Broadway Baby (11 page)

Scene XIII

Miriam didn’t trust this Paul kid, not one bit. Oh, he was talented, sure, but there was something about him (she couldn’t put her finger on it) that was up to no good, something underhanded, shady.
Th
at eyebrow of his seemed to rise mockingly whenever he looked at her. He’d smile at her but not with any warmth; he smiled too quickly, as if to cover up a scowl or a sneer. Yes, he could really belt out a tune, and with his long frame he tap danced like a young Gene Kelly. Ethan was shorter and stockier, and while his dance technique was flawless, even Miriam could see that he lacked a certain flair or freedom that Paul possessed. Ethan admired Paul. In fact, he seemed to worship him. And Paul played him like a fiddle. In rehearsal, when Stuart wasn’t looking, he’d poke Ethan or say something under his breath that made Ethan laugh, lose his concentration, and forget his steps, while Paul, the little angel, smiling innocently, sailed through the routine. “Ethan,” Stuart would yell, “pay attention, would you—just do it like Paul, for once!” Couldn’t Stuart see that Paul was egging Ethan on? When she’d try to tell him, he would pat her on the back and say, “Now, now, stage mom, a little jealous?”

H
ER STEPMOTHER CALLED
to tell her that her father had “passed away in his sleep.” She had anticipated this moment her whole life, it seemed—rehearsed it, mourned it in advance, composed and recomposed the obituary that described a kind and devoted father, a father who lived for nothing but his only daughter and his grandchildren, a father whom his daughter and grandchildren would never replace or forget. She had imagined the grief, the fits of sobbing, Curly and the children gathering round her to console her, to console each other, the condolence cards and letters she’d receive from friends of his, who’d want her to know what a wonderful man he had been and how very much he had loved her. But when she heard the words “passed away in his sleep,” it was like she was a little girl again, facing him in the doorway of the old apartment—watching him fumble with some poorly wrapped trinket that he would hand her and then hurry off back into the life she knew next to nothing about. A butcher in the same shop for nearly fifty years, who married the wrong woman when she was just a girl, a child really—and then married the right one, a woman as quiet as he was, as unassuming and nondescript, and together they lived happily or unhappily or, for all she knew, anywhere in between. You could say that for sixty-five years he had passed away in a bed in a small apartment, and now for all eternity he’d pass away in a box in the ground. What surprised her now, as she thought this, was the grief she didn’t feel. She was crying now for the absence of that grief. She was mourning everything between her and her father that had never taken place.

T
HEN A FEW
months later Bubbie died.
Th
e president was assassinated. Camelot was gone. And not long after that, her mother took a serious fall and broke her arm. It was clear to everyone she couldn’t do for herself any longer. But who would take her in? Miriam asked her cousins Charlie and Irene, but they declined. What with this and that going on, they couldn’t do it, much as they’d like to; maybe in a year or so, when things ease up, but not now, no, they couldn’t, it wouldn’t be fair to their kids. Besides, they said, your mother’s loaded; she can afford a nursing home. But Miriam wouldn’t dump her mother in a nursing home. Not in this lifetime. In that case, then, they said, being her daughter, you should take her in.

What could she do? She and Curly were barely getting by, even with both of them working; they had no time for the kids, or for each other (not that having time in that department would have made much difference). And despite her mother’s wealth—whatever wealth there was, no one really knew—Miriam was certain she herself would never see a penny of it. Tula would just be one more mouth to feed. And what about the kids, what would it be like for them to have to live with such an old, sick woman, and where would she put her?

What did she owe her mother anyway? She had had a tough life, sure. But she was hardly a mother, really. She had made a lot of money and had once taken Miriam to New York to see a show. But mostly she had never been around, off living her “real” life with Mr. Perez. And even when she had been around, she had seldom been available. Maybe Tula had had her reasons. But the fact is, she had left her only daughter for other people to raise. Her mother pretty much had done whatever the hell she had wanted to do. Miriam was the last thing she had ever thought of. Really, when it came right down to it, her mother had never known the first thing about being a mother. But Miriam, her daughter, she had learned the hard way what it meant to be a mother. She knew the meaning of sacrifice, devotion, and loyalty. She knew what a mother was supposed to do, and now, once again, it was up to her to do it. And she would do it. How could she not? She’d show her mother what a mother was.

