The Bijou Dream Theatre: How Dreams Helped Me Make It Through

By Virginia Sweeney Karl

My Memoir The Bijou Dream Theatre is about how I survived my childhood losses: the mental illness and alcoholism of my parents and our placement in a foster home. Along the way, a Quaker family takes us in and nurtures us for a while. I meet the love of my life and win a scholarship in voice to JUILLIARD.

Through it all I dream of fame and a better life, but like W. Somerset Maughan’s characters in “Of Human Bondage” I come to accept my limitations and seek a path that keeps me whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781614682080

Book preview

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Prologue

We were happy once. My parents and my sisters and I lived in a frame house with banks of Iris and a Lilac hedge in Mineola, Long Island, New York. My mother’s sister, Aunt Harriet, and my grandmother, Nana, lived with us. We also had a maid named Hattie.

My father wrote then in his Yale Vicennial Record in 1940, the good luck I have enjoyed in association with old friends in business, with the fun my wife and I are having in bringing up our active twin daughters soon to be four years old, together with their peppy six year old sister, are all contributing factors in making life in this peaceful hemisphere of the world look mighty good to me.

Every Sunday, my grandmother Clinton, made potroast; she called it a daube, with tender beef in dark gravy; her faded once-red hair pulled back in a bun, her Sunday dress covered in a flowered apron, she hunched over the stove, stirring the gravy, redolent with onions and bay leaf.

That’s almost all I can remember, except that Louise, my older sister, told me there was a terrible fight because my Daddy said that Aunt Harriet was auditioning half the Airforce base in the guest room upstairs.

Mommy and Nana were angry with him. Aunt Harriet just laughed.

Nana said,We’re leaving. They all packed up with Aunt Harriet and took off for High Bridge in the Bronx where Mommy and Aunt Harriet had grown up and where Nana lived.

Louise said Mommy had to stay close to Nana and Aunt Harriet, so we followed. Daddy drove.

They all lived in a Brownstone at 1040 Nelson Avenue with Great Grandma Rosenow, while we found an apartment on Anderson Avenue nearby. Our apartment was at the top of Anderson Avenue that had a big, long hill.

One time there was a runaway car with no brakes, heading straight toward a place where all the children were playing at the bottom of the hill. Daddy chased the car, jumped on the running board and stopped the car so it didn’t hit anyone. All the neighbors came out and were saying, ‘Sweeney can run, That’s our last name, Sweeney." Daddy was brave.

When Great Grandma Rosenow died, Aunt Harriet married, took my grandmother with her again and moved to the suburbs of Westechester; we followed as before. By then my mother had slipped into a world of voices and hallucinations, my father was drinking and gambling, and we were sadder and poorer.

We lived on the edge of Yonkers, bordering on Fleetwood, with its spacious lawns and tree-lined streets that my mother had loved in Long Island. Aunt Harriet lived in Bronxville, a fashionable address, with her well-to-do- husband, her daughter, Pammy, and my grandmother. We rarely saw them.

My father called our apartment house on the Bronx River Road, The Annex. He meant it was the annex to Grasslands County Hospital where people who were mentally ill were taken for observation. He liked to say, there were many more in the building who qualified for admission. My mother was taken there in 1943.

I thought of our apartment house as a castle. There were battlements along the roof line, wide stone steps leading up to the entrance, a gargoyle that hung above us, and angel faces carved in stone on each side. I imagined that they were my twin sister, Jacqueline and me.

From the rooftop at 541 I day-dreamed that we looked over our fortress to Sherwood Forest, along the banks of the river where Robin Hood and his band of jolly men lived in Nottinhamshire. I liked to think that the gangs of boys who sometimes roamed through Sherwood Forest were actually descendents of Robin Hood’s men. But it was Sherwood Park, on the Bronx River, and the boys were just kids who lived in Westchester County, Yonkers.

The happiness that I felt when we moved to the Bronx, surfaced through the years that followed each time we moved. I would feel comfortable, usually with a person that made me feel I was home; I would believe it was permanent; then there was always a reason why we had to move again. We went from Long Island to the Bronx, to Westchester, to Upstate, to a foster home where we stayed for seven years.

