Free Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir by Joel Grey Page B

she came this time the top was up. “I can’t any … more,” she told me, her eyes red from crying. “He’s started bringing guys home, strangers and … I just can’t.” While we were sitting in the car, Linda explained to me how she had told her parents everything; they wanted to get her an annulment and drive Paul out of town. I realized her position was not unlike mine. Having someone you love so much quickly become someone else is terrifying.
    But then, behind the wheel of her Oldsmobile, Linda told me something that took my breath away. Her lawyer, who was acting quickly, spoke about naming me as a co-respondent. Hearing this was perhaps the most frightening moment of my life. My heart didn’t just sink; it plummeted. It was a problem I was not only far too young to handle, it was also something without precedent, something I couldn’t have imagined in my worst nightmares. One thing I knew for certain: My life was over. But the worst part was that I was going to take my family down with me. A story so sordid and sensational would surely be picked up by the press, and then the whole town would know that Mickey Katz, a rising and beloved star in the music scene, had raised a lowlife deviant. Everything Dad had worked so hard for, down the drain because of me. The Sisters had been right after all: I was bad.
    Telling my parents was the last thing I wanted to do, but having them learn it in the press would have been even worse. After Linda dropped me off, I walked into the house and found Mom doing dishes and Dad practicing. I asked them to come into the living room—I needed to talk to them. By this time I was crying. I was in terrible trouble. I told them the truth about Paul and me, the night with Linda, and now the annulment.
    The look that swept across my parents’ faces solidified my guilt into a giant mass pressing down upon my chest, making it hard for me to breathe. The three of us stood there for what seemed forever, stunned by the scope of all of it—this unthinkable, unimaginable nightmare that nevertheless we all were beginning to process as truth. Finally, my dad turned to look at my mom, then at me. But Mother’s eyes never strayed; they bore into me with cold contempt as I wept. I reached out for her, sobbing, “I’m sorry,” but she drew back.
    “Don’t ever touch me again,” she said. “You disgust me.”
    She had hurt me many ways and many times before, but nothing she had ever done or said had even come close to this.
    Once my father and I were alone, he put his arm around me without hesitation.
    “Let’s go for a ride, sonny,” he said.
    After driving around in silence for what seemed like a lifetime, Dad and I both staring straight ahead, he said, “She doesn’t mean it. She’s your mother, she loves you, I know she loves you.” But I knew in that moment life for my mother and I had been forever altered.
    The affair fortunately never became public, and I didn’t have to testify. Linda got her annulment and moved on with her life, and Paul disappeared off the face of the Earth. Although I was still living in the same house, going to the same school, wearing the same clothes, my life was changed. My mother had shown me her last act of coldness, and I vowed never to need her again. I had to let her go.
    Having been betrayed by Paul and my mother, two adults I loved very much, I wondered who I could trust. The answer was clear: only me. My mother turned away from me—literally running away—when I needed her most. Now I needed to take care of myself.

I didn’t want the audience to think I got the job just ’cause I was the boss’s kid.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    Dressed in a ten-gallon hat, woolly chaps, and a borscht-colored cowboy shirt with BAR MITZVAH RANCH emblazoned across it, my father did his best imitation of an Arkansas hog caller by way of Chelm. Audience members clapped to the frenetic klezmer tune and laughed to the point of tears as Dad performed his hit “Yiddish