Suddenly, though, I was a little nervous about this meeting. I have always respected actors with convictions, the people in the old days who were Leftists and so on. Whatever people might say, those guys and girls had wonderful friendships between them. But I never felt it was really necessary for me to put my name on anything political. I never felt it would make a difference of any kind if I put my name or I didn’t.
Besides, I felt nervous about a public appearance. But I looked at this boy and he looked at me, and I could see once again how my generation used to look way back there, that this meeting was more than a meeting, it was to stop the world from ending. Which I didn’t believe, but for him it wasn’t all the same, for him—and I could see he was an actor—each new show was some kind of new beginning. I could see that he still remembered every single thing that had ever happened to him, that he was on his way up, up. Actually I was quite frightened about the meeting, but I couldn’t bear to say to him that it was not going to make any difference if I appeared or not. So we shook hands, and he even grasped my arm as though we were in league, or even to indicate that he felt especially good that an older man was going to be with them. Something of that kind.
When he turned around and walked out I saw that the seat of his overcoat was worn—it was a much lighter color than the rest of the coat. An actor notices such things. It means that he sits a lot in his overcoat, and on rough places, like the concrete bases of the columns in front of the Forty-second Street Library, or even park benches, or some of the broken chairs in producers’ outer offices. And here he is spending his time with meetings. I thought to myself, I cannot imagine anything I would sit and wait for, and I wished I had something like that. I ended up a little glad that I was going to be at the meeting. Exactly why, I don’t know.
I think I acted better that night, not that anyone else would notice, but I found myself really looking at my fellow actors as though I had never seen them before. Suddenly it was remarkable to me, the whole idea of a play, of being able to forget everything else so that we were really angry up there, or really laughing, or really drinking the cider we were supposed to drink, which is actually tea, and coughing as though it were bitter. Toward the end of Act II some man got up from the third row and walked out, and I usually feel upset about a walkout, but this night it went through my mind that it was his role to walk out, that the whole audience was acting too; after all, the whole idea of so many people sitting together, facing in the same direction, not talking, is a kind of acting. Except that some of us very soon are actually going to die.
That thought came to me also—it was just as the man was walking out—that really the only difference offstage is that you don’t get up after the death scene. Even the President gets made up now for his TV talks. Everybody, every morning, gets into costume. Except that I, instead of actually marrying, stop short at the last moment every time.
As we were taking the curtain calls I thought, Maybe I never got married because it would make my life real, it would rip me off the stage somehow.
The next morning I went to visit my father at the nursing home. I had been there only four or five days before, but I woke up and tried to read the scripts that had been sent to me, and I made a few phone calls, but I felt pulled. So I went.
It was a very windy day in October, a clear blue sky over New York. My father always liked strong wind and cold weather. He would put up his coat collar and say, “Ahhh,” and even as a little boy I imitated the way he exhaled and enjoyed facing into a cold wind. He would look down at me and laugh. “This is not a hot day, boy.”
The old man is in a cage. But the bars are so close to his face he cannot see them, so he keeps moving a step this way and a step that way. And finally he knows, for the hundredth time every day, that he is not free. But he does not know why. He feels someone knows, and whoever it is means him harm. Something is going to happen when the time comes. Someone is keeping him here for a time, temporarily, as you might say.
The room is freshly painted and smells it—a light blue color over many coats of paint so that the shiny surface is lumpy. A string hangs from the middle of the ceiling with a fluorescent plastic tassel on the end of it. His head strikes it whenever he moves about the room. In the dark at night he lies on his bed and goes to sleep with the bluish glow of this tassel on his retina. In the afternoons he can pull the string and make the ceiling light go on. He has never been at ease with machinery, so when he pulls the string he looks up at the ceiling fixture, a little surprised that the light goes on. Sometimes after his head has hit the tassel he scratches the spot lightly as though a fly had sat on his skin. The word “stroke” is very right, like a touch on the brain, just enough.
The nursing home is an old converted apartment house, but an extremely narrow one. The corridors on each floor are hardly wider than a man. You come in and on the right is an office where a fat woman is always looking into a thick registry book. On the left is a slow elevator. Up one flight is my father’s floor. There is always a mattress or a spring standing on edge in the corridor; someone has been moved out or died. Rooms open off the corridor, most of them occupied by old women. They sit motionlessly facing their beds, some asleep in their chairs. There is no sound in the place; they are all dozing, like thin, white-haired birds that do not thrive in captivity. All their eyes seem blue.
A zoo smell is always in the air as soon as you walk into the building, and it gets thicker upstairs. But it is not a filthy smell. It is like earth, humid but not diseased. At my first visit I was repelled by it, as by sewage. But after a while, if you allow yourself to breathe in deeply and normally, you realize it is the odor of earth and you respect it.
The old man’s room is the last one on the corridor. Opposite his door is a widened space where the nurses have a desk. They do not look up when I open his door. Nobody is going to steal anything here or do any harm. Everyone is so old that there cannot be an emergency.
