by Peter Davis
Bruno let the shouts and cheers break over him. He held up both hands.
“Those of you who took the advice of Horace Greeley and came west know you didn’t find the promised land. But you did find a land of promise, of possibility. We’re in the welcoming West, not the hidebound East. Then let us begin tonight, in Santa Monica, on La Mesa Drive in the home of Gloriana Onslow Flower, and let us begin with resolve, determination, open hearts, and, lest we forget, open wallets. This way to the revolution!”
During the extended applause Bertrand the butler reappeared to pass the silver tray around again. Still respectful, but was he also a trifle jaunty? No caviar on his tray now. It was empty until people began placing checks and cash on it. When the tray filled up and there was the threat of money spilling off it, Katinka the Red was right behind Bertrand with a canvas sack she raked the contributions into. Many people were already standing since there hadn’t been nearly enough chairs, milling their goodnights to each other, as the tray made its way around the lanai and on into the living room to which most of the conversational revolutionists had adjourned.
I found myself next to Yeatsman, who was writing a check for a thousand dollars, and Mitch Altschuler, who bellowed across the entire house, “Get low, everyone, down where the sharecroppers and factory hands are, get low into your pockets and write high—write the highest check you can afford and then double that!”
Bertrand Munson shoveled his silver tray among the guests with the same combination of propriety and coercion that an elder uses passing a collection plate through the pews after a sermon. So we were led, led ourselves really, into a new kind of sacramental servitude to an institution as insistent on doctrine as the medieval church and no less inquisitorial toward its dissenters. Whoever was naïve enough not to have brought a check, or canny enough not to want to be traced, threw cash onto the tray, usually hundred dollar bills.
As the tray approached me, Mitch Altschuler again solicited the butler, plucking him by his starched white sleeve. “Are you with us, Bertrand?”
“Sir?”
“The Negro is at the heart of our program, Bertrand.”
“Good to hear that, sir.”
“I know Gloriana will be tickled to give you the night off when we have our meetings. We need you, sure, but you need us, too. Can we count on your coming to our unit membership meeting next Thursday?”
“Thursday is my day off, sir.”
“Oh, ah, yes, of course. Good. And no more sir stuff, Bertrand. I’m Mitch. You won’t even have to ask Gloriana for the night off. See you Thursday then.” Mitch Altschuler, as the saying went, had bagged his first Negro. He smiled but he was really smiling at himself. His whole unit would be thrilled, proud, envious. “Good to know we can count on you, Bertrand.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mitch,” Bertrand Munson said. “Seeing that there’s still going to be a few people who tell the others what to do and all the others will still have to do it, I expect I’ll be taking my chances with Mr. Franklin D.” Mitch gaped. To everyone’s surprise, Bertrand Munson was declining the honor of joining the chattering insurgency. “Excuse me, Mr. Mitch,” he said. With that, leaving the abruptly crestfallen and bewildered Mitch Altschuler, who might have just seen his chances of doing important P work diminished ever so slightly, the insouciant butler thrust his tray in my direction.
I placed a fifty dollar check on the tray, aware I was at the extreme low end of eleemosynary zeal, but then I was also only a rookie writer. Sylvia wrote a check for ten times that, made out to the Scottsboro Defense Committee as we’d been instructed. I was told later that Gloriana’s party had raised just over $62,000, all for the ostensible defense of the Scottsboro Boys—boys, not men, not even young men—who were never mentioned at the Party party. With Sylvia’s check at the top of the pile on his silver tray, Bertrand nodded—a hieroglyph of amusement, reserve, bitterness and hauteur—and tilted his head sideways as he made for the next clutch of cheerful contributors.
“I believe we are, enfin, excused,” Sylvia said.
Outside, she tried to hand me a dollar from her purse for the still-running Mexican valet who brought around her Chrysler, but I motioned away the bill and pulled out my own. To my chagrin, I had only a ten in my wallet, so that’s what the valet got. I hoped Sylvia hadn’t seen the ten though we both saw the valet’s broad smile revealing his gold front tooth shining in the Chrysler’s headlights. “Muchas muchas gracias, señor!” annihilated any confidentiality he and I had.
