The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

by William Saroyan

  Poor Tom has just learned that the male offspring of his second wife is the product of his grown son by his first wife. Tom’s first wife committed suicide when she learned that Tom had fallen in love with the young woman who finally became his second wife. This young woman was the daughter of the President of the Santa Clara Railroad. She made Tom fall in love with her so that her father would go on being President of the Santa Clara. Tom had bought the Santa Clara for nine million dollars. Tom’s first wife threw herself beneath a streetcar when she found out about Tom’s infatuation. She did it by acting, with her face, her eyes and lips and the way she walked. You didn’t get to see anything sickening, you saw only the motorman’s frantic expression while he tried to bring the car to a stop. You heard and saw the steel wheel grinding, the wheel that killed her. You heard people screaming the way they do about violent things, and you got the idea. The worst had happened. Tom’s wife Sally had gone to her Maker.

  Sally met Tom when he was a trackwalker and she a teacher in a small country school. Tom confessed to her one day that he did not know how to read, write or do arithmetic. Sally taught Tom to read, write, add, subtract, divide and multiply. One evening after they were married she asked him if he wanted to be a trackwalker all his life, and he said that he did. Sally asked him if he didn’t have at least a little ambition, and Tom said he was satisfied, track-walking was easy work, they had their little home, and Tom got in a lot of fishing on the side. This hurt Sally, and she began to act. Tom saw that it would mean a lot to Sally if he became ambitious. Sitting at the supper table, he said that he would. A strange look came into his eyes, his face acquired great character. You could almost see him forging ahead in life.

  Sally sent Tom to school in Chicago, and she did Tom’s work as a trackwalker in order to have money with which to pay for his tuition, a great woman, an heroic wife. You saw her one winter night walking along a railroad track, packing tools and oil cans, snow and desolation all around her. It was sad. It was meant to be sad. She was doing it for Tom, so that he would be able to become a great man. The day Tom announced that he had been made foreman of the construction of the Missouri Bridge, Sally announced that she was with child, and Tom said now they could never stop him. With Sally and his baby to inspire him Tom would reach the heights.

  Sally gave birth to a son, and while Tom was walking to her bedside you heard symphonic music, and you knew that this was a great moment in Tom’s life. You saw Tom enter the dimly lighted room and kneel beside his wife and baby son, and you heard him pray. You heard him say, Our Father which art in heaven, thine the glory and the power, forever and forever. You heard two people in the theatre blowing their noses.

  Sally made Tom. She took him from the track and sent him to the president’s chair. Then Tom became infatuated with this younger and lovelier woman, and Sally threw herself beneath the streetcar. It was because of what she had done for Tom that her suicide was so touching. It was because of this that tears came to the eyes of so many people in the theatre when Sally destroyed herself.

  But Sally’s suicide did not have any effect on Tom’s infatuation for the younger woman, and after a short while he married the girl, being a practical man part of the time, being practical as long as Hollywood wanted him to be practical. Tom’s son, a young man just expelled from college for drunkenness, moved into Tom’s house, and had an affair with Tom’s second wife.

  The result was the baby, a good healthy baby, born of the son instead of the father. Tom’s son Tommy is an irresponsible but serious and well-dressed young man, and he really didn’t mean to do it. Nature did it. You know how nature is, even in the movies. Tom had been away from home so much, attending to business, and his second wife had been so lonely that she had turned to her husband’s son, and he had become her dancing partner.

  You saw her holding her hand out to the young irresponsible boy, and you heard her ask him significantly if he would like to dance with her. It took him so long to take her hand that you understood the frightening implication instantly. And she was so maddeningly beautiful, extending her hand to him, that you knew you yourself would never have been able to resist her challenge, even under similar circumstances. There was something irresistible about the perfection of her face and figure, lips so kissable, stance so elegant, body so lovely, soul so needful.

  It simply had to happen. Man is flesh, and all that.

  So the big railroad builder, the man who always had his way, the man who broke a strike and had forty of his men killed in a riot and a fire, has staggered into his room and closed the door.

