Screening Room (21 page)

A year or two after my mother’s suicide attempt, Dad confided in me what had really happened during the invasion of Salerno. He had been given instructions by his commanding officer to land men and supplies at a particular point on the coast. An enemy plane flew over and strafed his landing boats as they approached the shore. For defense, each boat had two machine guns mounted behind armor-plated shields, but the men had only seconds to spot attacking planes, and the artillery shells from the beach came out of nowhere. Dad had six landing craft under his command. Two miles out, an American patrol boat whooshed by and created a protective smoke screen for the incoming landing boats. When they emerged on the other side of the smoke, a half mile from shore—pandemonium. Just ahead, another landing craft was being ripped apart by shells. The boat was on fire, and bodies floated in the water. Two other landing boats were on fire. Through his binoculars, Dad could see a string of German tanks on a bluff above the beach. He heard screams; his men began shouting. He gave orders for his boats to weave back and forth in evasive maneuvers. A shell crashed into the ocean just ten yards in front of his boat. Another shell crashed close behind. Their position had been bracketed.

In a five-second decision, Dad signaled his six boats to turn around and to head for a less hostile beach two miles up the
coast. The coxswain shot him an intense look. Was it a questioning look? Or a look of disgust, an accusation of cowardice?

Two days later, Dad was called to the captain’s quarters aboard his ship. Please close the door, said the captain, a man of about fifty with white hair. Mister, your retreat probably cost us lives. We needed that road built. You disobeyed orders. Do you understand?

My father and I were sitting at a little restaurant in Overton Square. It was the late 1980s, and I was home for a cousin’s wedding. Dad said to me: “I wish I had died at that beach in Salerno.”

What I should have done right then and there was put my arm around him. I wonder if I really heard what he had just said to me. What could I have been thinking about at the time, at that moment? And I remember. I was thinking about moving to a different university to teach. What I actually did at that moment was listened to Dad and said nothing. Was I so wrapped up in my own little problems? Or was it that I had no outcroppings in his psyche to grab on to? I knew so little about his insides, and then suddenly I was confronted with this vast summation of his life, or at least how he felt about his life. How could I begin to fathom what he had just said to me? All of these years later, I am thinking: In a way, wasn’t he paying me the ultimate compliment by confiding such a highly personal thought to me? Wasn’t he expressing the truest closeness and intimacy possible? Or was he being selfish, unburdening himself of that terrible darkness without concern for what it would do to me? How can a parent tell a child that he wishes he had died before the birth of that child?

Or perhaps it was none of these things. Perhaps my father was insensible to the fact that he was sitting across the table from one of his children—after all, he had already demonstrated
great detachment from his family—and was simply alone on his solitary planet and uttering aloud the single most blazing truth of that planet. And now, so many years later, how can I come to terms with that devastating utterance still coursing through my blood? The horror of it. The desolation. I look at him now, a sweet man of ninety years, nearly deaf, silky white hair, and wonder if he would say the same thing of his life at this moment. I don’t have the courage to ask.

One afternoon in late 1962, black members of the Congress of Racial Equality showed up at the box office of Malco Theater and asked to buy tickets to the “whites only” section of the theater. They were politely refused. But my father realized that he had a situation to manage, and he had to manage it alone. Dad’s older brother, Edward, wasn’t interested in “getting involved with the race problem.” At this point in time, only a single business establishment in Memphis had been integrated: the lunch counter at Goldsmith’s department store.
Two years earlier, a white mob in Jacksonville, Florida, armed with bats and ax handles, had attacked people with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as they attempted to integrate a public school.
That same year, in Alabama, three black children were arrested and beaten in jail after they refused to sit in the colored section of a public bus.

