Broadway Baby

by Alan Shapiro

  Sam loved his brother and would do almost anything for him. But this, this was too much. He pictured a studio audience, his mother and her entire family in the front row, beaming, as the host intones, “And now Ethan, here’s your fantasy, here he is, fresh from Chicago, your baby brother, Sam, the poet!” The audience goes wild, they whoop and clap as the host continues, “And maybe, just maybe, folks, if we really let him know how we feel, he’ll share a poem with us, what do you say?”

  “Sorry,” Sam said, “but no can do.”

  “Come again,” Shirley Horowitz said.

  “I can’t do it,” he said.

  “What do you mean you can’t do it?” she asked.

  “I mean I don’t want to do it.”

  “But you’re his brother,” she said. “He’ll be so disappointed!”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that maybe there’s a reason we haven’t seen each other in a couple of years?”

  “Mr. Gold,” she said, patiently, as if to a child, a slow child with a severe learning disability, “your brother’s on the edge of stardom here. This could be his big break. Don’t you want to be part of it?”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “My big break, my shot at stardom, my fantasy.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “I always wanted to do stand-up,” he said. “You know, like Shecky Greene.”

  “Shecky who?”

  “Or Totie Fields. She lost a leg recently, though, didn’t she? So the stand-up part won’t work for her.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You can’t do stand-up if you haven’t got a leg to stand on.”

  “Mr. Gold,” she said, “please.”

  “Okay, how’s this? I was so fat I crushed my inner child.”

  “Mr. Gold,” she repeated.

  “My wife asked, can I help you off with that? And I was naked.”

  “Ha, ha,” she said. “Very funny.”

  “I told her I need something looser to wear. She said, ‘How about Montana?’ ”

  “Mr. Gold,” she said, “I don’t have time for this.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a million of them.”

  “Listen,” she said, “You’re Jewish. I’m Jewish. Let’s talk Jew to Jew. Let’s have a little J talk.”

  “A little what?” he asked.

  “J talk, Jew talk: J to J,” she said. “You mean to tell me that you won’t let us fly you out here, all expenses paid, put you up in a five-star hotel, wine you and dine you, and all you have to do is come on stage and hug your brother in front of millions of people?”

  “What I mean to tell you is I’d rather have my face epoxied to a urinal.”

  “Come on, Mr. Gold, get real.”

  “Real? You want real? I’ll give you real, since we’re talking ‘J to J.’ Surely, Shirley (ha ha), you must realize that this is a real chintzy fantasy you’re giving my brother. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were J-ing him a little bit. I should be offended. My people should be offended. Moshe Dayan should be offended. I mean, ‘J to J,’ why not send him to the Bahamas or buy him a yacht, if we’re talking fantasy? Me, he can see anytime.”

  “Okay, Mr. Gold,” she said. “Okay, but he’ll be disappointed.”

  “He’ll survive. That’s what we do, we Jews, we survive. We’re good at that.”

  HE CALLED HIS mother with the news that he had declined the invitation to appear on Fantasy. She was frustrated, disappointed, but not surprised. Her son, the foreign movie without subtitles.

  Scene XXII

  The sirens woke her early one Sunday morning. She could see from her bedroom window the police cars and paramedics in front of Sigrid Rosenberg’s house. She hadn’t seen Sigrid for a while, but that wasn’t unusual. Sigrid would often disappear for weeks or months and then surface again when someone in the neighborhood had died or gotten ill. Sigrid was always there at anyone’s side in time of sorrow. She was like the cul-de-sac’s official mourner. But for the past several months, since no one had died or fallen ill, there had been no reason for Sigrid to come calling.

  By the time Miriam had gotten dressed and gone outside, the paramedics were removing the body in a black body bag strapped to a stretcher. A police officer asked her if she had known the deceased.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve lived here over twenty years; Sigrid was my neighbor. She used to tie my son’s shoelaces.”

  “She what?” the officer asked.

  “Oh, nothing, never mind. I’m sorry, I just . . . can I ask what happened?”

