VICTOR: Well, that’s what I thought.—See, there’s one thing about the cops—you get to learn how to listen to people, because if you don’t hear right sometimes you end up with a knife in your back. In other words, I dreamed up the whole problem.
WALTER, casting aside his caution, his character at issue: Victor, my five hundred dollars was not what kept you from your degree! You could have left Pop and gone right on—he was perfectly fit.
VICTOR: And twelve million unemployed, what was that, my neurosis? I hypnotized myself every night to scrounge the outer leaves of lettuce from the Greek restaurant on the corner? The good parts we cut out of rotten grapefruit . . . ?
WALTER: I’m not trying to deny—
VICTOR, leaning into Walter’s face: We were eating garbage here, buster!
ESTHER: But what is the point of—
VICTOR, to Esther: What are you trying to do, turn it all into a dream? To Walter: And perfectly fit! What about the inside of his head? The man was ashamed to go into the street!
ESTHER: But Victor, he’s gone now.
VICTOR, with a cry—he senses the weakness of his position: Don’t tell me he’s gone now! He is wracked, terribly alone before her. He was here then, wasn’t he? And a system broke down, did I invent that?
ESTHER: No, dear, but it’s all different now.
VICTOR: What’s different now? We’re a goddamned army holding this city down and when it blows again you’ll be thankful for a roof over your head! To Walter: How can you say that to me? I could have left him with your five dollars a month? I’m sorry, you can’t brainwash me—if you got a hook in your mouth don’t try to stick it into mine. You want to make up for things, you don’t come around to make fools out of people. I didn’t invent my life. Not altogether. You had a responsibility here and you walked on it. . . . You can go. I’ll send you your half.
He is across the room from Walter, his face turned away. A long pause.
WALTER: If you can reach beyond anger, I’d like to tell you something. Vic? Victor does not move. I know I should have said this many years ago. But I did try. When you came to me I told you—remember I said, “Ask Dad for money”? I did say that.
Pause.
VICTOR: What are you talking about?
WALTER: He had nearly four thousand dollars.
ESTHER: When?
WALTER: When they were eating garbage here.
Pause.
VICTOR: How do you know that?
WALTER: He’d asked me to invest it for him.
VICTOR: Invest it.
WALTER: Yes. Not long before he sent you to me for the loan.
Victor is silent.
That’s why I never sent him more than I did. And if I’d had the strength of my convictions I wouldn’t have sent him that!
Victor sits down in silence. A shame is flooding into him which he struggles with. He looks at nobody.
VICTOR, as though still absorbing the fact: He actually had it? In the bank?
WALTER: Vic, that’s what he was living on, basically, till he died. What we gave him wasn’t enough; you know that.
VICTOR: But he had those jobs—
WALTER: Meant very little. He lived on his money, believe me. I told him at the time, if he would send you through I’d contribute properly. But here he’s got you running from job to job to feed him—I’m damned if I’d sacrifice when he was holding out on you. You can understand that, can’t you?
Victor turns to the center chair and, shaking his head, exhales a blow of anger and astonishment.
Kid, there’s no point getting angry now. You know how terrified he was that he’d never earn anything any more. And there was just no reassuring him.
VICTOR, with protest—it is still nearly incredible: But he saw I was supporting him, didn’t he?
WALTER: For how long, though?
VICTOR, angering: What do you mean, how long? He could see I wasn’t walking out—
WALTER: I know, but he was sure you would sooner or later.
ESTHER: He was waiting for him to walk out.
WALTER—fearing to inflame Victor, he undercuts the obvious answer: Well . . . you could say that, yes.
ESTHER: I knew it! God, when do I believe what I see!
WALTER: He was terrified, dear, and . . . To Victor: I don’t mean that he wasn’t grateful to you, but he really couldn’t understand it. I may as well say it, Vic—I myself never imagined you’d go that far.
Victor looks at him. Walter speaks with delicacy in the face of a possible explosion.
