by Daniel Stern
Walkowitz’s voice expressed sincerity. “I don’t. That is, not any more than I like him, which is quite a lot.”
“No, there’s something you have with him—some business I can’t figure out. What is it?”
“Ask him. Ask him about the halcyon days in the camps when men were gods—and the only important question was who was which.”
She started to speak, but he said, “Oh, be quiet and let me touch you.”
She turned over and looked up at him. “What did you see when you had to burn those people, Carl—that you couldn’t finish saying before?”
“Shhhh,” he said, lowering his face to her hair.
5
“HOW WAS THE PREVIEW?”
“Marianne was very good.”
“I told you so.”
“How was the meeting?”
“Grim.”
Jud slouched in his chair and looked balefully around his dimly lit study. “What am I doing in this business, anyway? It’s a rotten setup. So right now I’ve got a play I believe in, but how often does that happen? Sometimes I think I’d be happier doing something else.”
Walkowitz listened carefully, circling the room, running his hands across the spines of books. He looked at Jud over his shoulder.
“Like what?” he asked.
Jud curled up and then half crouched in the big, comfortable chair he liked so much, but which seemed to be unable to give him any comfort tonight.
“I don’t know—maybe I could have been a teacher, like Paul. Or a scholar, like my grandfather. Some profession involved with balance and dignity, where you’re concerned with knowledge or love of God. … I don’t know. It’s just that the worst part about something like tonight is that it comes out of such triviality.”
“I don’t believe you. Exactly what happened when the eagles gathered?”
“It seems I’m doing the play all wrong. There’s no play there now—that’s their opinion. Only they don’t want to leave it a matter of opinion, so they brought on the big guns.”
“Wolfson?”
“Right.”
“What’s the main problem as they see it?”
“They think I’m crippling the play by making Avrum a kind of martyr, sacrificing himself for his own idea of right and wrong.”
“What do they want?”
“Some black-and-white heroics. The play’s about how hard it is to be a human being, about how the Germans treated us like animals, first—then like things; objects that happened to have life but had no actual right to it.”
“Or to its privileges.”
“Right, right.” Jud was prowling, circling the chair in which he’d been sitting. “The result is, they have to become a little like animals, like things, or start to act like gods themselves.”
“You mean they have to become what they’re told they are by their masters, or else become like the masters?”
“Not that simple, but something like it. That’s why if it’s all right to do what Avrum does, if it’s made legitimate, then we’re saying, Yes, you’re right—you behaved like gods with absolute power, and you made other men into animals. So, Avrum chose to be a god. He took for himself the right to torment and kill. If he was right, then the Germans were right; and even if you say it was neither right nor wrong, only necessary, you still make it legitimate.”
“Then what is our man? A hero? A monster? An animal? A god?”
“A man,” Jud said.
Walkowitz moved closer to him. His good eye blinked with the late hour’s strain.
“Do we forgive Avrum for what he does?”
“No.”
“Do we understand why he does it?”
“Yes, but he is still wrong. And, worse than that, he becomes bad, then—evil, if you like.”
“Is there any forgiveness for him, ever?”
“Later he mustn’t forgive himself. He must know what he’s done. Otherwise all you’ve got is a sad story, not a tragic play.”
“Then he understands his own sort of complicity with the Germans?”
Jud grabbed a copy of the script from the desk and leafed through it quickly.
“Especially at the end. Look, a decent man agrees to work as a Kapo. All he sees, then, is a chance to help other prisoners and to stay alive as more than a ‘thing,’ himself. By the end, he’s all enmeshed with the system, and people he knows have died because of him. So he chooses to even the score by giving up his life.”
Walkowitz sat down in Jud’s chair, ignoring the script held out to him.
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“What?”
“I think you believe it’s right for Avrum to kill because he wanted to survive.”
“No! That’s why when he gives up trying to live, he is carrying out his own execution.”
Walkowitz pressed still closer to Jud. His eyes reflected the muted lamp light.
“Is that believable?” he asked. “If you found out that sort of thing about yourself, would you pass judgment and then perform the execution?”
“You like to strike close to the bone, Carl. You’d make a good director.”
Walkowitz persisted. “Would you?”
“Sometimes I wonder what you think of me. Whether you find anything admirable in me.”
“Would you?”
“Don’t expect such total virtue from anyone you know. You’ll always be disappointed, and you’ll make them pay for your disappointment.”
“What’s the alternative then, no value judgments?”
“No—maybe we should ask of people only what they ask of themselves.”
“Then I repeat.” This time Walkowitz smiled.
“I hope I would—or, to be more honest than that, I believe I should. The rest is a question of human strength. All right?”
Walkowitz stepped back a few paces. “All right,” he said.
In a distant corner of the large apartment there were squabbling sounds. Sarah’s treble could be heard.
Jud laughed. “What do I know from such things? I’m a nice Jewish fellow. I have trouble enough punishing my little daughter. When you’re a father you’ll understand.”
“Then I may never understand,” Walkowitz said, half to himself.
