Other People and Lost Places: A Memoir

Other People and Lost Places: A Memoir

Prologue

Who is/was Herr A. Pfeffer? A German man of his time — he died, aged 87, in 1985 — was his first name Adolf? Today, I’m wearing the brown ribbed cardigan with his name ticket sewn onto the collar. On cold days, his dark green Austrian-made Loden coat keeps me warm; and I often wear his underwear, his long-sleeved winter undershirts, all given to me forty years ago by the nuns who ran an old folk’s home in the Bavarian castle where I was living. When people see me this morning, they see Herr Pfeffer’s zip up cardigan. Does this mean I am in some way Herr Pfeffer? That Herr Pfeffer lives on through me?

Sometimes, when engaged in polite conversation, I hear myself using my old friend Catherine’s genteel voice, but there are bits of me that are Rosie, an Egyptian-Jewish refugee met long ago and only briefly. She had such charm, such a way of speaking to everyone as though they were all companions, that part of her has been incorporated into me. I am also Suzi, the Turkish-Jewish-English street actress who was equally outgoing, equally fearless, and a brilliant storyteller; I am Elaine, the stepmother I never much liked, and I’ve copied the gestures of unknown people seen in cafés, as well as all the Peters, Libbets, Lillians, Alices, Volkers, Elaines, and Maggies I’ve met.

We are all composites of those we have known (although, tragically, many mime the absurd images seen on televisions, computer screens, and in movie dramas.) And along with ways of dressing, walking, and combing hair, we adopt opinions, prejudices, then think they’re our own. Surely, we’ve all had moments when, standing back, we hear another person within us declaiming in full sail.

A memoir is, for me, other people’s stories. Some have, quite openly, asked me to write them down (although they might not have approved of the way I’ve done so); others have forgotten the details and passions that so impressed me. But a memoir is also a reminder of places, of beautiful buildings long since destroyed, of soft countryside that has been gobbled up.

Each time I return to Toronto, I feel as though I’m coming home, but the Toronto I grew up in no longer exists. As a schoolgirl, I rarely attended class, preferring travel on city buses and the (then) new subway system. My Toronto — the one I knew like the back of my hand — was a red brick Victorian city, a beautiful one, and rich with Canadian history.

Now glass and steel towers have replaced neighbourhoods, leafy trees, and the coffee shops with stools along the counter. There were once apple orchards where look-alike suburbia has spread, and excellent but unprotected domestic architecture from the 1920s is now being ripped out to make way for McMansions.

I’m sitting in an early eighteenth-century building in a small French provincial city as I write this. In front of me, the window looks out onto rain-slashed slate rooftops and brick chimneys. I am as at home here as I am in the Bavarian countryside, or in a Hungarian or Turkish village, or on an English moor, for I have been shifting from place to place for almost eighty years. It’s time, finally, to get the old stories down.

1956 Toronto: Lillian

Her hair, stiffened by dye, is sometimes fiery orange, sometimes jet-black—the flavour of the week; bitten down fingernails are polished blood red. Those rounded hips and full tits might be beyond control in ten years, but for the moment, in her late-thirties, they’re holding up.

Ever a fag on the go, ice cube clinking glass in the other hand, she sways to her one great love, Harry Belafonte. I spy on her constantly, always wary, waiting for a mood change, for sheer nastiness, pinches, slaps, hair pulling. That’s how I discover she hoards getaway money, stuffing it into the light fixture high above the den bookshelf. When she’s out, I climb up, shift the glass, find tight wads of American dollars. Heaven knows where it comes from! Much later, after she’s taken away to the hospital, I tell him. I think he’s shocked, at least confused. Perhaps angry.

To me, the skinny failure of a daughter, she confides her daydream future: a return (without me) to New York, the only brilliant city in the world, the place where she should have stayed, pursuing the modelling career that had put her in star position, that would have led to a place in the film world. She conjures up handsome men who will buy her diamonds and furs, give her the life she’s worth. She pictures herself in gleaming gold, head tipped back in charmed laughter, cigarette in rhinestone-studded holder, martini with two olives, feet in spikey heels, lush body svelte in those off-the-shoulder dresses she favours.

