My Mother the Cheerleader (4 page)

M
y mother spent the afternoon at the Paris Beauty Shoppe on St. Claude, having her hair done and her nails painted fiery red. After setting the dining room table for three, I brought Mr. Landroux his dinner tray and then retreated to my room to get dressed. I wore my best Sunday clothes, a light-green cotton dress with a white sash and a matching white ribbon in my hair. Using a dime-store hand mirror, I applied the slightest layer of lipstick. My mother didn't want me wearing any makeup, but I had swiped a lipstick from her a year ago that I occasionally used as
a one-stop makeup kit. I lightly layered my lips, just enough to give me a splash of color but not enough to look like I was actually wearing lipstick. Next, I rubbed a small amount into my cheeks as substitute rouge.

My mother returned around five o'clock and spent the rest of the afternoon picking out her wardrobe for the night. She settled on a tight red cocktail dress, aware that she could wear a red potato sack and make it look sexy. But this dress was no potato sack.

Morgan came down to the dining room at exactly the appointed time.

“You look lovely tonight,” he said to my mother as he came to the table, his eyes taking in all the hot spots.

“Why, thank you.” My mother blushed.

“You too, Miss Louise,” he said. “I should've brought fancier duds.”

“You're perfect, Mr. Miller,” my mother said. “Just perfect.”

He wore exactly the same clothes he had worn during the day, with the addition of a blue linen blazer. He had shaved and smelled faintly of an aftershave or cologne that was sweet yet masculine.

Charlotte's dinner of crab salad with rémoulade sauce and paneed chicken and creamy garlic greens was a smashing success. Morgan ate seconds and lavished compliments on my mother for culinary skills she did not possess. As Charlotte passed through the dining room clearing plates, she subtly rolled her eyes at me when she overheard Morgan praise the smoky flavor of the sauce. I stifled a giggle.

We finished the meal with a plate of Charlotte's homemade pralines. Before mixing in the pecans, she would sauté them with butter, just a dash of cinnamon, and crushed nutmeg, “to give them a bit of mystery.” I usually ate at least six pralines in one sitting, but held myself to two that night, not wanting Morgan to think I was a glutton.

Most evenings I took my dinner in the kitchen.
Sometimes I ate with Charlotte. More often than not I ate alone, because Charlotte liked to be home to feed her mother. My mother never really ate any proper meals. She'd pick at things throughout the day without ever sitting down to a whole plateful of anything. She never ate dinner with me unless a guest had requested dinner. Then she would put on a show and have us all eat in the dining room, and act as if we did so every night. Most of those meals were dull affairs, where I'd sit quietly and listen to the guests and my mother talk. If she was entertaining one of her truckers, he would typically do most of the talking, droning on about the road, just thankful to have a set of human ears listening. But Morgan was different. He seemed to listen just as much as he talked. And it wasn't the kind of listening where he would just be waiting for my mother to finish so he could start talking. He actually seemed to be interested in what my mother was saying; and she and I were certainly interested in him.

“What business are you in, Mr. Miller?” my
mother inquired as Charlotte cleared the dessert plates.

“Publishing. I'm an editor.”

“How fascinating. Do you do romances? Westerns? Mysteries? Do you work with anyone I might've read?” she asked.

I snickered to myself at the thought of my mother actually reading something other than her horoscope.

“Probably not. I edit mostly textbooks and technical journals. Pretty dry stuff.”

“Surely you must have gotten to meet some famous writers.”

“Well, I guess a few.”

“Oh, I knew it. Who? Please tell! Things are so dull down here. We never get to meet anybody famous.”

“Well, my work really isn't that glamorous. But I am friendly with John Steinbeck and his wife.”

My head nearly exploded. Did he really mean
the
John Steinbeck?

“Steinbeck! I love Steinbeck,” my mother
squealed with delight. “He's my very favorite author.”

“Really?”

“Why, yes! His books make the most wonderful movies. I must've seen
East of Eden
ten times. Please tell me you've met James Dean.”

“I'm afraid not,” Morgan replied with a light chuckle.