Through all the years, despite the moments of happiness, my sisters and I were fearful of IT- THE BREAKDOWN: the game of Irish/German-English roulette. One roll of the genes and at least one of us would land in a mental ward like our mother before us.

Part I

541 Bronx River Road

Yonkers, New York

1941

"On the road to Mandaly where the flying fishes play

And the dawn comes up like thunder out of China

‘cross the bay."

Dawn is a spooky grey light that creeps up on the world. I thought dawn would be orange and would break through the night with a crash like the words my father sang in On the Road to Mandalay.

I can hear my father’s beautiful tenor voice holding the high notes, and see Mommy giving him that look when he sings that says, I love you. That was before everything changed.

This is dawn, I tell my twin sister, Jackie. I have to explain everything to her because I am twenty minutes older. We are five years old. It is December 7.

When we first woke up this morning, Jackie was in with me because she wet her bed again. It was still dark, but we were worried. We have no clean underwear because Mommy doesn’t wash clothes anymore and Jackie still goes in her pants. We have to hide the dirty ones so Mommy won’t punish her.

Mommy has bad headaches and has to lie down a lot. She doesn’t go out of the house or shop or bring wash down to the cellar or walk outside. She just washes germs away in our apartment, and stays in the bathroom with the water running.

This morning I cuddled Jackie so she got warm. I love to wrap my legs around hers and smell the sweet smell behind her ears. We whispered about what to do. I told her my plan.

We got up very quietly and pulled the panties out from behind the radiator where we hid them and then I got mommy's scissors so we could cut out the dirty parts and put them down the sewer. We stuck a wad of paper in the door so we wouldn’t be locked out, tiptoed through the lobby and out the front entrance. In the courtyard I pointed to the evergreens that brush against our bedroom window.

See Jackie, that’s what that scary sound is-just the trees, come see. But she held back until I took her hand and led her past the windows.

From the curb on the Bronx River Road I can see halos around the headlight of a car across the park on the Bronx River Parkway. A bird begins to sing. The icicle air tingles.

My hiney is cold, I say as I sit down on the curb.

Say` buttocks`, dear. Jackie imitates Mommy and her low, la-de-da voice.

I hate the word buttocks. Whenever someone says it, I feel as if I have been touched there. It is one of our forbidden words so I have to pay Jackie back. I begin to work up spit saying gamasha, goomisha, gahmasha goomisha until I have a mouthful and then I pin Jackie down and dribble on her. She rubs the spit away and makes a face.

Now you smell biddy. That’s what you get I tell her.

She just laughs and wriggles out from under me. Biddy smells like the ground in spring after a rain, or like limburger cheese, or what my fingers smell like after I put them down there.

Buttocks, BUTTOCKS, BUTT -OCKS, Jackie shouts and laughs her deep laugh. I cover her mouth. A light goes on in our dark apartment house.

Now see what you’ve done. Take the scissors and cut only the part that has poopies on it, I tell her. We push the dirty parts down between the grates of the sewer with a stick.

What if Mommy finds the other ones we hid? Jackie is about to cry.

She won’t do that again, I say as I smooth her face.

The grey light of dawn is a little lighter and birds are singing in Sherwood Forest across the road. It’s really Sherwood Park, but I like to think it is Robin Hood’s forest like the stories Mommy used to read to us from our Journeys Through Bookland when the words smelled like coffee and cigarettes.

Back in the apartment, Mommy’s door at the end of the long hall is shut where Mommy and Louise, who is almost eight, are still sleeping. Louise told me once she was Mommy’s guard dog. Daddy is on the cot in the dining room where he always sleeps. We snuggle back in my bed and fall asleep. Then I hear Mommy. She creeps in like the dawn.

You sick cat, she whispers. I reach for Jackie, but it’s too late. She has her.

Daddy, I try to yell but my voice won’t come out.

Don’t you interfere, do you hear me? My mother is pulling Jackie’s hair.

I hate you. I wish you were dead," I yell as I try to push her. My legs are shaking. Daddy pulls her away.

Helen, for Christ’s sake-she’s just a little girl- she can’t help it. My mother scratches at Daddy’s eyes.

