Dry Your Smile (2 page)

“Oh hell, Paulie, I'm sorry. What I really meant was—” But my attempt to make amends was smothered in the bear-hug of a round, bald, beaming little man who abruptly precipitated himself into our conversation.

“It's the
Trooper!
Julian!” he yelped, and only when I had extricated myself from his embrace could I recognize Abe Gold, the show's former assistant director who had taught me how to play a mean game of poker during rehearsal breaks. I greeted him with genuine pleasure and refrained from blurting out how he seemed to have been the victim of a trade leaving him with more flesh and less hair. Abe dutifully shook hands with Paola, but when she murmured something about having to dash to an ad-agency meeting, he and I exchanged a glance of mixed relief and guilt.

“Say, you were sure good at the service, Julian. Classy. Too bad about Miss Clement, huh? Still, she lived to a ripe old age, didn't she? But how's your real mom, kid? She okay?” It was classic Abe, showing the same solicitude and directness that used to get him into chronic trouble—like the day he had actually dared ask Elizabeth, “Jeez, Miss Clement, you paying Rose enough, I hope? She sure works her ass off for you.”

“Hope? Hope's not so good, Abe,” I answered, hearing the Paola-brittleness drain from my tone. “She has an awful disease, in fact. One that affects the nervous system.”

“Aww, kid, that's too bad. Funny, she always talked about her nerves, too, ya know?”

“Oh yes, I know. Growing up, I used to think ‘nerves' was a disease in itself.”

“I mean, there you'd be, whoopin' around, doin' kid things on some five-minute break, and there Hope would be, saying ‘Don't do that, honey, quiet down. Remember my nerves.'” He looked suddenly apologetic. “Oh, hey, I don't mean you goofed off a lot or anything like that. You were a real pro.”

“Thanks, Abe. It's nice to hear that, especially from you.”

“Yeah, a pro. So much so, you scared the shit out of me sometimes.”

I couldn't help laughing. No wonder I'd liked him.

“Look, kid, I didn't mean any offense—”

“No, no, I didn't misunderstand you. Don't worry, Abe, you were always great. You never patronized me, always treated me as if I were a person. You treated everyone decently, in fact.”

“Well, I dunno about all that … but what
is
it with Hope, anyway? This time it's serious?”

“Very serious, I'm afraid. Not just ‘nerves.' It's something called Parkinson's disease. There's no cure for it, just medication to slow the degeneration. Sometimes there are temporary remissions, but eventually …”

“Aww, kid. Damn. I'm real sorry. What a shame. But she's a strong lady, isn't she? Comes from Ashkenazic stock, Polish-Russian Jews, just like me. Don't I remember right? She never liked to talk much about that, though,” he trailed off, mournfully.

“You have a gift for understatement. She changed all her names. Hokhmah to Hope. Broitbaum to Baker and—then to Travis. How more Anglo can you get? No, claiming her roots was never Momma's favorite hobby. On the contrary, she reinvented them all the time. Still does, god love her.”

“Oh well,” Abe continued, never one to be dislodged from a nonjudgmental stance, “my father shortened Goldenblatt to Gold.”

“Abe, dear Abe. There's a difference between the halfhearted disguise and the outright disavowal, you know.”

“Huh? Well, anyhow, I sure am sorry, kid,” he summed up, about everything or nothing in particular. “So, look, give her my love when you see her? Tell her Abe Gold remembers her and says hello and that she should get well real soon.” It was hard to tell whether Abe's flat-out rejection of tragedy made him a simpleton or a saint.

“I'm going over to her apartment right after this, in fact, and I'll tell her,” I reassured him.

“Right after
this?
Whew. Heavy day, kid.”

So he was no simpleton. We embraced again and he drifted off. It was another half-hour—of small talk, gossip about the threatened Actor's Equity strike, reminiscences about Elizabeth Clement that were lovingly etched with acid, and never-to-be-used telephone numbers exchanged with promises to “get together for lunch soon”—before I was able to make my way out of the fake Romanesque building and into the light drizzle falling on West Forty-eighth Street.

