The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told

by Dikkon Eberhart

  “Well, Dikkon, if you truly want to be an actor, then I charge you with these two jobs. First, think seriously if there is any other way—any way at all—by which you can earn a decent living, and if there is, then do that instead. However, if you simply must act, and there’s nothing else that will satisfy you, then find the very best acting school you can and acquire the very best classical education. Don’t spend your time on the new styles. Master the classics.”

  Turns out, I followed Sir Alec’s advice. I did find another way to make a living. But I still acted for my career: salesmen, after all, are actors.

  Once when we were doing A Man for All Seasons, and I was the Common Man, I reached into a drawer at a climactic moment for the paper I wanted to shake in the face of Richard Rich, only to discover there was no paper there. The set dresser had neglected to put the paper in the drawer beforehand. Nevertheless, I pulled that paper out of that drawer, and I shook it in Rich’s face, and my point was made. After the play was done, I tried to laugh with audience members about that missing paper—but every single one of them had seen that paper in my hand. I had “sold” that paper.

  Actors are salesmen. Salesmen are actors.

  It was much easier for me to be someone else than to be Dikkon, whoever Dikkon might be. For example, when I was a college sophomore, I loved to do Dr. Astrov in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. I loved to do Dr. Astrov because I was required to woo—and sensuously to kiss—a faculty-wife actress whom I found particularly attractive. While I had managed to kiss a few girls my own age, this kissing business was still a new game for me. The onstage requirement that I should kiss this woman, and do so convincingly, gained me experience yet required of me neither confidence nor responsibility.

  A sweet deal for me!

  And sweet for the audience, too.

  Art makes us see things that we don’t normally see. Art makes us see things that ought to have been. Art makes us see things that are coming but not yet. Art can even make us see things that are not there.

  And here’s one more nugget of acting advice, one of my favorites from among others. This one is from James Cagney, with whom—and with his pal, Robert Montgomery—I spent a rambling and conversational day on an island off the coast of Maine, meandering the beach and kicking up stones.

  Part of the fun of being with Cagney was that he spoke in Jimmy Cagney’s voice, as though it were natural for him to do so and not a clever mimic—which, of course, it was.

  I’d been telling Cagney a little of my acting ambition. Cagney had catapulted to stardom playing gangsters and other bad guys, and he said to me, “Dikkon, just remember this. If you really want to act, for any young actor just starting out, crime pays.”

  Dad was the one who made these encounters happen. How could I not adore that guy, my father, who could orchestrate such meetings?

  And yet . . .

  As I began to envision making a success of an acting career, Dad’s success once again eclipsed my own.

  In 1966, I was playing Fluellen in “Hank Cinq” (theater jargon for the title of Shakespeare’s Henry V). Fluellen is a smallish role, but that was okay because the play was the big production for that season. We did it on the big stage upstairs, with full sets, newly created period costumes, intricately choreographed battle scenes—the works. And I liked Fluellen for his bluster.

  We were doing a semi-dress rehearsal (semi meaning we wore any clothes or swords that would restrict our natural movements—and to which we needed to become accustomed—but not the costuming that was merely decorative). Our director’s voice suddenly boomed over the loudspeaker. “Hey, Dikkon. We just got a call. Something’s happened to your father. You’ve got to be home right now.”

  Home was a mile away across campus. I threw off my cap and my belt and sword, and I ran hard.

  Don’t let him die before I get there!

  There were lots of cars out front. There were people milling around. They didn’t seem to be sufficiently panicked. I burst in, out of breath and sweated up, still wearing my pantaloons and stockings, but fortunately for my run, with sneakers.

  I saw Mom. “What’s happened? What’s going on? Where’s Dad?”

  “Your father just won the Pulitzer Prize.”

  “What? The what?”

  “The Pulitzer Prize. Your father just won it.”

  “The Pulitzer . . . um . . . Prize?” Maybe the shock had given him a stroke. “Where is he?”

  “In the living room. Go congratulate him.”

  “You mean he’s okay?”

  Suddenly, Mom understood the problem. “Oh, my dear boy. What did they tell you?”

  “Just that I needed to be home right away because something had just happened to Dad. I ran.”

  She twinkled. “You poor thing. That isn’t the message I intended. How silly. Now go see your father.” She shooed me out of the kitchen and went back to gathering drinks and treats for the parade of merrymakers who were trooping through the house.

  I was the blustering, arrogant, warrior Fluellen—just off the stage, out of breath, and half in costume—whose father, formerly dead, had just won the Pulitzer Prize. With a cheer, I bulled my way through the crowd in the living room, stood next to my radiant dad, clapped him on the back, and announced to the room, “Next year, the Nobel!” Everyone laughed, and that was how I was quoted in the local newspaper the next day.

  Here’s the very best comment, though, from that whole afternoon. Hearing the commotion at the Eberharts’, Martha, the daughter of our next-door neighbors, ran home and burst upon her parents to announce, “Mr. Eberhart has just won the Poet’s Surprise!”