Mr. Merritt upstairs in 2A pounds the floor and yells, Cut it out you Goddamn maniacs!

Then my mother strips the sheets from the bed. I smell the pee and the Chantilly perfume we gave her for her birthday. She is pouring it on the mattress. Jackie cries and holds her head.

Poppa is here, Eenie Daddy says to Jackie as he picks her up. He calls her Eenie because she is so little, and he calls me Bimsey because when we were small Jackie couldn’t say my name, Virginia. It came out Bimsey.

Daddy’s cot is still warm and has his sleep smell. I lie on the side where his heart is so I can hear it beat. It is Sunday so he can stay with us. On weekday mornings he catches the train from the Mount Vernon station to New York. He works at Socony-Vacuum Oil. He has to work every day and stay late a lot, but on Sundays he stays with us all day and night. Sometimes he sleeps across our doorsill in case Mommy gets up in the night.

Later in the morning Jackie and I lie on the rug in the living room and listen to the radio, our ears against the gold tapestry with the sound turned low. Sometimes Mayor La Guardia reads the funnies on the radio. Daddy reads the Sunday paper at the kitchen table and Louise reads in Mommy’s room. Mommy sits at the dining room table covered with newspapers, Daddy’s tax forms, grocery bills, tissues, knitting needles and yarn, cotton balls, bottles of colored nail polish, polish remover, and empty Gristede boxes. (Mommy can’t go out to shop anymore because it makes her too nervous; Gristedes delivers all our groceries. The delivery boy goes in the Super’s entrance and puts the boxes in the dumbwaiter.)

Mommy lifts her arms in the air and says, Don’t blind him. She is talking to someone only she can see.

I can see the breakfront with the pretty china that Mommy says is Ming China - a wedding gift from Daddy’s roommate at Yale, Doug Prizer. I like to touch the Lyre bird’s blue tail and run my finger around the gold rim. There are only ten plates left because she throws them when she gets mad.

Our rug smells like Energine dry-cleaning fluid. I love the smell. (I hid a can of Engergine and a rag in the corner of my closet so I can go in and smell it when I want to.). It smells like gasoline. Whenever we need to get gas we look for the red sign of Socony-Vacuum.

Daddy says, Look for the winged-Pegasus. Pegasus is a magic flying horse. Louise says Daddy learned all about Greek myths at Yale. Mommy tried to get the poopy smell out of the rug with Energine where Jackie had another accident. I scratch at the rug and smell my fingers.

Mommy isn’t watching me. She says I drive her crazy always sniffing at everything. If she sees me smelling things she will come after me, but I can reach the door to the lobby before she can get me. And anyway Daddy is home. I know I am bad when I smell things. She caught me once smelling the chair when Daddy got up. She said that was disgusting. She said I was a sick Mick.

Sometimes I have to smell my hands and clear my throat three times. Then Mommy talks out loud to Daddy’s father, Michael Francis Sweeney, who isn’t there:

Don’t talk to me about insanity in the family. Look at this little Mick. Don’t look down your nose at me, she says to Grandfather Sweeney; All of you, you're all shanty Irish. And your son’s fancy Yale degree can’t hide it.

Mommy says Grandfather Sweeney has cold clammy hands and a mouth like a cod –like your father, dear, a gaping Mick mouth and glasses. My sisters and I have never seen him. He was a famous high jumper. Once he jumped so high that he made the world’s record and he held it for seventeen years. Sometimes I try to jump the bushes in front of our apartment, but Daddy just laughs.

Daddy told Louise that on their wedding day, his father came to the Concourse Plaza Hotel where Daddy was waiting for his wedding to begin, and said,

Gerry, I left the car running. Get out of this before it’s too late.

Daddy said it was like a curse in a Greek myth. He tells Louise things like that because he says she is precocious-that means she’s older and she understands.

Mommy likes to tell me what their apartment looked like when they first married. The rug was not beige, dear, it was champagne. Everything was champagne- the rug, the slipcovers. The walls were buff. There were pale striped silk cushions on the Duncan Phyfe chairs in the dining room...Grammercy Park and very chic..touches of ecru. She moves her hands in the air as if she is conducting a choir. I imagine her and Daddy floating like bubbles in the champagne room, dancing together singing, Heaven, I'm in heaven.

WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM TO BRING

YOU AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE:

THE JAPANESE HAVE ATTACKED PEARL

HARBOR.

We turn up the radio and run to tell them. That’s nice dear, Daddy says. Mommy says, My God, Gerry, Cousin Eddy is there.

Cousin Eddy is the Captain of a submarine stationed in Pearl Harbor. Cousin Eddy’s parents are Cousin Helen, who was a Wegman, Mommy says, and Cousin Wiley Taylor who live up on Kimball Avenue, above us, in a pretty house like the one we had in Mineola, Long Island.

They used to come down and visit us, and Cousin Helen played classical music on our piano. Then I opened the door to the lobby so everyone in the apartment house could hear and think we were special people.

We stand around the radio. President Roosevelt is about to speak. Daddy holds my hand while Mommy puts her arm around Louise. Jackie holds on to Mommy’s skirt.

When der Fuhrer says he is the master race

We heil! (Bronx cheer) Heil! (Bronx cheer)

Right in der Fuhrer’s face.

Daddy sings as he goose-steps around the apartment with his finger under his nose, a pretend mustache, like Hitler. We follow with Jackie singing off-key on purpose. Louise marches too. Daddy teaches us how to give a Bronx cheer. You stick out your tongue and make a bad sound like a fart. Mommy says it’s rude, but laughs.

That night Daddy goes to a civil defense meeting where he is elected section leader. He comes home wearing an arm band. He is responsible for seeing that everyone in the apartment buys black-out shades and turns out lights in an air raid.

Douse those lights, he calls from the street the night of the first air raid. I pick out his tenor from all the other voices. When the sirens begin I peek out from behind the shades and watch the search lights crisscross the sky. I’m not afraid. It’s an exciting game.

A year goes by. It is 1942. Daddy and I sing songs about bluebirds and tomorrows and peace ever after. I love to imitate the singers on the radio and learn all the words. When the lights go on again, all over the world.

Jackie listens and hugs me. She tells me, Someday you’ll be a famous singer, and I’ll come to a nightclub and listen to you.

It’s different now since the war, and I want it to stay that way. Daddy doesn’t go to the bars because of warden meetings. We fall asleep because we know he won’t drink and come in late and there won’t be a fight between him and Mommy. The ladies in the apartment house ask Mommy to join the Red Cross to roll bandages with them.

The day of the first meeting, a cold rainy day in the spring, I worry all day at school about whether she will go. I’m afraid she will start talking again to someone who isn’t there. Jackie and I go straight from school to the recreation room in the basement. The clothes drying on the metal rods smell good like baked potatoes. Mommy looks normal like the other mothers only prettier and she rolls bandages faster than anyone. After the meeting she makes meat loaf and tinned peas for supper.

That was delicious Helen, dear. Daddy pushes back from the table and lights a cigarette.

More coffee darling? Mommy asks as she pats Daddy’s hand. I pray: Please God, let this be forever. Afterwards the three of us sit with Mommy on the couch while Daddy goes to his meeting.

Tell us again how you and Daddy met, Louise pleads.

Mommy takes a big puff on her cigarette. All right dear.

She looks down, and grinds out her cigarette, and gives us a quick sideways look. Her face is like a stranger’s as the other part of her tries to laugh at us. She doesn’t want to go with that other part, I can tell.

She laughs-I think I hear her say under her breath, little micks- and then she says, No. I tug at her hand. Mommy... She comes back.

She lights another cigarette. I was a secretary at Prudential where I met your father’s sister, Helen, who introduced us, his dear, Helen Ann. Her voice is mean.

Did you love him right away? I ask quickly, trying to keep her with us.

She holds her hand up to someone she thinks is near her. NOT NOW, she says. She puffs on her cigarette, and turns to Louise.

Your father was a charmer when I met him, dear. He was thin and handsome, still had his hair and his teeth, a wonderful dancer. Sometimes the other dancers would stop to watch us.

Louise says that Daddy always had bad teeth –she saw them in the pictures she found in the hope chest- and he was old when he had us, in his forties. Now he’s almost fifty and he has false teeth, and he’s bald.

