Deadline for a Critic

by William Kienzle

  “I guess it wouldn’t matter; in the final analysis we’re all going to get it eventually. Oh, well, maybe we’ll get lucky: Maybe your note will upset Groendal so much that he’ll just up and drop dead. He does have high blood pressure, you know.”

  “And heart problems too.” Palmer seemed uncomfortable. “I must admit the thought has crossed my mind. What a service to humanity if someone could eliminate him! Maybe it could be done by making him so damn mad he’d explode.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think my note worked though. I sent it quite a few days ago and . . . well, there he is: ready to stick his stiletto into us and twist it.”

  “Oh, don’t give up hope. You know how backed up the mail gets at Christmastime. Maybe the post office hasn’t delivered your message yet. So maybe Groendal hasn’t read it yet.” She grinned. “Maybe you’ll kill him yet.”

  The very real possibility that he might be able to bring about Groendal’s death, or at very least his removal from the artistic scene, had occurred more than once to Palmer. The prospect made him almost giddy. There was little doubt that eliminating Groendal from the critic’s chair would be hailed as a noble deed.

  Well, in any case, it had not worked. For there he was—or rather, there they were, Batman and Robin. The Midwest Chamber Players would perform Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert, and would perform them very well. After which the group would be massacred by Ridley C. Groendal. It was foreordained.

  “Let’s get limbered up,” Palmer said. “Just fifteen minutes till showtime.”

  Palmer and Schwartz joined the other strings in exercising fingers and flirting with some of the melodies they would be playing in just a few minutes.

  “God, I wish they wouldn’t play so loudly when they warm up,” Harison remarked.

  “It’s Palmer, that showboat! It’s his way of dominating the other musicians. Don’t worry, Peter; I’ll take care of him.”

  Harison was certain Palmer would be cared for unto critical death. He turned slightly to see who else might be arriving a bit early. “I think that’s Mitchell a few rows back.”

  “Who?”

  “Carroll Mitchell—the playwright.”

  “You do him too much honor. He doesn’t deserve the title.”

  “For some reason, this always seems to be the most exciting moment at a concert.” Lynn Mitchell had just settled into her mid-main floor seat.

  Carroll Mitchell smiled. “You mean all that noise? That’s cacophony.”

  “No, Mitch, listen: The musicians are tuning their instruments and warming up. And in between, you can catch snatches of the melodies they’re going to play . . . hear that one?”

  “What one?”

  “There: the violin. It’s the loudest. That’s David Palmer. It’s sort of a trademark with him. No matter whether it’s a small chamber group like tonight or the Detroit Symphony, you can always hear him above everyone else.”

  “Yeah, okay, I can hear him. Isn’t that kind of distracting to the other players?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just the way he is. But isn’t that a lovely melody? It’s the Mendelssohn. Don’t you get a thrill, Mitch? Behind those curtains are eight professionals getting ready to recreate some of the most beautiful music ever composed.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, honey. I know I’ll enjoy the performance. I just don’t get much out of warm-ups. But then we’re even: You don’t get much out of the calisthenics before a football game.”

  “Oh, come on!” She grimaced in mock anger. “What do your actors do before one of your plays?”

  He cleared his throat. “Limber up, lose their cookies . . . things like that. But that’s different.”

  “Oh?”

  “The audience doesn’t hear any of that. They do their make-up and warm-ups in their dressing rooms. Even if they did do it backstage, they’d never be heard by the audience. So it’s not the same as all that racket we’re hearing now . . . although the feeling must be the same. Getting ready for any audience is a nerve-wracking experience. You never know what to expect. Each audience has its own character and no two are exactly alike. And if you don’t grab them at the opening curtain, you may never get them. At least that’s the way it is in theater. I assume it’s the same with a concert.”

  “I suppose so,” said Lynn. “Except that a concert like tonight’s has three chances to catch or lose you.”

  “Three?”

