New York Echoes (20 page)

The trip to New York would be a
surprise. To keep to a strict budget since the trip was a financial stretch,
they took a bus from Denison, a twenty-hour grind, and made reservations at the
cheapest Manhattan hotel they could find. Thankfully, the bus had arrived on
time and they would be able to freshen up and make curtain time at a theater
somewhere in a place strangely called Noho.

Aggie had been cautious when she
announced that she had gotten a part in this new play, and Peggy had
interpreted this calm as a kind of superstition that if she were too
enthusiastic it would jinx her performance.

“You're on your way, baby,” her mother
had exclaimed. “You'll see. It will happen just as I said it would.”

Aggie had told her, after much prodding,
that the name of the play was
The Shape of the World
, which sounded
grandiose and important. She was able to get the address of the theater from an
ad in the
New York Times
theater section she found in the library,
although she was somewhat disappointed her daughter's name was not mentioned.
Only the “directed by” credit was given. Someone by the name of Lance Goodwin.

Peggy could not contain her excitement
and it was a given that she and Charlie would, by hook or by crook, show up for
the opening night and hang the expense. This was, indeed, the beginning of the
dream, and Peggy felt dead certain that once people saw Aggie onstage the major
career hurdle would be breached and Aggie would be on her way.

Neither Peggy nor Charlie had ever been
to New York and it took a bit of research to be able to fit the trip into a
tight budget. They figured that they would attend opening night, then leave the
next day for the grueling trip back to Iowa. This meant that Peggy would lose
only two days at work. Charlie's brother gladly gave him the time off to see
his niece's debut.

It was planned as a surprise and Peggy
pictured Aggie's face when she would see her parents enter her dressing room
after the show. It would be, Peggy was certain, one of the great events in both
their lives. She fantasized about the size of the dressing room, picturing the
folding screen and the bouquets sent by admirers just as she had seen in the
movies.

For the occasion Peggy had bought a new
dress at Wal-Mart, getting her employee's discount, and Charlie had borrowed a
sport coat from his brother. They checked into the hotel, a dingy place, where
they got the cheapest room on the first floor with iron grating over the
windows. Peggy worried that if she had complained they would either throw them
out or move them to a more expensive room. Besides, what was a little
discomfort when one was about to see their daughter's first step to stardom?

It took them longer
than expected to negotiate their way to the theater in Noho, which, to Peggy's
surprise and disappointment was in a gloomy area of narrow streets and dark
buildings. There was no marquee, and the theater itself was entered through a
battered doorway and a tiny cluttered lobby with one young woman in jeans and a
spiky haircut selling tickets and giving out a paper program.

They were shown seats in the rear of the
little theater, which were actually five rows of mismatched chairs in front of
a tiny stage. Peggy stared straight ahead, wondering if somehow she had gotten
the address wrong. Then she scanned the program and noted on the bottom of the
cast credits the name of Agatha Pachowski. Not even the stage name they had
both favored, Melody Francis.

Then the play began
and Peggy sat stiff and unblinking, her concentration far from the action on
the little stage. How was it possible? She tried desperately to confront her
disappointment with a rationale that stipulated that this was merely a showcase
prior to going to Broadway, an audience test of what worked and what did not.
She did not turn toward her husband, fearing a confrontation with his confusion
at this searing spectacle of failed expectations.

Even when she forced herself to
concentrate on the action on the stage, she could not understand nor care about
what was going on. It was as if she had suddenly found herself in the middle of
bad, confusing dream. What rankled more was the fact that Aggie did not appear
until the last moment before intermission. The sum total of her part was to
serve drinks to other members of the cast in a scene in a restaurant. She was
on and off without a single line of dialogue.

A wave of anger and devastation gripped
Peggy as she sat stiff and depressed throughout the intermission while Charlie
went off to the bathroom. She fervently hoped that Aggie had not seen her
parents from the stage. She felt torn between the desire to see her daughter or
escape quickly to avoid further exposure to her humiliation.

