Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

But I was absolutely bone-lazy: loathed learning my lines, hated acting exercises, refused to breathe from the diaphragm. And I had such a bad sense of direction that blocking was a nightmare. I could never remember where upstage was. The lights blinded me. I stepped on people’s feet and forgot my lines, and had such horrible stage fright that I threw up before every performance. More than once Hillary had to literally push me onstage from the wings. Anywhere else on earth, I would have been banned from school productions, or sent for extensive counseling to determine why I insisted on acting in the first place.

Finally, to save face, I announced to my family and friends that I was going to be a playwright; and to this end began carrying around a notebook and a copy of The Bald Soprano. At night, alone in my room, I’d sit in front of an old Underwood typewriter, a filched bottle of vodka under my desk, and write. Actually, what I really did was drink, and listen to the radio through my headphones. But the line about being a playwright worked. People stopped pestering me to try out for plays. For a little while, at least, I felt as though I fit in.

Because this was Kamensic, and Kamensic was theater. What the village had, and has, is actors. Real actors, Broadway actors as well as Hollywood royalty, from Tallulah Bankhead and the Lunts, D. W. Griffith and DeVayne Smith, to lesser-known survivors like Theda Austin and the Wellers. Later there would be aging rock stars and hosts of twilight television (Cap’n Jack and Officer Hap and Gore DeVal), as well as retired icons from King of the Hillbillies and Tales from the Bar Sinister.

This last was where my father made his living, as the eponymous watering hole’s cadaverous yet elegant bartender, Uncle Cosmo, affectionately known as Unk. Tales from the Bar Sinister was fabulously popular on network TV in the early 1970s and had a long and happy half-life in syndication. My father couldn’t go out for groceries without being recognized, and everyone from waiters at the Muscanth Restaurant to kids on 125th Street called him Unk. Years later, when the show was picked up by Nickelodeon, Unk became a genuine pop icon. Recalled fondly by his original fans, embraced by a new generation who loved his moldy tuxedo, his garish Cryptkeeper makeup, and Peter Lorre voice. Our magazine even ran a cover: (H)UNK! it read, beneath his kindly crepuscular face.

Back then, and like everyone else in Kamensic, I took it all for granted. My father with his horror-show garb, mother with her daytime Emmys and TV Guide Reader’s Choice Awards. In Kamensic, Unk was spoken of as respectfully as Hume Cronyn or Jason Robards. At the annual village Christmas party my mother’s reading of “A Christmas Memory” reduced everyone to tears.

“Your mother.” Hillary shook his head, staring at my mother’s slender figure perched on a stool at the front of the Town Hall, surrounded by banks of sweet-smelling pine boughs and clumps of ghostly white mistletoe. “In the old days they would’ve burned her at the stake.”

“Along with your mother.”

“Yeah.” Hillary slumped down into his seat. “Actually, they probably would’ve burned the whole fucking town. ”

If Kamensic was a strange place to grow up, I never knew it. My mother worked outside the home before most women did, but then so did everyone else’s mom, acting or dancing or singing or designing costumes. I was lucky enough to be raised by my father rather than a housekeeper or nanny. Except for the three years when Bar Sinister was being shot in California, it was Unk who got up with me every morning, Unk who made my brown bag lunches and waited for me at the bus stop, Unk who met me each afternoon. My mother of course was in the city, taping Perilous Lives. My earliest memories are of waking at four A.M., lying in bed, and hearing her pad softly about our rambling house as she gathered her makeup bags and fashion magazines, and the more purposeful sound of my father in the kitchen, making her breakfast. Smells of coffee and scrambled eggs floating up through the chilly dark house; then the huffing of our Volkswagen squareback as my father drove my mother to the station, so that she could catch the first train to the city and make a six-thirty call.

My mother’s married name was Audrina Moylan. As a girl in London she had played all the Shakespearean ingenues, Ophelia, Cordelia, Rosalind; but it was as Audrey Gold that she created the role she inhabited for forty-some years, that of Livia Prentiss on Perilous Lives. Livia was raven-haired and raven-hearted; a suburban Medea in Bob Mackie gowns who seduced, poisoned, throttled, baited, stalked, and reproached her television clan for sixty minutes a day five days a week. Livia’s children were numerous and quarrelsome as those dragon’s-teeth sown by Cadmus, and Livia herself was something of a hydra, impossible to kill, prone to ridiculously unbelievable recoveries: from cancer, coma, drowning, childbirth. The character of Livia was equally immortal, but my mother had shed her Shakespearean aspirations with as little thought as a snake sheds its skin. She reveled in Livia, collected her Emmys and displayed them proudly in the living room beside infant photographs of her only daughter and a silver-framed picture of my father and Axel Kern at the Oscar ceremonies, the year Kern won for directing Die by Night. My mother loved her daily treks to the city, thrived on them; and while she claimed to love Kamensic, she is the one person who always seemed immune to its disquieting charm.

I grew up in Kamensic; everyone I knew grew up in Kamensic. Our parents worked in the city, as actors or directors or designers or dancers; but I had seldom been to the city alone, without my parents. Our houses were very old—those fieldstone fortresses left by the Dutch patroons, a few colonial farms left unburned by Warrenton’s raid—or else they were aggressively new, futurist machines designed by Vuko Taskovich or Michael Graves, the approximate shape and color of battleships. My family lived in one of the colonials, set within a broad swathe of lawn in that part of town known as The Hamlet. This was where the Constance Charterbury Library was, and Schelling’s Market. On Sundays we had brunch with our parents’ agents at the Village Inn. When my father was rehearsing for the Avalon Shakespeare season, groceries were delivered via bicycle from Schelling’s. Every year at my birthday party, my father would make a surprise entrance as Unk, which would send my guests into gleeful fits and me into an absolute rigor of embarrassment.

Still, while having Uncle Cosmo as a parent was mortifying, a lot of my friends had it worse. Duncan Forrester’s father had remarried a famous feminist sculptor who filled their rose garden with enormous bronze castings of her vulva. Linette Davis’s mother, Aurora Dawn, had been a model and actress in the Warhol Factory who was famous now for drunk driving. Sport and Jacey Finn had six sons with golden hair and emerald eyes, all addicted to heroin. In a lot of ways Kamensic seemed like a throwback to medieval times, a walled fortress with a high child-mortality rate. There were not many children in Kamensic, certainly not as many as in the neighboring towns of Goldens Bridge and Mahopac and Pawkotan. Children were at once cherished and expendable; families were large, so that even if one or two of the older kids were lost to drugs or madness or the Ivy League, the younger ones could always be found hanging out in front of the library, or fidgeting in the back of the Congo Church during benefit performances of new works by Beckett or John Guare. The Vietnam War swept by us like an Angel of Death distracted by other things: there were enough Kamensic boys of age to fight, but somehow no one was ever drafted. Our parents were unilaterally against the war, the town was against the war; and that seemed to be enough to protect us.