Timebends (5 page)

It may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family's little universe.
Kermit, three years my senior, I early on paired with our father as a force for order and goodness. With his blue eyes and fair skin he so resembled the old man, while my dark mother and I were linked not only in appearance but in our unspoken conspiracy against the restraints and prohibitions of reality. If I came up from the street and announced that I had just seen a policeman on roller skates, she would stand amazed and ask for more details, my father would frown slightly as he tried to keep from laughing, and Kermit would roll his eyes ceilingward, scandalized by such horse-shit.

And of what importance, I have so often asked myself, is any of this absurdity, not only in my life but in anyone else's? It is simply that the view from the floor, filled though it is with misunderstandings, is also the purest, the matrix whose content is so difficult to change later on. The impact of things seen and heard from the carpet is red-hot and returns with a far greater shock of truth when recalled because those visions are our very own, our private misunderstandings of reality shared by no one else, and are thus the soil of poetry, which is our freedom to alter mere facts. From misunderstandings, more than from anything dutifully learned out of respect for culture, the threads unwind that spin the uniqueness of each artist's vision, promising implicitly to remake the world all new. Unknowingly, almost from the beginning, I have sought to reconstruct my life, becoming my brother from time to time, my father, my mother, putting on theirs and others' forms and faces in order to test the view from angles other than my own. And incidentally, it sometimes took years before I could painfully strip myself of such disguises and find myself again. In a word, at the very time we are most vulnerable to impressions, we are least able to avoid outrageously misjudging what they mean. At a minimum, therefore, life will never lose its mystery.

The mystery, for example, of what made me decide that my position was second base. Somehow I came to make this choice, just as one day I would “decide” I was a playwright. Second base was “me,” while Kermit was a pitcher and a track man. These identities had a fate behind them, were inexorable, came down from on high. I have to wonder what other elements of my being I chose, took off the rack, for no good reason. Why did Kermit nearly always fall just a step or two before the finish line in the Central Park races we were constantly running? The crowd of boys from the row of apartment houses facing the park on 110th Street was cheering him on, his powerful legs were pumping along at a good steady pace,
and just as he spread out his arms, down he went and lost. What choice of his lay behind this? Was it unrelated to his volunteering for the army in World War II and as an infantry captain finding himself carrying a man on his back for hours in zero weather until they could reach an aid station, while his own toes were freezing and becoming gangrenous? Whence come these fateful images that might lose a man his feet, or his life—or be your salvation if he happens to be near when you need saving?

Kermit was always a good man to have around at such times. But his pathological honesty could sink my mother on occasion, like the time his teacher assigned the class an original picture to draw and he chose a house, which he managed decently enough, but the chimney's perspective he could not get right. He erased and redrew the chimney time after time, but it was never right, never seemed to be attached to the roof. At ten o'clock the night before the assignment was due, my mother (talented enough to catch a person's likeness with startling accuracy) took courage in hand and, sweetly smiling, suggested that she be allowed to draw the chimney. His yells of horrified protest woke me up, and I hurried down the corridor into the dining room, where he sat clutching his drawing to his breast while my mother, half hysterically now, pleaded to be allowed to add one single perspective line that would make the chimney look like a chimney and not a box kite that had gotten stuck on the roof. My father, of course, was deep in sleep, what with the stock market continuing its apparently endless climb and the coat business better than ever. His father's firm, S. Miller and Sons, had recently been dissolved, and a veritable wave of brothers and their outriding relatives had descended on Isidore and his Miltex Coat and Suit Company, which he had broken away to establish after the Great War. Family loyalty had forced him to make jobs for all of them, something my mother would blame for his firm's collapse a few years hence. But it pleased him to have been transformed from left-behind Izzie to the chief source of livelihood for the entire clan, he whom they had always scoffed at and who bore the scar, his illiteracy, of their barely concealed contempt throughout his life. But for now, he happily slept.

