The Next Best Thing

BERLE, MILTON

The Next Best Thing When I was eight or so, my mother read me to sleep every night but Thursday. Thursday was her poker night. The game out-ranked wars, pestilences, plagues, stock market crashes...

...My dad joined Uncle Abe...
...Ears, eyes, forehead were only trim for the nose...
...Put everything away, go to sleep, don't break anything, wipe your mouth, don't spit food, take your elbows off the table and wish me luck...
...On his balding head, above the temple but direcdy over his right eye, he had an intriguing bump...
...Uncle Abe and Aunt Betty weren't as closely related to us as their designations might suggest...
...Her version depicted a shoeshine boy Mr...
...My father pointed toward my bedroom...
...I rushed only toward the end when I realized that a reading by Aunt Betty would be a new moment in my life...
...She started to read from the beginning of the book...
...Mail to be answered or worked on was kept in a large flat pink glass dish on the credenza against the only windowed wall in the dining room...
...And, at the door, "Do I look nice...
...I liked to watch her talk...
...Aunt Betty has a special way of reading...
...I'll read to him," she said...
...Every relative or close friend, at 30, give or take an hour or two, became an uncle or aunt...
...Let me read, you won't care...
...Fortunately, Uncle Abe didn't mind losing 50 cents every Thursday...
...My mother started to prepare for her weekly exodus midway into dinner...
...As my mother left, as if on cue, Uncle Abe and Aunt Betty arrived...
...This isn't about a shoeshine boy...
...I didn't know what it meant...
...The shoeshine boy sworn in, Aunt Betty smiled broadly in acknowledgment of her excellent performance, put the book on the nightstand, kissed me on the forehead and said, "Next Thursday, if you want, I'll read about how he saves General Pershing...
...Aunt Betty looked, I suspected, like my mother would look when she was incredibly old...
...At Aunt Betty's funeral years later, my mother nodded wisely and hinted, "Her back was strong...
...I didn't mind Bessie's absence...
...Aunt Betty's sweat made it possible for Uncle Abe to open four businesses in two years, failing in each for reasons beyond his control...
...She probably was able to read through envelopes...
...To show my discontent with my father's obvious neglect, my journey to the bedroom that night was longer than Peary's to the Pole...
...We raised our paint prices today...
...Aunt Betty turned from examining- an antimacassar she'd never seen before...
...Between the intricate plotting and the movement of the teeth, I was soon caught up in Aunt Betty's story...
...She made up a whole story...
...Otherwise, some fool would have thought my mother rude, running off and leaving company...
...Aunt Betty had a regular route that led to every nook and cranny in our five rooms...
...He threw a fast kiss at me and said, "Your father is losing his pants...
...While Aunt Betty did a preliminary survey, Abe sat down, waiting for the game...
...A Broadway musical about Berle and his mother, tentatively called Milton and Me, is scheduled to open in 1992...
...I'm only a salesman," Dad said, then going on, to me, 'The bedroom...
...Dressed in a black coat with a red fox collar, a combination guaranteed to blind all who viewed it, my mother marched out toward a dozen royal flushes...
...Smart people had gray hair and wore eyeglasses...
...Uncle Abe and Aunt Betty marched into the house...
...I sat up...
...My father said, "You can listen, read for a half hour, and don't you have homework...
...His need, spiced with Aunt Betty's, made the Thursday night visit a highlight of their week...
...A H I card game that came through Ellis ^L-s Island with the immigrants from Eastern Europe, klabbiash was already in decline in these early years of World War I. Opponents were no longer easy to come by...
...Our apartment was a railroad flat...
...There was always sponge cake in the bread box...
...She loved to play two-handed poker with Sophie Tucker...
...Dinner or supper, my mother served the soup and salad, if there was a salad, as required by the mother's manual...
...She could carry two sons and a dreamer...
...It was where Uncle Abe had landed when dropped by his mother...
...He never looked up from the pages once...
...Aunt Betty died the year I graduated from high school...
...I said, "Can you read to me a litde...
...Kids were hugged and smothered...
...I have no homework...
...Not tonight," my father replied...
...The first page is all right, too...
...You open a dirty mouth...
...She was a remarkable woman...
...It can wait till tomorrow...
...Uncle Abe wasn't a hard thinker...
...Aunt Betty's teeth provided a Latin beat...
...Our family was proud to have an association with Aunt Betty...
