Dictation

by Cynthia Ozick

  "He must be a little guy," Frances said. "When you get old you start to shrink."

  "Old-timer," Matt spat out. "Can you imagine? That's what he called me actually."

  "Who did?"

  "That twerp Silkowitz."

  Frances ignored this. "Get a look at that bedspread or whatever it is. I'd swear a piece of theater curtain. And the bed! Stage furniture. Good God, has he read all this stuff?"

  Every space not occupied by the dresser, the chair, and the bed was tumbled with books. There were no shelves. The books rose up from the floorboards in wobbly stacks, with narrow aisles between. Some had fallen and lay open like wings, their pages pulled from their spines.

  "German, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish. A complete set of Dickens. Look," Frances said, "Moby-Dick!"

  "In the atrium they told me visitors," said a voice in the doorway. It was the brassy monotone of the almost-deaf, a horn bereft of music. Frances hiked up her glasses and wiped her right hand on her coat: Moby-Dick was veiled in grime.

  "Mr. Miller?" Matt said.

  "Bereaved, sir. Eli Miller is bereaved."

  "I heard about your daughter. I'm so sorry," Matt said; but if this was going to be a conversation, he hardly knew how to get hold of it.

  The old man was short, with thick shoulders and the head of a monk. Or else it was Ben Gurion's head: a circle of naked scalp, shiny as glass, and all around it a billowing ring of pearl-white hair, charged with static electricity. His cheeks were a waterfall of rubbery creases. One little eye peeped out from the flow, dangerously blue. The other was sealed into its socket. You might call him ancient, but you couldn't call him frail. He looked like a man who even now could take an ax to a bull.

  He went straight to the stepstool, picked it up, and tossed it into the corridor; it made a brutal clatter.

  "When I go out they put in trash. I tell them, Eli Miller requires no ladders!" With the yell of the deaf he turned to Frances. "She was a woman your age. What, you're fifty? Your father, he's living?"

  "He died years ago," Frances said. Her age was private; a sore point.

  "Naturally. This is natural, the father should not survive the child. A very unhappy individual, my daughter. Divorced. The husband flies away to Alaska and she's got her rotten heart. A shame, against nature—Eli Miller, the heart and lungs of an elephant! Better a world filled with widows than divorced." He curled his thick butcher's arm around Frances's coat collar. "Madam, my wife if you could see her you would be dumbstruck. She had unusually large eyes and with a little darkening of the eyelids they became larger. Big and black like olives. Thirty-two years she's gone. She had a voice they could hear it from the second balcony, rear row."

  Matt caught Frances's look: it was plain she was writing the old fellow off. Not plugged in, Frances was signaling, nobody home upstairs, lost his marbles. Matt decided to trust the better possibility: a bereaved father has a right to some indulgence.

  "There's real interest in your daughter's play," he began; he spoke evenly, reasonably.

  "An ambitious woman. Talent not so strong. Whoever has Eli Miller for a father will be ambitious. Eli Miller's talent, this is another dimension. What you see here"—he waved all around 1-A—"are remnants. Fragments and vestiges! The Bewildered Bridegroom, 1924!" He pinched a bit of the maroon velvet bedspread and fingered its golden tassel. "From the hem of Esther Borodovsky's dress hung twenty-five like this! And four hundred books on the walls of Dr. Borodovsky! That's how we used to do it, no stinginess! And who do you think played the Bridegroom? Eli Miller! The McKinley Square Theater, Boston Road and 169th, they don't forget such nights, whoever was there they remember!"

  Matt asked, "You know your daughter wrote a play? She told you?"

  "And not only the Bridegroom! Othello, Macbeth, Polonius. Polonius the great philosopher, very serious, very wise. Jacob Adler's Shylock, an emperor! Tomashefsky, Schwartz, Carnovsky!"

  "Matt," Frances whispered, "I want to leave now"

  Matt said slowly, "Your daughter's play is getting produced. I'm in it. I'm an actor."

