Authors: Ellen Feldman
Charlie went on most of the jaunts alone. I was reluctant to leave
Abby. But occasionally his parents moved into the apartment, and Orchid came to help, and I accompanied him.
Sometimes I take out the photographs of those trips and try to remember them as they were rather than as I see them now. In one snapshot, we’re in Istanbul, standing in front of the Hagia Sophia with a minor cultural attaché and several local writers, none of whose names I can recall. Charlie has a stern look on his face, because we’re as green as just-minted money, and he’s trying to hide the sheer giddiness of our good fortune.
In another picture, we’re sitting side by side in straight-back chairs on a dusty square of earth, watching a group of women in vivid African print dresses dance, and smiling stiffly in a futile attempt to persuade the world, and ourselves, that we’re card-carrying liberals, not imperialist swine reviewing the colonials.
In a third photo, we’re gathered around a small table cluttered with glasses, cups and saucers, and ashtrays in a sun-dappled Roman piazza with Frank Tucker, two Italian writers, and a beautiful French girl Frank had acquired. “Discussing the future of freedom” is scrawled on the back of the picture in my handwriting, with no apparent irony.
Sometimes the trips did not go as planned. In Buenos Aires, a noted American poet threw away his medications, replaced them with double martinis, stripped naked, mounted an equestrian statue in one of the city’s main squares, and delivered a speech in praise of Hitler. Charlie had to help the poet’s minder wrestle him into a straitjacket and get him to the hospital. Most drunken binges, impolitic outbursts, and naked high jinks were less public.
The only travel photos I never looked at in later years were the ones from Leningrad.
In the fall of 1955, we learned that the touring company of
Porgy and Bess
would be the first American theatrical group to visit the USSR. When Elliot heard they were looking for someone to cover the
trip, he recommended me. I was surprised. I knew he thought I was a loose cannon, and the Soviet Union was no place to send one of those. When I asked him about it, he said he admired my work and thought I could do a good job. Of course, I didn’t believe him. I was also wary of the auspices of the trip. For years we had been hearing rumors that the CIA was pouring funds into cultural institutions and artistic endeavors to further American interests abroad. Traveling orchestras proved that the United States was not the cultural wasteland sophisticated Europeans believed. Jazz bands showcased an indigenous art form that demonstrated how much Americans loved negroes, as long as they had rhythm. Touring art shows made the argument that American abstract expressionism was to the twentieth century what French impressionism had been to the nineteenth. That was a real coup. Gossip said the CIA, with the help of the Museum of Modern Art and certain critics, had made popular the new school of painting, which they saw as the opposite of dull, prescribed Soviet realism. Here was the spirit of American individualism, vibrating in living color on larger-than-life canvases. The Agency’s darling was said to be Jackson Pollock. Instead of an effete European-influenced artist, our national painter was a hard-drinking, hard-driving, all-American who wore cowboy boots and painted from the hip.
Some people insisted there was nothing wrong with CIA backing. Didn’t we want the government to support the arts? Others of us answered that what was wrong was that this wasn’t open and official government backing, it was clandestine support. And it was bound to come with strings. If the
Porgy and Bess
tour was propaganda to whitewash the country’s despicable racial record, I wanted no part of it. But when I asked around, I found that the producer had actually had difficulty raising money for the tour. The CIA, which was usually generous with arts funding, and even the State Department, deemed the story of a bunch of impoverished negroes
singing, dancing, and fornicating in a backwater southern bayou too subversive a picture of America to send behind the Iron Curtain.
Charlie didn’t want me to go. He warned of subzero temperatures, endless snow, and eighteen hours of darkness a day. The trip was scheduled for late December. He said the trains and hotels, even the first-class ones, were reputed to be punishingly primitive. I told him those were discomforts, not deterrents.
He pointed out that he would worry about me the entire time I was away.
I asked, not in a kindly way I’m afraid, how well he thought I’d slept when he had gone to Accra.
He didn’t want me to go, but he did not try to stop me. Most husbands would have.
Charlie was not the only one opposed to the trip. My old roommate, Natalie, whom I met for lunch every few months, said I was asking for trouble.
