Screening Room Read online

  (photo credit 2.1)

  I hear squawking and look up to see a cage of parrots in the little pantry room leading to the kitchen. There have always been parrots in this house. I have dim childhood memories of birds fluttering from lampshade to lampshade, sometimes roosting on the teak card table in the corner of the room. At that table, my grandfather played casual bridge games with friends, like a jet plane taxiing for three hours on the runway. I once sat beside him at such a game. After the first round had been played, he turned to me, then eight years old, and loudly announced with perfect accuracy the twelve hidden cards held by each of his two opponents. They didn’t have the heart to continue the game.

  As Harry goes on with his stories, my mind wanders to the enchanting room upstairs with the closets of stage clothes. M.A., dressed as a sea captain, sits grandly at his chart table, mapping out his next business conquest. Blanche and my mother both serve him tea, but their stations in life are reversed. Blanche wears the clothes of a refined southern lady, while my mother is dressed in a maid’s uniform. Blanche has just sharply asked my mother to put more hot water in the tea. “Yes’m, Mizz Blanche,” says my mother with her eyes lowered. Then my grandfather rises from his chair, seven feet tall. Oblivious to the two women, he marches from the room.

  A Visit to the City

  Although the sun has slid from the window, the room still blazes with heat. Four of us hold cool iced-tea glasses against our faces, as if we were performing some group pantomime in a game of charades.

  In midafternoon, Lennie’s fifth husband, Nate, stops by to pay his respects. Tentatively, he shuffles toward the couch where Lennie slumps in a heap of silk fabric and blonde hair. She looks up, notices him, and waves him away.

  Nate is the most Jewish member of the family. Not only was he bar mitzvahed. He spent ten years studying the Kabbalah, beyond the call of duty even for an Orthodox Jew. To Lennie’s annoyance, Nate wears a yarmulke every waking hour of the day, seven days a week. Nate will not leave the house without his yarmulke, which he fastens to his bald head with double-sided Scotch tape. Lennie has been known to hide Nate’s yarmulke in the morning so that she can watch as he searches through every drawer and closet to find it. After ten years, no one in the family can divine why Lennie ever took up with Nate. All of her previous husbands were handsome, while Nate has bulbous eyes that protrude like a bullfrog’s, sweaty hands, and a bad limp from a car accident in his youth. Still, he has a sweet disposition, and he offers her companionship. And Lennie was no prize herself when she married Nate at age seventy-five. He’s a half-decent cook, Lennie says, and he always opens the door for her.

  “Have I missed anything?” says Nate, after a few moments of silence. Nate has quietly asked Dorothy if any pecan pie remains in the kitchen.

  “We were talking about M.A.,” says Uncle Harry.

  “Ah, yes,” says Nate.

  “And the beginning of the family business.”

  “Mysterious circumstances,” says Nate. “Mysterious circumstances.”

  “Mysterious to you, my sweet,” says Lennie.

  “The facts are the facts.”

  The year is 1916. M.A. is burning to buy his first movie theater, but he has no money, nor does Papa Joe, unable to collect payments from some derelict clients. “Why in God’s name do you want to own a movie theater?” says Papa Joe in his heavy Hungarian accent. “Do something useful. Aren’t you trained as an engineer? Build roads. Help me in the quarry.”

  “I want a movie theater,” says M.A.

  The next morning, M.A. packs two clean white shirts and a tie in his raggedy college suitcase and takes the train to New York, to visit Papa Joe’s older brother, Jacob. Uncle Jacob, childless, has money from his confectionary in the Lower East Side, but he has never shared fifty cents with the rest of the family, and his Gentile wife would rather convert to Judaism than set foot below the Mason-Dixon line.

