' "Eric, what can I tell you? People in our business are scared. Everyone's terrified of ending up on some congressman's shit list – and they will snub their own brother if it means staying alive professionally. So, for the moment, I think you should consider another line of work. Because – after the Winchell item – you're an untouchable in this town. I'm sorry – but that's how it is."
'He then told me how much he admired me for refusing to rat on my friends. Know what I said back? "Everyone loves a hero . . . as long as he's dead."'
I took a deep breath. I tried to sound reasonable. 'All right,' I said, 'this is bad, but . . .'
'Bad? It's a fucking catastrophe. My career is kaput. Yours too. And it's completely my fault.'
'Don't say that. And don't completely write yourself off as yet. Remember, the Winchell piece appeared only a week ago. So it's still fresh in everyone's memory. A month from now. . .'
'You're right. Everyone will have forgotten about the Winchell item. Instead, they'll be focusing on my contempt citation from the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. And after my performance in front of the congressmen, I'm certain the employment opportunities will just keep rolling in.'
I could hear liquid being poured into a glass. 'What is that?'
'Canadian Club.'
'You now start drinking at three in the afternoon?'
'No, today I actually started drinking at two.'
'You have me worried.'
'There's nothing to worry about. Hell, I can always make a living churning out sonnets. Or maybe I'll corner the market in epic Norse verse. Now there's a section of the writing market that's probably blacklist-proof. All I need to do is brush up my Icelandic and . . .'
'I'm coming over,' I said.
'No need, S. I am feeling just hunky-dory.'
'I'll be there in five minutes.'
'I won't be. I have an important appointment this afternoon . . .'
'With whom?'
'With the Loew's Eighty-Fourth Street movie house. They're showing a helluva double feature: Sudden Fear with Joan Crawford, Gloria Graham and the delectable Jack Palance, followed by The Steel Trap with Joe Cotton. An afternoon of pure monochromatic bliss.'
'At least let Jack and me take you to dinner tonight.'
'Dinner? Hang on, I must consult my social diary . . . No, I'm afraid I'm otherwise engaged this evening.'
'What are you doing?'
'According to my calendar, I'm getting drunk. Alone.'
'Why are you avoiding me?'
'I vant to be alone, dahling.'
'Just meet me for a fast cup of coffee.'
'Ve'11 talk tomorrow, dahling. And please, don't call back – because the phone will be off the hook.'
He hung up. Naturally I tried to phone right back. The line was busy. So I threw on my coat and dashed down the three blocks of Broadway which separated my apartment from the Ansonia Hotel. When I reached its seedy reception desk, the clerk told me that my brother had just left the building. So I hopped a cab north, and paid seventy-five cents for a ticket to the Loew's Eighty-Fourth Street. I scoured the orchestra, I scoured the loge, I scoured the balcony. No sign of my brother. Sudden Fear was playing as I conducted my search. When I realized that Eric was nowhere to be found, I slumped into a seat. On-screen Joan Crawford was having words with Jack Palance:
'Remember what Nietzsche said – live dangerously.'
'You know what happened to Nietzsche?'
'What?'
'He died.'
I left the movie house. I returned home. I called the Ansonia. There was no answer in Eric's room. Jack came home from work. He sat vigil with me all evening. Every half-hour I phoned the Ansonia. Still no answer from my brother. Around nine, Jack went out and did a search of local bars, while I sat by the phone. Jack was back within an hour, having turned up no sign of Eric. At midnight, Jack called it quits and went to bed. I continued to sit by the phone in the living room. Eventually I nodded off. When I came to again, it was six thirty. Jack was dressed and handing me a cup of coffee.
'You must feel great,' he said.
'Try diabolical.'
I took a fast sip of the coffee, then dialed the Ansonia. 'Sorry,' the switchboard operator said after a dozen rings. 'No answer at that extension.'
I hung up. 'Maybe I should call the police,' I said.
'You last spoke to him yesterday afternoon, right?'
I nodded.
'Well, the cops aren't going to do anything about a guy who's been missing for less than twenty-four hours. Give it until this afternoon. If you haven't heard from him by then, we'll get worried. Okay?'
I let him pull me up and enfold me in a big hug. 'Try to get some proper sleep,' he said. 'And call me at the office if you need me.'