“What a gorgeous man he was. He was just made for the role of Cal Trask. I cried when I heard about the car crash that took him, I really did. What about Henry Fonda?”

“Henry Fonda?”

“Did you ever meet him? He was in
The Grapes of Wrath
. That was Steinbeck too, right?”

“No, I never met him, but I did see the picture. It was quite good.”

“What a wonderful actor. Those eyes of his just melt me….”

“I've read
Of Mice and Men
,
The Red Pony
,
The Pearl
, and
Cannery Row
,” I interrupted.

My mother's eyes bulged in surprise.

“Pretty advanced stuff,” he said.

“She's quite a bookworm,” my mother commented, making sure to place just the right emphasis on the word
worm
to telegraph to me just how mad she was at being upstaged and interrupted.

“What'd you think?” he asked.

“What did I think?”

“Yes. About the books?”

“I love his books,” I said.

“Why?”

“Why?” I paused. “It's the characters. They're like real people. A lot of books you read have all these characters that you'd never really come across, like they're too smart or too funny or too brave. But John Steinbeck's stories are about real people, people you think you might've seen in your own life. They talk like real people talk, not like in lots of books, where they talk like some writer's idea of how people oughta talk, and…”

I trailed off, suddenly embarrassed. I'd never talked so much at the dinner table before. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

“No. Go on,” Morgan prompted me.

My mother glared at me with heat-lamp eyes.

“Well, it's as if his characters really exist somewhere,” I said. “Like the bums on Cannery Row, or the farmhand Lennie from
Of Mice and Men
. I feel like I know people just like that right here in New Orleans. And I guess reading those books made me think I understand those people a little better. At least I think I do.”

“I think John would be very impressed by your analysis, Miss Louise.” He turned to my mother. “She really is very advanced for her age.”

“Yes, she's something all right,” my mother replied. “She took to books like a fish to water. Ever since she was the littlest girl, book learning was just like breathing with this one. She'd read through all the kiddie books at the library by the time she was nine and then started in on the adult section. It's really quite amazing considering how long it took me to potty train her. Do you realize she was still wetting the bed at age five?”

My throat constricted so fast I nearly choked,
like I'd been bit by a water moccasin. My eyes filled with tears. It took all my powers of self-control to stop myself from bursting into sobs. Even if I could have found my voice, I couldn't have rebutted what she said, because it was true. I'd never been to a sleepover for fear I'd have a relapse.

“Five!” Morgan gasped. “That's nothing. I wet the bed until I was nearly eight.” He winked at me. “It's always a pleasure to dine with another former member of the rubber sheet club.”

At that moment I was absolutely convinced he was an angel. My throat instantly relaxed and I felt my spirit lift toward heaven. Two fantasy scenarios formed in my mind. Either I would marry this man or he would adopt me as his own child. Either way, he would take me back to New York City with him so we could discuss books all day long.

“Morgan, would you care to join me for a sherry in the Music Hall?” my mother asked.

“That sounds nice,” he said.

“Louise, I think it's time for you to help Charlotte in the kitchen, and then it's time for bed.”

Banished. I knew it was coming. She had me. I couldn't disobey her without seeming like a brat. Reluctantly, I rose.

“Will you be joining us for breakfast, Mr. Miller?” I asked.

“Not tomorrow,” he replied. “I'm meeting a friend early in the morning. Maybe Tuesday.”

“Say good night, Louise,” my mother instructed.

“Good night, Mother. Good night, Mr. Miller.”

“Good night, Miss Louise,” he said.

He gallantly rose and dramatically kissed my hand. My face flushed so fast, I had to turn away and quickly retreat before he saw me transform into a beet before his eyes.

I found Charlotte drying the dinner plates as I entered the kitchen. I tried to busy myself putting away the pots and pans that Charlotte had already washed and dried, so she wouldn't notice my agitated condition. I worked fast, because I wanted to retreat upstairs so I could eavesdrop from my secret spot in the second-floor bathroom. In my
haste I dropped a glass, which shattered across the floor.

“What's wrong with you?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“You sure you don't have a fever or something?”

