The Dominant Tense
Sometime during those last few weeks, my father and I watched the late show together. We used to do that two or three times a year whenever I was home. Movies let us sit in the same room without having to talk about anything. He would lie on the couch, I would slouch in a chair next to him, and we’d turn the set down low in the dark so as not to keep anyone else up.
Our last late show together was a completely expendable forties musical called Orchestra Wives. I’ve since looked the film up, reading that it starred George Montgomery, Ann Rutherford, Cesar Romero, and the Nicholas Brothers, among others. My father named the performers, lying on the couch announcing the cast as they made their black-and-white entrances and exits in the dark. But the names meant nothing to me, and, along with the film’s plot, I instantly forgot them.
As far as I remember, the story concerns the wives of a big band’s members being bitchy to Ms. Rutherford, the newest swing-time bride. Themselves neglected, they apply group cruelty to the woman my dad called “Andy Hardy’s eternal Polly.” In the end, as mandated by the motion-picture code, everyone learns the value of compassion. Just how the healing fiction works its trick I’ve forgotten too.
For the film was truly forgettable in all respects except one. Its music was the finest of the era. The story was an excuse to get Glenn Miller’s orchestra in front of a camera for the second and last time. Not long after, Miller was shot down in the English Channel without a tiller. But behind the silly escapist plot and despite real life’s less than compassionate ending, Miller and men are there, preserved on film, making that great sound with those freewheeling, dangerously abundant reeds and brasses.
Although I failed to understand at the time, my father lay in the dark, involved in the stupid vehicle, evidently moved. Of course, he saw all sorts of phantoms in the thing that I could not. He said he’d been sixteen when he first saw the show, a confession I discounted, as I was the eternal sixteen-year-old to his perpetual forty-seven. When a tune began he would arch his eyebrows and sing along, neither ironic nor nostalgic but absolutely deadpan archival, to “Serenade in Blue,” “At Last,” or “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.”
As with 99 44/100 percent of American films made during wartime, the movie’s hidden message was a simple, contemporary variant of the advice given dutiful newly married Victorian women: “Close your eyes and think of England.” Hollywood’s meal ticket: give the forbidden appetite fantastic, rebellious slack. Then draw it back, fifth reel, into sacrifice and the public good. I’m not sure how it happens. In times of crisis something clicks, and suddenly vested self-interests vanish. Or at least that’s the myth of the wartime feature, one that’s always been good box office.
I guess at all this: I have never lived through a popular war effort, except via the late show. But every morale film I’ve ever seen has a curious way of giving and taking away simultaneously. Like Betty Grable on the lockers of GIs: nothing satisfies like the unavailable. I hear my father sing: “Get a load of those Gobs, doing their jobs, keeping the sea lanes free.” I see him at sixteen: after two hours in the matinee, returning to daylight in a world where the apocalyptic battle, untouchable, remote, and final, required that everyone play team ball. A world where women sacrificed stockings with delicious pleasure; men, gasoline.
Nodding off in the dark, I pretended Dad’s interest in the film was only clinical. He had a weakness for the dated artifact: the Shirley Temple single, the Mademoiselle issue of March 1942—“What’s New?” I filed the film away with those. Besides, I never sat where I could see his face. We watched the story, groaned, and then sat through the news. We groaned again at the headlines, and then we said good-night.
Much later I was shocked to discover how much my father, the archrationalist, loved this movie. Most old movies for that matter, escapist time-wasters included. I never once saw him go to the theater. But at home, at night, he used to ask me deferentially, “Want to see what’s on?” I should have been tipped off by his knowing all the lines and each of the actors’ names.
But I didn’t catch on until too late. Astonishingly, the professional educator, friendless, intent on discovering what was really going on, still loved the fables of moral fallen women and criminal moguls with hearts of gold. He fell victim to the cheapest narrative tricks. Until the end, he was a secret fan of the possibility of another place, the other person’s story. I always thought that intellect and sentiment formed the horns of an exclusive either-or. They do not. My father had them both in doses that he, as well as the rest of us, paid for healthily.
