Huddie and I had seen it — a profile of Iz on his seventy-fifth birthday. There was a bit of praise for Iz in it — fighting for the Haganah after the British left Israel, his research into the folk tradition of the diaspora — but there were also snide intimations that he had become less supportive of Zionism when it became unfashionable, that he blew with the fickle winds of protest — as if he had left the Zion cocktail party early because the El Salvador one served better canapés.
Even his popularization of Hebrew songs was questioned. The implication was that by making the songs more universal, he had made them less Jewish. They cited his version of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem:
As long as your heart yearns
As long as your soul burns
Finally you will turn
To the place that you must love
We had found a literal translation of it. The problem was that Iz had made it unspecific: in the original, the soul that was burning was a Jewish soul; the place that you were meant to love was Zion.
“So now he’s not Zionist enough for the Jews and too Zionist for everyone else! Remember all the heckling at that concert when he sang the Hebrew songs? He’s not responsible for the situation in Israel! And when he sang ‘Scars’? Oh, that was awful.”
Once people used to light matches and hold them up when he sang it. That time they didn’t. A few years before, Iz had allowed the song to be used in a television commercial for an antiseptic cream. A small boy in shorts and school cap limped through cobbled streets in the rain. His knee was bleeding and when he got close to a picturesque cottage with smoke coming out of the chimney, the door opened and his mother stood there with arms open. Over this, a male voice choir with brass band accompaniment sang rewritten words:
If you find yourself in pain
And the sky is full of rain
If your find your body aching
And you think your heart is breaking
Do not bow your head in shame
Just call your mother’s name
Come running to her from afar
And let her heal your scars
At the concert, when Iz was singing the original version, someone shouted out, “Where’s your mother?” and people began to laugh.
“He’s never performed again since then, has he?” Lally said. “It breaks my heart. He only sold the song to get the money to convert the ground floor for Huddie, which must have been very expensive.”
Huddie looked hurt and fell silent. In a while I could see him falling asleep. He was doing that a lot by then.
Lally was on a roll: “It’s so unfair: this is a man who has borne slights and criticism all his life, not just for his beliefs but for his personal life, too. That’s so intrusive, isn’t it?”
“You mean our mother?” I said tentatively.
“Well, it’s not for me to say.”
“Say it anyway, Lally.”
“I only met the woman a few times. She certainly didn’t want me around. Of course I didn’t mind getting divorced so Iz could marry her. In fact I wanted to make it easy for them. I even admitted adultery, which was completely untrue — I would never have been unfaithful to Iz. I asked for nothing. He had already given me so much.”
“What was she like? Naturally, Iz never talks about her,” I said, a little sarcastically.
“Too painful, I expect. What she put him through! I didn’t see Iz for a long time when he was with her, which broke my heart, but I’ve heard things from other people.”
“What?” I asked.
“Well, she led a very chaotic lifestyle.”
“Didn’t Iz?”
“No, he was bohemian. That’s quite different, Rosie,” Lally said sternly. “The thing was, she came from a different world. Iz didn’t fit into it. His was a world of pure song, not fizzed-up rock music.”
“It’s called folk-rock, Lally. What’s wrong with that?”
“Folk isn’t rock.”
“Maybe she didn’t play the crumhorn, but that doesn’t mean her music didn’t mean something.”
“She wouldn’t have known the crumhorn from the sackbut.”
“But you wouldn’t know the rhythm guitar from the bass, Lally.”
“Thank God.”
“You’re not being logical.”
“Oh, Rosie — you’re putting me in the position of bad-mouthing your mother. I don’t want to do that. I mean, a lot of people did love her and that group she was in,” Lally said. “They still do, I hear. So I suppose that’s good. I won’t mention the drugs and all those things,” Lally said primly. “Of course she was talented. Her voice was lovely, except she ruined it blaring out all those rock songs. If you want to remember one thing about her, listen to that unaccompanied version of ‘Let Them See Your Scars’ she did. That shows you the purity she could have achieved. Oh, Rosie, let’s not talk about this anymore. You must hang on to your memories of her.”
“I don’t have any memories of her,” I said.
Lally looked at her watch. “I should see if Iz is awake. We’ve got a lot to do.”
“Lally…” I had suddenly remembered something: “When you said that Iz would have liked a child.”
“Yes?”
“Didn’t he already have one? Joseph.”
“Oh —Joseph,” Lally said dismissively. “The less said about him the better. Sometimes the apple falls a very long way from the tree.”
Joseph
JOSEPH DREAMT IN RHYME. It was his country. Words have jagged edges: they cut you, they catch on your clothes. Rhyme smooths things out. It puts oil on a scratchy engine, honey on a raspy throat. Add rhyme to life, Joseph thought, and you could alter everything: the mean-spirited would become keen-spirited, the acrimonious harmonious. Those were rhymes that particularly applied to his father, Isaac Herzl.
