Q & A

by M. Allen Cunningham

  On the sidewalk at Broadway and Bleecker he stops, turns about. But no, no going home right now. Instead he checks himself, stooping a little to see his own clothing. Gray trousers, brown coat. Well, they’ll have to do for today’s appearance. At least they’re clean. He hasn’t eaten, but he hardly thinks of that, lets it flit like a little morning bird right through his head and out again. What he needs is to walk, to move, to charge on down the pavement, small—so comforting, somehow, to be so small!—at the foot of one massive building after another. They go on forever, the buildings, they pay you no thought, they hide you so nicely in their shadows. He’s heading north, he could stay on Broadway all the way up. But no, the newsstands won’t let him. They’re far too numerous. That headline in stark black lettering, reproduced in impossible numbers, distributed everywhere. He’s still below Washington Square, and he turns toward Mercer now. Can he get through NYU without being recognized? If only he’d brought a hat…

  No, but what he needs is a phone. He needs, suddenly he realizes it, to call Lacky. Maybe they’ve tried him already, back at home. Oh, how many people are going to call after this? And how many will come to his door? And who?

  There’s Mom and Dad, of course. Of course, he’ll need to speak to them…

  He’s not quite frantic, not quite panicked, but as quickly as possible he needs to find a telephone booth…

  Greenmarch answers, though the secretary said she’d put Kenny through to Lacky.

  “Kenny,” says Greenmarch, “it’s good of you to call. I just tried you at home.”

  “I left early today. I’m in a telephone booth.”

  “I spoke with your wife. She seemed a little concerned.”

  “Shouldn’t she be? Wait, you mean you told her about fixing…”

  “I mean she seemed confused…as to your whereabouts. What I told her was I’d try you at NBC.”

  “I’m on my way there now.”

  “Where are you exactly?”

  “Uh, West Fifteenth, I think. A telephone booth.”

  “Now, Kenny, I understand you’ve seen the headlines.”

  “Yes. And everyone’s going to—”

  “Now, now, Kenny, let’s hang on right there,” Greenmarch’s voice in a deliberately mellow register. “Let’s make sure you take some deep breaths. Have you stopped a minute to breathe?”

  Does Kenyon sound that frantic? He does, he realizes. He does. “Ray, don’t patronize me, not today. I called to see what you’re—”

  “—how we’re handling the situation, yes, of course. And we are handling it, Kenny. Don’t you worry. We’re convening a press conference, for one. And Fred will make a statement on the program very soon. But first, before all that, just look at the accusations, consider the source.”

  What can Kenyon say to this? The accusations, as it happens, are true.

  “Now, Kenny, we’ve just heard, you should know, that it’s going to be a grand jury. We just got the news over here. And listen, there’s no reason for alarm. That part will hit the papers tomorrow and we didn’t want it to alarm you. What you need to know at this point is that Mister Lacky and myself have been called to testify and you have nothing to fear from any of this. We’d die for you, Kenny. They could break our legs.”

  “I’ll be called too.”

  “You’re probably right. They’ll be calling all the contestants, no doubt.”

  “I’ll have to tell the truth.”

  “Yes, OK, but let’s wait a minute here, Kenny. Let’s think about what you mean by that. You mean, of course, the truth as you understand it. Let’s be clear on this point, nobody’s done any wrong here.”

  “I’ll have to, Ray. I won’t have a choice.”

  “Listen, Kenny, this may feel big to you, right at this moment, I can see that, but you need to bear in mind the reality of this situation. We’ve got all our public relations people on this, Kenny, and so does NBC, and the reality is that this isn’t—this brouhaha—it is not going to go far.”

  Kenyon hangs up, his coin jangling down at the mechanical gulp of the phone box. He’s enclosed in the musty booth, wind sweeping in through the three-inch gap below the folding door. He stares through scratched glass down the barren street toward Fifth. People are crossing there from corner to corner, their numbers increasing, the city waking up. But still, here on this little street a spirit of calm is hiding, stubborn, still gray, all gray here between the buildings. It will last a few minutes more at least.

