Frolic of His Own (52 page)

—You'd just think they could see a breakdown like that coming and do something about it before it happened.

—It was really her own fault Teen, she's never had to learn to take care of things. I mean Jerry says money means entirely different things to different people but it doesn't mean anything to her at all. Isn't that what Jerry told us, Pookie? Run over there and tell him I need a little more wine. Of course if you look around you today it's all in the hands of exactly the wrong people. What is that awful smell.

—I think Harry would tell you it's the smell of money, Trish. Harry's read Freud. You've got the paper towels, Lily? Over there, under the sideboard, can you help her Oscar?

—Listen Christina, we're not . . .

—Here, give me the towels old fellow, no reason you should both dirty your hands is there? he came on, arm's length under the sideboard —for some people it's credit, for some people it's a way to make more, buy stock in pharmaceuticals, the big drug companies have got a license to steal, say they need the profits for their R and D, government puts a
ceiling on one product so they reconstitute it and bring out a new one that's what their R and D is for. Some of them just use it to create envy, some of them pile it up as a bastion against death itself, read Tolstoy's Master and Man but she's right, listen to Freud these days and it's like diarrhea. Rock stars, ball players, developers, stock traders and arbitragers and your celebrity general who gets five million to write a book written by somebody else yes and who else? He straightened up holding away the wadded toweling, —the lawyers they bring in to clean up the mess. Money's become the barometer of disorder. Wealth and privilege, that's what it was with your Major there at Quantness wasn't it, money was the barometer of order, better go wash my hands. Down this way isn't it? second on the right?

—It's just the greed everywhere, that bandit in the shoe repair shop taking me to small claims until Jerry got a couple of postponements and he was losing business closing up shop to come into court till we finally won by default the day he didn't show up. I thought that was frightfully clever, don't you?

—It might turn out to be frightfully expensive, had you thought of that?

—It just costs a lot more to be rich today than it used to, I mean my God Teen I'm the living proof aren't I? Just getting Deedee out of this latest mess, can you imagine what that's cost already?

—Well a breakdown's a breakdown, they always cost money who knows better than you but after all it's the girl Trish, isn't it? the poor girl after all, whatever it costs?

—It's the car Teen, the car. It was one of those Lamborghettis or whatever they are she paid two whole months' allowance for, one of these high performance things you're supposed to change the oil every ten miles they told me and I said she'd never learned to take care of things didn't I? So the bearings or something burned out and it broke down on her way back from Diddy's wedding in Newport at four in the morning and she left it standing on the Merritt Parkway for a carload of I won't say what to run into on their way to work so they told the police but I'm sure you could smell whisky a mile away and the whole thing was simply demolished, the poor dear thought she was saving money not buying collision insurance so that's eighty thousand dollars right there Jerry thinks she hasn't a hope of recovering from the dip who hit her and even if she could on his salary it would take five generations, and then of course you've got the whole carload of them claiming broken legs and concussions and God only knows what, they'll say anything. I mean the rich are always lied to, it's one of our perks.

—Well at least be glad it's not your money, is it? I mean isn't that what her trust is for?

—It's the wear and tear Teen, the wear and tear. Jerry's tried to talk to this trust officer her fool of a father named in his will because they played baseball together at Princeton who wants her to invade the trust and set up a scholarship there in her father's name to get black people on the baseball team and he's frightfully sticky about anything like this that faintly resembles real life, I mean that's what I mean about leaving the children to the money, will you pour me a little more wine while you're standing there Oscar? You can open the other bottle can't you, I just thank God for Jerry, he's so quick isn't he, I mean life is so filled with coincidences. It's such fun that you two boys had already met over this marvelous lawsuit of yours and you have so much to talk about don't you.

—I'm not sure Oscar would call it fun Trish, he'd probably rather talk about something else because . . .

