The Hue and Cry at Our House Page 2
That five-minute speech was a sketch of the somewhat longer address the President would immediately give to an elite breakfast crowd in the hotel ballroom. (It was the room in which my parents had been married twenty-three years earlier.) Mom wanted Dad to spring for tickets to the indoor event. But he’d always been suspicious of the Kennedys’ mystique and huge millions. “I didn’t have a rich daddy like Jack Kennedy. Everything I’ve got, I earned!”
Mom and I were the Kennedy lovers in the house.
She kept a copy of Profiles in Courage on her desk. (It crossed few minds at the time that this Pulitzer Prize winner might have been ghostwritten for Kennedy.) From Mrs. Kennedy’s televised White House tour Mom had learned simply to put flowers in a vase rather than arrange them. Taped to the door of my bedroom was the Inaugural Address exhorting us to ask what we could do for our country.
On the platform this Apollo with his copper-colored hair, blue eyes and tanned complexion made a comic contrast to the raincoated, pasty, glamour-free men who surrounded him as he spoke, one of whom would be sworn in as the new President several hours later.
I recall that sometime between two and three that afternoon, we on the playground saw Mr. Singleton take down the flag, then raise it again to half-staff. When we got back to class Mrs. Westbrook was seated at her desk. She had taken off her glasses and appeared to us half naked. She rose. “Boys and girls . . .” A sob came out. She put her hand to her mouth and turned to the board. A couple of the nicest girls—Mimi (Emily) Anderson and Carrie Harrington—began to cry too, without needing to know why. Now Mrs. Westbrook turned to face us. She hooked her glasses first behind one ear, then behind the other. “Boys and girls, a very great man died in Dallas today.”
Dallas was a long way off, more than thirty miles. I’d been there only a few times. It was either east or west of Fort Worth. I could never remember. The only great man I could think of over there was the popular mayor, Earle Cabell, scion of a dairy and convenience-store fortune. Must be that Earle Cabell had died.
Then she told us. But I had shaken John F. Kennedy’s hand that morning and seen for myself that he was indestructible. And the words from Mrs. Westbrook’s mouth made no sense.
• • •
Westcliff Elementary. There all of us had lined up in the spring of 1961 to receive, in fluted pastry cups, Sabin’s polio-vanquishing sugar cube. A number of my early memories have to do with polio. In what must be my very earliest, I am struggling to escape Dr. Schwarz, who comes at me with an enormous hypodermic of Salk’s inactivated virus. Looks like buttermilk in the barrel, feels like lead when he drives it in. I shriek for all I’m worth.
Nearly as primordial is this, dating from when I was three or four: We’re boarding the Texas Zephyr for Denver. Daddy waves us—my mother, grandmother, brother and me—out of the station. It is a year or two before vaccinations; the traditional summer fear exercises all its dread power; everyone knows at least one family that’s been devastated by infantile paralysis. We’re on our way to the supposed safety of Colorado’s higher altitude. In our sleeping compartment Mom attaches a ready-made tie to me while my brother, ten years older, knots his own. She and Bubbe (Little Bubbe, my mother’s mother; my father’s mother is Big Bubbe) put on hats and gloves, and verify the contents of their handbags, and we make our way, swayed and jolted, to the dining car with its starched pink tablecloths, where little glass vials attached between the windows hold trembling carnations.
Here memory winks out, though I pick it up again when we’re back in our compartment and I’m curled against Little Bubbe’s ample flank in the upper berth, crying. There’s a night-light up there and a nylon mesh in which to secure belongings. Earlier, when the porter had opened the berth with his intriguing key, he assured the little boy there was nothing to fear. But I’m convinced this strange drawer will close up on Bubbe and me.
The scene changes. We are at Pike’s Peak. I’m feasting on saltwater taffy while Tommy (who liked courting a little danger) eyes the mountain and tells our grandmother he’s going to climb it.
Napping with Little Bubbe.