  “Suicide, we think,” he said.

  “Oh Jesus,” Miriam said. “The poor thing.”

  “Does she have any family, any relatives living nearby?”

  “None that I know of. She lost her family in the war.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. If you can think of anyone else who might know something more about the deceased, please let us know.”

  There was no obituary for Sigrid and, for all Miriam knew, no funeral. When she called Sam with the news, he said he would honor Sigrid by leaving his laces untied for an entire day. He wasn’t joking.

  Now and then, Miriam had seen Sigrid on the street, and they’d sometimes make small talk, but once Sam had no longer needed Sigrid to tie his laces, Miriam had done all she could to stay out of the woman’s way. Sigrid was a carrier of sadness; all Holocaust survivors were. Miriam pitied them, of course, but also felt as if they somehow might infect her with their gloom, as if they judged her for wanting to be happy. Sigrid made her feel as if she had no right to want the things she wanted, as if her dreams were nothing but delusions.

  But now that Sigrid was gone, Miriam wondered what she might have done to help her, what signs she might have missed, what cries for help. She tried to recall the last time she had seen her. Was it last month? Two months ago? Did she stop and chat, or just drive by, as she often did, pretending she hadn’t seen her calling and waving from her porch? One thing is certain, she didn’t know that last time would be, in fact, the last time. Maybe somewhere in her mind she thought, as she drove by, that there was still time, some other time, to give the woman the friendship that she needed. Now it was too late. Sigrid was gone, and now that she was, Miriam couldn’t stop thinking about the neighbor she had never liked to see.

  Scene XXIII

  Miriam decided she wanted to move west, too, to be near Ethan. Curly didn’t want to move. He loved Allston. He loved the house. They’d lived there twenty-five years. They’d raised their kids there. All their friends were there. How could she just turn her back on all that history? What about her family? His?

  She wanted a fresh start. After Sigrid’s suicide, the whole street seemed to be tainted, though what she said was that she couldn’t stand the winters. And she wouldn’t move to Florida, where so many of her cousins lived—sooner or later, she’d end up taking care of them, too, as they grew old. She’d had enough of caretaking, enough for a lifetime. Everybody’s nurse, everybody’s doormat; that was her, that was their Miriam. Well, not anymore.

  She wanted to be near Ethan, especially now that he was soon to hit it big. And it appeared that Ethan’s were the only grandkids they were going to have. She wanted to watch the girls grow up. She wouldn’t relent. She threatened to go without Curly. She’d had it with Boston. Against his better judgment, Curly gave in. They sold the house. He got transferred from the Boston Lord & Taylor to the one in Beverly Hills. They moved to Hollywood.

  THEY MOVED INTO an apartment complex constructed initially for retirees from the entertainment industry, but now open to the general public. The complex was built around a miniature nine-hole golf course. The units, all done up in a Hawaiian motif, looked out on courtyards, each with a small kidney-shaped pool, artificial grass, stunted palm trees, bronze egrets, and fake aviaries holding exotic wooden birds. Their neighbors were character actors, bit players in old TV shows, the doctor from
Little House on the Prairie, a cop from The Honeymooners, lounge singers, musicians, even a retired Rockette. They lived among the once-almost famous. Their next-door neighbor was an old ventriloquist, who had once appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. He would show up every Sunday morning at their door with a sack of bagels in one hand, and a parrot on his shoulder. “Zei Gezunt,” the parrot would say. “How’s by you?” On holidays, they held parties and sometimes put on shows in the Aloha Room. Miriam got to sing again, as she had years ago when she had worked for Stuart. Gus Bivona, who had once played tenor sax in the Tommy Dorsey Band, told her she had star quality!

  Here, she belonged—right here, where she could live among the people of her dreams, and where things were really happening for Ethan since the Fantasy exposure—he was auditioning for TV shows and movies and commercials.