'Are you sure about that?'
'Tell them you're a Miss Olson from Standard Life in Hartford – and my nosy secretary won't think a thing about it.'
'Who's Miss Olson?'
'Someone I just made up. Try not to worry about Eric, eh? I'm sure he's fine.'
'You've been amazing through all this.'
He shook his head. 'I wish I could do more.'
I fell into bed. When I stirred again, it was just after twelve noon. I grabbed the bedside phone and called the Ansonia. This time I got lucky. Eric – sounding sleepy as hell – answered.
'Oh thank God,' I said.
'What the hell are you so thankful for?'
'Your safe return. Where have you been?'
'My usual all-night haunts – ending up at the New Liberty picture house on Forty-Second Street. Me and the local tramp fraternity – sleeping it off in the balcony.'
'You know, I did go searching for you at the Loew's Eighty-Fourth Street yesterday afternoon.'
'Figured you would do that – which is why I decided to catch a double bill at New Liberty.'
'Why are you avoiding me? You've never shut me out, Eric.'
'Well, there's a first time for everything. Listen, I'm going back to sleep now. And the phone is going off the hook. Don't call us. We'll call you . . . as everyone in New York now tells me.'
Naturally I did try to call him back. But the line was constantly busy. I fought the urge to march down to the Ansonia and confront him. Instead I used the Miss Olson alias and called Jack. He gave me sound advice: back right off. Give him a few days on his own.
'He has to come to terms with this stuff by himself,' Jack said.
'But he's in no fit condition to be left alone.'
'He hasn't gone mental yet, has he?'
'No – he's just drinking all the time, and staying out all night.'
'He's grieving. What's happened to him is like a death. You've got to let it run its course. Right now, nothing you say to him will make sense. Because he can't see sense.'
So I didn't call him for three days. I waited until five in the afternoon on Friday. He sounded reasonably awake and sober.
'I've got a new job,' he said.
'Really?' I said, suddenly excited.
'Absolutely. In fact, it's more than a job – it's a new-found vocation.'
'Tell me.'
'I am now a professional drifter.'
'Eric . . .'
'Hear me out. It's such fantastic work; the most productive way imaginable of squandering time. What I do all day is wander. Drifting from movie house to movie house. Grabbing a twenty-five-cent lunch at the Automat. Loitering in the Metropolitan and Natural History Museums, walking, walking, walking. Do you know that yesterday, I actually strolled right up from West Seventy-Fourth Street to Washington Heights? It only took me around three hours. Part of me wanted to keep on hiking north to the Cloisters, but as it was three in the morning . . .'
'You walked up to Washington Heights in the middle of the night? Are you nuts?'
'No – just fulfilling my role as a drifter.'
'Have you been drinking much?'
'Certainly not while I'm asleep. But I do have some additional news on th
e work front.'
'Really?' I said.
'Yes – splendid news. I decided to bypass the agent route and instead opened my telephone book and offered my services to five different comedians I know. Guess what? All of them turned me down. These aren't even top-echelon comics. These are the sort of mid-grade guys who play the mid-grade clubs in the Poconos and the Catskills and West Palm Beach. So my stock has sunk so low that even the second-raters don't want to know me.'
'As I've told you again and again, this initial period is going to be rough. Once you get the HUAC hearing out of the way . . .'
'And I serve my year behind bars . . .'
'All right, say it comes to that. Say you do go to jail. It will be terrible, but you'll get through it. When the blacklist ends, not only will you be respected for refusing to name names, but . . .'
'When the blacklist ends? Will you listen to yourself. The chances of the blacklist ending are currently up there with me becoming Secretary of State. Even if the whole damn thing ends up discredited, the mud will stick. I'll always be regarded as the never-married one-time Communist. No one will ever want to hire me again.'
He refused to be talked out of this bleak perspective. Just as he also refused to let me see him. Once again, I charged down to the Ansonia. Once again, he was gone by the time I got there. It was another twenty-four hours before I made telephone contact with him again. This time, I didn't ask for a lengthy explanation about his whereabouts over the last night and day. I tried to sound practical.
'How are you doing for money at the moment?' I asked.
'Rolling in it. Lighting Cuban cigars with five-dollar bills.'
