Naked in the Promised Land

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Naked in the Promised Land Page 19

by Lillian Faderman


  If I’d spent my life in my mother’s shtetl of Prael, the inflexible rules would have been drilled into me from birth: “Be a dutiful daughter.” “Learn to cook and sew and take care of the house.” “Get married and serve your husband and children.” I couldn’t have escaped my shtetl fate except perhaps for a short respite in Dvinsk, working for a tailor and sending money home to my parents in lieu of my daily services, until a marriage could be arranged for me.

  And if Shtetl Lilly had had a rambunctious, striving spirit in her like American Lil’s, the family patriarch would have straightened it out early with a callused heavy hand if gentle persuasion didn’t do the trick—or failing that, the rabbi would have come to visit. Sitting her down on a stool, he would have lectured, with beard wagging, on what the sacred Book said about her obligations as a daughter of Israel. There wouldn’t have been many decisions for Lilly of Prael to make in her narrow, little life, because the path was as inescapable as it was obvious.

  But Prael had burned away in the Holocaust, and I was an American. For me, now, here, nothing felt obvious, and nothing yet was inescapable. I’d learned a few things so far: Mel Kaufman and company, for example, showed me what I couldn’t do and where I couldn’t go; Jan showed me that the coyote could be either gender. But who would show me what I could do, what doors I could open, what dreams I could invent to replace my worn-out dreams of stardom?

  “When are you going to sign up for school?” my despairing mother asked after I’d been back from Jan’s hotel room for a week.

  I slept until ten or so every morning now, and when I woke I stayed in bed, staring at the squiggles and patches you could read like a Rorschach test that were made by the peeling lavender paint that covered the walls and ceiling. I didn’t know what I’d do with myself if I left my room. If I wasn’t going to be with Jan anymore or go back to Geller’s or read plays or take modeling jobs, how could I pass the day and the long evening and the night?

  “You have to register for Hollywood High School. Mrs. Marcus from next door told me. You hear me, Lilly? It’s five blocks away. Sunset and Highland.” Since I’d disappeared for days, my mother never talked to me anymore without the shrill edge of lamentation in her voice, as though she feared I’d already taken the inevitable next step after letting myself be photographed in the nude. There was nothing I could say now to reassure her. Hadn’t I reassured her after the terrible discovery of the pictures? And right after that I vanished, didn’t even call her. What good were my reassurances?

  “In a week it starts. You need to sign up,” my mother nagged.

  All the previous year I’d waited for my sixteenth birthday so I could quit school. Now I was sixteen. Why should I go back? And yet if I didn’t, what would I do with the rest of my life?

  If no patriarch or rabbi is imposed on you, or even available to you, to whom do you turn in America for guidance?

  I opened the Yellow Pages to Psychologists and with a steeled finger dialed a number.

  When Dr. Sebastian Cushing heard that I was only sixteen and my family had no money, he told me about a counselor who was hired by the Rotary Club to talk to underprivileged youths in trouble.

  When had I not been an underprivileged youth in trouble?

  “But his clients are mostly male juvenile delinquents.” Dr. Cushing oozed sympathy over the phone.

  “That’s okay, I’m a juvenile delinquent, even though I’m a girl,” I told him truthfully, and scribbled Mr. Maurice Colwell’s number on the yellow page.

  The old stone edifice looked as though it had once housed studio glamour, but when you walked through the big oak door you were assaulted by the pungent odor of chlorine coming from a huge, enclosed swimming pool. The building was now the Hollywood YMCA, a shrine to male physical fitness, and Mr. Colwell’s office was on the second floor.

  I stood at the desk, feeling awkward and waiting to be acknowledged by the only female in sight, an elderly lady in a prim chignon who worked the switchboard. I could hear the gruff shouts of male camaraderie behind the closed gym doors and the dull bouncing of basketballs.

  The switchboard lady directed me up the marble staircase and down a dark hall to Maurice Colwell’s cubbyhole of an office.

