Morning in America
Morning in America
September. I sometimes believed that by simply speaking the month’s name aloud I might summon the cooler weather, set the leaves, just now beginning to change color on their branches, astir with chillier gusts. Back then, autumn still obeyed the school calendar, promptly arriving on the Tuesday after Labor Day. When it rained you felt droplets that were closer in temperature to ice. Central Park, that mood ring in the middle of Manhattan, began to tarnish, which the sun, wafer white, revealed in all of its ocher and saffron beauty.
September brought my family back together. Oren finally returned from Matt’s ahead of the holiday weekend and school’s start. To my amazement, he was nearly my height. He was also wearing eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames. “Are those real?” I asked.
“Of course they’re real,” he said. “Want to come get beer with me at the Shopwell? I got a fake ID.”
At the supermarket, Oren got a six-pack and then crossed the street west, to the park above the Dead Street. We climbed the low brick wall and then stood with our arms hanging over the fence’s railing. Below, the great expanse before the West Side Highway was the color of black ice. Oren raised his beer. “To my first year of high school.”
“May it be better than mine,” I said.
We clinked cans.
I considered the parked cars below, Naomi’s Mercedes nowhere to be seen. Why didn’t I take that opportunity to tell him about living with the Shahs? About Naomi? The truth is that it would have never occurred to me then to share the things I’d seen and done, any more than discussing Kepplemen, because our lives were so atomized, because we lived so unattended, because we were already so strangely private, access to each other’s inner lives did not come naturally.
“Mom’s coming home tomorrow,” Oren said.
From the north, we watched an airplane bank over the city.
“When did you speak to her?” I asked.
“Yesterday. She said Grandma had to quit smoking because of her lungs.”
“That’s good news, I guess.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s been rehearsing late.”
Because Dad was holed up at the St. James for final rehearsals ahead of opening night, he was not at the apartment upon Mom’s return. We heard her keys in the door and rushed from our bedroom to greet her. I let Oren hug her first. She swayed with him in her arms, his hair bunched in her fist while he shook. “Sweet boy,” she whispered, “how did you get so big so fast?” She waved me to her and hugged me while Oren took her suitcase to her room.
It was not lost on either my brother or me that she did not unpack, but instead placed the suitcase open, on her dresser, as you might during a short stay in a hotel. Oren ordered pizza and made a Caesar salad. I set the table. When we sat down, Mom asked me, “How are you on school clothes?”
“My pants are fine,” I said, “but none of my shirts fit. Or my blazer.”
“We’ll go shopping this weekend,” she said. “Do you want to come?” she asked Oren.
“I can’t,” Oren said. “I have a commitment.” He so attentively sprinkled his slice with garlic and red pepper that we knew not to press him about what this was.
“Do you have something to wear for Dad’s opening night?” Mom asked him instead.
“I can throw something together,” he said.
“How’s your summer reading going?” she asked me.
What a miserable several days it had been, not so much reading as inhaling pages. But I was close to finished.
“What do you have left?” Mom said.
“The Sun Also Rises.”
“Oh,” she said, “you can read that in an afternoon.”
Mom, never one to be flippant, was always saying such reassuring things to me. She might as well have claimed I could go on pointe if I just strapped on her shoes.
Were all of us listening for Dad to come home that night? Around eleven the phone rang. Oren and I jumped from our beds and raced for my study. He lifted the handset, careful to hold down the cradle’s prongs while I unscrewed the mouthpiece’s cap and popped out the receiver. Then I placed the earpiece between us.
“…it’s hard to tell what’s good or bad at this point,” Dad was saying to her. “They keep making changes.”
“It’s not your job to worry about that,” Mom said.
“True,” Dad said, and waited. The silence between them throbbed like a broken limb. “How are the boys?” he finally said.
“They seem good,” Mom said. “Oren’s the Green Giant, he’s grown so much. Griffin badly needs a haircut. He looks like a lion. He’s also behind on his homework.”
“What else is new?” Dad said.
“What else is new?” Mom said.
Dad paused. Mom refused to fill the air. “Do you want me to come home tonight,” Dad asked, “or do you want me to wait?”
Mom thought about this. It was as if the entire family were thinking about it. “I want you to come home, but only if you’re really ready to come home.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not going to spell it out for you, Shel.”
Dad said, “Fine then.”
And he hung up.
About my time with the Shahs, there was next to no discussion, although Mom did come into my room the following night and asked, “How did it go out there?” as if she had information. When I had nothing to report, she said, “Naomi told me Sam moved out. They’re getting a divorce.”