Awkwardly, Sylvia asked me if I’d like to come in when we reached her house. Awkwardly, I accepted. Quickly, she made us two stiff gins and tonic. Quickly, we drank them. The talking was the easy part because there had been so much at the party to gossip about—the people, the cause, what we’d heard. Sylvia seemed to know both who the studio spies were and who was sleeping with whom. “Not that it matters,” she said, taking my hand as she finished her drink.
In her bed, we were unfamiliar, then familiar.
24
Pogo Regnant
After she invited me to stay the night, I could tell Sylvia was grateful when I said I needed to go.
At my Royal the next morning, staring wordblocked at the platen and then at the blank page I rolled onto it, I mooned not about Sylvia but Pammy. I’d be faithful to the shadow that had no substance. Disdainful of others, I’d been impotent in a venture the previous week with a reader from Paramount. Sylvia, bless her, banished that demon.
The night after the night of Gloriana’s party, I dreamed a whole row of dreams. In one I’m kicking a rat. I’m on a dark sidewalk and the rat, huge, runs toward me. I kick it like a soccer ball. It flies through the air, lands, runs around and pitches itself toward us again. Us? I don’t recognize who I’m with but it’s a woman. I kick at the rat and miss. It passes us and turns around to run at us three more times, and then I connect again with a kick that hurls it away and the dream ends. In another dream I say a chaste goodbye to Esther Leah Zangwill and arrive at Pammy’s house in the dawn. Then I see the sunrise, but I’m not with Pammy. I ring her doorbell to tell her about the blossoming sunrise. I’m told by Millie her mother’s still asleep, don’t bother her. I show the sunrise to Millie.
In a third dream I’m having lunch on a train with Sylvia and no less than Franklin D. Roosevelt. I can’t believe I’m with FDR himself. I call him Mr. President but Sylvia is more familiar and calls him Franklin, which he appreciates. We talk about strikes, and he says he doesn’t like them even though he knows the laboring classes have a point. I think: Laboring Classes? Why is he being so British? The waiter, a black man in a white jacket, brings the bill and FDR reaches into his coat pocket. I say No let me pay for it, Franklin. Oh, now it’s Franklin, is it? he says. I say, Well, I mean Mr. President. He reaches again for his wallet, now in a pants pocket below the table. I reach for mine as well.
A rash of staccato dreams follows, images like flash frames, of sunrises. I see Pammy’s honey-gold hair with the rising sun backlighting it. I am not with her but see her from a distance. In another flash, I telephone to alert Pammy to the sun. I ask the maid, whose name cornily is Rose, to tell Miss Millevoix the sun is rising. Rose quickly says she won’t wake Miss Palmyra, and that flash ends miserably. On its heels is a vision of the two of us on the beach in front of her house, which actually is nowhere near the beach, and we see the sun peek through the dawn and come up a glowing disk over the ocean. Pammy wears a long white robe and holds a flower; the flower has wilted petals. I am wearing a turtleneck sweater over bathing trunks. We walk into the water toward the sunrise, and she vanishes in the waves still holding the flower with the wilted petals.
“Why is the sun coming up over the water?” Dr. Pogorzelski asked in our next session. I’d told him about the crazy weekend, with its pain, its lunatic and incandescent moments, and then the dreams. Since the position of the sun was the most trivial thing in any of the dreams, I scoffed at his being a geographic stickler. “But really,” he pe
rsisted, “the sun doesn’t rise over the ocean in California, it only sets in the Pacific.”
“You think I transported us to the East Coast?” I asked.
“No, you were in front of Palmyra’s house. I think you may be on guard against the sun setting. The sun rising is sexual and hopeful. The setting sun is the opposite.”
“The sun is setting on capitalism,” I offered. “That was the message of the party.”
“I see.”
“The Communists will resolve the future into triumph. It looks like only a dream now, but it can come true. A solution to a number of life’s problems, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, it is. It is life itself.” He paused. “For children.”
“What.”
