by Daniel Stern
Jud did not go back to the hotel immediately. Coatless, he walked to Broadway, then aimlessly up and down the side streets. The sky was gripped by dark clouds, slipping around the nimbus of the moon. Through the slow-sifting snow Jud moved, for the moment emptied of purpose. He stopped to look into the window of a department store. A gigantic Santa Claus leered at him from a forest of tinsel and cotton batting.
Can’t they wait? he thought. Thanksgiving is still two weeks away. Every year the Christmas madness began earlier. He hadn’t even begun to think about presents for Sarah and Marianne or Mrs. Broderick—or his agent and Marianne’s agent and … His mind carefully occupied itself with trivia: Thanksgiving, Christmas—emblems of normal reality that did not penetrate when you were in rehearsal, that separate country with strange customs composed of elements that had no relation to the outside world. Sometimes you left the theater after having worked with the actors for six or seven hours and were startled to see real people emerging from subways and stores, carrying bundles, involved in a pre-rehearsal reality, vaguely remembered. Even the morning newspapers, with their usual reports of apocalyptic events, seemed to have no bearing on his world.
At a newsstand he saw a headline: NEW H-BOMB TESTS ANNOUNCED. A young boy wearing an oversized raccoon coat, with a delicate, dark teen-aged girl on his arm, passed by. The boy grinned at Jud.
“Wanna borrow the coat, mister? You’ll be a snowman if you don’t.” The girl’s appreciative laughter trickled after them.
Jud looked and listened. He was, for the moment, a visitor, an observer. Then it came upon him with a rush. A deep, self-negating sense of being deflated, as if his spirit was a balloon, puffed out by noble ideas, that had been suddenly drained of air.
Earlier that evening he had ironically contrasted Joe Lear’s gauche public appearance with Joe’s probable inner picture of himself. Even unspoken cruelty can come home to roost. Jud Kramer (the public image) director, with the most exciting project on Broadway; with the happiest marriage; with the loveliest little daughter, whose godfather brooded over the family like a benevolent household god. What had happened to those precise integers that added up to his happiness? Walkowitz! There was no doubt that he had sent the telegrams. The reason was a mystery. What else had Walkowitz not done that was destructive? The scene with Marianne that had thrown him so badly (“you’re both the same—two different sides of the same coin”)—he was sure that Walkowitz was involved.
Something had made him anesthetize the questioner in himself, the director part, when it came to Walkowitz. Something had demanded that he play the innocent to all the revealing signs of a complex and dangerous relationship between himself and the crippled man who had blanketed his life in a period of only six weeks. Fear could explain this muting of his normal sensitivity, but he could think of no reason for fear. In six weeks his control over the play, his connection with his wife, his confidence in Paul, all had been damaged. And he could not define the exact nature or the exact cause. Except—Walkowitz!
He knew, too, something more painful, and he could not bring himself to use words, even silently, to define it. It was the finish to that recurrent enigmatic image of Carl, Marianne, and the cigarette lighter—an image that now had a meaning simple and cliché, that made it even more disgusting to Jud. It was a struggle to keep the pictures out of his mind, pictures of touching … and sounds …
What had happened to the safe island he had built for himself, working with the critical approval and respect of Marianne … of Paul? It was all because of this obsession of his, the play. The one chance you wait for in a theater career of second-rate TV offers, mediocre comedies, good plays spoiled, slanted toward the requirements of stars, rock-heavy dramas with pseudopoetic language instead of theatrical vitality. Then comes At the Gates, turning his insides upside down, making him feel that all the success he and Marianne had worked for was worthwhile if it could make it possible for him to do this play. Maybe it was an impossible idea from the start. But the impossibility had been part of the excitement, before this intensity about bringing in a hit had begun. The purpose of making it a Theater Workshop production was to give it independence from that kind of marketplace thinking.