To consider what he should do, my father met with a leader of the Memphis Bi-Racial Committee, Vasco Smith, a black dentist and the husband of civil rights activist Maxine Smith. Together, they devised a plan that would unfold over a four-week period in Malco’s flagship theater. One evening after the movie was in progress, while the lights were off, they seated a single black couple in the whites-only section. This subterfuge continued for a week. In the second week, two black couples were seated in the white section, again in the dark, and in the third
week, four couples. By the fourth week, any black patron could sit anywhere in the theater. To keep the scheme from exploding while in progress, Dad had to talk to the editors of the two Memphis newspapers and persuade them not to write any stories for a month. He also had to discuss the plan in advance with the commissioner of fire and police to make sure those powerful forces did not interfere. Both Dad and the commissioner kept the entire plan secret from the mayor of Memphis, Henry Loeb, who was a staunch segregationist. The idea was to do it all in a hushed manner and, at the end of a month, have integration a fait accompli.

The plan worked. After Malco Theater was integrated, all the other theaters in the Malco circuit were integrated, including those in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Kentucky. Other theaters followed. Movie theaters were among the first public spaces in the South to be integrated.

There was only one incident of protest. During a showing of
Cleopatra
, at the Crosstown theater in Memphis, a white patron poured his Coca-Cola down the neck of the black man in front of him. The situation was tense. Threatening phone calls ricocheted around the city. Finally, Dad defused the crisis by instructing the manager of the theater to buy the aggrieved fellow a new suit.

I learned about my father’s quiet pioneering work in civil rights only decades later, not from him, but from a book about the history of Memphis. One moment from this period remains in my mind. It would have been in the early 1960s, in the winter. My father and I had just driven to the Sears Roebuck department store on Poplar to buy some small item for the house. As we got out of our car, a cold rain fell from the sky. It was one of those ugly rains that penetrates your clothes and instantly chills your body. Your hands become numb. We raced from our car and
got to the entrance of the store just as a black family arrived—a mother, father, and two children, all of them drenched and shivering like us. As his young son looked on, my father opened the door for the black family and waited for them to enter before he did so himself.

It is my father’s generation that knows all the stories.

Today, we are gabbing in Abi’s house on East Parkway. Abi lives in the grandest house in the family, a real southern mansion built in the mid-nineteenth century, with ten granite steps up to the front door, a massive circular portico supported by twenty-foot-tall columns, an all-white exterior, forest-green shutters on the windows, and rooms the size of banquet halls. Under the portico is a fabulous mosaic floor embedded with a Confederate flag in colored tiles. Six feet away, a mezuzah hangs from the door frame. According to legend, one of the Union generals holding Memphis in the Civil War was sleeping in this house when Nathan Bedford Forrest raided the city in the wee hours of August 21, 1864. The general ran out of the front door in his nightshirt, and a young woman, wearing much less, fled from the servants’ door in the rear.

Just in the few weeks I’ve been visiting Memphis, Abi seems to have gained another ten pounds. And he hasn’t bothered to shave for days. His face has always been puffy, with a red birthmark starting behind his ear and dribbling down to his neck like red wine. Over the years, his hair has thinned but not entirely deserted him. He combs it straight back, so that you can count each individual strand, like the rows in a newly planted field.

Abi’s house is a cheerful shambles. Waddling through his vast disintegrating living room, Abi takes us out to his vast disintegrating
garden, where we sit among dead plants and crumbling terra-cotta pots. “You’ve come back for a while,” he says to me, grinning. “You’ve been living up the country for too long. We should fix you with a decent house in Memphis so you’ll stay put.” Abi, like his sister, Lennie, has always been especially affectionate toward me. When I was growing up, Abi took me to concerts of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, where I once heard Van Cliburn play Rachmaninoff’s
Piano Concerto No. Two
.

“What’s for lunch?” Abi bellows in the direction of the house. Six of us sit at a broken table.

A maid appears on the patio. “Egg salad sandwiches, Mr. Burson,” she says.

“I hope you didn’t use that fake, healthy mayonnaise,” says Abi.

“No, sir,” says the maid.

“And we’ll have some of those bananas,” says Abi.

“Them bananas is past prime,” says the maid.

“We’ll take them,” says Abi. He turns to his guests. “I love overripe bananas. Lennie, did Mamele ever tell you about Jake’s still?”

“Jake?”

“Jake, Mamele’s second husband. How soon we forget. Jake kept the still in the tool shed at the house on Merwin Street. It was a gorgeous thing with a big copper pot and a long copper spout that led into a copper barrel. Jake used to boil overripe, mushy bananas and molasses to make the whiskey.”