“No,” I said. But I was lying.

I fetched the broom, and Charlotte swept up the broken shards while I held the dustpan. Thoughts of Morgan had somehow gotten under my skin and inside my veins, throbbing in my chest and in my head. My entire body felt hot.

“You're so red it looks like you got sunburned.”

“It's nothing.”

Charlotte put her hands on my shoulders.

“Then let's talk about nothing,” she said.

She tried to stroke my cheek, but I abruptly turned away and dumped the broken glass into the trash can.

Charlotte put away the broom and washed and dried her hands. She kissed me on the head, put on her coat, and tied on a kerchief over her hair. I
placed the last plates back on the pantry shelf.

“Louise?” she called to me.

Slowly I turned to face her.

“You look pretty tonight,” she said, and then she walked out, closing the back door behind her.

I
had discovered my top-secret observation post in the second-floor bathrooms completely by accident two years earlier. As a little girl I had adopted the unusual habit of polishing my coins. Whenever I'd get any money, the first thing I'd do was take the coins into the bathroom and scrub them down with soap and hot water. For some reason I had it in my head that adding shine would increase their value. During one of my cleaning sessions I dropped a quarter down the heating grate behind the toilet. When I got down on my belly and pried open the grate, I realized that you could hear
everything that went on in the Music Hall, clear as a bell. Not only that, but if I stuck my head down inside, I could actually see a little bit into the Music Hall from the ceiling grate. When I did this, the blood would always rush to my head, so I usually had to content myself with just crouching near the opening and listening.

I used my secret observation post in the second-floor bathroom very sparingly, for only the most intriguing guests. There was always a chance that a guest would need to use the toilet, and then I'd have to scramble to put the grate back in place in time. I didn't risk exposure for the likes of Royce Burke. And if anyone's clothes started to come off, I'd retreat before things got too grisly.

After Charlotte left, I quietly snuck off to the upstairs bathroom, carefully removed the grate, and listened. They were settled in the Music Hall over glasses of sherry. When I stuck my head down into the hole, I could just make out my mother sitting on the couch and a piece of the back of Morgan's head as he sat on the love seat next to her. I tried to keep
my head down to watch, but had to pull myself back every few minutes when the top of my head throbbed. My mother regaled Morgan with her silly little Southern belle yarns. Some of the stories were true, most were not. But somewhere along the line the conversation took an unusual turn.

“So—is there a Mrs. Miller?” my mother asked.

“There was,” he said. “We're no longer together.”

“I'm sorry,” she lied. “I don't mean to pry.”

“No. It's all right. It's still strange for me to say it. We were married for so many years. Twenty-five, to be exact. It's funny, I never thought I'd be the type to get divorced. But I suppose you never do or you wouldn't get married in the first place, right?”

“Well, your marriage lasted twenty-four years longer than mine did,” she said. “So there must've been something between you.”

“There was. We were very much in love for most of the marriage.”

I could tell that something about the way this conversation was flowing caught my mother off
guard. It was his honesty. She wasn't quite sure how to respond, but I detected a change in her voice. The light, seductive purr receded, and she too seemed to become more unguarded and real.

“If you don't mind me asking,” she said, “what happened?”

“That's not an easy answer. I guess it never is. Sometimes I wish she'd fallen in love with another man or I'd fallen in love with another woman just so I'd have a shorthand way of explaining what went wrong. Like I said, we were happy for most of the marriage. Our passion cooled a bit over the years, but that's not unusual. I guess things really went wrong after the death of our son, David.”

“Oh Lord, I'm sorry. I had no idea,” my mother gasped.

My heart tightened in my chest.

“He was a medic in Korea,” he continued. “Volunteered before he was even drafted. That's the kind of kid he was. He was killed just two weeks after he got there. It wasn't a combat situation. His ambulance crashed. The driver veered off the road
to avoid hitting a Korean girl herding goats. All that time we spent worrying about him getting shot over there, and he died in a simple car accident. We got his first letters home three weeks after we got notice that he had died. It was like hearing a voice from beyond the grave.”