And tell us about how you went to the Bijou Dream Theater, Louise says.

Louise found an old yellow picture of the Bijou Dream Theater in Mommy’s hope chest. Louise says it is a very important picture because Mommy keeps it in the hope chest. She is always telling us things like that to make us think she knows so much more than we do. I think she does know a secret about the theater. Maybe they fell in love at the Bijou Theater.

Daddy took me there on a Saturday night. Mommy stops smoking and looks out the window. I was wearing peau de soie and a little cloche...

That’s what Mommy wore on her wedding day". Louise and I look at each other. Louise knows.

No, I mean -- tell us about the movie. What did you see? We move close to touch her. It was the twenties, wasn’t it? Louise asks.

Oh my putzy, so curious, Mommy says. She pats Louise. She doesn’t answer, but she stays with us.

Louise knows all about movies. She will write movies and I will be a singer some day and I will sing in a movie like Virginia Mayo. Louise made up a skit about nurses who have to put on a show to entertain the soldiers, and I made up a song that we sing in a chorus line:

We’re angels of mercy, please con’t call us nursey

We play for the boys woo, woo. (Here, we turn around flip up our skirts and show them our hineys.)

Our bedroom is the hospital ward. We have to close the door because the enemy lines are nearby. Then we take turns playing the wounded soldier who has to be examined. We have to take off our underpants and get under the sheets and the nurse says. Turn over, soldier, I have to take your temperature.

We know all about taking temperatures and enemas because every morning Mommy asks, Have you had a b.m., dear? We answer, yes, and run before she takes down the enema bag.

One morning I ask if I can help with the war effort--she knits wool socks and sweaters for the soldiers overseas. She says, This is a skein, Virginia, can you say that? You are Mommy’s bright girl.

She shows me how to hold up the skein of wool while she winds the yarn off the skein into a ball. She forgets about the enema. I want to sit as long as she wants me to be her helper, but my arms are too tired. I can hardly hold them up. Just when Mommy is happy with me and loves me I can’t do it. It makes me cry. When I try to swallow I feel as if I have a sharp stick in my throat. Mommy feels my forehead. By afternoon my temperature is 105. I have a rash all over my body. The doctor says I have Scarlet Fever and our family has to be quarantined. Mommy says she can keep the quarantine.

Mommy moves Jackie in with Louise. She scrubs the room with ammonia. She scrubs the walls as far as she can reach, the sill and the molding around the door, and the door knobs on the inside and out; no one is allowed in. She changes my sheets every day and brings them down to the wash room in the cellar, and then because she is afraid to ride the elevator, she climbs the six flights up to the roof. She is REALLY afraid of heights and hangs the sheets in the air.

When we moved to the Bronx from Long Island so Mommy could be near Grandma, Daddy found a nice apartment on the fifth floor. Daddy had the walls painted the color she likes-sort of like the color of meringue. Mommy came in the apartment, took one look out the window and started screaming. She said we couldn’t stay there because it was too high up. We had to move to a dingy apartment on the ground floor. Daddy was mad.

The bed pan is kept under my bed. When she slides it under me I cry. It feels like ice. Then she empties the pan and cleans it with ammonia. She writes on a pad that she keeps on the dresser.

Did you write that I did poopies? I ask.

Don’t be vulgar, dear. Say ‘b.m.’ she says.

Then she pulls the shades and lies down beside me.

I wake up and she is watching me. She peeks at me from behind her hands and plays peek-a-boo with me the way she used to when I was little. I giggle. She laughs the way that I love that has a little squeal at the end. Her wedding ring slides off and she lets me put it on my finger. Her hands smell like ammonia. I measure our hands and she says I have her hands. She has freckles on her hands like Daddy.

Two times a day she gives me a sponge bath with warm soapy water. She slides a water proof sheet under me and keeps the part of me that isn’t being washed under a cotton blanket. She holds my head while I sip ginger ale.

This is the second week. Sometimes when I first wake up Mommy looks like a skeleton. Her eyes are deep in her head, and her forehead bulges. I can see a blue vein in her temple.

What is the very best thing you can remember? I say.

My mother’s red hair, she says.