  “Come on in. Lillian, right? Come on in.” His voice was jarringly robust. He rose and extended a big mitt of a hand, but he didn’t move from behind a desk that was topped by a rat’s nest of scattered books and piles of papers; torn, empty boxes of Kleenex and one full one; and a cane with a duck-bill handle on top of it all. He had a brownish crewcut, and he wore round, horn-rimmed glasses and a gray flannel suit with a navy tie, like a respectable Rotary Club type. “Babbitt,” the guys at Geller’s used to call men who looked like that.

  “So, tell me, what’s your story?” Mr. Colwell asked without ceremony, pointing me to a metal folding chair opposite his desk. He sat on one too, leaning forward, cupping his cheeks in his hands, his elbows balanced on a piece of the desk’s disorder. He looked like an owl on a perch.

  How could I begin to tell my life to a strange man in a depressing office while brawny jocks walked up and down the halls? I searched my head for bland words that would tide me over until I could get out of there.

  “While you’re thinking, let me tell you one,” he began. “There was this schnorrer, you know what a schnorrer is, right?”

  I remembered what my mother and Rae had said about Fanny. “Yeah, a person who acts like a beggar.” This guy’s name was Colwell?

  “Right. He goes to a rich man and says, ‘I’m hungry. Give me something to eat.’ And the rich man says, ‘What chutzpah! Do I need to translate?”

  “No, it’s nerve … or daring … like, outrageous daring.”

  “Yeah. So the rich guy says, ‘What chutzpah, a man like you, with the arms of an ox, what right do you have to go around begging?’ And the schnorrer says, ‘What should I do for the lousy few cents you’ll give me, cut off my arms?’” Maurice Colwell grinned, and the gap between his front teeth looked wide enough for a cigarette to get lost in.

  I laughed, more at his silly grin than at the joke, which I wasn’t sure was really funny.

  “Now let’s see a little chutzpah from you,” he said seriously. “What’s your story?”

  “How do you know ‘chutzpah,’” I asked.

  “I’m an honorary Jew. My wife’s Jewish,” he said. “Nu?” and he leaned so far forward that the upper part of him was halfway across the desk.

  I told him. What did I have to lose? About my nude modeling and the Open Door and how I kept my age a secret and about getting D’s and F’s at Fairfax High School and not wanting to go back to school, and then about how I’d failed my mother and made her get married—and here tears tumbled out, and he handed me the full Kleenex box—and why I gave up on my Hollywood dreams that I’d hoped and planned for since I was a little kid, and how I still thought sometimes about what it would be like to go to New Orleans with Jan on a motorcycle. I handed him my whole life.

  “So, you really think you’re a homosexual, huh?” he asked after two hours.

  “I don’t think I am. I am,” I said. Did this guy in a Brooks Brothers straitjacket want to rescue me from being gay?

  “Well, listen good. It doesn’t matter if you’re a polka-dotted baboon, you still gotta eat. And if you’re a homosexual, you don’t want to get married, right? So you gotta work to eat. And if you gotta work to eat,” he intoned with Talmudic scholar logic, “it may as well be a good job that lets you eat good, right? So you better finish high school and get yourself into college. You don’t want to go full-time now, I’ll write you a letter, you take it to the principal, and he’ll let you leave before lunch every day. Deal?”

  He was right. Why hadn’t it occurred to me? If I didn’t want to get married, I’d have to work. If I couldn’t work as a movie actress and didn’t want to work like my poor mother at some miserable job that paid next to nothing, I had to go to school.

  “So what do you like
to do—when you’re not carousing in bars or picking up sociopaths or risking your neck on motorcycles?” He blinked his owl eyes at me. I couldn’t figure out if he was trying to moralize or be funny. What could I tell him about what I liked to do? Make love with Jan?

  I fished in my memory: “I used to read plays all the time,” I said.

  “Good start.” He stirred around in the mountain on his desk. “You’ll love this, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It’s a novel, a poor girl who becomes a writer, Irish Catholic—not like you but not that different. Read it and tell me next week what you think. This too, and these.” He extricated a half-dozen dog-eared paperbacks from the debris and handed them to me.

