Bill, never too probing, would ask me about my life.
“Doing well?” he’d say.
“Everything’s going great,” I would typically reply.
“That’s wonderful.”
We each recited our parts. Bill still sometimes called me Skippy, and that felt good.
* * *
In Miami Beach I knew that blacks were getting tired of sitting in the back of the buses. They didn’t want to get up to let white people sit down. Because we stayed in a wealthy, whites-only colony, I rarely saw the segregation although it was in front of my eyes. But when I did, like on the buses, I felt embarrassed—perhaps even guilty—about being a white person. In New York it was easier to maintain illusions. In the South, even in Yankee-packed Miami Beach, the reality of the coming racial wars was hard to miss.
As I grew older, family dinner discussion did occasionally turn to racial issues, but the conversations never went anywhere: “Things are fine the way they are,” Major would say. “Those damned fools are only stirring up trouble.”
Sometimes Major turned to Bill for confirmation: “They like it the way it is, isn’t that right, Bill?”
“Anything you say, sir,” Bill invariably replied.
And that was the end of it. We knew it was a bad idea to rile Major. But his total disregard for Bill’s personhood was a denial of his humanity, and I could not help being aware of it. Bill did his thing regardless of Major’s insensitivity. He served the meals in stately fashion, making a production of moving dishes and trays in and out of the dining room. Grandma Bessie’s finger on the tinkling bell announced our readiness for each new course. With an ever-so-slight bow, Bill brought in the tray.
“I think I’ll take the end piece. It looks so good.”
“As you wish, sir.” The words were delivered with a deferential nod, the tray lowered from the left to just the right level.
Every now and then one of the women said, “William serves so beautifully.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Bill would reply. “You are so kind.”
As much as I wanted to take my place at the dinner table, being waited on like the adult family members was hard, and I began to shrink from the table’s rituals. There was nothing I could say to Bill when he served me that didn’t bring with it the risk of a courteous response, which to me would be hurtful.
I looked into his eyes when he passed the tray.
“Thank you,” I said.
I wished he could somehow understand that I wasn’t one of them. I wanted to be a grown-up, but not to become a master. At the end of each meal, I sneaked off to the kitchen to prove that I was different from the other adults at the table.
The older I got, the harder our relationship became to navigate. After dinner at my grandmother’s, I started staying with the adults, and my trips to the kitchen became more perfunctory. Bill was still Bill, and I had become Lewis. But Bill was more reserved. I know now that this was not because he had changed, but because I had. Wordsworth wrote that the child is the father of the man, and in that respect Skippy was still around, and Bill was still a keystone in my developing sensitivity to race. But my childhood was fading into adulthood, and while certain things survived, my relationship with Bill and Lorraina was changing. Each time I saw Bill, it was slipping further and further away.
Sometimes I felt the pang of loss, but often I managed to desensitize myself to the pain of our drifting apart, or simply to ignore it because I was focused on what seemed like a new world. Bill was slowly becoming a mythical figure from my past. I carried his warmth and caring inside me as a seed that turned into a life in the civil rights movement, but the days of needing him had passed. Around this time, Bill changed the rules. Between my subtle detachment and Bill’s, it was no longer possible for me to indulge in the fiction that I was still his boy. He soon stopped calling me Lewis. I became “Mr. Lewis.” And for a while I pretended not to hear him. It was like some of the other new ministrations that I rejected, like the ritual around my coat.
“May I take your coat?” Bill would ask, as though I were a visitor who required special treatment.
“I got it,” I would reply, smiling.
But “Mr. Lewis” was too much. It wrecked my sense of belonging. I thought about talking to Bill about it, but I couldn’t. Every time I ran through the conversation mentally, it seemed impossible. I imagined asking him if there was a way for us to turn back the clock. But in the end, saying anything to Bill about what he was calling me seemed like a violation of some unspoken rules of our social contract. And it was. Talking about it was too threatening. It felt wrong. That was racism’s domain, and I was part of the problem.