The doctor says it is a miracle that no one else got it. I am all better. But I don’t want Mommy to go back to her own room with Louise. I want her to stay and take care of me.

When I go back to school, I find that our first grade class at P.S. 14 is part of the war effort too. After school Jackie and I pull a wagon around the neighborhood collecting scrap metal. They say they will use it to make guns. To fight the Nazis and the Japs.

But the best thing we do is plant victory gardens. One Friday morning in the spring, our teacher rolls in a cart filled with boxes of seeds in little packets. Every student gets a small box with five packets of seeds. That night Jackie and I count ours over and over. I love the bright red and green pictures on the front. I take them in the bathroom when I have to go. When my eyes get teary when I'm going, the print on the packet gets blurry. I imagine our garden coming up first, and how we will get a gold star by our names on the board.

There is an empty lot near our apartment house that the owners said the tenants in the apartment could use, so the next morning Daddy helps us plant the seeds. He wakes us up to the tune of Reveille.

You’re in the army now

You’re not behind a plow

You dig up a ditch

You never get rich

You’re in the army now.

Then he does a tap dance up and down the hall. You’re better than Jimmy Cagney, Daddy, Jackie says as she tries to catch him.

Ah, he says, I went to dance school with George Murphy. He does a shuffle-off to-Buffalo-step while we follow.

On our way to school each morning we kneel down to see if the seeds are sprouting. One day Jackie stays home sick, with a cold, but the real reason is because she still goes in her pants. Mommy won’t let her go to school with soiled panties and there are no more clean ones. I stop at the garden and I see neat lines of bright green seedlings like rows of cross stitches on a sampler. When I tell Mrs. Wilsie about the plants, she puts a gold star by my name on the board. I'm glad I’m the only one with a star and Jackie doesn’t get one.

It starts out to be one of my best days until recess when I’m climbing on the monkey bars and the boys underneath me yell they can see my hiney. The safety pin in my underpants has become undone. The boys are in a bunch looking up at me. Their voices get louder and echo in my head until I cry. I sit down on the bars and pull my dress under me and won’t come down. Mrs. Wilsie calls to the second grade teacher to take our class in, but the boys don’t listen.

Every one of you will march into the school this minute. Follow the second grade, she says in her meanest voice. Then they move.

Mrs. Wilsie comes under me and holds her arms out. It’s all right, Virginia.

Then she takes me to the school nurse who pulls the curtain around and asks me to take off my panties so she can mend them. I didn’t want her to see that they are dirty, or to see the safety pin that holds the seat together. She wrinkles her nose when I give them to her. I sit on the edge of the cot inside the curtain while she mends them. She washes her hands after she gives them back to me and asks me for my phone number.

Beveryly 7-7612.

Well, that’s a smart little girl. She seems surprised that I know my number. Now you go along back to your room.

That’s what I get for wishing for the gold star all for myself. I walk slowly so the sewing wouldn’t come out, and keep my head down when I walk into class. At lunch the nurse comes over to Mrs. Wilsie and whispers. I worry about what Mommy said to her on the phone, and then I got a stomach ache, so I ask the monitor permission to go to the lavatory.

When I walk by, I hear the Nurse say, Something has to be done but she stops talking when she sees me.

What does that mean? What has to be done? I feel as if everyone in the cafeteria knows what happened to me. I try to walk faster, but the light in the hallway leading to the lavatory seems as far away as the moon.

When I get home the apartment smells like Nair and Ammonia. Mommy cleaned up. Daddy’s cot is made, the dishes are done, and Jackie said Mommy gave her tea and honey for her cough. Mommy stays in the bathroom and never asks what happened at school. Maybe she cleaned up because the nurse called. I show Jackie the work for school while Louise makes us grilled cheese sandwiches for supper.

The next morning Mommy keeps Jackie home again. At school I think everyone is thinking about what happened the day before, so instead of going on the jungle gym I sit on the steps by myself. Mrs. Wilsie asks me if I want to jump rope. I say no, that I have another stomach ache. I watch Eleanor Arthur doing cartwheels and summersaults showing off her new plaid dress and her clean white underpants with the tight bands around the legs. I hate her because her apartment is like a real home with pretty rugs and a bed with a canopy and fluffy curtains