...I detected a look of puzzlement on my father's face...
...At family gatherings, I often heard Dennis mention Al Smith and a governor named Sulzer...
...Sure, but I want what's in the book...
...The last five minutes before her departure were hectic, filled with instructions, barked out with a vigor that would have made a general proud...
...Their noses ruled their faces...
...During card play or a political discussion, he often hinted that Uncle Abe's bump came from stupidity...
...Uncle Abe, could you tell me something...
...What have you got that's better than okay...
...Uncle Abe asked...
...I made the mistake of waiting for permission to do the same and was immediately turned down...
...Her survey had suggested that the pickings would be slim this evening...
...Sherwin Williams doesn't make enough money without raising prices...
...It was a feature with which I too had been blessed...
...Starting at twelve, she worked in a corset-manufacturing company on lower Manhattan for 35 years...
...Aunt Betty lived for looking around...
...My whole family had demons who lurked in dark corners, waiting to attack sleepy boys who refused to go to sleep...
...That made it look as if he was thinking hard...
...There was too much girl talk when she was around...
...Let him stay up for a while," Aunt Betty said...
...I'm not sleepy...
...I never learned how the shoeshine boy saved General Pershing...
...She didn't wait for a response...
...We had a substitute teacher...
...Tom the Ragged Boy was about a shoeshine boy...
...What have you got...
...Uncle Abe said, "Read a page to him...
...My brothers and I often debated its origin and function...
...In those days, still in his mid-30s, he already had gray hair and wore eyeglasses...
...It's not eight o'clock yet," Uncle Abe said...
...who worked hard, saving his money so that he could become a doctor...
...They had to be liberated from the darkness...
...Your day was when they shot McKinley...
...Her tongue wasn't always able to work them back securely onto the gums...
...Abe and Betty, about twice the age of my parents, were truly old and, thus, an uncle and aunt emeritus...
...My father scroonched up his face a lot...
...I can't play too late...
...The game was his sole entertainment...
...Passing the inevitable Uncle Abe and Aunt Betty, after nods were exchanged, my mother said, "I'm late...
...Aunt Betty checked everything—the gleam of our displayed china, the finish on our few pieces of porcelain and even the number of pieces of Rogers 1847 silver plate, pattern "Royalty," cradled in an open box with a burgundy velvet lining...
...Ferguson, no rotten James Gray and nobody named Bessie Bention...
...Most important, she had no girl stuff in her version...
...For some reason, Aunt Betty never read to me again...
...We called it supper in those days...
...Aunt Betty asked...
...Because she was a perfectionist and spent too much time preening, my mother was always late...
...He pointed backwards...
...Television Turns to Prose "Like Sandra in the story, my mother always carried a deck of cards," Milton Berle (right) confessed...
...Berle published 400 songs, appeared in comedy and dramatic roles on stage, in films and in radio and television for 75 years and is now an energetic writer...
...Aunt Betty had an interesting feature my mother and I lacked...
...It was okay...
...Not everybody'll understand if you read like Aunt Betty...
...She searched for apartment truths everywhere she went...
...The game out-ranked wars, pestilences, plagues, stock market crashes and maternal love...
...The changing contours of her cheeks made Aunt Betty more interesting than my mother...
...Her version, however, differed substantially from my previous reading...
...It's not a big deal to look at pages and what's on the paper...
...I said, "We're on page 90...
...Aunt Betty said...
...You and an enema...
...It also had demons for baths, spending and not taking ipecac for a bad stomach...
...By page three he was the doctor for the President of the United States and saved him a hundred times, so he saved the country and the shoeshine boy became Vice-President While he was taking the oath, between words about defending the flag, a one-voiced chorus sang "America...
...I won't be able to fall asleep...
...Her eyes took in every mote of dust not touched by my mother's lackluster housecleaning...
...That gave him away...
...My mother displayed the box on a chest-high, triangular knickknack shelf...
...Awintry Thursday came...
...My father rushed the last few dishes...
...Uncle Abe said, "David, today I'm going to clean you out...
...Force yourself...
...When I'd brushed my teeth and put on underwear for the next day, I jumped into bed and handed her Tom the Bootblack, a Horatio Alger novel...
...We both know this is my day...
...Aunt Betty, and Uncle Abe, too, loved my mother...
