Great Kisser (17 page)

I waited a while, then said, “What do you mean he was better looking than me?”

“He was!” my mother shouted. “You got a certain charm. But he was.”

At the door, I said, “You hated me.”

“Oh come on, Michael. I didn't chase you away. It was your choice to stay away.”

“That's not true,” I said.

“It is true. I accept you for what you are, okay? You should accept me for what I am.”

“You called me ‘It.'”

“Never.”

She paused and said, “I hit you, you say?”

After a moment, she said, “You were very anxious for me to come home when you were a little boy. You used to stick your face out the door. When you were seven or eight you were very affectionate, Michael. You used to like it when I got into bed with you. You used to touch my face. Remember? And kiss. You were a great kisser.”

In the intervening years, I would see little elderly women trundling down the street in high heels, or coming toward me, their faces heavily made up, their thin hair coiffed and dyed, holding shopping bags. And think of her.

VI

Now in my mother's silent apartment, I was afraid I would never get out again. I thought I might drown, sink beneath the thick carpet.

I could find amid my mother's copious notes and calendars no trace of a man, a lover, in her life. Only Placido Domingo tapes.

In her diary for 1987, three years before her death, on January 5 she had written: “Michael's birthday.” There was no entry for 1988, or 1989.

In the apartment, I imagined I heard the cry from the street I'd heard as a young boy: “Old clothes! Scissors!” The top-hatted man and his horse-drawn carriage. The house with the well in the garden was gone, and so was the little wooden newstand under the elevated subway at 90th Street, where I worked for free when I was eight for the glory of being a newsboy.

I grew up in this apartment. I took piano lessons from Miss Edith Jertson from Charleton Street in Greenwich Village. I walked home from school at dusk, in sunshine, on crunchy leaves, in heavy snow, to the waiting apartment house, where goldfish swam in a small rock pond on the right side of the entrance. Parents called out windows for Lance Leibman, Mark Weiss, Eddie Colletti, Maurice Wallack, Charles Greene, Linda Barker, Stephen Gunzen-houser and Frances Rinaldi.

In her desk I found my mother's diary of “Our Baby's First Years.” She had conscientiously recorded all the details of my birth and of the first two years of my life. She had been in labor twenty-one hours. I'd been a quiet newborn; I slept most of the time; I cried little. I weighed seven pounds, five ounces. My length was twenty inches; my chest thirteen inches. I was partially breast fed for the first ten days of my life. I turned my head at three weeks, started to walk around my playpen at nine months, held a cup to drink at thirteen months, walked alone at fourteen and a half months, climbed stairs at fifteen months. I was placed on the potty seat after every meal, my mother wrote, “and thus acquired the habit of elimination.”

I started to coo at three and a half months, said “nice” and “dada” at fifteen months, and sang to myself. I had a party for my first birthday. I “showed expressions of rhythm in body movement before one year. Loved to dance to music,” my mother wrote, “and clap his hands—also made movements to lead music with his hands.”

I searched for a link to this mother who cared enough about me (at least at first; she abandoned the diary after two years, leaving the rest empty) to write down every detail of my existence. I recalled nothing of it. I remembered only her fury at my achievements, her jealousy, her open anger. When she embraced me, as I remembered it, she did it to keep warm, to use me, to entice me—and then she would suddenly turn on me and slap me across the face.

I wondered about her strangeness, how she came to be. I remembered her loneliness and cruelty, but nothing good about her or how she treated me. Yes, she did buy me my first kosher hot dog on a cold winter day, which was delicious. But she resented cooking, and cleaning, and gave me no money whatsoever, not a nickel. I felt she would let me starve if it was up to her.

I remember how terrified I was by her hatred, how utterly alone I had felt, standing on the rooftop of the apartment house, wondering about her. Somehow if I understood, it would be all right. I could forgive her, help her. I tried to analyze her condition as I imagined an elegant, detached psychiatrist would, speaking aloud in a deep voice sentences of pity—which gave me a feeling of superiority and refinement. I was so above and beyond her.

