by Daniel Stern
“I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. You know what made me stop in at the theater on my way downtown?”
“To tell me about Dasha’s call?”
“I could have phoned for that. No, Louise told me about that remark Hendrix, the newspaper fellow, made.”
“That’s just foolishness,” he said. “Hendrix is welcome to go back with me to Bergen-Belsen or Dachau and then come back and cash in on it professionally. Don’t let that get to you.”
“Well, it did. I was boiling mad. So I took a bath to cool off. And while I was in the bath I began remembering the times when we had the little apartment in Chelsea, and I began thinking how fast so many good things have happened. Having Sarah, and Paul and Louise—and being able to do the kind of work we care about.
“My anger turned into pure sentiment, and it occurred to me that we’ve been so busy living that it’s been a long time since I told you how happy I’ve been with you. You see, pure sentiment. That’s what I stopped off to tell you.”
He kissed the eye nearest him. “We have been pretty lucky, when you stop to think.”
Marianne looked at him in a sort of questioning surprise.
He knew all the echoes she was demanding he take into account. They embraced awkwardly, like teen-agers necking in a cab. Jud touched her breast and whispered: “Maybe it’s time we had another baby?”
“You weren’t thinking of starting it right here and now, were you?” she said.
“No, I can wait—a few minutes. If you get pregnant you won’t have to make the picture. Act of God.”
“Act of who? Besides we should have thought of that months ago.”
“I refuse to accept defeat in advance.”
She broke away from the embrace, and gesturing to the taxi driver, she whispered: “Not in front of the d-r-i-v-e-r.”
After helping them with their coats, Nancy maneuvered Marianne into the living room. Then, pulling Jud aside, she said, “I hope you’ll forget everything I said at Downey’s this afternoon. I was kind of high. Not that I think you’d ever repeat anything to Joe, but I’d even like you to forget about it, too.”
Jud thought back. It had been such a long day, so full of events … Then he remembered what he had coaxed out of Nancy about her feelings toward Joe’s money. What the hell am I doing, he thought, going around as if the world is a play in perpetual rehearsal and I’m the director searching for the dramatic truth in each character?
“Of course not,” he said. “I feel like a schmuck for letting you make so much of it. Is Carl Walkowitz here? The man I was having lunch with today.”
“Not yet. But everybody else is.”
When Jud and Nancy entered the living room, Rovic rose and put his arm around Jud’s shoulders.
“How did it go today?” he asked.
“Pretty good,” Jud said. “I’ve lined up about a hundred actors for auditions tomorrow. I hope your teaching schedule isn’t too heavy. I want you to sit in.”
“I’ll arrange it.” He grinned. “A man with a heart condition has a great excuse. Carte blanche for canceling appointments.”
Lear handed Jud a drink and said, “Stop the crap, Paul. You’ve never canceled a class in your life except when you were sick.”
Louise joined in. “Everyone has my husband’s number. They all know that teaching acting is a religion to him.”
“Uh!” Paul said, “religion again. Which am I now—the Rabbi or the Jesuit?”
“All I know is that you’re my producer,” Jud said determinedly. “I need you there tomorrow.”
Rovic looked at him with open affection. He seemed more animated since Jud’s arrival. “I’ll be there if I have to bring my students with me.”
Jud sipped the Martini, and disliking the bitter taste, put it down. “Joe,” he said, “have you gotten me a secretary yet?”
Lear looked at Jud oddly, not quite facing him, and said: “You can use my secretary—keep expenses down.”
Lear’s oblique manner touched a nerve in Jud, and he asked, a little pugnaciously: “Has she got any theatrical experience?”
“Ordinarily, it’s important, Joe—” Rovic began.
Jud interrupted: “I won’t need her much, anyway. I’ve got myself an assistant. A man named Carl Walkowitz. I asked him to dinner tonight, courtesy of your charming wife.”
“How much theatrical experience has he got?” Lear’s irony was heavy-handed. “We can’t pay him much.”
“Is he really the man you want?” Rovic asked quickly.
Before Jud could speak, the doorbell rang and Nancy dragged Joe off to meet Walkowitz, who entered looking more sprightly and less solemn in a light gray suit. His scramble of gray hair was combed neatly.