  “See you next week,” he said, offering his mitt again in a handshake that swallowed up mine, “but in the meantime, think about this one, okay? There was a king two hundred years ago who hated Jews and he made this decree: ‘Every Jew who steps foot in my kingdom has to say something about himself. If he lies he will be shot, and if he tells the truth he will be hanged. So one day this Jew comes—long black coat, sidelocks, the works—and the king’s guards command him to tell something about himself. ‘I’m going to be shot today,’ he says. This really puzzles the guards (they all have goyishe kups)—what should they do with this guy? They go ask the king for direction, but he’s puzzled too. ‘If I shoot the Jew, it implies he told the truth,’ the king says to himself, ‘but in that case my decree says he should be hanged, so how can I shoot him? But if I hang him, that implies he told a lie, and for a lie my decree says he should be shot, so how can I hang him?’ What can he do? He’s gotta let the man go free.” The gap-toothed grin. “Quick—what’s the moral?”

  I laughed inside. This guy really was funny. But I shrugged in answer to his question.

  “The moral is,” Maurice Colwell said, “you have to use your head in this world. Now, chew on it.”

  He pulled his cane from the pile and walked me down the hall with a bobbing limp, one foot encased in an elevated shoe that tried in vain to make up for the shortness of the leg. “Polio,” he told me much later. “That’s how I started reading. You stay in bed for a year or two, you discover a lot of things.”

  I hugged his books close to my chest and walked west on Sunset Boulevard, back to the Fountain Avenue Court Bungalows. Maurice Colwell was right—about almost everything, but mostly about my using my head. I’d stopped doing that. But now I would go back to school, and I’d figure out what I wanted to be and how to do it. I’d spent a good part of the last year in photographers’ studios, dressed in feathers and harem pants and beachballs and nothing; I’d been in the Houdini whorehouse; I’d consorted with addicts and drunks; I’d been a regular in gay bars; I’d made love in a flophouse with a butch pimp. And now I needed to be an eleventh-grader. I had to bring this off. I had to get the high school diploma that Mr. Colwell—Maury, he told me to call him—said I needed if I was going to go to college and become somebody.

  I found myself soaring in seven-league boots down Sunset Boulevard because I was suddenly higher than Jan’s scotches had ever made me, though my mind was absolutely clear too, as though I’d ripped off layers of gauze. I could do something good, even if I couldn’t be an actress. I remembered that I’d once wanted to be a lawyer, and Fanny had said that poor girls couldn’t be lawyers. I’d ask Mr. Colwell—Maury—what he thought about it. He knew this country as my mother and Rae and Fanny never could.

  Algebra II, History, English, Latin—my classes went from eight o’clock to twelve. I couldn’t imagine now how I’d managed to mess up so badly at Fairfax. You just had to pay attention and turn in whatever the teacher said to turn in, and your homework came back marked with A’s, or at least B’s. It was easy.

  Though I was done for the day before lunch and was free to leave, by the third week I didn’t want to. The Speech Club met at noon. “We are looking for new faces—debaters, oral interpreters, extemporaneous speakers” the flier had read. “Help Hollywood High bring home the bacon from the Pepperdine regionals!” Oral interpretation—that meant dramatic reading. I no longer had actress dreams, but I missed the craft I’d studied for so long. In one of the books Maury had given me, USA by John Dos Passos, I found “Body of an American,” a piece about war horrors—what I’d felt in blood and bone since infancy.

  I loved the familiar sweet calm and sharp focus I felt when I walked up to the front of the classroom at the Speech Club’s second meeting. Lil disappeared into Dos Passos’s angry ironist. I held the book in my hands, but I knew the lines by heart, and I modulated my trained voice to the nuance of every phrase. I loved the hush in the room and the look on the faces of the kids and on the face of Mr. Bell, the speech coach, too. “Wow!” I heard a boy whisper when I finished. Like Irene’s “wow” all those years ago.

