The Hue and Cry at Our House

by Benjamin Taylor

  • • •

  Between the fire and the assassination had come that other schooling in contingency: the end of the world. On Monday evening, October 22, 1962, President Kennedy informed us that we faced a grave threat. “I wish to hell it was Ike in there,” said my father as we watched the Oval Office address. Kennedy explained, in his outlandish accent, that the Soviets were readying bases in Cuba from which to launch middle-range nuclear missiles (forty-one of them, though this we were not told) each with a thousand-mile range or more and (this, too, we were not told) a destructive power fifty times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Eighteen thousand times the might of Little Boy was aimed at the USA and as an important air force base, Carswell, and a major aircraft manufacturer, Convair, were located in Fort Worth, it was assumed that our city was earmarked for incineration. “I don’t see Kennedy as ready for this,” said Daddy.

  He reiterated our emergency plan, which Civil Defense had instructed every family to have. If not together at the time of the attack we should look for one another at the breakwater of Benbrook Lake. As if I’d have had the slightest clue how to get there. But I do recall a sudden image I got of desperate throngs encamped on the ridge of the dam.

  Dad was wrong to doubt Kennedy’s adequacy. He’d coolly played for time, postponing the preemptive attack almost everyone around him, in uniform and out, was urging. Such a move—supported by Dean Acheson, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and the Joint Chiefs—would have set in motion a sequence of retaliatory strikes and counterstrikes that would have killed tens of millions, poisoned the planet and doomed survivors to a subsistence that did not bear imagining. (“Retaliatory” had been the one word the President stumbled on in his Oval Office address.)

  Next day by noon the supermarket shelves were bare. Gasoline hoarders drank the filling stations dry. At school we were ordered to windowless inner rooms and kept there for hours. Mr. Lea, who seemed eager for the coming battle, kept us busy with duck-and-cover drills. The dangerous course of day-to-day events (not least among them, communications through an all-important back channel—a KGB officer who spoke sub rosa for Nikita Khrushchev) was of course known to no one.

  On Thursday came Adlai Stevenson’s bravura appearance in the General Assembly of the UN: “Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Don’t wait for the translation. Yes or no? . . . I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over.”

  We got through Saturday, the most dangerous twenty-four hours in human history, not knowing that Khrushchev had followed up a conciliatory letter of the previous day, Friday—proposing withdrawal of the Soviet arsenal if we would pledge never again to invade Cuba and to remove our Jupiter missiles from Turkey—with a hard-line message on Saturday that seemed to make war inevitable. This second letter, so contrary to the first, even aroused suspicion that Khrushchev had been replaced in a palace coup. (In reality, that would come two years later.) Additionally there was the downing of one of our U-2s over Cuba. And in the midst of all this, Kennedy suavely ignored the loss of the reconnaissance pilot and plane, responded constructively to Khrushchev’s first letter, ignored his second. . . .

  And waited.

  Strategic Air Command bombers circled the Arctic that night, prepared to strike targets within the USSR. Other bombers had their instruction packets for a Caribbean assault at daybreak. Our ships were ready to land battalions; they’d have been annihilated; unknown to anyone in Washington, the Soviets had also smuggled short-range battle nukes into Cuba expressly for use against a naval invasion.

  Late Saturday evening Attorney General Robert Kennedy met with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Speaking on the President’s authority, RFK agreed, in exchange for withdrawal of all missiles from Cuba, to make no further attempts on the Castro regime. And to remove our missiles from Turkey, provided this remain secret.

  At ten o’clock central time that morning, Khrushchev announced the end of the crisis. Mom said so when she picked me up from Sunday school. We took the long way home, through Forest Park. She turned off the radio. “I think this is nice,” she said. “Just you and me, driving around. I think this is plenty nice.” Embarrassed as always by adult emotion, I nodded. The world, a great glory, looked its old self.