If I asked Bill why he was calling me “Mr. Lewis,” I had no idea what he would say. Maybe, I worried, he would have told me the truth: “Because that is what you have become.”
But I doubt that would have happened. There were other forms of subterfuge open to him. He could have claimed that Bessie and Major wanted it that way. If I pleaded with him to stop, I figured he might. But even then, wouldn’t my pleading be interpreted as a command? And wouldn’t I hear the echo of that command in whatever he called me after that?
* * *
Filled with anxiety, I talked to Lorraina about it a few times. She nodded when I told her I felt that Bill was shutting me out, and that it hurt because I loved him very much.
“I don’t want to be anything but Lewis or Skippy to him,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
We looked at each other, both of us sad.
“Can you say something to him?” I asked her. “I’m afraid anything I say to him will make it worse.”
Lorraina was touched, but her choices were limited. Fear probably made it harder for her too. She shook her head and told me that Bill still loved me.
“That’s his way,” she explained.
I protested.
“It is too hard for him any other way,” she said smiling. “You’ve got to accept it. The Lord makes people the way they are. And you will be a good man,” she said, holding me by the shoulders, “just like Bill is a good man.”
5
Kitty Muldoon
Becoming a civil rights lawyer wasn’t exactly a fallback position, though I did work in the theater for a while before I went to law school and subsequently joined the movement. It would be more accurate to say it was part of my evolution. Race issues started to intrude at Culver Military Academy. Perhaps a dormant seed had already been planted with Bill and Lorraina, but there were other influences, like the blacks who served meals at Culver. They were our age. We cadets treated them like nonentities, and they lived somewhere out of sight, invisible. Then in Florida, the segregated buses, and the folksingers’ stories at Harvard, and in Texas, the night in jail for going to an integrated dance, and the goings-on in the South as the effort to end Jim Crow heated up—it all added up and started to occupy a larger and larger place in my mind.
The increasingly visible battle against racial injustice probably lurked beneath the surface of my fantasies of becoming a stage director too. I saw the theater as a place where the important issues of the day could come to life. I loved Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, and others for how they were able to change the way people looked at the world. American musical theater used lyrics to get to people’s hearts and minds. So many songs come to mind: Show Boat’s “Ol’ Man River” and “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from South Pacific, and of course all those numbers in West Side Story. Then there was Menotti’s The Consul, which I had directed at Harvard. All these spoke to injustice. I was drawn to characters who cried out for liberation. Then there was that mournful song I first heard at Harvard, “Strange Fruit.” Billie Holiday is probably better known for it, but when I listened to Josh White’s version, I felt as if I’d witnessed with my own eyes the horrible truth of lynching in the South. In many ways theater was my first revolt from the more conventio
nal path taken by my brother of going to a top law school and then joining a well-regarded law firm. I had a few good but low-paying theatrical jobs—including an onstage appearance feeding laugh lines to Academy Award winner Melvyn Douglas in the Broadway production of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, before deciding that this was not the place for me.
Melvyn Douglas aside, the most important gig of my short-lived show-business career was a revival of Babes in Arms, the musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, our old neighbor before we moved to Park Avenue. It was on the set of that production that I met Kitty Muldoon, who became my wife of more than half a century. She was playing the ingenue; I was the assistant stage manager. We fell in love.