How the hell did she get stuck here, in Toronto’s suburbia? Sure, she has the home she wanted—vulgar big, new—pushing, pushing, pushing at him until, albeit reluctantly, he sold the old place on the Cedarvale ravine, a spooky dwelling, rich with nooks, dark wood, and an ancient oak in the garden. For the rest of his life—seventy more long years—he’ll regret giving in to her. But now sitting pretty in this brand-new house that’s identical to the neighbours’, to the neighbours’ neighbours’, to all the houses on all these streets where stringy saplings fight for existence (most won’t make it, or will be ripped out by the perfect lawn folks), she discovers that dissatisfaction is still here, chewing at her soul.

Her friends? The gaggle of women who think she is wonderful. I hear them in the downstairs den, snorting and giggling at her words, her stories, her put-downs. These women who flatter and admire, they’re the ones she mocks once they’ve gone home: “Canadian hicks, boring, dull housewives with no ambition. New York, that’s where interesting people live.”

Look at the old photos, the ones showing her with a friend, the two of them bathing beauties on a Coney Island beach. What promise! She, the gorgeous daughter of immigrant parents, a precious pampered jewel. The school’s star student, several brilliant years at university, a career in modelling, an eager clutch of male admirers, then marriage to the most handsome man in Manhattan, another model.

Except… things didn’t work out as expected. Never consummated, her marriage to perfection was annulled. So back to modelling, to husband-seeking. Until she snagged the up-and-coming advertising executive, the Canadian. And, she confided, she was still a virgin!

This dissatisfaction, it’s his fault. He lured her here, to Toronto, and she’d imagined a rich life with floor shows, cruises, restaurants, cocktail parties, and brilliant children. Then daydreams lost their tinsel glitter.

Three children, a home in suburbia, not as much money as she deserves — he’s doing well but no big mogul. Even the maids are inferior, poor German girls — Helgas, Olgas, and Elfriedas — fleeing impoverished farms in a shattered post-war landscape. How she enjoys humiliating them, insulting them, mocking their tinsel-decorated Christmas trees, knowing they understand her every word.

Who else can she punish? Me, the oldest daughter, the school’s worst student, sulky, a dreamer, a thief, a consummate liar. “How did I get someone as stupid as you? We were the best students in school, your father and I, and look at you, Failure.” After school, I’m stood in front of the window, forced to watch as the popular girls pass. “Look how she walks. Look! Now copy her, walk. Head up, faster! Slower! Can’t you even do this correctly?”

On the yearly drive to Miami, down Interstate 95, we pass through red brick cities, stay in inexpensive 1930s hotels, or motels with turquoise pools no one uses, or wall-papered boarding houses. We see slum streets, diners, and shiny cars. Her lip curls as we pass one in bright orange: “Niggra car.” Ads for Stuckeys, billboards for Coppertone, and Magic Caves, then the southern states with separate taps and toilets for white and negroes, hostile policemen who make northerners pay cash for trumped-up tickets. And, all along the forest-bordered roads, people living in cardboard boxes, watching as we drive by. Looks good to me, that sort of life. Looks romantic.

Once, it’s only the two of us down here for a week and she can do what she wants, not just lie around our motel pool in the cheaper end of town. She drives to the classy Fontainebleau, stops in the parking lot. Here’s where we’ll stay. Eating her heart out, she watches liveried doormen bow to glittering women with fluffed pink or blue hair, wearing slinky pink or blue sundresses, carrying poodles dyed pink or blue, or stepping into pink or pale blue convertibles with plaid canvas tops. That’s what her life should look like. It’s her right! Every day we sit, boiling in the sun (“get out and pee between the cars, Stupid. So what if someone sees you?”), and as she watches and envies, she hates the absent husband for his failure.

