Rach and Artie had no coin to flip to designate visiting duty. Rach decided they should stop a policeman and ask his opinion. “Officer, which of us do you think should visit our pop tomorrow? He’s extremely sick in the veterans’ hospital, and probably dying.” Artie watched his sister go quietly off the deep end of grief, discharging one more infected joke, the sick humor their father had sentenced them to. He was powerless to keep her from falling apart in giggles here in the middle of the city crowd. The officer would run them in for snickering at the word dying in public. “I’ve got the car, and my brother is busy with law school. But on the other hand, he’s older and Dad likes him a lot better.” To Artie’s astonishment, the policeman didn’t even blink. Instead, he replied parentally in a Polish-American drawl that he thought that kind of thing was more of a son’s responsibility. Rach concurred. She made Artie take her home and lent him the Pinto for twenty-four hours, taking his watch as collateral.
Artie couldn’t afford any more time away from the books. But then, for the last two decades and more, he had not really been able to afford the family he had. He allotted an hour for the visit, an unrealistic estimate, he knew, but one that made him feel disciplined. Arriving at the room the next evening, he found Pop teaching Mr. Banks and Mr. Menkis how to play pinochle, which the man had long declared the best activity people can engage in without a fourth. Seeing Artie, Pop excused himself from the game, moved to his own bunk, and pulled the flimsy green curtain shut, more for the joke effect than for the illusion of privacy.
“Sorry about checking up on you so soon,” Artie began. “Your mother made me come out.”
“I figured. Don’t worry about it.”
“So what’s up? What’d they find?”
“You think they’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Christ. They must have said something.”
“Oh, sure. The proctologist said, ‘Hold still.’”
Artie shook his head, said, “Not funny, Pop,” and burst out laughing. But in truth, Dad had no news. Artie offered to go down to the ward nurse’s station and ask around. But Eddie surprisingly waved him off. The gesture indicated that Pop considered the step unnecessary.
For want of a conversational topic, Eddie whispered, “My colleague Mr. Menkis over in the corner must, the day after tomorrow, submit to what is euphemistically referred to in these parts as elective surgery. Last night, he dreamt they did the deed with an acetylene torch, burnt out the offending tissue, and sewed him back up. Later, they came and said they’d accidentally left a few ashes in him and had to go back in after them. Eye has not heard, nor ear seen, nor . . .” He caught Artie’s eye and his voice changed. “Nor heart report, what Menkis’s dream meant.” Father and son fell silent, thinking of the doomed third party. “Guess what I’ve been doing?” Pop at last segued a key change.
Artie held out his hand for a moment’s pause. “Wait a minute. . . . Let me guess. You’ve been lecturing in the TV lounge about the long-term effects of the Kefauver Committee on American media.”
“Close. I’ve been reading poetry.”
“Oh, Jesus. You insist on living long enough to embarrass me. Well, I had better know the worst.” He wanted to say that grown men, particularly sick grown men, had no business playing with lyrics. But he could not suppress his curiosity about what rhymes his father could possibly find consolation in, here at Hines. Dad did not respond right away. Instead, he gazed at his son with misplaced sorrow. Artie felt, with all the force of the old distress, the upheaval a few years back, when he had told his father that he intended to study literature. Dad had many times told him to study whatever he needed. But Artie had felt the man’s disapproval on pragmatic grounds. After several agonized months, Artie switched to prelaw on his own volition, without again asking his father how free he was. Now he could almost swear that the old guy was begging his forgiveness. Acutely uncomfortable, almost to the point of shame, Artie mumbled, “What has it been, big guy? Kipling?”
“Close.”
“Robert Service? ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’?” Artie felt horror-struck as he heard himself pronounce the words. He hadn’t even thought of the implications, but was just pulling the title out of the air. He knew of no way out of the humiliation except to pretend he had meant what he said and did not think it embarrassing.
Dad at last came to his rescue. “What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end . . .”
