Screening Room (24 page)

In these last few years, Memphis has continued to remind me of Memphis. The Junior Cotillion Club, dating back to 1928 and composed of the older students at Miss Hutchinson’s School and St. Mary’s Episcopal School, had their Christmas holiday ball at the Peabody Hotel. More than a hundred well-mannered young women wearing white evening dresses and high heels were presented to Memphis society. The Memphis Symphony Orchestra has begun a series of surprising collaborations with contemporary musicians in unlikely venues. In one recent season, the orchestra trundled out to the Hi-Tone bar on Poplar Avenue and played an adapted Jimi Hendrix piece followed by Handel. In another, they performed at the New Daisy Theater on Beale Street with Memphis rap artist Al Kapone, who learned his harmonica from Blind Mississippi Morris. The Ku Klux Klan staged an uneventful rally downtown to protest the renaming of Confederate Park, Jefferson Davis Park, and Nathan Bedford Forrest Park. My cousin Michael Lightman was elected King of Carnival Memphis, as far as we know the first Jewish guy to hold that title.

On one visit, I sat across from Dad at our dining table and watched as he gobbled down a dinner of oysters Rockefeller, an old favorite created in the Creole swamps of New Orleans and
one that he first ate sixty-five years earlier when he was courting Mother. The dish consists of oysters on the half shell smothered in a banquet of spinach, butter, parmesan cheese, and buttered bread crumbs. Accompanied by rolls and butter and salad with blue cheese dressing—all urgently forbidden by Dad’s doctors. As he ate, he would look up at the little television he kept by the dining table. News stories with closed captions fled across the screen, faint glimpses of an outer world increasingly remote from the shrinking dot of his life. Food was one of the few pleasures remaining. Next to the table, his walker, and the swinging door to the kitchen left open, so that Hazel could more easily respond to emergencies. Like my dad, Hazel was an avid reader of the good crime writers—Elmore Leonard and John le Carré and Robert B. Parker—and they would swap paperback books.

“You’re enjoying yourself,” I wrote on the notepad.

“Yes I am,” he replied. After which he buttered another roll and bit into it, letting out a long growl of satisfaction. I showed him some family photos from a few years back. “I could hear in those days,” he said.

“Do you want a bath tonight?” Hazel wrote on his writing pad.

“No,” said Dad.

“You’ll need one tomorrow,” Hazel wrote on the pad. Then she erased and wrote, “You haven’t had a bath for three days.” My father nodded.

Later that night, as I sat reading in a room across from his bedroom, I heard him saying prayers. I had never known that he said prayers of any kind. I heard him ask God to watch over his family, and then he named a dozen of us.

In one of my letters to him during this period, I wrote:

In another letter, I wrote:

Dad never responded to these letters.

When he was not reading, Dad watched movies. In earlier years, he previewed all the new movies, but now he watched only the classics, with subtitles of course, mostly foreign—
Cinema Paradiso, Raise the Red Lantern, Jean de Florette, Das Boot, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The African Queen
. We sat in the den, where he had a cushiony, mechanized chair that could tilt forward to allow him an easy approach from his walker. On the table beside the chair, a pile of books. He would read for twenty minutes with the magnifying glass and light attached to his miracle chair, fall asleep for twenty minutes, then wake up and begin reading again, as if the universe had skipped a few eons and then quietly been sewn back together without anyone’s noticing. I could never tell whether, after a nap, he picked up from where he left off, and I developed a theory that he did not read linearly in a book but in scattered islands of text here and there—quite a feat with a crime thriller—and that he somehow formed a narrative partly based on the actual written words of
the book and partly based on the dreams in his naps. I suppose that he was preparing himself for eternity.

Between spurts of reading and naps, we would have fragments of conversations, he in his chair and wearing his chocolate-colored sheepskin slippers and me stretched out on the embroidered couch nearby. These communications were not easy, as I had to write short sentences on his writing pad. After so many years of not being able to talk to this quiet and gentle man, I finally knew what I wanted to say. But I could not say it, or write it. I wanted to apologize. For fifty years, I had sliced deeper his wounds. I had been a silent partner in his humiliation. I wanted forgiveness. But I could not say it. I was ashamed. I wanted also to say that his life had not been a failure. And that too I could not bring myself to say. What I said was: “I love you.” He couldn’t hear me. I wrote down the words on his notepad. “I love you.” He read the words. Then he nodded and smiled and reached up to kiss me. In a few days, I’d be gone again, drawn back into the cavern of my life in the North. I was not able to say what I wanted to say. Perhaps he understood anyway. Could that, in fact, have been the last act of the
phasma
? A being that knows neither evil nor good but simply joins lines of the world. A being that exists out of time and can see past, present, and future at once.

