Death and Taxes
Page 18
He is terrified still of dying, he remembers the Capuchin Catacombs in Rome, how sad and disappointed those faces were, how horrible . . .
Maccabbee enters. Browne sends him to get the gravedigger—unfinished business. Babbo arrives to tell him Alice is here. (“She wannet me ta prepare ya fer da shock.”) He is very much afraid to see her, he calls Maccabbee back to delay that moment, and also to tell him what it looks like, inside that urn . . .
It’s as bad as Browne thought. All delays lead him back to the fear. Maccabbee’s no use—and here Browne decides to face these terrible tasks, Alice, the gravedigger, dying . . . Browne sends Maccabbee away.
He tries to prepare for the shock of seeing Alice, asking Babbo what she’s like. Babbo goes to fetch her, leaving Browne alone for a moment with the urn.
He tries to control the fear of it, of that stillmouth, by making a little epigram, a little poem line, an apostrophe. (“Oh open urn . . .”)
An unexpected and scary surprise. The spume of dust. Browne freaks a little, he tries a little joke . . . (“See? The dead do rise.)
And Alice is in.
She frightens Browne, and her resurrection suggests that scarier people still may have returned.
He dispenses with the formalities (“You look ferocious . . .”), and asks what’s really worrying him (“Is he [father] here, too?”). Browne tries to reassure himself (“But no, I suppose he couldn’t be.”), but it’s too menacing and that face was too real (“The silk merchant.”).
Her incredulity offends and frightens Browne—he doesn’t want to be going mad, seeing things. So he tries a little pleasant exchange (“Does convent life agree with you, Alice? Not too quiet?”).
Even composing a little ditty for her (“. . . Into the sea poor Alice was tossed . . .”) as he did when Alice and he were children.
But she’s still there, wanting something. It’s too terrifying. He begins worrying about the silk merchant again, and he talks to silence her voice, to not listen to this demanding . . . But talking about the silk merchant makes Browne remember that he is as his father was when he died.
Alice talks again. Browne turns away from her, he tells her about the writing desk and how the faces of the dead terrify him, how her face is terrifying to him.
And still she won’t go. She too wants the Will. Browne decides to evict her.
He tells her everything there is to tell about himself, beginning with his wife (who is getting all the money), and ends by telling Alice that she is hurting him, explicitly asking her to go (“Your presence is too vital and it causes pain.”).
It enrages Browne that Alice won’t leave after he tells her this, that she is still after the one thing she came to get, the Will, the money. He blasts her (“There’s a distinctly mercenary scent . . .”).
It works, she starts to leave, but Browne is afraid. Can she help him?
She can’t and doesn’t.
She leaves. Maybe the holy water will help, so he drinks it.
Babbo announces the arrival of a foreigner, and Browne knows who it is. He expects Estrelita, but Dorothy enters. He finds her presence reassuring (“Not so foreign after all.”). After all is said and done, Browne knows his wife and she knows him.
Maccabbee too reassures him, familiar. Browne gives Macc his marching orders, sends him off, and prepares to meet the next visitor who has come to say good-bye—Estrelita.
But Dorothy tells Browne she’s brought the gravedigger. This is a betrayal. But also what he asked for. He attacks her with considerable nastiness, in front of Pumpkin, and after she flees, Browne feels badly, he even admits to his misbehavior in front of this upstart, this usurper, and the usurper throws down a gauntlet. (“Yes, sir. I do.”)
Browne realizes that Pumpkin’s ready to fight. Browne chooses to fight by giving Pumpkin this list of impossible contradictory orders: do this, but not that! This, and not that! Browne uses the words, the surprising twists, the paradoxes of the speech about burial to stab at him; he becomes flush with the victory, which he imagines his verbal dexterity, his talent, is giving him. He flings false modesty at Pumpkin, he flings his sins at Pumpkin (“. . . who made his wife miserable . . .”), his failure to have grandchildren—BUT (a hairpin turn) HE IS A GENIUS! SHAKESPEARE HAD NOTHING ON HIM! He deserves AN OBELISK! A PYRAMID! A PYRE! A GRAND SEA BURIAL . . .
HE IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, and he cannot die! The idea is preposterous! Everything, even this wretch, depends on him and his continued life! He will never die. He dismisses the possibility, and for a moment feels immortal, victorious (“We’ll have no need of gravediggers then!”).
But as soon as Pumpkin starts to talk back, and even worse, to walk, healthy, young . . . Browne can only hope to hurt Dorothy through Pumpkin by saying, “Tell her I died knowing.” He wants her to know that she hurt him terribly.
And then he takes that back. There are several meanings to: “No, don’t tell her anything.”—leave her with nothing, just silence, leave them all with that, or possibly Browne has decided not to hurt her; or possibly he means both.
