Aria: Song of a Life

QUARTETTO - MY FAMILY    1944 - 1952

I remember a childhood overflowing with happiness and security, fun-filled family car trips, scrumptious food and much music. I also remember when all that came to an abrupt and tragic end . . . 

“Isn’t she adorable and clever!” our neighbors exclaimed when I stood on their front porches and sang I’m a Little Teacup, and asked to be paid. I was three at the time. I loved the praise and the money. That certainly continued as I grew up to become an opera singer. 
We lived in Forest Hill, the Upper Village, which wasn’t as classy as the Lower Village, but was a lot better than downtown near Kensington, where many other Jewish families lived.  
My mother, Ruth, was a change-of-life baby. Of course that meant nothing to me when I first heard that as a child, but it explained why her siblings were twenty years older. She had been a sad, lonely little girl who sat on a stoop outside her family home on Montrose Avenue in Toronto. I also learned that she had been born on Queen Street near the mental hospital, known then as an insane asylum. I tried to find some connection between that location, and her depression that came when I was a teen, but it was a stretch. 
She learned to play the piano by ear, and could play almost everything.  She once told me that her music kept her from being melancholy. It was always up-tempo lively music that held me enthralled. I often sang along, and our house was filled with our rousing melodies. My mother was in her element when she played the piano. We had a Mason & Rich baby grand that was regularly in use. I sang all the time, and Mommy accompanied me while Daddy listened. Music was my special bond with my mother. The other was food. 
Ruth Rosalind Siegel married late at twenty-nine - late in those days at least. She chose my father, Lou, who was a photographer, mostly of sporting events. He was sixteen years her senior, and an unusual choice, as most Jewish girls at that time married men in the trades, like furriers, jewelers, and tailors - or, if they were lucky, professional men like doctors, dentists or accountants. 
When she was young, my mother was blonde and lithe, distinctly different in her Aryan good looks from the many European Jewish girls in Toronto. My parents married in 1937, six weeks after the death of my mother’s mother, and although she looks quite serene in the formal sepia photos, holding calla lilies in a long white satin gown, there is an underlying sorrow about Ruth’s eyes. I understand that she wanted to postpone or even cancel the wedding party, but it went on.
By the time I was seven, she had gained weight considerably. I was skinny, and my bony body found a nice cushion in her warm rich one when we cuddled in bed. She talked about being stout and tried to diet. My mother was pretty, and no matter what size dress she wore, she could pull off looking splendid when she wanted to.
Years later, when she was depressed and sick, she lost most of the extra poundage, but I liked her better when she was heavy. I once called her a big fat horse, an expression I had heard on the radio. I thought it comical, but it obviously stung, as she sent me down to the basement as punishment. I learned a lesson then about telling the truth candidly, and how it could hurt people. I think carefully before I do that now.   
Ruth Turofsky had style. She also had beautiful pale blue eyes, silky fair hair, and high cheek bones. Her regular permanents each summer put waves in her hair, and she went to the hairdresser every Friday so that she could look her best for the weekend. I think she had manicures, but I am not certain. She didn’t have pretty hands though, rather thick with large unattractive thumbs. 
My father, Louis Joseph Turofsky, was born in Chicago, but moved to Toronto with his family when he was a teen. My parents met when my mother went to him to get her picture taken, knowing Daddy was a bachelor.  The rest is my history.
My father had an oval face with a very high forehead, and almost black wavy hair. He had deep blue eyes, and a straight nose. He wasn’t tall, about five feet seven with slim legs, and needed suspenders to hold up his socks on those legs.  His beautiful, slender fingers sported a gold ring with a tiny diamond in its center, on his pinky. He was proud of his hands, and had manicures regularly, as he hated the stain that the photo developer chemicals left on his nails. There was always a cigar in the side of his mouth. He hardly ever smoked it, but he sucked on it a great deal, and it became his trademark. Old Spice was his chosen aftershave. I was enchanted with the scent, and fell in love with a boy at a dance, just because he was soaked in it. Well, fell in love for the length of one song. I adored my Daddy and he me. I would lie against his stomach, which was considerable, and he would tickle my back. We would often listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts together. He loved his Texaco Saturdays, somehow teaching me about music while I lay there enjoying the sensual touch of his fingers. Once I put on a kimono, placed knitting needles in my hair, and pretended I was Madame Butterfly, with an operatic soprano voice that I found somewhere.  I pranced into my parents’ bedroom, and sang my heart out in some made-up language. Their delight was palpable.
Daddy arranged for all of us to see the Metropolitan Opera Company on tour at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, a hockey arena transformed.  It was a  performance of Rigoletto with Roberta Peters, Robert Merrill and Richard Tucker, a dream cast in an opera that I was to perform years later, and one that would be the first for me to learn as a fledgling singer. My father would have been overjoyed to hear me sing Gilda. I used to imagine that he was listening from some perch in the clouds.    
Everyone knew and liked my Dad. Much of his working time was spent at the track, where he covered the horse races for the newspapers. He pioneered a Canadian version of the photo-finish camera that precisely captured the horses speeding across the finish line. We were shown a Liberty magazine article about this, with pictures of him demonstrating how it worked, and how it was immediately used to determine the result of two close finishes at its debut in 1937. But he wasn’t a businessman, and lost the Canadian patent on this brilliant idea, which was the basis for the sensor called the electric eye, a device that automatically opens doors. We might have been millionaires, but we weren’t. Not even close.         
Daddy hung out with his younger brother Nat, and their colorful friends from the sports world, at their office downtown in the old Toronto Star building on King Street. They also spent a lot of time working there too, but it was definitely a gathering place. The office had a not-unpleasant odor of men, tobacco and photofinisher. The walls were covered with massive black-and-white photographs of hockey and equine pictures mounted on boards.  But the Miss Toronto ones, with swimsuit contestants wearing banners across their chests, with their long, tanned, bare legs in high-heeled pumps, absorbed me. 
Daddy was known for sports, but he had an artistic soft side. There was a shot of a gawky, young, tattered, newspaper boy asleep on a street curb, and another of a very old woman with hairy eyebrows, and weathered skin, smoking a pipe. Those were magical. On the walls were photos of the Queen Mother, Roosevelt with Mackenzie King, and the Duke of Windsor beside his American divorcée - I loved the sound of that last word, reminding me of my cousin Nina...