Dry Your Smile

For one thing, it was being held at the Church of the Resurrection. In the Performing Arts Chapel. For another, there was no bodyâa 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 aliveâunless 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”âhad dreaded it, actuallyâbut 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 thingsâflower 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 houseâa 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 naÃ¯ve theatricality of the toast touched me: the gesture was sufficiently blatant to lend itself innocenceâthe 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 writerâI mean not for TVâand 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?”âmanaging 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
any
body can live with
any
body 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 serviceâromance, excitement, glamourâto 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 jobsâ”

“âthat 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 boardâor 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 painâand 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 capacitiesâof perception and viciousnessâto articulate
.

Other books

Fate War: Alliance by Havens, E.M.

The Edge of Justice by Clinton McKinzie

Blood Relations by Franklin W. Dixon

To Tell the Truth by Janet Dailey

Texas Wild by Brenda Jackson

Naughty Secrets by Joan Elizabeth Lloyd

Sweet Nothing by Mia Henry

Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood

Bits & Pieces by Jonathan Maberry

Forever (This #5) by J. B. McGee