Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

by Budd Schulberg

  In Los Angeles Steiner showed it to a professor of archaeology at U.C.L.A. who marveled at his find and asked to put it on temporary exhibition at a pre-Columbian show he was organizing on campus. Before Steiner did that, he took it to Stendahl’s, who were equally impressed, indeed offered him a handsome profit. But this piece, Steiner felt, was too precious for material gain.

  Six months later, when his marble jaguar came back from the university, its heart-shaped eye spaces kept staring at him accusingly from its place of honor on the mantle in the living room, and its tongue in contrasting shades of brown marble seemed to be sticking out at him in a way that stirred his conscience. As an old friend of Mexico, as a lifelong aficionado of the Mexican spirit, did he deserve to hoard a treasure that belonged to the people of Mexico, no matter how cluttered with ancient artifacts was the basement of their Museo Nacional?

  After wrestling with his conscience, Steiner decided to smuggle it back. As soon as he was settled in at his favorite old hotel in the burgeoning city, the unreconstructed sixteenth-century Cortez, he taxied to the National Museum and asked to see the director, the author of several scholarly works on pre-Columbian art.

  The director, theatrically bearded but surprisingly youthful, thanked Steiner for bringing it to his attention, turned it over in his hands slowly, and then asked if he might keep it for a few days for his colleagues to examine more carefully.

  When Steiner returned at the end of the week, the director of the Museo kept him waiting almost half an hour. Steiner didn’t mind, as he was accustomed to the slower pace of Mexican life, and so he occupied himself with a new, illustrated booklet on the pre-Columbian art of Guerrero just published by the Instituto. The booklet opened with an introduction, in Spanish and English, by the director he was waiting to see. There was a full-page color plate of a jaguar head that seemed almost a twin of Steiner’s. He was devouring the text with the enthusiasm of the dedicated amateur when the director called him into his office. The manner of the museum official was very quiet, very dry, very un-Mexican.

  “Señor, we appreciate your honesty in offering us this piece. But unfortunately we have no interest in it. It is not auténtico. Not an original.” As he saw the stricken expression on Steiner’s face, he added, sympathetically, “I am afraid that you have been taken in, my friend.”

  “What? Not this time! I can’t …”

  “I understand,” the director interrupted with a thin smile. “There are good fakes and bad fakes, and then there are fakes that are almost a work of genius.”

  “But still a fake?” Steiner said. The question mark hovered there for a moment, then quickly disappeared in resignation.

  The director’s nod was more like a shrug as he handed back to Steiner the beautiful brown marble jaguar mask. “You see,” he took the trouble to explain, “today there is a new breed of what we call ‘archaeological pirates.’ They actually find real marble of the same age as the originals. And then they hire master craftsmen, sometimes the very same people we employ here to put together fragments of authentic pieces. So not even tests like carbon-14 will give them away. They are like brilliant copies of an Orozco or a Rivera. But copies just the same.”

  “A fake,” Steiner repeated because he could think of nothing else to say. “Another fake.”

  “Still, it is a very nice souvenir of our Indian culture,” the director tried to console him. “So take it home and enjoy it for what it is. An absolutely first-class reproduction.”

  As Steiner held it in his hands it seemed to have shrunk in size and weight.

  “By the way, how did you happen to get it?” the director asked casually.

  “From a dealer in Taxco,” Steiner said.” Actually, a friend of mine. Miguel …”

  “Miguel Delgado,” the director said quickly.

  “Oh, you know him?”

  “Como no? He brought the piece here a year ago but we were on to him. Of all the archaeological pirates—and it’s what you might call a ‘growth industry’—your Señor Delgado is one of the most sophisticated. He knows everything there is to know about archaeology. As much as we do, really, everything except about telling the truth.”

  Steiner walked out into the hot sun of the Museo plaza in a daze. He had planned to drive on down to Taxco for the holidays and spend Christmas and New Year’s in congenial celebration with his rags-to-riches compañero in archaeology, Miguelito. He had even thought of asking Rhoda down to join him for a possible reconciliation. But now he could hear her saying, “Why are you always such a patsy for these phonies? I could’ve told you you were being taken …” He could hear the self-righteous scolding and nagging, and the inevitable argument that drew them back to the most bitter of their differences.

