Treason

by Sallie Bingham

  MARY

  That was the only time I ever saw Olga cry. You set us both on your knees, tried to comfort us. I was crying, too, because I knew I shouldn’t want Gais, shouldn’t want my family here—

  EZRA

  I wanted to tell you then, but she wouldn’t let me—never the right time.

  MARY

  Tell me what?

  EZRA

  (With difficulty)

  To tell you … I came here to tell you … my other family. My … wife.

  MARY

  Your other family? Your wife!

  EZRA

  Dorothy. Dorothy Shakespear—no relation to … her mother was Yeats’s lover: It happened a long time ago, in England. I was a young, penniless ’Mercun poet. Dorothy came complete with two hundred pounds a year—“So, a bargain says the Jew.”

  MARY

  That woman who tried to talk to me in the street in Rapallo …

  EZRA

  Yes, Dorothy. She has a son.

  MARY

  Yours?

  EZRA

  A year younger than you—Omar.

  (Attempt at humor)

  I named him that so he could never be a poet.

  MARY

  Oh Babbo—

  EZRA

  Dorothy insisted on it, after you were born. What Olga has, Dorothy must have. So we had a son.

  (Silence—MARY unable to speak)

  Best to say nothing. Our secret. Like the gelato.

  MARY

  But it’s not a secret. Everybody must know.

  EZRA

  No one wanted me to tell you. Sordid complications, they said … Leoncina, you must have guessed …

  MARY

  No. Never. Olga never said anything.

  EZRA

  You must have wondered why I was only with you and Olga on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the occasional Thursday.

  MARY

  (Near tears)

  I thought you were away working.

  EZRA

  You were better off, in Gais, learning how to farm. Do you still keep the accounts? The way I taught you?

  MARY

  It’s not a farm now. We had to eat the sheep early in the war.

  EZRA

  I gave you a real account book—you no more than fifteen, but good at figgering! Staked you to your first breeding ewe. A man must work with his head, or with his hands.

  MARY

  You taught me so much, Babbo. Still the most fascinating man I know.

  (She takes his hands.)

  EZRA

  What’s this your Ma tells me about a boyfriend?

  MARY

  Oh, just Boris—he kissed me, once, in Rome.

  EZRA

  (Gently mocking)

  I hear he’s a “Prince.”

  MARY

  I didn’t know anything about his title, then. Neither did he. I just thought he was the most interesting man I’d ever met—except for you, Babbo.

  EZRA

  You’re not going to marry him, Leoncina? The torments of hell! Get back to your sheep.

  MARY

  We ate the sheep. And anyway, this is not the time for me to get married. Olga wants me to get “culture” first.

  EZRA

  You know enough to help me with my translations—that’s a pretty thorough education. And you’ve read Shakespeare …

  MARY

  I was rereading The Merchant of Venice the last time I was in Venice.

  (Quoting)

  “I have a father, you a daughter, lost.”

  (MARY exits. Light changes. EZRA wraps himself in the bedroll, lies down. Lights intensely bright and blue. He rubs his eyes.)

  EZRA

  (Quoting)

  “There is some ill a-brewing towards my rest …”

  (Shouting)

  Turn off the goddamned lights!

  (Intense light)

  BLACKOUT

  SCENE 6

  Setting: The Cage, Disciplinary Training Center. Morning, May, 1945

  (The packing crate now has a board nailed across it to make a desk, with papers, books, etc. EZRA, in army fatigues, is asleep. ELDER MICHAUX is heard over the camp speakers …)

  EZRA

  Cat piss and porcupines!

  (He rises, turns, and urinates into the can. Lights up on a distant view of farmlands toward Pisa. EZRA grips the bars, looking out. SGT. WHITESIDE enters with a magazine, which he takes into the cage.)

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  Morning, Mr. Pound.

  EZRA

  What’s that caterwauling?

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux’s Radio Church of God. Every Sunday. It’ll be over soon.

  EZRA

  Mussolini wouldn’t even let the Pope broadcast. He drained the swamps, made the trains finally run on schedule…. Il Duce said every man a house of his own in eighty years. Didn’t have eight years to get it done…. “Shoot me in the chest!” he said—hung up by the heels in Milano, with La Clara.

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  New issue of Time just came.

  EZRA

  (Eagerly scanning magazine)

  Baseball. Now I know the war’s over. Thanks! And thanks for this “table” ex packing box.

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  You’re the only man in the DTC, Mr. Pound, who knows the poetry of Langston Hughes.

  (He turns to go.)

  EZRA

  I set old Hughes on the right path—same as Fordie did me, same as I did Eliot! Told Hughes he finally got the authentic nigger talk in that poem of his called “Harlem.”

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  “What happens to a dream deferred?”

  EZRA

  (Taking up the recitation)

  “Does it dry up

  like a raisin in the sun?

  Does it stink like rotten meat?”

  (SGT. WHITESIDE joins in on the final lines.)

