Exit Laughing

by Victoria Zackheim

  In the last few years of her life, Rose slipped into pre-senile dementia. Aza came across her on the street in their old neighborhood, looking for their old apartment, lost, and took her home. We started watching her more carefully. One night we found her cowering in the stairwell of her apartment house, having had a nightmare. She had to save the children, the pogrom, the soldiers were coming. She had run from the apartment, locking herself out. We found her by chance when we punched the wrong floor on the elevator and were walking down to her level. Alzheimer’s was upon her. Aza quickly made arrangements at a retirement and nursing home on West End Avenue.

  Rose never lost flirting. When we picked her up for a drive through Central Park in our 1951 Riley Drophead, she would get in, give me her best come-on look, and murmur, “Hiya, handsome.” Her eyesight, not so good.

  A long-neglected breast cancer finally put her in the hospital, and then she died.

  Aza hung out in the City for a couple of days, grieved, saw a few friends, and then flew back to Minneapolis, where I was on temporary duty at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre. I’d been hired for the season, playing George in Of Mice and Men, directed by Len Cariou, and The Wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Roberta Maxwell and Frank Langella, directed by John Hirsch, a truly brilliant director, in repertory.

  John was another refugee, born in Hungary and spirited away in the late 1930s, before he could be swept up and sent to a concentration camp. His early memories were of winter, walking between rows of frozen bodies stacked like cordwood. When he was taken to safety, he was asked where he wanted to live. He looked at a map of North America and put his finger on Winnipeg, a dot on the landscape, where he became a major force in theater. In 1989, he died in his personal death camp, AIDS.

  The Guthrie, a theater where many rising actors dreamed of spending time, for a season, or for a great part, housed a small, permanent group of experienced performers, not retired, just not interested in the daily tilting at windmills in New York and Los Angeles; the appointments, the auditions, the rejections, the bad scripts and plays. It certainly ain’t all pretty. They could live in a beautiful city, work in a beautiful theater, do beautiful plays, ably directed, in front of the most intelligent and appreciative audience anywhere, and make a decent living.

  The group included Robert Pastene, probably the best actor I ever knew or saw. Everything he did on stage, just walking through an entrance, was effortless. He understood the magic of acting, the ability to leave his personal demons in the dressing room and bring onstage only the demons of the character he was playing, though sometimes closely aligned. And Pastene had demons, demons that presented as severe physical stress, a frozen shoulder and stiff neck, giving him a look of imperious, total command on stage. He didn’t need the look; he was in command. When he was Buck Rogers, on live television in New York, Aza played an enemy, Ishtar, goddess of something or other, who could look into her basin of predicting fluid and see all sorts of mayhem for which she would be responsible.

  When Robert had finished a lengthy, successful run on a television afternoon serial and was visiting the Barter Theatre (a summer theater in the hills of southwest Virginia, where a lot of us began our lives in the business), he was having lunch in the soda fountain section of the local drugstore. There was a commotion at the cash register in the front of the store, and someone yelled, “Call the police. There’s a killer in here, a murderer!” That was followed by the looming presence of a large, farmer-type man in bib overalls saying, “I’ll hold him. Call the sheriff!” Bob looked around the drugstore for someone who would do such a thing, and then “Bib Overalls” pounced on him. It took a lot of talking and restraining to convince the man to let him up. It was true TV, Pastene had killed his wife—on The Edge of Night. (Now, that is not necessarily a small-town happening; a similar thing happened to me on East 42nd Street in New York, and again in the parking lot of a supermarket in Cleveland, when I was acting in the soap opera Love of Life, playing a con-man killer. My mamaw, in Tampa, once declared, “I don’t care if he is a murderer, he’s my grandson!”)

  It was only days after burying her mother that Aza got the call from Los Angeles telling her that her father had died from a heart attack that morning. His wife, Aza’s stepmother, said he died in the shower; he was a clean old man, beautiful and clean.