Before she could make up her mind, the play
began again and she sat through yet another bland and incomprehensible
talkathon, during which Aggie as maid served tea. But this time, there was a
tiny moment of hesitation, a mini-second of peripheral double take of
recognition and Peggy was certain that she was seen and could no longer avoid
meeting her daughter.

She spent the rest of the play
contemplating her reaction. Above all, she needed to restrain and hide her
disappointment. She had no illusions about what Aggie's reaction would be. Most
likely resentment. They had borne witness to her abject failure. Not one spoken
line. Nothing more than a walk-on. So this was the fruit of years of effort,
hours of money spent on instruction back home in Denison and an eternity of
hope and certainty? Peggy felt her heart pounding in her chest and her breath
was coming in short gasps. She wanted to get up and run away. 

“You okay?” Charlie whispered.

She nodded, but did
not look at him, fearing his expression of disillusion. But then he was used to
failure, conditioned to it. By the time the play was over, anger and
frustration had replaced disappointment and she steeled herself to the reality
of the situation.

“I can't believe this,” Aggie said when
they met in the cramped backstage where the actors changed immodestly and
scrubbed away their makeup before a large battered mirror and a cracked
porcelain sink. Obviously shocked, Aggie did not, thankfully, exhibit the
feared resentment of Peggy's expectation.

“We just missed you honey,” Charlie said
as he embraced his daughter.

“I wish you had let me know, Mama,”
Aggie said looking at her watch. “I'm due at my job at eleven. I'm a cocktail
waitress at one of the clubs nearby.”

Peggy found it hard to
absorb. Was this the beginning or the end? At that moment, a tall man
approached them. He was obviously older, with long graying hair and a
pepper-speckled beard. He placed an arm around Aggie and kissed her on the
lips. Peggy felt a gnawing anger in her gut.

“These are my parents,
Lance,” Aggie said. “He's the director. He makes the magic happen, don't you
darling?”

Lance acknowledged the compliment with a
smile and pulled Aggie closer, a gesture welcomed by her daughter. Peggy's
anger bubbled and, and like a hot poker in her gut, she remembered Daisy's
comment, which had precipitated her anger management therapy.

 “So you make the
magic happen, do you?” Peggy said, feeling herself on the fiery edge of rage.

 “He's the man,” Aggie
said caressing Lance's cheek with a gesture of adoration.

“Did you enjoy the
show, folks?” Lance said, hugging Aggie closer.

“You really want to
know?”

“Easy, Peggy,” Charlie
whispered, but it was too late.

“I'd love to hear your reaction,” Lance
pressed, caressing Aggie's shoulder.

“Alright then.” Peggy sucked in a deep
breath that served to fuel her anger. “I thought it was a boring piece of shit.
Aggie here has more talent in her little finger than all the stupid actors you
put in this stupid play. Magic? Maybe if you put Aggie in the lead you might
make something really good out of this crap.“

Lance frowned and
rubbed his beard, obviously shocked by this sudden onslaught.

“Mother!” Aggie cried. She turned to the
director. “I'm so sorry, Lance. So sorry.”           

“Sorry. Why be sorry?” Peggy continued,
all restraint abandoned. “He didn't give you one fucking line. Not one.” She
turned to Aggie. “You're being used by this middle-aged asshole, Aggie. You've
got real talent, baby. Real talent. You're better than Donna Reed.” She raised
a finger and waved it at the director. “Not one line. You didn't give this
beautiful, talented girl one line.” She turned again to Aggie. “What do you
have to do to get one line, Aggie?” She felt her insides quiver, her chest
gasping, her face flushing.

“We better go, Peggy,” Charlie said,
grabbing Peggy by the arm.

“I'm so sorry, Lance,” Aggie cried.
“Take her away, Daddy. Please. She doesn't understand.”

“Oh yes I do little girl, I sure do
understand.”

“No you don't, Mama.”

“Oh yeah,” Peggy
screeched. “What the fuck do you think this horny old goat wants from you,
Aggie?"

