A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (10 page)

Dick declines to go, so I find myself sitting alone on a worn vinyl banquette, staring at the cracked black walls of Wein’s nightclub, now adorned with white Steinberg-style line sketches of New Orleans jazzmen—in particular, one noted in Dixieland for playing the slide trombone with his toes.

From the tiny bandstand George Wein introduces Pee Wee Russell. The response is scattered. Pee Wee’s name rings no bell with the young, hip crowd, too cool for the ebullience of Dixieland, preferring the mellow intricacies of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Pee Wee mounts the bandstand, his tall, skinny frame unsteady from an overdose of booze. He makes stabs at his mouth with his clarinet, but can’t seem to connect it to his lips. The crowd watches, nudges, whispers. Somebody guffaws. The guffaw does it. In a flash George Wein is back up on the stand.

“Don’t you dare laugh. You don’t know anything about this man. He’s a musical great.”

The tough scold works. The crowd quiets. Pee Wee straightens, connects his clarinet with his mouth and plays a haunting riff. Another effort at sobriety, and he launches into a slow number, segues to a second slow number and then takes a break. The crowd applauds, polite but unimpressed.

Then, mysteriously, a message comes up to the bandstand: Lennie would like to play the blues with Pee Wee. From the banquette darkness, pushing his way through the drink tables comes Leonard Bernstein, already a towering musical figure, Kousevitsky’s protégé conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He sits down at the piano and nods at Pee Wee. Pee Wee straightens, gives a courtly bow and plays a ribbon of melody. Lennie echoes it on the piano, punctuates it with an invention of his own. Pee Wee repeats Lennie’s phrase. Piano and clarinet begin to twine around each other. Over and over, Lennie woos the blues out of the old star until they sing as one—young Lennie on the up and up, swaying over the piano, and long string bean Pee Wee hunched over the last days of his clarinet.

The cool crowd goes wild.

The Dedham neighborhood young have accepted Temple into the “Wampatuck Gang.” The Wampatuck Gang consists of all the children who live on Wampatuck Circle, the semi-circular road bounded by our street, Lowder Street. On the other side of Lowder Street is a stone wall marking off a small farm, an open field, and a scrub wood hiding a large estate. In the children’s nursery years, we’ve breakfasted to the crow of Mr. Brown’s rooster, crossed Lowder Street, and watched Mr. Brown harness up his workhorse to plow the field for a vegetable patch. Then we’ve watched his hens descend from the henhouse, look at us sideways, duck their heads and pick their way down the little wooden ramp like a gaggle of disapproving ladies coming out of church. But now, the children have outgrown the simple joys of Beatrix Potter; they’ve seen me in a Vincent Show, and the theatre bug has taken over. They’ve turned their bedroom into a stage, constructed cardboard scenery, and rigged up a sheet for a curtain. Plots are makeshift; starring roles are what count. Temple plays “Bizban.” Bizban is Temple’s imaginary playmate who carries out the pranks she longs to do but has been warned off by her caution gene. Her best friend, Lyman (of Crusader Mouse fame), has no such compunction, seeing in Temple’s “Bizban” performance a possible partner for real life mischief. The two soon sic each other into pranks that Temple won’t admit to until it’s all over, happy to scare me later with her renegade gene. The few times she and Lyman are caught, their deeds turn out to be not so much bad as pesky, outside the line but not very far. Temple’s basic good sense and Lyman’s smile—he looks like Dennis the Menace—work in combination. Just pray they don’t fall out of a tree like a pair of baby robins and break their necks.

And me? How does my renegade gene play out?

An agent calls, offering me a singing gig in a cheap nightspot. The odd thing is, Dick seems rather proud, that is, until he hears a number of pursed-lipped comments circulating among the more conservative of the Leave-it-to-Beaver world. Caught off guard, he mounts the stump and starts in on me. Bad enough, he shouts, to have an unacceptable daughter. Now he has two unacceptables: a child who can’t behave and a wife who won’t!