  Not long after they got settled, a film crew shot a scene at their pool right outside their window. It was a Saturday morning. Miriam heard the technicians setting up the shot when she awoke, and she and Curly went out to watch. There must have been ten or fifteen cameramen, not to mention workers building lighting scaffolds around the pool, and the director and his assistants, all with clipboards. Then the two actors arrived with their makeup artists and hairdressers. Other residents had come outside to watch as well. By noon, there must have been fifty or sixty people standing around, waiting for the shooting to begin. Then a young woman with a clipboard approached the crowd. “People,” she said, “we need seven or eight of you for extras in this scene; we need some sunbathers in the background—any of you interested?” Everyone, of course, raised their hands. “Okay,” she said, laughing. “Okay. Not a shy bunch, are you?”

  She picked Miriam and Curly first. Miriam was stunned. Could this be really happening?

  Curly said, “I don’t know, honey.”

  “What don’t you know?” she said. “What’s to know? We’re doing this.”

  And she took his hand and tugged him out to the pool’s edge, where the woman had the extras gather.

  “All of you get in the lounge chairs and look as natural as you can, okay? And talk to one another, make small talk, you know, as you would on any ordinary day by the pool.”

  “But ordinarily we don’t talk a lot,” Curly said. “We’ve been married forty years.”

  “Well, pretend it’s only been twenty,” the assistant said, smiling. A few of the extras chuckled. Miriam was too excited to notice. “And if you can’t think of anything to say, just say ‘peas and carrots’ or ‘rutabagas rutabagas rutabagas’ over and over. Start talking when the director signals.”

  Curly raised his hand, like a grade-schooler.

  “Yes, sir,” the assistant said.

  “Can I keep my visor on?” Curly asked. “My eyes lately can’t take the sun. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with them, but between the eyes and the leaky bladder, let me tell you getting old’s no picnic.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t,” the assistant said. “Yes, of course, wear the visor. We wouldn’t want to hurt your eyes. Just remember to start talking when you get the signal.”

  Curly raised his hand again.

  “Yes,” the assistant said with a sigh. Miriam was mortified.

  “Can we move around while we’re sitting here?”

  “Move around?” the assistant asked. “Like musical chairs? No.”

  “But do we got to stay in the same position? See, I got a restless leg, drives Miriam crazy. Moves around so much at night sometimes I don’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  “Sure, mister,” the assistant said. “Cross your legs, uncross your legs. Do whatever you like, just stay in the lounge chair, okay?”

  So, there they were, seated side by side. Miriam put on her sunglasses. Curly crossed one leg over the other, then uncrossed them, then bent one knee, then straightened it, then bent and straightened the other. When the director signaled, Curly looked over at Miriam and shouted, “Peas and carrots, peas and carrots!”

  The director yelled, “Cut! Cut! Hey, you in the visor, not so loud, okay?—you’re not hawking vegetables on Hester Street; you’re making small talk, background noise. Patter.”

  “Patter, right,” Curly said. “Got a little carried away. First-time jitters.”

  When the cameras rolled again, Curly said as normally as he could, “Peas and carrots, peas and carrots,” and Miriam, staring straight ahead, repeated, “Rutabagas, rutabagas, rutabagas.” Meanwhile, at the far end of the pool, the main character, a private eye, approached his ex-wife, a blonde bombshell in a string bikini. He was saying something like, “We’ll always have El Paso,” when suddenly, to Miriam’s horror, Curly stood.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  The director shouted “Cut! Cut! Now what?”

  “Sorry, boss,” Curly said. “Gotta go, weak bladder. I’ll be right back.” As he passed the actors, he raised the tip of his visor to the blonde and winked.

  It took three more takes to satisfy the director. When it was over, he congratulated all the extras individually. When he came to Curly, he said, “You’re a real character, you know that?”

  “Well, I’m always available,” Curly said. “You know where to find me.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” the director said.

  Miriam was on cloud nine. That’s how she put it in her first letter to Julie from their new address, and in all the notes and cards she sent back east to friends and family. Yes, she missed every one, but LA was truly where she belonged.