When I went out on my own, I would go back to the old neighborhood and sneak up to the rooftop. I would look for her shadow in the window beneath me, ready to dart back behind a pole if she spotted me.

Stories of the Holocaust drifted across to America and frightened me, yet I understood the Holocaust through my mother's behavior. But that understanding must have come later on. When did she hold and kiss me? Teach me to speak? Make me laugh? She did, I was sure, but it went too far back.

She liked to rub noses, “like pussycats,” she said, but she wanted me pliant, her plaything. Even my laughter upset her, made her slap me. It was too robust, too independent. My joy pissed her off no end. And she was furious when I got sick: more work for her. Oh, I could document all the hurts and wrongs she'd done to me. This hatred of my mother made me strange to others, and to myself. And I wanted to feel that there was a time when she gave me love. She gave me birth, she kept the diary. I reached back to the dark apartment with my mother and my grandparents (they all lived together when my father divorced her) and I recalled the vivid scenes of my grandmother's cooking, my grandparents' love for me.

My mother cried after my father left. She cried in her bedroom and I could not console her.

VII

I tried to grasp a warm image of her. She did call me The Professor in proud moments, didn't she? Or was that sarcastic? She did buy me that hot dog, and, another time, spare ribs. And I remembered snuggling into bed with milk and my favorite cookies, so overcome with excitement I could hardly bear it, when my beloved Jolson was going to be the star of Lux Radio Theater. Where was my mother? I could not remember her being there. She probably was. She must have served me the milk and cookies.

But I could not remember anything—

Except the scent and taste of my grandmother's knishes; her peppery lamb chops and steaks that she cooked for breakfast; her chicken and schmaltz and chopped liver—so delicious. The smell of that kitchen where I was home.

VIII

I had been robbed of so much of myself, although I had always loved. Wherever I was, I could not ignore love, joy—on the page, on the stage, in the voice of the singer, the artist, I was hovering behind, I was darting around, I was there. Or it was Sherwood Anderson on the page, or O'Neill, Dostoyevsky, Landolfi, Schwartzbart, de Montherlant; or the conveyors of the art, my teachers: Emile Capouya, Anatole Broyard at the New School, and Ellie Hakim who died so young and lived down the street from me off Stuyvesant near St. Marks in the Bouwerie, with her bay window where she stood looking out, the light in the window. I was capable of love. Stunted as I was, peering out from behind the curtains, under the seats, I couldn't deny what was beautiful, what was so graceful and spectacular in the voices and expressions and selves of others. At the height of my near madness, the one time I saw serpents and stoplights turned into scorpions and the diners in the restaurants turning toward me with pitchforks and the faces of devils, I said to myself “I still love life, I know what is happening, how fucked up I am, but I cannot help but loving anyway.”

Walking through Washington Square Park now, I saw an old man with a pink face, long gray hair, pink shirt, and brown sweater bent forward on a bench reading. His nose was in the book because he was very nearsighted. As I came closer, I saw that the man was reading to his wife, who sat in her wheelchair facing him. The book he was reading from was perched on the arm of the wheelchair. They were sealed together against the grayness of the day.

I stood and watched them. How I loved the city.

IX

On the final day, when the apartment was emptied of the crystal lamps, the Steinway baby grand, the green jade lamps, the cupids, the marble tables and the smoked glass mirrors, I stood in the living room, the white curtains waving out the open window in the spring breeze. Across the street stood the charred remains of Dr. Carson's mansion, where my father had carried me in his arms for my tonsil operation. Dr. Carson's front yard was cluttered with the innards of shattered furniture and debris. A homeless woman neatly carried one piece of the debris at a time from one junk pile to another as if she was going to make a fresh start.

It had been incredibly sweet to be alive when I was ten, selling lemonade and comic books in front of my apartment house, in a world of kosher hot dogs in winter and Durante singing “Inka Dinka Doo” and a life ahead of belting out songs and wowing audiences. And a girl I would rescue from a convent.