  For a few minutes more, if no one comes along, Kenyon is safe in this little cell.

  Picking up the phone, he clinks another coin into the slot and dials and then Ernestine’s voice is in his ear, bewilderingly rich and full. She’s relieved he called, she says. She’s read the paper and was starting to worry—the way he rushed out, she’s never seen him like that.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “It’s OK now. Now I know where you are.”

  “I mean for all of it, Ernestine. For all of it, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not the only one concerned about you, Kenyon. Kip called this morning, your parents called, your brother, Mister Greenmarch…”

  “I spoke with Greenmarch. Listen, Ernestine, I don’t know what’s going to happen now. This won’t end any time soon.”

  “I know,” she says. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “People will see this story. You understand.”

  “They’re seeing it now, yes.”

  “And not only see it, they’ll believe it.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” she says. “It’s the truth.”

  Shut away inside the telephone booth, Kenyon closes his eyes, willing the outside world to disappear. Something sinking inside of him.

  “Isn’t it, Kenyon? It’s the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can say that now. You can say it.”

  “But I haven’t said it, Ernestine. I already lied. To the journalist.”

  “You’re not lying to me, Kenyon. This minute, right now, you’ve told me the truth. That makes things better already. One thing at a time.”

  She’s right, he thinks.

  “Anyway, who do you mean, people will see it? What people?”

  Kenyon breathes deep. He goes on staring through the gouged and blemished glass. All the morning people on the street. He’s remembering now, remembering for no particular reason—and finds himself speaking the memory into the phone: how in the parlor of the farmhouse they would rig up a rope and bedsheet, he and George, and stage their little theatricals for Mom and Dad. Sometimes the sheet was a curtain to be drawn back. Kenny, costumed in one of Dad’s old suits, stepping out on the braided parlor carpet to say his part. Dad’s sleeves gathered in thick rolls at Kenny’s wrists, Dad’s collar swimming about his chest. Sometimes the bedsheet was a screen and he and George would hunker behind it with a lamp, making shadows. Mom and Dad indulged them, the most patient audience.

  “They loved you,” says Ernestine. “They still love you, Kenyon.”

  “You know,” he says, “I’ll be asked to testify. Sooner or later I’ll be asked.”

  “One day at a time, darling. As for this morning, are you going to be all right?”

  “I think I will be, yes. They’ll have heard at the Today Show—Garroway and everyone.”

  “They respect you.”

  “Mm. I was going to talk about Renaissance Man. I can’t do that now. How can I?”

  “You should say what you want to say.”

  “Listen, Ernestine, I still want to take you on that honeymoon. Let’s make it Paris. Will you come?” He’s to join the cast of the TODAY Show in reporting from Paris next month. They hadn’t planned on Ernestine accompanying, but why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t they finally take some time for themselves? “I won’t be a liar,” he says. “No
t about that, Ernestine. Not to you.”

  “Kenyon,” she says, “you’re the most truthful person I know.”

  CONTROL

  Camera one: close on Dave Garroway and pulling back as he rises from his desk. Follow as he moves slow across the studio floor, the wide-awake stage-lights glinting in his pomaded hair. He talks to the lens as he goes:

  “As you may have seen already in today’s newspapers, ladies and gentlemen, there have arisen some doubts about the management of a few television quiz programs. It happens that one such program was lucky enough to have the Today Show’s own Kenyon Saint Claire as its reigning champ for…well, it was for more than a few weeks, wasn’t it, Kenyon?”

  Pull in on two-shot of Garroway and Saint Claire. Saint Claire poised on a stool, the TODAY Show sign aglow in neon just over his shoulder.

  “Good morning, Dave. Yes, I played for fifteen weeks.”

  “A terribly captivating fifteen weeks it was, too. Quite literally so for you, isn’t that right, having to stand in that isolation chamber?”