I joined my mother in pleading with Kermit to let her finish his drawing. “But she can't! It's supposed to be mine!” Corrupt conspirators, my mother and I tried to argue that he had certainly drawn everything but the chimney and chosen the colors and painted them in himself, but he would have none of this sophistry. The solution, as is so often the case, was exhaustion; so many tremendous
decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock. He would go to sleep, we all would, and think about it again before breakfast. Kermit agreed, hardly able to hold his head up after spending days drawing his house, changing the coloring, the location of doors and windows. As he went down the corridor to our bedroom, the drawing remained behind on the dining room table and I sensed what was going to happen. Did he as well? And when, at breakfast, he rolled up his picture, which now had a very nicely drawn chimney on it, did he not notice? Did one have to be evil, like me, to notice?

About forty-five years later that very dining room table was on the stage for the first Broadway production of my play
The Price.
In 1968 I had no idea that our old dining table still existed, and could hardly recall what it had looked like. But the set designer, my old friend Boris Aronson, liked to take off from reality and kept after me to describe each piece of furniture that would be piled up, one piece on top of another, in the room of the deceased father when his two sons returned to divide up the family's possessions after many years of not seeing each other. The characters were not based on Kermit and me, we were far different from these two, but the magnetic underlying situation was deep in my bones.

It was my sister, Joan—not yet born in this narrative—who, on hearing that the set required furniture of the twenties, reminded me that our old dining table had been given to my father's baby sister Blanche, then in her seventies; my mother had no room for it in the small apartment she and my father occupied in the last years of their lives. I hurried out to Brooklyn and Aunt Blanche's apartment. The youngest in my father's family, Blanche was sweet and pretty and soft, and now she was old but still good-heartedly ready for laughter. As it turned out, she had recently been talking to secondhand dealers about selling the table and eight chairs because she and her husband, Sam, my father's Depression-era partner in one of his ill-fated attempts to get another coat business going, were about to move into a smaller apartment themselves.

I looked at the table, still solid and sound and somehow amusing with its heavy harp trestle legs deeply carved and a scalloped border running around its top. My mother had gotten up and danced on it on more than one New Year's Eve (also her wedding anniversary), although I had never been allowed to witness these riotous displays, which only took place in the small, evil hours, long
after my bedtime. But I was not sure its style would fit into Boris's design, so I phoned him then and there and described it to him.

Boris generally didn't take kindly to outside suggestions; in fact, he found it hard to hear anything at all without instinctively taking exception to it. Years before his great success as designer of
Cabaret, A Little Night Music,
and other hit musicals, as well as
The Crucible, A View from the Bridge,
and
A Memory of Two Mondays,
we were sitting beside the swimming pool of a mutual friend who had invited us up to his swank Westchester estate to escape the terrible heat of the city. Stretching out in the cool shade, I lamented the fate of the poor folk who had to stay in the city in such weather. Boris was instantly spurred to invent his demurrer.

“I don't know, I like New York in the heat; even better I like it than in good weather.”

“How can you like New York in the heat?” I asked.

“Because it's so relaxing. I mean, when I'm walking down a street on a hot July day in New York, I know that whoever I'm going to meet is also a failure.”

Boris's Russian-Yiddish accent and his plastic attitude toward language were among my sources for Gregory Solomon, the eighty-nine-year-old used furniture dealer in the play. Though the true model for the character was a quite different man, it was still rather strange to be standing in sight of the dining table asking Boris what he thought of our buying it for the set of
The Price,
which was of course a play about selling old furniture to a dealer whose distinctive mangled English was exactly like Boris's. I was standing, as it were, between slices of mirrors going off into infinity reflecting my image, and within my image that of Boris, my play, my parents, their table …

“Vat style is it?” Boris asked.

I had no idea what to call it and turned to Blanche, who was standing there thrilled by the idea that the table might end up on a Broadway stage. “What style is this, do you know?”

“Well, one of the dealers who looked at it said it was Spanish Provincial.”

“You're kidding.”

She laughed at the idiocy of the description and assured me it was what the dealer had actually said.

“Boris? One of the dealers who looked at it says it's Spanish Provincial.”

“That's it! Take it!” he instantly and delightedly replied.