As Walkowitz was being introduced, Jud and Paul took the moments to speak alone. They stood in the corner of the room, near the broad windows fronting on the winter night, just under the Monet sunshine.
“Mr. Lear is acting as if his money is real,” Jud said.
“He’s just trying to act like producers he’s seen. Also, he’s concerned. Don’t worry, I’ll handle him.” Paul drew on his unlit cigarette reflectively. Seeing this always gave Jud a twinge of pain, something like the sadness he felt at the sight of Sarah’s glasses. People one loved should have no infirmities, no reminders of illness or death.
“I’ve been working with Emmet and Saul,” Paul was saying. (Emmet Thomas and Saul Waite were Paul’s students, and were to play the leading male roles in At the Gates.) “You’re in for a surprise when you get them into rehearsal.”
“The first readings were great.”
“Nothing compared to now. When they did the scene in the infirmary where Avrum is hiding—nobody in the class took a breath.”
Jud said, “Now all we need is the girl.”
Paul shook his head. “I haven’t found anyone. Joe would like us to get a star of some size.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jud saw Walkowitz lighting a cigarette for Marianne and then for himself. Their talk flowed under the blur of the room’s conversation.
Turning back to Paul, he said, “Louise has been hinting about Janet.”
“Oh?”
“I know how you feel about Janet’s career …”
“Do you? I wish I did. Funny thing, it’s only this play and you and Marianne and Sarah that get through to me these days. Louise accuses me of switching families.”
Paul finished his Martini and Jud said: “Are you allowed to drink?”
“One before dinner. Look, let’s find the girl we think is perfect for the part, if we can. But it’s not a perfect world. So, at least read Janet.”
“All right. I know she’s talented. But there’s a lightweight quality there that troubles me, for this play.”
“Just read her. That’s fair enough, even for Louise.”
Nancy was fluttering from group to group, rounding everyone up for dinner. Jud looked into Paul’s face, the brown eyes bloodshot, the gray hair thinner than he’d noticed.
“All I wanted to know,” Jud said, “was that it wasn’t your family problem—so it’s not mine.”
They began walking toward the dining room. “Your hands aren’t tied,” Paul said. “I’m Janet’s father, but she has a strength she never got from me.”
“I’ve gotten strength from you.”
At the entrance to the dining room, Jud could see an enormously long table covered with dazzling linen and silver, and dotted with thin-stemmed crystal glasses. As he sat down between Janet and Larry Elgin, opposite Walkowitz, Nancy whisked by, stopping long enough to whisper: “The household is alerted about your missing cousin. If she calls, Joe’s troops will have her picked up in a minute.”
For a moment Jud wondered if Dasha had returned to California, mercurial and elusive as ever. It would be like her.
The few sips of gin he’d taken had made him ravenous. As he ate his grapefruit, he wondered, too, if it was chance or Louise’s doing that Janet was seate
d at his side tonight. In the five years of his gradually deepening connection with the Rovics, he had never been able to know Janet well.
Like most pretty actresses, she spoke only of herself—and Jud knew it was impossible to gain any intimate knowledge of such narcissists. Their evaluation of themselves was a projection of an image onto a movie screen made of other people’s minds and eyes. And what can a screen know of the images it reflects? (Once Jud had told Marianne the reason he married her was that she was the only actress he’d ever met who listened.)
Tonight Janet was at least trying. She was using her “little girl” sexual seductiveness—a matter of wide brown eyes heavily made up at the corners and on the lids, in the current fashion, plus a certain amount of manipulation of pretty shoulders and bosom. But she’d taken the trouble to read the script of At the Gates, carefully, and she raised a question of some complexity about Avrum, the chief character, who becomes a Kapo when he realizes that not to do so would only mean that someone unsympathetic, sadistic, would get the job. Avrum feels he can use the power to help, to save. Then one day it becomes his responsibility to decide which of two prisoners will live. Janet questioned the meaning of the way out Avrum chose at the end.