  For a while they become my gang. I never before had a bunch of friends my own age, and I like the novel feeling—finally I’m something like a teenager. There is Ken, the boy who said “Wow!”—he’s the son of a famous leftist lawyer and lives in a big house in the Hollywood Hills. That’s where I learn that while money can buy a home like Simone’s, to create one like Ken’s you need culture and taste too. Ken lends me hardcover books with intact dust jackets—Dalton Trumbo and Upton Sinclair and Howard Fast—that he takes down from the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the rumpus room of his family’s house. We sit on furniture that is shiny oak and rich brown suede, and he holds my hand and gazes at my face while he tells me with great passion about socialism and about the evils of McCarthy and how his father had defended blacklisted screenwriters and directors, and the brave and clever things they’d said in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. There is Alice, who pirouettes through the school halls on fairy toes, who wants to learn to play the dulcimer so people will call her the Damsel with the Dulcimer, who declares everything to be “curiouser and curiouser” because she knows she looks like Alice in Wonderland, with her wide periwinkle eyes. There is Mario, who reads aloud to us from the paperback of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil that he carries in his back pocket, his full, red lips in an expressive pout, the bicep of his smooth, raised arm rippling as the book moves to the rhythm of the words. Ken is the heartthrob of all the cerebral girls in the Speech Club, but Mario is dubbed the sexiest boy in school by almost all the other girls and by Denny also, who calls me late at night to talk about the hidden content in any crumb—any word or gesture—that Mario deigns to pass in his direction.

  I lugged the giant trophy to the YMCA in a big paper sack, feeling foolish, but I needed to hear Maury tell me that I’d done something fine. I’d shown it to my mother first: Grand Prize in Oral Interpretation—Southern California Forensic League Regionals. “Kids from fifty high schools,” I’d said. She put down the Morton’s Kosher Salt that she’d been sprinkling on slabs of red brisket, wiped her hands on her apron, and lifted the gilt and wood Winged Victory gingerly. She moved her lips, trying valiantly to read and understand all the words on the base, and her smile was radiant. The way it was when she used to watch me performing with Irene’s troupe. But what did she know?

  “Extracurricular activities. Colleges love that stuff.” Maury gratified me with the words, his owl eyes fluttering under his glasses. “Keep rackin’ ‘em up.”

  If he thought it worthwhile, it must be. I was itchy in anticipation of the next tournament—mostly because I wanted to win again and have another trophy to carry up the marble staircase of the Y and present for his approval. “Sixteen going on ten,” I chastised myself, but I put myself to sleep many nights with the vision of how I’d walk through his door with another Winged Victory in my hands, and he’d say, “Ya dun good, kid! Keep it up.”

  “Let’s see what you got in that bag,” he never failed to say. Wise owl, he knew my need.

  “I took a first at Occidental” or “I won the State in oral interp,” I’d tell him, ashamed really by how much I relished his praise. “They’re sending me to the nationals in Lexington, Kentu
cky!” I ran to tell him, the telling more delicious almost than the happening.

  He talked and talked, for two hours or three every single week, sometimes twice a week. He was as generous with his pronouncements as he was with his time, and I accepted them both like a lost wayfarer, grateful for the beacon, the road map, the searchlight, that illuminated the way. He pointed me to plush swaths of open fields and made me intuit horizons far beyond the eye.

  He lectured me: “There’s no such thing really as class in America, not like in the old country. There, where you’re born, you stay. Here, you can go up, you can go down. Nothing’s etched in concrete, no Book of Peerage. Your parents can leave you a million, you shoot it up in heroin or some such crap in a year, and then you’re nothing. Or you can be born nothing and you make yourself into something—a doctor, a lawyer, a college professor. You need brains and hard work, and it’s yours. You know who Horatio Alger was? Rags to riches. It happens.”

  He educated me: “Do you know the greatest horror, the greatest threat to civilization? Not poverty, not ignorance. Injustice. That’s what denies your basic humanity the most. That’s the first thing a civilized society needs to spend its energies on—fighting injustice. Everything else falls into place when that’s taken care of.”

  He answered my worries: “Yeah, so you’re right, there aren’t a lot of women doing big things. But so what? There’s nothing they can’t do, it’s just more of a struggle for them to get to do it. Look, there have been women politicians, women scientists, women inventors, women lawyers. It’s not against the law. We’re not in the nineteenth century here. You just have to want it.”

  To this day his pronouncements, right or wrong, are etched on my psyche as much as shtetl wisdoms were etched on my aunt’s. “If you’re destined to drown”—she used to repeat the narrow fatalism she’d absorbed with Prael potatoes and cauliflowers—“you’ll drown in a spoonful of water.” She loved that one. Her other favorite was: “If something isn’t the way you like it, you’ve got to like it the way it is.”

 

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