  “Um-hmmm. If you don’t like the Beethoven, then how about the Schubert or the Mendelssohn? Speaking of those three old faithfuls, I don’t guess the situation makes him very happy.” She nodded toward the front of the hall.

  “Who’s that?” Mitchell craned to see.

  “Down front, second row, on the aisle . . . see?”

  “Damn! Groendal! Did you have to point him out? All he has to do is show up and an evening is shot. I think his motto must be, ‘Help Stamp Out Fun.’ I hope those poor souls backstage don’t know he’s here.”

  Lynn shook her head. “If they don’t know now, they certainly will after his review is printed.”

  “What was it you said . . . something about old faithfuls?”

  “The program. It’s three composers from the same general era. And worse, there’s nobody from this century represented.”

  “Well! A sin that cries to heaven for vengeance, I assume. You know, probably a whole bunch of these people came tonight just to enjoy some beautiful music. But just seeing Groendal and knowing the kind of review he’s bound to write, they’re going to be hypercritical themselves—see if they can guess what he’s going to find wrong and try to agree with him.”

  Lynn sank down in her seat so Groendal was no longer in her line of vision. “I don’t know how he keeps getting away with it. Just because he used to be with the New York Herald! Now he’s a big fish in a little pond. I swear, somebody ought to tell him where to get off.”

  Mitchell shifted nervously. “Uh, honey . . . I haven’t mentioned it to you . . . but . . . I did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Told him where to get off.”

  Lynn turned to face her husband. “You did what? To Ridley Groendal! When? How?”

  “About a week ago. I sent him a letter. I’m afraid I really let him have it. It may have been foolish . . . but I don’t regret it. Besides, I can’t take it back. He must have gotten it by now. I haven’t heard a word . . . but undoubtedly he’s mentally composing a killer review for my next play.”

  “He won’t have to wait that long; isn’t Marygrove going to do New Hope next month?”

  “Yeah. But that’s been around awhile; he bashed that all over the place a couple of years ago.”

  Lynn shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. He’s done it before. Knocked the performance and kicked hell out of the play. Well, dammit I’m proud of you! It’s about time someone had the guts to let him have it. I’m glad you did it. I can just see him when he got your letter. He must have been furious. I doubt that anybody ever had the guts to do that before. Matter of fact, the shape he’s in, I’m surprised it didn’t kill him.”

  “Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have minded one damn bit if we had read that he’d been carted off to the hospital. I guess I just didn’t quite reach the old boy’s notoriously short fuse. I feel sort of like somebody in an old Western who takes on a hired gun. I drew and fired—and missed. Now he can shoot me down at his leisure.”

  “Never mind.” Lynn patted his arm and snuggled close. “I’m proud of you no matter what happens.”

  “Isn’t that Carroll Mitchell and his wife up ahead?” Valerie Walsh asked.

  “Where? Oh, yeah, I think so.”

  Bill “Red” Walsh was much better qualified than his wife to verify the presence of the Mitchells. A professional basketball player, at six-feet-eight he was sixteen inches taller than his wife—a petite and beautiful local actress.

  The usher showed them to their seats near the rear of the main floor. There was a stir among nearb
y patrons. Some recognized Valerie. But from his size alone, not to mention the frequency of his appearances on the local sports pages, more people identified her husband.

  Valerie paged through her program.

  “Now, that’s a coincidence, isn’t it?” Walsh did not bother with a program. He was present only because his wife wanted his company. “I mean Mitchell’s being here just a few rows ahead of us. Aren’t you supposed to be in one of his plays soon?”

  “New Hope.” She did not look up.

  “Yeah, you did that one before, didn’t you?”

  “Um-hmmm; a couple of years ago, when it first opened.”

  “Was it that long ago . . . God!” Walsh squirmed, attempting to find comfort in a space definitely not meant for a large person. It was by no means an uncommon challenge. “Hey, isn’t that the guy you’re always talking about?”

  “Who?” Valerie looked up.

