Dictation (8 page)

Matt hefted the envelope. Thick, not encouraging. In a way Silkowitz was right about novelists doing plays. They overwrite, they put in a character's entire psychology, from birth on: a straitjacket for an actor. The actor's job is to figure out the part, to feel it out. Feather on feather, tentative, groping. The first thing Matt did was take a black marking pen and cross out all the stage directions. That left just the dialogue, and the dialogue made him moan: monologues, soliloquies, speeches. Oratory!

"Never mind," Frances said. "Why should
you
care? It's work, you wanted to work."

"It's not that the idea's so bad. Takes off from the real thing."

"So what's the problem?"

"I can't do it, that's the problem."

Naturally he couldn't do it. And he resented Silkowitz's demand that he trek all the way down to that sex-shop corner again—wasn't the telephone good enough? Silkowitz threw out the news that he couldn't proceed, he couldn't think, except in person: he was big on face to face. As if all that counted was his own temperament. With a touch of spite Matt was pleased to be ten minutes late.

A young woman was in the outer cubicle.

"He's waiting for you," she said. "He's finishing up his lunch."

Matt asked where the boy was.

Silkowitz licked a plastic spoon and heaved an empty yogurt cup into a wastebasket across the room. "Quit. Got a job as assistant stage manager in some Off Off. So, what d'you say?"

"The part's not for me. I could've told you this straight off on the phone. The character's ten years older than I am. Maybe fifteen."

"You've got plenty of time to grow a beard. It'll come in white."

"I don't know anything about the background here, it's not my milieu."

"The chance of a lifetime," Silkowitz argued. "Who gets to play Lear, for God's sake?"

Matt said heavily, bitterly, "Yeah. The Lear of Ellis Island. Just off the boat."

"That's the ticket," Silkowitz said. "Think of it as a history play."

Matt sat there while Silkowitz, with lit-up eyes, lectured. A history riff for sure. Fourth, fifth generation, steerage troubles long ago strained out of his blood—it was all a romance to little Teddy Silkowitz. Second Avenue down at Twelfth, the old Yiddish theater, the old feverish plays. Weeping on the stage, weeping in all the rows. Miller-Weinstock ("May she rest in peace," Silkowitz put in) was the daughter of one of those pioneer performers of greenhorn drama; the old man, believe it or not, was still alive at ninety-six, a living fossil, an actual breathing known-to-be-extinct duck-billed dodo. That's where she got it from—from being his daughter. Those novels she turned out, maybe they were second rate, who knows? Silkowitz didn't know—he'd scarcely looked at the handful of reviews she'd sent—and it didn't matter. What mattered was the heat that shot straight out of her script, like the heat smell of rusted radiators knocking in worn-out five-story tenements along Southern Boulevard in the thirties Bronx, or the whiff of summer ozone at the trolley-stop snarl at West Farms. It wasn't those Depression times that fired Silkowitz—it wasn't that sort of recapturing he was after. Matt was amazed—Matt who worshiped nuance, tendril, shadow, intimation, instinct, Matt who might jig for a shoemaker but delivered hints and shadings to the proscenium, Matt who despised exaggeration, caricature, going over the top, Matt for whom the stage was holy ground ... And what did little Teddy Silkowitz want?

"Reversal," Silkowitz said. "Time to change gears. The changing of the guard. Change, that's what! Where's the overtness, the overture, the passion, the emotion? For fifty, sixty years all we've had is mutters, muteness, tight lips, and, goddamn it, you can't hear their voices, all that Actors Studio blather, the old religion, so-called inwardness, a bunch of Quakers waiting for Inner Light—obsolete! Dying, dead, finished! Listen, Matt, I'm talking heat, muscle, human anguish. Where's the theatrical
noise?
The big speeches and declamations? All these anemic monosyllabic washed-out two-handers with their impotent little climaxes. Matt, let me tell you my idea, and I tell it with respect, because I'm in the presence of an old-timer, and I want you to know I know my place. But we're in a new era now, and someone's got to make that clear—" Silkowitz's kindling look moved all around, from desk to floor to ceiling; those hot eyes, it seemed to Matt, could scald the paint off the walls. "This is what I'm for. Take it seriously. My idea is to restore the old lost art of melodrama. People call it melodrama to put it down, but what it is is open feeling, you see what I mean? And the chance came out of the blue! From the daughter of the genuine article!"

Matt said roughly (his roughness surprised him), "You've got the wrong customer."

