There was only one moment that held me; I found myself facing a dry-cleaning store, which had once been one of the best restaurants in New York. On Sundays the old man would take my mother and me for dinner. There had been a balcony where a baker in a tall white hat baked fresh rolls, and whenever a customer entered he would put in a fresh batch. I could smell the rolls through the odor of benzine on Lenox Avenue. I could see the manager, who always sat down with us while we ate. He had some disease, I suppose, because the right side of his face was swollen out like a balloon, but he always wore a hard wing collar and a white tie and never seemed sick.
A Negro with a mustache was looking through the store window at me. For a moment I had the urge to go inside and tell him what I remembered, to describe this avenue when no garbage cans were on the street, when the Daimlers and Minervas and Locomobiles had cruised by and the cop on the corner threw back the ball when it got through the outfield on 114th Street. I did not go into the store, or even toward our house. Any claim to anything had slipped. I went downtown instead and sat in my dressing room trying to read.
I was just opening my pancake can when I thought of something I still don’t altogether understand: that the old man is the only one who is not an actor. I am, the President is, and Donald Frost is even though his convictions are very sincere; but on the platform last night I could tell, probably because I am an actor, that he was listening to his modulations, that he was doing what he was doing because he had told himself to do it. But he is not desperate enough, not like the old man is desperate. The old man does not know enough to listen to his own voice or to ask himself what he ought to do; he just speaks from his heart, and he has even lost his hold on the language so all that is left is the sound, you might say, of his gut, which is not acting. I wondered about the young, pink-cheeked boy who had come to remind me about the meeting—whether he also was acting. Maybe in his case, with the draft grabbing for him, it was real.
I started pasting on my beard, and I thought again of my not being married. It was like all this agitation now, like everything I saw and knew about, it was a lack of some necessity. Nobody seems to have to do anything, and the ones who say they do have to, who say that something is absolutely necessary for them, may only be the best actors. Because that is what a really good actor does; he manages to make his feelings necessary, so that suddenly there is no longer the slightest choice for him. He has to scream or die, laugh or die, cry real tears or die. And at the same time he knows that he is not going to die, and this thought makes him happy while he is screaming or crying, and it may be what makes the audience happy to cry too.
I was just taking off my clothes in my bedroom that night when the phone rang. And it frightened me, as it usually does these days. It really was the fat woman in the nursing home this time; the old man had escaped. He had slipped out not long after I had left, and here it was nearly two in the morning and the police had a missing persons alarm out, but there was no sign of him yet. The worst thing was that he had gone out without his overcoat, and it was raining and blowing like hell. There was nothing more to be done now, as long as the police had an eye out for him, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. I couldn’t help feeling proud of him and hoping they would never find him, that he would just disappear. I have always admired his willfulness, his blind push toward what he has to have. I have admired his not being an actor, I suppose, and he was not acting tonight, not out there in that rain and wind. I couldn’t sleep, but there was nothing I could do. The clock was inching up to three by this time. I got dressed and went out.
I had walked only a block when I felt my socks getting wet so I stepped into a doorway, trying to think what to do. It was somehow strange that both of us were walking around in the same rain. But whom was he looking for? Or what? I half didn’t want to find him. In fact, for moments I had visions of him crossing the river to the West, just getting the hell out of here, out of the world. But how would he talk to anybody? Would he know enough to get onto a bus? Did he have any money? Naturally I ended up being worried about him, and after a while I saw a taxi and got in.
I joke with cabdrivers but I never talk with them, but this time I had to explain myself for wanting to cruise around, and I told the driver that I was looking for my father. Cabdrivers never seem to believe anything, but he believed me—it seemed perfectly natural to him. Maybe it happens quite often like this. I don’t even remember what he looked like, even whether he was white or Negro. I remember the rain pouring over the windshield and the side windows because I was trying to see through them. It was getting on toward half-past four by the time I got home again, and the rain was coming down stiff. I got into my bedroom and undressed and lay down and looked toward my window, which was running with water. I felt as though the whole city were crying.
They found him next morning at about ten o’clock, and the police phoned me. They had already returned him to the nursing home so I hurried up there. The rain was over, and once again the sky was clear, a good sharp, sunny October day. He was asleep on his bed, wrapped in his flannel robe. A bandage was plastered over his nose, and he seemed to have a black eye coming on. His knuckles were scraped and painted with Mercurochrome. He badly needed a shave.
I went downstairs and talked with the fat woman in the office. She was wary and cautious because they can probably be sued, but I finally got the story out of her. He had been found in Harlem. He had gone into a luncheonette and ordered some food, but the counterman had probably realized that he was not quite right and asked for the money in advance. The old man had a dollar but would not pay in advance, and they went looking for a cop to take care of him. When he realized they were looking for a cop he got up and tried to leave and stumbled and fell on his face.
I went up again and sat in the armchair, waiting for him to wake up. But after a while one of the nurses came in and said they had given him a sedative that would keep him under for several hours. I left and came back just before my show, and he was sitting in the armchair, eating some chicken. He looked up at me, very surprised, and felt his lips with rapid fingers.
