I Must Say Page 4

  My father—Chuck, as we kids called him behind his back—really loved his gin and gingers, though he was careful to drink them only under our roof. Monday through Friday, he’d sip from the moment he arrived home till the moment he went to bed. Saturdays and Sundays, he sipped all day. It sounds traumatic, but it was just the normal state of things in our house. My siblings and I had a running joke: “Oh, Dad’s in his drunk shirt!” He had a specific plaid shirt that he wore only on weekends, and it meant, to us kids, that Dad had had a few—and therefore it might be wise to keep a wide berth.

  The five little Shorts were born, as I’ve said, over a fourteen-year span. David, my oldest brother, was born in 1936, followed by Nora, my only sister, in 1937. Then, a while later, came my brothers Michael and Brian, born in ’44 and ’45, respectively, followed, on the momentous date of March 26, 1950 (I think we all remember where we were that day), by me. We all adored our mother, Olive, who was as kind and radiant as Dad was bespectacled, plump-cheeked, and ornery. Mom was a stylish, striking woman, with blond hair and wide-set eyes; the actress Martha Plimpton reminds me a little of her. We kids considered her one of us, our ally in the ongoing battle against the benevolent household tyrant that was our father.

  Make no mistake, we loved Dad, and we knew he loved us. His drinking never made him physically violent, and he was never overturning tables like Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But his words were often barbed and full of provocation. I remember that David at some point in the 1950s invited over a friend, Kent Follis, a gentle, harmless kid who happened to have an Elvis-style pompadour. My father opened the door, sized up Kent, and said, “Can I take your hat for ya, dear?” Another time a friend of mine who was half Irish and half Jewish was visiting me. My father, upon hearing of my friend’s heritage, approached him and declared, “You know, dear, back in county Armagh, where my people are from, we have a name for someone who is half Irish and half Jewish. We call that person . . . a Jew.”

  Dad spoke with a faint Irish brogue because he was from Northern Ireland—born in 1909 in the town of Crossmaglen, one of eleven siblings. (Mom, four years younger, was born in Hamilton and was of English and Irish descent.) Dad was a self-made man, which, given the Depression era in which he navigated his new life, was quite remarkable. He first crossed the Atlantic as a seventeen-year-old stowaway, making his way to Texas before he was bounced back home for being in the United States illegally. He successfully put down roots on his second try, four years later, living first in Buffalo before finally settling in Hamilton and working his way up from traveling sales rep to third-in-command at Stelco.

  Only two other siblings sought a life outside Northern Ireland. Dad’s brother Tom moved to New York, and his brother Frank to Birmingham, England. One of Frank’s children, my first cousin Clare Short, grew up to represent Birmingham as a member of Parliament and a tough, outspoken Labour Party firebrand who was later tapped to be Great Britain’s secretary of state for international development. In other words, England got the second-generation Short who stood on principle and resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet over her nation going to war with Iraq under false pretenses, while Canada got the second-generation Short who falls over on talk shows and humps celebrities in his Jiminy Glick fat suit to get laughs.

  Anyway: the other eight Shorts of my father’s generation stayed in Crossmaglen, where since 1885 the family has owned and lived above a pub, Short’s Bar. It’s still there, and still operated by my aunt Rosaleen. When I went over and met the Irish Shorts, I began to understand how Dad’s background in a big, rowdy Irish family endowed him with a quick, jousting wit, which he passed on to us. In 1997, when I was in England doing the miniseries Merlin for NBC, I spent two weekends over in Crossmaglen, sleeping in my father’s old bedroom above the bar. My uncle Paddy, my father’s youngest sibling and Rosaleen’s husband, was still alive then, running the bar. One night I stayed up into the wee hours with my cousins Oliver and Patrick, Paddy’s sons, talking loudly and uninhibitedly about the Shorts on both sides of the ocean. We started with beer and quickly moved on to whiskey, followed by . . . still more whiskey. I finally got about four hours of bed-spinning sleep before the sun rose and woke me up. I walked down the stairs to the pub, bleary-eyed, to find Uncle Paddy cleaning out all the empty glasses we’d left at the bar. “Soooo,” he said, a glint in his eye, his voice not unlike Dad’s, “how did the character assassination go last night?”

