by Philip Roth
The flutist was a mournful-looking girl, long-faced, dark-eyed, and slender, and the more I looked at her and the more enamored I became of her—and the more I looked at Rosalind and the more enamored I became of her—the more trenchantly I saw how deficient my friend Sylphid was in anything designed to promote a man's desire. With her square trunk and stout legs and that odd excess of flesh that thickened her a bit like a bison across the upper back, Sylphid looked to me, while playing the harp—and even despite the classical elegance of her hands moving along the strings—like a wrestler wrestling the harp, one of those Japanese sumo wrestlers. Because this was a thought that I was ashamed to be having, it only gathered substance the longer the performance continued.
I couldn't make head or tail of the music. Like Ira, I was deaf to the sound of anything other than the familiar (in my case, to what I heard Saturday mornings on Make-Believe Ballroom and Saturday nights on Your Hit Parade), but the sight of Sylphid gravely under the spell of the music she was disentangling from those strings and, too, the passion of her playing, a concentrated passion that you could see in her eyes—a passion liberated from everything in her that was sardonic and negative—made me wonder what powers might have been hers if, in addition to her musicianship, her face were as alluringly angular as her delicate mother's.
Not until decades later, after Murray Ringold's visit, did I understand that the only way Sylphid could begin to feel at ease in her skin was by hating her mother and playing the harp. Hating her mother's infuriating weakness and producing ethereally enchanting sounds, making with Faure and Doppler and Debussy all the amorous contact the world would allow.
When I looked at Eve Frame, in the front rank of the spectators, I saw that she was looking at Sylphid with a gaze so needy that you would think that in Sylphid was the genesis of Eve Frame rather than the other way around.
Then everything that had stopped was starting up again. There was the applause, the bravos, the bows, and Sylphid, Pamela, and Rosalind came down from the stage that the library had become and Eve Frame was there to embrace each of them in turn. I was close enough to hear her say to Pamela, "You know what you looked like, my darling? A Hebrew princess!" And to Rosalind, "And you were lovely, absolutely lovely!" And finally to her daughter, "Sylphid, Sylphid," she said, "Sylphid Juliet, never, never have you played more beautifully! Never, darling! The Doppler was especially lovely."
"The Doppler, Mother, is salon garbage," Sylphid said.
"Oh, I love you!" cried Eve. "Your mother loves you so!"
Others started coming up to congratulate the trio of musicians, and the next I knew, Sylphid slipped an arm around my waist and was good-naturedly introducing me to Pamela, to Rosalind, and to Rosalind's fiancé. "This is Nathan of Newark," Sylphid said. "Nathan is a political protégé of the Beast's." Since she said it with a smile, I smiled too, trying to believe that the epithet was harmlessly meant, no more than a family joke about Ira's height.
I looked all around the room for Ira and saw that he wasn't there, but rather than asking to be excused to go and find him, I allowed myself to remain appropriated within Sylphid's grip—and engulfed by the sophistication of her friends. I had never seen anyone as young as Ramón Noguera so well dressed or so smoothly decorous and urbane. As for the dark Pamela and the fair Rosalind, each seemed so pretty to me that I couldn't look openly at either of them for more than a split second at a time, though simultaneously I was unable to forgo the opportunity to stand casually within only inches of their flesh.
Rosalind and Ramón were to be married in three weeks at the Nogueras' estate just outside Havana. The Nogueras were tobacco growers, Ramón's father having inherited from Ramón's grandfather thousands of farm acres in a region called the Partido, land that would be inherited by Ramón, and in time by the children of Ramón and Rosalind. Ramón was formidably silent—grave with his sense of self-destiny, diligently resolved to act out the position of authority bestowed upon him by the cigar smokers of the world, while Rosalind—who only a few years back had been a poor London music student from a remote corner of rural England but who was now as close to the end of all her fears as she was to the beginning of all that spending—grew more and more vivacious. And loquacious. She told us about Ramón's grandfather, the most renowned and revered of the Nogueras, for some thirty years a provincial governor as well as a vast landowner until he entered the cabinet of President Mendiata (whose chief of staff, I happened to know, was the infamous Fulgencio Batista); she told us about the beauty of the tobacco plantations where, under cloth, they grew the wrapper leaf for the Cuban cigars; and then she told us about the grand Spanish-style wedding that the Nogueras had planned for them. Pamela, a childhood friend, was being flown from New York to Havana, at the expense of the Noguera family, and would be put up at a guesthouse on the estate; and if Sylphid could find the time, said the overbrimming Rosalind, she was welcome to come along with Pamela.
