by Daniel Stern
Louise blinked at him. “You’re acting funny. Are you feeling sick? Walking around in the slush all day—”
“No. I’ve been wearing that ridiculous sweater and the big coat. Do I have to be sick to keep an eye on my family? One daughter …” Paul stood up and looked around.
“The kitchen,” he said, “at what point did we start to have family conferences in the kitchen? I’m too old for this.”
“It started as soon as we could afford an apartment like this, with a nice, private, paneled study. Stop harping on age.”
“Age is harping on me. It’s a dirty trick to play on a man. Take a young, nervous director and turn him into an ailing, middle-aged teacher.”
With a malicious smile, Louise added, “And producer.”
Paul grimaced. “The finishing touch. I’ll tell you, if this doesn’t let up, the pressure from Joe and all, I’d just as soon drop out of the production.”
“That bad?”
“For Jud. He had an awful time today.”
“With a play like this, he knew what might happen. It’s too close to the real thing.”
“That’s not it.”
“Then I know what it is. You needn’t elaborate. And I know he’ll never give in to Lear. Jud’s immovable when he wants to be.”
“I wish I could help him.”
“You can’t.”
“That makes it nice and simple.”
The ringing of the doorbell made Louise turn. Paul only muttered that Janet had probably forgotten her key … supposed to be grown up enough to be in love and she still forgets keys …
The opened door revealed Walkowitz. He wore his familiar olive-green raincoat, gleaming with still melting white and patches of wet.
“I’m sorry for dashing in without calling,” Walkowitz said, “but it’s very important. It was too important to phone.”
Paul nodded. “Always room for more trouble,” he said. “Come in.”
On a sudden impulse, Paul insisted on building a fire in the study they rarely used. Walkowitz rested on the leather couch facing the fireplace and told Paul about his encounter with Rolfe. When he had finished, all Paul could think of to say was: “And he was serious?”
Walkowitz frowned. “Don’t you think there are any anti-Semites left?”
“There are always anti-Semites. It’s only that the man seems a peculiar choice for the role. It’s foolish, of course. There are no types.” He joined his hands tightly together until the blood left the knuckles. He said, “It’s disgusting for a man like that to be associated with this production.”
Walkowitz nodded. “That’s why I felt it was all right to stampede in like this. I haven’t told Jud yet. I thought it best to speak to you first.”
“You haven’t told anyone else?”
“There was no one else I could trust enough. Except Jud, and I thought it best for you to take it up with him. You know him so much better than I do.”
Paul placed his two index fingers on either side of his nose and pressed, reflectively. “I’m not so sure.”
Walkowitz shivered. “I’m afraid the fire hasn’t done the job. Might I have a drink?”
Paul returned from the server with a Scotch for Walkowitz and a brandy for himself. “I’m allowed some small pleasures,” Paul said, brandishing the snifter. He took a long sip of brandy, then said, “I suppose we’ll have to fire him.”
“You sound almost regretful. It’s a remark I might expect from Jud.”
Unexpectedly, Paul smiled. “We’re more alike than people think. But I’m not regretful. The whole thing makes me sick. There’s no question about what has to be done. If we can’t change the bastards, at least we don’t have to support them. I’m glad you came to me. Don’t tell anyone else. I’ll handle it quietly.”
Walkowitz raised an ironic eyebrow. “Quietly is the word. Can you imagine if the newspapers got hold of this?”
“My God, I hadn’t thought of that. But there’s really nothing to get hold of. It’s not an incident. There was no fight, nothing dramatic.”
“Well, I didn’t hit him, but I did call him a son of a bitch. It’s the idea of it that would give them a field day. Shall I give you a few sample headlines: Concentration Camp Play Hires Anti-Semite!”
Paul shook his head. “You know,” he said, “this is the first time we’ve just sat and talked, you and me. It takes a crisis.”
“It’s nice here,” Walkowitz replied obliquely. “I feel protected from that hungry winter outside, waiting to devour my bones.”