  PART THREE

  That morning at Small Point Baptist Church I was confronted by the God-powered imperative that I must act—but I didn’t know how. For years, intellectual diffidence had been my comfortable cloak. We intellectuals don’t need to act; our work is to think.

  For years, I had thought upon God. But that morning I was struck by the certainty that God is not satisfied merely to be thought upon. God demands action. And I did not know how to act, at least for Him.

  I knew how to act in some venues.

  I knew how to act in marriage—sometimes. Though now and then not. Sometimes my way to act in marriage was, after a major argument, to go out into the night in despair and to lie facedown on the lawn and to press my face into the cold earth and to grit my teeth with anguish.

  I knew how to act as a parent—sometimes. Though now and then not. But I felt I was surer of my footing when I marched before my daughters than when I marched before my sons, and I did not know how to act to equalize my footing among all of them.

  I knew how to act as a son—sometimes. Though now and then not. My mother was deceased, and my father lived in his retirement community, much closer geographically to Gretchen’s family than to mine. I did what I could do to visit and to engage with him. But other times, I would just send him another (unneeded) flashlight and allow Gretchen to carry more of the administrative burden because she was closer by.

  Now here’s something else you need to know about me. At that time, as a Jew, I believed Jesus was a wise man, a stimulating teacher, etc. . . . but that he wasn’t, you know, a manly man. There was something too elusive, too ethereal. He wasn’t like the rest of us men. The rest of us men—if you’re a man, you’ll know this, and if you’re a woman, you will too—we men run on die-hard batteries of sex and competition. Whoever Jesus may have been to those who “got it” about him, he was fey to me.

  And the Resurrection? I knew resurrection was big for these people, but really . . . while the idea was poetical and stirring, in reality, it was preposterous.

  So why on earth did a committed Jew of middle age cross the road one Sunday in March in Maine? After all, he was successful in his sales career, happy in his marriage, and delighted with his four congenial children. He loved where he lived, and he even had a little time for writing—to cultivate the gorgeous words and rhythms his poet father had p
lanted in his brain while he was growing up.

  So why did he cross the road?

  He crossed the road because he was trying to struggle free from his father so that he might someday be able to say something of his own.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God!”

  Mom threw her arms around me and burst into tears. Then she reached with one arm and scooped my girlfriend into her embrace too. “Oh, dear God!”

  My girl and I were scarcely out of our car, just back from our happy day.

  Mom and Dad and several stunned neighbors were standing beside our garage. “There’s been the most terrible accident,” Mom cried, and her embrace tightened. “Oh, it’s been terrible.”

  My life changed.

  At that moment, my life changed.

  I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew.

  A knife stabbed into my gut, way down low, and it tore upward, ripping its way into my heart, and it sliced my heart in two.

  I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew.

  I had killed someone.

  What I did not know yet was that I had killed more than one someone and that one of the someones I had killed was a bright-eyed, blonde-curled, jolly-joking, last-sight-waving-good-bye eight-year-old girl.

  What I did not know yet—but I knew—was that the face of that bright-eyed, blonde-curled, jolly-joking, last-sight-waving-good-bye eight-year-old girl was now seared into the inside of my skull, burned there like acid, inside my forehead, where I would see it, without even closing my eyes, every single day during the next thirty-eight years of my life.

  My life changed. At that moment, my life changed.

  I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew.

  Satan smiled.

  “Gotcha,” he said, and he chalked up another soul that he had broken.

  My girlfriend was my first deep love. I was twenty-one; she was twenty. I was an actor; she was a dancer. We met at a party in a loft in Cambridge, which I had not wanted to attend. She had not wanted to attend the party either. Each of us was there at the behest of a friend. It was summer. I was living at Grandmother’s house and driving a cab in Boston and trying to finish a story about a young man who was looking for a way to get to sea with the merchant marine because he could think of nothing else to do with his life—trying to finish it before college started again for me in the fall.

  Our eyes met; our friends were forgotten; suddenly, this was the finest summer of my life—better even than any Undercliff summer with Reve.

  One day, later in the summer, she and I took the weekend off and drove to Hanover so I could show her Dartmouth and introduce her to my parents. My parents liked her at once. Well chaperoned, we had a fine night at our house, and in the morning, since we had heard about a picturesque antique train ride that could be enjoyed on a bright Sunday, we drove off to give it a try.

  The train ride was indeed picturesque, and the antique quality of it was fascinating. One of its anachronisms was that with this train line, when the individual train needed to switch to another line, the points—moveable sections of track—were lifted and moved by hand as they had been in the nineteenth century. So the train would stop, the conductor would alight, he would manipulate the points so that the track was now aligned in the new way that the train was to go, and then he would climb back on board, blow his whistle, and the train would move along. We excursionists would watch all this out the window of the passenger car and remark to one another about the quaintness of it.

  Aboard our train that day was a bright-eyed, blonde-curled, jolly-joking eight-year-old girl. She happened to sit in the seat ahead of us with her parents, and she and we became friends as we giggled and winked across the back of her seat.