  So my own family’s dynamic had an ancestral context. The mealtime conversation in our house on Whitton Road, even when Dad wasn’t engaged in it, was a sustained, survival-of-the-fittest verbal sparring match. The talk often became heated, but the key to it is that there was always laughter within thirty seconds of the heat. I think of this as a very Irish trait; Bill Murray and Conan O’Brien, who also developed their comedic reflexes in large, argumentative Irish Catholic families, know what I’m talking about.

  I actually used my beloved tape recorder to capture some of my family’s squabbling. Among my favorites is a recording of our Christmas dinner in 1966, when I was sixteen years old, and Dad was with us at the table for a change. As it opens, my brother Michael is upset at my brother Brian for wanting more dark meat from the turkey, but not a turkey leg:

  MICHAEL: The dark meat is on the leg! You don’t want a leg! Honest to God, I haven’t got—I haven’t got the mind to handle that problem.

  MOM: Nora’s, uh—

  MICHAEL (interrupting): You’d have to take a Goddamned file and file it off and shred it!

  NORA: Just calm down.

  MICHAEL: It’s the only way you could do it!

  DAD: He wanted dark meat, did he?

  MICHAEL: Yeah.

  DAD (angrily): Well, dark meat’s all on that Goddamned leg!

  NORA (to Brian): It’s not worth it.

  BRIAN: Now he’s, now he’s starting to—

  DAD (to Brian): Pick up the leg and chomp the dark meat!

  NORA (to Brian): Just close your mouth.

  BRIAN: Okay. Okay, Nora.

  MICHAEL: The only thing we could do is cut it up!

  BRIAN (now exasperated): All right! All right!

  MICHAEL (surprised): What happened?

  BRIAN: Shut your mouth, Michael! Just shut your mouth and everything will be—

  DAD (to Brian): Shut yours, now!

  BRIAN (defensively): Okay! Okay. I’ll shut mine, too, Dad.

  DAD (trudging off to the kitchen, speaking in a “mentally challenged” voice): “I waaants da dark meat . . . Darrrk!” (Returning to regular voice) Three-fourths of the world don’t have a choice between—

  BRIAN (to Dad, feeling picked-on): Shhhh! Shhhh!

  DAD:—dark meat or white meat.

  NORA: Would you shut your mouth, Brian!

  MICHAEL: Well, which do they eat, then?

  DAD (nattering on): Blue meat or green meat.

  MICHAEL: Well, which do they eat, then?

  (Brian and Marty start to laugh.)

  DAD: They don’t have any choice of meat at all!

  (Dad re-enters the dining room from the kitchen with the exact slices of turkey Brian wanted.)

  DAD: Do you want more potatoes, dear?

  BRIAN: No thank you, Dad.

  MICHAEL: Are you not going to have any turkey, Dad?

  DAD (raising his voice, irritated): My stomach is so sore right now, dear, if you mention turkey to me, I’ll vomit right on the middle of the table.

  (Everyone starts laughing.)

  DAD: Now, if I wanted turkey, craved turkey, ate turkey, desired turkey—

  MICHAEL: I think the question required a yes or no answer.

  DAD: But I don’t need a kid asking me. I don’t need an immature person asking me things.

  Some years ago, in the 1990s, I had this tape fully transcribed—it goes on for thirty pages—and presented a bound copy to each of my siblings. I also used to make my kids, when they were little, read all the parts every Christmas Eve. I’
d always cast my youngest child, Henry, in the Dad role, just so I could hear this sweet little boy saying “Dark meat’s all on that Goddamned leg!”

  People are often surprised to learn I’m of Irish descent and was raised Catholic; there’s a widespread misperception that I am Jewish. And I don’t think it’s just because I’m thrifty.

  No, this misperception actually makes some sense, because I was pretty much immersed in Jewishness from an early age. Westdale, the neighborhood we lived in, in Hamilton’s west end, had a large Jewish population. My parents’ best friends, the Paikins, were Jewish. The best nursery school in the area was the one at Temple Anshe Sholom, so that’s where I went to nursery school. And the friendships that I made there carried over into the rest of my childhood.