“It must've been horrible,” my mother said with true sympathy.

“We both took the loss really hard. Some irrational part of us probably blamed each other for what had happened. It's amazing where your mind wanders when you're faced with something like that. He was our only child. It's like half of what we had in common was instantly erased and replaced by this big chunk of shared agony. Just looking at each other reminded us of David. He had her eyes and smile, so looking at her became difficult for me. He had my voice.” He broke off and was quiet for a moment. “We held on for a couple of years, but then I think we both just got tired of our misery.”

“Do you still talk to her?”

“Sometimes. But less so since the divorce became
final. I still care about her, but there doesn't seem to be much point in pretending anymore. I guess that's why I'm down here trying to reconnect with my brother.”

“Did you see him this afternoon?”

“I saw him,” he said, “but he didn't see me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He runs our family business. Friendly Market on St. Claude.”

“Near the Chinese laundry?”

“That's the one,” he replied. “I parked my car across the street from the store and just watched him, trying to work up the courage to go inside, but I never did.”

I edged forward. Hearing him talk about things I had observed on my spy mission made my spine tingle.

“Why?” she asked.

“I lost my nerve. My brother and I haven't spoken in over twenty years.”

“Twenty years!”

“Hard to believe.” He nodded.

“I haven't spoken to my sister in eleven years!”

“Maybe they've been hanging around together,” he quipped.

“We'd never know, would we?” she said. They both laughed.

“Well, let's see who has the worst sibling story,” my mother said. “You go first.”

“Oh, come on, I just gave you my broken marriage story. Can't you go first this round?”

“No, the guest always goes first.”

“Okay, but I'm going to need another glass of sherry,” he said.

She topped off their glasses, and Morgan continued.

“We never had much money growing up,” he explained. “My parents started the business and worked themselves to the bone every day of their lives to keep it going.”

“It was just you and your brother?”

“Yes. Michael is three years older than me. We were very close when we were growing up. He was a great big brother. Always looking out for me. Our
favorite game was playing Treasure Island. I would be the young squire, Jim Hawkins, and he'd be the pirate, Long John Silver. We'd run around the neighborhood with swords cut out of cardboard boxes, looking for treasure. He must've read that book to me fifty times. I really looked up to him. He was bigger and stronger than me. And he was always great at sports and had an easy way with girls, all the things that matter most when you're a kid. Of course, we both worked in the store as soon as we could help out, because my parents couldn't afford to hire anybody.

“I don't remember my parents ever buying anything for themselves. All they seemed to care about was buying us a real education that would give us the opportunities that they never had. When I was ten years old and Michael was thirteen, they had saved enough to send one of us away to private school.”

“I think I know where this is going,” my mother said.

“I was the obvious choice. I always did a little
better in school, and Michael was older. He was about to enter high school, and they relied on him more around the store. So they decided to send me. Prep school in New Hampshire, then Columbia undergraduate, and then graduate school. I saw my family only on school breaks, and then during college I worked in New York and started coming home even less. My parents didn't mean to drive a wedge between us, but I guess it was inevitable. My brother never went to college and had to stay and run the business when my parents got too old. I know he felt that he didn't have any choice.”

“Did he ever marry?” my mother asked.

“Yeah. He built a life for himself, got married, had a couple of kids. But he basically lives the life of our parents. We both dreamed about escaping that life. It's irrational, but I know he blames me for his lost opportunities. There were other issues, of course. But that's the core of it. Over the years his bitterness grew and we moved further and further apart. Every little disagreement blew up into an argument. We had one final blowout just before the
Second World War. Twenty years later, here we are.”

“Well, at least you want to make an effort. If I never saw my sister, Denise, again, it'd be fine by me.”

“Okay. Now it's your turn.”

“All right,” she said. “But I've gotta start with my broken marriage and then go into my sibling rivalry, if you don't mind.”

“Bring on the broken marriage,” he said.

