Q & A

by M. Allen Cunningham

  Sidney picks up the phone and speaks with Marvin in the office at City College confirming yes, sure—certainly, if it can be arranged, says Marvin, we’d put it on the calendar right away, and Sidney says, that’s great thanks Marvin I’ll see what I can do, I do believe this could be good for all those concerned: for the college first of all, but also as a message, you know, to young people, about learning and knowledge.

  A Visit

  Sidney Winfeld knocks on the door of the house on Prince Street.

  Ernestine Saint Claire: [opening the door] Can I help you?

  Sidney: Missus Saint Claire, good evening. I believe you may know me from—

  Ernestine: Oh, of course! My goodness, I didn’t recognize you at first.

  Sidney: Yes, that’s on account of my hairstyle, probably. I’ve changed it since I was on TV. I realize this is unexpected. Me coming here, I mean.

  Ernestine: Would you care to come in?

  Sidney: Yes, thank you. It’s sort of a funny thing, I never did wear my hair that other way, not in my whole life.

  Ernestine: Have you come to see my husband?

  Sidney: I had a question for him, yes. Only take a second. Is Mister Saint Claire at home?

  Ernestine: I expect him back any minute.

  Sidney: Oh, well I wouldn’t want to keep you…

  Ernestine: It’s no trouble, Mister Winfeld. Can I get you some coffee or tea?

  They move together through the entry into the living room.

  Sidney: What a beautiful old place this is. I’d have a cup of tea, sure, if it wouldn’t be much trouble, you’re very kind.

  Ernestine: Not at all.

  Sidney: They put me in an old suit too, you know. Used to be my father-in-law’s, that suit. A full size too big at least. But hey, when they’re paying you…

  Ernestine: I’m sure.

  [Awkward pause]

  Ernestine: I’ll just put the kettle on. Please have a seat. Make yourself comfortable.

  Sidney, still wearing his coat, perches on the edge of the sofa cushion.

  Sidney: It’s funny, I know this sofa—this whole room actually—from Person to Person.

  Ernestine: [from the kitchen] Oh goodness, wasn’t that a disaster?

  On the sofa Sidney waits, alone in the room, looking about. Ernestine reappears.

  Ernestine: Do you live nearby, Mister Winfeld?

  Sidney: Forest Hills. Not so close.

  They hear the front door opening. Sidney stands. Ernestine steps away to greet Kenyon coming in.

  They murmur briefly in the entry. Then Kenyon steps into the living room.

  Kenyon: Well, well. Here’s a familiar face. [Extending a hand] What a surprise, Mister Winfeld.

  Sidney: [Shaking Kenyon’s hand] Pretty unexpected, I realize.

  Kenyon: You’re most welcome. It’s been a rather strange couple of months, hasn’t it?

  Sidney: A strange couple of years, yes it has.

  Kenyon: Have a seat, please.

  Sidney perches again on the cushion edge. Kenyon sits in the reading chair opposite.

  Kenyon: You’ve been well, I hope, since the show. It occurs to me now, actually, how little we ever saw of one another, shut up in those booths like we were.

  Sidney: Well, it was part of the casting, wasn’t it? Opponents and all that. … I’ve been well enough. My wife and I, we have a baby daughter now.

  Kenyon: Isn’t that nice. Congratulations.

  Sidney: And you’ve been very well, I’ve noticed. I was telling your wife what a beautiful old home. It’s like I knew the place already, I was telling her, from Person to Person.

  Kenyon: How embarrassing. I’d rather forget that little mishap. What can we do for you, Mister Winfeld?

  Sidney: Well, I come here with a kind of a proposal, which with the news about the quiz shows and all, I think this could be an opportunity you’d welcome. What I had in mind is a quiz match, a new one, like a rematch, between you and me.

  Kenyon: Do you mean on television?

  Sidney: TV or not, wouldn’t matter. What I picture would be a public event for charitable purposes. We already have a kind of invitation, in fact, from CCNY. I don’t know if you’d recall, but I was a City College student.