"Look before you leap, pal. Don't try to pin that nostalgia stuff on me. The youthful heart throbbing for grandpa's world. That's what you figure, right?"

"Not exactly," Matt fibbed.

"That's not it, honest to God. It's the largeness—big feelings, big cries. Outcries! The old Yiddish theater kept it up while it was dying out everywhere else. Killed by understatement. Killed by abbreviation, downplaying. Killed by sophistication, modernism, psychologizing, Stanislavsky, all those highbrow murderers of the Greek chorus, you see what I mean? The Yiddish Medea. The Yiddish Macbeth! Matt, it was
big!
"

"As far as I'm concerned," Matt said, "the key word here is old-timer."

"There aren't many of your type around," Silkowitz admitted. "Look, I'm saying I really want you to do this thing. The part's yours."

"A replay of the old country, that's my type? I was doing Eugene O'Neill before you were born."

"You've read the script, it's in regular English. American as apple pie. Lear on the Lower East Side! We can make that the Upper West Side. And those daughters—I've got some great women in mind. We can update everything, we can do what we want."

"Yeah, we don't have the writer to kick around." Matt looked down at his trouser cuffs. They were beginning to fray at the crease; he needed a new suit. "I'm not connected to any of that. My mother's father came from Turkey and spoke Ladino."

"A Spanish grandee, no kidding. I didn't realize. You look—"

"I know how I look," Matt broke in. "A retired pants presser." He wanted to play Ibsen, he wanted to play Shaw! Henry Higgins with Eliza. Something grand, aloof, cynical; he could do Brit talk beautifully.

Silkowitz pushed on. "Lionel says he's pretty sure you're free."

Free. The last time Matt was on a stage (televison didn't count) was in Lionel's own junk play, a London import, where Matt, as the beloved missing uncle, turned up just before the final curtain. That was more than three years ago; by now four.

"I'll give it some thought," Matt said.

"It's a deal. Start growing the beard. There's only one thing. A bit of homework you need to do."

"Don't worry," Matt said, "I know how the plot goes. Regan and Goneril and Cordelia. I read it in high school."

But it wasn't Shakespeare Silkowitz had in mind: it was Eli Miller the nonagenarian. Silkowitz had the old fellow's address at a "senior residence." Probably the daughter had mentioned its name, and Silkowitz had ordered his underling—the boy, or maybe the girl—to look it up. It was called the Home for the Elderly Children of Israel, and it was up near the Cloisters.

"Those places give me the creeps," Matt complained to Frances. "The smell of pee and the zombie stare."

"It doesn't have to be like that. They have activities and things. They have social directors. At that age maybe they go for blue material, you never know."

"Sure," Matt said. "The borscht belt up from the dead and unbuckled. You better come with me."

"What's the point of that? Silkowitz wants you to get the feel of the old days. In Tulsa we didn't
have
the old days."

"Suppose the guy doesn't speak English? I mean just in case. Then I'm helpless."

So Frances went along; Tulsa notwithstanding, she knew some attenuated strands of household Yiddish. She was a demon at languages anyhow; she liked to speckle her tougher crosswords with
cri de coeur, Mitleid, situación difícil.
She had once studied ancient Greek and Sanskrit.

A mild January had turned venomous. The air slammed their foreheads like a frozen truncheon. Bundled in their down coats, they waited for a bus. Icicles hung from its undercarriage, dripping black sludge. The long trip through afternoon dark took them to what seemed like a promontory; standing in the driveway of the Home for the Elderly Children of Israel, they felt like a pair of hawks surveying rivers and roads and inch-tall buildings.
"The Magic Mountain,"
Frances muttered as they left the reception desk and headed down the corridor to room 1-A: Eli Miller's digs.

No one was there.

"Let's trespass," Frances said. Matt followed her in. The place was overheated; in two minutes he had gone from chill to sweat. He was glad Frances had come. At times she was capable of an unexpected aggressiveness. He saw it now and then as she worked at her grids, her lists of synonyms, her trickster definitions. Her hidden life inside those little squares gave off an electric ferocity. She was prowling all around 1-A as if it was one of her boxes waiting to be solved. The room was cryptic enough: what was it like to be so circumscribed—a single dresser crowded with tubes and medications, a sagging armchair upholstered in balding plush, a bed for dry bones—knowing it to be your last stop before the grave? The bed looked more like a banquet table, very high, with fat carved legs; it was covered all over with a sort of wrinkly cloak, heavy maroon velvet tasseled at the corners—a royal drapery that might have been snatched from the boudoir of a noblewoman of the Tsar's court. A child's footstool stood at the bedside.

