Screening Room (5 page)

“I think after eight p.m. would be OK,” said my father. Mr. Davis nodded and scribbled in his notebook. London, the dog, took a pen from the desk and deposited it in Dad’s pocket. My father was sitting on a stool in the corner of the room. “Hello, London,” Dad said and held out his hand, expecting the dog to raise his paw and shake hands. Instead, the dog said: “Ello—o—o. Ow arrr yooo.”

In the 1950s, the social life of my parents and their circle of friends revolved around Ridgeway Country Club, on the eastern edge of Memphis. Weekends began on Friday mornings. All of the women would tramp off to the beauty parlor on East Poplar to have their hair and nails fixed. Sweating under the blow dryers, they gossiped about inadequate husbands, sassy children, and bathing suits they’d kill to be wearing if they could lose “a few pounds.” Then, in the warmer months, the Lightmans and Binswangers, the Lewises and Bogatins, the Schroffs and Rudners, would drive to the club in various cars packed with golf clubs, tennis rackets and bathing suits, evening dresses and jackets for the cocktail hour, and screaming kids, who could be conveniently deposited at the club camp. A great deal of alcohol was consumed, not all in the evening. It was not frowned upon to spend the entire day beneath a pool umbrella sipping gin and tonics. For the more energetic, the fairways and clay courts beckoned. After a vociferous round of golf, with husband-and-wife teams sniping at each other, the men sat around naked in their locker room, the mirrors steamy from hot showers, and discussed what was being prepared in the kitchens for supper. Everyone lied about their wood shots. Colognes and aftershave lotions perfumed the air, while slightly used towels, casually dropped on the floor by the dozens, were gathered up by Willie, a wiry black man with gold-capped front teeth. As each fellow left
the locker room nattily dressed in sports shirt and slacks, Willie would say “Have a blessed day.” The women, in their quarters, fussed with their hair and carefully reapplied their makeup. In the evening, after the maids had come to collect the children, the crowd danced on the terrace, looking over their partners’ shoulders at the vast sleeping slopes of the golf course, silver in the moonlight.

Mother, perhaps employing the same agilities that made her a splendid dancer, developed a graceful golf swing and was much sought after to complete a foursome. She never hit the ball far, but she hit it straight. She was certainly the best-dressed player on the links. A scrapbook photo shows her wearing a flattering white blouse, stylish green shorts, beautiful golf shoes with a splash of green to match her shorts, and a white sun visor on her head. Years later, my father said to me, “I would watch her walking off the golf course, and she looked so cute the way her head wagged from side to side with each step.”

I remember Ridgeway Country Club as the place where I could sit at the pool bar and order endless Dr Peppers and Coca-Colas and charge them to my parents’ account. I could find wayward golf balls in the bushes and tall grass and, as I got older, ogle the beautiful daughter of the club manager as she floated around in her snow-white bathing suit.

It was at Ridgeway that Morrie Kahn got so drunk one night that he mistakenly slipped into the car with Missy Nelkin—who, also drunk, didn’t realize that the man slumping next to her wasn’t her husband and drove all the way home with him. No one knows what happened next, but neither party contacted the outside world for over an hour. Missy’s husband, Howard, was so engrossed in a card game that he didn’t even notice his wife had departed the club. Morrie’s wife, Barbara, meanwhile, searched high and low for her mate and eventually called the police. “Mild-mannered Barbara never did believe that her husband
had gone home with Missy by accident and went after Missy with a crochet needle.”

Hubert Lewis, the heaviest drinker of the group, threw his two iron into the fifth-hole pond one day after twice failing to hit over it. Next he threw in his driver and putter, then finally his entire set of clubs. After which he retired to the clubhouse, drank three Kentucky bourbons, and declared he’d had a “marvelous day.”

On Wednesday nights, Cousin Abi orchestrated a men-only poker game. “A long night of solemn recreation,” Abi called it. At 9:00 p.m., Abi would have corned beef sandwiches and cold beer served from the club kitchen. Then cookies and petits fours. At midnight, after the kitchen had closed, he ordered pizza and beer from Garibaldi’s on Yates Road. Everyone routinely overate. In the wee hours of the morning, bloated and ill, too embarrassed to call their wives, the card players would stumble into the men’s locker room and sleep on piles of towels.

