Dry Your Smile

by Morgan, Robin;

  I don’t see any way out of this except by waiting, getting older. Meanwhile, I do it: “I hope other young people will realize, as I do, the vital importance of building our country’s future along with our individual futures vomit vomit.”

  Between the intention and the gesture falls the shadow, to misquote T. S. Eliot. (Thank you, Barbara.) I think the child actor is conscious of that T. S. Eliot gap all the time. It makes you think the whole world is a two-dimensional painted set.

  Barbara used to do her Socrates act with me and ask, “Then what is real?” She’d be right. The family? Hope and I are a “family”—the widow and her half-orphan. A college degree? Which I’ll probably never get because Hope won’t let me go away to school and because having been tutored now for so many years since I was twelve I’m terribly uneven—graduate level in literature and philosophy and the like, but still probably hovering around grade 6 in science: there’s just so many lab experiments you can do in a kitchen, particularly one with crusted pots and pans. Yet I’ve met college graduates who are honestly not very bright. So is their degree “real”?

  Is age real? Not only can I act older or younger, I can feel older or younger, depending on the situation. Is race real? Apostate Jews that we are, is it hypocritical that Hope plans a seder every Pesach (lassitudinous annual event attended by her broker, my agent, one or two of her “girlfriends,” and helpless me)? For that matter, are Jews a religion or a race or what? For that matter, am I a Jew? Or a girl? Or a woman? Or seventeen? Or an actress? Or a writer? Or a daughter like Goneril or one like Cordelia? Or stark raving mad?

  This is ridiculous. I ought to put down some of the good moments. Like yesterday, when I learned that years before I was born, she had loved a poem of William Blake’s I had just discovered in Songs of Innocence. Who would have thought it of her? The tender moments, the way her smile can make me feel. Her sudden shocking rare miraculous comprehension!

  She always manages to send me white lilacs on my birthday, and they’re sure not in season in October. But she knows I love them, and I guess she orders them way in advance; I bet they’re flown in from somewhere at an exorbitant price. The way she’ll buy me a book she knows I want, but be uninterested in my telling her about it after I’ve read it. Still, she’ll buy it for me—as a surprise, an un-birthday, or a gift for one of the billions of holidays she celebrates: Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Easter and Pesach and Succoth, and all the secular ones, July Fourth, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, the works. Right around this time of year, with Christmas and Hannukah overlapping, plus New Year’s, it drives me especially nuts, but I have to admit that in her frenzy to assimilate, she certainly is ecumenical.

  She can be so beautiful. When I was little, I used to long for her—which was silly since we were together all the time. If I couldn’t fall asleep I’d ask for her chenille bathrobe to cuddle with. Not one of my zillions of stuffed animals or the dolls—her bathrobe. Because it smelled like her: a mix of her skin and Joy perfume and sweat and warmth and sandalwood soap and something musky like cinnamon or vanilla (which I must have imagined because she never cooked with either one of them).

  Oh damn. Why does running away from her tyranny also mean running away from her love?

  So, Julian, that breathtaking comprehension you rapturized about last week, where was it this afternoon? Or does she dangle it like bait so you’ll be reeled in right after you snap it up? The cruel thing is that the tenderness can so suddenly be yanked back. Then the whole world dwindles gray and literally “hope-less.”

  But then I think: if it can be so suddenly withdrawn, was it real in the first place?

  The way she “manages.” Manipulates. Flirts. The vulgarity of her at times, when she cracks chicken bones with her teeth in a public restaurant, when she screams at my agent, her mouth distorted with rage (and his secretary watching as if my mother were an asylum escapee). The safety pin that holds her bra together. Her exaggerations. Not enough that she tells me I’ve already earned two million bucks and her investments are so good I’ll never have to work for a living. No, she has to claim to other people that I was the most highly paid child in the world. Our family doctor can’t just be “good,” he has to be “the finest anywhere, Arab sheiks come all the way to New York to be treated by him.” Whether any of that garbage is true or not, she has to go around all the time saying it. I could die from embarrassment. Some of it is an outright lie. My big-deal evening dress, which was made by her crony the dressmaker-girlfriend at cost, became “a Balenciaga.” After bloodying the battlefield to get her to permit me to attend even a few classes uptown, I hear her boasting that Julian is “going to Columbia graduate school already, and Phi Beta Kappa.” When I’m still a total ignoramus who can’t stop mixing up Manet with Monet. And the crudeness of her. The way she’s so bossy with waiters and cab drivers, but such a toady to people she thinks can “do us good.” The way her eyes go tiny and sharp, like a ferret’s, watching me. The way she changes the rules. All the time.