“I’ve been sniffling and coughing all week.” Paul cleared his throat and hawked into a handkerchief, as if to demonstrate. “But an ice-cold winter may mean good luck.”
“Are you superstitious?” Walkowitz was incredulous. “That’s one I never heard of.”
“Not really. But when I’m worried as I am about the show, I reach for anything. And the winter of my big success in the thirties was—uh, 1934. The worst winter in decades. I ploughed through snow up to my hips to rehearsals.”
“Tomorrow Is Now, ?”
Paul turned away from Walkowitz. He was afraid he would show how pleased he was. “That makes two of us who remember.” He drained the snifter and decided against another.
Walkowitz was saying, “I read about it, first, in Paris. I was broke and I spent weeks reading back newspapers and magazines at the American Library. It was one of the big social plays of the thirties.” Walkowitz turned a look of deliberate candor toward Paul. “Were you a good director?” he asked.
“That’s a dangerous question.”
“You’re the only one who can answer it. Were you?”
Paul nodded.
“Then you ought to be proud of what you’ve done and what you can do. It’s not something you can lose.”
Paul massaged his forehead nervously. “The tools get rusty,” he said.
“Like knowledge, intelligence, insight, talent …”
Paul said nothing. He could only wish, silently, that Walkowitz would stop.
“What’s there to be so afraid of?” Walkowitz asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you direct plays? A man should do what he does. That’s not really paradoxical. Fifteen years ago, if I had met you at a party and asked you the inevitable boring question: ‘What do you do?’ you would have said: ‘I’m a director.’”
“But that was fifteen years ago.”
“And today?”
“I’m a teacher. It’s an ancient and honorable profession.”
“Then why does it need an apology?”
“It doesn’t. Perhaps I do.”
“Perhaps not.”
Paul set his glass on the coffee table next to Walkowitz. Through the wide windows a cloudy twilight was being announced by the gleam that sliced through the falling snow from street lamps and from the myriad windows of the apartment buildings rimming the river. Paul stood abruptly, as he did when he wanted to end a class that had gone on too long. He was feeling the drink, the effect heightened by his fatigue from tramping the snow-wet streets and by his worry over Jud and the play. Wobbling slightly, he put his right hand onto the mantlepiece over the fireplace for steadiness. He looked down at the gray-haired man with the stiffened, outstretched leg and the eye set in a permanent half-wink.
“Who are you,” he said slowly, “Lazarus, come back from the dead, that you can speak the truth and not be afraid? Do you think because you were among the dead and still live that you can tell a man what his life should be? Are you so safe from reproach that you can say—here Paul intoned, recitation style—‘Knock with tremor … these are Caesars … should they thunder … how is it with you? … what have you to show?’”
Walkowitz nodded. “I know how it is when you’ve gotten away with not dying. You feel as if it’s a short-term debt—could be collected any time. Isn’t that all the more reason?” He struggled slowly to his feet.
“You’ll pardon me,” Paul said, in mock d
eference. “I’m notorious for quoting—or, rather, misquoting.”
Walkowitz nodded. “I know the poem. Dickinson, isn’t it? I’m sorry to have upset you, Paul. You’ve been very good to me. I respect you and your abilities enormously. And I spoke from my feelings.”
“It’s easy to have feelings,” Paul said bitterly.
Walkowitz replied: “Not always.”
Paul looked directly into the man’s gray eyes, clear, un-darkened by deception, and thought: What a strange thing to say. As if he knew. …
Paul was dressed for the dinner, except for the problem of the black bow tie, when Janet arrived home. The phonograph in the living room was blasting out the Mahler Fourth Symphony. As Paul stood before the bedroom mirror, struggling with the tie, he heard Janet’s voice melt into the sounds of Louise’s treble and the thick horn-and-string texture of the Mahler.
