Life Is Not a Stage Read online

  “Gal, rub my back,” my father had said to me one of the last times I saw him alive. Since I was the last of his ten children, he called me “Gal” rather than rattling off the long list of names of all of his girls to remember it.

  A dirt-poor tobacco tenant farmer, my father was nearly fifty years old and my mother twenty-five years younger when they married. Both of my parents were from Kentucky and each came from very large Catholic families. One plausible explanation why my father married so late was that he had spent years taking care of his immediate family. That responsibility also turned him into quite an accomplished cook, something I’m sure would have given him a more successful and fulfilling career than growing tobacco and tomatoes for the canning factory. We maybe never had all the delicacies, but he sure knew how to whip up a great vegetable soup from whatever was handy or plentiful.

  By the time my next oldest sister, Babby, and I were born, my father was getting close to seventy. The family had moved across the Ohio River to a small farm in Dale, Indiana. One of my earliest memories from that time was going out to the fields to “worm the tobacco.” And if you ever had to worm tobacco, you wouldn’t forget it either! First of all, working with tobacco is very gummy. The resin sticks to the little hairs on your arms and it felt highly unpleasant when anything would brush against us—our skin became like Velcro. My brothers and sisters and I would have to inspect every leaf. When we found the green, two-inch creatures holding on to the back sides of the leaves with their many legs, we’d pick them off, pull them apart, and throw them on the ground.

  One day, my brothers said that they’d give me a dime if I bit the head off of one of the worms. I did it. I got the dime. It tasted as you might expect, but it was worth it. I went out and bought some candy with it. They also challenged me to do things like carry a big canister of coal oil from the little store. We used it to fuel the lamps that lit our house at night. I was competitive in nature even back then. The canister must have weighed more than I did at the time, but I dragged it for the required distance. The end of the dares officially came another day when they asked me to swing from one rafter to the next in the barn. I fell and almost killed myself, and that sure scared the heck out of them.

  During my early childhood, we moved from that farm to another farm, and to a successive number of homes (possibly to evade the landlords due to unpaid rents?). Finally, we ended up in a small house in Rockport, population 2,400. By then, most of the other eight children had grown up and moved out of the house, my older sisters having married and my brothers gone off to the war. In the end it was just Babby and me. She was three years older and sported a short dark Buster Brown hairstyle of the time. Babby’s real name is Emily, which was what I called her then. The nickname Babby came much later. In our early twenties, we were goofing off role-playing from a wonderful film we had just seen called The Little Kidnappers. The young actors had Scottish accents, and we loved the sound of their voices. So I played the “Grandmommy” with my faux Scottish brogue, and Emily was the baby, pronounced “Babby.” Babby has stuck to this day, but mercifully not Grandmommy!

  My father was a big and powerful man in the eyes of a little girl, but by the time I reached high school age I had surpassed him in height. He had dark eyes and a nice smile, and he was considered to be a handsome man of strong Irish stock. Both of his parents and their families happened to travel together on the same boat from Ireland to America, but met only after they were settled in their new country. He had been bald since his late twenties, with only fringes of hair on the sides, so he was never without his favorite hat. The worn-out fedora had a ring of dried sweat from his being in the hot sun while he tended the fields. He smoked a pipe, and his clothes, which were never so clean to begin with, were pockmarked with burn holes from embers that would fall from his pipe when he fell asleep in his chair. As he dozed off, his suspenders would sag and his dime-store eyeglasses would go down the bridge of his nose.

  I could see the good in my father, but his alcoholism had a devastating impact on himself and his family. When he wasn’t drunk, he could be the sweetest, kindest man. He could stay sober for weeks and months, and remarkably, sometimes for a whole year. During those tranquil periods, he would get us up to go to mass every Sunday morning. He loved to read, especially books about Wyatt Earp and the Wild West and Abraham Lincoln.

  He was also a man full of considerable wisdom and advice, which he’d share with Babby and me in a repetitious manner that made it stick. When we heard that familiar tone in his voice, we would roll our eyes and say under our breaths, “Here it comes again.”

  “Gal, now, you know, you have to be careful,” he would tell us. “You’ve got to watch your reputation and your character. We don’t have much money and we don’t have many material things, but you’ve got a great reputation and a great character. People can take your money and your possessions, but they can’t take your good reputation and your character. You give that away.”

  Perhaps, in the final analysis, his words to us had more impact on us than we could have imagined at the time. It is one possible reason among others why, despite the harsh poverty and other difficult circumstances, all ten of his surviving children (one of my siblings died before I was born) went on to lead very productive lives. I’ve used what I have learned in my life and as a parent of four children myself to look back and understand both my father and my mother with a clearer perspective. The sadness and disappointment I had in my early years diminished gradually with time. It has made it easier to regard them not just with forgiveness and compassion, but also with a degree of awe and admiration.

  My father was dealing with a terrible disease, although it was hardly recognized as such back in the 1930s and 1940s. I know his condition really bothered him. But what could he have done short of abstaining? There were no twelve-step programs or other social services in our community that addressed this problem. Alcoholics Anonymous was only just getting started at the time.

