Donna kept repeating helplessly, “But, Daddy, we were there. We were ready to play. If we’d been with you, we’d have gotten frostbite too.”
Jeanette said nothing until Daddy ran down, just looked on, distant, controlled. Then she spoke evenly. “Daddy, if you’re going to act like this, I don’t want to be a part of it anymore. I don’t want to be in the band anymore.”
Daddy, who could break a brick with a blow of his bare hand, took a step toward her. But Jeanette did not flinch. She lifted her chin higher. “I’m tired of having you scream at us. I’m tired of having beer spilled on me. I’m tired of working when everybody else is playing.”
Mommy moaned, ‘‘Jeanette…”
“I mean it. I want out.”
“One monkey don’t stop the show,” Daddy ground out between clenched teeth. ‘‘You think the band can’t go on without you? One monkey don’t stop the show!” Now he was shouting.
“That’s a good thing,” Jeanette said, wheeling, “because I’m through.”
And out she went, out of the front door and out of our lives for months to come.
9
One Monkey Don’t Stop the Show
ALL THE TIME WE WERE GROWING UP, Daddy had never cursed, or if he started to, Mommy said, “Not in front of the kids, Donald,” and he acknowledged this with, “Oh, right, the kids,” and shut up. But after Jeanette left, four-letter words came whipping out of his mouth as though he were a sailor. His tirades against Jeanette for leaving the band sometimes went on for an unbroken hour. Larded into them at intervals was the resolute, defiant phrase: “One monkey don’t stop the show.” I never knew its origin whether it was a circus phrase or an army exhortation but it summed up his angry determination not to be defeated by his ungrateful child.
The problem was, of course, that this child was the one most like him. She had all of his determination, drive, fortitude, independence, and energy, which meant that he admired her, loved her, and fought with her passionately. Where the rest of us were negative poles to his positive force, he and Jeanette were two positives and inevitably the sparks flew between them.
When he wasn’t excoriating Jeanette, Daddy said over and over, “Where did I go wrong? I should have done something else, but what? Maybe if I’d done this … Maybe if I’d done that …”
When Mommy tried to say, “Donald, that’s the way kids are, that’s the way life is,” he turned on her and heaped blame, sending her fleeing into silence, retreating far back into the cave of herself. Day after day her depression deepened until she almost ceased to function and spent much of the time when we were at school sitting in the dark with tears trickling down her cheeks.
In between his fulminating outbursts, Daddy was a broken man. When Jeanette left, so did his sense of purpose, his drive, his smile. Late at night, when I entered the pitch-black living room I would often be startled to see the lighted end of a cigarette suddenly glow in the dark and realize that Daddy was sitting there staring out of the picture window, staring silently at the ashes of his life. We didn’t speak, but everything in me went out to him and I vowed in my heart that never would I let him down as Jeanette had done, never would I reduce him to such desolation because of something I had failed to do.
With Jeanette gone from the band, Daddy instructed Rita to play mostly chords on the piano and to play them louder to make up for the absence of the guitar, and he turned up the amplifiers to compensate, so the band still sounded great. But now it was becoming obvious that Mommy was not going to be able to continue and he cast around for some way of substituting for the bass, because without the electric bass, which Mommy had switched to a couple of years before to keep from being drowned out by the drums, the band wouldn’t have the solid backbeat we needed for the music to sound right.
Daddy tugged and pulled at the problem until he came up with the idea of having some sort of bass made that Rita could play with her feet, like the pedals on an organ. He went to Newark in search of someone to make it for him.
“It can’t be done,” was the answer at several places.
“Look,” Daddy cajoled, “I’ll pay for your time. Just try it.”
“Naw, can’t be done,”
His bolstering belief that people always say something can’t be done until one person goes ahead and does it kept him searching, and finally he found a man in Kearny willing to test out his idea. This fellow took the bass pedals from an organ, fashioned a keyboard with about thirty keys, and wired it into an amplifier. The sound this foot bass made replicated the sound of an electric bass played with the hands. Daddy brought the contraption home, placed it on the floor under the keyboard, and told Rita to take off her shoes and play the pedals with her feet while she played the piano with her hands. Now it was her turn to say something couldn’t be done.