Louise appeared in the doorway, cast a reflection of shrugging helplessness into the mirror, then vanished to be replaced by a tearful Janet. Paul despairingly disarranged the half-made tie and turned to his daughter. Before she could say anything, she sneezed four times in quick succession. The fifth time Paul joined her. Janet groped for a tissue on the dresser behind her and said, “This whole winter should be declared a disaster area.”
“You don’t look much like a victim,” Paul said admiringly.
Janet was dressed with attention to the most minute details. She sported a Persian lamb coat, a white fur hat, white gloves, and a white muff. Even beneath the cosmetic debris caused by tears and sniffles it could be seen that the make-up effect had once been perfect.
“I feel like one, Daddy. What am I going to do?”
“Hang up your wet things and we’ll talk in the talking room. I’ve actually got a fire in there, at last.”
“Don’t try to joke me out of it, like you always do. Not today.”
“I don’t even know what ‘it’ is.” Actually he had a good idea. And, listening to her speak while she sipped the carefully measured Martini he’d given her, and trying not to cry, his hunch was proven correct. It was the boy.
“Al isn’t against my career. He thinks it’s wonderful. He watches whenever I do a television show. And he admires my work.”
“Then what’s so terrible?”
“Well—” She gulped some of the drink, then some air, and said, “Well, it’s like what he said tonight, when we had some coffee at this espresso cafe after the rehearsal. He laughed aloud about the craziness of the theater—you work hard, you study, you make rounds, you meet people who know people, you start to get parts. Then, you do one or two really good things—and you’re a star, sort of, anyway.”
“Is that so bad?”
“But then, there you are being an understudy to some crazy girl who’s never acted before, practically. I screamed at him—oh God, I knew he was right—but I screamed at him anyway.”
Paul thought, So I was wrong. The tears are not for the fellow. They’re against me for getting her into this spot. He felt a twinge at the thought. He had, of course, enough perspective to understand that the depth of Janet’s wounded feelings was not very great. A somewhat contemptuous appraisal by the artist boy friend had triggered a crisis of self-esteem, that was all. But, still, her suffering was undeniable. And, she had relied on her father to steer her right, not even knowing that it had been Louise’s insistence that had, finally, made her Dasha’s understudy—that and his own weakness.
Janet began to sob insistently. Paul leaned toward her in an instinctive, protective gesture. As he did, he had an odd sense that he would never quite know the reason for his daughter’s extravagant grief; that there was a level of pain that remained always inexplicable to both sufferer and observer. Still, he suddenly could not bear to see her cry.
There was a flush of lilac odor in his nostrils. He remembered the morning, a few weeks earlier, when Janet had begged him to intercede with Jud for her. He remembered, too, how untouched and untouchable he had been. How strange it was that now, late in life, after years of complicated living, complicated workings in the arts with complicated people, all he should long for was to have simple feelings of decency, love and good will. To care for his family—if not for their happiness (since that was beyond anyone’s control), at least for their well-being.
He looked at Janet’s tear-smeared face in wonderment, the way an explorer might examine a map of unfamiliar terrain, thinking: Was there no end to the beginnings?
Roughly, like an undomesticated animal showing affection, he held Janet to him. “S-h-h-h,” he said, “I’ll do something. It will be all right. I’ll do something.”
When Louise had taken Janet to her room, Paul finished tying his tie. He was in a state of peculiar exhilaration, and in no mood to question its validity and so make it vanish. Sitting down in the big easy chair that faced the river-fronting window, he placed a cigarette between his lips, groping for the lighter on the coffee table. He puffed, remembering the lilac-scented embrace of his daughter. The last time he had embraced anyone at all had been when Jud had pressed his face against Paul’s sweating forehead after the first big hassle with Lear. And, before that, Louise, when they were lifting him from the bed to the stretcher after his attack. What a desert he had been living in!
He blew a thick fume of smoke toward the ceiling. When he saw the white, twisting strands begin to disintegrate, he realized what he was doing. With a few swift gestures, he stubbed the cigarette out. The stub was left smoking in the ash tray. With a sensation of pleasure he felt the swifter and swifter stroke of his heart.