“Is that why Jake got put in jail?” asks Lennie, lighting a cigarette and taking long drags between bites of her sandwich. “Mamele was always a bit vague about the reason.”

“No, Jake got put in jail because he borrowed somebody’s car for a week to play the slot machines at a gambling hall in Hot Springs. The problem was he didn’t bother to tell the guy he was
borrowing his car. Mamele said she didn’t mind being married to a drunk and a cheapskate, but she wasn’t going to be married to a jailbird.”

“Ha. That sounds like Mamele. What a mother we had.” Lennie pushes her sandwich aside, half eaten, and lights another cigarette. “They make good sandwiches at Marciano’s. Your father goes to Marciano’s almost once a week,” she says to me. “Hazel drives him. He’s such a sweet man, your father. One morning a year or so ago, he woke up horrified that he had forgotten to leave a tip the night before. So he had Hazel drive him back there in a pouring rain. He got out of the car, shuffled into the restaurant on his walker, and apologized to the staff. Left a gigantic tip. The manager told me about it. Keeps talking about it.”

“Dickie was always like that,” says Lila. “When we were kids, he used to give me a quarter every week, put it in my school pencil box, because he thought I wasn’t getting enough allowance.”

“Once Dad forgot an entire engine,” says my brother John. “It drove Mother crazy.”

“Do tell.”

“We were driving to Destin, towing our sailboat. That was when the Battles and the Steffens and we all had boats, and we were all going to Destin together in a caravan, towing our boats. Fifty miles into the trip, at a food stop, George Steffens and Joe Battle started comparing their outboard engines. They were such hotshots. Dad made the mistake of mentioning that he had a twenty-five-horsepower Johnson, a huge engine for a sailboat, and George and Joe were outraged. They wanted to see it right away. When we went around to the stern of our boat, no engine. First, we thought someone had stolen the engine while we were stopped for lunch. Then we decided the engine had fallen off, so we all got in our cars, the Steffens and the Battles and their boats in tow, and retraced our drive along the highway, trudging back
toward Memphis. Mile after mile, for fifty miles, we didn’t see any boat engines lying on the side of the road. We drove all the way back to our house on Cherry. The three cars and boats crept up the driveway like a giant snake. And there was the engine sitting on the porch. Somehow, Dad had forgotten to load it into the boat. Mother was so embarrassed, she ran into the house and called a taxi and asked to be taken to Nashville. ‘Nashville is two hundred miles, Ma’am,’ said the driver. ‘That’ll cost you a hundred dollars.’ Which was a lot of money in those days. ‘Well, then, take me somewhere else,’ said Mother.”

We are interrupted by some loud banging. Hanging precariously out of a second-floor window, a workman is attempting to repair a broken gutter. “I didn’t hire him,” says Abi, sheepishly. “One of my neighbors did. He said he was going to start shooting if I didn’t fix up my house. Evidently, I’m lowering property values. Let him shoot already. I’m eighty-seven years old. So shoot me.” Behind us, the dead plants turn to weeds, which turn to bigger weeds and finally a swampy yellow morass at the back of the property. When Abi’s wife, Marilyn, was alive, she took care of the place, but Marilyn has been dead fifteen years. Abi’s daughter Lizzy lived in the house for a number of years and took care of it, but she moved to Virginia with her husband and children.

“Your mother almost married a fellow from Philadelphia,” Abi says to me.

“When?”

“That would have been sometime in 1946.”

“Wasn’t she going with my father at the time?”

“Going, but not gone. This other fellow, he was in the insurance business. He invited her up for a weekend in Philadelphia. They’d been dating on and off, as he had clients in New Orleans. So your mother went up with one of her friends from Sophie Newcomb, and the guy sees the friend and falls for her like a
ton of bricks, so that was that. Your mother had to take the train back to New Orleans by herself. She didn’t even get one good dinner in Philly.”

“The guy’s name was Wallace,” says Lennie. “He was a sensational dancer. But he always had three or four girlfriends in the air at once. He made Charlotte’s life miserable. That was Jeanne’s friend.”