He had been in his armchair, watching the Yankee game. The door to the terrace (an actual terrace—a luxury we never imagined in the Bronx) stood open on this hot summer day. The wind was blowing in intermittent gusts. My father, who had been doing well for months after his most recent heart surgery, sat in that state of late-inning blissful anxiety that one endures for a team you love. Three men were on base. It was the bottom of the ninth, two men out, a Yankee at bat. Mel Allen, the voice of the Yankees since I was a baby, announced, “Here comes the pitch—”
At that precise moment, a gust of wind caught the terrace door and slammed it with the percussive blast of a gunshot—and my father’s heart said, “That’s it, I’m out of here!”
He was seventy-five. He was buried in a veterans cemetery out on Long Island. His Legion buddies showed up. Everyone spoke well of him. My strongest emotion seemed to fix itself on the fact that in six months Judy was scheduled to give birth to a grandchild that my father would not get to know. He adored children, particularly little children, as my mother never managed to. He especially doted on his five grandchildren: Mimi had Amy, Abby, and Jeff; Alice had Bruce and Glenn. And now my father was cheated out of meeting and playing with a child he was bound to go nuts over. My daughter Kate was born the following January, six months too late for both of them.
Dave and Rhoda, 1938
Shy Jules, Dave, and Mimi, 1930
BIRTH TRAUMA
I did not want children. I liked my nieces and nephews—what was there not to like?—but I was never tempted to have a family of my own. I knew I would make a terrible father. I had loving but awful parents who had little talent or instinct for raising children, why would I be any better? I was politely interested in the children of my friends, but no more than that. I didn’t enjoy spending time with them. We had no interests to share, read different books, liked different comics and movies.
I had worked hard over many years to bury the kid I was and reinvent myself as an improved model of the flawed and fearful person my mother gave birth to: independent and successful, a famous man, gregarious (where once I was shy), a partygoer, a happy boozer, a workaplayaholic. It was the life I was meant for, the life I grew up wanting, dreamed up for me by the movies and taken by me for the real thing.
Why in my right mind would I want to take on the burden of raising a child? I was over thirty. When I spoke in therapy about my own parents, I left my sessions determined that I, the last male in the family, was morally obligated to end the line of Feiffers. Take that, Dave and Rhoda!
And then my bewitching, beautiful wife, who absolutely pledged to me that we would have no children—out of the question!—looked up at me in bed one night, eyes apprehensive and glowing, and said, “I have some news to tell you.” She had every right to think I’d be outraged by this betrayal that she pretended was an accident. I had every right to think the same. But as the words “I’m pregnant” left her lips, my heart jumped for joy.
Who was I? I had spent so much time and effort willing myself into a different identity—several identities—other than the one I was saddled with at birth that the last thing I suspected was that I’d be thrilled to hear Judy tell me she was pregnant. My first narrative cartoon after Munro, originally called Sick, Sick, Sick, was about a young man, Franchot, who changes himself, over and over again, into being a member of the group he happens to be hanging out with. Had my identity become so muddled that my sense of self was that of someone I hadn’t met?
For the nine months of Judy’s pregnancy, I was ecstatic. And the same was true twenty years later when Jenny was carrying Halley. When my sperm count had called it a day, the last thing I thought I wanted in my sixties was to adopt a child, but I gave in to Jenny and instantly surrendered my heart to Julie.
How did it happen that one day I was indifferent to children and a few months later I went gaga over them? Not just my kids, but others as well. I grinned happily at kids on the street in their strollers. I waved, I chortled, I made funny animal noises.
I turned into a person who was content to get up in the middle of the night and walk around with a fretful or crying infant. Who, me? I was a loving, hands-on father. Who, me? I was a good father! Me?
Is it possible that if I’d given the army half a chance, I might have ended up loving it? But then I wouldn’t have written Munro, nor would I have had a career. You can overdo this love thing.
What I definitely do not love is how, time and again, I discover how dismally dim I am about myself or how I really feel. This after what feels like eighty-five years of psychotherapy—plus a career that leads people to confuse the insight displayed in my work with the addled author who produced it.
Kate at her Sarah Lawrence graduation with mom Judy, 1987
Kate with daughter Maddy, 1999
Jules, Jenny, and Halley in Key West, 1992
Halley, 1996
Maddy, 2006
Little Halley and Jules, 1990
© Roddy McDowall
Jules and Julie, 1995
© Meg Handler
Elizabeth Scalabrini (Beth), Julie’s nanny, and Julie, 2002
Glenn Korman, Halley, Alice, Jules, Jenny, Julie, with friends Molly and Emma
DEATH TRAUMA
A month or so prior to Kate’s birth, and some months after my father’s death, I was sent papers to sign by Manny Rosenstein, my father’s Legion buddy, who, at my mother’s request, had arranged for the interment of his remains in the Long Island National cemetery. All I had to do was put my signature on the papers, date them, and mail them back to Manny in the stamped envelope he had enclosed.