  “You’ll go on to even better things, Julian, baby,” she says. How, I’d like to know? When every move of independence is perceived as ingratitude? I know it can’t have been easy for her. She’s had to be both parents in one, she claims. But why should that necessarily make for these arbitrary shifts, like some schizophrenic deity?

  My choices are:

  #1) refuse to learn her manipulative tactics;

  #2) imitate them as realistically as I, the trained mimic, can.

  Problem with #1: then with what tools do I function??

  Problem with #2: oh god, how horrible.

  Could I ever invent my own tools? Whatever I invent she takes over. It becomes another “talent.” She never destroys outright. She does worse. She cheapens—and then leaves you with it.

  Once, I told her that someday I’d love to have a garden. I like to grow things. I’m not half bad at it: the potted plants thrive with my help. The next thing I knew, there were these little toy-type ladyish tools—a five-inch spade and hoe and rake. But guess what naturally no garden. No window box even. (Not even a room of your own yet, so why worry about a garden?)

  When I really began loving my music, back around when I was eleven, and practicing piano for my own pleasure (this was even before Bram) I found myself entered in yet another piano competition. So after I dutifully won, I stopped playing. The only way out.

  When my French improved with Barbara (because she put me onto Camus and Gide and Baudelaire—little did you know the stuff your daughter was getting her hands on, Momma), Hope trivialized it by insisting that I order in French at chic restaurants.

  When I made the fatal mistake of confiding that I was trying to write poetry and wanted to join a poetry workshop I heard about at Columbia, next thing I knew she’d found this snail of a man, Kent Campbell, and they were plotting to bring out a first book of little-heavens-look-how-she’s-grown-into-a-poet-for-goodness-sake Julian Travis. I’m still fighting on that front. The battle this afternoon was whether we had to go, “for the good of my writing career” (what writing career??) to some soirée this slug Campbell is giving in two weeks.

  “Think, darling, of the artists and writers you’ll meet there! A whole new universe!” she says.

  I could die. I want to regurgitate all the precious-wecious poemlets I ever penned. Now I’m supposed to smile and tap-dance my way through a whole new universe?

  Oh Momma, can’t you ever let anything just be? Can’t you leave anything untouched by your white be-ringed claws? Can’t you let me love some things, love you for that matter, without butting in?

  If she were to read this.

  She would be so hurt it would kill her. She would never speak to me again. She’d throw me out. She would cry until her eyes swelled, and then, still weeping but cold as the Arctic, she’d turn on me and say, “You are a petty, vile, inhuman, unfair, uncompassionate, spoiled brat. You’ve accepted everything and preened yourself and had the world’s adoration while I lived all these y
ears in your shadow. You haven’t the faintest idea how to love. You’ve played into every bit of what you claim to detest—and profited by it, and what’s more you’ve enjoyed it. You’re just like your father. And for this I’ve given you my entire existence—which you’ve destroyed.”

  And she’d be right about that, too. I’ve had a poem accepted for publication.

  I can’t believe it. It’s like a voice from god saying YOU CAN BE A WRITER.

  It’s a small poetry magazine in Arizona, called Cactus Wren. They sent me a check for five dollars and a note saying they’d be interested in seeing more of my work. They didn’t accept it because they knew who I was. I’m sure of that because they addressed the envelope and the note to Mr. Julian Travis. They didn’t know and didn’t care that I’d been a star. They think I’m a poet.

  It’s the sonnet called “Demeter and Persephone.” I know it’s probably not that good, but it’s been accepted for publication.

  I can’t believe it.