• • •
A slightly later memory pertains to one of the few times I got spanked: My parents are dressing to go to a party. I’m four. The summer heat is overwhelming. I’m outdoors, drinking from the garden hose. Daddy’s new car, a 1956 cream-and-red Buick Special, is in the driveway. In obedience to a brainstorm, I roll up three of the windows all the way and the fourth almost, stick the hose through and blithely come indoors. My parents kiss me in the kitchen, leave the housekeeper a number where they’ll be, go to the car. They’re instantly back. Daddy’s rage is uncontainable. Mommy just keeps asking why, why I’ve done such a naughty thing. They imagine it’s because I don’t want them to go to their party.
In fact they do go, in the other car, but not before I get it good. How can they, grown-ups, understand that the motive was nothing so calculated as wanting them to remain at home? I remember my thinking clearly: The day has been hot. The leather upholstery of the new car needs cooling down. I am doing them a favor.
That autumn Daddy’s ruined Buick Special was replaced by an Oldsmobile 98 sedan. I entered Mrs. Pakston’s kindergarten at Westcliff, straightened up, flew right. But I’d left Mom and Dad with a little taste of chaos and old night. Between us, thenceforth, the assurances would be only provisional.
• • •
I wonder whether I’ve learned as much since leaving Westcliff as I did under the tutelage of Mmes. Pakston, Bassinger, Pinson, Pyburn, Kirk and, above all, Westbrook. These dedicated educators, for without exception they were, opened my eyes on an ever larger world. I learned who Johannes Kepler was and who was Michael Faraday. And the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. Mrs. Canafax, in charge of music, introduced us to Haydn’s Surprise Symphony and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Under the guidance of Mrs. Everett, our art teacher, we discovered pictures—Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation, Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat, Millet’s The Gleaners, van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Thomas Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. For theatrics we put on Spoon River Anthology. Mrs. Westbrook assigned me the following words to speak: “I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, wedded to him, not through union, but through separation. Bloom forever, O Republic, from the dust of my bosom!” I wondered how I was going to get through it. Several girls were just as nervous about the men’s epitaphs they were assigned. But the show went beautifully.
I walked home from school that fatal November Friday to find everybody crying. In the kitchen, Otta Mae Lowe, our housekeeper, did so calmly as she organized dinner. Brushing past me, Dad walked out on his own tears as I came into the living room. Mom took me in her arms. Fresh from her regular Friday shampoo and set, she wore the particular fragrance of Mam’zelle’s, her beauty parlor.
“If it had gone on raining—” I ventured, but she put a finger to my lips. If it had gone on raining the assassin would have been firing on a closed and armored car.
We were a family expert in the ifs. Two years earlier in my father’s hometown, Tyler, a hundred forty miles east of Fort Worth, on the first cold night of autumn, a faulty furnace had set the family house ablaze, killing three of my cousins, Barbara, Lisa and Tanya, and Big Bubbe. Aunt Beatrice, called Pesh, my father’s beloved older sister and mother of the three girls, survived but was so damaged from smoke inhalation that she never spoke another coherent word. And she seemed not to remember her children, the only mercy in this tale. My uncle Max got through the fire unscathed, which enraged my father. He developed a suspicion, with what basis in fact none of us knew, that Max, always so handy around the house, had fixed the furnace himself and thereby caused the fire. Over the years I have come to think Dad was right, but on no more evidence than he possessed. Uncle Max died eight years later of bowel cancer, having faithfully cared for Aunt Pesh, who lived ano
ther eleven years.
When something this terrible happens to a family, it is either spoken about continually or not at all. We were of the not-at-all school, but now I see that the four dead of that night, along with Aunt Pesh, sat down nightly with us. There were no faint hearts at 4149 Ranier Court. But all roads led to and from the fire. The hue and cry at our house was against disorder, bedevilment, despair. My parents meant to outrun those beasts. If we’d had an escutcheon, VIGOR (our young President’s favorite word) would have been the motto it bore. But blow by blow, life builds you a tragic outlook.
