SIX

THE 1960S, JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA

When my mother lifted her hands, music happened. Those hands summoned the voices of singers, waved on orchestras with a thin white baton, and elicited the dulcet tones of a Bach fugue from a harpsichord, the Wagnerian state trumpets from her fourkeyboard pipe organ, and the intricate harmonic gymnastics of Rachmaninoff from her Steinway grand piano. When I picture her from those days, she is always pitching forward with an armful of music, plowing through life relentlessly from one rehearsal or performance to another.

Wednesday night was always choir rehearsal night. Always. Although over the years she sometimes had bouts of asthma or migraines, she was never sick on Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings, when she sat at the helm of the enormous pipe organ and directed the choir with one hand, her other hand and her feet steadily pouring out music. She generally dozed off during Sunday sermons. Music was her religion.

When she practiced her piano at home, her eyes would close as she swayed with the music; I would watch mystified as she drifted away from me. She told me that sometimes when she played, she would feel as though she were floating outside her body. It scared her a little.

I was my mother’s sidekick. My father had gone off to mess up the lives of other women, and my two older brothers had graduated from high school and left home by the time I entered first grade.

Mom wasn’t a great cook; we preferred restaurants. At the Derby House, I turned the salt and pepper shakers and the napkin dispenser into an ongoing story about a princess and a prince and a castle. I didn’t like to stay home with babysitters, so she brought me to rehearsals. She got no child support until I was seven, when my dad, the son of a wealthy industrialist, had finally received some of his inheritance. Even then she had to take him to court and he was hard-pressed to part with that seventy-five dollars a month.

The very best part of my childhood was growing up in the theater. Jacksonville had two community theaters and one dinner theater. My mother worked at all three of them as the musical director. In community theater, the actors and singers were not paid, but the musicians were, and theater work was a significant piece of my mother’s livelihood.

The Little Theatre was my favorite place to be in the world. During the first weeks of rehearsals, I would make a nest in a loft piled high with black curtains, silks, and materials for costumes and sets. For a child there was no more perfect place to daydream or to eavesdrop on unwitting adults.

Once rehearsals moved downstairs to the stage, I’d sit in the middle of the house, an audience of one. Night after night, I watched the shows: South Pacific; Kiss Me, Kate; Mame; and my favorite—Gypsy! Being a stripper seemed like a fine profession to me. I watched in awe as the actresses came out in their skimpy stripper costumes and bumped and grinded their way across the stage.

My mother had a closet full of black dresses for the orchestra pit. She was often the conductor and the pianist. She wore Estée Lauder perfume or Jean Nate bath splash. Each evening she carefully applied her “face”—foundation, rouge, eye shadow, mascara, and the essential red lipstick—before heading out for the night, with me in tow. She had an aura of elegance and power that enveloped me.

Once or twice a week, she’d get her hair done in a beauty salon until the styles finally moved away from that shellacked helmet look. A hairdresser once made her wait too long, and she stormed out of the beauty shop with her hair wet and stringy. When she shopped, she always told the clerk to “charge it.” She had impeccable credit.

Wherever we were, people fawned over my mother.

“Oh, Roz, that was simply wonderful,” I heard over and over again after performances and church services. She was gracious when the compliments came, but didn’t seem to care much about praise. She was always moving on to the next thing.

Adults would often lean over and ask me, “Are you going to be a musician like your mother?” My mother and I might exchange a quick glance before I adamantly shook my head “no.” We both knew the absurdity of the notion. I had no intention of patterning myself after her. In my eyes, she had already perfected the role. Besides, I simply wasn’t musically inclined. My mother says I did have perfect pitch as a child. I could identify notes on the piano and knew a third from a fifth chord, but I knew even then that you had to love something with all your being to play music the way she did. I much preferred to be outside, stomping in mud puddles and staring into the leafy branches of trees, rather than sitting inside at a piano for hours at a time the way she did—and always had.

We did give music a shot. I had piano lessons, guitar lessons, violin lessons, flute lessons, and even voice lessons. Though my mother arranged for these various lessons, she didn’t seem particularly dismayed that they didn’t take.

We discovered that I had a natural talent for the theater. When I went on stage, something clicked. But what talent was there wasn’t enough to overcome the slide into depression and self-destruction that I took during my teens. One rejection and I was through with theater.

The only thing, the only lifeline, was this: putting words down on paper. So while my mother played the piano, and later while my daughter sang in the children’s choir or took piano lessons, I settled down to wait somewhere with a book or with a pen and a notebook, and my mind left the building.