Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

by Budd Schulberg

Nathan extended his hand, not smiling like Mr. Brownstein, knowing he should like this comrade Brownstein, but finding something foreign in the man’s eyes, something aggressive and sharp which set him apart from Polish Jews.

  Brownstein was an American. He had the same stories to tell as Nathan, perhaps, being licked by little wops at school, being snowballed by hoodlums as he descended the El after a hot, tense day at the office. But there was something about democracy, Nathan thought, as he listened to Mr. Brownstein. Living in a democracy must be like sitting at the edge of the river with Irma. The confidence: being able to lift up your head and look the moon in the face. Even when Mr. Brownstein bitterly denied there was democracy in the States; where the yids couldn’t work for Universal Electric or get to be president, he leaned over the table and spoke at Nathan and waved his arms, and puffed his cigar, and offered Nathan one, and grandly produced his business card like an American, a Walt Whitman democrat, something whole, a man with a vote, a man to stare you down, no Polish Jew.

  “Why are you going to Palestine?” Nathan asked. “You speak loud enough to be heard in New York. Why do you need Palestine to amplify you into a man?”

  “Sadie’s old man,” Brownstein sighed. “I close up a good business so we can see him for the last time. Cloak and suit … Sold it to my brother-in-law. For only half what it’s worth.”

  Brownstein spoke so regretfully that Sadie looked at him reproachfully but sweetly, a Jewish wife with something to say, but knowing her place.

  “Sol, you know Sam took it over just to help us, a fine, smart boy.”

  “Sadie’s pop is a great old man,” Sol Brownstein told Nathan, watching his wife for the desired effect. “Twenty-five years we save for this trip.”

  Twenty-five years, Nathan thought. In Minsk I wanted to go to Palestine for twenty-five thousand years, a year for every day that Momma cried, a year for every time Max coughs in Warsaw, a year for every stone they throw at old man Gutterman. And no cloak and suit store behind. Just an empty window and some old cheese on the sill. Just hate, twisting through the woodwork like worms.

  “How do you like third class?” Brownstein was asking. “Sadie says, ‘Sol, take your second-class tickets back. Down there it gives nicer people.’ Just try to argue with your wife!”

  And Sadie suddenly wipes the grease of third-class food from the corners of Annie’s mouth, smiling because she has lost arguments to Sol for twenty-five years.

  Sol was all for telling Nathan about his seven trips, all second class, across the Atlantic, but Nathan couldn’t listen any more. It takes a Jacques to laugh with everybody, wanting to hear everybody, liking everybody. It takes a philosopher, a sense of humor. And Nathan could never be a philosopher. He was too lonely to be a philosopher. A philosopher can be alone, but he is never lonely. For he sees not only the people who avoid him, evade him, ignore him. He sees also the sky which roofs them all together and the earth which finally draws them all into it. He says we do not own this, it is only rented, leased for ninety-nine years and we all pay the same price. And this is funny, and he laughs, and then he cannot be lonely. For loneliness is minus, less than other people, behind the starting line, and laughter is plus, integration on a higher level, reaching for righteousness.

  So Nathan said good night, very earnest and weary, feeling his body heavy and filling the corridor as he moved to his cabin, wondering if it would suddenly grow lighter as he stepped onto Palestine, like reaching the moon, where one step is a flight.

  When he reached the stateroom the handlebar whiskers were already tucked snugly into bed, and the discordant vibrations emanating from the large nose above them indicated that their owner was slumbering like a baby, if somewhat more noisily. The big Negro wasn’t sleeping. He was just pretending. He just didn’t want to be bothered. As Nathan turned his face away from the one ventilator, he caught one Cyclopean eye staring at him. The man was on his guard against possible theft. Nathan tried to turn his gaze away from that eye. It followed him like a searchlight. He was like an escaped prisoner sighted against the prison wall, running madly for the darkness but always staring into the beam.

  The room was hot, stuffy with bad air. It stank with the sweat of old clothes. It was full of evil. Evil thoughts smashing his temples. This black man did not trust him because he was a Jew. The Italian had not talked to him because he was a Jew. Even a black man, a strange, African black was better. It was horrible. Not a word, all the way from Havre. Stink and silence, broken only by his own coughing as his lungs threw back into his face the foul air.