“We might call it pre-rational life, the life of fables and fairy tales, the life that faith attempts to explain, make bearable.”
“The Reds don’t want to make life only bearable, they want to transform it.”
“It’s a potent faith.”
“But look at Russia. The faith is revealing itself as a true guide.”
“We’ll see. I am from Poland. One man’s revelation is another’s fantasy is another’s hell. Tell me about the rat in your dream.”
“Fear. I’m afraid of rats.”
“Why?”
“Being bitten. Injury.”
“Bitten, yes, where?”
“Ah, castration? I’m afraid of being castrated?”
“That’s easy, but what is a rat in your life?”
“Oh, a producer. There’s a joke at the studios that an associate producer is the only person who will associate with the producer while an assistant producer is a mouse in training to become a rat. But Mossy isn’t exactly a producer.”
“Of course he is. He is the producer. And his humiliation of you for your innocent gaffe with the drunken tennis player is truly dastardly. You want to kick him for that. Or at any rate resign your position.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Why? You need the money?”
“Sure, but that’s not it. I could work somewhere else, write for the magazines, teach. But I want the movies. Motion pictures are the most exciting art on earth. Jubilee is the studio I know best. I don’t like having Mossy Zangwill as a god.”
“God, yes. God is … ”
“God is not Mr. Amos Zangwill, I can assure you. A devil, yes, not a god.”
“Scripture aside, I’m not sure there’s much difference between them in our fantasy lives, each so powerful and terrifying. Zangwill is no worse than any other figure you might choose to explain the unexplainable in nature. The idea of God is the intuitive perception of the power of the unconscious. The devil is his brother.”
“I’ll think about that. Meanwhile, Mossy haunts me like a ghost.”
“It’s up to you whether you take his brutal treatment or reject it. In here we can only try to get you to understand the choice. A rat can be many things—penis, money, power, monstrous—not only something you fear, perhaps something you desire.”
“The last thing I want to be is a rat,” I said heatedly. “They’re fearsome to me.”
“An object of fear isn’t only what harms us but what fascinates us because we wish to possess its powers, to be able, literally, to frighten others. Particularly after being humiliated. In recounting a dream, pride can have more power than memory. We don’t want to admit wishing to be what we hate. The rat suggests many things for both of us to consider. Ambivalence may be the only handle to hang on to, and it is slippery. We can offer merely crumbs of insight, as Freud happens to have said himself. The whole cake eludes us for some time. This FDR dream, what were you doing with him?”
I paused. Dr. Pogo was doing far more guiding than usual, and I thought he might be impatient with me, which seemed unfair. At the time I knew nothing of Freud’s famous Rat Man, who had been both terrified by his own rat fantasies and obsessed with them. If Freud was a spider and I a fly, I had stumbled into his parlor.
“I told you,” I said a little testily, “I was having lunch and then we were wondering who would pay the bill.”
“But you were on a train, no?”
“Oh yes, that’s some sexual reference, don’t tell me. And Sylvia was there, who I went to bed with. So I’m presenting my sexual conquest to the president. In the dream Sylvia already knows him. She’s more sexually experienced than I am.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Sure she is, she’s older, she’s been around, she’s—”
“That’s not what I mean. I don’t think you’re presenting Sylvia to FDR. In the map of your unconscious you have drawn for me, I don’t see Sylvia anywhere. We’re surveyors here, with our transit and compass measuring the boundaries of your land.”
“My perceptions?”
“Just so. Who I see in the subconscious is Palmyra Millevoix and Amos Zangwill. Tormenting you, attracting you. Sylvia in the dream is a stand-in for the star, who is Palmyra and who you don’t dare approach even in a dream. In the sunrise dreams you’re not with her until the very last one and even then she disappears. With FDR you have converted the bad father, Zangwill, into a benign figure, the devil into a god. The good father. Even more benign because President Roosevelt is a cripple, isn’t he? You have a power, a potency, he does not possess. He is no threat. This converted Zangwill, who Palmyra is already on familiar terms with, is who you wish you could win her from. Almost it is like asking her father for her hand. And so you wish to pay for the meal—money is an emblem of your power and generosity. You didn’t say who finally paid.”
