A:
Sorry? Why what?
Q:
Sincerity. You said sincerity was
all but impossible.
A:
Well, look around—the mass entertainments,
the spectacle, the gewgaws and gadgets.
Everywhere those things that absorb
our focus most of all—the majority of
them are superficial, temporary.
And one can’t—
Q:
—and one can’t be sincere by superficial means?
A:
Exactly.
Q:
Who says?
A:
The dictionary says. The literal meaning of superficial
is the top-most face. The mask. That which hides,
disguises, misrepresents, or seems.
Q:
Not what is.
A:
Yes, sincerity is what is.
Genuineness, wholeness.
It has completeness, truthfulness,
meaning.
Q:
We don’t mean enough.
We pretend too much.
A:
We play a role, or roles.
One role after another.
Q:
The masks.
A:
The top-most face, yes.
Q:
Can’t some roles be sincere?
A:
Sure, the roles we take on authentically.
Not all these roles thrust upon us.
Q:
These masks.
A:
Yes, these masks going up in
front of us every day.
Q:
Where do they come from, the masks?
A:
They’re in the air. In everything we
give our attention to. There’s no escaping them
anymore. It’s a surfeit of seeming.
Q:
And sincerity is out the window.
A:
Mm.
Q:
And yet if sincerity is out the window,
how can I trust these assertions of yours?
A:
------------------------------
KENYON
Tonight again the lights, the lights, the layers of glass, the camera lens that shrinks him in his box, the tympani, the applause, the puffed-up questions and all the contortions this spectacle demands before, at last, he can just say the answers. But finally, finally Kenyon has reached the end of his long public audition…
LIVING ROOM
How many tie games is too many?
Ding! goes the bell as Fred Mint plucks up another card.
“The category is Political Leaders. Missus Dearborn you have ten points. How many do you want to try for?”
“I’ll take eleven.”
“For eleven points, here is your question. The following men were rallying forces behind varying political movements during the last ten years. First, a Frenchman born in Saint—I’m not sure of this word, C-E-R-E—the owner of a small stationery and bookstore who wanted to reform the tax system. Second, a pro-Greek archbishop who wants his island home freed from British rule. Third, an Egyptian Army officer who first headed his country’s government after the exile of King Faruk. And fourth, an African who while serving a prison sentence was elected Prime Minister of what has since become the new nation of Ghana.”
She takes the second part first.
Her face—the crease in her brow—you just can’t tell what she’s thinking. She bites her lip, moves her head side to side. Yet she’s cool and collected too. She doesn’t sweat in that booth like all the men, not that you can see. The men, God how those little booths must just smell of them by the end of every game. But she takes her time. And that crease—is that worry or concentration?
KENYON
Throughout the broadcast, every time Mint turns, the green gabardine of his jacket shimmers at the shoulders and back.
Now with a click his voice is in the headphones: “Kenyon Saint Claire, you have ten points.”
Of course no one sees the green jacket at home, let alone the shimmer. The screens leech the colors away, the faces and scenes all bloodless variations of shadow and light.
The little bell chimes and the blue card is in Mint’s hand.
“The category is Biblical Families. How many points would you like to try for?”
The pressure of the headphones at Kenyon’s head, the tension of the bent metal band and the rims of his ears pressed flat and stinging, and the soft weight of the dangling wires tugging his whole skull downward ever so slightly, and his own breathing resounding back at him through the mike. The heat, the heat, the sweat that drenches his undershirt, the incessant stare of the cameras and the red eye anchored in the darkness of the studio—the things we accustom ourselves to!
“Biblical families,” says Kenyon’s own voice in his ears. “I think I’ll try for eleven.”
“For eleven points, and since you are trying for twenty-one I can tell you that your opponent has already scored twenty-one. Now, you know how this works, Kenny—if you answer this next question correctly we will have another tie and you and Missus Dearborn will have to play another game. If you miss, then you will lose something in the neighborhood of twenty-seven thousand dollars, and we will have a new champion. Now I don’t want to pressure you, so you’ll have some extra time if you need it. Here is your question: The oldest man in the Bible is Methuselah, who died at age nine hundred and sixty-nine. According to the Book of Genesis, who was his father? We’re going to give you some time to think it over, and I don’t have to tell you that the game is weighing on this. Now good luck.”
The music plays. Kenyon gives his best grimace, mouthing the words over and over.
Father of Methuselah, Father of Methuselah.
He stares at the exposed tangle of wires on the backside of his scorebox. The ragged edge of the industrial carpeting on the isolation booth floor, the threading all frayed—it doesn’t meet the wall all along the base but veers in places to leave a gap of two or three inches, exposing shoe-scuffed plywood, particles of sawdust and dirt.
In the lower left-hand corner of the booth’s front glass, clear as day, there’s a thumbprint—a workman’s thumb, slightly brown with grease.
Father of Methuselah, Father of Methuselah.
All the time his brain is answering Enoch, Enoch, Enoch.
