“Yes, Candy,” Dee joined in, holding his arm. “Come back soon—when the weather’s nice. The springtime’s beautiful here.”
“Well, I’m not sure when I’ll get back but I’ll come as soon as I can.”
“Oh, please do, honey. Don’t leave it again for too long.”
“I won’t, Dee. It’s been so good to see you both; I’ll really miss you.”
“I love you, honey,” Dee said as we hugged each other tightly.
“I love you, too, Dee.” We were starting to cry again. “Don.” I turned to him standing a little unsteadily next to her, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “Don, I’ll see you soon, okay? And I’ll call you both as soon as I get home.” We hugged each other clumsily, patted each other awkwardly, wanting to say, “I love you,” but not quite getting there.
Light was barely breaking as I got in my car. As I drove away it was beginning to snow.
15
MY father grew old suddenly. He seemed almost to age overnight, soon after he turned seventy-five. He didn’t like it much; none of us did. It was apparent in his attitude, not in his appearance. Outwardly he remained unchanged. He had never been “boyish” to begin with, his years as “youthful” had been few. Early hair loss and a remote demeanor gave him, from the age of forty, the distinguished aura of an older man.
The place you saw it first was in his eyes, wide now, and nervously darting, alert and watchful, full of fear. That was the difference—the sudden fear. He was frightened of things going on in his body that he didn’t understand and couldn’t control—his blood pressure, loss of memory, deep fatigue, and especially his heart, which had hospitalized him once and now demanded a battery of medications. He was more short-tempered than usual, even more distracted—perhaps his most characteristic state—and it was hard to catch his attention. Never the most direct of men, he seemed not to look anyone in the eyes but to constantly shift his gaze, avert his glance, as if to avoid being face to face with what he knew was coming.
Ventriloquists, even great ones, were now truly shelved as oddball relics. If offers came in, they were small potatoes—out-of-state conventions, country fairs. At one time he would have been glad even for those—any excuse to be entertaining—but, now, his health steadily declining, he could hardly trust himself before an audience. He stumbled through routines he’d done for forty years, forgot his lines, became confused, and left the stage embarrassed and bewildered.
My brother often traveled with him on these bookings—my brother, now almost a man: driving him, cueing him on his lines, dispensing his medicine, carrying his dummies and the names of doctors to call “just in case.” Loving, patient, dedicated to his dad, he once phoned my mother from Arizona in tears, pained for his father who, while telling a story to local reporters, had suddenly gone blank, the thread of what he was saying snapped, the words refusing to come.
When my father was home and restless, not working, it was my mother who distracted and amused him, kept him busy by inventing projects that needed his attention and encouraging his enthusiasm on a planned autobiography, carefully concealing with artful gaiety the stress his illness placed on them both.
And still, at times, he would turn strangely silent. Who knows what was fixing his stare, holding his tongue? The sighting of his own death, about which he professed to have no fear? Before our eyes he was pulling into himself, like a pale turtle, staring warily out of his shell.
For the better part of a year, when his health began to fail him, I spent most of my time in Los Angeles in order to be near my father. His condition was precarious enough that I avoided taking long or unnecessary absences, and when I was away I was careful to keep in contact.
I felt the urgency of remodeling our relationship before time ran out and the end closed in, of conquering our fear of each other, bridging the distance between us; of making one last try at being the daughter he wanted, proving to him that I loved him, convincing him to love me.
It didn’t go smoothly; we had lost a lot of ground. I was entirely at fault. The year before, I had given a lengthy interview in McCall’s and had said too much—much too much. Especially about my father, lamenting the distance between us, his postponement of my inheritance, which I interpreted as a refusal to grant me approval, the fear that I always felt of him, the sense of frustrated affection.
It was a strangely compulsive confession and I was later horrified to read what I had revealed. But it was entirely voluntary; the many words were mine. Here were feelings I never knew I had.
The interview hurt my father; my mother told me this. She had tried to keep it from him but too many people had read it, too many friends were calling wondering why I would want to say such things. And so my mother read it to him while he lay in bed, not feeling well. She read it all and he said nothing, just stared silently into space. Then he got up without a word and walked slowly from the room. It was never mentioned again.
Months passed and I tried furiously to make reparations, attempts at atonement, to no avail. He was polite but absent. When my parents came to New York, I served them supper at my apartment, then took them to see Annie, which had just then opened. Annie—the story of the love of a father and a daughter. Annie—where the sun will come out tomorrow.
In Los Angeles I redoubled my efforts, grateful for one last chance. In that year, I told him often that I loved him—face to face, not furtively on the phone—and truly tried to thank him for all that he had done for me, all that he had been. The time had come for me to give.
One night I asked him to dinner—just the two of us. We had not had dinner alone, he and I, for twenty years, not since those weekends when the two of us took wing. If I was nervous when I arrived to pick him up for this landmark meal, he was a wreck. When he realized that my mother was going out somewhere else, she told me later, and that my brother had football practice, and that left the two of us to have dinner alone—evidently something he hadn’t understood before—he panicked and asked if she couldn’t please come with us.
