I STOOD IN THE LOBBY OUTSIDE the door of the studio watching for him, not knowing what I would say if he showed up. There was really nothing you could say to change things now. It was too late for words. Somehow, as I stood there being jostled by the people crowding in, I knew that whatever was going to happen was out of my hands, beyond my control. I had done everything I could; I was exhausted; and besides, it no longer mattered to me, one way or the other.
I went inside and watched them scrambling for seats, mixing their little yelps of eagerness with the discordant sounds of the orchestra warming up in the pit. The studio had been built to accommodate a thousand, but a hundred thousand seats wouldn’t have been enough to take care of all who had wanted to be here tonight to see Sammy Hogarth make television history.
I looked at the faces—old ones, young ones, applecheeks from the sticks, know-it-alls from midtown Manhattan—all of them wearing the same look of anticipatory enjoyment. They had come here with the laughs already compressed inside of them, knowing with a confidence born of years of pleasurable experience that Sammy would not fail to set off the explosions.
I thought of the countless millions just like them in millions of living rooms all over the land, pulling the chairs up closer, making the last minute adjustment of the knob, watching the flickering screen of the magic box with that same expression, that same inward smile of impending delight as they too got ready to be titillated into joyful release.
This was it, then. This was what it was all for.
The waiting laughter of a nation.
For this, to detonate this rollicking explosion, to wrap up and deliver vast and waiting audiences such as this one, men lied, cheated, stole, sweated and fought over foolish words in dank-smelling, smoke-filled rooms, grew old before their time, and finally destroyed themselves and everyone around them.
The laughter of a nation, born of misery and despair.
I looked at the faces and knew what they were waiting for. I knew what they would get, and out of what it had come. I, more than anyone, I knew, and remembered. And remembering, I was back in Reilly’s Gym again. Only yesterday …
My God, it couldn’t have been only yesterday!
Feeling again the sudden terror … seeing the maniacal look … reeling back from the jarring blow … the ponderous hulk moving implacably forward. …
“Sammy, wait!”
He belted me with another savage right. “This is for Gleason,” he sneered, closing in “And this is for Berle.” I tasted the leather again. “For Caesar … and Benny … and Hope …” Short ones to the ribs.
“Sammy,” I panted. “For Chrissakes, Sammy …”
His face was contorted. He didn’t hear me. The left was cocked. I saw it coming. “For Phil Silvers …”
“Wait a minute!” I fell on him and tied him up in a sweaty clinch. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You going crazy?”
“Good, Al, hey kiddo?” His laugh was a crazy sound in my ear. “Hot as a two-dollar pistol reduced to a dollar-ninety-eight. Feel the power in that right? Come on …”
He struggled to break out of my arms. I held onto him, gasping for breath, aware that everyone in the gym was suddenly watching us, bewildered like I was.
“Enough,” I gasped.
He burst from my grip, stepped back. I saw the wicked grin on his face. “Get ‘em up, baby.” He moved at me again, purring, “Get ‘em up before I kill ya.”
“Look, Sammy, it’s late. They’re waiting for us at the office. It’s—”
“And this one—” he let go with the looping left—“is—”
I sidestepped. “For Sammy Hogarth!” I cried, and caught him with everything I had, flush on the button. He shuddered to a dead stop like a poled ox and his jaw hung with surprise. “You wanna play, I can play.” My voice was hoarse.
Anger flared up in his startled eyes, and for an instant the swift, darting mind weighed everything. Then slowly the face became a grinning mask, and he rumpled my hair with an open glove. “Scared the hell outta ya, didn’t I?” he chuckled. He glanced around at the other guys, who had halted their exercises to watch the great man in action. “Who has to worry about sponsors and ratings?” he called out to them. “I could go into Sugar Ray’s racket like that.” He shrugged. “Easy as committing suicide. They say to me: ‘Sammy, you couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag.’ So what? How many times does a man have to fight his way out of a paper bag? Unless it’s my brother Lester, who happens to be a salami sandwich.”
They all laughed—not because what Sammy Hogarth had said was funny, but because it had been said by Sammy Hogarth. The conditioned reflex. It was what most comics had going for them when they were off stage. And if they were shrewd—which Sammy indubitably was—and kept their mouths shut most of the time, few people would ever find out how truly unfunny most funnymen were.
He slapped me across the buttocks. “Whaddaya say, Al, let’s get moving.”
I walked ahead of him, not looking at him, trying not to listen to him, the sweat stinging my eyes and the cut on my chin.
“I feel good,” he was saying to my back.
“That’s fine,” I muttered, yanking off the gloves.
“You hear me?” He followed me into the shower room. “I feel good.” He stepped out of his shorts. “The timing is right. Everything is right. A hundred percent. Sammy is in tune with Sammy. I can feel it. My arms. My legs. Up here.” He tapped his forehead. “Down here …”
I turned on the shower but it didn’t help much. He kept on talking.
“It’s gonna be all right tomorrow, Al. Nothing to worry about. Good script. Good timing. Good Sammy. Everything good. Even your sketches. You don’t mind my saying so, I was beginning to figure you were over the hill, no more toothpaste in the tube. But those sketches—they play. Sammy makes them play. If they don’t play for Sammy, they ain’t got it for nobody. Every thing’s gonna be all right, baby. We got the world by the short hairs. And you with the fouryards-a-week you were gonna take from Gleason. Didn’t I tell you stick to Sammy? Hitch your wagon like all the rest. I got a sore behind from all the wagons hitched to me. You and Connie and Lester and Jake and Sonny and Phil and the whole goddam network—three goddam networks, what’m I saying?—all taking the short and easy ride with Sammy. Sometimes I wonder. Suppose there ain’t no Sammy. Suppose I slip on this here piece of soap and break my neck. Where the hell is everybody? What about you? Four lousy yards with Gleasons plus ulcers. I just hope you appreciate everything. From the way you hit me there, sweetheart, I wonder if you appreciate everything. Hey, kiddo?”
I didn’t answer.
“Do, you, Al?”
I turned the water up harder.
He came over suddenly and shut it off.
“I said do you?”
I stared at him, wondering if anything he had ever done on a nightclub floor or in front of the television cameras had ever been as comical as the sight of him standing there naked, without the two-hundreddollar suit and the Nat Lewis shirt and the Sulka tie to conceal the protruding belly and the fish-white skin. But all I could see was the face that went with it, thick-lipped and sensual and leathered with the years of greasepaint and the Florida winters, and I didn’t laugh. “Of course I do, Sammy” I said.
His mouth twitched. “All right then.”
I turned the water back on and began to soap myself rubbing too hard, as though I could get beneath the skin, beneath the surface sweat and dirt to other things. Tomorrow night, Sammy Hogarth would be making his bid to become the new Goliath of the television world. He would be starring in the tryout of the first combined-networks, comedy-in-color series in the history of the medium. And wrapped up in my hip pocket if the show went over would be the hundred-grand-a-year I had dreamed of, and struggled for, and lost sleep over, ever since I had turned my back on the decent, normal life to become a writer of jokes. Yet here I was, still finding it necessary to use a piece of soap as though it had magical properties.
You can’t have your cake of soap and eat it, Al.
Some day, when I saw the right opening, I’d use that as an ad lib and it would kill them. Right now, it was just another line with half a meaning. Like my whole life.
I wasn’t merely Sammy’s head writer. It wasn’t that simple. I was also vice-president in charge of keeping the public from finding out what he was really like. Their acceptance of his pattern of humor was predicated entirely on their belief that he was a kind and jolly clown, a good-natured buffoon who was forever trying to pass himself off as a conniving, devious villain given to insulting his betters. As long as you were sure he was only kidding, you could laugh. One wrong move on his part, one betrayal of the truth that his humor of insult had a deep and savage drive behind it, and his charm would vanish in a twinkling, the priceless and hard-won illusion would be shattered beyond repair.
That’s where I came in.
I was keeper of the keys to the closets that had all the skeletons; guardian of the maps that told where the bodies were buried. I knew the location of each headstone, the meaning of every epitaph that Sammy Hogarth had written into the graveyard of Broadway. I knew about Wendell James, who had been plagiarized and bought off; the violence that had ended the affair with Valma Stevens; the Red-smear job on little Freddie Kintner, who had accidentally found out how Sammy doctored the recordings of his radio shows so that ad agency men, checking audience-reaction in post mortem sessions, would hear laughs where there had been only bored silence. Oh, I knew things about Sammy Hogarth that even he didn’t know. And worst of all, most sickening of all, was the knowledge that the two sketches I had handed in—the foundation upon which tomorrow night’s hopes had been built—were stolen property.
Unknown to Sammy—stolen by me.
A comedy writer often enters the craft from the left field of personal unhappiness. Unable to face the bitter realities of his own existence, he makes of all life a joke. This becomes his stock in trade, and for a while he is able to turn it into money and whatever happiness money can purchase. But before long, there catches up with him an awareness that he has not appreciably affected the original, still-bitter realities. It is then that he finds himself running out of new jokes. So he begins to rewrite his old ones. And when he runs out of these, as eventually he must, he commences to rewrite the jokes of others, telling himself the old canard of show business that there is really nothing new under the sun. Finally, he loses even the ability to rewrite these jokes of others. He simply appropriates them, and passes them on as his own.
Somewhere in Korea, one cross among thousands, poor Davey Farber lay sleeping. Once, he had laughed with me and made others laugh. That was when we had both been much younger. Davey would never grow older than twenty-six. But I would. I had. And with the years had come the slow death at the typewriter that had led, finally, to go into the bottom drawer of my desk and come up with some of the sketches he had turned out in Boston one hectic weekend at the Ritz, where he had been summoned there to try to breathe life into a dying revue only to see it fold after two performances. Going into the army, he had left with me, partly for safekeeping, mostly out of sentiment, the last remaining copies of some of his favorite scripts. And tomorrow night, Sammy Hogarth would be using two of these old and long-forgotten skits, thinking I had written them, thinking they were now his.
“Enough. C’mon,” he was calling.
I hurried out of the locker-room after him, struggling into my coat. Soap and water hadn’t done a bit of good. No damned good at all.
II
Outside, the late afternoon air was sharp with the tang of approaching winter. I whistled for a cab. But Sammy said, “Let’s walk.”
I threw him a glance. “It’s after five.”
“I don’t care if it’s after fifty. I said, ‘Let’s walk.’ I need the oxygen. I don’t feel so good. I’m all tensed up.”
“But I thought you said before—”
“After all these years don’t you know when Sammy is whistling in the cemetery?” We walked east on Forty-eighth, Sammy taking the big-striding steps and me scurrying to keep up with him. He was inhaling noisily, trying to suck the confidence into his body through his lungs. “Okay, the script is good, rehearsals went great. But I’m scared. It’s too big, too important. It means too much to me. Jesus, Al, just think—to be able to look Gleason and Silvers and those other fakirs in the face and see the jealousy … to be able to spit.” He expectorated into the street. “If only I could stop caring. If only I could say: ‘So what, Sammy, it’s only another show.’ But it’s more. It’s everything. It’s—”
“It’s only another show, Sammy.”
He looked at me. “Y’mean it, Al?”
“Sure,” I lied. “It’s only another show.”
We strode in silence for a while. The sidewalks were jammed. Everybody was knocking off, going home. But not us. We never stopped working. Not even when we closed Lindy’s at four in the morning and climbed into bed with the little red capsule. In show business, you can’t do too much sleeping if you want to wind up with the longest obituary in Variety.
“Al?” We were nearing the office. “Do we have to go up now?”
“You told the fellows to be there,” I said. “All day long at the studio, and now they’ve got to be there. The least you can do is show up. Besides, we’ve got to cut twelve minutes … unless you want us to do it without you.”
