“The last time I quit smoking, I went up to a hundred and thirty,” I said. “And remember the way I looked in The Dark Ages? Sam, Sam, Superman used to call me The Blimp.”
“He didn’t mean that in a bad way,” Mama said. (I don’t know how anyone could mean it in a good way.) “I’m no sylph myself. Once we’ve both kicked the filthy habit we’ll look like a pair of beached whales for a while.”
We both started laughing then. We laughed for a long time, longer than the joke was funny. I’m not sure what Mama was laughing at, but I think I was laughing because I was relieved. I got my ulcer around the time Fedora began talking about extending Hometown a half hour. When Dr. Baird told Mama he didn’t advise my doubling my work load, I expected Mama to go into a real tailspin. She didn’t, though; she just sat across from him saying, “I couldn’t agree more,” but it never rang true to me somehow. Mama thrives on show business. If she had to choose between going for a day without any food and reading Variety, she’d choose Variety . . . and Mama loves to eat, a lot!
I still remember the time Mama got a sort of crush on the leading man in Hometown. She was spending a lot of time on the set with him, going across to McGlades for drinks with him, talking for long hours on the telephone with him at night. His wife complained to Fedora about it, and Fedora told Mama she was going to end my storyline if Mama didn’t do something about it.
Mama sent me to the set while she sat around The Dakota swallowing Valium and listening to old Tony Bennett tapes for hours on end, smoking and staring at the walls. We couldn’t talk about it together. Mama could never admit that Nick was just this pompous creep who went around trying to make any female in his path fall in love with him. It gave me stomachaches to hear Mama defend Nick, and we went through a bad time when we hardly talked at all.
Then one day after months had gone by, Mama came to the set as though it had all never happened. She gave Nick a smile, that was it, and went back to being my mother, cleaning up my dressing room, fussing over my wardrobe, cueing me and brushing out my long, blond hair—the whole bit. She even called Fedora, who was on the coast at the time.
“Well,” she said, “the news from this end is that the great storm has passed, the sea is calm, the little skiff is not capsized, sails are up. We’re still very much in the race.”
I don’t know what Fedora’s answer was, but I do remember the next thing Mama said.
She said, “Now get her that new storyline you’re always promising, toss in five hundred extra clams a month, and we’ll be back in business.”
It was right after that when Fedora started the whole “Tell me more” bit which made me famous.
The only flaw Mama has is that she’s overprotective. She’d keep me under glass if she could, until she was sure I was able to handle myself to her satisfaction, which would be sometime when I’m forty.
Around the time I got my ulcer, Fedora was trying out this new young writer named Lamont Orr. She wasn’t sure whether she was going to keep him as part of her regular stable of writers or not. The cast called him Lamont Bore, because he couldn’t stand to have one word of his dialogue changed, even when it didn’t play well. Here was this twenty-four-year-old, apple-cheeked kid, who’d never written anything but a few weird off-off-Broadway shows and some daytime television, trying to throw his weight around with talent that had been in the profession for years and years.
Fedora let him hang around the set to get the feeling of the show, and she sent us off for Cokes together to see what kind of a rapport we’d have. When Mama would try to come with us, Fedora would dream up some reason to have a conference with her. Once she just said flatly, “I want them to get to know each other, Peg! They have to, you know, if Lamont does her scenes.”
Mama was always saying things to me like “I guess the kid’s getting to you, hmmmm? He’s okay if you can get past all that Brut he splashes on himself.”
“Mama,” I’d say, “how can a man with a permanent wave get to me?”
“Well it’s the fashion now,” she’d say. “Someday he’ll probably blink his baby blues at you and you’ll be giving him his home permanents yourself.”
We had Lamont to dinner one night, and when he walked through our front door, the first words out of his mouth were, “What a lovely pied-à-terre, Peg!” Peg, he called Mama, when Mama was old enough to be his mother. Pied-à-terre, when he was born and raised in Bolivar, Missouri.
“Oh am I in love!” I said to Mama when he left. “Be still my beating heart! Mama, he compared himself to Dostoevsky. He said, ‘. . . Both Dostoevsky and I believe character development is primary to plot development.’ Did you hear it?”
Mama said, “If he ever . . . if he ever makes even the smallest kind of pass, I want to know about it.”
“Oh the whole world will know about it,” I said. “He’ll cry out, I’ll kick him so hard.”
As I was collecting my bathing suit and towel for a walk to the beach, Mama said to me, “Let me ask you something now. How do you really feel about leaving the show?”
“I think I feel relieved,” I said.
“You think you feel relieved?” she said. “What do you mean you think you feel relieved?”
“I think,” I said, “beat, beat, another beat, I’m relieved.”
“Get outta here!” Mama said. “And good luck with your mouth!”
Instead of underwear in the summer, I always wear a pair of trunks under my jeans so I can take a swim at one of Seaville’s beaches if I feel like it. This drives my mother up the walls. My mother says it’s no way for the son of a funeral director to behave. Funeral directors’ children, according to my mother, must lead exemplary lives because of the very delicate nature of the profession. Our home is supposed to be the sort of home one wants to see their loved ones resting in “at the end of the long journey”—to use another of my mother’s euphemisms for death.
If you want to know anything at all about the protocol of running a funeral home, don’t ask my father, ask my mother. I think my mother’s the world’s foremost authority on the dos and don’ts of funeral-home life. Do keep all the shades in the front of the house at the exact same level. Don’t sit around in any front rooms watching television with the drapes open at night. Do keep “the coach” (the polite word for the hearse) in the garage with the garage doors down, at all times. Don’t just throw out old “floral tributes” in the trash, but stuff them into a Hefty Lawn and Leaf Bag so they are not recognizable as old flowers. On and on and on.
Every time I slip out of my trousers on the beach, I hear my mother’s voice in my mind crying, “Wal-ly! Oh, no!”
That hot August afternoon after I left Harriet’s, I left my pants and shirt and sneaks in a ball on the sand, and walked down to the water’s edge. The tide was coming in, and Lunch Montgomery, this old blind-in-one-eye, black-and-white hound dog, was running around in the surf barking. That meant Monty Montgomery had to be around somewhere, a prospect I didn’t welcome.
A few afternoons a week I worked for Monty in the store he and his wife owned, called Current Events. Monty sold newspapers and magazines, greeting cards, games and office supplies. He also sold T-shirts, standard ones already printed up, or the kind you could have anything you wanted printed on them. I was the printer, the poor slob who fitted the letters on the shirt and then stream pressed them into it. For this I got $2.60 an hour. The fair thing would have been for Monty and his wife to pay me about triple that, since I acted as their go-between. I don’t think they even talked when I wasn’t