A week ago, I visited Mother. We talked all weekend, as usual. Partly we talked about this potential job that I've been mulling, because I wanted to assess how tough it would be on her if I moved 400 miles away to take it. Her answer was basically what Brother had said: it would be sad to have me farther away, but not devastating. (And, knowing my Mother, it would have to be pretty damned devastating before she would ever admit it.)
It must have been. But what does that tell me about him, that I didn't already know? Is there anything?
Well, maybe. Of course he was an actor, not a dancer. And he was dedicated to his craft. Even if he was playing forgettable roles in silly, summer stock shows he approached them with professionalism: to portray the character the best way he could, and to give the audience more than they had paid for. I remember the theater critic who wrote for the local paper when I was in high school used to roast the local theater company for failing to bring out the subtleties of "Charlie's Aunt" or "The Mousetrap" … and he always qualified his scathing remarks by saying, "… except for [Mr. Tanatu], who delivers, as always, the solid, polished performances we have come to expect from him."
He loved the fine arts. In a sense it's funny to say that, because I don't remember him going out to art galleries a lot. And while my parents had a large collection of LPs [that means "long-playing vinyl records to be played at at 33⅓ revolutions per minute," for those unfamiliar with the term] it seems like they played a lot of music when I was a baby or young child, and not so much when I was older. It is as if their music-playing dropped off sharply when they reached their mid-thirties. (Maybe there were external factors involved, because of things going on in their lives. I can only guess.) But I know that he thought of himself and described himself as someone who loved the fine arts, so I'll give him credit for that here. (That self-understanding also caused him problems in other ways, as I discuss in this post here.)
So I have to think that, in loving "The Red Shoes," he was wrestling with the same issues of success and failure—in other words, either Greatness or Muddling-through—that you've seen me wrestle with in posts like this one, or this one, or this one.
And I do mean wrestle!
On the one hand, Father wanted to be great and to be recognized as great—there is no question about that. It was a matter of enormous frustration to him that his career never took off, and indeed it seemed to him as if it were jinxed by a magic spell: as soon as he accepted a commitment to appear in something trivial, there would be an opportunity to appear in something grand whose schedule conflicted … only he couldn't even try out because he was already committed. I don't know the reality behind it, but that is exactly how he saw things. I heard this exact story from him so many times that both of us recognized it as a cliché.
On the other hand, he was not willing to give up the accoutrements of normal life to sacrifice it all to his craft. He had a marriage to Mother that lasted 56 years until death parted them; he had a house in the suburbs; he had two children (me and Brother) and two grandchildren (Son 1 and Son 2). He had friends in the Rotary Club. Would he—could he—ever have given these things up? They were tangible signs that his life hadn't been a complete waste, that he had at the very least achieved something. I think it would have been very hard to give them up for the chance—no guarantees—of success.
On yet another hand, "very hard" is not the same as "impossible." If Mephistopheles had appeared to him in the flesh, sulfur still steaming off his skin, and had guaranteed Father brilliance and worldly success as an actor—undying fame—if only he had given up all these accoutrements, what then? He would have had to struggle; that's for sure. He wanted greatness so badly that I cannot flatter myself that I or Brother would have been enough to stand in his way. Nor the house. Nor the Rotary Club.
That leaves one obstacle.
Father used to joke that he often fantasized about how his life could have been different if only he had made this or that decision differently. These were fantasies where he ended up on Broadway, or ended up as a millionaire, or ended up achieving any other crazy success you like to imagine. But he added that there was always one caveat. Whatever other twists and turns he fantasized for his life, he always had to figure out some way to show up in the right city and year to meet Mother, so that he could marry her. Everything else in his life was negotiable. (And I have to assume, as noted above, that this means Brother and I were negotiable.) But she was not. Whatever Mephistopheles asked him to give up, as part of the price for greatness, I believe he would have paid it gladly. But not her. That was where he balked. In comparing the Good Life with the Great Life, she was the one and only accoutrement of the Good Life that he could not live without.
Father once told me that sometime in his mid-thirties he visited an astrologer and asked for a reading about his past and his future. He said that she was eerily accurate about his past, but that everything she said about his future was wrong; so his assessment was that she could somehow "read" his past from him, but what she told him about his future was pure guesswork or reading his wishes. Because what she said is that he would be on Broadway in two years. She predicted a future of professional brilliance. And he didn't get it. Instead he farted around trying to manage the family business after his parents retired, so that "all the voyage of [his] life [was] bound in shallows and in miseries."
But here I have to ask a question. Does this necessarily prove that the astrologer was a charlatan? Or is it possible that the courses our lives take depend on our decisions, that she saw a path laid out for him providing he made Decision A at a critical moment, and that when that moment came he made Decision B instead? Let me go one step further and ask: Did he think it didn't matter what decision he made, because he thought that Broadway was already in the bag? Or was it just one of those things that happened without much reflection, the way so many of our decisions are?
I don't know the answer. But I already knew that he was tormented by the question. And now that I know "The Red Shoes" was his favorite movie, I see all the more clearly how sharply pointed that question was for him.
What I did not understand until this evening, as I wrote this essay, is how closely his life and mine lived out some of the very same questions. I suppose maybe in some sense I shouldn't be surprised to learn it, but I find it eerie.
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PostScript:
Also, it makes me wonder: What's my favorite movie? Can I write a similar essay about that?
I'll have to mull that question. Also I sent emails to Son 1 and Son 2, asking them what they think my favorite movie is. It's always possible that the vibes I've given off over the years are different from what's going on inside the privacy of my own head.
And I checked my movie references in this blog. I count over three dozen individual movies that I have referenced one way or another. Of these, there are only two that have shown up in two posts each ("Joker" and "Gone Girl"). And there is only one movie that I have referenced in three different posts: that's "Lawrence of Arabia." Is that my favorite movie ever? I don't know. Maybe. If yes, I'm not sure what it tells me.
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