My Mother the Cheerleader Page 5

  CHAPTER 9

  I had discovered my top-secret observation post in the second-floor bathrooms completely by accident two years earlier. As a little girl I had adopted the unusual habit of polishing my coins. Whenever I’d get any money, the first thing I’d do was take the coins into the bathroom and scrub them down with soap and hot water. For some reason I had it in my head that adding shine would increase their value. During one of my cleaning sessions I dropped a quarter down the heating grate behind the toilet. When I got down on my belly and pried open the grate, I realized that you could hear everything that went on in the Music Hall, clear as a bell. Not only that, but if I stuck my head down inside, I could actually see a little bit into the Music Hall from the ceiling grate. When I did this, the blood would always rush to my head, so I usually had to content myself with just crouching near the opening and listening.

  I used my secret observation post in the second-floor bathroom very sparingly, for only the most intriguing guests. There was always a chance that a guest would need to use the toilet, and then I’d have to scramble to put the grate back in place in time. I didn’t risk exposure for the likes of Royce Burke. And if anyone’s clothes started to come off, I’d retreat before things got too grisly.

  After Charlotte left, I quietly snuck off to the upstairs bathroom, carefully removed the grate, and listened. They were settled in the Music Hall over glasses of sherry. When I stuck my head down into the hole, I could just make out my mother sitting on the couch and a piece of the back of Morgan’s head as he sat on the love seat next to her. I tried to keep my head down to watch, but had to pull myself back every few minutes when the top of my head throbbed. My mother regaled Morgan with her silly little Southern belle yarns. Some of the stories were true, most were not. But somewhere along the line the conversation took an unusual turn.

  “So—is there a Mrs. Miller?” my mother asked.

  “There was,” he said. “We’re no longer together.”

  “I’m sorry,” she lied. “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “No. It’s all right. It’s still strange for me to say it. We were married for so many years. Twenty-five, to be exact. It’s funny, I never thought I’d be the type to get divorced. But I suppose you never do or you wouldn’t get married in the first place, right?”

  “Well, your marriage lasted twenty-four years longer than mine did,” she said. “So there must’ve been something between you.”

  “There was. We were very much in love for most of the marriage.”

  I could tell that something about the way this conversation was flowing caught my mother off guard. It was his honesty. She wasn’t quite sure how to respond, but I detected a change in her voice. The light, seductive purr receded, and she too seemed to become more unguarded and real.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “what happened?”

  “That’s not an easy answer. I guess it never is. Sometimes I wish she’d fallen in love with another man or I’d fallen in love with another woman just so I’d have a shorthand way of explaining what went wrong. Like I said, we were happy for most of the marriage. Our passion cooled a bit over the years, but that’s not unusual. I guess things really went wrong after the death of our son, David.”

  “Oh Lord, I’m sorry. I had no idea,” my mother gasped.

  My heart tightened in my chest.

  “He was a medic in Korea,” he continued. “Volunteered before he was even drafted. That’s the kind of kid he was. He was killed just two weeks after he got there. It wasn’t a combat situation. His ambulance crashed. The driver veered off the road to avoid hitting a Korean girl herding goats. All that time we spent worrying about him getting shot over there, and he died in a simple car accident. We got his first letters home three weeks after we got notice that he had died. It was like hearing a voice from beyond the grave.”

  “It must’ve been horrible,” my mother said with true sympathy.

  “We both took the loss really hard. Some irrational part of us probably blamed each other for what had happened. It’s amazing where your mind wanders when you’re faced with something like that. He was our only child. It’s like half of what we had in common was instantly erased and replaced by this big chunk of shared agony. Just looking at each other reminded us of David. He had her eyes and smile, so looking at her became difficult for me. He had my voice.” He broke off and was quiet for a moment. “We held on for a couple of years, but then I think we both just got tired of our misery.”

  “Do you still talk to her?”

  “Sometimes. But less so since the divorce became final. I still care about her, but there doesn’t seem to be much point in pretending anymore. I guess that’s why I’m down here trying to reconnect with my brother.”

  “Did you see him this afternoon?”

  “I saw him,” he said, “but he didn’t see me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He runs our family business. Friendly Market on St. Claude.”

  “Near the Chinese laundry?”

  “That’s the one,” he replied. “I parked my car across the street from the store and just watched him, trying to work up the courage to go inside, but I never did.”

  I edged forward. Hearing him talk about things I had observed on my spy mission made my spine tingle.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I lost my nerve. My brother and I haven’t spoken in over twenty years.”

  “Twenty years!”

  “Hard to believe.” He nodded.

  “I haven’t spoken to my sister in eleven years!”

  “Maybe they’ve been hanging around together,” he quipped.

  “We’d never know, would we?” she said. They both laughed.

  “Well, let’s see who has the worst sibling story,” my mother said. “You go first.”

  “Oh, come on, I just gave you my broken marriage story. Can’t you go first this round?”

  “No, the guest always goes first.”

