Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [60]
The following day, Louise and Johnny called on Miss Winston. “As I rang the doorbell and waited for someone to appear, my heart thumped against my ribs, my hands were clammy, and I felt the same quivering in the pit of my stomach that I always felt on an opening night. In a moment, I would be able to talk to someone who, not in the vernacular, but in reality, knew all the answers. All the questions I had been carrying around for so long, I thought in a moment were to be exchanged for facts. How will he talk? When will he talk? How will his voice compare with ours? Will he be able to carry on a conversation? Now I would know. It was almost like meeting God.”
Matie Winston was a cheerful, forthright woman in her mid-forties, enthusiastic and knowledgeable. She asked all the basic questions and wanted to know what Louise and her husband were doing for their son. She listened intently as Louise told her, in as much detail as she could muster. Then she said, “Fine, as far as it goes, but you ought to do more. He is old enough to start sense training.” She meant differences and likenesses—colors to start. She suggested blocks of two different colors, separating them by color, letting him do it, making a game out of it. Then, once he caught on, adding more colors to the pile. It sounded too simple. “I craved something hard,” Louise said. When Spence left for New York, she continued working with the blocks, and by the time she left to join him in Buffalo, Johnny was walking unaided, finally mustering the courage—and the balance—to try it alone.
It was exciting for Spence and Louise to be back in New York, especially at a time when neither one of them had to look for work. They could see old friends, shop, and take in an occasional show. After the first night, ticket sales were respectable, if not spectacular, and although Yellow was not a genuine hit, there was enough demand to keep it running awhile—which meant Louise had to find an apartment. “Eventually we went to a small ‘family’ hotel in the West Seventies, and, with the permission of the management, my well-worn electric stove of pre-marriage date—the same which more than once had put out the hotel lights in Detroit and points west—came out of the bottom drawer of my trunk and went on duty in the bathroom.”
Johnny arrived the last of September, his grandparents taking a temporary apartment not far from the hotel. Father Tracy had been ill and, prior to coming east, had resigned his position as president and treasurer of the Frankenberg Refrigerating Machinery Company. “I think he knew he might not be here long,” Louise said, “and he wanted to spend as much of the time as possible near his namesake.”
Spence’s relationship with Johnny had always been tentative, conflicted, but the boy and his grandfather were utterly devoted to one another and their example seemed to ease his burden. “I saw Spencer with Johnny when I visited their apartment,” Ethel Remey said, “and he was very affectionate and tender with the little boy. And very relaxed.” Tracy, however, always clung to the notion that Johnny’s condition could somehow be fixed, and that he could not truly bond with his son until he had undone the horrible thing he had wrought. “He was very disturbed one minute,” said Louise, “the next minute he was reassuring me that everything was going to be fine. I was the one who could do it. But I didn’t know enough. And he didn’t know how to talk to John. He did antics, he put on makeup, all sorts of silly things. He loved to show off what John could do, but he couldn’t get down to the brass tacks of what the learning problem was.”
Tracy didn’t tell many people about Johnny’s deafness, and Pat O’Brien found out only when he could no longer hold it in. “I think,” said Pat, “he was like any father, you know? You’re trying to solve a problem and you want to blame yourself for it. And I imagine Spence probably blamed himself for John’s trouble.” O’Brien was in Henry—Behave at the Nora Bayes at the same time Tracy was appearing in Yellow. “We’d meet