“In the pig’s ass.”
“All right then. If you don’t do it now, when are you going to do it?”
“Tomorrow?” he ventured.
“The dress is tonight.”
Suddenly he began to pound his stomach.
I’m getting sick!” he groaned. “My God, Al, suppose I get sick? Suppose—” He belched loudly.
“That does it,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Of course. You’re all better now.”
I wondered if there was any other nursemaid in New York who wore a camel’s hair coat.
We went through the lobby and pushed our way into the crowded elevator. Some jerk called out, “Attaboy, Sammy. Knock ’em dead tomorrow.”
I turned and withered the guy with a look.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Sammy snapped his fingers at the elevator man. “Get this goddam thing off the ground.”
We didn’t move.
He grabbed my arm. “We’ll walk.”
He headed for the stairs and started up two at a time. I panted after him, and didn’t catch him until the fourth floor. There was nothing wrong with Sammy, at least not with that enormous, supercharged body. He was merely doing all his failing in fantasy today, so that he wouldn’t be doing it in reality tomorrow.
I could hear the trouble in the office even before we got to the end of the hall. The rest of it I could see on Connie’s lovely face as we walked in. The door to the inner sanctum was shut, but the loud voices came through just the same.
“What’s going on here?” Sammy ripped off his coat.
Connie brushed a wisp of red hair from her eyes but didn’t look up from the desk. “Your brother,” she said letting the tone of her voice say the rest.
Sammy turned to me, a look of panic on his face. “Al, am I ever … is there ever going to be a day? For Christ sake, peace I want! Now of all times can I have a little peace around of mind? Will somebody please make it understood around here that I cannot go on without … I must not be distracted and upset and worried … constantly … every day … by my own brother in the bargain!”
“Will you relax, Sammy? You’re like a bride on her wedding night.”
“That’s right,” he cried, “and somebody’s always waiting in the next room to—”
“Come on.”
I opened the door and we went into the noise and it stopped as though a director had shouted “Cut!”
“All right now. A pack of wild animals,” Sammy shouted. “Anyone down the hall thinks I’m running a menagerie here. What the hell is it?” He whirled on his brother, who stood at the window with ashen face and lips working nervously. “Lester, I’m warning you.” Sammy’s voice was low. “I’m too much on edge. I’m all wound up. There is so much I can take and no more. Now what is it?” He slumped into the chair behind his desk.
Lester Hogarth turned and stared for a moment at the three writers who sat lined up along the wall looking down at their laps like naughty children suppressing giggles. He blinked and tugged at his bow tie. He cleared his throat and tried to check the quiver of his lips. He fussed with his horn-rimmed glasses.
“I would like to speak to you alone, Sammy,” he said in a precise, shaky voice.
Jake Pitz and Sonny Carmichael and Phil Kane started to get up but Sammy waved an unlit cigar at them. “Siddown. Stay right where you are.” He glanced up at his brother’s white face. “Anything you want to say, say it in front of Al and Jake and Phil and Sonny. We’re a team. We have no secrets.” He waited.
Lester blinked, glancing from one to the other of us with his sad, tired eyes. “Forget it, Sammy,” he said in a quiet voice. “It wasn’t important. It’s never important.” He started for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
He kept on walking, and shut the door behind him.
Sammy stared after him, his face twitching. Then he turned to the writers. “All right, lemme hear it.”
Jake Pitz was spokesman for the team. Sonny and Phil did most of the writing. Jake, naturally, got more money. “He saw the monologue on the desk,” he explained, shrugging. “He started raving like a maniac. He won’t stand for it, he says. I tell him I’m only a hired hand. I have no personal interest in making him unhappy. If Sammy Hogarth wants to make with the jokes about his brother, that’s Sammy’s business. If Lester Hogarth doesn’t like it, that’s his business. If he wants to act like a jerk and take it so seriously, I don’t want to hear about it. Personally, if you ask me, Sammy, I think he’s going off his rocker.”
“Nobody asked you,” Sammy snapped. “Is that all that happened?”
“Well not exactly.” Pitz threw a glance at the little guy with the angelic face.
Sammy nailed Sonny Carmichael with a pointing finger. “I thought I told you … how many times do I have to tell you to lay off him? You’re aggravating something that’s enough aggravation already. What did you say to him this time?”
“Aw, it was nothing, Sammy.” Carmichael flushed and cast his baby-blue eyes downward.
“I know it was nothing. If it was something, you wouldn’t of thought of it. Lemme hear the nothing.”
“Aw, I just asked him if he was listed on your income tax return. He gave me the stupid look, so I said. “I was just wondering—does Sammy have you down as a dependent, or does he list you under contributions to charity?”
Sammy frowned. “Is that all?”
“Nothing much else.” Sonny raised his eyes, gaining heart. “Except I told him, ‘Lester, I hear you’re gettin’ a raise.’ He said: “Is that right?” I said ‘Sure. With Sammy on three networks instead of one, you’ll be getting the same dough as now, even though you’ll be three times as useless. Isn’t that a raise?’”
The frown held for a moment, struggling to stay there and then it fell apart suddenly, and Sammy was shaking with laughter, and, as though on signal, the writers began to laugh along with him. “I don’t know what I’m laughing at, it’s such a tired joke,” he wheezed. “Look at Al. He don’t think it’s so funny either, do you, sweetheart?”
I turned away. “I’m going downstairs for some coffee. You want anything?”
They were too busy giggling to answer.
On the way out, I stopped at Connie’s desk and kissed her hair. She closed her eyes. “I’ll be downstairs,” I said.
She turned to see if the door was closed, then said urgently, “Call me, Al.”
“When?”
“Right away.”
I went out to the elevator assuring myself that this was going to be nothing at all. But my stomach told me I was telling myself lies. Downstairs in the drugstore, I pushed into a phone booth and dialed the office.
“Shoot,” I said.
“Can you hear me this way?” She was down to a whisper.
“Go ahead.”
“Well, while you were all over at the studio this afternoon, a woman called for Lester. I said he wasn’t in, and when I asked who was calling, she started to say she was merely returning his call, but she didn’t say to whom. Just as she was about to, she said, ‘Hold on a minute’ … you know, the way a secretary does when she has to ask the boss for instructions? And then she came back and said, ‘Never mind, we’ll call again,’ and quickly hung up.’”
“Okay, so what about it?”
“Darling, now don’t blame me if I’m wrong, but I could almost swear it was Ruth Stanton, Otis Elwell’s secretary. … Hello? … Al? …”
“Yes,” I said weakly, “I’m here.” Otis Elwell and his column had been out to get Sammy for years. The mere sound of Elwell’s name was adrenaline to every guardian cell in my body. He and Sammy’s brother could have had no reason to be in communication, no reason that would not be cause for alarm. “What else?” Suddenly it felt very warm in the booth.
“When Lester came in,” Connie said, “I told him that somebody’s secretary had returned his call but wouldn’t leave a name. He just blinked and went inside and shut the door, and I heard him starting to dial a number. But then he hung up and came out and said he’d be right back. I’m sure he went downstairs to use an outside phone.”
“You didn’t breathe a word of this to Sammy?”
“Certainly not.”
“That would be all he needs now.”
“Sweetie, what’s going on? Can you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s acting strangely. A little worse than usual. You know how he gets just before something big. But this time something’s really bothering him.”
“Is there anything I can—?”
“No. Nothing. I’ve got to hang up now.” I was beginning to perspire.
“Oh, I almost forgot one other thing. I hope you won’t be angry.”
“What now?” I mopped my neck with the handkerchief.
“Darling, you know that manila envelope you gave me last night to lock in your personal file drawer?” Her voice became faintly prayerful. “You didn’t by any chance take it from me again, did you?”
“No!” I shouted. “Why?”
“Oh, please, please don’t be angry, Al.”
“I’m not angry!”
“With all the confusion around here,” she pleaded, “I forgot to put it away, left it on my desk, and now I just can’t seem to find it. I’ve searched high and low, Al, but it’s gone … vanished … and I can’t imagine—”
“When did you first miss it?” I said quickly.
“When I came in this morning.”
“Was there anyone around?”
“Since last night? Just the cleaning woman. And when I got in this morning—Lester.”
Somewhere inside of me a nagging note of doom screamed to be heard. “The … the cleaning woman …” I swallowed hard, trying to get the words out, as though by getting them out I could convince myself that I believed them. “She probably threw it away. It’s all right.”
“Then it wasn’t anything important? Thank heaven. I was so—”
“Will you forget it!” I cried.
“You are angry.”
“I’m not angry!” I shouted. Sick, yes. Frightened, yes. But not angry.
“But you sound so … so awful.”
“I’m tired, that’s all. Worn out.”
“My poor angel. My lover.”
“Connie, not now.”
“Any time, any place. Oh, Al, when can I kiss away those circles under your eyes?”
“Honey, will you shut up?”
“I’m going to take care of you for the rest of my life. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to marry you next week, my tired darling. Do you want to hear some of the other reasons?”
“If I had you in this phone booth now, you know what I’d do to you?”
“God, I wish I were there with you.”
“So do I.”
“Oh, Al …”
“Be home tonight,” I said. “I want to know that you’re there, in case I can get away.”
“Make a call in a phone booth with me,” she sighed.
“A long, long call,” I said.
“I love you,” she said.
“You creature, you. I’ve got things to do. I’ve got worries to worry. I told you to stay out of my life until the show is over. One more day. One more night. Can’t you just—?”
I hung up on her.
Sometimes she frightened me. She acted as though love were something to be happy about, as though you did not have to worry about what Sammy would do when he found out you wanted to belong to someone other than him—as though you had nothing else to do with your life but be happy and not worry about Sammy and Lester and Otis Elwell and a missing envelope that could blow everything sky-high just when you were about in. I sat in the phone booth for a moment, feeling her throbbing inside of me and wanting badly to do some thing about it. Then the good feeling was drowned in a sudden wave of fear.
What had led me to hang on to Davey Farber’s original scripts after I had copied them? He was dead and gone. What kind of sentimental nonsense had made me feel that somehow he would still live, some part of him would still be here on earth, as long as those pieces of paper were not destroyed? They could ruin me now, like some avenging ghost.
I looked at my wristwatch, the one Connie had given me to show me that she was serious, even if I was afraid to be. It was getting late. No time to think about her now. First things had to come first.
III
I left the booth and walked past the soda fountain. He wasn’t there. I went to the rear, to the tables along the wall. I found him sitting at the last one, in the corner, staring morosely at a cup of stale coffee. I waited until he looked up.
“Mind if I sit, Lester?” Somehow, you never called him “Les.”
He examined me for a moment, as though searching for the clue— friend or foe? Then he looked down at the coffee again. “Why not?”
I slid into the chair facing him and lit a cigarette. I waited, but he didn’t say anything, just sat there idly stirring the muddy liquid. “Come on, kid, what’s it all about?”
His lips tightened.
“I don’t like to see things go on this way,” I said softly. “Isn’t there something I can do? Can’t I help you?”
He looked up at me. His face was drawn and haggard. Behind the glasses, his eyes were red and fretful, as though he might have been crying. “Help me? Sure, you can help me,” he said tonelessly. “You more than any one else. You have Sammy’s ear. You have control over the script.” He stared at me. “But why should you want to help me?”
I averted my eyes. “Why not give me a chance and see?” I said.
I could feel his eyes studying me carefully, doubtfully.