He is usually asleep on his bed whatever time I come. I am already twenty years older than he was at my birth. I am an older man than the one I looked up at during the windy walks. My hair is gray at the sides. Mother has been dead a long, long time. All of his brothers and sister are dead, everyone he knew and played cards with. I have also lost many friends. It turns out that he is not really too much older than I am, than I am becoming.
I stood there looking down at him and recalled the meeting the night before. About fifteen others were sitting on a row of chairs on the stage. Donald Frost was the chairman and introduced us in turn. For some reason, when I stood up, there seemed to be heavier applause, probably because it was the first time I had ever come out for such a thing, and also because I have been quite a hit in this current play and they knew my face. But when I stood up and the applause continued, Donald waved for me to come up to the microphone. I was frightened that the newspapers would pick up what I might say, and I had no idea what to say. So I came to the microphone. There was a really good silence. The theater was packed. They said that people were jammed up outside trying to get in. I bent over to the microphone and heard my own voice saying, “Someone went blind that I knew.” Then I realized that I did not actually know the boy who had been blinded, and I stopped. I realized that it sounded crazy. I realized that I was frightened, that someday there might be investigations and I could be blamed for being at such a meeting. I said, “I wish the war would stop. I don’t understand this war.” Then I went back to my chair. There was terrific applause. I didn’t understand why. I wondered what I had really said that made them so enthusiastic. It was like an opening night when a line you never had thought about very much gets a big reaction. But I felt happy and I didn’t know why. Maybe it was only the applause, which I didn’t understand either, but I felt a happiness, and I thought suddenly that it had been a terrible, terrible mistake not to have gotten married.
“Pop?” I said softly, so as not to shock him. He opened his eyes and raised
his head, blinking at me.
He always smiles now when he is awakened, and the lower part of his long face pulls down at his eyes to open them wider. It isn’t clear whether or not he knows who you are as he smiles at you. I always slip in my identification before I say anything. “I’m Harry,” I say, but I make it sound casual, as though I am saying it only because he hasn’t got his glasses on. His fingers dance nervously along his lower lip. He is touching himself, I think, because he is no longer certain what is real and what is dream, when people he is not sure he knows suddenly appear and disappear every day. He immediately insists on getting out of bed. He is fully dressed under the blankets, sometimes even with his shoes on. But today he has only socks. “My slippers.”
I got his slippers from the metal closet and helped him into them. He stood on the floor, tucking in his shirt, saying, “And uh, and uh,” as though a conversation had been going on.
There are no immense emotions here but deep currents without light. He is bent a little and stiff-kneed, and he plucks at his clothes to be sure everything is on. He is very interested that someone is here but he knows that nothing, absolutely nothing, will come of it. But he wants to lengthen it out anyway, just in case something might happen to free him. He is afraid of the end of the visit suddenly being announced so he tries to be quick about everything. He says, “Sit down, sit down,” not only to make you comfortable but to stall off the end. Then he sits in the one armchair, the fire escape behind him and a patch of city sky, and I sit on the edge of the bed facing him.
“I hear you went for a walk today with the nurse?”
“Ya. Awd the river. Doom days deen unden, but this here’s a beautiful day. Some day.”
“Yes. It’s a beautiful day,” I repeat so that he’ll know I understand what he is talking about, although it doesn’t make much difference to him. Some things he says, though, he is very anxious should be understood, and then it all gets terrible. But I am not sure he knows he is mostly incomprehensible.
He wanders his arm vaguely toward the night table. “My glasses.” I open the drawer and hand him one of the two pairs he keeps in there.
“Are these the ones?”
He puts on the wobbly frames, which his incapable hands have bent out of shape. The lenses are coated with his fingerprints. “Ya,” he says, blinking around. Then he says, “No,” and roots around in the drawer. I give him the other pair, and he takes off the first pair, opens the second, and puts the first one on again and looks at me.
I realize as he is looking at me that he feels friendship between us and that he is glad to see me, but that he is not sure who I am. “I’m Harry,” I say.
He smiles. He is still a big man even though he is very thin now; but his head is massive and his teeth are good and strong and there is some kind of force lying in pieces inside of him, the force of a man who at least has not at all settled for this kind of room and this kind of life. For him, as for me and everybody else, it is all some kind of mistake. He has a future. I suppose I still go to see him for that reason.
I never realized before that his ears stick out, that they face front. I think I was always so busy looking into his eyes that I never really saw his ears. Because there is nothing more to listen to from him or to fear, I have time to look at his body now.
His left leg is quite bowed out, more than I ever noticed. His hands are very slender and even artistic. His feet are long and narrow. He has strangely high, almost Slavic cheekbones, which I never noticed when his face was fuller. The top of his head is flatter, and the back of his neck. It was less than five years ago that I first realized he was an old man, an aged man. I happened to meet him walking on Broadway one afternoon and I had to walk very slowly beside him. A little breeze on his face made his eyes tear. But I felt then that it was not something very sad; I felt that after all he had lived a long time.