  The old man ejected a laugh. His dentures struck like a pair of cymbals; the corona of his magnetic hair danced. "Actor, actor, call yourself what you want, only watch what you say in front of Eli Miller! My daughter, first it's romanen, now it's a play! Not only is the daughter taken before the father but also the daughter is mediocre. Always mediocre. She cannot ascend to the father! Eli Miller the pinnacle! The daughter climbs and falls. Mediocre!"

  "Matt, let's go," Frances growled.

  "And this one?" Again the old man embraced her; Frances recoiled. "This one is also in it?"

  "Here," Matt said, and handed Eli Miller one of Teddy Silkowitz's cards. "If you want to know more, here's the director." He stopped; he thought better of what he was about to say. But he said it anyway: "He admires your daughter's work."

  "Eli Miller's Polonius, in the highest literary Yiddish, sir! Standing ovations and bravo every night. Every matinee. Three matinees a week, that's how it was. Bravo bravo. By the time she's born, it's after the war, it's 1948, it's finishing up, it's practically gone. Gone—the whole thing! After Hitler, who has a heart for tragedy on a stage? Anyhow no more actors, only movie stars. Please, sir, do me a favor and name me no names, what is it, who is it, who remembers? But Eli Miller and Esther Borodovsky, also Dr. Borodovsky, whoever was there they remember!"

  "With or without you," Frances warned, "I'm going."

  Matt hung on. "Your daughter's play," he said, "is out of respect for all that. For everything you feel."

  "What are you saying? I know what she is! My daughter, all her life she figures one thing, to take away Eli Miller's soul. This is why God makes her mediocre, this is why God buries the daughter before the father!"

  They left him with tears running out of the one blue eye.

  "I think you incited him," Frances said. "You just went ahead and provoked him." They were huddled in the bus shelter, out of the wind. It was five o'clock and already night.

  Matt said, "An old actor, maybe he was acting."

  "Are you kidding?" Frances said; hunched inside the bulk of her coat, she was shivering.

  "You're always telling me I do that."

  "Do what?"

  "Act all the time."

  "Oh, for Pete's sake," Frances said. "Why did you make me come anyhow? My toes are numb."

  Late in February, a day of falling snow, rehearsals began. Silk-Silkowitz had rented a cellar in a renovated old building in the West Forties, in sight of the highway and the river. The space had a stage at one end and at the other a sort of stockade surrounding a toilet that occasionally backed up. The ceiling groaned and shuddered. A far-off piano thumped out distracting rhythms: there was a dance studio overhead. The cast was smaller than Matt had expected—the three female roles had been reduced to two. Silkowitz had spent the past month reviewing the script, and was still not satisfied. No sooner did Matt learn the moves of a scene than the director had second thoughts and rearranged the blocking. To Matt's surprise, the boy who had been in Silkowitz's office was there, presiding over a notebook; Silkowitz had brought him back to be stage manager. Matt calculated that the kid had six weeks' experience.

  Silkowitz had put himself in charge of secrets. Each rehearsal session felt like a cabal from which the actors were excluded. Strangers came and went, carrying portfolios. Silkowitz never introduced any of them. "This is going to be a tight job, nothing extraneous. I believe in collaboration with all my heart, but just remember that collaboration runs through me," he announced. And another time: "My intention is to clot the curds." It was a tyranny that outstripped even Lionel's. The veneer was on the shabby side, but there was a stubborn complacency beneath. Matt, who had his own ideas and liked to cavil, was disinclined to argue with Silkowitz. The director would stop him mid-sentence to murmur against a wall with one of those coming and going unknowns: it was a discussion of the set, or some question about the lighting; or there would be the incidental
music to consider. The house was already booked, Silkowitz reported—a two-hundred-and-ninety-nine-seater west of Union Square—and he had nailed down a pair of invisible backers, whom he did not name. Silkowitz had a reputation for working fast: what seemed important yesterday no longer mattered today. He scarcely listened when Matt began to tell about the visit to Eli Miller. "Good, good," he replied, "right," and turned away to look over someone's swatch of cloth. It was as if he had never insisted on the journey to the Home for the Elderly Children of Israel.

  At the end of each day's rehearsal, the director sat on the edge of the stage and drew the actors around him in a half-circle and gave them his notes. And then came the daily exhortation: what he wanted from them all, he said, was more passion, more susceptibility. He wanted them to be drinking metaphorical poison; he wanted them to pour out blood and bile and bitter gall.

