Walking Through Walls (4 page)

Trying to stop him in his tracks, my mother exclaimed, “For God's sake, we may not even be alive in the morning! Why don't you just drop this nonsense right now? You and your crazy ideas.” Mom had heard enough. With that, she slammed the oven door on the meat loaf and retreated to the bedroom to enjoy her favorite meal—a fresh pack of Camel cigarettes and a pint of Howard Johnson's bright-green pistachio ice cream—while watching
To Tell the Truth
. Mom was a true believer in contradictions and extremes. To her, life was about style, and style was born from extremes.

When I woke up the next morning, I was surprised to find that despite the end-of-the-world nuclear war that had just occurred, everything looked the same. I looked around and didn't see any of the radiation damage I had heard about at school. Nothing was glowing. There were no large craters in our front yard, no mushroom clouds on the horizon.

Just like every other morning, Mr. Woodpecker was trying to peck a hole in the side of our roof. The malaleuca tree outside my window was giving off its customary morning medicinal smell that made me feel as if I was living inside a dentist's office. The air had that particular October clarity and brilliance found only with the tropical light of Miami. The fact that my father was on the verge of toxic death and that my mother was confused and angry seemed to be just a bad dream as the morning light flooded my bedroom.

I went out to the lanai, an architectural import from Hawaii that allows you to live completely open to the tropical elements and still have a stable roof over your head, to start my day. As usual, the parakeets that we let fly around the house were perched in the trees of our indoor garden, chirping away. Then, approaching the dining table, I noticed that my regular bowl of Trix had been replaced by a bowl of cold brown rice. This was neither a good sign nor a pretty sight. Rice was only for dinner, and it should be snow white. Somehow in this new world order of Castro versus the United States of America and the invisible dangers of sanpaku, our meals had been mistakenly inverted. I had never even seen brown rice before. To me it looked like a bowl of small worms. I wondered where my father got this stuff—certainly not at the local Food Fair.

Pop sat at the other end of the table, quietly chewing his brown rice. He was so engrossed in his anti-sanpaku breakfast that he didn't even notice me. Gone was our normal routine of cereal, eggs, Canadian bacon, fresh orange juice, and toasted bialys. Between last night and this morning, my father had become a different person. Instantly I knew that all my fun as a kid was about to end.

At the age of ten, I was not about to sit down and simply be the only acid-balanced, nontoxic macrobiotic kid in all of Miami. I wanted a breakfast that was multicolored, made noise, and had been seen on TV. I took another look at that rice and laid my head on the table and closed my eyes, hoping it would all just go away. If nonviolent protest worked for Gandhi, it sure as hell was going to work for me. Or so I thought. As the minutes passed, I peeked to see if the rice had been removed. Nope. That rice was going to sit there as long as I did. I was not going to get my way on this one. It was unusual for my father to be so adamant about something so small. When it came to the day-today details of my upbringing, he largely deferred to my mother. She was mainly concerned with tangible, external aspects of my character. First and foremost I should always be a deferential gentleman, which included holding doors open for ladies of all ages, never arguing over money, always picking up the check, and treating everyone with respect. My father, on the other hand, cared only about the intangible, internal aspects of my being such as indulging and fostering an unlimited imagination, learning to listen to and heed my own inner voice, always being honest with myself and others, and, above all, following my dreams, the most precious of all commodities.

Not acknowledging that something was terribly wrong at our breakfast table, Mom arrived and automatically went into her everyday routine: Folgers instant coffee with two saccharin tablets and a Metracal shake, accompanied by Camel cigarettes before, during, and after. She liked any food that came in a jar and could be mixed with water or swallowed as a pill—one of the major offshoots of the nascent space program. To her all this instant stuff was terribly sophisticated and very modern. After a perfect, modern breakfast for a modern mom, she was ready for the world.