  M.A. has never been to the North before. He has taken road trips in a borrowed Whiting Runabout to Knoxville and Jackson and Memphis, and even as far as Lexington, Kentucky. But New York City is an ocean that floods his mind—the tall buildings that punch holes in the sky, the rows upon rows of apartment windows, the scissoring crowds on the streets, the peddlers and shops, the automobiles, the shouts and the blares. He notices everything. He hears the wild thunder of time and the future. After dinner, M.A. outlines his business plan to his uncle and delicately asks for a loan. They sit in the little living room with photographs of railroad stations on the wall, the strong odor of Uncle Jacob’s cigar, the sounds of honking on the street. Nothing doing, says Jacob. M.A. pleads. He is wearing his white shirt and his tie, and he hates asking anybody for anything. Uncle Jacob offers him a glass of port, which M.A. politely declines. All he needs is $1,500, he says. He is certain that he will be able to pay back the money within two years, with interest. People want to see movies, says M.A., strong and eager and leaning forward in his chair. I’m sorry, says Jacob. I am not a charity. We have our own expenses, says Jacob’s wife. I am not asking for charity, says M.A. He is standing now, enormous. He fills up the room. He and his uncle exchange unpleasant remarks. You shouldn’t have come, says Jacob, fear in his voice.

  Without further words, M.A. takes the train back to Nashville. Two days later, Uncle Jacob is killed by a trolley car while crossing the street. His will leaves $3,000 to M.A.

  “M.A. always got what he wanted,” says Nate in a low voice.

  “M.A. never talked about that trip to New York,” says Uncle Harry.

  “There are strange powers at work in the world,” says Nate.

  I can never be sure what Nate knows to be absolutely true and what he embroiders. But my great-uncle Jacob was indeed killed by a trolley, at the time M.A. started his empire. And here we all are gathered in M.A.’s old house, sitting in the room where he sat, looking out at the grounds that he kept, living off the business he started, endowed with a slight thickening of our eyelids, like his.

  “The younger generations have gotten timid,” says Lennie, lifting her head from the couch to see exactly who’s in the room. “Your mother was a bombshell,” she says to me. “So was I. We had some times.” She looks over at Nate, to see if he’s paying attention. “Most of it can’t be discussed in mixed company.”

  The Famille

  (photo credit p2.1)

  Courtship in the Swamps

  During my mother’s third year at Sophie Newcomb, in New Orleans, she began receiving marriage proposals. Most of these came from young men in the armed services. While home on leave, her suitors took her to restaurants in the French Quarter and jazz clubs on Bourbon Street, then wrote her long, romantic, desperate letters from their ships or infantry units. She did not take any of these advances seriously. They were all just good fun. A cheerleader for the Tulane University football team with a full, pouting mouth made prominent by dark red lipstick, lush brown wavy hair, and a mischievous glint in her eye, Mother considered the male species a challenging recreation. Many nights, she would have two dates. After her first young man delivered her back to her house, apologizing for keeping her out late when she was evidently so tired, she would turn out the lights in her room, pretend to sleep for twenty minutes, then jump out of bed, reapply her makeup, and meet her “late date” beneath the sweating bayou tree on the corner of the street. A photograph from this period shows her dressed for a rendezvous with the opposite sex. She is wearing a filmy V-neck dress with a floral pattern and padded shoulders, a strand of pearls around her neck, high heels, and white gloves.

  By several accounts, my mother, Jeanne Garretson, was the life of the party in New Orleans in the mid-1940s. She was frequently seen with a bunch of young men and women at Pete Fountain’s jazz club or dancing at the Roosevelt Hotel, attending parties of the Pickwick Club at Mardi Gras, eating with a crowd at Antoine’s or at little Creole restaurants on Decatur Street. She told humorous stories and was a magnificent dancer, effortlessly mastering such Latin steps as t
he rumba, the samba, and the tango, as well as various ballroom dances. Her favorite was the jitterbug, which perfectly mirrored her own nervous and impulsive nature.