  And you know the picture is about to end.

  The atmosphere of the theatre is becoming electrical with the apprehension of middle-aged ladies who have spent the better parts of their lives in the movies, loving, dying, sacrificing themselves to noble ideals, etc. They’ve come again to the dark theatre, and a moment of great living is again upon them.

  You can feel the spiritual tenseness of all of these ladies, and if you are listening carefully you can actually hear them living fully.

  Poor Tom is in there with a terrific problem and a ghastly obligation.

  For his honor’s sake, for the sake of Hollywood ethics, for the sake of the industry (the third largest in America, I understand), for God’s sake, for your sake and my sake, Tom has got to commit suicide. If he doesn’t, it will simply mean we have been deceiving ourselves all these years, Shakespeare and the rest of us. We know he’ll be man enough to do it, but for an instant we hope he won’t, just to see what will happen, just to see if the world we have made will actually smash.

  A long while back we made the rules, and now, after all these years, we wonder if they are the genuine ones, or if, maybe, we didn’t make a mistake at the outset. We know it’s art, and it even looks a little like life, but we know it isn’t life, being much too precise.

  We would like to know if our greatness must necessarily go on forever being melodramatic.

  The camera rests on the bewildered face of Tom’s old and faithful secretary, a man who knew Tom as a boy. This is to give you the full implication of Tom’s predicament and to create a powerful suspense in your mind.

  Then, at a trot, with the same object in view, time hurrying, culminations, ultimates, inevitabilities, Tom’s son Tommy comes to the old and faithful secretary and exclaims that he has heard Tom, his father, is ill. He does not know that his father knows. It is a Hollywood moment. You hear appropriate music.

  He rushes to the door, to go to his father, this boy who upset the natural order of the universe by having a sexual affair with his father’s young wife, and then, bang, the pistol shot.

  You know it is all over with the President of the Chicago & Southwestern. His honor is saved. He remains a great man. Once again the industry triumphs. The dignity of life is preserved. Everything is hotsytotsy. It will be possible for Hollywood to go on making pictures for the public for another century.

  Everything is precise, for effect. Halt. Symphonic music, Tommy’s hand frozen on the door-knob.

  The old and faithful secretary knows what has happened, Tommy knows, you know and I know, but there is nothing like seeing. The old and faithful secretary allows the stark reality of the pistol shot to penetrate his old, faithful and orderly mind. Then, since Tommy is too frightened to do so, he forces himself to open the door.

  All of us are waiting to see how it happened.

  The door opens and we go in, fifty million of us in America and millions more all over the earth.

  Poor Tom. He is sinking to his knees, and somehow, even though it is happening swiftly, it seems that this little action, being the last one of a great man, will go on forever, this sinking to the knees. The room is dim, the music eloquent. There is no blood, no disorder. Tom is sinking to his knees, dying nobly. I myself hear two ladies weeping. They know it’s a movie, they know it must be fake, still, they are weeping. Tom is man. He is life. It makes them weep to see life sinking to its knees. The movie will be o
ver in a minute and they will get up and go home, and get down to the regular business of their lives, but now, in the pious darkness of the theatre, they are weeping.

  All I know is this: that a suicide is not an orderly occurrence with symphonic music. There was a man once who lived in the house next door to my house when I was a boy of nine or ten. One afternoon he committed suicide, but it took him over an hour to do it. He shot himself through the chest, missed his heart, then shot himself through the stomach. I heard both shots. There was an interval of about forty seconds between the shots. I thought afterwards that during the interval he was probably trying to decide if he ought to go on wanting to be dead or if he ought to try to get well.

  Then he started to holler. The whole thing was a mess, materially and spiritually, this man hollering, people running, shouting, wanting to do something and not knowing what to do. He hollered so loud half the town heard him.

  This is all I know about regular suicides. I haven’t seen a woman throw herself under a streetcar, so I can’t say about that. This is the only suicide I have any definite information about. The way this man hollered wouldn’t please anyone in a movie. It wouldn’t make anyone weep with joy.