  “There . . . down front near the aisle . . . you know the guy.” Walsh seldom adverted to the fact that others’ sight-lines did not give them the same view that his aerie gave.

  Finally, by half-standing, Valerie was able to spot him. “Groendal! Well, you’re wrong about one thing, Red. I don’t ‘always’ talk about the bastard. Only when I’ve been fouled and the referee refuses to call it”

  “Gotcha!” And he did. “If he weren’t so old, I’d pop him for you.”

  Valerie smiled. “That’s sweet of you, love. But it wouldn’t solve anything. He’d just come back needlessly hurting people twice as much as before . . . if that’s possible.”

  “Well, we know you can’t get his attention by batting him around, eh? Any of you people ever think of putting out a contract on him?”

  Valerie looked up, startled.

  “Just kidding.”

  “Well, I should hope so.”

  “Seriously . . . he sure seems to be making life rough for a lot of nice people. I wonder how long he’s gonna go on doing that?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Ordinarily, we don’t get so worked up over criticism, even when it’s negative. After all, I’m in a field where everything is pretty much subjective. Either you like a person’s performance or you don’t. It’s not like you and basketball. There you can measure a performance by some pretty objective standards—points scored, percentages, assists, shots blocked, rebounds, things like that. With me, I can deliver my lines perfectly, make no mistakes in performance; the audience may love me . . . and still a critic can blast me just because he didn’t like what I did . . . or maybe just because he’s got something against me personally.”

  “Yeah. There’s some sportswriters that are like that. No pleasing ’em.”

  “Well, that’s the way it is, I guess. You’re right; there’s an element of subjective evaluation even in sports, I suppose . . . though not as much as in the arts. But a jerk like Ridley Groendal goes beyond that. He’s vindictive and mean. He’s the type of critic who needs to feel more significant than the artist he’s critiquing.” She paused. “You know, I didn’t think I could get more angry at him, or loathe him any more than I do. But his latest review of the Detroit Symphony really reached me. He even singled out Dave Palmer for individual blame.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “There’s really no way, from the vantage of the audience, to tell if one specific musician in the entire first violin section has made a mistake. God, even the conductor can’t do that! But Ridley C. Groendal can!

  “He’s really got it in for Dave Palmer, along with just about everyone else, and he’s going to nail him every chance he gets. You watch: When he reviews tonight’s concert, odds are he’ll single out Palmer and blast him.”

  “But from what you tell me, he does things like that all the time. How come this reached you?”

  “I don’t know; I guess it was just the final straw. Anyway, I sent him a nasty letter.”

  “Uh-oh. What’s that gonna do to your career?”

  Valerie smiled briefly. “Honey, my ‘career’ is taking care of you and our kids. Oh, I know once upon a time, Groendal had a shot at my career and hit it dead center. He can’t hurt me anymore, much as he still tries. But I can reach him. I mean really reach him: scare the hell out of him.”

  “You mean like old Scrooge in A Christmas Carol?”

  “That’s the ticket. It’s about time somebody let that rotten creep know that, to some extent, we all live in glass houses. And some of us have some pretty big rocks to throw.”

  “Uh-oh, there go the lights. The concert’s about to start.”

  “Finally!” Harison said. “We’re about to get started. About time.”

  “I can hardly wait.” Groendal’s voice dripped sarcasm.

  Harison turned one final time to view the near-capacity audience. “Uh-oh! They’re just coming in now. In the balcony.”

  “Who?”

  “Charlie and Lil Hogan.”

  “That piece of trash. He’d be better off staying home and working on a novel. Not that it would do any good. No matter what he tries, it’s still going to be a sow’s ear.”

  “Hurry up! The lights are dimming; the concert’s about to start” Lil Hogan looked about frantically, trying to locate their seats.

  “It’s all right,” Charlie assured her, “we’ve still got a couple of minutes.” He handed their stubs to an usherette, who led them down the aisle and indicated two empty seats toward the middle of the row.