“Huh,” I said.
“She said you’ve turned into a real gentleman.”
Mom cleared the hair from my eyes to better search them and then left me be. I was so confident in my silence because on the morning of my return I called Sam at home and told him where his car was, that the keys were in their normal hiding place, in response to which he said, stiffly, “Thank you for letting me know.”
“How’s Naomi?” I asked.
“She’ll live,” Sam said, “how about we leave it at that?”
“Agreed,” I said.
And then he hung up.
It felt like the first adult conversation of my life.
—
That final week of summer, at 30 Rock, while we were shooting the season’s last episode, I was so bogged down with my school reading, I was so unprepared and blew my lines with such regularity, we had to halt nearly all my scenes in order for Liz and me to drill. These sessions were beyond triage, my flameouts so spectacular she was actually rooting for me to get through them, since the finish line was in sight, season five in the can. We stood just outside the set’s radiant circle so we could huddle, everyone keeping their places, me repeating lines she fed me like some sort of catechism.
“Don’t threaten my parents again, Lava Girl…” she said.
“Don’t threaten my parents again, Lava Girl…” I said.
“…or I’ll blow this volcano so sky-high…”
“…or I’ll blow this volcano so sky-high…”
“…Vesuvius’s eruption will seem like a firecracker.”
“…Vesuvius’s eruption will seem like a firecracker.”
“This is so bad…” Liz said.
“This is so bad…” I said.
“No,” she said, “the writing. ”
I laughed, and Liz did too, which relaxed me. “From the top,” she said.
Tensions were also high at the St.
James.
After we wrapped at 30Rock, I’d ride my bike there to catch some of the run-through.
I liked not alerting Dad to my arrival—having the chance to watch him while he was unaware of my presence in the darkened balcony’s first row, hidden by its ledge, rendered almost invisible by the light shining from spots and PAR cans arrayed beneath it, especially during the lulls, while Fountain and Ferrer and Kay interrupted the performance to huddle in the orchestra level’s aisles.
I might sometimes even risk discovery by sitting in one of the private boxes, and it was from here that I spotted Dad during one of the breaks—his back was to me—standing beside Katie near the left wing, his hands clasped behind him.
The cast was assembled for the opening number, taking direction from Ferrer, Dad bending toward her ear to tell her something, to whisper it, fervently, she patting his back and then feeling her way down to finally clasp one of his fingers with her own.
And I hated him for it.
Opening night was the Friday after Labor Day.
Mom and I went straight to our seats in the mezzanine; Oren hit the snack bar for a Coke and Milk Duds.
The audience’s chatter was an almost audible correlative to my anticipation.
The orchestra tuned up with such a feeling of tension it was as if I were witnessing a medieval legion pulling on a hundred drawstrings and then aiming their arrows toward the sky.
And then the lights went down, there was the stillness that accompanies several hundred indrawn breaths, followed by the blast of light when the curtains went up and the music played.
I wish I could do a better job of relaying the experience of Sam and Sara from start to finish.
But when your father is performing, when you have seen a show take shape over the course of several months, when you have heard its songs sung in your home so many times that they seem like nursery rhymes, have seen dance numbers whose steps have been altered, the palimpsest of prologues auditioned, tried, and then trashed, it is like looking at the underside of an Oriental rug: all you see is the stitching.
Instead, you watch for signs, for key moments at odds with the show’s rhythms; you wait, tensed, for funny parts that in the past have gotten laughs, only to have your heart sink when they don’t land; you are surprised when bits you never found comical set off a fusillade of cackles.
For me the show rose toward and sank away from Dad’s appearances, the stunned silence that followed his two duets a confirmation of approval and a promise of possible success.
I realized everyone noticed what Mom had flagged from the get-go, which was that the actor playing Sam had been miscast—his voice was somehow too operatic.
The show itself seemed somehow anachronistic .
As to the plot, Sam and Sara do not get together at the end.
The couple sings a devastating duet near the show’s conclusion called “Getting Away with It.” They have, by this time, consummated their love for each other, but they are older, and when their chance to break from their marriages presents itself, when their feelings are strongest but their nerve is at its most tenuous, they succumb to inertia.
They can’t bring themselves to leave their spouses.
Not that I cared.
The show had the quality of all mediocre art: my attention slipped right off it.
I don’t remember much of the performances at all.
We migrated to Sardi’s for the cast party.
This was customary for Fountain’s shows, to celebrate and eat and await the reviews from the New York papers just off the delivery trucks.