Sarah tumbled into the room, full of complaints and sleepy whines. Jud scooped her up.
“What’s all this, face?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?”
“You never play with me any more.”
Marianne and Mrs. Broderick appeared in the doorway.
“I’m rehearsing, Sarah. You understand about that.”
Sarah shook her head in grim, three-year-old silence.
Marianne spoke. “It’s been going on for the last week. I don’t want to make a big thing of it.”
She reached for Sarah but the child squirmed out of Jud’s embrace and landed on the floor. She whirled and faced Walkowitz.
“Can I touch your eye again?”
Mrs. Broderick snatched Sarah away and practically smothered her to prevent her from saying any more.
“Don’t be disturbed, Mother,” Jud said. “Carl isn’t.”
“Of course,” he said.
The grandmother released the child, and she looked up at Walkowitz solemnly. He bent his head so that she could touch his eye. Instead, she leaned her wet face against the shock of gray hair.
“She’s tired,” Jud said. “Put her to bed, Marianne.”
Before they left the room, Jud hugged Sarah and she blinked at him, sleepily. “No more rehearsing,” she said. “Promise?”
Jud saw Walkowitz to the door. But there he paused. “Tell me, Carl, is there any connection between the feelings you had after being in the camps and the feeling that should underlie everything that goes on in this play?”
Walkowitz took out his lighter and lit a cigarette before replying. He smoked and thought for a full moment, then spoke.
“Despair,” Walkowitz said. “Despai
r that’s fundamental, that insists on going beyond all limits, that leaves nothing to anyone, least of all myself.”
“False pride, you mean,” said Jud. “It makes you better than the others because you’re aware of it and you accept it.”
“As a member of a race who deny their death, who face away, blind-eyed and blank, I claim pride in facing straight ahead.”
Jud looked at him appraisingly. He twisted his lower lip between forefinger and thumb. “I think if there was no death you might invent it, so you could have something with which to earn your pride.”
Walkowitz’s voice grew very quiet. “It’s been invented, built right into the machine, so that’s not exactly the problem. But my death-pride, as you could call it, that’s for the night when despair is so extreme that something just as extreme is needed for balance. Your suspicions are correct. The dark part is easy for me. What really gives me trouble is daylight living—rivers in the early morning with gulls resting, gray wings … gray water … the sunlight in late afternoons when everyone has left the summer beaches, leaving only a remembered innocence … young girls in white dresses and their moist thighs … these things remind me that I’m human, vulnerable, that nothing has to do with me, really—not gulls or beaches or sunny afternoons. Only, perhaps, others. And I’ve seen their faces up much too close.”
Walkowitz smiled, but let the smile fade quickly.
“You asked,” he said.
Later, in the kitchen, Marianne gave Jud coffee and the mohn cake he particularly liked. While he ate, he told her about the situation that had developed that evening. He expected her to be furious on his behalf, but her reaction was one of weariness.
“What are you going to do?”
“Wait until I see what they really want. And in the meantime find out whether it’s just Lear who’s trying to insure a commercial smash—or whether Paul is really involved.”
“Paul couldn’t be.”
“I don’t know. Carl was hinting at something. He felt Paul was criticizing the production from the point of view of how he would direct it. Could be dangerous, if true.”
“If Paul did fall into a trap like that, I think he’d be grateful if you pointed it out to him.”
Jud beamed at her. “That’s a great idea! I must be getting mid-production marshmallow brain. I wish Carl hadn’t left. The idea is so simple and right, I’d like to see his face when he hears it.”
“Don’t tell him,” Marianne said.
“Why not?”
“It’s not a good idea to get him so closely involved with everything you do. We hardly know anything about him.”
“I know enough to be sure that he’s a big help with the play. Not only with the scenes he’s worked on for language, but the ideas and feelings behind the actions. He understands. And he’s on my side—which doesn’t hurt.”
“What would happen if Joe insisted that you get rid of him?”
“I wouldn’t. I have to direct everything or not at all.”
“And would it be so terrible if it turned out to be not at all? I mean it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Other projects have fallen through and we go on.”
“This isn’t other projects.”
“I know,” she said, turning her head to look at him, from the sink where she was washing some cups and saucers. “This is a family business now. You have a cousin to help support.”
“You too, Marianne?”
“I was only joking. But I’m glad there’s no out-of-town tour for this play. I wouldn’t want you to be called on to put her under control some midnight in the Taft Hotel in New Haven.”
Jud brought his dishes to Marianne at the sink. “Jealous? Good.”
She touched his face with soapy hands. “I’m sorry I said that about the play falling through. It’s not really what I meant … but—” She kissed him on the mouth and was dismayed at his response, strong and sudden. She was unprepared for it. Too much still had to be thought out.
Ten minutes later when they were making love, it was unsuccessful, a straining toward each other without actual awareness of the other; only reactions of limbs or mouths or sound of breath and murmured words. By the time Jud’s breathing was measured into regularity by sleep, Marianne was lying, one arm flung over her eyes, trying not to cry.
