by Jill Price
My mother was working as a dancer on the Mitch Miller show at the time, and he met her there that day. She has her own interesting family story. Her mother, to whom she was extremely close, had come a long way from her roots in the little town of Waterloo, Iowa. From there, her family had moved to Baltimore, and the family story goes that they had picked up and moved at the suggestion of a Ouija board. They’d been thinking about going but couldn’t decide, and when one day they took the board out and asked if they should go, the answer was yes, and that was it. When my grandmother was fifteen, she headed to New York, and somehow finagled her way into a Broadway show. She had taken two tap lessons in her entire life yet became a dancer in a show called The
EarlWhite Follies.
My mom started taking tap lessons when she was nine, and later took classes at the school run by June Taylor, which is how she got the job dancing in Taylor’s troupe. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the June Taylor Dancers appeared on lots of TV shows, such as the Toast of
the Town, starring Ed Sullivan, and Jackie Gleason’s Caval
cade of Stars. My mom started with Taylor when she was fifteen, and she was on the road all the time, doing shows at the Blue Room, the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, and in hotels in Lake Tahoe, as well as two of Guy Lombardo’s Jones Beach shows, Around the World in 80 Days and Paradise Island. She also regularly did the Ed Sullivan show, the Bell Telephone Hour, and the Mitch Miller show, where she met my dad one afternoon.
My dad was so struck by her that when he got back to the William Morris office in Manhattan, he called and asked her to dinner. They both laugh when they remember that first date because he met her in Brooklyn, then went back to Manhattan to his office to call her, then picked her up back in Brooklyn, and they went back into Manhattan for dinner. And the back and forth still wasn’t done. My dad had figured that she lived in Manhattan, but it turned out that she lived far out in Brooklyn, in Sheepshead Bay, with her mother. So after dinner, off they went back to Brooklyn, and he headed back to Manhattan one last time that night. They started dating steadily, and three weeks later he asked her to marry him.
My mom was, and is, beautiful, with dark hair and big hazel eyes and the slim figure and long legs of a professional dancer. But even from the time I was little, I always heard my dad say she was one of the most honest and strongest people he ever knew—very quiet but always with the strength inside her to do the right thing. This is one of the ways in which the stories my parents have told me from early on have influenced my life. Though both my parents worked with many celebrities, they always conveyed that it was most important to see the value inside people and not to be caught up in superficials or in the money culture.
I am extraordinarily grateful for the storehouse of warm memories that I have from our years in New York. Among my favorite family times are going out to dinner, almost every Sunday night, to Patrissy’s, a restaurant in Little Italy. It had round tables and white tablecloths, and the waiters wore white jackets and black bow ties. In the front by the door was a huge lobster tank, and I watched the lobsters move around while we waited for our table. I always ordered the same thing: veal parmigiano. My parents let me bring my favorite doll with me, and I loved the place so much that I named her Patrissy. I dressed her in little infant one-piece yellow terry coveralls with a hood, and she always wore Pampers, which I insisted my mom buy for her when we went shopping. One of the things I like about my memory is that the pure happiness that I felt at those dinners is as alive and as gleeful in my mind today as it was then.
My early memories are apparently not only more numerous than most other people’s childhood recollections, but are also clearer and fuller, and one of the pronounced features of my remembering, which seems to have developed by this early stage, is that I have heightened sensory perception in my memories. I hear the sounds, see the colors, and smell the smells of my memories much more vividly than most other people do when remembering, especially when they are remembering childhood. For some of those early memories, I love this quality of vividness, especially when I recall our summer vacations in Atlantic City.
From the time I was six months old until I was eleven, my family took a summer trip there and stayed at the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel. Built in 1906, it was one of the grand old palatial hotels that lined the beaches in the decades before legalized gambling changed the whole complexion of the place. It was so big and opulent to my child’s eyes that it remains my standard of wonder and luxury. The hotel had three buildings: a big white stucco section, a second of red and green wood, and a new section, built in the 1960s, that was very modern. The lobby was huge, and bridges connected the hotel buildings to the pool area, and tunnels led out to the beach. I loved the elegance of the beautiful carved mahogany bar in one room, and the library where musicians played violins at night, and how the bellhops wandered in and out announcing calls for guests. The place was a castle to me.
People dressed for dinner; my dad always wore a suit, and my mom and I wore dresses. There was something wonderful for me about being hot and sweaty all day and feeling the salt and sand on my skin, then bathing and putting on a clean white dress and my black patent leather Mary Janes and having my mom put my hair back. I had a little shoulder-length bob haircut and she would fix it with red barrettes and drape a sweater around my shoulders.
All the wonderful tastes, sounds, and smells of Atlantic City come to me when I travel back to those times, which I often do: the noise of people’s shoes clunking on the boardwalk and the pinging of the games in the arcades; the pervasive smell of roasted peanuts, and that marvelous blend of the smells on the beach of suntan lotion and the ocean air. The Marlborough-Blenheim had its own distinctive smell; I smelled it in so many places in the hotel that the scent and the hotel became one and the same in my mind. Over the years, when I catch a whiff of that smell in other places, it sends me right back to the Marlborough-Blenheim. In 1992—Monday, November 30—when my mom and I were visiting our cousin Natalie in Florida, staying at her condominium, the three of us were coming up in her elevator, and I smelled that scent. I said, “Mom, doesn’t it smell so good in here? Doesn’t it remind you of the Marlborough-Blenheim?” They looked at me a little strangely, and then my mother said to me, “Jill, that smell is mildew.”
