I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (2 page)

I
was four years old crossing the walkway high above the stage at the old Metropolitan Opera House on my way to ballet class. The sound of the song rising from the tenor on the big stage below was so powerful, I almost fainted. I hung on with both hands to the rope on the sides.

“Move!” they were hissing behind me.

We had to be quiet. I couldn’t move. I was waiting for the thick buzz in my head to clear. I was literally drowning in the passion the unknown singer had thrown up to the old Metropolitan eaves. Someone, maybe an older girl thinking I was frightened, unhooked my hands from the rope railing and led me to the door of our ballet class. I later learned it was an aria from
La Bohème
.

The big elevator had broken down again, so our class, like little Madelines, had the rare privilege of crossing the great stage on our way to the opera house’s elevator, which would take us out on that catwalk crossing the top of the theater.

That morning Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the Met’s manager, pointed at me.

“You,” he said. “You.”

He needed a Chinese prince, a child, who is kidnapped in San Francisco by Antonio Scotti, the great baritone, in a short opera called
L’Oracolo.
It was to be Scotti’s farewell performance, and he had to be able to carry the “prince” across the big stage and into the wings. The more Gatti-Casazza screamed “Relax!” the more I stiffened in Scotti’s arms, until I lay across them like a board. I finally collapsed and he carried me across the stage. I got the part.

I’m on the big stage at the Met. I’m Hu-Cî, a Chinese prince. Antonio Scotti rolls an orange to me and I roll it back. Then he races to the wings carrying me. I love the big, big stage. I can’t even see the edges. The lights are pink and blue and white and reflect off the dark wooden floor. The orchestra is in front, in a huge dark place, and beyond in the dark, a sea of people stretch to the back walls and to the ceiling in tiers. People, loving the music, the singing, and me. Loving me. I love the world onstage. I am swept away, surrounded by the boom of the music, the glory of all the voices, especially the soprano of Lucrezia Bori, the violins, the brass, and the big thumping drum.

I shared a dressing room with Gladys Swarthout, who sang in
Cavalleria Rusticana
, on a double bill with
L’Oracolo
, but my dressing room rights were taken away after I warned the tenor onstage that Mr. Scotti was sneaking up on him with a big knife to stab him in the back.

It was my Uncle Joe who had convinced me to save the tenor’s life.

“You ought to do it,” he said. “You see the bad man with that big knife? The tenor’s back is turned to him. Only you can save him. Everyone would be so proud of you.”

“How?”

“You pull the tenor’s sleeve. Say, ‘He’s coming, he’s coming. Turn
around.’ Yell it at him. Surprise him. Surprise your mother. She’ll be so proud.”

And so that night, as Mr. Scotti raised his big knife and the tenor was singing his heart out to Miss Bori, looking down from her balcony, I whispered, “He’s going to kill you. Please, please turn around, he’s coming behind you—”

The music was loud, his voice was loud and frantic. I started to yell above the music and pull at his arm. He pushed me away, his eyes flash at me in terror.

“Turn around,” I insisted.

He turned just in time to see the knife raised to kill him, then turned back quickly to resume his aria to Lucrezia on the balcony. Come to think of it, why didn’t she ever warn him? She could see the whole thing, too.

The audience burst into laughter as the knife plunged into the tenor’s back, and into applause for me as I joined the finale, making up my own song with its own language, joining the opera stars singing theirs in Italian. Even the serious prompter in his box facing the stage was smiling and winking at me.

When my distraught mother confronted him, my Uncle Joe said he never really meant for me to actually do it. Gatti-Casazza was so angry that I was banned from Miss Swarthout’s dressing room. I was no longer visible when the tenor was stabbed. A replica of a sidewalk cellar shed was created onstage, and I was stored there from the time I was kidnapped until the finale. I wasn’t bored. I could see everybody’s feet and the parades upstage and hear the music.

And
The New York Times
said, “Little Lyova Haskell Rosenthal is precocious.”

I thought at the time it meant “precious,” and at that time in my grandmother’s house, I really was.

•   •   •

A
bner Rasumoff lay stretched out on a string hammock in the backyard of the brownstone. I sat on a tree stump. His brown-blond hair dipped in a wave over his forehead. He swung in the hammock. We were very conscious of each other. I found it difficult to breathe and make conversation. Two lines appeared between his eyebrows, as if he were concentrating on something important, manly.

“Don’t frown,” I said, echoing my mother’s constant warnings. “You’ll get wrinkles.”

“If I don’t will you marry me?”

My heart lurched. I could feel the air go out of me. I waited until I could talk.

“Yes,” I said with certainty.

There was a minute of hesitation. Something more should follow. Should I lie on the hammock, too? The yard still looked the same.

“Let’s tell our mothers,” I said.

He was still looking ahead, not at me. I was afraid the moment would pass. He rose up from the hammock and held out his hand. It was dry and warm. We walked across the yard, up the wooden steps to the porch, and into the kitchen.

“Abner and I are getting married,” I said.

