by Warren Adler
Aggie had been cautious when she announced that she had gotten a part in this new play, and Peggy had interpreted this calm as a kind of superstition that if she were too enthusiastic it would jinx her performance.
“You’re on your way, baby,” her mother had exclaimed. “You’ll see. It will happen just as I said it would.”
Aggie had told her, after much prodding, that the name of the play was The Shape of the World, which sounded grandiose and important. She was able to get the address of the theater from an ad in the New York Times theater section she found in the library, although she was somewhat disappointed her daughter’s name was not mentioned. Only the “directed by” credit was given. Someone by the name of Lance Goodwin.
Peggy could not contain her excitement and it was a given that she and Charlie would, by hook or by crook, show up for the opening night and hang the expense. This was, indeed, the beginning of the dream, and Peggy felt dead certain that once people saw Aggie onstage the major career hurdle would be breached and Aggie would be on her way.
Neither Peggy nor Charlie had ever been to New York and it took a bit of research to be able to fit the trip into a tight budget. They figured that they would attend opening night, then leave the next day for the grueling trip back to Iowa. This meant that Peggy would lose only two days at work. Charlie’s brother gladly gave him the time off to see his niece’s debut.
It was planned as a surprise and Peggy pictured Aggie’s face when she would see her parents enter her dressing room after the show. It would be, Peggy was certain, one of the great events in both their lives. She fantasized about the size of the dressing room, picturing the folding screen and the bouquets sent by admirers just as she had seen in the movies.
For the occasion Peggy had bought a new dress at Wal-Mart, getting her employee’s discount, and Charlie had borrowed a sport coat from his brother. They checked into the hotel, a dingy place, where they got the cheapest room on the first floor with iron grating over the windows. Peggy worried that if she had complained they would either throw them out or move them to a more expensive room. Besides, what was a little discomfort when one was about to see their daughter’s first step to stardom?
It took them longer than expected to negotiate their way to the theater in Noho, which, to Peggy’s surprise and disappointment was in a gloomy area of narrow streets and dark buildings. There was no marquee, and the theater itself was entered through a battered doorway and a tiny cluttered lobby with one young woman in jeans and a spiky haircut selling tickets and giving out a paper program.
They were shown seats in the rear of the little theater, which were actually five rows of mismatched chairs in front of a tiny stage. Peggy stared straight ahead, wondering if somehow she had gotten the address wrong. Then she scanned the program and noted on the bottom of the cast credits the name of Agatha Pachowski. Not even the stage name they had both favored, Melody Francis.
Then the play began and Peggy sat stiff and unblinking, her concentration far from the action on the little stage. How was it possible? She tried desperately to confront her disappointment with a rationale that stipulated that this was merely a showcase prior to going to Broadway, an audience test of what worked and what did not. She did not turn toward her husband, fearing a confrontation with his confusion at this searing spectacle of failed expectations.
Even when she forced herself to concentrate on the action on the stage, she could not understand nor care about what was going on. It was as if she had suddenly found herself in the middle of bad, confusing dream. What rankled more was the fact that Aggie did not appear until the last moment before intermission. The sum total of her part was to serve drinks to other members of the cast in a scene in a restaurant. She was on and off without a single line of dialogue.
A wave of anger and devastation gripped Peggy as she sat stiff and depressed throughout the intermission while Charlie went off to the bathroom. She fervently hoped that Aggie had not seen her parents from the stage. She felt torn between the desire to see her daughter or escape quickly to avoid further exposure to her humiliation.
Before she could make up her mind, the play began again and she sat through yet another bland and incomprehensible talkathon, during which Aggie as maid served tea. But this time, there was a tiny moment of hesitation, a mini-second of peripheral double take of recognition and Peggy was certain that she was seen and could no longer avoid meeting her daughter.
She spent the rest of the play contemplating her reaction. Above all, she needed to restrain and hide her disappointment. She had no illusions about what Aggie’s reaction would be. Most likely resentment. They had borne witness to her abject failure. Not one spoken line. Nothing more than a walk-on. So this was the fruit of years of effort, hours of money spent on instruction back home in Denison and an eternity of hope and certainty? Peggy felt her heart pounding in her chest and her breath was coming in short gasps. She wanted to get up and run away.
“You okay?” Charlie whispered.
She nodded, but did not look at him, fearing his expression of disillusion. But then he was used to failure, conditioned to it. By the time the play was over, anger and frustration had replaced disappointment and she steeled herself to the reality of the situation.
“I can’t believe this,” Aggie said when they met in the cramped backstage where the actors changed immodestly and scrubbed away their makeup before a large battered mirror and a cracked porcelain sink. Obviously shocked, Aggie did not, thankfully, exhibit the feared resentment of Peggy’s expectation.
“We just missed you honey,” Charlie said as he embraced his daughter.
“I wish you had let me know, Mama,” Aggie said looking at her watch. “I’m due at my job at eleven. I’m a cocktail waitress at one of the clubs nearby.”
