The Prince of West End Avenue

by Alan Isler

  But I swallowed my disappointment. All through my convalescence I thought about the scene in the graveyard, trying to work my way into its meaning, digging "i' th' earth," so to speak. At last I have found it: viewed from the perspective of the Gravedigger—or Grave maker, as he terms himself and we had better term him—the play is transformed! For the Gravemaker and the Prince are the two faces of a single coin. I saw how Shakespeare insinuated this truth: the Gravemaker began to make graves on the day Hamlet was born; the skull, tossed

  casually out of the hole in the earth by the one, is picked up for contemplation by the other. Only after the encounter in the graveyard can Hamlet triumphantly assert, "This is I, Hamlet the Dane." May we not say, therefore, that it is the Gravemaker who leads Hamlet to his identity?

  Hamburger and Hermione Perlmutter were just going out for a stroll as I was returning from mine. We met at the corner of Broadway. She was holding him very possessively by the arm, laughing at something he was whispering into her ear. Well, well, well. (Watch out, Hamburger!)

  I raised my hat.

  When Hamburger saw me, his long face changed in an instant from gaiety to gloom.

  "Have you seen the bulletin board?" he said.

  "No, why?"

  "Better take a look," he said darkly. "We'll talk later. See if you can find the Red Dwarf. I'll try to find the others."

  The bulletin board is in the lobby, alongside the bulletproof glass window, behind which now sat Selma's temporary replacement. To it was pinned very prominently the following note:

  !!! NEW AUDITIONS !!! Hamlet

  by William Shakespeare

  Directed

  by

  NAHUM LIPSCHITZ

  A Lipschitz-Dawidowicz Production

  Auditions Will Soon Be Held For The Following Roles:

  * King Claudius

  * The Ghost

  * First Gravedigger

  * Fortinbras

  * Second Gravedigger

  * Costume Designer Also Wanted * !!! No Personalities Need Apply !!!

  Obviously Lipschitz had made his second move. It was a clean sweep. At the very moment when I have come to my new understanding of the Gravemaker's role, of its central importance, Lipschitz has kicked me out of the play!

  But my attention was seized by another sheet of paper pinned alongside the Lipschitz salvo. It was a poem. My tormentor had struck again, perhaps now for the last time:

  A Sonnet to You-Know-Whom

  When first I hinted at the culprits name And sought to point the hunter to his quarry, I thought it fair to let him bag the game: He was the victim. Now I think I'm sorry. Why help a fool for whom all clues are cold? Why make of such a simpleton my debtor? The wolf had slyly crept into the fold; The sheep with all my clues can't find his letter. But still I think I'll grant him one last chance, An opportunity to flush the vermin. He'll take it or he'll simply stand askance, Another stupid, bumble-headed German: Look for the thief in Denmark's Elsinore; He's in the play, and dallying with his whore.

  I tore the sonnet from its restraining tack. I think I'm

  going to have to take someone into my confidence. Probably Hamburger.

  Hamburger is a bitter disappointment to me. He is in the toils of a sudden passion that has crowded out any other concern. Friendship, for one example, is cavalierly brushed aside; for another, the Cause, worthy in concept if not in execution, is allowed to languish. And yet he was a founding member, his noble cry for justice drawing others, myself among them, into his doomed enterprise.

  We met briefly just after dinner and discussed the situation. Our forces had suffered a total collapse. Salo Wittkower has already crawled back, sniveling and whining, to Lipschitz, and has been readmitted to the company. Blum has decided to "quit the theater" and rededicate himself to his sole area of expertise: he is going to set his cap for Mandy Dattner, the physical therapist—"Randy Mandy," he called her—a coup that, if he could pull it off, would be worth "all the bright lights of Broadway." Emma Rothschild is relieved to be able to return to chess: her game has been suffering, she said. As for the Red Dwarf, he is hors de combat for the time being, "drying out," according to Dr. Comyns, whom I met as he emerged from Poliakov's room to affix a Do Not Disturb sign to the door. "Two bottles of vodka in twenty-four hours. Some idiot must have started him off again, he's been off the sauce for years. That his liver functions at all confounds medical science. Mine, anyway. It's worth a letter to the journals."

  "Will he be all right?"

  "Probably," said Comyns cheerfully. "If the Feds don't get him first."

