Then and Now (2 page)

WE SOON MOVED
again, this time into a third-floor apartment on Memorial Drive. It was a very nice apartment but just one bedroom, so I suppose we all slept in one room. This was the continuation of lots of moving around for me; and until I found my present apartment, in 1976, I never lived in any one location for more than five years.

It seems my parents' marriage never really recovered from Pat's death, and next to my sister's death, the most indelible memory of my childhood is that of my father leaving us three years later. He is standing at the door of our apartment on Memorial Drive, and he turns back just before he leaves. My mother is hysterical. A jagged, flailing lump of hysteria. I'm on the couch, kicking and screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, don't go, don't go.” I don't remember anything he says as he walks off. The door shuts behind him and my life is changed forever.

For some reason I never completely understood, my first therapist said he didn't believe the scene as I remember it. Some years ago, however, I was undergoing hypnotherapy, which I have found to be very helpful. I dutifully counted back from ten, and as usual I was not feeling hypnotized but thought I was just “going along with things.” All of a sudden I saw myself walking down a brick sidewalk with a picket fence on my right. I blurted out: “I'm a man.” Then: “I'm my father.” I was shocked. This had never hap
pened before. Suddenly I was my father standing in the doorway, looking back at the scene I've described above. I saw the entire event from his point of view and understood deeply that he had to leave. I felt his pain at leaving me but I knew he had no other choice. His intention was not to leave me. He had to break away from my mother.

It was quite a breakthrough, but the issue of abandonment remains. Decades later, when I would go out with my musical director/accompanist Wally Harper to see a concert or play, I'd want to talk about it after the show, but he would have already planned to take off to attend some late party. Wally's leaving to attend a party was very hard for me to take. I really believe it's because of the childhood abandonment issues. Six decades had passed, but the feeling remained.

My father had walked out, my mother had already told me that I had, in effect, killed my sister, and when, on the same afternoon that he left I wanted to go out to play, my mother held my shoulders and looked at me sternly.
Under no circumstances
, she said,
was I to tell anyone what had happened
. There was still a sense of shame about a broken marriage, and at age six I felt ashamed.

Just to add to the weight of events, my father had recently been in the hospital for a minor hernia operation, and my mother told me that he'd had an affair with one of the nurses taking care of him. An affair right after abdominal surgery? True? Who the hell knows! Appropriate information for a six-year-old? Hardly! And why would anyone convey all that to a very young child in the first place? Later on the night my father left, my mother brought me into her bed. And that never changed. I slept in bed with my mother every night until I was twenty years old and decided to make New York my home.

When my father left, my mother laid another burden of guilt upon me. She said, “If Pat had lived, your father would not have left.” So, according to my mother, Pat could have kept my father with us; I was responsible for Pat's death; so I had screwed
that
up as well. After Daddy left, whenever I was going to see him, my mother told me I should beg him to come back to us. If I did it right, she said, I could convince him to come back. Of course he never came back, and I always felt that I had failed miserably again. If I had to give a color to my life during the years before my daddy left, it would all be a golden sunny yellow. After he walked out it changed to a heavy, dull gray.

Although I would see my father often in the years ahead, I didn't see him in ways that were satisfying. He had remarried and moved to North Carolina for work. My time with him was always short and felt stolen, on the run, while he was in town.

My father couldn't afford to keep my mother and me in our present apartment, so she decided we would move in with her mother until she could figure out what to do. The truth is that my mother was so devastated from losing my father that she probably was not functioning well enough to make any decisions about how to go on with her life. My father was not coming back, and we were now going to live in a cheerless house at 366 Glenwood Avenue with my grandmother Harwell and three of my mother's sisters. Very shortly after we moved in, my mother became ill with pneumonia and I remember living with the fear that I would lose her, just as I had lost the rest of my family.

