The boy and his mother watched the van until it disappeared around the corner. Inside, the house was dead quiet again. He didn’t have to worry any more about Rover doing something on the carpets or chewing the furniture, or whether he had water or needed to eat. Rover had been the first thing he’d looked for on returning from school every day and on waking in the morning, and he had always worried that the dog might have done something to displease his mother or father. Now all that anxiety was gone and, with it, the pleasure, and it was silent in the house.
He went back to the kitchen table and tried to think of something he could draw. A newspaper lay on one of the chairs, and he opened it and inside saw a Saks stocking ad showing a woman with a gown pulled aside to display her leg. He started copying it and thought of Lucille again. Could he possibly call her, he wondered, and do what they had done again? Except that she would surely ask about Rover, and he couldn’t do anything but lie to her. He remembered how she had cuddled Rover in her arms and even kissed his nose. She had really loved that puppy. How could he tell her he was gone? Just sitting and thinking of her he was hardening up like a broom handle and he suddenly thought what if he called her and said his family were thinking of having a second puppy to keep Rover company? But then he would have to pretend he still had Rover, which would mean two lies, and that was a little frightening. Not the lies so much as trying to remember, first, that he still had Rover, second, that he was serious about a second puppy, and, third, the worst thing, that when he got up off Lucille he would have to say that unfortunately he couldn’t actually take another puppy because . . . Why? The thought of all that lying exhausted him. Then he visualized being in her heat again and he thought his head would explode, and the idea came that when it was over she might insist on his taking another puppy. Force it on him. After all, she had not accepted his three dollars and Rover had been a sort of gift, he thought. It would be embarrassing to refuse another puppy, especially when he had supposedly come back to her for exactly that reason. He didn’t dare go through all that and gave up the whole idea. But then the thought crept back again of her spreading apart on the floor the way she had, and he returned to searching for some reason he could give for not taking another puppy after he had supposedly come all the way across Brooklyn to get one. He could just see the look on her face on his turning down a puppy, the puzzlement or, worse, anger. Yes, she could very possibly get angry and see through him, realizing that all he had come for was to get into her and the rest of it was nonsense, and she might feel insulted. Maybe even slap him. What would he do then? He couldn’t fight a grown woman. Then again, it now occurred to him that by this time she might well have sold the other two puppies, which at three dollars were pretty inexpensive. Then what? He began to wonder, suppose he just called her up and said he’d like to come over again and see her, without mentioning any puppies? He would have to tell only one lie, that he still had Rover and that the family all loved him and so on. He could easily remember that much. He went to the piano and played some chords, mostly in the dark bass, to calm himself. He didn’t really know how to play, but he loved inventing chords and letting the vibrations shoot up his arms. He played, feeling as though something inside him had sort of shaken loose or collapsed altogether. He was different than he had ever been, not empty and clear any more but weighted with secrets and his lies, some told and some untold, but all of it disgusting enough to set him slightly outside his family, in a place where he could watch them now, and watch himself with them. He tried to invent a melody with the right hand and find matching chords with the left. By sheer luck, he was hitting some beauties. It was really amazing how his chords were just slightly off, with a discordant edge but still in some way talking to the right-hand melody. His mother came into the room full of surprise and pleasure. “What’s happening?” she called out in delight. She could play and sight-read music and had tried and failed to teach him, because, she believed, his ear was too good and he’d rather play what he heard than do the labor of reading notes. She came over to the piano and stood beside him, watching his hands. Amazed, wishing as always that he could be a genius, she laughed. “Are you making this up?” she almost yelled, as though they were side by side on a roller coaster. He could only nod, not daring to speak and maybe lose what he had somehow snatched out of the air, and he laughed with her because he was so completely happy that he had secretly changed, and unsure at the same time that he would ever be able to play like this again.