To my eyes Kitty was one of a kind. To describe her I would have to use every positive adjective in the dictionary. She was beautiful, caring, unspoiled, filled with fun, had only good words for everyone, a great listener, and—despite being only a high school graduate—someone who read a little of everything, knew more than a little about history and art, and was the most emotionally intelligent person I’d ever met. She also had a great soprano voice and knew hundreds of songs, though she couldn’t read a note of music. I’d never met anyone like her in the theater, at college, or among the various girls who populated my world at home. Kitty had heartbreak in her story too, which deepened the rivers of her soul and I think made her a more kindred spirit. When she was a teenager, her baby brother, Johnny, died. She was in charge, babysitting, when a neighborhood friend got into a car across the street from their house and released the emergency brake. It rolled and struck her little brother. The family’s tragedy was never more than a few moments out of her thoughts, and in many ways probably shaped her life. In addition to her other qualities, Kitty did not appear to have a prejudiced bone in her body. Kitty’s best friend was a comedian named Mitzi McCall. Like many Jews during that era, she changed her name (from Steiner) to get more work. Also, Kitty’s mother, Irene, had eloped with a Jewish boy when she was a teenager, but the families forced them to get the marriage annulled. The Jewish family supposedly sat shiva for Irene’s short-lived husband, who, they proclaimed, was dead to them for marrying outside the faith. It was a hard lesson in intolerance, and one that made Irene adamant about teaching her children to put prejudice aside. Kitty was a regular churchgoer back when we met, and I knew all about going to church from Culver, where we were marched to the school’s nondenominational Protestant church for vespers twice a week, as well as for the Sunday service. “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Stout-Hearted Men” were among the choir’s standard offerings. Religious services were not among my post-Culver activities, but I was so smitten with Kitty that I joined her every Sunday because I wanted her to know that I could accept her religious beliefs. Catholicism was new to me. I had no experience with kneeling, crossing myself, or breathing in the incense. I didn’t know about the prayer candles, and I wasn’t sure what I thought about it all. But I liked the Latin a lot. It was mysterious.
The rift between Protestants and Catholics was a bigger deal to Kitty. It didn’t mean very much to me. When I mentioned “Onward Christian Soldiers,” she informed me: “We don’t sing that. It’s Protestant.”
* * *
I will never forget the night we went to the Gate of Horn in Chicago’s Rice Hotel after the Babes in Arms show that night in Highland Park’s tent theater. We sat in that club listening to Josh White. He sang “Strange Fruit,” which was a test of sorts. Had Kitty hated it, I don’t know what I would have done—but I might not have felt the same way about her. I needed to be sure Kitty got it.
After Babes in Arms closed, I didn’t see Kitty for about seven months. She lived with her parents, who had long ago moved from Pittsburgh to Altadena so she could attend the Pasadena Playhouse. Quickly Kitty was cast in Les Girls, which played in Las Vegas’s Desert Inn. I was working too—first on a Tennessee Williams play in New York and then in London as the producer’s assistant in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. The following spring Kitty came back to New York as a Miss Rheingold finalist. Six months later we were engaged.
I was twenty-three. According to her passport and driver’s license she was two years older than I. Ten years later, while we were on vacation, Kitty brought up our age difference: “Darling, what if I were to tell you I’m a little bit older than you think I am?”
“How the hell old are you?” I shot back, echoing the prejudice of the day about marrying an “older woman.” Had I been nicer, she might not have chopped a year off the real number. It wasn’t until my seventieth birthday that her age came up again: “Darling,” she started in exactly the same way. “What would you say if I told you I’m a little older than you think I am?
“How old are you?” I asked. She added the missing year. “That’s sad,” I said. “I’ll have one year less to love you.” Sometimes you learn with age. The age difference was never a big deal, but other things were. While Kitty’s family didn’t care that I was Jewish, my mother cared a lot that Kitty didn’t come from a wealthy family. Somehow she decided that it was best to ascribe her disapproval to the religious difference. The insanity when I told her that Kitty and I were getting married in a Catholic church was memorable. She didn’t want to know about the church wedding.
“Your grandmother won’t come,” she fumed.
I thought it was all a show. Bessie wouldn’t miss my wedding, but the damage was done. Kitty was hurt, and I felt that was the real goal.
My mother had been unrelentingly miserable to Kitty from the moment she laid eyes on her—no kind words, no taking her out to lunch, not even the tiniest present as a gesture of goodwill after we announced our engagement. Nothing. She wanted Kitty to know that she wasn’t welcome—that she was and would remain an outsider. Trying to dictate the terms of our wedding merely offered another way for her to send that message. I stayed silent when all this happened—an unwilling but complicit agent of my mother’s agenda. It was not my finest moment. To Kitty, not getting married in a Catholic church was not getting married at all, so we ended up having a secret church wedding without my parents, and then another one for my family at my grandparents’ place in Miami Beach. In the pictures that were taken at that wedding, there is one of Kitty and me with Bill and Lorraina. Sadly, or more to the point, that photo did not make it into the wedding album.
