Cheat and Charmer (14 page)

There was silence. She didn’t think that Dorshka would ask her to leave, but her hands were cold and clammy and her chest still tight.

“Tell me, Dinah,” Dorshka said, sternly but not unkindly. “Why did you do this thing you must now live with for the rest of your life?”

Dinah let out a long breath and searched for words. When she spoke, however, it was matter-of-factly. “It didn’t seem right that Jake should be punished because of me.”

“But does it seem right to you that you have become an
informer
?”

She waited for the grand resonance of Dorshka’s stage projection to fade; surely even the walls of the fraternity houses down the block had registered the vibrations. “I don’t like the word ‘informer,’ ” she said. “But I can live with it. I don’t like what I did. It’s wrong, and I know it. I didn’t do it thinking there was anything
right
about it. And I didn’t believe I could justify it, if only I could see it from a certain angle—that’s Jake’s way of thinking, not mine. I don’t like hurting people. But I don’t feel loyalty to the Party. I was glad to get out when I did. Of course I don’t like the Committee, either. Can’t st-st-st-stand either of them. I didn’t do it to choose one b-b-big idea over the other—American horsesh-sh-sh-shit over Communist horseshit.”

“Why did you do it, then?”

“It’s v-v-v-very simple—to save Jake’s career. Irv said I’d have to testify or Jake would never work in Hollywood again.”

“Yes. I know all about that. He said the same thing to me when, like a fool, I went to talk to him.”

“I haven’t come here to ask you to forgive me,” Dinah said. “I came to offer help, if and when you need it.”

“Dinah darling, don’t be silly. What kind of help can you give me? For four years already I’m on their damn blacklist. What more can they do to me? Look, sweetheart, I would love to get the hell out of this lousy country and move to Switzerland, but I can’t. And do you know why? Because they took my passport. They can’t deport me because, no doubt much to their regret, I am now an American citizen. Can you imagine a more idiotic situation?”

“It’s the beatenest thing,” Dinah said, lapsing into one of her father’s Arkansas expressions.

“So, it’s for love you have done this terrible thing, yes?”

“What other reason could I possibly have?”

Dorshka searched her face. “And the rest of the world—?”

“There is no ‘rest of the world’ for me, Dorshka. When did the rest of the world ever give a good goddamn about me? You remember what things were like for me at Veevi and Stefan’s. Just the other night Anya Engel was telling me, in that sickly sweet way of hers, how f-f-f-fucking glad she is that I managed to land a guy like Jake. Well, thanks a lot. All those geniuses from Europe, the br-br-br-brilliant Party people, the fellow travelers, all those writers from New York—oh, they wanted to sleep with me, all right. I had great legs and I looked good in a bathing suit. But they thought I was the maid!”

“Yes, it’s true,” Dorshka said, nodding. At once Dinah felt enormous relief. She wasn’t making it up; it had all actually been the way she remembered it. “All those people—what snobs they were!” The way Dorshka pronounced it, the word sounded like
snops
. “Frightful snobs.”

“Do you remember Clement Wallach, the Czech playwright?”

“Of course I remember him. He was married to my old friend Henrietta Sternberg. They moved to New York after the war, and he died a couple of years ago, but she and I still write to each other. What about him?”

“God, how my heart went out to him. Straight off a freighter from Mexico to San Pedro. Had a monocle, remember? And a long cigarette holder. And Henrietta had bad headaches, migraines or something, and she would ask me to bring her c-c-c-cold compresses. They had been through so much, and I felt so sorry for them, and then one day out in my car, when I was showing him the difference between the brakes and the
clutch and she was dozing in the backseat, he stuck his hand up my skirt, the old c-c-c-coot.”

Dinah looked brightly at Dorshka. “As I told the committee boys downtown yesterday, it is one thing to be a pr-pr-pr-pr-proletarian
in
the industry and another thing to be a proletarian
out
of the industry. I was a proletarian non grata. And, oh boy, did all that change when I became a radio writer. Suddenly I was a hot ticket. When Clement Wallach heard about the show, he said, ‘Why don’t we take a nice little drive and I can help you develop your conception of the character.’ ”

“I knew nothing of this!” Dorshka said, laughing.

“It was even worse when it got around that I was seeing Jake. Oh boy, the Party wanted him so badly they were dr-dr-drooling. Why didn’t I bring him around? Maybe I could get him to write some jokes for the folksingers they were bringing to a h-h-h-hootenanny.”

“A what?”

“A hootenanny. Don’t you remember? You know, where you sing the Internationale and folk songs. ‘There once was a union maid’ and all that sort of thing. I remember this one very well. We were going to collect bandages and blankets and winter underwear for partisan groups in Yugoslavia. But Jake
hates
folk music, and he isn’t too crazy about labor songs, either. ‘It’s not the politics, it’s just that they’re all so goddamn square,’ he’d say. He said I’d have to leave the Party or we were through. And then I gave him my own ultimatum and—well, I won’t go into all that. But I’d lost interest in the P-P-P-Party anyway. It just didn’t matter anymore to me one way or the other.”

“That’s because you had found what you were looking for. I remember the first time you brought him over here. How happy you were!”

Dinah could hear something ironic and not altogether kind in Dorshka’s words, and she looked at her uncertainly. “And still am, Dorshka.”

“But tell me something, darling. Didn’t Jake try to stop you?”

“Maybe a little, in a halfhearted way. But I could see right through him. He was desperate for me to do it. He can’t live without working, and I can’t live if he can’t live.”

“Dinah, we’re not talking about life and death here. Just money.”

