Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  “That’s not for me, is it?” I asked, still burning with fever, although I’d been given all kinds of drugs the night before.

  “I’m afraid it is, my friend,” said the doctor, “what we have to do is inject the serum directly into the spinal column so it can start its work directly on your nerves. Let me give you a little anesthetic to deaden the pain.”

  Pulling a smaller hypo out of his pocket, neatly contained in a little black box.

  I felt like I was being lined up against a wall to be executed, kept thinking of Blessed Oliver Plunkett, this Catholic martyr who had been killed by Henry the Eighth, his arms and legs tied to horses and then the horses whipped so that they pulled arms and legs off, then opening up his belly with a dagger and burning his bowels in front of him while he was still awake, alive . . .

  Christ crucified.

  A little pin-prick in the arm. Hardly felt it. Was hardly awake at all, what with the fever and all.

  And then they had me sit up in bed as the doctor felt around in my back, telling my father something about the “lumbar” area, then the doctor warning me, “Don’t move now, no jumping around . . . this is the big one.”

  And in the needle went.

  Like a bayonet, my whole body screaming with pain.

  But I didn’t move, just took it, kept thinking of the Stations of the Cross, Christ carrying his cross, crossed with thorns, crucified, a spear in his side, that’s what life was about, wasn’t it, the imitation of Christ . . . always the resurrection and ascension on the other side of the wall . . .

  Nothing before or after ever equaling this pain.

  And then I was out, waking up hours later to find my parents still there, both of them like tragic wax figures standing around looking at the crucifixion.

  I had to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks anyhow. It’s all kind of vague for me, the pain, the sedation, like one long, over-heated session in a sauna torture-chamber.

  I remember getting all kinds of toys, log cabins you put together yourself, lead soldiers, coloring books and Crayolas, and then at the end, when it was time to leave, I had to leave everything behind, my father explaining to me “It’s all contaminated.”

  “Besmirched!” my mother added, “Leave the past behind and let’s start all over again!”

  So it all got left behind and one of the nurses explained, by way of consolation, “Don’t worry, it’ll all be burned, no one else will get any of it.”

  Some consolation!

  I couldn’t walk. Still couldn’t walk.

  I remember the doctor friend of my father telling him.

  “It’s all in a very experimental phase. Maybe he’ll walk again, maybe not. What we have to do now is rehabilitation,” handing my father an envelope, “here’s the name of a therapist who works with us, uses the Sister Kenny method; I’d suggest you get in contact with her.”

  “The Sister Kenny method . . .”

  My father pretending he knew what the Sister Kenny method was.

  A brilliant guy, fourth in his medical school class. But he didn’t keep up with things, did he? Got the Journal of the American Medical Society every month, but there it sat, with piles of others, unopened on the back of his desk next to the dozens of pictures he had of the babies he had delivered and the babies of his babies, and even a couple of the babies of the babies of the babies.

  I remember the wheelchair, getting down to the car, getting carried into the back seat, then the long drive home along the Outer Drive to our place in Chatham.

  The Sister Kenny method was very, very hot baths and then hobbling around (with help), relearning how to walk. Took months and months and months. Way into the winter.

  And, in a way, my other loved to have me totally dependent on her.

  In fact, this crippling experience ended up crippling me not only physically but psychologically, kind of gave a whole new direction to my entire life.

  I remember my mother, in the middle of winter, putting her stockings on my legs, “A little extra warmth; it’s the coldest winter on record.” One of her cast-off robes around my shoulders.

  Me, the only child she’d ever have, and she had so much of herself that she had to (had to!) pass on.

  All normal “boy things” cancelled out from that time on.

  I mean my father in a way was a frustrated artist, was a semi-professional violinist when my mother had met him. His violin teacher had told him, “Well, there’s nothing else that I or anyone else can teach you,” and he used to play in theater orchestras evenings, got a job working as a teller at the First National Bank in downtown Chicago.

  That’s how my mother had met him.

