Screening Room

by Alan Lightman

  My mother, a Garretson, was the daughter of an uneducated self-made man and an icy, college-educated mother who wouldn’t kiss people, including her own children, for fear of catching germs. Although Mother’s father, Dave, possessed a warm and affectionate nature, he was always working like a demon in a box factory, trying to compensate for his lack of education, and he was unavailable. Consequently, Mother felt unloved growing up. When we watched movies such as Swiss Family Robinson and To Kill a Mockingbird, Mother would always comment on the devotion of certain characters to each other. Later, when reading our school papers, she would suggest themes of loyalty and love. She craved touching and other physical demonstrations of affection. She was the source of passion in the family, the spurting artery. If we children withheld secrets from her or didn’t return love to her in sufficient quantities or forgot to lavish her with attention on her birthday, she would get a hurt look and sulk about the house. Like a twenty-four-hour weather station, she was constantly broadcasting her changing emotions.

  My father was not able to give my mother the caring she pined for. His detachment was the quality that most injured my mother. Yet even during their worst moments, Mother and Dad respected each other. He valued her bold wrestle with life. She valued his intelligence, his integrity. Dad had an enormous knowledge of history. He read and read, mixing such books as Churchill’s three-volume account of World War II with spy novels by John le Carré—all of which he kept to himself. Every once in a while, as the six of us sat at the dinner table, a historical question would arise, we would turn to Dad, and he would quietly come forth with a flood of information and insight, Mother looking at him with admiration.

  Mother also adored Dad’s low-pitched sense of humor. Upon insistent request, Dad would tell one of his ten-minute jokes, which he called “shaggy dog stories.” A shaggy dog story had no single punch line but was instead a series of amusing events connected by a loose narrative. I remember one story Dad called “The Cooshmaker.” An extremely brief synopsis would go something like this: At the beginning of World War II, a guy read in the papers that the navy badly needed men and would take any former servicemen back at their old rating and rank. This guy told the navy recruiters that he was formerly a “cooshmaker first class.” No one had heard of this position. The fellow went from one navy department to another, and at each place the officers were too embarrassed to admit that they had never heard of a cooshmaker, so they sent him on to the next department. But they finally had to take him in as a cooshmaker, and he was assigned to a ship. One day an admiral comes aboard the ship and points to the cooshmaker standing by himself and asks, “Who is that man?” The captain replies that he is a cooshmaker first class. The admiral says: “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a cooshmaker. Can he give me a demonstration of his specialty?” The captain asks for a demonstration. So, the cooshmaker gets some metal and a blast furnace and a crane. With the crane, he lifts up a cylinder of molten lead and drops it in the water. The captain asks: “What does it do?” The cooshmaker replies: “It went coosh, and I can have another one up in fifteen minutes.”

  My parents separated for a couple of months in the late 1970s. By that time, my brothers and I were all grown, finished with college, and launched on our own wandering paths. My parents never called it a separation. Mother simply said that she was going to New Orleans to visit an old girlfriend. For the first few weeks, Mother and Dad didn’t write or call each other. Then my mother wrote my father about an old beau she’d run into who had married a Catholic girl and converted from Judaism to Catholicism, then divorced her and married a Jewish lady and converted back to Judaism. Half of his children were Jewish and half Catholic. Dad replied with a funny cartoon drawing of my mother leading one of her dance classes and twirling about like a small tornado. Soon, Mother moved back, bringing with her some new recipes from Antoine’s and Galatoire’s.

  Heat

  It is a Sunday afternoon, and I am alone in the house I grew up in.

  When the air conditioner went haywire this morning, my father departed for cooler locations. I remained. I wanted this heat. This heat is the true flesh of the South. It is part of the pace and the manners and the patience I’d forgotten. In physics, heat is motion and speed at the molecular level, but in humanity, and especially southern humanity, heat is slowness, deliberation, grace, a rounded kind of courtesy. I want to roll in it and taste it. I’ve stripped to my undershorts, and the sweat slowly drips down my bare chest and legs. In this heat, an ice cube melts in three minutes. The air has a thickness.