I smiled at him. “I’m Harry,” I said.
He looked at me without much recognition, except as before, only knowing that there was something of a past between us. I sat on the bed and watched him eat. I talked at length about the good day we were having and how hard it had rained last night. I kept wishing and wishing that even for one split second he would look at me clearly and laugh—just one shrewd laugh between us to celebrate his outing. But he sat there eating, glancing at me with a little warmth and a little suspicion, and finally I grinned and said, “I hear you went for a walk last night.”
He stopped eating and looked at me with surprise. He shook his head. “No. Oh, no.”
“Don’t you remember the rain?”
“The rain?”
“You went to Harlem, Pa. Were you going home?”
A new attention crossed his eyes, and a sharpened interest. “I en home raro.” He spoke the sounds with an attempt to convince me. He had one finger raised.
“You’re going home tomorrow?”
“Ya.” Then he glanced toward the closed door and returned to the chicken.
• • •
Every night, sitting here putting on my beard, I keep expecting a phone call or a visitor, a stranger, and I feel I am about to be afraid.
He was trying to reach home, where ages ago he had entered so many times, carrying presents. He has a future that they will never be able to rip away from him. He will close his eyes for the last time thinking of it. He does not have to teach himself or remind himself of it. As long as he can actually walk they are going to have trouble with him, keeping him from going where he wants to go and has to go.
I’m not sure how to go about it, but I have a terrific desire to live differently. Maybe it is even possible to find something honorable about acting, some way of putting my soul back into my b
ody. I think my father is like a man in love, or at least the organism inside him is. For moments, just for moments, it makes me feel as I used to when I started, when I thought that to be a great actor was like making some kind of a gift to the people.
[1966]
HOMELY GIRL, A LIFE
Homely Girl, A Life
I
A cold wind seemed to blow on her as she surfaced from a deep sleep. Yesterday had been warm in Central Park, and it was June. Opening her eyes as usual toward him, she saw how strangely blanched his face was. Although what she called his sleeping smile was still there, and the usual suggestion of happiness at the curled corners of his mouth, he seemed heavier on the mattress. And she knew immediately and with dread raised her hand and touched his cheek—the end of the long story. Her first thought, like an appeal against a mistake: But he is only sixty-eight!
Fright but no tears, not outside. Just the thump on the back of her neck. Life had a fist.
“Ah!” she pitied aloud, and bringing palms together, she touched fingers to her lips. “Ah!” She bent to him, her silky hair touching his face. But he wasn’t there. “Ah, Charles!” A little anger soon dispersed by reason. And wonder.
The wonder remained—that after all her life had amounted to a little something, had given her this man, this man who had never seen her. He was awesome now, lying there.
Oh, if one more time she could have spoken with him, asked or told him . . . what? The thing in her heart, the wonder. That he had loved her and had never seen her in the fourteen years of their life. There was always, despite everything, something in her trying to move itself into his line of vision, as though with one split-second glimpse of her his fluttering eyes would wake from their eternal sleep.
Now what do I do? Oh, Charles dear, what do I do with the rest of it?
Something was not finished. But I suppose, she said to herself, nothing ever is except in movies when the lights come on, leaving you squinting on the sidewalk.
Once more, she moved to touch him, but already he was not there, not hers, not anything, and she withdrew her hand and sat there with one leg hanging over the mattress.
• • •
She hated her face as a girl but knew she had style and at least once a day settled for that and her very good compact body and a terrific long neck. And yes, her irony. She was and wanted to be a snob. She knew how to slip a slight, witty rotation into her hips when she walked, although she had no illusions it made up for a pulled look to her cheeks, as if alum had tightened her skin, and an elongated upper lip. A little like Disraeli, she thought once, coming on his picture in a high-school text. And a too-high forehead (she refused to overlook anything negative). She wondered if she’d been drawn out of the womb and lengthened, or her mother startled by a giraffe. At parties she had many a time noticed how men coming up behind her were caught surprised when she turned to face them. But she had learned to shake out the straight silky light-brown hair and flick the ironic defensive grin, silent pardon for their inevitable fade. She had a tonic charm and it was almost enough, although not quite, of course, not since childhood when her mother held up a Cosmopolitan Ivory ad to her face and so warmly and lovingly exclaimed, “Now that’s beauty!” as though by staring at it hard enough she could be made to look like one of those girls. She felt blamed then. Still, at fifteen she believed that between her ankles and her breasts she was as luscious as Betty Grable, or almost. And she had a soft, provocative lisp that men who had an interest in mouths seemed to like. At sixteen, she’d been told by Aunt Ida, visiting from Egypt, “You’ve got an Egyptian look; Egyptian women are hot.” Recalling that oddity would make her laugh and would raise her spirits even into her sixties, after Charles had died.
A number of memories involved lying in bed on a Sunday morning, listening thankfully to muffled New York outside. “I was just thinking, apropos of nothing,” she whispered into Charles’s ear one time, “that for at least a year after Sam and I had separated, I was terribly embarrassed to say we had. And even after you and I married, whenever I had to refer to ‘my first husband’ it curdled something inside me. Like a disgrace or a defeat. What a simple-minded generation we were!”
