by Peter Davis
I was still hot. But then, taking my own cue, I remembered two real dreams I’d had the night before. (Real? But then what was San Francisco? Provisional? Dreamlike but not as real as a dream?) In the first, I met a doctor in the street, much older than Pogo. I knew he was a doctor because he carried a black bag. He asked what I wanted. I was unable to answer. I only looked at his gray hair and clean-shaven face, which was kindly but also judgmental. I noticed his blue tie hung down from an old-fashioned curved collar. The dream ended.
“What do you think of that?” Pogo asked.
“I guess it meant I was on my way to see you, a doctor who tries to help though I can’t always say what I want to. I wanted to get to you after San Francisco.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “And the tie?”
“Sometimes you wear an all-blue tie, don’t you?”
“Actually, I don’t, but that doesn’t matter. Any other thought?”
“I think the dream means that I’ve been rescued from this awful thing that almost happened to me, and I’m glad to be safe again.”
“Mmm-hmm. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t? What then?”
“It’s not that you’re not relieved to be rescued, or to be home, or seeing me again. Incidentally, you were not rescued. You rescued yourself, you absolutely saved yourself, and no one is responsible for your being alive and on this couch except you yourself.”
“What do you think, then, about the dream?”
“The man in the old-fashioned collar is not me but the doctor from long ago, the doctor of your mother. Not perhaps her actual doctor but the composite of the doctors who treated your mother in her illness. You want him to cure her, to change the past, and you don’t dare say so because she has sacrificed herself for you, and if you undid that you might have to die instead of her. Not a real sacrifice, one created in your unconscious.”
“It’s that depressing?” I couldn’t imagine a sacrifice that guilt-producing.
“I don’t know that’s depressing,” Pogo said. “Perhaps it’s bringing forward a part of you that doesn’t accept what happened to her but senses, irrationally, that it could have happened on your own behalf. This can create similarly irrational guilt, which we can deal with, but can also help you bring all of yourself into the present, helping you understand her illness and death, that she cannot be cured or returned to you. Acceptance is not necessarily depressing. Perhaps it is only”—and he paused—“growth.”
“You mean I’ve delayed my grief all this time?”
“Not entirely. Surely you were sad when she died. Also you couldn’t write in your diary, remember? You were mute, as in the dream. But then you got up and went on. Except not all of you went on. Part of you stayed behind, in denial. What is the blue tie?”
I chuckled. “Well, Doctor, if I can paraphrase Freud on his beloved cigars, sometimes a blue tie is just a blue tie.”
“And sometimes blue means sad. The doctor cannot cure your mother.”
“If I were a safecracker, tumblers would be falling into place. “Born Blue” is Palmyra Millevoix’s song. Yes. I had another dream too. More falling. I dreamed I fell out of bed actually. I startled myself. Possibly I even woke up, I don’t recall, to reassure myself I was still in bed and hadn’t really fallen. And then I fell right back to sleep. Still falling, heh heh. But this is just the classic dream of being born, isn’t it? I’m reborn after my terrifying brush with death in San Francisco.”
“And?”
“Isn’t it enough to be reborn?”
“I don’t think so.”
That was Pogo’s usual way of letting me know he thought there was more to whatever I’d said or interpreted. “What then?”
“This is my own fantasy,” he said. “Use it if you wish. Do you remember your dream of Ulysses? Odysseus?”
Months earlier I’d told him of a dream about Odysseus in which I imagined the hero of the Odyssey outwitting a group of players on a football field, running around them toward the goal line, then diving for a touchdown. At the time I’d gone no further than to interpret the dream as my hope of eventually outsmarting the old-timers at the studio and becoming a Jubilee champion writer. Pogo had supported that.
But now, he said, “I think your falling is like your diving, diving means going down, going under. In the earlier dream a touchdown. You descend in the dream to the underworld, like Odysseus, like the descent to Nighttown in Joyce’s Ulysses. Odysseus speaks to his mother. You are going to the underworld to retrieve your mother. You are also re-enacting her death even while you, as yourself, join her in the underworld. But you cannot bring her back, and you don’t really want to be in the underworld—yet—so you awaken yourself for reassurance. San Francisco shook some apples out of the tree, yes?”
