How Frank-crazy am I? Well, imagine a boy of sixteen, on the eve of the Summer of Love, with the whole world going warpedly psychedelic around him. Yet what’s this kid doing? Standing solo in his attic, microphone in hand, affecting a Sinatra pose, ruminating autumnally on the swingin’, sweet-and-sour life he’s led:
One day you turn around, and it’s summerrrrrr
Next day you turn around, and it’s faaalll . . .
That was me in November of 1966, cutting my own faithful rendition of the title track of September of My Years, Sinatra’s milestone LP from the year before. I actually covered the entire album. I still have the recording. It is labeled, in my adolescent handwriting, “Martin Short Sings of Songs and Loves Ago.” On it, you can hear me re-creating the fiftysomething Frank’s takes on such wistful classics as “It Was a Very Good Year” and “Last Night When We Were Young.” Outside my attic walls, the hip sentiment was the Who’s “Hope I die before I get old.” Me? I was hoping I’d get old before I turned seventeen.
Martin Short Sings of Songs and Loves Ago was not a joke. It wasn’t like the crooner-parody stuff I would later do on SCTV and Dave Letterman’s show. I performed it totally straight and took it very seriously, without a trace of irony. I had my own reel-to-reel tape recorder and, of equal importance, a professional-grade microphone that came with a mic stand.
I bought a lot of this equipment with my baby-bonus money. After World War II, Canada established a program in which parents, every time they had a child, received a modest government stipend to aid in that child’s upbringing. (Thank you, socialism!) Being the youngest of five kids had certain advantages, far from the least of which was that I, alone among the Short children, got to keep my baby-bonus money to spend as I pleased. I also had a huge bedroom, on the third floor, the attic level. I adored my childhood home, on Whitton Road in Hamilton, Ontario. It was a four-bedroom brick house with a spacious, flat backyard, behind which was a brick patio where my parents entertained in the summer months. Beyond the patio was a thickly wooded ravine that ran the length of our block and seemed, in my youth, to extend forever into the northern wilds.
Of the five Short children, I was not only the youngest but also the smallest even after I finished growing, and the most precocious—and without question, as evidenced by the baby-bonus money, the most spoiled. Whereas the older four all had to share bedrooms at different times of their lives, I had that attic bedroom to myself, for it had already been vacated by my eldest sibling, David, born fourteen years before me and out in the wider world by the time I was in grade school.
The hallway outside that bedroom had an amazing echoey quality that perfectly complemented my singing—it was my own little version of Frank’s beloved Studio B in the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood. What I’d do is play the Sinatra album on the turntable in my bedroom, holding the microphone to my stereo’s speakers during Nelson Riddle’s rich orchestral intros. Then, just before Frank came in, I’d pause the recorder, lift the needle off the record, quickly move into the hallway so I wouldn’t lose the pitch, and record my vocal where his would have been. Following that, I’d hop back into the bedroom, find the place on the record where the next instrumental passage was, record that—and then repeat the process of pausing, lifting the needle, and doing my vocals in the hallway. I managed to match Sinatra’s pitch pretty well, but because I was thirty-five years his junior, my timbre was closer to a baby froglet’s than a grown man’s.
Outside, on Whitton Road, normal Canadian childhoods were taking place, with kids playing hockey in the street until darkness fell and the streetlights came on. Inside, little Marty was snapping his fingers and singing, “Weather-wise, it’s such a cuckoo daaay!” But what was amazing about my fantasy showbiz life, and underscored how lucky I was to be a member of this particular family, was that at no point did my parents or siblings ever belittle me or make me feel foolish for what I was doing. My mother, the former Olive Hayter, was wonderfully supportive of my musical efforts. She was a superb, classically trained violinist who had served for a time as the concertmistress of the Hamilton Symphony Orchestra. When I eagerly presented her with a copy of . . . Sings of Songs and Loves Ago, she didn’t laugh or find the gesture merely cute. She listened carefully and adjudicated each performance. I still have sheets of paper where she wrote things like “Beautifully sung; four stars” and “Some pitch issues on this one, maybe not a good selection for your voice; two and a half stars.” Mom was giving me the feedback I craved, the loving encouragement that any child should receive when he’s brave and willing enough to share something creative.
