Screening Room: Family Pictures

by Alan Lightman

  Blanche did the ironing on two days of the week: shirts, blouses, and underwear on one day; tablecloths, sheets, and cotton napkins on the other. A huge pile of laundry waited in a couple of baskets at her feet. One by one, she would bend over and lift up each item, straighten it, pat it, and stretch it out on her ironing board as if she were about to perform an operation. Then she would dip her hand into a bowl of water and sprinkle the fabric with a quick flick of her fingers. When the hot iron met the damp fabric, it hissed and sent up a little puff of steam. Blanche had a routine. With a shirt, she would first press the front, moving the iron in a little semicircle around each button. Then the buttonhole side, then the collar, then the sleeves in short strokes, careful not to form any double creases, and finally the back in long strokes. Her technique, slow and rhythmic, was hypnotizing to watch. Pat. Sprinkle. Back and forth. Up. Down. Turn. Pat. Sprinkle. Up. Down. Up. Down. After each shirt was done, she put it on a hanger, buttoned the top two buttons, and hung it from the doorknob of the silver closet. Fifteen years later, when I began to iron my own shirts, I was astonished to realize that I had unconsciously memorized Blanche’s technique and rhythm, in the same way that my fingers learned the notes of a Chopin sonata. Pat. Sprinkle. Back and forth. Up. Down. And I could picture Blanche standing at the ironing board, her face moist with sweat, a fan chopping the heat, an ashtray on the table holding her smoldering cigarette. Every minute or so, she would put the iron down and take a long drag.

  It was at her ironing board that Blanche held forth on her views of the universe. Never would she delve into such discussions when my mother was near, but if Blanche and I were alone in the laundry, she talked easily. “Some people’s rich and some people’s poor, but it don’t matter to God ’cause He can see into a person’s heart,” she said, sounding like one of Faulkner’s characters. She would pull out her Bible and point to a passage. Blanche could hardly read, but she had a well-worn Bible, and she knew what it said, and where. “God made the world so Jesus could save it. People always raisin’ cain and makin’ trouble, but if they jes put theirselves in the hand a Jesus … People is jes people, that’s all they is, jes people.

  “The Lord brought me here on loan, and He’s fixin’ to take me back. Alan, I’m countin’ on you makin’ sure I’m buried right.” She began saying such things when she was still in her thirties and I was in my early teens. The way she was talking, Blanche could drop dead any minute. I began worrying about where I was going to find the funds and the know-how to “bury her right.”

  Blanche herself always owed money. Credit bureaus were constantly calling our house at all hours to speak to her. Whenever the telephone rang, Blanche got an anxious look on her face and bustled out of the room. She seemed to know when it was a credit bureau. “Tell them I’s not here,” she’d whisper. Mother would roll her eyes at Blanche. “If you didn’t waste so much money on those dumb cigarettes,” Mother said, “you wouldn’t have to borrow so much.” Eventually, Mother would pick up the telephone and make up some small lie about Blanche’s whereabouts, shaking her head in disapproval the whole time.

  Blanche once came to my mother with a different kind of financial conundrum. She had a check she couldn’t cash. It was customary for the women in Mother’s circle to “lend” their maids to each other when a special evening’s entertainment required extra help. On such an occasion, one of my mother’s friends had paid Blanche by check. Needless to say, Blanche didn’t have a bank account. For weeks, she carried the check around in her purse. Finally, she mustered the courage to walk into a First Tennessee Bank. After waiting in a line of white people, she arrived at the teller’s counter. The teller, a middle-aged white woman, looked at Blanche, frowned, and asked to see her ID. Blanche produced her driver’s license. The teller studied the document with skepticism and called for the manager. At this point, people standing in line started mumbling impatiently. Out comes the manager, a white man in a suit. He looks Blanche up and down. Then, in a voice everyone can hear, he asks the name of her employer and her salary. Blanche crept away with her check. Now, with her eyes cast down on the floor, she asked Mother if she would be willing to accompany her to the bank. “Don’t look so mopey, Blanche Lee,” said Mother. “I’ll go with you. But next time you work for Mrs. Tannenbaum, make sure you ask for cash.”