—No but listen Christina, he just told me the appeal's been filed, Harry's come through after all putting pressure on Sam or somebody, there are oral arguments the next day or two and they've put on a new man to handle it I've got to thank him, to thank Harry for . . .

—Poor Harry. It's the wear and tear isn't it, the terrible pressure he's been under it's really no wonder, have you talked to him Teen?

—No he's, whenever I've called they say he's in court but this case of Oscar's, I don't think you quite understand the . . .

—For God's sake don't burden me with the grim details, I know Jerry will win and then we can all have a marvelous party, where is he, he's not out in the kitchen with her is he? I asked her to whip up some heavy cream earlier for these delicious chestnut tart meringues, I mean for forty dollars you'd think they could add a dab of whipped cream but oh Jerry, here you are what on earth are you carrying?

—Oysters.

—I'm sure she could have brought them in herself. Is that what you've been up to all this time?

—Been thinking. I've been thinking about our Major there old boy, bit of a stick as you said and that's as he should be, all the pompous platitudes of wealth and privilege based on land and chattels where the body of English law came from in the first place, same things that are tearing your main character to pieces out there howling for justice but now what about Kane, this character Mister Kane. A little bit stuffy himself isn't he?

—Well he's, no he's not supposed to be, he's . . .

—Not talking about his ideas or his dialogue, hardly need to change a word of it no, no I mean his persona, this fellow in philosophy and all the rest of it? Just thinking maybe you want a little more contrast there, make him something else, something entirely contradictory, how about one of
those itinerant peddlers who covered the countryside in those days. Pots and pans, scissors, handsaws, nostrums, a roll of calico for the ladies, plantations like your Quantness there were miles from anything, little worlds to themselves and he was the outside world, he was a real institution because his real stock in trade was news and gossip, welcomed with opened arms wherever he showed up with what they really hungered for.

—But that's not what I . . .

—You follow me? Who's just been shot over a card game or killed in a duel over some drunken insult, who shot his overseer caught sleeping with his wife, the price of cotton on the docks at Beaufort, prices at a horse auction, a slave auction and whose slaves have run off like you've set up John Israel right there in your prologue? He had his finger right on the pulse of the land in those dark days, wars and rumours of war he could show up anywhere with an ear to the ground, at a place like Quantness and nobody suspecting a thing, whetting their appetites for scandal where no household's secrets were safe, even theirs. Make him a bit more believable wouldn't it? a little bit more entertaining too up against your pompous Major, even works nicely when he walks in unannounced up north there in the second act peddling cigars and runs into Bixby.

—Bagby! If you want entertainment, if that's all you want Bagby's supposed to be a . . .

—Bagby of course yes, sorry old sport, a marvelous character, sort of your Greek chorus isn't he. The spoiler, the new man, the spirit of unbridled capitalism with his use versus own in the old Major's lexicon, the triumphant absence of integrity up against Kane who's the lonely heart and soul of it jangling across that desolate landscape with his pots and pans, the rootless wandering Jew who . . .

—Now wait, wait what makes you think he's Jewish!

—Because they were, most of them, weren't they? The Jewish peddler, a regular institution, make him a Jew and you've got half your Broadway audience right in the palm of your hand, you might even pick up a Pulitzer Prize.

—The Pu, good God talk about being famous for five minutes the Pulitzer Prize is a gimcrack out of journalism school you wrap the fish in tomorrow, talk about the great unwashed it's got nothing to do with literature or great drama it's the hallmark of mediocrity and you'll never live it down, what makes you think I want to get some wheezing Broadway matinee audience in the palm of my hand with a comic Irishman and a Jewish peddler telling dirty stories who . . .

—I wish they wouldn't fight, can you reach that wine Teen since they're too busy to notice? And for God's sake let me do something with
this revolting mess they've made of this oyster aspic, put it on the floor where we won't even have to look at it, if she's still whipping that cream out there she'll turn it to butter, shouldn't you call her?