My father at sixteen, too old to be precocious any longer, spent 1942 pent up in the Palisades, attending high school and moonlighting as a singing waiter at a showboat-turned-restaurant moored on the Hudson. I picture him reading a newspaper headline, BRITISH COVENTRATE COLOGNE, or poring over an account of the Bataan Death March, understanding, in theory, that the old world was dead. Not that apocalypse touched home. The nearest the war came in the first two years, he once confessed to me, was when the FBI picked up a half dozen German saboteurs that an enemy sub had dropped off on Fire Island.
Between innings on weekend ball fields, he exchanged stories of how Japs used GI skulls for shaving dishes or broke teeth and snapped off fingers for gold inlays and rings. I see the young man in his two-year holding pattern, pacing his cage, agonizingly delayed, frantically waiting to graduate, come of age, and contribute. For the world was entering its last unquestioned holy cause. The outcome was far from certain: the ball fields he lolled on might soon be run by Krauts. So he agonized, ached for eighteen. Even at his age, he did not delude himself that one more pimpled kid would tip the outcome. But more certain than the rightness of the cause was that win or lose, those who had not contributed would be beneath contempt.
I’m sure there was only a fine line between his laudable desire to help save Europe and his self-interest in securing the same official papers that gave his homely older brother free rein with what were then referred to, without irony or infringement, as dames. My grandparents, to his shame, would not let Pop enlist illegally. And no one could do preparatory sit-ups all day long. So he was forced to get through each day by killing time, which in northern Jersey required a substantial amount of social diversion.
One afternoon between school and waiting on tables, he caught a matinee of Orchestra Wives and was duly impressed by the film, if not by its philosophical underpinning. I am sure that even that first time, the dramatic tension of Orchestra Wives took second place to the glorious Big Band chords. He adored the music from the opening bars and immediately incorporated “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” into the showboat’s after-dinner set, a novelty number where the waiters strummed tennis rackets as if they were ukes.
The movie, coupled with Holiday Inn, Babes on Broadway, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and the other big-budget escapist enterprises Dad went to see that year, more than Doolittle’s Tokyo raid or the battle of the Coral Sea, affected who he became, and, by relation, me. The universal point of all these tales was that the best a fellow could do to fight the terrible vicissitudes of the Big Picture was to stay home and mind the local store. In particular, a man could move the world if he were happily married. And the trick to a happy marriage was to do one’s homework beforehand, before one’s condition had been permanently altared.
So Dad, at sixteen, found an outlet for the frustrated energy stirred up in him by the world’s burning. Years later, he elaborated for us at dinner his deadly earnest decision to do the legwork and locate the perfect girl. Too much was at stake in the early forties to settle for what was near to hand. However, since Kalamazoo was a shade too far for overnighters, Dad limited his first research forays for the ideal spouse to the greater New York metropolitan area. He concentrated around north suburban Jersey, fertile ground. Somewhere in the tens of thousands of girls his age, he felt sure to find one who combined the best parts of city girl and ingenuous hick, a woman both debutante and bespectacled wallf
lower—brilliant, bookish, industrious, but who could sing with a swing. All things abundant, but in moderation.
Yet to my father, all things in moderation always included moderation itself. It was not sufficient for his mate-to-be merely to maintain the Joan Leslie look while avoiding a criminal record. His woman had to shine. At sixteen, held to the sidelines in the hour of greatest urgency, he devised criteria severe enough to screen Supreme Court nominees. Starting the search at sixteen, he figured he’d have plenty of time to do it right. In Pop’s mind, marriage, like birth, death, and world war, only came along once in a lifetime.
