Screening Room: Family Pictures Read online

  ALSO BY ALAN LIGHTMAN

  The Accidental Universe

  Mr g

  Ghost

  The Discoveries

  A Sense of the Mysterious

  Reunion

  The Diagnosis

  Dance for Two

  Good Benito

  Song of Two Worlds

  Einstein’s Dreams

  Copyright © 2015 by Alan Lightman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lightman, Alan P., [date]

  Screening room : family pictures / Alan Lightman.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-37939-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-101-87003-7 (eBook)

  1. Lightman, Alan P., [date]. I. Title.

  PS3562.I45397Z46 2014

  813′.54—dc23 [B] 2013049341

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket photograph by Robert Norbury/Millennium

  Images, U.K.

  Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

  v3.1

  Dedicated to

  Richard Lightman

  (1919 – 2013)

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Family Tree

  Photographs

  Rememberings

  An Exile Returns

  Summons to Memphis

  One-Armed Push-ups

  A Visit to the City

  The Famille

  Courtship in the Swamps

  April 23, 1947: Wedding Reception with Ducks

  Honeymoon at Guardalavaca

  Shore Leave

  Show Business

  Jew Tree

  Sun Room in Late Afternoon

  Kentucky Lake

  Portrait of the Family at Home

  Salerno I

  Phasma I

  You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog

  Blanche

  “Sex Written All over Him”

  G.I. Blues

  KD Dance

  “Street Walkers as Thick as Wasps in the Summer”

  Stone Quarry

  “May His Substance Never Grow Less”

  Shanghai Express

  “This Is Memphis, Gentlemen”

  Yellow Fever

  Of Mules and Duels

  Cotton

  Phasma II

  A Fly in the Buttermilk

  For Every Action, an Equal and Opposite Reaction (Newton)

  Heat

  Breakfast at Noon with Lennie and Nate

  Look at This Trick on Your Mind

  Projectors

  My Career in the Movies

  Speaking Properly

  Gold-Plated Telephone

  Driving Lessons

  Eating When Full

  The Husbands of Lennie

  Rocket

  Always Ask for Cash

  Blanche’s Pecan Pie

  Babette’s Feast

  Salerno II

  Seeing in the Dark

  In the Dark

  Abi’s House

  The Old Cornfield

  Lorraine

  Marital Relations

  Cold on Cold

  Farewell to Vanishing Bloom

  Backhand

  Another Death in the Family

  Another Death in the Family

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Photographs

  Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are courtesy of the author.

  2.1 M.A. Lightman, ca. 1920.

  p2.1 Cheerleaders; Jeanne Garretson is second from left.

  4.1 Lobby of Peabody Hotel (Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library and Information Center, Tebbs & Knell, Inc., photographer).

  6.1 Honeymoon, Jeanne and Richard Lightman in Cuba, 1947.

  p3.1 Colored entrance, Malco Theater, 1953.

  15.1 Blanche Lee.

  17.1 Malco Theater interior.

  17.2 Malco Theater, 1943.

  17.3 Richard Lightman and Elvis Presley, ca. 1960.

  19.1 Main Street, 1912 (Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library and Information Center, John C. Coovert, photographer).

  19.2 Joseph Lightman (Papa Joe), ca. 1915.

  21.1 M.A. Lightman and Gary Cooper, ca. 1932.

  24.1 Barton Cotton Building, Front Street, 2009 (Courtesy Larry McPherson).

  25.1 Cotton steamboat, ca. 1900 (Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library and Information Center, John C. Coovert, photographer).

  25.2 Cotton Carnival float, 1950 (Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library and Information Center, [?] Poland, photographer).

  25.3 Cotton Maker’s Jubilee, 1950 (Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library and Information Center).

  33.1 E. H. Crump, followed by Mayor Watkins Overton, 1930s (Special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries).

  Rememberings

  1955. A lady’s pink boa flutters and slips through the air. All down the street, Negro janitors shuffle behind white horse-drawn floats and scoop up piles of manure. I am carried along by the heave of the crowd, the smell of the popcorn and hot dogs with chili, the red-faced men sweating dark rings through their costumes, the Egyptian headdresses, the warble of trombones and drums of the big bands from New York and Palm Beach—me six years old wearing a tiny white suit with white tie clutching the hand of my six-year-old date, both of us Pages in the grand court, trailing the Ladies-in-Waiting gorgeously dressed in their gowns made of cotton, the white gold of Memphis. Cotton town high on a bluff. Boogie town rim of the South.

