Broadway Baby

by Alan Shapiro

  Long into the night she watched the broken royal families drift from column onto column, searching for the proper suit and sequence over the kitchen table between the untouched cigarette burning in the ashtray and the coffee cooling in the cup.

  AT ELEVEN YEARS old, Sam was the only one left to look after his grandmother. Miriam hated to demand this of him, he was too young for this kind of thing. It wasn’t right to ask a child to do this, she knew that, she felt terrible about it, but what choice did she have? They couldn’t afford to have Melba come once a week. Even if she, Miriam, wanted to, she couldn’t afford to quit her new job as a secretary at Happy Trails, a local travel agency, not now, not with Curly making peanuts. She just couldn’t continue running her mother’s errands after work each day—medication, mouthwash, dietary candy, cigarettes—and nothing in her mother’s eyes was right or ever enough, she couldn’t do anything right, and lately she hadn’t been getting home till seven. She’d apologize for getting home so late, and her mother would scoff—party girl, you, you’re just a party girl, you never think of anybody but yourself. And tired as she was, there’d be an angry pool of urine waiting for her to wipe up on the kitchen floor or outside the bathroom her mother hadn’t reached in time.

  Ethan and Julie were already well launched into their lives. There was just no other way around it. Sam would have to run home between elementary school and Hebrew school and check on his grandmother, make sure she was all right, and didn’t need anything.

  What surprised her was how he took the news. Okay, Ma, he said, okay, but not like he was trying to be helpful, or not only that; but like he knew his not whining or complaining would disturb her more than if he pitched a fit.

  Without a fuss, he ran home after school. He cleaned up after his grandmother. He’d go to stores and get her whatever she needed or wanted.

  Then one night, a school night, and after his bedtime, she caught him leaving the house.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Grandma needs cigarettes, and saccharin, and she said, while I’m at it, I should get us a couple of sundaes at Brigham’s.”

  “On a school night, after bedtime? I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking down at his feet. “She’ll be real disappointed, Ma.”

  “I don’t care what she is,” she said. “It’s too late for you to be running all over town for her.”

  Her mother called down from upstairs, “Let the boy go, goddamn it; I need cigarettes and you’re too busy, miss party girl, to get them.”

  “Mother,” Miriam called back, “it’s too late, he has school tomorrow, and he’s just a boy!”

  “And you’re just a party girl!” Now her mother was crying. “Oy Gott, I should just be dead already. What did I do to deserve such a daughter?”

  They could hear her huffing and puffing as she shuffled back into her room.

  “Jesus, okay,” Miriam said, “go get her whatever the hell she wants. But only tonight. Never again.”

  But from then on her mother sent him out most every night. And not only that, when he’d return they would stay up late watching TV and talking, with the door shut. Sometimes, Miriam would creep up the stairs and put her ear to the door, though she couldn’t make out what it was they said. Sometimes she thought he was performing for her, telling her jokes, doing impressions, maybe imitating the comics they’d seen on the Johnny Carson show. She could hear her mother laughing. It was the only time she ever heard her mother laugh. What did they talk about? Sam would never say, and her mother would only smile, as if to say, such a good boy, and so talented.

  Sam wasn’t getting the sleep he needed; what with the late-night television and the bedwetting, he’d be especially cranky in the mornings. And the Hebrew school had called to say that he was failing and in danger of being kept back. But what could she do? She and Curly were just too tired at night to police them. They demanded that the late nights stop and then pretended that they had. He was a good boy, Miriam told herself. There was no denying that. She should feel grateful. But there was something in the way he was being good that she didn’t like; something about it, she couldn’t say what, didn’t feel good at all.

  THEN SAM STARTED telling jokes, one-liners—Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield, Myron Cohen, Milton Berle. He must have been getting the jokes from all the late-night television in her mother’s room. Lately, at dinner, particularly when nothing was being said, or when the bickering started, he would say them one after another in rapid fire:

  “Went to a child psychiatrist the other day; the kid didn’t do a thing for me.

  “Went to a psychiatrist, he said what do you do? I said I’m a mechanic, he said good you get under the couch.

  “I was so ugly when I was born my mother had to breast-feed me through a straw.

  “My mother refused to breast-feed me. She said she just wanted to be friends.

  “She told the lifeguard at the pool to keep an eye off me.

  “My proctologist stuck his finger in my mouth.

  “My wife and I bumped into her old boyfriend, Bob. ‘Bob,’ she said, ‘this is Sam. Sam this is good-bye.’

  “When I got home from work, my wife met me at the door dressed in nothing but Saran Wrap. What, I said, leftovers again?

  “She says to me what would it take to get you to go on a second honeymoon? And I say, A second wife.

  “She says, why don’t you take me somewhere I’ve never been before? I say, how ’bout the kitchen?”

  There was something manic in the joke-telling, as if he thought that if he didn’t tell them all as fast as possible something horrible would happen. She wondered if his quirkiness was finally turning into real insanity. For a moment she pictured him in the nuthouse, doing stand-up in a padded cell.

