Timebends (10 page)

Through the decades I have watched these dancing men cross my memory, each time resolving to find out what their ceremony was all about and forgetting to follow through, until recently, in writing this, I finally had to decide whether it was real at all or a dream. A rabbi friend, hearing the scene described, laughingly apologized, explaining that he was a Reform rabbi and that this sounded like a real old-time Orthodox service. But what time of the year was it? he asked. I searched for clues in the clothes I was wearing but could not recall. Then I remembered the open door to the fire escape through which the tobacco juice had streamed, which meant that it had to have been either spring or fall, because in summer we'd have been away in Far Rockaway. My friend now decided it had been fall and the occasion Simchat Torah, one of the three great festivals—the last day of Succoth, “The Rejoicing in the Law,” that is, in the Lord's gift of the Torah to the people. On Succoth the congregation dances with joy, and indeed it is the only occasion when all the Torah scrolls are removed from the Ark and carried around the synagogue to be kissed. The only baffling part was the instruction to keep my eyes covered, something the rabbi had never heard of before. As integral as this has always been to my memory of the scene, my friend's mystification made me wonder if I had really been forbidden to look or whether something so frightened me—and it certainly was frightening and thrilling and wonderful all at once—that I only dared recall it as though I had glimpsed it for an instant. For sure, I had witnessed something there so holy as to be unholy, forbidden to look at. But then again, maybe Great-grandfather was simply a kidder and was pulling my leg when he warned, “Don't look now,” and I was so awed by him as to take him literally. In any case, he must have been the only old, old man who loved me so and whom therefore I cannot think of, sixty-five years later, without warmth flowing into me.

His death, while not quite exemplary, has always thrown a certain poetic light on his nature. In his late eighties, believing he was close to his end, he one morning summoned his little wife to his bedside and told her to bring the young rabbi. And indeed he looked to her as he had never looked in their seventy years together. As soon as she could, she brought the rabbi, apparently a new one to the 114th Street synagogue, who sat with the old man and accompanied him in prayers until he fell asleep, whereupon the rabbi left. Hours passed while my distraught great-grandmother summoned her children to the Harlem apartment two stories up in a brownstone. The old man slept and slept. The
doctor who was brought in examined him without waking him and could only confirm what everybody knew, that like everybody else, but sooner than most, he was on his way to Abraham's bosom. The doctor left, and so did the children, who all had their lives to attend to. As the sun was setting, the old man awoke. His wife asked him how he felt, and he lay there trying to understand, apparently, why his head seemed lower than it had before. He slowly turned on his side, massive fellow that he still was, felt under his pillow and felt again, sat up and lifted the pillow and the bedclothes, and finally faced his uncomprehending wife, asking, “Who took them?”

Following custom in those roughriding years, Great-grandfather kept much of his assets in the form of diamonds, which took less space than cash and were easier to hide. He was apparently in that large minority who did not consider any financial institution a hundred percent honest or safe, along with W. C. Fields, another turn-of-the-century man who made no bones about his cold-eyed view in many a quip and script motif, as well as in his near paranoid distribution of his own money in an enormous number of banks across the country, against the inevitable day when some of them would abscond or plead a fake bankruptcy. In point of fact, just at the time Great-grandpa was reaching under his pillow for his life's savings, colorful or absurd as it may seem, Richard Whitney, head of the New York Stock Exchange and widely esteemed leader of the financial community, was quietly stealing enough to earn him a sentence in Sing Sing—he would not lack for colleagues there—once the Great Crash had confirmed the suspicions of my greatgrandfather and Fields and exploded the illusions of the trusting majority.

