The Americans

by John Jakes

  As she and Leo prepared to leave the coach, she heard a second, somewhat louder noise above the drum of the rain.

  “What on earth is that roaring?”

  Waldo answered. “The rivers.” Something in his tone made her shiver and recall his remark about the dam: Now it’s leaky as a sieve.

  The Goldmans stepped down on the wet platform. Leo pointed. “Look at that.”

  Beyond the depot, a red, white, and black three-sheet billboard was visible in the falling rain. The three-sheet advertised the evening’s performance at the Opera House with a mammoth capital-letter heading, which Leo read aloud. “ ‘Intensely funny.’ Surely they can’t mean us.”

  No one smiled. Pemberton scowled. It didn’t promise to be a successful engagement, and it was certainly a wretched way to spend Memorial Day. What Eleanor saw of the town only depressed her further. The main business district was situated on a triangle of land bounded by the two noisy streams. From the steep, dark hillsides, homes of the well-to-do looked down on the commercial buildings, and on shanties and tenements along the rivers, which were already close to overflowing their banks. The rain was falling harder than ever.

  Eleanor shivered. “What’s the name of this gloomy place?”

  Leo pointed to the dripping depot sign.

  JOHNSTOWN

  CHAPTER II

  THE OTHER CHEEK

  i

  PEMBERTON SENT THE STAGE manager to the Opera House to check on the progress of the Memorial Day program. Hacks proved to be nonexistent around the depot. So did trolleys. Pemberton left two men at the station to arrange for transportation of the scenery, then he and the others trudged through the downtown carrying their own luggage. By the time they reached the four-story Hulbert House at Clinton and Main Streets, nearly a mile of walking had left them soaked and in a bad temper.

  Leo carried both his valise and Eleanor’s. He sneezed loudly several times. Finally she asked if he felt all right.

  “Marvelous. I do this for my health all the time.”

  She tried to cover him with a parasol that offered little protection. He pushed it away.

  The hotel was sturdy, elegant, and obviously new. Leo didn’t like to stand in line, so he and Eleanor sat down in the lobby until all the others had signed the ledger and claimed their keys. Then they approached the desk. Pemberton was at the front door, conferring with the man he’d sent to the Opera House. The holiday program wouldn’t end till about four-fifteen. Pemberton’s curse could be heard all the way across the lobby.

  “Goldman, Mr. and Mrs.,” Leo said at the marble counter. They traveled under their married name but at the theater Eleanor was always billed under her maiden name. It was as Eleanor Kent that she received bouquets and written invitations from men in the audience who didn’t realize she was married. Displeasing her with his morbidity, Leo sometimes joked that if he died, her suitors would attend his funeral.

  “Goldman, Goldman—” The bucktoothed clerk studied some card or paper beneath the counter. Eleanor stepped up next to her husband, a wary look in her eyes. This had the smell of something familiar and infuriating.

  The clerk turned around to examine the pigeonholes containing room keys. After a moment he pivoted back to face them.

  “I’m afraid I just rented the last room, Mr. Goldman. We have nothing left.”

  ii

  Leo exploded. “Our manager made reservations for the entire company weeks ago!”

  “Be that as it may”—the clerk’s eyelids drooped as he shrugged—“we have nothing.”

  Leo gripped the edge of the counter, his fingers white. “Would the situation be different if our last name was Smith?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me, you lying fraud.”

  The clerk stepped back. “I’m not required to listen to that sort of—”

  “Some trouble here?” Pemberton said, bustling up to them.

  Eleanor spun to face him. “The hotel doesn’t have enough rooms. At least not enough for us.”

  “Regrettably, we are one short,” the clerk told Pemberton. His face showed a pious regret. But his narrow brown eyes were far from pious as they slid from Leo’s face to the swelling curve of Eleanor’s breast.

  “This is disgraceful,” Pemberton said. “Artists aren’t accustomed to being treated in this fashion. We were assured by telegraph that your establishment could accommodate my entire troupe.”