  It is unimaginable that people could work in this heat. And indeed, outdoor construction in Memphis comes to a near halt in June, July, and August. Just a few summers ago, eight people perished from the heat in Memphis. One of the victims was a sixty-seven-year-old woman from New Jersey, visiting for the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. She expired at a recreational vehicle park near Graceland. Northerners are unprepared, even though some travel brochures warn that “summer heat is brutal in Memphis.” As it is in Birmingham and Oxford and New Orleans. It could be argued that the main character of Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love” is not the man or the woman who meet in the restaurant, but the crippling heat of the South.

  Aunt Rosalie, when her memory was good, used to regale the family with stories of attempted romantic adventures in the scorching summers of the 1940s. Before going out to stroll or to park along Riverside Drive, couples would drive to an “ice house” on Union and procure a big block of ice. This they would chip through the evening, pressing the melting pieces against their sweaty cheeks and bare arms. It took a twenty-pound block to get through an evening. When two amorous couples shared the same car, each pair would require their own cache of ice, one in the front seat and one in the back. On Sundays, with the ice house closed, couples would buy Coca-Colas in the filling stations and hold the cold bottles against their foreheads. Some summer evenings, Rosalie says, young people went swimming in their underwear in the little lake at Chickasaw Gardens, now populated by Tudor-style mansions and Spanish colonial haciendas. The bathers could vaguely see other similarly clad couples sitting on the far edge of the lake, faint patches of white in the dark. Even late at night, the temperature could be in the nineties. Young women swooned in the heat, their dates mistakenly thinking they’d been overcome by love.

  Letting the sweat trickle down my body, I amble though the house. We children spent most of our time in the den, with its knotty-pine walls and shelves full of my father’s history books and a locked liquor bar. On Saturday nights, when our parents were at a party, my brothers and I would lie on the floor of the den watching television while Blanche cooked us hamburgers and french fries, the house smelling deliciously of hot cooking oil. The den was the site of some parental battles. Mother used to get so mad at herself for gorging in the middle of the night, she once asked Dad to lock up the ice cream in the fridge in the liquor bar and hide the key. The next night, in that crazed state she got into, she ransacked the house while everybody was sleeping, found the key, and wolfed down an entire quart of pistachio ice cream. Then she got furious at Dad for not hiding the key well enough. That night, he hid the key really well. Next morning, she was in a foul mood, saying terrible things to everybody, and she snapped at Dad for hiding the key too well. “Honey,” he said, “where would you like me to hide the key tonight?”

  The living room. Southern homes from the 1950s had gracious living rooms that no one set foot in—beautiful oriental rugs, embroidered chairs, and porcelain vases, all to be admired from an adjoining room but not to be disturbed by actual people. The only soul who entered the living room was the colored maid, to dust off the antiques. But during the year that my mother was dying of cancer, she insisted on spending evenings in this living room. All through that winter and spring and even the summer, she wanted a fire going in the marble fireplace. Dad would trudge in with armloads of wood from the backyard. Mother, wearing a bathrobe, her lush wavy ha
ir gone from the chemical treatments, lay on the Queen Anne couch staring into the fire while the rest of us tried to talk about anything except what we were thinking.

