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Dry Your Smile
A Novel
Robin Morgan
For Lois Kahaner Sasson
Contents
EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE: A Novel
Part One: September, 1980
Part Two: October, 1941
Part Three: May, 1981
A MASK OF ONE’S OWN: A Novel
Chapter One: 1950–1951
Chapter Two: Autumn, 1981
Chapter Three: Winter, 1959–1960
Chapter Four: Spring, 1982
Chapter Five: Autumn, 1961
Chapter Six: Autumn, 1982
Chapter Seven: Winter, 1982–1983
Chapter Eight: Spring, 1983
Chapter Nine: Summer, 1983
Chapter Ten: Autumn, 1983
EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE (conclusion)
Part Four: January, 1986
Part Five: October, 1983
Part Six: June, 1986
About the Author
“Of course you appropriated me—but too much.”
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
in a letter to his father, Leopold
EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE
A Novel
“When a woman loves a woman,
it is the blood of the mothers speaking.”
—Caribbean proverb
PART ONE
September, 1980
Momma’s funeral service failed to reassure me.
For one thing, it was being held at the Church of the Resurrection. In the Performing Arts Chapel. For another, there was no body—a combination of events which conspired to make me feel as if the real action were taking place somewhere else, offstage. I don’t mean offstage at the cremation, that imagined twilight-zone affair of smoke pots and dry ice, or even offstage behind the altar of the church, where the Channel 2 remote news team huddled, hissing curses at one another because their mobile generator had gone dead and they had to plug into the sacristy. No, I mean offstage in her cluttered co-op on Sutton Place, where at that moment she had slammed down the phone on her stockbroker and given herself up to the loud pleasure of sucking marrow from the chicken bone she had been splintering with her teeth, for emphasis, during her conversation with Trackill, Trackill, Bray, Greenbach, and Jones.
Momma’s funeral service was proof only that no matter how many times you buried her, she rose and walked again, unanswerably shrewd folk sayings rich on her tongue and merciless love for you watering in her eyes.
So there was nothing to do but proceed through the charade of a service, trying to fix one’s expression to attentiveness as various aging American actors each adopted individual versions of British accents in their procession to the pulpit to eulogize her. Then it was my turn. The only member of the “Family” company left alive—unless you considered it possible to remain alive in Los Angeles, where my erstwhile onscreen-and-in-living-color father and older brother now lived, still trying to survive in what has come to be called the television industry. I hadn’t wanted to come to the memorial service to speak “on behalf of the cast”—had dreaded it, actually—but the temptation to bury her proved, as always, too strong. So I in my turn ascended the pulpit and lugubriously intoned from my notes how Elizabeth Clement had been a great actress to the world and really a second mother to me, how I had had the good fortune to grow up under her influence and to work with her for almost a decade, an unheard-of privilege for a child actor.
I scrupulously avoided any mention of how her temperamental scenes had embarrassed me, since even at age six I was not indulged in such tantrums. Or of how imperiously she had treated her maid, an elderly black woman called only “Rose,” who taught me how much a single look at someone’s turned back can mean. Or of how in sympathy Clement had been with the red-baiting blacklist against leftist actors during the Joe McCarthy years. I spoke, instead, about her love of fine things—flower arrangements, music, the theater, vintage wines. I spoke of her generosity, and the annual party she used to throw for the “Family” company at her country house—a lavish ritual we all, and myself as a child especially, looked forward to each year, a ritual over which she presided in the grand manner of hospitality. I spoke about the grace with which she had made the transition from her decades of “legitimate” stage work to the small-screen intimacy of a television series. I neglected mentioning that this transition seemed to have caused her as much personal discomfort as did the notorious migraines she attributed to it, convinced to her dying day at age eighty-seven that despite the wealth the series had brought her, she was somehow slumming to have become a household word. I eulogized properly. I euphemized. I lied. Which turned out to be excellent preparation for the Actors’ League memorial reception scheduled for immediately after the service.