  “Well, someone made a mistake. And I don’t have to stand here and be insulted by this Je—this gentleman. If you want to take your troupe somewhere else, feel free to do so. We won’t suffer bankruptcy, I assure you.” He turned sharply and disappeared into his cubicle.

  iii

  Pemberton whacked his soft hat against his plaid trouser leg. Dismayed, he eyed the lobby. All the others had disappeared, anxious to reach their rooms and change to dry clothes. One fat guest sat with a newspaper in his lap and a smoldering cigar in his mouth. The man’s head was exceptionally large, too large even for his obese body. Protruding eyes added a final touch of ugliness.

  The man had been amused by the incident at the counter. He chewed the end of his cigar as he studied Eleanor’s face. A moment later he heaved himself up from his chair and waddled around a pillar where he fell into conversation with someone the pillar concealed.

  “We’ll all go somewhere else—” Pemberton began.

  “And turn everyone out into the rain again?” Eleanor shook her head. “That isn’t necessary.”

  “But if we stay, we’re condoning—”

  “Never mind, Regis,” Leo interrupted. “Eleanor’s right. It would be all right to protest if it weren’t raining, but the others are worn out. Let them stay. We’re used to this kind of reception.”

  And in truth so was the company manager. He was only one of many who’d urged Leo to Anglicize his last name. Even Gideon had made the suggestion to Eleanor. But the one time she’d mentioned it to Leo, he had lost his temper. Ever since the attack on his father in Philadelphia, he refused to put up with slights or insults caused by his being Jewish. With bleak humor, he often said it was easier for Christians to turn the other cheek because the first one didn’t get pummeled and spat on like the cheek of a Jew.

  Eleanor slipped her arm in his, picking up her valise with her other hand. “Don’t worry about us, Regis. We’ll find another hotel.”

  Leo nodded. “There must be one in town that isn’t run by bigots.”

  He said it loudly so that the clerk in his cubicle was sure to hear. A clearing of a throat said he had. Leo smiled in a humorless way, then snatched up the other valise with a suddenness that betrayed his suppressed rage.

  They walked toward the street entrance. Eleanor’s traveling cape and skirt were sodden and she was bone-cold. Leo sneezed again, then a third time.

  Pemberton called after them, “Don’t walk in this weather. Find a hack. Offer the driver double or triple— whatever it takes. I’ll reimburse you from company funds.”

  “Thank you, Regis,” Eleanor called back. It was a kind offer but a futile one. They all knew no hacks were operating in the downpour.

  As they passed the pillar, they came upon the fat fellow and the man to whom he’d been talking—a thin, whitehaired porter in rank overalls. Three steps more, and the Goldmans had nearly reached the street door. Suddenly Eleanor heard the fat man snicker and reply to a question. A few words of his heavily accented English carried clearly.

  “—sure he’s a kike—can’t you tell? Grüss Gott! It’s almost as shameful as a white woman giving herself to a nigger.”

  Leo dropped his valise and whirled.

  “Leo, don’t. He isn’t worth it!” Eleanor exclaimed. But her husband was already stalking toward the fat German, who had turned gray as oatmeal.

  Leo poured out invective in Yiddish. The porter scuttled away. But the fat man, momentarily puffed up by anger, brandished his cigar and shouted, “Don’t swear at me in your heathen tongue, you b
lack sheeny!”

  Leo’s cheeks turned plum colored. He kept walking. In a panic, the fat man jabbed his lighted cigar at Leo’s left eye.

  Eleanor clapped a hand to her mouth. But Leo was quick. The cigar’s glowing end only came within a couple of inches of his face. He seized the fat man’s forearm with both hands and pushed. The man could move the cigar no closer.

  Leo squeezed the German’s arm. The man’s hand opened. The cigar fell out, hit the carpet and rolled. Leo kept applying pressure to the arm.

  The fat man gasped curses in German. Tears began to run from the corners of his eyes. He dropped to his knees, moaning and pleading for mercy in his native tongue. Leo didn’t release him.

  The fat man kept pleading. His bladder let go, staining his crotch. The clerk peeked out from his cubicle. A twist of strong-smelling smoke was rising beside Leo’s muddy left shoe. He pointed to the burning circle in the carpet and called to the clerk, “Your rug’s on fire. Maybe this gentleman will help put it out.”

