Читать книгу Then Again - Diane Keaton - Страница 8

Not in the Cards

When I was little, I didn’t get my dad. He did nothing but remind me to turn off the lights, shut the refrigerator door, and eat what Mom cooked or I’d have to sleep in the garage. He wore the same gray jacket and striped tie to the Department of Water and Power every day. He said, “Drink all your milk; it gives you strong bones,” “Be sure to say please and thank you,” and, always, “Ask questions.” Why was he like that? Over and over I would ask Mom. Over and over she would say he was busy and had a lot of important things on his mind. He had things on his mind? What were they? She didn’t help me understand my father at all. The only clue lived a few miles away, but everyone was afraid of her, and I was no exception.

It wasn’t Grammy Keaton; oh, no, it was all five feet ten inches of stern-faced brown-haired Grammy Hall. She used to say she didn’t cotton to dressing up in a lot of gay colors, ’cause she “occupied a lot of space” and wanted everybody to see her “plain.” Grammy Keaton said the reason Dad had rickets was because Mrs. Hall hadn’t fed him the kind of nutritious food that would have made his legs straight; instead, they bowed backward, like a sailboat. She wasn’t wrong.

Even though Grammy Hall lived close to Grammy Keaton, they did not become friends. It was easy to see why. Grammy Hall’s face was lined with skepticism, while Grammy Keaton’s was filled with faith. Every Sunday, Grammy Keaton baked angel food cake with seven-minute frosting, served with homemade ice cream and lemonade in tall glasses. Once a year, Grammy Hall made devil’s food cake from a mix. Grammy Keaton was a God-fearing Christian woman. Grammy Hall was a devout Catholic. Grammy Keaton believed in heaven. Grammy Hall thought it was “a lot of bunk.”

After her husband disappeared in the 1920s, Mary Alice Hall drove from Nebraska to California with her son, Jack, and her sister Sadie beside her. It couldn’t have been easy being a boy without a father in the twenties. Mary Hall offered no explanations. There’s still some question whether Dad was a bastard or if in fact, as Mary claimed, Chester had died before Jack was born. Whatever the truth, Mary, a tough, no-nonsense Irish Catholic, picked herself up and waved goodbye to her eleven brothers and sisters, her mother, her father, and the broken-down family farm in Nebraska. She didn’t look back.

Nobody knows where she got the money to buy a two-unit Spanish duplex just a few blocks north of the new 110 freeway, but she did. Mary leased out the bottom floor to her sister Sadie, Sadie’s husband, Eddie, and their change-of-life son, Cousin Charlie. Mary shared the second floor with George Olsen, who rented the bedroom at the end of the hallway, next to Dad’s room. It wasn’t clear what George meant to Mary. No one asked. Grammy did not invite questions about her personal life.

Mary lived at 5223 Range View Avenue until she died in the dining room, the same dining room Mom and Dad dragged us to every Thanksgiving. One year I snuck down the hall, went into her bedroom, carefully opened her chest of drawers, and found a bunch of quarters shoved into several pairs of old socks. I was so excited I even told Cousin Charlie, who couldn’t be bothered with me since we’d had a fight over his stupid Catholic God. He said I was an idiot and a bunch of quarters was chicken feed compared to the sacks of hundred-dollar bills he’d found stuffed under the floor-boards in her coat closet.

Grammy was more man than woman, and looked it. She loved to describe herself as a self-made businesswoman who took in boarders. “What interests me is the world of commerce. I like to make a lot of money and make it quick.” In fact, Mary Alice Hall was a loan shark, who shamelessly went around the neighborhood collecting currency at high interest rates from people who were down on their luck. She had one goal in life: the acquisition and retention of cash, lots of it. This “make no bones about it” attitude applied to her choice of a newspaper as well. She proudly subscribed to the Herald Express, “a paper aimed at the underside of the community, the kind of people who wanted to know about murders and UFOs and sports results.” She wasn’t highfalutin. She understood people who disappeared into the thin air of a lousy marriage, a failed bank account, or a petty crime. Why wouldn’t she want to read about the plethora of commonplace sad stories that made up most people’s lives?

