Timebends (17 page)

“Well, I hope we can stay out of this one,” she went on, “but you just wait and see—those British are going to work around us till we're bailing them out of trouble with our boys again . . .”

For a moment her simple common sense promised to settle my uncertainty about this single most crucial issue of the hour. In effect, she was saying that no conflict of values stood between the Nazis and their Western opponents: it was merely the everlasting old power fight, this time over the redivision of empire as a result of a resurgent Germany having recovered from her defeat twenty years ago in the First War.

The issue itself is of course long gone, but the human process that underlay my rationalizations (and probably those of most Americans at the time) is still very much with us, now applied to other issues. For seven years I had literally been having nightmares about the Nazis, if only because they seemed in the profoundest sense to be unopposed, truly the wave of the future, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh had called them, a wave of total darkness as I envisioned it, a government of perverts, hoodlums, and the raving mad. How could I possibly have tolerated the idea that a Nazi victory would be no worse than that of the British and French, corrupt and decadent as they were, and craven as they had been during the decade in knuckling under to Hitler's demands? This paradox was very much part of the radical mind-set of the thirties.

Part of the national confusion as to how to view the oncoming war grew out of an uncustomary American cynicism resulting from the Crash. The stock market, far more than a mechanism of investment or even legalized gambling, had carried for a great many middle-class people the prestige of capitalism itself. The market
was the visible symbol of the rising line of “values” of property, even the proof of some sort of classless society in the making, since investing had spread so widely through the country. When the market collapsed practically overnight, with none of the great leaders or institutions capable of stopping it or even understanding what was happening, a panic deep in the spirit made questionable any and all belief in everything official. In an act of contempt, someone thrust a midget onto the lap of the great and formerly sequestered investment banker J. Pierpont Morgan while cameras flashed. Other financiers landed in prison or jumped out of windows. The uncontrollable slide of the market also took with it what had remained of the noble mythology justifying the First World War, which now became but another proof of the power of the moneybags to brutally squander innocent lives in order to make the rich richer. In this light the revolution in Russia, which had pulled the czarist army out of the war and its mindless slaughter, made terrific sense; from a distance it seemed a sublime instance of man's intelligence.

Now, in 1940, they were going at it again, and again it was the Russians who were opting out of yet another war. And if it seemed a cynical turnabout to have allied themselves with the very fascists they had inveighed against, there was also more than a semblance of consistency in the pact, if that was what you wished to see. Russia in 1940 had no colonies, had annexed no neighbors (the division of Poland with Germany and the occupation of the Baltic republics were explained away as defensive acts), and could therefore claim a clean anti-imperialist record; and it had no unemployment, unlike every major European country. Could her alliance with Germany not demonstrate either that she was determined to stay out of a rotten war even at the cost of having to embrace the loathsome Nazis or that she was buying time in order to prepare to fight them?

The difficulty of understanding human illusion is the difficulty of discovering its premises, the logic of the illogical. Once the Western democracies, led by men like Chamberlain of England and Daladier of France, had simply handed Hitler the Czechs, who with one of Europe's strongest and best-prepared armies could quite possibly have stopped the Germans, once it was perfectly evident in the refusal of the Allies to sell arms to the Spanish Republicans that they were accomplices of Italian and German fascism in the destruction of the first democracy in Spain's history, it was not a difficult step to believe that the secret dream of the
governments of France and Britain was a German victory in Russia, and afterwards a long future without any Communists at all in a world comfortably divided into spheres, none of them socialist, all of them held in place by German Nazis, English aristocrats, French millionaires, and their mercenary armies. That the Russians should now have drawn the teeth of this burgeoning new dragon by shaking its claws, leaving its tail to slash at Paris and London instead of Moscow and Leningrad, was certainly comprehensible.

What was omitted from this scansion was power, in place of which we injected moral considerations. It was our desire for a moral world, the deep wish to assert the existence of goodness, that generated, as it continues to do, political fantasy. Given the depth of our alienation from the failing capitalism of the time, it would have been intolerable to see the clear parallels between the social institutions of the fascist and Nazi regimes and those of the Soviet Union. Captive trade unions, mass youth organizations, secret police, informers in the workplace and the home, masses of political prisoners, and at the center of it all idolatry of the state and its leader—all of these had originated in the Soviet system. Fascism and Nazism were imitations of Soviet forms, with manic nationalism and racism replacing international proletarian solidarity as their central “spiritual” content. The generic enmity between the two systems turned out to be no deeper than the enmity of England for France at certain times in history, or of Germany for England. The moral conflict, which we preferred to take to heart, concealed the nationalism and geopolitics that were the driving engines of the time.

The fear of drift, more exactly a drift into some kind of fascism, lay hidden somewhere in the origins of
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
an early play of mine—seemingly a genre piece about mid-America that has no connection with any of these political questions. It was, so to speak, handed me by a woman who climbed up on the porch and seated herself beside Mary, Nan, and me. She was Mrs. Slattery's younger sister Helen, whose husband had hanged himself not long before. Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more. But there simply are circumstances in which plays collect and form, like bacteria in a laboratory dish, later to kill or cure.

Helen was eager to meet the stranger Mary was bringing into the
clan and seemed to long for news of the world outside. Slender, with a small pale face and brown button eyes, she had a certain absentminded integrity in her unselfconscious way of crossing her legs and leaning on her thigh, in her unawareness of the hairpins dangling from her bun and the crookedness of her blouse neckline. She emitted the power of the distracted, the air of a Middle American searcher.

Mary had told me about Helen's awakening one morning to see through her bedroom window the open barn door and her young husband hanging from a rafter. “I was sorry to hear about your husband,” I said. “I hear he was a fine man.”