  He seized the back of the fat man’s collar and hurled him down. The man’s chest crushed the hot cigar. He floundered, squirmed, squealed like a girl—

  Leo grabbed Eleanor’s arm, practically jerking her to the door. “Maybe it’ll rain forty days and forty nights and wash this benighted place off the map.”

  “Don’t say that, Leo, not even as a joke. That man doesn’t represent the whole town.”

  “I’d like to think not. But I wonder.”

  Luggage in hand, they lowered their heads and went through the door into the downpour. Although it was only late afternoon, the sky was almost completely black.

  Behind them, the fat man began yelling, “Sheeny Jew bastard! If I see you again, you’re in for it. You better not stay in Johnstown or they’ll ship you out in little pieces!”

  Hard rain battered Eleanor’s face as they headed up the street. Sometimes she felt a flash of pride when Leo stood up to the kind of witless bigot they’d just encountered. Yet what did you really gain when you offered resistance? Only trouble and more trouble—and you changed nothing.

  But she could never persuade Leo of that now. She’d lost that battle after Papa Goldman had visited Philadelphia.

  The fat man had lumbered to the lobby window. He pounded the window frame and continued to shout. Were the threats merely bluster, or something to worry about? She didn’t know, but she didn’t care to learn.

  CHAPTER III

  A DREAM IN THE RAIN

  i

  THEY FOUND A ROOM at the Penn Hotel, four blocks from the Hulbert House. The room was cramped and shabbily furnished. A few sticks of kindling in the grate provided the only heat, a single dim gas jet the only light. One small window overlooked an alley that resembled a river in flood. The storm showed no signs of stopping.

  An hour after they checked in, Leo was down the hall in the bathroom used by all guests on their floor. Eleanor was finishing a note to their friend and sometime employer, Louisa Drew. She had loosened her hair. It hung over her shoulders and down her back, long and dark and glossy. As she wrote, she snuggled deeper into the garment she always took along when she traveled—an old, faded cotton flannel robe of Leo’s, much too large but exceptionally comfortable and warm.

  She’d decided years ago that she would never make a society woman for a variety of reasons. One was her almost complete lack of interest in clothes. A large, expensive wardrobe simply wasn’t important to her. She’d often been told that she looked stunning in the lavish gowns provided for some of her stage roles. But her very favorite garments were old, familiar ones like the disreputable robe, which she wore with nothing underneath.

  Leo walked in, drying the back of his neck with a worn towel. His robe was much like hers, but somewhat newer. Suddenly he sneezed loudly.

  “Oh, Leo, you’re catching something.”

  “The Johnstown grippe. In this kind of weather, who could avoid it?”

  He stretched on the bed in the familiar position, hands laced under his head. He closed his eyes. Another melancholy monologue about to begin? Eleanor kept her head bent over her writing to conceal her disappointment.

  All at once Leo coughed and opened his eyes— something was on his mind.

  She signed the note, folded it, and smiled at him. He smiled too, but in a wan sort of way. He jumped up and stalked to the window.

  Eleanor turned in her chair, watching him. As she changed position, the robe’s lapels fell away from her deep cleavage. She clasped the lapels together, not for modesty’s sake but for warmth. The kindling in the fireplace had nearly burned away. A roach went scurrying along the baseboard beside the bed. She took notice without being unduly upset; she and Leo had stayed in far worse places.

  Leo eyed the streaming window. “The theater’s liable to float away by eight o’clock. But in case it doesn’t, I should go over those lines I had so much trouble with last night.”

  So that was it; he was fretting about his performance again. Well, that was better than longing for a past that would never return.

  “Which lines do you mean?”

  “Third act. Where Snap’s describing how the professor’s play failed.”

  She looked dubious. “I’d hardly say you had trouble. I noticed a moment’s hesitation, that’s all.”

  “It was more than that,” he shot back. “I paraphrased half a dozen words. It threw my timing completely off.”

