At the beginning of February, only a few weeks after Reagan’s inauguration and just as my one-win wrestling season was winding down—the new academic term, with all of its clean-slate hopefulness, under way—Dad, at dinner, said that he had an announcement. “I’ve been offered a major part in Abe Fountain’s new musical.” He took Mom’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s practically the role of a lifetime.” Mom squeezed his hand back. “Rehearsals start in April, and then we go on the road in the summer. Which means I expect the both of you to help your mother hold down the fort while I’m gone.”
Oren and I had entirely different reactions to this news, though looking back, I am surprised I managed any sort of response at all, as agitated and astir as I was, as distracted and dreamy. I swear I sometimes wonder if it was simply because I was eating normally—that is, voraciously—again. All that nutrition snaking through my veins to fuel my final growth spurt, a burst that, rather than bulk my shoulders and chest, widen my thighs, or inflate my arms, instead initially made my extremities outsized, bestowing me with size thirteen feet and enlarging my hands to a breadth as paw-like as my father’s. What an odd-looking bird I was, mid-molt. Given my profession, plenty of pictures of me were taken. Given my age—I turned fifteen that month—my self-consciousness was acute. It wasn’t lost on me how closely Dad and I resembled each other, although my aquiline nose was subtly hooked at its tip, like Mom’s, and my hair, curly as Dad’s, was a tawny brown to his jet black, which I, desperately seeking contrast, grew nearly to my shoulders.
True, my body’s transformation was nowhere near as dramatic as what was taking place in my heart and mind, but these were still a trio of accelerants and each intensified the others. Longing, expectancy, waiting for…what? Oh, all the energy such a process produces, all the by-products! In my case, a tear or two shed at songs like “Yesterday,” “I’m Not in Love,” “You Light Up My Life,” or—this is the most embarrassing—Kenny Rogers’s “Lady,” which I often belted out in my study closet, headphones on (“And yes, oh yes, I’ll always want you near me / I’ve waited for you for so long!”). I wanted to be in love, I was in love with the idea of love, O Romeo, Romeo, be careful what you wish for, Romeo…
Another side effect of this was constant and unmanageable erections. Often in public places, notably classrooms, they demanding cross-legged techniques of concealment a magician would appreciate. I chanted mantras only a mad monk might (dead kittens, dead kittens, dead kittens), my tumescence so aggressively out of control, it required I, like some street fighter, play dirty and throw elbows at it, knocking it up toward the waistband of my briefs (I sometimes wore two pair to contain it), to peek out, from above my belt, at my shirt’s inner plackets; or down into the leg opening of my Fruit of the Looms, so rigid I walked out of class with a pronounced limp. It was all so unrelenting—I having had no one teach me how to even temporarily relieve this pressure and jerk off—I sometimes worried I had a disease. Not to mention confusing, especially since my verb had no object. It wasn’t Deb Peryton, though she and I were in English and American government together and those classes also bequeathed unto me wood. Nor was it Bridget, whose person was strictly aspirational, who lived in Virginia, after all, and whose last name I never caught. And it certainly wasn’t Naomi, out of sight and out of mind, not to mention any categories beyond what I was equipped to contemplate, let alone fantasize about.
Perhaps my dream girl helped to distract me from the reality of my grades, which were all, with the exception of English, gentlemen’s C’s, math nearer to a D, although it was my comments that were the most deflating. Two in particular stand out:
After a rough start to the year, Griffin rallied, turning in assignments on time and promptly completing labs. Lacks command of all basic scientific concepts. Always willing to answer questions, even if he has the wrong answer. Average: 77
Griffin wants to speak Spanish and is always willing to speak Spanish in spite of the fact that he can barely speak Spanish. He has only a tenuous understanding of grammar, but his accent is perfecto! Average: 76
I was keenly aware of my superficial, surface-level grasp of all my subjets. Elliott was quick to remind me of my potential, which Dad parroted. And I wanted immersion, depth, command! But I no more knew how to study than to beat my meat. Is it any surprise my thoughts drifted toward romance?
My dreams’ subject was, of course, veiled in mystery, was not yet an individuated she, though we had, in that future I so longed for, fallen deeply enamored with each other, and the romantic movie in which we starred was shot on several recognizable locations (a long stretch of beach, in the shadow of cliffs, atop which a bell tower tolled, its roof circled by martins; or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we’d found ourselves accidentally locked in, and through whose various kingly and queenly antique rooms my girl and I wandered before stepping over the velvet rope to finally bed down), all of which ended happily ever after.