  “Maybe it just sags

  Like a heavy load

  OR DOES IT EXPLODE?”

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  It might … here’s some Countee Cullen you might not be familiar with.

  “Once riding in old Baltimore,

  Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,

  I saw a Baltimorean

  Keep looking straight at me.

  Now I was eight and very small,

  And he was no whit bigger,

  And so, I smiled, but he poked out

  His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’

  I saw the whole of Baltimore

  From May until December;

  Of all the things that happened there

  That’s all that I remember.”

  EZRA

  You got an opinion on the Civil War, Whiteside?

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  The right side won.

  EZRA

  I know what you THINK. I know what you’ve been TOLD. But you’re wrong. Economic—all economic! The South was in debt to the Jew North. That started the Civil War! You got any opinion on the Ku Klux Klan?

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  I’ve got an opinion. My father was a sharecropper—burnt out, in Virginia. Lost everything he had—except his life. And not because they didn’t try to take that too.

  EZRA

  American lynch law had its origins in the deliberate ruin of the American South. The Ku Klux once had a reason …

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  You in favor of the ovens, too?

  (EZRA appears not to understand.)

  The ovens we found in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia?

  EZRA

  As to the Hitler program, it was—what we all know, and do nothing about—that the breeding of human beings deserves more care and attention than the breeding of horses and sheep. That’s point one of the Nazi program. Breed GOOD, and preserve the race.

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  You talk some dangerous shit for a man in a cage.

  (SGT. WHITESIDE exits.) />
  EZRA

  Whiteside!

  (He finds what he is looking for in a manuscript.)

  “A white ox on the road toward Pisa,

  as if facing the tower,

  dark sheep in the drill field and on wet days were clouds in the mountain as if under the guard roosts.”

  (He sees something, drops to his knees.)

  “A lizard upheld me …”

  (Takes lizard in his hand as DOROTHY and OLGA enter. He puts it down carefully as he sees them. They stand on either side of the cage, holding the bars, looking in. EZRA, seeing them, raises his arms in silent greeting and exultation.)

  OLGA

  It’s hard writing into the blue, never knowing whether you get it and having no answer. If I could only do something for you …

  (EZRA grabs her hand through the bars.)

  I expect you’ll be out waving your wild tail before long, outside the barbed wire of the DTC and INSIDE the domestic cage …

  (He grabs manuscript from the table, reads from it.)

  EZRA

  “O white-chested martin, God damn it

  as no one will carry a message

  Say to La Cara: amo.”

  (To DOROTHY)

  Please see that Olga has money.

  DOROTHY

  I sent her one of the thousand-lire notes I found in your room soon after you were taken away. I wrote her, “This, as you may remember, was HIS money, not mine….” I was not thanked.

  OLGA

  (To DOROTHY)

  I’ve never taken Ezra’s money. All I have, now, are the few lire my students pay for their piano lessons.

  EZRA

  (Taking DOROTHY’s hand through the bars. He is now holding both women’s hands, which means they must stand close together. He speaks to DOROTHY as though they are alone.)

  You have given me thirty years of peace clear as blue feldspar and I am grateful. Do you remember Sirmione?

  DOROTHY

  Where I first saw color. My life began then.

  EZRA

  The little temple over the lake where we lay on the grass—with your glorious mother.

  “If, at Sirmio,

  My soul, I meet thee, when this life’s outrun …”

  DOROTHY

  “Thank you, whatever comes…. Nay, whatever comes One hour was sunlit …”

  Dear Mao—are you able to work here?

  EZRA

  I have my Confucius, a Chinese dictionary, paper—

  (He picks up papers to show them.)

  for these new Cantos I need the ideogram “chang”: constant, usual.

  DOROTHY

  (Taking pages through the bars)

  I’ll find it, send it to you.

  (Privately)

  Pazienza!

  OLGA

  Give me the drafts, I’ll type them up.

  (She reaches for the papers. DOROTHY does not give them to her.)

  EZRA

  (To OLGA)

  Tell Mary I bless the day I first saw you for all the happiness you have brought me.

  (To himself)

  But first I must go this road to hell.

  OLGA

  (Realizing she won’t get the papers)

  Mary always exhorts me to be a good loser, reminds me of Violet Hunt, how you counseled her when Fordie left her, “Never mind, you’ll be old soon, and then you won’t care.”

  DOROTHY

  All our friends send messages.

  EZRA

  The First War took our best. Age has got the rest of ’em. Willy Yeats and Fordie Madox Ford that once was Hueffer, and Jimmy Joyce that made a new language—I helped him publish that gawddarned Ulysses—and other men, many others—the best of the best. I don’t see them now, the ones that are left, don’t hear from ’em…. When Willy Yeats came to Rapallo to show me his new work, I wrote “Putrid” across it, can’t remember now rightly why … —no more letters, now.

  DOROTHY

  (She pockets the papers, takes out notes, begins to read from one of them.)

  “A good man, so kind, he never did anything wrong.”

