I COUNTED TO TEN, slowly. Then I opened the door and walked out into the corridor. It was a comforting and familiar sight. Two chambermaids were carrying linen to the guests’ rooms. From the Administration Office a typewriter announced the existence of endless lists of names, of personal histories, each one different, yet not quite different. Each one the same, yet not quite the same.
Outside, snow was sifting slowly down from the opaque sky. Part of me registered the occurrence personally: white to the eye, cold to the heart. Part of me, the Director-part, worried about having someone sweep off the steps to the Administration Building. But my encounter with Max had left my head whirling. The snowy steps would have to wait. It was seeing Jewel again that should have thrown me. But it turned out to be Max and the disturbing insanities of his tongue. What did he know of my childhood? What could Jewel have told him, except the part that she understood? And I had labored unsuccessfully, I’d thought, to make her understand.
My childhood was my father. How explain Solomon, the king of my young years? Especially to Jewel, the white, Gentile virgin, waiting to be sacrificed to the tormented Jewish God she had married. Solomon had been a member of a rebel Chasidic sect that settled in Key West in the mid-nineteen-thirties. There, again—should I explain Chasidism, its strange joys and historical origins? I chose the easy way out, telling her it was a kind of Christian Science Judaism—a little more pantheistic, perhaps. There were thirty families living in our village-within-a-village. A sheltered island in the midst of the twentieth-century ocean.
Like Buddha I was brought up entirely sheltered from pain and the uglier realities of life. (My mother died when I was two. She was never, thus, an abandoning presence, merely an absence.) My father tutored me at home. I never set foot in a public school. Yet his purpose was not particularly religious. My father said his morning prayers sporadically. He attended synagogue some Friday nights and Saturday mornings—others not. What were consistent were the precepts of the sect, for sect it was, as poorly organized as it had been.
God’s will is man’s will. Therefore the will is to be honored and trained above the mind and the emotions.
What happens in the world is good. Because the world is all there is: heaven, earth and hell, all at once. Thus, the world is to be shunned. Because good without evil is a sickness.
These slightly addled pseudo-Talmudic sayings were the daily bread of my childhood. Some of them were deliberately witty, like: Love thy neighbor before he loves you. Thus you have the moral advantage.
I studied these puzzling precepts with the same zeal as I did Chaucer, biology or the commentaries of Rashi.
The physical surroundings in which I grew up contributed to my sense of special protection. The lucidity of mornings that rose, dazzling, over the sea. Arching, rainbow-colored umbrellas of sky that accepted the sun as no sky has since. The result was a clarity of light that touched every shape, every outline, whether house or tree or abandoned boat, with luminescence. With this came a freshness of air that only the semi-Tropics knows—air that has the weight of the fragrances it bears, a delicate weight that presses on the sixteen-year-old heart, that squeezes out the anxious and nameless feelings that are carried in a tight cluster in the breast, until a breath of scented evening air releases them in an inarticulate flood.
Those who live near the sea develop an intense and continuous relationship with the sky. Sea—sky—the natural conjunction of the two is no accident. It is in the nature of such landfalls that the sky becomes a kind of comment on the meeting of ocean and land. That sky, that blue was of such an intensity that it promised a myriad of meanings to my eyes, looking always to see through it! Finally, I grew content to accept it as a silent and opaque partner in all my young—largely imaginary—ventures.
Then there were the rains. For days, weeks, months the sky deluged me with pouring reproaches. My brain musty with damp heat, I went about my studies with a sense of personal betrayal. When the skies were clear, during the few hours not actively filled with study or play or prayer, I would lie on my back and examine it the way lovers look moonily and endlessly at the beloved’s face. I would search for omens in the topography of the heavens. If I had a conflict—say a friend wanted me to play sick to avoid lessons, then sneak out with him to the movies—I would look upward for an answer. This had nothing to do with my supposed location of a God above. It was a primitive duality, myself and the sky. The question of choice even at that tender age was so crucial to me that I had to involve the great, inanimate vault overhead which I felt, in my motherlessness and in my self-imposed loneliness, to be my only true friend. If a girl whom I had been secretly lusting after was not returning my glances, I turned to the sky for some special configuration of puffy cloud or sun-gilded quadrant of blue that would tell me the time was ripe to be bold—or to bide my time in secret hunger. That was why I felt the rainy season to be a betrayal. It was like a mask over a father’s face (I could not remember my mother’s) hiding possible auguries that could influence choice.
