The house she and Curt had lived in for almost 30 years was being rented by a newly married couple and their 1-year old child. They were a nice couple from Virginia, who moved to town after the husband took a job at that new tech company just outside town. He told Mrs. Childs what his job was, but she had not understood. She was not tech-savvy and she was proud of it.
Myrna remembered the autumn day she’d abandoned her home to move in with Julie. Since Julie was divorced and her only son had just started graduate school in California, she’d convinced her mother that they might as well enjoy each other’s company. As they drove away, Mrs. Childs watched the last of the pale yellow willow leaves weep down, then drift and sail, and finally come to rest on the stairs and edge of the porch. It was the closing of another chapter of her life.
Even then, Myrna was losing strength, forgetting where she’d put things, feeling overwhelmed by the day-to-day obligations of running a big house. And it was so empty after Curt’s death. He’d filled the large spaces with his cheerful industry and quiet manner.
They had been such opposites. He quiet and practical, she loud and theatrical, unable to understand the simplest mechanical concepts. Curt had always kept the house in peak condition, making his rounds on the weekends, tweaking this or that. He could do anything: plumbing, electrical, painting and tiling. And he had been a good, responsive father. He had been a better father than she had been mother, not that she was jealous of him. She was grateful and loved him all the more.
Though he owned a bustling hardware store, and she was a drama queen who seldom set foot in that store, they were great friends and good lovers. They seldom argued, and when Ruby, her mother, came to visit, Curt was the perfect gentleman, even when Ruby insulted his store or his home. The only time he stood up to her was when she insulted his wife in front of him. “That’s enough, Ruby,” he said sharply, and Ruby never again expressed her feelings about her daughter’s wasted life in front of him.
Myrna thought of Curt every day, and missed his solid support and protection of her. She missed his warmth, and she missed his love.
In the hospital, when the doctors had rushed in because she was having difficulty breathing, Mrs. Childs thought it might be the end. But once again, the doctors had brought her back. Julie told her mother that she’d given them all quite a scare.
“Don’t do that again, Mother. Don’t try to leave me like that.”
“Julie, dear,” she responded, “the day will come. We all know that.”
Myrna believed that when the fates, the Grim Reaper, or God himself made an entrance—after waiting in the theatre wings with infinite patience to lead you away—you had to leave the stage and hope that your performance had been a good and meaningful one.
She was in the last act of her life. It was nearly her time. So be it. The chemo, the surgery, the radiation and then the pneumonia had all been too much for her. Myrna had never been one to ignore reality or get sentimental over things. As the Bible says, there is a season for everything, a time to be born and a time to die. Myrna wasn’t sad about dying. She’d had a full life. She’d been a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and the best teacher she knew how to be. She’d led a good life, a worthy life, she hoped.
The light in her room was dim. It was quiet in the house. So she wouldn’t miss the sweetness of Christmas, Julie had placed a miniature balsam Christmas tree on the chest of drawers, in clear view from the bed. Its steady white lights and cool evergreen scent were heavenly, and heavenly was the right word. Mrs. Childs would probably be dropping into that Promised Land soon.
Myrna took a slow breath and closed her eyes, feeling her head sink deeply into the soft pillow. She did want to live to celebrate another Christmas though. She’d loved Christmas, ever since she was a little girl growing up in New York’s Upper West side of Manhattan, on Amsterdam Avenue. Her father owned a drugstore there. It had lots of wood paneling, wooden drawers, and tall shelves, and two sliding wooden ladders. She loved the hex tile floor with its colorful pattern that zigzagged around the store. It was so much fun to hop-scotch across it. Her father never minded, even if customers were in the store. He’d just laugh and say “That’s my girl!”
A jumbo malted milk cost only 7 cents. At the Tip-Top Luncheonette, around the corner, the breakfast special was 12 cents, and you had a choice of a doughnut, roll or bagel.
At Christmas, her father always brought her little gifts from the drugstore: red and black licorice whip candies, lipstick, Christmas ornaments and face creams.