The Performance
Harold May would have been about thirty-five when I met him. With his blondish hair parted in the exact middle, and his horn-rimmed glasses and remarkably round boyish eyes, he resembled Harold Lloyd, the famous bespectacled movie comic with the surprised look. When I think of May, I see a man with rosy cheeks, in a gray suit with white pinstripes and a red-and-blue striped bow tie—a dancer, slender, snugly built, light on his feet, and, like a lot of dancers, wrapped up (mummified, you might say) in his art. So he seemed at first, anyway. I see us in a midtown drugstore, the kind that at that time, the forties, had tables where people could sit around for an unemployed hour with their sodas and sundaes. May was wanting to tell a long and involved story, and I wasn’t sure why he was bothering but I gradually caught on that it was to interest me in doing a feature about him. My old friend Ralph Barton (né Berkowitz) brought him to me thinking I might make use of his weird story, even though he knew that I had left journalism by then and was no longer sitting around in drugstores and bars, having become sufficiently known as a writer to be embarrassed by strangers accosting me in restaurants or on the street. This was probably in the spring, only two years after the end of the war.
As Harold May told it that afternoon, he had been employed only fitfully back in the mid-thirties, having built a tap-dance act that had played the Palace twice. While he almost always got excited Variety notices, he could never really escape the devoted but small audiences in places like Queens, Toledo, Ohio, and Erie or Tonawanda, New York. “If they know how to fit things together they tend to like watching tap,” he said, and it pleased him that steelworkers particularly loved the act, as well as machinists, glassblowers—almost anybody who appreciated skills. By ’36, though, Harold, convinced that his head was bumping the ceiling of his career, was so depressed that when an offer came to work in Hungary he snapped it up, although uncertain where that country might be located. He soon learned that a so-called vaudeville wheel existed in Budapest, Bucharest, Athens, and half a dozen other East European cities, with Vienna the big prestige booking that would give him lots of publicity. Once established, an act could work almost year-round, returning again and again to the same clubs. “They like things not to change much,” he said. Tap, however, was a real novelty, a purely American dance unknown in Europe, invented as it had been by Negroes in the South, and a lot of Europeans were charmed by what they took to be its amusingly optimistic American ambience.
Harold worked the wheel, he explained to me over the white-marble-topped table, for some six or eight months. “The work was steady, the money was decent, and in some places, like Bulgaria, we were practically stars. Got to go to dinners in a couple of castles, with women falling all over us, and great wine. I was as happy as I was ever going to get,” he said.
With his little troupe of two men and a woman and himself plus a pickup piano player or, in some places, a small band, he had a mobile and efficient business. Still young and unmarried, with his whole short life concentrated on his legs, his shoes, and persisting dreams of glory, he surprised himself now by enjoying sightseeing in the cities of the wheel and picking up odd bits about European history and art. He had only a high-school diploma from Evander Childs and had never had time to think about much beyond his next gig, so Europe opened his eyes to a past that he had hardly imagined existed.
In Budapest one night, contentedly removing his makeup in his decrepit La Babalu Club dressing room, he was surprised by the appearance in his doorway of a
tall, well-dressed gentleman who bowed slightly from the waist and in German-accented English introduced himself and asked deferentially if he could have a few minutes of May’s precious time. Harold invited the German to have a seat on a shredded pink-satin chair.
The German, about forty-five, had gleaming, beautifully coiffed silver hair and wore a fine, greenish, heavyweight suit and black high-top shoes. His name was Damian Fugler, he said, and he had come in his official capacity as Cultural Attaché of the German Embassy in Budapest. His English, though accented, was flawlessly exact.
“I have had the pleasure of attending three of your performances now,” Fugler began in a rolling baritone, “and first of all wish to pay my respects to you as a fine artist.” Nobody had ever called Harold an artist.
“Well, thanks,” he managed to say. “I appreciate the compliment.” I could imagine the inflation he must have felt, this pink-cheeked young guy out of Berea, Ohio, taking praise from this elegant European with his high-top shoes.
“I myself have performed with the Stuttgart Opera, although not as a singer, of course, but a ‘spear-carrier,’ as we call it. That was quite a time ago, when I was much younger.” Fugler permitted himself a forgiving smile at his youthful pranks. “But I will get down to business—I have been authorized to invite you, Mr. May, to perform in Berlin. My department is prepared to pay your transportation costs as well as hotel expenses.”
The breathtaking idea of a government—any government—having an interest in tap-dancing was, of course, way beyond imagining for Harold, and it took a moment to digest or even to believe.
“Well, I really don’t know what to say. Like where do I play, a club or what?”
“It would be in the Kick Club. You must have heard of it?”