Speaking of, Mom seemed so happy at Dad’s news it was a joy to behold, but Dad was even more thrilled, and his excitement briefly lifted a pall of anxiety I didn’t realize had long hung over our family. Was that another of the fire’s lingering scars? I, being in the same profession as Dad, knew what this opportunity meant for him. He had toiled for so long, and for a son to behold this is a suffering. All of which is to say, I was filled with hope. First for my future, since Dad’s and mine were so entangled that his success meant I could finally decide, for myself, how to spend my time; second, for our family, and all the attendant prosperity it would bequeath. Because if Dad was going to make it big, it would have to be on Broadway.
My father’s job title—actor—was a broad one, best defined negatively. He was not a television star, although he’d appeared, once, as a surgeon on the soap opera General Hospital. This was a bit part, a walk-on in which he wore scrubs and a mask, the latter dangling around his neck, his character having just come from the operating theater to deliver news to the bereaved. In order to fully appreciate his line, you must imagine it spoken in his bass baritone—a rich, mellifluous instrument, almost British in its articulateness but lacking any highborn lilt. It was a decidedly masculine sound, tonally cleansed of his outer-borough idiom (Queens), as well as his mother’s Russian and father’s Hungarian accents—the pair squeezed, syllable by syllable, from his throat. It was only amplified by his diaphragmatic control, acquired at Juilliard, where he was classically trained in opera and enjoyed a full scholarship until quitting, mysteriously, after two years. His voice had a disembodied, disproportionate sound, which on first hearing could cause the listener a discordant shock, as when a demonically possessed girl speaks in the devil’s basso profundo. “We’ve stopped the bleeding,” he told the victim’s wife, “but we won’t know anything for certain until the morning.” He was not a ham, but I would come to think he revered acting too much, with a love too big for small screens, so that his portrayal—even one as insignificant as this—was self-parodying, unwittingly genius, like a great actor brilliantly impersonating a bad one. It was not the first time a performance of his made me uncomfortable.
Never once did he appear in a motion picture. But his voice did, as background noise in famous scenes. Acting was involved, of course, but off camera, in a recording studio, dubbed in postproduction, the lines improvised with other actors so as to create that familiar, indistinct din you might hear in a crowded restaurant—“room tone” being the term of art. Or, as I came to think of it, trying to single out his voice from the others as we sat in the darkened theater—watching, say, Day of the Dolphin or Logan’s Run, or any number of the age-inappropriate films he took Oren and me to attend—Dad somewhere in the room. Not that my father didn’t enjoy the occasional star turn. Some of his lines became iconic. He’s the first man heard screaming from a window in Network: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” “Look,” you hear him say in Superman, “up in the sky.” Or perhaps most famously in Star Wars: “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” After that movie’s meteoric success, it was not beyond him to tell a stranger who was curious about his profession that he’d had the pleasure of working with Sir Alec Guinness, that he was that stormtrooper in that scene, even though he’d done the dubbing months later, in the U.S., and principal photography had been shot in Tunisia—a long time ago, in what might as well have been a galaxy far, far away.
That he’d never made it in movies was a source of pain for him, one he didn’t need to express for me to infer. I noticed the joy he took in my credits on film and television—the one-sheets from The Talon Effect he kept rolled in a packing tube in my study closet, or how he insisted that NBC send him Betamax tapes of every episode of The Nuclear Family. It was nearly impossible to get him to come to a wrestling match, but he showed up on set now and then, and I occasionally caught him studying these tapes in his bedroom and, later, when we gathered at dinner, he might mention how I’d played a particular scene—an offhand gesture I’d made in response to a line, adding how “in character” I’d been. Given how little thought went into these performances—they were, on levels I didn’t fully comprehend then, involuntary—he might as well have remarked, mid-meal, that I was doing a fantastic job of swallowing.
Once, when the praise became too much, Oren chimed in: “He’s a Saturday morning superhero, not Laurence Olivier.”
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t treat his work with professionalism,” Dad shot back.
To which Mom said to me, as if I were both confidant and conspirator, “One girl, that’s all I wanted.”
