B005S8O7YE EBOK (4 page)

In 1954, a group of black male singers known as the Penguins waddled up the R&B charts with
“Earth Angel.”
(Let the record show that when I was thirteen “Earth Angel” accompanied my first kisses.) Though the Crew Cuts, a white group, released a cover the following year, it was the Penguins’ version that inspired teenagers to form couples, dance, and make out. When both versions appeared in 1955 on the pop charts, the white group peaked at #3, five places above the black group.

In 1955, Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” held the #1 position on the pop charts for eight weeks. Initially I didn’t know or care what color the group was, nor did any of the kids I knew. We just loved listening and dancing to that song.

Before “Rocket 88” was accredited by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 as “the first Rock and Roll song ever recorded,” I had attributed that status to
“Rock Around the Clock,”
a misperception undoubtedly enhanced by the inclusion of that song in a
popular movie. To my knowledge,
The Blackboard Jungle
was one of the first films to cross-market a theme song. I believe “Rock Around the Clock” flew up the charts because teenagers like me saw the movie and ran out the next day to buy the single.

African Americans from my generation would likely cite a different song as a significant point of change, but for me it was unquestionably Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” That may not have been the first rock and roll song, but that 45 rpm single in 1955 divided my world into Before Rock and Roll and After Rock and Roll.

Before Rock and Roll, whenever I was upset about something, I had found comfort in going to the piano and playing whatever came out. I had needed more comfort than usual in the years between 1951 and 1955, when two events transformed my family and permanently realigned the planets in my emotional universe.

T
he first event occurred in 1951 when I was almost nine, when my two-year-old brother was diagnosed as profoundly deaf and what was then called “severely retarded.” My mother was working as a secretary in a New York City school. Knowing that she couldn’t afford to hire someone to care for Richard at home nor quit work to do it herself, she made the agonizing decision to place him in a facility suitable for his needs.

The day my brother left, my mother didn’t want me to experience the sights and sounds of his new environment, so she left me in the care of my grandmother and drove him to his new home by herself. Though my mother visited him frequently, I didn’t see my brother for almost a year, when both our parents drove me out to see him on his birthday. My mother’s plan was to take Richard to get some hot dogs and then go to a playground where he could ride on a little merry-go-round and go down the slide with me. Despite my mother’s concerns, I didn’t find any of the sights and sounds intimidating. It looked to me like a big school with a lot of buildings.

Richard had abilities as well as disabilities. He was very good
at communicating his enjoyment of certain things, with cars and hot dogs high on the list. As soon as he saw us he giggled with happiness. Though he couldn’t comprehend the concepts that characterized our relationships—mommy, daddy, sister, family—he knew we belonged to him. But we weren’t the main attraction. From the moment he saw our car, Richard could not contain his enthusiasm. He ran to the car and jumped up and down until my father opened the door, then Richard climbed into the back seat. Once in, he kept jumping up and down until I entered from the other side, sat down next to him, and showed him by example that he needed to sit still. This was before seat belts were in common use.

As we drove toward the playground, my pleasure at seeing my brother was diminished when I caught sight of our dad’s grim expression in the rearview mirror. And when my mom turned around to look at Richard, tears welled up in her eyes. Suddenly I started thinking about all the experiences my brother would miss. He wouldn’t learn to pump his feet to make his swing go up and down next to mine in the playground across the street. He wouldn’t sit at Ebbets Field with our father and me and learn the difference between a ball and a strike. Nor would he yell at an umpire who made a wrong call against our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. He’d never run in and out of the waves with me at Brighton Beach while our mother watched from our blanket. And he would never hear a note of music.

I didn’t realize how much I had missed my little brother. When he was still at home, each night as I drifted off to sleep I’d been comforted by the sound of his breathing through the thin wall between our rooms. I never felt resentful or competitive. As the older sibling, I had felt no lack of attention from my parents either before or after Richard was born. I didn’t like living as an only child. I wanted my brother to be normal.

If Richard’s going away was difficult for me, it had been far more
distressing to my mother. A prevailing societal ignorance about his disability had led some of my mother’s friends and close family members to express their wrongheaded opinion directly to her that having such a child was her fault and she should be ashamed of him. Seeing my mother struggle with such hurtful remarks, I wanted to help. But I didn’t know how. To her everlasting credit, my mom was resolute in looking for joy in her son’s existence, and she found it in his smallest accomplishments.

My father, too, was distressed, but his way of managing pain was to build a wall around it. That was probably why he didn’t accompany my mother in bringing Richard to his new home, and after Richard left my father rarely spoke of him. From things I’d heard him say to my mother, I understood that he carried the additional burden of a father’s failure to produce a healthy son, so I tried to be both son and daughter to him. As the only girl on the block I was already accustomed to playing ball with boys. Now I went to baseball games with my dad, asked him to show me how to use tools, and worked with him on household projects.

One positive outcome of my attempts to be both daughter and son was that my parents never told me, nor did I ever feel, that I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. All possibilities were open to me. My way of dealing with Richard’s condition was to strive for excellence in everything I undertook. As the child with all the advantages, I felt that I owed it to Richard and my parents to make up for what he couldn’t do.

Later in Richard’s life, when my mother was still able to travel, whenever she and I would visit him at the residence to which he had been transferred, he never failed to recognize us. I enjoyed renewing my bond with my brother, and he responded in all the ways of which he was capable. Still later, when I visited him alone or with one of my then adult children, I felt that same strong connection with Richard when he grabbed my hand and pulled me
over to look at some little thing he found fascinating such as a doorknob or a box of Legos.