Peggy found it hard to absorb. Was this the beginning or the end? At that moment, a tall man approached them. He was obviously older, with long graying hair and a pepper-speckled beard. He placed an arm around Aggie and kissed her on the lips. Peggy felt a gnawing anger in her gut.
“These are my parents, Lance,” Aggie said. “He’s the director. He makes the magic happen, don’t you darling?”
Lance acknowledged the compliment with a smile and pulled Aggie closer, a gesture welcomed by her daughter. Peggy’s anger bubbled and, and like a hot poker in her gut, she remembered Daisy’s comment, which had precipitated her anger management therapy.
“So you make the magic happen, do you?” Peggy said, feeling herself on the fiery edge of rage.
“He’s the man,” Aggie said caressing Lance’s cheek with a gesture of adoration.
“Did you enjoy the show, folks?” Lance said, hugging Aggie closer.
“You really want to know?”
“Easy, Peggy,” Charlie whispered, but it was too late.
“I’d love to hear your reaction,” Lance pressed, caressing Aggie’s shoulder.
“Alright then.” Peggy sucked in a deep breath that served to fuel her anger. “I thought it was a boring piece of shit. Aggie here has more talent in her little finger than all the stupid actors you put in this stupid play. Magic? Maybe if you put Aggie in the lead you might make something really good out of this crap.“
Lance frowned and rubbed his beard, obviously shocked by this sudden onslaught.
“Mother!” Aggie cried. She turned to the director. “I’m so sorry, Lance. So sorry.”
“Sorry. Why be sorry?” Peggy continued, all restraint abandoned. “He didn’t give you one fucking line. Not one.” She turned to Aggie. “You’re being used by this middle-aged asshole, Aggie. You’ve got real talent, baby. Real talent. You’re better than Donna Reed.” She raised a finger and waved it at the director. “Not one line. You didn’t give this beautiful, talented girl one line.” She turned again to Aggie. “What do you have to do to get one line, Aggie?” She felt her insides quiver, her chest gasping, her face flushing.
“We better go, Peggy,” Charlie said, grabbing Peggy by the
arm.
“I’m so sorry, Lance,” Aggie cried. “Take her away, Daddy. Please. She doesn’t understand.”
“Oh yes I do little girl, I sure do understand.”
“No you don’t, Mama.”
“Oh yeah,” Peggy screeched. “What the fuck do you think this horny old goat wants from you, Aggie?"
“Enough, Peggy, please,” Charlie begged, grabbing his wife by the arm and pulled her away.
“Call us back home,” Charlie said to his daughter, who nodded, her face ashen.
Charlie continued to tug on Peggy’s arm and finally led her out of the theater into the street.
“Believe me, Charlie, I know what she’s doing with that man.”
“Leave it alone, Peggy. Let’s go back to the hotel.”
“Fuck,” Peggy cried. “She was better than Donna.”
“Damn it, Peggy,” Charlie shouted. “Stop this.”
Peggy moved, obedient to Charlie’s pressure.
It took them more than an hour to find their way back to the hotel. Peggy was silent, thinking back on all those years of dreams and hope.
During the night, she awoke suddenly, screaming.
“Not one line. Not one line.”
Charley embraced her and soothed her back to sleep.
Oral History
by Warren Adler
“Why are you people so mean to Grampa?” Allison Zucker asked her parents after they said goodbye to Sam Gottlieb after their ritual Sunday brunch at the Madison Restaurant on First Avenue.
“Mean?” Allison’s mother, Betty, said, responding to her daughter’s assertion. “That’s ridiculous.”
“You don’t really talk to him. I mean really. It’s always like routine. ‘How are you?’ ‘How was your week?’ ‘Are you feeling OK?’ Stuff like that.”
“Does that constitute meanness, Allison?” her father, Michael, asked.
She was fifteen, still living at home, going to the Dalton School, a fancy private school in Manhattan, and still subject to the family rituals, like Sunday brunch with Grampa. Her two brothers were off at college.
“Fact is darling, ever since Gramma died, he has crawled into a shell. He really doesn’t want to have much to do with us. Besides, he’s in his eighties and probably getting senile.”
“Getting,” Michael snickered. “He’s arrived. Won’t be long before he needs a caretaker or we’ve got to send him to a home.”
“Fat chance,” Betty said. “He’s too stubborn and independent.”
“Chronology will take care of that,” Michael said. “Decline is inevitable. What does he do with himself all day, rattling around in that big apartment?”
“I don’t know,” Betty sighed. “He’s a very difficult man.”
“And gotten worse since your mother died.”
“He’s not exactly a bowl of cherries to be with, but he’s still my father.”
“He was always a pain in the ass.”
“I hate hearing you talk like that,” Allison said. “It’s cruel.”
“We’re not being cruel, honey,” Michael said. “Realistic.”
Allison held back any rebuttal. In fact, she had many disagreements with her parents but had chosen the path of least resistance, taking refuge in her own secret life. She prided herself on her own self-awareness and believed she had the insight to realize that she was not part of the mainstream teenage culture of her class, obsessed with shopping, attitude, and sex.