  Only her mother would laugh at the jokes. The two of them—it was like they were in league together, up to no good somehow at her expense, but she couldn’t say exactly how or why.

  “If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no sex at all.

  “At my age eating’s more fun than sex; I’ve put a mirror over the dinner table.”

  After a while Miriam would say, “Enough already. Let us eat in peace.”

  Her mother would still be laughing. Her mother would say, “Take my daughter!” And Sam would reply on cue, “Please.”

  Scene XV

  They were driving to Julie’s high school graduation: Curly behind the wheel, Tula beside him, and Miriam and Sam in the backseat. Julie and Ethan were already at the high school.They had just started down Webster, a narrow one-way street, when someone trying to pass them, horn blaring, drove them right up onto the sidewalk. Curly honked back long and hard, and the other car screeched to a halt. The door flew open; the man jumped out and ran toward them. He was extremely tall, heavyset, and he staggered a little as he ran. “Oh great,” Curly said, “a fucking lush.” Then he told them all to stay put and lock the door behind him. Miriam’s mother kept repeating, “Oy Gott, oy Gott.” Next thing they knew Curly and the man were shouting; what was said, they couldn’t tell, because now the windows were rolled up and the doors locked. All at once, Curly swung and hit the guy square in the face, and the guy collapsed. Curly jumped back into the car and they hurried off. By the time they turned the corner onto Park Street, the man had gotten to his knees and was touching his nose and cheek, feeling for damage. Blood ran from Curly’s knuckles, down the back of his hand, staining the starched cuff of his shirt and dripping onto his tan slacks.

  Miriam had seen flashes of his anger. She had always sensed the possibility of violence just under the surface of their testy day-to-day relations; she felt it, too, when he’d lose his temper at the kids over a forgotten chore, a not adequately respectful tone of voice, or any kind of trouble they got into. She felt it in the way he’d roughhouse with the boys, hurting them sometimes inadvertently. Sometimes he’d pretend to lose control so convincingly that she thought he had. Most of all, she’
d felt and feared it on those nights (which now thank God rarely happened—she could thank Stuart for that) when she would turn away from him in bed, when he would throw the covers off and leave the room, or worse just lie there brooding, saying nothing.

  Curly kept repeating, “Son of a bitch. Goddamn son of a bitch.” He told Sam that all he was doing was protecting himself, protecting his family. He hit first because the schmuck was drunk and twice his size and he wasn’t going to give him any advantage. Better not to fight than fight, he said. Walk away if you can. But if you can’t, always throw the first punch.

  Sam leaned over, one hand on Curly’s shoulder. He was staring amazed at the bloody knuckles. He said, “Drunk stops a man on the sidewalk. Says, buddy, can you tell me where the other side of the street is? and the man says, over there. The drunk says, I was over there and someone told me it was over here.”

  “Enough, Sam,” Miriam said. “Leave your father alone.”

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. Curly kept flexing his bloody hand, cursing under his breath; the boy stared out the window; Miriam found it hard to breathe, her heart was racing; the incident had come and gone in a moment, and the day now looked as peaceful as it had just minutes ago, but she couldn’t let it go, that violence; its aftershock went on inside her. The roughhousing at home, the stifled angers, the frustrations, everyone in the family so often, too often, in each other’s way, who knew why, or what to do about it, and every moment it was getting worse.

  THIS WAS 1964. The speaker at the graduation, a local politician, spoke about the dangers Julie and her classmates would be facing in the years to come: the doomsday clock, the power of the Soviet Union, the rise of communist regimes around the world. He said that we’re a peaceful country; we are slow to anger, but once provoked we would crush the enemies of freedom with an irresistible force. Sooner or later, he said, each and every one of us will be called on to defend our way of life. We were heading into a time of national sacrifice. The more he spoke, the more Miriam could feel the world around her growing large with rage, and the more it grew, the smaller she and her children seemed inside it. They were small and growing smaller. At any moment, they might disappear.

  IT WAS JULIE’S first night home from Antioch during fall break. She was out with friends, and Miriam was straightening up her room when she came across her diary, the gold lamé one Miriam had given her as a high school graduation present. It was unlocked and open on her desk. Miriam knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help herself. She’d always wondered what college life was like and she could get no details from Julie who brushed her off with “It’s just college, Ma, nothing to write home about.” Just college! Who knew what opportunities Miriam would have had, what kind of life she might have led, had she been able to go to college? She’d have married someone like Frankie, someone with ambition and talent. Why, she might have become a professor herself. A professor of theater!