Back in Toronto, she puts her foot down. Soon enough, here’s her blue convertible with blue chequered top. Two years later, it’s exchanged for pink. The neighbours, they must be as jealous as she was down in Miami, she thinks. But it’s not the same, not the same at all. The family poodle is black—what can you do with a black poodle? Get rid of it.

It’s because I need to find her little notebook (“I mark down all the things you do wrong. Wait and see what happens when I show it to your father. You think I smack you hard? Just wait.”) that I search endlessly in drawers and cupboards, desperate to know my crimes. And discover a secret space in back of the clothes closet. Inside, is a school report card. Why… she was only an average student, after all. And her real name? Not chic Lillian, but old country Lena.

I’m fifteen when she dies. “Poor child,” whine her cloying lady friends (including two who want to hook the handsome widower). How could these women have been so blind to her hypocrisy? I’m glad to be rid of her poisonous presence, and to escape solicitude I move to a friend’s house.

Only later, via relatives, do whispered truths (not meant for my ears) emerge: that first glamorous husband? A plumber, roly-poly and horny, dick hard for all comers. A divorce for adultery (some virgin!) The modelling career? A pair of heels worn for a headless photo, taken when working as receptionist in a shoe factory. New York glamour? Only Bronx streets.

I can still see her, standing on that miserly front landing of our nouveau-rich house, cigarette in one hand, clinky drink in the other, Harry cooing in the background. She’s wearing her tight orange off-the-shoulder sweater, the purple peddle-pushers, and those slapping backless, toeless mules.

And standing there, looking at the street’s look-alike houses in look-alike colours, with look-alike doors, look-alike lawns, look-alike cars in look-alike driveways, she sneers: “They’re all watching me, I know they are. And they’re envying me. Every single one of them.”

1962, New York: In the Barrymore’s House

“This superb mansion was the New York residence of the Barrymore family,” declares Mr Taylor. “Each occupied one floor — Ethel, John, Lionel. That’s why Sally and I are here. We’re both Vaudeville actors.” His felt fedora and ancient trench coat conjure up hoop-leaping dogs, confused horses, magicians, melodrama, tap dancing, packed dressing rooms, the reek of grease paint and sweat-soaked costumes. But those venues in America’s cow pat theatres were gobbled up by radio and cinema over thirty years ago, and Mr Taylor’s staginess smacks of defeat.

Did the Barrymores really live here? Who knows? This red brick building on West 53rd Street just off Broadway is a beauty long past her prime. The basement is occupied by a steamy Chinese laundry; the next three floors are empty, each dirty window barred with a whitewashed X; the fifth is home to transients, transparent men who slink by on the stairway, humiliated by failure. This, the fourth, is Mr Taylor’s domain. And Sally’s.

“You realise it’s a privilege to rent a room in such an historical place,” insists Sally. A square-shaped creature with pencilled-in brows on a featureless face topped by a meagre grey-and-dyed thatch, she is Mr Taylor’s long-standing paramour.

Privilege or not, there’s no heating, and no possibility of plugging in a heater for the electrical system is dangerously out-of-date. My room, icy and frayed, has high moulded ceilings, an open fireplace (not to be used) with its mantel of dirt-encrusted plaster flowers, a shredding maroon-ish carpet, a fatigued bed with sagging mattress, and a dressing table with a friendly mirror. Yet conjuring up the former grandeur, I feel stardust sprinkling on my shoulders.

Doors line a long, unlit hallway. At one end, a tiny kitchen, then my room; in the middle, are a square bathroom with huge claw-footed tub but no hot water, Mr Taylor’s room, and an out-of-service elevator, inhabited by endless generations of roo-cooing pigeons. The room at the far end is occupied by a young couple. She, Gail, is heavily pregnant; he, Michael, an intern at Bellevue Hospital, slaves for a prosperous future. Dominating all, Sally’s room, opposite the main entrance, affords her a god’s eye view of comings and goings.