“All right then. Here it is, very simply: Sammy has got to … he must never again …” The words stuck in his throat. “You must tell Sammy not to use the monologue tomorrow night.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“You want to help me,” he cried. “Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then why impossible? I’m telling you he must never again mention my name in public, never in any way humiliate me or make a public spectacle of me.” His voice shook with emotion. “This must begin as of now, with tomorrow’s show. Not next week, or the week after. Right now. A new show. The chance for a new series. If he gets it, it’s got to be without the monologues about me. I’m sick and tired of being the butt and I’m telling you I’ve—”
“Listen to me for a minute …“
“I’ve asked him myself for the last time. I’ve scraped the floors with my knees begging him to lay off. He won’t listen. I’m just a stuffed shirt trying to ruin his routine. To Sammy, everything is judged according to whether or not it’s good for a laugh. His brother Lester. Who is stupid, and lazy, and parasitic, and a great big laugh to forty million people on a twenty-seven-inch screen. Well, it’s got to stop, Al, and it’s going to stop!”
“Are you through?”
“No, I’m not through,” he raged. “I’ll never be through until I finish this once and for all. I’ve put up with it long enough. He’s fed me to the public like dope and now they can’t get enough. His brother Lester—the lazy jerk, the All-American slob. Anything for a laugh. But how about me?” He tapped his chest. “What about what it’s done to me?”
“Hasn’t Sammy been good to you in return?” I said quickly.
“You can have it. You can have all he’s been good to me!”
“Then why don’t you quit? Why don’t you walk out on him? Why do you always come back for more?”
He looked at me for a moment in startled confusion. “Why don’t you leave him?” he blurted out.
“Never mind about me. We’re talking about you. Maybe you like all this a lot more than you think. A guy takes what you take and comes back for more, maybe he makes all the fuss so that nobody, including himself, will know how much he secretly enjoys the kicking around.”
His face grew red. “Thank you!” he shouted. “I’m an idiot too, is that it?”
“Look, what’re we arguing for? Sammy’s done a lot better for you than you could’ve done for yourself if you’d gone into law practice when you got out of school. A car, a beautiful apartment. Look at the clothes you wear, the money in the bank. A young guy just turned thirty making all kinds of dough, and complaining.” I threw up my hands. “I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”
“Oh yes you do.” His voice was low and intense. “You’re a lot of things from being around Sammy, stooging for him all these years—”
“Now wait a minute.”
“—but one thing you’re not is stupid, Al. You’ve got your eye on the main chance all right and you’re getting just what you’ve been after, but at least you’ve got enough sense to be eating your heart out over it.”
I crushed out my cigarette. “You mind your own—”
“You can’t stand the smell. You can’t stand the way Sammy treats you. You can’t stand what you have to do to stay up there with him.”
My hand shot across the table and grabbed his lapel. I yanked him toward me. “You mind your own goddam business,” I muttered fiercely, “or I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” His face was inches from mine. I saw the look in his eyes. I remembered, suddenly, what that look meant. I pushed him back, feeling the bitter taste of truth in my mouth.
He ran a hand nervously through his hair. “I’m sorry, Al.” His voice softened. “I didn’t mean …”
“Yah.” I turned away.
“I have nothing against you. I’m not looking to hurt you if I can help it. You’re the only decent one. The others take their cue from Sammy, but you …”
“You’ve treated me like a human being whenever you could.” He took off his glasses and pressed his fists to his weary eyes. “You’re the only one … the only one Julie … ever … liked. She used to say … Julie always said to me …” His voice broke. I looked up sharply. His hands were pressed tightly to his face. His mouth was a quivering blur. And I knew from the small sounds that came from behind the screen of his trembling hands that he was weeping softly.
“Oh Lord, what now?”
“Julie,” he choked.
“What about Julie?”
He blurted it out from behind his hands. “She’s … gone …” It came out like a sob. “Left me … Al … it’s … it’s over … and I can’t stand …”
“What do you mean over?” I was stunned.
His mouth moved, but nothing came out. He worked a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed his eyes. “What do you think I mean?” he cried wetly. His face looked as though it had been smacked with a damp rag. “She’s gone. We’re finished. Miami. For a divorce …”
“But I thought you two were so—”
“And why shouldn’t she?” He blew his nose, listening to the sound of his own heartbreak. “Can you blame her? She married a man, not a coast-to-coast joke, not a dummy who draws catcalls on the streets. I knew it was coming. For two years she pleaded with me to leave Sammy. You know how she hated him, hated what he was doing to me. She begged me to move to California, get with the legal department of one of the studios, anything to get away from Sammy, three thousand miles away. I didn’t listen, Al. I tried. But how can you get away from Sammy? My brother is my keeper. You talk about money and clothes and all the rest. I never wanted it, not the way you do. Sammy made me think I did. But all I ever wanted … all I want now …” He began to dissolve again. “Julie … to feel decent … my self-respect … to have Julie … all gone now … robbed of everything by that … that …”
“Take it easy, kid. When did it happen?”
“Last week.” He shook his head with pain. “After the date for the show was definitely set and she saw that I was sticking. I should’ve known what that would mean to her. The chance for a natural break, and I let it go by. I thought maybe Sammy was going to be different … a new series … give up the monologues …”
“Does he know about Julie?”
“No!” A wild look came into his eyes. “I don’t want him to know a thing about this! You hear me?” He seized my wrist in a fierce grip. “You won’t breathe a word …”
“Okay, okay.”
“He’d love it, to know that he was able to break us up. What immense pleasure that would give him.” I didn’t like the crazy sound of his voice. “He’s hated me, Al, for everything I ever had or knew that was my own, that showed I was different from him. Since the day I was born, since the day he realized his act wasn’t going to be solo any longer, he’s despised me—for the books I read, the college I went to and he didn’t, the things I know that he doesn’t …”
“Maybe it’s all in your mind,” I said.
But he couldn’t be turned off now. “Why do you think he lured me into his rotten little world with all that money? He needed me, he said. He needed a smart young lawyer around to check the fine print in his contracts, to run his corporation. But did he ever use me? Sure. To go down for the coffee and sandwiches; to get theater tickets for his women; to phone his bookies for him when he was too busy to dial the number himself; to be there to take his abuse whenever he found hating himself too unbearable. Sure he needed me, to have me where he could make certain that I’d never amount to anything in my own profession. Don’t let Lester practice law. Cripple him with luxuries. Make him as much like yourself as possible. Wipe the grammar off his tongue. Dirty him up a little bit. Who the hell does he think he is? And when he saw that it wasn’t that simple, when he saw that in spite of everything he did to me I always managed somehow to be myself, and not like Sammy Hogarth, then I became a real threat to him. That was why he started to tear me down before the world.” I tried to interrupt but he brushed right past me. “And don’t try to tell me he did it because he needed the laughs. He was doing all right long before he began the Brother-Lester routine, and he’ll do all right when he stops using it. And he is going to stop using it! He’s not going to head for a new series with my good name dragged in as part of it!”
“You’re making too much out of nothing at all. You’re upset so you—”
“Can’t you see it, Al? Can’t you understand?” Tears welled up in his eyes again. “Julie may see the show. I know she’ll see the show. She’s at the Eden Roc in Miami Beach. Everybody down there will be watching Sammy go for the big one tomorrow night. Much as she hates Sammy, she’ll be watching too. If she sees there’s no Lester monologue she’ll know what that means. A new start. I’m through with the past. She’ll come back to me on the next plane. I know she will. You can help me, Al. Just speak to Sammy. The show runs long. You’ve got to cut the script anyway …”
“I should be up there right now.”
“Five minutes. That’s all it runs. Five lousy minutes that could mean my life to me!”
“He’ll never—”
“I’m not like Sammy,” he pleaded. “Every night a different girl. You know how he is, Al.”
Who better than I?
“Julie’s the only one for me,” he cried. “There’s never been another and there never will be. I’m not built like Sammy. She means too much to me. She’s got to come back. You’ve got to help me!”
“Look, kid …” I tried to squirm away.
“Al …” He pinned me down with his desperate, searching gaze. “Don’t make me do something terrible. Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do.”
I stared at him, feeling the cold knot of fear in my stomach. This was the moment I had hoped would some how never come. “What do you mean?” I said in a sick voice.
Our eyes met. “You know very well what I mean,” he said quietly. “Don’t you think I know why you’re showing this interest in me? But that’s all right. I don’t care what your motives are … as long as you help me.”
“You’ve got …” I swallowed, but the lump wouldn’t go down. “You have got them then, haven’t you … the Davey Farber scripts?”
His mouth tightened in a thin, grim line, and he nodded slowly. “Purely by accident, Al, believe me. I opened the envelope thinking it was something else, and it wasn’t something else.”
“You going to give them back to me?”
He didn’t answer, just blinked.
“They belong to me, not you,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not me, not you, not Sammy,” he said, with a flat, deadly calm. “Davey Farber.”
My face was hot and crimson. “Look, I can explain.”
“I’m not interested, Al.”
“But Sammy doesn’t know!”
“Who cares?”
“You’re going to turn them over to Elwell. Is that what you’re going to do?”
He stared at me for a moment, seeing that I knew.
“Elwell has nothing yet,” he said, with frightening coolness. “I’m giving you until midnight tonight. You and Sammy.”
“To do what?” I cried.
“To call me at my apartment, to tell me that Sammy has killed the monologue, to let me feel there’s a chance that Julie will come back to me.” He started to get up from the table.
“But wait a minute.” I grabbed his wrist. “Suppose he won’t listen to me?”
“He’ll listen to you, Al. You’re no fool. You’ll see to that.”
“But if he doesn’t …?”
He yanked his hand free. “From now on, I’m thinking of myself. If bystanders get hurt … well, nobody worried about whether I got hurt all these years, did they?” He looked at me with accusing eyes. “Besides, you’re not exactly an innocent bystander in all this, are you?”
I looked away. “How can you do this to your own brother?”
“My own brother …” He spat out the words.
“If it ever gets out it would ruin Sammy. They’d never believe that he didn’t know about it.” I looked at him imploringly. “Lester, if he finds out, he’ll kill me!”
“He killed me years ago,” he said with bitterness.
“If you could only give me a little time.”
His eyes burned through me, haunted, desperate, suddenly frightening.
“Midnight, Al,” he said quietly.
Then he turned and walked away.
I stared after him, watching the graceless, almost ludicrous body, a little too short, a little too plump for the dignity his high-held head sought to advertise, and I wondered again, as I had wondered so many times, what Julie Webb, with her electric personality and her easily marketable figure, had found in him to love and to marry and to live with for five years in what Broadway had always assumed was harmony and happiness. I was remembering the wedding dinner at the Copacabana on that long ago night … the hint of secret fires in her intense dark eyes as she held Lester’s pudgy hand. I was remembering Sammy—Sammy with the raw jokes, Sammy with too much champagne in him, Sammy in the new and uncomfortable role of brother-in-law to a desirable girl, Sammy trying awkwardly not to reveal that it killed him to let Lester have the spotlight even at his own wedding.
“A plain little nothing,” he had sneered to me afterwards.
Julie Webb … a plain little nothing out of New Rochelle who had stepped out from behind a perfume counter at Bonwit-Teller’s to marry neat, impeccable Lester Hogarth and grow to hate his loudmouthed, voracious and nationally famous older brother with a plain little, dark little, intense little hatred that might very well have been born that very first night at the Copa, with Sammy keeping her out on the dance floor too long and holding her too crudely close to him and making a joke, finally, that nobody heard but Julie, nor noticed but myself, just as I had been the only one to observe the cold look on her face and the sullen one on Sammy’s when they had returned at last to the table, and not together.
All this I was remembering as I sat there in the noisy drugstore feeling the dread creeping up slowly, knowing that the past contained all the omens of impending disaster, knowing too that I was going to have to make an attempt, even to do the impossible.
Reluctantly, I got up from the table and went back upstairs to the office.
