by Alan Shapiro
She held the other picture up to this one—there was Julie as an infant waving her hand forty years away at her own infant daughter, and there was Julie smiling back across forty years at Miriam who could be her younger sister who’s smiling back at her. The fifty-nine-year-old overweight Miriam, her hair dyed blond, looked at the twenty-two-year-old new mother she had been—even in the black-and-white Polaroid she could see how bright her curls were, how smooth her skin. Oh, what a handsome couple she and Curly had made, and how hopefully she had looked out into the future. What would that girl think if she could have seen the future? She would have been appalled to see herself so overweight—she, who’d always been such a beauty, so meticulous about her looks. How had it happened? How had she gotten from there to here? How had that Miriam turned into this one? Sunrise, sunset.
She got out one of the many Hallmark greeting cards she kept, a nonspecific congratulatory card, in which she wrote: “I love you very much.” She put a check inside it. Julie never wrote back and, as always, never cashed the check.
Scene XXVI
Ethan quit the business, got his real-estate license, and got a “normal” job, selling office space. Miriam thought that maybe if she reminded him of the world he’d left behind, if she talked show business to him so he wouldn’t forget, so it would always be before him, she could save him from making such a terrible mistake, a mistake that someday would destroy the very family he was so anxious to provide for. He’d come to hate his children and his wife if he gave up performing once and for all, couldn’t he see this? Couldn’t Esther? He would say, “Get off my back, Ma. Leave it alone.” But when she wouldn’t leave it alone. When she raised the subject every time he called or visited, when she cut out the latest reviews of shows in which this or that old friend was starring, when she showed him the reviews, when she said, “See? See? They struggled, too, and now look at them,” he would just explode. He would scream, “It’s not about you, understand? It’s not your life, it’s mine!” Curly would tell her to back off, stop nagging him, she was driving the kid away. But she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear to see him ruin his life by throwing away something he loved so much.
Nagging? He was standing in the middle of the freeway and a truck was hurtling down upon him. She wasn’t nagging. She was pulling her child out of harm’s way just in the nick of time.
THEN, A FEW years later, it happened just as Miriam had predicted: after almost twenty years of marriage, Ethan, the happy family man, walked out on his wife. He had come to resent Esther for pressuring him to give up show business, and when she finally couldn’t take any more of his tantrums and sulking and told him to go back to the stage if that would make him happy, never mind about her and the kids, he tore up his real-estate license and began auditioning again. And when he landed a role in the Broadway-bound musical Sunset Boulevard, he decided that he was done with Esther, with Hollywood (his girls, after all, were nearly grown), and that he would move to New York for good. He told his mother he’d made all the sacrifices he could make. Life is short. You’ve got to seize whatever opportunities come your way. One of the opportunities that had come his way happened to be a young woman in the cast of Sunset Boulevard, with whom Ethan had fallen in love, but this part of the story he kept to himself, for now. Miriam felt terrible for Esther and the two girls, but she was thrilled for Ethan. Esther had never truly supported Ethan’s love of show business. She had badgered Ethan into real estate, and in doing that she drove him out. It was her fault for not appreciating him. Terrible and painful as it was to see the marriage fail, Miriam nonetheless believed that this was for the best, not just for Ethan, but for all of them. In the long run they would all be happier. In the short run, no one was happier than Miriam. She would be there on opening night to celebrate with Ethan. She couldn’t wait.
CURLY WAS CERTAIN Ethan must be gay, to walk away from a wife and two children after so many years. He blamed it all on Miriam and that faygela Stuart Foster. When Sam would remind him that Ethan and Esther had fought constantly and had never seemed especially happy, Curly would say, “Happiness and marriage, that’s like comparing apples and, and, and—horseshit.”
