DAPHNE MERKIN
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way, and "Two Ladies in the Shade of the Banana Tree," which he
claimed had been made popular by a twin-sister singing team with a
German-sounding name, whom none of us had ever heard of.
Once , to my amazement, as if to throw out a rope from my
father's raft of memories to mine, these mythical sisters actually
showed up on "The Ed Sullivan Show" while I sat watching it with
Rachel and Eric. This was the only TV program we were allowed to
watch regularly in those years, a fitting finish to the specialness that
was Sunday . Eric loved the little talking mouse, Topo Gigio; it was
what he watched the show for. Topo Gigio had only to pronounce
Ed Sullivan's name, "Ed-tie, pu-leez, Ed-tie," to send Eric into howls
of delight. Rachel and I watched all the acts with equal and in–
discriminate passion, from juggles to ventriloquists to torch singers
like Nancy Wilson. Lily disdained the show altogether, and the only
times Benjamin sat through the whole thing was when Ed Sullivan
announced that one of his stable of wisecracking comedians would
be on, Alan King or Rodney Dangerfield or George Carlin . That
evening it was just the three of us, Rachel, Eric, and me (Arthur was
too young to stay up during most of the Ed Sullivan period), when
suddenly there they were: blonde and buxom and very guttural, the
pair swayed their ample hips in unison as they harmonized the re–
frain of "Two Ladies in the Shade of the Banana Tree ."
I was so excited to see them in living flesh that I went around
singing their hit to myself for weeks afterward, stringing out the
syllables in "ban-nah-nah tree" just as they had. I think I even con–
vinced myself for a while that these sisters had been my father's
girlfriends before he met my mother- part of a distant bachelor past
in which he went incessantly to nightclubs, a white silk scarf dan–
gling from under his coat collar. In actuality, although my father
married late and was by far the oldest father among the fathers I
knew-grandfatherly age, in fact-he was never quite the apogee of
rakishness I would have liked to believe him to have been. The
female whom he escorted most often to the clubs (pocketing match–
books from each, just as he always snitched hand towels from the
foreign hotels he stayed in) was undoubtedly my mother, during the
two years of their on-again, off-again courtship. But the reality of
who my father was - or had once been - didn't much matter at these
moments when he was at his ease, taking jolly part in a culture that
was recognizable to me rather than recounting with great sentiment
some aspect of his youth in Germany that sounded alien and intrin–
sically unappealing. I came closest to loving my father when he sat