  Eleanor said nothing. Leo’s insistence on perfection made him a highly dependable actor—one whom other actors trusted and enjoyed being with onstage. But that same perfectionism played its part in many of his personal disappointments. He expected too much of himself, of others, and the world. He always expected relationships to be flawless, and his career, and Eleanor’s, to be free of major difficulties. Was there such a thing as being too idealistic? she wondered.

  He walked to the bureau, there rummaging among personal articles they’d unpacked and put away. She reached under the note lying in her lap. “I have the bikhl, if that’s what you’re searching for.”

  She held up the frayed playscript. She’d picked up his habit of referring to it by the Yiddish word for small book. Leo had prepared the script by hand. It contained the dialogue for the entire play; normally, actors were issued only their own scenes. He laboriously wrote out a similar playbook for every show in which they appeared.

  “I was using it to write on,” she added. “Let me find the page—”

  One of the plot lines of A Night Off dealt with Marcus Brutus Snap’s attempt to make a killing by producing a classical tragedy written by a college professor named Babbit, who taught in a town where Snap’s troupe was playing. The production was a catastrophe, and in the scene Leo wanted to rehearse, Snap was bemoaning the result of some scenic improvisation: a borrowed parrot in a tubbed orange tree had been part of the stage decoration for a scene in ancient Rome—for no very clear reason.

  “Here it is,” Eleanor said. There were several characters onstage with Snap in the scene. She lowered her voice to read the line of the first to speak, a doctor: “ ‘How is it going?’ ”

  Leo sat on the edge of the bed, immediately in character as the manager whose production had just met with catastrophe. “ ‘It’s all over. It’s all over!’ ”

  She changed her inflection, playing the professor: “ ‘I knew it!’ ”

  Leo clutched his heart. “ ‘When I think of this happening to me in my old age—!’ ”

  She struggled to keep from smiling as she read the next line. “ ‘Tell us all about it.’ ”

  “ ‘I’ve been a manager twenty-five years, but I never had such a failure as that!’ ”

  Again she was the disappointed playwright. “ ‘How did it end?’ ”

  “ ‘How did it end? It ended in a riot, that’s how it ended!’ ”

  “ ‘A—a riot?’ ”

  “ ‘We had to ring down in the middle of the second act! I never heard such hissing and whistling on a railroad train!’ �
�

  Leo jumped up, waving his arms; his personation of the flamboyant, excitable manager made her laugh aloud.

  “ ‘The audience jumped up and down like madmen—but the tragedy was not all to blame. Half the calamity was your fault, Doctor. It was your parrot in the tubbed orange tree that capped the climax. Picture the pine grove in the second act—Cassius had just come on, and the audience was quiet. I was standing in the center—’ ”

  He took a long step toward the window. “ ‘—as King Titus Tatius, with my arms folded just so’ ”—he folded them with great exaggeration—“ ‘glaring at the Roman soldiers. My wife had just finished Virgia’s great speech, defying the haughty Romulus—’ ”

  Leo pitched his voice much higher, raising one finger as he declaimed, “ ‘What would’st thou, king? Thy stubborn silence break—what would’st thou, tyrant? Answer. Speak!’ ”

  He looked at Eleanor. “ ‘Then your confounded parrot squeaked at the top of his voice—’ ” He flung his arms wide and went falsetto. “ ‘Kiss me, darling!’ ”

  Eleanor burst out laughing again. “Oh, Leo, you’re wonderful. Absolutely wonderful!”

  He dropped out of character. “That did go a little better.”

  “A little better? Letter perfect!”

  He walked to her side, put his hands on her shoulders and leaned down. “Undoubtedly that’s because I have such a fine dialogue coach this afternoon. Thank you, Madam Goldman—” He planted a chaste kiss on her forehead. “But we both know where the genuine talent lies in this family.”

  “Now, Leo, please don’t start that.” She raised the playbook. “Do you want to go over it again?”

  He ignored the book. “It’s true, though. I realized it years ago. I’m a competent actor—sometimes even a good one—but there are thousands and thousands of those. You have talent and something else. You have that rare quality of holding every eye the moment you enter a room or walk onto a stage. It can’t be learned and it can’t be bought and only a very few possess it. The truth is, my dear, it’s a precious gift, and you should capitalize on it—”