Well, you must certainly see now how extreme a thing it was, to stick with him like that? And at such cost to you?
Victor is silent.
ESTHER, with sorrow: He sees it.
WALTER, to erase it all, to achieve the reconciliation: We could work together, Vic. I know we could. And I’d love to try it. What do you say?
There is a long pause. Victor now glances at Esther to see her expression. He sees she wants him to. He is on the verge of throwing it all up. Finally he turns to Walter, a new note of awareness in his voice.
VICTOR: Why didn’t you tell me he had that kind of money?
WALTER: But I did when you came to me for the loan.
VICTOR: To “ask Dad”?
WALTER: Yes!
VICTOR: But would I have come to you if I had the faintest idea he had four thousand dollars under his ass? It was meaningless to say that to me.
WALTER: Now just a second . . . He starts to indicate the harp.
VICTOR: Cut it out, Walter! I’m sorry, but it’s kind of insulting. I’m not five years old! What am I supposed to make of this? You knew he had that kind of money, and came here many times, you sat here, the two of you, watching me walking around in this suit? And now you expect me to—?
WALTER, sharply: You certainly knew he had something, Victor!
VICTOR: What do you want here? What do you want here!
WALTER: Well, all I can tell you is that I wouldn’t sit around eating garbage with that staring me in the face! He points at the harp. Even then it was worth a couple of hundred, maybe more! Your degree was right there. Right there, if nothing else.
Victor is silent, trembling.
But if you want to go on with this fantasy, it’s all right with me. God knows, I’ve had a few of my own.
He starts for his coat.
VICTOR: Fantasy.
WALTER: It’s a fantasy, Victor. Your father was penniless and your brother a son of a bitch, and you play no part at all. I said to ask him because you could see in front of your face that he had some money. You knew it then and you certainly know it now.
VICTOR: You mean if he had a few dollars left, that—?
ESTHER: What do you mean, a few dollars?
VICTOR, trying to retract: I didn’t know he—
ESTHER: But you knew he had something?
VICTOR, caught; as though in a dream where nothing is explicable: I didn’t say that.
ESTHER: Then what are you saying?
VICTOR, pointing at Walter: Don’t you have anything to say to him?
ESTHER: I want to understand what you’re saying! You knew he had money left?
VICTOR: Not four thousand dol—
ESTHER: But enough to make out?
VICTOR, crying out in anger and for release: I couldn’t nail him to the wall, could I? He said he had nothing!
ESTHER, stating and asking: But you knew better.
VICTOR: I don’t know what I knew! He has called this out, and his voice and words surprise him. He sits staring, cornered by what he senses in himself.
ESTHER: It’s a farce. It’s all a goddamned farce!
VICTOR: Don’t. Don’t say that.
ESTHER: Farce! To stick us into a furnished room so you could send
him part of your pay? Even after we were married, to go on sending him money? Put off having children, live like mice—and all the time you knew he . . . ? Victor, I’m trying to understand you. Victor?—Victor!
VICTOR, roaring out, agonized: Stop it! Silence. Then: Jesus, you can’t leave everything out like this. The man was a beaten dog, ashamed to walk in the street, how do you demand his last buck—?
ESTHER: You’re still saying that? The man had four thousand dollars!
He is silent.
It was all an act! Beaten dog!—he was a calculating liar! And in your heart you knew it!
He is struck silent by the fact, which is still ungraspable.
No wonder you’re paralyzed—you haven’t believed a word you’ve said all these years. We’ve been lying away our existence all these years; down the sewer, day after day after day . . . to protect a miserable cheap manipulator. No wonder it all seemed like a dream to me—it was; a goddamned nightmare. I knew it was all unreal, I knew it and I let it go by. Well, I can’t any more, kid. I can’t watch it another day. I’m not ready to die. She moves toward her purse.
She sits. Pause.
VICTOR—not going to her; he can’t. He is standing yards from her: This isn’t true either.
ESTHER: We are dying, that’s what’s true!