  • • •

  Who in his right mind would have preferred Richard Nixon giving orders during those thirteen days? Unremarked by reviewers of Robert A. Caro’s The Passage of Power, volume four of his magisterial life of Lyndon Johnson, was a careful analysis of vote tallies from two critical counties of the Rio Grande Valley in the 1960 presidential election. Lyndon Johnson had been brought onto the Democratic ticket to ensure that Texas, which had gone for Eisenhower in the previous two cycles, would come back to the Democrats. Without those twenty-four electoral votes there was simply no path to a Kennedy–Johnson victory.

  No polite way to say this: On the evening of the elections, Lyndon’s strongman in the Valley, George Parr, the “Duke of Duval County,” held back returns till he saw how many votes were needed. (By similar means he and Lyndon had stolen a Senate election twelve years earlier.)

  My father used to talk smilingly about the Duke, whom he’d known in the Valley, where as a young man importing Mexican bananas Dad first made a name for himself. “George? Colorful character. Jovial. Ruthless. We heard some pretty bad stories. ‘El Jefe’ to the Mexicans—Mexican-Americans, I mean, but who the hell said that? The Mexicans voted how he told them to. He bought their poll-tax certificates for a buck apiece, which was real money to Mexicans, and delivered their votes to the polling place.” That’s how politics was done in Duval and Wells and seven other counties, all of them in the Duke’s pocket.

  I have a fragmentary memory of election night, 1960. I knew the Kennedy campaign song, made famous by Sinatra to the tune of “High Hopes,” and stormed around the house singing it: “Everyone is voting for Jack, ’cause he’s got what all the rest lack! Everyone wants to—BACK—JACK! Jack is on the right track!” High hopes indeed, for what Lyndon and the Duke could bring to pass. Caro’s research reveals that in a presidential election decided by forty-six thousand ballots in Texas, the Duke delivered improbable majorities—more than ninety percent in some of the nine precincts—to the Democratic ticket. About fifty-two thousand votes, what was needed plus a little, and Texas went for Kennedy–Johnson.

  “Would steal a red-hot stove,” was my father’s verdict on LBJ, whom he considered a worse scoundrel than the Duke. But forget red-hot stoves. On the night of November 8, 1960, George Parr and Lyndon Johnson, acting together, finagled twenty-four electoral votes for, let us say, the good of the nation. One can’t help being grateful that they did.

  That autumn Little Bubbe, who was dying of nephritis, had come to stay with us. She observed my Kennedy mania: eight years old and a political animal. “Could be a very disappointed little boy,” I remember her saying on election night. But no one need have worried, with Lyndon on the ticket. Were the Kennedys even aware of how much they owed him?

  • • •

  Grandpa Bockstein, a man of very strict routines, would throw back a shot of Crown Royal every day at noon, shudder as if taking medicine and tuck into his lunch, a well-done sirloin and buttered baked potato. (He couldn’t bear, at any meal, to see a green vegetable.) My own father’s relationship to alcohol was profligate by comparison—one measure of how rapid our acculturation from Polish shtetl to American suburb had been. “Bartender!” he’d call out, meaning me, and order a Chivas and soda, or sometimes a Courvoisier and water. And sometimes he’d send me into the bar to shake a martini. We watched Huntley-Brinkley while he drank. I sat on the floor, had done so for years, the way children do, liking the floor. Then one evening he looked at me and said: “What the hell are you doing on the floor? Go sit in a chair.” But if I often saw him testy or riled, I never saw him dru
nk. About the shoal marked alcoholism, on which so many families went aground, we knew nothing.