  Nathan grabbed the easel hanging from his bunk. He ran out into the corridor and up the hatchway to the small deck in the stern. A feeble light was burning. He set his easel and started to paint. The first thing he saw. The yellow light. The first thing he thought. Christ. Whom Christ had died for? For Paul Kazinski, the butcher boy who pulled old man Gutterman’s beard, chanting, “You killed our Christ, you killed our Christ”? For Irma, the anti-Christ, who said faith is not enough, there is only struggle, class war for the right to live? For Nathan, who turned the other cheek until he spun around like a top?

  That is what he began to paint, three Christs, three yellow Christs, burning like a light. And as he painted, Nathan thought: This I will paint as I feel, in turmoil, a yellow frenzy of doubt, yellow religion, yellow gold, yellow fire, yellow death. When I reach the promised land I will paint the sequel, in calm, cool colors, poised, rested, discovered.

  Nathan did not realize that Mrs. Hazel MacKnowlton was looking down at him from the first-class deck until she called out. It was late at night and the woman had just slipped out from the cocktail lounge, partly because the mounting martinis had left her suddenly nauseous, partly because she had a reputation for being something of an adventurer. Mrs. MacKnowlton was on a round-the-world cruise and was always having adventures. In London she had escaped her guide and gained the top deck of a London omnibus, where she sat all afternoon, observing sufficiently to supply her with material for monologues for four dinners at the captain’s table. In Prague she had walked the streets at night all by herself, until the increased tempo of masculine footsteps behind her drove her back to the metropolitan mediocrity of her hotel. Life aboard the Venus had been insufferably dull. The captain was a little black-bearded fellow who drank too much red wine at dinner, and had read too much of Garibaldi. The first mate was more distinguished, slender and handsome in his uniform, but, as he carefully explained to Mrs. MacKnowlton, he could not join her at the bar again as he had the first night because of his increasing and pressing duties. The passenger list, too, left much to be desired, and Mrs. MacKnowlton felt that she had no one but herself to blame for sailing on an obscure Italian scow instead of waiting for the Roma.

  But this was a little better. Here it was, early morning, the Mediterranean, and perhaps an artist to be discovered, a poverty-stricken Italian workman who flares into genius by night. Here was something to make the folks in East Orange tell each other that Hazel simply must have an intuition about people, the way she seemed to get on with those artists and foreigners.

  So Mrs. MacKnowlton called out in her best romanticism, and her best Italian, her cape blowing about her in the night wind. Oh, if she only had a picture of this to show the folks back home.

  Nathan wheeled around abruptly, torn from his yellow light. He was slightly frightened, upset and surprised by this sudden intrusion. Mrs. MacKnowlton babbled on in her version of Italian. He looked up for a moment into this florid face nesting in a circle of furs. It was smiling down on him. Not snoring, or staring out of one eye, but smiling, glad to see him, a broad East Orange smile for a broad Minsk Jew. Nathan’s first reaction was surprise, his second confusion, his third utter self-consciousness. He met the crisis by turning back to his easel as suddenly as he had left it.

  Three Christs, three yellow Christs, three Edison Sons of God.

  But Mrs. MacKnowlton was not only an adventurer, she was a persistent one. Now that she had h
er artist at bay she was not going to lose him. She ran back to the bar and pressed Mr. Benturini into service. Mr. Benturini was a good-natured American Italian who had made the mistake of smiling at Mrs. MacKnowlton as they went on board. She confessed to him that the artist she had discovered must speak some out-of-the-way dialect and asked him to venture forth with his more polished lingual weapon. So. Mr. Benturini joined her on the deck overlooking the steerage quarters, but his speech brought forth the same confused response from Nathan. He spoke in rapid Italian and Nathan only looked blankly at him, and turned to his canvas again.

  So this is how it goes, thought Nathan. Always I am alone, alone or being chased. And now that I want to be alone, look, these people want to talk. No, it is too much, and Nathan shrugged his shoulders, thinking Nu, which is a profound thought and the nearest he ever came to being a philosopher.