In a rush of affection, Artie completed, “which is always present.” He felt suddenly flushed, limitless, as if his father had just confessed to loving him. “Eliot, Dad? You going highbrow on me in your old age?”
“Somehow I knew you’d come through on that couplet. I used to hate that poem. Know why?” Artie shook his head. “Here’s the leading poetic figure of the twentieth century. An air-raid warden during the Blitz. He’s going to write the definitive literary statement on the world apocalypse. Comes out in ’42. And he doesn’t once mention the real shooting.”
“Oh, but he does,” Artie objected.
“That’s what I have only now seen,” Dad agreed.
For more minutes than Artie had allotted, the two of them sat together and played Complete the Quotation. Dad began. “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,” and Artie completed, “Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.” Dad did the third: “A lonely impulse of delight,” and Artie wrapped up, “Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”
Dad challenged, “I have a rendezvous with Death,” and Artie supplied, “At some disputed barricade.” They wandered from Frost to Auden to Rupert Brooke. Years later, Artie remembered the few minutes as the only time he had ever spent with his father on equal terms, with no invasion or distrust between them. He had never enjoyed his time with the man so much, and would never match the moment again.
At length, they returned to Four Quartets. Dad demanded, “The end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started . . .”
“And know the place for the first time.”
Dad expressed his admiration for his son’s unexpected reservoir of trivial knowledge. “Unstumpable,” he declared. Finally, he deadpanned, “If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs . . .” and Artie, at last the man’s equal, answered, “You call that poetry?”
They lapsed into one of those silent holes that swallows surrounding noise. Artie listened until he could not stand another second. He looked at the enclosing curtain and said, “I understand from Little Eddie that you pointed out to him the problems with ‘An eye for an eye’ as an extended strategy?”
Dad needed no gloss. “It might work,” he answered softly, “if we could be sure of getting more than one time through the showdown.”
“What about unilateral disarmament?” Artie said, still to no one in particular.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, ‘I refuse to defect, no matter what you decide to do.’”
Dad did not answer at first. When he did, Artie could hear mucus welling up in the man’s vocal cords. “You see where that strategy has landed me.”
A circuit breaker flipped inside him, and Artie jumped up. “Hey, call your family, all right?” he said. But already he knew his father’s answer. Neither of his folks would ever acclimate to long distance. They kept a stopwatch by the phone and turned every toll call into a three-minute mile. After twice the time he had allotted for the visit, Artie made the obligatory “Don’t touch the nurses” joke and said he’d give Pop a call the next morning, when the first lab results were supposed to be ready. They shook hands and the visit was history. Or almost. Dad stopped him in the doorway.
“Don’t forget, kid. Calamine. The Sea will provide.”
“Right, Pop. Many brave hearts. Talk to you soon.”
Artie forgot to make his promised call. Two days later, on Thursday morning, the phone rang in Barbed-Wire City. Ailene was in the middle of the extended cosmetic ritual that Rach liked to call “putting on a happy face.” Lily still slept, havin
g gone for a late walk the night before. Eddie Jr. engaged in the robust pastime of singing the alphabet song along with kiddie TV while waiting for the bus that would take him to high school. Ailene yelled at him to get the phone at the same instant he yelled at her that he was getting it.
“Yo!”
“Edward Hobson, please.”
“This is he.” Both Eddie and the party of the second part missed beats. The ensuing silence spread from the center of the line to both ends. Then both started speaking at once, like the stuck two-step people on the pavement make in failing to get around one another. Eddie kicked back and let the other guy have a go.
“I guess I mean your father. Is he there, please?”
“Big Ed is at the hospital for a few tests. He’ll be sprung by the weekend. This is . . .” For the first time in years, he remembered the title Pop had plagued him with while the kids were growing up. In yet another frequently repeated, quasi-pedagogic game Pop marshaled the kids around, Artie became the Heir Apparent, Lil the Crown Princess, Rach the Arch Duchess, and Eddie Jr., always near tears at the gag, suffered as the Pretender to the Throne. “This is the Pretender to the Throne. May I ask who’s calling?”
