Screening Room Read Free Page B

a mild warning and never pressed her to disclose the identities of the other students involved. The entire affair, including its precarious conclusion, earned my mother everlasting fame with her sorority sisters at Alpha Epsilon Phi.
    One of Mother’s male devotees, a young man named Robert Rigolot, did finally manage to get himself secretly engaged to her. No one can remember whether Robert had once served in the military and received an honorable discharge, or had been disqualified from service for some reason. At any rate, he seemed to be at large in New Orleans on a regular basis. My mother would not oblige her fiancé with a wedding date, so he took to sitting out all day on the front porch of her sorority house in a love-struck vigil, refusing to shave or change his clothes, likethe prison master’s son in Dickens’s
Little Dorrit
. The sisters of AEPhi thought this conduct terribly appealing and offered their telephone numbers to Robert. But he would have no one except my mother and pleaded with her through the screened porch window to come out. My mother, meanwhile, would exit through the back door of the building to the waiting cars of other paramours.
    After a week or two, Robert’s parents, who descended from one of New Orleans’ oldest and most prominent families, began receiving rumors that their son was making a fool of himself over a young woman, and a Jewish one at that. Apparently, Robert’s father drove up to the sorority house in his Bentley, rolled down his window, and began gesturing wildly to his son. Robert did not even look up from his sitting position, determined to endure any amount of suffering in the name of love. At this point, Mother appeared in person on the porch and did something that was to serve her in good stead in many awkward moments in the future. She fainted. Both Rigolot Senior and Rigolot Junior were perplexed at this behavior and promptly departed. A week later, my mother received a polite note from Robert breaking off the engagement.
    A month after the “gigoloed Rigolot” incident, as the AEPhi girls began calling it, my mother first met my father. It was late 1945, the year that
The Lost Weekend
, starring Ray Milland, won four Academy Awards. The introduction of my parents occurred through the good graces of Lennie, a fellow student at Newcomb and my father’s first cousin. Evidently, Mother was a shrinking violet compared to Lennie. On the first Saturday of each month, Lennie was whisked away by a black limousine and taken for the weekend to Baton Rouge, where she sang in unnamed nightclubs and returned with incredible stories of ten-dollar bills usedfor napkins and drunk white women slow dancing with colored men for twenty-four hours straight.
    During this period, late in the war, my father was in the navy, fighting the Germans in the Mediterranean. His own father, M.A., had never served. I’ve always wondered whether this slight moral advantage over the king gave my father some comfort. Or whether he took any pleasure in the handsome photographs of himself in his uniform. My father was slight of build, with delicate features, dreamy eyes, and a resemblance to the actor Ralph Fiennes. But he would never have expressed such comforts or pleasures even if he had felt them.
    Soon after the war ended, Dad received a call from Lennie saying he should drive down to New Orleans immediately and meet some of the AEPhi women. “These are
nice
girls, Dickie. And Jewish.”
    My father’s first date with my mother, as Lennie recalls, took place at the Roosevelt Hotel. To avoid mishaps, Lennie accompanied the couple, dragging along one of her boyfriends—“somebody already bald at age thirty, but my gawd he had beautiful eyes.” Lennie drove, in her lime-green 1939 Pontiac Arrow sedan given to her by a man of her past. In fact, Lennie had attempted to introduce my parents earlier that afternoon and coaxed my father into stopping by Alpha Epsilon Phi. As it happened, my mother