Oh, the cries from our mothers, the cakes, the tea that was pressed on us, the celebration. His mother, Musea Rasumoff, of the white, white skin and red hair, my mother, Witia, and my grandmother, with her rough fingers in my hair. Abner and I accepted the music of our mothers, basked in their warmth and our own importance. I was five years old. Abner was nine.

To celebrate, Musea, clapping her hands, danced to the upright piano used for the nursery school. A hand at her heart. Her eyes
matched her blue eyelids. She sang in Russian, swaying, carried away by her own passion. Overcome by longing, she pulled at the low neckline of her dress, sang and pulled until a whole breast appeared. She ignored it and finished on a husky high note. My mother clapped her hands.

“Musea, your breast, your breast is exquisite,” my mother exclaimed, gesturing toward it. “You’ve had two boys. How do you manage to keep your breasts like that?”

Musea pulled down her dress to reveal the matching one, and my mother gasped.

“Oh Musea!”

“Witia,” said Musea, “when I have breakfast in the morning, I say to my orange juice—go-o-o to the right breast.” She pantomimed a sip. “Go-o-o to the left breast . . .”

I looked over at Abner. He was eating his fruitcake, drinking tea, his eyes fixed on the table, his ears and cheeks pink. I wanted to move over to him, but I knew he didn’t want me to.

That whole winter, I would steal glances at my mother during breakfast. With each sip of juice or cider vinegar she would close her eyes, tilt her head to the side of her body she was addressing, and mouth the words silently and prayerfully.

•   •   •

I
entered the office with my mother. She said that maybe I could be in a movie, with a great songwriter. There, sitting at the edge of the desk, her long legs crossed in front of her, was a beautiful lady with an orange face. She was turning over pages with orange hands. We were greeted by Gus Edwards, an older man, short and square, with a wide smile. His forehead and hands were also orange, but mixed with tan. Edwards had cowritten “School days, school days, dear old golden rule
days, readin’ and writin’ and ’rithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick,” and was now starring in and directing a short movie set in a classroom.

He was set to sing the song to a classroom full of children seated at their desks while their mothers milled around before filming began. The lady with the orange face was the teacher. My mother flashed her shining smile at Gus, showing both rows of teeth.

I was placed at a desk in the back of the class, with a pencil and a notebook. A cute boy with brown hair and an Irish face turned to me and looked into my eyes when Gus sang, “You were my queen in calico, I was your bashful, barefoot beau.”

When Gus sang “I love you, Joe,” I held up my notebook to show the boy; it was written on the page. The camera was on me, looking at him so seriously, a big white bow in my hair.

I saw it once, I don’t know where, and felt the jolt of recognition. Somewhere in that five-year-old girl was a presence, a mystery, the me to come, hiding behind the eyes.

I
would visit my father some weekends, on College Avenue in the Bronx, where he lived with his parents. The walk-up apartment smelled of stewing chicken and spices.

My grandparents’ small, neat, white bedroom looked out onto a courtyard that was pure theater. Fire escape upon fire escape full of families popping in and out of windows. The duvet on the bed was a marvel, a two-foot-high cloud of soft feathered down, which they let me dive into.

Aunt Anne, who lived in the front room overlooking the street, invited a friend over, a lady with a big red mouth who kept laughing and touching my father. She leaned on him, laughing. Sitting on the chair watching, I felt a clutch at my heart. I was jealous. I ran to my father and pushed her away. They pointed at me and laughed, but I didn’t. I hated her.

Not long after, I was asleep in my bed when my mother woke me. She was radiant and smiling. She wore a dress the color of cream of tomato soup, crepe, with a V-neck edged in a white organdy collar that stood up in waves and framed her beautiful face.

“Daddy and I are getting back together.”

She squeezed me and hugged me, imprinting me with the scent of Shalimar, then held me away so she could see my reaction.

“Lyova, we’ll all be together . . .” I was sleepy. It was a good dream.

The condition my father agreed to in order for our family to be together again was to grant my mother’s wish to spend a year in Paris with Fremo and me.

No wonder she was so excited. A year in Paris!

Fremo left for France weeks before us because I had a fever. So my mother and I sailed together on the
Île de France
. As I reached the top of the gangplank and followed the curve of the ship, heady with excitement, a young man reached out and pulled my hair. I turned. He was sitting on the railing, laughing, the sun behind him giving his tweed jacket and his black hair an aureole. I leaned against my mother’s legs and looked up at his shining face, his shining teeth, his teasing eyes. I fell in love.

Looking up at my mother, I felt she had, too. Her face was glowing from his attention. He was a young doctor, I remember. Days later, they went to the ship’s masquerade together. She had made a costume for me, a gypsy girl, I think. I had never been so excited before. I wanted to show my costume to him, to dazzle him, but the night of the masquerade my mother told me I couldn’t go. Children weren’t allowed.

Plead, plead, plead.

“No!” She stood her ground.

“Why?” I yowled, the unfairness of life closing in on me, yet another life lesson.

The magic of attraction, the unfairness of my competition: my mother.

