Page 60 of Playworld

In the port of Amsterdam

There’s a sailor who sings

Of the dreams that he brings

From the wide-open sea

And I still wonder at how its lines seemed to contain both the horizon’s vastness and the ocean’s breadth, the pair shot through with desire. I didn’t analyze it then, didn’t think of it at all, much less articulate it. I merely felt it. It was like a wound, as if I’d stepped on coral and it grew in my foot.

In 1977, the famous director Joshua Logan had him appear in his revueMusical Momentsat the Rainbow Room. Logan had seen my father perform inThe Fisher Kingand went on to direct the movie, in which, to my father’s consternation, he was not cast. I never once saw the man in anything but a tuxedo. At the performances he always had me sit between him and his wife, Nedda. “And now,” Logan whispered to me as Dad took the stage, as he took the mic in hand and gently cracked the cord’s whip to give it slack, “your father will sing one of my all-time favorite songs. He sings it as well as Ella Fitzgerald, and heelectrifiesit with desperation.”

Somewhere there’s music

How faint the tune

Somewhere there’s heaven

How high the moon

There is no moon above

When love is far away too

Till it comes true

That you love me as I love you

And when Dad sang the last verse—when with his free hand he reached out toward the audience, as if begging them to pull him to safety; when he held the note on the word “high” for so long there followed a shocked silence at the song’s conclusion—even I, at ten years old, recognized it as a howl of pain:

The darkest night would shine

If you would come to me soon

Until you will, how still my heart

How high the moon.

After the show’s final performance, Logan invited our family to his town house for a nightcap. Mom declined; Oren was too tired. Dad and I rode with Logan and Nedda in his stretch limousine. Logan’s tux hung on him loosely, as if he’d recently lost a great deal of weight. He was jowly and had a thick mustache; he grew his remaining hair long and combedit back. When he addressed me, it was clear that the person to whom he was really speaking was Dad.

“Would you like to know why your father is a great singer?” Logan said to me. “Because he possesses the three most important qualities a singer can have. First, articulation. He makes you hear every word in the lyric, which allows for emphasis and a wider range of interpretation. Second, magnitude. The verybignessof his sound, its unquestionable authority, demands you listen. And finally”—he pressed his pinkie to his thumb and held up three fingers, “storytelling. Your father makes every song answer the following question: Why is this night different from all other nights?”

My father, so guileless in his admiration of Logan, appeared childlike. He was so thrilled to be here, so close to this god, that he seemed to have forgotten I was present. Our roles—son and father—were reversed, and at such times, observing his wonder at having made it, at least this far, seated, as he was, across from such a legend, I felt happiest for him, and completely invisible.

—

January 1981 had been freezing. From my room’s window, I watched the barges of ice on the Hudson bear south. They looked long and wide enough that I was sure I could frogger them to Union City, whose scalloped cliffs were dusted with snow. Snow drifts, piled in the parking lot beneath our terrace, were caved with footprints and dotted with soot. Dogs, their raised legs visibly shaking, hurriedly pissed through the powder’s crust, flecking it emerald and saffron. Fire hydrants were snowcapped, water towers white-topped, roofs wool-blanketed: nothing, it seemed, could break the deep freeze; there was no escaping our tiny apartment. February was more of the same until that evening when Dad broke the news about the Abe Fountain musical, with its assurance of a promising spring, a summer warmed by stardom, and a bountiful fall.

“Where are you on the playbill?” Oren asked.

“Right below the two leads,” Dad said.

Oren said, “So this is big money we’re talking about?”

“I can’t complain.”

“Then maybe,” Oren said, “we could actually go on a vacation this spring? Like everyone else at my school.”

Our parents glanced at each other.