  I’ve always been a top-feeder, drawn to the smartest people in the room, and the simple truth was that the smartest kids in the schools I attended were the Jewish ones. We had a teacher in Grade 7, as we Canadians call the seventh grade, Miss Critchmore, who seated her pupils in order of intelligence, a cruel stroke that would never be allowed now: the smartest kids (in her estimation) in the front row, the dumbest in the back. I always strove to be in that first row, where my row-mates were reliably Mitchell Rosenblatt, Shelley Lipton, Rick Levy, Debbie Zack, Alex Stiglick, and Marvin Barnett. My people: the chosen.

  I dated my share of Jewish girls, too. One of these romances had to be carried out in secret, because the girl’s parents were deeply observant and didn’t approve of their daughter’s dating a goy. After a couple of furtive petting sessions in Hamilton’s Churchill Park, we tearfully went our separate ways. A sort of West Side Story, with blue balls.

  Then there’s the fact that I work in comedy, and so many of the comedic greats have been Jewish. Some of them—Jerry Lewis, Harpo Marx, and Mike Nichols—were childhood idols of mine, while others, among them Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, and Larry David, became dear friends. So I understand why I’m often mistaken as Jewish, and I find it flattering. By osmosis, I’ve absorbed a lot of Jewish-comic rhythms into my performances, and when I’m doing a Jewish character, it’s an easy fit. The foremost of these is Irving Cohen, the ancient, prolific Tin Pan Alley songsmith I introduced on SCTV, carried over to Saturday Night Live, and still do in my live act:

  It’s wonderful to be here representing the world of the tins and the pans and the sulfur flash pots going off here and there.

  At my age, the only time I don’t have to pee is when I’m peeing.

  I just poy-chased a Maserati. I know it’s ridiculous, but I’m going through a little mid-death crisis.

  You know, I have written over twenty-eight thousand songs—two thousand since lunch. Such classics as “Honey Do the Hula,” “Wigwam Serenade,” and who can ever forget the Al Jolson classic, “Sam, You Made the Truss Too Short”? And I feel another one coming on right now—either that, or the Metamucil is kicking in. Gimme a C! A bouncy C!

  Listen, even I was confused as a child about whether I was or wasn’t a son of Abraham. For reasons too convoluted to get into here, I was not baptized until I was seven years old, at my family’s regular church, Christ the King Cathedral. Which means that, unlike the babies who were routinely baptized there, I was fully cognizant of what was going on—physically, if not sacramentally. After the priest had done his business of ladling holy water on my head, I looked at him and asked, in all seriousness, “Am I Jewish now?”

  He just barely managed to stifle his laughter into a snort, which resonated gloriously, along with my father’s laugh, through the majestic cathedral.

  My inadvertently interfaith upbringing notwithstanding, I was never particularly stirred by the spirit of the Lord as He or She is presented in organized religion. Nor have I ever put much stock in the paranormal, the occult, or anything smacking of clairvoyance. With one notable exception.

  In the summer of 1962, I was twelve years old, and my brother David was twenty-six. The age difference made him a little mysterious to me, living a life a world apart from mine. In our family photos he’s kind of off to the side, handsome and brooding in his shades, like Stu Sutcliffe in those early photos of the Beatles as a five-piece. But in reality David was total sunshine, a funny and loose charmer. As a small child, I’d creep into his bedroom on Saturday mornings around seven a.m. (he’d probably only gotten in at five thirty) and play this game we invented called “Giant.” Basically, it was David, groggily aware of my presence, good-naturedly pretending to be a sleeping giant while I tried to steal the “magic pillow” from under his head without waking him. He always tolerated my mischief and had a special nickname for me, “Muggers-All,” though none of us in the family can remember its etymology. I just worshipped him.

  At the age of twenty-six, David was justly excited about his life. He was living and thriving in Montreal, following in Dad’s footsteps, working as a salesman for Samuel, Son & Co., another Canadian steel company. More important, David was engaged to be married in the fall, to a beautiful girl named Margaret Spracklin. His adulthood was taking off with a vengeance.

  On July 2, 1962, Dave composed a cheerful letter to me while I was away at a YMCA camp three hours north of Hamilton.