And so it was that table that David Burns, a comic genius, struck
with the flat of his little hand as he tipped back his dusty black fedora, brushed cigarette ashes off the lapels of his drooping black overcoat, and explained, “Listen! You can't move it. A man sits down to such a table he knows not only he's married, he's got to stay married—there is no more possibilities. … You're laughing, I'm telling you the factual situation. What is the key word today? Disposable. The more you can throw it away the more it's beautiful. The car, the furniture, the wife, the children—everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is—shopping. …”

Once the table was on the stage, I was strangely unable to feel sentimental about it. Nevertheless, it had once been a center of life, where my brother sat and did his lessons and I learned to read while Mother sketched us in a silence warmer than blanket or fire. The only sounds were the scrape of her pencil on paper and the hissing of the radiators. And if very occasionally a sharp shot echoed from some Harlem rooftop farther uptown, no one so much as looked up.

There was of course no television, and our superheterodyne radio pulled in KDKA, Pittsburgh, as well as WJZ, New York, but no one would think of simply turning it on and letting it foul the air with a background of shapeless music. One either listened or it was shut off, probably because the sound was so tinny, a mere facsimile of music. As often as not, though, it was out of order as a result of Kermit's attempts to fix it. Once Kermit laid hands on a clock or a machine of any kind it died, as though of fright, its leftover parts hidden under vases and inside the piano, where suddenly he would rediscover them, after months had passed, and attack the ailing machine again, finishing it off forever if it had survived his first ministrations. I soon knew that I could fix things better than he, with his tendency to storm a mechanical problem in the hope that by sheer righteous determination it would yield to him. But what I envied him, as I did my mother, was the ability to memorize. Like her, he could read a text a couple of times and embed it in his brain at will while I would go wandering off after irrelevant associations.

On my first day in school the teacher, a Miss Summer, showed us a cardboard clockface to teach us to tell time, mysteriously manipulating the hands to cue us into calling out the hours and minutes. All I was really interested in was how she got the clock hands to move. I managed to creep around until I could see her turning a handle behind the face, and at the end of the lesson she
allowed me to turn it myself. But I finally had to get my mother to teach me how to tell time. Equally distracting were Miss Summer's admirable horn-rimmed eyeglasses; no one I knew wore glasses, and I now took to walking around squinting as though I were going blind, until my mother, to avoid a breakdown, talked the oculist into fitting me with an unneeded pair of glasses, which I wore about a week and lost in the park grass. Nothing was more enjoyable than mimicry. I was about the height of my father's back pocket, from which his handkerchief always hung out, and for years I pulled the corner of my handkerchief out exactly the same distance. I had noticed early on—from my vantage close to the floor—that men, though not women, often leaned to one side to fart; experimenting, I never managed the output, only the position, but it was yet another enticement to grow up, one of the great things in store once the helplessness of childhood was ended.

The new excitements of the Jazz Age, perceived from a few feet off the floor, came to me chiefly through women, my mother and her friends. When she bobbed her long hair it shocked Kermit and made him weep in his room and scold her for days, particularly for not forewarning him. As innocent as I was at five or six, I was still aware of an exciting secret life among the women, and I found myself one warm evening taking one of my father's straw hats and going down the elevator to sit on a box in front of our apartment building, hoping somehow to attract female notice. But this kind of sexuality is a colored cloud rather than a physical state, and I lived on that cloud much of the time. It was, perhaps, part of my inability to forgo, to wait until a wish could be fulfilled; I had to have what I wanted at once. To see an interesting thing was to need to possess it, and my life consisted of explosions of desires that could not wait to be satisfied, in contrast to my brother's self-control and responsibility. I would soon be haunted by what I suppose were guilt images, naive but real. Our apartment windows on the top floor of the building took the unobstructed force of wind-driven rains, and the flickering lights from neighboring apartments flashed the shape of a furious large monkey against the outside of the glass, his teeth bared and his dripping arms outspread as he tried to get into my bedroom. (An organ grinder's monkey I had patted on a street in Rockaway the previous summer had suddenly bitten my finger and held it tenaciously between his teeth until its master slapped it loose.) I was gradually turning into a habitual sleepwalker, haunting the apartment corridor, staring, fast asleep, into my parents' bedroom. Once I awoke leaning far
out the window looking six stories down into the depths of the interior courtyard. As I came awake, the terror of the height whistled up through my veins, a fear I have never lost.