“Enough, Peggy, please,” Charlie begged,
grabbing his wife by the arm and pulled her away.

“Call us back home,” Charlie said to his
daughter, who nodded, her face ashen.

 Charlie continued to tug on Peggy's arm
and finally led her out of the theater into the street.

“Believe me, Charlie, I know what she's
doing with that man.”

“Leave it alone, Peggy. Let's go back to
the hotel.”

“Fuck,” Peggy cried.
“She was better than Donna.”

“Damn it, Peggy,”
Charlie shouted. “Stop this.”

Peggy moved, obedient to Charlie's
pressure.

It took them more than
an hour to find their way back to the hotel. Peggy was silent, thinking back on
all those years of dreams and hope.

During the night, she awoke suddenly,
screaming.

“Not one line. Not one line.”

Charley embraced her and soothed her
back to sleep.

“Why are you people so mean to Grampa?”
Allison Zucker asked her parents after they said goodbye to Sam Gottlieb after
their ritual Sunday brunch at the Madison Restaurant on First Avenue.

“Mean?” Allison's mother, Betty, said,
responding to her daughter's assertion. “That's ridiculous.”

“You don't really talk to him. I mean
really. It's always like routine. ‘How are you?' ‘How was your week?' ‘Are you
feeling OK?' Stuff like that.”

“Does that constitute meanness,
Allison?” her father, Michael, asked.

She was fifteen, still living at home,
going to the Dalton School, a fancy private school in Manhattan, and still
subject to the family rituals, like Sunday brunch with Grampa. Her two brothers
were off at college.

“Fact is darling, ever since Gramma
died, he has crawled into a shell. He really doesn't want to have much to do
with us. Besides, he's in his eighties and probably getting senile.”

“Getting,” Michael snickered. “He's
arrived. Won't be long before he needs a caretaker or we've got to send him to
a home.”

“Fat chance,” Betty said. “He's too
stubborn and independent.”

“Chronology will take care of that,”
Michael said. “Decline is inevitable. What does he do with himself all day,
rattling around in that big apartment?”

“I don't know,” Betty sighed. “He's a
very difficult man.”

“And gotten worse since your mother
died.”

“He's not exactly a bowl of cherries to
be with, but he's still my father.”

“He was always a pain in the ass.”

“I hate hearing you talk like that,”
Allison said. “It's cruel.”

“We're not being cruel, honey,” Michael
said. “Realistic.”

Allison held back any rebuttal. In fact,
she had many disagreements with her parents but had chosen the path of least
resistance, taking refuge in her own secret life. She prided herself on her own
self-awareness and believed she had the insight to realize that she was not
part of the mainstream teenage culture of her class, obsessed with shopping,
attitude, and sex.

She was a loner, and because she kept
her distance from the power crowd at school, she knew that her peers thought of
her as a bit of nerd with her nose always in a book and when not reading she
was browsing through her computer. In fact, she was ahead of the pack with her
knowledge of the latest technologies and, while still not certain about her
career choices, she suspected that it might have something to do with the
sciences.

Her father was an investment banker and
her mother busy with charity work. She thought of them as a typical East Side couple, snobby, culture supporters, and very social. She thought most of their
friends were boring and shallow, but she kept her opinions to herself.

“Why are you so withdrawn?” her mother
would ask periodically.

What she meant was that Allison was not
a typical teenager, not part of the mainstream, and she had overheard her
parents on numerous occasions voice their concerns about her lack of social
skills and their worries over the absence of friends. She did have one or two
friends, but they were also nerdy loners like her, and their social intercourse
was limited.

She knew she wasn't attractive in the
traditional sense with her pale complexion, kinky hair, and squinty eyes. So
far, she had never kissed a boy, although she had fantasized about having sex
and she did indulge in solitary pleasures.

