Driving Lessons
I am on foot. Since leaving the Center City Commission on North Main, I have been walking an hour, my shirt drenched in sweat. Old and new Memphis, Memphis fifty years before I was born and Memphis fifty years in the future. It is all gone in an instant, and what remains is the fragrant voice of a black woman singing the blues from her window on Beale.
I decide to take a detour through Confederate Park, on Front Street. Standing tall on a pedestal is a statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, holding a scroll in one hand and reaching out in an oratorical gesture with the other. One can still find Confederate flags in the homes and business establishments of Memphis. People used to say that Memphians refused to carry five-dollar bills in their wallets because they couldn’t stand to look at the picture of Abraham Lincoln.
Back on Main Street, approaching Beale, I can see the old Malco Theater, now called the Orpheum. A stone’s throw away, a tiny park with a statue of Elvis on a cement block. His legs are splayed wide in an inverted V, and his guitar is aimed skyward like a rocket launcher. Elvis destroyed Memphis and then rebuilt it.
At the corner of Main Street and Beale, the pavement is black from the soot of a million automobiles that have shot out from this raw heart of Memphis east toward the white suburbs. By my estimate, my father made this trip more than thirteen thousand times during his working life. On one such occasion, he drove M.A. home. M.A. was known as an aggressive driver who never allowed other cars to pass him. Many people refused to climb into an automobile with M.A. Lightman behind the wheel. On this particular journey, M.A.’s car was in the shop, so my father was the driver. Almost immediately, M.A. began motioning rapidly with his hands, directing Dad to overtake particular cars first on his right and then on his left. “They’re moving too fast,” said my father. “Son,” said M.A., “if you drive like this, you’ll never get anywhere.”
Eating When Full
The Husbands of Lennie
“My mother always said that well-behaved women never make history.”
It is rumored that Lennie gave birth to a child her first year after college. Unexpectedly, she extended her two-week vacation in Spain by a month, and then five months more. That would have been the second half of 1946 and the early part of 1947. During that period, Lennie sent few letters home and did not respond to questions concerning her whereabouts. What letters she did send exclaimed over the scenery in vague terms and then asked for additional funds to be wired to various Western Union stations in Barcelona, Toulouse, and a little medieval town in Dordogne called Sarlat. When Lennie returned to Memphis in early April 1947, in time for my parents’ wedding, she appeared in good form, although, according to Aunt Lila, there was a certain “postpartum quiet” about her. She returned also with pierced ears and a taste for absinthe. If Lennie did indeed have a child, she never spoke of it, and the rest of the family was afraid to ask. None of her five marriages on record produced any offspring.
Lennie’s first marriage was to a hotelier from Atlanta named Henry. “He was extremely rich and extremely good-looking. Incroyable! People mistook Henry for Gregory Peck. I met him at a little after-hours party in the Ritz-Carlton lounge. I was dashing about Atlanta with some girlfriends, all of them single and foaming at the mouth for a man.” Evidently, Henry was so smitten with Lennie that he followed her back to Memphis and rented a love nest in some undisclosed location for the next four months, leaving his hotels for his brother to manage. Henry was not Jewish. When he proposed marriage to Lennie, the family objected. Even Lennie’s mother, Regina, who was then on her third husband and never known to hesitate at the brink, put her foot down. “Sleep with whoever you want, my dear, but don’t marry a goy.” Lennie pleaded with her uncle M.A. to bless the union. As adventurous as she was, Lennie still craved the good graces of the family, and Lennie’s father was long gone. M.A. sized Henry up. He decided that he liked Henry’s business accomplishments, and Henry was a southerner, of course. The two men had a drink together. Then, offhandedly, M.A. suggested that Henry join him in an informal bridge game at his home the next evening. To everyone’s surprise, Henry turned out to be a superb bridge player; not as good as M.A.—which would have caused a disaster—but very, very good. That talent sealed the deal. Lennie and Henry were married for five years, dividing their time between a lovely house in East Memphis and a penthouse in one of Henry’s hotels in Atlanta, swimming in cocktail parties in both cities. “In Atlanta, people ask you about your business interests. In Memphis, they delicately inquire about your family pedigree.” One afternoon, when Lennie was shopping in an unfamiliar part of Atlanta, she came upon Henry holding hands with another woman. End of marriage. Lennie devoutly believed in a double standard, but 180 degrees different from the usual one.