The worst thing about this crazy, unexpected tangle she was in was the finger of light it pointed at herself. What emptiness was now exposed … the vicarious life she had always led, apparently, long before she met Jud. She could hear that stupidly gay music the orchestra played as a finale for the act before her dance was to begin—a kind of polka, it had been—and she could feel the palms of her hands sweating and hear herself asking again, as she always had, What am I doing here … living out Mother’s and Father’s idea of hope, of betterment—cheap vaudeville and beauty contests? …
… and, lying in the lonely cradle of night, Marianne heard the music at her father’s funeral, the awful organ sound of death and emptiness, saw the scruffy palm trees outside the funeral chapel, the Florida sunshine bright on the polished exteriors of the black Cadillacs—herself a twelve-year-old, very good in Latin, poor in arithmetic, and poor in everything else … poor even in sorrow. She had never quite known how to feel about her father. He visited her regularly after the divorce, but he had never let her know what he needed, what he lacked. And how could you know what to feel for a person until you knew what they needed?
Standing by the coffin and looking down at her father’s face, she hadn’t known what to weep for, though she had wanted desperately to weep. So she had chosen something, arbitrarily; had chosen the day he had left them, her mother screaming that she, too, was a human being, that she, too, was entitled to speak and to receive an answer. Then, he was gone—and, in time, gone entirely, and her mother never spoke of him again. Being a rebellious child, Marianne had attempted to raise the issue many times, but each time she received silence, the same silence her mother had complained of so bitterly to her father. Finally, it became easier to acquiesce, and the silence became complete.
Until Jud. What an answer to silence he had been. What a pendulum swinging between present drive and past deprivation—and it was so good, such a relief, to have another eye perceive just how much of her was going through the motions of how to behave socially, how to react for the right professional purposes; how much of her was watching other people, looking for the key to what they felt, what they desired; and, in spite of this, to have this eye belong to Jud, who loved her, who would not admit of emptiness in anyone he could love. So, by syllogism, she did not suffer from emptiness because he loved her. And, she believed, and lo, she was saved. Because he had been so close to hell that it was impossible for him not to know reality, and she had never felt so real as when he fell asleep next to her, after making love … or when he would suddenly jump up in the middle of a conversation about their acting classes with Paul, or about the future, and would tell her that he’d given up hope of finding anyone who excited him so, and who also understood—it didn’t matter about what—just understood.
Unspoken, in Marianne’s mind, it had always been: understood about that, the that about which Jud was disturbingly silent, except for those unbearable, but welcome, moments when she broke through, if just a little. Actually it was always present in his speech by implication: my father, etcetera … or, my little sister, etcetera … or, when I was a kid, etcetera—but rarely did he place them anywhere close to the camps. She accepted this, of course, but was not aware herself of how disturbing it was to her. Only after they were married did she realize how important it had been, by the effect its absence had on her. Even so, it had not been a major issue until Walkowitz appeared, like a crash of thunder, wearing his wounds like decorations, wearing his humiliated past like honor.
Now Marianne understood the connection between Walkowitz’s appearance and her remembrance of her father’s absence. Walkowitz had shattered the silence of years, a silence that Jud’s experiences had p
romised to break, but which Jud himself had only reinforced. A crash of thunder, she thought, remembering Walkowitz’s arrival that first evening, a month ago, and the awful feeling of being lost now came back again. She looked at Jud. He was sleeping on his side, legs flung wide, one foot dangling over the side of the bed. His face was tranquil, or seemed so. His skin looked very pale against the blue of the pillow case. She reached for a cigarette, taking the risk of waking him, but he didn’t stir. Smoking quietly, Marianne thought of the coming week and gave way to the feeling of terror. She was afraid to go away and afraid to stay.
6
IN THE FINAL WEEK of rehearsals, all the forces of publicity, finance, and the other pressures attendant on a New York theatrical production descended upon At the Gates. At the Monday morning rehearsal, just before his meeting with Rolfe, the proposed lighting man, Jud was told by Larry Elgin that he was scheduled for an interview with the United Press, at lunch; with the drama editor of The New York Times, sometime in the afternoon; with the representative of an English syndicate that was looking to produce dramatic plays in London, at cocktails; and with a movie star who had formed a company and wanted Jud to direct a film for him in Spain.
What Larry did not note, but which he knew were also on the days agenda, were: an interview with a playwright about a script that Jud had kept far too long and liked, not enough to direct, but enough to want to speak to the writer personally; three short sessions with three actors, one of whom might prove right for the general male understudy in At the Gates; and a meeting with Korn, the unfortunately named composer who had been delayed completing the music for a television documentary on the Coast.
Besides these, all Jud had to do on Monday was to rehearse the play and go over some script changes with Walkowitz.
The day began, officially, with the meeting between Jud and the lighting man, Glenn Rolfe, a man in his fifties, elegant, stylish.
“I’ve admired your work,” Jud said, shifting the paperweight on his desk restlessly. “And Michaels feels that he can work well with you.”
Rolfe lowered his head slightly in unspoken recognition of the fact that Jud was aware of his relationship with Michaels.