And was I ever creative. With my fertile imagination and trusty reel-to-reel recorder, I imagined myself not only a singer but a triple-threat entertainment juggernaut: movie star, TV host, and savvy mogul. In my mind I had my own television network, MBC, the Marty Broadcasting Corporation—the anchor program of which was, naturally, The Martin Short Variety Hour. I was on Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m.—well, actually, every other Tuesday, because I always made sure to leave room for my imaginary film career. My bedroom was my stage and the pictures on the walls my audience. I had a gooseneck lamp in the corner that I’d arch upward for performances; even then I understood the importance of good lighting.
I’d open The Martin Short Variety Hour with an up-tempo tune, something along the lines of Cy Coleman’s “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and then follow it with an edgy monologue.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. You’re so very kind . . . and right. You know, we Canadians love living right next to America. It’s like spooning with Mama Cass—you feel safe, but by morning, your spine is completely shot.
I’d then introduce my first guest.
Please welcome a three-time Oscar winner: the legendary Katharine Hepburn and her spinning plates!
I’d run over to a smaller tape recorder that played pretaped applause, record some of that applause on the bigger recorder, and then become Hepburn, juggling plates on long sticks while saying things like:
My goodness, these plates are so wobbly! I feel they’re somewhat precarious. If they’re not going to spin properly like plates should, then to hell with them!
Then I’d do a hard-hitting interview with Kate, playing both parts.
ME: Miss Hepburn, what’s your favorite day of the week?
HEPBURN: I would say Sundays. Sundays are mine. They always were. I wake up very early. I then have a huge bowl of oat bran. The next few hours, I’m indisposed. And then, before you know it, it’s Monday.
My show also strived to be current. My brothers smuggled copies of Playboy into the house, and I’d page through them greedily—I swear!—for their long, serious interviews with newsmakers. So if, for example, Playboy featured an interview with Eldridge Cleaver, the author and Black Panther, I would do both sides of the Q&A, in my own voice and in my best approximation of Cleaver’s.
After that, Johnny Mathis might walk on as a surprise to sing “Chances Are” and perhaps join me in a medley of songs that featured the word locomotive. I even went so far as to type up TV Guide–style listings for these shows: the guests on each episode, what songs were being performed, and so forth.
At the conclusion of each episode, I would bid the audience farewell:
Well, that’s our show. Good night, God bless you, and remember, if you must drink and drive, be sure you have a car.
Then someone downstairs would yell, “Dinner!” and I’d put away my taping equipment for later.
Though my eccentricities were warmly indulged most of the time, they did occasionally cause some concern. In my bedroom, beside the gooseneck lamp, I had an old rocking chair whose left arm kept popping out of place, so I almost always had an open tube of glue sitting around on my desk. At one point my brother Michael—perhaps after hearing me in the attic shouting, “Whoa, how did all of you get into my room?” to my imaginary audience—took my mother aside and said, “I think Marty might be sniffing glue.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom said.
“Well,” said Michael, “he just finished a medley of ‘songs that weren’t nominated,’ so I’m going with glue.”
Still, my mother just laughed him off. She was used to doing so, and to laughing me off, too. Once, I walked in the door from school and jokingly shouted at her, “Owlie”—we sometimes called her that—“Owlie, you ol’ flea-bitten whore! Where are ya?” I didn’t realize that there were three additional musicians in the house, practicing in the string quartet over which Mom was presiding. Her eyes met mine when I made it to the living room, and, with a combination of embarrassment and amusement, she said, “Marty! Why don’t you say hello to our guests?”