Though in many ways it’s a great gift to be able to remember my childhood as vividly as I do, at the same time, many of the experiences of childhood—anyone’s childhood—are emotionally distressing, and I remember those just as vividly. We don’t often think of childhood as such, but it is a frightening time. My hunch is that our minds are built to forget so much of those years because we live them with intensity of emotion and a limited understanding of causality. We believe in monsters under the bed, see scary faces in the dark, and are never quite sure there isn’t something hiding in the closet. I still feel the dark fear I had of the light switch in my parents’ bedroom. At night if I sat up in my bed, I could see it, and it looked like a monster—no matter that during the day I would examine it and ask myself why I was so scared of it. I was three years old, and at night, it terrified me. I’m told most people look back on those irrational fears with none of that emotion left, and one of the crazy things about how my memory works is that I can’t get that emotion, in all of its childlike intensity, out of my mind. I’m still the kid staring at that light switch in dread all over again. As much as I try to tell myself not to be silly, not to feel that fear, I cannot turn it off.
Another example of how my childhood emotions haunt me is one of my saddest memories, which I realize I should not at all allow to still upset me. At one point, my dad took over as the agent for the amazing Muppet creator Jim Henson. Dad would tell stories about being at Henson’s office when Sesame Street was just starting, and Henson would open up a drawer and there would be Kermit or Miss Piggy. My dad got such a kick out of Henson’s studio that he arranged for my nursery school class to go visit, and I was thrilled. But I got very sick with tonsillitis a few
days before we were to go. Of course, my parents still had to go because they were hosting the field trip, but being a kid I didn’t understand and I felt cheated. I recall my mother standing in the dining room trying to explain to me why she had to go while I kept insisting that I had to go too. She says that despite my tonsillitis, she could hear me screaming at the top of my lungs all the way down in the elevator when she left.
It is a small thing in retrospect, and yet I recall it with an overwhelming sense of disappointment every time I see the Muppets, to this day. I think the reason we call experiences like being unable to visit the Muppets “small” is that for most people, they fade over time and are replaced by bigger problems or events certainly worth more attention than a missed school trip. It’s not quite that way for me. I can still hear my mother’s heels clicking down the hallway outside our apartment as she left, and to me, the feelings of that day are anything but small. Silly as it may sound, it is still not easy for me to see the Muppets today knowing that I missed meeting them many years ago. Of course, being unable to meet Big Bird and being frightened by a light are not high on the list of emotional traumas for most children—certainly not compared to a parent’s death or divorce or any score of other tragedies. All of my life I have tried to use the perspective that time is supposed to give us to push the feelings of those memories away, but all this time they have persisted.
Probably my most traumatic childhood memories are ones of concern for my brother. Michael was born in November 1969, when I was three years and ten months old, and I adored him from the start. He has been a steadfast and deeply caring life companion for me—and my total opposite. Always independent, he struck out on his own early while I stayed at home, and he has gone on to a marvelous career as a TV producer. He has always been emotionally steady through all of our family turmoils, and from early on he has been a protector and a great comfort for me. One day when I told him I wished I had an older brother too, he told me, “That’s okay, I’ll be your big brother,” and true to his word, he has always taken special care of me. When he was a baby, though, I was terrified that something would happen to him.
I found out a few months after I turned three years old that my mom was going to have another baby, and though I know some kids are wary about siblings joining the family, I was excited. I already knew that I wanted children of my own someday, and this would be almost like having my own baby. I took a lively interest in my parents’ discussions about the baby, and when they told me they were considering naming him Mark, I told them that I wanted them to name him instead after my cousin Michael, whom I loved. To my delight, they agreed.
I remember the day well when my mom and dad left for the hospital. My grandmother stayed with me and brought me to the hospital later, after Michael was born. I was wearing red stockings with brown shoes and a little red skirt and sweater, and I was so excited to see my new brother. But the hospital staff made us sit in the lobby because little kids weren’t allowed to visit the nursery. I still get mad when I remember that.
When we left, I stood on the street looking up at the hospital windows, and I was happy knowing that my baby brother was up there somewhere. When he came home, his day crib was in the living room, and I constantly checked on him. From the floor, I couldn’t really see inside through the crib’s bumpers, so I kept climbing up on one of the living room chairs to see in and check that he was still breathing. I could also crawl underneath, and I found a hole in the board under the mattress where I could stick my finger in and poke the mattress. If he moved around or made some noise, I was happy because that meant he was still alive.
