My Blue Heaven

In the years preceding my birth, Sonia and Matt had a two-year-old son and great joy and innocent hope about their future in the land of milk and honey. It's strange to think of two children of Russian-Jewish immigrants as being part of the "Jazz Age," - the phrase usually brings to mind Gatsby and his very waspy entourage in the Hamptons looking at Daisy's little green light across the bay.- but this is how I remember my parents.
Whenever I hear the sad little, tinny sounds of My Blue Heaven or Bye, Bye Blackbird I'm struck with the gaity and hope of those years despite the despair that was to come.Even a song like Brother Can You Spare a Dime has at its roots a certain generosity, a certain love for all mankind.. Then there's Tomatoes Are Cheaper./ Potatoes Are Cheaper Now's the time to fall in love. My parents were truly part of the "Lost Generation," but perhaps not in the way that Fitzgerald meant. I was to experience many of these losses, but I have to believe I was conceived in love.
You were pretty jazzy then, Mom and Dad. Do you remember, Dad, you had a V-neck sweater and – yes – played tennis. (It doesn’t seem possible that the bitter, lame old man you became, is in any way related to that spry, young tennis player.) Remember the time you and Mom staged a murder scene for the snoopy old lady next door who was always peering at us from behind her curtains? You chased Mom from room to room with a carving knife and we kids collapsed with laughter. Every morning. Every evening. Ain't we got fun
And, Mom, how your eyes shone. And when you went out in the evening in your backless, gold lame, flapper gown, hair newly bobbed, I thought you were the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. And all those coats you had – velvet, fur, brocade. Toni Morrison in her novel, "Jazz," says that womens' coats in the twenties, held together only by a fist clutched in front were " like sleepwear for the streeet." No wonder I have always found Erte ladies so sensuous, slinking from bed to the bar. Where somebody waits for me/sugar sweet/ so is she/ Bye, Bye blackbird.
On Sunday evenings, like so many families in the early thirties, we sat around a huge console actually watching the disembodied voices on the radio, with more wonderment, I believe, than the next generation would watch real TV images. That was the night my father made us all three-decker sandwiches and we would hoot and howl when Jack Benny said, "Jello, again." To this day, I cannot understand why we were so mesmerized by Edgar Beergen putting words in Charlie McCarthy's mouth on radio. These evenings always ended with Rudy Valee's nasal rendition of I love to spend each Sunday with you/ And at the end/I'm sorry it's through.
It's hard to say when it was all over. Only in retrospect , do I undertstand that it was not some silly game we played on freezing winter nights, the four of us huddled in one bed laughing and singing. It seems food won over coal in our hierarchy of needs. Then the quarrels began; harsh words, screaming retributions, and a few indelible times, physical violence. Terrified, I would pray to a God now lost to me, "Please, dear God, make Mommy and Daddy stop fighting," as words turned to blows and crockery shattered like broken promises.
The sadness and fury did finally give way to a painful resignation and a reluctant truce. At the end, why did they become those two old people living in the same house, sitting in the same room, staring at each other and speaking only when necessary, Why couldn't they keep their dreams alive? Why couldn't their romantic love turn into a mature respect rather than a narcissistic yearning for youth?. Why did the music go out of ther lives?
These questions will remain unanswered. I only know that for my parents their eyes never shone the same way when the music stopped.. Yet despite all of that, they have given me the priceless gift of their memories, which in the retelling have become my memories to alter idealize and reconstitute. Always changing, always shifting , but always the same verities – love, joy, loss, anger – the story of a family.
And I like to believe that no matter how it ended in real time, in another dimension they are still those jazzy people I remember and somewhere it is always: Three o'clock in the morning and they've danced the whole night through.