Mom, Oren, and I were among the first to arrive.
The room’s decor was a ubiquitous crimson: the awning, the walls, the carpet, and the leather banquettes were all red.
Mom asked for a table in the far corner, I would realize later, to be as far as possible from Katie at all times and who, once the restaurant filled up, seemed similarly determined to keep as many guests as possible between herself and Mom.
Oren and I hunkered down on either side of her in the highbacked banquette like a security detail.
I left her only once to study the rows of caricatures that lined the walls.
When I asked Mom about the drawings, she said that there had been a series of caricaturists since the restaurant had opened in the thirties.
They were on their third artist who did all the portraits, but the first was a Russian immigrant who exchanged his services for two free meals a day.
Was Fountain among its cohort? Might Dad be up there one day? He came over to join us, unable to sit still, too nervous to eat.
He was all jitters compared to Mom’s implacable steeliness.
Their conversation was the most wooden sort of dialogue, shot through with bad acting.
When Dad finally got up the nerve to ask her, “What did you think?” she tilted her chin toward Fountain, who was now standing on one of the chairs, waving the Times in his hand, ordering everyone to gather round.
Dad left us to huddle with the cast.
Fountain thanked everyone profusely for their efforts these past seven months, and then he snapped open the broadsheet and said, “This, ladies and gentlemen, from Richard Eder in the Times ”:
This critic recalls first hearing Marc Morales perform the title character in “Don Giovanni”—at Teatro Alla Scala, in 1964, to be exact—and how it seemed his voice could make the very earth tremble. Sadly, time and its ravages have reduced this great baritone’s instrument to a quaver—one of many shaky aspects in the new musical “Sam and Sara.”
Opening last night at the St. James Theater, “Sam and Sara” is the latest (I almost wrote last) offering by two of America’s most influential collaborators, librettist Abe Fountain and composer Hershy Kay. Once it was axiomatic that every aspiring lyricist cut his teeth imitating Fountain’s lines and every budding arranger echoed Kay’s melodies. Now the pair sounds like a poor impersonation of their past selves.
Oren pulled at my elbow. “This is scorched earth stuff,” he whispered.
“Maybe it gets better,” I said, trying not to look at Dad.
True, Fountain and Kay are still capable of the stratospheric showstopper but in spite of these soaring moments, “Sam and Sara” fails to launch.
“This is Old Testament,” Oren said.
“Be quiet,” I said.
“We’ll be sharing a bedroom until you leave for college.”
Fountain pressed on:
In one of the musical’s unintended ironies, it is the spurned spouses who perform the most revelatory song about love. These standouts, Shel Hurt and Katie Deal, are not only fully realized characters but also heartbreaking in their roles. Their final duet is by far the show’s outstanding number.
Dad looked over his shoulder at us, at Mom, and smiled, albeit mournfully.
Fountain, after pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, continued:
Mr. Fountain’s lyrics occasionally steal fire from the gods. In between, the audience must suffer an eagle eating its liver.
I watched Dad. It was hard to tell if he was listening anymore. He’d struck the same pose as in his headshot, arms crossed and chin resting on his thumb while staring at his feet, brushing invisible sawdust from the carpet.
Is “Sam and Sara” Abe Fountain’s swan song? That remains unknown. But this production is unquestionably a turkey.
The cast stood motionless, heads downcast.
“But what does he really think?” one of the actors finally shouted.
Several couldn’t help it and cracked up. It freed some of the others to do the same, to put their arms around those who were crying and try to comfort them. Others looked to Fountain for direction.
“What he thinks,” Fountain said, “will not stop any of us…” And at this he paused. “…from getting good and drunk.”
I turned to Mom. “What does this mean?”
Mom was smiling as if she had just told herself a private joke or had made a final decision. She sat with her elbow on the table, chin to palm, her mouth hidden behind her bent fingers, her eyes flickering between anger and delight. What I was certain of was that when she turned to me to speak, when she let her arm fall in order to be heard, I understood, with total clarity, why my father needed her, trusted her, sometimes hated her, feared her, occasionally fled from her—and loved her.
“It means,” she said, “that soon this will all be over.”