  A number of the young men enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Tulane learned of my mother’s exceptional dancing abilities and begged her to offer them dancing lessons. Which she was happy to do, provided she receive certain compensations. After each dance class, which took place in an unused conference room of the university, Mother would leave her unfinished homework in sociology and history discreetly cloaked within a copy of the Times-Picayune. One of the cadets would deliver the completed assignments to her sorority house the next morning. (Although Mother slept in her parents’ residence on Octavia Street, she spent all of her waking hours in the grand but disintegrating mansion of Alpha Epsilon Phi and preferred to orchestrate her correspondence and romantic adventures from that address.) Mother was perfectly capable of doing her homework herself, but she considered this pact with the cadets a delicious prank, with the added benefit of liberating more time for social engagements. In fact, the arrangement seemed satisfactory to all parties. Then, like many good things, it was taken to excess. To gain favor with her sorority sisters, who were sometimes jealous of her easy success with the opposite sex, Mother began taking their homework as well as hers to the Tulane cadets. The logistics eventually became so complex that one of the students, an accounting major, had to work out a flow diagram, of which numerous carbon copies were made. A copy fell into the hands of a dean. After which an unsympathetic article appeared in one of the college bulletins:

  Yesterday, Dean Howard Barthelme uncovered a scheme in which ROTC students have been completing homework assignments for Newcomb women in exchange for dance classes. An investigation of the campus room where the classes were allegedly given, Blessey 131, has turned up several cigarette butts stuffed under a couch, a pink boa, and a cracked recording of “Llora Como Llore,” by Martína Lombassa. Professor David Abernathy of the Chemistry Department expressed the opinion that the record might be a Cuban rumba, but he was unwilling to join the ad hoc discipline committee. According to several of the cadets, whose names are being withheld, the dance classes were taught by Miss Jeanne Garretson, a junior at Sophie Newcomb and a New Orleans native.

  The next day, my mother was summoned to the academic dean’s office at Sophie Newcomb. For the occasion, she wore a tailored suit, high heels, and her pearls. The dean stared admiringly while listening to her discuss Jung’s theory of archetypes. (She was a psychology major.) After twenty minutes, he excused her with a mild warning and never pressed her to disclose the identities of the other students involved. The entire affair, including its precarious conclusion, earned my mother everlasting fame with her sorority sisters at Alpha Epsilon Phi.

  One of Mother’s male devotees, a young man named Robert Rigolot, did finally manage to get himself secretly engaged to her. No one can remember whether Robert had once served in the military and received an honorable discharge, or had been disqualified from service for some reason. At any rate, he seemed to be at large in New Orleans on a regular basis. My mother would not oblige her fiancé with a wedding date, so he took to sitting out all day on the front porch of her sorority house in a love-struck vigil, refusing to shave or change his clothes, like the prison master’s son in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. The sisters of AEPhi thought this conduct terribly appealing and offered their telephone numbers to Robert. But he would have no one except my mother and pleaded with her through the screened porch window to come out. My mother, meanwhile, would exit through the back door of the building to the waiting cars of other paramours.

  After a week or two, Robert’s parents, who descended from one of New Orleans’ oldest and most prominent families, began receiving rumors that their son was making a fool of himself over a young woman, and a Jewish one at that. Apparently, Robert’s father drove up to the sorority house in his Bentley, rolled down his window, and began gesturing wildly to his son. Robert did not even look up from his sitting position, determined to endure any amount of suffering in the name of love. At this point, Mother appeared in person on the porch and did something that was to serve her in good stead in many awkward moments in the future. She fainted. Both Rigolot Senior and Rigolot Junior were perplexed at this behavior and promptly departed. A week later, my mother received a polite note from Robert breaking off the engagement.

