Anyone Got a Match?

by Max Shulman

  Well, maybe so, maybe so, thought Polly. Maybe she and Ira, who had both endured hard, poor childhoods, had unconsciously pushed the twins into becoming idlers and beach bums. There was surely evidence to support such a hypothesis: Polly and Ira had both grown up on the New York pavements, had both known the pinch of empty pockets, had both wanted their children to have it easier than they did, and, when Ira’s fortunes improved, had both been proud to see their kids enjoying the same advantages as the neighbors’ kids (the neighbors, in this case, being Gregory Peck, Bing Crosby, and Aristotle Onassis).

  But no, thought Polly. Parental wish-fulfillment, if ever it were a factor, had stopped early. As soon as Polly had realized the twins were turning into a set of sun-baked slobs, she had tried with all her considerable resources to reverse the tide. And, in fairness, she had to admit that Ira had done his sporadic best too. Polly had supplied an intelligent amalgam of love and discipline; Ira had contributed Levantine outbursts and mouth-to-mouth kisses.

  Nothing helped. The twins greeted all assaults with the same open, level-eyed, unastonished agreeableness. If they were asked for an apology, they would apologize. If they were required to swear to reform, they would so swear. If they were punished, they would make no protest. Slobs they remained—good-natured slobs, to be sure, but slobs.

  With a quick wave of her hand, Polly dismissed parental wish-fulfillment. She had a simpler answer, the same answer that accounted not only for the twins’ slobbery, but for Ira’s misery and Polly’s mopery: television.

  Everything had been fine in the Shapian family until television intruded its big ugly eye. The boys had been averagely bright; Polly and Ira had enjoyed a felicitous union. Of course, they had had occasional spats.… No, make that fights.… Also change occasional to regular.… But the fights had been good, healthy, air-clearing fights about important topics—like Henry Wallace, or fruit-symbolism in The Cherry Orchard.

  The Shapians had been very serious thinkers back in the early years of their marriage; in fact, they had been cerebrators of consequence even before. They first met in 1940. Ira was nineteen years old, and Polly—then Miss Polly McLeod—was sixteen, and the world needed saving. To this worthy end they pledged their youth and their brimming passions. They joined the Group Theatre.

  Of course, they were not full-fledged members of the Group. They did not figure importantly in major productions, or exchange opinions with giants like Odets, Clurman, Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford. Polly and Ira served a more lowly, more peripheral function. They painted scenery, rigged lights, rehearsed classroom scenes, did improvisations in mime, worked as grips, prompters, ushers, and, occasionally, walk-ons.

  But they were not kept forever on the edges. When the Group held general meetings, Polly and Ira were privileged to attend and to listen, fascinated, as the giants held forth on topics like Stanislavsky, Ibsen, Adam Smith, Prester John, the Missouri Compromise, and Newton’s Third Law—all of which, in the minds of the giants (and in the minds of Polly and Ira too), were clearly interrelated.

  And, in addition to their long, stimulating days at the Group, Polly and Ira were frequently detailed to go out and distribute leaflets or march with pickets or hiss at rallies of the German-American Bund.

  Perhaps the most gratifying of all were the postmidnight sessions at Riker’s Cafeteria. Here the hot-eyed Groupniks would gather by the dozen and sit the whole night through discussing life, art, politics, science, metaphysics, beauty, and truth, their fervor unflagging, their cigarettes burning so low that a toothpick was needed to hold the butt, their single cups of coffee developing a cold, viscous scum.

  These were busy, challenging days for Polly and Ira, but, nonetheless, love crept in. One spring day in 1941, about six months after they had met, Ira turned to Polly as they were marching with a striking cloakmakers’ local and said, “Listen, I think I love you.”

  “Me too,” said Polly.

  “All right,” said Ira briskly. “We’ll activate our impulses when we get time. Right now there’s work to do. Right?”

  “Right!” said Polly.

  They exchanged a fast handshake and resumed chanting, “Down with the bosses!”

  The activation of their impulses was not quickly accomplished. As soon as the cloakmakers’ strike ended (won by the bosses) Ira got his first chance to direct. It was only a small classroom exercise, a scene from Othello, but it was Ira’s maiden effort and he shook like an aspen.