Many of the civic and cultural leaders of Memphis were members of Ridgeway. These included people like Dr. Morton Tendler, president of the Memphis Surgical Society; P. K. Seidman, president of both the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and the Memphis Little Theater; Will Gerber, attorney general of Shelby County; Lenore Binswanger, the first woman to lead a campaign division of United Way; and Abe Plough, then building a huge drug company that would eventually turn into the philanthropic Plough Foundation. Not to mention my grandfather M.A., who was president of half a dozen philanthropic organizations and on the board of every institution that had a bank account.

Everyone was Jewish, of course. The other social clubs in Memphis, such as the Hunt and Polo Club, the Memphis Country Club, the University Club, and Chickasaw, strictly barred Jews from membership. In retaliation, the Jewish crowd stuck together and formed their own. Marriage, or even dating, between
Jews and Gentiles was discouraged. A sprawling oak tree on the grounds of Central High School, one of the oldest schools in Memphis, was called “the Jew tree” because all the Jewish students would congregate there during lunch break. “You were just more comfortable being with your own.” Attempts at rapprochement were made. The president of one of the leading universities in Memphis ended his commencement speech by exhorting the new graduates to “
be nice to Negroes and Jews.”

The majority of the Jewish population in Memphis was of the Reform branch, the most liberal version of Judaism. My own rabbi, an extraordinary man named James Wax, once told me that “
God needs man more than man needs God.” My family, and all the Reform Jews I knew, ate pork, often celebrated Christmas in addition to Chanukah (complete with Christmas trees), had Sabbath dinners combining fried chicken with matzo balls, and more or less assimilated into Christian society. Growing up, I never heard my father utter a single word of Hebrew. I never saw him wear a yarmulke. When a friend of the family went to the temple gift shop to buy a mezuzah to hang on her door, she said, “I want a mezuzah, but one that is not too Jewish.” Everyone in my parents’ circle was proud of being Jewish, but they didn’t want their Jewishness to show.

The other social activity of this crowd was the “puzzle hunt,” also carried out in the summer. Each evening’s host would have the responsibility of devising a number of challenging and “damn wicked” clues. The answer to each clue had to be the name of a person or business listed in the Memphis telephone directory. Upon guessing the answer, a player would look up the name in the telephone book and drive to the address given. If the answer was correct, the contestant would find a sign-up sheet nailed to a building or house at the address, write in his name to prove he’d been there, and pick up the next clue. The players grouped themselves into several teams, each team with
its own automobile, telephone book, and flashlight. The cars raced all over Memphis through the hot summer nights, roaring down Poplar or Union Avenue, often going to a wrong address and waking up innocent people, the players hollering and cursing and ripping pages out of their telephone books. In the early morning hours, the exhausted contestants would reconvene at the host’s house, refortify themselves with Jack Daniel’s or Johnnie Walker, and dance the rumba.

My father, I’m told, was a genius at the puzzle hunts, and he quietly concocted and solved the most brilliant clues. One of his clues was “If Paris’s main squeeze had been a Southern belle …” The answer was “Helen of Memphis,” a tony dress shop on Union Avenue. Dad was the one who came up with the answer to the difficult clue “GWIJKLMN.” The answer was “Washington,” arrived at by noting that the given letters are the alphabet from
G
to
N
, but with
W
substituted for
H
. This observation can be stated as
W
as
H
in (the partial alphabet of)
G
to
N
. Unlike the other players, Dad’s ingenuity seemed to get better and better the more he drank. “After a couple of hours,” he once said to me, “I was the only one who could still read.” For many years, I found small scraps of yellowing paper in our family car with words written in my father’s hand, odd-sounding names, juxtapositions, destinations in the night.

In the boiling summers of the American South, passions could not be contained. Franklin Gray, a man who once worked for Malco, was twice found naked with a particular female usher in the beverage storage room of the Crosstown theater. It is almost certain that M.A. bedded one woman after another while away at bridge tournaments. My grandmother Celia, a cultured woman of great bearing and warmth, may or may not have known of her husband’s infidelities, but outwardly she remained devoted to him. Regina, M.A.’s sister, had numerous husbands. Lennie, in her long career of affairs, slept in so many different hotel rooms that she frequently didn’t know where she was when waking in the morning and, even in her own house, would sometimes open the wrong door to the bathroom.