The day they’d decided to go ahead with the play, he and Marianne had toasted the decision with a special wine (ironically, a German wine, a delicious Liebfraumilch), and Marianne had said:
“What’s the good of my making two more movies a year than I want if the extra money doesn’t help us do something fine. Darling, let me be your Ford Foundation.”
It seemed so long ago—a day like that of natural felicity between Marianne and himself. It was one of those moments that made him feel sure Marianne understood all the things he had left unsaid. Like the absurd habit he had carried off from the camps—that crazy delight in working with discipline from day to day, mirroring in the presentness of each day’s accomplishment or frustration the presentness of what happened on the stage. The shape of the entire play grew from this, and if the play, the actors, the director were good, and everything else in the world was propitious on opening night, you had a success. But a success was, by its nature, either past or future. You couldn’t start with it and then try to sustain it by force of desire and will, or by compromise after compromise.
The pleasure of the Marianne-memory faded quickly. Maybe she didn’t understand. She hadn’t understood why he wouldn’t fire Rolfe. Was he being foolish in not reacting to an anti-Semite as if he were a direct danger? He wanted to be as open and as fair as possible. He could not define Rolfe only as someone having anti-Semitic ideas. When you fired a man from a job, you didn’t fire just the part that thinks Jews are pushy or aggressive and know how to squeeze ahead in business, or have hook noses and lend money at usurious rates; you fired the whole man. And he was still a man. (Jud remembered Hendrix’s sickening, secret smile—“Rolfe has to be careful how he goes.”)
Jud thrust his hands into his pockets for warmth; they were nearly frozen. It took some time for the tingling in his fingertips to go away. He leaned against the wall outside the Cafe Metropole, dimly hearing the music of the Dixieland band through the closed doors. The intertwining visions of Marianne and Walkowitz kept returning to his mind. Each time he shut them out they returned with some diabolically clever variation in detail, photographed by his jealousy and developed by his imagination.
He saw himself reflected in the glass windows of the Metropole and was surprised. A stocky good-natured young fellow wearing a well-fitting tuxedo, the collar limp with perspiration and snow, gazed out at him. He did not look very imposing. There was a poetic, distracted look in the blue eyes. Nothing about him suggested that he might be capable of extraordinary suffering or achievement.
8
THE BALLROOM WAS IN a state of post-banquet shambles. Only when he entered did Jud realize that he must have been gone more than two hours. Most of the people had left or were leaving. At their table Emmet and Larry were still sipping coffee. Dasha was drinking brandy.
“Where were you when it all hit the fan?” Larry asked. “You look as if you’ve been trapped in a blizzard.”
Jud said, “Where’s Carl?”
“His leg was hurting him. He said he was going to the theater to lie down for a while. Too excited to go home to sleep.”
“Excited about what?”
“All the fuss about the newspapers calling and everything. Oh, you missed the works.”
“What was the finish?”
“God knows. I suppose it will all blow over after we get rid of the fancy-pants who started the trouble.”
“Simple as that?”
“Why not?”
“Haven’t you noticed any other troubles, Larry?”
“Look, Jud, I handle publicity for a few other outfits on Broadway besides this one. This play is a labor of love, more or less. As soon as you have ideals and money in the same bed, there’s trouble. A musical with nothing on its mind but money has troubles, too, but a d
ifferent kind. It’s what my professor taught us in law school, the great American schism. Everybody wants to be noble, respected, and make a lot of money. This can all be solved by bringing in a good play. It’s one of the few ways left.”
“I don’t want to talk about any of it right now,” Jud said.
“Did you straighten things out with Hendrix?”
“Didn’t you hear what I just said?” Jud forced the question: “Where’s Marianne?”
“She left right after the speeches.” Larry turned toward Dasha and said: “Your star is still here, and slightly looped.” His manner seemed suddenly awkward. There may be more than one matter tonight, Jud thought, about which I seem to be the last to know.
“Jud!” Emmet was unusually convivial. “Where’ve you been? This was a great idea, unwinding like this in the middle of the goddam rehearsals for the goddam play. Don’t frown. I’m only mildly high. It’s my lovely Biblical co-star who is three sheets to the wind.”