Then one morning, in the belly of the big boat, a family of beautiful blond-haired children ran past me, like a shimmering stream of white goldfish. The girl’s hair was long. She was about ten, her
brothers younger. I turned and started to run after them when the youngest boy, maybe six, turned suddenly and punched me hard in the belly. I was so startled by the pain that I stood still, in the middle of the big ship’s hallway, feeling circle after circle of pain rise and ebb inside me, holding my breath till I could breathe again. I stood there a long time afterward.

On deck the next day I saw the girl without her brothers talking to a bursar. It was sunny and breezy. Her white-yellow hair flew behind her, her arms were tan, and on her head was a blue satin ribbon that said
ÎLE DE FRANCE
. I went up to her.

“Where did you get your ribbon?”

“Jews aren’t allowed to wear these,” she snapped, then turned and ran.

“What’s a Jew?” I asked my mother in the stateroom.

“Why?” she asked. I told her.

That evening she brought me three ribbons that said
ÎLE DE FRANCE
on them. But I didn’t care.

•   •   •

P
aris was spring dresses, a pale green one with a collar that crossed and buttoned. I prayed when I put it on, “God, please let Fremo say changing to this dress was wise.”

The door opened. Fremo came in.

“Lovey,” she said. “How wise of you.”

Yes!

We stayed with a French uncle and aunt, my cousin Charlotte, and her brother. The French girls my age were delicious scamps. Charlotte and I walked back from the bakery with fresh baguettes, smelling the tops of the hot bread, then eating it, while the girl downstairs stuck her tongue out at me. I was like a sheltered puppy out on a leash for the first time. The children didn’t love me, as they had in the Haskell
Nursery School. They were wild and beautiful, and I loved them, not they me.

The Luxembourg Gardens, the puppet shows, the sounds and smells of spring, the boys whipping their wheels, learning table French at my cousins’ table—
“Donnez-moi le pain et le beurre, s’il vous plaît”
—all were enchanting. Fremo and I wandering the back streets together, coming on a wedding and climbing the little church steps to sit in the back and watch.

In autumn we left my cousins and found grim rooms for the three of us. My eyelids stuck together in the morning. My mother bathed them in warm boric acid till I could open them. It frightened me. Mother was having gas pains and staying in bed. We stuck out three months of our year in Paris and steamed home on the
Paris
.

And so, for the first time in my memory, we were to be a family, a traditional American family. Mother, Daddy, and me. Before my sixth birthday I’d discovered I had a low tolerance for boredom, a high tolerance for physical pain, fell hopelessly in love, found an ally in God, and discovered I was a Jew.

Reunited, we moved to 706 Riverside Drive, the big beautiful white apartment building next to my grandmother’s brownstone. One entrance led out to 148th Street; the other, grander entrance was on the Drive. There was a bus stop in front of it. In those years all the buses were double-deckers, and the life seen through other people’s windows—other children looking back at me or playing in their rooms, grown-ups setting tables—became my fascination. I spent a lot of time on that bus from the age of four till nine. Those were the early years, when my mother’s lofty dream was that I be a great ballerina in the Met’s corps de ballet. Twice a week in coldest winter we traveled down to the old Met on Broadway and 37th Street for my ballet lesson with Miss Curtis, the children’s ballet mistress. In snow, in wind, we rode downtown and back again on the number 5 bus. It
seemed an interminable ride. In those days, girls wore neither pants nor tights. All winter long I wore a warm English wool coat with a velvet collar and kneesocks. The space where my socks ended and my white cotton panties began was open to the fierce, bitter cold wind of the Drive. I always had chapped thighs in the winter. Once, when it had snowed for days and an icy wind was blowing, I went out the entrance on the Drive. The snow was thigh-high. A cat with gray fur was frozen. Standing on its back feet, its claws out to fight the wind, its mouth wide open, its teeth bared, yellow eyes opened wide in rage. Facing the river.

Our seventh-floor living room had a big window that covered almost the whole wall. We had a view of the Hudson all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. My mother built a long window seat fitted with a long pillow. It was a wonderful place to sit and read after school when it was too cold to go outside. In the warmer months, in spring and fall, all the girls from 706 would tumble out onto the street, breathless with freedom from school, from parents, from piano lessons or, in my case, ballet.

My mother had charmed George Balanchine into inviting me to join the newly formed School of American Ballet, along with another child from Miss Curtis’s class at the Met, Anne Marie Conradi. Anne Marie was a marvel. We were only eight or nine, but already she had a dancer’s body, long and lithe—and remarkable, almost mathematical technique. We were the only children in Pierre Vladimiroff’s classes. Anne Marie could keep up with all the great dancers in the class. It was clear to everyone but my mother that I could not. I was obedient but unhappy. Anne Marie was absent for a couple of weeks. We learned she had tuberculosis of the hip and could not dance anymore. The sense I had of my own lack of talent and of Anne Marie, a real star being brought down, was vivid and haunting. I spoke to my father about it. He had no notion of my dancing ability. All he heard was
tuberculosis, and he informed my mother at dinner that night that there would be no more dangerous ballet for me. It was an edict. My mother regretfully accepted it, and we moved on to the other arts. I was free (of ballet). No more buses in winter, cold legs, no more peering into other people’s windows and lives.