She probably got this idea from reading something in
Life
magazine about some minor starlet who started her day with this exact breakfast regimen. In her mind she was constantly auditioning for whatever dramatic role was necessary at that particular moment: glamorous wife, nightclub swinger, civil rights activist, patron of the arts, socialite. In addition to her long nights in offshore casinos, Mom eventually marched on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr., spoke knowingly about Pollock and de Kooning, and investigated starting a halfway house for drug addicts. She liked being in the forefront of the tides of cultural change. There was a particular cinematic logic to her thinking and how she lived her life—as if she were on camera twenty-four hours a day.

While in starlet mode, she wore sunglasses at all hours of the day and night. Glamour was her first name, and style was her last. Mom had an incredible radar for the latest fashions and somehow by osmosis was able to integrate them into her wardrobe, her speech, or her mannerisms as required. She always knew which way the fashion winds were blowing long before they ever hit the pages of
Vogue.

At this point in their marriage, Mom perfectly complemented my father both personally and professionally. She was attractive, vivacious, and very comfortable around people with large sums of disposable income who wanted a new bedroom designed for the yacht or a whimsical folly created in back of the house facing the Gulf of Mexico.

My mother enjoyed the social whirl of the small, incestuous fraternity of the decorating world. As second in command, she would do the books, handle difficult clients, and occasionally make grand, sweeping pronouncements that determined the direction of a particular design scheme. At just the right moment, Mom would interrupt a client conference that was going nowhere due to indecision and say with absolute confidence, “Why, Mrs. Parker, I think your house done in black-and-white with a touch of red would be
too
divine.”

Mom became a destination for all the decorators along the street. As if on some predetermined flight plan, they would come zooming into Pop's office with their wings flapping and drop the latest gossip on my mother. She worked the office like it was her private booth at the Brown Derby. Squeals of delight escaped her mouth as some decorator whispered to her, “…and then Marty said to Mrs. Worthington, ‘Excuse me, Mrs. Worthington, but the Salvation Army wouldn't take those chairs even if you paid them, so let's just save you the effort and throw them in the trash right now. After all, that's all those chairs are anyway, nothing but
trash
. Now, I want those chairs out of here
immediately
…'”

“Oh, I don't believe he said that; he didn't really, did he? So what did Mrs. Worthington say?”

“Well, that's just the beginning. So then Mrs. Worthington said to Mary—I mean Marty…”

And on it went. As the gabfest continued, my father would sketch out new designs for furniture or talk on the phone with clients. My mother was all ears while Pop ignored the gossiping magpies and focused on serious issues, such as whether the piping on a sofa should be magenta or mustard. Occasionally when he went out to meet with a new client, my mother, left alone in the studio, not only held court but would often attract new clients. She had a way, which she never really appreciated, of convincing people with just a few simple phrases that there was a better, chicer, more glamorous way of designing the dining room than what they currently had. And while they were at it, a new sunroom, cabana, and draperies for all twelve rooms wouldn't be such a bad idea, would it?

If it hadn't been for my mother, my father would have been just a plain old heterosexual decorator dressed in dreary suits. Instead she convinced him to wear custom suits and artisan-made jewelry, and drive jazzy cars. She set the tone for all of us. Her style was accepted and admired by my father and his circle, but the outside world was another story.

Those southern hicks had no idea what had just whooshed by them as she glided through the A&P with her black patent leather heels, oversized sunglasses the shade of midnight, her black patent leather pocketbook the size of a small footlocker, massive gold and jade earrings, rings on practically every finger, a small pillbox hat wrapped in black iridescent feathers that looked like crows' wings, and, of course, her gold cigarette holder with an unlit Camel projecting from it. Believe me, at just four-feet-nine, she did not go unnoticed.