  His trembling accelerated when he learned which three actors had been assigned to him for the scene. There was Polly, there was a man named Eric Lindstrom from Minnesota, and there was a man named Linus Calloway from Georgia.

  He loved Polly and had a lover’s normal nervousness about directing his beloved, but she was the least of his problems. She would, of course, play Desdemona. But casting the other two parts, Othello and Iago, gave Ira fits of anguished vacillation. The dilemma was that Lindstrom was a thin, pale, frail, blond Swede, whereas Linus Calloway was a big, deep-chested, woolly-cropped Negro.

  How could Ira, a certified left-liberal equalitarian, cast a Negro as Othello? Wasn’t it a bit de trop? Wasn’t it too obviously white-massa?

  And yet, what kind of theatrical sense did it make to blacken pallid, piping Lindstrom and whiten booming, black Linus? How would the giants of the Group feel if they saw such a gaffe? But, on the other hand, how would they feel if they saw Ira exploiting—that was the word: exploiting—a Negro?

  Ira agonized and came to a decision: civil liberties superseded art. “Linus,” he said as rehearsal drew near, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “I know what you’ve been thinking,” Linus interrupted with a smile. He was a handsome man, imposing, bass-voiced, easy in his bearing, quick to smile. “I know exactly what you’ve been thinking,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “But—”

  “Ira,” said Linus gently, “you’re directing a scene from Shakespeare, not organizing a lynch mob. Do it right. That means me as Othello and Lindstrom as Iago.”

  “I can’t!” cried Ira.

  “Why not? Were you thinking of having Othello enter eating a watermelon? Do it right, Ira. They’ll all be watching. This could mean something to you.”

  “Do you think,” asked Ira hotly, “that I would advance my career at the cost of exploiting a fellow human being?”

  “Tell you what,” said Linus. “Send a dollar to the NAACP, but do this scene the way it needs to be done. Now can I please go tell Lindstrom he doesn’t have to play the Moor, because he’s out in the wings peeing in his pants.”

  Linus laughed then, a big, booming, infectious laugh, and he held Ira in a bear-hug until Ira was laughing too. The scene was performed with Linus as Othello, and later some restrained but definitely flattering words were murmured to Ira by the paladins of the Group, and Ira took Polly and Linus to Riker’s to celebrate.

  So festive was Ira that he ordered pound cake with the coffee. “To you, Linus,” said Ira, raising his cake like a goblet of champagne. “You did me one hell of a favor.”

  “That I did,” admitted Linus without immodesty. “And I’ll tell you why: because you’re a bleeder, and that’s good. You never send to find for whom the bell tolls.… Nor you either, Polly,” he added, turning to her.

  “Thank you,” she said. Then she said earnestly, “I appreciate what you did for Ira. I think you’re a fine, decent person, and I’m proud to be your friend.”

  “Not so fast,” cautioned Linus. “We’re not friends yet, good Caucasian lady. I’d like to be your friend—yours too, Ira—but there’s a question that has to be answered first. I mean answered by me, not you. Trouble is, neither of you will ever ever be able to ask it.”

  “What’s that?” said Ira.

  “You want to know what it feels like to be black,” replied Linus.

  “Well—” said Ira and Polly, exchanging a guilty glance.

  “Let me try to tell you,” Linus continued. “It’s bad mostly. It’s a kick
in the belly mostly. But there’s part of it that’s awful good. It’s like when you were a kid and you had a secret nobody else had. Maybe the secret was measles, but it was yours. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Polly.

  “No, you don’t,” said Linus. “You don’t understand at all. But try to understand this: I don’t need or want or appreciate pity. If you feel like putting your little pink hand in my big black one, well, I’d like that. But don’t pull away, sweet child. Once you put it there, you must go where I go, and it could just possibly be to the barricades.”

  Polly held out her hand without pause or reservation. Linus hesitated a brief moment, then took it. Ira reached over and closed his hand on both of theirs.

  “Kind of misty, ain’t it?” said Linus. Then he threw back his head and laughed deeply. “Yes, I do like you palefaces,” he said. “Let’s hope none of us ever has to stand up and be counted.”

  “I know which side I’ll be on,” declared Ira.