Ill as he was, Great-grandpa definitely remembered stashing his whole little fortune under his pillow and now demanded to know who had been to visit him. His trembling wife reeled off the list, plus, of course, the new rabbi. Commanding her, despite her protests, to help him dress, he took his oak walking stick and, refusing her touch on his elbow, plodded up Madison Avenue from 112th to 114th and into the synagogue, where he found the rabbi seated at a table writing. He said to the rabbi that he would like to have his jewelry back. The rabbi looked up and with a blank expression repeated, “Your jewelry?” With which the old man raised his stick and brought it down on the rabbi's neck before the poor man could dodge out of the way. Bedlam. But new life had sprung into the old man's sinews as he pursued the rabbi around the room with people trying to grab his flailing rod of righteousness. At last the rabbi
faced him, both of them gasping for breath, and with hands raised he backed to the coat draped over his chair, reached into a pocket, and produced a knotted linen cloth. The old man unknotted it with his bent fingers and after a glancing count stuffed it into his own coat and walked out. He got home but barely made it back upstairs through the narrow brown-painted hallway and into his bed. The news had flown, and my mother and her father and a whole troop of heirs quickly assembled and watched as from his pillow he distributed his life among them, then sighed and closed his eyes, never to wake again.

Thirty years later, on a cold spring day in 1952, I was the only visitor in the Historical Society “Witch Museum,” the exhaustive collection of papers on witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, at the time an institution known to few outside scholarly ranks but far more widely frequented when my play
The Crucible
had registered in the public mind. My eye had been caught by some framed etchings and woodcuts made in 1692 during the lethal court proceedings of Salem's tragedy. The pictures showed the goings-on in Salem so the people in Boston and other remote locations might have some firsthand idea of how fantastically people were behaving under the prickings and seducing tricks of witches. Portrayed were the afflicted innocent girls pointing in terror at some farmer's wife who was secretly persecuting them and yet stood in proud contempt of their Christian accusations. Nearby, in front of an enormous window indicating a church or courthouse, loomed a judge and some fifteen subordinate officials and Christian ministers dressed in floor-length robes, with long prophetic beards, looking wildly outraged at the incredible Devil-driven adamancy of the accused. The shafted light on the scene sharply contrasted with the sinister shadowed areas.

I was researching
The Crucible
then, and in this handful of pictures I suddenly felt a familiar inner connection with witchcraft and the Puritan cult, its illusions, its stupidities, and its sublimity too, something more mysteriously personal than even a devotion to civil liberty and justice, reaching back much further into my life. I had all but committed myself to writing the play, but only at this moment did I realize that I felt strangely at home with these New Englanders, moved in the darkest part of my mind by some instinct that they were putative ur-Hebrews, with the same fierce idealism, devotion to God, tendency to legalistic reductiveness, the same longings for the pure and intellectually elegant argument. And God was driving them as crazy as He did the Jews trying to maintain
their uniquely stainless vessel of faith in Him. And now, in these pictures, they also had the beards and, oddly, a building and lighting suggestive of the somber synagogue on 114th Street, where light—and I had done a lot of looking up there—seemed to vanish into dim paradisaical indefinition before the eye reached the man-made ceiling, so that all the humans moved as though suspended in a luminescence not quite of this world, lacking a hardness of outline—an impression derived, I suppose, from my having first seen that incantatory dancing through the fuzziness of my own eyelashes. More than once in the future, on crossing paths with some Ancient of Days, some very old man with a child's spirit, I would sense an unnameable weight upon our relationship, the weight of repetition of an archaic reappearance. Perhaps one of these is Gregory Solomon in
The Price,
another, the silent Old Jew in
Incident at Vichy.

Large families inevitably mean a constantly renewed supply of deaths that at some point set up a resonance, a certain rhythm of trips to cemeteries, of ingatherings in living rooms to finish off the coffee and cake and to say one more goodbye to a rarely encountered aunt or uncle from the Bronx or Cleveland who thereupon promptly walks out of one's life forever. Few occasions are as joyous to small children as funerals, almost better than the big wedding blowouts that take place at night when it's hard to stay awake. A small boy will never be harshly criticized at a funeral; he is more treasured as death comes close and all his wickedness vanishes before the inescapable fact that, thank God, he is healthy.

