In 1932, two years before I was born, my
mother was an 18-year-old blonde pretty enough to stop traffic, only
five-foot-two but with a superb figure and shapely legs suited to
her profession as a dancer, singer and actress. The oldest of the
five children of a Virginia railway man and a one-time Baltimore
society girl who had married "beneath her" for love, my
mother had been forced out of school by financial need when her
father lost his job at the onset of the Great Depression. A
powerhouse of natural talent, she drove on undaunted and at 16
was already the headliner of a big movie theater in Washington,
D.C., starring in the live entr'acte spectaculars between first-run double
features, as epitomized in popular memory by the
shows featuring the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall in New
York City.
A girlfriend of hers played piano and sang in the sheet-music
department of a large Kresge Five-And-Dime retail store of which my father, at 28, was
general manager. The friend contacted Mother one morning and
asked that she substitute for her because she had a cold. Not
having a matinee that day, Mother did so and while she played
and sang "Million-Dollar Baby" for a prospective
sheet-music customer, my father strolled by and was instantly
smitten with love. Why not? She played well, had a thrilling
soprano voice, beautiful teeth, a lovely face, dimples as deep
as the sea in cheeks blooming under enormous eyes that changed
color from gray to green to sky blue depending on what she wore,
gloriously blonde hair set in natural curls like a halo ringing
her oval face. "I found a million-dollar baby in a five-and-ten
cent store," would become, in time, their song.
Although he had fallen desperately, hopelessly in love with the
pretty singer, my future father soon realized he probably didn't
stand a chance with so sought-after a beauty. Senators and
congressmen and millionaire businessmen in the nation's capital panted
after her. Stage-door Johnnys crowded around her dressing room after
every performance. A famous dancer who became a film star playing,
of all things, gangsters, had tried unremittingly to make love to
her during rehearsals for a routine to be performed at a White House
gala. When she refused, he purposely dropped her into the orchestra
pit at the dress rehearsal and called it an accident. The fall could
have killed her, but it only caused a slight sprain of an ankle which did,
however, cancel their appearance before the President. Young as
she was, she had already learned what chicanery and madness men
were capable of in matters of unrequited or possessive love.
Perhaps this was why my father's steady pursuit of her, despite his
fear that nothing might ever happen between them, began to impress her.
He was gentle, not forceful, quite starry-eyed and sweet to be around.
He treated her like a person instead of a sex object. He was highly
educated; it made her feel inadequate. But he was never condescending,
and corrected her grammar with kindness in charming, inoffensive ways.
He brought her books and read them aloud to her and with her. Although he
was essentially a southerner, as was she, he had led a more
cosmopolitan life as the son of a Baptist minister who was also a
writer and a learned man, who had demanded education of his
children and encouraged them to go out into the world, unlike
more provincial men of the cloth.
She remained blissfully unaware of the darker side of this man whom she
came gradually to love more for his intellect than his appearance. Of more
than average height and slim build, he was neither handsome nor ugly, with
regular features, and wore unstylish, round, silver-rimmed glasses
although his brilliantined hair was slicked straight back
modishly per the fashion of the day. His head of hair, brick red
in early youth, had turned oddly dark in college when a
mysterious malady seemed to change his body chemistry and he
nearly went blind. Still, though, his was the complexion of a
fair-haired man inclined to burn, not tan, in the sun, making him
happy to cover his orangish-haired chest and back at the pool
with the swimming shirts men were universally required to wear
for modesty's sake in that more puritanical time before Clark
Gable appeared shirtless in "It Happened One Night." A
man of generally serious disposition with unhealthy but
presentable teeth, he did not often wrinkle his thin lips in a
hearty grin. He was not truly austere, but he was inclined to
moralize sometimes as his father might have done from the pulpit.
He could tell a joke, but his stories were never off-color,
certainly not with her.
How could she know that behind that facade of gentle intellect,
behind those eyes seemingly aglow with love, there lurked an insanely
jealous, wildly possessive, virulent brute?
That the girl who would become my mother agreed
to marry the man who would become my father was for him a fluke.
For her, it opened a new chapter in which her life would be
fraught with more perils than the cinematic Pauline whose
cliff-hanging serial endings had brought lumps to Mother’s
throat in childhood when there were still pennies to scrape
together to make the nickels it cost to get her and her five
younger siblings into the magical glow from the flickering light
of silent movie screens. The pennies disappeared in the wake of
the Great Depression of 1929 after her daddy lost his job on the
railroad.