  I think it comes to this: we’ve got to stop committing suicide in the movies.

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

  Walking through Woolworth’s in 1927, he saw a small crowd of shoppers working swiftly with their arms over a table stacked high with phonograph records. He went over to find out what it was all about, and it was a special, new Victor and Brunswick records, five cents each, and a wide choice of titles to choose from. Well, he hadn’t heard the phonograph in months. He might wind it up again and listen to it. The phonograph was pretty much himself. He had gotten into the machine and come out of it, singing, or being a symphony, or a wild jazz composition. For months he hadn’t gone near the phonograph, and it had stood in his room, dusty and mute.

  These five-cent records reminded him that he had been silent through the phonograph for a long time, and that he might again enjoy emerging from it.

  He selected a half dozen records and took them to his room. He was certain that none of the records could be very good, but he wasn’t seeking anything good and he didn’t mind how trivial or trite the music might be. If a thing is terribly bad, anything, a man or a piece of music, it is a form of exploration to go through the thing. He knew that he could do this with the worst sort of American jazz. The melody could be idiotic, the orchestration noisy, and so on, but somewhere in the racket he would be able, by listening carefully, to hear the noblest weeping or laughter of mortality. Sometimes it would be a sudden and brief bit of counterpoint, several chords of a banjo perhaps, and occasionally it would be the sadness in the voice of some very poor vocalist singing a chorus of a very insipid song. Something largely accidental, something inevitable.

  You could not do this with the finer music. The virtues of the finer music were intentional. They were there for everybody, unmistakably.

  It was early August, I think. (I am speaking of myself.) For many months he had not listened to himself through the phonograph, and now he was taking these new records home.

  In August a young man is apt to feel unspeakably alive: in those days I was an employee of a telegraph company. I used to sit at a table all day, working a teletype machine, sending and receiving telegrams, and when the day was over I used to feel this unspeakable liveliness, but at the same time I used to feel lost. Absolutely misplaced. I seemed to feel that they had gotten me so deeply into the mechanical idea of the age that I was doomed eventually to become a fragment of a machine myself. It was a way to earn money, this sitting before the machine. I disliked it very much, but it was a way.

  He knew that he was lost in it and that they were taking out the insides of him and putting in a complicated mass of wheels and springs and hammers and levers, a piece of junk that worked precisely, doing a specific thing over and over again, precisely.

  All day I used to sit at the machine, being a great help to American industry. I used to send important telegrams to important people accurately. The things that were going on had nothing to do with me, but I was sitting there, working for America. What I wanted, I think, was a house. I was living in a cheap rooming house, alone. I had a floor and a roof and a half dozen books. The books I could not read. They were by great writers. I could not read them: I was sitting all day at the table, helping my country to become the most prosperous one in the world. I had a bed. I used to fall asleep sometimes from sheer exhaustion. It would be very late at night or early in the morning. A man cannot sleep anywhere. If a room has no meaning for you, if it is not a part of you, you cannot sleep in it. This room that I was living in was not a part of me. It belonged to anybody who could afford to pay three dollars a week rent for it. I was there, living. I was almost nineteen, crazy as a bat.

  He wanted a house, a place in which to return to himself, a space protected by lumber and glass, under the sun, upon the earth.

  He took the six records up to his room. Looking out of the small window of his small room, he saw that he was lost. This amused him. It was a thing to make slurring conversation for entertainment. He walked about in his room, his hat still on his head, talking to the place. Well, here we are at home, he said.

  I forget what he ate that night, but I know he cooked it on a small gas-range that was provided by the landlady for cooking as well as suicide. He ate something, washed and wiped the dishes he had used, and then turned to the phonograph.

  There was a chance for him to find out what it was all about. There was a chance that the information would be hidden in the jazz music. It was a thought. He had learned something about machinery, American machines working, through jazz. He had been able to picture ten thousand humpback New York women in an enormous room, sewing on machines. He had been able to see machines bigger than mountains, machines that did big things, created power, conserved energy, produced flashlights, locomotives, tin cans, saxophones.