The beauty of my “Hey, let’s put on a show!” obsessiveness—the saving grace of it, really—is that it never felt pre-professional. With hindsight, it’s easy to think, well, he was fantasizing about having his own TV network; it’s obvious where he was headed. But back then I never dreamed of being in show business. I never even performed in school plays. Show business, as I perceived it via the Sinatra albums and The Ed Sullivan Show (which we picked up, along with most American TV, through the networks’ Buffalo affiliates), existed at arm’s length, in a fantasy world. Canada at that time was further away from the United States, psychologically, than it is now. I’d see ads during Ed Sullivan for products not available to us—Bosco chocolate syrup, Ipana toothpaste—and think, boy, those American kids are so lucky. I’ll never get to try those things. I was so taken in by those “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” toilet-paper ads that when I finally did get to visit the States, I dashed into a supermarket’s paper-products aisle almost upon arrival to fondle the product, thinking, wow, it really is soft!
So for me to say “I’m going to be in show business someday” would have been tantamount to saying “I’m going to live on Venus someday.” The Marty Broadcasting Corporation was pure imaginative play, and that was probably very healthy. Certainly music was a regular part of my life, with Mom playing violin, Michael an excellent pianist, and David a trumpet player in a swing-jazz band. But no one, including me, walked around our house with delusions of becoming a Hollywood or Broadway star.
As a kid, I assumed I’d end up a doctor—not because I was particularly interested in science, but because I found medicine a noble calling and was a big fan of Richard Chamberlain’s work on Dr. Kildare. Becoming Dr. Short would have been very much in keeping with my upper-middle-class upbringing. My father, Charles P. Short, was an executive at Stelco, the biggest steel company in Canada, which had its headquarters in Hamilton. We were the type of family that went every weekend to the Hamilton Golf and Country Club for dinner. We had season tickets to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League, and, as only we Canadians can say, we had prime seats right on the fifty-five-yard line. And we faithfully attended Sunday mass at Cathedral Basilica of Christ the King.
All of these facts make us Shorts sound traditional. Believe me, we weren’t. I grew up thinking that our household was the strangest on the street, bordering on insanity. I later learned that many of the other families on Whitton Road—and it was the kind of street where every family had lived there for twenty, thirty, forty years—had their own brand of lunacy, with drunken dads, sedated moms, and so on. By comparison, ours was a happy home, but it was still nuts. My father would come home from the steel company wearing that Mad Men fedora that all executives wore back then, and he would immediately pour himself his usual drink: gin and ginger ale, no ice. Dad didn’t eat dinner with us. As we Short children convened with Mom around the dinner table in the kitchen nook, he would sit off to the side, about six feet away, sipping his gin and ginger at the little table with the radio on it, his face buried in the newspaper.
Still, his remove from the family table didn’t prevent Dad from peering over his paper on occasion to insult our manners. “Marty, don’t shovel the food in like an animal, dear,” he’d say. Or he might jump from his chair with feigned urgency, arms wide open in a protective stance, and pretend to guard the table, saying, “Good boy, Michael. Eat even faster. I’ll make sure the dogs don’t get at your plate.”
Later on, around 9:30 p.m., Dad would go into the kitchen and pan-fry a steak for himself, heavily seasoned with Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. Occasionally he’d fry an extra one for us, sliding a piece of bread under the steak as it finished cooking so that the bread absorbed the juices. He’d bring his plate into the den, where we were watching TV, and we kids would pretend to be dogs, panting around his chair, paws out, begging for scraps. He’d say, “Here ya go, dear,” and give us bites. Maybe it’s sentimentality, but, to this day, I have never tasted anything more delicious.
Dad was smart, funny, and, as you might have surmised, witheringly sarcastic. His bluntness and condescending wit were hysterical as long as you yourself weren’t bearing the brunt. Years later, when I was playing the celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick on TV, I’d watch the playback of my totally improvised scenes—things like Jiminy telling Conan O’Brien, “Look at how wonderful you look; whatever cosmetic surgery you’ve had done, I’d say twenty percent more and then stop,” or asking Mel Brooks, “What’s your big beef with the Nazis?”—and think, where on earth did that instinct come from? Oh, right: Dad. (Mel’s response, by the way, was, “Oh, I don’t know. I find them rude.”)