One day, of course, the rain would stop. Then the world was revealed in a primary light, its blues definitive, its yellows gilding the crystalline air: in the face of such magnificent renewal who could believe in the existence of death. Obviously an old wives’ tale! Having endured the ordeal of rain for so long, sometimes months, for the rest of the year the sky had an impossible purity. It was at this time, right after the rains, that the entire Fellowship gathered at the Bay to celebrate the end of the deluge. Together we chanted the b’rocha of gratitude for deliverance from natural disaster (we were not farmers; rain was not cherished among us). The summer I remember best was when Solomon, my father, was chosen to speak afterward. I don’t recall everything he said too clearly—I was only about eight years old—but I do remember snatches of his themes. He spoke of speech and silence. Speech, he said, was marvelous. And silence, too, was marvelous. Only the deaf monologue was bad. Most of our lives, he said, we carry on a deadly monologue while fooling ourselves into thinking we are engaged in a dialogue—with anyone or anything—with a teacher, a wife, an automobile. Actually all of life must be a dialogue to be of any value. There are no excuses, he added with a laugh that twisted his short black beard foolishly. He was not a prepossessing-looking man. Rain, for example. When rain falls a dialogue is instantly initiated. You are depressed by the rain? You are responding in dialogue. You delight in it? Likewise! There is the dialogue between man and man. Very difficult, he grinned. And there is the dialogue between man and nature. Almost impossible. And there is the dialogue between man and God. This is, of course, quite impossible. After all, we do not know that God exists. We only have His word for it. And our experience shows us that everything and everyone that claims to exist is not necessarily telling the truth. This is why the impossible dialogue is important. It keeps the mind and the heart forever open to the interchange of thought and feeling. In replying with our answers to a question that may never have been asked, we are affirming the glory of dialogue for its own sake. If God answered directly one day, we would no doubt plead with him to be silent again so the human possibilities of dialogue could continue, so the idea could remain always present. If that mad dialogue between the language of men and the deafness of the heavens could remain always potentially possible, then surely the simply difficult dialogues between men and men—and the almost impossible dialogues between men and nature—surely these must continue for the sake of whatever revelations they might bring!
Solomon closed his sermon—a lay sermon was what it was, every member of the Fellowship being a Rabbi—with five minutes of silence. It was purgatory for me. If I had not been bursting with pride in my father I could not have borne it at all. I fidgeted like mad; shifted my weight from foot to needling foot. Finally, failing to catch the eye of any of my friends with my own conspiratorial eye, I looked out at the great curve of the Bay, swooping away from the sea in a dramatic arc. I was not merely bored with the five-minute silence. I was troubled. Perhaps my father had discovered my eight-year-old dialogue with the sky. I shivered a little in the hot August sun. Later I told Solomon of my fears. He laughed and told me I was the only one who had understood his sermon. He gave me a quarter for it which I spent on the cotton candy they sold in a store near the beach.
My eloquent father remained a widower, permanently. His main preoccupations were the Fellowship, my education—and protection—and his work for the local of the Teamsters’ Union which he had helped organize. Driving his truck to the produce markets of Miami, Nashville and Memphis, he supported us. The surplus he donated to charity. Himself he donated to the struggle for justice to the teamster. His father, too, had been a teamster, in Odessa. There the internal combustion engine was the horse. But the injustice had been the same. Barely enough to eat while you had the brawn to fight the horses, the cobblestoned streets and the no-good kids who tried to steal your cargo. Then when you were too old or took sick—onto the cobblestones and someone else could drive your team of horses. His son, Solomon, never forgot this. It killed him, finally, while still a young man. I saw him die. And if anything kills me while still a young man or saves me, for that matter, it will be that sight. The children had always been protected from death. We were not only not allowed to attend funerals, we were not told of the existence of death. Of course, in oblique ways we knew of it. Books spoke of death. But when it never comes close—when people just “go away”—it has an insubstantiality that allows you to manipulate your feelings about it, rather than the reverse. My best friend had “gone away” at the age of eleven. It was sad—but not desperate. Even sicknesses were handled in an indefinite way, to protect the children.
Thus the background to my witnessing my father’s murder. He was on a picket line during the famous teamsters’ strike of the ’forties. They were marching around the headquarters of a trucker in Tampa who stubbornly refused to recognize the union: as they trudged they chanted some rhythmic slogan. It was a hot August day and I had been allowed to drive up with my Uncle Joseph to go to my first movie. Until sixteen, movies were not allowed us. I would then be driven home by my father when his turn on the picket line was up. (Joseph was not a relative. All the older men in the community were called “Uncle” by all the kids.)
My father’s death occurred swiftly, mysteriously, like the spark in a flash fire, the exact cause of which defies discovery forever. There was a scuffle, some shouts; one man fell; some horses’ hooves got involved; then my father was lying on the ground bleeding, it seemed, from his pepper-gray hair.
Uncle Joseph whisked me away swiftly. But not swiftly enough. The whole thing had collapsed. I don’t think I’ve ever understood anything as simply and profoundly since that day. I struck through the web of responsibility—the tangle of social pressures—the uniform—(to confuse things further, the cries of “kike” from the policemen). All of it allowed of no doubt. I saw the fragility of skin, the easy availability of blood. I saw that my father’s breathing had been a lie in its very casualness. It had always been temporary—Gods and men both waited to choke it off. It was only a question of who got there first. Like Buddha, I realized with shock what a terrible lie my happy, hermetic childhood had been. Where had all the pain, misery, cruelty and death been those sad and marvelous years? Waiting for me—like the snow I never saw until my eighteenth year.