“This is the hospital.” Another silence, as both ends did some quick calculating. “It seems your dad has sprung himself ahead of schedule.”
1944
The boy is perfect: Walt knows it from the first set of the singing waiter’s act. Disney snatches teenaged Eddie Hobson from the jaws of current events and whisks his lead-to-be back to the safe haven of World World. He snares the boy just in time, before he is touched by outside developments. The nisei pilots scrape the belly of their DC-3 while bringing it down in the cornfields, but the director and his discovery reach the hidden kingdom intact. As young Eddie steps down onto the simulated Tarmac, his eyes open in astonishment. For spreading in front of him is a miniature, picture-perfect Lost Domain.
The insignificant swatch of cornbelt has transformed beyond recognition into a panorama of steep mountains, dismal swamps, forbidding tundra, mysterious forests, and meandering rivers. It fills with great cities that start, peak, and drop off again within a few yards. Traffic clogs the congested arteries of a hundred towns, turns the corner at shimmering intersections, and just as suddenly disappears. Villages and farms dot nearby rolling meadows in an optical illusion of plenitude and miles. Animals from every niche of the food chain graze the layout, side by side.
And the people: the most miraculous of all, they pass back and forth in constant industry, building and refining the outskirts of their still-growing creation. Eddie cannot tell how many they are. They swell to millions and in the next minute shrink down to a dozen. It seems only moderately strange, then, that they are all black-haired, umber-skinned beings of another country.
“Where are we?” asks the boy, although he recognizes the place better than his own home. He has spent whole years here, lifetimes. He grew up in this place’s shadow, the magnificent portal of Perhaps that has always run just alongside his own life, hidden a few steps behind or ahead, to the right or left. The Maybe his movies have always hinted at. The one place necessity cannot touch.
Up close, he sees that the Shangri-La is only a pasteboard nation. But that hardly matters. All Eddie has ever known of moonlight anyway is the little bit that sifts into his chamber. Nips and tucks by the busy countrymen produce so strong a suggestion that the resulting castles and countryside serve nicely for the real thing. The boy Hobson is still young enough to believe that a hole is a well if he can drink the resulting water. Halfway down the airplane steps, he promises Disney full allegiance. “I’ll do anything. Just let me be a part of this.”
The world’s most popular artist explains to the boy that he already is a part, and more. He is the crucial ingredient, the guest of honor, the moral and motive force. He is the one the sovereign state has been built for. Disney fills the kid in as they tour the shooting set. Every person they pass, he explains to the uncomprehending child, would be in jail if not for this project. “You locked up your own neighbors in order to win the current fight,” he tells young Hobson, “a sin you didn’t even know was on your hands. How would you like to make a little compensation?” The boy gives a stunned and furious nod of his head.
Together, they explore the live-in models and locations. A sweep of Disney’s hand indicates the size of his support staff, its magnitude. “Of course we didn’t need ten thousand pairs of hands to pull this off. We could have brought the project in with twenty dozen.” But from the beginning, he says, the point has been the same as that animating his most modest cartoon: to set free as many as possible, to coax them into acting on their own. Now these folks are free. “But we still live in a world that needs to jail them.”
They walk in silence along a line of A-frame houses, flat movie props, piecing things together. “Life as we live it,” Disney says, “is about to become a free-for-all. Completely up for grabs.” The anger and the beet-red violence that comes into his protégé’s face forces Disney to laugh and quickly add, “Don’t worry. The Nazis and Nips haven’t a prayer. The good guys will win this one.”
