Missing Men: A Memoir

With a style balanced between lyricism and forceful clarity, Joyce Johnson has become one of our premier memoirists. O, the Oprah Magazine Joyce Johnsons classic memoir of growing up female in the 1950s, Minor Characters, was one of the initiators of an important new genre: the personal story of a minor player on historys stage. In Missing Men, a memoir that tells her mothers story as well as her own, Johnson constructs an equally unique self-portrait as she examines, from a womans perspective, the far-reaching reverberations of fatherlessness. Telling a story that has shaped itself around absences, Missing Men presents us with the arc and flavor of a unique New York lifefrom the authors adventures as a Broadway stage child to her fateful encounters with the two fatherless artists she marries. Joyce Johnsons voice has never been more compelling. Preface I once had a husband who started obsessively painting squaresthree squares in shifting relationships to each other on what appeared flat ground, colored emptiness. He explained to me that the negative space in his work was as important as the positive, that each took its form from the other. What interested him most was the tension between them. I remember being fascinated by his concept of negative space, though negative seemed the wrong word for something that had so much presence. I was still young then, too young to look at my history and see how my life has shaped itself around absencesfirst by happenstance; ultimately, perhaps, by choice. one Samuel Rosenbergs Daughters Toward the end of her life, when I thought my mothers defenses were finally down, I asked whether she remembered her fathers death, which occurred when shewas five years old. Oh, yes, she replied brightly. He was in a trolley car accident, and we never got the insurance. Then she looked at me with the glimmer of a crafty smile. Youve asked me too late. Ive forgotten everything. She had never spoken of what it was like to grow up without a father. In fact, she seemed to lack a recollected girlhood, except for one memory she was willing to call up: the Victory Garden shed tended during World War I, when her family was living near Bronx Park. Her garden was at the top of a long hill. When she was in her nineties, her mind kept wandering back to that sunlit patch of earth, and she would marvel over and over that the carrots she grew there were the sweetest shed ever tasted. Otherwise, except for her singing, which had pre-dated my arrival into the world, it was as if my mothers life and memories had begun with me. I have a trained voice, Id sometimes hear her tell people. In a bitter way, she seemed proud of that fact. On the music rack of our baby grand was an album of lieder by Schubert, her favorite composer. Once in a while, when one of my aunts induced her to sing, she would reluctantly sit down on the piano bench to accompany herself, and her voice would sound to my astonished ears like the performances that issued from the cloth-covered mouth of our wooden radio. Whatever was classical was welcomed into our living room, but if you switched to the wrong station and got the blare of a blue note, my mother would give it short shrift. Popular, as she dismissed all music that was not classical, was dissonant and therefore no good, with an exception made for melodies from certain Broadway shows. For months she dusted and cut out her dresspatterns humming My Ship, a song from Kurt Weills Lady in the Dark. She even decided to teach it to me, though it was really too difficult for a four-year-old. My ship has sails that are made of silk, I remember singing shyly for my aunts and my father, with my mother prompting, The decks are trimmed with gold, in her radio mezzo as I faltered. When I was older, I learned that she had actually been serious about her singing, with ambitions of performing Schubert on the concert stag