—
The next day, Howard Kissel’s Daily News review of Sam and Sara hit the stands, notably more positive than Eder’s. Ferrer, my father said, had heard that Walter Kerr—of New York’s critics the most reliably negative—was coming out with a long piece on the show at month’s end that would be “glowing.” Could Sam and Sara stay afloat until Kerr’s review published? Would the investors be willing to carry it for three weeks if ticket sales were poor? And then, as if by divine intervention—for the show’s success or its ultimate failure, I can’t say even now—Morales, who played Sam, took ill. His voice began to turn hoarse by the conclusion of Saturday’s matinee; by curtain Saturday night, he was rasping and running a high fever; he croaked almost inaudibly through his performance.
Dad was already preparing to take the role by Saturday afternoon. Early that morning, Mom had departed for Montauk to stay with Al for the weekend, so Dad returned to the apartment. He had, on his person, and at all times, a small tape recorder with the melodies of all his new songs. On a blue set of flash cards, his lyrics; on a yellow set of flash cards, his lines. Slowly but surely, these were shuffled into a multicolored deck, which he mumbled and hummed around the clock. He left for rehearsal Sunday evening, to go over the songs with Hershy Kay and Fountain. Oren and I were asleep long before Dad got home, although he was up well ahead of us, to cook us breakfast before school. At the table, he told us he’d be home well past our bedtime. His first performance was Tuesday night.
That week, Mom stayed at Al’s. In spite of Dad’s performance schedule, he made us breakfast every morning before school, and sat with us, in spite of his exhaustion, taking great pleasure in watching us eat. But because he was gone on weeknights, and because Mom wasn’t there to cook dinner, Dad left us cash and told us to fend for ourselves. Friday afternoon through Sunday night, Oren disappeared and didn’t come home until very late, if he came home at all. When I asked him where he’d been, he said, “None of your b - i -bizness,” if he said anything.
I went to see Dad perform.
I knew then the show wasn’t going to make it. Eder’s review had decimated sales. If you’d been visiting New York, you could’ve sat front row center for pennies on the dollar, which I did not, even though the stage manager gave me carte blanche. I was worried that doing so would distract Dad. I soon learned I didn’t need to worry about that at all.
The role was perfect for him; it freed him up. There was a built-in bigness to Sam’s character, something outsized and commanding that matched up perfectly with Dad’s statue-bust features, his Roman emperor’s profile, which suggested both authority and appetite. In the show, he is described as a brilliant architect, and there is a scene toward the middle of Act I in which he dresses down a classroom of graduate students; the relish with which Dad did this, torpedoing their half-baked observations with academic knowledge, was perfect. He wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches like the professor he’d never be, the empty frames of wire-rimmed eyeglasses giving him that extra dash of stodgy condescension. I often found my father’s put-on profundity pathetic in its transparency, but in this moment, in these performances, he seemed incontestable.
And when he sang, he soared through his seemingly endless range, and I was reminded of the times I dropped Sam’s Ferrari into fifth gear.
Oh, to be flooded with my father’s full-throated sound! To hear, as he hit his highest note and held it, how much he had to give if he’d ever had the chance.
I was not the only one to notice this.
The musical did twelve performances before closing, and on the final Saturday night, watching from the wings, I spotted Mom in the audience.
She was as rapt as I was.
She laughed as if we were all four at dinner in the apartment; she whistled, to my shock, with her two fingers pressed to the underside of her tongue, at curtain; it was clear to me that she was having the best time.
And her love for my father, I realized, exceeded mine, exceeded her love even for Oren and me.
Was that a love, in marriage, to aspire to? I remember watching Mom watch him, shaking her head at times and squinting when he hit certain notes; how during other moments, she turned her head away ever so slightly, as if she were averting her eyes from the sun.
Or holding her prayer-clasped fingers pressed to her lips and nodding in joy.
Talent, I thought.
That great leveler.
Smasher of gates and all-access pass.
Velvet-rope opener and the penthouse view.
Follow me please, says the ma?tre d’ to talent, I have our best table waiting.
That uniquely and unfairly bestowed gift America had figured out how to tap more efficiently and mercilessly than any other country in history.
It should be written on the goddamn Statue of Liberty: Give me your talented, your gifted, your huddled geniuses, yearning to breathe free.
That was our country’s exceptionalism—her thrown-wide-open doors she might just as suddenly slam shut.
Rob my father of his money, like that insurance agent did; call him Burger or hebe or kike, but you still could not wrest from him his talent.
I said I was not the only one to notice how perfect Dad was as the lead, how—I truly believe this—the fortunes of that show might have been otherwise if he’d been properly cast, if they’d given him his one shot.
That night, during Dad’s last performance of “Getting Away with It,” I felt someone touch my shoulder.