  A month after the “gigoloed Rigolot” incident, as the AEPhi girls began calling it, my mother first met my father. It was late 1945, the year that The Lost Weekend, starring Ray Milland, won four Academy Awards. The introduction of my parents occurred through the good graces of Lennie, a fellow student at Newcomb and my father’s first cousin. Evidently, Mother was a shrinking violet compared to Lennie. On the first Saturday of each month, Lennie was whisked away by a black limousine and taken for the weekend to Baton Rouge, where she sang in unnamed nightclubs and returned with incredible stories of ten-dollar bills used for napkins and drunk white women slow dancing with colored men for twenty-four hours straight.

  During this period, late in the war, my father was in the navy, fighting the Germans in the Mediterranean. His own father, M.A., had never served. I’ve always wondered whether this slight moral advantage over the king gave my father some comfort. Or whether he took any pleasure in the handsome photographs of himself in his uniform. My father was slight of build, with delicate features, dreamy eyes, and a resemblance to the actor Ralph Fiennes. But he would never have expressed such comforts or pleasures even if he had felt them.

  Soon after the war ended, Dad received a call from Lennie saying he should drive down to New Orleans immediately and meet some of the AEPhi women. “These are nice girls, Dickie. And Jewish.”

  My father’s first date with my mother, as Lennie recalls, took place at the Roosevelt Hotel. To avoid mishaps, Lennie accompanied the couple, dragging along one of her boyfriends—“somebody already bald at age thirty, but my gawd he had beautiful eyes.” Lennie drove, in her lime-green 1939 Pontiac Arrow sedan given to her by a man of her past. In fact, Lennie had attempted to introduce my parents earlier that afternoon and coaxed my father into stopping by Alpha Epsilon Phi. As it happened, my mother never showed up. My father waited two hours for her in the lounge, during which time two uniformed men from Pest Bequest clambered up into the attic and returned with a cage of three squirrels to be disposed of.

  Before setting out for the Roosevelt that evening, the two couples determined that it was essential to fortify themselves with oysters Rockefeller, so they swung by Antoine’s. While my father reminisced about certain eccentric professors at Vanderbilt, Mother told jokes and jittered her legs under the table with such force that the water glasses turned over. (If my father thought the jiggling legs were due to first-date nerves, he would have been mistaken. My mother simply had too much energy to be contained within one body.)

  For the next hour, the foursome strolled through the cobbled streets and gaslit alleys of the French Quarter. “The smell of coffee was just divine, dear, and the saxophones pouring out of the clubs made you drunk. Of course, we stopped to visit friends at the outdoor tables of little restaurants.” Returning to the car, the party proceeded to Greenwood Cemetery on Canal Street, where they wandered between the rows of tombs, then sat on the stone steps of a mausoleum and consumed a bottle of bourbon in the moonlight. Lennie gave a blow-by-blow description of how the AEPhi squirrels, whose droppings and midnight munchings had annoyed the young women for months, had finally been trapped and carried off the premises. “Will they be killed?” asked my mother. “I don’t know,” said my father, “but when I saw them they were blindfolded and smoking cigarettes.” Upon which Mother burst into gales of laughter.

  Finally arriving at the Fountain Lounge of the Roosevelt Hotel, my mother leaped onto the dance floor. My father’s motor ran considerably more slowly. Furthermore, he was a terrible dancer, and a history major. While Mother waited and fidgeted on the dance f
loor, my father sat quietly at their table and read a book he had picked up on the eighteenth-century Spanish and French settlements in New Orleans. Undeterred, my mother simply enlisted other partners and soon was the center of attention, as usual.

  For the next week, while waiting for his reassignment to a military separation center in Texas, my father explored the historic sights of New Orleans by day and took my mother dancing by night. There are no reports of those evenings. I can’t imagine what they talked about; my father was such a quiet man, and modest to an extreme. Unfamiliar with the fact that New Orleans was mostly a swamp, half under water, Dad evidently walked through numerous bogs on his sightseeing jaunts, as Lennie remembers receiving one soggy pair of trousers after another to clean and dry. Each day, he bought books for my mother, which she thanked him for and later deposited unread in various drawers of her sorority house.