***

I have arrived in New York, a school expellee and runaway with no intention of returning home. Stepping off the Greyhound, I knew I was destined for success. An actress? A model? With my good shoes, beautiful blue and turquoise coat and scarf (second hand from my well-dressed stepmother), I could tackle anything.

Caught in escape’s heady joy, I wandered through Times Square, delighting in the tawdry, the oddballs, cranks, weirdoes and losers. Then curled up to sleep at the end of a dark corridor. You see? I made it! New York! In the morning, plucking off golden brown cockroaches, I headed for a model agency found in a telephone book.

“Va-va-va-boom,” said an oily traveling salesman as I passed.

The woman at the agency was less convinced. Tall, featureless, hair pulled back tight, she weighed, measured, pointed out flaws. “Your face is wrong for what we need. Too Jewish. Your nose… perhaps surgery. Your feet are too large. You can sign up for our modelling classes. Come back when you can afford them.”

There will be other opportunities for fame. I’m young, a decent fibber and spinner of amusing yarns. But first: money.

Banks are hiring: fifty whole dollars a week! In the First National City Bank I’m tested to see if I’m capable of carrying out menial tasks. The lady in personnel is astonished. “You’ve done so well, even without a high school diploma.”

I could have told you so.

“We’ll keep our eyes on you. You’ll go places, climb the ladder.”

Hired as a page, I start a career of delivering folders, stuffing documents into the cans of the sucking pneumatic post, and endless hours of filing.

“Doan fergit, I bin here longest,” threatens Carrie, one of the bevy of pages. “I got priority. Know what that means?” With that guttural voice and belligerent pudding face, she’s not going anywhere, but at the moment, no ladder in sight for any of us. The work, stupefyingly dull, pays for the room in the Barrymore residence. And I spend lunchtimes reading Shakespeare.

***

A shadowy, ghost-like presence in the dingy corridor, Sally waits for her lover’s venues — “Perhaps Mr Taylor will come today. Wouldn’t that be nice? Everyone adores Mr Taylor. We were in the theatre together, you know. In Vaudeville. Some of the top names were in Vaudeville, too — Will Rogers, Lillian Russell.”

I try to picture a young Sally hamming it up in bustier and top hat, playing straight woman in gags, warbling a ditty or two, but it’s a stretch of the imagination. Sneaky, dubious, and dishonest, I’m certain she visits my domain, for nothing is ever quite in its place.

There are no room keys — are Mr Taylor and Sally legitimate tenants? — and I take to placing bits of string between doorframe and door each morning. When I return in the evening, they are always missing. So! No word in my journal will be unread.

“Better stay away from that woman at the end of the hallway,” Sally murmurs. “Slightly off her rocker.” Her arthritic finger spins a circle around one flaccid ear. “Black and blue marks all over her body. Husband beats her, you know.”

That fatigued man with the kindly bedside manner? Don’t beatings belong to another milieu?

Sally’s eyes glow. “I know he does because I hear them at night, hear them through the walls, their room is next to mine. She isn’t normal, not just because of the beatings.”

“She seems nice.”

“Nice? Why keep messing with my spoons if she’s so nice? Is that what nice people do?”

“Spoons?”

“Spoons. Waiting until the middle of the night when we’re all asleep and I can’t see her, then sneaking down the corridor to the kitchen. She takes my spoons out of their drawer and puts them in the sink. Sometimes it’s only one, sometimes five, all in a little row. What do you think of that?”

What can I think? Perhaps she’s right. Gail isn’t normal, after all, but what does it have to do with me? She’s merely the friendly, freckled woman I say hello to in the corridor. And that tiny repulsive kitchen, I never go in there. I want nothing to do with cooking, have never learned how. Instead, I live on smoked oysters and mussels, fork them, plump little lumps, from oval tins where lemon tears top the viscous oil.

***