  So now he decided just to stay here alone in Mexico City, where the bogus Santa Claus of the north was moving in on the Three Kings. When he stopped to wonder at a porky Mexican, sweaty and uncomfortable in his heavy red Santa outfit, unconvincing white beard and incongruous red cap, waving dispiritedly from a new department-store show-window, Steiner felt like taking his brown marble jaguar head and hurling it through the glass.

  But he restrained himself and retreated to the courtyard of the Hotel Cortez, where he drowned his archaeological blues in tequila añejo, thought about Miguelito’s mother lying there in the hillside graveyard, spared the knowledge of how her piety was being used to lend credibility to her son’s ingenious piracy, and consoled himself that at least one poor little mongrel bastard would never have to go barefoot on the cobblestones, or howl with the hungry dogs of Taxco.

  LETTER TO

  MACFADDEN

  Mr. Bernarr Macfadden,

  Liberty Magazine

  U.S.A.

  Cross my heart, Mister Macfadden, I would never think of bothering a busy important man like you if it wasn’t for a good reason. No sir, I know a man like you who puts out all those magazines we public have been enjoying for the past twenty years or so (and I’m not saying that just so you will keep on reading this letter either) a high mucker-muck like you has his hands full all ready without listening to every tom dick and harry who thinks he wants to wash his dirty linen in public, like my wife Sarah always says.

  But I’m no tom dick and harry, Mister Macfadden. I’m a man who happens to have good common ordinary old-fashioned American hog sense, and I still like to think I have some of the old ideals left even if the young fellows laugh nowadays when you talk about ideals only I’ll bet they would be laughing out of the other side of their mouths if they only knew how things used to be in those days when a man wore his ideals proudly like he did his old derby instead of stuffing them in his pocket like these new fangled berets. And if a man hasn’t got good American ideals in him why he might as well go back to somewheres where he belongs like Red Russia or some of those other places where I read in your magazine Liberty that the state runs everything and a man can’t even spit without getting the written permission of some high and mighty dictator.

  But as I was saying I would never think of writing this letter if it wasn’t for the fact that I can’t help feeling you and me have a lot in common even though we never met and you are a big shot and I’m just another of those people who can’t seem to climb back on his feet yet though I’m not through trying by a long shot. And I’m not saying this just to pull your leg either because if you knew me you’d know I was never the kind to pull anybody’s leg. What I always say is I can stand on my own two feet, thank you and when I want help from anybody I’ll ask for it.

  For instance when I was seventeen I thought it was about time I got a job and I went in to see Mr. Shumacher who owned the cigar store downtown and he asked me if I wanted him to give me a job. Give me a job nothing said I just like that, I want to earn this job, and would you believe it Mister Macfadden in four years I worked myself up to where I could buy that store from Mr. Shumacher. So I have a pretty good idea of what a man can do with ideals even if I did happen to buy that store in ’07 right when t
he Panic was about to burst and the Banks had to call in their loan on the store but how was I to know that or Mr. Shumacher either for that matter. So you can see we are not so different after all and why I am writing you because you are a man after my own heart all right and every time I read Liberty I always turn to the editorials first, that page with your name signed at the bottom of it in big letters, right next to that full page ad of Plymouth “America’s Best-Engineered Low-Price Car.”

  Every time I read those editorials I used to feel like writing in and telling you how they were just about the best thing I have ever read and I’ve read a lot of magazines in my time, Physical Culture when you first put that out and I was still young enough for that stuff, Western Stories and a lot more I could write down if I think a minute or two only I am anxious to finish this letter because it is not just a fan letter as I was starting to tell you but a sort of business letter, in fact a matter of life and death.

