Small Ironies

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

From Hollywood Spot Light: "Edna Ferber was invited to a studio to see a film that had been made from one of her manuscripts. 'It's a good picture,' she said afterward, 'but it isn't my story. I wonder if you'll let me buy my story back'" The movie magnates finally agreed to sell it back. 'But,' they said, 'you've got to give us an option on the movie rights.'" Walter Winchell

The hotel where my father worked, the year I was born, was the Excelsior Grand on West 38th Street. It was a reasonably fashionable place, especially for the opera singers at the Metropolitan - that's the old Met, not the new one, of course - because they could get back and forth easily, the stage door being only a block and a half away. My father knew many of them well. In fact, according to Briana, he knew two of them extremely well, close and well. It makes me laugh to think about that, because he knew nothing about their music, didn't even like it very much. There was a period of time, I was about twenty, when they had a subscription series at the Met - that's the new Met, not the old ne - and he always complained about going, literally begged me to take her. But it was the singers, not the songs, that held him in thrall in the 1940s.

"Helga says she can't stand the new line," he told my mother once when I was still an infant. It's a sentence I remember hearing, obviously not understanding, but hearing it anyway. What caught my ear in that first year of my life and stayed with me was the oddness of it, I suppose. I could recognize words, even grasp their meaning sometimes, but not restate them in any coherent fashion, a not unusual situation I suppose for a child of less than one year old. "Helga says she can't stand the new line." What could that mean? Even today I don't truly grasp the nuance, the hidden revelation.

Helga, it turned out, was the Wagnerian soprano my father had befriended at his hotel: Helga Meerstadt. And the "new line," what the hell was that? Clothing? Music? I never knew for sure. Now, now that I'm older and I fully understand the family history, the family profession, I wonder if that was a code, a buzz-word for some sexual by-play, something too outside the limits for Frau Meerstadt to indulge in during those idle hours in a room upstairs at the Excelsior Grand.

My father's other operatic companion was the American basso Paul Donner. He was from California. He was tall, elegant, with dark flashing eyes and bright, overly white teeth. Donner had a rich, lush voice and even when he spoke there was a clarity and a strength that made your blood boil over, your skin tingle. I think he was the sexiest male singer in the classical music world of his day. He made three movies. I've seen them all. In them he overacts and his hammy gestures and his speaking voice don't seem connected. In real life, and I saw him quite a lot up until I was about ten, he was just plain dynamic, just plain sexy. You couldn't avoid the animal side of this man and when he opened his mouth and sang, that voice ran over you like molten silver. It heated up everyone in the room, female, male, it made no difference. Any room where he sang became an intimate space. Carnegie Hall, the Met, our living room, it didn?t matter. He lassoed you with that dark sound and reeled you in like a heifer at a rodeo.

They were both married in 1946, Donner and Meerstadt, though not to one another. His wife lived on their ranch in California and raised chickens and artichokes. Her husband lived outside of Vienna and analyzed sex-starved women and sex-crazed men. I met them each just once. But in 1946, the year I was born, and the year my father was a waiter and not the manager of the Excelsior Grand, Donner and Meerstadt were lovers and my father arranged for the room. He was their connection. He was, for all intents and purposes, their pimp. They each paid him handsomely for his friendship and his services. His "tips," going out and coming in, were proof that his pudding had gelled nicely.

My father had a successful career going and he had an eleven year old daughter and a newborn son, a wife and a mother-in-law, my Granny, and he had his parents as well. He had a rich existence. He was content, well reasonably content, I suppose. He also had a brother and sister-in-law, my Uncle Frank, my Aunt Gussie.

Frank and Gussie were older than my parents. They had been married for seventeen years at that point in time and they were still childless, a situation my mother loved to bring up every time Frank or Gussie got the slightest bit judgmental about my father and his "career."

VThis conversation I am about to relate is not one I remember. I don't recall a single word of it personally, but I heard my mother repeat it and repeat it incessantly during the years I spent listening to her every word, worshiping the family stories she liked to tell. This is how she related the incident that I don't remember.

It was over dinner at our apartment. Only family was present. The main course had been consumed and dessert was underway. Granny Elainie was in the kitchen dishing out the Apple Brown Betty when the argument began, so she only heard part of it, only participated in the final moments.

"I think it's disgusting," Aunt Gussie apparently said, starting the fight.

"Gussie, don't go on," Uncle Frank added quickly.

"And there are children," she said before he had even finished admonishing her.