  Pop was a printer, a Linotype operator who learned his craft after he came over from Russia to Rochester, a jumping-off point for many Jews fleeing czarist Russia, coming in by way of Quebec. He joined the union after his apprenticeship. In 1911, he was asked to help a young revolutionary gangster escape the police, after she had held up a government courier, stealing important documents. There was a harrowing run through Belarus to the Baltic Sea, using a sort of underground railroad, a steerage journey to Montreal, then on to Rochester, where an older brother, a plumber, had migrated with his family. The steerage part of the journey was obviously horrific because Samuel never spoke of it.

  There was a time when Rose, her second husband Abe, and Aza were living in Russia. Abe Millenky, Aza’s stepfather, was a mechanical engineer who had been sent by Ford Motor Company to Nizhny Novgorod to build an assembly plant. Rose took this opportunity to travel deep into Siberia, where she found her mother quite ill and brought her back to western Russia. The woman died shortly after the reunion. While Rose was away, Aza stayed in Moscow with her father, who had been asked by The Daily Worker to go to Russia to translate and teach Linotype operating for a sister newspaper.

  While the family was in Russia, Hitler was coming to power. Travel routes were closing, and Stalin still didn’t like the Jews. Abe and Rose, being under the auspices of Ford Motors, felt safe enough, but they didn’t feel so sure about an incredibly beautiful young Aza. On a weekend Volga River outing, a soldier had threatened to carry their teenager off to the mountains on his horse—he was probably not kidding around.

  Sensing the impending danger, Pop prepared an adventure that included retracing a route to the Baltic Sea. This time, he’d take his daughter, and the police weren’t searching for him. They traveled by train to Riga. The ship was a regular ocean liner, accommodations were light-years from the terrible scow he had sailed on several decades earlier, hunkered in a filthy bilge. Pop’s only concern was the crush Aza had on a very handsome young sailor and the sailor’s attraction to her. They returned to New York and The Coops, sans sailor, and Aza went back to high school a celebrity.

  I had met Pop a few years before Aza knocked me over. I was a union printer, as in International Typographical, as in Linotype operator. Looking for acting work, I didn’t have to worry about having to quit temp jobs, like waiting tables, then trying to find a job after the acting job. I could work around New York. There were still quite a few newspapers then—Times, Tribune, News, Mirror, Post, Wall Street Journal, Morning Telegraph—and I was able to substitute for regulars who couldn’t make it out of the Blarney Stone or McSorley’s, or were on vacation, or when a paper, like the Times, needed extra operators to produce ads for its huge classified section in the Sunday edition. If all else failed, there was the Journal American, a rag on South Street between Battery Park and Fulton Fish Market. You could get a beer and a fish sandwich wrapped in butcher paper for a buck and a quarter and eat lunch in the park.

  Pop was a retiree, allowed to work a few days a month for extra income and hang out at the shop for a while. After the Daily Worker—where he had worked since it started printing in 1924—stopped publishing in 1958, he retired. Since he lived downtown on the East Side, it was easy enough to catch a bus to the Hearst paper and work his seven-day allotment. However, he was not much of a hanger-outer.

  I remember catching on at the Journal American, and sitting at the machine next to him, being struck by the neatness of this old guy. Composing rooms of newspapers were not particularly clean places to work; a film of printer’s ink was on every surface, including the keyboards of typesetting machines, and there was the graphite dust used for lubrication.
Pop didn’t use a paper towel to wipe the grime from his keyboard and surrounds; he had a cotton dish towel with a bit of a clean smell to it, and he used it a lot, it seemed. Like most of the tradesmen of his generation, he wore a white shirt and tie, only he didn’t roll up his sleeves, didn’t unbutton his collar, didn’t tuck in his tie, and didn’t wear an apron. Clean old man. Handsome. Reserved. Didn’t have anything to say to me, just a nod.

