So I returned to the stage and resumed my tour. I opened in Pittsburgh, not far from where my mother and father had met, and it was a joy for me.
The show was sold out, the reviews fabulous, the audiences dreamily enthusiastic, and my knee was fine. I wore a bandage for each show to give me support. I knew I had attained a hard-earned wisdom, which had admittedly taken its toll but more than rewarded me with a sense of love for what I was doing.
Dr. Perry returned early from a trip to the Soviet Union where he had been invited to present a paper before the Leningrad Academy of Sportsmedicine and Science, to be with me on opening night. We sat in my dressing room afterward. He smiled with pride at my “comeback” and then leaned forward and said, “You know, you’re not supposed to be able to dance.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Dr. Finerman and I didn’t think you’d be able to get up there and do what you do ever again. Especially to this degree of excellence.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Dead serious,” he answered.
“Then you’re telling me that you didn’t tell me the truth?”
“That’s correct.”
“I see.”
He didn’t editorialize, or apologize, or comment one way or the other. Then he said, “But your truth is different from other people’s. And I knew that. So I believed you could do it, regardless of the physical limitations. And, you proved me right. So there’s no sense in looking back.”
He was more than right. I could have given up had he told me the truth, or I could have gotten up there on the stage and injured myself for life, believing that I could do anything. Either way it was a risk for him.
But he had psyched me out properly, because he was a man who had been through the same thing himself. He had been told by many doctors that he would never walk again, that he shouldn’t live in a fool’s paradise and expect a miracle. That was not a reality he wanted to accept.
He knew from experience that you make your own reality, and he had passed that on to me. I would be forever grateful for his astute insight into what I had been too naive to see myself. I had not been aware of what I had overcome. He had.
I went on to play five cities in Japan, four cities in Australia, London and Europe, and South America. The tour was a triumph personally and professionally.
Sachi came with me to Japan. We went to our old house—the house where Sachi had spent five years of her childhood. It was now a condominium apartment building. We stood on the street corner looking at what had replaced the home where so much of her formative years had occurred. “It’s gone,” said Sachi. “The past is really gone.”
She wandered away from me, returning to some of her childhood secret places down small streets in the neighborhood. Her childhood friends were gone too. They were all adults now, attempting to keep pace with a world rushing headlong into the next millennium. I wondered if they were having the same confusions as we were.
I stood by the condominium apartment building remembering the house we had had for so long. The fish pond was gone, the tumbling waterfall, and the Japanese garden. All had been replaced by an apartment building—progress, they say.
I remembered the first time I had eaten sashimi and sushi, kneeling at a table in that garden thirty-five years ago. No one in America had heard of sushi then except in geography books. Now it was an American favorite. Women and men wore kimonos on the street, and the sound of geta (Japanese shoes) on the cobblestone streets heralded the arrival of a visitor.
I had had a husband then whom I lived with in that house, talked with in that garden, and shared Sachi with in the tatami rooms inside.
Today we didn’t even know where he was. “He moves around a lot,” I had heard from mutual friends. Yes, I thought. He certainly does. He moves around from country to country. I never asked where he was, because he was like a phantom. First you’d see him, then you wouldn’t. But he had been an important teacher for me. Probably the most important in my life. He had taught me to be more discerning. It’s one thing to have blind faith in someone. It’s another to “know” within yourself who they are because you know yourself better. So eventually I divorced him. He didn’t mind. He just disappeared … literally.
I stood in front of the house wondering where he was. No one knew, including Sachi. I wondered what it was like not to know where your father was. Only Sachi could feel that. I always knew where my father was. With all his stunted brilliance, he had been there for me. Even his broad-stroked cruelty had been honest. He was not a mystery. I could see that now.
And my father had warned me that my husband was dishonest thirty-five years ago in the living room of this very house which was no longer there. I had not listened. I accused him of being possessive and never daring to have an adventurous relationship of his own. He said, “You’ll see, Monkey.”
And I saw. Before my Dad died, I admitted that he was right and I thanked him. He nodded and smiled. But even after my divorce, Dad wouldn’t let the matter drop. We were sitting at the kitchen table just before he went into the hospital for the last time.
“Look, Daddy,” I said. “I’ve divorced the guy. Why can’t you?”
“Because, Monkey,” said Daddy, “the son of a bitch was smarter than I was.”
Sachi came up behind me and tapped my shoulder.
“I understand so much more now,” she said quietly. “I’m going to have dinner with Egouchi-san tonight and talk about my childhood.”
Egouchi-san had been Sachi’s governess when we lived in Japan. They too had a relationship I couldn’t begin to fathom because it was traditional Japanese.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” she said. “I just need to hear about some things regarding Dad. It’s got nothing to do with you. I need to figure out who I am now. I need to resolve the Japanese and the American parts of me.”
We put our arms around each other and slowly walked away from the corner where so much of our love had gone unexpressed for years. We had taken it for granted and now it was time to talk.
