The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [63]
The programs were done live, and I don’t recall much about our performance, except that the producer had sternly warned us not to wipe our brows or scratch our noses under the hot lights. I do have memories of our rehearsals, of being in awe of the studio itself, the stage with its vast contraptions—banks of lights, pulleys, and sandbags, one of which fell, loudly and spectacularly, onto the floor where the stage crew had recently been standing. “They could have been killed instantly,” someone said, and I had a new, terrifying concept to contend with.
I was also in awe of another new phrase, “stage mother,” and the forceful, incarnational way that it had became a part of my vocabulary. My own mother was at home with a new baby, but the mother of my singing partner took up the slack, fussing furiously over my tendency to leave my sashes untied and my sock cuffs unrolled. Mostly she fussed at the producer and my father, making sure they fully appreciated her daughter’s talent, and which side “favored her,” another new concept for me. I had never met a mother like her and was appalled at the way her daughter caved in to her bullying. I tried to engage the girl in mild acts of rebellion, but to no avail.
I came to associate Chicago, the Loop especially, with new words and phrases: “child star” was another that came my way. I was fascinated by the Mouseketeers—the idea of a tribe of children appealed to me—and when my father took me into the city for what he promised would be a big surprise, it turned out to be the Mouseketeer Doreen signing copies of a book. I had a special affinity for Doreen—we both had buck teeth and braids—but the experience of meeting her disturbed me. She looked exhausted, her face greasy with makeup, her hands dirty. The signature on the book had been made with a rubber stamp. I mumbled something to her and she mumbled something in return, and then I took my book from the stack and pretended for my dad’s sake that all of this had been wonderful. But I must have looked disappointed, because he began to explain to me what being a “child star” could mean.
My father’s forays into the entertainment world supplied other startling words and concepts: “He’d sell his own mother down the river” was a comment he made about one star who’d been a guest on the television show, allowing me to ponder iniquity at a whole new level. My favorite of the new phrases was “killing time,” which is what my father said we could do every time we missed the train back to Waukegan. The violence of the phrase puzzled me, but not for long, as “killing time” turned out to mean that we went to movies, concerts, the Art Institute, the Field Museum, Kroch & Brentano’s bookstore, and the Marshall Fields department store, where one year my mother trusted us to pick out a new winter coat for me. We lunched in restaurants that seemed elegant to me, but were probably not.
I especially loved the sense that I had crossed over into the adult world. One of the places I felt this most keenly was the shop where my father took his cello for repairs; on a second story, its Old-World smell of resin and wood contrasted sharply, and most pleasantly, with the busy streets below. Time seemed to move more slowly there, and I always hated to leave.
One year, when I was six or seven, my father took my brother and me to the Loop for Christmas shopping. We’d saved our allowance money to buy presents, but on reflection, my dad must have subsidized those gifts for our mother, little sisters, cousins,