  I never worked with him again, didn’t know his name, never saw him again until Aza introduced us in Los Angeles. I was startled. You sit beside a host of printers over the years, in shops around the country, with and without white shirts and ties, with and without aprons, and a chance, one-time meeting becomes indelible; also, he’s now your father-in-law. Even more startling was that he remembered me. He recalled seeing my name on the sign-in board and had decided he wouldn’t speak if I sat next to him. With a last name like McKenzie, I was probably an anti-Semite.

  After Pop got his union card in Rochester, he moved on down to New York City, to the Lower East Side, and then with Rose and Aza into The Coops in the Bronx. The complex had been built by the United Workers’ Cooperative Colony to house secular Jews, mostly Communists, who had fled the czar’s Cossacks in Russia and, later, Stalin’s purge—Communists but anti-Stalinists. The conditions for survival, especially on the Lower East Side, were far worse than the shtetls of Poland and Russia, thus the formation of workers’ cooperatives that bought property and built living quarters, activity centers, and shuls for immigrants, including Yiddish-speaking camps like Kinderland, in the Berkshires, where Aza spent many summers.

  So we’re back in Minneapolis, where Aza got the call one week from the day her mother died, telling her that Pop was dead. I drove her to the airport, and she was on a plane to Los Angeles by midafternoon, sobbing, shaken. She had had time to prepare for Rose’s death, as her mother had been failing for a while, and had been in the hospital for several days. But Pop’s sudden heart-attack death seemed almost unkind, inconsiderate, selfish. And Aza had to do it alone: there were no understudies at the Guthrie Theatre. There were no friends to meet her, to hold her, to put her up. Her stepmother didn’t invite her to stay (she wasn’t called “Mean One” for nothing).

  Mean One was still angry at Pop for dying on her, in the shower where the water ran out onto the floor. Also, her son from her first marriage was staying with her, and she had always been mad at Aza for having somehow dissed him. Aza had called him a lazy mama’s boy, which was the truth, not a diss. Also, the old woman was in failing health herself.

  Most of the arrangements for Pop’s burial were handled by Workmen’s Circle. Plots had been bought years before in the Workmen’s section, where Pop would be buried next to his brother. This was Sholom Memorial Park, part of, but below, Glen Haven Memorial Park. That was the rub.

  There were three recruited drivers (grandchildren of Pop’s friends) and nine mourners. Pop’s widow, Mean One, had fallen quite ill and was unable to attend. That left Aza, once again alone, to take charge. They gathered in the parking lot of a small mortuary in the Wilshire District. Pop, a devout atheist, wanted nothing to do with synagogues, none of that opiate for him. The mourners divided themselves up, climbed into the cars that constituted the processional, and headed out to the San Fernando Valley, to Sholom Memorial Park, faithfully following the hearse.

  After a few cautionary stops and starts, they crossed into the Valley, but it became noticeable to Aza and her young driver that perhaps the hearse driver might be in a little over his head: whenever he came to a stoplight, he’d consult a map. Somewhere along the route—which led past several cemeteries, but none called Sholom—a traffic cop in the middle of an intersection pointed to a yellow sign that read “Accident Ahead” and motioned for them to turn left. Away they went, now in real trouble.

  Rather than follow the road, the hearse driver turned into a series of cul-de-sacs. The first one led to a neighborhood under construction, and the little roundabout was filled with stacked lumber, plywood, and cement bags. The street wasn’t even paved. They managed to bump their way out, the hearse followed by three cars, mostly filled with elderly mourners with bladder issues.

  The next circle was inhabited—bicycles, wagons, bats, balls, gloves everywhere—the street deserted. Aza saw a curtain drawn back briefly, then dropped, just like in a Western. The young driver said to Aza, “What is it with this guy and cul-de-sacs?” The ancient mourners in the backseat had now nodded off.

  The next side trip was inhabited by actual people. As the driver got out to talk to a woman watering the lawn, a rubber baseball hit the side of the hearse. The driver ducked just in time. While he was asking for directions, kids on their bikes snaked in and out between the vehicles, staring into the hearse’s window at the casket. An adorable little girl sitting on the curb near Aza’s window smiled at her and said, “Would you like to play dolls with me?” displaying her array. Aza said she almost got out of the car. The conversation with the watering lady was not fruitful.