Walking felt good despite the cold, no cab was in sight anyway, and procrastinating a visit to Momma was always in order. Besides, talking to Abe had reminded me of some of the good times, and I wanted to savor them, go over them like a litany, the way I used to in my twenties when I would catch friends regarding my childhood with horror and pity, as if it had been a latter-day version of some Judy Garland-Hollywood scandal: drugs, orgies, and depravity.

“Look,” I would patiently explain to my captive listener and myself, “I was spared the rejection experience of lots of child actors, those endless routings in and out of casting offices. No matter what other parts I played—more dramatic, more creative, more satisfying—this job remained steady for seven years, the heart of my childhood, playing the daughter in a not too badly written series about a Swedish immigrant family. Most of the time, the scripts managed to avoid mere wholesomeness. Some of the time they actually grappled with issues of poverty and ethnic discrimination. Some of the time, too, the company really did serve as a surrogate family for an only child like me, raised in an all-female world of a single mother and aunts.” Friends would nod sympathetically.

It was raining harder now, and I began to walk faster, searching in earnest for a taxi.
Look at it this way
, I muttered to myself in a familiar personal mantra, because all thought-roads seemed to lead back to Her,
the series earned you quite a bit of money before you even turned fourteen, money which, though never at your own disposal, nonetheless kept Momma more than comfortable in her Sutton Place co-op. Moral: you don't have to support an elderly parent now, because you unwittingly provided for that by age fifteen. Besides, you know by this time that holding firm to a sense of irony may yet save you from the cliché bitterness of the ex-child star, godforbid
. These self-lectures usually had a bracing effect, and today a further positive reinforcement against self-pity pulled up in the shape of a free taxi.

The doorman of Momma's building eyed me with disdain as I passed by him. I might be dressed up on
this
occasion, but he had seen me too often in jeans and navy pea jacket to be fooled. Even as I moved across the lobby, sinking into the plush carpet at each step, the old hit of anxiety, dread, and longing began to seep through my veins like some addictive drug. Rising in the elevator, I wondered when I might learn that I would never get through to her, when I would ever be at peace with that knowledge.

“Just a minute! I'm on the phone! Use your key!” she shouted in answer to the doorbell chime. It was a small point of contention among so many others—that I should use the key she'd given me. I claimed I didn't want to use it except in emergencies; that it was an invasion of her privacy, even when she knew in advance that I'd be coming, like today. She claimed it was for her convenience, so she wouldn't have to get up and answer the door. The subtext was that her doctor had said she
should
try to move about, that exercise was crucial to stave off muscle atrophy. The
sub
-subtext was that she wanted to believe I still lived there and used the key as if it were to my home—while I wanted to assert that I was a visitor, even a stranger, on her premises. First skirmish lost. I found her key in my purse and let myself in.

“Anaconda Copper is down
what?
” she was saying sharply over the phone. I peeled off my coat and took advantage of her preoccupation with her broker to adjust myself yet again to the astonishment that was her apartment.

Here, on the twelfth floor of one of Manhattan's best buildings, Momma had managed to create a high-baroque slum. Pink marble lamps in the shape of cherubs shed their glow through shades festooned with torn, dust-gray lace. The faded champagne-brocade sofa was piled with papers—stock-market proxies, canceled checks, past issues of
The Wall Street Journal
, months-old undone “To Do” lists scribbled on yellow legal-pad sheets. The television blared a “daytime drama.” Along the walls, ladies billowed their skirts from summer garden swings in Fragonard-type prints hanging crookedly amid a tapestry of framed photographs. The Baby in front of a microphone at age four, anchoring her very own radio show. The Baby in tutu, on point. The Baby tap-dancing at a charity benefit for paraplegic children. The Baby selling U. S. Savings Bonds. Even as a teenager, The Baby was always smiling. I turned away, and spied a cockroach ambling across a corner of the once-splendid Bokhara carpet. Stomping on it brought relief.

“Sit down,” she barked, half covering the phone receiver with one hand. “I'll get rid of this schmuck in a second. Eat something,” gesturing toward the open box of stale canoles on the cardtable that still served as her desk. Then back into the phone at high decibel, “
No
, dammit. I said
sell
the Marietta Mining and
buy
more of the AT&T!”