  Through the door came the voice of the Red Dwarf, bravely singing between chattering teeth the "Song of the Volga Boatmen."

  "Well, what are our plans now?" I asked Hamburger.

  "Plans? Are you serious, Korner? Plans!" Then, in a more kindly tone, "There's nothing to be done right now, obviously. We'll talk about it again in a few days."

  "So you are prepared to let Lipschitz just kick us out?

  Hamburger drew himself up to his full height. (Even so, he was still a good three inches shorter than I.) "It pains me to have to remind you, Korner, that nobody kicked me out. I quit." He looked at his watch. "Meanwhile, if you will excuse me, I have plans of another sort for this evening."

  "You can spare me half an hour, can't you? There is a personal matter—"

  "Unfortunately, no." The Thalia Cinema, it appeared, was showing an old favorite of his, which coincidentally was also an old favorite of Hermione Perlmutter's: Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He must hurry, or he would be guilty of keeping a lady waiting. "You wouldn't care to join us?" he added dis-suasively.

  "Tomorrow, then?" I said. "I need your advice about something."

  Alas, no. Hannah, Hermione—that is, Mrs. Perlmutter— had been kind enough to invite him to join her for the weekend at her daughter's "estate in the Hamptons." A limousine was to pick them up at eight in the morning. The foliage, he was given to understand, was quite magnificent at this time of the year. The daughter, by the way, I might have heard of, the famous neofeminist Lucille Morgenbesser? No? Pity. Her first book, Re-Membering Freud: Toward a Feminist Psychology, had been last year's sensation, a Book-of-the-Month Club choice. Her second, published only a week ago, was already on the Times 's best-seller list: Lesbos and Judaea: the Polarities of Commitment. Clearly, he said, Lucille Morgenbesser took after her mother.

  "Hermione Perlmutter is a lesbian?"

  "Of course not," said Hamburger coldly. "What kind of shit is that? I meant as a writer." Not that La Perlmutter had published any of her work. No, not for her the descent into the "grimy commercial pit." But she had written over the years plays, poems, short stories, a "treasure trove in a trunk, a cornucopia of excellences." Hamburger was proud that she had shared some of her work with him, and he hoped he could persuade her to share some of it with me: as a man (like himself) trained in the Old School, a man, in short, with literary sensibilities, I would be well able to appreciate her talent. And now he must run.

  At that point I said something shameful to his retreating back. It was a clear sign of my distress, certainly, but that is no excuse. "Blum failed to break that particular bank," I said. "And he had an ace hidden in his trouser pocket. Do you perhaps have a joker in yours?"

  He turned slowly toward me. "What you imply about me, I choose to forget," he said. "We are old friends. But you have insulted a lady. That I can neither forget nor ignore. Hannah, Hermione, Mrs. Perlmutter, is a woman of impeccable honor and unassailable virtue. I think you want to apologize. Am I right?"

  He was right. I apologized.

  WHAT IS THE MATTER with these old men? I am reminded of Jumbo the Elephant. When he arrived in the England of Queen Victoria (a woman, as we know, of unbounded though scarcely acknowledged sexual energy), he was still quite young, and, vainly longing for union with a female of his species, he became unruly. He was treated as any English headmaster would have treated one of his charges caught in a like condi
tion—that is to say, he was soundly thrashed and hosed down with icy water. For many years after that he could be relied on to give safe rides

  to children in the London Zoo. But after his acquisition by P. T. Barnum and his exhibition in Madison Square Garden, the aging Jumbo began to show ever-increasing signs of unruliness again. He fell into terrible rages. Some said these were caused by a kind of frenzy linked to the sexual cycle; others said they were caused by the shifting of giant molars. No one knew for sure.

  Is the libido of old men an elephant, placid for years but always capable of sudden eruption? Is the only cure extraction, so to speak, or, as was the case with poor Jumbo, execution? I remember ruefully enough my own response to Mandy Dattner and Dr. Comyns as they rubbed against one another, ignorant of my abysmal voyeurism. But at least for me a sense of personal decorum intervened and prevailed. Blum, of course, is a special case: he is cursed with an unflagging libido. I suspect he suffers from what, as I recall my Krafft-Ebing, is known clinically as satyriasis, his Kraft —but here you must forgive the play on words—never ebbing. But is poor Hamburger, that gloomy and thin-faced pachyderm, a victim of Jumbo's disease? "My love is like a red, red rose," claimed the Scottish poet. Hamburger, beware of thorns!