“The Russians invited us. It’s a goodwill tour, not an espionage mission.”
“I’m not talking about trouble with the Russians. I’m talking about Charlie.”
“Charlie wants me to go,” I lied.
“That’s exactly my point. While the cat’s away …”
“Charlie doesn’t need me out of the country for that. He doesn’t even need me out of town. Not in the world we live in.”
Nancy and Linda, whom I no longer whiled away entire mornings or afternoons with, though Orchid sometimes took Abby to play with their children, were scandalized when they found out about the trip. What kind of mother leaves a two-and-a-half-year-old child to go halfway around the world to cavort with a bunch of commies, their faces said. Then Nancy picked up her little boy and blew wet kisses into his neck while he giggled deliriously.
My enlightened socialist mother-in-law agreed to stay in the
apartment with Abby and Charlie, but I could tell she didn’t think I ought to go either. Even my mother objected. Mourning had awakened her maternal instincts.
Eighteen months earlier, Mr. Richardson had collapsed on the squash court of the New York Athletic Club. He had left her nothing in his will—he did not want to hurt his wife, the letter his lawyer gave her explained—only ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills tucked in the envelope along with the letter. When she amortized the gift over the time she had spent with him, it came, she told me, to sixty-one dollars and twenty-four cents a year. Her voice held a touch of irony rather than her usual self-pity, and I almost liked her for it. Then she told me I had no right to leave Abby to go gallivanting around the world. I didn’t tell her that you could abandon a child by staying right at home.
Only Sonia encouraged me. “Why on earth wouldn’t you go?” she asked.
“Abby and Charlie.”
“What do you think is going to happen to them in two weeks? You’d better grab this, because if you don’t, I’ll go after it, and you’ll be green with envy.”
ON A CLEAR
December night, I crossed the tarmac of Idlewild Airport under a black pincushion of a sky studded with metallic stars, boarded a plane, and flew to West Berlin with two other members of the group. The tour consisted of fifty-eight actors, seven stagehands, two conductors, several wives and clerks, six children, one teacher, two dogs, and one psychiatrist, all of whom, except the cast, were, predictably, white. However, only three of us were on the flight. Mrs. Ira Gershwin was in first class; a woman called Faith Anderson, who was the director’s secretary, and I were not.
“Let’s hope the Ruskies are saving their rubles to do it up brown once we’re there,” Miss Anderson said, as she wrestled her boxy cosmetics case into the overhead bin. The gesture made her breasts
stand up and salute. She reminded me of the ads showing women dressed to the nines in hats, gloves, and elaborate skirts wearing only a bra on top.
I dreamed I traveled to the USSR in my Maidenform bra
. The cantilevered breasts gave her an aura of impregnability, but the turquoise harlequin glasses lent her a kittenish air.
She asked if I preferred the window or the aisle. I said it didn’t matter to me. She stood aside to let me slip into the window seat, and as we buckled ourselves in, she ticked off a list of last-minute crises.
The visas had not yet arrived. “They swear they’ll be waiting at the hotel in Berlin,” she said.
The Soviets were upset, because they had just discovered that Paul Robeson was not in the cast. “I told them we couldn’t have every negro actor in the country in the show,” she said and didn’t add that the last thing the U.S. government wanted was Robeson, an unrepentant communist, touring the USSR as a goodwill ambassador.
The psychiatrist had been dropped from the roster. “I’m not sure whether that’s because someone higher up decided the trip won’t be so nerve-racking after all, or because the Soviets think psychoanalysis is an antistate ideology that’s the product of decaying capitalism. We substituted an NAACP legal adviser.”
After the stewardess took away our dinner trays, Faith said she was exhausted from getting the show on the road, traded her harlequin glasses for a black eye mask with heavily lashed pink eyes embroidered on it, pulled a blanket over her enviable breasts, and went to sleep.
I tried closing my eyes, but I was too keyed up. I opened a book on Soviet Ukrainian writers, but the droning of the propellers made concentration difficult. Finally, I closed the book, took out a sheet of airmail stationery that I had brought and a pen, and began to write.
Years later, when I was cleaning out Charlie’s dresser, I found the letter I wrote him that night in a small leather box in his top drawer.