Watching Dad do voiceovers was impressive. Picture a recording studio and my father in the live room or an isolation booth, on the other side of the control room’s soundproof glass. He’s wearing headphones. On a stand rests the sheets with the ad copy. There’s a digital clock atop the mixing console that counts down the time sequences. “Shel,” says the engineer, “I need you to shave two seconds off that last take.” And uncannily, expertly, exactly, my father would. It wasn’t just his efficiency, which was welcome, given the cost of studio time, but his prodigious command of tone, the humor or pathos he could inject into commercial copy, that added to his value. He’d knock out as many as three to ten spots in an hour, sometimes even more, and make enough to cover a month’s expenses in that compressed span. But then he might not do another commercial for weeks, sometimes longer.
During these dry spells, when I was in elementary school and auditioning, I might meet him at his midtown studio, across from Carnegie Hall, or run into him at one of the ad agencies where we’d both been to go-sees, and we’d walk home together. I equated his distraction with suffering and considered it my job to comfort him. Were these efforts of mine to be sweet what made him at once magnanimous and miserable as we walked home? Did I, his dependent, so eager to cheer him up, remind him of his failings as a father? Crossing from the East Side to the West, Dad was regularly indrawn, eyes to asphalt. This angst made it easy to convince him to stop for a snack, since it comforted him to feed me and gave him an excuse to stress eat: he’d get me a slice of cheesecake at Wolf’s Delicatessen (“Just to make sure it isn’t poison,” he’d say, and, with his knife, neatly scalp the dessert’s graham cracker crust), or, if no crosstown bus was in sight by the time we’d reached Seventh Avenue, we’d stop at the counter of Chock Full o’ Nuts, so Dad could peacefully brood and occasionally graze while I pigged out.
“How come you never did movies?” I once asked him.
Dad helped himself to one of my doughnuts. He talked while he chewed. “Quinn was supposed to get me into pictures,” Dad said, “but he didn’t come through.” When your father is a large and intimidating man and you are a comparatively tiny and successful pro, one who knows something of how the business works, it is uncommon, at best, to call such a person on his bullshit. Dad shook his head and swigged his coffee; it was probably his tenth cup of the day. Thank God he wasn’t a drinker. With my napkin, I wiped the powdered sugar from the corner of his mouth.
“Thanks,” he said, “I needed that.”
That was both Aqua Velva aftershave’s tagline and a tic of my father’s as he moved through the city. He’d eye a movie poster lining a construction site or one posted on a billboard and read its copy aloud. “In space,” Dad said—to me, to himself, to the air—“no one can hear you scream.” Or walking by a liquor store: “We will sell no wine before its time.” Or through a sanitation truck’s pungent cone of odor: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” I had a far higher tolerance for these impromptu performances than Oren because I was rooting for him to not only land one of those multiyear, national network accounts with its game-changing residuals but also one day be the famous personality with whom a product was associated—like Ricardo Montalbán for Chrysler or Bill Cosby for Jell-O. Perhaps then his anxiety would finally be alleviated. Land a fish like that, and it would be game over. The old man could finally retire from the sea.
Thus, some sort of career-defining role was to be desired, for professional reasons and financial purposes. There were riches in recognition, in becoming a brand name, but he could see no path toward it, could make no path toward it, since he was, in the end, waiting to be the chosen and at the mercy of others, no matter how hard he kept at it. “The problem with my business,” Dad once said to me on one of these walks, and here I sniffed out an Elliott aphorism, “is that there’s no graduation system.” If he could enjoy just one great stretch—if he could have, as he sometimes liked to say, a bucket when it rained—I might not discover him, as I did sometimes, in the living room in the middle of the night, sitting on the couch with the light on, his brown-and-black-striped robe, the one that had survived the fire, hanging open as he sat staring at the wall, sawing at his lip with his index finger as if it were a violin’s bow, entirely unaware of me as I walked past him to get a late-night snack. “Dad,” I said, briefly interrupting his ruminating, “are you okay?”
“I’m fine, boychik,” he’d say, “why don’t you go get some rest?”
He’d make Oren and me breakfast the next morning, looking even more haggard and unkempt, and was soon off to the YMCA, where he had a membership at the Businessman’s Club and where he went every morning for a light workout, followed by a steam and a shower and a shave, “to get myself together,” he liked to say. It was more often at night, when he returned home, that we got a look at the person he was out in the world during the day.
