The Miller Masks: A Novel in Stories

By Neil D. Isaacs

Jesse Miller wears a lot of masks. He's a freelance writer, a bicoastal academic, a husband, an ex-husband, a father, a son, a lover, a teller of tales, a college kid, a college teacher, a tennis player, a man on the make, a man on the come, a man on the job, a man on the ropes, and on the mend. Jesse can't wear all those masks at once: the interconnected stories that make this a novel span five decades of his life, but the ghosts of those masks have a way of coming back to haunt him as he goes from youth to middle age experiencing epiphany after epiphany.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil D. Isaacs
• Release date: Apr 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311060037

Neil D. Isaacs

Neil D. Isaacs holds degrees from Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Brown, and UMAB School of Social Work. He was a college professor for forty years, a psychotherapist for twenty years, and a writer throughout. His hundreds of credits include newspaper columns (Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Times, Baltimore Sun), magazine and journal pieces, and three dozen books. He lives with his wife in Pompano Beach, Florida.

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The Miller Masks

A Novel in Stories

Copyright © 2000 by Neil D. Isaacs

All rights reserved

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For Ellen with love

because, if I hadn’t found you,

I’d have had to invent you

Contents

I. On the Come

Dancer /13

War Stories / 20

Lessons / 25

II. On the Ropes

The Way Some Were / 37

Blowing It / 44

Match Points / 50

Interlude: On the Job (1)

The Ghost of Brewster McCloud / 61

III. On the Make

First Nighter / 79

The Girls from Briarcliff

(Diptych for Petey) / 84

Interlude: On the Job (2)

The Swannanoa Review / 97

IV. On the Mend

Ashes /113

The Healing Process /127

Doing It Over /134

Closing Ceremonies /150

Interlude: On the Job (3)

Juan Wake

(Sketch for a Ballet) /161

V. On the Bias

Parting Shots /171

Res Judicata /182

VI. On the Whole

Inventing Myself /195

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of The Ghost of Brewster McCloud, Match Points, and Closing Ceremonies appeared in Arete (now called Aethlon); of The Way Some Were in The Great Molinas (WID Publishing Group and the Sport Literature Association); and of The Swannanoa Review in The Virginia Quarterly Review. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for their kind permission and encouragement. Special thanks to Amy Richards for her careful technical assistance.

Note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

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I. On the Come

Dancer

What gets me about family mythology is the way the slightest incident that fits into a received pattern is taken to prove ancient wisdom. If my brother Noah hadn’t caught me that night when I was eleven, the myth that I was destined to be the dancer in the family might have been buried.

Instead it lives on. Even now, if you’re walking behind me with members of my family, they’ll say, Look how Jesse’s feet turn out in that characteristic way of dancers. But what you have to understand is what weight the family placed on performance and celebrity.

My father was the first of the Millers to move away from New York City, and he paid a heavy price for it. He not only bore a burden of guilt that the family heaped on him, but he did penance by traveling back for visits practically every Sunday for at least fifteen years. More vividly than the houses we lived in during most of those years I remember the Boston Post Road and Grandma and Grandpa Miller’s top-floor apartment in a six-story building on 175th Street east of the Concourse.

New Haven was not exactly the last frontier, but settling there was an unfortunate compromise for us. It was not quite far enough to mitigate the weekly demands for attendance, but too far for the trek to be anything but onerous in the days before the Merritt Parkway. I remember the games we played to pass the time, the traffic bottlenecks, my father’s impatience with those Sunday drivers he called goat-grabbers, and the short cuts he’d pursue to avoid traffic jams.

That apartment in the Bronx, more than any other place, is where I can chart the development of certain values—a keen sense of family and contempt for outsiders, a charged atmosphere of game-playing and competition between siblings and generations and collateral branches, the priority of winning and embarrassment of losing, the premium placed on accomplishment with the concomitant encouragement of showing off and blowing your own horn.

What I experienced there was part of what I have since learned to call the curse of bright children (not unlike Alice Miller’s notion of the drama of the gifted child). They begin with certain advantages in life and are sorely taxed for them. They are quick to learn but also quick to feel, sensitivity being the precocious handmaiden of early intellect. Bright children adapt rapidly, master new perceptions and knowledge with ease, and use them to get attention and rewards and affection. But at the same time they quickly master the art of rationalization.

They have to, because they must deal with sensitively perceived emotional stimuli for which they are otherwise unprepared. Too soon they see that they are valued for what they do and not what they are, too soon they are thrown into the arena of conscious sibling rivalry, too soon they experience the loss of their mother’s exclusive attention, too soon they are aware of Oedipal or Elektral tensions, and much too soon they know the tenuousness of security in a world they see much too soon as unjust, whimsical, unstable, threatening, and hostile.

Year after year parents tell bright children, With your brains you can do whatever you want, and you can be whatever you want to be. But it didn’t get me chosen first for schoolyard games and it never got me the size and strength and speed and looks and girls I envied in others. Instead it allowed me to rationalize my envy and lust into a kind of alienated contempt.

