The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead (17 page)

Bloodline to Star Power (iii)

In the early 1970s, my half sister, Emily, was working as a maid at a motel in Oregon. “Don't know how it happened,” my father explained, “but Pepi and his wife were guests at this posh place.” Emily introduced herself, told him who she was, and Schildkraut gave her one of his “stylish Borsalino felt hats, which he wore in rakish over-one-eye European style—always the matinee idol—as a souvenir.” She gave the hat to my father, who “had it in the closet for years, but it must have got thrown out when I moved after your mother's death.”

I tell this story to Emily, who writes back, “Concerning the story about Joseph Schildkraut giving me a hat: that's a total mystery to me! I did work for a short time in a hotel in Cannon Beach, Oregon. I have no memory of this mysterious visitor—or even seeing him—except in the movie
The Diary of Anne Frank.
Either I was that spaced-out in those days and have blocked out this significant event, or once again our Pop has fabricated another yarn for you from his rich imagination. Sorry.”

I relay what Emily has said back to my father, who wants to know: “Then where did the Borsalino hat come from? I distinctly remember Emily telling us that when she learned Joseph was a guest at the Oregon resort she was working at, she went over to him, told him her father's original name, they talked for a few minutes, and then Pepi gave her the hat. He wore hats like a Borsalino in his stage and screen roles back in the days when all male actors wore hats. And Borsalino, an expensive Italian-made hat, would be his style.”

Then, shortly afterward, in a truly weird coincidence, an old friend of our family's calls my father and asks him to pick up two boxes of odds and ends that my father had left with them many years ago. “The lid flipped open on one of the boxes, and on top there was the hat Schildkraut gave to Emily at that Oregon coast resort back in the early '70s. Thought you'd be interested to learn about my (accidental) archaeological finding.”

I am, I am, but the hat proves nothing. Only very recently I happened to discover that Schildkraut died in 1964, which means that Emily—sweetly seeking my father's appreciation—must have invented the entire story, my father invented the story, I've got the details wrong, or being in a family is indistinguishable from playing telephone. And yet the photograph in
My Father and I
of Schildkraut kissing Susan Strasberg on the forehead in
The Diary of Anne Frank
mimics exactly the melodramatic bad acting in two photographs of my father kissing Emily when she was very little. In so many photographs of “Pepi” or my father or me is this certain quality of mugging hungrily, of pretty-boyness (me till I was 12, my father into late middle age, Schildkraut until he was dead), of stilted posedness, of on-your-knees-before-the-camera obsequiousness, of needing to be liked by the lens, of peasant smilingness, of over-reliance upon previous modes of appearing in pictures…

Schildkraut also has what is to me a disturbing-because-familiar detachment toward his own feelings. “Maybe there was no such thing as love in real life,” he writes. “These all-consuming agonies and ecstasies of love existed only on the stage.” I once wrote about stuttering that “it prevents you from ever entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world's happy property and not yours—not really yours except by way of disingenuous circumlocution.”

The tightest warp and woof I can weave comes from the sound of the syntax. Joseph says of Rudolph, “He was passionately in love with the sound of words. They intoxicated him.” Joseph says of his mother, “She had an acute business sense, a talent for making every kreuzer count.” My father says, “You can bet all the borscht in Brownsville on that.” My father writes, “It's been at least a year since that coffee-klatch-cum-current-events-discussion-group held its final meeting, but many people at Woodlake still talk about the explosive events of that fateful day.” I write, “The tightest warp and woof I can weave comes from the sound of the syntax.” Do you hear the keynote—the incessant buzz and hum of alliteration? I point out to my father what I see as the link between Schildkraut's alliteration-dependent writing style, my father's style, and my own (as well as my stutter), and he writes back, “About Joseph Schildkraut's style: I believe the book he wrote in collaboration [
My Father and I,
“as told to Leo Lania”] is the only thing he's ever written. Solo, or with somebody's help. Don't know how much his collaborator did and what Pepi contributed. My style? Strictly journalese. Marked—riddled?—by too much, far too much, alliteration. The O. Henry influence: as a young boy of 7 or 8, I read his stories over and over. My brother Phil had won a complete set of O. Henry in a writing contest and there they were for me to devour—and (sadly) to incorporate, lock, stock, and barrel, into my own writing.”

A decade ago I told my father that I hoped to travel someday to Eastern Europe to trace the Schildkraut ancestry, and he responded, “That would be a dream trip—the two of us investigating the Schildkraut strain in Austria, Germany, and the Ukraine. Whenever you're ready, I'll be ready. It would be a great adventure.” (We've never gone.) I explained that what I'm most interested in is my need to get him to tell the stories over and over and over again and his ceaseless capacity to reinvent and extend the material. He replied (and this is what I've come to recognize as my father's signature and see projected forward in myself and backward in Schildkraut: an unshakable self-consciousness), “Writing about it, you'll probably use and exploit how I arrogated to myself the ‘cousins, yeah, they're probably second cousins' relationship. And how I told and retold—dined out a lot on it, as the saying goes—the story of my one actual involvement, in person, with Pepi: the Einstein memorial night, etc.”

