Exit Laughing (25 page)

I think this is what Mary was talking about when she talked about loving the ones we care for.

Each day, a little more of my mother disappeared. First her sight, then her hearing. Her appetite was already shot. She started reaching into space for things that weren’t there, and one afternoon she fell into my arms, weeping.

“I can’t see. I can’t hear. This is no way to live,” she sobbed, as I held her and tried to comfort her—as if in that moment she really was my child and I was her mother.

Except, in point of fact, she was still
my
mother. Still Irene. Still the Belle of Pittsburgh. Not ten minutes after her outburst, she was fretting over what to wear the following morning when Rabbi Gary was due for his next visit.

“He’s a
hospice
rabbi,” I told her again. “He’s used to seeing people in their bathrobes. You don’t need to worry about putting on makeup or getting dressed.”

But as long as she had a shred of consciousness left, my mother could not let herself go. What’s more, I think she secretly believed that if she had the wherewithal to pull herself together she would be able to, if not outfox (in her case, outdress) death, at least delay it.

And so the next morning, instead of greeting Rabbi Gary in her favorite animal print dressing gown, Irene insisted on getting dressed. She couldn’t stand or walk on her own, so Dawn—her Jamaican voodoo angel aide—practically carried her to the bathroom to put on her face. Then, somehow, Dawn managed to get her into her bra and the green-and-white striped blouse she’d chosen to wear for the occasion before her energy simply gave out. She toppled over into the easy chair by the hospital bed, her mouth slack, eyes shut, softly snoring. Dawn covered her lower half with a blanket since she’d collapsed before Dawn could get her into her pants.

I knew how much she wanted to see Gary again, so I tried to rouse her. So did Hugh and Dawn, with no success. When Gary arrived, he talked to her for a while, then said a blessing, but she didn’t respond to him either. My mother seemed to be sleeping a sleep that was deeper than what we do in the night, but this side of death. Eventually, when it became clear that she’d slipped into unconsciousness, Hugh, together with Dawn and Gary, lifted her onto the hospital bed. She never awoke again.

In a way, her retreat could not have been more perfect,
more Irene. My mother used up every last atom of her awe-inspiring, superhuman energy reserves to make herself look pretty for the rabbi.

As Hugh and I kept vigil at her bedside over the next week, I realized that it didn’t matter anymore what we called each other. Mother or daughter, those roles were done. Finished.

She was just Irene, a woman being swept away by the current that sooner or later takes us all. This was her story, her passage, and I was her witness. It was the first time I really saw her as a separate person—not in relation to me—and, somehow, during the hours I spent by her side not trying to do anything except be present, something came unhooked. All the things we fought over—my ripped jeans and wild hair, her ridiculous pretensions, my bad boyfriends and so-called irresponsible ways, her yearning for a daughter who would reflect her back to herself, my longing for a mother who would see me as I really am—seemed as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke.

Gone.

I buried her in the leopard chiffon.

“We’re lost.”

Aza was speaking to me from a pay phone in a coffee shop in Sylmar, California, on July 27, 1972.

Nine days earlier, she had spoken to me from a pay phone in the waiting room of Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. “Mom died. Genie can’t leave Vancouver; the orchestra has a concert. I’ll bury her Thursday. The arrangements have been taken care of by the union. I’ll be at home.” Our apartment was practically around the corner from the hospital.

My mother-in-law, Rose Millenky, was a milliner, a member of the garment workers’ union, retired, and living in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union apartments on Eighth Avenue. In a younger time, she was an adventurer, swimming across the Hudson River, hitchhiking around the country, climbing in the Adirondacks; if there had been skydiving, she would have been right there. She was hardly a flit, though. She was intelligent, educated, and artistic.

When David Burliuk, already a major painter and poet in Russia, came to the Lower East Side, he and his wife lived in Rose’s apartment building. She recognized the importance of his work and started hawking his paintings to family,
acquaintances, galleries, passersby on street corners, and anybody else who would look to help get him established. His day job was writing for the Russian language newspaper. Rose’s recompense was that he would write a review of Aza’s dance recital. It was glowing. They became lifelong friends. Aza still has a bunch of his paintings to take care of us in our old age.