“Just try it,” Daddy urged, “Try, try, try.”
Dutifully, each afternoon Rita practiced and practiced, attempting to master a workable technique. Daddy, when he came home from work, listened and announced the tempo had to be faster. He dropped to his hands and knees and beat out the tempo on the floor.
“Faster. Faster like this.”
“Daddy, I can’t go that fast.”
“Sure, you can.”
“Daddy, I’ve got cramps in my legs!”
“Okay, go put hot towels on them, then get back here.”
Rita, kicking out to get at the pedals, time and again fell off the piano bench backwards. But driven by Daddy and by the determination she and Linda and I shared not to let Daddy down as Jeanette had done, she kept at it until she had not only mastered the foot bass but become wondrously good at it.
The sound was terrific. We could play all of our regular repertoire plus any of the hit songs that demanded a heavy bass. With Daddy working the controls on the amplifier, he would have the bass really pushing when the song called for that kind of kicking out. Not long ago, I ran into a fellow who had been at Princeton when we were playing, and he said, “You’d hear the music and you’d say, ‘Wow! How many people are in that band?’ Then you’d go inside and you’d see three women up there on the bandstand. You just couldn’t believe it, the sound was so incredible.”
Mommy did have to drop out of the band. Her depression, aggravated by the fact that she was menopausal, deepened so intolerably that she was hospitalized on the psychiatric service at Monmouth Medical Center. When she was released, she was on medication that so slowed her reactions that it was months before she could rejoin the band, and she never did get back to being the player she had been. She just more or less went through the motions, which was all right because by now Rita was so good on the foot bass that we didn’t really need her.
Donna stuck with us, turning up some weekends because, in effect, the younger ones had played to pay for her college tuition and cars and clothes and now it was our turn. I was going into my junior year at Monmouth College and Linda was coming in as a freshman, and Monmouth, because it was a private college, was expensive even though both Linda and I had grants-in-aid and small scholarships.
Junior year meant that now it was my turn to come up against organic chemistry. By this time I had learned that it didn’t make much difference what you majored in—it could be Chinese literature or English or mathematics—but you had to have organic chemistry to get into medical school. It was like a screening course—really tough. If you could make it through organic chemistry, everyone said, you could make it through anything. Organic chemistry was a rite of passage.
The professor was a male chauvinist who announced on the first day of class, “All the girls sit in the front row, and you don’t wear slacks in my class,” which didn’t mean that he liked women, only that he liked to look at their legs. He was, if anything, tougher on the women than on the men, and I prayed silently, ‘“Just let me pass this course. Just let me get a C and I’ll be happy.”
“You’re going to get these five unknowns,” the professor told us, “five chemicals in test tubes, and
it’s your job to find out what these unknowns are. You have the entire semester to do it. You can be in the lab until midnight, until two in the morning, I don’t care, but unless you get four out of the five, you’re not going to pass the course even if you get A’s on the tests.”
I took him literally about being able to use the lab until two in the morning and searched out the night custodian, Willie Dee, who scratched his head and said nobody ever used the lab after ten o’clock. I told him there was a first time for everything and he’d be seeing a lot of me that semester.
Willie Dee became my guardian angel, and night after night he’d stick his head in the lab door to check on me. “You sure you’re okay in there?”
“I’m fine.”
“Is anybody else comin’?”
“Not that I know of, but they can if they want to.”
“I just want to know, are you waitin’ for somebody?”