'Delighted to hear it. I'll be leaving fifty dollars for you in an envelope in reception.'
'No thanks.'
'Eric, I know what your financial position is.'
'Ronnie gave me some cash before he left.'
'How much?'
'Plenty.'
'I don't believe you.'
'That's your problem, S.'
'Why won't you let me help you?'
'Because you've paid a high enough price for my idiocy. Got to go now.'
'Am I going to see you for dinner this weekend?'
'No,' he said – and put down the phone.
I placed fifty dollars in an envelope and handed it in to the Ansonia's reception. The next morning, I found it on my front doormat – the name Eric crossed out and Sara penciled over in my brother's distinctive scrawl. That day, I must have left a dozen messages for him. No reply. In despair, I managed to track Ronnie down to a hotel in Cleveland. He was shocked when I told him of Eric's increasingly erratic behavior.
'I phone him about twice a week,' Ronnie said, 'and he always sounds okay to me.'
'He said you left him some money . . .'
'Yeah, around thirty bucks.'
'But you went off on tour ten days ago. He must be broke. He's got to accept my money.'
'He won't – out of guilt for what happened to you at Saturday/Sunday.'
'But he knows they're paying me two hundred dollars a week as a retainer. And I've got no mortgage, no dependents. So why shouldn't he take fifty? It still leaves me plenty . . .'
'I don't have to tell you how your brother works, do I? The guy's got a huge conscience and a lousy streak of pigheadedness. It's a bad combination.'
'Would he accept the money from you?'
'Yeah – he might. But there's no way I could come up with fifty bucks a week.'
'I've got an idea.'
That afternoon, I walked down to Western Union and wired fifty dollars to Ronnie at his hotel in Cleveland. The next day, he wired it back to Eric at the Ansonia. I called Ronnie that night in his next port of call: Cincinnati.
'I had to feed Eric some crap about Basie giving everyone in the band a raise,' he said, 'but he didn't seem particularly suspicious. I think he really needs the cash. Because he told me he'd go straight down to Western Union with the wire and pick up the cash.'
'Well, at least we know that he'll now have enough money each week to keep himself fed. Now if I could just get him to see me.'
'He'll want to see you when he's ready to see you. I know he's missing you.'
'How do you know that?'
'Because he told me, that's how.'
As instructed, I kept my distance. I made my daily phone call to check up on his well-being. If I was lucky, I reached Eric when he was sober and reasonably lucid. Usually, however, he sounded either drunk or hung over, and basically dispirited. I stopped enquiring about whether he'd been exploring other possible work options. Instead, I listened to his monologues about the five movies he'd seen the previous day. Or the books he'd been reading at the Forty-Second Street Library (he'd become one of the habitues of its Reading Room). Or the Broadway show he'd 'second-acted' last night:
'Second-acting is such an easy thing to do,' he told me. 'You stand near the theater until the first intermission. When everyone comes pouring out for a cigarette, you mingle with the crowd, step inside and find yourself an empty seat at the back of the orchestra. And you get to see the next two acts free of charge. What a ruse, eh?'
'Absolutely,' I said, trying to sound cheerful, trying to pretend that sneaking into Broadway shows was a perfectly acceptable activity for a man crowding forty.
What I really wanted to do was to intervene – to run down to the Ansonia, bundle Eric into a car, and take him up to Maine for a few weeks. I'd actually broached this idea with him on the phone – arguing that some time out of New York would be beneficial, and would give him some perspective.
'Oh I get it,' he said. 'After a week of walking along an empty beach, my equilibrium will be repaired, my faith in humanity restored, and I will be in tip-top shape to parry with all the delightful folk on the UnAmerican Affairs Committee.'
'I just think a change of scene might prove beneficial.'
'Sorry– no sale.'
I stopped begging to see him. Instead, I found a desk clerk at the Ansonia – Joey – who was happy to keep me informed about Eric's comings-and-goings for five bucks a week. I knew this was a form of surveillance – but I had to somehow keep tabs on his general mental and physical condition. Joey had my home number, in case of an emergency. A week before his HUAC appearance, the phone rang at three in the morning. Jack – asleep next to me – bolted upright. So did I. I reached for the receiver, expecting the worst.
The Pursuit Of Happiness Page 51