Rose had two girls. Aza, fathered by Samuel Cefkin (Pop), became a Martha Graham modern dancer, Broadway dancer, Broadway actor, and Actor’s Studio early member. She picked me up after our first rehearsal playing my wife in a Tennessee Williams play,
A Period of Adjustment
, in Richmond, Virginia, and has kept me around for forty-eight years so far. She’s an inveterate reader of history, politics, and periodicals from the
New Yorker
to the
Nation
, with fiction thrown in. Her sister Eugenia, known as Genie, was fathered by Abe Millenky. Genie was a violin prodigy, won a scholarship to Juilliard, hankered for a French horn player, switched to English horn and oboe so she could sit closer to him in the orchestra, and had her scholarship renewed in a few months. They married, shipped out to the Vancouver Symphony (British Columbia), and became union leaders in the orchestra—left-wing troublemakers.

In the last few years of her life, Rose slipped into pre-senile dementia. Aza came across her on the street in their old neighborhood, looking for their old apartment, lost, and took her home. We started watching her more carefully. One night we found her cowering in the stairwell of her apartment house, having had a nightmare. She had to save the children,
the pogrom, the soldiers were coming. She had run from the apartment, locking herself out. We found her by chance when we punched the wrong floor on the elevator and were walking down to her level. Alzheimer’s was upon her. Aza quickly made arrangements at a retirement and nursing home on West End Avenue.

Rose never lost flirting. When we picked her up for a drive through Central Park in our 1951 Riley Drophead, she would get in, give me her best come-on look, and murmur, “Hiya, handsome.” Her eyesight, not so good.

A long-neglected breast cancer finally put her in the hospital, and then she died.

Aza hung out in the City for a couple of days, grieved, saw a few friends, and then flew back to Minneapolis, where I was on temporary duty at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre. I’d been hired for the season, playing George in
Of Mice and Men
, directed by Len Cariou, and The Wall in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, with Roberta Maxwell and Frank Langella, directed by John Hirsch, a truly brilliant director, in repertory.

John was another refugee, born in Hungary and spirited away in the late 1930s, before he could be swept up and sent to a concentration camp. His early memories were of winter, walking between rows of frozen bodies stacked like cordwood. When he was taken to safety, he was asked where he wanted to live. He looked at a map of North America and put his finger on Winnipeg, a dot on the landscape, where he became a major force in theater. In 1989, he died in his personal death camp, AIDS.

The Guthrie, a theater where many rising actors dreamed of spending time, for a season, or for a great part, housed a small, permanent group of experienced performers, not retired, just not interested in the daily tilting at windmills in New York and Los Angeles; the appointments, the auditions, the rejections, the bad scripts and plays. It certainly ain’t all pretty. They could live in a beautiful city, work in a beautiful theater, do beautiful plays, ably directed, in front of the most intelligent and appreciative audience anywhere, and make a decent living.

The group included Robert Pastene, probably the best actor I ever knew or saw. Everything he did on stage, just walking through an entrance, was effortless. He understood the magic of acting, the ability to leave his personal demons in the dressing room and bring onstage only the demons of the character he was playing, though sometimes closely aligned. And Pastene had demons, demons that presented as severe physical stress, a frozen shoulder and stiff neck, giving him a look of imperious, total command on stage. He didn’t need the look; he was in command. When he was Buck Rogers, on live television in New York, Aza played an enemy, Ishtar, goddess of something or other, who could look into her basin of predicting fluid and see all sorts of mayhem for which she would be responsible.

When Robert had finished a lengthy, successful run on a television afternoon serial and was visiting the Barter Theatre (a summer theater in the hills of southwest Virginia, where a lot of us began our lives in the business), he was having lunch in the soda fountain section of the local drugstore. There was a commotion at the cash register in the front of the
store, and someone yelled, “Call the police. There’s a killer in here, a murderer!” That was followed by the looming presence of a large, farmer-type man in bib overalls saying, “I’ll hold him. Call the sheriff!” Bob looked around the drugstore for someone who would do such a thing, and then “Bib Overalls” pounced on him. It took a lot of talking and restraining to convince the man to let him up. It was true TV, Pastene
had
killed his wife—on
The Edge of Night
. (Now, that is not necessarily a small-town happening; a similar thing happened to me on East 42nd Street in New York, and again in the parking lot of a supermarket in Cleveland, when I was acting in the soap opera
Love of Life
, playing a con-man killer. My mamaw, in Tampa, once declared, “I don’t care if he
is
a murderer, he’s my grandson!”)