Dasha looked up at Jud. She cradled her brandy glass in both hands, looked over it solemnly, and nodded.
Jud reached down and cupped her face in his hands.
“Come, Dasha-face,” he said gently. “The ball is over. I’ll take you home.”
It was almost midnight when the taxi stopped in front of a four-story brownstone house on Eighty-fourth Street near Columbus Avenue. The moonlit snowdrifts garlanded by beer cans, a boy’s blue stocking cap, yellowish-brown banana peels, and other remnants of food. The temperature had dropped again and the drifts winked with ice.
“Is this where you’ve been living?” Jud asked.
“Don’t be snotty. It’s cheap. And I like it.”
Dasha held tightly to Jud’s arm as they walked upstairs to the top floor. “Whoops,” she said as they turned onto the final landing, “don’t shake me up. Got to be in good form for rehearsal in the A.M. Mustn’t miss the rehearsal in the A.M., must I, Jud?”
The apartment made Jud smile. It was little more than a furnished room; the bathtub was in the kitchen and the bathroom was the old-fashioned kind with an overhead water tank and a chain. But what made Jud smile was what Dasha had done to it. It was a replica of a consciously “typical” Greenwich Village apartment, like the one he had lived in when he first came to New York—or the apartment he and Marianne shared in Chelsea, when the Village grew too expensive. There were the bamboo mats on the floor, the lamps made from empty Chianti bottles, the patterned Mexican rug hanging on the wall. Dasha tossed her coat on the bed and stood in the center of the room, a splash of white silk and olive-dark skin. She wobbled a little in her pumps.
“Are you laughing at my place?” she asked, feeling the liquor too much to be able to muster any true indignation.
“No, that was a nostalgic smile, believe me. I had a place just like this once.”
“Just?”
“Almost just …”
“Once upon a time?” Dasha flopped on the low couch-bed in the corner and took off her shoes.
“When I was almost married to Marianne,” he said. “It’s a decent place, Dasha, but I’m feeling guilty now. I should have taken care of you better. This neighborhood, for a girl alone … You should have stayed with us.”
“I don’t think cousin Marianne would have approved.”
“We’ve been having our tzures. … And I’ve been so worked up.” He followed the line of her body from breast to knee and felt a bitter desire. He thought: Why not, why the hell not?
“Emmet helped me fix it up. He says it’s the way an aspiring actress from Hollywood imagines her first New York apartment.” She laughed. “He’s right, too. He’s such an actor he hardly ever thinks about anything else except his career. But he was right about that. I like it this way, Jud. You’ll see—after the opening, when I’m a grand star, the papers will write articles saying about how I choose to continue living in voluntary poverty, like a Zen Buddhist monk, or a kind of beat saint—what’s a girl saint? A saintess?”
“Whatever it is, you don’t look much like one.” She had removed her gown while talking.
“Don’t look,” she said, “you’re my cousin. And even a second cousin looking is incest.”
“Go to bed, Dasha. I have some things to straighten out.”
“Want a drink, first? That’s part of my New York apartment life, too. I have liquor so I can offer you a drink.”
“No. And neither should you. Rehearsal’s at ten tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there, Jud. Can’t you tell I’m hooked? When you caught me at the station, running away after the audition, I wasn’t hooked then. Not yet. But now there’s no hope. Stuck. I don’t care how much applause the Janet Rovics get. … Oh, I do, but I don’t. I care that I can be someone else so completely that if the person were to suddenly come alive, in some crazy way, I’d bet on me to be realer.”
“I’d bet on you, too. In fact I have,” Jud said, thinking: Good, the process has begun. She is an actress. She’ll be able to take care of herself. She’ll push ahead and I can worry less about her and her complicated feelings.
Dasha said: “Did you know I hated you? Sure you knew, but did I ever tell you how much—when you came back instead of Zvi?”
“You never told me.”
“But you knew?”
Jud nodded.