  Jake, her brother, worked at the First National Bank as a General Man, filling in for anyone in the bank who was sick, from teller to Vice President. He met my father, brought him home, and my mother had found out that he had gone to pre-med at the University of Chicago, then over to France during World War I (where he’d almost died from typhoid), then the bank.

  So she had kind of pushed/forced him into medical school, got a job as a secretary, and paid all the bills that way. I mean she’d gone to secretarial college and all that.

  But I think my father was more artiste than M.D. And now it was time for them to get rid of their artistic frustrations in me. Beginning with me starting to study violin at age five when I could at least stand up again.

  I was so small though, that I had to get a three-quarters size violin. And they managed to find me a very interesting violin teacher over at the Curtiss Music School—P. Marinus Paulding.

  Tall. Always wore a cape and boots and wide-brimmed hat, carried a cane. Looked like he was right out of nineteenth century London. Nothing at all to do with grimy, working-class, hog-butchers of the world Chicago.

  Great composer, too.

  I remember going to a Curtiss Music School concert where they played one of his symphonies. Vaughan Williamsish. A blend of Aaron Copland and Vaughan Williams.

  Great teacher. He’d point to a note and then indicate where it was on the violin finger-board. Note, place on finger-board. Note, place on finger-board. So, a hundred years later I can still pick up a violin, put some music in front of me and I’ll play it, automatically, instinctively.

  Not the way the nuns over at St. Francis de Paula grammar school had taught me piano.

  “In the treble clef, the lines are All Good Boys Do Fine, AGBDF, and the spaces are F, A, C, E, FACE . . .”

  So put me down at a piano and I start thinking of letters instead of notes on the keyboard. Something I’ve never been able to relearn.

  Only piano and violin weren’t enough.

  “We have a ballet school right downstairs!” my mother said one night over dinner after my father had gotten through describing a particularly horrifying double mastectomy with matastases into the liver and kidneys. “The boy ought to take ballet, that’s what Nurse O’Brien suggested . . . he’s doing well, but could/can do much, much better . . .”

  The ballet school was right between Mrs. Gorman’s delicatessen and Kelly’s drugstore.

  More tights. More costumes.

  A little tap dancing thrown in for fun.

  Then my mother found out about Mrs. Metzger’s All Children’s Grand Opera, and once I was able to walk pretty well again after Nurse O’Brien’s scalding hot baths and endless leg-massaging, I was enrolled in Mrs. Metzger’s singing classes.

  Which was one of the big influences on my whole later life.

  I must have been about eight by then.

  I’d started grammar school at age five, instead of the normal, “legal” age of six. My birthday is February 12th and my mother had some sort of idea that I was being cheated out of a whole year of school because of my birth date.

  So she’d brought me over to St. Francis de Paula grammar school and sat me down in a seat, even after being told I was going to have to wait until September to enroll me, sat me down and said “Don’t let them get you out of that s
eat. It’s yours, you’re here, and here you’re going to stay!”

  So I stayed; Sister Ana Claire let me stay. She wasn’t about to tear me apart and throw me in the garbage.

  So I was always one year younger than my classmates; kind of automatically helped to make me even more of an outsider than all my music and dance education was making me.

  Then along comes Mrs. Metzger, and every Thursday afternoon I start taking a subway up to the north side of Chicago where Mrs. Metzger rents this studio for her classes, and I start learning how to sing.

  “Ich liebe dich wie du liebst mich . . .”

  Beethoven’s “Ich Liebe Dich.”

  Mrs. Metzger interrupting me.

  “A little more ‘cccccc’ in the ‘dich,’ si vous plait.”

  Another try.

  “Ich liebe diccccccch wie du liebst micccccch.”

  “Much better, my little friend.”

  Mrs. Metzger always the soul of patience.

  She reminded me of my grandmother a little. Her hair all woven into braids and then stacked up on top of her head, the same sorts of housedresses my grandmother wore, the same sort of practical square-heeled, tie-in-front black shoes.