  "Especially you, Matt. You're underplaying again. Forget that less-is-more business, it's crap! More energy! We've got to hear the thunderclap."

  Matt's throat hurt. He was teaching himelf to howl. He had abandoned all his customary techniques: his vocal cords seemed perplexed by these new uses. He felt his chest fill with a curious darkness. In the morning, before taking the subway down to rehearsal, he tramped through the blackening snow to the public library and found a warm spot near a radiator and fell into King Lear, the original. He saw how those selfish women were stripping the old guy to the bone—no wonder he howls!

  He was heading back to the subway when it occurred to him that it was weeks since he had stepped into the shoe-repair shop.

  Salvatore did not know him.

  "Hey, Salvatore!" Matt called in that stagy roar Silkowitz liked, and attempted an abbreviated version of his little comic jig. But in his clumsy buckled-up snow boots he could only stamp.

  Salvatore said over the noise of his machines, "You got shoes to fix, mister?"

  "What's the matter with you?" Matt said.

  "Il attore!"

  The trouble was the beard, the shoemaker said. Who could see it was his friend Matteo? What was the beard for? Had he gone into opera after all? With the beard he looked one hundred years old. This frightened Matt. Just as Silkowitz had predicted, Matt's whiskers had grown in stark white: he was passing for an old-timer in earnest.

  And it was true: in a way he had gone into opera. Marlene Miller-Weinstock's primal voice still reverberated, even with Silkowitz's changes. His changes were logistical: he had moved the locale, updated the era, and accommodated the names of the characters to contemporary ears. Marlene Miller-Wein-stock's play was a kind of thirties costume drama, and Silkowitz had modernized it. That was all. The speeches were largely unaltered. Grandiloquence! There were no insinuations or intimations, none of those shrewd hesitations Matt loved to linger over. His gods were ellipsis and inference. Hers were bombast and excitation. Matt's particular skill was in filling in the silent spaces: he did it with his whole elastic face, and in the stance of his legs—a skeptical tilt of knee, an ironical angle of heel. But Marlene Miller-Weinstock's arias left no room for any play of suggestion or uncertainty. Fury ruled; fury and conviction and a relentless and fiery truth. It came to Matt that fury was truth; it amazed him that this could be so. His actor's credo had always been the opposite: glimmer and inkling are truth, hint and intuition are truth; nuance is essence. What Marlene Miller-Weinstock was after was malevolence, rage, even madness: vehemence straight out; shrieks blasted from the whirlwind's bowel. She was all storm. In the gale's wild din—inside all that howling—Matt was learning how to hear the steady blows of some interior cannon. The booms were loud and regular: it was his own heartbeat.

  Those two women with him on that dusty ill-lit stage—he felt apart from them, he saw them as moving shadows of himself. He felt apart from the men, one of whom he had worked with before, under Lionel's direction. And in the darkened margins of the place, on folding chairs along the wall, here was the boy with his notebook, and Silkowitz next to him, faintly panting, kicking his foot up and down as if marching to an unheard band. But Matt had pushed through a vestibule of embarrassment (it was shame over being made to howl) into some solitary chamber, carpeted and tapestried; it was as if he had broken through a membrane, a lung, behind which a sudden altar crouched, covered with Eli Miller's heavy tasseled bedspread. In this chamber Matt listened to his heartbeat. He understood that it wasn't Silkowitz who had led him here. Silkowitz was a literalist, a sentimentalist, a theorist—one of these, or all. Mainly he was flashy. Silkowitz's bets were on the future. He had nothing to do with this voluptuous clamor, Matt inside the gonging of his own rib cage, alone and very large; terrifyingly huge there on that dusty ill-lit stage. Marlene Miller-Weinstock had drawn him in. Or her father had. Inside his howl, Matt was beginning to believe the father's accusation: the daughter had taken hold of the father in order to copy his soul.