  My parents’ bedroom. Here I find the little metal table where my mother used to sit typing books for the blind on her Braille typewriter, an unusual machine whose keys created raised dots instead of ink. The paper was thick and beige-colored, like a manila folder. As I remember, each letter of the Braille alphabet is given by a particular pattern of raised dots, with a maximum of six dots in each pattern. Mother transcribed textbooks into Braille, and occasionally romance novels, all on a volunteer basis. She typed away feverishly on her own self-imposed schedules and deadlines, demanding of herself that she finish so many pages per week. When she fell behind schedule, she typed through the night. Every couple of months, she would take a finished manuscript to be proofread by Miss Starks, a blind woman. I sometimes accompanied her. Miss Starks, an elderly lady with white hair and garish, outsize jewelry, lived alone. Her apartment was chaos. She knew exactly where everything was, but the place twisted and jangled with oddly placed objects and clashing colors. Miss Starks would run her hands over Mother’s face, and sometimes mine, before offering us tomatoes from her garden. When Miss Starks found mistakes in the manuscripts, Mother would correct her errors with a small wooden tool that pushed the wayward dot back to a level position. If Mother made too many mistakes on a single page, she would throw it out and start over. When I was growing up, discarded pages of Braille lay scattered everywhere about our house. I sometimes imagined a blind family moving in, feeling their way along the walls from room to room. Every once in a while, they would stumble upon a discarded Braille page and sink to the floor reading it, like a secret message from our family to theirs. Then, when they inevitably encountered the mistake, a nonsensical jumble of dots, a heated discussion would follow. Sometimes they got confused, sometimes they scoffed at the clumsy work of my mother, and sometimes they reinterpreted the mistake as a completely different word that gave the book a deep and mysterious meaning. I can almost hear the sound of the keys as Mother presses them with her fingers.

  I walk up the stairs to my old bedroom. A bookcase still holds my dusty copies of Borges and Kafka, slim volumes of poems by Eliot and Frost, a folder of my own juvenile stories and poems. Near the dormer window is the large closet that served as my boyhood laboratory. In that alchemist’s den, I hoarded capacitors and transistors, spools of wire, photoelectric cells, Bunsen burners and Petri dishes, test tubes and beautiful glass funnels and flasks. I had two groups of friends, the artists and the scientists. The artists read unassigned novels and poems, acted in the school plays, reacted impulsively to people and events. The scientists relished math, built gadgets, demanded logical explanations. I loved the dark and mysterious back alleys of the arts, but I also loved the certainty of science, the questions with definite answers. At times, I could feel something flip in my mind as I switched from one group of friends to the other.

  Downstairs to the kitchen. Fifty years ago, Blanche stood in this kitchen teaching my brothers and me how to dance to gospel music. In a lovely voice she sang:

  All to Jesus, I surrender,

  All to Him I freely give.

  I will ever love and trust Him,

  In his presence daily live.

  And as she sang, she swayed her enormous hips back and forth, jostled her shoulders with the perkiness of a seventeen-year-old girl, and clapped her hands from side to side. We were enthralled, and we began imitating her, four little boys in their pajamas shaking and gyrating to soul music. Then my mother walked in. She threw one glance at Blanche, put on her own record, and proceeded to give us a lesson in the jitterbug.

  Breakfast at Noon with Lennie and Nate

  “Hattie Mae was the only living creature could talk to Bob,” says Lennie, lighting one of her long, slim cigarettes. “I think that’s the main reason M.A. and Celia kept her. That and her cooking. When Hattie Mae sang ‘Amazing Grace’ to Bob, that ornery mule would get real quiet. Hattie Mae looked at you cross-eyed, like Bob, and she had a mouthful of gold-capped teeth. She also didn’t kowtow to white folks. I remember one year about two weeks before Thanksgiving, I was over at the house on Cherry. Lila and I were helping Celia with some decorating, but it was mostly me helping because Lila was in the powder room all day preening and fixing her hair. Celia called in Hattie Mae and said that she was having Thanksgiving dinner that year at her house and needed Hattie Mae to work for her that day. Hattie Mae could take off the Monday after, said Celia. Hattie Mae was none too happy about this assignment, as she had her own plans for Thanksgiving, but she didn’t say anything and went about her cleaning and sweeping. Later that evening, as Hattie Mae was getting ready to go home, Celia said that she’d like to have the turkey ready at four p.m. on Thanksgiving day. ‘Mizz Lightman,’ said Hattie Mae, ‘I fix Thanksgiving dinner for my own family.’ ‘Don’t you have a sister?’ said Celia. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ‘Well, you can let her cook the dinner for your family on Thanksgiving. I need you here.’ Hattie Mae turned directly toward Celia and looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Mizz Lightman, I been fixing Thanksgiving dinner for my family for twenty-five years. I’ll find somebody else to help you.’