For years she had hardly paid much
attention to her grandparents. They came and went in her life, showed the usual
affection, but seemed more interested in her brothers than in her. Not that it
mattered, since she paid little attention to them. But in the years since her
grandmother had died, she began to wonder about her grandfather and the kind of
man he had been and was. Each Sunday, he would meet them punctually at the Madison Restaurant and invariably order pancakes, say little, and then after the goodbyes
on the street, he would walk away to his apartment on York Avenue near Sutton Place.

Apparently he had been retired for a
number of years. He had been some sort of salesman and had made a good living.
Beyond that, she knew very little about him, where he was born, who his parents
and grandparents were, what his life had been like. Nor did she care.

Actually it was in history class at
school where she got the idea. They were studying the presidents, and the
teacher was telling them about the oral history of President Kennedy, and how
people who knew him would record their memories about him.

It sort of grew in her mind that it
would be cool to do an oral history of her grandfather, the only one in her
family from that generation who was still living.

“Why do you want to do this?” Sam asked
her when she arrived at his apartment with a small tape recorder.

“It's a school project,” she lied.

“What is it you want to know?”

“All about Grampa,” she teased.

“I'm not very interesting,” he said.

“You are to me.”

She had rarely been in
his apartment, which was large and shabby but fairly neat since he had a
cleaning woman come in two or three times a week. Although she hadn't paid much
attention before, she was more observant now, noting the many framed family
pictures scattered around the apartment. There were photographs of her mother
and her sister, who lived on the west coast, and pictures of both their families.
There were also many pictures of her grandfather and grandmother in various
stages of their lives.

She set up her little tape recorder on a
table next to his well-worn easy chair. He was a dignified man, the kind
usually characterized as a gentleman. He was bald with a round belly and wore
his pants high up.

“So where do I begin,” he said as she
started the tape recorder.

“At the beginning,” she said. “Like
where were you born.”

“I was born in the Jewish Hospital on Eastern Parkway. My mother once told me she was in labor for twelve hours and I weighed more
than eight pounds.”

“Your mother,” Allison reminded herself.
She wanted to know about the generations before he was born. “Where was she
from?”

“Both my mother and father came from Poland when they were under five years old.”

“Where in Poland?”

He pondered the question, then shook his
head.

“Tell you the truth, I'm not sure. It
was somewhere near Minsk.”

“Near Minsk? That it?”

“I didn't have a school project to find
out,” he laughed.

“OK then, tell me about your parents.”

He paused and grew reflective, quite
obviously searching his memory.

“I think about them a lot,” he told her.
For a moment his eyes seemed to glaze over as if he were looking inward. After
a long pause, he spoke again. “Funny. They were born in the last years of the
nineteenth century. Dead now. Let's see, nearly thirty years. They are
enormously vivid in my mind.” He looked at Allison. “They say long-term memory
is the last to go.”

“Okay then, Grampa. Tell me all about them.”

“The things you remember,” he sighed.
“We had no money.” He smiled. “But who knew that. My father was a union guy, a
cutter. That was when the garment district was big in New York.”

“A cutter?”

“A cutter was someone
who cut the patterns for dresses and suits. It was a skill and he was proud of
it.”

“And your mother. What
was she?”

“A mother. In those
days a woman who was working meant that a man was incapable of supporting his
family. It was considered shameful.”

“Really?”

He exchanged glances
with her as if to illustrate the gap between the generations. She decided that
she would not interpolate, but listen only. After all, this was his oral
history, not hers.

Without interruption,
he talked for an hour about his early life growing up in Brooklyn. When his
father was laid off since cutting was seasonal work, they would be unable to
pay their rent and would have to pile into their grandparents' little house in East New York that had been bought by his mother's brothers. Allison was, of course, tempted
to ask questions, and it took enormous discipline on her part to remain silent
when he spoke to the running tape recorder.

As his life unfolded,
her interest grew more intense. She wanted to know more and more, and when they
paused for lunch, she would chatter on like a question box about his life.

“And you went to the
movies every Saturday?”

