Screening Room: Family Pictures Page 4

  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.

  Sun Room in Late Afternoon

  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.”

  “I could use Dorothy at my house,” says Lennie. “I could use two Dorothys.”

  Lila gives a slight smile and nod of her head. “The dinner parties that Daddy and Mother gave! You remember, Lennie. Hattie Mae was a marvel, wasn’t she? She’d get her sister Pauline to help. For three days before the party, they’d be ironing the table linens and polishing the silverware, polishing every piece of metal that could shine. They polished the brass on the chandeliers and the brass doorknobs and the brass candlesticks and even the brass light switch plates. Then, they’d be in the kitchen for two days baking pie shells and buttermilk biscuits. The day of the party, Hattie Mae and Pauline would get to the house about eight a.m. and cook for ten hours straight. Absolutely scrumptious smells went from one end of the place to the other. At three o’clock, the flowers would arrive. Roses and stargazer lilies. Mother put flowers in every room of the house. At five o’clock, Hoke, Mrs. Twaddle’s chauffeur, would show up wearing a suit and set up the bar right here in the sun room. He put a white tablecloth over one of Daddy’s card tables and brought colored toothpicks for the martini olives. Hattie Mae and Pauline were a marvel. An absolute marvel. For hors d’oeuvres, they served crab dip with flaky biscuits and little pieces of steak on crackers with a tip of an asparagus and a dollop of hollandaise sauce. Then there would be French onion soup, beautiful roast beef, potatoes au gratin, cream spinach with oysters. They got that recipe from somewhere in New Orleans. For dessert they served pecan pie and cherries jubilee. Some of the men got so stuffed they had to go upstairs and lie down in the bedrooms. You’d see shoes in the hallway. The women would say to Mother, ‘What a lovely party, Celia, you’ve outdone yourself.’ Then they’d sneak into the kitchen and corner Hattie Mae and try to sweet-talk her into giving out her recipes. But Hattie Mae wouldn’t oblige. Hattie Mae was independent minded, but she had a loyalty to Mother.”

  “You’re killing me,” says Abi from the living room.

  “Too much swishin’ of the dishes for my blood,” says Lennie.

  A piece of some toy skitters across the slick marble floor and a toddler chases after it, while my cousin Stephen, who now runs the family business, comments on the lineup of films for the summer. “Nothing great,” says another cousin. “People don’t care if it’s great, they just want escape,” says Jake, a red-faced cousin who keeps a fifty-foot yacht in Florida. “Scott finished number one tennis player in his age group,” says Nancy, another cousin. “Don’t be modest,” says Jake. Nancy makes a face while Jake puts his arm around her.

  I look at Nancy and Jake, see them as children when we played together in the leaf pile.

  What is this cord? And me, rarely home for the last forty years, now gathered with my family in this old house, a flickering dream I keep repeating.

  Bereft Aunt Rosalie walks in with red, swollen eyes. For a moment, she stands in the doorway, tall and ethereal and faint, like a woman in one of Thomas Dewing’s paintings. Then she sits down next to Lennie, who gives her a kiss. The room becomes silent. Despite her grief, Rosalie has managed to order thank-you cards, to be engraved on beige paper just like the ones her mother, Helen, made in Birmingham twenty-five years ago, just like the ones Helen’s mother, Bess, made in Atlanta twenty-five years before that. Uncle Ed’s widow rocks back and forth in her chair, back and forth, and finally says, “He was only a boy when I met him.”

  Kentucky Lake

  The principal vacation destination for our family during the late 1950s and early 1960s was Kentucky Lake, about two hundred miles northeast of Memphis, an area famous for the eerie morning mists hanging low over the lake. Ambers and lavenders and mossy green hues would refract in the air for an hour, then melt away like some rare species of plant in bloom only a day. For these weekends, we booked rooms at the Kenlake Hotel. It was a three-story rustic building, perched high over rolling grassy hills on one side and the lake on the other. A water tower afforded a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside. If we went out to the hotel balcony early in the morning, before breakfast, we could watch an old man with white hair and suspenders walking slowly around the grounds and turning on the sprinklers. Then, after a breakfast of fresh orange juice and French toast, we wandered down a little path to the water. The lake, with its dissolving mists and the soft landings of blue herons and egrets, spread out before us like a fairyland, far from the world of our schoolwork and carpools. This was the place of our dreams, and the place where my father and mother came closest to happiness.