The first gal who looked good enough on paper, accumulating a sterling GPA, amassing the obligatory public-service points, and even garnering, at the tender age of fifteen, the distinction of Passaic Meat Packers’ Union Junior Princess, fell from the running when Dad discovered that her crazy Greek father lived only for his obsessive dream of stealing the Elgin Marbles back from the British Museum. A second beauty, so his story usually went, took the disqualifying demerit because of a harmless pathology that drove her, every time she got a hundred yards away from her house, back to the front door to check if she’d locked it. As Dad told us, he calculated how many minutes of their life would be lost to this habit over forty years, and quietly shook her hand good-bye. By this time in the recitation, Dad would always have us in hysterics. To finish us off, he’d wind up with the tale of still another young lady who went into File 13 because, although she knew everything there was to know about matrix manipulation and made a dynamite peach melba to boot, she thought that Cervantes was a Mexican mariachi band.
Despite his later facetious retelling, the boy he’d been was really out there, digging. The old guy in embryo, the child’s research grew increasingly rigorous and took him farther and farther afield. Passaic, Paterson, and beyond: still nothing panned out. Saturday nights he tried the time-tested, dance-marathon, trial-by-erotica method, but always came away empty. Pop grew older, more sophisticated in the art of the stakeout. Turning seventeen, he escalated his efforts. Dad became adept at sifting information—the Library Municipal Room, City Hall, even the public-school system’s records. Somewhere his wife waited for him to discover her. He had to check everywhere.
As time passed and his less fastidious classmates pinned and unpinned, engaged and disengaged themselves many times over, my old man began to suspect that he was a victim of his own search techniques. He liked to speak of his dark night of doubt: maybe there simply weren’t any girls of marriageable age that could meet selection standards as stringent as his. But once having started out on the path of talent scouting, he doomed himself to sticking to it. For if he settled now for second best, he could never hope to respect, for life, a woman whom he deliberately avoided measuring against surrendered standards. In his entrapment by perfectionism, he never changed.
Why a lower-middle-class teenager couldn’t content himself with the simple cycle of dating and mating, of love-marriage-baby-carriage, that satisfied everybody else is as much a mystery to me as it was to him. Granted my grandfather, a hard-drinking latter-day economic immigrant who managed to squeak in just before the country slammed its doors shut and sealed the Ellis Islands, had cultivated a modicum of Irish morality in the boy. But Dad’s father’s idea of a clean and ordered world required only that the boy maintain rulered sideburns and hang his pressed pair of Sunday pants upside down in big wooden cuff-clamps. The fastidiousness that the old Irishman meant to instill in his progeny degraded in Dad, who thought it sufficient to hang his trousers upside down by their cuffs from dresser drawers, only to resurface cruelly in me, a man who single-handedly subsidizes the dry-cleaning industry.
In place of this shed clothes-conscientiousness, Dad had a rage to order that his immigrant father, as well as his assimilated children, never quite understood. For even though he rose no higher than deplorable in father’s and son’s hierarchies of good grooming, Pop contracted a far more lethal strain of the efficiency disease. The search for the perfect spouse was one symptom. He was infected with the need to squeeze the full, appropriate use from every item in his life. The need helped kill him.
He told us where he had first been exposed to the virus. He’d caught it three years before Orchestra Wives, the year his voice changed, 1939, out in Flushing Meadow at the New York World’s Fair. The place was a septic hotbed of the Progress disease, and Pop contracted it at once. Several visits to the Fair, an unprecedented celebration of technological progress and utility built around the theme of “Building the World of Tomorrow,” changed the boy profoundly in a way that rippled down a causal chain and never stopped.
The etiology was even more specific. Of the more than fifteen hundred exhibits, one in particular did him in. At thirteen, he did not understand the earth-moving events behind the premature closing of the Czech pavilion. In the amusements and side shows, he was already too sophisticated to have more than passing interest. He stopped at Westinghouse long enough to chat and share a cigarette with the robot Elektro. The time capsule fascinated him, but he did not then have the patience for the past that circumstance would later force on him. He would come back to the buried metal message later, dig it up from an all but lost printed map.