And talk we did … for days in the hotel room in Tokyo, over Japanese meals in restaurants—sometimes with Egouchi-san, sometimes just the two of us. We talked about her childhood, her fears, her confusions about the two cultures, her concerns about being ready to bear children of her own. We talked about love, sex, work, and even death.
Then Sachi began to do interviews in Japanese—something she never wanted to do before. The cultural reminder had been too painful. And finally one night she told me to stay up and watch her on television. I did. There she was in her full-blown adult glory talking about her life for one hour in fluent Japanese. I didn’t understand one word.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll have it translated later.”
“Sure,” I said. “You know something, sweetheart. There are things I am never going to understand about you. By the same token, there’s a lot you’ll never understand about me. And there’s stuff neither of us will ever understand about your father.” Tears filled her eyes.
“I know,” she said. “I realize now that I’m just going to have to let him go and get on with my own life.”
“Yep,” I said. “I had to do the same thing with him. My father and mother had to do the same thing with me—and I with them.” She nodded and wiped her eyes.
“I guess we just have to let each other BE, huh?”
“I guess so,” I said.
The trip to Japan had obviously been about very much more than performing. Both Sachi and I did some growing up and our relationship recognized a new dimension.
When I returned from my tour, I visited my mother in Virginia.
It was probably the last time I would visit her in the house where she and my father had lived for so many years, because she was going to move to California to be with Warren and me. Many treasures still lay sequestered in the dusty basement of that house on that weekend visit.
I waited until Mother had gone to bed before I
made my way to the recreation room closet in the basement. It was as though I was guided to the drawer by a voice which, from somewhere within me, directed me to “the black folder” under a pile of papers. I didn’t know what I was guided toward, I just knew I needed to listen.
I slid the black folder out from under the papers, running my fingers over the dust along its edge. Then I opened it and began to read. I could see it was about music. Suddenly I realized it was my father’s Ph.D. dissertation on musical composition from Johns Hopkins. I had searched for this for years, finally concluding that it had gotten lost somewhere in the moving melee of the last twenty-five years.
I turned the pages carefully. There it was—all his research on the effect of musical composition on the human mind. He had explored the subject of sound and its metaphysical effects on human beings. He had discussed the subject many times with me as though he needed to prove that music healed and calmed.
Here was his thesis. This is what had been turned down by Dr. Bamberger. This had been the turning point in his life. Dr. Bamberger had failed him, and in doing so, had been responsible for nipping his “confidence” permanently in the bud. It had been an apocryphal story in our family—the cruel act perpetrated on the father of our household, which would serve to make him suspicious and distrustful, not only of his but of my talent, for the rest of his life. All because of her.
I continued to read. I turned the yellowed pages slowly so as not to damage their brittle edges. A piece of paper fell out. I picked it up. It was a letter—a letter addressed to Dr. Bamberger. I read it. It was from Dr. Stephen at the Johns Hopkins University School of Higher Studies in Education. The letter was polite and almost apologetic in what it said. Dr. Stephen was recommending that Dr. Bamberger not accept my father’s dissertation because it had not been well enough researched, not well enough thought out, and indeed not well enough written and accounted for in relation to the theories he was proposing. He wished he could see his way clear to accept it, but it just wasn’t thorough enough to pass.
I stared at the letter. So it hadn’t been Dr. Bamberger after all?
I read through more of the dissertation. I saw it begin to disintegrate in what it was saying. Some of what he had presented wasn’t even typewritten. It was still in longhand. My heart stopped. What had he expected?
Then in between the pages I saw notes and recommendations inserted and written by someone else. The notes implored him to research this or that more thoroughly, make the connections more clear and logical. The notes made sense. I looked closely at them. They had been written by my mother.
I was overcome by the realization of what this meant. Tears welled up in my eyes for all the years of living the frustrations, the fights, the accusations, the forgiveness, the love, represented in these dusty pages. This treasure I held in my hands was a metaphor for their life together, and indeed the catalyst for what Warren and I had become. Dad had been the harsh dreamer who couldn’t follow through because of his own self-doubt. Mother had tried to influence him to be more thorough and, for whatever reasons, she had transferred her inspiration to us. Warren and I had both become overachievers of the first order, never to be accused of not being perfectionist in the realizations of our dreams.
I stood over the pages with tears splashing on the words, remembering the stories of my grandmother’s brutal treatment of her son when he was young. His fear of the female authority figure had been played out in many ways, not the least of which emerged in that defective dissertation, his own thinly inspired attempt at innovative thought, resulting in the apocryphal story that Dr. Bamberger had failed him. My mother had tried to bail him out; but I suspected now that he preferred to fail so that he could prove that he would never have realized his dream, because he believed that somehow he didn’t deserve to.
I sat down on a dusty chair. The air in the basement was dank. The brick walls chilly. But I sat there, going over the implications of this sad and revealing document. How had I translated it to my life?
Well, for one thing, no one was ever going to be in a position to fail me. I would decide whether I’d pass or not. I would follow through thoroughly enough with whatever it took. So would Warren. We would never be disappointments to ourselves like Daddy had been to himself and to Mother. And we had used Mother’s insistence that perseverance was necessary to accomplishment. Neither of us ever gave up on anything until we had succeeded.