Connie was gone for the day, for the night, to her own private haunts of loneliness. And with a pang, I realized how wrong it was that I wasn’t with her now, always, wherever she was, whatever she was doing. And it didn’t do me any good to tell myself that all that would be different soon—after Sammy’s success, and mine, were assured— because I couldn’t make myself believe it. Not tonight, I couldn’t.
“That you, Al?” Sammy’s voice came to me harshly from the inner sanctum.
I went inside.
“You took your own sweet time, didn’t you?” He was slumped behind his desk, all alone. Just him and the cigar. Sonny and Jake and Phil were gone.
“Where are they?” I said. “I thought we were going to cut—”
“We did it ourselves. It’s all finished.” There was a pleased smile on his face, as though he relished this opportunity to show me how well he could do without me. “We threw out the whole Can-Can number. Seven minutes of backsides and no Sammy. It’s lean and smooth now. No fat, no extra weight.”
“Sammy …” I sank down in the leather chair. “I … I want to talk to you about the monologue.”
He sniffed. “What about the monologue? It’s beautiful. We even added that stupid Sonny’s crack about Lester being three times as useless. They’ll howl.”
“All things considered, I think you better drop the routine.”
He eyed me curiously. “All things considered, I think maybe you better start remembering that I decide what’s in and what’s out around here.”
“Downstairs, I was talking to Lester. He’s very upset, Sammy.”
“Tough tiddy.” He bit down on the damp cigar.
“He’s been in touch with Otis Elwell,” I said.
His face blanched. Then he forced a laugh. “They deserve each other.”
“You can joke,” I said. “Lester knows plenty. He’s been on the inside for years. If he should talk out of turn … Elwell is laying for you. Tomorrow would be the time to let you have it.”
He looked up with startled expression. “Let me have what? Whaddaya mean?”
I swallowed. “You never know.”
“Listen!” he shouted with sudden hysteria. “I don’t wanna hear anything more about it! You’re ruining my appetite just bringing up their names! I got nothing to hide that the others don’t have to hide too! So don’t give me any more of that! I want peace! I want to relax! I want—”
He stared out of the window fretfully. “What time is it?”
“Seven o’clock.”
“Let’s get out of here.” He jumped up.
I looked at him and saw the nervous, restless twitching of his face. It wouldn’t have done any good to say anything more right then. Perhaps with a little food in his belly … perhaps after the right kind of massage for his ego …
“Lindy’s?” I said, getting into my coat.
He snapped off the lights. “Where else?”
I followed him down the hall to the elevator.
It was five hours to midnight.
Only Sammy didn’t know what time it was.
IV
I tried not to listen to him.
I stuffed my ears with the noise of clattering dishes, the babble of table-talk and the shrill-sounding laughter of the silver blonde in the booth behind me. But it didn’t do any good. His voice was like the angry rasp of a buzzsaw, chewing into everything it touched.
“That’s all I want to know,” he cried, spitting out shreds of tobacco. “Are you with me or with him? The way you talk, I don’t know. It don’t sound right. I don’t like it. All my life he’s in my hair like a flea … a fat little flea. I’m good to him, set him up cozy, see that he shares in my success. And what do I get for it? Flea bites! Nagging trouble! And now this! For him I should cut off my right arm just when I’m about to go into the fight for the title. Al, I don’t wanna hear no more about it tonight. I’m getting sick!”
“But, Sammy—”
“Sick to my stomach!”
It hadn’t done any good coming to Lindy’s. The big entrance, the mob bowing and scraping before the new king, the flattery, the bootlicking, the steady stream of well-wishers to the table—none of it had had its usual ballooning effect on the Hogarth ego. He was still in a troubled mood, unable to clear his mind of whatever it was that was bothering him. And the mere mention of his brother’s name seemed to make it only worse.
I watched him working savagely on the cigar.
“Look, Sammy,” I began again. He turned his face away in disgust. “There can be no question whose side I’m on. I’m not trying to upset you or destroy your format. But to create unnecessary headaches, I just don’t think the Lester monologue is that important. If you tried dropping it just once, I’m sure you’d find—”
“No,” he shouted, pounding the table. “D’ya hear me? No!”
“You’re much too big a personality to need any one thing that badly.”
“You’re goddam right I am,” he sneered. “I’m big enough I don’t need monologues, I don’t need you, I don’t need nothing. But I know what I’m talking about. The jerks expect the Lester routine. They wait for it, they want it, they love it. It’s in, it’s gonna stay in, and that’s that.” He took the cigar out of his mouth. “I suppose you’re gonna tell me Ida Cantor and the five daughters liked his cracks about them all those years. Like hell they did. And what about Jessel with his uncle? And Benny with Mary’s sister Babe?”
“I never heard them complain,” I said. “It was always in fun, not cutting like a knife. Lester does mind. He has complained. He has asked you to lay off. A man has a right, Sammy. After all, he’s your own brother.”
“Don’t gimme any of that!” he screamed, the rage mottling his face. “He was never no different, always complaining, even when we were kids, always trying to tear me down. I was never good enough for him. Joe College. The big words. Always the face in the books and the nose in the air for the big dumb brother who makes enough in one year to buy and sell him for life. I try to fix him up with a few broads. But no. Not him. Sammy’s girls aren’t good enough for a hot brain like him. I give him money, an easy job doing nothing at all. I make him famous. Yeah, famous. And all I get is complaints. Never a good word. And now I should tear out the best part of the show just ‘cause he’s whining again. Well listen to me, sweetheart, I’m not gonna do it—not now, not next week, not next year. I like it this way. And besides—” He broke into an ugly, humorless grin. “I like to see him earn his money.”
It was there on his face, just as it had been written on Lester’s—this lifelong involvement beyond their control. They were like two bodies in space, repelling and attracting, forever swinging about each other in a sickening orbit from which neither could escape. The fist and the punching-bag; the slap and the cheek; and always, the other cheek. Wasn’t I in a similar constellation with Sammy? The bucket and the well; the insatiable thirst for material and the dried-up brain; repelling and attracting, but never breaking away. How easily I could have altered my course if I spoke up now and revealed to him that if he were finally undone by Elwell, it would not be because of Lester but because of me—I who had stood guard at the barricades all through the years against the legions who were aching to see him get everything they knew he deserved. But I just sat there with the sound of his angry ranting in my ears and said nothing. I could tell myself that there was still time. For what, I did not know. But there was still time. So I said nothing.
I glanced at my watch. Eight o’clock. I looked past Sammy’s shoulder to the revolving door in the entrance. Every night except Saturday you could set your watch by his arrival. Tonight mine must have been fast. He didn’t come walking in until 8:01—Otis Elwell, in the velvet-trimmed coat and the black Homburg, on the prowl for gossip to help him reduce as many lives as possible to the disorder of his own soiled existence.
I watched him peel off the pearl-gray gloves, hand his hat and coat to the checkroom girl, and stand there for a moment, casing the restaurant for prey. His eyes met mine in a cold, blank stare, and then he turned and walked toward the other side of the room.
“I’ve got to go downstairs a minute,” I said to Sammy.
He grunted. “We got a half hour.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Downstairs, in the foyer outside the washrooms, I went into a phone booth and called the cashier’s desk upstairs and told them to page Elwell.
“He just walked in. One minute.”
Presently I heard the voice, deceptively soft and phonily British. “Elwell speaking.”
“Otis, this is Al Preston. I’m right downstairs in the men’s room.”
“Everything finds its natural level eventually, doesn’t it?”
“Look, I’ve got to speak to you, Otis. Would you do me a big favor and meet me down here?”
“Why there? My hands are lily-white clean.”
“Sammy is upstairs. I don’t want him to see me talking to you.”
“Dear, dear. Will he spank you?”
“Please, Otis. Only for a minute.”
“Preston, I know exactly what’s on your fevered, joke-ridden mind. I know precisely what you want to say to me, and I know specifically what my answers will be. But I’ll come down anyway. My fading locks need a combing.”
He hung up.
I went into the washroom and let the hot water run on my hands. They were icy with apprehension. I examined my face in the mirror. When would I ever be able to rest? When would I be able to jump off the treadmill? If I failed tonight in what I was trying to do, I would fall off and break my back. If I succeeded and tomorrow’s show became a hit, the treadmill would only go faster. What kind of a game was it when there was no winning, only losing?
Elwell came sauntering in. “From the way your master is shredding his cigar upstairs, I would say you are trying his patience.”
I peered under the stall doors. We were alone. “Otis, I’m going to get straight to the point. What is it you want?”
He took out his pocket-comb and stood before the mirror eyeing himself. “Can you be a little more explicit, Preston? For example, right now I want a plate of Lindy’s chicken soup with noodles. Next summer, I want a month without cares or typewriter on the Riviera. Tomorrow, I want to see under my byline a column that will set this silly town on its left ear. There are so many things I want, lad. All depends when—and for what?”
“You know damned well what I mean,” I cried impatiently. “What do you want for laying off Sammy … for calling a truce … for not printing …” I waved a hand, “… whatever it is that Lester told you … or gave you … or promised …?”
He took his time about it. First he wet the comb. Then he combed the black hair forward, then toyed delicately with the part. He glanced at my face in the mirror and smiled a nasty, silken smile. “Good heavens, you look awful, Preston. You ought to take life easier.”
“What is it you want?”
“Lester Hogarth has told me nothing,” he said, inspecting his complexion. “He is a slightly hysterical member of the Hogarth species who whets the appetite with tantalizing tidbits, then withdraws. In the trade, we call him a teaser.”
“You mean he’s told you nothing?”
“I mean he is holding out like a coy mistress, until midnight. I have a feeling that he’s going to let me down, too. Most teasers do, y’know. I also have a feeling that if he does, I shall be positively desperate for copy. Some how, Preston, it would not seem right to me not to run something about Samuel tomorrow. Tomorrow is unofficially Hogarth Day, if I am to believe what I hear around town. Never has so much been said about so little.”
I licked my dry lips. “Look, if I get Sammy to turn over a whole week’s salary to your arthritis foundation …”
He chortled with delight. “If every member of his family were dying of arthritis, Sammy wouldn’t give five centimes to that worthy cause and you know it.”
“Ten thousand dollars!”
“Why do you insist on trying to take him away from me? I found him. I claimed him. He’s mine, all mine. And now I want to enjoy him.”
“A new car then. For Christmas. I know he wants to make up with you. Any make, any model you want. Just say the word.”
“My dear boy, are you insinuating that I use my column for blackmail?” He regarded me with an amused smile. “Because you know perfectly well that I do. However, I have a new car, a rather nice one, too. And besides …” His voice hardened. “There is only one thing I would take not to use whatever I pick up from our hysterical friend Lester—and that is an even juicier morsel to replace it.” He grinned. “Get what I mean?”
“Sammy’s a legend. They’ll hate you for anything you do to him, Otis. Nobody loves a knocker. That’s why nobody likes you.”
The grin hadn’t left his face, but it had a frozen quality to it. “I never hit a man when he is down, Preston. I always wait for him to get up. And Hogarth is as up as up can be. In my shooting gallery, he is a perfectly legitimate target for the truth. Why take pot-shots at the small game when it is so much more soul-satisfying to bring down the king of the jungle … the lumbering pachyderm with the face of a pig, the smell of a skunk, the appetites of a tomcat and the voice of a Joe Miller?”
“What did he ever do to you? Nothing! One lousy impersonation on television … a few cracks about the way you dress …”
The smile vanished. “You don’t seem to understand. There’s nothing personal in this. It’s just that I despise and detest and loathe the man. That’s all. Now may I go?”
I went after him and held him back. “But you’ll hurt other people, not just Sammy! I know! I know what that crazy Lester is going to fill you full of. He’s not in his right mind. If I told you what’s going on, why he’s trying so hard to help you hurt Sammy, you’d know not to believe a word he says!”