He looked unhappily resigned when I came in early, respectfully dressed for dinner with my father at Trader Vic’s in white slacks and blue silk shirt. I looked nice; my father liked blue. But as I entered his dressing room, he looked me over and said, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t waste too much time dressing. Is that what they’re wearing now?” Nervous.
“Where would you like to go, Dad?” I asked, in case he changed his mind.
“Oh, let’s go somewhere sexy.”
We arrived at Trader’s and he smiled at the captain, saying, sotto voce, “Don’t tell my wife.” As the captain showed us to our table, we passed family friends along the way who avoided him, averting their eyes from his “date” discreetly until one finally yelled after him, “I won’t tell Frances!” The unspeakable is spoken.
My voice jumping to the octave level of Bambi’s, I tried, once again, to apologize, to tell him I loved him, to make certain he understood. I explained that my regrettable mention of money in that interview was not about money at all but about what I saw as the long-postponed promise of his approval. Nothing more. Nothing less.
How was he to know? Anointing me was hardly his job, of course. He had enough to do without dispensing paternal seals of approval. If I believed life began with his benediction, that was my problem—a handy excuse to hang back till Dad’s Decoration of Worth. On and on I went, while he said nothing, trying to unsnarl the mess I’d made, hoping that out of the ashes some fatherly phoenix would rise up to hug me again.
And then, for the first time, we talked—cautiously, politely. We talked about getting sick, about getting old, about dying. About why he said he wasn’t scared. “I just feel it’s ungrateful. It’s unfair to be angry or afraid when I’ve been lucky enough to live this long, this well.” But the fear in his eyes belied the nobility of his beliefs. “In the past six months, for the first time, I feel like an old man. I don’t have the energy anymore, I’ve lost the drive. I have trouble rem
embering things—lines in my routines, appointments. Sometimes, I forget where I am, where I’m going. Just in the last six months. It happened so quickly.”
And he talked about my mother. “When we met, in many ways, she was still a child; I felt she was too young. I sort of waited for her to grow up but I couldn’t get her out of my mind. And now, I don’t feel complete unless I’m with her.”
And then, he talked about me. He was concerned about my rootlessness, my restlessness, he said, recognizing in it much of his own. “I hope you’re happy in your life,” he added, so quietly I knew he sensed that I wasn’t, and also understood that it was more difficult than it seemed.
“I remember when you were six or seven,” he said. “I came home at night and you were in your room and you called out—maybe you were feeling lonely—and I came in and lay down next to you and cuddled you and you said, ‘I know the twinkling stars are the ones that burn gas, Daddy, but what are the other ones? How are they lit? And what’s behind them?’ And I just didn’t know what to tell you because, of course, I didn’t know the answer myself. You were always bothered by what was behind the stars, about what lay beyond.”
We drove home slowly. My brother had come back and was waiting for us at the door, grinning, to wrap his arms around his dad, engulfing him. A bear hug for his best buddy. We walked into the study together, and, on his desk, my father saw a letter from the Burbank Police Department. As he opened it, my brother and I peered at him anxiously, knowing what it was.
My father looked up, way up, at my brother—my father being five feet eight and my brother six feet two. “This seems to be a notification from the Burbank Police that you were booked for possession of marijuana at a rock concert last week. It says we have to appear in Juvenile Court.” My brother carefully examined the rug. “Kris, you’ve been booked in Burbank? Before your sixteenth birthday you have a record?” My brother looked at him, his eyes big and blue. “What will become of you?” my father asked.
“Well, Dad,” my brother said quietly, “all it really means is that I can’t be a policeman in L.A.”
Our father stood looking up at us. A seventy-five-year-old man with a thirty-one-year-old daughter arrested for obstructing a hallway in the Senate and a fifteen-year-old son arrested for possession of pot. He shook his head, bewildered, smiled ruefully, and gave me a kiss on the cheek, “Goodnight, honey,” then put his arm around Kris who hugged him back, “Goodnight, chum,” and slowly shuffled off to bed.
EDGAR AND CHARLIE TO MAKE FAREWELL APPEARANCE
Bergen Announces His Retirement
In the summer of 1978, my father reluctantly called a press conference at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills to announce his retirement, half wondering whether anyone would show up. He had not expected it to make much of a splash in anyone’s pond and so was surprised when the press conference, packed, was carried on the evening news, and startled to find his picture with Charlie on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.
While it had been years since the pair had made America sit up and take notice, it had never occurred to people that Edgar and Charlie might not always be there. Since anyone could remember, they always had been there, and one assumed they always would be.
His final appearance, he announced, would be a three-week engagement at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on a bill with Andy Williams. The engagement was a serious risk to the health of a man who, not six months before, had been hospitalized in coronary intensive care. But as soon as the offer had been made, he was hellbent on accepting it, determined, one last time, to “play the Palace”—not between the trained-dog acts and the dancing girls, as he’d done for the past ten years, but once again featured on “the top of the bill”—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy—just like way back when. Here was an opportunity to go out in style—and one he could not refuse.
He was so dead set on the September engagement that my mother, with his doctor, agreed that depriving him of the appearance and confining him at home would put as great a strain on his heart as that of performing two shows a night.