—Not it at all old boy, try to be patient with me for a minute, not suggesting a character who parades around up there muttering oy gewalt and picking his nose am I? No reason he can't be just as intelligent, just as shrewd and cultivated as your character is right now, just as well read without this stiff sort of academic veneer, a free spirit rattling along down those country roads all day behind his mule in his cart pots and pans jangling while he reads the Aeneid and oh, incidentally, running through your deposition again you ascribe the Iliad to some Greek nobody ever heard of, can't imagine why I didn't trip you up on it.

—Some Greek? I never mentioned the Iliad, you think I'd make a mistake like . . .

—Talking about characters beneath contempt like Bagby?

—Nicochares, the Diliad not the Iliad, the Diliad, characters beneath our level of goodness in the Diliad.

—Your point old sport, tripped me up that time, stenographers you get these days you've got to be grateful they've even heard of the Iliad. Comes a bit closer to your Socrates parallel too doesn't he? Informal, deceptively humble, a little unkempt, touch up his dialogue a bit here and there and there's your wry argumentative Jew with his own fierce hunger for intelligent talk, for this relentless doomed pursuit of ideas out there peddling his pots and pans in this intellectual wasteland, five cents, ten cents, the counting gene again, the second half of your equation, you follow me?

—No.

—Of course you do. The whole thing's your creation isn't it? the forces struggling against each other in this terrible equation that's still there at the heart of the matter today, obviously you've read your Tocqueville? You lay out the left side of it at the start with the apparition of this black runaway slave, he doesn't even appear, we don't see him we don't have to, the invisible man somebody called him haunting the whole play, haunting your main character with that flimsy pretext from the Social Contract of compelling men to be free to be hunted down somewhere and killed with no bands of angels waiting out there wails the dried old husk of a woman who's taught him to read in the Bible, about what it amounts to isn't it?

—But you can't say a flimsy pretext no, that whole noble idea of Rousseau's that for life to be good at all it had to be good for all men, and . . .

—Noble idea! About all it was, that pragmatic notion of ideas as instruments for guides to action never mind, I withdraw it, he's instrumental isn't he? Get on to the right side of your deadly equation where Kane's
hounding him with his merciless logic about justice, manipulating all his hollow high sounding claims to moral rectitude leading him deeper into his dilemma, your cunning old Jewish peddler blackmailing him with four thousand years of Christian guilt, he isn't simply embattled, your main character. He is the battlefield, and there's your deadly equation, the black on one side and the Jew on the other fighting it out today wherever we look, you follow me?

Backed into a corner now silhouetted against the glass giving down on the pale light glistening on the pond, hands digging distracted in the pockets at his side for whatever they might come up with, a packet of obsolete design in one of them, coming out with —no . . . tearing it open with the other, —no it's going too far, a play about the Civil War I don't see how we got into all this, it's not about these quarrels between black people and Jews that burst out on the front page is it? It's . . .

—Not about these crude street fights that bring out the worst in both of them no, it's not about Hollywood Jews backing movies to show blacks as beasts in a jungle, Jewish doctors dispensing disease to black babies, it's not even about Jewish storekeepers in Harlem using the counting gene to exploit blacks who don't have it no, that's how they'd like it isn't it, your clean white Christian middle class watching it explode on the evening news worried to death about property values when the Jews move in, then the blacks and the whole harlequin spawn of the Caribbean and there goes the neighborhood as you say. Drugs, gunfire, let them fight it out, turn off the news and go in to dinner, not our fight is it? like your wounded pheasant burrowing for refuge in the stone wall, trying to flee from what was happening? the hollow essence of this Christian hypocrisy? And the burnished silk of Sulka's tailoring leapt up against that fine old worsted gripping a wrist there, —sorry . . .

—No I'll get it he blurted, excused for breaking away to recover the torn cigarette packet from what little of the floor remained between them, digging one out as he straightened up if for no more than to occupy his unsteady hand only to find himself abruptly caught by a lapel backed up against the window itself.