Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [5]
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SOME OF MY EARLIEST and best memories of childhood are of Ermi and of moonlight cascading through the window of my bedroom late at night. I was three or four when Ermi came to live with us in Omaha as my governess, and I see her as vividly now as I did then; she was eighteen years old, slightly crosseyed and had fine, silky dark hair. She was Danish, but a touch of Indonesian blood gave her skin a slightly dusky, smoky patina. Her laugh I will always remember. When she entered a room, I knew it without seeing or hearing her because she had a fragrant breath that was extraordinary. I don’t know its chemical composition but her breath was sweet, like crushed and slightly fermented fruit. During the day, we played constantly. At night, we slept together. She was nude, and so was I, and it was a lovely experience. She was a deep sleeper, and I can visualize her now lying in our bed while the moonlight burst through my window and illuminated her skin with a soft, magical amber glow. I sat there looking at her body and fondling her breasts, and arranged myself on her and crawled over her. She was all mine; she belonged to me and to me alone. Had she known of my blinding worship of her, we would have married on the pinnacle of Magellan’s cloud and then, bejeweled in our love, I would have taken her in my chariot made of flawless diamonds beyond the stars, beyond time, and farther than light to eternity.
Ermi had a boyfriend named Wally. When I was seven, I was playing by myself near a stream when I saw them kissing in a car. I was mystified, but had no idea of the disaster that this event foreshadowed. When Ermi left me not long after that to get married—not to Wally, but to a boy named Eric—I was devastated. She never told me she was going to leave or to be married. She merely said one day that she was leaving on a trip and would return soon. (In fact, she did return—twenty years later.)
The night I realized Ermi was gone forever, I looked up and saw a buttermilk sky. There was a full moon behind the clouds and as it seemed to skip overhead across the saffron universe, I felt my dreams die. It had been weeks since she had gone. I’d waited and waited for her. But I finally knew that she wasn’t coming back. I felt abandoned. My mother had long ago deserted me for her bottle; now Ermi was gone, too. That’s why in life I would always find women who were going to desert me; I had to repeat the process. From that day forward, I became estranged from this world.
When I was six years old, we moved from Omaha to Evanston, Illinois, near Chicago, where my father established his own company, the Calcium Carbonate Corporation. I think I was probably ready for a change.
At Field Elementary School in Omaha, I’d been the only one in my class to flunk kindergarten; I don’t remember why. Perhaps it was because I was starting to resist authority. All I remember about kindergarten was that I was the bad boy of the class and had to sit under the teacher’s desk, where my primary activity was staring up her dress. I must have had dyslexia, although there wasn’t a name for it then. Even now I often have to work carefully with words and numbers, one at a time, one sentence at a time, especially if I feel under stress, and I still can’t dial a telephone correctly if I look at the numbers; I have to dial without looking at the keyboard as if I were touch-typing.
My mother’s drinking got worse in Evanston. Sometimes alcohol sent her into a crying jag, but initially it usually made her happy, giddy and full of mirth, and she might sit down at the piano and sing to herself, and we often joined in. But she was seldom home. With Ermi gone, I was alone a lot, and it was shortly after this that I found myself behaving in odd ways. I was failing in school, I was truant, I became a vandal and trashed houses that were being renovated; I shot birds, burned insects, slashed tires and stole money. At the same time I began finding myself not wanting to go home, and spent most of my time at the house of Jimmy Ferguson, a classmate and longtime friend,