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Memories Offscreen (Part Three of Three)

© Emily Woodward

Feeling herself slip away from the world, Ma came increasingly under my protection. She began to accompany me to the show on Saturdays. We'd huddle together in the rear of the balcony; two frightened women, hiding behind the same screen. It was all that we shared.

Ma had a beguiling Eastern persona. Black Irish and Italian, many of the neighborhood Jews accepted her as one of their own. My devoutly Catholic mother found this amusing, but I didn't. As her shikse offspring, I was viewed with politely concealed mistrust. The recipient of my father's fair complexion, his French and Anglo-Saxon features, I gravitated toward the WASPish set in my community and school. In a neighborhood as ethnically diverse as Flatbush, there was little intermingling between groups. I wouldn't say that we were all hardened bigots, just products of our time. It was certainly a time of labels. The idea of the group was emphasized, generally at the expense of the individual.

My goal was to establish definitively what I was. It was a time very different from today. One received nothing for one's suffering. There was nothing to be gained from being poor - wasn't everybody? Having an absent father did not make me a candidate for sympathy. It merely lowered my chances for acceptance by the "right" people. These individuals were largely the result of my own fabrications. By their words and deeds, they comprised everything that was elitist in American life. As Dottie, I knew how to play their game. I cunningly went about acquiring friends from affluent, well-respected families. All were nice girls. Unfortunately, my shallow "onscreen" persona was more intrigued by their material attributes. My precarious existence received a charge when Gladys Tyler invited me to New Rochelle one summer. Like most children of the Depression, I'd never been on a vacation. The experience added glamour to my life. Or, rather, to Dottie's life.

Buddy remained the same - observing, holding back. Hob-knobbing with Gladys' country club friends, I felt the same longing as when I listened to my mother cry at home.

All at once, or maybe at last, I wanted to the show to end. The screen that shut out reality failed to subdue the nightmare of my insecurities and loneliness. While my father had abandoned me, his absence was less apparent than that of the entire human race.