Katharine Weber - The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities

A LSO BY K ATHARINE W EBER

True Confections

Triangle

The Little Women

The Music Lesson

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

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Copyright 2011 by Katharine Weber
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were previously published in different form:

A Decent Family: Oy Tannenbaum in the New York Times, December 17, 2005; A Childs Christmas in New York in Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales fromInterfaith Homes, edited by Laurel Snyder (Brooklyn, NY: Softskull Press, 2006). The Fire That Time: The Fire That Time in the New York Times, June 4, 2006. Subject: Sidney Kaufman: The Loves of His Life in The Other Women, edited by Victoria Zackheim (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007). The Memory of All That and Ganz: The Memory of All That in A Few Thousand Words About Love, edited by Mickey Pearlman (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), In a Painting, Gershwin Packed the House in the New York Times, August 30, 1998, and The Memory of All That, liner note essay for Fine and Dandy: World Premiere Recording (Bronxville, NY: PS Classics, 2004).
See for additional credits.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weber, Katharine.
The memory of all that: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and my familys legacy of
infidelities / Katharine Weber.1st ed. 1. Weber, Katharine, 1955Family.
2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 3. Gershwin, George,
18981937. 4. Swift, Kay, 18971993. I. Title.
PS3573. E2194Z46 2011
813.54dc22 [B] 2011003023

eISBN: 978-0-307-88859-4

Jacket design by Jean Traina
Jacket photographs: All courtesy of the author except George Gershwins
1934 self-portrait with Andrea Warburg, used by permission
of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts.

v3.1_r2

For Nick
O.L.I.H.T.S.

Please visit http://rhlink.com/memmain to view or download larger family tree images.

I think it is all a matter of love;
the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

V LADIMIR N ABOKOV

W E ARE WALKING INTO THE OCEAN . H E IS HOLDING ME in the crook of his left arm and I cling awkwardly to the soft expanse of his chest where I am squashed against his cold skin and his disconcerting chest hair. He wades deeper into the black water that laps against my thighs, and I am afraid, afraid of him and afraid of the ocean. He strides through the waves, a father going into the ocean with his little girl, and over his shoulder I see my mother in her blue seersucker shorts and her dark blue sleeveless shirt standing on the wet sand at the hem of the tide, taking photographs, her face masked by her perpetual Leica as she frames her picture of a devoted father holding his happy child.

She takes the picture of her husband and her little girl, the devoted father and his happy child enjoying this moment of going into the ocean on this perfect summer day. This is a day we wont forget, a moment we have not forgotten, because she is taking, she has taken, this photograph, the evidence of this afternoon, this spot of time in one of many summer days spent in the funny rented house on Luchon Street at the end of the block facing the dunes. Remember that summer? she will ask me from time to time for the next forty years. Remember that summer, the one after the summer of Johns heart operation, the summer we rented the Lido Beach house with the kitchen upstairs, and you had that terrible sunburn, remember the lady across the street who put polish on the nails of her brown standard poodles? What were their names? Coco and Chanel. You remember everything, dont you?

He strides purposefully away from the shore, his enormous black swim trunks billowing under me like seaweed. He is as purposeful as the polar bears I have seen at the zoo, the ones who dip into the water, swim in a circle and clamber out, only to repeat the activity relentlessly. They have to do it. They dont know what else to do. He is wading deeper into the ocean, turning momentarily sideways to brace against the occasional wave that breaks against us, as if this slow march toward the horizon is a requirement, as if he doesnt know any other way to be at the beach with his child, any other way to go into the water with his little girl. He doesnt know what else to do.

I have never seen my father run, I have never seen him throw a ball, I have never seen him sit on the ground, I have never seen him in a bathing suit before, and now he is carrying me into the ocean, and I am seven years old and he is fifty-two, and this is the summer we are renting the beach house at the end of Luchon Street, facing the dunes, the house with the kitchen upstairs and the dog-smelling shag carpet, and the sour piano on which my grandmother, my mothers mother, the one we call Ganz, teaches me to play a new chord each time she visits. The sea air has ruined the soundboard, she diagnoses. My father is working at his office in the city and is only here on weekends, like a guest, and he sleeps in the room we call the guest room, downstairs, next to the room where my brother sleeps, and I share the upstairs bedroom, with its twin beds, with my mother. We are wading deeper into the ocean and a wave smacks me in the face and I am afraid and I cling more tightly to his unfamiliar arms and chest, and he says, Oh ho, are you afraid? Do you want to go out?

I say, Yes, I want to go out, looking over his shoulder at the beach, where my mother is now sitting on the blanket beside my brother, who wears a pith helmet and digs in the sand between his spindly legs. It is the summer after the summer of his heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic, and everyone says he is fine now, but where they cut open his skinny chest is a long red caterpillar of an incision which my mother gaily calls his zipper, but I am never supposed to bring it up at all. I am supposed to act as if it isnt there, even though it is disturbing and irresistible to look at, even when she calls it his zipper, which makes me worry that he could come unzipped.

M Y MOTHER is angry at me the week before our family drives to Rochester, Minnesota, for those interminable days I spend interrogating my Magic 8 Ball under the folding card table in the dingy apartment next to the hospital while everyone is preoccupied with the before, during, and after of my brothers heart operation. (Is he going to die?