Before Jud could express his ideas, Walkowitz spoke with an animation Jud had not seen in him before. “That’s what’s so interesting about this play,” he said. “The idea of a gentle man who is forced into an inhuman situation and is determined to survive—but to survive as a decent man, as the person who went in. That’s a fine concept. Then to have him finally accept the necessity of survival, to become a Kapo and take responsibility for the death of other prisoners, that’s dramatic and it’s true. But the stuff at the end about him not wanting to survive any more, because of what he’s become, well …” Walkowitz fixed his half-squinted stare directly at Jud and shook his head.
The others watched and listened to the two men, aware of their peculiar bond and curious about it. Jud said, “I don’t think you can dismiss that part so easily. Avrum is an extraordinary man. He enters the camp, like most others, not knowing what’s waiting there for him. But he enters it knowing that all humans are under sentence of death, so they must not put each other to death—that they are capable of cruelty, so they must try not to be cruel.” Jud, half embarrassed, tried to control his impassioned tone, but he could not. “And in a death camp, of all places, where men, in this case Nazis, have taken over the function of fate, accident, and nature—of God.
“Think of it—if, starting right at this moment, not one person ever raised his hand again to do violence to another man, the world would still be a gigantic slaughterhouse. Avrum has a line in the last act: ‘The natural deaths and sufferings of pain, alone, every day give off a stench of natural murder.’ So, in this universal slaughterhouse, the one thing a man can do is to say, ‘No!’ And if, in his human weakness, Avrum becomes a Kapo and ends up joining in the slaughter, the one thing he can still do is to refuse to make it legitimate. Avrum’s way is to refuse the natural function of men—to go on living. It’s a way of trying to reestablish some sense of meaning and order among men.”
Walkowitz said, “But you’re missing an important point, Judah. A man who could turn Kapo, for whatever reason, is no longer one of those ‘natural’ men you speak of. By becoming a Kapo, Avrum participates in the absolute freedom that existed in the camps. And when he finally takes responsibility for someone’s death, then he is as free as his masters—or as a god.”
“Freedom,” Rovic murmured. “What are you saying?”
Walkowitz smiled. “Total freedom was really invented in the concentration camps. Don’t think I’m crazy. I’m telling you there has never before been such freedom. Think a moment. Obviously the question is freedom for whom, and the answer is just as obvious—for the masters, of course. But there have always been masters and slaves so it becomes a question of how much freedom for the masters. A Roman who owned a slave could beat him, or even put him to death. But slaves were property; they had a price and a value. And there was always the question of supply and demand. It took the camps to discover an inexhaustible source. If they die, you simply replace them. Even property that is so disposable tends to lose its value.
“Also, they used to give slaves their freedom on occasion. That proved they were human. Sometimes they revolted. That proved the same thing. Spartacus in Auschwitz is impossible.
“I can understand you thinking my idea is ridiculous. Even Jud and I can’t always seem to agree on what happened. And we—as they say—were there. But, look, take kings, ancient kings. Not even they had absolute freedom. If they murdered too freely, they could be overthrown, even killed. Only the S.S. discovered that freedom could be limitless, in a closed world behind electrified gates. Only the S.S. discovered that people could be emptied of their people-ness. That you could declare people subhuman and then go ahead and make them so. Only the S.S. discovered that people could be completely dominated. If degradation and death are made permissible, in advance, and never have to be accounted for again, then freedom is absolute. Anything you desire can be done—if you have the power … and you know you are right.
“This freedom, once it exists, is complete, because there is no God that can see inside—and the people outside don’t exist. They wouldn’t believe it, anyway. They can’t quite believe it now. I know that a lot of prisoners couldn’t believe what was happening to them. And I even had a feeling, sometimes, about the guards. That it was like an upside-down amusement park, without reality, for them, too.
“And that is when the fun begins—when prisoners can be used for target practice, when torture is used, not only to extract information, or to extract pain, but to proclaim that anything is permissible. Of course the Germans were human beings. They often had to make up some kind of reason. Research—tying together the legs of pregnant women just before they gave birth. Patriotism—there was an S.S. officer who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, the fifty-fourth, I think. He had fifty-four Jewish babies tossed in the air and shot them as they fell.