“Ah, so I’m doomed,” I said, “to walk the earth forever, like a Greek unhero, or perhaps like Oedipus himself, looking for the woman who is my mother.”
“But unlike Oedipus, you’ll never be able to marry your mother.”
I laughed. “We’ll see about that.”
Pogo said, with just a trace of triumph, “An element of a movie plot’s what-if is in the dream. What if you hadn’t saved yourself in San Francisco, what if you had indeed dropped, fallen, off the fire escape into the not-so-tender mercies of the stevedore Widdelstaedt. What if he became your executioner and sent you to the underworld?”
“Oh.” I was a little dazed. I’d never catch up with this guy.
“Till next time, then.”
“No goddammit.” I was still angry at Pogo’s initial failure to see my San Francisco experience as reality. I wanted my parting shot. “Of course,” I said, “if I’d been an Army veteran telling wartime battle experience you’d have had an institutional framework—ah, a soldier at war, he may have shell shock, a terrible revisiting of comrades being bayoneted in the trenches of France. But here’s a simple peacetime occurrence where I almost lose my life and your first instinct is to call it fantasy.”
“Your point,” Dr. Pogorzelski said, “is well taken.”
As I entered the studio, the early sun disappeared in mist, leaving a silken sky. The action at Jubilee was not just on the sound stages. Mossy had flown to New York to mend fences. Goddard Minghoff was in charge and ordered a speed-up of all work, including scripts, to let any New York spies on the lot know the boss’s absence wasn’t hindering production. Having had my confidence shaken by my close call in San Francisco, I consulted Yeatsman on how to write my earthquake treatment. While I was telling him I also had to write something about the strike, he interrupted to tell me Pammy was moping. Minghoff was threatening her with suspension. She was on the lot but hadn’t shown up on the set where she was shooting; since she was fond of me I should go cheer her, get her quickly over to her set. My skin, like the peel of a grape about to burst, felt tight, not ample for this labor. I thought, never send a boy to do a man’s … but I stopped myself from that kind of thinking.
Pammy answered the door to her bungalow in her robe. To my amazement she kissed me on both cheeks. A strand of her hair, wispy, brushed my chin as she drew back, and I thought I might run a fever. I held my breath, thrilled. I’d never noticed her eyelids, but as she turned aside, blinking, her eyelids, translucent, had the character of thoughtful concern and … alabaster. Having escaped death so recently, I could have died at that moment to preserve the perfection of my bliss. She said she wanted to let me in on a secret no one knew. “I need,” she said, “a confidant. I believe I can trust you.” At this I was, if possible, even more thrilled. I was suddenly an intimate. Speaking or singing, Pammy had a voice like Champagne. Could I take her in my arms? Don’t be ridiculous.
Sweeping back her honeyed hair, Pammy said, “Look, I have to tell someone. Teresa would talk her head off if I told her. Plus, she’d criticize me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “If nothing else I can be depended on to keep quiet.” I was fishing, hoping she’d spell out some virtue of mine other th
an silence. She wasn’t biting and simply ignored what I’d said.
“The Commies are after me. Again.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, not knowing whether they were attacking her for being a capitalist or trying to woo her back to her old outspoken sympathies.
“The thing is,” she said, “I agree with them, but I don’t want to be with them.”
“Why not?”
“They’re humorless, dogmatic, and they suck the life out of you. Aside from that, I love them.”
“What do they want you to do?”
“Address a meeting at the Shrine Auditorium. Introduce the ambassador.”
Mike Quin had told me Alexander Troyanovsky, the new Soviet ambassador to the United States, was coming west to look at the country he was now accredited to. American Reds were giving FDR unusual praise for recognizing the USSR though they heaped most of the credit on Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s foreign minister, who negotiated the exchange of ambassadors. “So tell them you’re busy that night,” I offered.
“Except I want to help them. What they’re saying about the capitalist system and its holding down the working class is right. Look at this Depression. It’s not the capitalists on the bread lines. The industrialists hurt a little, but the big thing hard times do for owners is drive down wages, force the unions either to make bad deals or give up jobs to scabs who gobble up the dregs from the troughs of the rich guys.”