My father—Chuck, as we kids called him behind his back—really loved his gin and gingers, though he was careful to drink them only under our roof. Monday through Friday, he’d sip from the moment he arrived home till the moment he went to bed. Saturdays and Sundays, he sipped all day. It sounds traumatic, but it was just the normal state of things in our house. My siblings and I had a running joke: “Oh, Dad’s in his drunk shirt!” He had a specific plaid shirt that he wore only on weekends, and it meant, to us kids, that Dad had had a few—and therefore it might be wise to keep a wide berth.
The five little Shorts were born, as I’ve said, over a fourteen-year span. David, my oldest brother, was born in 1936, followed by Nora, my only sister, in 1937. Then, a while later, came my brothers Michael and Brian, born in ’44 and ’45, respectively, followed, on the momentous date of March 26, 1950 (I think we all remember where we were that day), by me. We all adored our mother, Olive, who was as kind and radiant as Dad was bespectacled, plump-cheeked, and ornery. Mom was a stylish, striking woman, with blond hair and wide-set eyes; the actress Martha Plimpton reminds me a little of her. We kids considered her one of us, our ally in the ongoing battle against the benevolent household tyrant that was our father.
Make no mistake, we loved Dad, and we knew he loved us. His drinking never made him physically violent, and he was never overturning tables like Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But his words were often barbed and full of provocation. I remember that David at some point in the 1950s invited over a friend, Kent Follis, a gentle, harmless kid who happened to have an Elvis-style pompadour. My father opened the door, sized up Kent, and said, “Can I take your hat for ya, dear?” Another time a friend of mine who was half Irish and half Jewish was visiting me. My father, upon hearing of my friend’s heritage, approached him and declared, “You know, dear, back in county Armagh, where my people are from, we have a name for someone who is half Irish and half Jewish. We call that person . . . a Jew.”
Dad spoke with a faint Irish brogue because he was from Northern Ireland—born in 1909 in the town of Crossmaglen, one of eleven siblings. (Mom, four years younger, was born in Hamilton and was of English and Irish descent.) Dad was a self-made man, which, given the Depression era in which he navigated his new life, was quite remarkable. He first crossed the Atlantic as a seventeen-year-old stowaway, making his way to Texas before he was bounced back home for being in the United States illegally. He successfully put down roots on his second try, four years later, living first in Buffalo before finally settling in Hamilton and working his way up from traveling sales rep to third-in-command at Stelco.
Only two other siblings sought a life outside Northern Ireland. Dad’s brother Tom moved to New York, and his brother Frank to Birmingham, England. One of Frank’s children, my first cousin Clare Short, grew up to represent Birmingham as a member of Parliament and a tough, outspoken Labour Party firebrand who was later tapped to be Great Britain’s secretary of state for international development. In other words, England got the second-generation Short who stood on principle and resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet over her nation going to war with Iraq under false pretenses, while Canada got the second-generation Short who falls over on talk shows and humps celebrities in his Jiminy Glick fat suit to get laughs.
Anyway: the other eight Shorts of my father’s generation stayed in Crossmaglen, where since 1885 the family has owned and lived above a pub, Short’s Bar. It’s still there, and still operated by my aunt Rosaleen. When I went over and met the Irish Shorts, I began to understand how Dad’s background in a big, rowdy Irish family endowed him with a quick, jousting wit, which he passed on to us. In 1997, when I was in England doing the miniseries Merlin for NBC, I spent two weekends over in Crossmaglen, sleeping in my father’s old bedroom above the bar. My uncle Paddy, my father’s youngest sibling and Rosaleen’s husband, was still alive then, running the bar. One night I stayed up into the wee hours with my cousins Oliver and Patrick, Paddy’s sons, talking loudly and uninhibitedly about the Shorts on both sides of the ocean. We started with beer and quickly moved on to whiskey, followed by . . . still more whiskey. I finally got about four hours of bed-spinning sleep before the sun rose and woke me up. I walked down the stairs to the pub, bleary-eyed, to find Uncle Paddy cleaning out all the empty glasses we’d left at the bar. “Soooo,” he said, a glint in his eye, his voice not unlike Dad’s, “how did the character assassination go last night?”