JUST BEFORE HE moved to New York City, Ethan introduced them to Alice, his fiancée. Curly was relieved that Ethan was a man’s man, even if an irresponsible one. Miriam was thrilled. Alice was tall and willowy and had a strong, high voice. They looked so good together. And boy, with those long legs could she dance. They might become a famous duo—like Steve and Eydie, or Fred and Ginger. Alice could give him the encouragement he had never gotten from Esther. Now maybe he’ll have a fair shot at stardom. For once in his life, maybe he’d catch a break. God knows, the boy deserved it.
ACT III
Scene I
He couldn’t remember the lyrics. He’d get into an audition and start to sing “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” or “On the Street Where You Live,” or “Maria,” songs he’d been auditioning with forever, and suddenly he’d draw a blank. No words would come. He thought it must be stress. He’d been through a lot the last few years—the divorce; Alice; Esther’s unrelenting fury and incomprehension; the constant traveling between New York and LA to see his children. The divorce had been hard on them. But they’d get over it; they’d see eventually how happy he was now, how good this would end up being for all of them. Besides, he’d been getting work, bigger and better roles; things were turning his way, at last.
But then he couldn’t remember where he lived. He couldn’t recognize his own address when he saw it on an envelope. Words longer than two syllables he couldn’t pronounce. He couldn’t even remember the words to “Happy Birthday.”
They operated on the tumor the very day it was diagnosed. Glioblastoma multiforme. Prognosis: maybe a year.
Miriam thought, Why me? When she spoke to Ethan, though, she said, “Think positive.” She said, “You can beat this.” She said, “The glass is half-full,” and “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” It infuriated him how she refused to accept his situation. She argued with his terror. She tried beating it to nothing with clichés, bromides, platitudes. Her belligerent optimism, her desperate good cheer—she set his teeth on edge. Whenever she called, Alice would answer. She would say that Ethan was sleeping. Miriam was no dope. She noticed that Ethan was always sleeping when she called.
A FEW MONTHS later, in July, he came down with meningitis. The tumor hemorrhaged. His left side was paralyzed. A nurse was helping him from the bed to the commode when she lost her grip and dropped him. He was wearing his Sunset Boulevard T-shirt—the T-shirt he got the cast to sign for him when he left the show a year before the cancer. As he fell, the nurse grabbed for the T-shirt and it ripped off. He was apoplectic. The phone rang. It was his mother. The nurse handed Ethan the phone, not knowing what else to do. He tried to tell his mother what had just happened, but all that came out was, “Fucking bitch . . . Fucking bitch.”
Miriam thought he was yelling at her. She yelled back, “You can’t talk to your mother like that. Who do you think you are?”
He stammered, “No. No. You . . .”
“No, you,” she said. “You listen to me. I’m your mother and you’ll treat me with . . .”
“Shit,” he said. “You don’t . . .”
“No,” she interrupted. “You don’t, you don’t talk to me like that, I don’t care how sick you are.”
He slammed the phone down. Miriam was beside herself. She was in a rage. When Sam called, she started right in, no hello, how are you—just “He can’t talk to me that way. I’m his mother, and he’s got to learn to treat his mother with respect.”
Sam said, “Ma, he doesn’t have to learn anything anymore. He’s done with learning.”
And she said, “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
IT TOOK A month of physical therapy before he regained all his motor skills. Toward the end of this period, he became oddly cheerful. Maybe it was the crisis atmosphere,
the show of love from all his friends, all the attention he was getting, but when Miriam and Curly flew in to see him there was a weird party atmosphere in the apartment; he was like a different person, happy, calm, attentive to others, like he didn’t have a care in the world. Miriam thought it must be the chemo he was undergoing. Well, whatever it was, they should all be thankful. Happiness was happiness, let her son just be happy, please God, even if under such terrible circumstances, even if only for a little while.
