Читать книгу In the Belly of Her Ghost - Colin Dayan - Страница 7

You Go to My Head

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AFTER I LEFT HOME for good, I would open a dresser drawer, and out would come the sound of my mother’s laughter. Her laugh was not a giggle, but a snort and shriek. She laughed at Pépé le Moko, her poodle, when he humped the legs of visitors. I wish I had asked her why she called a randy, albino dog with squinting eyes and freckled pink skin by the name of Jean Gabin’s impertinent and alluring gangster. She laughed at dirty jokes, or when she heard a ribald comedian like Belle Barth. In what my mother called “the back den,” she played a motley set of records for her three closest friends — Zenobia, CG, and Molly: If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends, along with Nancy Wilson’s Yesterday’s Love Songs, Today’s Blues, and Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely. She loved his “Blues in the Night” with its warning: “My Mama done tol’ me,” and droned his lament for nature gone wrong: “The evening breeze will start the trees to cryin’/And the moon’ll hide its light/When you get the blues in the night.”

The ladies were gorgeous. Zenobia was tall with black hair piled high. Everyone talked about her drinking too much, but they said she was Indian and couldn’t help it. She always stood apart from the crowd, though men circled around her. “Like moths to a flame,” my mother said. CG was a regular item of gossip. Blonde and muscular, she taught me how not to be too feminine. She golfed as well as a man, and after the game, she always drank in the Oak Room, the one room at the Standard Town and Country Club that was off-limits to women. I remember she sat on men’s laps, but I might just be imagining it. Her legs held a particular fascination for me. I have never forgotten the buoyancy of those blonde hairs.

My mother’s closest friend, Molly, used to walk into the den, look at me, smile and say with her head tilted to one side, the voice gliding down like molasses, “Gone possum hunting.” She was tall, too stout to be statuesque, and wore a lot of make-up. As a child I wondered why she looked at me the way she did and why she spent so much time saying “possum,” which she drew out into a sound like “paws some,” her mouth turned into a tight oval, pink and wet. “Gonna eat me some possum, ain’t nothing so sweet,” Molly crooned, adding in a lowdown voice, “They got pussy and the men are going after it.” Men talking about a hunt, whether for possum or pussy, it didn’t matter much. That’s what she thought of their ways of loving you. Pussy and possum, that’s about as close as I can get to my sense of the South: sticky, hot, and unusually cruel.

One night my father sat down by my bed and showed me a picture of lemmings. Thousands of these warm-bodied creatures were darting over cliffs and into the sea. He told me that they were lemmings, Norwegian, lemmus lemmus, who for reasons no one knew killed themselves by rushing away from their homes, running through the woods, and finally drowning themselves in the dark waters below. They appeared before me as if in a dream, a blur of fur and feet bounding down the mud bank and into the creek behind my house. I never forgot their headlong plunge into oblivion. It appears before me as something momentous and beguiling. My father always found ways to link what he reckoned as love and the death of animals.

Death hung around my house. No way around fate, that’s what my mother told me. “Once something bad happens, it will happen again.” My rabbits ate their babies. I buried my turtles alive, thinking they had died when they were just in hibernation. My mother’s canary drowned in a glass of orange juice. My hamster got stuck and died behind the stove. A car ran Pépé down one afternoon when my mother left the door open. A neighbor’s German Shepherd attacked Johnny the Pekingese — the dog we left outside — and bit his neck so hard that his eyes popped out. One eye was put back in. Everyone called him One-Eyed Johnny. A few years later Johnny was adopted by one of my mother’s friends. She renamed him Precious, kept him in her bed with lace sheets, and told everyone he was her sacred lapdog from China.

Everything happened to the tune of Sinatra’s singing, his chic and casual disregard: “Witchcraft,” and “Those fingers in my hair.” I took a deep breath. “That sly come-hither stare.” Perhaps that was the problem. Even in a lament for a woman he loved now lost, there’s a boozy kind of pleasure, a lingering sense of sex. I had a strange feeling in my stomach when I stood at the top of the stairs and saw my father in the basement taking what he called “dazzle photos” of my mother sitting spread-legged on a stool wearing a corset. She had ordered the corset and a push-up bra from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

I began to repeat words prayed on the Day of Atonement to ward off evil and temptation. “But repentance, prayer, and righteousness shall avert the severe decree.” I read Ezekiel and thought about dry bones. They could save me from the stench of flesh. One afternoon I walked into the den and saw my mother undressed again, this time right

down to her bra and panties, sitting on Bernard’s lap, with a bottle of Chivas in her hand. Bernard was married to the woman who took on Johnny the Pekingese.