It was only days after burying her mother that Aza got the call from Los Angeles telling her that her father had died from a heart attack that morning. His wife, Aza’s stepmother, said he died in the shower; he was a clean old man, beautiful and clean.

Pop was a printer, a Linotype operator who learned his craft after he came over from Russia to Rochester, a jumping-off point for many Jews fleeing czarist Russia, coming in by way of Quebec. He joined the union after his apprenticeship. In 1911, he was asked to help a young revolutionary gangster escape the police, after she had held up a government courier, stealing important documents. There was a harrowing run through Belarus to the Baltic Sea, using a sort of underground railroad, a steerage journey to Montreal, then on to Rochester, where an older brother, a plumber, had migrated with his
family. The steerage part of the journey was obviously horrific because Samuel never spoke of it.

There was a time when Rose, her second husband Abe, and Aza were living in Russia. Abe Millenky, Aza’s stepfather, was a mechanical engineer who had been sent by Ford Motor Company to Nizhny Novgorod to build an assembly plant. Rose took this opportunity to travel deep into Siberia, where she found her mother quite ill and brought her back to western Russia. The woman died shortly after the reunion. While Rose was away, Aza stayed in Moscow with her father, who had been asked by
The Daily Worker
to go to Russia to translate and teach Linotype operating for a sister newspaper.

While the family was in Russia, Hitler was coming to power. Travel routes were closing, and Stalin still didn’t like the Jews. Abe and Rose, being under the auspices of Ford Motors, felt safe enough, but they didn’t feel so sure about an incredibly beautiful young Aza. On a weekend Volga River outing, a soldier had threatened to carry their teenager off to the mountains on his horse—he was probably
not
kidding around.

Sensing the impending danger, Pop prepared an adventure that included retracing a route to the Baltic Sea. This time, he’d take his daughter, and the police weren’t searching for him. They traveled by train to Riga. The ship was a regular ocean liner, accommodations were light-years from the terrible scow he had sailed on several decades earlier, hunkered in a filthy bilge. Pop’s only concern was the crush Aza had on a very handsome young sailor and the sailor’s attraction to her.
They returned to New York and The Coops, sans sailor, and Aza went back to high school a celebrity.

I had met Pop a few years before Aza knocked me over. I was a union printer, as in International Typographical, as in Linotype operator. Looking for acting work, I didn’t have to worry about having to quit temp jobs, like waiting tables, then trying to find a job after the acting job. I could work around New York. There were still quite a few newspapers then—
Times, Tribune, News, Mirror, Post, Wall Street Journal, Morning Telegraph
—and I was able to substitute for regulars who couldn’t make it out of the Blarney Stone or McSorley’s, or were on vacation, or when a paper, like the
Times
, needed extra operators to produce ads for its huge classified section in the Sunday edition. If all else failed, there was the
Journal American
, a rag on South Street between Battery Park and Fulton Fish Market. You could get a beer and a fish sandwich wrapped in butcher paper for a buck and a quarter and eat lunch in the park.

Pop was a retiree, allowed to work a few days a month for extra income and hang out at the shop for a while. After the
Daily Worker
—where he had worked since it started printing in 1924—stopped publishing in 1958, he retired. Since he lived downtown on the East Side, it was easy enough to catch a bus to the Hearst paper and work his seven-day allotment. However, he was not much of a hanger-outer.

I remember catching on at the
Journal American
, and sitting at the machine next to him, being struck by the neatness of this old guy. Composing rooms of newspapers were not particularly clean places to work; a film of printer’s ink
was on every surface, including the keyboards of typesetting machines, and there was the graphite dust used for lubrication. Pop didn’t use a paper towel to wipe the grime from his keyboard and surrounds; he had a cotton dish towel with a bit of a clean smell to it, and he used it a lot, it seemed. Like most of the tradesmen of his generation, he wore a white shirt and tie, only he didn’t roll up his sleeves, didn’t unbutton his collar, didn’t tuck in his tie, and didn’t wear an apron. Clean old man. Handsome. Reserved. Didn’t have anything to say to me, just a nod.