  “Okay, but I’m going to need another glass of sherry,” he said.

  She topped off their glasses, and Morgan continued.

  “We never had much money growing up,” he explained. “My parents started the business and worked themselves to the bone every day of their lives to keep it going.”

  “It was just you and your brother?”

  “Yes. Michael is three years older than me. We were very close when we were growing up. He was a great big brother. Always looking out for me. Our favorite game was playing Treasure Island. I would be the young squire, Jim Hawkins, and he’d be the pirate, Long John Silver. We’d run around the neighborhood with swords cut out of cardboard boxes, looking for treasure. He must’ve read that book to me fifty times. I really looked up to him. He was bigger and stronger than me. And he was always great at sports and had an easy way with girls, all the things that matter most when you’re a kid. Of course, we both worked in the store as soon as we could help out, because my parents couldn’t afford to hire anybody.

  “I don’t remember my parents ever buying anything for themselves. All they seemed to care about was buying us a real education that would give us the opportunities that they never had. When I was ten years old and Michael was thirteen, they had saved enough to send one of us away to private school.”

  “I think I know where this is going,” my mother said.

  “I was the obvious choice. I always did a little better in school, and Michael was older. He was about to enter high school, and they relied on him more around the store. So they decided to send me. Prep school in New Hampshire, then Columbia undergraduate, and then graduate school. I saw my family only on school breaks, and then during college I worked in New York and started coming home even less. My parents didn’t mean to drive a wedge between us, but I guess it was inevitable. My brother never went to college and had to stay and run the business when my parents got too old. I know he felt that he didn’t have any choice.”

  “Did he ever marry?” my m
other asked.

  “Yeah. He built a life for himself, got married, had a couple of kids. But he basically lives the life of our parents. We both dreamed about escaping that life. It’s irrational, but I know he blames me for his lost opportunities. There were other issues, of course. But that’s the core of it. Over the years his bitterness grew and we moved further and further apart. Every little disagreement blew up into an argument. We had one final blowout just before the Second World War. Twenty years later, here we are.”

  “Well, at least you want to make an effort. If I never saw my sister, Denise, again, it’d be fine by me.”

  “Okay. Now it’s your turn.”

  “All right,” she said. “But I’ve gotta start with my broken marriage and then go into my sibling rivalry, if you don’t mind.”

  “Bring on the broken marriage,” he said.

  “It’s my own damn fault for falling in love with a drummer in the first place. It’s the oldest music business cliché, but I fell right into the trap. Duane was playing with a pop jazz trio around town when we met. I started singing and playing a little piano with them and we weren’t half bad, started getting some pretty good bookings. We fell in love, at least I did, and things were going really good for a while. I was still basically a kid, living out my dream of being a girl singer like Helen Forrest or Dinah Shore.

  “Then came what seemed like a big break. Duane got the band a regular gig at a fancy hotel in Baton Rouge. It was gonna be enough money that he could quit his day job and focus on music full-time. We were all going to have to move. My father wouldn’t let me go unless Duane married me. And Duane wasn’t about to let a silly little wedding ring stand in the way of the band’s progress.

  “Things went sour in Baton Rouge. My older sister, Denise, was already living there and working the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s downtown. Denise was always really girlish-looking. People always thought I was the older sister.”

  “Were you close growing up?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “But the rivalry was always there. Even when we were little girls, we fought about who had the prettiest doll, the prettiest dress, the prettiest hair. We were all sticky sweet as pecan pie until a man got in the way. She and Duane took one look at each other and it was like two high-powered magnets. I couldn’t have pried those two apart with a crowbar. It took me a while to catch wind of what was going on, but pretty soon I was seeing signs that were too obvious to ignore. We weren’t there more than a year when they ran off together to Kansas City.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I should’ve known better than to fall for a drummer. And he was trash. Handsome trash, but trash nonetheless.” She paused for a moment and then nodded. “But he was fun. He could make me laugh so hard it hurt. He’d do this thing, like a comedy routine with his drums, where he’d make all these funny sound effects as he was telling a story. It was just about the funniest thing you could imagine when he got it going. It was kind of like a Danny Kaye routine, where he got all worked up till his hair started flying everywhere and his face turned red. He did all sorts of imitations, too: Edward G. Robinson, Cary Grant. He was a real performer.”

  That part of the story was brand-new to me. I had absolutely no idea that my father had a sense of humor or that he could imitate movie stars or that he ever made my mother laugh. Suddenly I wanted to hear more good things about him, to fill in some of the dark empty spaces he always held in my mind.

  “So he left you alone with Louise?”

  “He ran out on us just after she was born.”

  “Poor kid,” he said.

  “I haven’t heard from either of them since May 12, 1948. Just one week after Louise arrived.”

  “I’ll never understand how people can abandon their babies,” he said sadly.