Some of my relatives slyly went off for “little drives” with their secretaries or bosses, calling back a week later to have someone water the plants. It was in such a manner that Lila’s first husband, Alfred, took his leave one morning in September 1976, on a little drive into the country with Genieve, his legal assistant. Alfred continued on to California, not bothering to call back about the plants, or the children. Lila was so embarrassed that she didn’t talk about what had happened for six months and kept Alfred’s mail on his desk, as if he would return any moment.

In my own generation, various cousins gave rollicking parties in the 1970s and 1980s with half-naked guests at the pool
passing joints and others indoors watching X-rated videos on large-format TVs. “Lust was more sacred than marriage.” There were divorces, estrangements, secret liaisons, remarriages, marriages to Gentiles, multiple sets of children. Still, the family has held together. M.A. had two sons and a daughter, all of whom married and multiplied, producing new Lightmans. His sister, Regina (Mamele), with multiple husbands, also produced many new offspring—including Lennie, who gaily followed in her mother’s footsteps. At last count, there were some one hundred and twenty descendants of Papa Joe living in Memphis and the South, sprinkled in time like the stony dust from his quarry.

It is late afternoon, and Aunt Lila has come down from her nap. She must be in her mid-eighties. As she walks into the room, all of the males instinctively rise from their chairs. Uncle Harry gives her a frisky pat on her bum, which she returns with a coquettish smile. “What a confabulation,” says Lila, using one of her favorite words and pronouncing it with a drawl so slow you can count each syllable lining up and waiting its turn to tumble out of her mouth.

Although only family members are here, Lila has put on her lipstick and eye shadow and is immaculately dressed in her customary outfit: a tailored pants suit, a pale pastel scarf, and a Louis Vuitton handbag on her arm. Lila has the face of a woman twenty years younger. When she hit sixty, she and Harry stole off to California for plastic surgery, returning after a month with diaphanous stories of the wonderful “golf.” Aunt Lila is the most proper woman of the family. No one would dream of using a crude word or raising a voice in Lila’s presence. In the warmer months, Lila will sometimes change her blouse four times a day to avoid the unseemly sight of sweat rings under her arms. Harry remembers an occasion when he and Lila and friends were out
driving one warm afternoon and desired some ice cream. The other husband ran into a shop, emerged with four vanilla cones, and off they went. While everyone slurped and licked, Lila stared at her ice cream in a state of paralysis. Her mother had taught her never to
lick
anything, and certainly not in public. Then the ice cream began to melt and drip. Eventually she had no choice but to begin taking large bites, which presented other problems.

Lila is the living embodiment of the white columns of southern mansions. Fresh from her nap, she pats down the collar of her blouse, sits correctly in one of the embroidered chairs, and quietly listens to the conversation. Dorothy, without being told, serves cocktails.

Cousins and their children and
their
children wander and crawl about, munching on crackers and snacks, laughing, spilling out into the dark living room with its hulking grand piano like some large sleeping animal. M.A., dead for fifty years but captured in a photograph on the card table, looks out with kindness on the confusion. In another era, just home from the office, he would have been stretched out on the sofa taking one of his famous twenty-minute naps, a newspaper over his head, his Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler crime novels on a nearby table. When I was eight and nine years old, I would pray that he would just
look
at me, turn his lofty head toward me and look at me for two seconds. Decades after he was gone, I would be in Chicago or San Francisco or New York, and a stranger would come up to me and say, “I knew your grandfather.”

At this hour of the day, the light in the sun room is smooth and thick. From the kitchen, Dorothy inquires about how many people will be staying for dinner. As if the kitchen were always stocked for two dozen guests. Lila walks into the pantry and relays instructions to Dorothy. “I hope y’all can stay for some nice roast beef,” she says, returning to her chair. Then she whispers, “
Please compliment Dorothy on the food. She isn’t the cook that Hattie Mae was, but she tries.”