Myrna’s mother, Ruby, had been an aspiring singer, dancer and actress and, by the time Myrna (who was named after the famous actress, Myrna Loy) was four years old, her mother was dragging her to theatre and nightclub auditions. Myrna would wait on wooden benches with the other performers when her mother was called in to audition. One time Ruby had managed to land a job, performing in a floorshow at The Latin Quarter Night Club in 1944.
Myrna’s father, Eddie Lewis, disapproved of his wife’s theatre ambitions. He waited up one night, sneaking peeks out the window. He saw her being escorted home by the night club manager. He flew into a rage and threatened to kill her. They’d had frequent arguments and slapping fights, but that one was the worst. He demanded she “Stay home and take care of our daughter, and your husband!”
Myrna’s parents finally split up when Myrna was 12 years old. In 1950, she and her mother left New York to live with her grandparents in Cincinnati, Ohio. It would be years before Myrna returned to New York. The two times she saw her father, he drove to Ohio to see her. He promised he’d pay for her to visit him in New York when she was 16, but he died of a heart attack in 1953, when Myrna was just 15.
When Ruby Lewis left Manhattan, she knew she’d never achieve her goal of becoming a professional actress, but for a while, she did try to find theatre work in Ohio. She managed to perform in an amateur production of Show Boat before she finally gave up her dream and accepted a permanent role as a secretary for McAlpin’s Department Store in downtown Cincinnati. As the years passed, she gained weight and lost her girlish figure and face.
But for Myrna, those first magical Christmases in New York were etched in her memory. At Christmas, her parents made an extra effort to get along, for their daughter’s sake. They took her to Carnegie Hall to hear the great Messiah, to local churches for Christmas caroling, and to Radio City Music Hall to see the Christmas show with the Rockettes and the living nativity, complete with camel and sheep. They took her to Macy’s to see Santa; they walked from 34th Street to Rockefeller Center to view the window displays at all the stores along Fifth Avenue from Lord & Taylor to Saks Fifth Avenue. And on Christmas Eve, they attended the Lessons and Carols service at one of the churches in the area, and then went home for hot chocolate and cinnamon raisin toast with lots of butter.
Myrna fell in love with the music, drama and pageantry of Christmas. She loved the carols and the choruses singing Bach and Handel. She joined in the sing-a-longs, feeling the joy and peace of the season. Christmas music uplifted her; it cheered and sustained her, and whenever her parents fell into their inevitable combative arguments or her mother grew depressed as soon as Christmas was over, Myrna would close her eyes and recapture the majesty and glory of the Christmas season.
“You will be a great actress someday, Myrna,” her mother often told her. It became a kind of mantra. “You’ll be the great star I never was. You will, won’t you, my darling?”
What could Myrna say? She never wanted to disappoint her mother, a tall imposing woman with dyed auburn hair and a big soprano voice, who did everything with a dramatic flair, from wearing big, sweeping hairstyles to sporting gaudy jewelry. She had a big booming voice and grand gestures, as if, truly, all the world were her stage. She dressed in dramatic and revealing outfits, with low-cut blouses or slim skirts or sleeveless dresses with crinoline ruffles. She wore halter tops that revealed too much midriff. She changed her hairdo and bought new costume jewelry nearly every week, making fre
quent use of her employees’ discount. Her outfits were not always appreciated by her bosses at the department store.
Myrna opened her eyes, staring up at the ceiling, using its soft surface as a screen to reminisce—to watch, as if they were a movie, the old images flickering across the surface…old faces, old scenes, old conversations.
Despite her mother’s objections, Myrna studied for a degree in education at the University of Cincinnati, saying she wanted a profession to fall back on in case, like her mother, she did not succeed in New York. But she minored in theatre and had a successful run as Laurie in a 2-week production of Oklahoma her senior year. All those years of singing, drama and dance lessons that Ruby had insisted upon had paid off.
“It is the way I tithe,” Ruby would say. “Some people give 10 percent of their salary to the church. Well, I give 10 percent for your lessons, Myrna, because I worship the church of the theatre,” she’d said with an imperious air. “You will be a big star someday.”