  There was one editorial that I carried around with me for weeks and I showed it to all the young squirts down at the shop. I might as well tell you now that I was working in a glass factory up here in San Francisco. My job was to lug the boxes around when the glass is being shipped out, that is I worked in the shipping rooms, loading the trucks from the floor of the storeroom that opens up on the back alley, but I guess that wouldn’t mean much to a man like you who is too busy with your writing and thinking and everything to bother much with wondering what goes on inside a big factory like the one I started to tell you about where I’ve been working. Of course this work was just temporary. I always was cut out for something better than manual work if I do say it myself and during this depression I have just sort of been marking time waiting to get on my feet again and start up my own business like I used to have before that oughty-seven crash.

  But anyway this editorial was the goods. Most of the boys on the floor gave me the merry ha ha when I showed it to them and when I said that the dignity and good breeding of labor stand for something, they said ha ha it stands for plenty, pop. And Sarah, that’s my wife, when I showed it to her she just kind of sniffed like she does when the ice melts because our icebox leaks and the milk gets scummy around the edges and then she has to boil it because Harry, my youngest kid who still lives with us, Harry has been learning in high school and he says the heat has got to be used to kill the microbes. But as I was saying this editorial of yours was all about Capital and Labor and it showed in the picture one man standing there dressed in a suit and a stiff white collar with a sort of kind face shaking hands with another fellow in overall pants and an open white shirt, a big bruiser with his sleeves rolled up, looking husky and happy and smiling. And they were shaking hands together, both smiling at each other like Teddy Roosevelt when he went off to fight the Spaniards or hunt elephants, and on one side of the picture was written in good-looking little white letters Capital and on the other side Labor. And then one side was a picture of swell buildings and gobs of swell looking smoke and on that side it said, “Together we stand, solid, substantial, a challenge to the world.” And on the other side all the buildings were flattened out and it looked like hell itself has broke loose and a couple of gulls were flying around or maybe they were buzzards flying around like they were in that story “To the Last Ditch,” one of your stories too I think which I will never forget because I was reading it when I was waiting in line for the job in this glass factory I told you about and I was just up to the part where the buzzards are swooping down on the cow-puncher after he has been shot bang by the Mexican horse thief when my turn comes and when I got the job I was so happy I ran all the way home and forgot all about the story and Sarah, that’s my wife, could see in my face that I had got it and we didn’t say anything we just danced around the room like a couple of kids because I had been sitting around for seven months and Harry had to quit school just when he was learning all about microbes and decimals and had been chosen the president of his class.

  I don’t know how I happen to tell you all about this except that I guess even though I never met you I feel like we were friends because of those wonderful editorials if you know what I mean. This picture showed how if Labor and Capital would only stop doing each other dirt and just shake hands like they did in the picture we could have the greatest wealth in history and be a challenge to the whole world. I can still remember the words because I memorized them and as I think I told you before I have a memory that can’t be beat and when I was a kid my ma used to say I probably would be a school teacher or a senator or something and then I had to quit school when Pa died and go to work selling papers. But I don’t want to sound as if I’m complaining, Mister Macfadden. I guess we both know there is no school like the school of hard knocks. That newspaper vendoring was the best thing in the world to make me a serious and ambitious boy and to teach me to rely on my own initiative and maybe if it wasn’t that I never would have got to be owner of that cigar store I used to own.

  When I began this letter I told you I was writing it because it was a matter of life and death and now I suppose you are thinking humph it can’t be so gol-darned important if he doesn’t get to his point quicker than this. But the reason I am telling you the whole story is because the whole thing started pretty much on account of those ideas of cooperation and I thought if you found out what happened to me just because I tried to carry out what you said you would want to help me because it would really be helping to spread those ideas of yours, or I should say ours.