The apartment we were living in when my father left was very comfortable. We had electricity, heat, hot running water, and a comfortable bathroom. When we moved in with my grandmother, we had none of those things. Suddenly I was living with kerosene lamps
and ineffectual fireplaces for warmth. If we wanted hot water, it had to be heated on the iron stove in the kitchen. The house was wired, but we couldn't afford to pay for electricity. This was during the Depression, right in the city of Atlanta.

My grandmother's house on Glenwood was a two-family gray wood house. Gray in color, gray in atmosphere. My God, what a change for me. With the exception of my mother's two younger twin sisters, Doris and Dorothy, there was not a lot of love and kindness going on. Five women and me, all living in two rooms without electricity or heat.

My grandmother was a hard woman. Actually, she and my mother were somewhat alike, a fact that certainly helps explain why there was often tension between them. God knows, my grandmother had a hell of a life. She was divorced from my granddaddy, Charlie, and in the 1920s that did not make for an easy state of affairs. She could be ornery and divisive, and as a result there was constant chaos in her house.

My handicapped aunt Dorothy, my grandmother, my mother, and I all slept in two beds in the middle room, the feather beds smelling of urine and God knows what else. My aunts Doris and Margaret slept on cots in the front room—the living room—and in the third, back, room was the kitchen with a kerosene stove along one wall and a black iron woodstove against another. A big round oak table was in the center of the room. Through the kitchen was the door to the back porch, where the icebox lived.

Although a bathroom had been added to my grandmother's back porch (a big improvement, because they had been living with only an outhouse in the backyard), there was no heat or hot water in the bathroom, and tub baths during the winter proved impossible. Instead, we all washed in the kitchen, dabbing soap and water
on ourselves from a big gray pan of water that had been heated on the woodstove. Even in the warmer months a bath could turn into a big project because all the water had to be heated in dishpans and carried out to the porch, pan by pan.

I suppose there were electric heaters of some sort in those years, but even though the wires were in evidence, the electricity had been cut off long ago. It was the Depression, and there was simply no money to pay for electricity. I could deal with the heat in the summertime, but it was cold in the winter, and without heat or electricity the cold stayed in your bones. All six of us were just plain uncomfortable.

We had kerosene lamps and small fireplaces in the two front rooms, and I did my homework by the light of those kerosene lamps. I was not a particularly good student for a simple reason: if the subject didn't interest me, then I put no effort into it. In my high school years I earned very good grades but failed geometry because I had no interest in it and couldn't see how it could be of any possible use to me. Honestly, I still don't.

My mother's sisters were quite a trio. Margaret was most always angry and didn't have much to do with me, except to snarl at me from time to time. She had hennaed red hair, very curly, and even with that sour disposition she had a sweet boyfriend who was tall and so thin that everyone of course called him “Fats.” Fats and Margaret were going to be married after the war, but he never came back and she married Horace Poss instead. Her taste was typical of the world I knew in my grandmother's house. She collected salt and pepper shakers, and I remember very well her favorites: two little boys sitting on chamber pots labeled “Billy Can” and “Billy Can't.” Lord, help us!

I adored my aunt Doris, who was blond, beautiful, and, to my
seven-year-old self, perfect. Only twelve years older than I, she taught me to draw, and from her I learned the words to the songs she loved: “Winter Wonderland,” “Bei Mir Bis Du Schoen”—all the hits of the 1930s and early forties. She taught me the latest dances—the Shag, the Big Apple, the Little Peach—and her kindness provided me a measure of comfort and security. I loved Doris, and it was sad to hear about her eventually sinking into alcoholism toward the end of her life. It's a stark fact that my mother was one of eight children, four of whom were ultimately alcoholic.