So my own family’s dynamic had an ancestral context. The mealtime conversation in our house on Whitton Road, even when Dad wasn’t engaged in it, was a sustained, survival-of-the-fittest verbal sparring match. The talk often became heated, but the key to it is that there was always laughter within thirty seconds of the heat. I think of this as a very Irish trait; Bill Murray and Conan O’Brien, who also developed their comedic reflexes in large, argumentative Irish Catholic families, know what I’m talking about.
I actually used my beloved tape recorder to capture some of my family’s squabbling. Among my favorites is a recording of our Christmas dinner in 1966, when I was sixteen years old, and Dad was with us at the table for a change. As it opens, my brother Michael is upset at my brother Brian for wanting more dark meat from the turkey, but not a turkey leg:
MICHAEL: The dark meat is on the leg! You don’t want a leg! Honest to God, I haven’t got—I haven’t got the mind to handle that problem.
MOM: Nora’s, uh—
MICHAEL (interrupting): You’d have to take a Goddamned file and file it off and shred it!
NORA: Just calm down.
MICHAEL: It’s the only way you could do it!
DAD: He wanted dark meat, did he?
MICHAEL: Yeah.
DAD (angrily): Well, dark meat’s all on that Goddamned leg!
NORA (to Brian): It’s not worth it.
BRIAN: Now he’s, now he’s starting to—
DAD (to Brian): Pick up the leg and chomp the dark meat!
NORA (to Brian): Just close your mouth.
BRIAN: Okay. Okay, Nora.
MICHAEL: The only thing we could do is cut it up!
BRIAN (now exasperated): All right! All right!
MICHAEL (surprised): What happened?
BRIAN: Shut your mouth, Michael! Just shut your mouth and everything will be—
DAD (to Brian): Shut yours, now!
BRIAN (defensively): Okay! Okay. I’ll shut mine, too, Dad.
DAD (trudging off to the kitchen, speaking in a “mentally challenged” voice): “I waaants da dark meat . . . Darrrk!” (Returning to regular voice) Three-fourths of the world don’t have a choice between—
BRIAN (to Dad, feeling picked-on): Shhhh! Shhhh!
DAD:—dark meat or white meat.
NORA: Would you shut your mouth, Brian!
MICHAEL: Well, which do they eat, then?
DAD (nattering on): Blue meat or green meat.
MICHAEL: Well, which do they eat, then?
(Brian and Marty start to laugh.)
DAD: They don’t have any choice of meat at all!
(Dad re-enters the dining room from the kitchen with the exact slices of turkey Brian wanted.)
DAD: Do you want more potatoes, dear?
BRIAN: No thank you, Dad.
MICHAEL: Are you not going to have any turkey, Dad?
DAD (raising his voice, irritated): My stomach is so sore right now, dear, if you mention turkey to me, I’ll vomit right on the middle of the table.
(Everyone starts laughing.)
DAD: Now, if I wanted turkey, craved turkey, ate turkey, desired turkey—
MICHAEL: I think the question required a yes or no answer.
DAD: But I don’t need a kid asking me. I don’t need an immature person asking me things.
Some years ago, in the 1990s, I had this tape fully transcribed—it goes on for thirty pages—and presented a bound copy to each of my siblings. I also used to make my kids, when they were little, read all the parts every Christmas Eve. I’d always cast my youngest child, Henry, in the Dad role, just so I could hear this sweet little boy saying “Dark meat’s all on that Goddamned leg!”
People are often surprised to learn I’m of Irish descent and was raised Catholic; there’s a widespread misperception that I am Jewish. And I don’t think it’s just because I’m thrifty.