H
ER MOTHER MOVED
in, and it seemed to Miriam that everyone retreated from one another. Sam, of course was Sam, off in his own little world. But now Ethan, too, like Julie, was hardly ever at home. When he wasn’t performing, Ethan was out with friends. Julie had gotten into Antioch on a full academic scholarship and would be leaving in the fall, but really it felt to Miriam as if she had already left. At dinner, both kids would wolf down their food and bolt. Her mother’s obesity and incontinence disgusted them; it embarrassed them to bring friends to the house, because she was always there, always complaining, always demanding this or that, or wishing she was dead already. Miriam couldn’t blame them, but out of respect for her, couldn’t they treat her mother with a little kindness, if only to make
her
life easier, so her mother wouldn’t be at her as she always was whenever she got home from work?
Th
ey’d roll their eyes at all her pleading and disappear into their lives.

“Can’t you see what’s happening?” Curly asked one night, as he was getting into bed.

“So what am I supposed to do?” she responded, laying her book down on her chest.

“Put her in a nursing home, for starters,” Curly said.

Across the room in the mirror above her dressing table, she saw herself, her face, beneath the
South Pacific
poster—just over her head, Emile de Becque was singing as he held Nellie Forbush at sunset under a palm tree on a Polynesian beach—the vibrant reds and blues, the incandescent whiteness of the sand made Miriam’s face seem paler by comparison; her face looked ghostly, she could almost see right through it.

“Miriam, are you listening to me?”

“What?”

“A nursing home—we should put your mother in a nursing home.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“
Th
at’s not the point,” he said. “She’d be safe there.
Th
ere’d be people, professionals, to take care of her. She might even make friends.”

“Would you dump your father in a nursing home?”

“Look what she’s doing to the kids,” he said. “
Th
ey can’t stand to be around her.”

What song was Emile singing? “Some Enchanted Evening”?

“Miriam,” he shouted.

“What?”

“We can’t do this, I can’t do this. Tula won’t give us a penny to help out. You got your girl Melba coming twice a week now, which we can’t afford. And for what? I’m telling you, I work too goddamn hard to come home to her, to this.
Th
is is tearing us apart.
Th
e kids are suffering.”

“You never answered my question,” she said.

“What question?”

“About your father—what you would do if it was your father we were talking about.”

“Well, it isn’t,” he said. “And my father hasn’t had a stroke and doesn’t shit and piss everywhere but in the hopper.”

“So we’ll move out, okay, my mother and me. Will that make you happy?”

“No comment,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. Forget it.”

He turned out his light and she turned out hers.

Some evening, she thought. Some enchanted evening.

H
ER MOTHER HAD
called Miriam just as she was leaving the studio to tell her to pick up mouthwash and dietary candy on her way home. She also had to pick up dinner, and Curly’s dress suit at the dry cleaner, and she was running late as it was. But what the hell could she do. Only later, as she was leaving the pharmacy did she realize that she had left her Gershwin songbook in the studio. She was supposed to find a number that Ethan might use in his callback for a summer stock production of
Funny Face.

Th
e studio was locked and dark.
Th
e darkness and the quiet soothed her as she climbed the stairs to the office. She would just sit here for a minute. It was already way too late to forestall the bickering in store for her when she got home. “Party girl,” her mother would call her; Curly would start with her, too, about the little “faygela,” and the kids, the kids would be at one another’s throats by now. She couldn’t stand it anymore. She wanted to just sit there for a little while. She wanted to think about songs for Ethan without Ethan and his temper tantrums getting in the way; she wanted to sit there, as she was doing now, in the dark office, with the desk piled high with songbooks, with the shadowy studio through the window in front of her, here where there was no one to feed or fend off, no one to fight with, or appease.

Th
e phone rang and she woke. How long had she been sleeping?

“Where the hell are you,” Curly was shouting.

“I was just, um . . .”

“You were just what? Why are you still there? What are you two doing? You’ve got a family, for Christ’s sake!”