  And what is the matter with these old women? After Albert's death, the Prince being a short, stout, sexual popinjay in whom all Germany took a leering pride, Queen Victoria transmuted her misery in her lonely bed into spiritual exaltation and pneumatological longing. At teatime a place was always laid for the necessarily absent Albert. She taught all Europe how to mourn. But it is commonly believed nowadays that women's sexual desire increases at a rate inversely proportional to men's sexual ability—the rare example of a priapic Blum aside. The gods, we may suppose, are much amused. Of my own experience with the Contessa I have already written. What she needed, pour soul, according to the modern graphs, was a younger and less fastidious man.

  But that Hamburger, for a woman, for any woman, and at his time of life, should refuse the request of a friend, should leave the battlefield at the first whiff of grapeshot; that he should abandon in exchange for a weekend in the country among the ephemeral literati what should be most important to him; that the autumn foliage—God save the mark!—should matter more to him than his integrity, I did not expect to learn.

  I hesitate? I suppose because I was still smarting from Lenin's insult; certainly I was not going to put his advice into immediate practice. I thanked her but said I would not be staying long. Still, it would give me pleasure to furnish her with a creme de menthe if she would allow me to add an appropriate sum to my bill. Yes, she would certainly allow me, she said with a giggle. And off Minnie went, my money in her hand, her firm round rump undulating into the shadows. Sitting alone in the midst of revelry, I sipped my drink and tasted my idiocy.

  Lights went on suddenly at the foot of the room, illuminating the far wall (on which had emerged from the shadows paintings of a bizarre and garish kind), the piano, and a floor space cleared of sawdust. A tubular young woman in a tubular black dress rose to her feet from a front table and walked slowly to the center of the "stage," her progress recorded by the tapping of a spoon on a tin pot. Sawdust adhered to her skirts like a furbelow. Her face was powdered dead-white, her eyes were enlarged by the application of kohl, and her mouth was a painted scarlet line. Accompanied by the pianist, she sang songs of the Belle Epoque in a clear albeit somewhat feverish voice. She kept her face entirely expressionless, with her lips moving mechanically, which added an unexpected element of irony to the songs of dark passion and lighthearted love.

  It was late. I had an early-morning appointment with Professor Dr. Winkel-Ecke. It was my duty to support an heretical concept I had proposed: the absence of a relationship between the gathering of harvests and the declaration of wars. So far, the professor was letting me have my say before revealing my youthful errors: a meritorious endeavor undermined by meretricious ahistoricity. Eventually he would slap me heartily on the shoulder and urge me to cheer up: "All acknowledged truths must be examined from time to time. Occasionally we must even revise our thinking. If not this time, then perhaps the next."

  At any rate, I had finished my drink and was thinking of leaving. Idly I watched the tubular chanteuse return to her table. A short, dark man got up there, but my attention was caught by a young woman whose back had been to me but who now turned her head to clap the performer to her seat. I could scarcely believe my eyes, but it was certainly she. I had found Magda Damrosch.

  It is impossible to describe the emotions that swept through me then: joy, certainly, and relief, but terror also, as I might have ignored Lenin and hurried past the Cabaret Voltaire; wonder was there, and a fierce exultation, a melange whose constituents I could not then and cannot now disentangle. I half rose to my feet, collapsed back into my chair, got to my feet again. There she was, not in my dreams but in the flesh, not two dozen paces from where I stood. Like a man in a fever, I stumbled over to her table.

  "Fraulein Damrosch, I'm so happy to see you again!" She turned toward me and arched her left brow.

  "Yes?" It was quite obvious she did not recognize me!

  "I beg to remind you, we met on—"

  "Ssh!" She frowned (beautifully!) and waved an admonitory finger. "Sit down and be quiet. Tzara is about to recite."