He had a hard time believing that a girl was in the lab until two in the morning looking, not for love, but for unknowns. I got one rather quickly, then a long time later two more, so I had three but I couldn’t get the fourth, couldn’t…couldn’t… couldn’t. A week before the end of the semester I faced the fact that I was never going to get the all-important fourth. I leafed through the books a last despairing time. All during the course, the professor had lectured about an alpha-phenol, never once mentioning that there was a beta-phenol with an entirely different chemical reaction from an alpha-phenol. I stumbled across mention of it in a textbook. “I wonder. I wonder,” I said, and I began testing.
As the results came through, “I can’t believe this,” I kept saying out loud, all alone in that lab at two in the morning. “I can’t believe he would try to trick me like this.” But it was my fourth unknown and I passed organic chemistry. I got a B. “How come you didn’t get an A?” Daddy said. When I answered, it was the first time in my life that I really hurt my father. I had studied so hard, worked so hard, other students had flunked the course right and left, and here he was criticizing me for not getting an A. I exploded. “What do you know? You never even graduated from high school and you’re telling me I should have gotten an A!”
He sank down in his chair, shriveling like a spider dropped in a candle flame. Instantly I longed to be able to take the words back. “Daddy, I’m sorry.”
“‘Yeah, I didn’t graduate from high school, but I’m puttin’ your ass through college.” He was trying to bluster, but his voice sounded hollow. “This old dumb father is gettin’ you through college.”
“Daddy, it’s just that I worked so hard.…” I knelt beside him but he wouldn’t look at me.
“You work hard and your kids betray you.” He buried his face in his hands, and I knew he was thinking about Jeanette and Donna. “That’s the hurtin’ part. You go in front of people with big ideas about what you want for your kids and then you have to go back and admit that your kids aren’t going to be doin’ that.”
“I am, Daddy.” I grabbed one of his hands and tried to turn his face toward me. “Daddy, listen to me. I’m going to be a doctor. I promise you, Daddy.” He was a long time in answering. Finally he said, as he had all those years ago when I’d asked for Donna’s saxophone, “You, Cookie? You’re too little.”
“Daddy, I’m on the dean’s list, I’m getting straight A’s in my biology courses, and I’ve made it through organic chemistry, the one course you have to pass to get into medical school.”
“The one that flummoxed Jeanette and Donna?”
“‘Yes.’“
“Really, Cookie? You really think you can do it?”
He never expected it to be me. In his mind it was going to be Jeanette, and when she swerved off the path to the goal, that was it. The dream was dead. Now he sat up straighter and a light came into his eyes. “You really think you can be a doctor?”
“If I can get accepted at a medical school, Daddy, which may not be possible because of applying from Monmouth College that nobody’s ever heard of.”
“College is college,” he said automatically, and suddenly he was back to sounding like the old Daddy. “If there’s a will, there’s a way. If you can’t get in the front door, go around the back. If you can’t get in the back, try a window. Just don’t give up, and you’ll get in.” He changed the pronoun confidently. “We’ll get you in.”
He was seeing himself putting on his suit and tie and sallying forth to seduce the dean of a medical school as he had seduced the president of the bank and the president of Monmouth College, luring them into stepping into his shoes and seeing things from his perspective. But I thought I had better try a more conventional approach first. I went to the chairman of the science department and asked his advice about applying to medical schools.
“It’s really nice that you’re coming to me for guidance Yvonne,” Dr. Garner said. “But, unfortunately, I can’t give you any, because we've never had anybody from Monmouth College go to medical school. I’ll support you with letters of recommendation and whatever else you need, but all I can suggest is that you go to the library and see what you can find out.”
This I did, and began making out a list of schools that were near enough for me to continue to play in the band; schools in New York, New jersey, and Pennsylvania, except that I left out Cornell because I knew from the band playing there that Ithaca was too cold and too far away, never noticing that the medical school was not in Ithaca but in New York City.
