QB VII (20 page)

“What the hell is this,” Abe said, “the General Assembly of the U.N.?”

“I phoned David last night before we left.”

“I must say, Abraham, I’ve received warmer greetings from German prisoners of war.”

“Maggie tell you the whole story? “

“Yes.”

“Comments?”

“Your behavior is about as much comment as anyone needs. You see, Laura, he loves his family and would go on with his wife forever if she let him pursue the thing that’s eating him alive. He’s a Jew and he wants to write about Jews. He loathes the contaminated air of the studios. I’ve seen a lot of writers get caught in that trap. One day, they simply stop writing. Abe smells that day at hand. It’s his death warrant and he knows it.”

“What about the alternative, Shawcross. There’ll be no movie sale on
The Place.
Lou Pepper will see to that Samantha will never agree to a book that means two years’ research out of England. By the time we finish dividing up with lawyers, I’ll be down to zero again. What are we going to do, gang, ask Maggie to hock her diamonds?”

“I’ve spoken to my bank and your American publishers. We’ll keep you floating one way or the other.”

“You will?”

“Yes.”

“You think I’ve got enough stomach left? “

“You write, I’ll pay the bills. “

Abe turned away. “It may be past midnight,” he said. “I may let you down. I don’t know, Shawcross, I just don’t know.

“I always felt you were one Jew who wouldn’t be taken to the gas chamber alive.”

The houseboy entered and said Mr. Pepper was calling again.

“What are you going to tell him?” Shawcross demanded.

“If you want the truth, I wasn’t this scared when I crashed my Spitfire.”

Abe wiped a wet palm, lifted the receiver, and drew a deep breath to stabilize the pounding and trembling.

“Abe, I talked to Milt this morning. He wants to demonstrate his sincerity. Another twenty-five thou on the novel rights.”

Abe was sorely tempted to end it all on a note of profanity. He looked from Shawcross to Laura. “No dice,” he said softly and hung up.

“I do love you, Abe. Ask me to come with you. Order me not to go away with him.”

“You think I haven’t thought about this. We’ve had a look at paradise. Only a damned fool could believe he could spend his whole life this way. All we can expect is a moment of peace between battles. We’ve had that. The places I’m going to are hot and sticky. You won’t like them after a while. If it means anything, I love you too.”

16

SAMANTHA POSSESSED ENOUGH NATIVE FEMALE SHREWDNESS TO MAKE ME MARCH TO HER TUNE FOR TWENTY TEARS. SHE DID NOT HOLD ME BY COMPASSION OR SACRIFICE OR TAKING A PARTNERSHIP IN MY WORK.

I WAS HELD BY BLACKMAIL.

SHE UNDERSTOOD THAT MY GREATEST FEAR WAS THAT OF LONELINESS. LONELINESS HAD DRIVEN ME INTO THE ARMS OF WOMEN I DID NOT CARE FOR OR WISH TO SPEND AN EVENING WITH ... ONLY TO AVOID BEING ALONE.

SHE ALSO UNDERSTOOD THAT MY GREATEST LOVES WERE MY SON AND MY DAUGHTER, BEN AND VANESSA. SAMANTHA PARLAYED THIS LOVE AND THIS FEAR INTO A CONSTANTLY DANGLING THREAT THAT I WOULD BE LEFT ALONE WITHOUT MY CHILDREN.

IN HER COCKSURENESS SHE ALWAYS BRAGGED THAT I WAS FREE TO GO ANY TIME AND SHE WOULDN’T DEMAND A THING. I WAS FREE TO LEAVE HER JUST AS I WAS FREE TO RID MYSELF OF LOU PEPPER AND MILTON MANDELBAUM.

WHEN I BOTTOMED OUT, WHEN I WAS DEPRESSED AND DISGUSTED WITH THE WAY MY LIFE WAS TURNING, SHE HAD A STANDARD TACTIC OF GETTING ME INTO BED AND MAKING SAVAGE LOVE TO ME. IT WAS A PACIFICATION, LIKE SCRATCHING A DOG’S CHEST. BUT SAMANTHA WAS SOMETHING IN BED AND RARELY FAILED TO BLUNT MY ANGER.

FOR TWO DECADES I PRAYED FOR THE MIRACLE THAT THINGS HAD TO CHANGE AND THAT ONE DAY SHE WOULD TELL ME SHE REALIZED I WAS UNHAPPY AND I SHOULD GO OUT AND FIGHT WINDMILLS AND SHE WOULD STAND BESIDE ME.

WHEN I RETURNED FROM HOLLYWOOD WITH MY BRAINS SCRAMBLED I PLEADED WITH HER TO LEASE LINSTEAD HALL. PACK UP THE CHILDREN AND COME WITH ME TO FAR OFF LANDS THAT CHALLENGED THE WRITER’S IMAGINATION.

WHO WAS I KIDDING?