After graduating, Myrna did what was expected of her and moved to New York. It was an exciting time to be in New York, and an exciting time for the theatre. She auditioned for Bye Bye Birdie, but didn’t make the chorus. She also auditioned for The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Wildcat and Do Re Mi. Again, she was cut in the final singing audition. She didn’t have her mother’s voice. Hers was heavy in the lower register and a bit strident in the upper.
But there were good days. Like many, she worked as a waitress. She snuck into plays at half-time with fellow thespians. She got boisterous and drunk after auditions, singing on the side streets with other actors. She often ate at the 6th Avenue Deli with an older, still-struggling actress, who told her many stories about actors who had made it. One story was about the not-yet-famous star, James Dean. She’d watched him cross the street and fall in front of a taxi cab on his knees, as a joke. It was shocking. People were stunned. They pointed and stared. The cab driver screeched to a halt, just missing him. He leaned out the window, angry and shaken, shouting, “You son of a bitch!”
James Dean got up laughing, brushed himself off and hurried along.
Myrna’s first break was a part in the chorus of Subways Are for Sleeping. It played over 200 performances. After that, she found work in other short-running shows, but only in the chorus or as an understudy. In late 1962, she played the second lead in an Off-Broadway show, but her performance didn’t win the excitement of the critics. One critic wrote “Myrna Lewis never seems to rise much beyond mediocrity, when so much more is asked for.” Another wrote “Ms. Lewis doesn’t elicit much sympathy for a young, abandoned wife. I personally felt the husband was justified in leaving her.”
The best review she ever received was not from a critic, but from the famous actor, Jason Robards, who’d received rave reviews for his performance in Eugene O’Neil’s The Ice Man Cometh.
After he saw Myrna in an Off-Broadway performance of The Bed You Lie In, he found his way to her closet of a dressing room and told her, in his rich baritone voice, “You moved me, Myrna Lewis. You moved me to tears. Well done.”
Myrna’s acting career fizzled and Ruby Lewis grew progressively pushier and more irritable at her daughter’s lack of success, finally declaring, “If you had my talent, you’d be a star by now. You just don’t have it.”
During Myrna’s last year in New York, she grew increasingly more interested in analyzing the craft of acting, as well as in directing. She attended rehearsals of fellow actors and took notes on their performances. Her friends found her observations helpful and insightful. She began directing scenes in acting classes and was praised by her fellow students as well as by her teachers, who suggested she consider a career as a director. They said she had a real eye for directing, a real talent for bringing out the best in an actor and in a scene. Myrna was thrilled. She’d finally found her life path, her true calling.
That’s when a friend of her mother’s called to say that Ruby had collapsed at work. After years of battling alcoholism, she was too sick to live alone.
Myrna returned home to find her mother in the hospital, rail thin, malnourished and diagnosed with high blood pressure and cirrhosis of the liver. Myrna knew her mother drank, but she didn’t know it had gotten so out of hand.
She stood over her pale, bony-faced, hollow-eyed mother and told her, “You have to stop drinking, Mother. Now. Or you will kill yourself.”
Her mother looked at her, with disdain. “What are you doing here? You should be auditioning, working. You don’t have the talent I had. I would have made it if it hadn’t been for your father. You have to work, work, work at it, Myrna. I don’t want you here. Get out!”
Myrna did not leave her mother. She found a job teaching drama at Norwood High School, a small town within Cincinnati, Ohio, and she slowly nursed her mother back to health. A year later, Myrna met Curt Childs, a German American who owned a hardware store in Deer Lake, Ohio. Curt’s grandfather, Martin Kind, had changed his surname from Kind to Childs, since “kind” in German meant “child.” He had added the “s” so that no one would ever have an excuse to say, in jest, “the Children family.”
Curt and Myrna married in 1964. They settled in Deer Lake and Myrna became the drama teacher at the high school two years later.
In 1970, Myrna’s mother died in her sleep. Ruby hadn’t taken a drink in seven years, but she remained bitter and accusing. The mother and daughter relationship remained strained and distant to the last, and the week before Ruby passed, she attacked her daughter yet again with the usual questions: “Why did you marry that man and throw your life away? Your father owned a drugstore and he owns a hardware store. Why did you have to repeat your past? Why did you come back here and throw your career away?”