• • •
Friday was, as I say, my mother’s standing appointment at Mam’zelle’s. Maxine was her “beauty operator,” as they were called. I would sometimes, when younger, be taken along to that paradise of femininity: the addictive aromas of Aqua Net and nail polish, the babbling brook of ladies’ small talk, so much more interesting than the large talk of men. Among the leading hairdressers at Mam’zelle’s were Wayman and DeWayne. These oddly named men were of a kind unfamiliar to me. I recall that Daddy would not allow either to touch a hair of Mom’s head. Anyhow, nothing could stand in the way of this Friday routine. Maxine had told Mom the news from Dallas when she came through the door for her one-o’clock. Wash, set and manicure took place while the radio gave updates on the President from Parkland Hospital.
From that Friday I have dreaded weekends. A disproportionate evil is crowded into them. A little after nightfall at Andrews Air Force Base the new leader asks, in a glare of klieg lights, for our help and God’s. On Saturday the dead President is taken to the Capitol where he lies in state. On Sunday the assassin is assassinated on live TV. “Just grateful the killer wasn’t a Jew,” Daddy said as soon as Oswald was named. But the killer’s killer, Jack Ruby, is Jewish and the local press are promptly calling him “Rubenstein.” On Monday the caisson, followed by a riderless stallion, makes its way from the White House to Saint Matthew’s Cathedral. There’s Charles de Gaulle in plain khaki, towering over the crowd. And beside him Haile Selassie, unsuitably covered in medals and ribands. Now the dry-eyed Kennedys, majestic as Romans in a frieze, make their way down the Cathedral steps. A planet stops when the little son salutes.
| CHAPTER TWO |
A CLEAN BURROW
In the early months of 1963 I’d fallen seriously ill. My asthma led to a bronchitis that turned into pneumonia. We had Dr. Cohen, old Dr. Schwarz’s successor, coming daily to the house, and a nurse was hired. I wasn’t scared, just tired of battling for the next breath. Every part of my body hurt from the days and nights of fever. I remember asking my mother if she thought I might die. She told me I was silly and left the room in a hurry, with her hand on her mouth. My brother came in and gave me a long, tight hug. This, too, was a bad sign.
Then my fever broke, my breathing eased, and I went back to school. That was fifth grade. The scholarly promised land of Mrs. Westbrook’s classroom was not yet mine. I was stuck with Mr. Dreasley, who belonged to the John Birch Society. He talked to us about the need for every family to have its own bomb shelter. Weathering thermonuclear war wouldn’t be as hard as people imagined. A clean burrow stocked with canned goods, bottled water, board games, a firearm and ammo was all a family was going to need. (Where are you now, Dreasley? Still sniffing out Reds in the Fort Worth public school system?)
To be fair, it wasn’t just Birchers calling for us to dig. President Kennedy had done so too, in a televised address. In our neighborhood, plans for a community shelter took shape—one big shelter to accommodate everybody. Night after night the fathers met in the various living rooms. At one of these gatherings Daddy stood up and raised the question of colored maids. Were they to be left behind when we white folk ran for cover? Daddy alone had thought of this. He pictured Otta Mae washing and ironing as the Bomb bore down on her. “I’m buying places in the shelter for my wife and myself and our two boys. And a fifth spot for Miss Otta Mae Lowe, our beloved employee of many years,” Daddy told the crowd, “and when the rest of you have reflected a little, I believe you’ll do no less for your own domestic help.” A general silence. Was integration going to come to Ranier Court along with the end the world? Daddy came home working his jaw. He told Mom what had happened. He said the matter of the help had been swept aside when someone raised the less vexing question of whether to admit cats and dogs.
Howie Feinberg, my friend from down the street, got the idea that he and I should do our part by establishing where this shelter was to be, so we could start digging. I’d seen photos of the Queen Mary in Life magazine and envisaged similar saloons and staterooms in our subterranean home away from home. The colored maids could as easily be colored maids down there. What was the problem?
Mom and Dad as I first knew them.
My father was a self-made businessman with no flim-flam about him. He had dead reckoning in money matters and a ready contempt for touts and frauds. And for vacillators: A weak-willed associate was a fart that didn’t know which pant leg to run down. And for independent women: A vibrant or fun-loving widow was likely to have poisoned her husband. And for any boy not rough and ready: “Weak handshake. Won’t go far.” Nor was he modest about his energy and enterprise. “Busy as jumper cables at a Juneteenth picnic!” he liked to say of himself. With maître d’s he could be pithy, telling them that the ketchup, at least, had been delicious.
