DAVINA: He goes everywhere with her, you know. It’s not as if it’s a great big secret.
REBECCA: No, it’s certainly not a secret. Mama’s dead a little more than a year, and he moves in with a shvartzeh file clerk who...
DAVINA: She’s very good for him.
REBECCA: She’s twenty-four years old!
DAVINA: So what? Don’t be such a prude, Rebecca. You want to know something? I think it was going on even when Mama was alive, what do you think of that?
REBECCA: I believe it.
DAVINA: So?
REBECCA: So let him do whatever the fuck he wants, but he’s not bringing her to this house. Not yet, he isn’t.
DAVINA: Then when?
REBECCA: How does eight years sound?
ABE: Donna, you want some more turkey? Rebecca, is there more turkey in the kitchen?
REBECCA: Harriet? Would you bring in the turkey platter, please?
DONNA: The stuffing is delicious, Rebecca.
REBECCA: Thank you. Harriet made it. Harriet!
HARRIET: Comin’, comin’.
STELLA: Why does Ike have to leave the table right in the middle of dinner?
REBECCA: It’s an important call.
STELLA: What kind of call is so important he has to leave the table on Christmas Day in the middle of dinner?
REBECCA: It’s something about scoring a movie.
JIMMY: Ike’s going to be in another movie?
REBECCA: No, he’s going to score it. Write the music for it.
JIMMY: Yeah? Maybe he can get a part for me in it.
HARRIET: Who wants the turkey, ma’am?
REBECCA: Donna would like some, please.
HARRIET: You the one, miss?
DONNA: Yes, please.
JIMMY: I could do my Charlie Chaplin imitation.
REBECCA: Well, Pop, all he’s doing is writing the music for it.
JIMMY: Maybe he could put one of my poems to music.
STELLA: You and your poems.
ABE: He writes good poems. Didn’t you think that was a good poem, Donna?
DONNA: Yes, it was very good.
STELLA: Thank God he didn’t use “xylophone” again. That’s ’cause I told him about it that time. He’s got some memory, this one.
JIMMY: She takes credit for everything I do.
STELLA: Well, didn’t I tell you?
ABE: Did you see that Christmas card from Harry James, Donna? Ike knows Harry James.
DONNA: There’s one there from Count Basie, too.
JIMMY: Those bands are always repeating themselves. Ike never repeats himself. That’s what I like about his band.
STELLA: What bands repeat themselves? What are you talking about?
JIMMY: Like Count Basie’s.
STELLA: Sure, only your bands were good.
JIMMY: Did I say anything about my bands? I said Ike’s band was good.
DONNA: I love “The Man I Love.”
JIMMY: That was his best record. It was the first one, and it was the best one. I don’t care what anybody says.
HARRIET: Ma’am, if the young lady’s through, I’d like to start clearin’.
It amazes me now that everything remained so predictably constant in our Immigrant America. Aside from statistics — Sophie’s death, Tolerant Abe’s shvartzeh, this or that latest event in my all but invisible career — the voices, the cadences, the tonalities were precisely those I had heard in Harlem and Rebecca had heard on the lower East Side during all the days of our separate childhoods. When Rebecca repeated the conversation she’d had in the bedroom with Davina, I could have sworn I was listening to a similar conversation my grandfather once had with Grandma Tess, who’d refused to allow Aunt Bianca to bring her butcher boyfriend into the house. And in contrast to those seemingly endless Sundays we spent with the family, the times we spent with close friends and acquaintances were exhilarating. They were Wasp America — even though most of them were the grandchildren of immigrants or slaves. I don’t know when Wasp stopped meaning White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I feel certain that in the new American lexicon, the acronym should more properly read Wealthy And Successful Professional. A Protestant ditchdigger is an Immigrant American, and Paul Newman is a Wasp American, and Camelot (when it existed) was divided between the folk who lived up there in the uppermost chambers of the castle and the folk who squatted in the castle keep below. Forget the fact that John F. Kennedy was the grandson of Irish immigrants, forget that he was a Catholic. Even my mother (who’s American, don’t forget) knows he was a Wasp. She knows it because she is an Immigrant American, whatever else she may tell herself.
In July of 1970, like all men who suddenly find themselves to be not only forty, but almost four years past it already, I began questioning everything — my success, my marriage, my family, and America. I had a lot of time to do a lot of soul-searching, navel-contemplating, and nitty-gritty investigation. This is what I decided. I decided everything was hunky-dory.
My success had lasted longer than anyone might have reasonably expected. I had enjoyed ten long years of popularity, and people still knew my name wherever I went; in fact, the house band would invariably break into the Dwight Jamison version of “The Man I Love” whenever I walked into a club. I’d already scored one movie, and Mark was certain he could get me other movie gigs. Every now and then he’d line up a weekend in a posh spot on the Coast or in Miami, and that was enough to keep my hand in. Alone in my studio, I would sometimes spend long hours listening to my jazz collection, and in truth I rather enjoyed the serenity of what could only be called semiretirement.
As for my marriage, I considered it quite carefully, and decided it was no worse and perhaps a lot better than most of the marriages around us. I no longer had the freedom I’d become accustomed to on the road, but I discovered there were a great many... well. . . “restless” women in the town of Talmadge, Connecticut, and that they were eager to exorcise their demons in various motels and country inns to which they were kind enough to drive me in their station wagons. I lied relentlessly and recklessly to Rebecca. Our chauffeur would drop me off at a record shop in Stamford, and I’d tell him I wouldn’t be needing him till four o’clock, to pick me up in front of Bloomingdale’s at that time, and then the transfer to this or that station wagon would take place, one or another willing matron transporting me first vehicularly and later physically. They all had different station wagons and different in-bed specialties, the most bizarre of which perhaps was... but I digress again. I would be standing in front of Bloomingdale’s at the appointed hour, having first wandered into the record shop to buy two dozen albums at random, and when I got home that afternoon I would tell Rebecca I’d had a marvelous time record-hunting, not to mention a delightful Chinese lunch. Rebecca bought it. (I thought she was buying it.) And meanwhile I figured this was what marriage in America was all about. I mean, if such and such a respected Talmadge matron was cheating on her husband with me, then it was reasonable to assume he was cheating on her with a respected matron somewhere in New York City, where he took his three-hour lunches. In a way, my explorations into suburban sex were more satisfying than the liaisons on the road had been. My fame had passed, you see; The Beast no longer claimed morsels from the table.