With no hesitation she moved right into the subject, as though by telling it again and again her story might turn out to be less real.

“We were together in the same classes since kindergarten, don't y'know, and right through high school, although Peter had to quit and get some work and I went on and graduated. Everybody'd always liked him, so he never wanted for a job, I mean people just liked having him.around, he was so cheerful, don't y'know . . .”

Like a litany, her story seemed to have been often told, reminding me of the prisoners' wives at Michigan's Jackson State Penitentiary, the largest in the country, where as a student I had spent many weekends visiting a friend who had gotten the job of psychologist there after a single psychology course in Ann Arbor. Those women, too, seemed to have spent years repeating the same stories of injustice to anyone who would listen.

“Then he changed. Overnight, just all of a sudden started this getting up out of bed and putting on his clothes and going out.”

“Where'd he go?”

“A lot of the times to the filling station . . .”

Peter had owned a very lucrative gas station, only one of the properties he had developed while still in his twenties, and he liked to make surprise inspections to balance the cash against the gallons pumped. That no discrepancies ever turned up did not lessen his panicky conviction that his employees were pilfering. “You couldn't contradict him, he'd get mad if you did,” Helen said.

Naive as they were, his friends realized he was ill and finally managed to get him to doctors in a Cleveland hospital. For a time he seemed better, but just when Helen and he were planning a vacation to Canada, he killed himself.

The story swept through me with a certain familiarity that I could not understand. I was almost nakedly ignorant of formal psychology, and it never occurred to me to write Peter off as a case,
a paranoid psychotic; instead I sensed the mysterious motion of spirit in his illogical behavior, and like Helen, who still could not recover her confidence in the reality of the daylight world, I was preoccupied by the unanswerable. Why would so successful a young man be drawn to his own death? Especially in this pristine countryside far from the crush and competitive pressures of the city? What logic required his death, a logic we ordinarily never notice ruling our lives?

First as a novel, which I never found a publisher for, then as a play,
The Man Who Had All the Luck
hounded me for the next three years, until its 1944 production, my first on Broadway, which lasted four sad performances and disappeared. But it was through the evolving versions of this story that I began to find myself as a playwright, and perhaps even as a person.

To begin with, Helen moved me through an odd resemblance to my cousin Jean, Aunt Esther's daughter, who lived across the street from us on East Third Street in Brooklyn. Both were mild-spoken young women with intrepid and smiling natures that sudden death had struck down. Jean's husband, Moe Fishier, a strikingly handsome man with straight and sparkling white teeth, a fascinating black mole on his flawless white cheek, glistening black hair, and a small, perfectly proportioned body, had also been a great success by his early thirties. He radiated an unmistakable aura of competence and good fortune. During the Depression, when everybody else was financially gasping, he had steadily risen to become a prosperous textile executive. But something had apparently come between him and his wife, and they barely spoke to one another anymore.

They were an extremely fastidious family, and now they seemed to be kept together by all the polishing they did. Moe would even polish his red Buick's engine until it shone like the body paint. Jean came from a family of three daughters whose recreation was to cover their heads with bandannas and clean their tiny house under the leadership of their mother, my aunt Esther, a woman who could not sit down in a chair without first giving it a swipe with the side of her palm and was forever dusting her décolletage with the tips of her fingers lest a snowflake of dandruff had drifted down on its expanse.

On a hot summer afternoon Moe decided to drive alone to Brighton Beach, some two miles away, for a swim. By sundown he had not returned. As the sky turned a darker blue, with the last yellow rays of the sun still flashing on the windows of their house, Jean stood alone on their high brick porch looking toward the corner,
worried but too timid to call the police. Now a lone car, one she'd never seen before, rounded the corner, and she watched, motionless as a deer that has seen a hunter, as it slowed to a halt in front of her stoop. Out of the driver's side a tiny hunchbacked man in a bathing suit slid himself off the seat onto the pavement. Like a large broken doll, he limped around the car to the bottom of the five steps. Looking up at Jean, he seemed apologetic in his tone and movements, his hands turned up toward her. “I have him in the car,” he said, without introduction or explanation, apparently sure from her widened eyes, as much as from Moe's identification in the wallet he held in his hand, that she must be the new widow he was looking for.

She came down the steps into the final dream of her life and looked into the car window and saw her beautiful Moe dead. The hunchback was a physician who had been lying on the beach when he saw Moe collapse and had tried to save him. Now Moe's mother came out through the screen door and the screaming began, the helpless and furious wailing. All the neighbors came out onto the sidewalk—old people, kids, women carrying babies, young couples, and the one gentile on the street, little gray-haired Mr. Clark, who lived next door and worked in a bank and normally carried a small pistol. (This evening he was in his old wash trousers and undershirt, having just lubricated his Model A Ford. It could be seen shining in his garage, the floor of which he had dug out so that he could stand in the pit and grease the car himself. When he died a few years later, Moe's sister Mae and her husband bought this car from Mrs. Clark. In a half-dozen years of ownership the Clarks had put less than three hundred miles on the Ford. It had been less an auto than an icon. The childless couple had nowhere they wanted to go; they merely needed something to care for and worry about and protect from the elements.)

Moe was lifted out of the car with Mr. Clark's awed help, but the hunchbacked doctor was fended off by Jean, who in her hysteria kept him from touching him. Moe's mother, furious, was screaming incoherently at him; why had he come, this misshapen midget in a bathing suit bringing them a dead, still-beautiful son? “Who are you!” she kept yelling at him, as though Moe might revive if she could deny that this deformed creature had any connection with him. And they never let the little doctor enter the house, as though he were cursed, and I saw him waddle back to his car on his crooked skinny legs in his droopy bathing suit, weeping openly as he drove away.