But there was another side to my mother, a woman who believed in undying love. “The Lady of Camellias.” Not the woman who told me, “A rich man is just as easy to love as a poor man.” Back I go into her voice, into the song she repeated again and again, only a few lines of it, when I least expected her to break into song.

Our Love,

I feel it everywhere.

Through the nighttime

It is a message of the breeze.

I can hear it

In every whisper of the trees.

And so, you’re always near to me

Wherever you may be.

I see

Your face in the stars above.

In the sitting room of the Standard Town and Country Club, my father took a photo of her.

Set atop greensward with a challenging golf course, swimming pool, and tennis courts surrounded by woods, the Club was the Jewish answer to the exclusive Cherokee Town and Country Club and Piedmont Driving Club, which allowed only white Christians: blondes with long straight hair, the easy confidence of good breeding, a heritage of immaculate inclusion that was never at risk.

I never forgot the way my mother looked on Saturday night: diamonds, martini in hand, overly plucked eyebrows and tightly controlled hair. Not expectant or appreciative, but quite still in her elaborate, almost fleshless articulation of what should be ease but instead seems brittle, a woman hobbled by my father’s devotion. Her face, though beautiful, seemed dead, as if the smile has been held too long.

The South was not kind to my mother. It lured her with what she could never be part of, a community of women that would always be closed. I look at the pale gossamer creatures with faces never threatened with sweat; and the lonelier I become the more I understand the texture of discrimination.

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Sometime around 1963, I began to feel angry and mean. I was just 13 years old, but my mother’s friends said I looked older. My wild, tangled hair and serious demeanor made me unpopular. Whether at home or in school, I never fit in. “You’ll be left holding the bag.” My mother looked at me with eyes dead as glass and warned: if I didn’t want to “end up behind the eight-ball,” which I always heard as “ape-ball,” then “you better stop talking politics. Men don’t like that. You look like a dried prune.” I was alone except for an odd little boy who used to whisper: “I would like to know” — a long pause here — “if you would like to go” — another pause — “to the woods.” To escape the lust of ladies and a little boy’s lure, I spent my time memorizing songs from Broadway shows. Years have passed, but I still remember every song. When I think back to that time, I realize how much my life was shaped and determined by words like “I wonder what the king is doing tonight,” “Let me entertain you, let me make you smile,” “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait,” “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette, till your last dyin’ day.”

Now, sometimes driving in the heat of Nashville, I begin to sing and think how much my confusion about the difference between real life and fantasy began in those lonely afternoons in Atlanta.

Not just because of a fair lady, street gangs in New York, or a good-hearted stripper — though I liked to imitate Natalie Wood as “Gypsy Rose Lee,” not quite taking off her clothes. Most of the time I pretended to be a dying swan like Margot Fonteyn, who soared with her pale, almost transparent arms rising high and coming down like wings in Swan Lake. Once in bed, late at night, I couldn’t stop thinking about Christine Keeler and her pale long legs in the backseat of a limo. “Profumo,” my mother whispered to her friend on the phone, as she reveled in the scandal that brought disgrace on Tory cabinet minister John Profumo. “He was nearly bald,” she laughed, and “any man who looked like that got what he deserved.” For the next few months, amid their drinks and laughter, I heard my mother and her friends talk about Keeler, as if she had once been their dear friend, a woman they admired for her naughtiness. They all agreed that she was too beautiful not to be destroyed by those who had wealth but no pity.

Maybe it was all just too much, the cottonmouth water-moccasins in the creek, the giant mosquitoes called “gabber-nipples” or “gallon-nippers” on the wall, the mother drunk on the sofa, the crickets rubbing their legs at dusk, the yellow and white honeysuckle I sucked dry. After tearing off the part that holds the petals together, I found the delicate string, pulled it out, and tasted the nectar like honey. “Kill the flower,” a neighbor used to say, “and you’ll taste something real sweet.” He hunted possum, cut up snakes, and took the legs off daddy long leg spiders so I could watch the ball of a body bouncing on the dirt.

Here in Nashville, I remember what had seemed long faded away. It’s enough like the Atlanta I knew as a child to make me feel cornered. Unease, a state of mind that is close to panic, overcomes me when I least expect it. Old rules of behavior beset me, even when walking down the street. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” Whenever I see a twig, a piece of paper, anything at all on a crack, I stop and move it with my foot, as nonchalantly as I can. Seeing spiders that appear in all shapes and sizes, I know with absolute certainty that if I kill one, I’ll be punished. “Don’t you kill that spider if you want to live,” Lucille said. Wedged in the corners of windows or dropping down before me, they hang in the air, whether dead or alive no matter. They’re everywhere.