Rosalind spoke with eager innocence, with a joyful blend of pride and accomplishment, about the enormous wealth of the Nogueras while I kept thinking, But what about the Cuban peasants who are the tobacco workers—who flies them back and forth from New York to Havana for a family wedding? In what sort of "guesthouses" do they live on the beautiful tobacco plantations? What about disease and malnutrition and ignorance among your tobacco workers, Miss Halladay? Instead of obscenely squandering all that money on your Spanish-style wedding, why not begin to compensate the Cuban masses whose land your fiancé's family illegitimately holds?
But I was as close-mouthed as Ramón Noguera, though, internally, nowhere near as emotionally composed as he looked to be, unflinchingly staring straight ahead as if reviewing the troops. Everything Rosalind said appalled me, and yet I could not be socially incorrect enough to tell her so. Nor could I summon up the strength to confront Ramón Noguera with the Progressive Party's assessment of his riches and their source. Nor could I move voluntarily away from Rosalind's English radiance, a young woman both physically lovely and musically gifted who seemed not to understand that by abandoning her ideals for Ramón's allurements—or, if not her ideals, by abandoning mine—by marrying into Cuba's oligarchical, landholding upper class, she was not only fatally compromising the values of an artist but, in my political estimation, trivializing herself with someone far less worthy of her talent—and her reddish gold hair and eminently caressable skin—than, for instance, me.
As it turned out, Ramón had reserved a table at the Stork Club for Pamela, Rosalind, and himself, and when he asked Sylphid to join them, he also, with a certain vacant aplomb, a kind of upper-class analogue to courtesy, turned to extend an invitation to me. "Please, sir," he said, "come as my guest."
"I can't, no—" I said, but then, without explaining—as I knew that I should, that I had to, that I must ... as I knew Ira would—"I don't approve of you or your kind!" but adding instead, "Thanks. Thanks just the same," I turned and, as though I were escaping the plague rather than a marvelous opportunity for a budding writer to see Sherman Billingsley's famous Stork Club and the table where Walter Winchell sat, I rushed away from the temptations being dangled by the first plutocrat I had ever laid eyes on.
Alone I went up to a second-floor guest bedroom, where I was able to find my coat at the bottom of the dozens piled on the twin beds, and there I ran into Arthur Sokolow, who was said by Ira to have read my play. I'd been too shy to say anything to him up in Ira's study after Ira's brief reading, and, occupying himself with browsing through that Lincoln book, he hadn't appeared to have anything to say to me. Several times during the party, however, I'd overheard something he was aggressively telling someone in the living room. "That got me so goddamn mad," I heard him say. "I sat down in a white heat and wrote the piece overnight"; I heard him say, "The possibilities were unlimited. There was an atmosphere of freedom, of willingness to establish new frontiers"; then I heard him laugh and say, "Well, they fed me against the ranking number-one program in radio...," and the impact on me was as t
hough I had encountered the indispensable truth.