He was enjoying my terror. “You don’t have to tell me what’s going on, sonny boy. You’d be surprised how much I know. Maybe I know even more than you do. Not everything, mind you, but enough.” He smiled at me in a way that sent a chill through me. “And I’m getting warmer every minute.”
He left me standing there, my heart beating wildly. I could have gone after him and pounded him to a pulp. But all I did was look at my sweating palms and stare at my white face in the mirror.
Finally I had to go up the stairs.
Sammy had his coat on, waiting.
“You want me to miss this thing?” he muttered. “What’s the matter with you?”
I got my hat and coat and pushed through the revolving door, catching up with him on the crowded sidewalk.
“Sammy,” I said, “I’ve got to talk to you after the rehearsal. We’ve got to discuss this thing about Lester again.”
He walked faster. “I had all the talk I wanna hear about him. Anyway, I’m driving up to Scarsdale tonight to the house.”
“For what?”
“To get away from all this, that’s for what. I wanna relax, take it easy, get a good night’s sleep, be on my toes for tomorrow.”
“Then I’ll go with you,” I said.
“You will if I ask you. I don’t hear me asking you.”
I glanced at him sharply. It didn’t sound right: Sammy away from Broadway on the eve of triumph, Sammy not taking the fast-striding parade down the Stem just as the theater-crowds broke, not making the loud entrance at Toots’s, the stop-off at Twenty-One, the late watch at Lindy’s … Sammy not milking the last drop of glory.
“Who’s the broad you got waiting for you, Sammy?”
His head jerked around and he didn’t smile the smile or give out with the sly cackle. “One of these days you’re gonna talk yourself right outta my life. I’m warning you, Al.” His voice was hoarse. “I’m getting sick and tired—”
I stopped dead on the curb and cut him off. “You go on ahead.”
“What is this? You’re not coming to the dress?”
“There’s something I have to do. I’ll try to make it as soon as I can.”
He stared at me, his face twitching. “Don’t hurry.”
“You won’t need me.” There was bitterness in my voice. “After all, you didn’t need me this afternoon when it came to cutting the script.”
But who was I angry at? And for what? Who told me to become a gagwriter? Who told me to want big money? Who told me to want more of everything than there were jokes in my head to provide?
He hurled the cigar into the street and walked away from me.
He didn’t need me. He didn’t need anyone.
As long as he had Lester. Or a stone wall to smash his fist into.
The Paramount clock above Times Square said 8:19.
It might just as well have said midnight.
V
I went to my hotel. I called Lester. He wasn’t home. I called Sardi’s, Shor’s, Moore’s, the Stage Delicatessen and Hanson’s Drugstore. He wasn’t there either. And if he had been, I don’t know what I would have said to him anyway—except possibly “please.”
I lay on my bed, blowing smoke at the ceiling, remembering all I had put into the big push toward success—the days, the nights, the struggle with words; the breath holding until they got the joke and exploded into laughter; the stormy rages of Sammy when the well ran dry; the good dumb luck of becoming head writer on a large staff— the head man doesn’t have to know how to crack the joke as long as he can crack the whip; then the big chance, tomorrow night’s mammoth job, and Sammy’s demand that I write the sketches, which were too important to trust to the others.
When a man is through, he is supposed to know it and quit. When he doesn’t have it any more, the rules call for him to throw in the towel, or the sponge, or the typewriter, or whatever happens to be the symbol of the pursuit that has defeated him. I was through then; I knew it; and I would not quit. I was through now; I knew it; and still I would not quit. I wanted to be able to keep on going—a dynamo without a motor, a joke-writer without humor—knowing that in show business you can get by without talent as long as you can keep them from finding you out.
I swung my legs off the bed and went to the window.
Outside, the theater district was bright with the lure of lighted tungsten, spelling out words of promise and enticement. The lights had to glow more brightly these nights; the words had to be chosen with greater care. The people weren’t coming down here any more in the great stampede for pleasure the way they used to. They were staying home. They were escaping their drab living rooms without even leaving them.
I wondered how long it would be before the monstrous magic box would darken these lights of Broadway for ever. I thought of other lights, other cities … State Street, Chicago … the sprawling, twinkling mazdas of Hollywood, not far from the darkening studios … the neon brilliance of Miami Beach … Collins Avenue … Lincoln Road …
Miami Beach …
Miami Beach!
Of course!
I snuffed out the cigarette.
Why not?
It was a chance. What could I lose?
I went to the phone on the night table, feeling a sudden surge of excitement. I called the desk. “This is Mr. Preston. I want to put in a long distance call to the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach. Got it?”
I hung up and went to the dresser and poured myself a half tumbler of scotch, letting the whiskey heat up my optimism even more.
If I could get her to return, if I could somehow convince her that she had made a terrible mistake … get her assurance that she’d fly back north on the next plane. That was what it was all about, wasn’t it? Not a monologue, not a couple of stolen scripts, but her, Julie Hogarth. If I could tell Lester that she was returning to him, wouldn’t that be enough? Was there anything better I could do for him than that?
I poured myself another drink with shaking hands.
Then the phone rang.
“Here’s your call, Mr. Preston.”
“Right.”
“Go ahead.”
I cleared my throat. “Hello?”
Faintly, the voice was saying, “Eden Roc. Good evening.”
Too loudly, too eagerly, I said, “Mrs. Lester Hogarth, please.”
“One moment.”
I waited.
A voice came on. A man’s voice. “Desk. Lyons speaking.”
“Look, this is New York calling. I asked for Mrs. Lester Hogarth.”
“Oh, is this the same gentleman who called a while ago?” “No, no. Can I speak—?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but Mrs. Hogarth is not with us here.”
“Are you sure?”
“That’s right, sir. She checked out yesterday.”
“Then where can I reach her? It’s urgent.”
“Hold on one moment, sir.” Not there. Checked out. The guy took his time coming back. Then, “All we have for her here is a post office box to forward her mail. Box four-eight-three-one, Main Post Office …”
“Is that Miami or Miami Beach?”
“No, sir, New York City.”
I hung up slowly. My brain was fuzzy. Too much scotch. A hard day, not enough food, too much scotch …
New York City.
I began to pace the carpeting, trying to latch on to something, trying to make sense out of the disorder in my head. I looked at my watch. Sammy was in the middle of the dress rehearsal now. But why worry about Sammy? Why think about Sammy? Why now? What was I trying to come up with? Thinking back … over the day … voices … words … Lester … Sammy … Otis Elwell …
Not Miami Beach.
It was crazy. But so was everything else. What was crazier than a man being on the brink of a one-hundred-grand-a-year success at the very same time that he had run out of talent? Everything was crazy, but you had to play it out as though it all could happen.
You had to play your hunches as though they made sense.
I called the garage and told them to get my car over in a hurry. I went into the bathroom and doused my face with cold water. I fixed my hair, pulled my tie straight, threw on my jacket, grabbed my hat and coat and headed for the elevator. The elevator man gave me a funny look.
The hell with the elevator man. I was in a hurry, that was all.
My car was waiting outside. I jumped into it and fought my way through the snarling wolf-pack of cabs, shot west on Fifty-seventh, then onto the West Side Highway and I was in the clear. The night air was fresh and cold. The car liked it, and purred along at sixty.
I turned on the radio. I needed something there in the car with me. Dance music … recordings … at the bottom of the dial. I didn’t want to have to think. There was too much to think about. Better just to listen to Bing … and Frankie … and an old Tommy Dorsey platter. Tommy Dorsey … gone forever … like so many others … like Davey Farber …
I turned to another station.
Better not to think. Better just to listen.
The Henry Hudson Parkway was almost deserted. I ate it up at sixty-five. Who bothers to venture out at night when the magic box is aglow?
The music was soothing. Radio wasn’t washed up yet. Radio would always be with us as long as guys wanted music in their ears while they made love, or lay on a beach in the sun, or drove through the night on lonely roads trying not to think about where they were going or why they were going or what they would discover when they finally got there.
I cut off at Scarsdale.
It was off by itself, up on the hill, past the clump of protecting trees at the end of the wide-swinging arc of the graveled driveway—a mansion with too many rooms, for occasional weekends and hot feverish nights when the girl was as desperate as Sammy but the risk was too great in a city of husbands and a million prying eyes.
I shut off the motor and got out quietly. The blood was pounding in me as I went up the flagstone walk to the porch. No lights in the windows. No bright lights in the windows. A few, but very dim. In the living room. To scare off prowlers.
Like myself.
I stood on the porch, remembering another night … the sound of Valma Stevens’ pearl necklace shattering and bouncing in a hundred different directions in the silence that followed the wounded cry … the blood at the corner of her mouth, like smeared lipstick … Sammy’s face as he stood there rubbing his fist …
What had they always seen in him? What did they still see in him? The loveliest, the softest, the most vulnerable of them … impaling themselves on his ruthless, contemptuous hunger …The things I didn’t know about women …
I pushed the button. Far off, inside, I heard the chimes. I waited. But nobody came.
I rang again. And waited.
“Who is it?” The voice was muffled behind the thick oak door.
“Hey, Kelly!” I called out.
“Who’s there?” He sounded frightened.
“Al Preston. Open the door.”
“He ain’t here.”
I pounded on the wood. “I know that. Will you open up?”
Silence for a moment, while the wheels went around in the battered head. Then finally the inner chain rattled and the door swung back a few inches. I jammed my foot in the opening. “It’s okay,” I said, pushing in with my shoulder.
“Hey wait a minute …”
I shoved and the door gave, and I was inside.
Kelly peered at me, his fight-scarred face blotchy with confusion and worry. The punchy eyes shifted in their sockets as he wet his lips with a nervous tongue. “The boss say nobody supposed to come in. He ain’t here and he tell me nobody—”
“Okay, okay.” I was looking around. From some where, I heard the soft music of a dance band. The living room … “Mr. Hogarth will be here in a little while,” I said. “It’s all right, Kelly. He’s coming right after the rehearsal.”
He examined my face, watching me as I stared in the direction of the music. “The boss … he … he tol’ you?”
I gave him the broad wink. “He tells me everything.”
An idiot-laugh bubbled from the puffy lips. “Got a cigarette on ya?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Gimme the whole pack.”
“Sure, pal.”
He winked and shuffled off to the kitchen, still giggling.
Sammy didn’t have to pay Kelly a lot of money. He enjoyed his work too much. He liked the smell of them, and the fright on their pretty faces, and sometimes from the kitchen he could hear them sobbing, or the sound of Sammy’s voice, rising in frustrated rage.
I moved toward the sound of the soft music, my hat and coat still on.
The jade lamp was on in the living room. That was all. And at first I didn’t see anything but the gleaming green magic-eye of the console. Then I looked to the sofa, to the white hand reaching out to the glass on the low-slung coffee table, and when the glass was set down again, the pale clear liquid had disappeared and there was only the tiny white onion, like one of the pearls of a shattered necklace.
She lay there, facing away from the entrance, unaware of my presence … waiting for him in the half-lit silence of the enormous living room with nothing but the sound of soft music and the aroma of gin and vermouth to keep her company. And suddenly, she heard my footfall.
“Sammy?” Thickly, with the unpracticed tongue of too many unfamiliar martinis from the empty mixer. “That you?”
I looked her over slowly, trying to make sense of it all—the high-heeled suedes that would lift her voluptuous body to his groping desire, the firmly molded legs in the sheer nylons, the black sheath of her dress, crushed beneath her reclining form, shoulders bare and gleaming in the half-light save where the raven hair lay, shoulder length now, no longer up in the chaste coiffure of a chignon. I was Sammy, standing there and seeing her as Sammy saw her—as any man who was a man and still alive would instantly see her …
It made sense. It had always made sense.
Only Lester could have failed to see the inevitability of it.