  Kenyon: This would be a benefit, so to speak, for the college?

  Sidney: Exactly, all the proceeds to CCNY. And we’d play it straight, just fair and square, as it goes without saying, I suppose.

  Kenyon: Well, Mister Winfeld, it’s an awfully nice idea.

  Sidney: I wouldn’t have any trouble, naturally, answering the questions. Which is to say, that’s not why it was played fixed, you understand. The TV program.

  Kenyon: Yes, I’ve heard, of course, about your charges.

  Sidney: It was the producers’ decision to play it fixed. From the start that’s how they wanted it. I think I coulda won it on my own though. [smiles]

  Kenyon: [Also smiling] I’m sure that’s true. Well, this benefit match, it’s a very nice idea—

  Sidney: And I figured you’d welcome the chance to show your own true colors in a quiz situation—I mean a situation of a different nature than what they put us through on those Wednesday nights.

  Kenyon: [demurring] I have to admit, Mister Winfeld, that with the news, as you say, being what it is right now … I’m afraid I’m not inclined to do so public an event.

  Sidney: No? Well, you can think it over. How about you think over? I mean, if it’s the public nature of the event, I mean, you’re on national television every day.

  Kenyon: In a different capacity.

  Sidney: Sure, in a different capacity. This quiz match, it’s an opportunity, is all. Which, that’s the reason I thought to extend to you the invitation…

  Kenyon: I’m not sure the timing is right. I’m sorry.

  Sidney: I see.

  Pause. They sit, silent. After a moment, Ernestine enters.

  Ernestine: The kettle’s ready. Kenyon, Mister Winfeld is having a cup of tea. Will you have one?

  Sidney: Thank you very much, Missus Saint Claire, but I’m afraid I won’t have the time after all.

  Sidney rises, and so does Kenyon.

  Kenyon: [Walking Sidney to the door] I do appreciate the proposal, Mister Winfeld, and the idea, as I say, is a very nice one. I only wish the timing were better.

  They arrive at the door. Kenyon lowers his voice.

  Kenyon: Before you go, do you mind if I ask… why did you… I mean, what was it that made you go to the newspapers?

  Sidney: [Pausing, taken aback] I’m an honest guy. What can I say? All that money, and putting one over on the public every week. It all just didn’t sit right.

  Kenyon: What I mean to ask is… I’m trying to understand… why would you admit to being fixed, for everyone to know? There must have been something...

  Sidney: I’m an honest guy, like I said. Unlike Ray Greenmarch, I’m an honest person who keeps his promises. (Pause) What I am not is a loser.

  Kenyon: I see.

  Sidney: They said to me, we don’t want you, we want the TV you. Well, I am not the person the TV represented me as.

  Kenyon: Sure. I see.

  Sidney: What about you, Mister Saint Claire, since we’re discussing this.

  Kenyon: Pardon me?

  Sidney: Myself, this TV business, at various times and occasions I’ve been angry about this and I’ve been jealous and I’ve been vengeful—across the board, you name it. But now? Now I just want to be me again. How about you?

  Kenyon: Well, Mister Winfeld, there you have me. That’s something worth thinking about. Sidney is out the door and gone.

  8.

  GLASS

  1959

  KENYON

  They didn’t call. They didn’t summon. No telegram, no
letter by registered mail. Months went by, and he’d begun to think that, just perhaps, it might all slide away into the past: the D.A.’s interview, the suggestion that he’d be called to testify—an episode of uncouth intimidation, of legalistic power-mongering, a momentary scare. Maybe they wouldn’t come after Kenyon after all. What anyway would they gain from doing so? Maybe they’d taken a clear look at last, seen the honorableness of his aims in being on television: education, always education. Since the beginning he’d had good intentions. Since the beginning all he’d wanted to do was make a difference for the better. Surely anybody reasonable could see that—and maybe they had.