  “Captivating is a good word for it, yes.”

  “Well, as you said yourself to the reporters, this hullabaloo about the quiz shows, it’s all come as something of a surprise.”

  “That’s right, Dave. It’s caught me quite off guard, to be honest.”

  “I imagine so. Being a Columbia professor yourself, having shared so abundantly of your knowledge with our viewers this past year, I’m sure these accusations of cheating are—well, they must be dismaying.”

  “Yes, Dave, as our viewers may know by now, I have had my doubts about the educational value of quiz programs, but this sort of business—cheating and whatnot—that would be something else entirely.”

  “In any case, this morning you’re going to tell us about the Renaissance.”

  “I am. In fact it relates to the subject of education. You see, it’s during the Renaissance that the idea of liberal education first begins.”

  “Tell us, please.”

  Camera two: Pull in on Saint Claire as Garroway takes his next mark.

  IN LIVING ROOMS ACROSS AMERICA

  The television keeps talking as if it has the household’s full attention. But in the house on Grove and McConnell Street in suburban New Jersey other business is afoot. Your daughter runs past the set where Kenyon Saint Claire, fixed in closeup, is saying, A Renaissance man is neither an expert nor a specialist. He or she knows more than just a little about ‘everything’ instead of knowing ‘everything’ about a small part of the entire spectrum of modern knowledge. Your son runs past. Young Genevieve, young Isaac, they’re in their school clothes, they’ve just finished the cream of wheat and milk you set out.

  It is universally believed that no one really can be a Renaissance man in the true meaning of the term, says the television.

  Isaac is in a hurry to find his sweater. Genevieve has misplaced a shoe.

  Was there ever a Renaissance man, even during the Renaissance, in that sense of the term? The answer is no. We shall even have to examine the question whether it is not possible for Renaissance men in the true sense to exist today. …

  And in Apartment 26A in Queens, the dog is scratching at the door to be let out.

  And in the Virginia rowhouse on Hillman Avenue, the milkman’s crate clatters down on the stoop.

  The teapot is shrieking. A black strand of smoke trails in from the kitchen—you’ve burnt the toast.

  Originally, says the television, the student would be taught seven arts or skills, consisting of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic…

  In the stucco duplex on San Francisco’s Geary Street, you can’t find your cigarettes. Damn it all, has the wife tossed them out again?

  …and the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The names are antique, but the seven ‘subjects’ were comparable to a modern liberal curriculum of languages, philosophy, mathematics, history, and science.

  In Boston, on Garden Street, your husband paces the living room, brushing his teeth as he goes.

  The television says, The arts or skills were ‘liberal’ because they were liberating.

  Your husband calls out about his green tie. Did you iron it? It’s not on its rack.

  That is, they freed their possessor from the ignorance that bound the uneducated. The twentieth century has seen radical change in this traditional scheme of education.

  The telephone rings. The ironing board skirls loud as it opens.

  Someone’s buzzing at the intercom.

  The failure of the Renaissance, says the television, to produce successful “Renaissance men” did not go unnoticed.

  The downstairs neighbor, Apartment 26, comes knocking at your door, still in his bathrobe, still unshaven, to hand you the Journal-American and say how they keep mixing up the apartment numbers.

  All that remained, in the popular consciousness, was the sometimes admiring, sometimes ironic, and sometimes contemptuous phrase “Renaissance man,” says the television.

  The pipes are rattling. A siren blares just below the window. The kids are shouting at each other. The cat is mewing at the door. Johnny keeps banging the kitchen cupboards. Carolyn is grinding coffee.

  …which was applied to almost anyone who manifested an ability to do more than one thing well. Even then, the phrase was never used in its original, Aristotelian sense.

  BIG QUIZ SHOWS FIXED,

  CONTESTANTS CLAIM

  Kenyon Saint Claire, compact in the neat gray frame of the television screen, continues to look at the camera as if staring you straight in the eye.