  Silkowitz was pleased. "You've got it together," he told Matt. "Stick with Matt," he said to the others. He praised Matt for being everywhere at once, like a rushing ghost; for looking into the women's eyes with a powerful intimacy beyond naturalism; for what he called "symbolic stature" and "integration into the scene." All this puzzled Matt. He hated the lingo. It wasn't what he was feeling, it wasn't what he was doing. He had no consciousness of being part of a company. He wasn't serving the company, whatever Silkowitz might think. He was in pursuit of his grand howl. He wanted to go on living inside it. When rehearsals were over he kept to himself and hurried to the subway.

  Ten days before the opening, Silkowitz moved the cast to the theater. It was a converted movie house; the stage was undersized but workable. To get to the men's dressing room you had to go through a narrow airless tunnel with great rusted pipes sweating overhead. The place was active, swarming. The boy with the notebook kept on checking his lists and schedules; he seemed professional enough. Wires crisscrossed the floor. Taped music traveled on phantom waves between scenes. Big wooden shapes materialized, pushed back and forth along the apron. Silkowitz had a hand in everything, running from corner to corner, his long girlish hair rippling, the silver thumb ring reddening in the light of the Exit sign whenever he glided past it.

  Frances had decided to attend these final days of rehearsal. Silkowitz made no objection. She came hauling a tote bag, and settled into the next-to-last row, laying out her dictionaries and references and pencils on the seats around her. She worked quietly, but Matt knew she was attentive and worried. He was indifferent to her inspections and judgments; he was concentrating on his howl. She mocked it as rant, but it didn't trouble her that Matt had departed from his usual style—he was doing his job, he was giving the director what he wanted. What it meant was a paycheck. And by now Matt couldn't claim, either, that Silkowitz was egging him on. The director was taking in whatever Matt was emitting. He was emitting a sea of lamentation. Frances dumped her papers back into the tote and listened. Matt was standing downstage, alone, in profile, leaning forward like a sail in the wind, or like the last leaf of a wintry tree. He looked wintry himself. It was the day's concluding run-through; the rest of the cast had left. Matt was doing his solo scene near the end of the second act. His big belly had mostly sunk. Lately he had no appetite. He was never hungry. His beard had lengthened raggedly; a brownish-yellowish tinge showed at the tips. He seemed mesmerized, suffering. He was staring ahead, into the dark of the wings.

  He turned to Silkowitz. "Someone's out there," he said.

  "There shouldn't be," Silkowitz said. "Sally's kid's sick, she went home. And anyhow her cue brings her in the other way. Is that electrician still working back there?" he called to the boy with the notebook.

  "Everyone's gone," the boy called back.

  Matt said hoarsely, "I thought I saw someone." He had let his hair grow down to meet the beard. His eyes were birdlike, ringed with creases.

  "O.K., call it a day. You're not the only one who's dead tired," Silkowitz said. "Go get some sleep."

  On the way to the subway, Fran
ces beside him, Matt brooded. "There was a guy out there. He was coming from the men's toilet, I saw him."

  "It's the neighborhood. Some creep wandered in."

  "He was there yesterday too. In the middle of that same speech. I think someone's hiding out."

  "Where? In the men's toilet?"

  "Ever since we got to the theater. I saw him the first day."

  "You never said anything."

  "I wasn't sure he was there."

  He was sorry he had spoken at all. It wasn't something he wanted to discuss with Frances. She had ridiculed his howl; now she was telling him it was worse than rant, he was hamming it up. The ignorance, the obtuseness! He was seized, dissolved, metamorphosed. His howl had altered him: the throat widens and becomes a highway for specters, the lungs an echo chamber for apparitions. His howl had floated him far above Frances, far above Silkowitz. Silkowitz and Lionel, what did it matter? They were the same, interchangeable, tummlers and barkers, different styles, what did it matter? Silkowitz was attracted to boldness and color, voices as noisy as an old music hall; he was as helpless as Frances to uncover what lay in the cave of the howl. As for the actors, Matt saw them as automatons; he was alone, alone. Except for the man who was hiding out, lurking, gazing.

  "My God, Matt," Frances exploded, "you're hallucinating all over the place. It's enough you've started to look the part, you don't have to go crazy on top of it. Don't expect me to go there again, I'm keeping away, I've got my deadlines anyhow."