  As children, my brothers and I could feel the house expand and contract with the body language between Blanche and Mother. They dueled and fenced, they danced around each other, they loved and hated each other. I think they completed each other. Those two females were the tsunami waves of my childhood. Despite the insults constantly heaped on Blanche, both intentional and unintentional, she never complained. Blanche once asked me, “Why does Mizz Lightman treat me the way she does?”

  I felt terrible. But what could I say? Mizz Lightman was my mother. And Blanche didn’t expect a reply. It wasn’t really a question. It was a statement, an addendum to the universe as she saw it. She hesitated for a moment, looking off somewhere, then went back to her ironing.

  Sometime in the 1980s, long after I’d moved away from Memphis, I was back for a brief visit and drove out to Blanche’s house in Midtown. In all the years that Blanche had worked for our family, I’d never seen where she lived. Her house was wedged into a row of tiny ramshackle houses, each with a little screened porch and a rotting white picket fence. Parked in front was Blanche’s ancient Oldsmobile, given to her by my parents after they’d put a hundred thousand miles on the car themselves. When I arrived, Blanche was sitting on her front porch wearing bedroom slippers, fanning herself and listening to WDIA. I kept waiting for Blanche to invite me into her house. Over the years, I had often imagined the inside of her house. Did she have secondhand furniture, like her disintegrating car? Did she have photographs on her tables of me and my brothers? Or pictures of Jesus on the wall? But Blanche never invited me in. We talked on her porch for an hour, glad to see each other, and I left.

  Blanche’s Pecan Pie

  CRUST: 1½ cups flour and ½ teaspoon salt sifted together. Add 4 tablespoons chilled shortening and 4 tablespoons chilled butter and churn together with fingers until mixture becomes coarse crumbs. Add 1 beaten egg and 2 tablespoons ice water. Stir with a fork until dough holds together. Cover and refrigerate. Roll out dough in a 12-inch circle on a floured sheet of wax paper. Place circle of dough in a 9-inch pan and crimp edges. Makes 1 pie shell.

  FILLING: Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix together 4 tablespoons melted butter, 2 eggs, 1 cup dark corn syrup, 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 1 tablespoon brandy. Pour into pie shell. Put 1 cup shelled pecan halves on top. Bake 45–50 minutes and allow to cool.

  Babette’s Feast

  Near the end of the film Babette’s Feast, members of an ascetic Christian sect in a chilly town in Denmark are invited to a sumptuous meal prepared by a French refugee. After discussing the matter among themselves, they agree to attend the feast out of courtesy but to show no pleasure while eating. As dish after dish of turtle soup, quail, cheeses and fine wines and creamy desserts is placed on the candle-lit table, the villagers struggle in vain to deny the raptures of their palates as they devour the meal.

  After all these years since my mother’s passing, I have come to believe that there was some part of her that rejected the pleasures of life. With food, with entertainment, and with romance, she never gave herself permission to fall headlong into the dark and wondrous cave of sensual delight. When she ate, she ate at such high velocity that there was no time to taste. When she laughed, the laugh came from her throat instead of from deep in her stomach. Even in her dancing, so graceful to me as a child, she sometimes struck at her body as if it were a dog that had to be trained, she leaped with a compulsiveness that went with her insomnia and her incessant to-do lists and the fidgeting of her legs. She was a taut string. Certainly she didn’t consider pleasure to be sinful or immoral. Her ambivalent relation to pleasure was something else, some kind of hesitancy in herself, a denial of her sel
f.

