That night we went to see, appropriately, Sunday in the Park with George, and before the theater met Steven, who wanted to see them. He had taken up with an anesthesiologist and was living on the Upper West Side with him and a remarkably large Tamara de Lempicka. He couldn’t wait to tell my parents that he lived with a doctor. After he had shared the news, my mother looked down at her hands and said, “Well, that will be handy if you get sick.” Steven stared across the table, looking frightened for a second. “She means like with a cold is all,” I said.
My parents weren’t crazy about the show, but at the end there was an extraordinary song called “Sunday,” sung by the entire cast. It was the real thing, the goose bump experience, hitting somewhere between jubilation and sorrow, instilling a little of both. One voice—a woman who it seemed was trained for the opera—soared over all the rest, and the first time I heard her, bringing the humor and its emotion further, I took my father’s hand and squeezed it. Leaning over, I whispered to him, “This would not be the time to sing along.”
During the two previous hours, through all the songs and the changing of the sets, and the intermission when my mother watched the many glamorous people, I wondered if we would ever sit in another theater together or if there would be another trip, or if they would ever recover if I died. I wondered if my father would ever sing again.
The next day they visited our apartment in Brooklyn. On the subway, I told Betty there were hookers at the Waldorf. “What did they look like?” she wanted to know. “I’ll bet there are some on this train right now. We’d never know.” We met my roommates, had coffee and sweet rolls. The blackened tub was a concern. I said it had been painted after a gangster was shot there.
Basically, they thought the entire apartment seemed like a potential crime scene. My father, always concerned about my living in New York—a place where he felt certain I would get hurt in some way—looked around and asked, “So this is how you want to live?”
Betty was less concerned. “Things are different here. Let him go,” she said. “Let him go.”
She glanced at me as if he just couldn’t understand city people like ourselves. She was in an excited, festive mood and wanted to get out of Brooklyn as soon as possible. She was determined to shop. That afternoon at Saks, because I wanted her to have something to remember the trip and maybe me, I bought her a blue St. John knit sweater with black-and-white stripes on the collar, paying with money she had sent the week before. She bought me some Giorgio Armani pants. “The way they’re cut,” she said, “you won’t want to gain a pound.”
At Saks, Betty stopped at every floor, looked over what seemed like every piece of women’s apparel, eyed every New York woman as if she wanted to know everything about her life. My mother always loses track of time in department stores, but this time it was worse. “I just want to see everyone. It’s Saturday afternoon. That girl looks like the one on L.A. Law.”
“I love a tall woman,” a clerk told Betty as she lingered over some dresses. Betty was ecstatic. I didn’t say that my mother had spent her whole life trying to look shorter, hated being taller than all the women and many of the men. “The models are all tall,” the clerk said.
“I’ve heard a lot of them are foreign,” Betty replied.
. . .
When my mother shopped in St. Louis, at Stix or Famous-Barr, or Montaldo’s, or Saks, Mammy was in her mind as she searched for hours, hunting out the bargains, looking for outfits. Time and again, Betty brought home clothes from the city, unwrapped and carefully unfolded them, tried them on in front of the mirror, frowned at herself, walked through the halls in them, looking kind of guilty.
Mammy would always look up and say something like, “What did you pay for that?” or “How are you going to get any wear out of that?”
The dresses and shoes and blouses and skirts would wait in their boxes, unworn, until my mother’s next trip to St. Louis, where she returned them, ready to begin the whole process again. Every trip to St. Louis began with the returns. It still does.
. . .
When my father and I were ready to leave Saks, Betty said, “Go, I’ll get a taxi home.” She wanted to stay, I think, to be there alone and wander the aisles and see the people and imagine, as I did in such stores, buying the best things and taking them home to a fancy place. She wanted to be on her own in the city for a little bit, to hail her own taxi, to see what it would be like if life had led her somewhere far different than her home. When she returned to the hotel, she was especially cheerful, as if she had pulled off something extraordinary. She had fallen into conversation with a woman in the shoe department. A woman from New Jersey. Betty said she was nice, but she would never go to New Jersey for a haircut. “It did like this in back,” she said of the woman’s style, waving her hand and rolling her eyes.
. . .