At eight months I could walk and talk—in sentences. Because I was able to communicate and coordinate so well, I was also toilet-trained at eight months, and the whole family had to hear about it at 175th Street Sundays. The regular crowd included the four of us and a parallel foursome—my father’s brother Herb, his wife Charlene, and their twin sons. Others came almost as regularly, including Grandpa’s closest brother and, until she died (some said from too much of Grandma’s roast beef), his wife, along with their two unmarried daughters (cousins Tooty and Fruity, as Noah and I called them). Besides us New Haveners, the farthest anyone else ever traveled was Great Aunt Letty from Yonkers.

With only a break for dinner, there was always a card game in progress, three- or four-handed pinochle or two-handed gin rummy. Brother against brother, father against son, it didn’t alter the dialogue. The winners gloated about their superior skill; the losers muttered about how lucky the winners were, angrily demanding that the cards be dealt for the next hand. Scores were kept with scrupulous care, the numbers providing the immediate satisfaction of results, absolute and concrete, clear-cut and clean.

And I remember the measurement of success, whatever the topic was, by prominence, visibility, celebrity. If I was born with a taste for fame, it was nurtured into an intense hunger as I learned that I lived in a celebrity society. The family respected the tradition that held to know as the highest value, yet it embraced a culture whose highest value was to be known. That’s what counted, I understood from an early age, not only in the family, not just in the media, but in the hearts and minds of the masses.

From Grandpa on down the family cherished connections with well-known people, whether from the world of politics or of show business or of sports. Three of the framed pictures I remember seeing on the walls at 175th Street were Grandpa with Herbert Lehman, Dad with Sophie Tucker, and Uncle Herb (named for the Governor) with Frankie Frisch. Performing arts were honored as high cultural attainments. Those Millers and kin with occasional showbiz achievements were the relatives held in highest regard.

Take Uncle Ainsley, for example. Grandpa’s youngest brother, he had been a Tin Pan Alley song plugger appearing regularly in vaudeville houses, singing his clear tenor heart out from a box seat, getting a spotlight, and then performing solo the song he was pushing. Years later, the same act launched Al Jolson’s career, but by then it had become commonplace in the business. And Ainsley, who, so far as I could tell, had never done anything since, was still a fair-haired favorite Miller.

My father himself had been hooked on vaudeville at an early age. As late as the Sixties he was known for his ability to remember whole bills of half a century past and even to reconstruct many of the acts. The family had approved his marriage to my mother, I always thought, because her Uncle Morris was a talent scout, agent, and producer—a dapper little man with a heart as gold as the knob on his walking stick. I remember seeing him on TV once—an early This Is Your Life program when the subject was a famous Hollywood restaurateur. There were Dave Chasen and Uncle Morris, big as life on the little screen, reminiscing about the good old days when W.C. Fields and John Barrymore were their drinking buddies. Well, the way the family reacted to that show, you’d have thought one of us had been canonized.

Morris never married, but he doted on the families of his brothers and sisters, forever trying to get them launched to stardom. When my mother started going with my father and Morris saw them dancing together, he thought he had a winner. Wiry and determined, my father did as mean a onestep as you could see in Roseland or the Keith Theatre, though not up to Cotton Club levels. My mother as a partner was what she would be as a wife, devotedly attractive and dedicated to follow the leader. Uncle Morris billed them as sweethearts of the boards, song and dance and pretty patter. Well, they couldn’t sing, the patter he wrote for them was banal, their reading of it was wooden, and the onestep got to be a drag. My mother didn’t really like the life, and my father turned his ambition toward straight success, learning to sell a washing machine much better than he ever sold a song.

Out of such a background I came naturally to believe I was worthy of fame, even that I had it coming to me. My fantasies were of athletic feats that would not only please the family but make me socially successful among my peers. But my mother cultivated the myth that I was destined to be a dancer.

You can be whatever you want to be, she always said, but then would remind me of that dream she cherished. Long after any possibility of its coming true had passed, she held on to it, and still later she’d wistfully rehearse the loss of it. She’d talk about my gifts of rhythm and coordination, how precociously I’d demonstrated them before I was a year old, keeping time to music by clapping hands, even singing along. She’d dwell on my stage presence, how I’d never be reluctant to perform on request for any audience. I would be the dancer, she thought, because I had all it took—the genes, the environment, the native ability, the encouragement, and the opportunity. And in time the litany became, You should have been the dancer.

Beginning with the summer I turned eight, I had two months of relief from those Bronx visits, the demonstrations on demand, the talk of skill and luck and fame, the toting up of points and wins in endless games, and the Boswellian reports of celebrity contacts. Summer camp was attractive to me for that relief, and yet I missed being a featured attraction if not a star.

I must have been a difficult camper for my counselors, but I was a keen competitor in any game. Brains counted for little or nothing—all I wanted was to be successful at sports. Disdaining Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly as role models, by the end of that summer I wanted only to be another Davy O’Brien or Charlie Gehringer or Nat Holman—champion performers though all relatively undersized. In time, basketball became the dominant obsession, sharpening the irony since I was ever the smallest boy in my class.