Lennie was twenty-eight when she divorced Henry. At this time, she was in her prime, with a figure to die for. She was tall and willowy, she had breasts that men wrote sonnets about, and she threw herself on starvation diets whenever her weight rose above 125 pounds. Everyone commented on her curly blonde hair and the adorable dimple in her chin, which in later years somehow sank to the underside of her jaw and eventually merged with the rolls of loose skin forming around her neck. But that was several husbands into the future. For two years after Henry, Lennie was a free woman. And she was wealthy from the divorce settlement. She attended all of the parties and social events open to Jews and established quite a reputation for herself. At M.A.’s insistence, Lennie volunteered three days a week at Methodist Hospital on Union, changing from her Christian Dior outfits to the scrub suits of the nursing assistants. Decades later, she said of her time at Methodist that “it was the one thing in my life that was real.”
It was during this period between her first and second marriages that Lennie began drinking Kentucky bourbon. Her favorite brand was Wild Turkey, which she called “that Dirty Bird.” No one ever saw Lennie drunk, a condition she felt absolutely unacceptable for a southern lady in public, but she was often observed holding her head gingerly the morning after. It was also during these two years that Lennie learned how to cook. Her repertoire was limited to candied yams, which she made with grated orange peels, chopped pecans, and bourbon; and corn pudding, which involved white bread, yellow onions, eggs, cream, and corn. Lennie did not exactly like to cook, but she found the skill useful in certain situations involving the opposite sex, and she would sometimes cook her two specialties at family dinners when properly asked. Once she tried to teach my mother how to cook. Mother replied that she saw no reason to cook, as she had Blanche at her service, and besides it was impossible to cook with little children running all over the house. Amen, said Lennie, who had recently announced that she was not cut out for motherhood in any form and would refrain from that profession.
Next was Simon, a lawyer. Simon and Lennie first met by exchanging eye contact and telephone numbers in the thirty seconds they waited across from each other at a red light on Getwell, he in a new Ford and she installed in a new Cadillac bought with Henry’s money. Simon was from Nashville. People in Nashville tended to look down on Memphians as unwashed behind the ears. First of all, Memphis was dangerously close to the ignorant swampy backwater that was Mississippi. Second, none of the institutions of higher learning in Memphis equaled Nashville’s Vanderbilt University, one of the premier universities of the South. And as far as architecture and culture, sniffed the Nashvilleans, Memphis had nothing to compare with Nashville’s Parthenon in Centennial Park, built in the late 1800s as an exact replica of the Athenian temple. The social elite of Nashville would descend to Memphis for the parties of Cotton Carnival but make haste back to their excellent city with the last flute of champagne. Simon did not suffer from this stuffy attitude. I remember Simon. He had the soft-spoken charm of a southern gentleman. Simon was a good listener. And when he spoke to you, he chose his words so as not to give even a whiff of offense. Even with no children to care for, Lennie and Simon employed a maid, a cook,
and a gardener. If Lennie loved any of her husbands, I think it was Simon. His is the only photo from marriages past that she still keeps in her house. Unfortunately, Simon worked long hours at his law practice. For years, Lennie didn’t mind, as she had plenty of social engagements of her own, but one night at nine o’clock, when Simon still had not come home from the office, she realized that she was lonely, and it was worse being married and lonely than single and lonely. So she divorced Simon in 1965, after eleven years of marriage.
The marriage to Felix, a year later, lasted six months. The problem with Felix was that he had no college education, and he spoke like it. The only thing worse than marriage to a non-Jew was marriage to someone uneducated and ignorant. M.A. and his sister, Regina, both had a university education. Their spouses had university educations. All of their children—Richard, Edward, and Lila; Lennie and her brothers, Abi and Samuel—had university educations, as did all of their spouses, until Felix. Lennie knew that her family would disapprove of Felix, to which her response was “It’ll be just for a little while.” And it was.