  “Excuse me,” Lil said repeatedly as she led the way around and past a series of legs. “Well, here we are,” she remarked as she sat down.

  “Lil, you’re just going to have to get more organized. We can’t keep arriving places at the last minute. My heart won’t take the strain.” He was kidding and she knew it.

  “Your heart’s okay, Charlie. And nobody knows that better than I. Unfortunately,” she nodded toward the main floor of the gradually darkening hall, “Ridley Groendal’s heart seems to be every bit as good as yours.”

  “What’s that? Oh, my God, there he is!” Hogan hesitated in lowering himself into his seat. Directed by his wife’s gaze, he identified Groendal in the diminished light.

  “He seems to have survived your letter,” Lil said.

  “If truth be known, I don’t give a damn whether he survived or not. The thing is, I feel better. I’ve been keeping a whole bunch of things bottled up for so many years. It just felt good to get them off my chest. But I’m not done with that bastard yet.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I thought it was high time somebody told him off—for all the good it’ll do. I think he’s one of those people who are so nasty to the core that they can’t be reached.”

  “There goes the curtain, Lil.”

  “Right. Let’s enjoy the concert until we read Ridley C. Groendal and find out how lousy it was.”

  “Damn!”

  2

  It was an unpretentious building, a squat, two-story gray structure near the corner of Jefferson and the Chrysler Freeway. It was particularly unprepossessing considering the enormous influence of the Suburban Reporter, for which the little building was headquarters.

  It had not always been thus.

  The Reporter had begun in the mid-twentieth century as an advertisers’ and buyers’ guide. The brainchild of Jonathan Dunn, it was, in the beginning, a shoestring operation—literally. Shoelaces were used to hold together cigar boxes that contained the monthly receipts.

  As it turned out, the Reporter’s very survival was attributable to the determination, tenacity, and talent of Jonathan Dunn. He, almost alone, nursed it through its vicissitudes and growing pains as well as the insults and derogations directed at it. “Legitimate” journalists, i.e., editors and staff writers at Detroit’s daily metropolitan newspapers, invariably referred to the Reporter, if at all, as the “Shoppers’ Guide.”

  Generally, those in the editorial section of almost any publication tend to think that anyone can sell advertising while it takes rar
e talent to “write.” So there is a tendency on the part of reporters, editors, and columnists to look down pseudoaristocratic noses at a publication composed almost entirely of ads.

  Thus, while the “big” papers were snickering at the Suburban Reporter, this modest “shoppers’ guide” was growing, imperceptibly at first, then like Topsy.

  It expanded from a monthly to a weekly (more bad jokes, puns on weekly vs. weakly) to twice weekly.

  Then, over the years, many heavy local advertisers left Detroit for the suburbs. There they found an indigenous publication geared precisely to their desires.

  Now, positions were nearly reversed. The big dailies began to scramble for ads in direct competition with the maligned Suburban Reporter. Once a week, the News and the Free Press published special regional sections. But an impartial observer would have to conclude that the Reporter had been there first.

  And as the Reporter grew fat, its editorial sections began to increase both in size and influence. While the pay scale and fringe benefits did not compare favorably with all that the unions had won at the dailies over the years, the impact of reportage and opinion was in a similar, if not the same, ballpark.

  An ideal vehicle then, for a Ridley C. Groendal.

  Groendal’s career at the New York Herald had been terminated somewhat prematurely. He could have retired at age sixty-five. By mutual agreement he might have continued virtually interminably. As it happened, management forced him into retirement at age fifty-seven. It was not a happy parting but it was one whose details were carefully worked out if not to everyone’s delight, at least to everyone’s minimal satisfaction.

  The Herald had grown most unhappy with Groendal’s work over the years. In the beginning, he had seemed to possess all the erudition of which he was prone to boast. As time passed, it became evident to informed readers as well as to management at the paper that what Groendal possessed was the appropriate jargon required for criticism of the various art forms. He also manifested a disgust, at times an outright loathing, for most artists, writers, and performers.