“Of course,” Chef said. “Well, I better get crackin’ or you’ll hire another Jamaican-British chef from Italy.”
That was maybe the most fantastic breakfast I have ever had, for more reasons than I have the space to write about here. Suffice to say that the best things about it were my amazing family and then the food.
Part Four
1941–1944
Last night I dreamed of a meadow as vast as a continent, under the blue light of a moon as strange as any. In the center of the field, a lovely lamb stood tethered to a stake. The night was alive with the howling of wolves, though as yet the wolves themselves had not appeared. I made my way to the lamb, kissed its brow, and freed it from the stake. As it gamboled away, it vanished as if through a curtain into a parallel world of safety.
I tied the tether to my wrist and sat on the ground. My heart was full, not of fear and grief, but of joy. The wolves fell silent as they arrived, their eyes silvered by the moon. I reclined full length upon the grass so that they would know there was only flesh to feed on, not also human terror and regret. Having lived among men and women born of Adam and Eve, I had no dread of wolves. If they crossed the meadow to what I offered, I do not know, for I woke.
And so I’ve had four blue dreams, all in four nights. Somehow I know there will not be a fifth, just as I know that these have been more than dreams. If they are visions,they are not the revelations given to saints, for I am no saint. I wonder, however, if I am meant to be guided by the blue dreams as my life unfolds—and one day find the freedom and deep happiness that have thus far eluded me. I think it best never to speak of them, but write about them in a letter to myself, seal it in an envelope, and hide it very well. Such precious dreams are fragile and may turn to dust if shared.
—from a letter by Alida, April 17, 1927
Forty
Enjoy life but stay alert. Always trust in the rightness of the world. But stay alert. Never be bitter or despairing. But stay alert. Life is a great gift. Love and mercy are the promise of it. But stay alert.
Without revealing my project to the family, I’ve written pages of this memoir every year since I arrived at the Bram. It will be my gift to them one day, a book of memories. I suppose it isn’t much of a gift, but it’s all I have to give. Most people forget much of the past. I do not. I like to believe they will regard the memories I leave in this volume as a worthwhile history of our time together or at least as a volume of that guilty pleasure called nostalgia. No life, certainly not just thirteen years of a life as lowly as mine, can justify a thousand pages. Therefore, from time to time, I have reread what I’ve written and condensed it. Furthermore, I’ve limited my recollections to the years that seemed, in retrospect, to be those in which events of greater significance occurred. Between those years I have focused on, eight others were full of love and mercy and joy, years during which I remained alert without cause. How wonderful my life has been—by now almost three decades—blessed in both the good years and those not as good. The promise of it has been kept to an extent that allows no complaint.
However, a new reality began for us on what we expected would be a peaceful Sunday devoted to preparations for the coming holiday.
We had gone to an early church service because we intended to have breakfast at home, rather than brunch at a restaurant. Most of the day would be spent decorating the usual five Christmas trees as well as fireplace mantels, door surrounds, and other architectural elements that cried out to be given a more festive appearance. After changing from our Sunday best into casual clothes, we’d taken longer at breakfast than we should have, because Harry entertained us with a highly amusing presentation of a movie he was writing.
For the past two years, much to Franklin and Loretta’s surprise and delight, their son had set himself to learn filmmaking and the financial ins and outs of the motion-picture industry, inspired by the prospect of making history as interesting to large audiences as it was to him. The current project, if it got off the ground, was a comedy based on a period in the life of one of the least funny of American presidents, Andrew Jackson. In 1791, when Jackson was Tennessee’s state prosecutor, he married Rachel Robards, the former wife of a major landowner, Lewis Robards. Ah, romance. Then it was discovered Rachel and Lewis might never have been legally divorced. Scandal! Jackson was a hothead who’d been involved in a number of brawls over the years. The press was adversarial to a fault; they hated Jackson. Lewis was befuddled. Rachel was shy and retiring but capable of cleverly manipulating the press and Nashville’s elites. “The film is like a British farce,” Harry said. “The basic facts are true, but the opportunities for hilarity are countless.”
Isadora was home for the month. She had completed a six-week guest singer stint with Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra, performing solos but also singing duets with that new young sensation, Frank Sinatra. After four years of short-term contracts with various bands, she had gained enough admirers in the business that she had just signed a recording contract with Brunswick, which was a top-tier label that boosted DukeEllington among others. “It’s a slog,” she said, “more than half the year on tour with one band or another, the rest of the time bouncing around from one short gig to another—but, God, it’s fun. If I burn out before anything really, really big happens, it’ll still be worth it.”
“If you crash like theHindenburg,” Gertie said, spreading lemon marmalade on a slice of toast, “you can always have a job as my amanuensis.”
“So you think, just because I’m a big band bulbul, I don’t know what an amanuensis is. What exactly would you need a secretary for?”
“For when I make the move from short fiction to novels and the fan mail comes pouring in. You’ll need to answer it for me, sharpen my pencils, correctly read mygribouillage. And a bulbul is an Asian songbird, a nightingale, often mentioned in Persian poetry.”
“Huh.” Izzy raised her eyebrows. “Little sister can probably even pronounce ‘nefarious’ these days.‘Gribouillage’is French. It meansscribbling.” They were grinning at each other throughout these exchanges. “By the way, that novella inCollier’swas a knockout.”