While it is true that we could not ponder our minute existence in space and in time without facing a life of paralysis, it is also true that the whirling of our globe through the vast rooms of space relieves us of certain responsibilities. What do we owe to a father or mother, to the soil of a place, to a moment in personal history, when an infinity of time preceded that moment, and an infinity afterward? Viewed from sufficient distance, we are dots. The long line of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, loyalties and betrayals, successes and failures, hauntings and rehauntings, are as one gasp of air. On the other hand, perhaps
the very fleetingness of that one gasp, before which lies an infinite cosmos of dumb bloodless matter and after which the same, bestows an extraordinary obligation, an imperative to make that second count, that flash of blood sing. As the planet of memory goes hurtling through space.

Here is the photograph of Papa Joe and my father on the front steps of the stone house in Nashville. Here is the photograph of M.A. and Celia, Dad, Edward, and Lila, somehow all sitting on the same bench of the grand piano. Here is the photograph of my father and mother on the boardwalk in Guardalavaca, he in his white swimsuit and barefoot, she in sandals. Here is a photograph of me and my three brothers playing shuffleboard at Ridgeway.

I have found, and I have lost. I have witnessed the glittering cornfields, the labyrinth of magnolias, the temples of childhood and kin. I have heard the wandering slow speech of the southern dominions. I have held the hot soil in my hands. I have smelled the sweet honeysuckle of memory. It is all fabulous and heart-wrenching and vanished in an instant.

Screening Room
owes some of its inspiration to Michael Ondaatje’s lyrical
Running in the Family
, a partly fictionalized account of his family history in Sri Lanka, and to Peter Taylor’s lovely novel
A Summons to Memphis
, about family life and manners in Memphis and the South.

The characters of Joseph Lightman, M.A. and Celia Lightman, Richard Lightman, Jeanne Garretson Lightman, their four sons, Blanche Lee, and Hattie Mae are based on real people of the same names. Stories relating to these characters are for the most part true but have been embroidered by the vagaries of memory and the impulse for drama. Other Lightman characters are loosely based on members of the Lightman and Levy families, with names changed in some cases; some are amalgamations of real people. Lennie and Nate are fictitious. The events surrounding Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King Jr., E. H. Crump, Lloyd T. Binford, and Sam Phillips are historically accurate, as are most of the places and events in Memphis. The biographical details of M.A. Lightman are accurate, including his many accomplishments and his election as president of the Motion Picture Owners Association of America, although the scene at the Willard Hotel in 1932 has been fictionalized. The role of Richard Lightman in the civil rights movement is historically accurate.

Many people contributed their stories and recollections, including my father, Richard; brothers John, Ronnie, and David; my aunt Jean Sands Lightman; my aunt Nell Levy; family friends Rosalie Rudner, Lenore Binswanger, Jocelyn Rudner, Nancy Bogatin, and Dot Roth. I thank Memphis historians and archivists Patricia LaPointe McFarland, Ed Frank, Gina Cordell, Sarah Frierson, and especially Wayne Dowdy. I thank the Special Collections department of the University of Memphis Libraries and the Memphis and Shelby County Room of the Memphis Public Library and Information Center. Special archives used included the Mississippi Valley Collection (stored at the University of Memphis) and the Sanitation Strike Archives (stored at the University of Memphis). I thank WKNO Television for making their
Memphis Memoirs
series available to me. Others who gave assistance include Rabbi Micah Greenstein, Richard Colton, and Bill Everett. I thank LaRose Coffey, Janet Silver, and Lucile Burt for critical comments on the manuscript. I also thank my brothers John and David and cousin Nancy Lightman Tashie for reading an early draft of the manuscript. I thank my wife, Jean Greenblatt Lightman, and daughters Elyse and Kara, not only for critical comments on the manuscript, but also for their moral support. Finally, I thank my late father, for graciously tolerating this upheaval late in his life.

Although facts and quotations are referenced in the following notes, in no way does
Screening Room
aim to be an exhaustive or authoritative history of Memphis.