“Do you understand what I mean by freedom now? This happened, and the skies did not burst open. No one stopped the man—fifty-four babies, and no one destroyed himself in protest. Nothing happened, exactly nothing. Obviously everything is possible.”
Slowly, they began to buzz to each other. Jud was gathering his chaotic thoughts, preparatory to challenging Walkowitz, when the phone call came. It was Mrs. Broderick, complete with martyred sighs and sarcastic tone of voice.
“Your punctual cousin Darcia called, finally. She woke Sarah. I think she’s been drinking.”
“Her name is Dosha, Mother. Where is she?”
“She was at the Biltmore Bar, near Grand Central. Where she is now—”
“What do you mean?” Jud said angrily. “When did she call?”
“You needn’t shout, Jud. She just called and I said was, because she sounded drunk.”
8
THE BAR WAS ALMOST deserted when Jud reached it. At a corner table littered with wet paper napkins and yellow crumbs, he found her. In her rumpled brown skirt and black sweater, with the triple string of pearls around her throat, she looked as young as the last time Jud had seen her, five years earlier. Her dark face wore a bright, drunken smile of welcome. She was delighted to see him, but fearful; a naughty child.
Jud did not know why she had gotten drunk alone in a bar, instead of coming to the house, or why she was here at all—and he did something he never would have dared to do when they were both living in Harold and Manya’s house in Los Angeles. He kissed her on the cheek. Before he could say a word, she closed her dark eyes and launched into a breathless monologue:
“Now don’t yell at me, Jud. I don’t really know how it all happened so please don’t yell at me … not that you ever did before, so I don’t know why I should be afraid now. But I don’t really know who you are any more, so how could I just go to your house and meet your wife and child who I’ve never seen? So, you see i
t was not such a simple matter to get into a cab and tell him your address and walk in, so I had another drink and that’s how everything started … Well, not really everything. Everything started because I came to New York and Jud, it’s a city … and it’s so real it’s scary … Maybe you don’t know how real it is because it’s where you live now, but you see Hollywood isn’t a place … we used to talk about how Hollywood isn’t a place, remember? … I mean, here the buildings are really rooted to the ground, not like back home … And, anyway, don’t yell at me, Jud, because I don’t feel so good, and maybe I shouldn’t have come at all, but if I wrote I thought you’d say no and then I wouldn’t have a chance and my acting teacher said you have to be aggressive if you ever want to act on a real stage in front of real people … He said, ‘Dasha, if you want the part you go and ask to try for it … he can always say no, even if he is a relative …’ and I explained how you weren’t really a first cousin, exactly, and that—Well, anyway, so I decided to come and see Jud Kramer who’s directing a play and see if he was Jud any more … And then Harold drove me to the airport and the sun was so hot and yellow on my arm outside the window of the car … and then suddenly all this dirty snow here, and the cold so real. So I called Marianne—that’s your wife—and she said to come on over, but I got scared so I started walking around the city, just me and my little blue flight bag and my crazy ambition to be an actress in New York because Variety said there was a girl’s part and it wasn’t cast yet … And Jud, this city is so strange. I wandered around and saw two midgets talking to each other near Forty-fourth Street, isn’t that crazy to see right off? And there are so many girls, secretaries, probably, all carrying these new fancy intellectual paperback books, the ones for a dollar forty-five … and girls who are probably students but look like whores, and I saw a couple of girls I’m sure are whores and they looked like students … and there was a man on a box with a flag, trying to convert the Jews to Christ … and in front of a beautiful hotel some men in evening clothes and their women in white tulle, in the middle of the winter, waiting for taxis—I think everybody in New York is always waiting for a taxi—and a soldier tried to pick me up so I came back here, alone, because it was the only bar I felt safe in, and had some more drinks … And some man was talking about his son becoming a priest, and how proud he was … only he didn’t sound proud, only sad and scared … and I had some more drinks … I don’t know how many, but I don’t feel so good … I’ve never been drunk before—well, maybe once at the Fog Cutter’s on Wilshire—and I kept drinking because I couldn’t call you and I had to drink enough so I’d be able to.”