Well, so, as my father likes to say, what? What is this correlation-seeking but a ghoulish attempt to backform a bloodline to star power? What proof is it, in any case, to find common traits in a putative relative's memoir? Is he or isn't he? Was he or wasn't he? I don't know, I can't know, and I'll never know; why, then, is it important for me to believe there's a link? Why do I care about being related to someone who—on the basis of my father's stories and
The Diary of Anne Frank
—appears to be a singularly unpleasant human being and painfully ham-fisted actor? Star-fucker: name-dropper: strain-strainer. My father now informs me that he believes—although he can't be absolutely certain—that we're related to Robert Shields (né Schildkraut), of the former San Francisco mime duo Shields and Yarnell, and I can't help it: I think, well, then, maybe I'm also related to Brooke Shields; toward the end of
Endless Love,
when she's crying in that dark New York hotel room, trying to say good-bye to David, and her hair is braided and rolled up in a bun, she does, it seems to me, especially in the mouth and chin area, look at least a little the way I sometimes looked as a teenager.

Sex and Death (iv)

In 1986, Denys Arcand released his movie
The Decline of the American Empire,
an obsessive talkathon on the subject of sex. Seventeen years later, the sequel appeared—
The Barbarian Invasions,
an obsessive talkathon on the subject of death. The film about sex is called
Decline.
The film about death is called
Invasions.
A point is being made here:

When groups of verve monkeys feed, several males sit with their backs to the group and brandish their genitals to ward off potential scavengers. If an unknown animal approaches, male verves get an erection and make a threatening face. Fighter pilots, when escaping dangerous situations, release extremely high levels of epinephrine (the hormone released by stress) and sometimes ejaculate.

Louis Réard, a French auto engineer who also ran his mother's lingerie business, designed a two-piece swimsuit. Four days before he presented the swimsuit to the public, the U.S. military exploded a nuclear device near a group of small islands in the Pacific known as the Bikini atoll. On July 5, 1946, Réard unveiled the swimsuit and claimed the bikini was named for the beauty of the islands rather than for the atomic blast.

Men who are hanged sometimes have erections and orgasms, which are caused by the snapping of the spinal cord; when the nerves beneath the neck are severed from the spine, the spasm can create a mechanical, reflexive ejaculation. An engraving by Daumier shows a torture chamber filled with skeletons in chains and a hanged man ejaculating. In Marquis de Sade's
Justine,
Thérèse helps Roland achieve orgasm by briefly hanging him; afterward, he exclaims, “Oh, Thérèse! Oh, those feelings are indescribable. They exceed everything!” In
Ulysses,
the Croppy Boy “gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his dead clothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs. Bellingham, Mrs. Yelverton Barry, and the Honourable Mrs. Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.” Pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury's handwritten autopsy note of an early twentieth-century hanging states that there was no “seminal effusion” on this occasion, which implies that it often occurred on other occasions.
Spilsbury.
The photograph of the execution of the Lincoln conspirators in 1865 shows one of the men, Lewis Powell, with an erection after he was hanged.

James Boswell frequently attended public hangings in eighteenth-century London. Afterward, he liked to look at the faces of the dead bodies. Once, while the bodies were still dangling, he went directly to a prostitute. “I have got a shocking sight in my head,” he said he told her. “Take it out.”

         

Easier said than done, because, as Michel Houellebecq writes in
Elementary Particles,
“The chromosomal separation at the moment of meiosis which creates haploid gametes is in itself a source of structural instability. In other words, all species dependent on sexual reproduction are by definition mortal.”

In
The Merchant and the Friar,
the nineteenth-century poet and critic Sir Francis Palgrave wrote, “Coeval with the first pulsation, when the fibers quiver, and the organs quicken into vitality, is the germ of death. Before our members are fashioned is the narrow grave dug, in which they are to be entombed.”

Jules Bordet, a Belgian scientist, wrote, in a famous formulation 100 years ago, “Life is the maintenance of an equilibrium that is perpetually threatened.”

“Boys are like Pez dispensers,” says a teenage girl. “Show 'em a nipple and they get an erection.”

In
The Tragic Sense of Life,
Miguel de Unamuno wrote, “To live is to give oneself, perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself, to give oneself, is to die. Perhaps the supreme delight of procreation is nothing other than a foretasting or savoring of death, the spilling of one's own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves: that most intimate embrace is naught but a most intimate uprooting. In essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of resuscitation in another, for only in others can we resuscitate and perpetuate ourselves.”