Then I noticed Fountain’s white-gloved hand there, the cotton fabric dotted with tiny sequins.
His touch, which had startled me, briefly turning my body to ice.
He gave me a warm squeeze.
“Finally,” he whispered, “I can hear my lyrics.”
And then the curtain fell.
That Sunday was the final matinee. I met Dad at the stage door and hugged him and told him he was great, and I meant it. It was one of those September afternoons in New York when the passenger plane banking west—a white crucifix against that endless lapis lazuli—leaves no contrail. Weather so perfect you believe certain states of being, like happiness, might be eternal. It was a healthy walk home from the theater, and Dad was quiet. Just as Lincoln Center came into view, its plaza full of people, its fountains susurrating, he said, “How about something to eat,” which was not a question, and then he led me to O’Neals’ on the corner.
Dad asked for a booth; I wasn’t hungry and told him so. “A bowl of pickles,” Dad said to the waitress, “and a cream soda, please.” When she returned, he said, “Eat something with me, even if it’s just a nosh, ” and so I scanned the enormous menu, which hid Dad from my view, and when I lowered it, Katie was sitting next to him.
She smiled at me, we exchanged pleasantries, and I, intentionally this time, concealed my face behind the menu’s screen. When the waitress returned, I ordered the surf and turf with a milkshake.
“I thought you weren’t hungry,” Dad said.
“I changed my mind,” I replied.
He and Katie began discussing the show’s failure—a conversation that did not include me but did allow me to study her closely for a time.
She wore high-heeled black leather boots.
Black slacks.
A collared black button-down blouse.
A thin black leather jacket.
Several gold necklaces with pendants that measured the slope of her substantial cleavage.
Hooped earrings, also gold.
Black thick-rimmed eyeglasses; heavy mascara and eyeliner.
A glossy maroon lipstick.
She wore her black hair up.
Everything about her said street tough, said street smart—said New York.
Said don’t fuck with me .
Her laugh was husky and commanding.
She was used to being stared at, I could tell, and occasionally I caught Dad complying, admiringly, as when she took a moment to make small talk with me, to ask me how the new school year was going, what classes I was taking. Her brother had been a wrestler, she said, a play for quick connection between us. When I asked her where, she replied, “Oklahoma,” and plucked a pickle from its basket. “That sport saved his life like the theater saved mine.” As she chewed, I noticed that her hair was dyed, that the lipstick was crumbling at the corners of her mouth. She was—long had been—in flight from something, and if she were to excuse herself to the bathroom and remove her makeup, I might not recognize her when she rejoined us.
The waitress arrived with my food. Dad said he needed to hit the john. Katie and I sat facing each other while I pondered my steak and lobster tail. Then she leaned toward me, fingers laced together, palms to the table, and stared at me, while I stared back, unimpressed.
“I thought it was lovely how often you came to your father’s performances,” she said. When I didn’t respond she asked, “Can I have a French fry?”
She took one and bit the end. Its white meat smoked.
“You have a big fall coming up,” she said, and then dipped into my ketchup.
“You mean wrestling?”
“I mean Take Two comes out.” She pointed the fry at me. “You’re gonna be a star.”
The idea of Dad talking with this woman about my future was appalling. “I haven’t thought about it much.”
“I’d have killed to have had an opportunity like that when I was your age.”
“You seem like you’re doing okay.”
She offered a half smile. “I don’t have to waitress anymore.”
“What about now that the show’s closed?”
“I sing jingles.” She took another fry and bit it in half. “These are dangerous,” she said.
I forked the entire lobster tail from its shell and considered it. When I looked up, Katie was considering me.
“You believe in gut feelings?” she asked.
I shrugged in half agreement, half indifference.
“I’m a big believer in the instinctual response,” she continued. “Also first impressions. They tend to be right. So let me ask you something. Be honest.”
Because I was going to oblige her.
“Do you like me?” she asked.
I tilted my head to the side. Was this an audition?
“Do you think you could like me?” she said.
I looked over my shoulder, toward the bathroom, then back at Katie. “I think,” I said, “I don’t know you.”
Katie shrugged. “Fair enough.”
“I know,” I said, and paused, but not for effect, “I don’t like what you’re doing to my family.”
Katie stuck out her lower lip, nodded.
“I also know,” I said, “that my father always ends up choosing my mom.”
Those Venus flytrap eyelashes of hers closed and opened.
“Does that answer your question?” I asked.
When she didn’t respond, I pushed my plate toward her.
“Eat,” I said, and stood to leave. “While you can.”