After Felix, Lennie took a long break from marriage. She left Memphis and traveled in Europe, in South America, even in Thailand. A friend of the family, on a cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires, spotted her playing shuffleboard on deck with a “gorgeous man” who may or may not have been the captain. By this time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I had left Memphis myself. Lennie and I were the two expats of the family, and for that reason a bond developed between us. I received colorful letters from her, sometimes containing a one-square-inch picture of her and her current boyfriend in a photo booth. Lennie always remembered my birthdays, wherever she was, and sent me expensive colognes, wallets, and sweaters. I responded with news of my studies and work, of the newly discovered worlds of the West Coast and East Coast, of people in my life. Lennie and I shared a certain sympathy, and she trusted me with secrets she told no one else.
After ten years of wandering free, Lennie, now in her early fifties, decided to settle down again and married Leonard, whose forebears hailed from Philadelphia. Leonard taught economics at Memphis State University. To the family, he seemed an unlikely match for Lennie. The professor was quiet, dull, and, despite the monetary nature of his subject, never managed to earn more than $30,000 per year. (No matter, for Lennie was still loaded with Henry’s money, which she had shrewdly invested.) Leonard’s nickname was Lennie, of course, and people referred to the couple as “the two Lennies.” Lennie’s one redeeming feature, besides being Jewish, was that he loved movies, and he got Lennie to sit with him in various of M.A.’s theaters and watch Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and other such pictures.
Was it possible that Lennie had burned herself out and now wanted only to live out the rest of her days in tranquil domesticity? No, it was not possible. Lennie began cheating on Lennie. At first, in a small trickle, and then in a flood. In the last year of their marriage, she had a couple of assignations per month at the Peabody Hotel, all of which she confided in me without mentioning names. Lennie was in her mid-sixties by this time, still a surprisingly attractive woman, and some of her lovers were half her age. She was always discreet, but the high volume of her activity could not go unnoticed. Leonard, performing a cost-benefit analysis, stayed with his untoward wife as long as possible, but after everyone in the city knew of the cuckoldry, he had no choice but to divorce her. Lennie was sad but unrepentant. “Life is what it is,” she wrote to me at the time.
After Leonard, Lennie swore that she would never marry again. Four marriages, and she was now sixty-six years old. She moved into a little apartment on South Perkins. Her romances did not end, but they dwindled to long lunches and slow walks in Overton Park and the occasional tryst in a Downtown hotel. Then, at age seventy-five, Lennie married Nate. “I don’t want to die alone,” she said.
Rocket
Today, it is raining, a small relief from the hundred-degree heat of the summer. You can see steam rise up from the hot pavement, swamplike, and the glass windows of shops and restaurants are almost opaque with condensation.
I am listening to my brother John and his jazz group, Fountainbleu, practice in a makeshift recording studio near the Union viaduct. The studio used to be a dressmaker’s shop. Large swaths of old fabric still hang from the walls and serve as an excellent absorber of sound. In the corners of the room, plastic mannequins, once used to fit clothes, now provide a docile audience for my brother and his fellow musicians. John plays the bass. As he plays, he closes his eyes. Now and then, a pained expression flits across his face, but it is the pain of making good music. In the early 1970s, John played for a year with Big Star, a swaggering rock and roll group that became a cult band known around the country. The four musicians in Fountainbleu are old friends, having played together on and off for decades. Now they are all in their late fifties and in various states of disrepair. Baldness, bellies, stiff joints, gimp legs. Fred the sax player, who will not answer to any name except Frodo, is the most weathered of the group. Even with the rain outside, the room feels like an oven, and Fred has stripped off his John Coltrane T-shirt and tossed it over the head of a mannequin.
At the break, John wants me to tell his friends about my boyhood rockets. “And don’t leave out the lizard.”
“Yah,” says Frodo. “Don’t leave out the friggin’ lizard.”