  This editorial of yours kept eating into me and I swear sometimes I would wake up mumbling, “Divided we fall, bringing chaos, ruin, wreckage, to the homes of the nation,” like it said over that picture of the flattened buildings and the seagulls or buzzards or whatever they were. And Sarah would just look at me as if I was crazy and ask me where in landsakes I was spouting all that nonsense from and I would say just off-hand like, Oh just a few lines from an editorial I was reading in Liberty. Then she would jump up and look straight into me and say Mister Macfadden don’t care about you and me, he’s just saying that so he and his kind can keep you where they want you, upside down on a hook with your blood dropping out drop by drop. (I hope you’ll excuse me please for putting this in the letter, Mister Macfadden, but that’s exactly what Sarah said and there was no telling her anything different.) Now Sarah is a fine woman and all that and she has always been a good mother but she has got some mighty curious ideas. She got them from her old man, I think, whom I never have seen because they sent him to jail one time in a strike before I ever started to court Sarah. It was the railroad strike back in ’87 and when it was all over he couldn’t get his job back and he always went around talking about how the capitalists and the working men would struggle until the workers finally got what they deserved and he got worse and worse and finally he must have done something awful bad because he never did get out and every time I try to ask Sarah about it she just walks away and Harry says why don’t you leave her alone Pop and pretty soon she comes back with her eyes all red and she doesn’t say nothing only she yells at Emmie’s kids if they bounce a ball against the wall and then if she goes to bed and Harry comes in late she yells at him for waking her up and now just this week Harry’s taken to staying out all night and when I want to know where he went he says don’t bother me Pa you haven’t got room for me anyway with you and Mom fighting and that kid in the same room bawling. Emmie’s kids moved in last month. Emmie is my youngest daughter. She’s married to a nice young fellow who used to be a ripper in a slaughter house but now somebody has invented a machine to do that so I guess Emmie had to move her kids in with us.

  So you see I know what it is when someone like Sarah’s old man doesn’t understand your ideas. So there’s just no use trying to explain what you meant to Sarah because she wouldn’t be able to understand either. Sarah is a good deal younger than me too so maybe that explains it. I am beginning to think you have to come from our generation to really see things. It seems to me the older Americans should try to get together
on a plan of their own. My gosh, that wouldn’t be a bad idea for one of your editorials, Mister Macfadden.

  But as I was saying this editorial begins to sink into me and every time I get a few minutes I take it out and read it, and the more I read it the more I see that all these young men working down there on the floor have been making a bad mistake, trying to start a union and cause trouble just at a time like this when business is so bad that if we don’t pull together we might have the whole damn boat sink right out from under us and pretty soon while we are swimming around some Jap boat will pick us up, and that will be the end of America. The trouble with these youngsters is they don’t know how close the country is to going on the rocks and if they did they would shut up with all this talk about fighting the factory owner and they would see that unless we all pull together with smart men, like you for instance Mister Macfadden, the men who know what they are doing, why there won’t be any wages to increase, there just won’t be any wages at all and how would they like that I wonder.

  Now right off I might as well tell you that I never was so good at ideas like this because I think I told you I never got a chance to finish school but I can tell a good idea when I see one thank you and when I do I don’t like to just talk about it, like Sarah does with her ideas about the workingmen having the power to stop the whole government from working and then making the men who run the whole shebang give in. All I say then is well Mrs. Bolsheviki it’s a good thing Mr. Green is president of the A. F. of L. instead of you because he knows what he is doing and is smart enough not to get the big shots sore at us little fellows, like Mister Macfadden says. That is just what I say and I’ll stand up for it here. I guess I’ve always been the sort of man who doesn’t care if anyone agrees with me or not. I guess you can’t really blame Sarah so much because she has never got much out of life and after her Pa got sent up she had to go to work ten hours a day and then after I lost my store why she had to go to work again because kids had come and I was a little down on my luck and now she has to cook for Emmie’s kids too and sometimes, I hate to say this, but sometimes I think the heat has kind of gone to her head, because that shop is down in the cellar and when you are down there all day and come out to go home the air from the Bay cuts your breath like a sharp knife and your hot face cools off as fast as those can-can girls are said to when they find out you are broke, and then coming indoors again and standing in front of that hot stove—well you see what it can do Mister Macfadden, and so I try to be patient with her and I just laugh off her radical ideas.