THE FEW TIMES SAMANTHA TRAVELED WITH ME SHE WAS MISERABLE ABOUT THE DISCOMFORTS, MY SCHEDULE, THE SOCIAL OBLIGATIONS. SHE SPENT HER DAYS SHOPPING. AT NIGHT I WAS SO WORRIED ABOUT POOR BORED SAMANTHA BEING LEFT AT THE HOTEL WHILE I CONDUCTED INTERVIEWS I WAS UNABLE TO CARRY ON MY WORK PROPERLY. EVERYTHING HAD TO BE PRESENTED TO HER WITH AN APOLOGY.

I WANTED TO WRITE AT LINSTEAD HALL. EVEN THAT PIECE OF CRAP, “THE PLACE.” BUT SAMANTHA INSISTED MY PRESENCE AT HOME DISRUPTED THE ROUTINE AND TIED HER DOWN. IT WAS ALWAYS TOO PAINFUL FOR HER TO ENTERTAIN MY COLLEAGUES AND BUSINESS ASSOCIATES.

AND NOW I LISTENED TO HER WITH UTTER DISBELIEF. SHE HADN’T LEARNED A THING IN TWENTY YEARS.

Thank God,” Samantha said, “for dear friends like Lou Pepper. Your behavior put him in the hospital in London with severe colitis.”

I DIDN’T REALIZE YOU COULD GET COLITIS OF THE MOUTH BUT IN LOU PEPPER’S CASE IT WAS CONSISTENT. HE HAD RETURNED TO LONDON BEFORE ME AND WORKED HER OVER, COMPLETE WITH DISCLOSURES OF LAURA. HE HAD TOLD HER THAT THIS NEW ASSIGNMENT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENT OF MY LIFE AND SPELLED OUT THE MONEY. IF SHE WAS TO SAVE ME FROM FUTURE LAURA ALBAS I SHOULD NOT GO TO LOS ANGELES ALONE. WHAT HE MEANT, OF COURSE, WAS TO HAVE A BUILT-IN ALLY TO ALWAYS BE READY TO SIT ON MY HEAD IN CASE I GOT OUT OF LINE.

SO, SAMANTHA WAS WILLING TO FORGIVE ME AND MAKE THE SACRIFICE TO COME AND LIVE WITH ME IN A BEVERLY HILLS MANSION. SHE ROUNDED OUT HER ESSAY WITH A DISSERTATION ABOUT HER POOR HEALTH, HOW HARD SHE WORKED, HOW FRUGAL SHE WAS, AND FINALLY, HOW SHE HAD ALWAYS STOOD BY ME AND ENCOURAGED MY WORK.

IT WOULD DO ME NO GOOD TO GO INTO A RAGE. I’VE DONE THAT. I LOOKED AT HER AND REALIZED THAT IT WOULD NEVER CHANGE. SAMANTHA WAS AS SHALLOW AS HER HORSES, AND I NOW ADMITTED THAT I DID NOT BECOME A WRITER BECAUSE OF HER, AND I HAD REMAINED A WRITER DESPITE HER.

“I WANT A DIVORCE,” I SAID.

AT FIRST SAMANTHA TRIED TO SOOTHE ME OUT OF IT. I HAD A LONG FLIGHT, I WAS TIRED, ETC., ETC. I PRESSED THE ISSUE. THEN SHE BROUGHT OUT THE FEAR TACTICS. I WOULD BE ALL ALONE. THE CHILDREN WOULD TURN AGAINST ME. MY GUILT WOULD OVERWHELM ME.

WHEN SHE REALIZED I WASN’T GOING TO BUDGE SHE BECAME DESPERATE.

“I’m drowning, Samantha. If I continue on this way of life, I’m done. I have chosen, madam, the alternative of going down fighting.”

AT THIS POINT SAMANTHA, WHO NEVER WANTED ANYTHING, THREATENED TO STRIP ME OF EVERY SHILLING.

“I’m going to make it very easy for you,” I said. “You can have everything, including the rights to
The Place
, which, I suspect was really inspired by you. I leave here without a nickel. It’s yours ... all of it ... everything.”

THEN I HAD TO TELL BEN AND VANESSA WHAT HAD HAPPENED. I TOLD THEM THAT I WOULD START TRAVELING SOON IN EASTERN EUROPE AND IF ALL WENT WELL I’D BE IN ISRAEL FOR THE FOLLOWING SUMMER AND THAT THEY SHOULD COME.

A STRANGE THING HAPPENED. THEY INSISTED ON COMING TO LONDON WITH ME AND SEEING ME OFF.

WHEN I LEFT LINSTEAD HALL, IT WAS SAMANTHA WHO WAS ALONE.

17

T
HE ODYSSEY OF
A
BRAHAM
Cady began in the Soviet Union, where he was given a canned tour of model factories, new housing, the ballet, museums, children’s pioneer homes, and dialectic acrobatics at the writer’s union.

In the subways, before loud blaring radios, in the parks, there were clandestine meetings with Jews.

His request to visit Prodno was lost in a bureaucratic maze. He traveled to Kiev to the infamous pits of Babi-Yar, where thirty-five thousand Jews were rounded up and murdered to a chorus of cheering Ukrainians. The large, persecuted Jewish minority of Kiev was more willing to speak to Cady.