In truth, a small boy can make use of deaths to discipline his more uncontrollable outbreaks if he wishes to. Among the infractions that led Miss Fisher to summon my mother to school were the fits of giggling that came over me at the most inappropriate times, as when half a dozen of the black boys in our class, missing from their seats one beautiful spring day, attracted our mass attention by waving to us from a rooftop across 112th Street. At the same time, Miss Daniels, a teacher of sixty or more, was reading from
Julius Caesar,
of which not one word or syllable was comprehensible to any of her pupils. Just as she was being quite carried away, she sensed a rush of suppressed energy flowing through the children. Looking up and seeing the miscreants across the street, she indignantly instructed us all not so much as to glance at them but to give our entire attention to her and to Shakespeare. Like everyone
else, I tried, perhaps even a little harder than the others because my mother and Kermit were so depending on me to behave. Besides, by now I had a new baby sister, a whole new responsibility, another psychic mouth to feed.

Probably because the six escaped inmates were our worst inciters, the class was able to obey Miss Daniels and even to take her side, more or less, against these guys who were snubbing her good efforts to educate them. I fixed her in my gaze, resolved not for an instant to look out the window, and I was doing wonderfully when the vicious rippling began in my belly and I knew I was in for one of my worst fits, the kind where your mouth begins reaching back to swallow your ears. Desperately clenching my jaws and gripping the desk, I was suddenly visited by thoughts of Uncle Hymie, who was dead. Who had died. Who was actually under the ground covered with dirt and being rained on. Handsome Uncle Hymie, and my mother, my poor mother having to weep so hard for him. My stomach flattened out, the fit passed me by, and from that time on I could control my giggling by forcing myself to think of my handsome dead uncle. There were occasions when I was driven not only to think of Hymie but to hold him in my arms as he was dying, and a few times I even got into his coffin with him and patted his cheek. He was always a reliable resource.

And so the years as they passed were marked off by rhythmical repetitions—the funerals, the weddings and bar mitzvahs, the cycles of games that, for some reason no one understood, could be played only in their proper seasons. Shooting checkers into chalked-off squares on the sidewalk was strictly for spring, and immies rolling along the curb only happened in fall. There were always one or two boys who, unlike my brother or me, saved their last year's checkers and immies and sold them to the other kids when the season rolled around. Joe Rubin was one of these hateful bankers and naturally became an important lawyer on Wall Street, and another was my best friend, Sid Franks, whose father actually was a banker; he became a New York cop. Sid was already capable of building crystal radio sets that could bring in broadcasts, and on rainy afternoons, rather than running up and down the hallways of the building like a crazy person, he would be trying to unravel math texts he had found in the library. He was the first person I met who talked concretely about the future as a kind of stairway, each step to be mounted in its turn—certain scientific courses to be followed by others, certain schools to be applied to, fields of science to consider as one's specialty.

Sid's father, president of a downtown bank, emerged each morning from the apartment house and strode confidently to a line of chauffeur-driven cars waiting at the curb for him and the other big men, whose daily departure was also rhythmical. Mr. Franks smoked a pipe with half a cigar sticking up out of it and wore a fur coat. He had a Locomobile, the most beautiful of all the cars, an open beige tourer with gorgeous wire wheels and two beige canvas-covered spare tires mounted in its front fender wells. It was so aristocratic a car that it did not deign to put its name on the hubs or radiator. Automobiles then, the more pretentious of them, were close to being handmade objects; their owners wanted them to look different from those of the neighbors. We could hang out our sixth-floor window, Sid and I, and call out the names of every car passing on 110th, recognizing them from above, so distinctive were they; at the time there was a far longer list of makes than there would be after 1929. To see a chauffeur-driven Minerva going by, or a Hispano-Suiza or even one of the greater Packards or Pierce-Arrows, the Marmon, Franklin, Stearns-Knight, some of them with the chauffeur's compartment exposed roofless to the sky, was to feel the electric shock of real power. These were rolling sculptures, steel totems polished like lenses to throw back the light of the stars, and there was no question that the social power they represented could ever weaken or pass from the earth, for they spoke their own rumbling, deep-throated reassurance that within their glinting panes of glass sat the very rich who were so rich their chauffeurs were rich. The wealthy had not yet been frightened, as they would be after the Crash, into feeling guilty.