My father could be vain, but only in public. For his own reflection he had a sixth sense, and he was incapable of passing a mirror or storefront window without checking his profile, subtly sucking in his cheeks. But at home he suffered far less self-regard: in the mornings, he often paraded around our small apartment in only a shirt, socks, and briefs—his storkish, hairless legs pale as his underwear’s cotton—even when Oren and I had friends sleep over. After bathing, he sat on the living room’s sofa, enrobed and reading the Times. He might allow his gown’s flap to fall open, revealing his enormous nakedness underneath, upon which he’d scratch his scrotum as innocently as a zoo ape. Nor was he ashamed of his fake teeth. A pair of bridges spanned the cuspids on both his upper and lower jaw. So it was that, when Oren and I were little, if we came upon him scraping these with his dentist’s excavator or surprised him preparing the gray paste that secured these fakes to his gums, he’d turn on us and broadly smile, spooking us by this glimpse into his mouth’s inner workings; or he’d make a bogeyman howl, as if we’d discovered his true, monstrous identity, then stick out his tongue through the enormous gap until we covered our eyes and fled screaming. Throughout my childhood, the story he always told was that his originals were too small and thus gave him a smile unfit for stage or screen, so he’d had “some light cosmetic work done” to address the problem. This sounded like a perfectly reasonable answer, and I accepted it, though when I discovered in his dresser pictures of him as a teenager and, later, as a navy seaman, I thought they looked absolutely proportional—which, I’d learn later that year, they had been.
During my dad’s dry spells, he still made it a point to work. He gave his days something like a nine-to-five by teaching singing and commercial voice at the studio he rented on Seventh Avenue. He had an upright piano here as well as recording equipment. He also did the headshots of some of his students. He’d been a photographer in the navy, had been drafted during the Korean War but saw no action, tooling around the Mediterranean instead on a heavy cruiser, another chapter in his life I knew next to nothing about. He took my headshots as well, and I hated these sessions. They were usually conducted in Central Park, and were some of the more painful exercises in false spontaneity of my young life. To mitigate embarrassment and be as far from the weekend sunbathers as possible, I demanded we conduct the shoot by the exposed rocks at the field’s southernmost end. Dad posed me in ways I hated: With my hands to my sides. With my body turned sideways. With my arms crossed.
“Look down,” Dad said. “Now up.”
“Stop squinting,” he ordered. “And open your eyes.”
“How about a smile?” Dad asked, holding his Nikon at his belt. “You call that a smile?”
Determined to be miserable, I had fixed my face in a frown, which Dad considered for a moment, his cheeks inflating, until he exploded in laughter. It made my misery more complete because it threatened to decouple my expression from my feelings. Sensing I was close to breaking character, he lifted the viewfinder to his eye. In the lens, I caught sight of my face, my mouth clownishly downturned, and, made suddenly aware of how proximate strong passion is to its opposite, began to laugh myself, furious. (Mom, it’s worth mentioning, was a far more willing model than I. Dad might ask to shoot her, of a regular Saturday, and these pictures, which I also found in my study closet, had an intimacy, a frankness, a seductiveness, that even then I recognized as reserved for Dad only.)
My mother taught children at Neubert Ballet in the afternoons, a job—though Dad could barely bring himself to call it one—that left her days open to get her BA at Columbia and, for the past several years, her MA in literature at NYU, the latter pursuit one that occasionally drove him nuts. They often fought about this, sometimes openly, at the dinner table.
“What do you do with a degree like that?” my father might ask. “Do you teach? Like maybe at Griffin’s school?”
“You mean English?” she said.
“You could get us a break on tuition,” Dad said. “Even health insurance.”
“I do it for myself,” Mom said.
“What about becoming a secretary, then?” Dad asked. “For an executive. Or maybe writing a novel.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“You could be a speechwriter. For a corporation. I see those ads in the paper all the time.”
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” Mom said.
“Your business is my business,” Dad said, “because it’s our business. The family business.”
“Why don’t you do jingles then?” Mom asked. “Georgette Fox makes all kinds of money doing that.”
“You know my rule about jingles.”
“What about copyediting?” Oren asked Mom.
Mom, stunned, glared at my brother. “Excuse me, young man, since when do you give me professional advice?”
“You like to read so much,” Oren pressed, “why don’t you go into publishing?”
“Shut your trap,” Mom said to him. “And you too,” she said to Dad. “And you,” she said to me, “don’t look at me like that!” When I said nothing, she flung her wadded napkin onto her plate, knocked over her chair when she stood.
