Dictation (10 page)

Dress rehearsal went well, though a little too speedily. The man in the wings had not returned. Silkowitz sat with the cast and gave his last notes. He did not address Matt. Odors of coffee and pastries wafted, and with unexpected lust Matt devoured a bagel spread with cream cheese. He understood himself to be in possession of a deep tranquility. All around him there was nervous buffoonery, witticisms, unaccountable silliness; it was fruition, it was anticipation. The director joined in, told jokes, teased, traded anecdotes and rumors. A journalist, a red-haired woman from the
Times,
arrived to interview Silkowitz. He had hired an industrious publicist; there had been many such journalists. This one had just come from speaking to Lionel, she said, to cover the story from another angle: how, for instance, a more traditional director might view the goings-on down near Union Square. Lionel had responded coolly: he was a minimalist; he repudiated what he took to be Teddy Silkowitz's gaudy postmodern experimentally. Would he show up at the opening? No, he thought not.

"He'll be here," Silkowitz told the interviewer. The little party was breaking up. "And don't I know what's bugging him. He used to do this sort of thing himself. He was a child actor at the old Grand Theater downtown."

"Oh, come on. Lionel's an Anglophile."

"I read up on it," Silkowitz assured her. "In 1933 he played the boy Shloymele in
Mirele Efros.
God forbid anybody should find out."

The cast, packing up to go home, laughed; wasn't this one of Silkowitz's show-biz gags? But Matt was still contemplating the man in the wings. He had worked himself up to unhealthy visions. It was likely that Frances was right; at least she was sensible. Someone had sneaked in from the street. A homeless fellow sniffing out a warm corner to spend the night. A drunk in need of a toilet. Or else a stagehand pilfering cigarettes on the sly. A banner, a rope, an anything, swaying in the narrow wind that blew through a crack in the rafters. Backstage—deserted at the end of the day, inhabited by the crawling dark.

On the other hand, he knew who it was; he knew. It was the old guy. It was Eli Miller, come down on the M-4 bus from his velvet-curtained bed in the Home for the Elderly Children of Israel.

Lionel would keep his word. He would stay away. Matt had his own thoughts about this, on a different track from Silkowitz's. Matt as Lear! Or a kind of Lear. Lionel had never given Matt the lead in anything; he was eating crow. Naturally he wouldn't put in an appearance. Thanks to Marlene Miller-Weinstock—swallowing her father's life, vomiting out a semblance of Lear—it was a case of Matt's having the last laugh.

In the clouded dressing-room mirror, preparing during intermission for the second act, he thickened his eyebrows with paint and white gum and spilled too much powder all over his beard—the excesses and accidents of opening night. He stepped out of his newly polished shoes to stand on bare feet and then pulled on his costume: a tattered monkish robe. Sackcloth. A tremor shook his lip. He examined the figure in the mirror. It was himself, his own horrifying head. He resembled what he remembered of Job—diseased, cut down, humiliated. The shoemaker if he could see him would add another hundred years.

The first act had survived the risks. Silkowitz had all along worried that the audience, rocked by the unfamiliar theatricality—the loudness, the broadness, the brazenness, the bigness—would presume something farcical. He was in fear of the first lone laugh. A shock in the serpent's tail pulses through to its tongue. An audience is a single beast, a great vibrating integer, a shifting amoeba without a nucleus. One snicker anywhere in its body can set off convulsions everywhere, from the orchestra to the balcony. Such were the director's sermons, recounting the perils ahead; Matt habitually shut out these platitudes. And more from that cornucopia—think of yourselves, Silkowitz lectured them all, as ancient Greek players on stilts, heavily, boldly masked; the old plays of Athens and the old plays of Second Avenue are blood cousins, kin to kin. Power and passion! Passion and power!

Were they pulling it off? During the whole first act, a breathing silence.

Sweating, panting his minor pant, Silkowitz came into the dressing room. Matt turned his back. A transgression. An invasion. Where now was that sacred stricture about the inviolability of an actor's concentration in the middle of a performance, didn't that fool Silkowitz know better? A rip in the brain. Matt was getting ready to lock it up—his brain; he was goading it into isolation, into that secret chamber, all tapestried and tasseled. He was getting ready to enter his howl, and here was Silkowitz, sweating, panting, superfluous, what was he doing here, the fool?