  He’d gone to Paris with the TODAY Show, bringing Ernestine along. It was a promise kept, if not exactly a honeymoon. He joined the cast and crew broadcasting from the very boulevards—un homme de la rue, a televised flâneur, although harnessed as he was to his microphone cable and the bulky camera he couldn’t wander more than a few feet in any one direction. He and Ernestine had the afternoons and walked the city together. Now and then he spoke to her of his time in Paris years ago, leaving out certain parts. Somehow the place seemed not nearly as real to him now as it did back then—all its visions more remote, the sensations dulled. He could hardly believe in that time of his life anymore. That raw hopefulness. Himself as a writer: a novelist! Had that dream faded completely? What did he have to show for it? Ernestine seemed happy to be there, in Paris, even if forced to share him with the TV people.

  When they got back home the grand jury was still underway, as far as he knew. But it seemed bogged down in the drudgery of legal process. The longer it plodded on, the less furor it aroused. Sam Lacky, he’d heard, had spent no more than a few hours in jail, released on bail almost immediately. He’d relocated with his family to Mexico. The quiz program itself was off the air, a thing of the past—and now Kenyon hoped it could be forgotten altogether.

  Kenyon’s mail continued to bring a mix of affection and damnation, but with Ernestine’s help he could screen the worst of it. And by avoiding the newspapers, too, he found he could almost put the whole two-year episode out of mind. Almost.

  He began to relax again into his pleasant reality: TODAY Show in the morning, then Columbia, and here and there a special appearance on nighttime TV: Jack Paar, Jack Benny, Steve Allen. Mostly he wasn’t asked about the Winfield charges anymore, but got to speak about the things he loved, the things that mattered: literature, history, philosophy—even on “primetime,” as they called it. Hadn’t that been his accomplishment: to elevate the medium? The rest of the time was his and Ernestine’s to share, at home together in their beautiful old house, or with his family at the farm.

  And then, in January, the summons did arrive.

  Strangely, its appearance did not revive the crushing dread right away. Instead, with surprising equanimity and clarity, he showed the summons to Ernestine and said, “I want to protect us here. That’s what matters most. I need to do what will best protect us.”

  Did that mean he should tell the truth? Kenyon himself didn’t yet know, and Ernestine didn’t ask—not out loud, at any rate (but she kept looking at him in a way only she could do). Somehow even not knowing what he would do did not unsteady Kenyon—he felt sure he would know soon enough. For now, he could put it all out of his mind. When the day of his testimony arrived, he would know.

  One evening, a week or so after the summons came, Kenyon found himself alone in the house, Ernestine away at her monthly book club meeting. This month’s book was Fitzgerald’s Gatsby—a novel Kenyon had always found troubling, both in its substance and because of its exaltation in the literary world. He took out the summons and looked at it, then folded it away in the inside pocket of his jacket and went out for a brisk walk around the neighborhood, bundled in scarf and overcoat and woolen hat.

  It was January’s early twilight, the trees mostly skeletal and the sky leaden and lamps beginning to come on in the windows of shops and residences. He moved in widening circles, rounding his own block before branching off deeper into the Village. He’d grown up on these blocks, and yet on this night the city felt alien, inhospitable. The bodies swarming along the sidewalks, the roar of accelerating cars, the unrestrained after-hours laughter, the slammed doors, the shouts and odors—it was a pandemonium of clashing motives, of desperate private destinies all striving to outpace each other—dreams and fears entangled at an urban crossroads.

  How does one city bear so much stranger-to-stranger proximity? How does any person ever cross the gulf to knowing and caring for any other? In the dioramas of the windows Kenyon could see faces—faces in profile, faces in passing, faces staring into twilight. Across the darkening streets these windows, and the faces in the windows, faced each other—without greeting, without so much as acknowledgment.

  You learned to look through your fellow citizen, your neighbor. Life in the city demanded this. And meanwhile, more and more, you fixed your attention—fixed your attention with ardent, blinding hopefulness—on the inside window, the small glinting box abuzz in your living room.

  In the many windows now as Kenyon walked, there were flickering projections: the restless broadcast. That window, because its knobs and buttons promised empowerment, was more and more a source of light and warmth and affirmation and reassurance. A new technological community: illimitable, immediately accessible.