But this day I felt that it was different because he had not given up his future. In fact, he was reaching toward his future even more energetically than I was toward mine. He really wanted something.
“Linnen, I ah gedda hew orthing. Very important.”
“You want something?”
“No-no. I ah gedda hew orthing.”
He waited for me to reply. “I don’t understand what you’re saying but keep talking, maybe I’ll understand.”
He reached over toward the door and tested that it was shut. Now as he spoke he kept glancing with widened eyes toward the corridor outside, as though interlopers were out there who meant him no good. Then he clamped his jaw angrily and shook his head. “I never in my life. Never.”
“What’s the matter?”
“He maug lee me ounigh.”
“They won’t let you out?”
He nodded, scandalized, angry. “Hew maug lee me ounigh.”
“But you went out with the nurse, didn’t you?”
“Linnen. Hew linnen?” He was impatient.
“Yes, Pop, I’m listening. What do you want?”
Something politic came over him as he prepared to speak again, something calculating. He was positioning himself for a deal. His lips, without sound, flicked in and out like a chimpanzee’s as he practiced an important message. Then he crossed his legs and leaned over the arm of the chair toward me.
“Naw hen my money.”
“Your money?”
“Naw hen. Yesterday she said sure. Today, naw hen.”
“The lady downstairs?”
“Ya.”
“She asked you for money?”
“Naw hen my money.”
“She wouldn’t give you your money?”
He nodded. “Naw hen. Fifty thousand dollars.”
“You asked her for fifty thousand dollars?”
“For my money hen.”
He was leaning toward me, cross-legged, just as I had seen him do with businessmen, that same way of talking in a hotel lobby or in a Pullman, a rather handsome posture and full of grace. Of course he had no fifty thousand dollars, he had nothing any more, but I did not realize at the time what he really had in his mind even though he was telling it to me clearly.
“Well, you don’t need money here, Pop.”
He gave me a suspicious look with a little wise smile. I too was not on his side.
“Linnen.”
“I’m listening.”
“I could go home,” he said with sudden clarity. He had no home either; his wife was dead eight years now, and even his hotel room had been given up. “I wouldn’t even talk,” he said.
“It’s better for you here, Pop.”
“Better!” He looked at me with open anger.
“You need nursing,” I explained.
He listened with no attention while I explained how much better off he was here than at home, his eyes glancing at the door. But his anger passed. Then he said, “I could live.”
I nodded.
“I could live,” he repeated.
Now came the silence, which is always the worst part. I could find nothing to say any more, and he no longer had a way to enlist my help. Or maybe he was expecting me to start packing his things and getting him out. All we had in the room was his low-burning pleasure that someone was here with him, even though he did not know for sure who it was, except that it was someone familiar; and for me there was only the knowledge that he had this pleasure.
He would look at me now and then with various expressions. Once it would be with narrowed eyes, an estimating look, as though he were about to say some searching sentence. Then he would blink ahead again and test his lips. After a few moments he would look at me, this time with the promise of his warm, open smile, and once again go into a stare.
Finally he raised his finger as though to draw my attention, a stranger’s attention, and, tilting back his head as though recalling, he said, “Did you St. Louis?”
&nb
sp; “Yes, I’m back now. I was there and now I’m back.” I had been in St. Louis with a show nine or ten years ago. One of his factories had been in St. Louis forty years ago.
He broke into a pleased smile. He loved cities; he had enjoyed entering them and leaving them, being well served in hotels; he had loved to recall buildings that had been demolished, the marvelous ups and downs of enterprises and business careers. I knew what he was smiling at. He had once brought me a toy bus from St. Louis, with a whole band on top that moved its arms when the bus moved, and inside it was a phonograph record that played “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” He had come home just as I had gotten up from my nap. In his arms were gift boxes. This bus, and I remember a long pair of beige kid gloves for my mother. He always brought fresh air into the house with him, the wind, his pink face and his reedy laugh.
“Well, I have to go now, Pop.”
“Ya, ya.”
He hastened to stand, hiking his pants up where his belly used to be, plucking at his brown sweater to keep it properly placed on his shoulders. He even enjoyed the goodbye, thinking I had important work to do, appointments, the world’s business with which no one had a right to interfere. We shook hands. I opened the door, and he insisted on escorting me to the elevator. “This way, this way,” he said in a proprietary manner, as though he could not help being in charge. He walked ahead of me down the narrow corridor, bent, heavily favoring his bowed left leg, his face very much averted from the open rooms we passed where the old ladies sat motionless. He had never liked old women.
Outside the wind was even faster than before, but the sky was turning gray. I had some time so I walked for a while, thinking of him turning back and re-entering his room, lying down on the bed, probably exhausted, and the plastic thing on the light string swaying overhead.
It was fine to walk without a limp. I resolved again to stop smoking. I have wide hands and feet. I am not built like him at all. I crossed from Riverside Drive to the Park and caught a bus to Harlem, where I was born. But as soon as I got out I knew I had lost the feeling I had started with, and it was impossible to feel what I had felt there in my youth forty years ago.
Presence: Stories Page 24