by Joseph Kanon
By midmorning there was already a line of cars in front of Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The lot behind was full, but Ben circled around and finally found a spot two blocks in on Hobart. The temple was Byzantine inspired, a scaled-down Hagia Sophia, and the crowd gathering outside made it feel a little like one of the big movie theaters downtown. Ben stopped for a minute, watching people being helped out of black Packards and hugging each other on the sidewalk, another premiere. There were photographers and even the usual cluster of fringe people who’d come to see stars, held away from the entrance doors by ushers. Sam and his younger wife stood at the top of the stairs, hemmed in by well-wishers. Women were in dressy day clothes, navy set off with a diamond brooch, peach silk with pearls, everyone in hats and a few in fur stoles, in spite of the bright autumn sun.
Ben thought, looking at the guests, that all weddings and family parties were the same, everyone falling into predictable place. Rosemary stepped out of her car all ready for the camera, but the beefy middle-aged man off to the side, looking slightly lost, was probably Uncle Al, who ran a linen supply business in Inglewood. Sam’s mother-in-law, on a cane, was being escorted by an older grandchild-Jonathan, the Bar Mitzvah boy, would already be inside looking over the Hebrew passage. Al’s daughter, the pretty one, had brought a new man. Aunt Rose, whom nobody ever knew what to do with, was beaming at a photographer. Happy families, all alike.
The front office people were now arriving, the Lasners first, then everyone else in a quick jumble so that they all reached the steps at once, swarming around Sol the way they had at Grand Central. Fay teetered on high heels, holding on to his arm.
“What are you, walking?” Sol said, seeing Ben.
“I parked behind.”
“Yourself? What if people see?”
“What people?” Ben said, laughing.
“People. There’s always people. You should know that.”
“Just saving the studio money,” Ben said, brushing it off.
“You and who else?”
But he dropped it, tugged by Fay to start up the stairs.
“Rabbi Magnin’s doing it himself,” she said to him, leaning in. “Say something to Esther. She’s thrilled.”
Lasner turned slightly to Ben. “Come sit with us,” he said.
But Ben held back, already imagining Bunny’s scowl, Fay’s appraising glances. Liesl was getting out of a car with Dick Marshall, a little excitement running through the spectators.
“Dick! Over here!” Almost a squeal as he waved, flashing the Marshall grin.
Ben kissed Liesl on both cheeks, a European family greeting.
“You look nice.”
She smiled, relieved, but still tentative. “Wardrobe. I think from the Wehrmacht,” she said, touching one of the padded shoulders. “You know Dick?”
But Dick was flashing the grin again for one of the photographers.
“Save me a dance later.”
“What?” she said, slightly thrown, not sure if it was a double-entendre.
“At the Grove. Sam hired the band, too.”
“Oh. Yes, that would be nice.” Letting her eyes stay on him, talking.
More car doors were slamming, voices getting louder, rising like heat waves.
“Better get inside. There’s Polly,” he said, spying her farther down the row of cars.
“No, we’re supposed to talk to her.”
Dick, seeing her, put his arm around Liesl. “Hey,” he said to Ben, drawing a blank.
Liesl put on a public smile and started to turn.
“Have fun,” Ben said, sliding away, heading for the stairs.
“So glad you could come,” Pilcer said as they shook hands. “You know Esther?”
“Congratulations. You must be proud.”
“Ask me after,” she said pleasantly. “It’s still touch and go with the Hebrew.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said, a meaningless reassurance. But wasn’t it always? How many had he seen-struggling through their readings, rabbis at their sides, but always ending with elated grins. He remembered a whole season of them, the year Danny was thirteen, dreading the boredom of the service, all of it alien to them, who weren’t being instructed, who weren’t in their friends’ eyes even Jews. Otto had been indifferent and their mother gentile, so they’d escaped the Hebrew lessons, the tedious weeks of preparation. The services themselves were exotic, a series of risings and sitting downs and words repeated phonetically, just to go along. Most of the boys used the synagogue in Fasanenstrasse and afterward there would be a formal lunch across the street at the Kempinski, all good manners and politely smiling grown-ups. Years later, after they had left, it had been torched on Kristallnacht. Now there was nothing, a few shell-like walls.
“He’s reading from Esther,” Sam was saying. “For his mother. It’s a nice touch, don’t you think? What did you read? I’ll bet you don’t even remember.”
Ben shook his head. “I didn’t. My father wasn’t observant.”
“Like Sam,” Esther said, nodding to him. “‘A lot of work and who remembers?’ But I think it’s important. Now, I mean.” She faltered a little, embarrassed. “You know, after-”
“Yes,” Ben said, helping her.
“Of course, you would,” Sam said. “You know what he’s making at the studio?” But someone had taken his elbow. “Abe. Wonderful to see you. Esther, you remember Abe Lastfogel. The Morris office.”