  But Mrs. MacKnowlton was not only a persistent adventurer. She was a positive turtle, the way she held on to Nathan. Back into the bar she went again. This time she selected Mr. Nussbaum as her champion. Mr. Nussbaum was the salesman for a Yiddish publishing house in New York. He was on his way to Palestine to bring the light to his people. Except for traveling expenses and a reasonable profit, it was a philanthropic mission. Mr. Nussbaum was also a linguist, speaking besides Yiddish broken English and a French he was just in the progress of breaking. Mr. Nussbaum accompanied her, dignified and stately, to the deck, where he began impressively in French, not anxious to be called in as a Yiddish interpreter. But Nathan shrugged his shoulders at this, and Nussbaum changed his gait, breaking into a cantering Yiddish. Mrs. MacKnowlton could not help but be bitterly disappointed that this artist was not a starving Italian or a Latin Quarter Frenchman, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that after all there were Menuhin and Mendelssohn and Einstein, and even if they couldn’t get into the Orange Country Club, you can’t have everything.

  So she had Mr. Nussbaum ask Nathan if he would come to her stateroom the next morning, and bring some of his work, and Nathan nodded, thinking this is like Palestine already, Nathan Solomon an Artist, a Jewish Artist in the shoes of the Jew loafer.

  Mr. Brownstein looked at Nathan’s pictures rather doubtfully next morning, nodding his head and trying to appear interested as Nathan brought out his dark Polish landscapes, his mad yellows and greens, his splotchy portrait of Irma.

  “This woman in the first class wants to see these?” he asked meditatively.

  Nathan nodded. Mr. Brownstein looked at the paintings again. Not quite cloaks and suits, but still …

  “If you are smart, this rich woman—she will buy, eh?”

  Nathan shook his head. “Nobody likes my pictures, only Irma, and she …”

  “Mr. Solomon, excuse me, you know your business, but confidence, it needs confidence. Now for ten percent …”

  “Thank you, Mr. Brownstein. But paintings and suits—not the same to me. If she feels them, she will buy. If she doesn’t …” He lifted his shoulders.

  “A fine way to sell,” commented Brownstein. “It gives me goose flesh.” And he washed his hands of the deal.

  Mrs. MacKnowlton welcomed Nathan to her stateroom with open arms, like a mayor or a woman evangelist. It was a room as big as a barn, with chairs so clean he was afraid to soil them by sitting down. With her was Mr. Nussbaum, to act as interpreter, and seven or eight women selected for their aesthetic appreciation, their social standing, or their abject ignorance, in which case Mrs. MacKnowlton’s knowledge of art would swell to Gargantuan proportions.

  “Isn’t it funny about people with artistic temperament,” she began. “Me, for instance. I can always sense the presence of something creative, even if I haven’t seen it. Last night I just didn’t happen to wander out on the deck. Something in me felt your painting down there.”

  All the women agreed that this was certainly strange. They went from picture to picture, sighing and heaving. Wine was brought out, and its odor mingling with the cigarette smoke afforded the ladies a pleasant sensation of the salon.

  And they turned their smiles on Nathan, like faucets, lip smiles, mouth smiles, condescension pouring into the sink and flooding the drain. Nathan saw that they were not outward, contact smiles but inverted, self-indulging, ego-sweetening smirks. He looked into their eyes, trying to find himself, the new friendship, the moral coitus we seek. But they were full and spilling over with their own image. And a Jew was not of them. Nathan was seen and admired and devoured like a surrealist canvas or a shapely woman who walks past a pool room. It is not enough to draw an occasional bucket from the well of loneliness. It is not enough to enjoy an occasional stretch and a chat after solitary confinement. This was not the laugh for the friend by the fire. It was the giggle for the chimpanzee in the zoo.

  Nathan sat there very still, hating himself for not picking up his canvases and rushing back to Mr. Brownstein, who at least possessed the vulgar honesty to admit he thought they stank. Nathan looked at the blotched Irma, the dead Irma in which the life-colored vitality of the girl broke through here and there. She was looking up at them with her hard eyes, her cold black lips set in a twisted smile. She was hating these people, having no soft edges, never happy or fool enough to let them fool her. And suddenly Nathan turned her face to the wall, and Mrs. MacKnowlton smiled, remarking how interesting and impulsive these artists were.

  With Irma gone, Nathan was completely alone in this room of pulpy flatterers, and there was no time for manners, though Mrs. MacKnowlton pleaded and Nathan promised to leave several pictures with her until they reached Jaffa, hoping he might sell one. He shuddered and ran out onto the cold deck, breathing the air deep, suddenly screaming to drive it deeper in his lungs, a berserk Jew, a bug of an artist, flapping his wings hideously to find a perch.