  Far off through colored balloons, I glimpse the King and Queen, just off their barge on the muddy brown river. They solemnly stride through an arch made of cotton bales. Bleary-eyed women and men reel in the streets, drunk from their parties and clubs. From an open hotel window, someone is playing the blues. Music flushes the cheeks of the coeds and debutantes, dozens of beauties from the Ladies of the Realm who flutter their eyelashes at the young men. I am lost in this sea, miraculously picked from a first-grade school lottery; candy and glass crunch under my feet, wave after wave of marching youth bands flow through the street. Then a young majorette hurls her baton high in the air. Before it can fall back to earth, the twirling stick touches the trolley wires and explodes in a burst of electrical fire. Pieces of baton rain on the heads of the crowd.

  An Exile Returns

  Summons to Memphis

  It began with a death in the family. My Uncle Ed, the most debonair of the clan, a popular guest of the Gentile social clubs despite being Jewish, had succumbed at age ninety-five with a half glass of Johnnie Walker on his bedside table. I came down to Memphis for the funeral.

  July 12. Midnight. We sit sweating on Aunt Rosalie’s screened porch beneath a revolving brass fan, the temperature still nearly ninety. For the first time in decades, all the living cousins and nephews and uncles and aunts have been rounded up and thrown together. But only a handful of us remain awake now, dull from the alcohol and the heat, sleepily staring at the curve of lights that wander from the porch through the sweltering gardens to the pool. The sweet smell of honeysuckle floats in the air. Somewhere, in a back room of the house, a Diana Krall song softly plays.

  I wipe my moist face with a cocktail napkin, then let my head droop against my ch
air as I listen to Cousin Lennie hold forth. Now in her mid-eighties, Lennie first scandalized the family in the 1940s when, in the midst of her junior year at Sophie Newcomb, she ran off to Paris with a man. Since then, even during her various marriages, she has occasionally disappeared for weeks at a time.

  “With due respect to the dead,” Lennie whispers to me, “Edward trampled your father. Always.” She pours herself another bourbon and stirs the ice with her finger. “When he was about fifteen years old, your Uncle Ed opened a bicycle shop. He got some tools, read a magazine article, and started repairing his friends’ bikes. Charged them their allowance money. Your dad begged Edward to let him work in the shop. At first, Edward refused. This, of course, made Dick even more desperate to help; he was dying to work in that shop. Finally, Edward agreed, but he charged Dickie money every week for the privilege.”

  “Shush,” says Rosalie.

  “Did you know how your grandfather M.A.’s heart attack really happened?” Lennie says to me, smiling slyly and sipping her bourbon.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exertion, bien sur. The best kind. And not with your grandmother.”

  Forty years ago, I escaped Memphis, embarrassed by the widespread belief that southerners were ignorant bigots, and slow. I returned only for brief visits. Now I’m back again, for an entire month, caught by things deep in me I want to understand.

  Lennie lights a new cigarette and wriggles her stocking-covered toes, poised to let fly another story. Cousins nudge forward in their reclining chairs. In my mind, I am sitting at the breakfast table with my grandfather, watching with delight as he butters my silver-dollar pancakes, then lathers on grape jelly and honey, finally sprinkling sugar on the entire concoction. Sweet as pecan pie. Muddy like the Mississippi River. Fragments of visions of Cotton Carnival. Elvis. Malco. BBQ at the Rendezvous. Someone moans from the pool, the next generation, and Lennie exhales a cool cloud of blue smoke.

  One-Armed Push-ups

  The next afternoon, we gather in my grandfather’s old house on Cherry Road, a magical realm of my childhood that remains in the family. Aunt Lila lives here now. From the street, the house appears far smaller than it actually is. Its exterior walls are a copper-colored terra-cotta, with beautiful stone accents and a sweeping arched portico adjoining the front door. A gravel drive winds gently through the four-acre wooded property. Over the years, far from the thick air of Memphis, I’ve often walked through this house in my mind—the sun room with its smooth marble floor cool to the bare feet; the dark living room with its antique mahogany commodes from New Orleans and grand piano on which I practiced my scales as a child; the elegant dining room in which my parents and brothers and I and my uncles, aunts, and cousins would sit for the seder; the damp basement where Hattie Mae, the black maid, sometimes slept in a small room; the carpeted stairs leading up to mysterious chambers and corridors I wasn’t allowed to see. In the back, behind the gardens of azaleas and boxwoods, was a musty barn converted to a garage, with harnesses and bridles still hung on the walls and the odor of horses in the air. My grandparents kept a mule there named Bob, who carted off the dead leaves in the fall and returned with compost in the spring.

  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 cou
ldn’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.