“Sammy?” She turned her head.
“Hello, Julie,” I said quietly.
VI
“Al!” Her hand dug into the arm of the sofa and she pulled herself, struggling, to her feet, swaying slightly as she stared at me. “Al …” She looked past me. “Where …?”
“He’s not here,” I said, switching on the lights.
“But what … what’re you doing here? What … do you want? Kelly!” She started moving unsteadily to the archway. “Kelly!”
I grabbed her arm and swung her around. “Come here. Now sit down. I just want to talk to you.”
“Get out of here,” she moaned, falling back into the club chair. “Please. Go ’way. Oh God. I’m so tired. Go ’way. Mix me a drink.”
I threw my hat and coat on the sofa. “How long have you been here?”
“Sammy,” she cried weakly.
“How long?”
She shook her head and the shiny black hair fell into her eyes. “What day is it? What time is it? What do you want? Let me alone …”
I took her by the shoulders and shook her up. “It’s Thursday night. Come on now, when did you get here?”
“This morning,” she mumbled. “Kelly met me at the airport. Why did Sammy tell you, Al? Why? He promised. ‘Nobody’ll know, Julie. Don’t be afraid. You jus’ take the next plane and fly back, go up to the house. Stay there. Plenty of food in the refrigerator. Kelly won’t bother you. Soon as I can get away I’ll come up. We talk it over. Jus’ talk it over, ‘n then you go back to Miami, do what you want. Jus’ talk it over.’ Al!” She looked up at me, and I saw the torture in her eyes. “I swear to God that’s what he said. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Give me a drink.”
“Look, Julie—”
“Give me a drink!”
I stepped to the sideboard and put some cubes in a glass and filled it with soda and went back to her and she was weeping silently. “Here,” I said.
“Don’t want it. Go ’way.”
“Where are your things?”
“What things?”
“Your clothes. Your suitcase. Whatever you came here with.” I looked at my watch. Almost ten o’clock.
She gazed up at me, the tears streaming down her face. “What’re you going to do?”
“Where are they?”
“The bedroom,” she moaned. “Al … oh God … my mascara …”
“Here.” I gave her a handkerchief.
“You believe me?” She dabbed at her eyes.
“Yes. Now go on up and pack your things and—”
“Well, I’m lying,” she sobbed. “It’s not true. Every thing’s a lie. Five whole years are a lie. Must be a lie. My idea, calling him from Florida. Not his, my idea. Telling myself jus’ want to put in a word for Les … plead with Sammy … maybe he’ll listen to me … give Les a chance so I can go back to him, and love him the way I used to love him. Could’ve said no, Al, but I didn’t. Sammy tells me to take the next plane, fly up here, see him, talk it over. Could’ve said no, but I said yes. I must’ve wanted to come, don’t you see?”
“It wasn’t your idea, it was his!” I shouted. “You wanted to talk to him on the phone but he got you to come up here!”
She struggled to her feet and came toward me, crying, “All day I’ve been here waiting for him, enough time to think, enough time to go ‘way, but I’m still here waiting for him, wanting him to come. Telling myself all these years I can’t feel anything but disgust for Sammy … love Lester … sweet, gentle Lester … not Sammy … not that horrible … Look at me, Al!” she cried out. “Waiting for him and wanting him to come … ”
“So badly, so desperately eager,” I said, letting her come into my arms and weep all over me, “that you have to render yourself unconscious with alcohol before you can even bear to think of it.”
“… Hating him, afraid of him, always hating him for being there, part of my life, part of Lester’s, always grinning at me, looking at me with those eyes and knowing why I hated him. Afraid of him. Afraid of myself.” She dug her face into my chest as though she could hide there and get away from whatever had been torturing her. “Oh God, Al, how can a woman bear to live knowing there are times when she can feel something that isn’t disgust for a man like Sammy. Times when she … oh, Al …”
She, too, like all the others? What kind of flame was it that made moths of the best of them?
“Pleaded with Les,” she was crying. “‘Leave Sammy,’ I told him. ‘Get away from him. Far away from him.’ Not jus’ for Les. Thinking of me too. Sammy knows everything. He watches me, sees me turning away. Knows that some day … he knew I’d come. Had to happen sometime. He knew …”
And knowing, he’d do everything in his power to hasten the day. Leave it to Sammy to want to tear off the richest piece of fruit on the tree, to want to strike the final, ultimate blow. His brother’s wife. The cherished possession of his brother Lester, All-American slob. It was too wonderful, too much even for Sammy to bear without the unnerving stabs of secret guilt, leading to fear, leading to wild and redoubled anger at the symbol of it.
His brother Lester.
“Come now, honey.” I took her tear-streaked face in my hands. “I know you too well to go for that kind of talk. Let’s have no more now. You go upstairs and pack and we’ll get out of here before Sammy arrives.”
“Where to?”
“You’re going home—to Lester.”
“No,” she moaned, pulling away. “Can’t do that.” She covered her face with her hands. “How can I? What can I tell him?”
“You changed your mind …”
“Changed my heart.”
“… flew back to New York on the spur of the moment. You called me at my hotel to meet you at the airport. You were afraid to go home without talking to someone first, to find out how Lester felt …”
“How can he take me back?” she cried. “I was so horrible to him. Taunted him for being so weak. Knew he couldn’t help himself. Made him worse. How could he do anything about Sammy when even I couldn’t?”
“Listen to me, Julie.” I took her by the shoulders. “He’s going out of his mind, that’s how much he misses you and wants you back. Why do you think I’m here?”
“Don’t know. Why are you here, why am I here? How can I be in love with Les, knowing all the time that someone like Sammy was able to get me to come here, to make me feel—?”
“You don’t know what you feel or what you think,” I said, with anger and impatience in my voice. “You’ve been through too much … quarreling with Lester, running away from Sammy and yourself, running to a divorce you never really wanted. You’re all confused like the rest of us. Sammy’s got us all going in circles. Hitch your wagon to a star and go crazy from it. And in case you don’t know it, you’re more than a little tight, too. Now go on.”
“Can’t.” She shook her head.
“Okay, you can’t.” I went past her, out to the foyer and up the winding staircase two steps at a time. Her grip was under the bed; there was a dress in the closet, a few things on the dresser and in the bathroom. You travel light when you’re hell-bent for disaster. I swept everything into the bag and hurried back downstairs to the living room.
Her big dark eyes went wide with the realization that I wasn’t fooling.
“Al, I don’t feel so well,” she moaned.
“Did you wear a coat?”
She nodded dumbly.
I put on my own, grabbed my hat and went to the closet in the foyer. A silver-blue mink, bought with money, bought with the ashes of Lester’s self-destruction.
She struggled, but I got her into it.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You better leave him a note.”
“But what’ll I say?”
I yanked open the top drawer of the huge secretary and found a gin rummy score pad … Sammy 24, Felicia 78… an unfinished game. I ripped off the sheet, wondering if Felicia Warburton still regretted she had stopped playing cards that night. “Here,” I said, “say good-by … say you hate him … say you love him … say anything, but make it fast. And make sure there’s no mention of me. I’ll be right back.”
Kelly was seated at the white enameled table, talking to himself over the funnysheets of some bygone Sunday. He looked up at me. “No more gin, huh?”
“If I ask you for a big favor, pal, will you do it for me?”
He gave me a wink. “You betcha, boy.”
“Just don’t tell Mr. Hogarth I was here tonight. Okay?”
He peered at me with bleary eyes. “Ya goin’, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“The brudder’s wife, she goin’ wit’ ya, huh?”
I nodded.
He broke into a wet, silly laugh. “Wha’ time is it?”
I pulled back my sleeve and glanced at my wristwatch. “Five after ten.”
He chuckled. “The boss’ll be here in anudder half ’n hour. He be awful mad. Crazy mad, huh?” He stared at my hands as though hypnotized as I began to peel off the crisp new bills.
“You’ll never tell him I was here tonight,” I said slowly. “The lady called a taxi and went away by herself. You didn’t see me here. Okay? Fifty bucks.”
I held out the folded bills, but he just stared at them.“Maybe he hit me … boom boom … for lettin’ her go.” He got up and went into a shadow-boxing stance.
“C’mon, pal.” I thrust the money toward him.
“Naw,” he shook his head. “Gimme a cigarette.”
I groped in my pockets. “I gave you all I had.”
“Gimme the watch.” He grinned.
“Now wait a minute …” The gift from Connie.
“Gimme the watch,” he said.
Slowly I undid it from my wrist and he snatched it.
“You swear you’ll never tell him?”
He nodded solemnly.
“On your mother’s grave?”
Tears came to his eyes. He crossed himself quickly and nodded. Then he began to cry, blubbering softly as he sank down at the table to stare blindly at the watch in his hand.
I left him that way and hurried back to the living room. “Let’s go,” I said to Julie. I picked up her suitcase and led her outside to the car waiting there for us in the moonlight. She sat beside me in silence, staring straight ahead, as we pulled away.
Back on the highway, city-bound, I glanced at her. She looked awful. “You need some air,” I said, lowering her window.
She nodded, and put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes, and I could feel the tension going out of her body like a sigh. She snuggled closer, breathing deeply. And before long, she was asleep. I gazed down at her. She was like a little girl now, a tired little girl who had run away from home. I was seeing her now not as I had seen her before, not as Sammy might have seen her tonight, but as Lester had always seen her, and would see her again.
I stepped down harder on the gas. I wanted to get her back to him, back where she belonged, back over this highway to his astonished arms. But why was I hurrying? There was plenty of time till midnight.
The headlights coming at me from the opposite lane were bright and swift in their passage, as though eager to escape the city, like Sammy would be, somewhere in that stream of northbound traffic in his robin’s-egg blue convertible, hurrying home to the relaxation of a good night’s sleep he had never counted on. Faster I went, as though to flee the scene of enraged discovery …
As we neared the city, I felt her stirring on my shoulder.
“Hello,” she murmured sleepily.
“Almost there,” I said.
She looked up at me. “Al?”
“Yeah.”
“Have I ever told you that I like you?”
“Go back to sleep,” I said.
“You, I like … Les, I love … Sammy, I … I guess Sammy I feel sorry for …”
“See that you make it stick.”
“For always,” she sighed, putting her head back on my shoulder
“How do you feel?”
“Wonderfully better,” she said.
“The fresh air did it.”
“No, not just that way. Inside, too. I feel so much better in here … purged … released from something that’s had me in a nasty, horrible grip for too long. Just talking about it, Al, admitting it … it doesn’t seem to hurt any more. Gone, like a bad dream.”
“Named Sammy.” I turned to her. “What sort of farewell message did you leave him?”
“Oh, that. I just wrote: ‘Don’t wait for the laugh, Sammy. This is one joke that’s never going to pay off.’ But he’ll never believe that that can be possible. Only you and I and the walls of that God-awful living room know the whole story, and walls can’t talk and you won’t, ever, will you, Al?”
I glanced at her, and saw her eyes searching mine desperately for some quick assurance that whatever she had lost, and found again, would not be kicked away by somebody else.
“ I didn’t hear a word you said tonight,” I smiled at her.
She gave my arm a squeeze. “Thanks.”
“For nothing.” I turned back to watching the road ahead.
“For everything. Please, Al, I mean that.”
“Okay, okay.”
Thank me, then. Thank me for doing whatever I had to do to save whatever it was I was trying to save. For a while tonight, I had even managed to forget what that was. I had even managed to forget that all this was for me—not for her, not for Lester, but for me.
Thanks for nothing.
I shoved my foot down to the floor-board, as though in anger … sixty-eight … seventy … seventy-five … spurting ahead … pulling away swiftly from the big black Lincoln Continental that had been dragging at my tail ever since Scarsdale …
I got her to the apartment house on Sutton Place at five minutes past eleven.