The chairs had succumbed to the same fate as the sofa. There was nowhere to sit except on her bed, now plonked in the middle of the livingroom, and she was already on it. I chose to walk around. But the apartment was an emotional minefield.

Bric-a-brac, furry with dust. More cherubs and cupids. Porcelain rabbits from the Danube Valley. A demitasse in a wooden stand. An open-box-displayed fake turquoise and silver bracelet. And an occasional eclectic intruder into this Kitsch City—a carved ivory buddha, a genuine Sevrès plate, a lone teakwood chess queen, a gold-plated tea strainer. It was a collection to no purpose and of no consistency. Some of the pieces she had been told were “valuable,” some actually were, some she had bought because they were “cute,” some were gifts, some she had kept out of sentiment or superstition. Most of all she hated to throw anything away.

I turned to the bookshelves, the safest spot in the room. There
they
were, also dusty, leaning drunkenly this way and that, but their power still intact—the magic that had sustained me. My childhood books, which she'd refused to let me take with me, were jealously guarded here: the
Alice
, the
Enchanted Garden
, the
Arabian Nights
, the Dickens and Stevenson and
Oxford Collection of Children's Poetry
. And the later treasures: my
Complete Stories and Parables of Kafka
, which she herself had once loved. And here, Blake's
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
, which she'd also cherished. And my first copy of Lao Tzu, which she'd given me, with her own inscription, “Let emptiness fill your life, and you will never be prey to greed.”

I knew tears were on their way to stinging my eyes even before I felt them. What could you do to heal such a life, without going under in sacrificing your own again? Hundreds of women—strangers—you could help, but not this one woman.
Shit!
I whispered fiercely to myself, brushing at my eyes as I heard her bang down the phone.

“So where have you been?” she started in briskly. “I could have died.”

“I was here just day before yesterday, as usual. You look fine.
Hello
, Momma,” I said, moving to where she sat, a wasted buddha plumped on her pillows.
Control and restraint
, I told myself, that's the key.

I reached over to kiss her and was struck by the slightly sour smell of her flesh. Her housecoat was stained with food drips. Control and restraint.

“Momma, you've really got to let me do something about the state of this apartment. Let me do a laundry, a big cleaning. Have the place repainted, even. Get the carpets cleaned and some exterminators in. Maybe even get you to see a new doctor? The works.” It came out in a rush, too brightly, lacking authority.

“Leave it!”
she snapped, as I stooped to pick up a used Kleenex by the side of the bed. “I know where everything is. I like it just this way. The last time I came home from the hospital and you'd done one of your ‘the works' I couldn't find anything for weeks. As it is, that woman you got to come in and fluff up pillows and bring groceries every day drives me crazy.”

Long-suffering Mrs. Dudinsky. How she pitied Momma, but also how many pleadings, on the average of twice a month, it took from me to get her to continue, in the face of Momma's abuse.

“All right,
all right
,” I mumbled, my voice already taking on the vintage tone of pacification. “At least let me turn down the TV.”

“Turn it off,” she commanded, “I never watch the thing anyway.”

I switched off one of Paola Luchino's soap heroines in mid-anguish, removed the bathrobe and the Annual Report of IBM dumped on a wobbly French Provincial chair, added these two items to the precarious paper Alps on the sofa, and lowered myself carefully to a seat.

“You didn't call today, Julian honey.” She settled in, feeling things were normal at last.

“Momma. I call every day and come up every other day. You know that. Don't you remember yesterday I said on the phone I'd be by as always today but I wouldn't call this morning at the usual time because I had to go to Elizabeth Clement's funeral?”

“Oh yeah,” she mumbled with disinterest. Then, “You wore pants to a funeral?”

“These are silk slacks, Momma. With a silk shirt. This is the way I dress up. These are in dark blue, even. Respect for the dead and all that. Nobody minded.” Not exactly the truth, since the president of the Actors' League had raised his eyebrows at my forked legs and the Episcopal minister appeared to have mild indigestion as I mounted his pulpit.

“Well,” she shrugged, “your life is your own.”