By the time I was eleven, we had moved into that wonderful dark-brick and ivied apartment house on the Boulevard in New Haven. Our entrance served only three families, one on each floor in identical six-room apartments, and we had the third floor. I was just in the fifth grade, my parents having resisted all the chances I had been given to skip, while Noah was already a senior at Hillhouse High. It was not unusual for the two of us to be left alone while the folks went on a trip, and if they and Noah were out for the evening it was perfectly all right for me to be on my own.

My bedroom was the one in the northwest corner with the twin beds. My mother had installed some glass contraptions in the windows so that the healthy night air would get in but not blow directly, unhealthily, on her child. These vents or wind deflectors or whatever they were called came away from the sills at about a forty-five-degree angle, forming excellent targets— not for a ball that might shatter the glass, but for a rolled-up pair of socks that simulated a ball. No one in my house ever had an odd sock. My mother had perhaps the only perfect record in that category in the annals of housekeeping. And every mated pair was always rolled up in a neat little ball in silent testimony and tribute to orderliness.

Basketball. Often during those seasons I’d stay up late at night listening to Marty Glickman broadcast the college games from the Garden. There was nothing like his staccato delivery— "rebound up, missed, rebound up, good... like Nedicks." He captured the rhythms of the game and he kept on top of the play. I could visualize every move. When my parents were home I’d get under the covers with the radio to hear the nightcap of a doubleheader.

With the window attachment as basket and sock-roll as ball I played fantasy basketball in my bedroom. Sometimes I’d empty the drawer and practice shots with all the balls. Sometimes I’d take one fluffy pair and act out a game, scoring for the opposition if I missed, but moving in close for offensive rebounds if I got behind.

I’d use the whole room for the games, maneuvering around both beds, shooting the halfcourt shot from the open doorway off the hall. I shot set shots two-handed and one-handed. I did turn-around jump shots—ahead of my time. Remember this was about seven years before Elvin Hayes was conceived in Rayville, Louisiana. I shot hooks with either hand. My free throws were automatic. I simulated dribble-drives, as Glickman called them, by bouncing the socks from one hand to the other. And of course I had a variety of dunk shots that I still use in exact change lanes at toll booths. Oh, I had all the moves.

On the particular night in question, my parents had gone out to play bridge, and my brother left to see his girlfriend. I got out of my bath, dried myself with the scrupulous attention to detail that made my mother famous—getting the towel between every pair of toes, and got involved in a basketball game with a particularly good-textured Argyle ball. By that time, incidentally, imitating my brother, I had given up the wearing of pajamas.

I was hot that night, dazzling the crowd with my moves. I was even experimenting with a fadeaway hook shot. Very graceful, it was a sort of prophetic cross between Kareem’s elegant sky hook and Dave Cowens’s jump hook as it might look if Nureyev did it. And everything was going in. The further ahead I got, the more daring; the more athletic, the more aesthetic.

Either I was so involved in the game that I didn’t hear, or else he was deliberately quiet so as to surprise me, but Noah came back unexpectedly. He said later that he had forgotten something, and I tend to believe him because he’d never done anything deliberately mean or hurtful to me in my life, no matter how provoked. But he never could explain why he hadn’t turned on the hall light.

I was pirouetting in a frenzy of zoned-out concentration around my well-lit court when out of the dark of the hall a leering face appeared. Caught in mid-leap I felt a thrill of terror shoot up my back into my head. I had never been so frightened. If my training hadn’t been as prodigiously potent as my socks were compulsively paired, that is to say perfect, it would have scared the shit out of me.

I didn’t scream, just froze where I landed, and stared. Noah realized immediately that it was a mistake. He said later that my eyes had grown monstrously big. I was never able to describe how ghastly his face had looked to me. He rushed into the room and tried to make a joke of it, but I was too dazed to laugh or cry or even talk about it.

And then it became something else, a story, an actualization of mythic material. Because, you see, Noah in his agitation hadn’t noticed the socks in my hand. What he saw and reported later that night gave my mother mixed emotions—vicarious horror and renewed hope. It was his image of young Pan as Isadora Duncan. When I was alone at night, in the version he shared with anyone who cared to listen thereafter, I would practice dancing naked in my room.

That image became fixed in family consciousness and I never saw any point in trying to correct it. I supposed I wouldn’t be believed. Noah had seen what he had seen. Fond ambitions for me were reactivated, and with great embarrassment and chagrin I had to listen to weekly rehearsals of the anecdote on 175th Street. I tell it myself now, not in a gesture of Wordsworthian reflection, but as an act of ritual divestiture, a debunking of mythology, a shedding or purging of one small vestige of false apotheosis.

War Stories

For a long time Jesse wondered why his brother Noah never told any war stories. The war had mainly come alive for Jesse, after all, through Noah and the letters he had written home. From basic training at some godforsaken Camp Wolters in the heart of Texas, to the ASTP program in Ypsilanti, then from shipboard on the way overseas to England, France, Luxemburg, and even Czechoslovakia where Noah’s company had been among the first to meet the Russian troops coming the other way, Noah’s letters recited the odyssey of World War II for Jesse.

Otherwise, the war for Jesse had been a matter of colored pins on maps in his