“Why shouldn’t I sing?” I protest. “The job is at night, after the kids have gone to bed. I’m a good singer; I’ve worked hard for it.”

“It isn’t work. You like singing.”

“Work is something you don’t like?”

The tight little man in Dick’s brain can’t figure that one. Stopping me is all he can deal with. “You’ve had your way with Temple. That should be enough for you.”

“I’ve already signed the contract.”

“You can’t do it! Everybody says so.”

“How do you know you don’t say so, then everybody mumbles a vague ‘yes’ to you, just to be neighborly?”

Dick gnaws his cheek and stares out the window.

Freed from their Sunday clothes, the Wampatuck Gang is running loose in the open field, floating banners that read “Bizban Forever.” In a barking circle around them are the Wampatuck dogs and a large white duck named Wilhemina, given as a downy yellow Easter present to Neddy, another neighborhood boy. Wilhemina has survived the holiday mauling and grown into a handsome white duck. Snubbed by the hens, who won’t let her into Mr. Brown’s coop, she’s now decided to be a dog. To everyone’s amazement, the dogs have accepted her.

“Only Hal Roach could dream up Wilhemina.”

Dick is too single-minded to be entertained by my quip. “The only reason that cheap club hires you is because your picture was all over the paper after you sang in the Vincent Show. And the Vincent Club loved it! It sold tickets.”

Before I can answer, Dick has strapped on his back brace and gone out to mow the front lawn. Back and forth, back and forth, brow furrowed, shoulders hunched, he cuts angry swathes through the lush new green, furious at June’s ebullience.

He’s feeling tricked. His sister has told me that he’s complained to her that I keep setting up new rules, and then, “Dammit all, it turns out she’s right!” Sort of a backhanded compliment, why does it always have to be, “Dammit all?”

The lawn done, Dick spreads fertilizer. God knows the lawn doesn’t need it now, but if he doesn’t feed it, the summer heat will kill it off. Always a feast or a famine, eh Dick? Nothing stays put, including me.

Dick studies the bare patches on the driveway where the snowplow has shoveled up the gravel. Dandelions and witchgrass are already springing up. Tar will be his answer. He’ll call it a capital investment.

He puts away the lawn mower, heads for his desk and the pile of financial figures spread out beside his adding machine. How he loves that adding machine, the sound of it, the long white curl of paper. “You know where you stand with an adding machine.” That’s his favorite remark. The same goes for his boat. “You can count on a boat. It holds to a course. And boat chores, once you’ve done them, they stay done. The boat’s good for Temple, too.”

I don’t deny that.

“She likes polishing the boat brass. None of that giggling and spitting on the boat.”

What’s really upset Dick is his sister’s teasing him about Jep.

“Who’s Jep?” the children chorus. Dick’s sister laughs.

“Jep’s the imaginary collie your father had as a little boy. Jep lived under the sofa.”

Dick turns red and laughs too. “Don’t,” he begs his sister. Too late. Jep’s escaped from under the sofa, and Dick can’t stop laughing. Shamefaced, a little out of control, he laughs like Temple when she laughs about Bizban. Like Temple, he can’t seem to make the laughter stop. Is Jep the reason for his fierce conviction that life and laughter, like the June grass, will get the better of him if he doesn’t mow it down?

After supper I sing to him. “Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone.” It’s his favorite song.

“You can sing, that’s the bitch of it. Something in your voice, in the song. God, a pop song can break your heart.” Later that evening I find a letter on my side of the bed, a true love letter, the first he’s ever composed.

“I can’t bear to think of you standing alone,” he’s written, quoting the lyric of the song. “You’re the one I want to be there for. Someone you really could care for.”

My fantasy is to be the girl singer in a cheap joint in a Grade B detective movie, singing “Blue Moon” to Dick.