Harold had heard of the Kick Club as one of Berlin’s classiest. His heart was banging. But his booking experience warned him to circle around the proposal. “And how long an engagement would this be?” he asked.
“Most probably one performance.”
“One?”
“We would require only one, but you would be free to arrange more with the management, provided, of course, they wish you to continue. We are prepared to pay you two thousand dollars for the evening, if that would be satisfactory.”
Two thousand for one night! This was practically a normal year’s take. Harold’s head was spinning. He knew he ought to be asking questions, but which? “And you? Excuse me, but you are what again?”
Fugler removed a beautiful black leather card case from his breast pocket and handed Harold a card, which he tried unsuccessfully to focus on once he glimpsed the sharply embossed eagle clutching a swastika, which flew up like a dart into his brain.
“Could I let you know tomorrow?” he began, but Fugler’s mellow baritone voice quickly cut him off.
“I’m afraid you would have to leave sometime tomorrow. I have arranged with the management here to free you from your contract, should you find that agreeable.”
Free him from his contract! “I felt,” he said to me over his half-empty chocolate-soda glass, “that unbeknownst to me people had been discussing me in some high office somewhere. It was scary, but you can’t help feeling important,” he said, and laughed like a wicked adolescent.
“May I ask why so soon?” he asked Fugler.
“I’m afraid I am not at liberty to say more than that my superiors will not have the time to see your performance after Thursday, at least not for several weeks or possibly months.” Suddenly the man was leaning forward over Harold’s knees, his face nearly touching Harold’s hand, his voice lowered to a whisper. “This may change your life, Mr. May. You cannot possibly hesitate.”
With two grand dangling before him, Harold heard himself saying, “All right.” The whole encounter was so weird that he immediately began to backtrack and ask for more time to decide, but the German was gone. In his hand he saw a five-hundred-dollar bill and vaguely recalled the accented baritone voice saying, “As a deposit. Berlin then! Auf Wiedersehen.”
“He’d never even offered me a contract,” Harold told us, “just left the money.”
He barely slept that night, castigating himself. “You like to think you’re in charge of yourself, but this Fugler was like a hurricane.” What particularly bothered him now, he said, was his having agreed to the single performance. What was that about? “Over the months, I’d gotten used to not bothering to understand what was going on around me—I mean, I didn’t know a word of Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, German—but a single performance? I couldn’t figure out what it could mean.”
And why the big hurry? “I was stumped,” he said. “I wished to God I’d never taken the money. At the same time, I couldn’t help being curious.”
His mind was somewhat eased by the troupe’s delight at getting out of the Balkans, and at his sharing some of his advance among them, and on the train north they were jounced with life and this cockeyed adventure. The prospect of playing Berlin—the capital of Europe, second only to Paris—was like going to a party. Harold ordered champagne and steaks and tried to relax among his dancers and smooth out his anxieties. As the train clanked northward, he contrasted his luck with his probable situation had he stayed in New York, with its lines of unemployed and the unbroken grip of the American slump.
When the train stopped at the German border, an officer opened the door of his compartment, which Harold shared with Benny Worth, who had been with him the longest, and two Romanians, who slept almost continuously, but did waken occasionally, smile briefly, and return to their dreams. The officer, Harold thought, scowled at him as he opened his passport. He had been scowled at by border guards any number of times on this tour, but this German’s scowl touched something very deep in his body. It was more than his suddenly remembering that he was Jewish; he had never really had a problem with being Jewish, especially since his blond hair, blue eyes, and generally happy nature had never invited the usual reactions of the era. It was, rather, that until now he had managed to erase almost totally the stories he had read a year or so earlier about the young German government’s having staged rallies against Jews, driving them out of businesses and professions, closing synagogues, and forcing many to emigrate. On the other hand, Benny Worth, who called himself a Communist and had all kinds of information that never appeared in regular papers like The New York Times, had told him that the Nazis had been tamping down on the anti-Jewish stuff this year so as not to look nasty for the Olympic tourists. In any case, none of this had applied to him personally. “I’d heard some bad stories of Romanian incidents, too, but I never saw anything, so I could never keep them in my head,” he explained. I could understand this; after all, he’d had no verbal contact with his audiences and could not read local papers, so that a certain remoteness was wrapped around anything real going on in the cities he had been playing.
Presence: Stories Page 30