No, this misperception actually makes some sense, because I was pretty much immersed in Jewishness from an early age. Westdale, the neighborhood we lived in, in Hamilton’s west end, had a large Jewish population. My parents’ best friends, the Paikins, were Jewish. The best nursery school in the area was the one at Temple Anshe Sholom, so that’s where I went to nursery school. And the friendships that I made there carried over into the rest of my childhood.
I’ve always been a top-feeder, drawn to the smartest people in the room, and the simple truth was that the smartest kids in the schools I attended were the Jewish ones. We had a teacher in Grade 7, as we Canadians call the seventh grade, Miss Critchmore, who seated her pupils in order of intelligence, a cruel stroke that would never be allowed now: the smartest kids (in her estimation) in the front row, the dumbest in the back. I always strove to be in that first row, where my row-mates were reliably Mitchell Rosenblatt, Shelley Lipton, Rick Levy, Debbie Zack, Alex Stiglick, and Marvin Barnett. My people: the chosen.
I dated my share of Jewish girls, too. One of these romances had to be carried out in secret, because the girl’s parents were deeply observant and didn’t approve of their daughter’s dating a goy. After a couple of furtive petting sessions in Hamilton’s Churchill Park, we tearfully went our separate ways. A sort of West Side Story, with blue balls.
Then there’s the fact that I work in comedy, and so many of the comedic greats have been Jewish. Some of them—Jerry Lewis, Harpo Marx, and Mike Nichols—were childhood idols of mine, while others, among them Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, and Larry David, became dear friends. So I understand why I’m often mistaken as Jewish, and I find it flattering. By osmosis, I’ve absorbed a lot of Jewish-comic rhythms into my performances, and when I’m doing a Jewish character, it’s an easy fit. The foremost of these is Irving Cohen, the ancient, prolific Tin Pan Alley songsmith I introduced on SCTV, carried over to Saturday Night Live, and still do in my live act:
It’s wonderful to be here representing the world of the tins and the pans and the sulfur flash pots going off here and there.
At my age, the only time I don’t have to pee is when I’m peeing.
I just poy-chased a Maserati. I know it’s ridiculous, but I’m going through a little mid-death crisis.
You know, I have written over twenty-eight thousand songs—two thousand since lunch. Such classics as “Honey Do the Hula,” “Wigwam Serenade,” and who can ever forget the Al Jolson classic, “Sam, You Made the Truss Too Short”? And I feel another one coming on right now—either that, or the Metamucil is kicking in. Gimme a C! A bouncy C!
Listen, even I was confused as a child about whether I was or wasn’t a son of Abraham. For reasons too convoluted to get into here, I was not baptized until I was seven years old, at my family’s regular church, Christ the King Cathedral. Which means that, unlike the babies who were routinely baptized there, I was fully cognizant of what was going on—physically, if not sacramentally. After the priest had done his business of ladling holy water on my head, I looked at him and asked, in all seriousness, “Am I Jewish now?”
He just barely managed to stifle his laughter into a snort, which resonated gloriously, along with my father’s laugh, through the majestic cathedral.
My inadvertently interfaith upbringing notwithstanding, I was never particularly stirred by the spirit of the Lord as He or She is presented in organized religion. Nor have I ever put much stock in the paranormal, the occult, or anything smacking of clairvoyance. With one notable exception.
In the summer of 1962, I was twelve years old, and my brother David was twenty-six. The age difference made him a little mysterious to me, living a life a world apart from mine. In our family photos he’s kind of off to the side, handsome and brooding in his shades, like Stu Sutcliffe in those early photos of the Beatles as a five-piece. But in reality David was total sunshine, a funny and loose charmer. As a small child, I’d creep into his bedroom on Saturday mornings around seven a.m. (he’d probably only gotten in at five thirty) and play this game we invented called “Giant.” Basically, it was David, groggily aware of my presence, good-naturedly pretending to be a sleeping giant while I tried to steal the “magic pillow” from under his head without waking him. He always tolerated my mischief and had a special nickname for me, “Muggers-All,” though none of us in the family can remember its etymology. I just worshipped him.