“You can give the speech you’re giving me and then say here’s the ambassador.”
“Don’t be naïve, Owen. Hollywood’s part of the system too, and my appearance at what will be seen as a Communist rally will enrage all the studio heads, which will in turn hurt every union and guild in this town. ‘Get the Reds out of the picture business’—can’t you just hear Louie B. Mayer and the rest singing that song in unison?”
She did have a problem. I saw a sheet of yellow paper on her piano, filled with block printing, the unlined kind of paper used by Western Union to give a copy of sent messages to the sender. “All right,” I said, “send them a telegram of support they can read at the rally, and tell a couple of your friends to send their own telegrams—Frederic March likes the Reds, doesn’t he?—which will take the sting off the whole business, and you won’t have to go.”
“That just might do it,” she said, “and I’ll think about it while I’m dressing. Excuse me. I want you to tell me about San Francisco—a lot of Reds up there, too, no?”
While she was in the next room I couldn’t resist looking at the yellow sheet of paper I’d spotted. The printing spread over four of the little half pages Western Union favored. Must have cost a fortune, I thought. I read:
Mr. Amos Zangwill
Waldorf Astoria
New York City
Coming together,
Transcontinental medley,
A portal opens,
Hotel door,
Eyes on eyes,
Lips to lips,
Wordless.
Hands, mouths,
Swirl of fingers, hungry lips:
Not so fast:
Pace
Proportion,
Going down,
Now ungowned,
Ancient, Grecian, deliberate
Abandon.
Tongue—
Probing recesses,
Recess, process, possess,
Pause, full stop—
Slow, fast, slowly, faster, finding
Scent beneath smell,
Desire’s scent.
Then the form,
An unfamiliar, familiar shape
Moving, tangle of legs,
Moving, almost combative,
Afraid to move,
Softness, hardness mingled,
Venting dew,
Mingling wet sweetness,
Moving, moving, moving
In harmony
Until, until, until
One gives over
Now now now now now,
One part of the form
As the other looses torrent,
Clasped,
Fresh,
Old, new,
Transcontinental medley,
Coming together.
At the bottom she added, “Sleep deeply, dream sweetly, Your P.”
My turn to mope. Just a subaltern, that’s all I was. As my head lolled to my chest, I heard her behind me. Startled, I straightened to military attention, guilty, dejected.
“You’re awfully nosy, Owen,” Pammy said, but she said it kindly, regretfully.
And you’re a fucking Communist who doesn’t have the courage to admit it! is what I wanted to say but didn’t.
“I know I’m horrid, beastly,” she went on Britishly, “but when I’m not mad at him I’m mad for him, which is madness itself. Son of a bitch that he can be, yearning, craving, in his way a bighearted son of a bitch though. The world sees a schemer, the studio sees a tyrant. But inside the tyrant is a willing boy and inside the boy is an artist aching for approval.”
“Gee, you could print that in Photoplay,” I said, wanting to hurt her back.
“Sorry,” she said, shrugging off my insult. “I should have put the damn thing away. I should have known about you. I did know. In my selfishness I forgot. But Owen, dear Owen, don’t you see? Your little crush … ”
Little? Crush? Suddenly, for the second time that morning, I was furious, far more than I had been at Dr. Pogo.
“Your crush will subside, soon, you’ll see, you’ll find a girl more your … ”
She paused. More my what? Style? Speed? Type? Age? Class? What horror was she about to utter? Again I was proving my facility for staying silent, passive. How sweet to be prized for a quality I hated, tongue-tied frozen fearful silence.
“You know,” she continued, “more the kind of girl you should be with. Maybe a young starlet, you could almost have your pick you’re such a dear, or a junior writer like yourself, or someone completely, mercifully out of the business, free of all of us.”
What do you say when you’ve been knocked down, knocked that flat? “Thank you, Pammy,” was all I could think of. Thank you for decking me.
“I know. You came to coax me onto the set. They’re doing a shot that doesn’t need me anyway, but they want me over there and ready. Tell them I’m on my way. Merci beaucoup for the idea about the Reds. We’ll always be friends, won’t we?”
She hugged me. No kiss on the cheek now. I breathed her, lavender and almond, my anger wilting like lettuce. Hopeless.