But the pavilion that utterly floored him at the time, completely overhauled his life and therefore mine, was General Motors’s Futurama. Three times that year he stood for hours on the sinuous entrance ramp, waiting among a crowd of tens of thousands for his glimpse of the astonishing city of 1960. He fidgeted through the preshow in the darkened auditorium, then climbed into his self-powered conveyor chair, leaned back beside the speaker, and listened to the recorded voice narrate a synchronized tour of the wonders opening up in front of him. He spun past the thirty-six-thousand-square-foot model of futuristic landscapes, farms where plants grew under individual globes, power factories that doubled as recreation areas, impeccable suburbs, logical industrial parks, and, finally, the staggering city center itself, a vision beyond even the recorded narrator’s ability to describe. “Unbelievable?” I can still hear him mimic the voice-over. “Remember, this is the world of 1960.”
Pop described how each time, at the end of the ride, he would stand up from his chair, still under the spell of the model, and leave the pavilion, only to find himself outside in a full-scale version of the panorama’s final scene: a typical intersection of 1960, a life-size implementation of the model, a large-as-fact creation of the miniature replica working out the simulated future he had just witnessed. That, he often explained, first fired his forming mind: the exhibit’s last prediction fleshed out in the full-scale world.
I can feel the rush of arrival that passed through him each time he stepped into Futurama’s final chapter. This glimpse of perfection only twenty-one years off remade the teenager in its own image. Overnight, he grew obsessed with bringing this future world about. He made himself into a mobile sieve, extracting order from disorder, decreasing entropy by directing things to their proper place. He never stopped believing, as far as I know, that if he followed his own miniature exhibit through to the end, he would eventually come onto the last, life-size display, out in the open air.
This Futurama-induced administrative competence stranded the boy in singing-waiterdom while the future of the real place was being decided. Bricked in, the urge demanded a hundred other outlets, ultimately driving him to Passaic for the spouse research on weekends, not to find the most desirable mate but the most appropriate.
Dad probably should have been an engineer, the only line of work that fit his temperament. The job might have given him that illusion of slow improvement that could have saved him. He would have become one, too, if it hadn’t been for the detour that history arranged for him. He wanted me to take up the work he never did, but on that hope I could not deliver. My product has to be another.
Some months after Futurama closed, when he heard the news about the miracle at Dunkirk, Pop thrilled to it as only a suitor of progress could. He cheered not
so much the escape itself—light technology throwing mud in the Nazi’s eyes by evacuating a third of a million soldiers in fishing boats. He was electrified by the delicious sense of the episode being managed efficiently, meetly, and effectively.
If the other major evacuation of the war, the one Roosevelt authorized on February 20, 1942, failed to give him the same sense of engineering perfection, it was because he never heard it happening. Like most wartime Americans aside from those imprisoned, the boy probably would have approved of the internment of a hundred thousand of his fellow citizens, Americans of Japanese Ancestry. Since he had never met any AJAs, Dad thought them as mythical as Assyrians coming down like wolves on the fold. At sixteen, the efficiency of our country’s reverse Dunkirk would probably have interested him more than the morality or defensibility of the matter. Had Dad heard of the mass imprisonment, coming from a matinee of Orchestra Wives, it might have seemed no more real than the pictures of Nazi concentration camps that year distributed to boys on bubble-gum cards, reading “Don’t let this happen here.”
By the time we sat in the dark and watched that ludicrous film together a third of a century later, most of his issues had already been decided. Dad had settled on a life where all his emotional possessions were small, light, or easy to give away. He had already planned the details of his own break, even as he called out the movie’s cast of players to me.
I have long since forgotten what the film was all about. All I can recall now is sitting in that room, in front of the faint, gray glow of the tube, wondering where my father was escaping to. I was still sidetracked on second-guessing, in the progress of his health, the covert message he meant to send to himself, to us, to the runaway and untouchable world. I overlooked the principal point: I should have seen that whatever Dad thought his illness represented, he was really sick. He was going through an actual hell of tortured and poisoned cells. I should have addressed the illness first and not waited to discover what it stood for.
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 8