“I’m not certain.”
“Yes, perhaps we can’t know that yet. The letters FDR are initials as well for Freud, DR, or Dr. Freud.”
“I suppose Freud hovers over anyone in analysis. Over you, too.”
“Mmmmm.”
“Maybe my dreams are having dreams of their own. They keep doing this until … ” I paused lengthily, unsure where to go.
Finally Pogo said, “Until?”
“Until at last I am awake,” I said.
“What is conscious is transient,” he said. “The unconscious is what endures—until we make it conscious, and then the unconscious gets a little smaller. With Shakespeare and Mozart, for example, they seem to have been able to make their entire unconscious expressible. Tell me the last sunrise dream again, the one on the beach.”
I did this, giving him the same details about Pammy vanishing into the sea.
“I don’t understand something,” Dr. Pogo said. “You described her as holding a flower, an obvious symbol of sexuality, yes?”
“I guess so. What don’t you understand?”
“The flower had sick petals.”
“Wilted petals, yes, that’s what I said.”
“What about flowers?”
“Mossy Zangwill has an enormous garden, flowers blooming all over it. Gloriana Flower, the widow Flower as she’s called, gave the party I was at with the Communists.”
“Living flowers in Zangwill’s garden, and Gloriana is notoriously alive, though her name might have planted, one might say, the word in your consciousness from which it could descend into your dreamlife. In the earlier dream the maid is named Rose.”
“Not Pammy’s maid’s name in real life,” I said.
“Yes. You said sick flower, wilted petals. Do you remember anything about flowers in your childhood?”
“No. Sure. Not much. I mean we did have flowers around sometimes, and my grandmother, she liked to have a bouquet in her apartment. That was in New York.”
When I said the words New York, it was as though another light had been turned on in Pogo’s office. Holding my father’s hand, which I did not normally do, I saw us returning on Broadway to the Ansonia Hotel from my grandmother’s apartment, where he had told me. “Oh, New York,” I repeated.
“What about New York?” Dr. Pogorzelski asked.
“My mother died at Flower Hospital in New York. And on the East
Coast the sun comes up over the ocean.”
“So.”
“Oh.”
“See you next time.”
25
Jubilee Regnant
“Master Youncey,” read the scrawled letter that Yeatsman thrust at me as soon as I reached the studio from Pogrezelski’s office, “Newman wouldn’t keep off Sugarlee so I shot him 7 times and he ran plum to gin and died off. I in seres trouble. High Sherf took me to gale and juge send to pen for life. I tole juge you in Hollywud was my boss and wooden put up with no nigger of yrs in pen for life but so plese tell juge I’m yo ol nigger. I holp you Master Youncey and yr ol miss is well and fine. I am well and fine and in seres trouble. Sir do something. Yore ol Willie Waddy.” The envelope’s return address was Wetumpka, Alabama, home of the state penitentiary. I shook my head.
“Look at them,” Yeatsman said, pointing to the writers gathered in the rotunda of the building in which we all worked. The writers building was low-slung, two-storied, as undistinguished as an Army barracks. Near the center of the ground floor was a large circular room off of which were several writers’ offices. In the middle of this space was a typewriter on a pedestal. This was in honor of a boyhood friend of Mossy’s who had hoped to become a novelist. Mossy had talked his pal into forgetting novels and coming west to try his luck in pictures. As Mossy described the journey, the two of them lit out for the territory in 1921 driving an aging Stutz Bearcat that had belonged to the friend’s rich uncle. Mossy’s face would cloud as he told of the friend’s death in an accident at the Grand Canyon. When he created his own studio, Mossy had his friend’s old Underwood bronzed and mounted on a pedestal in the writers building.
Around this typewriter about twenty writers were now huddled, like gulls gathering at a lighthouse before a storm. They were murmuring about a strike. Several had looked up when I walked in, reassuring themselves that I was not their keeper, Colonel DeLight, whom they didn’t trust.