Myrna did not answer. She stood proudly erect before a woman whose cold eyes had persistently pronounced her a failure. Myrna did not take that in. She had made peace with her life. She had her teaching job, and her students, and a profession she loved.
The bedroom door opened and Julie entered quietly, creeping toward the bed.
“I’m awake,” Myrna said.
“How are you feeling, Mother?”
“Not bad. I’ve been looking back. Taking stock, you might say. I’d forgotten some things. So many memories.”
“There are more to be made, Mother.”
Myrna swallowed. She looked earnestly at her daughter and smiled. “You have been the best of daughters, Julie. Have I ever told you that?”
Julie sat down, brushing back a loose strand of hair that had fallen across her mother’s forehead. “Not in so many words, Mother. But I always knew you loved Nick and me.”
Myrna rolled her head away, thinking. “Maybe I left you both alone too much. Maybe it was because my mother was always in my face, pushing me. I didn’t want to repeat that. Maybe I went too far the other way. I don’t know.”
Myrna turned back to her daughter, enjoying her daughter’s pleasant face and kind eyes. “Was I a good mother, Julie?”
“Yes, Mother. You were, and not just to me. You were a good mother to your students. You must have been. Look how they remember you and come to see you.”
Myrna shut her eyes, and again she saw her students’ many faces flit by. She saw them so clearly.
Julie stood. “You sleep now, Mother. I’ll check in on you in a little while.”
After Julie left, Myrna opened her eyes, wondering and struggling with doubt. What mother, what teacher, doesn’t have doubts? Had she really been a good and loving mother? Had she really made a difference in her students’ lives? Had she been too harsh or brusque with them? Too unkind, too unforgiving of their insecurities? Not complimentary enough? Had she been too pushy and strident, like her mother had been?
In the final analysis, and this was her final analysis, did she really help her students prepare for a life of challenges, setbacks and triumphs? Had she really taught her students anything?
Myrna’s attention was drawn to familiar music drifting in from the livi
ng room. Silent Night. She smiled. Julie, too, grew up loving Christmas music. Every year on December 1st, she took out the dozens of Christmas CDs she’d collected through the years and started playing them, always starting with Nat King Cole. Then came The Messiah. Christmas in various cathedrals. The Boston Pops, Tony Bennett, jazz and pop singers, New Wave versions of the classics, and even an old Bing Crosby rendition of Jingle Bells. Julie didn’t like to sing, which was for the best, because she couldn’t carry a tune. Mrs. Childs folded her hands on her chest and tried to sing. She produced only a squeaky, breathy struggle of a sound that caught in her throat. Nonetheless, she sang on.
During the Christmas show at the high school, they’d always ended the program with Silent Night. The lights were dimmed, and the ushers distributed little white tapered candles. One lighted candle was lit by another and another, until the entire auditorium was a mass of flickering candles. It was heavenly to experience the entire auditorium filled with people gently swaying and singing, their glorious voices filling the vast space with a divine, soaring peace. It had always brought tears to her eyes, although she’d never let anyone see her cry. She’d retreat into the shadows, thankful that God had placed her in the perfect job with the perfect people at the perfect time.
“Was I a failure?” Myrna asked, whispering to herself.
Mrs. Childs lay in her bed, remembering, smelling the vanilla and evergreen scent, hearing the swelling voices of Silent Night, as if the singers were standing in her room, surrounding her. She sang along with them, until her eyes closed and she drifted off into a deep sleep.
THIRTEEN
The alumni performers began arriving on the afternoon of Friday, December 19. After checking into various motels and Bed & Breakfasts, they called or texted Ray or Trudie for the latest plans. Most eventually made their way to Rusty’s, where they crowded around the circular mahogany bar, slapping backs, swapping old stories and catching up with their lives. Some were heavier, some balder, some even more youthful than at the last high school reunion, probably because of line-erasing fillers. Perlane and Botox were the unacknowledged make-up artists.
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