  Tears silently ran down my face and into my mouth. I wiped my eyes and nose with the back of my hand, choking back the sobs. I had heard my mother tell the story of my father’s abandonment in various forms over the years and it had never made me cry. I had never shed any tears for my lost father. It never really occurred to me to miss him. First of all, I never knew him, so there was really nothing to miss. Occasionally, kids around the neighborhood would tease me about not having a daddy, but that just made me mad, not sad. The other reason I never thought to miss him was that until that night, my mother had never said even the most vaguely positive thing about him. Part of me felt bad for my mother for the first time in a long time. Not many people made her laugh these days.

  Yet I think what made me so upset was the fact that Morgan was hearing the story and pitying me.

  “We always had music in common,” she continued. “That boy could really play.”

  “Do you still play?” He nodded to the piano.

  “Just here and there.”

  “I’d love to hear something.”

  “Oh, stop,” she said.

  “Please. I am the guest making a request.”

  My mother almost never played the piano anymore. Every once in a while I’d hear her singing along to the radio, but that was it. From what I could tell, she did have a nice voice.

  “Well, my pipes are pretty rusty,” she said as she moved to the piano. “So be kind.”

  “I’m an easy audience,” he assured her.

  “My signature song was ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans’ by Alter and DeLange. We always had to play the songs with local flavor for the tourists.”

  Ricky Nelson had just released a version of the song, and it was getting played on local radio, but I’d never heard my mother’s arrangement. She played it as an ultra-slow blues number. Her voice surprised me. It was fragile and girlish, but also a little rough around the edges. Her version communicated a sense of longing that Ricky Nelson’s didn’t. It wasn’t until I heard Billie Holiday’s recording of the song that I discovered the origin of my mother’s interpretation. She seemed to be able to give each word meaning, as if she were singing about her own longing for a real man.

  Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans

  And miss it each night and day

  I know I’m not wrong…the feeling’s getting stronger

  The longer I stay away

  Miss the moss-covered vines…tall sugar pines

  Where mockingbirds used to sing

  And I’d like to see that lazy Mississippi…

  Hurrying into spring

  The moonlight on the bayou….

  A Creole tune…that fills the air

  I dream…about magnolias in bloom…

  and I’m wishin’ I was there

  Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans

  When that’s where you left your heart

  And there’s one thing more…I miss the one I care for

  More than I miss New Orleans

  She finished with a little piano flourish and Morgan applauded.

  “Bravo!” he said. “That was wonderful.”

  “Well, I’m no Peggy Lee.”

  “Peggy doesn’t sing with half the feeling you’ve got.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” my mother said, the seductive purr returning to her voice. Morgan coughed, and there was an uncomfortable beat of silence. At this point I was waiting for my mother to pull out one of her clinchers. If she was trying to seduce a shy man, she had a number of lines she used to snare him. Before she had the chance, Morgan said something completely unexpected.

  “Would you allow me to take you to dinner tomorrow night?”

  “Dinner?” my mother said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve never been to Commander’s Palace, and I’ve always wanted to try it.”

  This took my mother and me completely by surprise. The men she was used to consorting with almost never invited her to dine. And even if they did, Commander’s Palace was way out of their league. Tucked away in the Garden District, Commander’s Pala
ce was considered the very finest restaurant in all of New Orleans. The restaurant had played host to everyone from Jefferson Davis to Mark Twain to Elvis Presley. A meal there would cost at least a week’s worth of our income. I know my mother had always yearned to go there. After shaking off the shock, she managed to reply.

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “Great. We’ll plan on six thirty?”

  “That’d be fine,” she said.

  “I’d better hit the sack. I’ve got an early breakfast. But I want to thank you for a most lovely evening.”

  “It was my pleasure.”

  I stuck my head back down into the heating duct just in time to see Morgan and my mother rise.

  “Good night, Pauline.” He gave her a gentle kiss on the hand, just like the one he gave me.

  “Good night, Morgan,” she said.

  He turned to walk upstairs. My mother stood in place for a moment, letting it all sink in. I heard Morgan’s footsteps on the top of the stairs before I remembered that I needed to replace the grate and get out of there.

  CHAPTER 10

  Now, as I mentioned earlier, the blood tended to rush to my head whenever I’d lower it down into the heating duct. I hurriedly pushed the grate back into place, but as soon as I tried to stand up, I knew something was wrong. The walls seemed to fold down on top of me, and my stomach and head felt like they were twisting in opposite directions. Then my knees turned to jelly and I blacked out, just like that. I’d never fainted before, so I had no idea what was happening at the time.

  When I opened my eyes again, I didn’t have any sense of how much time had passed. All I knew was that I was lying on the floor of the second-story bathroom with my mother and Morgan huddled over me.

  Then I saw the blood on the front of my dress. Earlier that afternoon I had prayed to the Lord for puberty to overtake me so that I could sprout breasts to rival my mother’s. As I lay on the bathroom floor, my heart filled with paralyzing dread: I realized that my desperate prayer had been answered in the most horrible way possible: I had gotten my period.