In the South, domesticity and chatter and ease are almost always accompanied by something gross. The sweetest memory depends on the shattered life of whatever is granted neither leisure nor mercy. In Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate,” Lester Maddox took up the Confederate flag, iron skillets, and axe handles at his Pickrick Restaurant to block “colored folk” or those he called “heathen rascals” and “race mixers” from entry. During the first lunch counter sit-ins, my father’s friend Charlie Lebedin dragged the Reverend Ashton Jones by his feet, across the floor and out the door of his Leb’s restaurant at 66 Luckie Street, on the corner of Forsyth. He paid white crackers to kick and spit at black student protestors; then he turned off the lights and locked the demonstrators inside. My anger about this further divided me from my parents, who tried to ignore it all, and I watched their irritation with me turn to disdain. They didn’t want me around.

I was 13 when Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail, and four girls died in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing there, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. Malcolm X suffered Elijah Muhammad’s discipline of public silence after he described Kennedy’s murder as a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.” A week after his assassination, Liberace in satin and diamonds appeared with Cassius Clay on The Jack Paar Show. Clay had not yet become Mohammed Ali. But in 1964, after he punched out Sonny Liston in six rounds, I danced through the house, jumped up and down, shouting: “I am the greatest.” “

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Only two people mattered to me, and they are still on my mind: Thomas, the yardman who killed the chickens I had raised at my father’s command, and Lucille, the woman who raised me, and, I almost wrote, “the love of my life.” So, it’s done. I’ve said it. She is close by even now. When she walked into our house in Atlanta for her interview, I was just a baby, and my mother used to tell me how I climbed up into her lap and clung to her like a “barnacle” that couldn’t be “pried off.” If it hadn’t been for her, I would be dead. I’m sure of it.

I hear my mother ringing the bronze bell my father brought back from Czechoslovakia in 1946. In the morning when she awakened, she called for Lucille to bring her breakfast in bed. I still see the little peeing boy and hear the tinkling sound of the bell, a “bronze replica,” my father said, “of the main fountain in the center of Prague.”

Taking photos satisfied my father’s sense of control, photos of the peeing boy and my smiling mother, of a beggar on the curb in the Bowery and women bending down as they scrubbed their clothes on the rocks in Mexico.

Lucille stood up to him. Lucille gave me joy. She walked around the house humming. Outside on a late spring afternoon, she spoke out loud the names of bushes, flowers, trees, and vines. We talked about lightning bugs, black widow spiders, daddy long legs, dried-out shells of June bugs left on trees, the difference between crickets and cicadas. She taught me the kind of dread that was also desire: the longing to go out of this world and know what can’t be seen. She brought ghosts into my bedroom, the dead man in the closet, the white woman who appeared trying to get her hand through the screen of my window. When the trains passed, she told me to listen to them and behave, “‘cause they were carrying the souls of orphans who cried out in the night.”

Out back, Lucille conjured up love songs that only I could hear. When she wasn’t crooning, she taught me how to recognize the ghosts that mattered most to her: little girls bit by spiders, husbands whose legs were torn off by scythes in the field or lost in the wheels of cotton mills, white women whom lust had worn down like the heels of her shoes.

One spring morning in 1960 Lucille heard about the students from Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, and Clark colleges. They were still sitting in protest against segregation at 10 lunch counters and cafeterias throughout the city of Atlanta. My father came home, mad “as a two-legged bat,” Lucille said, after he couldn’t have lunch at Leb’s Restaurant downtown because of the sit-ins. Lucille stayed in the kitchen and refused to speak to anyone for three hours. She cursed those “pig-eyed juveniles” making trouble. Thomas called her a “house slave, who’d die with nothing in her hands but her white lies.” She took her lighter, flicked it on and chased him, flame glinting, out of the house and down Plymouth Road.

A few months later, I heard Lucille tell him: “I don’t want you round here, go on and get your fool self to Birmingham,” which for her meant dynamite, blood, and riots. But Thomas never kept quiet. “You can fall in a ditch and stay there till I go,” he said. He wanted me to know about South Georgia, where he used to make 25 cents a day at a sawmill in 1939. Before that, he worked as a sharecropper, but said he had decided not long after he’d been whipped, “cut till the blood stopped dripping,” that he’d never work on a farm again. “I wouldn’t tell a mule good morning,” he used to repeat. Years later, I understood that this was his response to the dubious gift to freed slaves of “40 acres and a mule.” At 82, not long after Lucille had died, he remembered: “You couldn’t tip your hat to a white woman. You’d get the chair. They’d break your neck. You wouldn’t raise your head. Did, you wouldn’t take it down.”