I got my strongest picture ever of what I wanted my life to be like when, by deliberately roaming within earshot of him, I listened to Sokolow describing to a couple of women a play he was planning to write for Ira, a one-man show based not on the speeches but on the entire life of Abraham Lincoln, from his birth to his death. "The First Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural—that's not the story. That's the rhetoric. I want Ira up there telling the story. Telling how goddamn difficult it was: no schooling, the stupid father, the terrific stepmother, the law partners, running against Douglas, losing, that hysterical shopper his wife, the brutal loss of the son-—the death of Willie—the condemnation from every side, the daily political assault from the moment the man took office. The savagery of the war, the incompetence of the generals, the Emancipation Proclamation, the victory, the Union preserved and the Negro freed—then the assassination that changed this country forever. Wonderful stuff there for an actor. Three hours. No intermission. Leave them speechless in their seats. Leave them grieving for what America might be like today, for the Negro and the white man, if he'd served his second term and overseen Reconstruction. I've thought a lot about that man. Killed by an actor. Who else?" He laughed. "Who else would be so vain and so stupid as to kill Abraham Lincoln? Can Ira do three hours up there alone? The oratorical stuff—that we know he can do. Otherwise, together we'll work on it, and he'll get it: a mightily harassed leader full of wit and cunning and intellectual power, a huge creature alternately high-spirited and savagely depressed, and," said Sokolow, laughing again, "not yet apprised of the fact that he is 'Lincoln' of the Memorial."
Now Sokolow merely smiled, and in a voice that surprised me by its gentleness, he said, "Young Mr. Zuckerman. This must be some night for you." I nodded but again found myself tongue-tied, unable to ask if he had any advice for me or any criticism of my play. A well-developed sense of reality (for a fifteen-year-old) told me that Arthur Sokolow hadn't read the play.
As I was stepping out of the bedroom with my coat, I saw Katrina Van Tassel Grant coming toward me from the bathroom. I was a tall boy for my age but, in high-heeled shoes, she towered above me, though perhaps I would have fallen under the spell of her imposingness, felt that she considered herself to be the loftiest example of something or other, even had I been a foot taller. It all happened so spontaneously that I couldn't begin to understand how this person I was supposed to hate—and to hate so effortlessly—could be so impressive up close. A trashy writer as well as a supporter of Franco's and a foe of the USSR, yet where, when I needed it, was my antipathy? When I heard myself saying, "Mrs. Grant? Would you sign your name—for my mother?" I had to wonder who I suddenly was or what sort of hallucination I was having. This was worse than I'd behaved with the Cuban tobacco tycoon.
Smiling at me, Mrs. Grant came up with a suggestion as to who I might indeed be to explain my presence in this grand house. "Aren't you Sylphid's young man?"
I hadn't even to think to lie. "Yes," I said. I didn't know that I looked old enough, but perhaps teenage boys were a specialty of Sylphid's. Or perhaps Mrs. Grant still thought of Sylphid as just a kid. Or maybe she'd seen Sylphid kiss me on the nose, and assumed that kiss had to do with the two of us rather than with Abelard taking Eloise for the eleventh time.
"Are you a musician too?"
"Yes," I said.
"What instrument do you play?"
"The same. The harp."
"Isn't that unusual for a boy?"
"No."
"What shall I write on?" she asked.
"I think in my wallet there's a piece of paper—" But then I remembered that pinned inside my wallet was the Wallace-for-President button that I'd worn to school on my shirt pocket every day for two months and that, after the disastrous election, I had refused to part with. I now flashed it like a police badge whenever I went to get money to pay for something. "I forgot my wallet," I said.
From the beaded bag that she carried in one hand, she extracted a notepad and a silver pen. "What's your mother's name?"
She had asked kindly enough, but I couldn't tell her.
"Don't you remember?" she said with a harmless smile.
"Just your name. That's enough. Please."
As she was writing, she said to me, "What is your background, young man?"
I didn't at first understand that she was asking to what subspecies of humanity I belonged. The word "background" was impenetrable—and then it wasn't. I had no intention of being humorous when I replied, "I don't have one."
Now, why had she seemed a greater star to me, a more frightening star, than Eve Frame? Especially after Sylphid's dissection of her and her husband, how could I be so overwhelmed by the cravenness of fandom and address her in the tones of a nincompoop?
It was her power, of course, the power of celebrity; it was the power of one who partook of her husband's power as well, for with a few words spoken over the radio or with a remark in his column—with an ellipsis in his column—Bryden Grant was able to make and break show-business careers. Hers was the chilling power of someone whom people are always smiling at and thanking and hugging and hating.