Mary’s idea of motherhood was simple: If Jack misbehaved, she locked him in the closet and walked away. Nothing more. Nothing less. When her good-for-nothing card-shark brother Emmet was down on his luck, she made little Jackie share a room with him. She must have figured, what the hell, she could use the extra money. According to Dad, Emmet was immoral. Right before Dad enrolled at USC, Emmet cheated him out of a hundred dollars. They didn’t speak for two years, even though they continued to share the same room. Dad hated Emmet, but their forced alliance produced something positive. Jack Hall did not become a lying cheat like his stinky-cigar-smoking uncle.

Dad never knew his father’s first name. As with everyone else, he didn’t ask. Mary made sure no one mentioned a man called Chester. Aunt Sadie followed her marching orders and kept her mouth shut. Mom too. The last thing Dorothy wanted was a confrontation with her mother-in-law. Stirring it up with Mary Alice Hall was not worth it. The mystery remained unsolved until I discovered a newspaper article in Mom’s file cabinet.

Wife Hunts 9 Years for Husband;

Asks for Insurance.

Monday June 23, 1930. Positive He’s Dead,

She Declares; Husband Vanished Three Months

After Marriage.

Somewhat like Evangeline was Mrs. Mary Hall. Only she didn’t stick it out as long as the girl of the romantic verse. She searched from coast to coast, seeking Chester N. Hall, who nine years ago left her, when she was his bride in Omaha. She never heard from him and believed him dead. “Because if he were alive he would surely come back to me,” the woman said. “Our love was a great one.”

This is the story told in Mrs. Hall’s petition filed through Attorney Harry Hunt, wherein she is seeking to have Hall declared legally dead so that she may collect $1,000 in life insurance.

On July 26, 1921, three months after their marriage, Hall came home to her, melancholy and depressed. He had a good job, and the wife could not understand. “About 9 o’clock, said the wife, “he took up his hat and said he was going to a movie. He never came back.” Mrs. Hall came to California with their son, Jack, 4 years ago. She said she had made every effort to locate Hall.

Before Jack Newton Ignatius Hall grew up and became a civil engineer, he was Mary Hall’s little Jackie. One can only imagine what that was like. She had balls or, as my son, Duke, would say, “a big old nut sack.” Before Dad sliced and diced the land for housing developments in Orange County during the sixties and seventies, he was just a kid with his nose pressed against a window, watching his mother play poker until midnight in one of the gambling boats off Catalina. Before he spearheaded the design of curbs and gutters that kept water flowing safely to storm drains, he was also a high diver on the USC diving team. As an adult, Jack Hall took pride in severing the earth into blocks of mathematical reason.

Sometimes I wonder if Dad decided to become a civil engineer because it gave him the illusion that he could change something as big and unpredictable as the earth. As a boy he learned he would never be able to change his mother. Mary Hall was never going to hold him tight, or praise him, or wipe away his tears. Closeness wasn’t in the cards. Maybe that’s why he turned his efforts to that other mother, Mother Earth. Now that I think about it, it helps me understand how Dad related, or didn’t relate, to Mom and us kids.

Once in a while he would try to inject himself into Dorothy’s inner circle: us. After all, he was our father. But how was it possible to fit in with his hard-to-understand children and his high-strung, sensitive wife? Every night Dad came home to his family, and every night we’d stop what we were doing as soon as he walked through the door and present a friendly if distant wall of silence. I’m sorry to say we never extended an invitation to join us. Dad seemed to accept it, just as he’d accepted it from his mother.

Three Stories

Dad told us kids exactly three stories about growing up, and no more. There was the story about how when he was little he had rickets so bad he had to wear braces. There was the story about how Grammy Hall made him play the clarinet in Colonel Parker’s marching band, even though he couldn’t stand the clarinet. And there was his favorite story: the story about meeting Mom at a Los Angeles Pacific College basketball game when they were nineteen, and how he knew right then and there that she was the only woman in the world for him. Dad’s ending was always the same: “Six months later your Mudd and I eloped in Las Vegas.” And that was it. Or, as Mary would say, the past schmast.