Although he held a lower management position earned after years
as a lineman, my grandfather had struggled hard to feed and clothe
his family on wages that left little to spare for such luxuries as
the films. His had been a struggle from the beginning, even from the
day in 1912, when both were 22, that he first saw my grandmother
standing on the station platform of a country town in Northern Virginia,
waiting for the next train to Baltimore. The struggle then was in his
heart. Linemen were not allowed to speak to passengers, but when he saw
this dark-haired, tall, elegant, young woman, beautifully gowned and
obviously of the landed gentry, turn in his direction and catch
his eye from beneath her parasol, he felt a surge of love run through him that nearly knocked
him off his feet. In that moment, the train pulled in and shut her out of
view. Stunned by her look as though he had taken a blow, he came to his
senses when the caboose tail-ending the train came to a halt. He saw
through the window the ticket-taking conductor enjoying a quick smoke before
the next departure. My grandfather knew the man. Heart pounding
wildly, he next took the step that would lead him to the greatest
happiness of his life. He sprang up from the track to the
platform and dashed into the caboose where he begged his friend
to lend him his uniform jacket and let him take over his duties
for the run. That done, he strolled through the aisles
resplendent in the coat brass-buttoned over his thumping chest,
with the conductor’s too-small hat jauntily perched over his
blonde hair, looking for the lady who had nearly stopped his
heart. There she was, and there was that look again.
By the time the day was over, they had made two round trips to
Baltimore together without setting foot in the city either time.
By then he knew of her great sadness. She had been divorced, a stigma
at the time, following a miserable marriage to a wealthy man who had
snatched her from the lineup of debutantes at the Baltimore Cotillion
when she was 16, with promises of devotion, and proceeded literally to
imprison her for five years in his magnificent home. She had escaped
and returned to her family battered and bruised not only of body, but also
of mind, vowing never to marry again nor even to turn her gaze
toward another man. But on that day in 1912, riding the Baltimore
train, her resolve faded into shadows, driven back by the
sunshine in my grandfather’s smile. He had no social
standing to sacrifice for love. All he had was two strong hands
and the will to carry her off in a cloud of dust no matter what
people might think or say.
Happy marriages were made in heaven some used to say, and if a
heaven there be, the marriage of these two proved the point. If love
were money, they would have been millionaires. Their six children
bloomed in their lives like a garden giving endless delight. The
oldest, my mother, grew up laughing, inheriting my grandmother’s
propensity to turn dark moments into jokes and to entertain everyone
around her with a song. She sang so sweetly, and played the piano so
well by ear, that neighbors gathered on the sidewalk outside the window
of a summer evening to while away the humid hours listening to her
sing not alone the hits of the day, but the old-time love songs
and hymns as well. She was so beautiful when she entered her
teens that the brother closest to her in age brought friends home
just to watch the sister with the blonde-angel curls dance the
Charleston like nobody could. There wasn’t another smile
like hers in the whole town of Alexandria, Virginia, where they
lived. People came by just to see "that darling girl."
Strangers would stop her in the street and touch her hair.
"Don’t mean no harm, little miss; I had to do that; it
don’t look real!" they’d say and move on enchanted
by her curtsy and melodious "thank you."
When the troubles came, when her daddy had no job, she cheerfully
dropped out of school in the seventh grade and went to work as a waitress
to help make ends meet and to keep her siblings in school. It was over
doughnuts and coffee that her future changed. A talent scout for the
Earle Theater across the Potomac in what was known in Alexandria as
"Washington City" dropped by the cafe one day for "a cuppa
java and one of them jelly doughnuts with the red runnin’ out, and
make it snappy, sister, I’m a busy man." With the
coffee came her brilliant, dimpled smile. Bedazzled, he drew
back. "Honey, can you sing?" Indeed she could, not to
mention dance on the prettiest legs he and the management at the
Earle had seen in years when she performed for them the following
Saturday morning. They put her in the chorus, but a face and
figure like hers couldn’t be tucked away in the background
for long. In a month, she was dancing out front as a solo
butterfly, soon to be followed by her debut as a singing star.
She was on her way.
TO BE CONTINUED
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