19
Treatment
“Greatness,” Yeatsman was saying to me, “once resided in the throne, the church, the academy, the sword. Now it lives in the flashbulb. The flashbulb and the movie camera make hostages of us all, destroying identity and replacing it with celebrity. That’s the machine that cranks and hums here, and we’re the oil for it.”
Yancey Ballard was from a family of Alabama dairy farmers who had devised a way to mass produce and preserve butter in the nineteenth century. Ballard’s Better Butter began to be sold in Chicago not long after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern in 1871, and Ballard’s soon started its own sales fire. By the time Yancey was born in 1895, the family was as rich as the Alabama plantation owners. The boy grew into lanky southern ease, effortlessly becoming a squash champion in prep school, someone who succeeded too handily, whom others tried hard to emulate, and the too-hard trying was already their failure. He was sent north to college and missed being a classmate of Scott Fitzgerald’s at Princeton only because he enlisted early in the war, going overseas with the Canadians. In 1915 he was in the battle of Neuve Chapelle when the Canadians were ordered to make a feinting maneuver to draw the attention of the Germans away from the principal battle zone, where the British were attacking.
“That’s always been my trouble,” Yancey drawled, “I’m diversionary, can’t help it, can’t be the main event to save my soul. I was lucky though. Fella next to me was hit in the head by shell, had his brains
land next to my feet. Looked like salmon roe. All I had was shrapnel in my shoulder.” That was enough to keep Yancey out of further combat, and he spent the rest of the war writing battle reports for the First Canadian Division. He didn’t come home until 1920.
“I had my Paris,” he told me, “right after the Armistice, and it was angrier and less drunk than it became in the Twenties.” He worked on the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, and what he fell in love with was not Paris but Yeats. A trip to Ireland was futile, netting him no admission to the poet’s presence but only a dose of gonorrhea in Sligo. When he sailed home, Yeatsman finished his Princeton time and then gravitated to Hollywood in pursuit of an actress he’d met years earlier in Paris. The career choice of Hollywood pretty much cost Yancey Ballard his family, who regarded Jews, along with leprosy, as two of mankind’s incurable afflictions. He sold a story to the newly formed United Artists, assuming it would be a ticket to the actress’s affections. But she had already been in Hollywood a month, which was time enough. “Only the most stupide girls here have a liaison avec l’écrivain,” she told him, adding dismissively, “Jamais. Pour moi, je cherche le cinéaste! Bonne chance, mon cher. See you around, as they say.” She helped along Yeatsman’s education.
A decade later, most of it spent at Jubilee, Yeatsman thought of Mossy alternately as his champion and his nemesis. “‘Some violent and bitter man, some powerful man,’” he told me, echoing his bard, “‘Called architect and artist in, that they, Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone The sweetness that all longed for night and day, The gentleness none there had ever known.’ Wasn’t old Ghostie thinking of Mossy and the rest of us when he wrote that?”
“He has his visions,” I said, “and I guess we’re supposed to accommodate them.”
“‘I am worn out with dreams,’” Yeatsman quoted, “‘and yet, and yet, Is this my dream, or the truth? O would that we had met When I had my burning youth!’”
“Yeatsman, uh Yancey, I need your help.”
“We all need help,” Yeatsman said, warming up. “As we pace the corridor of life, people keep coming out of little doors, and each one hands us a piece of our destiny. Here’s your driver’s license. Here’s your degree. Here’s your first job, oops you’re fired, you’re not ready for this. Here’s your wife, here are your kids, and if you write some scripts that actually get made here’s your next wife, your new kids, your pool, the maid, the houseboy, don’t trust him. Here are your kids as they get older and betray you. Here are your ulcers, a gift from Mossy or some producer. But here’s your mistress. The doors along the corridor keep opening and the faceless people hand you more small portions of your fate. Here are some screen credits, here’s a sweet holiday in Tuscany, here’s your psychoanalyst, here’s your reconciliation, more travel, your retirement, your heart attack, cancer, thrombosis, shingles. Here’s your death, weren’t quite ready were you? Here’s your … forget it because you’re already forgotten.” He took a deep breath, lit a Pall Mall.