...He indicated the book on the nightstand...
...I would be company for her and might, by mistake, blurt out some family tidbits...
...There was no hungry Jacob, no Mr...
...My children loved it...
...Please, Poppa...
...At nine (left) he posed coyly...
...The trouble with you is you're afraid to play tonight...
...One was now an engineer on the city payroll...
...In front of the boy...
...Because her teeth were false, she was constantly maneuvering them inside her mouth...
...Aunt Betty wasn't malicious...
...Does that mean the world is coming to an end...
...My brothers and I cleared off the table as fast as we could, dropping enough crumbs on the floor to make a marked four-lane highway for a Hansel and Gretel...
...His pioneering television show, Texaco Star Theatre," was so popular from 1948 to 1954 that theaters and restaurants were nearly empty on Tuesday nights when people watched "Uncle Mittje...
...Go to sleep fast before the demons know you're tired...
...Although there's no one-to-one connection between the story and my childhood, the facts were drawn from real life...
...the crash had cost Uncle Abe his brains...
...Under 30, they were cousins...
...Just tell me—how come Aunt Betty doesn't read what's in the book...
...Anybody could read what's in a book...
...While the rest of us tried to survive the ordeals of a motherless meal, my mother bathed, her second of the day, put on a dress intended to "knock their eyes out," and crowned her dark brown hair with a hat that would "kill them if they were still alive after seeing her march in to the game with that dress on...
...The bedroom I shared with my brothers was the room nearest the front door...
...Since it seemed that it was either her version or lights out, I surrendered...
...Their feeling was reflected in the subde way they waited in the hall until my mother was on the way out...
...No, they came in as she went and the slightest tinge of rudeness went out with her...
...She was always late...
...Your father is waiting...
...We received no kisses from Sandra, the departing gambler...
...Dad did a solo with the dessert, generally a pudding—rice with raisins in it or softened stale bread with brown sugar and raisins added...
...No secret remained a secret after one of her inspection tours...
...And like Aunt Betty, the amateur sleuth, my mother was a real detective—a store detective—in her early days...
...While the men were occupied, she was free to frisk our apartment...
...My father said, "Do you want to start playing at midnight...
...No matter how much of a pile of mail there was, Aunt Betty could go through it in 10 seconds...
...Next time," my father said to him more than once, "you'll land on your head and maybe it'll bring back your brains...
...Uncle Abe was tall and thin...
...One in the morning I'll be working on my order books...
...His remark puzzled me...
...An actress of sorts, having been in plays at some center downtown, she did well by all the parts...
...I believed my father to be bright...
...He was actually a better player than Uncle Abe...
...My cousin Dennis read long speeches at the services for each of them...
...I have to change all my order books...
...A minute after Aunt Betty left, on muffled orders I could make out, Uncle Abe shuffled in to say goodnight...
...How long does it take to read a page...
...The next courses were up to the rest of us—my dad, my three brothers and me...
...Already tall and gangly, I needed the height, according to my oldest brother Frank, to support my nose...
...Uncle Abe's retort was always the same, more or less, "At least there's a place for brains...
...Uncle Abe died four days after her funeral...
...He was always smiling...
...You can read now...
...There's sponge cake in the bread box...
...Midway into Aunt Betty's second sentence, I protested, That's not in this book...
...Of course, you should read what's on the pages...
...We're almost finished with the book...
...Her hands, gnarled from stuffing long ivory stays into ungiving holes, had gendy pushed two sons through school...
...Promising to be home in a half hour, my brothers took off...
...Do you want me to read to you or don't you...
...Aunt Betty often picked up scoops from the mouths of seemingly innocent babes...
...Her younger son, Dennis, the only one of her children who showed up at family affairs, worked for the precinct boss and was being groomed for political office...
...My father called it a bump and, generally, it didn't mean anything...
...She said merely, "I'll be home...
...Berle made his silent screen debut at age five...
...My father was an opponent, the son of a klabbiash champion...
...We're on page 90...
...Tncle Abe liked to play klabbiash...
...She didn't even really look at the pages...

Vol. 16 • October 1991 • No. 5


 
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