  I continue to be haunted by the letter she wrote to my father in the months before they married, correctly foreseeing the raw edges of their union and the missing flesh of her life: I criticize you all the time for not being social minded, but in reality you are a better person than I will ever be. I care too much what people think. Maybe that is why I will never be completely satisfied or happy. These remarkable words were penned in dark blue ink on light blue stationery. Her handwriting has a lilt, a roundedness and slight forward slant, and the gs and ys have long flourishing tails. There are no words scratched out. How could my mother know at age twenty-two that she would never be completely satisfied or happy? Had she already decided that she would not let herself taste? Or that nothing in life would live up to her expectations? Or did she see something unworthy and desolate in herself, a barren and cold village on the edge of the sea?

  Salerno II

  A year or two after my mother’s suicide attempt, Dad confided in me what had really happened during the invasion of Salerno. He had been given instructions by his commanding officer to land men and supplies at a particular point on the coast. An enemy plane flew over and strafed his landing boats as they approached the shore. For defense, each boat had two machine guns mounted behind armor-plated shields, but the men had only seconds to spot attacking planes, and the artillery shells from the beach came out of nowhere. Dad had six landing craft under his command. Two miles out, an American patrol boat whooshed by and created a protective smoke screen for the incoming landing boats. When they emerged on the other side of the smoke, a half mile from shore—pandemonium. Just ahead, another landing craft was being ripped apart by shells. The boat was on fire, and bodies floated in the water. Two other landing boats were on fire. Through his binoculars, Dad could see a string of German tanks on a bluff above the beach. He heard screams; his men began shouting. He gave orders for his boats to weave back and forth in evasive maneuvers. A shell crashed into the ocean just ten yards in front of his boat. Another shell crashed close behind. Their position had been bracketed.

  In a five-second decision, Dad signaled his six boats to turn around and to head for a less hostile beach two miles up the coast. The coxswain shot him an intense look. Was it a questioning look? Or a look of disgust, an accusation of cowardice?

  Two days later, Dad was called to the captain’s quarters aboard his ship. Please close the door, said the captain, a man of about fifty with white hair. Mister, your retreat probably cost us lives. We needed that road built. You disobeyed orders. Do you understand?

  My father and I were sitting at a little restaurant in Overton Square. It was the late 1980s, and I was home for a cousin’s wedding. Dad said to me: “I wish I had died at that beach in Salerno.”

  What I should have done right then and there was put my arm around him. I wonder if I really heard what he had just said to me. What could I have been thinking about at the time, at that moment? And I remember. I was thinking about moving to a different university to teach. What I actually did at that moment was listened to Dad and said nothing. Was I so wrapped up in my own little problems? Or was it that I had no outcroppings in his psyche to grab on to? I knew so little about his insides, and then suddenly I was confronted with this vast summation of his life, or at least how he felt about his life. How could I begin to fathom what he had just said to me? All of these years later, I am thinking: In a way, wasn’t he paying me the ultimate compliment by confiding such a highly personal thought to me? Wasn’t he expressing the truest closeness and intimacy possible? Or was he being selfish, unburdening himself of that terrible darkness without concern for what it would do to me? How can a parent tell a child that he wishes he had died before the birth of that child?

  Or perhaps it was none of these things. Perhaps my father was insensible to the fact that he was sitting across the table from one of his children—after all, he had already demonstrated great detachment from his family—and was simply alone on his solitary planet and uttering aloud the single most blazing truth of that planet. And now, so many years later, how can I come to terms with that devastating utterance still coursing through my blood? The horror of it. The desolation. I look at him now, a sweet man of ninety years, nearly deaf, silky white hair, and wonder if he would say the same thing of his life at this moment. I don’t have the courage to ask.

  Seeing in the Dark

  In the Dark

  One afternoon in late 1962, black members of the Congress of Racial Equality showed up at the box office of Malco Theater and asked to buy tickets to the “whites only” section of the theater. They were politely refused. But my father realized that he had a situation to manage, and he had to manage it alone. Dad’s older brother, Edward, wasn’t interested in “getting involved with the race problem.” At this point in time, only a single business establishment in Memphis had been integrated: the lunch counter at Goldsmith’s department store. Two years earlier, a white mob in Jacksonville, Florida, armed with bats and ax handles, had attacked people with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as they attempted to integrate a public school. That same year, in Alabama, three black children were arrested and beaten in jail after they refused to sit in the colored section of a public bus.