A male American college student says, “I picture Death as being millions of years old but only looking about forty.”

“Life,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary when she was 44, “is, as I've said since I was 10, awfully interesting—if anything, quicker, keener at 44 than 24, more desperate, I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara—my new vision of death; active, positive, like all the rest, exciting; & of great importance—as an experience.”

Giacomo Leopardi wrote, “Death is not an evil, for it liberates from all evils, and if it deprives man of any good thing, it also takes away his desire for it. Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures, while leaving his appetite for them, and brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, men fear death and desire old age.”

Tom Stoppard: “Age is a high price to pay for maturity.”

Antony says to Cleopatra, “I am dying, Egypt, dying.”

According to Thomas Browne, the physician and author of
Religio Medici,
“The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.”

When Confucius realized he was about to die, he wept.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

         

In World War II, my father was assigned to Army Information and Education; his job was to lecture to the troops about America's allies and enemies and send news releases to the hometown newspapers of the men in the outfit. If a private was promoted to Private First Class, my father would send a press release to the private's hometown paper announcing that he'd been promoted for his “courage under fire” and “military bearing.” But when the radio battalion headquarters in the middle of the compound on Okinawa announced, on August 8, 1945, that the Japanese had surrendered unconditionally and would be signing the peace treaty later that day aboard ship in Tokyo Bay, my father went berserk and raced down to the mess hall, where he told the mess sergeant, Coleman Peterson, that he was taking over and would be serving breakfast to the 120 men in the unit.

Sergeant Peterson told my father he'd lost his mind and would want to quit after the first six grunts went through the chow line complaining that the scrambled eggs were too hard and the pancakes were too thin. My dad told Peterson nobody, including Douglas MacArthur, was going to stop him.

Peterson insisted on at least preparing the egg and pancake mixes. My father agreed, tied an apron around his waist, and when the first man came through the line, asking what was on the menu this morning, my father sang out, “Horseshit on French toast. No, actually, the V-J Day special: scrambled eggs, bacon, all the pancakes you can eat, and the strongest coffee on the island!”

         

Apparently, though, my father is not immortal:

On my most recent visit, he evaluated, as he always does, what kind of physical shape I seemed to be in and contemplated, as he always did, the potential safety hazards of my one-handed driving. He asked me, as he always did, whether Natalie had enrolled in swimming lessons yet—he was concerned that she'd wander into Lake Washington and drown—and when we went to a department store so he could buy a birthday present for Natalie, he made sure, as he always did, that I paid for it. He apparently wants to take his not very vast fortune with him.

The next morning, when I arrived 15 minutes late to take him out to brunch, he was sobbing. Fearful that I'd perished in an auto accident, he'd called my hotel, 911, and even Laurie back in Seattle to see if she'd heard anything about my whereabouts. At the restaurant, he vehemently criticized the spiciness of the soup, which couldn't have been more bland; he wanted nothing sharp to throw him off stride.

Having not seen my father for several months, I was startled by his swift decline: he shuffled around his tiny apartment, which was almost empty, because of his new fixation with getting rid of nearly everything he owned; his breathing was loud and labored; his eyes were glassy and flat; a pouch of skin sagged beneath his left eye; a portion of his left ear had been excised in surgery to remove skin cancer; he ping-ponged back and forth between diarrhea and constipation; he often neglected to zip his zipper.

Waiting for
Sicko
to start, he asked me when and where I learned the facts of life. The people in the row behind us convulsed into giggles, and though it seemed a little late to be discussing the birds 'n' the bees, I had to answer quite loudly—his hearing aid wasn't working well—that I consulted a variety of sources on the subject. Thanks to his malfunctioning hearing aid, he found the movie utterly unintelligible. Leaving the theater before the lights had come up, he took a bad tumble down the stairs, to the collective gasp of the audience.

“I'm perpetually tired,” he wrote me when I returned home. “Used to be—until a year ago—I could swim a dozen laps. Can just about make 3 to 4 now. I crave sleep a lot. With the aid of sleeping tablets—Tylenol PM—I sleep in two sessions, from 9:30 to 4:30, then breakfast, then back to bed for a couple of hours, plus an occasional nap of one-hour duration. I used to go to the 18-hole putting green at Woodlake often, now indifferent to its lure. Haven't gone in a couple of months. On the positive side, I still work out in the gym for 30 minutes. Usually on the stationary bike. Do that after lunch. Like a forced march. But I still do it and am glad I've still got the willpower. To sum it up, some of my most vexing problems are traceable, I'm sure—and so are you and you're correct—to the passages of the years. Ninety-seven ain't 79.” For my father, this very partial and begrudging acknowledgment constitutes a major declension.