His visit was abruptly halted and he was asked to leave Russia.

Starting from Paris with a new passport he traveled to Warsaw, which was intent on selling the point of view that the Poles were blameless in the genocide of the Jews and there now existed under communism a new and liberal attitude.

Abraham made the sorrowful pilgrimage to the Jadwiga Concentration Camp, the place of the murder of nearly all of the Cadyzynski family. It was intact, a national shrine. And the visit was to set off years of nightmares of the gas chamber and crematorium where he viewed it from the viewpoint of the SS murderers as well as the murdered Jews.

He went through the medical barracks where the maniacal experiments in surgery were carried out.

Again, he was talking to too many people and too many were willing to talk to him. He was picked up at the Bristol Hotel in Warsaw in the middle of a meal, detained for three days at the secret police headquarters as a Zionist spy, then ejected from Poland.

It was the same in East Berlin where the prevailing propaganda was that the Eastern Germans had redeemed themselves by turning to communism while the Western Germans remained the true Nazis. On his third trip into East Berlin he was warned not to return.

Next, Abraham Cady took the path of the surviving refugees of the Second World War from Eastern Europe to the main staging center in Vienna. From Vienna to the camps in Italy and France along the sea where the illegal immigration agents purchased leaky, ancient, unfit boats and tried to cross the Mediterranean into Palestine against the British blockade.

He wandered the fabled Island of Cyprus like the resurrected Lazarus had wandered it, for it was here that the British established mass detention camps filled with those refugees turned away from Palestine.

He went to Germany and interviewed dozens of former Nazis, none of whom knew the words to the “Horst Wessel” song, their marching anthem in the Hitler era. Nor did anyone living near Dachau detect any strange smells.

Over the streets of Munich and Frankfurt and Berlin he re-created the “Night of Crystal,” the dreaded mass assault on German Jewry by the Brown Shirts.

At the end of seven months, Abraham Cady arrived in Israel for a reunion with the few remaining relatives and then, twenty thousand miles of travel within that tiny state. The interviews ran over a thousand backed by three thousand reference photographs. Hundreds of hours were logged in the archives of death. He compiled a mountain of hooks and documents and he read until his eye nearly collapsed.

And his debt to David Shawcross mounted.

Vanessa and Ben arrived during the first summer. Abe welcomed it because he was wearying of a rather wild Hungarian mistress who stormed out at the infringement of her territory.

At the end of the summer, they announced candidly they were not returning to England.

“Why? What will your mother say?”

“Mom is a bit tired from her devoted service as a mother, she won’t mind.” Vanessa said.

“Cut it, Vinny,” Ben said. The reason we want to stay is that we’ve found what you’re hoping other people will find through your writing.”

It was pretty hard to argue even though Abe knew his son intended to train to fly for the Israeli Air Force. But the unsaid reason, and he felt it keenly, was that the children didn’t want him alone during the writing of the book. All the research had been gathered and consumed and one could feel the tension mount as the actual writing was to begin.

For the next sixteen months Abraham Cady wrote and rewrote and rewrote some two million words.

David Shawcross

77 Cumberland Terrace

London NW 8

December 15, 1964

Dear Uncle David:

I have some disturbing news, but fortunately, everything is going to turn out well. We found my father on the beach a week ago, collapsed from exhaustion. He is resting in a hospital in Tel Aviv for what is described as a minor heart seizure. All told, we are quite fortunate for this served as a warning.

During the past three months Dad has been writing himself into a frenzy, almost totally detached from the world. He is obsessed with this book and would only quit when his fingers fell off the keys and his mind ceased to function. Often as not he fell asleep over the typewriter.

This has been an experience we shan’t forget. Each day, at sunset, we would sojourn to the outside patio and Vanessa would read the day’s work, aloud. Dad would listen without interruption, jotting down notes for changes. In a small measure we were able to feel some of the emotional upheaval he was undergoing.

The manuscript is ready except for the last three chapters, which Dad wants to rewrite. I’m sending it, save those three chapters, under separate cover.

My Hebrew is coming along fine. I hope it will be sufficient to begin flight training soon. Vanessa has graduated from the English-speaking gymnasium and may be called into the Army for a year’s national service. Technically, she doesn’t have to serve, but I don’t believe anything will keep her out.

Please don’t worry about Dad. He’s under good care.

Our affection to Aunt Lorraine.

Ben Cady

NIGHT LETTER

ABRAHAM CADY

KFAR SCHMARYAHU BET

ISRAEL

JANUARY 15, 1965

I HAVE READ YOUR MANUSCRIPT STOP I BELIEVE THAT TOO HAVE ACHIEVED WHAT EVERT WRITER ASPIRES TO AND FEW REALIZE STOP YOU HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK THAT WILL LIVE, NOT ONLY BEYOND YOUR MORTAL TIME ON EARTH, BUT FOR ALL TIMES. YOUR DEVOTED FRIEND, DAVID SHAWCROSS.