"Your wife said to give you this." Silkowitz handed Matt a folded paper. He recognized it as a sheet from the little spiral pad Frances always carried in her pocketbook. It was her word-collector.

"Not now. I don't want this now." The fool!

"She insisted," Silkowitz said, and slid away. He looked afraid; for the first time he looked respectful. Matt felt his own force; his howl was already in his throat. What was Frances up to? Transgression, invasion!

He read: "metamerism," "oribi," "glyptic," "enatic"—all in Frances's compact, orderly fountain-pen print. But an inch below, in rapid pencil:
"Be advised. I saw him. He's here"

She had chosen her seat herself: front row balcony, an aerie from which to spot the reviewers and eavesdrop on the murmurs, the sighs, the whispers. She meant to spy, to search out who was and wasn't there. Aha: then Lionel was there. He was in the audience. He had turned up after all—out of rivalry. Out of jealousy. Because of the buzz. To get the lay of Silkowitz's land. An old director looking in on a young one: age, fear, displacement. They were saying Lionel was past it; they were saying little Teddy Silkowitz, working on a shoestring out of a dinky cell over a sex shop, was cutting edge. So Lionel was out there, Lionel who made Matt audition, who humiliated him, who stuck him with the geezer role, a bit part in the last scene of a half-baked London import.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill
us for their sport.

Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor,
bare, fork'd animal as thou art.

Lear on the heath—now let Lionel learn what a geezer role could be, and Matt in it!

Lionel wasn't out there. He would not come for Silkowitz, he would not come for Matt. Matt understood this. It was someone else Frances had seen.

He made his second-act entrance. The set was abstract, filled with those cloth-wrapped wooden free forms that signified the city. Silkowitz had brought the heath to upper Broadway. But no one laughed, no one coughed. It was Lear all the same, daughter-betrayed, in a storm, half mad, sported with by the gods, a poor, bare, forked animal, homeless, shoeless, crying in the gutters of a city street on a snowy night. The fake snow drifted down. Matt's throat let out its unholy howl; it spewed out old forgotten exiles, old lost cities, Constantinople, Alexandria, kingdoms abandoned, refugees ragged and driven, distant ash heaps, daughters unborn, Frances's wasted eggs and empty uterus, the wild roaring cannon of a human heartbeat.

A noise in the audience. Confusion; another noise. Matt moved downstage, blinded, and tried to peer through the lights. A black silhouette was thudding up the middle aisle, shrieking. Three stairs led upward to the apron; up thudded the silhouette. It was Eli Miller in a threadbare cape, waving a walking stick.

"This is not the way! This is not the way!" Eli Miller yelled, and slammed his stick down again and again on the floor of the stage. "Liars, thieves, corruption! In the mother tongue, with sincerity, not from such a charlatan like this!" He thudded toward Matt; his breath was close. It smelled of farina. Matt saw the one blue eye, the one dead eye.

"Jacob Adler,
he
could show you! Not like this! Take Eli Miller's word for it, this is not the way! You weren't there, you didn't see, you didn't hear!" With his old butcher's arm he raised his stick. "People," he called, "listen to Eli Miller, they're leading you by the nose here, it's charlatanism! Pollution! Nobody remembers! Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter, she wasn't born yet, mediocre! Eli Miller is telling you, this is not the way!"

Back he came to Matt. "You, you call yourself an actor? You with the rotten voice? Jacob Adler, this was a thunder, a rotten voice is not a thunder! Maurice Schwartz, the Yiddish Art Theater, right around the corner it used to be, there they did everything beautiful, Gordin, even Herzl once, Hirschbein, Leivick, Ibsen, Molière. Lear! And whoever was there, whoever saw Jacob Adler's Lear, what they saw was not of this earth!"

In a tide of laughter the audience stood up and clapped—a volcano of applause. The laughter surged. Silkowitz ran up on the stage and hauled the old man off, his cape dithering behind him, his stick in the air, crying Lear, Lear. Matt was still loitering there in his bare feet, watching the wavering cape and the bobbing stick, when the curtain fell and hid him in the dark. Many in the audience, Frances informed him later, laughed until they wept.