"Gussie, mind your own business," my mother said firmly.

"You shut up!" Gussie responded. "You have no right to...."

"No right? In my own house, no right?"

"Come on, ladies ... Gussie, please," my father said.

"Don't you call her a lady, Jimmy. Any real lady is offended by that!" Gussie retorted, heaving her breasts upward, her arms crossed firmly, supporting them.

"She is my wife!" my father said, slamming his large, flat hand down on the table and making the glassware ring.

"Your choice, not mine," Gussie shouted.

"Gussie, please, keep your voice down, the children ..." Uncle Frank hissed at her.

"The children? The children? The children should know who their mother is," my aunt spat back at him.

"My children know their mother, know who she is, what and how she is," my mother said. "Don't you babies?"

Briana, eleven years old, said quickly, "I hate you Aunt Gussie. Your twat is dead. No babies for you."

"Don't say those words, Briana," my father shouted at her, although apparently he was smiling when he said it.

"Did you hear her? Did you hear her language? How can she say such a thing to me?" Aunt Gussie cried.

"You brought in on yourself, Gussie," Uncle Frank told her.

"Dried up old man," Briana continued, pointing her finger at Uncle Frank. "Dried up gizzum. No babies for you."

"Where does she learn this language?" Aunt Gussie shrieked.

"From me, you hideous hag." Granny Elainie had come in from the kitchen and overheard this last part, I guess. "You prune, you pissant, you heinous heartless half-a-harlot. You don't even have the good sense to sell what no one can disturb."

"Elainie! You shock me," Aunt Gussie sounded like she was whimpering when she said this, my mother always told us.

"Do I? Good. Your system could take a few shocks. Might be the best thing for it."

"Mama, please," my father said, but she waved him off with a flaccid gesture.

"You owe these people, your generous hosts, an apology, Gussie. You owe them an apology so big you should hit the streets and work the men until you can repay them for this vile humiliation with dirty dollars you earn on your knees in back alleys."

According to my mother, Aunt Gussie fainted dead away at this concept and had to be taken home in a taxi. Two weeks later, by the time of the next family dinner, all of this had been set aside, put away somewhere in a drawer with a lilac cachet to cover its stench. Everyone was nice to everyone and nothing was said. I don't know, to this day, if in between those two get-togethers something was said, or done, to put this all right. But somehow the family came together and nothing was said. It was supposedly a pleasant time, but I don't remember that either. That's just what I was told.

My immediate family. Now you know about them. I should tell more about me, for this is my story, not theirs, but without them there would be no me. There's a small irony buried in that statement. It's obvious that without my parents there would not have been a me. But the others you've met, Gussie and Frank, Granny Elainie and my sister Briana, had as much to do with forming me, creating me, as my own parents ever did when they were still alive.

When I was ten I read Charles Dickens's novel David Copperfield. Are you familiar with it? "I am born," he wrote. "I am born." Well, I was born, too, and I led a life that so mirrors young Davey's it sometimes confounds and confuses me, especially on those long nights in winter when memories flood the room where I sit with a brandy in a snifter on a table in front of a roaring fire. Music plays in this room, usually old opera recordings, mostly Paul Donner. His voice gets inside my body and swells it up, fills it with emotions and desires and even a tinge of sorrow. "I am born." I was raised. Some are raised up. I, oddly, was raised down.

Chapter Two

I had a friend when I was about five years old. We vowed to be best friends forever and he suggested we should be blood brothers. He was almost a whole year older, you see, and knew about these things.

His name, curiously was Robert Louis Stevenson, but he wasn't the same one. His parents had an apartment near ours, in the next building actually. We met one day when I was sitting on the front stoop watching traffic, something I seemingly adored at that age. At any rate, he came up the stairs and sat down next to me and imitated my pose, chin on cupped hands, elbows on knees, and he watched with me. We never spoke that day. When I'd had enough of this, I stood up and went into our building. He, I believe, stood up and went home to his own. I don't know for sure, because I didn't look around to see what he was doing.

A few days later we met on the street and he nodded solemnly to me and I returned the nod. As I moved a few steps past him, I heard him giggle and I laughed in return. Suddenly we had a secret. I don't think my mother realized what had happened that day. I don't know about his.

When we met for the third time he introduced himself and I was forced to do the same thing.

"I'm Robert Louis Stevenson," he said, extending his right hand, open and flat, palm up. "How do you do?"

"I do fine," I said. "Thanks."

"And who are you?"

I hesitated a moment. "I am ... I am Maxwell Draper.