  It was a small phonograph, not a portable, but a small Victor. He had had it for years, and he had taken it with him from place to place. It was very impractical to carry such a phonograph around, and he knew it was impractical, but he always carried it with him when he moved from one room to another, or from one city to another. Even if he hadn’t used the phonograph for months, he would take it away with him. He liked to feel that it was always there and that whenever he liked he could listen to it. It was like having an enormous sum of money in the bank, a sum so large that you were afraid to touch it. He could listen to any music he liked. He had Roumanian folk songs, Negro spirituals, American westerns, American jazz, Grieg, Beethoven, Gershwin, Zez Confrey, Brahms, Schubert, Irving Berlin, Where the River Shannon’s Flowing, Ave Maria, Vesti La Giubba, Caruso, Rachmaninoff, Vernon Dalhart, Kreisler, Al Jolson. It was all there, in the records, himself in the music, and for months he had not listened to the phonograph. A silence had come over him and the phonograph, and as time went by, it had become more and more difficult to break the silence.

  He had begun to feel lost months ago. One evening, from a moving streetcar, he had suddenly noticed the sky. It was a terrific fact, the existence of the sky. Noticing it, looking up into it, with night coming on, he had realized how lost he had become.

  But he hadn’t done anything about the matter. He had begun to want a house of his own, but he hadn’t done anything to get a house.

  He stood over his phonograph, thinking of its silence and his own silence, the fear in himself to make a noise, to declare his existence.

  He lifted the phonograph from the floor and placed it on his small eating table. The phonograph was very dusty, and he spent a leisurely ten minutes cleaning it. When he was through cleaning it, greater fear came over him, and he wanted for a moment to put it back again on the floor and let it remain silent. After a while he wound the machine slowly, hoping secretly that something inside of it would break, so that he would not be able, after all, to make a noi
se in the world.

  I remember clearly how amazed I was when nothing in the machine snapped. I thought, after all these months of silence, how strange. In a moment sound will be emerging from the box. I do not know the scientific name for this sort of fright, but I know that I was very frightened. I felt that it would be best if my being lost were to remain a secret. I felt certain that I no longer wanted to make a noise, and at the same time I felt that, since I had brought home these new records, I ought at least to hear them once before putting them away with the other records I had accumulated.

  I listened to the six records, to both sides of them, that night. I had purchased soft needles, so that the phonograph should not make too much of a noise and disturb the other dwellers in the rooming house, but after months of silence, the volume of sound that emerged from the phonograph was very great. It was so great that I had to smoke cigarettes all the time, and I remember the knock at my door.

  It was the landlady, Mrs. Liebig. She said, Ah, it is you, Mr. Romano. A little music, is that it? Well . . .

  Yes, I said. Several new records. I shall be done with them in a moment.

  She hadn’t liked the idea of my playing a phonograph in her rooming house, but I had been with her so long, and I had paid so regularly and kept my room so orderly that she hadn’t wanted to come right out and tell me so. I knew, however.

  The records were all dull and a little boring. All except one. There was one passage of syncopation in this record that was tremendously interesting to me. I played this passage three or four times that night in an effort to understand its significance, but I got nowhere. I understood the passage technically, but I could not determine why it moved me so strangely. It was a bit of counterpoint to a rather romantic and therefore insipid melody. It was eight swift chords on the banjo, repeated fourteen times, while the melody grew in emotional intensity, reached a climax, and then dwindled to silence. One two three four five six seven eight, swiftly, fourteen times. The sound was wiry. There was something about the dogged persistence of the passage that got into me, something about it that had always been in me, but never before articulated. I won’t mention the name of the composition because I am sure the effect it had on me was largely accidental, largely inevitable for me alone, and that anyone else who might listen to the passage will not be moved by it the way I was moved. The circumstances would have to be pretty much like the circumstances of my own existence at the time, and you would have to be about nineteen years of age, crazy as a bat, etc.