“What danger, then . .?” As bright as he obviously is, Eddie has bought into the same morale-raising that Disney himself has hawked since Pearl Harbor: the sucker’s hope that the fighting will be over when the fighting’s over. Slowly and succinctly, Disney explains it to him. We have reached the point where we imprison ourselves by the hundred thousand, commonly agreed to be in the best collective interest. We must, because the Other Guy is even less scrupulous about playing by the rules. Such a moment never fades. The world is now so treacherous and immense that the private citizen in the postwar world will lock himself up rather than face the prospect of prison.
“I don’t mean chaos or collapsing buildings. The explosions and insurgencies will all disappear, except for livable doses, far away. But our lives a few decades from now will be a closet hell: each person passive, static, too terrorized to leave the apartment. The standard of living will keep creeping upward, but everyone will be dead bankrupt. Life will be endlessly entertaining, with nothing to dig into. Trust will have flown, and we will all know it. Each for himself, and the group against all.”
Disney listens to himself speak. He stares full face into the scene he is painting. For a moment, he despairs of taking arms against it, he, the national spokesman against Despair. He takes a breath, and is ready again. “It’s up to the two of us to fend that off. To convince the world to keep trusting. You with me, buddy?”
“But how will we ever do that?” the child asks.
According to Walt, nothing could be easier in the whole of creation. “We will tell a fable. We’ll rewrite your life, spin it from the top all over again.” He describes the long and revered tradition they will extend. “A creature of another order will come to show you what you otherwise could not suspect: where you fit in, what difference you make.” He speaks of Dante’s Beatrice; Scrooge’s Ghosts; and George Bailey’s Clarence, AS2, Angel Second Class. “Your job is the easiest of all. All you have to do is live. Wait for everything to come clear. Go through what the shooting script asks you to. Keep your eyes open, and believe.”
A scowl passes over the seventeen-year-old face, and Disney fears for a moment that the boy is already too old. The scowl shows the knowledge of howitzers and political upheavals, strategic power plays spreading over seven continents. But he gives the boy a chance to speak. “How will telling my story do anything?”
“Easy,” reveals Disney. That silent and well-mannered free-for-all is not inevitable. The world is not millions; it is one and one and one. It does not become an impasse until those ones start to renounce it. And they will have no cause to, if they stay tied to the good faith of others. “That’s where we come in,” the cartoonist croons. “We show them how one life, yours, changes all the others it touches on. How the game remains worth the candle, so long as one walks by faith and not by sight.”
Young Eddie still cannot see it. “Who will believe that what happens to me makes any difference whatsoever?”
“They will if you will,” Disney corrects him. “Don’t worry about the global tie-in. That’s my job. Our artists will paint that in. Look at it this way. If we can make forty million people weep over a cartoon woman, we should be able to swing it with flesh and blood. If our Duck can take on the Nazis, surely you can chip in. These things have ways of propagating. The audience will think they matter, if you believe you do,” he says again. “And if everyone thinks they matter, then they do.” Disney again falls silent, darkly so. “But the minute you lose faith, down comes the whole house of cards. Everybody might just as well run for cover.”
“So who’s my guardian angel?” Eddie asks with a grin.
“Haven’t you guessed?” replies the high-pitched voice that Walt himself has always supplied for his most powerful creation. The voice heard around the world.
They begin shooting the following week. Eddie meets his parents-to-be, Samuel Hinds and Beulah Bondi. Jimmy Lydon is the older brother. The boyhood home shifts from Teaneck to Hell’s Kitchen. The nisei carpenters create a family apartment more rustic and more comfortable than any Eddie has ever seen. The first few weeks of shooting cover domestic scenes, with everyone except the lead speaking in delightful immigrants’ accents that Eddie can barely understand.
Disney’s elegant and simple scheme is to shoot all of the Eddie Hobson story in black and white. At critical points, he will set the little man afoul of periodic crises, small showdowns with history. Then Mickey will appear and pull child Hobson out of the celluloid frame into another world, a place of unsuspected connections and living color. There, the mouse will explain enough of the ineffable to get the boy through his next segment of gray scales and halftones.
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 28