  Czech? German/Viennese?

  They kind of merged in my mind, and Zerlina Mulhman Metzger became a kind of instant grandmother-figure for me.

  Of course she was Jewish.

  Her mother (the Mulhman in her name) was a singer and, in fact, had done the singing when Mahler had conducted the first performance of his Das Liede Von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) in Vienna half a century earlier.

  I met the old lady once in the fine arts building in downtown Chicago.

  A performance of Mendelsohn’s Elijah that The All Children’s Grand Opera put on. I was about twelve by then, my voice had just changed, and I was given the big bass role of Sarastro, the high priest.

  I remember Madame Mulhman coming down the hall with Mrs. Metzger, this frail old lady, barely able to walk, but still managing to put some vigor in her step, all smiles when Mrs. Metzger introduced me to her.

  No idea that I was meeting HISTORY.

  I came across her name years later when I was reading a book about Mahler.

  So Mrs. Metzger herself was a link to the great traditions of Viennese-German culture.

  I mean she’d do things like take an orchestral score of an opera like, say, Carmen and put it up on the piano and play from it, someone taking all the orchestral parts, first and second violins, violas, flutes, bassoons, cellos, and turning them into a piano score.

  An amazing feat.

  Speaking of Carmen, when the Metropolitan Opera came to Chicago on tour they didn’t bring a children’s chorus along, of course, and Mrs. Metzger had made some kind of deal with them so that our All Children’s Grand Opera group did the singing. The same for Boris Godunov; wherever they needed a children’s chorus.

  It was so crazy.

  My mother loved it, of course. She’d make costumes for me, all silky and fancy, stockings under my pants, of course, cover my face with pancake makeup, eye-pencil my eyes, put on lipstick and rouge.

  I was supposed to be a little boy but she turned me into a little girl.

  And then the craziest part was that instead of driving me down to the Civic Opera House in downtown Chicago, I would walk from our place on Cottage Grove over to the Illinois Central train (a couple of miles), take the train downtown, then walk over to the Civic Opera House (another mile or so), do my thing, and then come home, what, ten-thirty, eleven o’clock at night, all by myself, walking through the deserted financial district in Chicago back to the train station , then back home again.

  I guess I got used to walking around in stockings, all made up, fearless . . . noon, midnight, what was the difference?

  I got to know the guy who was in charge of extras down at the opera house. You know, like in Aida there are street scenes where they need people walking around, or La Boheme...lots of operas that need extras.

  I got to know him so well that when I got older I’d be onstage whenever they needed anyone in a street scene, and, in fact, everyone backstage got to know me so well that I could come in whenever I wanted, even when I wasn’t onstage.

  So I’d hang around during operas, ballets, symphony concerts, fell in love with all the ballerinas like Maria Tallchief, Irna Barinova, Patricia Wilde . . .

  I’d be way up on the crosswalks above the stage, or sometimes right in the windows, a kind of phantom of the opera.

  I remember one time years later, after I’d become an English professor and had gotten a Fulbright professorship to Caracas, Venezuela, Maria Tallchief came down to dance and lecture on dance, and the U.S. ambassador had invited me to a party for her, I’d gone up to her and said “Maria Tallchief, I was one of your fans the whole time I was growing up—”

  “Growing up?” she answered, “What does that make me, some sort of ancient Egyptian?”

  Sorry!

  And when I wasn’t practicing the violin or piano or writing piano concertos (P. Marinus Paulson also taught me composition, how to see a keyboard as a series of look-alike patterns that enabled me to sit down anywhere at any time and improvise to my heart’s content), my mother would take me shopping with her.

  Down to Marshall Fields, for example. To the China department.

  Teach me all the China patterns. So I came to a point where I could identify any style, any time-period.

  Enrolled me in ceramic classes at the Art Institute, got me so used to the galleries (gave me a lifetime membership to the Art Institute when I graduated from high school) that when I was in pre-med I’d make it a point to give myself a little break and go to the Art Institute after classes every Friday afternoon, look at ancient Chinese or Sumerian pots, which prepared me, I guess, for the archaeological discoveries I’d make later, when I married a Peruvian.

