundred pounds and needs help to put on his socks. For years, Abi has cared nothing for his appearance—he routinely goes out to restaurants in his bedroom slippers, and he shaves or doesn’t on a random basis. However, his eighty-seven-year-old mind still cuts like a knife.

“You remember the parties we used to have at Justine’s?” says Lennie. “On the first night the Metropolitan Opera was in town.”

Abi grunts an acknowledgment from the next room.

“The opera people came on a train from New York. They wouldn’t stay anywhere except at the Peabody. They didn’t think the illiterate folks down here deserved an entire week, so they came to Memphis for three days, then went to Dallas for three days. But they did like a good party. When they got drunk they started singing arias.”

Dorothy, the black maid who works for Aunt Lila and Uncle Harry, tiptoes into the living room toward the comatose form of Abi. “Mr. Burson, you wants another piece of pecan pie?” Dorothy whispers. “I got plenty.”

“No, no,” says Abi, protesting too much.

Dorothy leaves a piece of pie on the table by the sofa.

At my insistence, Uncle Harry begins recounting the early days of the family business, the movie business. Every once in a while, Lennie will correct him, they argue for a few moments, and then they compromise on some version of the truth:

“You should have mentioned that Papa Joe lost all his money in a card game when he first arrived in Nashville.”

“What? What?”

“Turn up your hearing aid, Harry.”

“Shush.”

“
Shush nothing. Turn up that thing so you can hear. I said that Joseph Lightman lost all his money in a card game way back when.”

“He did not. He hid his money in a violin case and then accidentally left it at a railroad station.”

“You seem cocksure of your facts for someone who’s been in this
famille
only a piddly thirty-five years.”

“I won’t dignify that remark …”

Then Abi, from his horizontal throne in the next room: “A dream of what thou wert, a breath, a bubble, a sign of dignity.” Evidently Abi has committed Shakespeare’s plays to memory.

Lennie: “Papa Joe never stepped onto a train in his life. He was suspicious of all internal combustion.”

Uncle Harry is an engaging raconteur, but my attention span has been jeopardized by my second piece of pecan pie. As I lick my fingers, I fondly remember Blanche, the black woman who worked for my parents for decades, going out to the backyard in her white uniform and plucking pecans from our stately pecan tree to make a pie—after which my mother would chastise her for adding too much water to the dough, or not enough water, Blanche would make a face of frustration and helplessness, and my mother would write down instructions she knew Blanche couldn’t read.

Harry continues, even though a brother and a cousin have disappeared to the kitchen to rummage for something more to eat. According to family legend, my father’s father, Maurice Abraham Lightman, known as M.A.—the son of a Hungarian immigrant and trained as a civil engineer—was working on a dam project in Alabama one day in 1915 when he looked out of his hotel window and saw a long line of people waiting to get into a movie theater across the street. In those early days of film, many movie theaters were simply converted storefronts with a projector installed at the back of the room and folding chairs for
the audience. M.A., who fancied himself more a showman than an engineer, decided it might be time to try the movie business.

The next year, at the age of twenty-five, M.A. opened his first theater, called the Liberty, in Sheffield, Alabama, where he played the original, silent version of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
. The next few years sputtered as M.A. took time to help out his father, Papa Joe, in the construction business. M.A. opened the Majestic in Florence, Alabama, then built the Hillsboro Theater in Nashville. In 1929, he moved his family from Nashville to Memphis and began acquiring and building cinemas not only in Alabama but also in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Missouri. This was the moment when new technology allowed movies to include sound. Over the years, M.A. managed to stay ahead of his competitors on each innovation in motion picture technology and created a movie-house empire of some sixty theaters. Most of my male relatives have worked in the empire: my father, three uncles, an occasional brother or two, several cousins, the children of cousins.

“M.A. wrestled at Vanderbilt, you know,” murmurs Lennie from the couch, where she’s been carefully cradling her head. “When he went into a room, he would ask the biggest man there to lie on the floor, and M.A. would lift him up by his belt. I once saw M.A. do push-ups with one arm.” She looks up and stares out into the living room, as if expecting the great man to stride through the arched doorframe. Women worshipped my grandfather. Although I was only ten when he died, I remember him vividly as barrel-chested and square-jawed and handsome. He smelled of Old Spice cologne. Although he was probably less than six feet tall, my grandfather seemed far taller. Even photographs of him, from his younger years, convey the physical power and striking good looks that made new acquaintances think he was a movie star. M.A. was the person I wanted to be
when I grew up. He was the master of the universe, the undisputed king of the family. It was M.A. who imagined and built the business on which four generations lived. At age forty-three, he swam across the Mississippi. For a number of years, he was president of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America. He was founder and president of the Variety Club in Memphis. He was president of the Jewish Welfare Fund. He was president of the Memphis Little Theater and loved to act in plays himself. He was a bridge player of extraordinary cunning and skill. At his peak, in the 1940s, M.A. Lightman ranked among the top bridge players in the world.