VICTOR: I’ll tell you what happened. You want to hear it? She catches the lack of advocacy in his tone, the simplicity. He moves from her, gathering himself, and glances at the center chair, then at Walter. I did tell him what you’d said to me. I faced him with it. He doesn’t go on; his eyes go to the chair. Not that I “faced” him, I just told him—“Walter said to ask you.” He stops; his stare is on the center chair, caught by memory; in effect, the last line was addressed to the chair.
WALTER: And what happened?
Pause.
VICTOR, quietly: He laughed. I didn’t know what to make of it. Tell you the truth—to Esther—I don’t think a week has gone by that I haven’t seen that laugh. Like it was some kind of a wild joke—because we were eating garbage here. He breaks off. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. And I went out. I went—he sits, staring—over to Bryant Park behind the public library. Slight pause. The grass was covered with men. Like a battlefield; a big open-air flophouse. And not bums—some of them still had shined shoes and good hats, busted businessmen, lawyers, skilled mechanics. Which I’d seen a hundred times. But suddenly—you know?—I saw it. Slight pause. There was no mercy. Anywhere. Glancing at the chair at the end of the table: One day you’re the head of the house, at the head of the table, and suddenly you’re shit. Overnight. And I tried to figure out that laugh.—How could he be holding out on me when he loved me?
ESTHER: Loved . . .
VICTOR, his voice swelling with protest: He loved me, Esther! He just didn’t want to end up on the grass! It’s not that you don’t love somebody, it’s that you’ve got to survive. We know what that feels like, don’t we!
She can’t answer, feeling the barb.
We do what we have to do. With a wide gesture including her and Walter and himself: What else are we talking about here? If he did have something left it was—
ESTHER: “If” he had—
VICTOR: What does that change! I know I’m talking like a fool, but what does that change? He couldn’t believe in anybody any more, and it was unbearable to me! The unlooked-for return of his old feelings seems to anger him. Of Walter: He’d kicked him in the face; my mother—he glances toward Walter as he speaks; there is hardly a pause—the night he told us he was bankrupt, my mother . . . It was right on this couch. She was all dressed up—for some affair, I think. Her hair was piled up, and long earrings? And he had his tuxedo on . . . and made us all sit down; and he told us it was all gone. And she vomited. Slight pause. His horror and pity twist in his voice. All over his arms. His hands. Just kept on vomiting, like thirty-five years coming up. And he sat there. Stinking like a sewer. And a look came onto his face. I’d never seen a man look like that. He was sitting there, letting it dry on his hands. Pause. He turns to Esther. What’s the difference what you know? Do you do everything you know?
She avoids his eyes, his mourning shared.
Not that I excuse it; it was idiotic, nobody has to tell me that. But you’re brought up to believe in one another, you’re filled full of that crap—you can’t help trying to keep it going, that’s all. I thought if I stuck with him, if he could see that somebody was still . . . He breaks off; the reason strangely has fallen loose. He sits. I can’t explain it; I wanted to . . . stop it from falling apart. I . . . He breaks off again, staring.
Pause.
WALTER, quietly: It won’t work, Vic.
Victor looks at him, then Esther does.
You see it yourself, don’t you? It’s not that at all. You see that, don’t you?
VICTOR, quietly, avidly: What?
WALTER, with his driving need: Is it really that something fell apart? Were we really brought up to believe in one another? We were brought up to succeed, weren’t we? Why else would he respect me so and not you? What fell apart? What was here to fall apart?
Victor looks away at the burgeoning vision.
Was there ever any love here? When he needed her, she vomited. And when you needed him, he laughed. What was unbearable is not that it all fell apart, it was that there was never anything here.
Victor turns back to him, fear on his face.
ESTHER, as though she herself were somehow moving under the rays of judgment: But who . . . who can ever face that, Walter?