“He was my protector against everybody in the world. Against my mother, my father, my teachers—against my own crazy kid self. He was supposed to never die. I was only eleven when they sent me to America to live with Harold and Manya. The others were all going to come later. I was waiting for him.”
“I know.”
“But do you know when I really hated you?”
I have to get out of here, Jud thought. No more of this, not tonight. But he made no move to go.
“It was when you began to get me interested in acting. And then you got me to join your little theater group in Santa Monica, and I caught your passion about the whole thing … and I began to come out of my shell a little. I still haven’t really, but you got me all on fire about acting. You do the same thing now, when you’re directing me. And then one day we went swimming at Laguna and I fell asleep in the sun and I woke up with my face somehow buried against your shoulder. It was warm and sweaty and I wondered what it would be like to sleep with you. I think I wanted to. Maybe I was drugged by the sun and the beach sweat. Or maybe I thought you could let go of hate with sex. Then I got good and scared.”
“How scared?”
“So scared that later in the evening, in the car going home, it happened for the first time.”
“What happened?”
“I tried to think of Zvi and I couldn’t remember his face. Do you understand that, Jud?”
“Sure. I knew why you came to New York better than you did. It wasn’t just a play. It was a play about what happened to Zvi. You already felt him slipping away from you.
“But you found something else.” He sighed. “And that’s the way it goes. You lose more of your brother, you get more of yourself. And I get something from it, too.”
“What do you get?”
“The right actress for my play. And—”
“And?”
“I get forgiven, a little.”
Dasha’s laugh had a drunken edge. “Forgiven for living?”
“That’s no small matter,” Jud said. “You may have thought you hated me for not dying instead of, or along with, Zvi. But don’t forget, you’re alive and in America, too. What I mean is, I was a good scapegoat, but you couldn’t fool yourself altogether. We’re partners in crime, you and me. We’re both alive and he’s not.
“If you want to remember about yourself and what you’re like you can just look in the mirror. But your first night in New York, when you were looped to the gills at the Biltmore Bar, you told me about the fading of your brother’s face.”
She stood before him, weaving a little, a dark wand in the white fragility of her lace slip.
“What does it mean, Jud? Does
it have to happen?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s how the dead begin to die.”
9
PAUL WAS BRUSHING HIS teeth when the telephone rang. He rinsed his mouth and went to the bedroom to pick up the extension. It was Lear.
“I’ve been trying to get you for a half hour, for Christ’s sake.”
“That was Janet, enjoying her fame.”
“Look, I’ve had it. Either Jud is out or I am. I know how close you are and all that, and I have great admiration for the kid as an artist. But there’s still a play to get on. Take it or leave it. I don’t like to have to talk this way, Paul, but—” He left the word deliberately suspended.
It’s “the kid” now that he’s out, Paul thought. He spoke slowly. “It’s not that simple, Joe. This is a Theater Workshop production. All the publicity has hit that very hard. Jud is one of the directors of the Workshop. Besides, even if Jud were to quit, or be forced to quit, who—”
“I’ve thought of that. There’s nobody closer to this play than you. I know we’re under the gun for the opening, but I think you should take the responsibility.”
“You mean, direct the play—redirect the play?”
“That’s my feeling. I think you’d do a fine job. Jud has given us complication after complication. He won’t even get rid of this bastard who hates Jews. Now, I can’t understand a man like that. A man who has been through the worst tortures the Nazis could think up, and he still won’t do it. He’s betraying his own people. I say the hell with him, if you’ll pardon me. But that’s the way I feel. I don’t give a shit how good a director he is. This whole idea was an idealistic one and that meant a lot to me. Now it isn’t that any more, and we’ve just about lost Wolfson because of him.”
“I was disturbed about that,” Paul said quietly.
“What’s that, Paul? I can’t hear you.”
“I said, Yes, I know what you mean.”
“And look at that reception Janet got tonight. Could there be any better proof that I’m right? If you agree to take over I think you ought to seriously consider replacing Dasha.”