Over the years Joseph had spent more than his fair share of time thinking about rhymes in hotel rooms at night in New Haven or Boston or Plymouth and now, in Manchester. He always found it hard to sleep in them. It was not much better at home but at least there was more in the fridge there than a bag of peanuts and miniatures of Johnnie Walker. Hotels were frustrating for Joseph — the tiny bars of soap that slipped through your fingers in the shower where you could not work out how to change the temperature of the water; the many switches by the side of the bed that only seemed to turn on the light by the door or the bathroom, even though at least one of them had turned off the bedside light when you had gone to sleep; the key card that worked only intermittently, and certainly never after midnight when the night porter who spoke no known language had to be summoned.
What he liked to do in those rooms late at night was invent additions to other people’s songs. Although he wrote songs of his own for a living, he found thinking about the ones that he did not have to write strangely soothing. For the last few weeks he had been toying with some embellishments to “Manhattan.” He kept going back to it like a half-finished crossword puzzle.
All songwriters have their perfect song. This song, that Ella Fitzgerald had sung, was his. He loved the rhymes: “Manhattan” with “Staten”; “Fancy” with “Delancey”; “Take a” with “Jamaica.” It was perfect. Tonight he was trying to add a verse that might make the song more topical. These days you couldn’t write a song called “Manhattan” without making some reference to the twin towers. He was trying to recast it as the thoughts of someone yearning for New York from abroad. So far, he had come up with:
I dream of old Manhattan
Before they flattened
Those two scrapers. How I ache
For some New York cheesecake
Before those kamikazes make
An increased quake
It was not perfect by any means. He had had some trouble with rhyming “cheesecake.” “Increased quake” was on the edge of being a false rhyme, but it just about worked. Before he came up with “kamikazes make,” he had toyed with “chimpanzees make.” It was a better rhyme, but he worrie
d that equating terrorists with chimpanzees might not play these days. Even in fantasy you’re not allowed to cause offense. It also reminded him of some lines in a song called “Tell Me on a Sunday” which he had a particular aversion to:
The song is about a girl being left by her lover and she’s singing about the places in which she would like to hear the bad news. She wants the deed to be done at a zoo where there are chimpanzees, and to be told on a Sunday “please.” There was no truth to that. It was just rhyme for rhyme’s sake. Who — even in the alternative reality of the musical — would do that? And assuming she did have a preferred setting, Joseph could not understand why it would be in front of a lot of screeching chimpanzees. And why Sunday? Wouldn’t the girl rather be left in the middle of the week, when at least she had work to distract her? Joseph knew how empty Sundays could be.
To make those lines truthful, it would be better to do something like:
Put a box of Kleenex on my knees
Tell me on a Thursday, please
The sad thing was that, after all these years, he was happier trying to improve other people’s lyrics than writing his own. If only he could made a living doing that — he could not see anything enviable in writing musicals, not in Manchester anyway, not when the last show they had written had had crippling reviews and quickly closed there two years ago, not when the first performance of their new show, A Taste of Honey, was tonight, not when the show was in crisis, not when there seemed to be no shred of human comfort coming his way.
It was Alan, Joseph’s writing partner, who had come up with the idea of turning Shelagh Delaney’s old play A Taste of Honey into a musical. They needed to work: in the last few years their unbroken run of successes seemed to have dried up.
The original play had been written in the late 1950s and was considered rather shocking then: the heroine, Jo, is an art student in Bolton who gets herself knocked up by a black sailor and is seen through the pregnancy by her gay best friend, while her nightmare of a mother causes havoc. It was rather plotless, without the through line that drives a musical, and it was very dated.
Alan came up with the idea of changing the period: 1950s Bolton seemed so drab. They moved the time to 1963 and made it about England on the cusp of change: the Beatles, the Lady Chatterley trial, Harold Wilson coming to power. A Taste of Honey was what the decade would bring. It was always good to have some cheap symbolism in a musical, Joseph thought.
Then Kevin Lever became involved. He had never produced a show before but he had money, or so they were led to believe. They were swayed by the fact he had been in the music business, talked about a record label underwriting the show and took them to meet “his investors,” who said they loved the show. It was Kevin’s idea to get Michelle to play the mother, which had seemed rather inspired at first.
She had not sung onstage for a while, but her voice was still in good shape. She was in a rock band before she went into the soap that made her famous. She was as keen to do the show as Kevin was to have her. He said her coming aboard was going to be the key that would unlock the shortfall. “Shortfall” was not a word that filled Alan and Joseph with confidence. Still, this would not be the first show — and certainly not the first for Joseph and Alan — that had had finance problems. Everybody in the theater was used to that.
Although she was a big enough name to bring the investors in, she also became the problem: Michelle was the star of the show, top-billed, but the part she played — the mother — was not the biggest part. Jo, the daughter, was the biggest part. Michelle began to make demands which Kevin agreed to: she wanted her part to be bigger, she wanted more songs. Alan and Joseph went crazy trying to give her more lines and crowbar her into scenes she was not meant to be in. The show began to list dangerously.
They had another problem when the part of the daughter went to Toni. The daughter was meant to be scrawny and working class: Toni was a well-fed girl from the Home Counties, all puppy fat and peachy complexion, who had won some TV talent show. And after all the changes, the story made little sense: at the end of the show, Jo was going to take the train down to London in search of her dream despite knowing nobody there, being nine months pregnant and having no money. They were in the middle of rehearsals and the show was already in crisis.