  Julie had no interest in theater. Maybe that’s why their relationship was always bristly and tense, why Julie had always been so unavailable. Julie’s subjects were sociology, political science, and history, subjects Miriam found depressing. Where was the music in that? It didn’t surprise her to see words like “injustice,” “cold war,” “communist,” and “communism” reappearing on the pages she was scanning; but words like “pigs” and “honkies,” “sit-in” and “rally” made her slow down and read more carefully. Julie had joined the Communist Party. Julie had become a radical activist against the war. If the administration didn’t change course soon, she and her cohorts would take more drastic measures. Julie’s boyfriend (Julie’s boyfriend?) was black. They were living together. They were “fucking”—that’s the word Julie used, “fucking!” which she described in disgusting detail. And then Miriam came across a passage about her and Curly—Julie couldn’t wait to tell “them” the truth, so they would see her for the person she is, not the girl of their fantasies. Their whole little racist world was based in fantasy. Her mother’s especially. She couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces when she told them the truth.

  Who was this child? Had she always thought this way? Had she always believed these horrible things? Was this, this anger and contempt for everything her parents represented what lay behind her often blank expression, her remoteness, her “independence”? Why hadn’t she and Curly ever seen or guessed what had to have been stirring all these years inside their daughter? They were close, Miriam and Julie, weren’t they? Hadn’t she given Julie all the mothering that her own mother withheld from her?

  And now what? Should she show the diary to Curly? Oh God, to think what he might do. Maybe she could talk to Julie herself; maybe mother to daughter she could get through to her, show her how this was just a phase, that she was ruining her life. But when she tried to imagine talking with Julie about such intimate things, such sensitive things, she couldn’t picture it. She wasn’t a racist, no, but that didn’t mean she had to give her blessing to her daughter’s . . . no, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it by herself. She and Curly both would have to sit her down. They were still a family. They’d have to work this out together.

  “Curly,” she called downstairs, “Curly, come up here. You need to see this.”

  CURLY WAS HOLDING the diary when Julie got home.

  “Shacking up with schvartzas?” he shouted. “Overthrowing the government? Is that what we sent you to college for?”

  “You had no right to read my diary,” Julie said.

  “No right?” Miriam said, “We’re your parents.”

  “Well, you don’t own me. I can do what I want.”

  “Not in this house,” Curly said. “Not as long as you’re under my roof.”

  “How could you do this to us?” Miriam asked.

  “I’m not doing anything to you. I’m living my life.”

  “And what we think,” Miriam sobbed, “what we care about, what other people think, that doesn’t matter to you, does it?”

  Julie lunged for the diary and Curly pushed her back. He raised his hand to hit her, but Miriam caught it. “Curly,” she cried, “don’t hit her. Don’t you dare hit my daughter.”

  She threw herself against him to hold him back.

  “I’m not your daughter,” Julie said.

  “You’re damn right, you’re not,” Curly shouted. “Get your things, get out. Go back to your schvartzas. You’re no child of ours.”

  Julie ran up to her room, up the stairs past Miriam’s mother who was coming down.

  “Oy Gottenyu,” she said. “You spoiled that girl, you ruined her. It serves you right.”

  Miriam looked at her mother, just looked at her, her eyes bright with hatred. “Look what you’ve done to me! Are you happy now, you bitch, you fucking bitch?”—that was what Miriam wanted to say, but did not. Without a word, Miriam ran into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  The old woman hobbled back upstairs, panting, saying “Oy Gottenyu, oy Gottenyu.”

  And it was over, staged like a scene in a musical, a tragic musical about abandonment, betrayal, revenge, though without the score, without the singing and dancing.

  BEHIND CURLY’S BACK, Miriam wrote Julie every week. At first she wrote long letters about the importance of parental respect and how she and Curly had lived a lot longer than Julie and knew a thing or two about the world and how to live in it. Experience ought to count for something. And her experience had shown her in no uncertain terms that the world today just isn’t ready for interracial romance. It may not be right, it may not be fair; in a perfect world, we’d all be color-blind. But the world is anything but perfect, and you have to live in this world, not a dream world of commendable ideals, if you want to get ahead. Julie never wrote back. And Miriam’s letters got shorter. She told Julie she loved her and only wanted what was best for her. She said you may think your friends can substitute for family, but only your family would be there for you in a pinch. Eventually, all she sent were cards with news of
Ethan and where he was performing and the reviews he had received. She never stopped believing, not for a second, that her daughter, her only daughter whom she missed so much, would come around to her way of thinking. Julie just needed to grow up a little bit, to learn a little more about life.

  Maybe her mistake was to name her Julie in the first place. Maybe the name fated her to this, who knew? So maybe now she should think of her as Chava, the wayward daughter in the new hit musical Fiddler on the Roof, her banished waif; maybe that would make the heartbreak somehow less unbearable, at least while she listened to the songs or sang them to herself—for a little while, at least, she could be Golda, not Miriam, and her pain might then be singable, made beautiful by the songs, songs she couldn’t sing without becoming even more determined that her daughter never forget her mother, her family, her past. She would always be there for her; even now the door was open. It would never not be open, through thick and thin, in good times and bad. Every birthday, every holiday, any time she had a little extra, she sent a greeting card with “I love you” written on the bottom, and a check inside, a check Julie never cashed, and Miriam never stopped sending. That’s what a mother does. That’s what a mother is. Tradition. Tradition. Just like in the song.

  Scene XVI