That Said (2 page)

that someday God might read in bed

and change a life.

The first time I got my hands on her,

I took off all her clothes—to see

exactly where her voice came from.

I pulled the white plastic O-ring

knotted to the pull string in her back,

pulled it, gently, as far as it would go,

and Chatty Cathy threw her voice—

not from her closed pretty pink lips

but from the open speaker-grille in her chest.

Chatty Cathy was her own ventriloquist!

 

She said eighteen phrases at random,

chatting up anyone who'd pull her string.

Tell me a story. Will you play with me?

What can we do now? Do you love me?

Did I love her? I loved her so much

I had to be careful not to wear her out.

Even though she always “talked back,”

behavior my parents would have spanked me for,

there wasn't a naughty bone in her

hard little body! When she'd say,

Carry me. Change my dress. Take me with you.

Brush my hair
—she always said
Please.

When she'd say,
Let's play school.

Let's have a party. Let's play house
—

she'd flash me her charming potbelly.

 

May I have a cookie?
she'd sweetly ask,

in that high fake goody-goody voice.

She wasn't allowed to eat or drink—

it would gunk up the mini record player

inside her chest.
May I have a cookie?

She'd pester me while I combed her hair

and buttoned her dress for a tea party.

I'm hungry
—she'd point her index finger at me until

I held a pretend cookie against her lips

and poured her another empty cup of tea.

May I have a cookie? May I have a cookie?

 

Finally, one afternoon I gave her one,

squishing it into the holes of her grille.

After that, sometimes she'd start talking

all by herself, a loud deep gargling

that shook her body—limbs akimbo,

skirt inching up—showing her panties

with the
MADE IN HONG KONG
tag

still attached.
I HURT myself!
she cried.

Please carry me. I'm hungry. I'm sleepy.

She awoke with two black marks on her leg

and a crack on her back along the seam.

A rash of Chatty Pox dotted her cheeks.

Give me a kiss,
she ordered, and I did.

I'd do anything to shut her up.

 

Where are we going?
bratty Chatty Cathy

warbled for the last time.

She stopped wanting to play. Stopped

saying
I love you
. Next, laryngitis.

Then a growling sound.

Her O-ring cracked off, the frayed

string a strangled loop spooling

inside her damaged voice box.

Then she was mute, stiffly propped

against my bed pillow like a fancy

boudoir doll made only for show.

He kissed me once in his dressing room

at the Palace Theater. I was six,

and he was forty, and my aunt Rozzy

had had a fling with him years before

he was famous, when he was a
tummler

clowning at her first husband's hotel

in the Catskills. Danny Kaye was famous

in our house too. My family would talk

about his family like family; his daughter,

Dena, just my age, was like a cousin

 

twice removed. How many times

had I heard the one about how Danny

and Aunt Rozzy took a midnight drive

and smashed up her husband's roadster?

(No one was hurt.) There's a snapshot

of them smooching on a rustic bench,

Danny draped impishly across
her
lap,

the boss's wife, Queen of White Roe,

not the thrice-married, thrice-divorced,

childless bookkeeper she'd become.

 

And on whose sumptuous lap I sat,

that matinee at the Palace, although

my orchestra seat cost her one week's pay.

Here was Danny Kaye in person,

Aunt Rozzy's Danny Kaye, rattling

off the names of 54 Russian composers

in the 38 seconds of a song named “Tschaikowsky.”

“Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakoff...,”

the stage so close I could see

his spit-spray dancing with the dust.

 

Years later came rumors that, although

he was sunny in public, in private

he was ice. He threatened to disinherit Dena

if she ever wrote a word about him.

“Not
our
Danny,” my family said.

We knew him before he was famous,

right after he changed his name from

David Daniel Kaminski to Danny Kaye,

Duvideleh
to his parents, double-talker,

before he was Walter Mitty, Red Nichols,

 

Hans Christian Andersen, the Court

Jester, Pied Piper, Inspector General,

Anatole of Paris, the Kid from Brooklyn,

we knew him before he stood in front

of a symphony orchestra and conducted

“The Flight of the Bumblebee” using

a fly swatter as his baton—when there

was still time for him to become

my uncle Danny—who kissed my left

cheek, the last and first time we met.

After giving away his Italian suits,

I couldn't find a taker for the pair

of wooden shoe trees he slipped

inside his custom-made dress shoes

imported from England. Themselves

a luxury protecting his investment,

the cedar shoe-trees kept those shoes

in shape, kept the chestnut leather

from shrinking, so you could say

they prolonged the pampered life

of his shoes, though not his own.

Every so often he would lightly sand

the wood burnished from years

of wear and oil from his fingertips,

and the lovely cedar scent returned.

Since his death, I've displayed them

on my coffee table like
objets d'art,

keeping their provenance secret.

Is it any stranger than casting baby

shoes in bronze? When I ask a man

his size—the size of his
feet,
that is—

they're either too long or too wide.

My father's shirts fit most slender

medium-sized men; they were easy

to dispose of. But his shoe trees

continue to be a problem.

Straight out of a classic fairy tale,

like the infamous glass slippers,

they'll only fit inside the shoes

that only fit the one pair of feet

of the future prince they're fated for.

Once the patient stops drinking liquids, he's got up to fourteen days to live. If he takes even a sip of water, you reset the clock
.

 

Eleven days without a drop. The rabbi

made his rounds. They stopped her

IV and her oxygen. I asked them

to please turn off the TV's live feed

to the empty hospital chapel, lens

focused on the altar and crucifix—

it seemed like the wrong God watching

over her, up there, near the ceiling.

And because hearing is the last

sense to go, the nice doctor spoke

to me in a separate room. He said

it's time to say goodbye. Next day,

he returned her to her nursing home

to die. Her nurses said just talk

to her; let her hear a familiar voice.

I jabbered to the body in the bed.

I kept repeating myself, as I'd done

on visits before, as if mirroring

her dementia. I rubbed her hand,

black as charcoal from the needles.

I talked the way a coach spurs on

a losing team. Suddenly she opened

her eyes, smiled her famous smile,

she
knew
me, and for the first time

in a year of babbling, she spoke

my name, then, in her clearest voice

said, “I love you. You look beautiful.

This is wonderful.” I urged her

to sip water through a straw. Then

two cold cans of cranberry juice,

she was that thirsty. Her fingertips

pinked up like a newborn's.

I wanted the nurses to acknowledge

my miracle, to witness my devotion

although I'd been absent all spring.

They reset the clock, resumed her oxygen.

I was like God, I'd revived her. Now

I'd have to keep talking to keep her alive.

That dog
never
barked, not a whimper,

so it was heaven living next door

to Pickwick and his mistress, Elzbieta,

the Polish novelist on Brattle Street,

my first apartment, my first year

out of grad school. Elzbieta had escaped

the Warsaw ghetto, then worked

for the Resistance during the War.

What had I accomplished at twenty-four?

At her holiday party, tongue-tied and

outclassed, stuck in a clot of Harvard

literati, I bonded with a fellow poet