Staring straight ahead, she held the phone out from her ear; Curly’s voice was a far-off insect buzzing. She wasn’t listening; she was watching something moving in the studio, a shadow by the piano, no, two shadows, one taller than the other, and thinner, too, both bending over, moving, picking things up, putting things on, dressing, as they hurried out. She could hear the footsteps running down the stairs—was that Stuart laughing?—and the door slam.

Did she dream this? Was she dreaming now? She could still hear Curly’s tiny shouting as she hung up the phone. Dream or no dream, whatever it was, it was not to be looked at, not to be thought of.
Th
at much she knew. And the sensations that came and went almost too swiftly to be felt—shame, fear, revulsion, humiliation, excitement (why did she feel shame? what had she done wrong?)—what were they but the disintegrating traces of a bad dream from which she would eventually wake up?

To steady her breathing, she tried to think of nothing. As if nothing had happened, as if pretending as much would make it so, she walked slowly out of the office and down the stairs. For the second time that night, she left without the Gershwin songbook, though this time she wouldn’t remember what it was she had forgotten, what it was she’d come back to the studio to get.

T
HE NEXT DAY
she did not show up for work. When she didn’t show up the day after that, Stuart called.

“Miriam, my pet,” he said, as spritely as ever, “are we under the weather?”

She couldn’t think of what to say. She put out her cigarette and placed her free hand on the kitchen table to keep herself from trembling.

“Miriam? Are you there?”

“Stuart, listen,” she finally said.

“I’m all ears,” he said.

“I was at the studio two nights ago.”

“What a coincidence,” he said. “So was I.”

When she didn’t say anything, he added, “Miriam, what did you expect? What do you think I do for kicks, go home each night and listen to ‘
Th
ere Is Nothing Like a Dame’? What do you think, I just pretend with you all day?”

“I didn’t think that, at the studio . . .”

“
Th
at what?
Th
at I’d ‘use’ the studio? Desecrate the inner sanctum?”

“But what would people say?”

“What people?” he said. “No one else was there.”

“I was,” she said.

“Yeah, you were, and what are you going to do, break it to the press?”

“But someone could,” she said, her voice quavering, “and then what?”

“
Th
en this,” he said.

“What?”

“Just this.
Th
e two of us talking.”

“
Th
ere’d be more than just the two of us talking, you know that.
Th
ink of the scandal.
Th
e repercussions.”

“Come on,” he said. “We’re grown-ups, aren’t we? You pays your money, you takes your chances.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I have a family to think of.”

“Maybe you do, dear,” he said. “But let’s be honest. It isn’t ‘the family’ you’re thinking of.”

Miriam was silent.

“Sweetie,” he continued, “tell yourself whatever story you need to tell—but don’t give me a song and dance about your family. I’m a fag. I’m not an idiot.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” she said.

“How about I call myself a man’s man, a regular guy, one of the boys? Curly would approve of that, wouldn’t he?”

“Was that Paul with you?”

“What difference does it make, stage mom? Should I have been with Ethan?”

“How could you say such a thing? How could you do such a thing? I thought, I thought . . .”

“Your problem, Miriam, is you don’t think. You dream. Every­thing you love’s a dream.”

“
Th
e sooner I wake up from this one, the better.” She slammed the phone down.

Her mother was standing in the kitchen doorway watching her. “Who was that?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Why were you yelling?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Lucky you,” her mother said. “A regular Madame Butterfly.”

W
HEN ANYONE WOULD
ask her why she had quit her job, she’d tell them what she told herself (as if pretending it were so could make it so): that Ethan would be moving to New York soon, and since there wasn’t much more Stuart could do for him, there was no real reason for her to stay on. She could make more money doing something else.
Th
en she’d shrug and change the subject. She couldn’t imagine telling anyone the truth, certainly not Curly, or any of her friends. She wouldn’t know where to start, or what to say, what language to use. In every imagined telling of the story—“I saw two ‘confirmed bachelors’ committing sodomy,” “I saw two homosexuals having intercourse,” “I saw this naked faygela I used to worship fucking another faygela, his student, up the ass”—she didn’t recognize herself. It was like someone had changed scripts on her in the middle of a scene, and so it wasn’t that she couldn’t remember what her lines were, but that there were no lines, none anyway that she’d been trained to say.