  I had to endure the next performer, the short man with thick hair who had got up a moment before. He was neatly dressed in a dark velvet suit and wore a monocle that he could keep in place only by squinting angrily. I suppose you would call him good-looking. In one hand he held a cowbell, in the other a rubber ball, rather like an automobile klaxon without the metal horn. From the center of the stage he declaimed the most appalling nonsense in rapid French. I no longer remember what it was exactly—I was in any case scarcely in a condition to remember, with Magda Damrosch sitting no more than a hand-span from me—but it was something of this order: "When the pink crocodile saunters down Broadway, his straw

  hat atilt, then the houris of Lithuania ready themselves with coats of varnish." He went on and on in this vein, punctuating his recitation with clangs from the cowbell and crepitations from the rubber ball. Occasionally the pianist would throw in a chord or two. He finished to thunderous applause and threw out a generous hand to the pianist, who stood up to take deep bows.

  "Now then. ..."

  "We met last September, Fraulein, on the train. My name is Otto Korner."

  At last she remembered. "Ah, yes, the mama's boy." She thumped on the table. "Introductions, introductions," she announced. "Fraulein Emmy Hennings" (the chanteuse), "Herr Hugo Ball" (the pianist), "Herr Tristan Tzara" (the poet), "I wish to present to you Graf Otto von und zu Korner, a member of the Kaiser's Secret Service, here tonight in mufti. Thanks to his heroic efforts I was successfully smuggled into Switzerland. Applause, please." Each of them clapped, once.

  Perhaps a look had passed among them. I do not know why otherwise they should have behaved in concert to exclude me. But they chattered and laughed among themselves, ignoring any comment of mine. "Waiter," they called, or "Waitress, more drinks here," or "Herr Ober, sausages, if you please," and grew more and more animated. It was humiliating. Even Magda seemed reluctant to be drawn from their circle, to talk to me. I was reduced to intermittent attempts to capture her attention, banal questions that she answered evasively. Where was she staying? Oh, with friends. Might I have the honor of escorting her home? No, her "friends" were picking her up. What had she been doing for the past six months? This and that. What this, what that? Oh, painting mostly: she wanted to become an artist. "Like those?" I said, indicating the gro-tesqueries that had merged once more with the shadows of the wall. "Ah, if only. ..." (In time I would have to reassess the

  "grotesqueries": already on those walls in 1916 were van Rees, Arp, Picasso, Eggeling, Janco, Slodky, Selinger, Nadelman!) Would I see her again? Zurich was a hamlet. Yes, but would she come out with me, to dinner, perhaps? She supposed so. When? So
metime. Tomorrow? No, not tomorrow. The day after? She laughed at last with something of the delightful freshness and warmth she had shown months before on the train. "You win, junger Mann, you have worn me down. But there must be an exchange. If I do agree to go to dinner with you—I say //—will you promise to go home now and show me some mercy? Very well, one week from tonight. You may take me to the Restaurant Wallenstein."

  Tzara had heard her. She had named the most famous and certainly the most expensive restaurant in Zurich, perhaps in all Switzerland. "Ow!" he said, shaking a hand limply as if he had burned it. "The Wallenstein! My God, Magda, what is this Graf von und zu, a munitions manufacturer?"

  "At the moment I am a student."

  Tzara screwed his monocle more firmly into his socket and grimaced horribly. "Ah, then I understand: you are studying to become a munitions manufacturer?"

  The turn in the conversation had reminded me of tomorrow morning's appointment and thus of the lateness of the hour. I stood up.

  "A speech!" cried Emmy Hennings, clapping her hands. Greasy sausages had smeared the scarlet line of her lips; perspiration had caused the kohl to run in driblets down her cheeks. Her features now seemed akilter, like one of their paintings.

  "No," I said. "I am studying political economy." For some reason this answer seemed very comical to Ball and Tzara, and they burst out laughing. Tzara's monocle popped out of his socket and sank into his beer stein; Ball, with his pockmarked white face, looked like a paring of Swiss cheese shuddering in the wind.

  no

  Magda put a hand on my sleeve. "Never mind those idiots," she said. "Herr Korner is not only a student, Tristan. He is also a poet, a published poet." She turned to me, looking up with those wondrous eyes. "Herr Tzara might invite you to give a recitation."

  Tzara had lost interest. He was peering into his beer. "Yes, by all means," he said, waving his hand dismissively. "Show me your work sometime."

  "Remember," I said to Magda, "the Wallenstein, next week. Where may I call for you?"