I prepared to leave the apartment for the last time. There was one yellowed piece of paper remaining on the dining room floor. I picked it up. It was my birth announcement, in Yiddish and English. There was a picture of the rabbi, Reb. H. Gotsaof of the Bronx, wearing a Russian felt hat and a bow tie not quite in place. He had a little beard and moustache.

I went back to my mother's scrapbook:

To Min:

For sale little Min for a wife

Whoever wants a prize for life,

Rather particular and neat as a pin

For further particulars enquire within.

Your little pal,

Beatrice

To my loving sister Minnie:

A father's love is pure and deep

Likewise is a brother's

A sister's love is pure and sweet

But there is none like Mother's.

From your loving Brother,

Danny.

June 19, 1928

To Minnie:

May your troubles

be a midsummer's night dream

And your future as you like it.

Your friend,

Edna

There was among her things a miniature yellow ivory dance program. A tiny pencil was attached to it by a purple string. It had no names in it, but my mother had kept it through the years. Within, it had the insignia in purple of New York University. The little book was issued for the Winter Ball of the student organization of Washington Square College, held at the Waldorf Astoria, December 21, 1931.

I saw snow falling, forming crystals in the trees of Washington Square Park. My mother would have been eighteen years old. I didn't think New York University had winter balls anymore.

Now the apartment was as silent to me as I had been to her in her last years, in her great, unstated need, in her panic, her fear of death, her aloneness.

I kissed the walls. The pillows, the last pink cubes of soap in the bathroom, the things my mother's hands had touched.

She loved me. What do you know.

Danny and Me

I

On Sabbath night, they gather for prayers and dinner. I am the volunteer staffer. No one knows the Hebrew prayers, so the black attendant, Gaylord, his arms folded, emotionally sings “The Lord's Prayer.” As he sings, the group stares out into space.

Buddy, about forty-five, struts like a peacock in his purple shirt, and wears a large and busy orange, purple, and chartreuse rabbit's foot key ring on the right side of his pants. He likes to act like the big shot, and calls out to the men in wheelchairs, “Hey, how ya doin', old man?” and winks to the rest of us.

“Black people are the best,” Buddy says to Gaylord. “I never feel fear among blacks. Such a sweet black nurse my uncle had, so kind to him. My uncle got robbed, and he shot at them, but he shot at the cops too. So the cops shot his ankle off. His leg was amputated.

“I bought him a bottle of Scotch. And I went to Barracini's for a three-pound box of sour candies. I gave them my order. I say, Look at me. I want my order, and I want it now. And I told the sweet black nurse: give him one. If he wants more, you give him a little bit at a time. You take a little ashtray, and you fill that up by his bed. And you fill up a shot glass with a little water, take a little Scotch, and an ice cube. Then hide it from him because he wants more. I tell my uncle, you want to take a walk? I'll wheel you in your room, I'll wash you around, get you dressed. Then I'll dress you up warm, put you in a wheelchair, put his artificial leg on.”

“I would like some cookies, Michael,” an etherized voice wafts up to me. It is Leah, whose body is twisted and whose head circles around constantly. I get the cookies for Leah. “I said I want some cookies, but I didn't say I want them now. When I'm done with dinner I would like some cookies please—”

“Here they are—”

“You're not listening, Michael. I would like three cookies please, when I am done with dinner. Please get me three cookies on a plate when I am done with my dinner.”

“Okay—”

“What kind of cookies do you have?”

“Pecan and oatmeal.”

“Pecan, please. Three cookies, when I am done with my dinner. My father will be picking me up at eight o'clock. Please listen. My father will be picking me up at eight o'clock. We will go downstairs at 7:45 and wait for him. Will you take me downstairs at 7:45 please? I would like my cookies now.”

Danny Stein is one of the people I've volunteered to counsel since I arrived in Los Angeles. An obese young man in his twenties with a sharp, whining, robotic voice, he is slumped in his chair. Seated across from him, Michelle, a pretty young girl, his former girlfriend, is staring at him.

“Hi, Danny,” I say.

“I'm so glad I don't have to speak to Michelle anymore. She was always bothering and disobeying me. She was just impossible to deal with,” Danny responds.