Or is it a spokesmodel’s thumb?
Has it been there all along?
Would anyone believe the stale and burnt-smelling air inside this glass cell, the Klieg lights—Krieg lights, he always wants to say, War Lights—baking the particleboard and carpet, the Formica and aluminum and steel.
Methuselah.
Enoch.
Would anyone believe the blindness behind this glass, all the blackness beyond the scorching Klieg lights?
To stand here and look out is to see nothing at all. A nonexistent vista, nothing like a window.
Look at them, Kenny, how they all go by? Oh, it’s like a play, isn’t it, how they all go by?
The window was like a screen, but its projection was grandly three-dimensional.
Methuselah. Enoch.
The first thing Kenny did in this house was fall down the stairs.
Click.
“Kenyon Saint Claire, your time is up. For eleven points, which would bring you to twenty-one and another tie game, please tell us the name, according to the Book of Genesis, of the Father of Methuselah.”
First thing Kenny did…
With the white square of his doubled-over handkerchief Kenyon is swabbing his brow, his eyes, his mouth.
&nb
sp; …fall down the stairs…
“Well, Fred,” he says into the snakelike microphone. “I know my scriptures, but right now at this moment the name is escaping me.”
In his earphones he can hear the anxious rustle and murmur of the crowd.
“There’s an awful lot riding on this, Kenny. Would you like to venture a guess?”
Enoch. Enoch.
“Because we’re having a bit of an indication from our studio audience, I have to caution them not to call out or make noises of any kind. Kenyon, I’m afraid I have to ask for your answer now.”
Enoch … fell down the stairs.
With a clarity almost sickening in its intensity Kenyon senses the forthcoming relief, finally, of failing to answer.
COMMENTATORS
“A degree of deception is of considerable value in producing shows.”
“Those concerned with this matter also recommend that viewers sit far enough away from the TV set to give their eyes a chance to focus properly.”
MAILBAG
Dear Kenyon,
Since it’s all over and done with, I thought now would be as good a time as any to write and say, “Who do you think you’re kidding?” It’s many occasions now that I have watched you on TV and I just want to tell you I am not fooled, nor can you expect the whole American public to be fooled either. Not for long. Hold tight, sir, your moment of truth has not yet arrived but it is coming.
Sincerely,
Linwood Youngers
(San Marco, Texas)
Stockton Junior College
Office of Communications
1998 Pershing Way
Stockton, CA 95206
Dear Mr. Saint Claire,
On behalf of Lincoln Walters, Dean of Stockton Junior College, the Office of Communications writes to congratulate you on your display of erudition on American television, and to extend to you our cordial invitation to speak before our graduates at our commencement ceremonies in May of this year.
On average, four hundred students graduate from Stockton Junior College every spring, with a majority continuing on to our nation’s finest four-year institutions of higher learning. Among the current student body you may count your fans and admirers in the hundreds. It gives us no small pleasure to inform you that your television success inspired the formation here of a thriving Quiz Club last year. Twice monthly the Quiz Club sponsors “quiz show” contests in our campus quad, events which draw great crowds of spectators even from the general public in Stockton.
It would be our honor to host you in May. You can be assured of the warmest welcome. In the secondary document attached please find our invitation and proposal laid out and itemized in full, including your prospective itinerary.
With cordial regards,
Miriam Whittaker, Secretary to the Dean
Office of Communications
Stockton Junior College
Dear Kenny,
I write on behalf of my baby sister Elaine Cheryl Vaughan, who is in love with you but too terribly shy to write and tell you so herself. Elaine is a good girl, twenty-three last month, and a Christian in all ways, although very lonely. She is often down-hearted and I believe that a letter from you would mean the world to her. It needn’t be awfully long either—just a few kind words to lift her spirits. Won’t you write to her?
Sincerely,
Jackie Vaughan
(Terrence, Oklahoma)
KENYON
In Boston, Kenyon and Ernestine stay on the fourth floor of the Beacon Hotel off Tremont Street. True to his word, Kenyon has booked her a room of her own. Their doors stand at opposite ends of a seemingly endless hall that runs half the length of the city block at least. They couldn’t be more chaste.
Both rooms have a view onto the Boston Common, the lawns parched a yellowish green and the many old trees still bare and the ponds all brackish black. Beyond the park, scoured bright in the early spring daylight, the gilded dome of the statehouse glints like ice. Everywhere all the puddles are still frozen, the gutters are petrified runnels, and the wind whips over the sidewalks and the stark concrete paths of the Common with such polar ferocity that everybody hunches down under scarves and upturned collars. Even in the bitter air, men and women in the costumes of eighteenth-century patriots stand at the park’s perimeter distributing leaflets and soliciting tourists. Watching them from Kenyon’s window, Ernestine says, “Do they ever get anyone, do you think, in this cold?”
“Who?”
“Those poor tour guides down there. Those Paul Reveres and Abigail Adamses or whoever they are.”