  When he was drunk, all hell would break loose. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old when I first noticed that there was something terribly wrong. At that time, we were still living on the farm. One night, I heard my mother yelling at my dad. I snuck close by the door and looked in through the crack. My mother was standing by an ironing board, shaking her finger at him. My father was sitting in a chair in his long underwear. He looked so sick and so sad. Then he started to cry. Seeing my father in that condition was devastating. It just about killed me.

  My mother, too, would drink with my father from time to time. On Saturday nights, they’d go uptown to a saloon. Babby and I would be outside waiting on a bench for them to come out. Invariably, once home, they’d get into a fight. I worried about my older sister Ilean, who was out on a date with a new boyfriend. “Ilean’s going to be home soon,” I’d say, going into the kitchen where they were yelling at each other. “He [the boyfriend] is going to hear you. He won’t like us. He won’t like Ilean. Please don’t fight.”

  “Think nothing of it,” my mother snapped back in her customary rhetoric. “We’re fine. Just say your prayers and go to bed.”

  My mother was not an alcoholic. She had more self-control. I think she went along with it just to try to cope with him. As crazy as it appeared to me, maybe it was their form of relaxation, a form of self-medication against the pressures and strains of their life together. They didn’t have the skills to channel it in a healthier way. Nevertheless, when my mother was drunk, usually on beer, I learned to stay out of her radar range. Years later, when we’d go out to a fancy restaurant, I’d cringe every time the waiter would ask her what she wanted to drink. “Bring me a beer. In a can.”

  If things were not interesting enough, my father was also a moonshiner. He made a corn whiskey that was popularly known back then as white mule. During the years of Prohibition, my father told my older sister, “Pauline, gal, if anybody comes asking if we’ve got any white mule, tell ’em, ‘Yeah, it’s standing there way out in
the pasture.’” He also brewed his own beer.

  When my father would go on a binge, Babby and I would find empty bottles everywhere, in the house and piled in the garage. He could have a beer or two without a problem, but once he got a whiff of hard liquor it was all over. It was hard to say what would set him off. I once asked the great comedian Jackie Gleason about this issue when we were having lunch one day, and he brought up the subject of his problems with alcohol. “Yeah, I drink a lot,” he admitted. I asked him if there was any pattern to when he got drunk. He laughed. “No, any excuse will do. A leaf has fallen from the tree. There’s a cloud in the sky. Better have a drink.”

  When my father would go on a toot, Babby and I would take turns taking care of him. In this state, he would beg us to go uptown and get him a beer. We would walk into a bar, I’d ask the bartender, and most of the time they obliged. But we found that the best way to slowly get him off the stuff was to give him a protein cocktail of whiskey with milk and a raw egg.

  “Come on, Daddy, you can’t keep doing this,” I’d tell him, imploring him to straighten up. Lying down on the sofa as he did for days on end, he looked sick and melancholic. In response, he sounded almost sweet and apologetic. He would tell me what most drunks say. “Oh, Gal, it will be okay. Now don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  “Would you just rub my back?” he’d often ask me. Within a few moments, he’d try to take advantage of the situation. I’d find his hand touching one of my calves. Looking back on these incidents, I know they could have been so much worse than they were. No matter how young or innocent I was at the time, I always had an inbuilt sense of my surroundings and knew when something might be dangerous or harmful. While things never degenerated to a more severe degree of sexual assault, the sacred bond of comfort, protection, and safety that a child wants to have with her father was damaged forever.

  If there are any explanations for what triggered his binges, I think it was a combination of factors. As I described before, growing tobacco and farming the land were hard work, and the years had taken a toll on him. He also had the daunting responsibility and pressures of raising ten children.

  It might sound Pollyannaish, but my faith made it possible for me to always be optimistic and feel that there was help available to me to face any situation. It also made me feel a sense of love for everyone. I recently read a passage by the great spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda. He wrote that when you really experience being in union with a spiritual force, you begin to more easily see the good in everybody. This was a bit confusing for a small child confronted by the unpleasant sides of humanity—that I could still love that person despite their hurtful actions. It had made me feel guilty at times.

  It is true that my upbringing stressed loyalty and God forbid you should say anything negative about anybody, especially your family. But that will only take you so far. I did not want to go the other way where anger and bitterness take the place of love. I found a piece of writing I did in a notebook when I was six or seven years old. It read, “Dear God, give me the gift of understanding.” That’s the way my little mind worked. I think I realized that I was in a situation for which I needed to have more compassion and understanding. Maybe I understood my situation far better at that early age than I thought.

  In the months before my father’s death, I returned home from my studies at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York to see him. That particular visit haunted me the most. No different than I had seen him hundreds of times before, he was on a big toot. But on this occasion he also had a large swelling on his face that was hard not to notice. As I rubbed his back, I told him, “Daddy, I hate it when I see you like this.”

  Without pausing, I said, “I’d rather see you dead.”