Frank Castle knew everything. He was an art critic; he was a book critic; he wrote on politics and morals; he wrote on everything. He was a journalist, both in print and weekly on the radio; he had "sensibility," but he was proud of being "focused." He was a Catholic; he read Cardinal Newman and François Mauriac and Étienne Gilson and Simone Weil and Jacques Maritain and Graham Greene. He reread
The Heart of the Matter
a hundred times, weeping (Frank Castle could weep) for poor Scobie. He was a parochial man who kept himself inside a frame. He had few Protestant and no Jewish friends. He said he was interested in happiness, and that was why he liked being Catholic. Catholics made him happy.

Fumicaro made him happy. To get there he left New York on an Italian liner, the
Benito Mussolini.
Everything about it was talkative but excessively casual. The schedule itself was casual, and the ship's engines growled in the slip through a whole day before embarkation. Aboard, the passageways were packed with noisy promenaders—munchers of stuffed buns with their entrails dripping out (in all that chaos the dock peddlers had somehow pushed through), quaffers of colored fizzy waters.

At the train station in Milan he found a car, at an exorbitant rate, to take him to Fumicaro. He was already hours late. He was on his way to the Villa Garibaldi, established by a Chicago philanthropist who had set the place up for conferences of a virtuous nature. The Fascists interfered, but not much, out of a lazy sense of duty; so far, only a convention of lepidopterists had been sent away. One of the lepidopterists had been charged with supplying information, not about butterflies, to gangs of anti-Fascists in their hideouts in the hills around Fumicaro.

There were wonders all along the road: dun brick houses Frank Castle had thought peculiar only to certain neighborhoods in the Bronx, each with its distinctive four-sided roof and, in the dooryard of each, a fig tree tightly mummified in canvas. It was still November, but not cold, and the banks along the spiraling mountain route were rich with purple flowers. As they ascended, the driver began to hum a little, especially where the curves were most hair-raising, and when a second car came hurtling into sight from the opposite direction in a space that seemed too narrow even for one, Frank Castle believed death was near; and yet they passed safely and climbed higher. The mountain grew more and more decorous, sprouting antique topiary and far flecks of white villas.

In the Villa Garibaldi the three dozen men who were to be his colleagues were already at dinner, under silver chandeliers; there was no time for him to be taken to his room. The rumbling voices put him off a bit, but he was not altogether among strangers. He recognized some magazine acquaintances and three or four priests, one of them a public charmer whom he had interviewed on the radio. After the conference—i t was called "The Church and How It Is Known," and would run four days—almost everyone was planning to go on to Rome. Frank Castle intended to travel to Florence first (he hoped for a glimpse of the portrait of Thomas Aquinas in the San Marco), and then to Rome, but on the fourth day, entirely unexpectedly, he got married instead.

After dinner there was a sluggish session around the huge conference board in the hall next to the dining room—Frank Castle, who had arrived hungry, now felt overfed—and then Mr. Wellborn, the American director, instructed one of the staff (a quick hollow-faced fellow who had waited on Frank Castle's table) to lead him down to the Little Annex, the cottage where he was to sleep. It was full night now; there was a stone terrace to cross, an iron staircase down, a pebbled path weaving between lofty rows of hedges. Like the driver, the waiter hummed, and Frank Castle looked to his footing. But again there was no danger—only a strangeness, and a fragrance so alluring that his nostrils strained after it with appetite. The entrance to the Little Annex was an engaging low archway. The waiter set down Frank Castle's suitcase on the gravel under the arch, handed him a big cold key, and pointed upward to a circular flight of steps. Then he went humming away.

At the top of the stairs Frank Castle saw a green door, but there was no need for the key—the door was open; the lamp was on. Disorder; the bed unmade, though clean sheets were piled on a chair. An empty wardrobe; a desk without a telephone; a bedside cabinet, holding the lit gooseneck; a loud clock and a flashlight; the crash of water in crisis. It was the sound of a toilet flushing again and again. The door to the toilet gaped. He went in and found the chambermaid on her knees before it, retching; in four days she would be his wife.

He was still rather a young man, yet not so young that he was unequal to suddenness. He was thirty-five, and much of his life had flowered out of suddenness. He did not know exactly what to do, but he seized a washcloth, moistened it with cold water at the sink, and pressed it against the forehead of the kneeling woman. She shook it off with an animal sound.