Richard had the “mischievous” gene. He wasn’t so disabled that he didn’t understand when he was told not to do something. The stimulus of being told “No!” through unambiguous verbal and nonverbal signals typically caused a response in which he did exactly the proscribed action while looking sidewise at the person who had just told him not to do it. I was proud of my brother’s instinct to challenge authority and found his displays of spunk reassuring. Richard may have been deaf and intellectually disabled, but he was a Klein.

The second disruption of my universe occurred in 1953 when I was eleven. When my parents separated for the first time, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had borne witness to scenes in which they alternately yelled at each other and suddenly went silent in mid-conversation. Each time, the sight of them turning away from each other, thin-lipped, bottling up the hurt while trying to keep it from reaching their hearts, was more than I could bear. I didn’t know which was worse, the shouting or the silence. As their only child who could potentially have had any influence on the situation, I took responsibility for fixing their problems. I said and did everything I could think of to bring them back together. I tried so hard, but the damage was irreparable. After separating, they divorced. I never got over that. Our home had once been happy. Now it was broken.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized my brother’s disability had probably been an underlying cause of our parents fighting. It’s not difficult to see how my mother would have taken my father’s withdrawal as a lack of support, with blame and accusations undoubtedly escalating from there. And yet as fervently as
I
wished that my mother and father would get back together, they must have had similar feelings some of the time. Over the
next seven years they tried several times to reunite, and they even remarried each other, but every reconciliation was followed by another separation and, ultimately, their final divorce.

Some psychologists believe everyone has an underlying thought that drives them—a sentence repeated in a person’s subconscious like a mantra. It might be, “Notice me!” or “Don’t hurt me!” or “Nothing good ever happens, and if it does, it won’t happen to me.” When my mother and father started fighting, my mantra became “I just want everyone to be happy.” I had put so much time and hope in being able to keep my parents together, but I couldn’t do it. I was just a child.

The breakup of my family flung me on a quest for “home” that would take me through four marriages, two subsequent relationships, and a variety of places to live. The home I was looking for had a mommy, a daddy, and one or more children, all of whom loved each other very much. It would take me decades to figure out that “home” needed to exist inside me before I could find or create it externally.

But I didn’t know that in the early fifties. Sometimes my emotions about things I couldn’t talk about were so overwhelming that I went to the piano and played until I was exhausted. Other times I acted out by misbehaving in school. And sometimes I literally acted out by playing insolent girls in a succession of school and neighborhood plays, some of which were written and directed by my theatrically gifted mother. At one point I thought, Maybe if I become an actress it will make my mother feel better, and I can be someone other than myself. I didn’t realize that I was adopting a dream of acclaim that had been handed down to me by two previous generations.

M
y maternal grandmother, Sarah Besmosgin, was born in the final decade of the nineteenth century in a small village in Russia called Orsha (now part of Belarus). Her father, my great-grandfather Yitzrok, was a scholar, a prestigious occupation in the Jewish community that didn’t bring in a single ruble of income. Sarah’s mother, my great-grandmother Riva Leah (pronounced RIV-er LAY-uh), had to work as a baker to support her family. The job of delivering those baked goods to wealthy families fell to Riva Leah’s eldest daughter. When twelve-year-old Sarah looked through a grand parlor window and saw a girl her own age playing a piano, that image became a symbol of the wealth and accomplishment to which she could never aspire. She resolved instead to become an
aishes chail
(rhymes with “gracious mile,” has a guttural “ch”). Loosely translated, an
aishes chail
is “a woman of worth, a virtuous woman.” To my grandmother it meant becoming the mother of a renowned classical pianist.

After emigrating to America, Sarah met Israel Benjamin Cammer—my Grandpa Bennie. They had two daughters, Eugenia and Gladys. Like many women of her generation, my grandmother
understood that she was powerless out in the world, but inside the home she ruled with an iron will. Brushing aside the aspirations of her older daughter—my future mother—to write plays and participate in dramatic productions in school, my grandmother made my mother spend hours practicing the piano. Though my Grandma Sarah never attained her goal of becoming an
aishes chail
as she understood it, the benefits of her compulsory musical training would accrue to my mother later, when she would use it to write and direct musical theater productions. Benefits would also accrue, through my mother, to me. My mother reunited with her creative muse in college when she majored in English and drama and worked in summer stock as Eugenia Merrill. After I was born she had to quit summer stock, but she stayed active in theater by writing, directing, and acting in local productions.

My mother began taking me to Broadway plays and musicals when I was five. She absorbed everything and incorporated what she saw into her own productions. Combining nepotism, talent, and proximity, she cast my father as Nathan Detroit in what people who saw the show referred to for years afterward as “Genie’s
wonderful
production of
Guys and Dolls
.” I, too, absorbed everything. I kept the memory of those shows alive by listening to my mother’s collection of original cast recordings. Along with
Guys and Dolls
her collection included
South Pacific
,
Oklahoma!
,
The King and I
,
Carousel
,
Peter Pan
,
My Fair Lady
, and, later,
West Side Story
. When I was thirteen my dad bought me a portable phonograph—a gray-flocked metal turntable in a blue metal case with a handle that made it easy for me to carry it to the girls-only sleepovers we called “pajama parties.” Not long after I acquired the phonograph, my mother’s albums grew legs, walked into my room, and jumped onto the turntable.

At first I was a little confused when my mom cast me in one of her original plays as a bratty girl called Nina. As my mother,
she was constantly exhorting me to behave better. As my director, she encouraged me to behave as badly as I liked. Seeing my confusion, she said, “You may behave badly only when you’re playing Nina.” I had so much fun with that role that I began to think more seriously about becoming an actress. That notion continued to percolate until an opportunity arose for me to do something about it.