Estrelita’s visit is painful, and also redemptive: she has loved him all this time, in spite of his having been a coward, of his having abandond her, all things Browne has spent his life despising himself for. She never stopped loving him, and she promises to take him home with her.
Estrelita’s visit completes the stations Browne has had to visit on his way to what he believes is a truce he’s made with dying. The last interruption of the eulogies is dispensed with easily, with magisterial calm—he wants to be alone, with Dorothy, to try to face the end.
They are embarrassed to be together. He is moved by her loyalty, she is frightened that he is clearly near the end; they are sad that there is so much hatred between them, her betrayal of him, his cruelty to her. He confesses to his role in the killing of the women accused of witchcraft—the memory of their hanging has never left him; the guilt he has suffered, he who is essentially a decent man, has been an awful torment.
He drifts, slowly letting go, the toxins inside overwhelming him. He has a final vision (“Dorothy, good-bye. The ship embarks at first wind. The mast and sails are gilded with blood . . .”), which is also his farewell to the world, his final poem. She loses her nerve at the end, and cannot wait to watch him breathe his last; she runs away to find help, and Father Death finally makes his move. Browne begs for his life, tries to move this monster to pity, tries reproaches, pleas, but . . .
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
Act Five
When Browne comes back from the Other Side to deliver his Will, he is hungry, vibrant, joyous, mobile, feeling great for the first time in years. He is also an instrument of Vengeance, and is enjoying that, the delivering of Justice, immensely.
G. David Schine in Hell
With apologies to George Bernard Shaw,
Philip Roth, God, the Devil
and everyone in between
Cast
G. DAVID SCHINE
ROY COHN
ALGER HESS
DICK
MARY
Setting
Hell, June 19, 1996
We are in Hell—Have you noticed?—which resembles a dinner theater in Orange County, California, across the interstate from the Nixon Library. Onstage are four music stands placed before four bar stools, on each of which a man is sitting. Three are dressed elegantly in black tuxedos, and the fourth, Roy Cohn, is wearing tuxedo pants and an aggressively busy, plaid red-green-heather-mustard dinner jacket, with matching bow tie and cummerbund. Roy turns to the Elderly Gentleman seated next to him.
ROY
Come here often? What’s your sign?
ELDERLY GENTLEMAN
My . . . ?
ROY
Scorpio? Cancer? What’re you drinking?
ELDERLY GENTLEMAN
I’m not . . . (A glass appears in his hand, yellowish ice, parasol, pineapple chunk on a toothpick) Oh! (He sips it) Banana daiquiri?
(Roy sticks
his finger in the man’s drink, licks, makes a face.)
ROY
Bleah. I knew a guy who drank that dreck by the bucket—his dad owned a hotel in Boca Raton. The bartender claimed he’d invented the banana daiquiri and, oh yeah, there was this gal down there who’d marry wealthy old diabetics, get them hooked on banana daiquiris and—
ELDERLY GENTLEMAN
(Recognizing Roy) Oh my God, it’s . . .
ROY
What?
ELDERLY GENTLEMAN
Where . . . Where am I?
ROY
In Hell. (Staring at the man more intently) What did you say your name was?
ELDERLY GENTLEMAN
I didn’t say, I . . . HELL? No, but that’s not . . . Roy?
ROY
Don’t I know you from some . . .
ELDERLY GENTLEMAN
Roy Cohn?
ROY
David? David Schine?
DAVID
ROY COHN! This must be Hell!
(They hug.)
ROY
Dave, Dave, so great to see you, look! (Wipes his eyes) Tears! So old, Dave!
DAVID
But what am I doing here? There’s a mistake somewhere, Roy, I’ve been really good, the last fifty years, I mean, not perfect, but I produced a hit movie! I married Miss Universe! I should be in Heaven, Roy.
ROY
Oh, you’d hate Heaven, Dave, trust me.
DAVID
I do, Roy.
ROY
You always did. Incredible.
DAVID
But what’s so bad about Heaven, Roy?
ROY
Fulla kvetchy communists, Dave, trying to figure out how the Great Leap Forward turned into the Biggest Bellyflop in History. Bill Kunstler’s up there, for God’s sake. Trust me, Hell’s better.
DAVID
Who’s in Hell?
ROY
All Republicans, many Democrats, Jesse Helms—I know, he’s not really dead but he has a backstage pass. Whittaker Chambers with that fekachteh medal Reagan gave him. Buy him a drink and he’ll polish it on your necktie.
DAVID
What about Purgatory?
ROY
Lionel Trilling, and the editorial board of the New York Review of Books. Nobody ever gave me a medal. Ingrates.
DAVID
Naw, Roy, they all hate you up there, pretty much everyone except Bill Buckley. And they say you were a fag.
ROY
Bisexual! Please! And so was Whittaker!
DAVID
But I tell ’em it just isn’t true, Roy, you were a ladies’ man.
