Notes on a Cowardly Lion (61 page)

We continue through the park, looking for the bandstand. He follows slowly. “It was a bandstand. On Sundays, they used to have concerts there … I used to practice tapdancing when it was quiet …”

I lead him to a large, somnolent plaza at Eighty-sixth Street. An old woman walks abruptly into the space and, without looking around, begins to distribute breadcrumbs from a large paper bag. The wind expands the baggy calico sleeve of her dress like a buzzard's wing.

“This must be it, Pop.”

He glances around. “It wasn't here. It couldn't have been here. There was kind of a gazebo, you know …” He scans the circumference of the park. “Well, then, I guess it's all gone. It's pretty here
now.”

We walk out of the park, glancing at the beautiful bit of old New York that has been turned into fashionable townhouses at Eighty-sixth Street, Henderson Place. “It all used to be pretty bad in this section here. Not quite middle class, except for these houses on the river. Let me see, who lived here? I used to know him when I was a kid. I think his name was … he passed away later on …”

The Eighty-fourth Street baths are our next stop. Dad doesn't expect them to be there, but he turns the corner anyway. He wants to make sure.

But when we approach the spot there are only luxury apartment buildings. He looks eagerly for the baths where he swam all day for fifteen cents.

“No. They've built this place up. It's not here. It used to be right here. Geez, I haven't any picture of what was.” We gaze at the Triborough Bridge, strung like a massive skein of wool against the full blue sky. He points to the island, which still remains. “That's Blackwell's Island.” He turns around unexpectedly and starts back toward Eighty-sixth Street.

He begins to mutter to himself, “Frankie … Frankie … Frankie … Frankie?”

“What did you say, Pop?”

“I'm trying to think of his name, the kid I used to know here.”

We pass the plaza again. The old woman now stands in animated conversation with some pigeons. They are pecking at her outstretched hands for breadcrumbs. A group of people have collected.

“How about that for a picture?”

“Yeah, I'm going to take it.” The professional photographer's hauteur. He has already planned the shot. He cocks his camera and takes aim, poised like a skeet shooter with his weight on his front foot. He squints and focuses on the woman who is too involved with her birds to notice him. But the people watching begin to look away from the birds and concentrate on the familiar face. They don't interrupt; they just stare. He takes one shot, but a bird flies across the old woman's face. Not satisfied, he tries another angle.

“Got it that time.” He ambles toward the cab stand with his camera strung like a St. Bernard's flask around his neck. A park attendant who has been watching him follows behind us. Dad pretends not to notice.

“Say, Mister?”

There is no reply.

“Is that Bert Lahr?” he says quietly, moving next to him.

Dad turns slowly and gradually begins to smile.

“I was born in Yorkville too, Bert. My old man was always talking about how he used to know you when you lived around here.”

The park attendant extends his hand. “How are you, sir,” Dad says, shaking it and noticing the drab gray park uniform.

We walk on. “Do you remember ‘Schneider's Miracle,' John? I wore a costume just like that.” He is tired now and he walks slowly. He squints at his camera before putting it back in the leather case. He examines it closely again, and then suddenly looks up in fierce disgust.

“For chrissake, I forgot to put the camera on automatic. I'll have to take all the pictures again.”

Maybe, he says, he'll do it next week. Maybe he will never do it. We hail a cab. As he bends inside, he groans to himself, “Aaaaah! if I could only walk …”

Back at the apartment, a script of
Minsky's
has been delivered and placed, businesslike, at the center of his desk. Near it are his radio, the dictionary, and a fly swatter imported from the kitchen. He sits silently at his desk.

Mother pulls me aside to ask if I've sent Dad a birthday card. Tomorrow he will be seventy-two; and I've forgotten.

When I come back to the room to see him, he is still at his desk preparing to read the movie.

“Hey, Pop, what do you want for your birthday?”

He doesn't answer.

“What can I get you?”

“Save your money, John. I don't want any more birthdays. It's sort of stupid, don't you think. What are you celebrating. Like Beckett says, a child is born and immediately he's dying. It's stupid.”

A fly strafes his head and Lahr pans around the room looking for it. He puts on his glasses and reaches for the fly swatter as the pest lands on his dictionary. Raising the swatter slowly, he comes down on the book with a butcher's menace. The fly glides with infuriating ease to the other side of the desk.

“The son-of-a-bitch! He's been hit before.”

He turns on the color television, a golf tournament. He adjusts the portable set on his desk for the baseball game, and fits the earphones in place. The radio plays Jerome Kern.

He laughs at the script. I say something, but there is no answer.

“I think I'll go home, Pop. Thanks for the walk.”

I kiss him on the top of his bald head. It is beaded with summer sweat and smelling like the inside of a baseball glove.

Richard Avedon's picture of him as Estragon bears down on me as I leave the room. In it, my father's hands are pressed to his chest with a novitiate's urgency; his face swollen with a nameless, punishing despair.

“See 'ya, Pop.”

Without looking up he mumbles, “Okay, kid.”

I shut the door quietly. He is silent: sitting surrounded by noises and the flickering images of television. He is waiting.

Avedon's photograph evokes Estragon's words—Dad's words—“Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!”

Epilogue

BERT LAHR DIED
in the early morning of December 4, 1967. Two weeks before, he had returned home at two a.m., chilled and feverish, from the damp studio where
The Night They Raided Minsky's
was being filmed. Ordinarily, a man of his age and reputation would not have had to perform that late into the night, but he had waived that proviso in his contract because of his trust in the producer and his need to work. The newspapers reported the cause of death as pneumonia; but he succumbed to cancer, a disease he feared but never knew he had.

For the few days that he teetered on the brink of consciousness the family was with him—talking, listening to his demands, concentrating on muffled words. He told me for God's sake to get a new suit of clothes because they knew him in this hospital; he mentioned his project to update
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, which he wanted E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen to write for him. He kept imagining he was still at work. “Mildred,” he said, “why aren't my clothes laid out, I've got a seven o'clock call.”

I heard him singing in bed. The nurse thought he was calling for help, but bending over him, she saw he was doing an old routine. The words were inaudible, but the rhythm was musical comedy. His last word, whispered two days before a quiet death, was “hurt.”

At the end, they had to strap his hands, which kept jutting out in illness, as they had vigorously in life. He clutched at the air—hopeful and bewildered.

Many praised his art. Editorials throughout the nation mourned his death: his leering humanity had become a part of America's heritage. In an age of uniformity, Bert Lahr remained unique. His voice never lost its range; his statement never lost its hard truth. He told us about the limitations of the body, about the isolation and humble beauty of the soul.

He made a most gorgeous fuss.

He made us laugh, until, at times, we cried.

Appendix 1

“The New Teacher,” a Kid Act

Based on the Avon Comedy Four

by Joe Smith and Charlie Dale (c. 1900)

The Kid Act reflected the good-humored anarchy and vague frustration of an immigrant New York population. The dialects and stereotypes are taken off the streets and put on the stage. Obstreperous students bait the overbearing, incompetent teacher. Bert Lahr grew up in such conditions; his own truncated schooling bore the scars of the nation's indifference to its poor. The Nine Crazy Kids based their act on this prototype of urban farce.