"I have three names."

"So do I!" I snapped that back at him. "Max. Well. Draper."

"Oh, okay," he said sweetly enough, "then I'll just call you Max. And you can call me Louie."

We shook hands, like the grownups always did when they came to an agreement. I knew right then that Louie would be my best friend and that I could tell him anything.

We saw a lot of each other that spring and summer. New York City was an easy place for children in 1951. It was safe for us to run around the block and play in the alleys behind our buildings. There were women on the steps of almost every building , hanging out of windows, shopping in the local stores. It seemed that there was always someone nearby who knew Louie or me or our parents or my sister. We were protected by the neighborhood, safe in our world. Cars didn't speed then. Or at least they never seemed to do so. Garbage cans were our fortresses. Fire escape ladders were our circus tents' center rings. We jumped, flew, hid and ran. We weren't angels, but we weren't devils either. We were two kids playing and two people developing personalities along the way. Louie, being slightly older, developed quickly, but I was keeping up with him most of the time.

It was late in August. We had been playing cops and robbers for hours and I was tired of the game. I dashed up the stairs of Louie's building and got myself a perfect top step seat on the stoop. The iron railing of his front stairs included wide bands of textured metal, painted black and at that particular point I could squeeze myself tiny behind three of them and be almost completely out of sight while maintaining a perfect view of the street below. I was in place when he came hightailing it out of the alley next door. He stopped at the curb and looked up and down the street for me, but he didn't see me. I saw his shoulders drop a bit and his neck bend forward so that his head could droop a bit. He looked tired to me. Then I heard him sob once. It hurt me to hear that. I didn't understand it.

Without hesitation I called out his name and stood up so he could see me behind the metal bars. He threw back his head and laughed and came quickly up the nine steps of his stoop, throwing himself down on top of me. It was a roughhouse sort of thing, a way of playing and we wrestled around a bit. Winded, he stopped suddenly and pulled back and stared at me.

"We should be blood brothers," he said. I nodded, not knowing what he was talking about. "Alvin told me about it. You don't know him. He lives in Brooklyn. He's my cousin."

"Okay," I said rather absently. Th at was all I said; I didn't understand a word of it.

"You don't know what that is, do you?" Louie asked me.

"No. What is it?"

"Well, it's like this," he said, "you make a cut in your wrist and I make a cut in mine and when we're bleeding good and hard we put our wrists together and our bloods mix and you get mine in you and I get yours in mine and we're blood brothers, forever and always."

"I'd have to cut my wrist?" I asked him.

"Sure. All guys do it."

"I don't know about that."

"Indians do it, too."

"I'm not an Indian," I told him.

"Well, they do it and we can do it. We're as good as any damn Indian."

"Better," I said. "My sister knows an Indian and she doesn't like him, but she likes you."

"How does your sister know an Indian?"

"She knows him at work," I said. Briana was fourteen now and she had a part time job in the drug store making sodas at the fountain. An Indian who worked on the bridges liked to come in and drink an egg cream every afternoon and she had talked to him.

"Golly gee," Louie said. "That sounds like something big."

"Yeah," I said, sorry I'd said it because my father always told me not to say 'yeah.'

"Well, we have to be blood brothers, Max. That's all there is to it."

I agreed and we decided to meet the next day and cut ourselves and become really best friend blood brothers forever and always. Th e truth was I didn't want to do it, but I knew I had to do it and that was that.

At dinner that night I didn't tell anyone about the plans that Louie and I had made that day. I was already afraid of what my mother might do but I had some questions about the bleeding and I had to ask someone something, so I brought up the subject after dinner. My father had gone back to the hotel to work a partial night shift and Briana wanted to listen to some dance music on the radio. So this would be a perfect opportunity to talk to mother.

"I have a question," I said to her.

"Is it about modeling, Maxie? I know you love to do it."

I did, but that wasn't my goal, as I told you, so I shook my head emphatically.

"Oh, all right then, what's on your mind?"

"Its about the bleeding," I started to say, but she grabbed me and put her hand over my mouth.

"It happens to me every month, darling, and it's nothing for you to worry about."

"You do it every month?" I asked her, not believing what I was hearing.

"Yes, all women do."

I stared at her not believing what I was hearing.

"You must have a lot of best friends," I said.

"Yes, I do, darling, why?"

"If you do it every month."

"I'm sorry?"

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Small Ironiesby J. Peter Bergman Copyright © 2011 by J. Peter Bergman. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.