During the next year I lived with Uncle Joseph and his family. I was a sixteen-year-old secret traitor in the community. I knew the truth, so I merely endured. My passionate interest in studies vanished. I walked through them just to keep the adults happy. I listened to the eternal aphorisms with unvoiced skepticism. I knew better. This attempt to make sense made no sense. That was clear.
I am not a prisoner of any trauma theory. I know that the one event, no matter how awful, can never determine the future course of a life. I had always been a subtly estranged child. Once, at the age of seven, I’d said to my father, “I feel unreal, Da.”
“Unreal. You mean not real—like other people?”
“I don’t know. Just unreal.”
As always, he countered it with a teaching. You are only as real as you make other people think you are. Except when you are alone. And you are always alone. This sort of thing contributed to my growing up as a thinking animal—but not exactly a secure one.
Max had been right in his contemptuous comment about my “crazy childhood” leading to the Academy. But it was not a straight or simple line. The day after I turned eighteen I left the community. Whether they couldn’t find me, or never tried, I do not know. Perhaps it was covered by some obscure epigram: The day a child runs away is the day he stops being a child. And who chases after a runaway man?
Out in the world, in this case New York City, I was faced with the problem of what to do for money. All of the interests I had developed as a child—geology, sociology, science—all had been postponed with the inevitable: “That you’ll pursue further in college.” Now I was the pursued, not the pursuer. The first thing I did was drive a truck. I had, after all, been driving my father’s truck around town since I was fourteen. That didn’t last long. The irony of it was too flat to the taste. I was a clerk in an insurance company for a time; then a private investigator for a company that checked up on other company’s employees. I performed many of the non-jobs done by people who live entirely in the present with respect to their occupation. Only at night do their personal lives pick up the thread of continuity. But here I differed. I kept that as abstract and non-continuous as my jobs. Until I met Jewel.
That happened during one cold winter—my twentieth—when I took a job as manager of a winter stock company in Pennsylvania. It was actually a menial position, but I liked the sound of it: one can see already the future Director of the Suicide Academy.
One night an actor became ill. In desperation I played his part. (We could not afford paid understudies. We counted on actors in robust health, a kind of pre-Blue Cross health roulette.)
Acting was a profound shock. I knew, the instant I began to move and speak as an imaginary person, that I had discovered the sequel to the first shock that had so disarranged my sense of life four years earlier, my father’s bloody death.
Acting! From a minimal life confined in my doomed skin I was suddenly born into a hundred, a thousand lives: as many as there were parts. Standing there in makeup for the first time in my life, I felt myself in the middle of time. I understood why there are clocks backstage. I threw myself into acting with a frenzy. Ten parts in seven weeks. I knew what had been bothering me. The normally extreme ambitions of youth had been aggravated by the abnormal upbringing my father had subjected me to. Death! If I couldn’t not die, what was the use of living? If I couldn’t be everybody—then I was nothing. But an actor is everybody and nothing. For the first time I understood the awful banality of the actors I knew, those I’d been living with since becoming the manager of the company. They were so directed toward the temporary, the present tense of their art, they had no presence left for mere living. Those that seemed to were only using mannerisms that ring true on stage and are hollow as a bell off stage. But what a magnificent company I joined when I began to act. Only actors could live in that imaginary world my father’s sect had tried to create. In the theater everything exists in the present; all human action is a moral parable the meaning of which is not quite clear—or at best is ambiguous. (Even the most learned of critics disagree.) And the success of an attempt is immediately apparent, as is the failure. There is no need to wait for the ultimate outcome of a revolution. You play “Danton’s Death” and by the end of the evening, history has brought in its judgment. The next morning the critics guillotine history. Best of all, though, what I felt as liberation was the conjunction of myself on the stage and the people in the audience. I would cover in the small space of an evening what they would have to live an entire lifetime to find out. And even better, the next evening I could do it again—and again—and again ad mortuum. It was a kind of immortality. The superficiality of the society and the boredom of the daylight hours seemed a small price to pay.
I began to have strange dreams—full of masks that spoke like people and people who looked like masks. Children who died of old age; old men and women romping like children. I traveled across centuries and continents in seconds. This carried over into the oddest, most omnipotent daytime life I have ever had. Not that I felt immortal. On the contrary. Two and a half hours sufficed for a life.
I met Jewel when I played Petruchio to her Katharina. I was tamed at once. How could I have known the desperate lack of form that lay within that beautiful form? I, the supreme artist of choice, fell instantly in love with a beautiful Jewel absolutely incapable of choosing.