From the moment she woke up until she turned off the switch of the Venetian chandelier above their bed, my mother lived as if she were constantly walking into a movie premiere—hers. Any movie was a glamour event, even at the downscale Tropicaire Drive-in Theatre, where an entire car packed with eight people watched a movie for fifty cents, or for free, if you had ten RC Cola bottle caps. At the Tropicaire, we would put down the convertible top, hook the speaker to the window, and watch the movie under the stars. Paradise.

Mom, wearing her darkest sunglasses, always sat straight up in rapt attention, completely absorbed in the film, while Pop and I would swat mosquitoes. Mom was too engrossed in the movie to be bitten. The bugs knew enough to leave her alone. She explained her natural immunity simply as, “I'm too sour for them.” Eventually I would fall asleep in that little concave area where the top went down while my parents sat through double features such as
Gypsy
and
Hatari!
Though Mom pulled off her starlet pose with great panache, occasionally it was a bit too much even for my father. At times, for what he felt was her own good, he would admonish her in an attempt to bring her back to earth. “How can you see a thing with those damn glasses on?” he would say. His practicality only encouraged her to buy another dozen pair. This, in essence, was the yin and yang of my parents' relationship. Mom was always ready for her close-up, while my father was ready for his blast-off to other dimensions.

When Mom got dressed in the morning, it required more effort, concentration, and theatricality than any Broadway star preparing for opening night. Pop had already risen with the birds, had his breakfast, and left for the office. For my mother, her first two waking hours were spent slowly digesting her black coffee and cigarettes. The social column was usually read out loud to no one in particular, with appropriate emphasis when either her or my father's name appeared.

Even her dinner parties made the
Miami News
's “Party Camera” column, with “Buffet supper celebrating completion of their pentagon-shaped dream house was given by Lew Smith and his wife Esther.” The black-and-white photograph shows Mom dishing out her creation to a waiting line of hungry decorators. Below the story is another photograph of “Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Mimms swinging in Lew Smith's backyard.” Hmmm.

If my father had a particularly favorable write-up, she'd lean over to his side of the bed, pick up the phone, and dial the office. “Guess what Kay wrote about your new designs for the Allen residence? Uh-huh, yes…but she didn't mention that fabulous revolving bar that you had designed at poolside. Ummm, only three photographs, but at least one's in color on the front page. No, she didn't show the master bedroom, only the living room. Okay, enough chitchat, I haven't even put my face on yet, let me go…” After the daily news briefing, she then would fiddle with the crossword puzzle for a half hour while the gold cigarette holder dangled from her red lips long after the cigarette had been extinguished.

There were times when she would throw the society page across the room in a fit of rage. After having just had lunch with Frank Lloyd Wright at an American Institute of Architects event, she was justifiably furious when the paper mistakenly quoted the maestro. “Listen, what he said to me during dessert was that he thought Miami was nothing but a future slum. You don't think they'd put
that
in the paper, do you? Of course not. They're nothing but a bunch of cultural illiterates. They wouldn't know great architecture if it fell on them. But that's exactly what he said to me. And instead they print some meaningless trash. Did they mention that little pat on the back that he gave to Alfred Browning Parker, which should have been more of a hug? After all, he was one of Frank's best students at Taliesin. No, they're too stupid to understand the symbolism of that gesture. Alfred is a genius. And he knows how to pick them; that's why Alfred works with your father on the interiors. Honestly, I need to get that editor on the phone…” But that call would have to wait; she needed to focus on her jewelry fitting. Would it be black pearls and jade or just plain emeralds today? Mom was lucky: her sea captain brother, Max, used to roam the world and would pick up a few precious “rocks” in every port. My father would then have one of his jeweler friends fashion them into massive gold-encrusted works of art that doubled as both conversation pieces and lethal weapons.

My mother did not have to color-coordinate her jewelry to that day's outfit, since she wore the same black dress every day. Her closet was filled with rows and rows of identical little black cocktail dresses, all made by her mother from an old Dior pattern that she had bought from the back pages of
Vogue
. It was a kind of uniform, as she served in the fashion army on the front lines of style.