She was a loner, and because she kept her distance from the power crowd at school, she knew that her peers thought of her as a bit of nerd with her nose always in a book and when not reading she was browsing through her computer. In fact, she was ahead of the pack with her knowledge of the latest technologies and, while still not certain about her career choices, she suspected that it might have something to do with the sciences.
Her father was an investment banker and her mother busy with charity work. She thought of them as a typical East Side couple, snobby, culture supporters, and very social. She thought most of their friends were boring and shallow, but she kept her opinions to herself.
“Why are you so withdrawn?” her mother would ask periodically.
What she meant was that Allison was not a typical teenager, not part of the mainstream, and she had overheard her parents on numerous occasions voice their concerns about her lack of social skills and their worries over the absence of friends. She did have one or two friends, but they were also nerdy loners like her, and their social intercourse was limited.
She knew she wasn’t attractive in the traditional sense with her pale complexion, kinky hair, and squinty eyes. So far, she had never kissed a boy, although she had fantasized about having sex and she did indulge in solitary pleasures.
For years she had hardly paid much attention to her grandparents. They came and went in her life, showed the usual affection, but seemed more interested in her brothers than in her. Not that it mattered, since she paid little attention to them. But in the years since her grandmother had died, she began to wonder about her grandfather and the kind of man he had been and was. Each Sunday, he would meet them punctually at the Madison Restaurant and invariably order pancakes, say little, and then after the goodbyes on the street, he would walk away to his apartment on York Avenue near Sutton Place.
Apparently he had been retired for a number of years. He had been some sort of salesman and had made a good living. Beyond that, she knew very little about him, where he was born, who his parents and grandparents were, what his life had been like. Nor did she care.
Actually it was in history class at school where she got the idea. They were studying the presidents, and the teacher was telling them about the oral history of President Kennedy, and how people who knew him would record their memories about him.
It sort of grew in her mind that it would be cool to do an oral history of her grandfather, the only one in her family from that generation who was still living.
“Why do you want to do this?” Sam asked her when she arrived at his apartment with a small tape recorder.
“It’s a school project,” she lied.
“What is it you want to know?”
“All about Grampa,” she teased.
“I’m not very interesting,” he said.
“You are to me.”
She had rarely been in his apartment, which was large and shabby but fairly neat since he had a cleaning woman come in two or three times a week. Although she hadn’t paid much attention before, she was more observant now, noting the many framed family pictures scattered around the apartment. There were photographs of her mother and her sister, who lived on the west coast, and pictures of both their families. There were also many pictures of her grandfather and grandmother in various stages of their lives.
She set up her little tape recorder on a table next to his well-worn easy chair. He was a dignified man, the kind usually characterized as a gentleman. He was bald with a round belly and wore his pants high up.
“So where do I begin,” he said as she started the tape recorder.
“At the beginning,” she said. “Like where were you born.”
“I was born in the Jewish Hospital on Eastern Parkway. My mother once told me she was in labor for twelve hours and I weighed more than eight pounds.”
“Your mother,” Allison reminded herself. She wanted to know about the generations before he was born. “Where was she from?”
“Both my mother and father came from Poland when they were under five years old.”
“Where in Poland?”
He pondered the question, then shook his head.
“Tell you the truth, I’m not sure. It was somewhere near Minsk.”
“Near Minsk? That it?”
“I didn’t have a school project to find out,” he laughed.
“OK then, tell me about your parents.”
He paused and grew reflective, quite obviously searching his memory.
“I think about them a lot,” h
e told her. For a moment his eyes seemed to glaze over as if he were looking inward. After a long pause, he spoke again. “Funny. They were born in the last years of the nineteenth century. Dead now. Let’s see, nearly thirty years. They are enormously vivid in my mind.” He looked at Allison. “They say long-term memory is the last to go.”
“Okay then, Grampa. Tell me all about them.”
“The things you remember,” he sighed. “We had no money.” He smiled. “But who knew that. My father was a union guy, a cutter. That was when the garment district was big in New York.”
“A cutter?”
“A cutter was someone who cut the patterns for dresses and suits. It was a skill and he was proud of it.”
“And your mother. What was she?”
“A mother. In those days a woman who was working meant that a man was incapable of supporting his family. It was considered shameful.”
“Really?”
He exchanged glances with her as if to illustrate the gap between the generations. She decided that she would not interpolate, but listen only. After all, this was his oral history, not hers.
Without interruption, he talked for an hour about his early life growing up in Brooklyn. When his father was laid off since cutting was seasonal work, they would be unable to pay their rent and would have to pile into their grandparents’ little house in East New York that had been bought by his mother’s brothers. Allison was, of course, tempted to ask questions, and it took enormous discipline on her part to remain silent when he spoke to the running tape recorder.
As his life unfolded, her interest grew more intense. She wanted to know more and more, and when they paused for lunch, she would chatter on like a question box about his life.
“And you went to the movies every Saturday?”
“Without fail. There was a double feature, a comedy, serial.” He explained what a serial was. “I must have seen every picture made in the thirties, when the talkies started. When I see a black-and-white film I can tell you every actor and actress of that era, even the supporting players.”