  “Don’t say that, Gal.”

  Not long after, I came back from New York and saw him for what proved to be the last time. I shaved him. I had no idea that he was so sick. Despite the abuse I had suffered, my prophetic words to him about wanting to see him dead and the fact that I did not attend his funeral disturbed me greatly.

  I was so troubled that I went to confession and told the priest about the situation. His advice was to try to go easy on myself. “Don’t feel bad about it. As young people, we all feel these things about our parents. We all go through rough times. But as we get older, we learn that we didn’t know everything.” He went on to speak to me about forgiveness. Easier said than done. The incident continued to bother me for years and marked the first onset of my insomnia.

  There was a strange irony as I accepted my fate that I would not be attending my father’s funeral. There was a sense of gratitude that, for once, finally, I got a free pass from the trauma. Instead, with Oklahoma! and the whirlwind of work that would follow with my success, I was in full stride on my mother’s notorious galloping horse. The ensuing adventures in my life are proof positive that it would be many years before I would feel safe enough to slow down and relax.

  My father used to say his prayers every night before bed when he was sober. I once asked him what he prayed for. He replied, “I pray for everybody but I also pray for a happy death.”

  Because of my studies in New York, I wasn’t there when he took ill. My sisters Pauline and Babby took care of him. He had a terrible form of cancer that started in the sinuses and spread from there. It was the root of that swelling I had noticed during my visit. Pauline told me that he repeatedly apologized for taking so long to die. When the time was nearing, they called for the priest to give him the last rites and to hear his last confession. Pauline said that she could overhear laughing and carrying on from his room. From those sounds, I think my father’s prayer was answered, but he was also given an extra bonus. From my sister’s account, I have some peace and gratitude knowing that he also had a courageous death.

  CHAPTER 2

  Singing for My Supper

  My mother, Elizabeth, left when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. For Babby and me, it was par for the course. Like the other traumas we had experienced, we had learned that there was little other option than to accept it and try to cope the best we could. We knew that sitting by the door hoping that she would return was a waste of energy and would set us up for more disappointment. It was a nebulous time, of which the memories are a little bit foggy around the edges.

  There was also a part of me that understood that the situation was perhaps not as harsh as it could have been, and for one good reason: From as far back as I can remember I had experienced so little maternal love in the first place. Kind words or any gestures of affection from her were virtually nonexistent. I was, after all, the last of her ten children, and she had no doubt already reached the end of her rope. It was the way things were. I didn’t give my mother’s absence that much more thought, I blocked it out. Things would be okay. I put my energy instead toward staying optimistic.

  Years later, when I faced a crisis in my own marriage, I had a different perception of what my mother did. I pondered the courage that it took for her to leave. It gave me the courage to change my life. Curiously, both my sister Pauline and I left our marriages at the same age my mother did.

  Along with my father’s alcoholism and all the children to care for, my mother had little material comfort or support. There was no running water or electricity at home for much of the time. And medical care for childbirth and everyday problems was basically unaffordable. When Babby and I got a bit older, my mother brought in a little extra money working at a nearby café, but that didn’t improve matters greatly. She also cleaned houses. One day when I went along with her to one of the homes, I could not resist the temptation of a real luxury item within my grasp. It was a stick of gum. My mother read me the riot act that theft was still theft no matter how small the item was, and gave me a whipping to make sure I didn’t forget it.

  My sister Ilean, who is ten years older than I, thinks that our parents went “a bit crazy” soon after she left home. She could recall that Daddy went for a decade at one time without drink
ing. She wrote to me in a recent letter that she was certain he was hurt badly when Mother didn’t come back. She said that life was hard before I was born, but admitted that she had grown up under more tranquil conditions than what Babby and I had to endure. Like me, she also has an appreciation for the fact that our parents instilled in all their children the values we needed to get through life. Despite the hardship and all the traumas, they left us with the skills to take care of ourselves, do the right thing, and have integrity.

  Ilean also remembers our mother from her childhood as being strict but fair, with a bark that was far worse than her bite. She thought that behind her toughness was a more loving manner toward all of her children, but that the hard life forced her to be on the defensive. “She didn’t want to leave herself open to get hurt,” Ilean surmised. Our mother didn’t really think she was abandoning Babby and me, according to Ilean’s recollection, perhaps part and parcel of that defensive shield.

  Babby and I were only told that she was going to Cleveland to work. Although she left, I still longed for my mother’s affection and never gave up hope for the rest of her life that things would improve in that regard. We spent more time together periodically as I got older and became successful in show business. But she remained a tough nut to crack.

  She was a beautiful woman with black hair and bluish-green eyes. Her colorful and larger-than-life character was the kind an actress might dream of playing. She also had a large physical presence, accentuated as she went up and down in weight as she got older. She was tough-talking and strong-willed. No doubt if she were alive today and read this book, she’d probably be angry and try to “beat the gizzard out of me,” even though I write of my father and her after the passage of time with love and forgiveness (along with candor). My father, on the other hand, would have cried melancholic tears of remorse.