  Dear Muggers-All:

  Comment ca va ma bien frere, I am spending this weekend in Hamilton and I am gouging the family as usual. I was very proud to see all the diplomas you won and that you graduated with first class honours.

  I am going back to Montreal today and will be back August first. You can tell me all about your adventures at camp. You must arrange with mum and dad to spend one week in Montreal with me and we will have some fun.

  Love dave xxxx oooooo

  On the morning of July 18, 1962, near the end of my allotted three weeks at Camp Wanakita, I awoke in an unfamiliar, befogged state: oddly depressed, lethargic, weighted down, burdened by a sense that the whole universe was out of sync. My unease was conspicuous enough, and sufficiently out of character, for one of my cabin-mates to take notice and ask, “Are you okay? Are you sick?” I didn’t know how to respond. “I’m fine,” I said. “Something’s just weird.”

  Twenty minutes later I was called down to the head counselor’s cabin. After an awkward greeting, with him unable to look me in the eyes, the counselor blurted, “There’s been an accident. Your brother David’s been in an accident, and it killed him.” What an odd way to put it.

  That strange, unsettled moment of waking, just minutes before the counselor’s horrible announcement, is the only extrasensory experience I can ever claim to have had. And I still can’t make sense of it: why or how I knew—or my body did, or my subconscious, whatever—that something terrible had happened. Why did my twelve-year-old psyche, which otherwise seemed to exist in a perpetual state of bouncy, wired joy, feel, for the first time, a true sense of despair?

  In the moment, I was simply stunned to the point of confusion. A minute later, I asked the counselor, “But is he okay?”

  Up to that point in my childhood, I’d had it easy. Now, suddenly, life was a blur of sadness and confusion. My dad’s good friend, Bob Lord, materialized at Camp Wanakita to collect me and deliver me back to Hamilton. The long, conversation-free drive in Mr. Lord’s gunboat-size Mercury Park Lane was made more awkward still by a news bulletin that came crackling through the static of his car radio on CHML, the local Hamilton station: “David Short, the son of Stelco executive C. P. Short, has been killed in a car crash.” I wouldn’t learn the details until later: David had spent a late night pacing in a hospital corridor with a buddy whose wife was in labor with their first baby. At around four thirty a.m., in the Montreal suburb of Dorval, David must have fallen asleep while driving home. His car hit the back of a parked truck and flipped over, hurling him to an instant death.

  Our house on Whitton Road was in a high state of angst. Dad had just flown home from Montreal, where he’d been to collect David’s body. Mom was beyond bereft, upset that the casket needed to be closed rather than open, given the extent of David’s inju
ries. “Do you want it opened? We can have it opened,” said my father, heartbroken, trying to solve it all. “No, no,” my mother sobbed, “it’s just the idea that it can’t be open.”

  Nora, my sister, was flying in from Los Angeles, where she was working as a nurse. This, to me, was strangely a source of excitement—I missed my big sister and was thrilled that she was coming home. Since the airport was an hour away, I petitioned Mr. Lord, who was heroically filling in as the family driver, to let me come with him to get Nora. It was night, so he said, “Better bring a pillow.” I ran into the house to get a pillow, and Mom told me in no uncertain terms that I was not leaving the house that night. When Nora did come home, she looked different, more grown-up, with elaborate early 1960s eye makeup and long hair—the peculiar details you fixate on in moments of crisis.

  The following morning, I caught sight, from my bedroom window, of my mother talking with our next-door neighbor, Mrs. James, whose front yard was separated from ours only by a driveway. Mrs. James had lost her son five years earlier; he’d drowned in Lake Ontario. Then I saw Mom, never one to lose her temper or betray signs of aggravation, storm across the driveway and back into the house. I ran downstairs to ask her what happened. She said, “Marjorie James told me that I will get over this. I will never get over this.”

  A few days later, in the middle of the night, Mom found herself unable to sleep, so furiously were words and thoughts racing around in her head. She knew she would get no rest until she wrote them down. So she did, as a poem.

  —TO DAVID—

  Where is the laughing face?

  The eyes so grey and tender

  Looking down into my own.

  The arms outstretched in greeting.

  To clasp me to his side

  In a bearlike hug?

  Can this be all there was for him?

  The few short years?