Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [2]
ROBERT LINDSEY
1
AS I STUMBLE BACK across the years of my life trying to recall what it was about, I find that nothing is really clear. I suppose the first memory I have was when I was too young to remember how young I was. I opened my eyes, looked around in the mouse-colored light and realized that Ermi was still asleep, so I dressed myself as best I could and went down the stairs, left foot first on each step. I had to scuff my way to the porch because I couldn’t buckle my sandals. I sat on the one step in the sun at the dead end of Thirty-second Street and waited. It must have been spring because the big tree in front of the house was shedding pods with two wings like a dragonfly. On days when there wasn’t any wind, they would spin around in the air as they drifted softly to the ground.
I watched them float all the way down, sitting with my neck craned back until my mouth opened and holding out my hand just in case, but they never landed on it. When one hit the ground I’d look up again, my eyes darting, waiting for the next magical event, the sun warming the yellow hairs on my head.
Waiting like that for the next magic was as good a moment as any other that I can remember in the last sixty-five years.
• • •
As I sit at home now, winnowing the remembrances, they often come across my mind as unrelated images and feelings with smoky edges. I remember the sweet aroma of fresh-cut hay, the fragrance of burning leaves and the redolence of leaf dust as I scuffed through them. I remember the fragrance of the lilies of the valley in the garden where I often slept on the hot afternoons in Omaha, and I suppose the fragrance will always be with me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the smell of lilacs or wild roses or the almost chic appearance of the trees in our neighborhood dressed in the silver lamé of a spring ice storm. Or the unforgettable sound that grates on me even today, the squeak of midwestern snow beneath my boots when the temperature was fifteen below. Nor can I forget the smoky fragrance of toast and burning bacon with grits and eggs that drifted up the stairwell of our house on Sunday mornings.
We had an old-fashioned cast-iron wood-burning stove that always embarrassed me. It was a wonderful stove, but in those days I was ashamed of it because it made me feel that we were poor. If I ever invited friends over and we passed through the kitchen, I tried to engage them and lock their eyes on me so they wouldn’t notice the stove.
When my mother drank, her breath had a sweetness that I lack the vocabulary to describe. It was a strange marriage, the sweetness of her breath and my hatred of her drinking. She was always sipping surreptitiously from her bottle of Empirin, which she called “my change-of-life medicine.” It was usually filled with gin. As I got older, occasionally I would find myself with a woman whose breath had that sweetness that still defies description. I was always sexually aroused by the smell. As much as I hated it, it had an undeniable allure for me.
As her drinking increased, it became more and more difficult for my mother to disguise the fact that she was simply an off-the-shelf drunk. The anguish that her drinking produced was that she preferred getting drunk to caring for us.
My mother was always unconventional. Sometimes when it rained, she wore a shopping bag over her head with a little visor she had torn at the corners; it looked absurd, but she thought it was funny. I was embarrassed by it, though if she did it today, I’d be gasping with laughter.
The memories of those times drift in and out of my mind like the hoboes who used to come and go near the railroad tracks not far from our house. It is surprising that those remembrances visit my mind and that most of the time, pain and shame are mercifully absent.
I have been told that I was born one hour before midnight, April 3, 1924, in the Omaha Maternity