WALTER, to her: You have to! To Victor: What you saw behind the library was not that there was no mercy in the world, kid. It’s that there was no love in this house. There was no loyalty. There was nothing here but a straight financial arrangement. That’s what was unbearable. And you proceeded to wipe out what you saw.
VICTOR, with terrible anxiety: Wipe out—
WALTER: Vic, I’ve been in this box. I wasted thirty years protecting myself from that catastrophe. He indicates the chair: And I only got out alive when I saw that there was no catastrophe, there had never been. They were never lovers—she said a hundred times that her marriage destroyed her musical career. I saw that nothing fell here, Vic—and he doesn’t follow me any more with that vomit on his hands. I don’t look high and low for some betrayal any more; my days belong to me now, I’m not afraid to risk believing someone. All I ever wanted was simply to do science, but I invented an efficient, disaster-proof, money-maker. You—to Esther, with a warm smile: He could never stand the sight of blood. He was shy, he was sensitive . . . To Victor: And what do you do? March straight into the most violent profession there is. We invent ourselves, Vic, to wipe out what we know. You invent a life of self-sacrifice, a life of duty; but what never existed here cannot be upheld. You were not upholding something, you were denying what you knew they were. And denying yourself. And that’s all that is standing between us now—an illusion, Vic. That I kicked them in the face and you must uphold them against me. But I only saw then what you see now—there was nothing here to betray. I am not your enemy. It is all an illusion and if you could walk through it, we could meet . . . His reconciliation is on him. You see why I said before, that in the hospital—when it struck me so that we . . . we’re brothers. It was only two seemingly different roads out of the same trap. It’s almost as though—he smiles warmly, uncertain still—we’re like two halves of the same guy. As though we can’t quite move ahead—alone. You ever feel that?
Victor is silent.
Vic?
Pause.
VICTOR: Walter, I’ll tell you—there are days when I can’t remember what I’ve got against you. He laughs emptily, in suffering. It hangs in me like a rock. And I see myself in a store window, and my hair going, I’m walking the streets—and I can’t remember why. And you can go crazy trying to figure it out when all the reasons di
sappear—when you can’t even hate any more.
WALTER: Because it’s unreal, Vic, and underneath you know it is.
VICTOR: Then give me something real.
WALTER: What can I give you?
VICTOR: I’m not blaming you now, I’m asking you. I can understand you walking out. I’ve wished a thousand times I’d done the same thing. But, to come here through all those years knowing what you knew and saying nothing . . . ?
WALTER: And if I said—Victor, if I said that I did have some wish to hold you back? What would that give you now?
VICTOR: Is that what you wanted? Walter, tell me the truth.
WALTER: I wanted the freedom to do my work. Does that mean I stole your life? Crying out and standing: You made those choices, Victor! And that’s what you have to face!
VICTOR: But, what do you face? You’re not turning me into a walking fifty-year-old mistake—we have to go home when you leave, we have to look at each other. What do you face?
WALTER: I have offered you everything I know how to!
VICTOR: I would know if you’d come to give me something! I would know that!
WALTER, crossing for his coat: You don’t want the truth, you want a monster!
VICTOR: You came for the old handshake, didn’t you! The okay!
Walter halts in the doorway.
And you end up with the respect, the career, the money, and the best of all, the thing that nobody else can tell you so you can believe it—that you’re one hell of a guy and never harmed anybody in your life! Well, you won’t get it, not till I get mine!
WALTER: And you? You never had any hatred for me? Never a wish to see me destroyed? To destroy me, to destroy me with this saintly self-sacrifice, this mockery of sacrifice? What will you give me, Victor?
VICTOR: I don’t have it to give you. Not any more. And you don’t have it to give me. And there’s nothing to give—I see that now. I just didn’t want him to end up on the grass. And he didn’t. That’s all it was, and I don’t need anything more. I couldn’t work with you, Walter. I can’t. I don’t trust you.
WALTER: Vengeance. Down to the end. To Esther: He is sacrificing his life to vengeance.
The Penguin Arthur Miller Page 79