Three Memories

When I was nine, Dad taught me how to open a pomegranate. He took a knife, sliced around the circumference, laid his hands on either side, and popped it open. Inside was a chestful of garnets—my birthstone. I bit into the pomegranate. Fifty red gems came crashing into my mouth all at once. It was like biting into both heaven and earth.

There wasn’t a family excursion that didn’t lead to the ocean. It didn’t matter if we were camping in Guaymas, or Ensenada, or up the coast past Santa Barbara; every evening Dad would sit down and stare into his acquiescent friend, the Pacific Ocean. Evening was Dad’s designated few moments of peace. As I got older, I would join him with a glass of 7Up with ice. We would sit in silence. Then: “Your mother sure is a beauty.” “Your Mudd—God, do I love her or what?” “Di-annie, do me a favor and be sure to tell your mother what a delicious meal she made.” Compliments were Dad’s way to whitewash his guilt about Mom’s submissive role. He worried about Dorothy, just not enough to change the way he went about living with her. He never contemplated a different approach. As he stared into the ocean, he must have tossed a lifetime of apologies into its silence. Maybe he thought the tide would wash his troubles away.

I thought I was dying. I couldn’t breathe. Asthma was bad enough, but this whooping-cough thing was way worse. When Dad turned me upside down, I got my breath back almost instantaneously. It was like a miracle. Mom was so worried, she kept me out of school for two months of my fourth-grade year. Every day she spread Vicks VapoRub on my chest, and she gave me 7Up with ice hourly. Sometimes she’d even let me watch TV. One night Dad and I saw a drama about a really old lady whose Seeing Eye dog was run over by a truck. I asked Dad why God let a dog die for nothing. He told me not to be scared. That seemed weird, because I’d heard Mom tell Auntie Martha that Dad passed out when he got pricked by a rose earlier that afternoon. I never thought of Dad as a fraidy-cat. After all, he’d saved my life. And it seemed mean of God to let the really old lady on TV lose her dog when she was going to die soon enough anyway. So I asked Dad, “Why do old people have to die just because they’re old?” He put me on his lap and said, “Old people have already had long lives, so they’re prepared for death. Don’t worry, they’re fine, Di-annie.” He gave me a kiss, put me down, and told me to get ready for bed. That night I heard Mom and Dad talking behind closed doors. Maybe Dad felt safe with Mom, safe enough to tell her about scary things like roses that made him faint, or the story of a beloved dog dying from a stupid accident, or just being old.

Think Positive

Dad found his version of the Bible, well, two bibles, in Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I guess that’s why he talked in clichés peppered with catchphrases like “think positive.” As a girl, I repeated it over and over in hopes that I would learn to think and also be positive. When I asked Dad why it didn’t seem to do any good, he’d always say, “Try again.” But what was positive? And, even more important, what was think? I wanted to know. As usual he told me to keep asking, and as usual I followed his advice.

We moved into the beige board-and-batten tract home surrounded by acres and acres of orange groves at 905 North Wright Street, Santa Ana. It was 1957. The utopia Southern California held out to those of us who grew up in the fifties was irresistible. We believed happiness would come from owning a Buick station wagon, a speedboat, and a Doughboy swimming pool. It didn’t take long before the orange groves started disappearing in favor of more developments, with names like Sun Estate Homes. Leveling the Orange out of Orange County made me sad, and I told Dad. His response was concise. “That’s life, Diane, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” In my own misbegotten way, I bought into his belief of living out the American dream, but the loss of the orange trees lingered.

The move to Santa Ana was my prelude to adolescence. Not only was I going to be a young woman; Dad started telling me how pretty I’d be and how some boy would love me all up, and wouldn’t that be fun? I didn’t want any boy loving me, not at all, not for a second. I began to formulate how much better it would be if a lot of people loved me instead of one confusing, hard-to-understand boy. This barely realized notion, among others, unwittingly helped drive me toward acting. Many of Dad’s messages became justifications for seeking an audience in lieu of intimacy. Intimacy, like drinking and smoking, was something you had to watch out for. Intimacy meant only one person loved you, not thousands, not millions. It made me think of Mom on that stage at the Ambassador Hotel and Dad’s unhappiness about having to share her with others.