At the age of twenty-six, David was justly excited about his life. He was living and thriving in Montreal, following in Dad’s footsteps, working as a salesman for Samuel, Son & Co., another Canadian steel company. More important, David was engaged to be married in the fall, to a beautiful girl named Margaret Spracklin. His adulthood was taking off with a vengeance.
On July 2, 1962, Dave composed a cheerful letter to me while I was away at a YMCA camp three hours north of Hamilton.
Dear Muggers-All:
Comment ca va ma bien frere, I am spending this weekend in Hamilton and I am gouging the family as usual. I was very proud to see all the diplomas you won and that you graduated with first class honours.
I am going back to Montreal today and will be back August first. You can tell me all about your adventures at camp. You must arrange with mum and dad to spend one week in Montreal with me and we will have some fun.
Love dave xxxx oooooo
On the morning of July 18, 1962, near the end of my allotted three weeks at Camp Wanakita, I awoke in an unfamiliar, befogged state: oddly depressed, lethargic, weighted down, burdened by a sense that the whole universe was out of sync. My unease was conspicuous enough, and sufficiently out of character, for one of my cabin-mates to take notice and ask, “Are you okay? Are you sick?” I didn’t know how to respond. “I’m fine,” I said. “Something’s just weird.”
Twenty minutes later I was called down to the head counselor’s cabin. After an awkward greeting, with him unable to look me in the eyes, the counselor blurted, “There’s been an accident. Your brother David’s been in an accident, and it killed him.” What an odd way to put it.
That strange, unsettled moment of waking, just minutes before the counselor’s horrible announcement, is the only extrasensory experience I can ever claim to have had. And I still can’t make sense of it: why or how I knew—or my body did, or my subconscious, whatever—that something terrible had happened. Why did my twelve-year-old psyche, which otherwise seemed to exist in a perpetual state of bouncy, wired joy, feel, for the first time, a true sense of despair?
In the moment, I was simply stunned to the point of confusion. A minute later, I asked the counselor, “But is he okay?”
Up to that point in my childhood, I’d had it easy. Now, suddenly, life was a blur of sadness and confusion. My dad’s good friend, Bob Lord, materialized at Camp Wanakita to collect me and deliver me back to Hamilton. The long, conversation-free drive in Mr. Lord’s gunboat-size Mercury Park Lane was made more awkward still by a news bulletin that came crackling through the static of his car radio on CHML, the local Hamilton station: “David Short, the son of Stelco executive C. P. Short, has been killed in a car crash.” I wouldn’t learn the details until later: David had spent a late night pacing in a hospital corridor with a buddy whose wife was in labor with their first baby. At around four thirty a.m., in the Montreal suburb of Dorval, David must have fallen asleep while driving home. His car hit the back of a parked truck and flipped over, hurling him to an instant death.
Our house on Whitton Road was in a high state of angst. Dad had just flown home from Montreal, where he’d been to collect David’s body. Mom was beyond bereft, upset that the casket needed to be closed rather than open, given the extent of David’s injuries. “Do you want it opened? We can have it opened,” said my father, heartbroken, trying to solve it all. “No, no,” my mother sobbed, “it’s just the idea that it can’t be open.”
Nora, my sister, was flying in from Los Angeles, where she was working as a nurse. This, to me, was strangely a source of excitement—I missed my big sister and was thrilled that she was coming home. Since the airport was an hour away, I petitioned Mr. Lord, who was heroically filling in as the family driver, to let me come with him to get Nora. It was night, so he said, “Better bring a pillow.” I ran into the house to get a pillow, and Mom told me in no uncertain terms that I was not leaving the house that night. When Nora did come home, she looked different, more grown-up, with elaborate early 1960s eye makeup and long hair—the peculiar details you fixate on in moments of crisis.