There, assembled over drinks surprisingly stiff considering that we were gathered in the Parish House, we drank her a toast, at least half the room silently wishing for her a flowering stake in the heart. Maybe it was the overstrong vodka and tonic after only coffee for breakfast, but the naïve theatricality of the toast touched me: the gesture was sufficiently blatant to lend itself innocence—the way Kabuki theater defies an audience to notice its visible stagehands. So when the tall, chic woman with frosted hair approached me, dressed-for-success in her business suit, her familiar double martini in hand, I was tipsily reconciled to being sentimental.
“My god,” she declaimed. “It’s The Baby!”
“The very one, Paulie,” I smiled back gamely, “Forty next year, escaped from the business, a writer, married: The Baby.”
We brushed cheeks. She still wore Tigress. I hadn’t smelled it in years.
“Well, of course I knew you’d left the business long ago, and I’d heard you’d become some sort of book writer—I mean not for TV—and got married.” She banged her glass against mine in what I took to be congratulations. “Never could understand,” she went on. “You had real talent. Christ, you were a fucking star.”
“I don’t know whether to say thank you or offer an apology.”
“Well. So,” she sighed, “any best sellers yet? Or are you a mother? Ever thought of writing scripts? Still married?”—managing to register rapid-fire disappointment and insult under the cover of interest.
“No to the first three questions, I’m afraid. I write poetry, and my prose books are about women, political stuff. I doubt I could ever write a TV script. So I work as a free-lance editor, too. But yes to the fourth question. At least I was still married when I left the house two hours ago. The same man, almost twenty years.”
“Sweet Judas! I don’t see how anybody can live with anybody for twenty years! It’s psychotic.” She drained her martini and reached for another from a tray offered by the passing caterer.
“Well, maybe you have a point. But there it is.” Then, trying to parry her thrust, “What about you, Paulie? You hardly look a day older than you did when I was seven. Didn’t I read somewhere you’d left writing nighttime sit-com shows behind and gone on to writing soap operas? Aren’t you famous now? Paola Luchino, the Suds Queen?”
“Well, I’m a long way from the wop ghetto in Brooklyn, dearie, where I grew up. And we call them daytime dramas, sweetie-pie,” she purred. “I know you women’s libbers are down on all that, but we believe we’re providing a vital service—romance, excitement, glamour—to all those dreary housewives. An escape. You know, from Dullsville.”
This was dangerous. I could feel my canines lengthening and fur sprouting on my palms.
“Actually, Paulie,” I began, in my tight surely-we-can-be-rational voice, “the women’s movement is saying that home-makers
don’t lead such contemptuous lives, after all. That they deserve respect as much as women with paying jobs—”
“—that they take pride in their truly invaluable work. Yes, sweets, we all know the feminist jargon. You gals need better scriptwriters. If you’re one of ’em, you ought to go back to the drawing board—or the typewriter. Me, I use a word processor.”
It felt oddly the same as when she used to riffle my bangs and coo, “Our Baby Bernhardt is growing too fast. We’re going to have to put bricks on her head to keep her television’s favorite wee girl.” She made me feel simultaneously malicious and powerless.
“It may sound like jargon, Paulie, but it happens to be true. Housewives are proud of what they do, believe it or not.” I sounded defensive to myself, and I knew I was spouting rhetoric, but I couldn’t stop. Then, all at once, I understood where I was going and discovered, after so many years, the weapon with which to counterattack. I sipped my drink and smiled. “There’s a, well, a whole new pride lots of women are feeling. Like, for instance, younger lesbian women being proud of who they are and refusing to cower all their lives in the closet, the way so many older women were forced to.”
I had hit my mark. Her face fractured along tiny fissures of seasoned pain—and I felt instantly rotten. You are a heel, I told myself, you are not only Politically Incorrect, you are also an idiot who has let yourself be reduced to saying something nasty you wanted to say to Paulie for totally other reasons when you were eight years old but only now have the adult capacities—of perception and viciousness—to articulate.