  “And I!” added Polly stoutly.

  “I believe you,” said Linus truthfully. “But let’s hope the day never comes. Let’s all hope real hard, because I don’t want to be there either.”

  From then on, Polly and Ira went nightly to Riker’s with Linus. He was a good talker, wry, funny, and authentically erudite (B.A., Fisk—M.A. and Ph.D., Columbia). He was in the Group not because he was stage-struck—in fact, he thought show business was largely ridiculous—but because he was investigating the theater as an instrument of propaganda. The betterment of race relations was the goal and fixation of Linus’ life, and he proposed to explore every possible means.

  Pearl Harbor put an end to the seminars at Riker’s. Linus went immediately to enlist. He tried first to join as a line soldier, but when he learned he would have to serve in a segregated outfit, he signed on instead as a mess boy in the Navy. “If Uncle Sam says I’m second-class, well, goddam it, I’ll be second-class,” he explained to Polly and Ira, laughing loudly but without mirth.

  Ira, too, rushed to his nearest recruiting office, for he yearned mightily to do battle with the forces of reaction. “Polly,” he said after he had filled out his Air Force enlistment papers, “I think maybe we should get married right now.… Who knows,” he added with a kind of twisty Ronald Colman smile, “if I’ll be coming back?”

  “Oh, my darling!” cried Polly, clutching him.

  Polly’s father’s consent was reluctantly given. Her father, a member of the New York City Police Department, disapproved thoroughly of Ira (as a matter of fact, Polly gave him kind of a pain too), but as a veteran of the Fighting 69th, he could hardly say no to a young man on his way to fight the Hun.

  There were very few Huns and no Japs at all where Ira was stationed after his induction. He was sent South to an Air Force base in the town of Owens Mill.

  Polly joined him there, which might have been pretty dismal for a girl born and bred in New York, except that she found three powerful antidotes to boredom: first, she had Ira, who was then a fiery young buck; second, she made friends with two attractive people—a young woman named Barbara Ogilvie Owens and a young man named Virgil Tatum; and third, she got pregnant, which women love to do.

  Not trusting the local doctor, who doubled as a veterinarian, to preside over her confinement, Polly went back to New York to give birth to Ezra and Leo. By then the war was in its final months, so she never returned to Owens Mill. Instead, she rented a flat on MacDougal Street and waited for Ira to be demobilized.

  Ira sought work as a director when he returned to New York in early 1946. Being the avant-gardist he was, he encountered a knotty problem: Off-Broadway had not yet started, so he was forced to stage Off-Broadway type plays on Broadway. He enjoyed a succession of resounding flops, and each night he came home screaming like a wounded thing. Polly screamed right back, but only because Ira required it. She knew that in his heart he was not unhappy for his reach was exceeding his grasp.

  The fluke invitation to join M-G-M was as disastrous for Polly as for Ira. They sat in Hollywood for six months and screamed for real. Then Ira went into television, and the bluebird of happiness came flying back.

  Ira, as a director, had the guts of a steeplejack. He would try anything—Sophocles, Robinson Jeffers, Cardinal Newman, documentaries on whores and junkies—and television, still too young to know fear, let him.

  But Ira’s halcyon days, and therefore Polly’s, were numbered. He had been marked as a man who could nice, and his seduction was accomplished in short order.

  Polly was honest. Her seduction, she admitted, was accomplished at the same time. While the paunchy, plausible executives bamboozled Ira, their smooth, lacquered wives worked on Polly. First they disarmed her by telling her they were smooth and lacquered and they hated it. Then they extended invitations to her, not invitations to canasta or long lunches at Scandia, but invitations to serve on committees for the symphony and the hospital and the fair treatment of Mexicans by the Los Angeles police force.

  They did their work well, and Polly was properly snowed—not for very long, of course, but long enough to take her eye off Ezra and Leo while they slipped, irretrievably, into the soft, shiftless life of the California rich.

  Yes, thought Polly, pacing her flagstone patio in Bel Air, it was television that did it. No need to get fancy about parental wish-fulfillment. It was just plain old television that turned her kids into oafs, her husband into a sponge, and herself into a hatchet.

  For years she had wanted out, desperately wanted out. But how? Ira was mired, and all her piety and wit could not budge him.