  Reading the renowned memoirs, I’m struck by what extremes they recount. Mary McCarthy’s mother and father died of the flu within twenty-four hours of each other when she was six. Mikal Gilmore grew up the younger brother of Gary Gilmore. Kathryn Harrison was her father’s lover. Mary Karr’s mother came after her with a knife. Lucy Grealy lost a portion of her face to cancer. Alison Bechdel’s father threw himself under the wheels of an oncoming truck. David Small’s radiologist father treated him for asthma with large doses of X-ray leading to cancer of the larynx. Examples could be multiplied. The things I saw in other homes sometimes made me laugh, as when Milt Feinberg licked the mouth of the ketchup bottle before passing it to me. “Milt!” his wife cried, probably because she saw the look of revulsion on my face. Yes, the Feinbergs’ prig of a guest, taken in on a moment’s notice, found them uncouth. But what would I have made of things in other homes for which I hadn’t even the names? Dysfunction flourished all around yet I was oblivious to it. We lived without any of the curses: no madness, violence, bankruptcy, drug-taking, drunkenness, incest or desertion. Not even an apple core where it shouldn’t have been.

  • • •

  As a small child I was a payer of calls throughout the neighborhood. My parents had built the comfortable, unpretentious flagstone house at the crest of the hill two years before I was born. Ranier Court was the only world I knew. Accompanied by Jeff and Davy, my beagles, and armed with social skills that were none of the finest, I’d choose a doorbell and ring it, confident of being brought inside for a cookie and glass of milk while Jeff and Davy dug up the flower beds. The Goulds, the McDonalds, the McCanns, the Salems, the Thompsons, the Suggses, the Stevenses, the Dominys, the Wests. Some of these households had more melancholy in them than others. One or two were childless and had the deep quiet of childless homes. Each had its own smell and standard of tidiness. In some the good fragrance of beeswax on wooden floors prevailed. In others it was cigarettes and old cooking. And, in not a few, demons crouched at the hearthside, invisible to blithe little me. I was something like Gertrude Flannery, the roving girl in John Cheever’s story “The Country Husband”: “Opening your front door in the morning, you would find Gertrude on your stoop. Going into the bathroom to shave, you would find Gertrude on the toilet. . . . She was helpful, pervasive, honest, hungry, and loyal. She never went home of her own choice. When the time to go arrived, she was indifferent to all its signs. ‘Go home, Gertrude,’ people could be heard saying in one house or another, night after night.”

  A certain residence on Ranier Court was no-go. The widow Crowley lived there with Half-Pint, her malicious dachshund, which we pronounced “dash hound,” and dash he could, right for Jeff’s and Davy’s throats. We gave the Crowley place a wide berth.

  On the next hill and too far to visit was the palatial residence of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Ginsburg. Jeannette was a plainspoken, warm, beautiful woman. Her husband, Arthur, was the most pretentious Jew in Fort Worth. In the aftermath of the Missile Crisis he had decreed for himself a mausoleum that could withstand, as he never tired of telling people, anything short of a direct nuclear strike. Friends would be driven to the cemetery to view this rose marble wonder.

  Arthur’s pomposity was the rack on which Jeannette lived, as my mother used to say. About twenty years ago, when I was home on a visit, Mom looked up one evening from her Star-Telegram. “It says here that Arthur Ginsburg has died.”

  “Are they sure?” said Dad and went back to what he’d been doing. Speak only well of the dead, ancient Rome advised: De mortuis nil nisi bonum. As if anybody could adhere to such a ridiculous maxim. My father certainly did not, and made no bones about it. More than once I remember him saying: “Rabbi’s eulogy made me want to open the box and see who was in there.”

  Now my parents lie together beneath a plain slab of black marble near Arthur I. Ginsburg’s magnificent tomb, which casts no shadow on them at any hour of the day.

  | CHAPTER THREE |

  THE REAL MAN, THE IMAGINATION

  My best friend was Robby Anton. From him I learned a more whimsical way of life than Taylors or Bocksteins could teach. We thought the funniest thing was to telephone some hotel in the red-light district and attempt, in elevated language, to make a reservation. Or else we’d sit in his mother’s Cadillac and be a couple of stars driving from Fort Worth to New York to open in a Broadway show. While others played ball outside, Robby and I would lie around his house or mine listening to Sophie Tucker, last of the red-hot mamas, sing: “Who wants ’em tall, dark and handsome! Who cares about glamorous guys!” We loved the great indoors. One Saturday, in a corner of my bedroom, we opened an expensive Polynesian restaurant. On a sleepover at his house, draped in afghans and turbaned in bath towels, we lip-synched highlights from Lucia di Lammermoor, seen at the Fort Worth Opera with a senescent Lily Pons in the lead and an unknown twenty-one-year-old Spaniard named Plácido Domingo as her Edgardo. Ordinary boys we were not. We adored theater and ceremony and pomp and pretense of every kind. We especially loved funerals. One time we put on a funeral for a bookmark.