  The scene itself never made it into the movie, but it thrilled Miriam to think of the two of them being watched by some big-shot producer in a studio at Universal Pictures, to have been captured, immortalized even, in a few frames of a reel in the studio archive.

  Scene XXIV

  Sam hadn’t said anything about a chapbook; it just showed up one day in the mail—thin as a pamphlet. Family Matters by Sam Gold. He inscribed it, “To Ma and Dad, love, Sam.” On the cover was a picture of a gouged-out block of cream cheese beside a plate of lox. The blade of a knife hovered over the lox. You couldn’t see the hand that held it, but something in the tilt of the blade and the splotch of garish light reflected off it told you the person holding the knife was hungry or angry or both.

  Miriam had no idea what the cover meant, and the poems, well, the poems were difficult and strange. These were a far cry from the flowery verse that Mrs. Pinkerton had made her recite so many years ago. Though all the subjects had to do with family, she couldn’t recognize herself or anyone else in what Sam wrote. The tone was either mocking or sorrowful, and sometimes a harsh mixture of both, but Miriam, for the life of her, could not say why. Where was the uplift? Where was the beauty, the rhyme? Why all the ugliness? People wanted to lose themselves in a book, they wanted to be transported, sung to, just as in the theater. They wanted to be carried away into a better world, into that better somewhere that Maria sings of while holding the murdered Tony in her arms in West Side Story. But there was nothing better about the world Sam wrote about. In the poems of his that she understood, the world was messy in familiar ways, in ways all too depressing. She could stub her toe any day of the week. She didn’t need to open a book to feel the pain of it.

  Curly was having trouble reading lately, so she tried to read a few poems out loud to him, but they never got past the first one because he fell asleep halfway through.

  “Too deep for me,” he said, opening his eyes and yawning.

  “From the sound of it,” Miriam replied, leafing through the book, “you’d think he was raised by Nazis in a concentration camp. You’d think we beat him. You’d think . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Miriam” he said. “It’s poetry. No one’s gonna read it, and those that do won’t get it.”

  “Family Matters,” she said, closing the book. “If family matters so much, you’d think he’d call from time to time.”

  Scene XXV

  At last, a letter arrived from Julie, announcing both a marriage
and the birth of a little girl. Inside the letter was a snapshot of Julie holding a coffee-colored baby, with Julie’s husband looking out over her shoulder, his black face beaming at the camera. In the letter, Julie wrote that she and Sean were happy, and that Danielle, the baby, was the center of their life. She would like her daughter to know her grandparents, but if Miriam and Curly could not accept the three of them with open hearts she never wanted to hear from them again.

  Curly threw the letter down in disgust. “The tramp,” he said, “the trollop, flaunting it in our faces. Who does she think she is?”

  Miriam didn’t know what to think or how to feel. She wanted to see Julie and her baby, but she couldn’t picture it. What would she say to them? What would they say to her? Sean, whoever he was, whatever he was like, where did he come from? What did he do? What did his parents do? Did he have parents? Was his mother a maid? Had her daughter married Melba’s son? How could he not resent her, not hate her? She wanted to show him she was not the monster Julie had probably made her out to be. But she wasn’t going to apologize for how she was raised. Julie and all her radical ideals—she thought she could live in a perfect world where everything was the way she thought it should be, and if the world wasn’t perfect, she would make it so. Well, Miriam lived in the real world, with real friends, all of whom were raised to think the way she thought. Maybe it wasn’t right, but it was too late to change it now.

  And yet how could she not respond, not want to see her grandchild? She missed her daughter, she loved her daughter. But the idea of all of them together, one big happy melting pot of a family, that seemed beyond imagining.

  That night after Curly fell asleep, she opened an old photo album, on the first page of which was a picture of her and Julie. In the picture Miriam is thin and beautiful. She holds Julie, her newborn daughter on her lap. The baby’s fingers are wrapped around her finger; she waves the tiny hand at the camera. Curly sits beside her on the bed. One arm around his lovely wife, he’s looking down at his daughter, fussing with her blanket. He seems too shy to look up at the camera. The shyness makes him even more attractive.