Larky when he had the upper hand, Dad could turn dangerous when thwarted. And he was this way as much at home as in the world. Conditional love was what he had to offer. Perhaps he knew Mom was bestowing on my brother and me the unconditional kind, and thought that hers would do. But to be loved just for being alive is what a child seeks. If not for Mom, Tommy and I would have had to get by on the love we earned: not nearly enough to live on. The sound of her shoes in the front hall was happiness. The sound of his was, often as not, a warning.
I vividly recall the grand opening of a Ramada Inn on which Daddy held the franchise in San Antonio. His guest of honor was a recent Miss Oklahoma, Anita Bryant. I had a case on her and said how much I liked “Paper Roses,” included on Hear Anita Bryant in Your Home Tonight!, her LP on sale in the lobby, whereupon she took me by the hand and we walked around the motel swimming pool. Anita afterward blazed two paths of glory—as spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission and as the nation’s leading opponent of homosexuality.
Our father subscribed to perfection. He liked telling Tommy and me what was wrong with the Christians: They excused themselves on account of original sin, excused themselves and got drunk. (Mom wished he wouldn’t instill such prejudices against the majority; we lived among them on sufferance.) But what he was really after was not so much perfection as perfect self-presentation. When among elegant people he talked like them. At home he was ungrammatical. (Mom spoke the same to everybody, everywhere.) In Oxxford suits and Countess Mara ties and smelling lightly of Lilac Vegetal, Dad announced himself faultless. His shirts were custom-made and highly starched. Shaking hands, he shot a monogrammed cuff. At home in undershorts he was big and fleshy, yes. But the contained figure hurrying along West Seventh Street drew looks of admiration and perhaps some curiosity about what the up-and-comer’s briefcase held. Only one defect preyed on him: a mouth of gold-filled teeth, hard on a man so vain of his appearance. He’d been told from time to time that he looked like Victor Mature. Then one afternoon Daddy came home from the dentist with Victor Mature’s smile—“a complete set of Hollywoods,” as he called his new appliances.
• • •
The fresh knowledge that followed upon November 22, 1963, was a discovery of history not as what happened in the past but as the current we rode. Until then I’d seen us Taylors as an autarky or closed system. From that day, we braved the elements alongside everyone else. All of humanity attending the same televised funeral was enough to make us know it.
Three events yanked me from the random floating mental life of childhood and propelled me into
youth: the fire and the assassination, both of which happened; and midway between these, in October of 1962, the end of the world, which did not. I suppose it was contingency I was discovering in those years, to give it an abstract name. After the fire I understood, in a nine-year-old way, that nothing at all was guaranteed, that we Taylors were the playthings of chance. When my father told me what had happened he hid his face with his hat as he said, very slowly: “Big Bubbe is gone. Barbara is gone. Lisa is gone. Tannie is gone. And Aunt Pesh is very sick.” It was the only time he ever let me see him sob.
My emotion, which I remember accurately, was hatred of him for not preventing such things. What he was telling me through tears I’d heard a week earlier on the news. He and Mom and Tommy had rushed to Tyler that morning. I was left behind in Fort Worth in the care of Howie Feinberg’s parents. Marlene, Howie’s mother, was an anarchic housekeeper who slopped around most of the day in nightgowns. Milt, his father, allowed no talking at meals so he could concentrate on the food, and didn’t close the bathroom door when he defecated. In their telephone hutch you might come upon a can of Raid, some old TV Guides, a collection of dead batteries and the core of an apple. Their dog, Mags, infested the upholstery with fleas. Stu, Howie’s older brother, kept snacks of pizza under his bed that he or Mags would pull out when hungry. In this squalid place, with Mom and Dad and Tommy enduring the worst in Tyler, I received my sexual education. Stu taught Howie and me, in one evening, all the four-letter words I know to this day. And instructed us nine-year-olds in how to perform oral and anal sex on each other. “Ta da da boom de ay,” he sang, “I’ll take your pants away! And while you’re standing there, I’ll take your underwear!” That Satan, disguised as a Feinberg, wanted to watch us. And did.