We found our way to better conversations after I won a debate at Willard Junior High School. Thus began many nightly discourses over solutions to family problems and local politics. Dad was a Republican. He argued for lower taxes and better behavior. Mom, a determined Democrat, believed in higher taxation and more leniency with us kids. I chose to argue in her defense. What happened in the heat of our deliberations became a determining factor in my future. The more intense things became, the better I argued my point. Following my impulses did something wildly exciting; it triggered thought. Fighting for something within the safety of a formal context became my path to personal expression, but, more important, it gave me the opportunity to know Dad in a different way. He was a great debater. And fun too. It wasn’t the subject or the content of our deliberations; it was the shared experience that meant so much. I couldn’t care less if I lost. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a turning point in my relationship with my dad. I was learning how to navigate something new: Dad’s mind.

C-Minus

In my fourteenth year, Mom handed me “My Diary” after a parent-teacher meeting in the eighth grade. It was her way of addressing my C-minus in English. I had been put in the so-called dumbbell section, with bilingual Mexican girls, bad boys, and drifty dreamy types like me. Bound together by a lack of skills, the buxom Mexican girls and I became friends. They took prepubescent, big-personality Diane under their wing. They were kind and generous and a great audience to my pratfalls. After three years in remedial English, I still didn’t know a conjunction from a preposition or a proper noun from a common noun. In those days there were no alternative teaching methods to help kids like us. I had a lot of feelings, but I didn’t understand what we were being taught. Were we even being taught? I don’t think so. I think we were being “dumped.” Mom was not a stickler for homework. She was more comfortable addressing my aspirations. For example, it was her idea to black out my teeth when I auditioned for the talent show with “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” When I was a Melodette, she advised me to approach Mr. Anderson, our choirmaster, about singing duets like “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” before trying to convince him I could handle “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along” as a solo. Mom encouraged all of my performing-based activities, but that parent-teacher meeting must have convinced her that “My Diary” would help teach me to respect the power of words.

Dear Diary,

I wish I had a boyfriend. Boys are never going to like me because I’m flat. Well, maybe one boy might, but I’m not sure. There’s Joe Gibbins, but he got caught sniffing glue today. Man. That’s really getting bad. I hope I never know another boy who does that. Not ever.

I wish I could sing like Megan. She gets to take lessons with Kenny Akin. And she gets all the solos too. Of course everyone thinks she’s neat. I’m going to ask Mom to let me take vocal lessons with Kenny Akin too. He puts on a lot of shows in Orange County.

Dear Diary,

Today, I went downtown with Virginia Odenath and Pat Amthor. All they did was talk to each other. Plus Pat told Virginia I like Larry Blair. I cannot stand one thing about her or her big fat mouth. And then of course Virginia couldn’t wait to tell me Larry likes Genene Seeton. Well, he can just have her. Not only that, some person predicted the world will end tomorrow, and I got a D on my Algebra test.

One good thing though, Mom said yes to the lessons. So, I’ll be singing with Megan at last. This is so neat.

Dear Diary,

I just don’t think it’s fair that Kenny Akin never lets me have a chance at a solo. I’m just a nothing around there. That’s for sure. Maybe my time hasn’t come yet. Oh well.

Dear Diary,

Today I found out that Megan is adopted, and her sister went insane and tried to kill herself. It was so sad. Why would anyone want to die? I wish no one ever had to die in the first place. It’s too scary. I pray to God that in heaven everyone is happy and can’t remember what it’s like to wish they wanted to kill themselves like Megan’s sister.

Dear Diary,

I finally got the nerve to ask a boy to the Girls Ask Boys dance. And he said he would go with me. Isn’t that neat? He’s in the popular crowd. He’s scads of fun. He always calls me “stupid.” Guess who it is? Ronnie McNeeley. I can’t wait to tell Mahala Hoien, my new best friend. His shirt size is 18. This is just about the neatest thing ever. The girls are supposed to make the boys a shirt that matches their blouse. Isn’t that just so cool?