  While there has been life for me after Robby, more than thirty years of it, there was none at all before. His parents were the closest friends of mine—you rarely saw Shirley and Charlie without Sol and Annette—and so it happened quite naturally that Robby, three years older than I, became my first friend, a piece of luck I’ll marvel at till I die: to have been granted from earliest childhood the company of a creative genius.

  My earliest memory of him must be from when I was about five and he eight—an eight-year-old artist in the spell of his calling, which was puppetry. He had a stage his parents had brought back from FAO Schwarz (I wailed till my parents got me one like it), complete with a set of hand puppets: an alligator, a glowworm, a cockatoo, a bearded lady, a heavy-lidded ostrich, a monkey with a scarlet maw and so forth. And how, with his effortless theatricality, Robby stirred them all to life! After a few attempts to emulate him at home on my own bare stage, I folded it up and put it away. Under my tutelage the puppets had refused to live. With glass eyes they reproached me.

  Yes, I was a flop—who decided, like flops before me, that reflected glory would be better than none at all. So I made myself Robby’s factotum, taking up the slack backstage, operating the lights out front, et cetera. Our audience? Our squirming and benevolent parents, and, occasionally, our guffawing older brothers.

  Anything on a stage was rapture. Galvanized by Fort Worth Opera’s Madame Butterfly, we decided to mount a version of our own and commandeered two girls from Mrs. Westbrook’s class, Libby Lee and Angela Tipton, to play Cho-Cho-San and Suzuki. I myself would take the role of Captain Pinkerton.

  Libby and Angela were a couple of troupers. They had ballet recitals to their credit and we felt, somehow, that their tutus and tights would look Japanese enough. I’d wear my new seersucker for Pinkerton’s regalia. At Record Town we bought the Angel LP set of Victoria de los Ángeles and Jussi Björling singing Butterfly. The idea was that Angela, Libby and I would lip-synch the whole thing. Robby painted the flats and put me in charge of staging. Who was going to see this opera? That we’d figure out later.

  Angela, a fiery girl, felt miscast as Suzuki and hankered for the starring role. Midway through the dress rehearsal, that hellcat spat on us both. Robby said, “You’re gonna get it, girlie!” Libby leapt in. I gave her a hard pinch. Still in their tights and tutus, she and Angela flew out the front door, roller bags clattering behind them. Libby’s had a dud wheel, which for some reason made Robby and me laugh uncontrollably.

  “Did you see that wheel?” he managed to say through tears.

  “She deserves it!” We fell against each other.

  Last we saw, Libby and Angela were waving down some car. Of a nice person, we hoped. More helpless laughter. But our Butterfly had perished in the larval stage
.

  Many years later Robby said: “Pathetic of us to have employed those girls when what we wanted was to be Cho-Cho-San and Suzuki ourselves.”

  • • •

  It was with puppets that Robby began and with puppets that he ended. That he became in the last decade of his brief life one of the greatest puppeteers who has ever lived is not doubted by those who saw his work of the late seventies and early eighties. This time he made the protean characters from scratch, a cast of tiny finger puppets who broached the darkness, made alchemical discoveries, suffered and were metamorphosed from their illusions. His theater was a single-handed mythology, outside all creeds and yet systematic. William Blake comes to mind as a comparably uncompromising artist and Blake was among Robby’s fascinations. Like the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Robby invented an allegory in which characters embody instincts and faculties. He drew the numinous circle around these human things in order to show, as myth does, how interfused they are with a universe of powers transcending them.