I jumped out and went up with her in the elevator.
She needed someone to carry her grip.
She needed someone to hold her trembling hand.
She needed someone to tell her that everything was going to be all right again.
Also, there was a little matter of payment on delivery.
Even as her key was fumbling in the lock, he opened the door and saw her. He looked at her, and then at me, and his lips were quivering. He wanted to say something, to tell her in some way what this meant to him … this opening the door of their home, their barren home, and seeing her standing there with shining eyes, seeing her walking in and going into his arms. He wanted to tell me what I had done for him. But all he could do was shake his head to hold back the brimming tears, and then they were weeping in each other’s arms, making silly little sounds like children who didn’t know the words yet. And he walked with her to the bedroom, hugging her to him.
“Don’t go, Al,” he said.
I waited in the foyer.
In a moment he was back, drying his eyes with a handkerchief, trying to stem the happy laughter that was bubbling up inside him. He had the envelope in his hand.
“Al, Jesus …” He looked at me with the gratitude shining in his tired eyes. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing. Please.” I took the envelope from him, trying to get it out of sight, into my pocket, as though it were something unclean, which it was.
“Aren’t you going to look inside first?” he said.
I pushed back the flap. The scripts were there—but torn into a thousand little scraps of paper. “What …?”
He was smiling at me. “Just in case I failed to hear from you tonight. Just in case I’d be tempted to do something I’d always regret. I could never do that to you, Al.”
To me? Or did he mean to Sammy?
The other cheek.
I turned away.
“Davey Farber had a mother living somewhere in New York,” he was saying in a soft voice. “Perhaps this Christmas an anonymous friend will remember her. Is that so bad?”
I shook my head wordlessly.
No. That would not be so bad.
I left him, then. I left the both of them alone to rediscover their love for each other.
The night was still young. My work was finished. And Connie would be waiting for me.
I went down in the elevator.
Fluttering the scraps into the trash-basket on the corner. Breathing deeply of the clean night air.
Knowing, at last, that I was in the clear, I was home free.
Knowing, too, that something good and decent had come out of it, for them at least.
Walking to my car.
Feeling great about everything.
Feeling young and healthy and in love with the night.
And then hearing the voice suddenly coming at me out of the darkness.
Whirling.
And seeing him sitting there in his car.
Seeing the triumphant grin on his face.
Remembering, suddenly.
Knowing, suddenly.
Seeing him sitting there in his new car.
“Hello, Preston …”
In the big black Lincoln Continental that had been secretly stalking the hot trail of scandal.
“I told you I was getting warmer every minute, didn’t I?”
And watching him, helplessly, as he drove away …
VII
Only yesterday … only last night …
My God, it couldn’t have been only last night!
I stood outside the door of the studio watching for Lester, not knowing what I would say if he showed up. There was really nothing you could say to change things now. It was too late for words. Somehow, as I stood there being jostled by the people crowding in, I knew that what ever was going to happen was out of my hands, beyond my control. I had done everything I could; I was exhausted; and besides, it no longer mattered to me, one way or the other.
The column had hit the newsstands at noon.
It didn’t name names, or draw diagrams. It didn’t have to.
It could stand up on the filth of its own nasty implications.
It was called “Brother, Can You Spare a Wife?”
And no one had seen Lester since.
I went inside now and watched them scrambling for seats, hearing their little yelps of eagerness, seeing on their faces the look of anticipatory enjoyment. I thought of the countless millions just like them in millions of living rooms all over the land, pulling the chairs up closer, making the last minute adjustment of the knob, watching the flickering screen of the magic box with that same inward smile of impending delight as they, too, got ready to be triggered by Sammy Hogarth into the vast and joyful explosion.
The laughter of a nation.
Born of misery and despair.
I had stayed in my hotel room most of the day, refusing to take calls, trying to delay the inevitable as long as possible. And when finally I had emerged, the message box at the desk had been filled. One from Julie, about Lester. And five from Sammy, the last one demanding: “Be in my dressing room before the show.”
An hour ago, I had answered the summons, confronted the face, dark and brooding as he closed the door and turned to me, sucking furiously on the damp, unlit cigar. “Nice of you to come. A big favor. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it. Don’t think I don’t know what a busy man you are, what a big thing it is you should do me the honor.”
I saw the newspaper on the dressing table. “Look, Sammy, about the Elwell column, I’m sorry, if that means anything to you.”
“Sorry?” he sneered. “For what? It’s good. It’s great. I love it. It’s beautiful.” He was pacing the floor of the narrow dressing room like an animal in a mirror-lined cage. “That filth Elwell. He thinks he hurts me. A gnat buzzing at an elephant. Nothing he can do, nothing he can say is as big as forty million people laughing at Sammy Hogarth at one and the same time. He can’t touch me. Nobody can touch me.”
“I’m glad you liked it,” I said. “I thought—”
“You thought. You’re always thinking. A brain. Like Lester. Always figuring things out. Well, you were wrong. I like it. I love it. Let them read it and talk about it. Let them know that Sammy was the one she was always hot for.” The thick layer of pancake cracked in an ugly smile. “Maybe they’ll be a little jealous, too. She ain’t so bad, even if she is married to that flea.”
“You haven’t by any chance seen him today?”
He whirled on me in sudden panic. “No! And I don’t wanna see him either!”
I started for the door
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Well, if you have nothing else to say to me …”
“Say to you? No, I got nothing else to say to you. I got something to give to you though.” He strode swiftly to the table and came back with something dangling from his outstretched hand. “Yours, isn’t it?”
I stared at the wristwatch, swallowing hard.
He knew, then. He knew everything.
I saw the bruised knuckles of his hand. Kelly, the poor son of a bitch …
“Yes,” I said, in a hollow voice. “It’s mine.”
He dropped the watch into his other hand. Then he turned it over and read the inscription on the back. “‘All my love, darling … Your Connie.’” He looked up at me. “Your Connie,” he said mockingly. “My Connie is your Connie. My secretary is your what?”
I spoke quietly. “We’re going to be married next week, Sammy.”
He sucked in his breath. “Married!” His face darkened. “How long … how long you two been …?”
“Four months,” I said.
“Behind my back. …”
“We didn’t see any need to spread it around.”
“A big man,” he sneered. “I was making something out of you. Soon you could’ve had the pick of the field and you pick a—”
“That’s enough, Sammy.” My fists tightened.
“Sneaking behind my back … “ His voice rose. “Sneaking like last night …”
“If you give me a chance I can tell you all about last night. I can—”
“I don’t wanna hear about it! I know everything there is to know. For me you do nothing. For him you do everything. Butting in where it’s none of your business …” Hysteria crept into his voice. “Making trouble for me. Upsetting me just when I gotta have peace, gotta be right! You’re just like him, two of a kind!”
“Whatever I did, I had to do,” I said. “Whatever I did was for one reason only.”
“For me!” he shrieked. “Go ahead, tell me you did it for me!”
Go ahead. Why not?
I stared at the face, seeing the rage and the guilt and the deep nagging fear.
Show him how you did it to save him from ruinous publicity. Knowing what he knows about last night, he hasn’t tossed you out yet. He must need you, still. He’ll always need you. Wrap it up. Seal it. Tell him how you did it for him. Go ahead …
“For me, for Sammy,” he was shouting, “who took you when you were nothing!”
And I heard the answering voice and it was mine, but it was saying, “No, Sammy, for myself, not for you. I did it to keep you from finding out the truth about me.”
“You?” He took the cigar from his mouth.
“The sketches for tonight’s show,” I said.
“What about them?”
“They’re not mine,” I said quietly. “They’re not mine and they’re not yours, but you’re going to have to use them just the same because it’s too late now to do anything about it. I stole them, Sammy. I didn’t have it any more, so I stole them from a guy named Davey Farber who was killed in the war.”
He set the cigar down and came at me slowly, lips trembling, eyes wide with stunned disbelief. “You steal?” he cried. “You steal and give it to me and take this chance of ruining me? You do this to me?”
“ I had the only copies in existence and they’re torn up now … destroyed. No one will ever know.” My voice faltered. “Only Lester …”
“Only Lester!” he shrieked in panic. “Only Lester! You’re through, you hear me? Right now! As of this minute! Washed up! Finished! Through!”
“No, Sammy,” I said, smiling coldly at the twitching face. “I was through months ago. Only you didn’t know it.”
“Get out!” he shouted.
I held out my hand. “My watch, please?”
He hurled it to the floor with an angry snarl. “Without you …” He crushed it viciously beneath his heel. “Even without you Sammy is a smash!”
He slammed the door behind me.
I kept on walking.
Out of his life.
It was over now—the chase, the rat-race, the back-breaking struggle for the success I had never deserved. And I should have been feeling awful about it. I should have been feeling something I could understand … not this exhausted calm, this utter peace, this wonderful feeling of absolution and release.
I went out front to the auditorium. I wanted to be there to see it through to the very end, come what may … a sketch-writer who would never again juggle with words, returning to the crime of his scenes. …
I looked now at the faces, and knew what they were waiting for. I knew what they would get, and out of what it had come. I, more than anyone, I knew, and was thankful that I would not be a part of it again. I saw Julie in an aisle seat way in the back, hiding her worried eyes behind the screen of smoked glasses, and when she spied me, I shook my head and silently framed the words: “Not yet.”
No sign of Lester yet.
In what bar … on what lonely park bench … was he seeking the answer, the final solution?
Inexorably, the moving red hand of the clock above the control-room window swept the buzzing, chattering throng toward its rendezvous with laughter, and across the nation, the millions shifted restlessly in their chairs, waiting.
Five minutes to go now.
A hush fell over the great auditorium.
I saw the ushers closing the doors.
Eyes turned to stare at the closed red curtains that hid the stage.
The three cameramen out front, shirts stained with sweat, earphones clamped on their heads for the directions that would come from the control-room, swung the giant mechanisms in their hands in a final tryout to make sure that these cameras, these eyes through which outside millions would be present here, were fluid and mobile and ready to shift with the wild, swift movements and the sometimes unexpected acrobatics of a Sammy Hogarth harlequinade.
In the sponsor’s booth behind their screen of glass, I saw the men from the tobacco company—solemn faced, waiting to be shown, unwilling yet to smile, waiting to find out if the laughter of an audience could be louder than the whisper of scandal that had been growing in volume ever since noon of that day.
In their seats near the exit, as though prepared for quick flight, I saw Jake Pitz and Phil Kane and Sonny Carmichael, pale and sick with the fear that their laugh-bombs would fail to go off. And right beside them, Connie, whose eyes met mine, and seeing my face, were kind enough to look away.
I sank into my seat down front beside the television monitor screen, hearing the vast silence, feeling the breathless tension building up behind me as the second-hand of the clock swept forward.
Once more around.
Then zero.
The red light flashed.
And suddenly the silence blew up in the booming of kettle drums.
VIII
This was it, then.
Beginning now with the crashing chords of musical introduction and the exuberant cry of an announcer and the sliding credit-cards to spell out the words to the cameras:
The Sammy Hogarth Show.
Through the combined facilities of three great networks and the continent-spanning magic of microwaves.
This was what it had all been for.
This, which was beginning now with ear-splitting applause as he came trotting out in the silly costume, wearing the invisible, undetectable mask of jolly good nature, and instantly sent them into shrieks of pent-up delight with his machine-gun patter.