  This is February 15, 1960.

  This is the best day of my life (so far).

  I can’t avoid it any longer. I’m going to write it down. I’ve got to tell it somewhere or explode. Even though neither of us have spoken about it since that nightmarish time when I was thirteen. She acts as if it never happened. But it haunts me. Maybe if I write about it here—though if she knew she’d see that as yet another betrayal—maybe I’ll get free of it.

  I can’t even remember how it started. Freud would probably say I’ve blocked that. I know I’d already been accumulating clues here and there, and a previous visit of Aunt Yetta’s had yielded up some juicy ones to an expert eavesdropper like me. (Train an actress, Hope, and you get an actress. I can walk in my sox across a parquet floor to eavesdrop without one creak of the floorboards. I can detect the difference between the shifting of her weight in a kitchen chair and the other kind of shifting, prior to rising, so as to scurry soundlessly back to bed with no discovery.)

  But this time I almost forgot my technique with the shock of overhearing, through their mix of English and Yiddish, that they were using the present tense. When the rising weightshift creaked from the chair, I barely made it back to the bedroom in time. My heart was banging so loud I was afraid it would heave through my “sleeping” body when she peeked in at the door.

  How many days after that did it take me to build up the courage, to wait for the perfect moment? A couple of months, I think. But eventually I must have felt the time was right. Idiot.

  It was during one of those mirage oases of her “comprehension”—the ones that turn out to be quicksand. We were lying in our twin beds, in the dark, having the close conversation we seldom have—the kind that goes rancid in my memory when I hear her tell a reporter “We’re real girlfriends who can tell each other anything with total honesty and how proud I am of Julian’s independence.” But the opening was there, the mood was right. Ripeness is supposed to be all.

  So I maneuvered it around to get her discussing the time before I was born, her own girlhood and adolescence and the war—all of which I’d heard before anyway. But sometimes a new nugget would drop. You never knew. Then, very softly, I asked,

  “Momma? Tell me more about him.”

  “Him?” she said into the room between us.

  “My father.”

  “I’ve told you already, Julian. You know what a brilliant man he was, what a fine doctor. The languages he spoke, how well-educated he was. We loved each other so much. We could have been so happy. It was tragic when the war killed him.”

  “The war killed him, Momma?”

  “But you know that, honey. All that intelligence, that compassion, cut off in the prime. I thought I’d die of grief. I would have, too, if it hadn’t been for you. There was a baby to think about. It kept me going. And I’ve never been sorry, either.”

  I could hear her voice smile through that last sentence.

  I remember calculatingly putting into my own voice all the tenderness it could communicate, with every vocal skill I’d acquired in my thirteen years, whispering oh so gently,

  “Momma?… Momma, he’s alive, isn’t he? He’s still alive.”

  There was such a silence in the room that for a second it felt as if I were there alone.

  “Momma? It’s all right, Momma. I love you, Momma. Nothing can ever change that. But, Momma? Momma, I know he’s alive?”

  The bedtable light switched on. The room sprang into vision and her face, turned toward me, seemed to fill all of it.

  “Spy,” she hissed. “Traitor. Who told you? How did you find out? Who in hell do you think you are that you can—”

  “Momma, Momma, dearest little Momma—” even now I can recall my panic as I ran from my bed and tried to get into hers, under the covers, the way I used to fall asleep when I was little.

  She wouldn’t let me in. She was sitting up in bed staring at me as if I wasn’t me but some intruder, burglar, murderer. I burst into tears and tried to sit on the edge of her bed, but she stuck out a foot and kicked at me. So I stood there in my pajamas, crying.

  “Momma, honest, it’s okay Momma! I still love you more than anything or anyone! I always will, Momma, always! I just want to know, Momma, don’t you see? Please—”

  “What do you want to know,” she asked, but it came out as a statement. Her tone was flat, like someone who’d been waiting years for this moment, like this had been a threatened but until now delayed sentence of death.

  “Anything, Momma, everything. Whatever you want to tell me. Please. Please?”

