LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

his lament for nature gone wrong: “The evening breeze will start the trees to cryin’/And the moon’ll hide its light/When you get the blues in the night.”

      The ladies were gorgeous. Zenobia was tall with black hair piled high. Everyone talked about her drinking too much, but they said she was Indian and couldn’t help it. She always stood apart from the crowd, though men circled around her. “Like moths to a flame,” my mother said. CG was a regular item of gossip. Blonde and muscular, she taught me how not to be too feminine. She golfed as well as a man, and after the game, she always drank in the Oak Room, the one room at the Standard Town and Country Club that was off-limits to women. I remember she sat on men’s laps, but I might just be imagining it. Her legs held a particular fascination for me. I have never forgotten the buoyancy of those blonde hairs.

      My mother’s closest friend, Molly, used to walk into the den, look at me, smile and say with her head tilted to one side, the voice gliding down like molasses, “Gone possum hunting.” She was tall, too stout to be statuesque, and wore a lot of make-up. As a child I wondered why she looked at me the way she did and why she spent so much time saying “possum,” which she drew out into a sound like “paws some,” her mouth turned into a tight oval, pink and wet. “Gonna eat me some possum, ain’t nothing so sweet,” Molly crooned, adding in a lowdown voice, “They got pussy and the men are going after it.” Men talking about a hunt, whether for possum or pussy, it didn’t matter much. That’s what she thought of their ways of loving you. Pussy and possum, that’s about as close as I can get to my sense of the South: sticky, hot, and unusually cruel.

      One night my father sat down by my bed and showed me a picture of lemmings. Thousands of these warm-bodied creatures were darting over cliffs and into the sea. He told me that they were lemmings, Norwegian, lemmus lemmus, who for reasons no one knew killed themselves by rushing away from their homes, running through the woods, and finally drowning themselves in the dark waters below. They appeared before me as if in a dream, a blur of fur and feet bounding down the mud bank and into the creek behind my house. I never forgot their headlong plunge into oblivion. It appears before me as something momentous and beguiling. My father always found ways to link what he reckoned as love and the death of animals.

      Death hung around my house. No way around fate, that’s what my mother told me. “Once something bad happens, it will happen again.” My rabbits ate their babies. I buried my turtles alive, thinking they had died when they were just in hibernation. My mother’s canary drowned in a glass of orange juice. My hamster got stuck and died behind the stove. A car ran Pépé down one afternoon when my mother left the door open. A neighbor’s German Shepherd attacked Johnny the Pekingese — the dog we left outside — and bit his neck so hard that his eyes popped out. One eye was put back in. Everyone called him One-Eyed Johnny. A few years later Johnny was adopted by one of my mother’s friends. She renamed him Precious, kept him in her bed with lace sheets, and told everyone he was her sacred lapdog from China.

      Everything happened to the tune of Sinatra’s singing, his chic and casual disregard: “Witchcraft,” and “Those fingers in my hair.” I took a deep breath. “That sly come-hither stare.” Perhaps that was the problem. Even in a lament for a woman he loved now lost, there’s a boozy kind of pleasure, a lingering sense of sex. I had a strange feeling in my stomach when I stood at the top of the stairs and saw my father in the basement taking what he called “dazzle photos” of my mother sitting spread-legged on a stool wearing a corset. She had ordered the corset and a push-up bra from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

      I began to repeat words prayed on the Day of Atonement to ward off evil and temptation. “But repentance, prayer, and righteousness shall avert the severe decree.” I read Ezekiel and thought about dry bones. They could save me from the stench of flesh. One afternoon I walked into the den and saw my mother undressed again, this time right

      down to her bra and panties, sitting on Bernard’s lap, with a bottle of Chivas in her hand. Bernard was married to the woman who took on Johnny the Pekingese.

      But there was another side to my mother, a woman who believed in undying love. “The Lady of Camellias.” Not the woman who told me, “A rich man is just as easy to love as a poor man.” Back I go into her voice, into the song she repeated again and again, only a few lines of it, when I least expected her to break into song.

      Our Love,

      I feel it everywhere.

      Through the nighttime

      It is a message of the breeze.

      I can hear it

      In every whisper of the trees.

      And so, you’re always near to me

      Wherever you may be.

      I see

      Your face in the stars above.

      In the sitting room of the Standard Town and Country Club, my father took a photo of her.

      Set atop greensward with a challenging golf course, swimming pool, and tennis courts surrounded by woods, the Club was the Jewish answer to the exclusive Cherokee Town and Country Club and Piedmont Driving Club, which allowed only white Christians: blondes with long straight hair, the easy confidence of good breeding, a heritage of immaculate inclusion that was never at risk.

      I never forgot the way my mother looked on Saturday night: diamonds, martini in hand, overly plucked eyebrows and tightly controlled hair. Not expectant or appreciative, but quite still in her elaborate, almost fleshless articulation of what should be ease but instead seems brittle, a woman hobbled by my father’s devotion. Her face, though beautiful, seemed dead, as if the smile has been held too long.

      The South was not kind to my mother. It lured her with what she could never be part of, a community of women that would always be closed. I look at the pale gossamer creatures with faces never threatened with sweat; and the lonelier I become the more I understand the texture of discrimination.

      _____________________________________

      Sometime around 1963, I began to feel angry and mean. I was just 13 years old, but my mother’s friends said I looked older. My wild, tangled hair and serious demeanor made me unpopular. Whether at home or in school, I never fit in. “You’ll be left holding the bag.” My mother looked at me with eyes dead as glass and warned: if I didn’t want to “end up behind the eight-ball,” which I always heard as “ape-ball,” then “you better stop talking politics. Men don’t like that. You look like a dried prune.” I was alone except for an odd little boy who used to whisper: “I would like to know” — a long pause here — “if you would like to go” — another pause — “to the woods.” To escape the lust of ladies and a little boy’s lure, I spent my time memorizing songs from Broadway shows. Years have passed, but I still remember every song. When I think back to that time, I realize how much my life was shaped and determined by words like “I wonder what the king is doing tonight,” “Let me entertain you, let me make you smile,” “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait,” “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette, till your last dyin’ day.”

      Now, sometimes driving in the heat of Nashville, I begin to sing and think how much my confusion about the difference between real life and fantasy began in those lonely afternoons in Atlanta.

      Not just because of a fair lady, street gangs in New York, or a good-hearted stripper — though I liked to imitate Natalie Wood as “Gypsy Rose Lee,” not quite taking off her clothes. Most of the time I pretended to be a dying swan like Margot Fonteyn, who soared with her pale, almost transparent arms rising high and coming down like wings in Swan Lake. Once in bed, late at night, I couldn’t stop thinking about Christine Keeler and her pale long legs in the backseat of a limo. “Profumo,” my mother whispered to her friend on the phone, as she reveled in the scandal that brought disgrace on Tory cabinet minister John Profumo. “He was nearly bald,” she laughed, and “any man who looked like that got what he deserved.” For the next few months, amid their drinks and

Скачать книгу