Across the room at the small tea-service, Kenyon is filling their cups. He brings Ernestine’s in its saucer, then moves the muslin drape aside to see for himself. “Look at those tri-cornered hats,” he says.
“And those bonnets.”
“Let’s pray they’re all wearing two pairs of long johns.”
“Mm, especially the women.”
He turns back to the table for his own saucer. “You’ve got to respect them, being out there.”
“You don’t think they’re just fleecing the tourists?”
“They could find warmer ways to do that. No, those tour guides are my kin—I’d recognize them anywhere. I’d bet they’re all amateur historians, teachers.”
Ernestine makes a doubtful noise. “I think I’d take a history class before I hired one of them.”
Kenyon snickers. “It’s that old problem of educator versus entertainer.”
“Is it too cold of me?”
“They’re the cold ones, remember?” He comes up close and rests his chin on her shoulder, murmuring, “No, I understand completely. I won’t make you take a tour, how’s that?”
She chuckles.
Kenyon carries his tea to the desk in the corner, sits and picks up the green steno pad. He’s had it at hand since they left New York this morning. Life has asked for 2,000 words, a personal account of Kenyon’s quiz show experience and rocket to fame. But he’s been wrestling with how to say something more—something suitable of a Columbia man. For most of the train ride he was jotting notes while beside him, so beautifully calm and calming, Ernestine read Maynard Saint Claire’s Quixote book.
Kenyon jots a few notes now:
Educator/Entertainer
Classroom/Living Room
Teacher/Television
Living Presence/Screen Projection
Knowledge/Facts & Answers
Then:
I’m glad it’s over, but now I see that the hardest work is
to come: I’m going to have to think about what happened.
He feels Ernestine’s hands at his shoulders, her stomach and breast pressing warm against his back. “Still thinking about the article?”
“Mm-hm. That, and trying to decide what to tell them tomorrow.”
He’s to give the 9:00 a.m. keynote to open the broadcasters’ conference.
“Tell them the truth,” says Ernestine.
Sitting very still, the steno pad in his lap, Kenyon is silent. Her hands warm and palpable on his shoulders. Her words burning in his ears.
Could he be any more grateful that she’s here, that she’s with him, standing over him in this way? Won’t Ernestine finally bring him out of that constraining screen in all its monochrome and dissimulation? Briefly, in the moments following his last game, as he walked away from Fred Mint’s podium and out of the blinding studio lights toward the dark wings and the dying out applause, he had thought, Now I am out, now it is finished, now I’m myself again. But it wasn’t to be, because it isn’t so simple. Still the letters keep coming. Still his fame betrays him every time he walks the streets. Still the red-eyed cameras await him in the TODAY Show studios. Every morning he’s to be boxed in the grays and blacks of
the shrunken frame, the screen’s entrapment. But in stepping toward Ernestine, in answering to her solidity and warmth, won’t he finally return to himself, a man in full color again?
He’s been rereading Marcus Aurelius, a tiny pocket edition of the Meditations. Come back now to your sober senses, he read last night. Recall your true self. Awake from slumber, and recognize that they were only dreams that troubled you; and as you looked on them, so look now on what meets your waking eyes.
Isn’t Ernestine just that? The sight he’s to see upon his awakening?
Oh, but he wants to be careful—not, for all his winning, to lose her in the end. He believes, believes strongly, in her understanding. But how to admit it, everything there is still to admit, without displacing it all upon her?
“The truth, huh?” he says.
“Yes. I mean don’t hold back,” she says. “Tell them what you think.”
He knows what he thinks, he does, and he could say it tomorrow, say what he thinks about television and all the rest. And yet with what right? What right does he have to say such things, a teacher who’s been pretending all this time?
Well, he does have the right—doesn’t he?—of a man awakening.
“Do you ever feel guilty?” says Ernestine.
“Hm?”
“It’s like a conspiracy, isn’t it? Hasn’t it been a conspiracy all along?”
He shifts in his chair, pulling away to look up at her. What is she saying, exactly?
“I mean, here I am,” she says, “answering all those doting letters—and they have no idea, those girls, that the person writing to them—”
“—isn’t me?”
“Is in the exact spot they’re all wishing for.”
Kenyon breathes. Curling over the back of the chair, he kisses her wrist. The scent of floral soap.
“You have a very pure conscience,” he says.
“Only because I know my own deceptions.”
The next morning, reading his notes from a podium at the front of a Unitarian meeting hall near Downtown Crossing, Kenyon declares, “I believe in TV as a medium of communication. I think it is potentially the greatest of all.”
Before him sit rows upon rows of attentive men in suits—radio men, television men.
“For a while,” says Kenyon, “I had the feeling that quiz shows might have an effect on American education—they might be the secret weapon the educators needed. But I’ve concluded that in the long run the effect of the quiz shows can only be bad. The reason for this is that these programs do not have any faith in their audiences. They do not encourage the audience to ask questions, only to listen for answers.”
Q & A Page 18