“I know, Dorshka. It must seem incomprehensible to you. You’ve saved so many people from death. I mean horrible death—Auschwitz death, shooting and starving death. This isn’t even remotely on that scale. No one was holding a gun to my head. I get it, I really do. It’s a terrible thing to inform
on people because you don’t want your husband to lose his job. It’s not even as if his life were in danger.”

“So at least about this you do not kid yourself.”

“I don’t expect you to understand—I’m not noble, like you. I just can’t stand the thought of doing anything to hurt my husband and kids.”

“Aren’t you worried about what your children will think?”

“They can think what they like, when the t-t-t-time comes. The one thing they’ll know is that I did it because I loved their father.”

“I think, you know, that this attitude is something which you find maybe only in America.”

Dinah looked puzzled. “What attitude?” She found her mind alert, sharpened, as if, having undergone that interrogation yesterday, she was ready for more questions. And yet she didn’t understand what Dorshka was saying.

“This not giving a damn about what the others think because love justifies all.”

Dinah shrugged. “I don’t know, Dorshka, if it’s American or not. Does it matter? I don’t care about people I don’t love. The problem, though, is that in addition to Jake I also love you and my s-s-s-s-sister.” She said this simply and directly; she was not asking Dorshka for anything.

“Not the way you love Jake.”

“Ah, Dorshka, come on. I don’t want anything b-b-b-bad to happen to you or Veevi because of me.”

“But you named us. We are expendable.”

Dinah’s eyes wandered along the walls and lit momentarily on a still life by Vlaminck of some lemons and a pitcher. Dorshka had brought it over with her so long ago. “No, you’re not. Not to me.”

“But you sacrificed us.”

“Jake is my husband, the father of my children.”

“You also believe in all this dreary American nonsense about falling in love forever and worshiping your husband.”

Startled, and menaced by this remark, Dinah drew back. “It’s not nonsense, Dorshka. It’s what I’ve always wanted. And now I have what I want and I want what I have, and I’m going to protect it no m-m-m-matter what.”

“Really, my dear,” Dorshka said without harshness.

Dinah noticed how long Dorshka’s legs looked in her men’s slacks—long,
sturdy, energetic legs. “But you’re the one who used to say, ‘Love is a gift you must always accept freely, without doubt and questions.’ ” She said this dramatically, with head held high in the air and hand over the heart, in affectionate imitation.

“I wasn’t talking about
marriage
,” Dorshka said drily.

Dinah looked bewildered. “You mean,
affairs
?”

Dorshka shrugged.

“Oh Jesus, Dorshka, I’m a real dope about that kind of thing.”

“No doubt you are. Tell me, have you had a romance since you married Jake?”

“A
romance
? Of course not!”

“Well, that’s too bad for you,” Dorshka teased. “You and every other chaste wife in this Calvinist country will end up looking like boiled cabbages. You must live, Dinah, while you have the chance!”

“Dorshka, don’t waste your breath. I’m a simple American housewife in love with her husband. I wasn’t going to go to jail—that would have hurt my kids. I’d rather accept the dishonor than hurt them and Jake.”

“NO!” Dorshka brought her fist down on the armchair. “Don’t you see? You say you don’t want to hurt your children. But you already have, by doing what you did! You will say to your children: I was an
informer
. I named names because I didn’t want you to suffer. Do you honestly think they will be grateful? That they will thank you? No. Even if
you
don’t feel any guilt, or think you don’t,
they
will, because they will know, without any doubt, that for them you broke the most fundamental moral law to—”

“The most f-f-f-fundamental m-m-m-moral
what
? The moral
law
? That must be something you talk about in college when you read a lot of philosophers. I don’t think that way. I don’t go around asking myself if I obeyed the fundamental moral law today. I ask myself if I bought enough milk and eggs, and did I p-p-p-pick up Jake’s golf shoes and should I order some more redwood rounds for the front path. M-M-Moral law? That sounds like something from a
Saturday Review
, something I have to look up.”

Without answering, Dorshka got up and went to her desk and handed Dinah a newspaper clipping. “I saw it this morning,” she said. “So I knew you had done this before I had any idea I would be seeing you today. And I tell you something, Dinah darling. When I saw this, my heart, well, it just sank. What you have brought upon yourself, of this you have no idea.”

Dinah felt intensely aware of her friend’s self-possession, her love affairs, her loneliness, her difficulties both surmounted and endured. Her old breasts drooped under the short-sleeved man’s shirt, having become comfortably obsolete. She had been born to a large life, but here she was, confined and straitened, without an ounce of self-pity.

“Didn’t you ever do something you didn’t want to do but had to do, or thought you had to do?” Dinah asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “But it was just, you know, private stupidity.”

“It’s nice of you to want to save my soul,” Dinah said. “But you know, you’re used to thinking about things in a European way. Complicated and s-s-s-sophisticated. I don’t know how to do that. I’m not an intellectual, Dorshka. I go by my guts and I don’t have the head for abstract ideas. I just came here today to say that I hope I haven’t hurt you, but that if I have and if you need anything …” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to get home before the kids get back from school—”

“Ach, Dinah, you American women let your children run your lives. But please, stay a little longer.” She folded up the newspaper clipping and stuck it in her shirt pocket, from which she also took out a letter. It was a light-blue tissue-paper-thin aerogram. Dinah recognized it immediately. Withdrawing her glasses from her breast pocket, Dorshka began to read aloud in her thickly accented, full second-balcony voice:

“Pregnant?” said Dinah, interrupting her. “I thought Mike didn’t want children.”

“Shh. Just listen.” Dorshka read on: