I Must Say (7 page)

One afternoon I was idly watching the movie
Broadway Melody of 1938
on TV, and there was Sophie standing beside a young Judy Garland, telling her, “You know, in the old days . . .” Jesus! I thought. Even
then
she was talking that way! She must have had, like, one year when she was current.

At any rate, when Paul and Dick told me they wanted this old Jewish trouper, I knew precisely which influences and references to draw upon, and exactly how Irving would present himself: shriveled, irritable, smoking a huge cigar, and moving gingerly out onto the stage at a rate of about three inches a minute. Paul and Dick, not to mention Joe and John, seemed stunned by how fully I inhabited Irving right from the outset. I've been dragging him out onstage—very, very slowly—ever since.

O
n the evening of September 26, 1962, two months after David's death, my mother and I were watching the very first episode of a new CBS sitcom entitled
The Beverly Hillbillies
. We were sitting in the den, Mom in her chair and me on the couch next to her. The show was all about rural hayseeds finding oil on their property, striking it rich, and moving to a mansion in Beverly Hills, but to me it was mainly about Donna Douglas, who played the daughter in the hayseed family, Elly May, unbelievably sexy in short shorts and a gingham shirt tied off at the midriff.

At one point Mom turned to me and said something along the lines of “It's so good to see Buddy Ebsen working again. Did you know that he was the original Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
, but they had to recast the part because his skin couldn't handle the silver paint?” Even at twelve I wondered, how could I not know of Buddy Ebsen? Today, I'd Google Buddy; then, not so easy. I was turning to respond to Mom when I saw, to my horror, that she was in the midst of a grand mal seizure—her arms and legs twitching, her eyes rolling back into her head.

I leaped out of my chair and screamed at the top of my lungs,
prompting my father to come charging into the room. Neither of us knew what to do. Utter pandemonium and confusion. Michael came running down the stairs (Brian was away at boarding school), took one look at Mom convulsing, and bolted out the front door. Instinctively I took off after my big brother, and we two shoeless Short boys ran frantically down the street to fetch the neighborhood doctor. By the time we got back, with Dr. Ambrose Listen in tow, Mom's seizure had come to an end, and Dad had gently laid her out upon the living-room couch. She was hospitalized that night at Joseph Brant Hospital, and a whole new scary chapter in my young life had begun.

What I didn't know then was that Mom had breast cancer way back in 1957, and had undergone a mastectomy and radiation treatment. I don't know quite how this was kept from me, but in 1950s households it wasn't uncommon for illnesses, especially those with the word
cancer
in them, to be kept very hush-hush. Did the stress of her son's death compromise Mom's immune system, allowing the cancer to recur? It's hard for me to believe otherwise. We knew that at David's funeral, Mom had developed a nagging cough that hadn't gone away, but we had all assumed it was psychosomatic.

Mom came home from the hospital after a short stay, and she and Dad acted as if the seizure had been a onetime event, not for household discussion, especially among the children. However, by Christmastime I knew that something was terribly wrong. Mom was thinner, not her effervescent self, and clearly burdened by something she wasn't telling me.

When she eventually leveled with me, she did so, oddly, on the phone. I had called her from school about something banal, like a delayed volleyball practice, and asked her how her doctor's visit had gone. She quietly said, “Well, darling, they've found a small little lump in my breast and they think it might be cancer.”

“Cancer!” I blurted out.

“Shhh, Marty,” she said. “Don't say it so loudly. This will be our secret.”

In 1962 a cancer diagnosis was still often seen as a death sentence. No one had yet come up with the term
survivor
—there was scarcely need for it. When I returned to my volleyball practice, I didn't know what else to do than impersonate myself acting like nothing was out of the ordinary. If I willed things to be normal, they would be. It was a little trick I'd use many more times in the years to come.

B
y the spring of 1963, thanks to the many bar and bat mitzvahs I was privileged to attend in my predominantly Jewish 'hood, I was having the greatest social season of my life. Libby Stephens from down the street and I had started making out in her basement. My social life was fully abloom. But home was a different story. Mom had gone downhill quickly, her weight plummeting to 114 pounds, which was nothing, considering that she stood five-eight—that is to say, my height. All right,
fine
, half an inch taller than I would ever be. By April she was back in the hospital, and no one could say for sure when she was coming home.

My sister Nora, who had been nursing at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, decided to take a leave of absence from her job to private-nurse our mother back to good health. When she arrived at the hospital in Hamilton, she was shocked—not by the withered condition of Mom, for which she was prepared, but by Mom's dire condition as outlined in her medical files. Dad, in complete denial about his wife's terminal prognosis, had told none of us kids, including Nora, the extent of her illness. When Nora read Mom's charts for the first time,
she burst into tears and confronted the doctors. “Why haven't you told my father how ill my mother is?” she asked.