Sam was beneath her in some indefinite class sense, but that was part of his attraction to the thirties, when to have been born to money was shameful, a guarantee of futility. People her age, early twenties then, wanted to signify by doing good, attended emergency meetings a couple of times a week in downtown lofts or sympathizers’ West End Avenue living rooms to raise money for the new National Maritime Union or buying ambulances for the Spanish Republicans, and they were moved to genuine outrage by Fascism, which was somehow a parents’ system and the rape of the mind; the Socialist hope was for the young, for her, and no parent could help but fear its subversive beauty. So political talk was mostly avoided at home. Anyway, hers were hopelessly silly people, Jews putting on the dog with a new, absurd name endowed by the Immigration inspectors back in the other century because Great-grandpa’s original Russian one was unpronounceable by their Irish tongues. So they were Sessions.
But Sam was Fink, which she rather relished as a taunt to her father, long a widower and very ill now but still being consulted on the phone as an authority on utilities by the time of her marriage, dying as he read that Hitler had walked into Vienna. “But he won’t last,” he whispered scoffingly across the cancer in his throat. “The Germans are too intelligent for this idiot.” But of course by now she knew better, knew a world was ending, and would not be surprised to see American storm troopers with chin straps on Broadway one evening. It was already scary to go walking around in Yorkville on the Upper East Side, where the Germans were rallying on the street corners to bait Jews and praise Hitler on summertime Saturday nights. She was not particularly Semitic-looking, but she feared the fear of the prey as she passed thick-necked men on Eighty-sixth Street.
In her teens, she wondered: I am never going to be beautiful or even a genius. What am I supposed to expect then? She felt surrounded by too much space and longed for a wall to have to climb over.
A stylish man, her father, with a long, noble head and an outmoded mind, or so she thought of him in the flush of her newfound revolutionary independence. Stroking his cold hand in the gloom of the West End Avenue apartment, she thanked her luck, or rather her own perceptive intelligence, which had helped turn her away from all this heavy European silverware, the overstuffed chairs and the immense expanse of Oriental carpet, the sheer doomed weight of their tea service and the laughable confidence it had once expressed. If not beautiful, she was at least strong, free of Papa’s powerful illusions. But now that he was weak and his eyes closed most of the time, she could let herself admit that she shared his arrogant style, caring a lot and pretending not to, unlike her mother, who’d screamingly pretended to care and hadn’t cared at all. But of course Papa accepted the injustice in the world as natural as trees. Outwardly a conventional man, he was quickly bored by predictable people, and this had conspiratorially linked her to him. She delighted in his covert mockery of uniformity, which fueled her rebellion against her mother. A day before he died, he smiled at her and said, “Don’t worry, Janice, you’re pretty enough, you’ll be okay, you’ve got the guts.” If only okay could ever be enough.
The rabbi’s brief ceremony must have been developed for these bankrupt times; people were scanting even rote funerary farewells to get back to their gnawing make-a-living worries. Following the prayer, the funeral chapel man, looking like H. L. Mencken, with hair parted in the middle, shot his starched cuffs and picked up the small cardboard box of ashes, handing it to her fat brother, Herman, who in his surprise looked at it as if it were a ticking explosive. Then they went out into the hot sunlit street and walked downtown together. Herman’s butterball wife, Edna, kept falling behind to look into an occasional shoe store window, one of the few shops still occupied in whole blocks of vacancies along Broadway. Half of New
York seemed to be for rent, with permanent “Vacancy” signs bolted to nearly every apartment house entrance. Now, eight years after the Crash, the heads of the bolts were beginning to rust. Herman walked flopping his feet down like a seal and sucked for breath. “Look at it, the whole block,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“Real estate doesn’t interest me right now,” Janice said.
“Oh, it doesn’t? Maybe eating does, ’cause this is where Papa put a lot of your money, baby.” They entered a darkened Irish bar on Eighty-fourth Street facing Broadway and sat with an electric fan blowing into their faces. “Did you hear? Roosevelt’s supposed to have syph.”
“I’m trying to drink this, please.” Defying ritual and capitalist superstition, she wore a beige skirt and a shiny white silk blouse and high-heeled tan shoes. Sam had to be in Syracuse to bid on an important library being auctioned. “You must be the last Republican Jew in New York,” she said.
Herman wheezed, absently moving the little box around on the bar like the final beleaguered piece in a lost chess game, a futile three inches in one direction and then in the other. He sipped his beer and talked about Hitler, the remorseless heat that summer, and real estate.
“These refugees are coming over and buying up Amsterdam Avenue.”
“So what difference does that make?”
“Well, they’re supposed to be so downtrodden.”
“You want them more downtrodden? Don’t you understand anything? Now that Franco’s won, Hitler’s going to attack Russia, there’s going to be a tremendous war. And all you can think of is real estate.”
“So what if he attacks Russia?”