“Oh hell, Paulie, I’m sorry. What I really meant was—” But my attempt to make amends was smothered in the bear-hug of a round, bald, beaming little man who abruptly precipitated himself into our conversation.
“It’s the Trooper! Julian!” he yelped, and only when I had extricated myself from his embrace could I recognize Abe Gold, the show’s former assistant director who had taught me how to play a mean game of poker during rehearsal breaks. I greeted him with genuine pleasure and refrained from blurting out how he seemed to have been the victim of a trade leaving him with more flesh and less hair. Abe dutifully shook hands with Paola, but when she murmured something about having to dash to an ad-agency meeting, he and I exchanged a glance of mixed relief and guilt.
“Say, you were sure good at the service, Julian. Classy. Too bad about Miss Clement, huh? Still, she lived to a ripe old age, didn’t she? But how’s your real mom, kid? She okay?” It was classic Abe, showing the same solicitude and directness that used to get him into chronic trouble—like the day he had actually dared ask Elizabeth, “Jeez, Miss Clement, you paying Rose enough, I hope? She sure works her ass off for you.”
“Hope? Hope’s not so good, Abe,” I answered, hearing the Paola-brittleness drain from my tone. “She has an awful disease, in fact. One that affects the nervous system.”
“Aww, kid, that’s too bad. Funny, she always talked about her nerves, too, ya know?”
“Oh yes, I know. Growing up, I used to think ‘nerves’ was a disease in itself.”
“I mean, there you’d be, whoopin’ around, doin’ kid things on some five-minute break, and there Hope would be, saying ‘Don’t do that, honey, quiet down. Remember my nerves.’” He looked suddenly apologetic. “Oh, hey, I don’t mean you goofed off a lot or anything like that. You were a real pro.”
“Thanks, Abe. It’s nice to hear that, especially from you.”
“Yeah, a pro. So much so, you scared the shit out of me sometimes.”
I couldn’t help laughing. No wonder I’d liked him.
“Look, kid, I didn’t mean any offense—”
“No, no, I didn’t misunderstand you. Don’t worry, Abe, you were always great. You never patronized me, always treated me as if I were a person. You treated everyone decently, in fact.”
“Well, I dunno about all that … but what is it with Hope, anyway? This time it’s serious?”
“Very serious, I’m afraid. Not just ‘nerves.’ It’s something called Parkinson’s disease. There’s no cure for it, just medication to slow the degeneration. Sometimes there are temporary remissions, but eventually …”
“Aww, kid. Damn. I’m real sorry. What a shame. But she’s a strong lady, isn’t she? Comes from Ashkenazic stock, Polish-Russian Jews, just like me. Don’t I remember right? She never liked to talk much about that, though,” he trailed off, mournfully.
“You have a gift for understatement. She changed all her names. Hokhmah to Hope. Broitbaum to Baker and—then to Travis. How more Anglo can you get? No, claiming her roots was never Momma’s favorite hobby. On the contrary, she reinvented them all the time. Still does, god love her.”
“Oh well,” Abe continued, never one to be dislodged from a nonjudgmental stance, “my father shortened Goldenblatt to Gold.”
“Abe, dear Abe. There’s a difference between the halfhearted disguise and the outright disavowal, you know.”
“Huh? Well, anyhow, I sure am sorry, kid,” he summed up, about everything or nothing in particular. “So, look, give her my love when you see her? Tell her Abe Gold remembers her and says hello and that she should get well real soon.” It was hard to tell whether Abe’s flat-out rejection of tragedy made him a simpleton or a saint.
“I’m going over to her apartment right after this, in fact, and I’ll tell her,” I reassured him.
“Right after this? Whew. Heavy day, kid.”
So he was no simpleton. We embraced again and he drifted off. It was another half-hour—of small talk, gossip about the threatened Actor’s Equity strike, reminiscences about Elizabeth Clement that were lovingly etched with acid, and never-to-be-used telephone numbers exchanged with promises to “get together for lunch soon”—before I was able to make my way out of the fake Romanesque building and into the light drizzle falling on West Forty-eighth Street.