  My girl and I were in love; this little gal was jolly; the sun was shining; all was right in this most perfect of all perfect worlds.

  When our train reached its destination, we all debouched and explored the area. After a while, we desired to take a return train, and the next one was just about to depart. That train was already full of passengers, so we ought to have taken the following train. However, the conductor of the returning train saw that we were in love and that all was right in this most perfect of all perfect worlds, so he allowed us to board his train and to take our places on the rear platform of the passenger car, which was his station too.

  Our train pulled away.

  And there she was! There was that bright-eyed, blonde-curled, jolly-joking, last-sight-waving-good-bye eight-year-old girl. She had run over to the train tracks and was waving to us.

  “Good-bye, good-bye,” we cried to her. “Good-bye, good-bye.”

  Along our way, as before, our train needed to switch to the other line. When the point-switching process was done, our conductor climbed back aboard our platform, blew his whistle, and our train started up. My girl and I were standing with our hands on the rear rail, looking back along the track where we had just been. The conductor was looking the same way too. Looking back along the track, suddenly I saw that the point-switching process had not been properly completed and that the rails were now misaligned.

  I opened my mouth to call out, “Hey, that doesn’t look right!”

  But I closed my mouth. I was shy. I was shy to speak about anything except love in front of my newly loved girl. And anyway, the conductor—a professional of the line—was looking behind us in just the same way that I was looking, and he was saying nothing.

  Ours was the most perfect of all perfect worlds. Of course the engineer of the following train would see the misalignment of the tracks, and he would stop his train in time.

  I could have shouted, “Hey, that doesn’t look right.”

  I could have.

  But I did not.

  The engineer of the following train did not see the misalignment of the tracks in time, and he did not stop his train in time. His train—the train on which my girl and I should have been barreling along—derailed and plowed into the earth and six people died, among them a bright-eyed, blonde-curled, jolly-joking, last-sight-waving-good-bye eight-year-old girl.

  My girl and I took our sweet time getting back to Hanover. There was quite a lot of countryside to see, and I knew of a beautiful, secluded pond where I could stop, and where she would be pleased to admire the view. I did stop at the pond, and she did admire the view, and she let me kiss her—quite a few times—until both of us realized we had better stop that business right away quick. So then we moseyed on, meandering through small towns, perhaps—I don’t remember—stopping for an ice cream cone.

  Meanwhile, back home, the news of the terrible accident had broken over the radio. Jean, our next-door neighbor, rushed to our house. “Turn on the radio, quick!”

  Aghast, Mom and Jean heard the news flash repeated. Another neighbor showed up at our door. “Didn’t Dikkon and his girlfriend just take that train?”

  “Oh, my God,” moaned Mom. “Richie! Richie, come here!”

  Dad held Mom. The neighbors stood around, supporting them. There was nothing to do—cell phones hadn’t been invented. Hours went by.

  “Oh, I can’t stand it!” Mom cried.

  And then, bold as brass, happy as clams, we drove up—and my life changed.

  I wished that knife in my gut had actually bled my heart out.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Meanwhile, while wishing I were dead, I needed to do something to support myself during this dead life I was sentenced to lead.

  Was I really to be an actor?

  Acting offered me control.

  I could control everything around me when I was in the theater. Once the rehearsals and the mistakes and the changes in direction and the responses to the stage notes were done, then there was just me—up there in the lights—saying things I knew how to say and causing the other actors to react as they had been instructed to react.

  The only unknown was the reaction of the audience, and since I was good at what I was doing a
nd took my job seriously and studied our art intently and deeply desired to give the audience a touch of this script’s grandeur, or pathos, or irony, or whatever it was, the audience’s reaction was almost always ideal.

  On stage was the safest place I knew. Many other places were not safe like that. Places where classes met were sometimes not safe. Places where girls mingled were usually not safe. Places where men drank themselves into stupors were always not safe. Places—like my parents’ dining table—where yet another of those poets was holding forth in order to impress my dad—those places were not safe either.

  I was safe on stage, but was I to be an actor? One of my acting pals in college, Jerry Zaks—since then the winner of four Tony Awards—certainly was to be an actor, and a director as well. You could taste it on him, like salt. But was I to be one?

  Anyone who has been an actor and has taken it seriously knows its seductive power. Standing there in the light, you are saying words you have perfected the saying of. You can’t see each audience member, but what you can do is make all three hundred of them hold their breaths at the very same moment. And then you can make them cry.

  You are at center stage delivering the last line of the play. You can feel tension in the audience. They ache with tension. Slowly, you speak the last line of the play except for its single, final word. Then you pause, and then you sweep your eyes across each of their eyes, as they sit there in the darkness, tight and waiting, and then—with a softened voice—you utter that single, final word.

  The lights snap out. The play is done. There is an instant of silence. Then the applause swells, and it swells, and it keeps on swelling. And then the lights come back on, and you are lifted so very high that you are above (this is how it feels anyway), even for one moment, above even sin.