  “Hattie Mae had spirit. Another story I remember. M.A. and Celia had an old lawn mower that stayed in the garage, never used. One day Hattie Mae said, ‘Mr. Lightman, is you goin’ to use that lawn mower?’ ‘I don’t think so,’ said M.A. ‘Well, then,’ said Hattie Mae, ‘I got some grass at home that would be mighty helped with that lawn mower.’ So Hattie Mae had her nephew come over and get the lawn mower, and she kept it. About four years later, the machine broke. Hattie Mae took it to Sears and Roebuck to be fixed. She came to work the next day and said to M.A., ‘They’s askin’ fifteen dollars to fix that lawn mower of yours. Don’t you want it fixed?’

  “Hattie Mae went to all the big family events. She went to Jeanne and Dick’s wedding and was the only black person there. After the wedding, she said to me, ‘I felt like a fly in the buttermilk.’ ”

  “Hattie Mae was married to Willie, M.A.’s chauffeur, wasn’t she?” said Nate.

  “How in the world did you remember that?” said Lennie. “I think the man’s name was Douglas.”

  “No, Douglas was Dick’s chauffeur.”

  “I never knew Dick had a chauffeur.”

  “Everybody white had a colored chauffeur back then.”

  I remember them both, Willie and Douglas. Both smelled of alcohol all day long, starting early in the morning. Douglas had several silver teeth and a white stubble of a beard and wore blue denim shirts. He showed up at our front door one day, after walking up the long driveway from the street, and said he was out of work and could do whatever we needed around the house, inside or out. Over his shoulder hung a cloth sack, which I think contained all of his worldly possessions. My father didn’t have any work for Douglas but hired him with some kind of vague instructions about raking the leaves and keeping the automobile running well. As it turned out, Douglas was as little acquainted with internal combustion as my father was. But he could rake leaves, and he could help Blanche polish the silver. One of Douglas’s duties was occasionally to drive members of the family, and when he did so, he donned a back chauffeur’s hat. Douglas was clearly lower down on the pecking order than Blanche. However, once or twice a week when he drove, as soon as he put on his chauffeur’s hat he stood up taller, added a lilt to his gait, cracked a few jokes on his own, and bowed to no one. Douglas had a daughter who visited him once in a while. They would sit in one of the cars in the garage. The daughter didn’t want to come into the house. Eventually, my father had to fire Douglas because he was stealing the silver.

  Willie. I think it was Willie White. Willie’s people had been sharecroppers in Alabama, and he had learned about engines of all kinds by watching his father drive a tractor. He was one of the gentlest men I ever met. When he spoke, his voice sounded like a quiet song. Will
ie loved children and animals, but he was timid around adults, especially white adults, and he would not look my grandparents or parents in the eye. He was most comfortable around machines and automobiles. On the occasions I remember riding in a car Willie was driving, he shifted the gears so smoothly that you couldn’t even notice unless you were watching his hands. He wore black gloves when he drove. I once heard him actually talking to my grandfather’s car, as if it were a person. When Willie married Hattie Mae, he wanted her to move away from the little space attached to M.A.’s garage, but Hattie Mae said she didn’t want to move, she felt safe there, so Willie lived with her there. Sometime in the early 1970s, Willie developed Alzheimer’s and had to move to a home for the mentally ill. “I won’t see the man I knew again in this lifetime,” said Hattie Mae. “The Lord does what He does.”

  Look at This Trick on Your Mind

  Projectors

  “M.A.’s first theater in Memphis was the Linden Circle. That was before my time. Ha ha.”

  Lennie takes a bite from her barbecue ribs and pats at her mouth with a napkin. Lennie, my brother David, and my Aunt Lila are having lunch with me at the Rendezvous. From the outside, the place is not much to look at, located in the basement of an alley with exposed steam pipes tangled around the front door like veins in an autopsy. But diners routinely wait a half hour for a seat at the little tables with the red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. Frank Sinatra, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, and the Rolling Stones have gotten their fingers sticky at the Rendezvous. Rumor has it that the only person who knows all thirty-four ingredients that go into the barbecue sauce is John Vergos, the owner and a former high school classmate of mine.