The only thing that everyone liked was the title song, which the daughter sang at the end of Act One. Kevin had kept asking for a song that “came from the heart,” and Joseph knew that this one did: it was really about himself.
All the hurt you’ve ever seen
The things you might have been
Put them all in quarantine
All the hurts you wanted healed
All the thoughts you wanted freed
Grown to flowers in the field
That’s what I need
On the afternoon of the first preview, before heading for the theater, Joseph had been sitting in the bar of the hotel with Alan and Shirley, having a drink to prepare themselves for the onslaught ahead. He had hardly taken a sip of vodka when the assistant manager came over to them and asked rather aggressively if they had any idea when their room bills would be settled.
He could see Shirley’s face becoming red, not an uncommon occurrence. He knew she was about to blow, also not an uncommon occurrence in the last few weeks. Alan put his hand on her arm and, with the telepathic stun gun he had perfected after thirty-five years of marriage, managed to calm her down before she broadcast to the whole of the bar the financial mismanagement of the production, her opinion of Kevin, and how badly they had been treated. Once Alan had got rid of the man, Shirley started on a smaller tirade: she simply didn’t understand why the stars were living in smart penthouse apartments round the corner from the theater, while they just had standard doubles in this godforsaken hotel.
“All they have to do is run their lines, for God’s sake! You two are doing the real work. You have to write the bloody thing. Remember when we were in Baltimore with Monte Cristo? They were so nice that they had a piano shipped up to the suite for you without even being asked. When we did the Dickens show at the Ahmanson, those producers were professional. And charming! Remember the leather-bound first editions they gave us inscribed by the cast?”
“I don’t think they were first editions, Shirley,” Joseph said. “First edition Dickens would cost more than putting on the show.”
“Well, it was a giant success! They could have afforded it. And when we did…”
“Please don’t go through all our shows, Shirley,” Joseph said wearily.
Just when it seemed as if she might be winding down, he saw Kevin heading through the lobby. Shirley called him over. Joseph could see him freeze. He must have wondered whether he could make a run for it, but there was no escaping Shirley. By the time Kevin got to them he had arranged a smile on his face.
“Did you get my first night presents?” Kevin said nervously. “They’re only small.”
“I daresay,” Shirley said sourly. “If you left them at reception, it’ll be a decade before they’re delivered to our rooms.”
He ignored her. “I thought the tech run went great. I think we’re in pretty good shape, fingers crossed, touch wood, don’t walk under ladders.”
In turn, Shirley ignored him. “Kevin — why is it that, when Alan and Joseph are working all the hours God gave them to come up with yet another song for Michelle, we have to be hassled by the hotel asking about unpaid room bills?”
He looked shifty. “You’ll have to ask the accountant.”
“I don’t want to ask the accountant,” she said. “The accountant is never around. I’m asking you.”
“I’m concept not detail, Shirley,” Kevin said dismissively.
“Actually, Kevin, you’re the producer: you’re detail not concept. Alan and Joseph are concept.”
Kevin shifted gear: “Look, you know how hard it’s been.” There was a little catch in his voice. “The last tranche of money’s coming through this week. It’s been quite a roller
coaster. I’ll sort out the hotel. And listen — thanks for everything you’ve done.”
“Are doing,” Shirley corrected him.
“Oh — and I’ve booked the pizza place opposite after the show. A little celebration.” As Kevin scuttled off, he turned back and gave them a double thumbs-up.
“Pizza!” Shirley said. “This production is in worse shape than I thought.”
They should change the billing on the posters, Joseph thought: “Book and Lyrics by Joseph Carter, Music by Alan Isaacs, Anger by Shirley Isaacs.” She was very experienced at it. She had made herself the hurdle that had to be overcome to get to Alan and Joseph. She was finish-the-vegetables-if you-want-pudding. When a meeting was arranged for them to discuss a project, Joseph could hear the person on the other end of the phone saying to Alan, “Shirley wants to come? What a shame — I don’t think they can do another place at the table on Thursday.”
But there she was on Thursday with her hair buffed up by a visit to the hairdresser, her bangley jewelry clanking, lipstick the same shade as her nails, asking questions about contracts and giving the waiters a hard time because she had asked for her tuna well-done, not swimming off the plate.
In many ways, though, Joseph loved her. She was like a Rottweiler puppy. He had known her as long as he had Alan. They had all been at school together. Over the years she had been kind and generous to him, but he still reserved the right to have murderous thoughts about her when she threatened to take him shopping to smarten up his wardrobe or brushed the dandruff off the shoulder of his tux. But she was brave. Although it could be embarrassing, Joseph was always impressed by her willingness to be unpopular on their behalf. Why did they pay their agent 10 percent? Shirley did most of the work. Still, it filled up her life and gave her something to do. Maybe it would have been different if her daughter had not died. Maybe it would have been different if one of the psychics Shirley had been to over the last fifteen years had actually got in touch with Sally. Then she could have interfered with her life on the other side instead of interfering with theirs. Joseph did not want to think about Sally. He did not want to think about holding her bony, fleshless hand in the hospital, as insubstantial as a chicken wing.
The Songs Page 4