5
ON THE WAY TO the dinner Jud and Marianne sat in the taxi, silent as stone. A feathery haze enveloped the windows, a slanting stream of white that seemed to mute the entire city in a parallel silence.
Jud was bitterly aware that they had never before been so distant from each other. No difficulties had ever resulted in such a rigid silence. Marianne leaned against the seat cushions, her hands, black-gloved, folded in her lap. Over her cocktail dress she wore her mink coat. He could recall her giggling happily and saying: “What a lot of money for a cultural cliché.”
He had replied: “You’re an expensive toy,” unable to conceal his pleasure at being able to afford it. And she’d nestled her face in the fur, half ashamed at being so delighted.
Tonight she seemed to wear it defiantly, as armor—the remote, unapproachable actress, the successful woman with so many professional interests that her detachment could be interpreted in a thousand ways.
He broke the silence. “Sarah had a cough tonight.”
“She’s had it for weeks. You just noticed it tonight.”
“Are you saying I neglect her?”
“I know how it is during rehearsals. Please, Jud!”
He took her final statement as a plea for the restoration of silence. Unexpectedly, she broke it herself.
“I’m damned if I know why I had to come tonight.”
“You didn’t have to come. Larry thought it would be a help, that’s all.”
“Do you think so?”
“Sure. You’re a movie star.”
“That’s right,” she said, coldly.
For a moment Jud played with the idea of barreling his way through to find out exactly what was wrong—what she had meant by saying he and Walkowitz were the same, why she had wept and then frozen, for what seemed to him so little provocation. And, going further, he wanted to ask her about the odd tableau that had taken up residence in his memory—the tableau that included Marianne, Walkowitz, and a cigarette lighter. But he had no idea what he wanted to ask, or, in truth, why he wanted to ask it.
The silence resumed. When they stopped for a traffic light, Marianne said, “I’m going to the Coast on Friday. The agency is arranging about the plane tickets.”
Jud nodded. A rush of words formed within him, but they dwindled to a quiet, ironic statement.
“I’m grateful you stayed as long as you did. It’s a big picture. You shouldn
’t jeopardize it.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“I was quoting. By the way, don’t say anything to Carl about that business—until I can speak to him.”
Marianne nodded but said nothing, staring straight ahead.
At the entrance to the Grand Ballroom, a tuxedoed Larry Elgin detached himself from a group of women organizers.
“Marianne,” he said, “I’m glad you could make it. Everybody’s here. You’ll just take a bow and”—he lowered his voice—“listen to speeches. Some woman always tells how she felt when she got to Israel and saw the hardships. She always forgets to mention that it was in 1949, when things were roughest. It’s better to tell it the hard way, for the financial pledges.” Larry laughed. He looked more at ease in his tuxedo than Jud.
“I suppose you can hardly expect to increase contributions by talking about the soundness of the Israeli pound.”
Fanny heaved into view. She was dressed in a low-cut evening gown that revealed massive stretches of shoulder and bosom. She pecked Marianne wetly on the cheek. Jud received his kiss full on the mouth. “In front of the wife it’s allowed, “Fanny announced proudly. Then she dragged Larry off on some errand.
Standing in the archway leading to the crowded dining room, Jud turned to Marianne. In a small voice that was almost lost beneath the noise of the gathering crowd of diners, he said, “I’m afraid.”
“Don’t,” Marianne said.
“For the first time I feel afraid—first time in years, anyway. Maybe you were right about that dream of mine. A warning? …”
Before she could reply or even recover her composure, a woman with an official badge pinned to her gown recognized Marianne. In a rush of skirts she swept them to the long table at which the company of At the Gates was seated.
Louise was making a direct assault on Fanny Lebow, who hovered over the table like a combined waitress and guardian angel.
“Everybody happy?” Fanny beamed.
Louise assured her that everybody was. She added, “Larry said we got eight at a blow the other day. Was your group one of them?”