  She dialed a Yellow Cab to take her on her errands. God is love there is no death, she repeated rapidly to herself as she spun the dial. Look at the bright side. Things could be worse. The twins could have become juvenile delinquents instead of lovable dunces; Ira could have gone into daring daylight robberies instead of television; and herself—

  Polly paused. What worse could have happened to her? She concentrated fiercely, but nothing came to mind.

  Chapter 6

  Making a first-rate college out of Acanthus was a task roughly comparable with turning Tia Juana into the Acropolis, or the Three Stooges into Learned Hand. Yet Jefferson Tatum and Virgil Tatum accomplished the metamorphosis in the incredibly short period of six months. They embarked on the project in March; they were finished in time for the fall semester.

  They divided the work of transforming Acanthus into two parts: Jefferson rang out the old; Virgil brought in the new.

  Jefferson’s chore was, in the main, easier. To get rid of the incumbent student body, a simple literacy test was sufficient. To shuck the resident faculty, all elders of the Don’t-Fiddle-With-The-Gospel Brotherhood, Jefferson offered these alternatives: either they could sail on a three-year mission to the Jivaros, or else they could retire on full pensions. All chose the pensions, save for one, who declined both offers and went into the aluminum siding game.

  One task remained—firing Nineteen Meyers—and Jefferson approached the moment with trepidation. He was convinced that Nineteen, as a free agent, would be instantly grabbed by Wake Forest or Duke, and the thought of his coach carrying the colors of R. J. Reynolds or American Tobacco filled the old man with profound melancholy.

  But Jefferson was wrong. Nineteen sighed mightily when he was dismissed and wiped his eyes and blew his nose on his sleeve, and then he said, “Well, Mr. Tatum, I guess that’s the end of me as a coach.”

  “Nonsense, Nineteen,” Jefferson protested. “Plenty of places be glad to have you.”

  “Naw, it wouldn’t be the same,” said Nineteen, shaking his head sadly. “Way the college business is going these days, wherever I went I’d be hind tit to a bunch of deans. What’s the use kidding? I’d never find a touch like I had here. Acanthus, God bless it, is—was—the last of the football schools.”

  “What will you do, then?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nineteen, scratching his tree-sized neck. “Politics maybe. Lo
ts of folks around here like me, don’t they?”

  “Almost nobody,” said Jefferson gently. “It’s best that you know.”

  “Oh,” said Nineteen. He lapsed into silence, furrowing his minuscule forehead with concentration.

  “Listen,” said Jefferson. “You must have gone to school at one time. You didn’t, by chance, learn some kind of a trade?”

  “By God, I did!” cried Nineteen, his face lighting up like a sunburst. “Clean forgot about it. I’ve got a diploma in dentistry!”

  “Why, that’s real nice, Nineteen. I’ll set up an office for you right away.”

  “Gee, I better not,” said Nineteen doubtfully. “I ain’t what you’d call real good at it.”

  “Who’ll know?” asked Jefferson.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said Nineteen upon reflection, and within weeks he was conducting a decently lucrative practice.

  While Jefferson was cleaning the deadwood from Acanthus, Virgil packed his bags and crisscrossed the nation, seeking the eminent professors of nutrition and food chemistry who were needed to prove that anything you eat will kill you, plus distinguished teachers in the arts, the humanities, and the social and natural sciences who were needed to make Acanthus a top-caliber college.

  Virgil’s excursions failed more often than they succeeded, but he persevered, and by midsummer he managed to bag 135 teachers, every one of them with impeccable credentials. It was a faculty that would have done honor to Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., or Stanford—which, in fact, is where Virgil stole most of them.

  Stealing was not Virgil’s Hue of work, but, as he kept telling his rumbling conscience, how else could he get a good teacher to come to Acanthus? Someday, he assured himself, eminent academicians would beg for appointments to Acanthus—would trample each other. But for now—conscience, be still!—robbery was the only answer.

  So he snuck from campus to campus with a three-pronged burglar’s tool: first, of course, money—salaries not even dreamed of in the collegiate world; second, contracts insuring lifetime tenure; third—and most alluring to his quarry—binding, ironclad, loophole-proof guarantees of academic freedom.