Dear Diary,

The worst thing of all was the Girls Ask Boys dance. I thought it would be a blast. But it wasn’t. Ronnie acted like he was too good for me. He even asked Pat Amthor to dance instead of me. And he had the nerve to leave before the whole thing was over. I dispise (spell) him. He should have at least danced with me once. It’s awful. Boys just don’t like me. I’m not pretty enough.

Dear Diary,

For Christmas Kenny put on a production called Amahl and the Night Visitors. Megan was the lead. Boy, does everybody primp over her or what? For instance, Judy says, “Megan, are you cold?” Virginia says, “Megan, here, take my coat.” Meanwhile, I’m freezing. Do you think they’d offer me their coat?

Kenny had a long talk with me today and said that he would be using me a lot next year. And that someday I’d be a great comedian. Har de har.

Kenny Akin

Kenny Akin was known as “Mr. Music of Orange County.” He looked like a six-foot-four version of Howdy Doody without Buffalo Bob pulling the strings. Even though I couldn’t process the meaning of my student-teacher relationship with this larger-than-life character, I must have instinctively known he was a means to an end. Besides producing and directing Kismet, Oklahoma!, and Babes in Toyland, Kenny Akin managed his own voice-and-dramatics studio and portrayed leading tenor roles in numerous productions from Los Angeles to San Bernardino County. Kenny’s protégée, Megan, and I were both thirteen, but Megan was poised and attractive and had an all-out killer voice. No getting around it: Kenny thought Megan was as close to perfection as a person could be. In his eyes I was one thing only—WRONG.

Thank God he never bought into my brand of appeal. His rejection gave me the will to persist long enough to find a loophole that would force him to give me a chance. As always, my loophole was Mom. Over a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter, I told her how Kenny gave all the big parts to Megan. Mom didn’t say anything; she just shook her head. But I know for a fact she had a little chat with Mr. Akin, because a few days later I saw them through a crack in his study door. All I can say is Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall could be very convincing when it came to her children.

After Mother’s chat, I was assigned bit parts that led to Raggedy Ann in Babes in Toyland. I must have scored big, because Kenny started to take me more seriously. That’s when I started to take him less seriously. It wasn’t long before I told Mother I didn’t want to study with Kenny anymore. I’d learned all I needed to know from him. I couldn’t articulate my thoughts, but with enough experience under my belt, I’d learned how to hold my own at least long enough to find my way to an audience. The audience would decide my fate, not Mr. Kenny Akin. I always thought I’d be crushed by people who didn’t buy into me. But I wasn’t. There would be many Kenny Akinses who found themselves stuck with me whether they liked it or not.

Applause

There was no discussion with my parents on the night I sang “Mata Hari” in our Santa Ana High School production of the musical Little Mary Sunshine. Under the direction of our drama teacher, Mr. Robert Leasing, the production was worthy of Broadway—at least, that’s what it was like for me. I was Nancy Twinkle, the second lead, who loves to flirt with men. Little did I know that her big song, “Mata Hari,” would be a showstopper. I ran around the stage singing about the famous spy “who would spy and get her data by doing this and that-a,” ending with a grand finale featuring me sliding down a rope into the orchestra pit. That was when I heard the explosion. It was applause. When Mom and Dad found me backstage, their faces were beaming. Dad had tears in his eyes. I’d never seen him so excited. More than excited—surprised. That’s what it was. I could tell he was startled by his awkward daughter—the one who’d flunked algebra, smashed into his new Ford station wagon with the old Buick station wagon, and spent a half hour in the bathroom using up a whole can of Helene Curtis hairspray. For one thrilling moment I was his Seabiscuit, Audrey Hepburn, and Wonder Woman rolled into one. I was Amelia Earhart flying across the Atlantic. I was his heroine.

Later, Dad would boast about my career, but it was “Mata Hari” that became our watershed moment. There were no words. It was all—every timeless second—encapsulated in his piercing light-blue eyes. The ones Mom fell in love with. There was no going back.