On that first night, Alice’s dog, Daisy, bit Miriam on the hand. Miriam had been cooking dinner for everyone. Daisy, a high-strung border collie, was following her from stove to counter, from counter back to stove, in the hope of something falling from a plate or dish. Miriam pulled the brisket from the oven and stepped on Daisy’s paw. The dog yelped, Miriam nearly dropped the brisket. A little gravy spilled on the floor. Daisy scrambled back over the tiles to the gravy. Miriam yelled, “Get away you—get get get!” But Daisy didn’t get, and when she tried to push her away, Daisy bit her right through the oven mitt. She didn’t break Miriam’s skin, but the bite was hard enough to bruise her. Miriam came running out of the kitchen, holding her hand, screaming, “What kind of meshuggene dog is this!”
“Miriam,” Alice said, gently, trying not to laugh, and tending to the already swelling hand, “you make her crazy when you yell like that. Just speak to her in a normal voice.”
Curly said under his breath so everyone could hear, “That was her normal voice.”
“Just keep her away from me, okay?” Miriam said.
Ethan laughed, “Leave it to you to bring out the attack dog in Daisy.”
Curly patted Daisy on the head. “Good girl,” he said. “Good girl. Welcome to the family.”
YESM HAPPINESS WAS happiness, but Alice was worried that Ethan wasn’t facing up to the gravity of his situation. She didn’t like it that he didn’t complain, now that he could walk and talk again and wasn’t in any kind of pain; besides the occasional nausea, he wasn’t breaking down or blowing up. Alice was afraid that when the symptoms returned, as they surely would, and everyone was gone, it would be so much worse for him if he didn’t prepare himself for it now while the family was here. “To hell with reality,” Miriam told her, “he should just be happy while he can.” But Alice wouldn’t let it go. She said that the family still had a lot of unresolved “issues”—since when was family an issue, like crime or welfare? Yet Alice went ahead and arranged for a therapist friend of hers to facilitate, for Ethan’s sake, what she called a family session.
SO HERE THEY were, facing each other in Ethan’s small apartment; even Sam had flown in for the session with Belinda, their therapist for the night, an attractive woman in her early forties. She had bright blond hair teased up into a breathy supernova. Curly took one look at her and muttered, more loudly than he meant, “Sweet Magnolia, how high is your hair!”
Miriam had never met anyone so professionally earnest — like an actor acting the part of a therapist. She spoke in short clauses and so slowly it was as if she thought that English was their second language.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s begin. I so admire you all. Let me say that first. I admire you for agreeing to share your feelings. This is a very difficult time. A painful time. It’s hard for even the closest of kin to talk openly about the death of a loved one. It’s so much harder to do so in front of a stranger. A crisis like this brings up a lot of ancient history, buried emotions, forgotten wounds. Honesty is risky. Things get said. Things get said and people get hurt. When people get hurt, they shut down. When people shut down, the hurt festers. When the hurt festers . . .”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Curly blurted out.
Belinda seemed not to notice. “See,” she continued, “anger is a secondary emotion. There’s always pain behind it. So my job as facilitator is to help you all get past the anger to the pain, so you can hear the pain. So you can listen to it with an open mind. And speak with an open heart. Okay? Okay. So, what I’d like to do first is to go around the room and have each of you say what you hope to get out of the session.”
She turned first to Curly sitting to her left. He was still staring, dumbfounded, at her hair. He looked like he wanted to reach up and touch it.
“Mr. Gold?” she said.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Would you like to go?”
“No thanks,” he said. “I went a little while ago before we all sat down. I’m fine for now. But I appreciate you asking.”
“No,” she said, “I mean, would you like to say anything to us, to Ethan.”
Curly just stared back at her.
“About tonight,” she continued. “You know, what you hope to accomplish here tonight.”
“Accomplish?” he asked.
“Dad,” Sam said, “is there anything you want to say to Ethan?”
“I did already,” he said.
“When? How?” Belinda said. “You haven’t said anything yet.”
“Earlier,” he said. “Before you got here. In private.”
“Would you like to share with us what you said to Ethan?”
“What, are you kidding?” he said. “That’s family business.”
“But this is family therapy,” she said.
“Yeah, sure, but I mean family as in, you know, father and son. As in personal.”