  “Anything. Everything,” she repeated dully. “Whatever I want to tell you.” Then she looked at me, sharp and deep. I could hardly breathe with fear, hope, excitement.

  “Then I will tell you, Julian. Sit down.”

  So I sat on the foot of her bed. I waited. I didn’t dare hurry her.

  “Everything you already know is true. What I never told you … well, I always intended to, when you were older, better equipped to handle it. You’re a highstrung child, you know, oversensitive, fragile. That goes with your talent, but still, I worry … What I would have told you when you were older—if you hadn’t turned spy on your own mother”—the hiss in her voice rose again, then receded as if reined in by an act of will—“is that he … changed. I’ll never know why. Maybe he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of being a father after what he’d been through. He’d escaped from the Nazis, lost every single human being he’d ever loved. That must have been it. I think so. Yes. Because, Julian—since you want the truth—he deserted his wife and child. He abandoned us.”

  “He … abandoned us?”

  “Totally. He disappeared. At first I tried to have him traced. I thought something had happened to him, an accident or something. But then as time went by, I realized how cold he’d grown while I was pregnant with you, how remote. Finally I got a letter from him—no return address—somewhere in Connecticut, saying it was finished. Over. And I knew how absolutely futile it would be to try and find a man who had managed to cover his tracks all across Europe—false papers, false names—with the whole Gestapo on his trail. This man knew how to hide.”

  “Was he—Is he—Couldn’t you look up David Travis, Momma? Couldn’t you just look up his name?”

  “His name?” she laughed strangely. “His name was Traumstein, David Traumstein.”

  “Not David Travis? But Momma—”

  “Why should my child and me bear the name of the sonofabitch who abandoned us? I had to recover. I had to survive. So I did. I got a divorce on the grounds of abandonment. Then I went to court and had your name and mine changed. Legally. To Travis.”

  “But—who’s Travis then?”

  “Nobody’s Travis, you fool,” she snapped, “we are. You and me. I made it up. I liked it. I came across the name somewhere in a magazine and I liked it. So I took it. It’s a good name. What’s wrong with it?” she glared at me.

  “Nothing, Momma. It’s a beautiful name. I like it a
lot. It’s just—strange that—”

  “There’s nothing strange about it. People change their names all the time. Just like I’d already changed my maiden name. It’s normal. What do you know about life, about anything, Julian?”

  “I don’t. I don’t, Momma. I know I don’t. But all I mean is, it’s … peculiar. Not being my real name.”

  “The hell it isn’t!” she shouted at me. “It’s legal, it’s real, it’s mine, it’s yours. The whole goddamned country knows you by that name. That name is famous because of you and me. What could be more real? Are you crazy?”

  I remember thinking: back off, don’t aggravate her further, get more facts if you can.

  “Momma?” I reached out and touched her hand. She pulled it away.

  “Momma?” again, “And he never … I mean, in thirteen years he’s never once—”

  “Never.” The word hit like a fist in my face. “And don’t start to get romantic fantasies in your overheated brain, Baby, about finding him, either. Get the message? Never. He didn’t want you. He still doesn’t.”

  “But, how do we know that for sure? I mean—”

  “Do you hear him pounding down the door out there to get in to see his cherished daughter?”

  “No, Momma.”

  “He didn’t want you. I wanted you.”

  “Yes, Momma.”

  “I bore you, raised you, sacrificed for you, loved you. He didn’t give a damn for his precious daughter. He only wanted a son.”

  “He did? Did he say that?”

  “He didn’t have to say it. Maybe he did say it, I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter, I knew it. Your father, Julian, is a Prussian ice-man, arrogant and fancy, the kind from a long ‘line’—and wanting to extend it. A son he would have stayed with his wife for. A son.”

  I just sat there, crying. She looked at me and seemed to relent.

  “Baby. I wanted a daughter. What would I do with a son? Look, it’s no use thinking about it. Put it out of your mind. It’s always been just us against the world, you and me, remember? Back in the old Yonkers apartment, when we’d go window shopping and plan our future and bake cookies together and laugh? It used to be enough. It still is. We’ve got each other. That’s all we’ve ever really had. But we’re special, you and me.”