“I had a teacher who worked me half to death, mocked me for my errors, then called me ‘honey,’ as if she really cared about me.”
“She pulled the same trick with me when I was trying to write my own songs and the lyrics weren’t right. She’d work me so hard I’d be in tears. She’d hand me a Kleenex and say, ‘Before you spend the day sobbing, you should look at how much a box of these disposable hankies costs, sweetheart.’”
I said, “I love you little darlings, too.”
“There she goes again,” Gertie said. “Anyway, sis, I heard you on the radio doing a duet with that Sinatra guy. You were fabulous, but he shows a little promise. When you cut your Brunswick records and everyone knows your name, you might want to give him a hand up.”
After that long breakfast, we’d hardly begun decorating the trees when Chef Lattuada, having come to the main house from his apartmenton this day off, hurried room to room in evident distress, urging us to turn on the radio. A General Electric jewel-box-style Bakelite radio was placed conveniently in every major room, for we were a tuned-in family. Most of the usual Sunday morning religious and inspirational-music programming had been wiped aside by the broadcasters’ news divisions. The Japanese had pulled off a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, destroying a significant percentage of the United States Navy’s warships, killing hundreds if not thousands of sailors and others. Meaningful details were slow to come and not easily winnowed from a harvest of misinformation. The shock we felt wasn’t merely emotional but also physical—a pressure in the chest, a greasy turning in the gut. Initially, the mental trauma was more severe than the fear of what was to follow the treachery of that December 7, but as the shock abated, the fear was sustained.
We didn’t abandon the task of decorating for Christmas, because the holiday was about hope, peace, and the defeat of evil. However, what would have been a day of laughter was bereft of it. The work went slowly, for inanimate objects now possessed the power to resist whatever we wished to do with them. The wire hangers didn’t want to be hooked through the wire loops in the necks of the blown-glass ornaments. Tangled strings of colorful lights insisted on not being untangled. An angel placed atop the tree repeatedly took flight and had to be returned to her rightful perch.
We finished what was usually a one-day effort in two days, by late Monday afternoon, when the radio was still reporting new and more disturbing details about Pearl Harbor by the hour. President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war against Japan, which it did in six minutes. Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the US. Days would pass before we got a picture of the devastation in Hawaii. The navy reported two thousand men killed and more than seven hundred wounded in the two-hour attack. The Army and Marines lost over three hundred, and more than four hundred were wounded. The presidentcalled the seventh of December a “day of infamy,” and certainly it was, though many days of infamy had occurred in the history of humanity, and many more were sure to come. By Christmas, Japanese forces, committing atrocities that many thought would never occur again after the abominations of World War I, had taken over Guam, Hong Kong, Wake Island, and the Philippines.
There were things that ordinary citizens could do as the costs of war were brought home to us—organize paper and rubber and scrap-metal drives, volunteer at hospitals, donate care packages of candy and paperback books and other items to remind the troops of home and keep their spirits up. Those of us at the Bram, family and staff, were getting involved in those activities. Franklin and Loretta were in consultations with the Department of War and other government offices, donating their time, skills, and resources to recruiting films, propaganda aimed at the enemy, and movies designed to lift the spirits of the American people.
On December 26, with the whole family gathered at breakfast, Harry informed us that he’d signed up for the Marines four days after Pearl Harbor and had passed his physical on December 22. He had scored high on the armed forces qualification test, guaranteeing him training in any specialty he chose, but he didn’t want to be in a support position. He wanted to be a grunt, trained to fight and given every opportunity to fight. He expected to be told to report for boot camp after the new year. “I didn’t tell you,” he explained, “because I didn’t want to cast another shadow on this Christmas.” He was twenty, saturated in history and military lore. We’d known he would seek to serve, but we hadn’t asked him what his intentions were. I suspect, in our hearts, we hoped he would pursue a military exemption in order to work with his parents on their Department of War projects. Of course that could never have happened. That was not Harry. For all his enthusiasm for such things as the adventures of the Clyde Tombaugh Club and hisquickness to engage in silly banter, there had always been a somber side to him that he did his best to keep from us in the interest of being the fun brother that we wanted him to be. We didn’t get teary-eyed at that breakfast, because he wouldn’t want that reaction. We were proud of him, and it was our job to express our pride without embarrassing him. In a time of war, the pride you feel for someone you love, someone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, inevitably comes tangled with other powerful emotions—fear, anger at those who broke the peace, choking disquiet at the unpredictable nature of life, and a tenderness without pity, a tenderness so intense that I have no words to describe it.
I cried in bed that night. I cried, but not in excess, for it seemed that indulging in too much sorrow would tempt fate to punish my intemperance with a better reason for grief.
On December 29, Harry received his notice to present himself at the induction center on the morning of Wednesday, January 14, 1942. Isadora had canceled a two-week gig in San Francisco to be with us. In his remaining days at home, Harry wanted no special treatment, only to have every breakfast and dinner with all of us, to play cards with his “three sisters,” and to watch some films with us in the Bram’s screening room—a little Chaplin, a little more Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, and Abbott and Costello inBuck Privates, which had just hit theaters in ’41. He spent time with Loretta and Franklin, brainstorming propaganda films aimed at the nation’s enemies overseas and those at home. Rafael received his share of attention, chasing tennis balls on the great lawn and splashing with his “brother” in the swimming pool.