  When this “Lost Tribe of Israel” was passing the same coffee shop for at least the third time, an alter cocker in the backseat yelled, “I gotta go!” The driver blew his horn and turned in. All vehicles followed. The driver of the hearse headed for a phone booth in the parking lot. Inside, the old folks lined up according to the severity of squirming. The Men and Ladies signs were not in the equation: the old guys were told to squat. In the café, Danishes and crullers were wiped out, with coffee and sodas. There was a pay phone on the wall.

  I was in our apartment in Minneapolis, having just returned from the airport to pick up my parents, who had come to visit from Tampa. When the phone rang and the operator told me it was Aza, I accepted the charges.

  “We’re lost. I mean lost. The hearse driver hasn’t got a clue. I’ll tell you about it when I get home, if we’re ever found. The driver is waving at us. We’ve been waving at him for the last two hours; now he’s waving. I’ll see you tomorrow, probably Saturday. I love you, ’bye.”

  When they got outside, there was another funeral procession in the parking lot, engines running. The hearse driver had obviously flagged it down. There were a lot more than three cars with that hearse; they even had a police escort. Pop’s group piled in and followed, driving into very familiar territory, turning onto a road they had been on before, four or five miles through a canyon they recognized, to a cemetery they had been at before, Glen Haven Memorial Park. Pop’s driver had seen the sign and turned around to journey back through the canyon, on to other dead ends. There was a mortuary office right there. What a guy.

  One of the motorcycle cops, hand up to stop them, got in front of the hearse, escorted them around a corner, perhaps a couple hundred feet, and turned right into Sholom Memorial Park and the Workmen’s Circle section. The hearse driver slid Pop’s casket onto an available gurney and split. Aza was sure there were many cul-de-sacs to be lost in before his day was through.

  The three young drivers and the policeman put the casket onto the straps of the prepared gravesite—the service had been expected much earlier, so nobody was around. They lowered him. After a short goodbye, a lot of tears, and a few laughs about the day, Aza tossed in her handful of dirt; the gravestone and the pebbles on top would have to wait. She knelt there for a few moments and was quite certain she heard Pop say to his brother resting beside him, “Misha, have I got a story for you. Oh, boy, have I got a story.”

  VIRGO

  — Starhawk —

  In life, in death, my mother was a Virgo, which means she was so many things that I am not: neat, well-organized, meticulous, good with details. She delighted in filing things in their proper places. When she got sick with cancer and faced the possibility of her own death, one of her laments was “What’s going to happen to my files?”

  On her deathbed, as my brother and I sat with her, she insisted on getting out her Rolodex and going through it, telling Mark who to invite to her funeral. By the time they got to the E
’s, he couldn’t take it any longer. “Mom,” he said, “you’re dying. You’ve got to let go.”

  But letting go was not my mother’s strong point. She had the tenacity of a pit bull when she got hold of an issue, and a loud and furious bark. She yelled when she was angry, or irritated, or simply anxious. We were a yelling sort of family—yelling when we were mad and yelling when we were happy. When we were apart, she would occasionally yell by mail, typing a furious letter at 3 AM and trudging out to the mailbox to send it.

  I’m not sure if it was a tragedy or a blessing that she did not live quite long enough to get on the Internet, which would have saved her the trek to the mailbox. Long before the days of personal computers, my mother loved to ferret out and pass on information she thought would be illuminating or persuasive. Her letters to me—the ones that weren’t tirades—were always thick with newspaper clippings, snipped from the L.A. Times, which she read standing up every morning, with it spread out on top of the portable dishwasher in her narrow kitchen. Sometimes I’d open an envelope and find nothing but a stack of clippings. They ranged from little items she thought would catch my interest to third-hand admonitions—for example, studies of the psychological impact on children of being born from artificial insemination, which seemed to pop up in great numbers after I mentioned to her that I was thinking of going to a sperm bank in order to conceive a child.