“Without fail. There
was a double feature, a comedy, serial.” He explained what a serial was. “I
must have seen every picture made in the thirties, when the talkies started.
When I see a black-and-white film I can tell you every actor and actress of
that era, even the supporting players.”

“What did it cost for
admission?”

She was surprised that
she asked such a question. Money was of no real interest to her, but she was
suddenly curious about the comparison.

“Ten cents, and on
weeknights when I went with my mother they gave you a dish. You could furnish a
whole table with plates.”

He told her that suits
came with two pair of pants and cost as little as $29.95. He had been a
traveling salesman carrying a full line of men's suits at the beginning of his
career, then he had formed his own company and still went on the road to sell
menswear. Then he told her whatever costs he remembered, from cigarettes to
bananas to shoes and socks, to the cost of the subways, which was a nickel, to
baseball tickets.

“Bleacher seats were
fifty-five cents.”

“What are bleachers?”

He patiently explained
everything she asked, and she could tell he was enjoying himself immensely.

“Nobody ever cared to
ask me these questions,” he told Allison.

She came back day
after day to her grandfather's apartment. He would look forward to her coming
and would be sure to give her a glass of milk and cookies, which became a part
of their regular routine. She did not tell her parents what she was doing and
categorized this project as part of her secret life. Not that they would have
objected, but she wanted this for herself and her grandfather alone.

When they met for the
family brunch on Sundays, her grandfather would wink at her as if to say, “keep
this between us,” and she would nod her head in agreement. Neither her mother
nor father ever noticed.

Since she was far more
technically adept than him, she persuaded him to purchase a computer and taught
him the bare rudiments so that he could order things online using his credit
card. Having discovered his memories of black-and-white movies, she taught him
how to order DVDs online and often they would share viewings of old
black-and-white movies. He loved the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,
the Thin Man movies, and soon she was conversant with all the old
black-and-white stars of the golden age of Hollywood.

When he told her about
the Brooklyn Dodgers, she searched the Internet and found old DVDs and audios
of Dodger games. She loved being with him when he recalled these old baseball
stories. For months she visited him almost daily, listening to and recording
the oral history of his life and pressing him to tell her about all the events
that were happening during his lifetime. She even went so far to encourage him
to get a microfiche apparatus so that he could recycle all the
New York
Times
of the thirties, forties, and fifties.

Her parents, Allison
suspected, wondered where she went after school every day. Although they
inquired, they were very circumspect on how they questioned her.

“I hope that wherever
you go after school you are being careful,” her mother warned, meaning if she
had sex she should take every precaution.

“Don't worry, Mom.”

“It's very dangerous
today. You know what I mean.”

“Of course, I do. I'm
very careful.” It was laughable. She was still a virgin.

“Do you have a
boyfriend?”

Her mother seemed
addicted to that question.

“No mother. I don't.”

“Better to postpone
that part of life, Allison.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“And stay away from
drugs.”

“I do, Mother.”

She knew that she was
definitely out of the mainstream of the teenage life of the privileged kids who
attended her school. She knew it might reinforce their opinion about her
nerdiness. She didn't care and she honestly felt she was learning far more
about life from her grandfather than she learned at school.

Meanwhile, the tapes
proliferated and the relationship with her grandfather grew closer. It was as
if she had opened a door into his world and she had jumped right through it.
Because they read the microfiche copies of the
New York Times
together,
she knew a great deal about such diverse events as the Spanish Civil War, the
four Franklin Roosevelt campaigns, and the names of the cars and other products
of the era, especially cigarette brands, which were heavily advertised. She
learned the titles of movies and the actors of that period, the stocks that
went up and down, Hitler and Mussolini, the rise of the Nazis, the battles of
World War II, the baseball rivalries, and especially the fate of the Brooklyn
Dodgers.

“When they left Brooklyn, I left baseball,” her grandfather told the tape recorder. She learned pretty much
everything about his history when he talked into the recorder, including how he
had met Gramma at the Freddie Fitzsimmons bowling alley on Empire Boulevard.