My mother went with him to Las Vegas and they checked into a suite at Caesars Palace that would have made Liberace blush. Little chalk-white Venus de Milos and miniature Michelangelo Davids perched on pedestals in the red rococo living room and, in the bedroom, pale plaster cupids pinned back cut-velvet curtains on either side of the circular bed. Sunken in a raised marble platform, a giant Jacuzzi was visible in the open adjoining bath.
Lying in bed later that night, in the sleazy splendor of their suite, startled to find himself in the mirrored ceiling, my father chuckled softly and gently patted my mother on the head. “Well, my dear,” he said, smiling up at her mirrored reflection, “it looks like I’ve brought you here too late.”
On opening night, my brother and I were there to surprise him: Kris had come from Los Angeles and I had flown in from New York. We were sitting out front with my mother in the giant showroom as the house lights dimmed and the orchestra started up, hoping he would make it smoothly through the routines, terrified that he might lose his way in the lines and wanting so much, for him, for it to go well. Then the music was stilled, and from the darkness an announcer’s voice boomed, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, Caesars Palace proudly presents—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy!”
Our eyes met for a second, the three of us barely breathing, as the orchestra led into “Charlie My Boy”—the familiar theme brought into America’s living rooms by radio thirty years before. There were many there that night who remembered—people for whom Edgar and Charlie were old fireside friends—and, as Bergen walked from the wings with McCarthy at his side, the applause was long and alive with memories of the years of Sunday evenings when these two had made them laugh.
My father stood straight and proud on the stage, his right hand on Charlie’s back, his left resting lightly on his knee. For this occasion, his final farewell, he had insisted on playing once again in white tie and tails. He was, after all, an elegant man, a man of manners. He looked splendid, I thought, the tears starting, as I watched him modestly acknowledge the prolonged applause, a poised and graceful presence commanding center stage.
Even in the outrageous, silly spectacle of “Circus Maxi-mus,” Caesars garish showroom packed with people in open shirts and polyester, spearing frozen shrimp and sipping soup du jour, he shone as something special, reminiscent of a grace long gone from our lives.
“Well, Charlie—”
“Bergen, you old windbag, I’ll kill ya, so help me, I’ll mooowww you down—”
And they slipped into their old roles and routines, the familiar patter of a partnership that had lasted sixty years.
The routine went more than smoothly; it was flawless. Bergen reasoning, McCarthy razzing, the steady laughter of the audience, delighted, the frequent interruptions of applause. The two of them flying now, nothing could stop them; the audience was enchanted and asking for more.
My mother sat, still as a statue, her concentration locked on the man on the stage. Only her lips moved silently as she unconsciously mouthed the dialogue she had followed for thirty-five years like a mantra, as if willing it to come out right. Each of us knew by heart the lines of the routines that had spanned our lives; but there, that night, we heard them fresh, as if for the first time—perhaps because we knew it would be the last.
The act ended with a sound track from their old radio shows, a montage of Bergen and McCarthy memories: John Barrymore jousting with Charlie, Marilyn Monroe and Charles McCarthy announcing their impending engagement, W. C. Fields threatening to split him into Venetian blinds—flashbacks of famous voices from the past, while, up on stage, Edgar and Charlie cocked their heads, swapped knowing glances and chuckled softly as they looked up, listening wistfully to their lives.
Then my father said simply, “In vaudeville, every act has to have an opening and a close, and I think, for me, the close has come and it’s time to pack up my little friends and say goodbye. Goodnight, God bless
, and thank you all for listening.” As the orchestra played his favorite “September Song,” he picked up Charlie and gracefully walked offstage.
The three of us smiled and cried, trying to compose ourselves before the house lights came up. But Bergens were not the only ones moved. There were tears in other eyes that night, and I think everyone felt they had been a part of something special. At the end, the audience rose to its feet, applauding him with deep affection, grateful to share his farewell.
There were photographers in his dressing room backstage as we entered, and we had to press our way through the throng. He hugged Kris and my mother, then I came forth, wiping my eyes. We held each other tight and once again I started sobbing, so proud of him, so happy for him, so sad. Knowing somehow that it was a last goodbye. His to an audience, ours to him. We held each other tight for a few seconds while I cried. The love of a lifetime squeezed into those few seconds, surrounded by photographers, for once unaware of their presence.
My father seemed moved and surprised that Kris and I had been there, flattered by the popping flashes of attention, quietly content with his success. Yet, wedged in the corner between the crush of well-wishers and the floral sprays, he seemed oddly silent, conspicuously calm. Still in his stiff white tie and starched dress shirt, he sat, completely peaceful, distant and detached. Where has he gone? I wondered, and thought that I had never seen him so serene.
The reviews of the show were unanimous, effusive in their praise and appreciation. The next day’s performances went just as smoothly again, with a standing ovation at the end of each.
It made no sense, then, to my mother that on the third day after the opening, she woke up feeling strangely weary and deeply depressed. Lately she was often up and dressed before my father, but that day she stayed in her robe and never left the room, offhandedly making excuses to him to cover her bewildering behavior.
Knock Wood Page 26