  Hey, wait a minute now. He’s the front page news—him, Kenyon Saint Claire.

  Mr. Saint Claire, who proceeded to win $129,000, was reached at his Columbia University office for comment yesterday: “I’m sad and I’m shocked,” he said.

  They’re saying somebody was giving him the answers all along.

  In the television, he keeps talking. That ideal and idea, he says, have been lost completely.

  AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS

  “The charges made by Sidney Winfeld against our quiz program first came to the attention of our staff at NBC over a year ago. At that time our network made a thorough investigation and found them to be utterly baseless and untrue…”

  “We go live now to the Biltmore Hotel for a press conference concerning the events and investigations surrounding the television quiz shows…”

  The whole gloss and excitement of the quiz shows has been badly tarnished this week by evidence of corner-carnival showmanship and petty scheming. The increasingly loud question among TV viewers is: Are the shows fixed?

  “Good morning, I’m Raymond Greenmarch and this is my production partner Fred Mint. We’ve convened this morning’s conference because it is our desire to refute and conclusively disprove the allegations made against our program by one disgruntled individual, an ex-contestant on the show. In fact, I may say—and I know Mister Mint feels very much as I do—that we have been pushed this week beyond all reasonableness of professional and human endurance by the malicious statements of Mister Winfeld.”

  From unquestionably crooked ‘Dotto,’ ruined by the revelations of standby contestant Terrence Higgenfritz, suspicion spread fast to N.B.C. and the biggest program of all, the hallowed battleground defended for nearly three months last year by Kenyon Saint Claire.

  “…All of us at NBC were completely convinced of the integrity of the program and of its producers, Mint and Greenmarch…”

  Sidney Winfeld, 31, one of the show’s earliest big-money winners ($49,500), claims to be out to establish the facts. He is hardly a confidence-inspiring witness. He seems bent on destroying the reputations of everyone connected with the show.

  “And now, presented by Geritol, America’s Number One Tonic, your master of ceremonies, Fred Mint!”
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  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you and good evening…”

  Mr. Winfeld admits to bitterly envying Kenyon Saint Claire, the man who defeated him, and appears to choke with bile at the very mention of producer Ray Greenmarch. But for all his vindictiveness, Mr. Winfeld’s detail-packed story continues to command attention.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a bit unusual, but before we begin our show tonight there is something I must say to all of you. I am talking about the stories that you have read attacking my partner, Raymond Greenmarch, and me. All I want to say is this. The stories are wholly untrue. I repeat, they are wholly untrue…”

  “…At the time these charges were first brought to our attention at NBC and shortly thereafter, two major New York newspapers made thorough investigations of them and apparently concluded, as did our executive staff, that they had no basis in fact. As a result they printed nothing.”

  “…There are two items this morning that Mister Mint and I would especially like to make known to the public, each relating to Mister Winfeld’s wild claims…”

  “…Now, ladies and gentlemen, every week for nearly two years we have presented for you the quiz program you are watching right now. You have come to know and depend on us for programming that is quite different from the standard fare, and I trust that we have been in every way reliable in showing you great contests of knowledge, one after another. You have every reason to believe me when I tell you that at no time, ladies and gentlemen, has any contestant ever been given advance information about any questions ever used on this program…”

  “…In the first instance, we have in our records at Mint and Greemarch Productions a signed statement from Mister Winfeld dated more than eighteen months ago. This is a statement which we have shared with the District Attorney in the course of investigations into this matter, and I’d like to ask Mister Mint to read this statement now.”

  “I’d be happy to, Ray. Good morning, gentlemen. This statement from Mister Winfeld is dated February 11, 1957. It reads: ‘I do hereby state and declare to whomever may be now or in the future concerned that Raymond Greenmarch, producer of Mint and Greenmarch Productions, has never in any way, shape, nor form, given imparted or suggested to me any questions or answers connected with the NBC television quiz program…’”