Unforgettable by Scott Simon

Author:Scott Simon [Simon, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Personal Memoir, Retail
ISBN: 9781250061157
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 2015-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

15

We’re singing through musicals my mother taught me to love (Fiorello now). She says, “I’ve seen so much talent in this world!”

My mother made smart remarks. I don’t mean that she was witty or quotable, though she could be.

(A reporter writing a profile of my father, in the glory days of his comedy career, asked her, “What’s it like to be married to the funniest man in Chicago?” My mother said with a cow-eyed, chorine shrug, “I wouldn’t know.”)

But she wasn’t caustic, sarcastic, or snippy, the way wits are. She didn’t strive to have people retell any zingers or wisecracks. Instead, she had a gift for saying the right thing to put someone at ease, make a point gently, or help someone laugh.

Just minutes after Ralph Newman was convicted in court, our family had to board an elevator to depart the federal courthouse in Chicago. When the steel doors parted we saw a familiar face inside: the gray-haired man who had been Juror Number 5.

He was courteous, and smiled at teary strangers. Then he looked away when he realized that he recognized us from the courtroom. “Dear Amy: What do you say to the man you have just convicted and his family?” We all stopped talking. The juror riveted his eyes to the upper corner of the elevator car, as if looking for a leak. We had another seventeen floors of close quarters and delicate silence until we reached the lobby, but my mother turned around to the man and spoke.

“Well, at least we all get to go home now and get some rest, don’t we, sir?”

Back at her bedside, I told my mother, “That’s the most amazing thing I ever heard anyone say in a tight situation. No politician, no statesman, no great writer, I think, ever topped that.”

She lifted one eye wide open.

“I used to look at the jurors’ faces. Didn’t you?”

“Of course. Remember the nicknames we gave them? Popeye, Miss Sarah Vaughan, Turtle Man.”

“He wasn’t green. What was it?”

“Long tongue he couldn’t keep cooped up in his mouth.”

“Yes,” she remembered. “Well, Number Five seemed so nice. He had very kind blue eyes. I could see him look at us, and he’d have to look away. He didn’t want to hurt our family. He just had to do his duty. So I didn’t want to hurt him.”

My mother closed her eyes again.

“It was a sad, cold, raw, rotten day,” she remembered. “So I thought: Let me try to give it a small kindness.”

* * *

When sleep still didn’t come my mother said, “Maybe we should tell jokes.”

Jokes were not just laughing matters in our family. I knew from watching my father, knowing comics, and even from some of my own writing, that while jokes shouldn’t be confused with coal mining, soldiering, or trash removal, they were work. If we did the job well (and just working hard wouldn’t work; it had to be deft), the work produced laughs.

When my mother’s mother died, the visitation was held at Mrs. Ahern’s funeral home nearby.

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