The following morning, I caught sight, from my bedroom window, of my mother talking with our next-door neighbor, Mrs. James, whose front yard was separated from ours only by a driveway. Mrs. James had lost her son five years earlier; he’d drowned in Lake Ontario. Then I saw Mom, never one to lose her temper or betray signs of aggravation, storm across the driveway and back into the house. I ran downstairs to ask her what happened. She said, “Marjorie James told me that I will get over this. I will never get over this.”
A few days later, in the middle of the night, Mom found herself unable to sleep, so furiously were words and thoughts racing around in her head. She knew she would get no rest until she wrote them down. So she did, as a poem.
—TO DAVID—
Where is the laughing face?
The eyes so grey and tender
Looking down into my own.
The arms outstretched in greeting.
In a bearlike hug?
Can this be all there was for him?
The few short years?
What useful purpose served?
What noble cause fulfilled?
Or was it I who was to blame?
Wrapped in my own security—
Of love and family and the joy of music.
Serenely living, until the jealous Gods
Struck with ironclad fist
To sickness and despair!
But no, if there is only one omnipotent God,
He could not surely choose—
—“You I will slay, and you protect.”
In petty favoritism.
’Twas but an accident of fate.
A single moment out of time.
A tired and nodding head perhaps,
That hurled him to his death
Upon a lonely road.
OLIVE G. SHORT
(xxooxx)
This poem, and the events surrounding it, had a profound influence upon my views about organized religion. Mom’s words made complete spiritual sense. Why did David die? For some noble cause? At some perverse whim of God? No, she concluded, it was just a matter of a tired head on the road. Oh, and by the way: that letter that Dave wrote to me on July 2? I didn’t receive it until after his death, after the camp forwarded it to our house in Hamilton. Its chipper tone, promising fun with me in the future, did not suggest that there was some cosmic plan afoot for my brother to be called to heaven. Yet in the days and weeks after David died, well-meaning family friends and members of the clergy constantly advised me that “God works in mysterious ways, and you can’t understand the will of the Lord.”
This sentence not only failed to reassure me, it angered me. Yeah, well, God also created my mind, which is questioning everything, including His will, so your theory doesn’t hold.
I had been the kind of kid who ritually said his prayers before bedtime: “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild / Look upon a little child,” that sort of thing. But no more. I didn’t stop praying or believing, but I had no further interest in church doctrine and unquestioning faith. My prayers changed, too. No longer did I pray over trivial matters: “Please let me pass my history exam.” I went bigger-picture. I prayed, simply, for strength, for the inspiration to go on.
As for Mrs. James, our neighbor, she was clearly just trying to comfort my mother. But “getting over this”—what did that mean? How was it done? It was a new concept to me. And then, the night after the funeral, something instructive happened, pertaining to this very subject. Like my mother, I too had been traumatized by the fact that David’s coffin was closed. I would never see him again. My brain struggled to process the thought.
This trauma was fresh in my head as I went to bed that night. And then I fell asleep, and had a dream unlike any I’ve had before or since. For one thing, it was in bright Technicolor worthy of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I was outside a log cabin in the woods, sitting by a scenic little stream—artificially scenic, like an MGM-backlot version of the old frontier. And while I was sitting there, David walked up and took a seat beside me. He looked handsome and strong, not remotely in need of a closed casket. He wore a vivid orange jersey that matched the scenery. And he said to me, in the most reassuring tone, “Everything’s fine. It won’t be long before we see each other again. I’ll see you in a fleeting moment.”
“A fleeting moment”—funny words for a twelve-year-old to dream.
When I woke up, I felt great, as if the veil of sadness had lifted. A spiritualist would say that I had experienced a visitation. A psychologist would say that my subconscious had manufactured this dream scenario to fulfill an emotional need for closure. In any case, I learned what would turn out to be a valuable lesson: that something terrible can happen to you, and yet, the day after this something terrible, the sun still rises, and life goes on. And therefore, so must you. I don’t mean to sound facile, or to imply that David’s death doesn’t still pain me to this day. But I was glad of this lesson, because it would not be long before I was forced to heed it again.