In a handbook put out by the American Association of Medical Colleges, I went through the listings of over one hundred medical colleges. My eye was caught by one that did not term itself a medical school or school of medicine. Unlike Harvard Medical School or Yale School of Medicine, this one was called the College of Physicians and Surgeons. “Oh, what a pretty name,” I said to myself. It sounded professional, imposing. Where is it? Columbia University, New York City, Presbyterian Hospital, where I was born. That seemed a good omen. It had, according to the handbook, an early-bird admission policy—if granted an interview, the prospective candidate would be notified within a few days whether he or she had been accepted or rejected rather than having to wait until the following spring to find out. “That’s it,” I said. “That’s the one I want.”
To be on the safe side, I picked out twelve other schools to apply to, thirteen in all, and went to Daddy for money for the application fees.
“Just tell me what you need, Cookie. However much money you need, I’ll get it for you.”
The only college he objected to on my list was the University of Michigan, and I knew he was thinking about my staying with the band. But Michigan was my ace-in-the-hole, I explained, because the medical school had spelled out that they were actively seeking women and minorities. If all else failed, maybe Michigan would take me, not despite my being female and black but because of it.
There was one more thing I told him. “If I get to be a doctor, Daddy, even if I get married, I’m never going to change my name. I’ll always be Dr. Thornton, in honor of you.”
Did I want to be a doctor or did I want to make my father happy? I think it was both, and I think I needed both. One motive without the other might not have been enough to see me through the tough times, times when I wondered if it was worth it to have to work so hard, times when I felt so far behind the pack because I didn’t have educated parents, I didn’t have the background to compete head-to-head with the other kids. People have asked why I didn’t become a midwife. But my father didn’t talk about midwives. He said doctors, and a doctor who delivered babies was an obstetrician, so that is all I ever was going to be—a doctor for him, an obstetrician for me. Plus, I had one more motive: after Donna and Jeanette left the family, I knew that if I screwed up, that would be the end of things for Linda and Rita, too. If three of us couldn’t make it, what hope did the last two have? I had to keep going.
Around the house now Daddy seemed reborn. His eyes danced. He cracked jokes. He was gentle with Mommy, and Jeanette’s name could on
ce again be mentioned. Jeanette herself began to show up occasionally. It was, “Hi, Mommy, fix up my dresses. I think I’ll play with the band this weekend.” And Mommy and Daddy welcomed the prodigal’s return: “Wow, Jeanette’s coming! Let’s make a cake!”
“Daddy…!” we protested.
“She’s your sister. You guys love each other.”
We wanted to answer, “Yeah, but she doesn’t love us. She abandoned us. She’s got her own apartment and is living her own life. She goes off on skiing weekends and we never even learned to ride a bicycle. She’s got guys who bring her flowers and candy. She only goes to college part-time. We’re here breaking our butts studying and playing in the band and she’s hanging out.”
We did say some of this, but Daddy didn’t want to hear it. When she telephoned, it was like, “Oh, I love everybody the same, but Jeanette might be coming tonight to play!” And he laid down the law. “If she wants to come back, she’s welcome here and there’s not going to be any screaming and yelling and ‘Jeanette did this, Jeanette did that.’”
We respected what Daddy said, but the Jeanette who turned up now and again was like a stranger to Linda and me—Rita was too young to feel strongly one way or another—which was not really too different from the way it had always been because she and Donna had been so close that the rest of us felt excluded from their pairing. We were polite and didn’t object that Jeanette showed up when she pleased—or when she needed money—but we resented that she didn’t practice and did little more than fumble around on the bandstand. We wished that Daddy would pull her up short on the music, tell her we didn’t need her. But what Mommy and Daddy were seeing was that all the kids were there. We could tell by the look in their eyes how much it meant to them. At whatever price, they felt it was okay for Jeanette to come back when she felt like it just so we would all be together again.
We heard that Jeanette was seeing a lot of her ski instructor, but she didn’t bring him around to meet us, unlike Donna, who asked Daddy if she could bring her friend Willis along on weekends to help with the instruments. Daddy didn’t allow it too often, until Donna and Willis got engaged, and then he let Willis come along every so often to hear the band play.
The Ditchdigger's Daughters Page 15