  To consider what he should do, my father met with a leader of the Memphis Bi-Racial Committee, Vasco Smith, a black dentist and the husband of civil rights activist Maxine Smith. Together, they devised a plan that would unfold over a four-week period in Malco’s flagship theater. One evening after the movie was in progress, while the lights were off, they seated a single black couple in the whites-only section. This subterfuge continued for a week. In the second week, two black couples were seated in the white section, again in the dark, and in the third week, four couples. By the fourth week, any black patron could sit anywhere in the theater. To keep the scheme from exploding while in progress, Dad had to talk to the editors of the two Memphis newspapers and persuade them not to write any stories for a month. He also had to discuss the plan in advance with the commissioner of fire and police to make sure those powerful forces did not interfere. Both Dad and the commissioner kept the entire plan secret from the mayor of Memphis, Henry Loeb, who was a staunch segregationist. The idea was to do it all in a hushed manner and, at the end of a month, have integration a fait accompli.

  The plan worked. After Malco Theater was integrated, all the other theaters in the Malco circuit were integrated, including those in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Kentucky. Other theaters followed. Movie theaters were among the first public spaces in the South to be integrated.

  There was only one incident of protest. During a showing of Cleopatra, at the Crosstown theater in Memphis, a white patron poured his Coca-Cola down the neck of the black man in front of him. The situation was tense. Threatening phone calls ricocheted around the city. Finally, Dad defused the crisis by instructing the manager of the theater to buy the aggrieved fellow a new suit.

  I learned about my father’s quiet pioneering work in civil rights only decades later, not from him, but from a book about the history of Memphis. One moment from this period remains in my mind. It would have been in the early 1960s, in the winter. My father and I had just driven to the Sears Roebuck department store on Poplar to buy some small item for the house. As we got out of our car, a cold rain fell from the sky. It was one of those ugly rains that penetrates your clothes and instantly chills your body. Your hands become numb. We raced from our car and got to the entrance of the store just as a black family arrived—a mother, father, and two children, all of them drenched and shivering like us. As his young son looked on, my father opened the door for the black family and waited for them to enter before he did so himself.

  Abi’s House

  It is my father’s generation that knows all the stories.

  Today, we are gabbing in Abi’s house on East Parkway. Abi lives in the grandest house in the family, a real southern mansion built in the mid-nineteenth century, with ten gran
ite steps up to the front door, a massive circular portico supported by twenty-foot-tall columns, an all-white exterior, forest-green shutters on the windows, and rooms the size of banquet halls. Under the portico is a fabulous mosaic floor embedded with a Confederate flag in colored tiles. Six feet away, a mezuzah hangs from the door frame. According to legend, one of the Union generals holding Memphis in the Civil War was sleeping in this house when Nathan Bedford Forrest raided the city in the wee hours of August 21, 1864. The general ran out of the front door in his nightshirt, and a young woman, wearing much less, fled from the servants’ door in the rear.

  Just in the few weeks I’ve been visiting Memphis, Abi seems to have gained another ten pounds. And he hasn’t bothered to shave for days. His face has always been puffy, with a red birthmark starting behind his ear and dribbling down to his neck like red wine. Over the years, his hair has thinned but not entirely deserted him. He combs it straight back, so that you can count each individual strand, like the rows in a newly planted field.

  Abi’s house is a cheerful shambles. Waddling through his vast disintegrating living room, Abi takes us out to his vast disintegrating garden, where we sit among dead plants and crumbling terra-cotta pots. “You’ve come back for a while,” he says to me, grinning. “You’ve been living up the country for too long. We should fix you with a decent house in Memphis so you’ll stay put.” Abi, like his sister, Lennie, has always been especially affectionate toward me. When I was growing up, Abi took me to concerts of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, where I once heard Van Cliburn play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. Two.