  He didn’t stop till he reached the prow, where, in the early morning light, he looked far ahead for the sight of land, Palestine, the promised land, the goal for the homeless gaze.

  When the sun rose, he felt suddenly sticky and let down, and he stumbled into his bunk, pulling the damp covers over his head to hide from the light and the fear.

  Nathan leaned on the rail as the ship shivered its way to mooring beside the swaying wharf in the harbor of Larnaca. The streets of the little town on the Isle of Cyprus seemed narrow and foreign and the swarthy little men who ran to catch the ship’s ropes were like little black elves. There is always something about walking into a strange city that is unfriendly and sinister. But to look down into a city from deck rail forces one to a legless, godlike point of view. Nathan thought, Here are little dark men running, and the strange sounds, and new jobs to be done, and funny new little doors to enter, and all this has one meaning for them, meaning to last a lifetime, and I swoop over it, I fly, I am a bird so high over Warsaw I can’t tell a stooped Jew from a low house.

  The whistle blew. The water quickly spread between the ship and the wharf, like blood from a fresh wound. The desolate Larnaca wharf was dropping out of sight as if it were slowly sinking into the sea. Nathan still leaned on the railing, thinking that Larnaca was a tiny splinter being drawn slowly out of his world.

  “Well, Mr. Solomon,” said Brownstein at breakfast, “next stop is the homeland. Maybe if those Yids like art, we should set up shop together.”

  “You should come visit us when we get settled,” said Sadie.

  Nathan looked at their Julian, who was blowing at the hot coffee with such gusto that it was flying across the table at him like hot rain.

  “Thank you. That is very kind.”

  “Oh, it is nothing,” said Sadie, who had neglected to inform him just where in Palestine the Brownsteins could be found.

  Nathan spent the day standing at the prow, watching the nose of the ship plough toward the homeland. The sea was rough, and he had to hold tightly to the railing as the deck seemed to soar toward the sky, and then, with an intoxicating tremble, hurl itself into the sea again. Nathan laughed into the wind. Every trip to the sky, every descent t
o the sea brought the homeland nearer. Nathan laughed as his stomach fell suddenly from under him and plunged into the sea. And he dove down after it, bringing it up with him and tossing it into the sky like a ball.

  That night there was a knock on his stateroom door. Nathan sat up, dreaming he was knocking on the gates of the homeland, the homeland, and then he heard the handlebar whiskers snorting irritably at the interruption and the Negro rolling over like a walrus. He jumped out of his berth, stubbing his toe in the excitement, and opened the door.

  It was Mr. Brownstein … He was so excited his usual volubility was concentrated in a few wild exclamations.

  “Mr. Solomon, hurry, the inspectors, passports, you can see the lights!”

  Nathan drew his trousers over his nightshirt and rushed out to join him.

  Mr. Brownstein was right. In the dining saloon sleepy-faced officials were sitting behind tables ready to inspect the passports of those disembarking at Jaffa. While Mr. Brownstein was authoritatively pointing out the resemblance of Sadie, Julian and Anne to the passport pictures, Nathan ran out on deck. The ship was not more than half a mile from shore. Across that black expanse of water twinkled a few scattered lights. Jaffa. Gateway to Jerusalem. The gates of the homeland. Jaffa, Palestine’s Cyclopean eye, winking at Nathan Solomon.

  Nathan floated back to the dining hall and the row of officials. He floated up holding his passport out in front of him like a one-way ticket to heaven. As he reached the tables he noticed something that startled him. Mr. Brownstein ostentatiously drawing a wallet from his pocket and revealing to the officials a clump of green bills.

  “Here is my forty pounds,” said Mr. Brownstein. The officials checked his name.

  “Well, Mr. Solomon,” said Mr. Brownstein. “For a Jew this is a great day. My Sadie has been crying her eyes out, that’s how happy she is.”

  Forty pounds? Nathan wanted to ask Mr. Brownstein why. But the official was already checking Nathan’s credentials, and he was too timid to interrupt. He stood in front of the table wondering if he would ever be as confident and fitted-in as this inspector seemed. He wondered if this cocky, authoritative fellow could be a Jew like himself. But flashing through these worry-clouds like lightning was the ominous thought of that forty pounds.