Ever since the launch of Sputnik, around my ninth birthday, I was entranced with the idea of building a rocket of my own. I imagined the liftoff, the lovely arc of the craft as it careened through space. All of this appealed to my poetic as well as my scientific proclivities. By thirteen, I started mixing my own rocket fuels. A fuel that burned too fast would explode like a bomb, while a fuel that burned too slow would smolder like a barbecue grill. As I remember, I settled on a particular mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate. The body of the rocket I built out of an aluminum tube. For the ignition system, I used the flashbulb of a Brownie camera, embedded within the fuel chamber. The high heat of the flash would ignite the fuel, and the bulb could be set off by thin wires trailing from the tail of the rocket to a battery and switch in my command bunker, a safe couple of hundred feet away. The launching pad I made out of a Coca-Cola crate filled with concrete and anchoring a V-shaped steel girder, tilted skyward at forty-five degrees.
Somehow I had got it into my head that I needed a passenger. Unmanned spaceflight was just too routine. So I built a capsule, to be housed in the upper fuselage of the rocket, and recruited a lizard to ride in the capsule as my astronaut. I constructed a parachute out of silk handkerchiefs and carefully wrapped it around the capsule. A small gunpowder charge—ignited by a mercury switch, a AAA battery, and a high-resistance wire—would eject the capsule at the highest point of the trajectory. I built the mercury switch out of a sealed glass vial with two wire contacts at one end and a thimbleful of mercury at the other. According to my plan, at the moment the rocket turned horizontal in its flight, the mercury would slide across its tiny container, bridge the two wire contacts and thus complete an electrical circuit, the gunpowder would ignite, the capsule would get blown out of the nose cone, the parachute would unfold—and the capsule, along with its reptilian passenger, would slowly descend to earth. I had it all figured out.
As the designs and preparations unfolded over a period of a few weeks, mostly in my upstairs bedroom laboratory, my three younger brothers looked on with admiration and awe. The launch of this craft took place one Sunday morning at dawn on the ninth hole of Ridgeway Country Club. My brothers were all in attendance, as well as a number of fifteen-year-old friends from the neighborhood.
The launch went flawlessly. After the countdown, I closed the switch, the Brownie flashbulb went off, the fuel ignited, and the rocket shot from its launching pad. A few seconds later, at apogee, the capsule ejected just as planned and came floating gracefully back to earth. All of us boys hurried over to inspect the capsule and astronaut. I am not sure what we were expecting to find. What we did find w
as that the lizard seemed to be A-OK, except that its tail had been burned off. Only a blackened stump remained at the base of its spine. Apparently, the lizard’s tail had hung down into the fuel chamber, a detail I had neglected in my various drawings and calculations. To the gathered spectators, this one outcome—the burnt tail—was far more noteworthy than any other aspect of the launch.
Some years later, in college, I discovered that other students were better with their hands than I was, and I retreated to theoretical science. This career I pursued for twenty years, until I reached my personal apogee among theoretical physicists, who famously peak at a young age. Just as I began to descend, I turned to my other passion, creative writing, a veering course that made everyone in the family anxious over my well-being and livelihood. Finally, I had traded certainty for uncertainty, questions with answers for questions without answers.
“I’ll bet the lizard didn’t feel any pain,” says Frodo.
“How would you know what a lizard feels?” says another member of the band. “Or what a lizard thinks about?”
“Everyone knows that a lizard can grow back a new tail,” says Frodo. “No big deal.”
Always Ask for Cash
It is Sunday. I want to drive past the Mount Olive Baptist Church, where Blanche used to sing. The church is a modest one-story building made of beige, gray, and sienna uneven stones, with two belfries on either side of a steeply pitched roof and stained-glass windows on the side walls. As I drive by, I can hear the choir.
Blanche hummed gospels as she ironed my parents’ shirts and blouses. As a young child, I lay in my bed listening to Blanche sing when I was supposed to be napping. Although she sang softly, you could hear her music from anywhere in the house, and it was a comforting sound, a fragrant balm that oozed from room to room and healed everything that was not right in the world.