Oren waited until he heard her lock our bathroom door and the faucets squeak, the running water canceling our noise. “My friend Betsy’s mom works at Random House,” he whispered. “She has an office with a secretary and gets any book they publish for free.”
“Mrs. Potts,” I said to Dad, “works at Smith Barney.”
Dad glumly shook his head, imitating the British actor John Houseman: “They make money the old-fashioned way,” he said. “They earn it.”
He glanced at Oren and then at me, and he couldn’t help himself: he started to laugh. Which gave us permission to laugh too. After we fell silent, Oren, with some hesitance, said to Dad, “Why don’t you do jingles?”
Now it was Dad who pushed away from the table.
“Because,” he yelled, “you have to say no to something!” Then he marched to the front closet, thrust his arms through his coat sleeves, and, upon leaving, slammed the door.
Perhaps, I have often reflected, singing was for Dad somehow even more sacrosanct than acting and was not to be soiled by commercialism. In point of fact, Dad did perform one jingle for a local toy store. In it, a couple of kids were featured playing with a racecar set, their smiles followed by its bargain-basement price, and then comes the song. The bouncing ball, which in the commercial was a globe with a striped hat and smiley face, compressed as it hopped atop each word’s syllable. To this day, I occasionally catch myself happily humming the melody and then have to suppress the urge to burst out singing it the same way the chorus of kids perform it—jubilantly:
Playworld!
A world of toys.
Great for girls.
And great for boys.
Playworld!
Where prices go…
And then Dad sings the descending notes down to the deepest C:
So low,
low,
low,
low,
llllllllloooooooooow…
Oren and I identified his voice the first time we saw the commercial. It ran during afternoon cartoons, and when we told Dad we’d heard him, he’d said offhandedly, “They give me a fifty percent discount on all their merch,” a fact which, true or not, immediately slivered into Oren’s mind.
“Can you take us shopping there?” he asked.
“It’s all the way in Paramus.”
“What about the one in Hackensack?”
“That’s far too.”
“There’s also a store in Syosset.”
“That’s past Queens.”
“So’s Hackensack,” Oren said, “depending on which direction you’re going.”
“What’s the rush already?”
“I want a skateboard. At that rate, I can buy some Peralta wheels and still have money left over.”
“Maybe next weekend.”
“You mean tomorrow?”
“I mean the weekend after.”
Oren crossed his arms and shook his head. “There is no discount, is there?”
Dad’s eye twitched. “I don’t like your attitude, young man.”
“You and your endless bs,” Oren said.
Dad slapped him in the mouth. When Oren covered up, Dad grabbed his shirt collar, turned him around, and mushed his cheek against the wall, giving his ass a good whupping. Then Dad dragged him to our room and flung him in the corner, where Oren sat facing him.
“No allowance for a week!” Dad said.
“Fuck your cheap allowance!” Oren cried.
“Make it a month then!”
“I’ve got a year saved up!”
“Two years and nothing for you!”
“Make it till I move out!” Oren screamed.
Dad stormed off. I closed our door and quietly locked it. Then I slid down next to my brother. Oren reverted to his boyishness when he cried. He whimpered and mumbled and let his nose run. There were lots of consonants in his burbling. I took a mental snapshot, in case I needed the face down the road. “You okay?” I asked.
“Cut the caring crap. It’s the same load of horseshit as his.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“See!” Oren said, and pointed at my face. “You’re about to laugh.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and then climbed into my top bunk, covered my face with my pillow, and giggled into it.
“Fucking assholes,” Oren said of us. “Only out for yourselves. The both of you.”
I stared into the muffled dark, listening to my breathing. It wasn’t the first time Oren had leveled this accusation. Even though its origin was a mystery, I knew it to be true, and didn’t ask.
What my father’s talents perfectly suited him for was the stage—for musicals in particular. Some of my earliest memories were of seeing and hearing him sing. But it was the attendant emotional and physical response to his voice, paired with music, that registered, in my bones, as something close to joy. I recall, for example, seeing Dad perform Beethoven’s Fidelio on television—this at our first apartment, before the fire—playing Rocco, the old jailkeeper, in Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. It was a recital with no costumes. My father and the soprano with whom he sang wore black turtlenecks and slacks. Elliott, who was, along with Lynn, watching at our apartment with us, translated the German as Dad sang:
Nur hurtig fort, nur frisch gegraben.
Es währt nicht lang, er kommt herein.