The irony of expecting prejudice from Kitty’s family when there was none (or very little), while my mother’s snobbery masquerading as prejudice forced us to have two separate weddings, was exquisite. I should have been furious, but I went into survival mode. I wanted to get through the whole thing without being disowned.
Making our real wedding easy, a close friend, John Eyre, set up the church ceremony. He had connections in the New York Diocese and somehow arranged for us to get married on Holy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. Standing in for her father, John accompanied Kitty down the aisle. Kindly as Irene was, she wasn’t going to share the occasion with Jack Muldoon, with whom she was on the outs. My brother, John, served as my best man. A few friends were there, and of course we had Kitty’s two disabled aunts from Erie, Pennsylvania, who wouldn’t have missed our wedding for the world.
Being a Jew married to a gorgeous Irish Catholic girl made me feel like a stranger from another world. I was afraid the more doctrinaire members of the Catholic Church might take a dim view of one of their own marrying a Jew, as the boys from the South had when wrestling a black kid at Culver. Of course there was a difference. When I left the church after our marriage, I didn’t fear for my life because I had flouted a cultural convention. There would be no thugs waiting for me, much less a lynch mob. It seems unlikely that the black wrestler’s feelings were the same as mine. While he was not in danger at Culver, I feel certain he was on heightened alert.
Twenty-three going on fifteen is what I felt like when I got married, and there I was in church, all the crosses covered with dark fabric, and all I could think was that “they” had done t
hat because Kitty was marrying a Jew. I believed they thought they had to protect the crosses from the affront. It was unsettling. The reality was that the crosses were covered because it was Holy Week. But there was no way I could know that when I walked down the aisle. I loved Kitty, I was committed to her, and even though I wondered what I was getting myself into, I wasn’t about to say a word. The red-cheeked priest, Father O’Pray, had a twinkle in his eyes as he did his thing. It was short and simple. Walking out of the church, married, I breathed a sigh of relief and put the covered crosses out of my mind. That afternoon John Eyre and his wife, Susan, threw us a party. Afterward we went straight to Miami Beach for what my family thought was our marriage the next day. I’ve long since forgotten the lies we must have told about why none of Kitty’s family showed up. But then again, my parents didn’t care. I was marrying into an Irish cop’s family, not into the family of a Catholic millionaire or aristocrat. The Irish Catholic part was meaningless. My parents would have been delighted if I had married into the Kennedy family. The problem was class. The irony of Kitty Muldoon, a cop’s daughter, born without sufficient pedigree, was that she would become the most educated member of the Steel family, with two master’s degrees, a Ph.D., and a career as a psychoanalyst.
Over the years my parents never once visited Kitty’s family, even when they vacationed near them in California. When they went to Palm Springs, they visited Lottie and Harold Mirisch, who produced Some Like It Hot, West Side Story, The Pink Panther, and other blockbusters. But Ruth and Arthur had no time to see the Muldoons.
* * *
When I joined Kitty’s family in that slow dance where strangers are supposed to love each other or at least be nice, I sensed a few mild intimations of anti-Semitism. It wasn’t much—some loose words said in jest or the automatic kind said without any intended malice, like that old chestnut, “Jews can’t go to heaven.” What I saw as anti-Semitic, however, could have been something else. I can’t be sure. Perhaps I was oversensitive and too quick to apply an incorrect label. It could have been me, I can’t be sure. Sometimes I think it may be impossible to grow up Jewish in the United States, even in New York City, without getting a taste of the very real—sublimated, modulated, insinuated—prejudice against Jews out there. So maybe I jumped too quickly while staying with the Muldoons. There were what I took to be concrete things; Grandpa Duffy, sister Mary’s grandfather in-law, dousing me with a glass of whiskey being the most memorable. But maybe even that was not anti-Semitism; it could have been his playful way of welcoming me into the family.
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