But why did I kiss her ass? I didn't have a show-business career. What did I have to gain—or to lose? It had taken under a minute for me to abandon every principle and belief and allegiance I had. And I would have continued to if she had not mercifully signed her name and returned to the party. Nothing was required of me except to ignore her, as she was having no trouble ignoring me until I asked for the autograph for my mother. But my mother wasn't somebody who collected autographs, nor had anyone forced me to fawn and lie. It was just the easiest thing to do. It was worse than easy. It was automatic.
"Don't lose your courage," Paul Robeson had warned me backstage at the Mosque. Proudly I shook his hand, and I had lost it, first time out. Pointlessly lost it. I wasn't pulled into police headquarters and beaten with a truncheon. I walked out into the hallway with my coat. That was all it took for little Tom Paine to go off the rails.
I headed down the stairs seething with the self-disgust of someone young enough to think that you had to mean everything you said. I would have given anything to have had the wherewithal to go back and somehow put her in her place—just because of how pathetically I had behaved instead. Soon enough my hero would do that for me, however, and with none of my egregious politeness diluting the rich recklessness of his antagonism. Ira would more than make up for all that I had omitted to say.
I found Ira in the basement kitchen, drying the dishes that were being washed in the double sink by Wondrous, the maid who'd served our dinner, and a girl about my age who turned out to be her daughter, Marva. When I walked in, Wondrous was saying to Ira, "I did not want to waste my vote, Mr. Ringold. I did not want to waste my precious vote."
"Tell her," Ira said to me. "The woman won't believe me. I don't know why. You tell her about the Democratic Party. I don't know how a Negro woman can get it into her head that the Democratic Party is going to stop breaking its promises to the Negro race. I don't know who told her that or why she would believe him. Who told you, Wondrous? I didn't. Damn it, I told you six months ago—they are not going to bring an end to Jim Crow, your weak-kneed liberals of the Democratic Party. They are not and never have been the partners of the Negro people! There was only one party in the election that a Negro could vote for, one party that fights for the underdog, one party dedicated to making the Negro in this country a first-class citizen. And it was not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman!"
"I could not throw away my vote, Mr. Ringold. That's all I would be doing. Throwing it down the drain."
"The Progressive Party nominated more Negro candidates for office than any party in American history—fifty Negro candidates for important national offices on Progressive Party tickets! For offices no Negro has ever been nominated for, let alone held! That's throwing a vote down the drain? Damn it, don't insult your intelligence, and don't
insult mine. I get damn angry with the Negro community when I think that you were not alone in not thinking what you were doing."
"I'm sorry, but a man who loses like that man lost cannot do nothing for us. We got to live somehow, too."
"Well, what you did was nothing. Worse than nothing. What you did with your vote was to put back in power the people who are going to give you segregation and injustice and lynching and the poll tax for as long as you live. As long as Marva lives. As long as Marva's children live. Tell her, Nathan. You met Paul Robeson. He met Paul Robeson, Wondrous. To my mind, the greatest Negro in American history. Paul Robeson shook his hand, and what did he tell you, Nathan? Tell Wondrous what he said to you."
"He said, 'Don't lose your courage.'"
"And that's what you lost, Wondrous. You lost your courage in the voting booth. I am surprised at you."
"Well," she said, "you all can wait if you want, but we got to live somehow."
"You let me down. What's worse, you let Marva down. You let Marva's children down. I don't understand it and I never will. No, I do not understand the working people of this country! What I hate with a passion is listening to people who do not know how to vote in their own goddamn interest! I would like to throw this dish, Wondrous!"
"Do what you want, Mr. Ringold. Ain't my dish."
"I get so goddamn angry about the Negro community and what they did and did not do for Henry Wallace, what they did not do for themselves, that I would really like to break this dish!"
"Good night, Ira," I said, while Ira stood there threatening to break the dinner dish that he was finishing drying. "I have to go home."
Just then, Eve Frame's voice came from the top of the landing: "Come say good night to the Grants, dear."
Ira pretended not to hear and turned again to Wondrous. "Many are the fine words, Wondrous, bantered by men everywhere of a new world—"