It lay beneath three or four widowed cuff links, a couple of Navy medals that he insisted were given out in Cracker Jack boxes, and a Phi Beta Kappa key. As I opened it, the paper began to tear along the folds. I wondered if that was from age or from being repeatedly taken out and read.
But the real surprise all those years later was the letter itself. It sounded like a document to be opened after my death, which was funny, because I had not been afraid that night, only contemplative, and perhaps a little guilty after all for leaving him and Abby. I would not admit it to other people, but I could to myself. Soaring over the Atlantic, with no view but my own reflection in the darkened window, with no company except a sleeping stranger beside me, I felt like a bird, or a god, looking down on my life. I suppose by that I mean I had perspective, which, it occurs to me now, is another word for vision impaired by distance. Misperceptions, after all, often masquerade as profound insights. Whichever they were, that night I wrote to Charlie of my love for him and Abby, my great joy in my life with them, and how lucky I had been to find him, when I hadn’t even known I was looking. He was the touchstone, I told him, of my existence.
To this day, I’m not sorry I wrote the letter. I would rather be gulled than do the gulling. Charlie always said I went for the moral high ground.
THE NEXT MORNING
, a representative from the embassy was waiting for us at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Mrs. Gershwin, a small woman swathed in mink and weighed down by a variety of large diamonds, had descended the steps first and was standing on the tarmac. We were supposed to be on a goodwill tour, but I couldn’t help thinking that her diamonds and furs were not likely to create much goodwill in a proletarian society that was suffering from a shortage of just about everything.
The representative shepherded us through customs, then drove us to the Kempinski Hotel.
“This is where first class begins,” Faith said as we checked in. All that coping with crises seemed only to ramp up her capacity for optimism.
When I came back down to the lobby an hour later to leave for the orientation meeting, she was standing with a girl whose white fur coat with its attached scarf made her look as if she were being strangled from behind by a polar bear. The coat was too short for warmth but perfect for revealing the long fine legs of a Thoroughbred racehorse. Faith introduced her as Vera Bailey and said she had been traveling with the chorus for four years. As the hotel doorman ferried us to the cab under the shelter of his huge umbrella, Vera confided to me that she had seen the world.
“But what I want to know,” she went on when the three of us were settled in the backseat, “is what I’m supposed to tell the Russians when they ask what it’s like to be a negro in America.”
“Tell them the truth,” I said. “You’re treated like a second-class citizen.”
She looked dubious.
“Why don’t you ask the officials at the briefing what you should say?” Faith suggested.
I closed my mouth and turned to look out the window. I was supposed to be an observer, not a troublemaker.
Beyond the rain-sluiced glass, the Kurfürstendamm, once Berlin’s most fashionable street, lay gray, bleak, and, to my mind and despite our new status as staunch allies with Germany, hostile. If I squinted I could see flames leaping from pyres of books; shop windows shattering as thugs rampaged through the streets; and men, women, and children being herded to train stations, lugging suitcases and bundles they would never get to keep, while overhead swastikas swooped and snapped in the wind.
That was when it came to me, the real reason Charlie had not wanted me to go on the trip. We were to spend tonight in West Berlin. Tomorrow buses would transport us to East Berlin, where we would board the Blue Express to take us across Germany to Warsaw, then on through Moscow to Leningrad. As far as Charlie was concerned, the first leg of the itinerary was a tour of hell. He would not set foot in Germany, not for a night, not for an hour. The charnel house of the Jews, he called it.
I turned back to the other women. “Tell them the truth,” I repeated to Vera.
The taxi let us out in front of a sooty old beaux arts building with patches of bright new limestone where it had been rebuilt since the war. Inside, folding chairs were set up at one end of a long mirrored hall. Faith said the cast would rehearse here after the meeting. The seats that weren’t occupied were piled with heavy coats, scarves, hats, and gloves. A man I had been introduced to as Bob, who handled publicity for the tour, was lifting his trouser leg to show off red long underwear to another man named Bob, who was the assistant to the director. I threaded my way through the crowd to an empty seat toward the rear where I could observe the troupe.