“But that’s what therapy does, Mr. Gold. It delves into intimate things like that, the more personal the better.”
He said, “But there’s personal, and then there’s personal. This is the latter, if you know what I mean, not the former.”
Belinda scanned the room for help. “Would anyone else like to start?”
“I guess I will,” Ethan said. “I hope after tonight we can feel a little closer to each other.”
“Since when aren’t we close?” Miriam asked.
“I’m not saying we’re not,” Ethan said.
“What are you saying then?”
“That there’s room for improvement.”
“We’re a family, not a house,” she said. “You need us, we come. You’re sick, we take care of you. What’s to improve?”
“Ma,” Ethan said, sighing. “You don’t have to get defensive; no one’s attacking you.”
“I’m not defensive!” she said. “Why do you say I’m defensive? And how is it not attacking me to call me defensive?”
“I’m just saying . . .”
“I’m making a point,” she interrupted. “Can’t I make a point?”
Belinda jumped in, asking if any of them could change one thing about themselves, what would it be?
Curly, staring at Miriam, said, “No comment.” Sam joked that there was a particular hat, a boater, he wished he’d bought back in the day, but when no one laughed, he said he could do a better job staying in touch and maybe be less driven by his work. Ethan said how much he’s come to value truth and honesty and that he wished it hadn’t taken cancer to make him see the light.
When it was Miriam’s turn, she stared out at the room, saying nothing, her jaw clenched.
“Mrs. Gold,” Belinda prodded, “is there anything you’d change about yourself, your life? Anything you wish were different?”
“You mean aside from having a son I can’t keep from dying and a daughter I never see?”
Nobody said anything. Nobody, especially Belinda, knew what to say. Then Ethan, tears running down his face, dropped to his knees, and on his knees walked over to Miriam. Like Al Jolson, she thought, he looked like Al Jolson singing “Swanee how I love ya’ how I love ya.’ ” She almost laughed, but then he reached up for her hands, and he said, “Ma, I’m begging you, open up a little, for once in your life. If my illness is telling us anything, it’s that we don’t have time for bullshit.”
“You think what I did for you, the sacrifices I made, were bullshit?”
“No, Ma,” he said. “Just that you never really . . .”
“Don’t you lecture me,” she
said. “Don’t any of you dare lecture me. I never did anything but what I thought was best for you, for every one of you, and I never asked for anything in return except respect. I wasn’t perfect? Sue me. I did the best I could. And now I have to watch my son die. So nobody gets to tell me how I’m supposed to feel.”
The very force of her outburst seemed to lift Ethan to his feet and push him back across the room into his chair.
“Well,” Belinda said, smiling, looking around the room, “does anybody have anything else to add?”
No one had anything else to add. She thanked them, she said she hoped the evening was “cathartic.” She commended their courage and honesty and she wished them all the best in the days ahead.
Miriam was furious. Miriam had never been so furious. She was seventy-five years old. She had done the best she could, and what good would it do now anyway, to think she could have done more of this or less of that? Why rake through the past for this or that shortcoming or failure, since the past was what it was, and nothing could change it? She had plenty to complain about, too, but did she complain? No, and why? Because she knew what happened when you vented your feelings—you just had more feelings to vent.
EVERYONE (BUT JULIE, of course) was at the hospice: Ethan’s fiancée, his daughters, his brother, Curly and Miriam. Alice was reading a profile of Ethan by the Broadway star Gwen Salsby in the latest Actors’ Equity Newsletter. Her letter was a warm and detailed tribute to Ethan. Ethan, she said, was not only a fabulous performer, but also a tireless fighter for actor’s rights, serving many years on the union board. He had helped to establish and publicize the Actors Fund, which was designed to help defray the medical costs of unemployed actors. He was diligent, hardworking, a joy to be around, a model of professionalism and dedication, somebody everybody in the business knew and admired. She invited the union, all fifty thousand members, to join with her in thanking Ethan for his service to the art, and in Ethan’s name to donate something to the Actors Fund.