—making the ein in herein ring with such immediacy I felt my neck tingle. “Hurry and dig the grave,” Elliott translated, “it won’t be long, it won’t be long, and he’ll arrive.” And then Dad thundered:
Es währt nicht lang,
Es währt nicht lang,
er kommt herein.
I also saw countless performances of my father in Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris at the Village Gate. Certain songs he sang thrilled me and stay with me, so that I find myself humming them, or singing to this day:
In the port of Amsterdam
There’s a sailor who sings
Of the dreams that he brings
From the wide-open sea
And I still wonder at how its lines seemed to contain both the horizon’s vastness and the ocean’s breadth, the pair shot through with desire. I didn’t analyze it then, didn’t think of it at all, much less articulate it. I merely felt it. It was like a wound, as if I’d stepped on coral and it grew in my foot.
In 1977, the famous director Joshua Logan had him appear in his revue Musical Moments at the Rainbow Room. Logan had seen my father perform in The Fisher King and went on to direct the movie, in which, to my father’s consternation, he was not cast. I never once saw the man in anything but a tuxedo. At the performances he always had me sit between him and his wife, Nedda. “And now,” Logan whispered to me as Dad took the stage, as he took the mic in hand and gently cracked the cord’s whip to give it slack, “your father will sing one of my all-time favorite songs. He sings it as well as Ella Fitzgerald, and he electrifies it with desperation.”
Somewhere there’s music
How faint the tune
Somewhere there’s heaven
How high the moon
There is no moon above
When love is far away too
Till it comes true
That you love me as I love you
And when Dad sang the last verse—when with his free hand he reached out toward the audience, as if begging them to pull him to safety; when he held the note on the word “high” for so long there followed a shocked silence at the song’s conclusion—even I, at ten years old, recognized it as a howl of pain:
The darkest night would shine
If you would come to me soon
Until you will, how still my heart
How high the moon.
After the show’s final performance, Logan invited our family to his town house for a nightcap. Mom declined; Oren was too tired. Dad and I rode with Logan and Nedda in his stretch limousine. Logan’s tux hung on him loosely, as if he’d recently lost a great deal of weight. He was jowly and had a thick mustache; he grew his remaining hair long and combed it back. When he addressed me, it was clear that the person to whom he was really speaking was Dad.
“Would you like to know why your father is a great singer?” Logan said to me. “Because he possesses the three most important qualities a singer can have. First, articulation. He makes you hear every word in the lyric, which allows for emphasis and a wider range of interpretation. Second, magnitude. The very bigness of his sound, its unquestionable authority, demands you listen. And finally”—he pressed his pinkie to his thumb and held up three fingers, “storytelling. Your father makes every song answer the following question: Why is this night different from all other nights?”
My father, so guileless in his admiration of Logan, appeared childlike. He was so thrilled to be here, so close to this god, that he seemed to have forgotten I was present. Our roles—son and father—were reversed, and at such times, observing his wonder at having made it, at least this far, seated, as he was, across from such a legend, I felt happiest for him, and completely invisible.
January 1981 had been freezing. From my room’s window, I watched the barges of ice on the Hudson bear south. They looked long and wide enough that I was sure I could frogger them to Union City, whose scalloped cliffs were dusted with snow. Snow drifts, piled in the parking lot beneath our terrace, were caved with footprints and dotted with soot. Dogs, their raised legs visibly shaking, hurriedly pissed through the powder’s crust, flecking it emerald and saffron. Fire hydrants were snowcapped, water towers white-topped, roofs wool-blanketed: nothing, it seemed, could break the deep freeze; there was no escaping our tiny apartment. February was more of the same until that evening when Dad broke the news about the Abe Fountain musical, with its assurance of a promising spring, a summer warmed by stardom, and a bountiful fall.
“Where are you on the playbill?” Oren asked.
“Right below the two leads,” Dad said.
Oren said, “So this is big money we’re talking about?”
“I can’t complain.”
“Then maybe,” Oren said, “we could actually go on a vacation this spring? Like everyone else at my school.”
Our parents glanced at each other.
“I was thinking Captiva,” Oren continued, and then from his back pocket produced a rolled-up Sports Illustrated with Christie Brinkley on the cover, which he opened for them to see. “It’s an island off Fort Myers. In Florida. In the Gulf of Mexico. They have beautiful seashells you can collect, Mom, see? And if you don’t want to pay airfare,” Oren said to Dad, “we could even drive.”