My aunt Dorothy, Doris's twin, was born with a curvature of the spine, and, according to my mother, it was the doctor's fault. Dorothy was sweet and fragile—but she was a sweet and fragile tyrant. She could sit up for a few hours in her big wooden rolling chair, but other than that she lay in bed all day, drooling and kicking and flailing uncontrollably. We played Old Maid and other little games and made designs with colorful, shiny little clay beads, and I loved her. When my school friends came to visit they were frightened of her, but I wasn't. I was used to her. She was a constant strange playmate, a frail tyrant who went crazy if my grandmother even hinted at leaving the house, which made my grandmother a prisoner in her own home. Finally my grandmother just never left the house at all, and it was no surprise when, after her mother died, Dorothy lived for only one more week. She couldn't exist without her mother.

A very sweet old couple, the Drums, lived in the other half of the house. I was terrified of their huge German shepherd dog, and in their kitchen they kept a mean, screechy cockatoo that scared the hell out of me every time I ventured within sight of its cage. Mrs. Drum tried to reassure me by telling me the bird thought I was a monkey and that that's why he made that god-awful noise
when I came near. She took great interest in me, and loved having me sing to her. It was a blessing to be able to visit with this sweet lady and get away from the other side of the house.

The Great Depression had hit, but so had my own six-years-old depression. Don't ever doubt that kids can be depressed. How could I not be? My sister had died. My father had left, even though I had cried and begged him not to go. My mother had been ill with pneumonia. I was scared. Always.

When my mother recovered from her pneumonia, she looked endlessly for work, any kind of work, walking into town in order to save the bus fare. Night after night she'd walk dejectedly back home, the job search having proved utterly futile. My aunts Doris and Margaret did have employment, however, working at the Standard Coffee Company, where their jobs consisted of bagging the beans, hour after numbing hour. Under their skirts they wore long bloomers that had elastic just above the knees, and some of that coffee found its way into their bloomers; other foodstuffs might have been in short supply, but we never lacked for coffee. It was great fun watching them pull the elastic away from their knees and seeing the coffee beans come tumbling out.

My mother was sad and depressed. In hindsight, I understand how fragile she must have felt, but in her loneliness she shared wildly inappropriate information with me. Our house was near Grant Park, with its big lake, and one night when I found her crying, she blurted out her plan to go to the park, walk into the lake, and drown herself. It was 1934 and I was seven years old.

Of course I developed all sorts of nervous fears. I thought that my mother was going to die, just like my sister. Atlanta has always had severe lightning storms during the summer, and when one of those storms came roaring through, I was petrified that my
mother would be hit by lightning and instantly die. Storms terrified me, and I remember on one of those terrifying afternoons that Mrs. Drum comforted me by telling me that my mother would be safe from the lightning because the hat she was wearing included a rubber band that would protect her. But it all weighed on me, this constant fear of being lost and alone with no one to take care of me except my tough grandmother. My young life had fallen apart.

It was at this time that a fire-and-brimstone preacher set up a tent in a nearby vacant lot and for several weeks held an old-fashioned revival meeting. One hot summer evening my mother and some of her friends went to one of the meetings, and she took me with her. During the sermon the preacher said that if Jesus had come to us and we had refused him we would burn in hell for eternity. Make that ETERNITY. In my young mind I was thinking that perhaps Jesus had come to me and I hadn't realized it. I was sure I was doomed. That night began a pattern of my waking in the night, gasping for breath, filled with a dread certainty that I was dying right at that very moment. Now I recognize these episodes as panic attacks, but then I was seven years old, wetting the bed again, and waking up thinking I was dying.

The attacks and the bed-wetting continued, and my mother took me to the doctor. Nobody had connected my panic to the preacher's fire-and-brimstone sermon, but when the good doctor discovered that the first attack had happened hours after I had gone to the revival meeting, he simply said, “Don't take her to any more revival meetings.” End of discussion.

Our house was in a constant state of chaos, but there was always food of some sort, and I never went to bed on an empty stomach. It's striking to realize how many of my childhood memories revolve around food: oatmeal with loads of sugar. Evaporated milk.
Peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwiches when I came home from school. Tea every morning with evaporated milk and so much sugar it remained a sludge in the bottom of the cup.