“It's my own damn fault for falling in love with a drummer in the first place. It's the oldest music business cliché, but I fell right into the trap. Duane was playing with a pop jazz trio around town when we met. I started singing and playing a little piano with them and we weren't half bad, started getting some pretty good bookings. We fell in love, at least I did, and things were going really good for a while. I was still basically a kid, living out my dream of being a girl singer like Helen Forrest or Dinah Shore.

“Then came what seemed like a big break.
Duane got the band a regular gig at a fancy hotel in Baton Rouge. It was gonna be enough money that he could quit his day job and focus on music full-time. We were all going to have to move. My father wouldn't let me go unless Duane married me. And Duane wasn't about to let a silly little wedding ring stand in the way of the band's progress.

“Things went sour in Baton Rouge. My older sister, Denise, was already living there and working the lunch counter at the Woolworth's downtown. Denise was always really girlish-looking. People always thought I was the older sister.”

“Were you close growing up?” he asked.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “But the rivalry was always there. Even when we were little girls, we fought about who had the prettiest doll, the prettiest dress, the prettiest hair. We were all sticky sweet as pecan pie until a man got in the way. She and Duane took one look at each other and it was like two high-powered magnets. I couldn't have pried those two apart with a crowbar. It took me a while to catch wind of what was going on, but pretty soon I was
seeing signs that were too obvious to ignore. We weren't there more than a year when they ran off together to Kansas City.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I should've known better than to fall for a drummer. And he was trash. Handsome trash, but trash nonetheless.” She paused for a moment and then nodded. “But he was fun. He could make me laugh so hard it hurt. He'd do this thing, like a comedy routine with his drums, where he'd make all these funny sound effects as he was telling a story. It was just about the funniest thing you could imagine when he got it going. It was kind of like a Danny Kaye routine, where he got all worked up till his hair started flying everywhere and his face turned red. He did all sorts of imitations, too: Edward G. Robinson, Cary Grant. He was a real performer.”

That part of the story was brand-new to me. I had absolutely no idea that my father had a sense of humor or that he could imitate movie stars or that he ever made my mother laugh. Suddenly I wanted to hear more good things about him, to fill in some
of the dark empty spaces he always held in my mind.

“So he left you alone with Louise?”

“He ran out on us just after she was born.”

“Poor kid,” he said.

“I haven't heard from either of them since May 12, 1948. Just one week after Louise arrived.”

“I'll never understand how people can abandon their babies,” he said sadly.

Tears silently ran down my face and into my mouth. I wiped my eyes and nose with the back of my hand, choking back the sobs. I had heard my mother tell the story of my father's abandonment in various forms over the years and it had never made me cry. I had never shed any tears for my lost father. It never really occurred to me to miss him. First of all, I never knew him, so there was really nothing to miss. Occasionally, kids around the neighborhood would tease me about not having a daddy, but that just made me mad, not sad. The other reason I never thought to miss him was that until that night, my mother had never said even the most vaguely
positive thing about him. Part of me felt bad for my mother for the first time in a long time. Not many people made her laugh these days.

Yet I think what made me so upset was the fact that Morgan was hearing the story and pitying me.

“We always had music in common,” she continued. “That boy could really play.”

“Do you still play?” He nodded to the piano.

“Just here and there.”

“I'd love to hear something.”

“Oh, stop,” she said.

“Please. I am the guest making a request.”

My mother almost never played the piano anymore. Every once in a while I'd hear her singing along to the radio, but that was it. From what I could tell, she did have a nice voice.

“Well, my pipes are pretty rusty,” she said as she moved to the piano. “So be kind.”

“I'm an easy audience,” he assured her.

“My signature song was ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans' by Alter and DeLange.
We always had to play the songs with local flavor for the tourists.”

Ricky Nelson had just released a version of the song, and it was getting played on local radio, but I'd never heard my mother's arrangement. She played it as an ultra-slow blues number. Her voice surprised me. It was fragile and girlish, but also a little rough around the edges. Her version communicated a sense of longing that Ricky Nelson's didn't. It wasn't until I heard Billie Holiday's recording of the song that I discovered the origin of my mother's interpretation. She seemed to be able to give each word meaning, as if she were singing about her own longing for a real man.