  I mean talk about artsy-craftsy.

  And then she’d always take me shopping with her downtown. Endless trying on of shoes. Always with ankle straps. That was her thing: ankle straps. No ankle straps and they weren’t shoes.

  Loved alligator. Alligator shoes and a mink stole, always a hat with a little veil.

  Nice legs.

  A very beautiful woman. Men always reacting to her.

  Jewelry. I don’t remember the names of the endless (always Jewish) jewelers we would always visit downtown, exotic little places where she’d buy diamond-studded watches and diamond bracelets and rings and earrings.

  There was a Jewish tailor down on Van Buren, too, where I’d go and get measured for suits and overcoats.

  Always, everything tailor-made.

  Especially liked to get me into the tweedy look. Tweedy suits and overcoats, tweed caps, white shirts and conservative ties.

  And she was always buying more stockings and bras and corsets, garter belts. She’d gone to secretarial college and had worked for Diamond T (trucks) for years and then later on in life had gone to work at Ginn and Co., textbook publishers with offices right close to the Wrigley Building in downtown Chicago.

  She did all my father’s billing for him, wrote all the letters that had to be written, handled all financial matters; but what she looked like was some sort of frustrated Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Irene Dunne, Betty Grable. Always getting her nails done, her hair permanent-waved, shaped.

  What I was supposed to do was to learn how to be a woman from her. All the learning about China and silver, learning about shoes and minks and jewelry . . . I mean she’d take me into a fabric store (the fabric department at Marshall Fields) and start showing me the different kinds of fabric as if my life depended on it: “This is brocade, feel it; and this is satin; poie de soir; chiffon, don’t you just love chiffon? If I could that’s all I would wear: chiffon and furs . . . uuuuuuuuuu . . .”

  Always on the edge of orgasm.

  My father always bringing her little “secret” gifts.

  “Here’s a little something for you
, my darling . . .”

  “Excuse us!” she’d say, and they’d go into the bedroom, the bedroom lock would click, and there I’d be, left on the sofa reading, say, Ozma of Oz. Age 10. Some Beethoven symphony on my record player, me trying to memorize all the movements of all the nine symphonies so that I’d hear a few measures, and bim, bam, bong, “That’s the fourth symphony, third movement . . .”

  I had a thought about memorizing all the movements of all the symphonies of, say, Schubert, Brahms, Hayden, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and was beginning to build up a huge collection of records.

  It all seemed normal to me. After all I was onstage at the Civic Opera House one time when Sir Thomas Beecham was conducting, the Metropolitan Opera on a tour to Chicago, doing Carmen (Gladys Swarthout as Carmen), and when it came time to cue in the children’s chorus, who did he look at, point his baton at? Me, of course!

  When I got a little older, in my teens, a “normal” Saturday night would be the Chicago Symphony in concert.

  When I got into college, Loyola University, pre-med, of course, I took German from a Czech professor named Schwarzenberg, who was this diplomatic big shot from a famous Czech family. I mean, go back into Austro-Hungarian-Bohemian history and look for the name Schwarzenberg and you’ll find it everywhere.

  There I’d be in a box seat at a Saturday night concert in Orchestra Hall. Some beautiful munchy-crunchy doll like Shirley Bourke (highest heels, black stockings, black suede dress and cape, a face right out of Fleurs du Mal) sitting next to me, and just as the concert was about to start, Schwarzenberg would wave a hello to me, Kubelick would come out, bow to the audience and give a special little wave to Schwarzenberg.

  “Eins, zwei, drei,” and the concert would begin, Shirley would turn to me and say “I feel so ‘in,’ you know what I mean?”

  “In” was the word.

  That’s what my whole life was about: being “in.” Inside culture, inside the best society, inside the best concert halls for the best concerts.