I didn’t get around to it. The papers lay on the desk next to my drawing table for over two months, then three months. After the first month, Manny, this man who was doing my family a favor, called to find out what was happening. I was full of (unfelt) guilt and (un-acted-upon) gratitude. I said, “Manny, I am so sorry. I have the papers right here on my desk.” (True.) “I’ll sign them and get them out to you tomorrow.” (Untrue.)
Another month went by, during which the only thing special in my life was not signing and mailing the interment papers.
While not signing and mailing the papers, I wrote and drew my weekly cartoon, went to lunches, cocktail parties, dinner parties, theater, movies. Somewhere during this time, Norton Juster called me and asked if I had heard the news that Kennedy had been shot. Norton didn’t make it sound serious, but I knew he was dead. That was my state of mind.
His style and wit notwithstanding, I enjoyed mocking JFK in my cartoons. I was not a fan. I would have been less critical if I’d known the turn the country was about to take and how much worse everything was soon to be.
Outside of the gloom brought on by the death of the president and the fear of madness run amok brought on a week later by Ruby’s shooting Oswald, my routine continued unchanged. It was as if I had no obligations but my Voice cartoon. It was as if I had nothing to do but avoid signing the papers for my father’s interment.
Manny kept calling. I kept telling him the papers were in the mail. I didn’t sign them, but I saw them every day on the desk next to my drawing table, waiting not to be signed.
I went to therapy twice a week and sometimes I talked about my joyous reaction to Judy’s pregnancy, and sometimes I talked about my guilt and bewilderment over my not signing my father’s interment papers, and sometimes I talked about my sense, felt more strongly by the week, that all forms of authority were collapsing in postassassination America and that this country was on the verge of a national nervous breakdown.
By December, Judy was as big as a house, and the big house on Montague Terrace that we lived in looked like we were hiding out from the police. Mess was everywhere, even more than usual. My corner of the living room, where I maintained my studio, was a jungle. I had to search for every paper I needed—except for my father’s, which I didn’t need. Apparently.
The last time Manny called was early in the morning on one of the days I
had therapy. Manny was a correct and courtly fellow of the old school, and on the other occasions when he’d checked in on me and I’d expressed impatience and guilt over my inability to perform this single simple task, he was constantly reassuring.
But his patience had run out. He was curt with me, clearly puzzled and angry over why I had let months go by without signing the papers. I couldn’t get him off the phone fast enough. I said yes to everything. Yes, I would sign them today, yes, that minute, yes, I would put them in the envelope and rush out to the mailbox on the corner, yes, Manny, yes, just stop being mad at me, stop talking, get off the phone.
He finally did, and I went back to doing what I did best. Not signing the papers. I had three hours before I had to leave Brooklyn Heights and take the subway to Manhattan for my therapy session. All the time in the world to take care of those pesky papers. But first I had better do this, then I had better do that, then I had better rest, perhaps take a nap after all that exertion from doing this and doing that.
And then it was time to go, five minutes before I had to leave the apartment and start for the subway to go to therapy. Now I would sign those papers, sign them in a jiffy, nothing could be more simple. Jules was in charge.
The papers had been lying in the same spot on the desk I used for a side table, gathering dust for months. And now they were nowhere in sight. They were not where I had seen them that very morning—or was it yesterday morning, or the day before? I ransacked the desk to find where they were hiding. They weren’t anywhere. Hundreds of other pieces of paper I had been searching for and wasn’t able to find made themselves visible. But not my father’s interment papers.
It was minutes before I had to leave for therapy or risk being late. I ran around the apartment in rage and panic, checking out every surface upstairs and downstairs. Nothing. Not a trace of the papers. Vanished. Gone! Poof!
I was salivating self-loathing. I fled the apartment, mortified, guilt-ridden, shamed before Manny’s judgment. I imagined myself on the phone, explaining that the papers were lost—I’m sorry—that you have to start from scratch, Manny—I’m so sorry—you have to do it all over again, this task that wasn’t your responsibility in the first place—I am so, so sorry—but you have to understand, Manny, your buddy Dave’s son is not the kind of person you can trust with this close-to-insurmountable task of signing a paper, dating it, and sticking it in an envelope, then sealing it and taking it out to the corner mailbox to send it on its way, it’s too much responsibility.
It’s just one too many jobs for a cartoonist who has so much else on his mind. Did I tell you that Judy is pregnant? Did I tell you that Kennedy was shot? Did I tell you that Jack Ruby shot Oswald? It’s all too much for a person of my sensitive nature and minimal organizational skills to handle. So, Manny, I leave it in your capable, grown-up hands. Do it over again from scratch, and maybe next time around I’ll be in better shape to sign the papers.
On my way to the Borough Hall subway stop, I approached a parked police car on Joralemon Street. Two police officers were talking, smoking, drinking coffee, one outside the car, leaning against the front passenger door, the other in the passenger seat, his coffee cup resting on the sill of the open window.
I passed by, glaring at them out of the corners of my eyes. I shot them both dead. Bang! Bang! Two shots rang out in my head and the policemen fell. They were dispatched. I had dispensed justice. Vengeance was mine, sayeth whoever I happened to be at the moment.