“We have,” they told her. But my father had told no one. Not even the patient, his wife. Poor Daddy, keeping all of that horror to himself.

Nora was present when the doctors finally told Mom that she had no more than three months to live. After they left the room, Nora says, Mom turned to her and matter-of-factly said, “Well, that just can't happen. I have one more child to raise. Nora, pass the grapes, won't you, honey?”

That phrase—“Pass the grapes, won't you, honey?”—would be used many times in the years to come as a shorthand for Short-family determination in the face of adversity.

At that point, though, little Marty was still none the wiser as to the severity of Mom's illness. The evening of the day that Mom told Nora to pass the grapes, I could hear Nora and Dad and Michael talking heatedly in the kitchen. But when I walked in, they all clammed up.

What the hell is happening here? I thought. Even then, I was acutely sensitive to bad acting; I knew something was up. I immediately went upstairs to my bedroom, shut the door, and phoned Mom in the hospital. When she picked up, I asked her, “Mom, what's going on?”

“Well, darling,” she said, in the sweetest voice possible, “I've been told that I'm not going to live my four score and twenty.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I'm not going to live to be a little old lady.”

“You're not?” I asked, aghast. “Then how long?”

“Oh, I don't know, baby. Perhaps just another ten years.” Another lie, but in this case a welcome and probably well-advised one. I hung up the phone, and for the first time in my life, I felt
true fear. I didn't tell anyone that I had talked to Mom. I was afraid that if I stated the cold facts out loud, then they would become real; if I kept mum, the bad news might go away. Oh, the things we learn from our fathers.

M
om came home from the hospital shortly thereafter. Everyone besides little Marty—who'd been spared the awful truth by her white lie—expected her to be dead in a matter of weeks. Yet somehow she rallied. There was no stopping the “pass the grapes” chick.

Only a few days had passed before I heard Nora happily shout up the staircase, “Marty, Mom weighs one-sixteen!” She had entered a wholly unexpected remission that couldn't be explained, since she was not receiving any further medical treatment. By the summer of '63, she was to all appearances back to full health and seemed more radiant than ever. My father, who despised doctors because they never gave him the news he wanted to hear, ran into Mom's oncologist on a golf course. “Well,” Dad said in his sarcastic Irish singsong when the man asked after my mother, “she's up to one-forty—and she's
dieting
.”

“Well, Charlie,” the guy said matter-of-factly, “that's what we occasionally experience in medicine: a pure miracle.”

For the whole of my first two years in high school, Grades 9 and 10, Mom was in excellent health. But from Grade 11 to the start of Grade 13—in Ontario, in those days, secondary school lasted a year beyond the American norm—her health fluctuated. She would plummet and then pull through, plummet and pull through. Finally, though, the cancer metastasized throughout her body, and on February 14, 1968, a very sad Valentine's Day, she died at the age of fifty-five.

So many people have commented to me through the years about how sad I must have been to lose my mother at seventeen. And of course it was. But I was very aware, even as she lay dying, that I'd been the beneficiary of an extraordinary act of willpower: Mom's determination to hang in there on behalf of that “one more child to raise.” To lose her at thirteen, before I was done cooking in the oven, would have been far more devastating than losing her at almost eighteen, by which time I was something approaching an adult. During those precious extra five years, Mom gave me her critical evaluations of
Martin Short Sings of Songs and Loves Ago
. Those were the years when our legendarily argumentative, preserved-for-posterity Christmas dinner happened, and when she organized our family trips to Toronto to see the great artists play the O'Keefe Centre: Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland, Richard Burton in
Camelot
, the London production of
Oliver!
on its way into New York.

And in 1965 Mom was the ringleader of the Short boys' first trip to New York City. Dad had to work, so she took Michael, Brian, and me, and we stayed at the Hotel Astor. The whole experience was magical and mind-boggling: the far-off fantasy world glimpsed in our television-watching made real. I was excited simply by the fact that we could see the giant, neon-lit Camel cigarettes billboard from our window, with puffs of smoke blowing out from the fedora'd Camel man's mouth.

The ostensible hook of our trip was the tail end of the 1964–65 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. But Mom, ever the cultural omnivore, made sure we took in as many shows as possible. We saw Sammy Davis Jr. in the Broadway musical
Golden Boy
. Sammy broke up during the show, momentarily losing himself in laughter—something that apparently wasn't in the script—and he actually came out onstage after the final curtain call to rap with us
all and make amends. Cigarette in hand, he said, “I feel like I'm cheatin' the audience, man. Let me just explain something to you cats, if I may, about what transpired . . .” (You can see how this experience
might
have had some bearing on some characters in my later television career.)