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photo credit 2.1
)

I hear squawking and look up to see a cage of parrots in the little pantry room leading to the kitchen. There have always been parrots in this house. I have dim childhood memories of birds fluttering from lampshade to lampshade, sometimes roosting on the teak card table in the corner of the room. At that table, my grandfather played casual bridge games with friends, like a jet plane taxiing for three hours on the runway. I once sat beside him at such a game. After the first round had been played, he turned to me, then eight years old, and loudly announced with perfect accuracy the twelve hidden cards held by each of his two opponents. They didn’t have the heart to continue the game.

As Harry goes on with his stories, my mind wanders to the enchanting room upstairs with the closets of stage clothes. M.A., dressed as a sea captain, sits grandly at his chart table, mapping out his next business conquest. Blanche and my mother both
serve him tea, but their stations in life are reversed. Blanche wears the clothes of a refined southern lady, while my mother is dressed in a maid’s uniform. Blanche has just sharply asked my mother to put more hot water in the tea. “Yes’m, Mizz Blanche,” says my mother with her eyes lowered. Then my grandfather rises from his chair, seven feet tall. Oblivious to the two women, he marches from the room.

Although the sun has slid from the window, the room still blazes with heat. Four of us hold cool iced-tea glasses against our faces, as if we were performing some group pantomime in a game of charades.

In midafternoon, Lennie’s fifth husband, Nate, stops by to pay his respects. Tentatively, he shuffles toward the couch where Lennie slumps in a heap of silk fabric and blonde hair. She looks up, notices him, and waves him away.

Nate is the most Jewish member of the family. Not only was he bar mitzvahed. He spent ten years studying the Kabbalah, beyond the call of duty even for an Orthodox Jew. To Lennie’s annoyance, Nate wears a yarmulke every waking hour of the day, seven days a week. Nate will not leave the house without his yarmulke, which he fastens to his bald head with double-sided Scotch tape. Lennie has been known to hide Nate’s yarmulke in the morning so that she can watch as he searches through every drawer and closet to find it. After ten years, no one in the family can divine why Lennie ever took up with Nate. All of her previous husbands were handsome, while Nate has bulbous eyes that protrude like a bullfrog’s, sweaty hands, and a bad limp from a car accident in his youth. Still, he has a sweet disposition, and he offers her companionship. And Lennie was no prize herself when she married Nate at
age seventy-five. He’s a half-decent cook, Lennie says, and he always opens the door for her.

“Have I missed anything?” says Nate, after a few moments of silence. Nate has quietly asked Dorothy if any pecan pie remains in the kitchen.

“We were talking about M.A.,” says Uncle Harry.

“Ah, yes,” says Nate.

“And the beginning of the family business.”

“Mysterious circumstances,” says Nate. “Mysterious circumstances.”

“Mysterious to you, my sweet,” says Lennie.

“The facts are the facts.”

The year is 1916. M.A. is burning to buy his first movie theater, but he has no money, nor does Papa Joe, unable to collect payments from some derelict clients. “Why in God’s name do you want to own a movie theater?” says Papa Joe in his heavy Hungarian accent. “Do something useful. Aren’t you trained as an engineer? Build roads. Help me in the quarry.”

“I want a movie theater,” says M.A.

The next morning, M.A. packs two clean white shirts and a tie in his raggedy college suitcase and takes the train to New York, to visit Papa Joe’s older brother, Jacob. Uncle Jacob, childless, has money from his confectionary in the Lower East Side, but he has never shared fifty cents with the rest of the family, and his Gentile wife would rather convert to Judaism than set foot below the Mason-Dixon line.

M.A. has never been to the North before. He has taken road trips in a borrowed Whiting Runabout to Knoxville and Jackson and Memphis, and even as far as Lexington, Kentucky. But New York City is an ocean that floods his mind—the tall buildings
that punch holes in the sky, the rows upon rows of apartment windows, the scissoring crowds on the streets, the peddlers and shops, the automobiles, the shouts and the blares. He notices everything. He hears the wild thunder of time and the future. After dinner, M.A. outlines his business plan to his uncle and delicately asks for a loan. They sit in the little living room with photographs of railroad stations on the wall, the strong odor of Uncle Jacob’s cigar, the sounds of honking on the street. Nothing doing, says Jacob. M.A. pleads. He is wearing his white shirt and his tie, and he hates asking anybody for anything. Uncle Jacob offers him a glass of port, which M.A. politely declines. All he needs is $1,500, he says. He is certain that he will be able to pay back the money within two years, with interest. People want to see movies, says M.A., strong and eager and leaning forward in his chair. I’m sorry, says Jacob. I am not a charity. We have our own expenses, says Jacob’s wife. I am not asking for charity, says M.A. He is standing now, enormous. He fills up the room. He and his uncle exchange unpleasant remarks. You shouldn’t have come, says Jacob, fear in his voice.