Free I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir by Lee Grant Page B

from the book, all the while blowing my nose into a clean hankie, not moving from my bed.
    “Mabel.” The sound of vacuuming in the hall outside my bedroom. “Mabel,” I called, louder. The vacuum stopped. I was impatient. What I’d read was so amazingly appropriate. Young Mabel, not much older than I, opened the door. She was small, black, with one almost-closed puffy black eye. I read her a section from the book about the lack of living wages for working people and looked up to see her reaction. Blank.
    Underneath, spoiled Lyova felt helpless. I couldn’t say, “Don’t go back to the guy who’s been beating you up. Save yourself.” I felt as helpless as I had been watching a man stalk a woman on Broadway, or when Mrs. Cherry hit Foster’s open palms with her ruler.
    •   •   •
    F remo had not one wrinkle on her face. She took my mother’s dictum, “Don’t frown, you’ll get wrinkles,” as an instruction to eliminate any movement of her face. Her limpid blue eyes were merry but wide, always. Her scarlet lips made a V for a smile, but never widened into a grin, so wrinkles never formed around her eyes or mouth. Her irrepressible laugh shot through the top of her head in a loud shriek—“Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!”
    Try to laugh without moving your mouth; you’ll see what I mean.
    My mother and aunt were merry together, walking with their long legs, pushing me in front of them to instruct me to walk like they did, one foot in front of the other, or gossiping at the dinner table, my mother with expulsions of laughter, pink-faced and moist-eyed, Fremo hooting, genteelly, both squealing at times, so overcome by this and that.
    They would be overcome with laughter at my taste in gifts for them, purchased at some specialty store on Broadway. “Darling, that’s hideous!” holding up a blouse I’d given them, as if
hideous
meant
gorgeous
. “Lovey,” they’d twinkle, holding the garment up to them, “this is hideous!” Peals of laughter, sisters as close as twins.
    For all I was learning I was still my mother’s daughter and Fremo’s niece. Fremo had her ice skates slung over her shoulders. It was a warm June day, but she had taken up ice-skating. She was humming the Vienna Waltz as we waited for the elevator with my mother. From the seventh floor down she chirped out the Vienna Waltz to herself, unmindful of the five other occupants of the elevator. She didn’t care.
    On the subway we sat together, I between my aunt and my mother. Suddenly the train stopped between stations. There was that eerie quiet that follows when the brakes stop squeaking. A man standing over us hung on to a strap.
    “Witia,” Fremo said in her high, loud, rich-lady voice. “Doesn’t that man look just like Hitler?”
    The man reddened; people opposite craned their necks to look at him.
    “Yes, yes he does,” my mother called out calmly, like a loud, well-bred bird. “He certainly looks a lot like Hitler.”
    The man at the center of all the attention, now thoroughly traumatized, looked for a way to get away. When the train started up again, he moved as fast as he could away from my mother and Fremo.
    •   •   •
    I n 1949, I was hired as understudy to the ingenue lead in an Irish play. My daytime rehearsals and nighttime check-in were all geared to the Theater District, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, Shubert Alley. Gene Lyons and I understudied the leads. We delighted in each other. Love lite. He was elegant, charming, funny and, yes, Irish.
    I wanted to move in with him, so my parents promptly left our wonderful spacious apartment on Riverside Drive, where I grew up, and moved the family to a small apartment on 52nd and Eighth Avenue near the Theater District, so I would have no excuse and not have to travel uptown to 148th Street. They would not let me get an apartment of my own. They would rather move to a grungy building. Above us, Betty Bruce, a singing star on Broadway, lived with her mother. Her two