I take the gig and turn up at the club the afternoon of my opening night. I introduce myself to the piano player, who’s Irish and friendly, and to the comic, who’s setting up music cues with him. The comic stares, snorts, and goes back to his cues. Instead of waiting my turn, I stand by the piano and gush at both of them. I can’t seem to stop; my tongue’s gone crazy with excitement. After the piano rehearsal, I find my way to my dressing room and hang up my gowns. The phone rings.

“I’m the rep from AGVA.” It’s a hoarse male voice. “You can’t go on till you’ve paid your dues.” Dues to what? What’s he talking about? “You debutantes, you think you can get away with murder.” Murder? “Who’s your agent?”

“Al Navarro.”

“Al knows better than to pull this. He knows we don’t take it down at AGVA. We’re a respectable, high class union.” He goes into a long garbled harangue about union honor and cheating. He does all the talking, which is lucky because I haven’t a clue what he’s yelling about.

“I’ll call Al,” I offer.

“No. I’ll call him. You’re young. You don’t know nothin’. Al knows better. He’s gonna hear from me.”

As soon as he hangs up, I call Al. He laughs.

“Let me deal with him. Stay in your room till it’s time to go on.”

This is all so exciting I can hardly bear it. I’m really, truly in the middle of a Grade B movie. I squeeze into my black satin gown, so tight I can’t sit in it, and mince down the stairs. The comic watches me from the bottom of the stairs and sucks his teeth. I explain to him that I have to mince; it’s the only way I can negotiate in the gown. The comic gives his racing form a snap.

“We’re working for a guy named Harry Hess. He don’t know his Hess from a hole in the wall.”

I giggle. He snaps my garter.

“You can’t do that.”

“I already did.” The comic’s name is Leon. I know because, outside the club, for all of Huntington Avenue to see, are five-foot high advertising blow-ups of the two of us. My mother has already driven by and, in her shock, arranged to be out of town.

Harry Hess emerges from the bar, pushing ahead of him the AGVA rep, a shrunken relic from vaudeville, now thoroughly cowed by Hess, Hess’s lugubrious face, his pink-tinted glasses, his heavy prompting paw. The rep gulps, runs his fingers round his stained hat brim.

“It was not my intention to upset you, Miss. I know what it’s like to break in a new act. I know how the nerves can play games. I wouldn’t want to upset a nice young lady like you.”

Hess grunts approval. The rep tries to get his hat back on at a jaunty angle, but Hess pushes him out the door. The rep hurries down the steps. Hess looks at me. “Yeah, you’re a nice kid, but your act stinks. Forget them ballads you’re rehearsing. Stick to the jump tunes.”

Hess has hired a blonde to sing the ballads. The blonde’s name is Dana and when she isn’t doing her act, she wears a fluffy angora stole snuggled round her shoulders—not really a sweater, more of an imitation fur. Or, maybe, a negligee. Will I ever be able to sing ballads and wear something like that? My gown is black satin, but my no-nonsense face gives me away. Dana’s gown is white satin, cut on the bias. Her ballads are slow and sensuous.

“I’d work for you. I’d slave for you. I’d be a beggar or a knave for you.” She strokes her thighs as she sings. “If that isn’t love, it’ll have to do…” No wonder Hess wants me to stick to the jump tunes.

Leon is at my side. “Every time I meet a girl I like, either she’s married or I am.” Leon needs someone to fire off jokes to, so he can warm up his act. I give him a giggle. Leon runs up onto the bandstand, flashes his diamond pinkie ring in the spot, and starts in. “My gall stones! I had ‘em mounted.” From there, he goes into a Charles Laughton/Quasimodo routine. Hess stands at the back of the room and growls.

“That’s in very bad taste. There could be customers here with a cripple in the family. He could be hurting their feelings.” I have trouble making the connection, but by the time I’ve thought of an answer, Hess has left to do business in the bar. There seems to be a lot of business in the bar, a lot of coming and going, heavy on the cash register, not a whole lot on the drinks.