  In fact, it was no window at all, but a mirror—no community, but a congregation of mirrors—and like some mythological tool, the mirror held every fantasy, every nightmare, every secret aspiration.

  Once inside that mirror, once reflected there, how did one get out again?

  I want to protect us …

  Later that evening Kenyon called Dad, asked to be put in touch with Ruben Carlino, his lawyer.

  I need to do what will best protect us.

  At their first meeting, before even opening his briefcase, Ruben calmly folded his hands on the tabletop, leaned forward, and said, “I can best advise you only by knowing exactly what happened. So tell me, Kenyon, did they give you the answers?”

  Kenyon paused. How could he compound his lie yet again? On the other hand, how could he not? Ruben had known his father for decades, another Columbia man.

  “No,” he said.

  But even as he spoke the lie, Kenyon preserved in his own mind and imagination the awareness that he could just as well, when the day of his grand jury testimony arrived next week, speak the truth.

  He wanted to keep in reserve every possibility—orchestrate and command every possible outcome. He wanted to hold onto the freedom to choose.

  Now it’s the night before his testimony, and as he lies in bed beside Ernestine, Kenyon’s mind begins to clear. He feels himself visited—in his very limbs there’s some powerful surge of confidence.

  He says: “It’s a performance. Just like the quiz program was. And I survived that. I survived the isolation booth. I’ll survive this.”

  Ernestine, silent, moves closer, embracing him more tightly. But hers is a plangent, reproving silence, and as quick as it came Kenyon’s confidence ebbs. Then he lies stranded in their bed, in her arms, alone and adrift though she embraces him.

  In his mind Kenyon Saint Claire is saying to himself: I survived, I survived—but did I win?

  Did I ever truly win?

  And can I win this now?

  Truth or lie, can this be won at all?

  “Part of you,” says Ernestine, after several minutes.

  “Mm?”

  “Some part of you will survive, yes.” She’s talking into his neck, quietly, her head nestled into his shoulder. Slow, slow words. “Go before that jury and give one more little performance. Say the lines the producers expect. Protect these people who make a game of everything. Some part of you will survive that, sure. But I want more, Kenyon. I want more than part of you.”

  “Darling, there’s not much choice here. What can
I do? It isn’t even about principles. They’re all lying: Greenmarch, Lacky, all the other contestants.”

  “Not Winfeld—not all the others.”

  “No, but the rest. Is it my place to put them at risk? Or this—am I to put all this at risk? We could lose it all, you know, if I misstep now. Everything. It could be…just stripped away. This house, everything.”

  “It’s what you do that matters, Kenyon. Not whatever happens to you.”

  The first thing Kenny did was fall down the stairs.

  “Whatever happens,” he says, “happens to us.”

  “Yes,” she says. “To us.”

  “Ernestine, this is a grand jury.”

  “That’s right. Not television. You say Mint and Greenmarch want you to go on performing, to just go on speaking their lines. I say you are realer than every one of them. Than all of them put together.”

  We help you be you. Even on television.

  “You always have been realer, Kenyon.”

  And what if the impression one made is not one’s own?

  “Being real,” he says, “to be real …” but his words drift off into silence, his brooding thought.

  The person we’re creating here, that’ll be you.

  “Go on,” says Ernestine. She’s reading his mind. All along, always, she’s had this way of reading his mind. “Say it, Kenyon.”

  You know what you know, and we know what you know. It’s simple, see?

  He says: “How… how is a person ever real again? After all the faking.”

  “You break the pattern,” she says. “You tell them.”

  “Tell them?”

  “Yes. Then they’ll see you. Let them see you, Kenyon. Show them.”

  Let them see you.

  In the morning Kenyon is ready. He passes through the doors of the wood-paneled grand jury room—he’s dry-cleaned and freshly shaven, collar starched and woolen tie carefully knotted—and takes his seat in the burnished witness chair. He feels rejuvenated, refreshed, lucid-of-mind. His purpose here is crisp and certain. He can hold his head high.