From War Baby

By Leah Napolin

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I first learn about it when I see a poster go up in the halls of my school advertising the senior play. People are excited. “Please, can we go?” I beg my mother. It’s the last few weeks of my first and only year at Richmond Hill High. We’ve bought a house in the suburbs! We’re moving away! To a town called Sea Cliff. Part of me is relieved to be going because now I won’t have to imagine myself sinking to the bottom of the pool in shame and not graduating with my class, but part of me feels broken-hearted to leave this place with all its memories behind, the bad ones as well as the good. The truth is, it’s the precious precinct of childhood that I’m leaving. What awaits us, though, is a whole new chapter of life where we’ll make new memories and live happily ever after in a world without war, which I have at long last concluded is bad, not good. At the last minute, with the movers hoisting our piano onto the truck, I’ll grab the cigar box under my bed—the cigar box with its three tiny glass animals, all that’s left of the original dozens—and take it with me.

 

This will be only the second time I’ve seen live theater and I really want to go. The first time was a disaster. It was a production at the Queens Playhouse of Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel. Mother and Hazel and Steven and I sat in the first row. Good seats, perfect sightlines. Standing on the apron of the stage on the other side of the orchestra pit not ten feet in front of us was the wicked witch. She began to sing. After a moment Steven cried out loudly “Oh!” and covered his ears. The witch could clearly see him. Playing a witch, she surely must have had moments when children in the audience would scream in fright, but this was different. The more she warbled her aria the more Steven crouched in his front row seat and carried on—moaning in distress, grabbing his knees and making panicky, pained faces. “Sh-h!” whispered Hazel. “Sh-h!” whispered Mother. It wasn’t the witch’s acting or witchy demeanor that was causing him distress, it was her voice. Just as high-pitched sounds at certain frequencies can set dogs to howling, the singer’s soprano was too piercing for Steven’s tender eardrums. Years later, he would tell me that it was like someone drilling holes in his head, and we laughed about it. The witch glared at us furiously, then tried not to, then glared again and for a moment swallowed the notes as her singing faltered. When we fled at intermission I sensed relief all around.

 

Tonight is only an amateur performance at an ordinary high school in a blended working class and lower-middle-class but upwardly-mobile lower middle class neighborhood in an outer borough of a big busy city—that reliable old standard You Can’t Take It With You, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. But it promises to be a happier event than Humperdinck.

 

The young actors go through their paces with enthusiasm; the audience loves it and them, their girls and boys, so sweetly poised and hopeful on the cusp of adulthood. I don’t cover my ears or make faces. On the contrary I feel astonished, enchanted! How did it happen that I’ve come full circle from fairy tales to fairy tales? At the curtain calls we cheer and stamp our feet and clap our hands wildly. That was a good night. That was the night I found my true religion.