"He must be a little guy," Frances said. "When you get old you start to shrink."

"Old-timer," Matt spat out. "Can you imagine? That's what he called me actually."

"Who did?"

"That twerp Silkowitz."

Frances ignored this. "Get a look at that bedspread or whatever it is. I'd swear a piece of theater curtain. And the bed! Stage furniture. Good God, has he read all this stuff?"

Every space not occupied by the dresser, the chair, and the bed was tumbled with books. There were no shelves. The books rose up from the floorboards in wobbly stacks, with narrow aisles between. Some had fallen and lay open like wings, their pages pulled from their spines.

"German, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish. A complete set of Dickens. Look," Frances said,
"Moby-Dick!"

"In the atrium they told me visitors," said a voice in the doorway. It was the brassy monotone of the almost-deaf, a horn bereft of music. Frances hiked up her glasses and wiped her right hand on her coat:
Moby-Dick
was veiled in grime.

"Mr. Miller?" Matt said.

"Bereaved, sir. Eli Miller is bereaved."

"I heard about your daughter. I'm so sorry," Matt said; but if this was going to be a conversation, he hardly knew how to get hold of it.

The old man was short, with thick shoulders and the head of a monk. Or else it was Ben Gurion's head: a circle of naked scalp, shiny as glass, and all around it a billowing ring of pearl-white hair, charged with static electricity. His cheeks were a waterfall of rubbery creases. One little eye peeped out from the flow, dangerously blue. The other was sealed into its socket. You might call him ancient, but you couldn't call him frail. He looked like a man who even now could take an ax to a bull.

He went straight to the stepstool, picked it up, and tossed it into the corridor; it made a brutal clatter.

"When I go out they put in trash. I tell them, Eli Miller requires no ladders!" With the yell of the deaf he turned to Frances. "She was a woman your age. What, you're fifty? Your father, he's living?"

"He died years ago," Frances said. Her age was private; a sore point.

"Naturally. This is natural, the father should not survive the child. A very unhappy individual, my daughter. Divorced. The husband flies away to Alaska and she's got her rotten heart. A shame, against nature—Eli Miller, the heart and lungs of an elephant! Better a world filled with widows than divorced." He curled his thick butcher's arm around Frances's coat collar. "Madam, my wife if you could see her you would be dumbstruck. She had unusually large eyes and with a little darkening of the eyelids they became larger. Big and black like olives. Thirty-two years she's gone. She had a voice they could hear it from the second balcony, rear row."

Matt caught Frances's look: it was plain she was writing the old fellow off.
Not plugged in,
Frances was signaling,
nobody home upstairs, lost his marbles.
Matt decided to trust the better possibility: a bereaved father has a right to some indulgence.

"There's real interest in your daughter's play," he began; he spoke evenly, reasonably.

"An ambitious woman. Talent not so strong. Whoever has Eli Miller for a father will be ambitious. Eli Miller's talent, this is another dimension. What you see here"—he waved all around 1-A—"are remnants. Fragments and vestiges!
The Bewildered Bridegroom,
1924!" He pinched a bit of the maroon velvet bedspread and fingered its golden tassel. "From the hem of Esther Borodovsky's dress hung twenty-five like this! And four hundred books on the walls of Dr. Borodovsky! That's how we used to do it, no stinginess! And who do you think played the Bridegroom? Eli Miller! The McKinley Square Theater, Boston Road and 169th, they don't forget such nights, whoever was there they remember!"

Matt asked, "You know your daughter wrote a play? She told you?"

"And not only the Bridegroom! Othello, Macbeth, Polonius. Polonius the great philosopher, very serious, very wise. Jacob Adler's Shylock, an emperor! Tomashefsky, Schwartz, Carnovsky!"

"Matt," Frances whispered, "I want to leave
now"

Matt said slowly, "Your daughter's play is getting produced. I'm
in
it. I'm an actor."

The old man ejected a laugh. His dentures struck like a pair of cymbals; the corona of his magnetic hair danced. "Actor, actor, call yourself what you want, only watch what you say in front of Eli Miller! My daughter, first it's
romanen,
now it's a play! Not only is the daughter taken before the father but also the daughter is mediocre. Always mediocre. She cannot ascend to the father! Eli Miller the pinnacle! The daughter climbs and falls. Mediocre!"