The setup, the payoff, the answering yell … faster and faster. …
Look at me! This is your Sammy. Your lovable, likable, laughable Sammy. Look at me, listen, and answer me, please answer me. Let me hear you telling me, in the only language I can understand, that it isn’t true, this which I feel inside of me … unloved, unloving, hateful and hating. Tell me I’m like you, like him, like everyone, good as everyone, better than everyone. Tell it to me. Quick. There aren’t enough of them … Rita, Felicia, Rosemary, Julie. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t last. So tell me. Convince me. Let me hear you. Look at me. Listen. See? Hear that? This is your Sammy, your lovable, likable, laughable Sammy. Please! Quick! More! I need it!
Louder!
He dropped his trousers to the floor. The under-shorts were plaid. They screamed with delight, and he beamed at them gratefully. We love you, Sammy, they said with their hands as he skipped into the wings.
It was a good beginning.
And as the minutes fled by, it got even better.
He came back and was funny with the humor of Jake Pitz; he did the Harry Truman parody at the piano and they roared their approval, believing Sammy Hogarth to be witty and clever, not knowing of Phil Kane’s blood and Sonny Carmichael’s sweat and tears. He sang the genius of Irving Berlin’s words and music, gave up the stage reluctantly for a commercial, then convulsed them for seven minutes, as I had known he would, in the barbershop sketch.
You had it, Davey boy. A hundred grand a year if they had let you live long enough to feed your wit to the hungry monster called television …
And then the throng relaxed to the ballet, and the boy singing words of love to a girl, because they knew that Sammy would return to them soon.
Which he did, disguised as a magician.
And again, in the Foreign Legion sketch, to the enormous sound of their laughter.
And when he came out at the end of the skit, mopping Davey Farber’s sweat from his forehead, he walked down to the apron of the stage, and the curtains swept closed behind him. He looked out at the eager, expectant faces, his eyes shining in the lights with the gleam of satiety. They had answered his plea; he had heard them and believed them; they had enabled him to do his best. He was in, and he knew it, and there were only six minutes to go now. He looked down at them, and they knew what was coming, and he knew that they knew and he grinned at them, toyed with them. They held their breath, straining for release, waiting for his signal, and he just looked down at them and smiled, and then finally when they could stand it no longer, he gave it to them.
“Lemme tell you,” he said, “about my brother Lester …”
And they exploded, screaming.
Let me tell you about the lazy jerk, the parasite, the All-American slob …
I sat there with my hand shading my eyes, not watching, just listening. Listening was bad enough. Hearing them howl and yip at each brutal thrust was bad enough. It had to be funny. They had to laugh. This was their Sammy, their lovable, likable, laughable Sammy. If they could not respond to the shock of each stinging barb with a laugh, it would suddenly not be funny. It would be cruel and malicious and destructive, and that could not be. That would be unbearable. This was Sammy. It had to be funny. This was all a big joke. For years, now, they had been partners with him in this great big wonderful, familiar, comfortable running gag, and they howled with unhesitating delight, because they knew he was only kidding.
Lovable, likable, laughable Sammy.
“‘Of course it’s a raise,’ I said to him. ‘Here I am on three networks and you gettin’ the same salary even though you’re three times as useless …’”
They shrieked. Oh, it was a hell of a successful spot, all right.
Some say it was the greatest thing that ever happened on television, probably greater than any single event that will ever be witnessed on the medium again.
At first I didn’t know what they were tittering for, or why it grew so swiftly to a loud guffaw of recognition. And then I looked up at the burst of applause and saw him shuffling out onto the stage, and there was something about the drooping body, the way he walked, the expression on his face, that was so much the embodiment of all that Sammy had built up in the minds of the public—he looked so much like the ineffectual little nobody of Sammy’s endless portrait—that it just had to be him. It had to be Lester, it was Lester, and they yelled with pleased surprise. My heart skipped a beat when I saw him.
On the screen it was a long shot, and the millions could not see the look in his eyes, and the color wasn’t that good that they could see the pallor of his face and the bloodless lips, drained of everything by the inner anxiety. And then Camera Two was coming in on Sammy for a closeup of his reaction, and I knew then that Byron Ford, the director, was not sure this was not a last-minute addition to the routine.
I glanced up at the control-room window and met his questioning look, and I found myself raising my thumb and index finger in the circle of “okay,” and nodding my head.
And then Sammy saw Lester coming, and his face quickly took on the mask of impish astonishment to cover the sickening dismay I could see in his eyes.
“Whaddaya know? Here he is!” he shouted above the sound of their applause. “The kid himself … my brother Lester!”
He reached out an arm to encircle Lester’s shoulders in greeting as he came, now, down to the apron where Sammy stood.
“For him I would do anything. I would give him the shirt off my back, the suit off my body, the tie off my neck, the shoes off my feet …” He paused, grinning. “Look good on him, don’t they?”
They laughed, and giggled again in a higher pitch as Lester suddenly raised up on his toes and slapped the grin off Sammy’s face. It was such a silly, ineffectual attempt at muscular action, like a parody of anger. And Sammy’s stunned, comical expression only added to the effect. Oh, it was wonderfully funny. Leave it to Sammy, they said to themselves. Leave it to Hogarth, the tobacco-men beamed in their glassed-in booth. Leave it to Sammy, they said up in the control-room and into the earphones of the cameramen. Leave it to Sammy to come up with a show-stopping surprise.
You could hear the second slap like the crack of a whip, and Sammy winced at the sting, then forced a foolish giggle.
“Could it be possible this late in the year I feel a mosquito?”
He ducked, seeing the hand coming at him again, and quickly he grabbed Lester’s wrists and held on to them, looking past him to the wings but unable to show them back there with his eyes that they must do something. Someone must help him get rid of this flea.
He turned to the audience. “Is there an exterminator in the house?”
Still the laughter came.
And then suddenly Lester burst from his grasp and stood there for a moment, swaying unsteadily, eyes wild and drunken, lips trembling. He whipped off the horn-rimmed glasses and tossed them, unheeding, into the orchestra pit. And for an instant I thought he would speak, cry out, say something … anything … it was in him. You could see it in him … the years of it trying desperately to get out, be heard, to hit, to smash. But it was just a pudgy fist and it caught Sammy in the soft of his stomach and he gasped with surprise and quickly screwed his face into a comical grimace to arouse their gale of laughter.
And it came now, the laughter, but peculiar-sounding, almost hysterical, as though they were using an extra measure of effort to make it come forth and stay up there where they could hear it. And they looked desperately to Sammy for reassurance and saw him circling around Lester, hands up awkwardly in the mock stance of a John L. Sullivan, flicking at his own nose with a comical thumb to underline the joke of it all.
Couldn’t they see this wasn’t part of the show?
Up there behind the glass, out front behind the cameras, off-stage in the wings … couldn’t they sense that something was happening, drag him off, break it up, cut it off the air and replace what was happening here on the screen with a test pattern for forty million people to stare at in momentary wonderment? Or did they know, and knowing, still find themselves too stunned by the swiftness of it, the wonder of it, the excitement of it, pounding now in their own blood, too, as though this were dramatic spot news that had to be covered? Or was it something deeper down and perhaps even completely unknown to them, the secret wish come true, the inevitable result of years of working with Sammy, taking Sammy, enduring Sammy … was it this that kept all who might have intervened frozen at their posts?
I edged forward in my seat, feeling the wild beating of my heart, seeing them captured beautifully by the camera in the rectangle of the monitor screen. It was like fight night at the Garden, and the crowd was yelling now like a fight-crowd yells, and Lester was moving in slowly, trying to work past Sammy’s left, pawing at the air in feeble gestures, stumbling back, crying softly to himself, plodding in again, mouth working in a confused mumble of compulsive fear as he came closer and closer to the terror of Sammy’s fists, waiting there before him, feinting toward him now. I could see Sammy’s lips. I could read the frantic, “Beat it. Get off!” behind the mask of his strained smile.
Lester swung jerkily and missed.
Sammy pushed into him with his belly.
The laughter of the crowd was hollow and desperate, breaking now, faltering, trying again, and coming out in confused shouts. A woman screamed. A little child began to cry.
Sammy looked out over the lights, his face suddenly agonized.
Please let me hear you. Please. This is your Sammy, your—
Lester swarmed all over him.
—Lovable, laughable—
He shoved him off.
“Attaboy, Lester!” a voice shouted from the crowd.
Sammy moved in, the torture in his eyes, feeling it, seeing it, hearing it slipping away. Lester stepped back, watching … staring … moving back … circling away … mouth working silently beneath the shouting voices.
I heard the uproar behind me rising in an hysterical crescendo.
“What’sa matter, Sammy?”
His lip curled. He moved.
The cameras swept in.
“Look out!”
Lester ducked. Sammy’s right caught him high on the cheek. His head snapped back. Another right, and a left. He rubbed his face and moved in, swinging. I glanced at the screen, saw the struggling figures framed perfectly there. Lester was crying. Quietly, the quivering lips were spilling over into sobs as he moved in blindly and met the hard fist and the blood spurted sickeningly from his nose.
I heard the hoarse shouting.
I saw the clock.
Two minutes to go.
Sammy looked out as though pleading: Save me, save me … and shuddering, he took the stomach punch. Frantically he pushed and grappled and tried to hold on to the squirming, struggling body that was almost lost beneath the immensity of his own. Sobbing, Lester broke away and came back again, swinging wildly, came back to the fists, asking for more, asking for it as though it were something he wanted, had always wanted, and needed now … the fist and the punching bag … the slap and the cheek … as though this was what he had been moving toward, inexorably, all his life, this moment whose consummation might free him.
Blindly, sobbing, he walked into the maelstrom.
And suddenly the desperate fury erupted.
With an angry snarl, Sammy seized him by the tie, swung him around so his back faced the audience, pulled him toward him, yanked the pathetic, beaten little body to an upright position and, kneeling, measured him for a final moment.
“Sammy, wait!” The cry burst from my throat and was lost in the uproar.
I saw it coming.
I saw the camera moving in for the closeup.
I saw it on the screen as the millions saw it, as every one saw it.
The rectangle of glass filled by a hate-torn face.
The maniacal look, the frightening eyes, the twisted mouth …
“No!” people were shouting. “Don’t!” they screamed, unheard, unnoticed, forgotten in the blind, red fury of a lifetime exploding now with the cumulative force of the bitter years as Sammy tore into him with the big, hard fists, crunching into the soft, unpracticed body, faster and faster the welter of savage blows, snapping the head back, rocking the loose-hanging jaw and the blood-spurting face, moving in and down, following the sagging body down, pummeling the senseless, battered head, finishing it off with a final gasping crack and stepping back, at last, panting, the sweat pouring down his contorted face, to stare at the crumpled form lying there at his feet, white and still in the widening stain of blood.
In the awful moment of deathlike silence, I saw the stagehands hurrying out to carry the senseless body into the wings, and I heard Julie’s cry as she ran down the aisle.
And then, suddenly, Sammy looked up. Suddenly he remembered. Suddenly he was back, in a nightmare of recognition.
Desperately he ran a hand through the disorder of his hair. Quickly his mouth opened, as though he would save it with a word, a joke perhaps.
And then he saw the faces.
He stood there in the terrible stillness of the house, looking out at them, trying to say something, anything, trying to joke, to smile, to slip the mask back on, but it would not come, it could not come. It was gone, the mask was gone, stripped off by his violent hands and destroyed forever.
He gazed at them beseechingly, feeling the coldness of their anger and their stunned betrayal sweeping over him. And suddenly, in an agony of awareness, he knew the truth. He was through. It was over, forever. Nothing he could do or say would ever be able to restore the shattered illusion or wipe out the memory of what they had seen revealed to them tonight. He looked out at them with frantic, pleading eyes and saw the answer on their faces, and it was oblivion.
Slowly, hopelessly, he turned and walked off the stage, off all the screens of all the living rooms in the land.
And in a moment, it was over.
I pushed through the solemn crowds, searching for Connie. I found her and took her hand. Together we went outside, into the fresh air.