  And here are some from our friends in England.

  (Hands him letters through the bars.)

  EZRA

  (Reaching through bars for the notes)

  O Mao! Tell me everything—all the news. Personal gossip, anything. Tom Elliot, Willy Yeats—

  (DOROTHY strokes his wrist.)

  OLGA

  Mary sends her love. She longs to visit—

  DOROTHY

  Your mother wants to hear from you. I moved down the hill to be with her as soon as you left. The old lady’s well, though a nuisance. Talk, talk, talk.

  (Quietly)

  You may imagine that I’m thinking of you all the time; but I do not worry all the time. I only hope captivity is not proving bad for your health—

  EZRA

  The army feeds me very solid.

  (Pounds his stomach)

  Back to 166 pounds, but nothing like the prewar bulge. Tell me more—

  OLGA

  Mary’s quit her hospital work, gone back to Gais, now the war is over. I asked her to stay with me, but she wouldn’t. She told me she couldn’t do anything to make me happy. Left me that quote from The Merchant of Venice about losing a daughter. She underlined it three times.

  EZRA

  Loves the mountains, that girl—fat as a cat full of cream.

  DOROTHY

  Omar’s quite happy in the army. He just heard his first Magic Flute.

  EZRA

  How old was he when I … ?

  (DOROTHY doesn’t understand.)

  How old was my son—when I first …

  DOROTHY

  When you first “met” him? He was twelve, on vacation from boarding school, staying with my mother in London. You came for one day.

  EZRA

  Dorothy …

  DOROTHY

  Your son is very proud of you. Pray God he survives this war.

  EZRA

  I could have stopped it in ’39, when I went back to the States to speak to Stinky Roosenfeld. He wouldn’t see me, too busy talking to his Jew banker friends—palmed me off on that old fool congressman from Idaho. “I’m sure I don’t know what a man like you would find to do in Washington.” Waall, they’ll hear from me now—if they try me, I’m prepared to defend myself.

  OLGA

  Oh no, Ezra.

  DOROTHY

  You always have too many ideas, you’ll go over the edge, exhaust everyone.

  EZRA

  I have no choice. It would take a superman to defend me.

  DOROTHY

  I’m prepared to spend my last penny—

  OLGA

  I’ll start a petition—

  (SGT. WHITESIDE enters.)

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  Time’s up, ladies.

  EZRA

  (Holding their hands)

  Write me. Anything. A scribble. Tell the others—

  OLGA

  I’ll come again as soon as they’ll let me, even if I have to walk.…

  DOROTHY

  Thank you, whatever comes.

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  That’s it, folks.

  (He escorts DOROTHY and OLGA off, OLGA protesting.)

  EZRA

  (Hanging onto the bars, looking after them)

  Trees die & the dream remains.

  “UBI AMOR IBI OCULUS EST.

  Where love is, there is the eye.”

  (As OLGA’s protests die away)

  The female is a chaos….

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  I’ll have to take those letters.

  (He unlocks cage, enters, takes letters.)

  EZRA

  (As he’s doing this)

  Just little words of friendship, encouragement.

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  Sorry. Regulations.

  (He takes letters, leaves cage. EZRA appears devastated.)

  EZRA (Sho
uting)

  Twenty minutes with Stalin is all I ask—WHITESIDE!

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  What do you want now?

  EZRA

  Come here.

  SGT. WHITESIDE (Approaching)

  What’ve you got up your pants this time?

  EZRA

  Not much. Hand me that broom.

  (He indicates a broom lying outside the cage.)

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  Now, you know …

  EZRA

  No rule against brooms.

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  What do you want it for?

  EZRA

  Fourteen days in this gorilla cage. What I need is exercise. So hand it to me.

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  Sorry. The answer is no.

  EZRA

  (EZRA now works the wire handle off the latrine bucket into a hook. He uses this to reach through the cage bars and hook the broom, drawing it in. Dramatic stabs and flourishes with the broom.)

  Billy Yeats and I, reading all day in the stone cottage in Sussex, then going out after dark with our foils. Dorothy was supposed to cook for the three of us—our honeymoon.

  “Some cook, some do not cook. Some things cannot be altered.”

  (Using the broom as a tennis racket)

  I won all my games, that last winter at Rapallo—told Olga my scores. She didn’t want me to talk about tennis. She wanted me to talk about love.

  (Drops the broom, gets down on his hands and knees)

  “What thou lovest well remains …”

  SGT. WHITESIDE

  Get some rest, Mr. Pound. Be careful not to overdo your exercise.

  (Exits)

  EZRA

  (Shields eyes from light, strikes a pose)

  “Put out the light, and then put out the light.”

  Margaret Cravens slit her throat the afternoon before her tea party, left me a note on the piano—I’d told her thanks so much for the money—a thousand a year—but no, I won’t marry her. Shouldn’t-a taken it personal; shoulda known I’m agin marryin’. François Villon said, “Absolve, may you absolve us all.”