Walking felt good despite the cold, no cab was in sight anyway, and procrastinating a visit to Momma was always in order. Besides, talking to Abe had reminded me of some of the good times, and I wanted to savor them, go over them like a litany, the way I used to in my twenties when I would catch friends regarding my childhood with horror and pity, as if it had been a latter-day version of some Judy Garland-Hollywood scandal: drugs, orgies, and depravity.
“Look,” I would patiently explain to my captive listener and myself, “I was spared the rejection experience of lots of child actors, those endless routings in and out of casting offices. No matter what other parts I played—more dramatic, more creative, more satisfying—this job remained steady for seven years, the heart of my childhood, playing the daughter in a not too badly written series about a Swedish immigrant family. Most of the time, the scripts managed to avoid mere wholesomeness. Some of the time they actually grappled with issues of poverty and ethnic discrimination. Some of the time, too, the company really did serve as a surrogate family for an only child like me, raised in an all-female world of a single mother and aunts.” Friends would nod sympathetically.
It was raining harder now, and I began to walk faster, searching in earnest for a taxi. Look at it this way, I muttered to myself in a familiar personal mantra, because all thought-roads seemed to lead back to Her, the series earned you quite a bit of money before you even turned fourteen, money which, though never at your own disposal, nonetheless kept Momma more than comfortable in her Sutton Place co-op. Moral: you don’t have to support an elderly parent now, because you unwittingly provided for that by age fifteen. Besides, you know by this time that holding firm to a sense of irony may yet save you from the cliché bitterness of the ex-child star, godforbid. These self-lectures usually had a bracing effect, and today a further positive reinforcement against self-pity pulled up in the shape of a free taxi.
The doorman of Momma’s building eyed me with disdain as I passed by him. I might be dressed up on this occasion, but he had seen me too often in jeans and navy pea jacket to be fooled. Even as I moved across the lobby, sinking into the plush car
pet at each step, the old hit of anxiety, dread, and longing began to seep through my veins like some addictive drug. Rising in the elevator, I wondered when I might learn that I would never get through to her, when I would ever be at peace with that knowledge.
“Just a minute! I’m on the phone! Use your key!” she shouted in answer to the doorbell chime. It was a small point of contention among so many others—that I should use the key she’d given me. I claimed I didn’t want to use it except in emergencies; that it was an invasion of her privacy, even when she knew in advance that I’d be coming, like today. She claimed it was for her convenience, so she wouldn’t have to get up and answer the door. The subtext was that her doctor had said she should try to move about, that exercise was crucial to stave off muscle atrophy. The sub-subtext was that she wanted to believe I still lived there and used the key as if it were to my home—while I wanted to assert that I was a visitor, even a stranger, on her premises. First skirmish lost. I found her key in my purse and let myself in.
“Anaconda Copper is down what?” she was saying sharply over the phone. I peeled off my coat and took advantage of her preoccupation with her broker to adjust myself yet again to the astonishment that was her apartment.
Here, on the twelfth floor of one of Manhattan’s best buildings, Momma had managed to create a high-baroque slum. Pink marble lamps in the shape of cherubs shed their glow through shades festooned with torn, dust-gray lace. The faded champagne-brocade sofa was piled with papers—stock-market proxies, canceled checks, past issues of The Wall Street Journal, months-old undone “To Do” lists scribbled on yellow legal-pad sheets. The television blared a “daytime drama.” Along the walls, ladies billowed their skirts from summer garden swings in Fragonard-type prints hanging crookedly amid a tapestry of framed photographs. The Baby in front of a microphone at age four, anchoring her very own radio show. The Baby in tutu, on point. The Baby tap-dancing at a charity benefit for paraplegic children. The Baby selling U. S. Savings Bonds. Even as a teenager, The Baby was always smiling. I turned away, and spied a cockroach ambling across a corner of the once-splendid Bokhara carpet. Stomping on it brought relief.
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