I arrived at therapy and I told my very nice, warm, helpful therapist, Miriam Yelsky, that I had just shot two cops on the street because I couldn’t find my father’s interment papers. I told her that I was quitting therapy. Today was my last day.
Miriam tried to calm me down and talk me out of it, but I would not be calmed down and I would not be coaxed into acting rational when I knew that, in my case, “rational” was a hoax.
I told her that after all these years of therapy, if it was bang, bang, you’re dead—now don’t I feel better?—then I had no choice but to take on the job that she and I were not able to handle together. I had to learn to do it alone, I had to learn to at least assume the pretense of being grown-up.
I didn’t need any more help. I needed a brain. And stamina. And I was now going to leave, go out into the world, and try to reinvent myself as a human.
I left therapy. I went home to Brooklyn Heights. I entered my apartment. The first thing I saw, lying in plain sight, where they had been all along, was my father’s papers. I signed them. I mailed them. For a couple of weeks, I felt like a grown-up.
Village Voice, October 10, 1963
Part Three
ANOTHER COUNTRY
CLOSET AMERICA
An excerpt of a speech before the American Civil Liberties Union during Ronald Reagan’s first term in office:
These are unfashionable times for civil libertarians. Years ago there used to be a phrase on the Left called “enlightened self-interest.” Well, there’s nothing enlightened about self-interest anymore. Not mine and possibly not yours. We are running scared in this land; we are scared of crime; we are scared of the unemployed; we are scared of the unemployable; we are scared of the growing underclass; we are scared of minorities that threaten to become majorities. In such a time, all-out support for civil liberties is a tricky proposition.
First of all, to believe in civil liberties you have to believe in the Constitution, but a constitution to what? If you have a constitution, you need a country to go with it. But there really isn’t a country out there anymore. Looking around, it’s hard to stick to the belief that America still truly exists. The ideals and faith that once unified us have largely dissipated. Our reasons for hanging together, rather than hanging separately, have fast disappeared. There used to be something out there called “the American Dream.” It was our state religion; it was an umbrella ideology. Americans, having no past to sink their roots into, sank their roots into the future. Our assumption was that the future would be better, that the future would be more prosperous, there would be more work in America, there would be more dignity, there would be more equality, there would be more freedom.
From our beginning, one of the ground rules was that each generation understood that the next generation would do better, would have more opportunity, more affluence, and more equality. Well, that ground rule is no longer operative. My generation no longer believes that, and the generation of our children not only doesn’t believe it, many have not even heard of it.
We look at opportunity today and see it narrowing, rather than widening. We don’t see light at the end of the tunnel; we see more tunnel at the end of the tunnel, so we adjust; we acquire tunnel vision. We bury “the American Dream;” we bury optimism; we bury our sense of the future, our belief in answers, our belief in racial equality or in education or, for that matter, our belief in literacy. For if there’s to be a permanent underclass, why bother to educate it? It’s pointless, expensive, and potentially dangerous.
With the death of “the American Dream,” we have become woefully aware that there is not one America out there anymore but 200 or 300 Americas, closet Americas, whose citizens owe a stronger allegiance to their own codes, their own systems of values, their own closet constitutions than they do to the Constitution of the United States; led to believe in the cultural and political correctness of their particular America over all other Americas, schooled first and foremost in the rules and regulations, the laws of their closet America. So fundamentalist America lives in a principality unto itself, as does corporate America, criminal America, druggy America, elderly America, blue-collar America, teenage America, middle-management America, and all the various branches of ethnic America, viewing all other Americans as active or potential enemies to defend against; therefore, acquiring codes of behavior they will not understand, language that is designed to confuse and mystify them, values that permit one to lie and cheat and bribe and steal and still feel good about oneself; because you are acting as an agen
t of your own America in a war against those other Americas. And we have learned that in war, in the defense of one’s land, or in this case one’s closet, it’s ethical to lie and cheat and bribe and steal and sometimes kill.
When the New Right refers to the United States of America, it does not harken back to 1776 and Philadelphia; it really means the 1940s and Hollywood, the America of old black-and-white movies, small frame houses on shady-lane streets, white folks with white picket fences and white values—a world where Walt Disney died for our sins and the Gipper is God’s messenger, a symbol of the nostalgia that these people mistake for principles, the fairy tales they mistake for history. Now they are out there contorting and distorting with old movie values and old movie magic, defining our reality, making tintypes of our hopes, turning our most creative, innovative, and ambivalent impulses into needlepoint samplers. These true believers of the Right are trying to simplify us back into the Stone Age.
For years they have cried out the purity of their purpose, that they alone know the way, that liberalism was crippling us, draining us of our vital bodily fluids…. We are back in a debate fought over since slavery, since the Industrial Revolution, since the last Great Depression. It’s the argument that stirs us awake and keeps us alive. It’s reaction versus hope, freedom for some versus freedom for all. It’s a continuation of the oldest game in town, the contest for the American soul.
Village Voice, January 2, 1964
THE ASSASSINATION OF CARY GRANT
Backing Into Forward Page 29
