and by the time she was nineteen she’d had three gold medals for violin state champion and four abortions, her life having finally, I suppose, proven that you can’t go around being an L.A. woman and expect society not to notice when your bowing begins to sound a little off – not screechy, naturally but, well, she simply wasn’t gold medal material finally, and they gave her a silver one, second prize. My father got the gold one. Even though Lola insists that my father’s tone was then and always has been enough to make you leave the room.
“Mort,” she says to my father, the minute he tries to play anything in front of her for as long as I can remember, “for God’s sake! Not more Bach!”
And he looks around like a cat does when it pretends it wasn’t doing what it just did that you caught it at, and was really licking its foot, or wondering if it were going to rain.
Lola and my father never saw anything in each other. My father would never have liked any woman crazier than my mother. And as for Lola – looking at a particularly outstanding old photograph of her standing beside this six-foot-tall extra who looked like a Hindu (as he was billed in his mystic-prince capacity for those who wanted a “reading”), both Lola and he wearing this rattan shadow falling across what would have otherwise shown them to be as naked as you thought – Mort was simply too square.
From the beginning, from the time she was standing outside that mountain cabin and she was wearing her Cleopatra haircut which she wore all her life, turning it oranger and oranger with henna as time went on until today Colette would have tripped if she saw her, Lola’s preferences weren’t socially bogged down. And a trust fund kept her from letting what she wanted get in the way of wolves at the door, for wolves never threatened her door and she never had to turn to the idea of respectability just to tide herself over for a decade or two until she could figure out how to indulge her flagrant tastes for the out-of-the-question. Or for men who, English mothers have always told their daughters, simply “won’t do.”
Even she, Lola’s mother, didn’t seem to get overburdened by the problem of men who “didn’t do,” once her only husband’s brisk demise allowed her to pack up and leave for L.A.
“Nobody ever knew why Hein was such a rebel,” Lola said. “The family wanted her to take the three of us home to Berlin and be brought up with the better things. Minneapolis, anything in America, was Greek to them. And when she came out West, they sent this friend of the family, this doctor called Frederik, to marry her and take her back.”
A photograph of Lola’s mother, Hein, looking like a battle-ax from the Queen Victoria understanding of the word, dressed in a Red Cross Volunteer Aide’s outfit with some kinds of medals attached to her jacket, which meant she was a general or something gruesome like that, her hair hidden behind a nurse’s nun-type headdress, her overbearing bosom completely making Lola’s and mine both pretty much as hers was, except that we weren’t battle-axes, forcing your eyes to look elsewhere from obviousness.
Beside her stood Frederik, a delicate Berliner Jewish intellectual who found himself spending the rest of his life in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. (for the first few years) and then, in a house nearer Hein in Hollywood, wooing her as best he could into whatever it was they did.
“They used to give musicales,” Lola told me. “They’d invite the whole Berliner community over on Sundays and she would play the cello and he would play the oboe—”
“The oboe!” I cried.
“That’s right.” Lola shook her head.
(As anyone with a knowledge of orchestra instruments knows, playing the oboe for longer than two years makes you go insane.)
One time the musicale was a special fundraiser – though since Lola was nineteen at the time and it was 1930, what the worthy cause would have been even Lola can’t remember (usually it was Flanders Field-type orphans her mother leaned toward). This particular night Lola had to get all dressed up in a taffeta and net powder-blue formal which came down to her feet and stockings, a garter belt, the works.
“And I was to play Mendelssohn’s violin concerto – my first really Berlin debut,” Lola remembered. “Only even though I could play it fine in public in front of judges – playing in front of all those women, they all looked like her, you know, Hein – and all those men who looked like Frederik, so sensitive and delicate – I just stood there. I couldn’t remember one note. And they just sat there, politely. And I just stood there. God.”
“How long did you stand there?”
“Five minutes,” she sighed.
“Oh, Lola, come on, not five whole minutes. Not five! They wouldn’t let you just stand up there for five whole minutes and not play a note.”
“My friend timed it,” Lola said. “She began looking at the clock at eight-fifteen and watched me run out of there – I left the fiddle on the stage – at eight-twenty. Precisely. And we’ve always been very precise.”
Lola ran down the street to where her current boyfriend lived in a rooming house, rattling his window and insisting that he meet her at the corner. The “corner” was right at Beechwood and Franklin, which, today, is two blocks from where I grew up and is three blocks from where my father and mother’s latest home is. (That particular neighborhood in Hollywood has always been so hard to shake that when my parents sold their house – the one I grew up in – and moved to Europe, they finally couldn’t take it anymore; they missed too many things about L.A. that Rome and Paris and Heidelberg just don’t offer – they missed winters you could gloss over, I think, mainly; they got one just like it a few blocks away. It was larger than the one I grew up in but otherwise just like it, so whenever I go home things don’t seem to have shrunk, like other people’s houses do when they return, or like my grammar school seemed to when I wandered through it once as an adult. Returning to L.A. my parents couldn’t think of the city as anyplace other than that part of Hollywood, near that corner of Beechwood and Franklin.)
The guy, whose name Lola thinks was Ted Kovokovitch (a Yugoslavian in California to plant grapes), met her within seconds.
“And there, right at that corner – you know? – I pulled up that damn taffeta and net skirt, pulled down those awful cotton drawers she always had us wear – and we—”
“You didn’t!” I cried.
“Yes. Twice.”
“But there’s a street lamp!” I said.
“Is there?” Lola asked, frowning a moment. “There wasn’t one then. All we had to worry about then was the Dinky.”
“The what?”
“The Dinky,” Lola said. “That little railroad train they used to have going up Canyon Drive. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton – all those western pictures they made up at the end? – they’d carry the stars and all the extras right past Hein’s front window. It was the most amazing thing, looking out through all that Queen Victoria massive power of our living room – the drapes alone, my God, they must have weighed twenty pounds of velvet and lining and interlining, each panel – through the torrey pines that grew in our front yard, and there, going past on this tiny little car, not anywhere as big as a streetcar, that’s what they called it, the Dinky, would be this face – this face everyone in America knew. Everyone, that is, except Mother. Or any of her friends. But of course Mother wouldn’t even allow the servants to go to the movies, she thought them so immoral. And I have no idea where she thought we lived.”
“So