  On the Friday before a weekend at Kentucky Lake, my father would come home early from the office to pack. Packing, and in fact any task that required organization or leadership, brought out the worst in my parents’ relationship. Dad seemed almost willfully to stumble over himself. When he made the reservations for family trips, dates would be wrong, hotel bookings snarled up, once an entire city misplaced. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, we built an underground bomb shelter in the backyard, frightened by President Kennedy’s exhortations for all Americans to protect themselves. My father bumbled the job. He hired an incompetent construction company, and the whole thing filled up with water. For the next several years, we fished out cans of sardines, floating first-aid kits, and other items we had stockpiled for the impending nuclear war.

  Packing for a trip to Kentucky Lake, my father would stand incapacitated and confused in front of the closet where he stored life jackets and oars and other boating accessories in a tangled mess. “What are you doing, Dick?” my mother would say. “I should trade you in on a better model.” I would watch silently, never speaking up on my father’s behalf. Without responding, Dad would drag one item after another from the closet, looking for something he seldom found, while my mother began hyperventilating. “I’m going to faint, Dick. Where’s Blanche? I’m going to faint.”

  At the last minute before departure, my father would discover that he had no clean underwear and summon Blanche to do a quick wash and dry. Then my mother would start to sing.

  The drive to Kentucky Lake took three and a half hours, not an easy journey for my three brothers and me as we shoved and fought in the backseat. “Dick, do something,” Mother would demand from the passenger seat. “You’re supposed to be the man of the family.” At that, my father would take one arm off the steering wheel and swat at us in the backseat. The car would swerve on the road, Mother would scream, and my brothers and I would become silent. We felt guilty. But there was something else worse than guilt, something I can express only now. I vowed to myself that I would never be like my father. Never. Surely, he must have felt that vast, hollow space, that abandonment. But I could not say for sure. Then, and for the next fifty years, I rarely knew what my father felt.

  I have good memories of our vacations. We drove up Interstate 51, through Covington, Ripley, Union City, and into Kentucky at South Fulton, passing farmhouses, fields of corn and tobacco, roadside cafés and barbershops, pe
ople sitting on benches doing nothing in particular. On the way, we usually stopped in some small town at a Krystal to eat square hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes. Dad would ask for sweet milk, and Mother always wanted raw onions on her hamburgers. The Krystal waitresses wore white uniforms, red-checkered aprons, and white hats. Sometimes, they flirted with one of my brothers or me, and we would puff up like bullfrogs.

  Stretching a hundred feet over the lake was a wooden dock owned by the hotel. As soon as we arrived, we would walk out on that dock. My mother always exclaimed over a certain magenta bougainvillea climbing out of a terra-cotta urn, and she would fuss with its winding branches as if seeing an old friend again. On the dock, we breathed in the lake air, and we looked out at the tiny figures of fishermen arcing their fly rods back and forth, back and forth, with the movement of ballet dancers. Later, the hotel brought us bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, and cold Coca-Colas.

  My father was a passionate sailor. Each day at Kentucky Lake, he rented a sailboat and cajoled as many of us as possible to come along as his crew. At sea, with his hand on the tiller, Dad displayed the power and command that he lacked on dry land, although he routinely led us into maritime disasters. On one outing, we went under a bridge that was too low and split our mast. On another, my father accidentally jibed while I was sitting (at his orders) on the boom as a human boom vang, and I was catapulted into the air and then into the lake. Lines became mysteriously tangled around cleats on the dock just as we were sailing away, our boat straining to break free like a wild hog with a lasso around its foot. We ran aground. We crashed into other boats. “Please, Dick,” Mother would say. “Do we have to go sailing?”