I wiped my tears. Why had I found this treasure now? It thoroughly exposed one of our family myths. Dad hadn’t been failed unjustly. He had failed himself.
I thought of Warren’s life, Warren’s talent and brilliance. What were the motivating inspirations for him? He had not wanted to fail himself.
Just as the thought hit me, I found myself standing up and opening a drawer in a long-forgotten filing cabinet. There were old bills, tax forms, letters from bygone days.
Then my hand selected what looked like a homemade envelope, folded together by a child out of loose-leaf paper. Suddenly I recognized it. I had made this envelope for my father for Father’s Day when I was about nine years old. I remembered having pasted it together. I remembered printing “Happy Father’s Day” on the outside, with “Guess Who?” as the return address.
Inside was a card with a picture of a tree I had drawn. The tree was full-blown with green leaves, and in the center of the leaves was a black bag.
The caption under the tree read in a childish scrawl: “If you read Dick Tracy today, the money is in the bag in the tree.”
My breath left me. I felt the childish envelope with my fingertips. Why was I finding this now? Warren’s picture, Dick Tracy, had just premiered across the Potomac in Washington a few days earlier as a benefit for Johns Hopkins Hospital, where my father had died, and which was attached to the University that had overlooked his dissertation.
I was overcome by the symbolism, although I couldn’t quite piece it together. Did the tree I had drawn represent life? Was it the Family Tree? What did the money bag mean? Did it mean the riches in life are found within the family?
On the next page I had drawn my father’s car with a flat tire on the way from Richmond, Virginia (where we lived at the time), to Arlington, Virginia, where he was seeking new employment, because he was fed up with the “peanut politics” of the teaching profession in Richmond. “Too many overpowering women I can’t get along with,” he had said. “They won’t let me teach.”
Had I unconsciously felt that his leaving the teaching profession, regardless of its trials and tribulations, would result in a flat tire (failure) for him on the way to a new profession (real estate), which wasn’t really him?
Perhaps the seeds of my conflict had been present on that Sunday morning when I drew that picture. Perhaps I had taken my father’s pain and lack of confidence onto my own shoulders so that I could do something about it. My mother, apparently, couldn’t make a difference. I would try. And in doing so, his disheartenment would govern my life. Maybe that’s the way it was with many parents and children; rare indeed is the child who has parents with love so wise, and understanding so objective, as to happily balance needed limits with the freedom to grow and develop the child’s own talents, to allow realization of its full potential. Far more often the child is neglected, or overindulged, or limited beyond reason, only to reflect those problems in his or her own life, and project them upon others.
My mother had denied her creativity in order to nurture her children. She chose a family over career—and never let us forget it. I had chosen a career over family so that I wouldn’t make the same mistake. What was my daughter seeing in me that I denied? What was I inspiring in her from the well of my own overachievement pattern? Had she, as a little girl, throttled her feelings, remaining immature for many years, in the knowledge that neither her mother nor her father was interested enough in her needs to always be there, on call daily, during her growing-up years?
Even in maturity, Sachi had been in some confusion, because she want
ed a career and a family, and saw no reason why she couldn’t make both work for her. But something had happened—seemingly insignificant. She had been given a puppy, which afforded her a dress rehearsal for what she could expect in the age-old conflict between motherhood and work. She couldn’t handle it. If the puppy cried as she left her place to go to work, she was riddled with guilt.
At first she understood she was identifying the puppy’s abandonment with her own. But then she realized that the most difficult thing for her to accept in herself was the fact that she could, and would, walk away from a living, needing creature in order to get on with her life. Her guilt had not been that of being unable to leave, but rather the guilt of discovering she could do so quite easily. It was a small but infinitely revealing step to recognizing that she could still be committed to a puppy, or a person, and leave for a while to pursue her own creativity. And from there to the realization that she was not going to allow herself to be colonized, put into any false position, by the demands and expectations of society, attitudes, family conditioning, and—last but far from least—herself.
My mother had “chosen” family. I had “chosen” career. Sachi would choose both, and make it work for herself.
And my father? It was as though he had never chosen at all. He had fallen between two images—that of being afraid to dare and that of wanting so much more—never venturing out because he felt so responsible as the “head of the house,” but never really being that either. He simply didn’t know how. He had never been inculcated with the values of self-esteem and a sense of positive worth. On the contrary, it had been the opposite for him. No wonder he did not dare to choose what to do with his life, his creativity, his aspirations, and his dreams.
Perhaps he had come to understand LOVE so deeply before he died because he didn’t have anything else. His had been the ultimate victory—the surrender of self. He was finally liberated when he put himself into the emotional hands of LOVE—love of God, love of people, love of life, love of the trust in death. He had finally come to the most important trust and love of all—himself. He said so without shame or sentimentality. In fact, he winked at me when he said, “If I love myself, Monkey, I can love everything. Too bad it took me so long, eh? Do you really have to die to find this out?”
Dance While You Can Page 28