The day of his bris, the Jewish ceremony of circumcision eight days after birth, was horrifying. The living room of our apartment was packed with people, and all I knew was that we were having a party for my brother. A strange-looking man with a beard came in carrying a Bible and what looked to me like a pouch of workman’s tools. Everybody but me seemed to know why he was there. The mood was festive, but I could feel tension building, and I was suspicious about what was going on. Then all of a sudden I heard Michael scream, and the terror that I felt still rushes through me when I remember this. I tried to push my way through the forest of adult legs crowded around him, crawling in and out of the legs in a panic, looking for my mother. I vividly remember the smells of all the women’s perfume, and I still feel my intense rage that no one would let me through. Finally I found my mother sitting in a chair looking shaken. I started patting her face and asking if she was okay, and even though she told me she was, I didn’t believe her.
Later I was so worried about my brother that I kept asking to see him, but his baby nurse kept me away. Though I know it’s irrational, I still feel resentment toward her when I go back to this memory. I was so annoyed about how she shooed me away. She had done the same thing when my mom and Michael had come home from the hospital. That day of the bris—the first time that I can recall she told me I couldn’t see him—I consciously tried to force my memory back. I stretched to try and remember back to when I was born so I could recall my own baby nurse. My goal was to go back to when I was a week old so I could relive my own homecoming. I sat on the floor and kept concentrating, but I just couldn’t go back that far.
Interestingly, one of the questions being studied about childhood memory concerns this issue of when children begin to forget the happenings of their lives. Does it start right away, or do children remember a good deal for several years and then later forget all of those memories? Research that would illuminate the answer to this question is difficult to devise, because until about age two, children can’t speak, and for some time after that, they may not really understand the concept of a memory and what they are being asked to do when being asked to recall past events. But there is some evidence that young children’s earliest memories are generally from earlier points in their lives than those of adolescents, and that adolescents, in turn, have earlier earliest memories than adults. So earliest memories are perhaps lost over time as opposed to not having been formulated at all. I think it would be fascinating for researchers to interview very young children in order to create a fuller understanding of how rich their memories are at that time. The idea that the memories might have been there for my mind to have captured more fully is intriguing.
My memories from years two to four are definitely spotty, more like how other people’s memories are described to me than my memories for the later periods of my life. One distinct difference about my early memories, though, seems to be how vivid the emotion of them remains for me. Although some research has shown that the specific emotion felt at the time a long-term memory was encoded is not stored along with that memory, it seems that in my brain, the emotion does get stored.
Another early memory of mine regarding Michael is particularly intense this way. When I was four years old, my mom took me down to the garden between the two buildings of our apartment complex and said I could play there alone because she had to be upstairs with Michael. She was firm that as soon as she came back down to the lobby door and put her hand up, I had to come running. That was the first time I was given so much freedom, and I played happily in the dirt beside the privet hedges, with a blue pail and yellow shovel that I loved. The trouble came after she came and got me. The key jammed in our front door lock, and as my mother fiddled with it, I panicked, running up and down the hallway yelling, “We have to get to Michael!” My mother finally got the door open, and I ran straight to Michael’s bedroom, terrified that he might be hurt, but of course, he was perfectly fine, holding on to the side of his crib and jumping up and down smiling.
When I remember this incident, I am jolted by that utterly irrational fear that I felt about Michael, and the clarity with which I still feel my earliest memories has given me great sympathy for what children that age go through. When I see a small child crying uncontrollably or having a temper tantrum, I am sent right back to those intense days myself.
The scientists who studied me do not know exa
ctly how the nature of my memory has affected my emotional makeup. Because my memory syndrome is so little understood and because the science of the ways in which our earliest memories influence our lives is still developing, it’s impossible to know in a truly scientific way how the lingering emotions of those earliest childhood experiences have changed my psychological development. I have no doubt, though, that the way that I’ve retained so many of these intense childhood fears has had a profound effect on my life. In particular, I cannot remember a time when I haven’t had a terrible dread of death, and I’ve also had a compulsion about order. I believe both stem from a particular memory, from when I was two, when I overheard a conversation between my mother and her friend Diana.
My mom recently mentioned Diana, and how her father had died a long time ago and I said, “Oh, I remember that.” She balked, saying I couldn’t possibly remember that, and so I told her the story of my memory. “It happened when I was two years old. You and Diana were talking in the living room…” My mom and Diana and a third friend of theirs, Patty, were talking about Diana’s father having gone into the hospital for surgery and died. What stuck most in my mind was that they kept saying he had “wrapped things up” and “got things in order,” which evoked an image in my mind of him sitting at some old desk and locking things up as he put them away. I wasn’t sure why he would do that, but it seemed the only thing alleviating how upset they were that Diana’s father was never coming back: he got his things in order. As I try to trace the arc of my life, it seems to me that along with that image of Diana’s father putting his affairs in order, I developed an enduring fear of death and also of disorder. To my child’s mind, the associations were simple: someone is dying—bad. Putting things in order—good. That simple child logic still holds sway over me.
Though I would never want to lose my wonderful memories of my earliest years in New York, I wish the intense feelings of fear and confusion, anger and dread, that my mind still conjures up so vividly from those days had dissipated as they normally do. I’d absolutely love to be able to remember the good and forget the bad.