ROY
Dave, Dave, such a sweet, simple kid. Hey, but listen kiddo, here you don’t have to look like an alter kocher anymore, here you’re spirit, not flesh—in Hell you can look any age you want!
DAVID
But you didn’t change, Roy, you look sixty.
ROY
What are you kidding, change? After I paid for all these face-lifts? Oh alright I didn’t actually pay for them, but I think I look better now than I did then, and anyway, as the very Embodiment or rather as the Spirit of American Conservatism—you know, the unconsidered contradictions, the ill-considered unconstitutional adventurism, the paranoia, the ebullient bile—I can’t change, it wouldn’t look good. You on the other hand don’t have a political bone in your body, Dave, so let me see you again as the gorgeous rich boy for whose sake I nearly sank the anticommunist movement! The face that launched a thousand slips!
DAVID
OK, Roy!
(Whisk! He changes into a twenty-five year old—handsome in his GI uniform.)
ROY
There you are! Poetry is what you drive me to! The dreams I’ve had of you, Dave—of us, of our schtupping and caressing, of our World-purging love! You, a nice Jewish boy I could bring home to my mother—alright so maybe not a genius, but with a face and a body like the replacement lead in a Tarzan movie! And a hotel chain and a bank account!
DAVID
Roy, Roy, such a kidder.
ROY
Who’s kidding? Even you must have known, you must have suspected. For you I ruined the credibility and career of the man I admired most in all the world, for your sake I pushed Joe McCarthy to perdition, Dave—for you—because Joe had moxie like nobody’s business but he didn’t have your eyes! Dave, our story is epic, it’s tragic, it’s . . . South Pacific. Dave, my doomed love for you turned you into history—Dave, you gotta know that! And what about that afternoon we spent in that hotel in Munich?
DAVID
Aw, Roy, that was 1952—who remembers? And I had serious jet lag in Munich, you know that, and my cold medicine made me sorta dopey. I loved you too, guy, like my vicious kid brother or something, such a cutup! I was real sad when I read you’d gotten sick and died from—
ROY
Liver cancer.
DAVID
Oh, right, liver . . . But I thought the papers said it was—well, never mind. But history, Roy, gee, I dunno, I mean, you sure got my name in all the papers, Roy, you sure did, but no one reads the papers anymore, the kids these days, all that stuff is pretty much forgotten. You, me, Senator Joe, all that. Nobody remembers last month, let alone 1952.
(Music plays: “The Internationale.” Spotlight on the third man, who looks around as if waiting for someone.)
DAVID
Roy, who’s—
ROY
Hiss, David.
(David hisses.)
DAVID
Why are we hissing, Roy? Is it the Devil?
ROY
No, no you lamebrain, it’s Alger Hiss.
DAVID
(Not remembering the name) Alger . . . ?
ROY
Oh for christ sake!
ALGER
Microfilm in the pumpkin?
DAVID
OH RIGHT! Jeez, I haven’t thought about you in years! But, Roy, you said all the commies were up in—
ROY
He visits.
ALGER
Change of scenery, that sort of thing. Thinking of relocating.
DAVID
You mean that’s possible?
ALGER
To switch? Of course, old man, didn’t they teach you that at Harvard?
ROY
He wasn’t an A student.
ALGER
I suppose not. Yes, anyone can switch and Lord knows many do. I come down here for a little moral certainty, you know, even if it’s obtained at the price of an appalling degree of moral shortsightedness, here at least you know who you are. Up there everyone’s swimming in guilt, ideological confusion, and the questions, my God! “Did you do it, Alger?” “You never did it, did you, Alger?” “Why did you do it, Alger?” “But what about the Hitler-Stalin anti-aggression pact, Alger?” “Were we wrong, Alger?” Right, like I know the answer! Do I look like Teresias?
DAVID
Who?
ALGER
Teresias. A Greek androgyne, Mr. Schine, he had breasts.
DAVID
Communist?
ALGER
I should think so, yes.
ROY
Here at least we know you, Alger. Even if you never spied (which you did), you organized the UN. For that alone you shoulda done time.
ALGER
And don’t forget Yalta!
(The wailing of the Damned.)
ALGER
I love this place! In Heaven it’s all soul-searching. Here in Hell you haven’t got any souls to search, and it’s still possible for a man to produce an effect.
So you fellows really were queers, huh, it wasn’t just gossip?
ROY
Never take the name of Gossip in vain, especially down here—it’s the brandy of the damned.
ALGER
You stole that line from Shaw.
ROY
Oh yeah, like I ever read that Fabian socialist windbag.
Are you looking for someone in particular?
An old comrade of mine. He lives here, we’re going to discuss trading apartments. He’s late, he—
(Music: “Hail to the Chief.” Spotlight on the fourth man, immediately recognizable by the jowls, the ski-slope nose, the widow’s peak hairline, the alarming nervous grin.)