“Congratulations again,” Ben said to Esther, letting her go. “He’ll be fine.”
“It’s just, you know, it’s important to have a sense now,” she said, still making a case to herself.
“Yes,” Ben said, moving inside. But was it? Had it mattered before? Even Mischling s had been taken, one parent, people who’d had no teaching at all.
He picked up a yarmulke from a pile on a sideboard. Inside, through the marble arches, people were settling in, waving to friends, the hum before a show. All religion was a kind of theater. He smiled to himself as he walked in. At least here they knew their audience. The whole vaulted ceiling, a night sky, was covered with stars.
He sat with Hal Jasper behind the Lasners, close enough to be in the party without taking anyone’s place. Bunny, who’d also put on a yarmulke, was next to Fay and took his cues from her, rising when she did, mumbling during the unison response. Rabbi Magnin, in wire-rimmed glasses, led the Shabbat service in one of those pleased-with-itself oratorical voices Ben remembered from his childhood. Jonathan sat waiting on the bema, dwarfed in a chair that made him look no older than eight. All of it just as expected. In a few minutes they’d open the ark and walk the Torah through the congregation, letting people reach out to touch it, then finally open it for Jonathan to read and then they’d all go to the Ambassador.
Fasanenstrasse. Otto hadn’t believed in any of it, only allowed them to go because it would have been impolite to refuse the invitations. Drehkopf s, he called the rabbis, head spinners. A hostility that Ben had never really understood until now. No room for two religions. But he would have been killed for either. As a Communist, Genia had said, not as a Jew. But that had only been a matter of time. Ben looked around- all these well-dressed lucky people, faintly bored, waiting to congratulate Sam and go to lunch. It could have been any of them, except they’d been here, out of the way. And Otto had stayed.
He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. It always came back to that. Why make Danny run the same risk? They knew what would happen if they were caught. What did happen, at least to Otto, denounced. And now his denouncer gone, connected somehow to Danny, the link he couldn’t understand but must be there. Could Otto really have believed in it that much, when he didn’t believe in anything else? Or did he know, somehow sense, that he’d left it too late, that he could only help save the others now, before he became one of the millions, no matter what he believed. Somebody Ben had seen standing on the platform and then never saw again.
On the bema Magnin had finished and the cantor got up and walked to the l
ectern. Another endless wail, Ben thought, another thing he’d hated about the services. He looked at Bunny, wondering how he was reacting, one of the few there for whom this wouldn’t even be a memory, the yarmulke just a prop of respect. Thinking about the studio maybe, or how Polly’s talk had gone with Liesl, a hundred things. How to protect Jack MacDonald.
The first note, high and clear, wavered in the air, dropped, then rose again, a call reaching out. Ben felt his head go up, as if the note were lifting it. A second phrase without a breath, lonely, the voice its own music, but so beautiful that it filled the great room, hushing it. It hung there for a minute, a pure abstraction, and then the imagination rushed in around it, adding color and suggestion as the music began to float, a haunting stream of notes. A few heads nodded, familiar with it, but Ben couldn’t move. A sadness so knowing that it felt like an actual fingertip on his heart. Not a wail, not even a lamentation, but an endless sorrow. He imagined it vibrating through thin air, over bleached rocks, stretches of dry waste, desert music, meant to carry long distances, across emptiness. Had it really been written there, a tribal heirloom, or much later in some Polish village, the desert by then more a story than a memory. There were notes in Gershwin like this, bent midway in a kind of ache. He didn’t know the words-it might have been a simple hymn of praise-but what he saw were figures wrapping a body in linen, laying it into a shallow ditch, rocks and sand. And the body, he knew, was Otto. The day, the temple, had triggered the memories, all the old questions. There hadn’t been a service for him. No details of the death itself, so that it seemed not to have really happened, the official letter a kind of missing persons report. But now here he was in the music, everything he’d denied being, the string that connected Ben to this room of survivors, not lessons but blood.
The music might have meant anything, but in the stillness of the room he saw that it now meant everyone who had gone. It was important to have a sense, Esther had thought. He noticed that Lasner had lowered his head, a tear running down his cheek, overwhelmed by some loss of his own. Or perhaps a sign of age, easily moved. Ben remembered him at the camp, actually sobbing. The first thing Ben had liked about him. Who was it now? The same vast number, a lost father? How long before a blood tie finally dissolved? Never. He was still Otto’s son, after everything. Danny even more so. Ben sat up. Even more so. Otto wasn’t someone he would ever deny, no matter how much his politics had changed. Otto had died for his. You didn’t honor the memory of that by feeding gossip to a Minot. He wouldn’t have done it. But there were the files.
Hal leaned toward his ear. “This is it,” he said softly. “The music. For the pan shot.”
For a moment Ben was confused, still lost in his own thoughts. He needed to think it through, about Otto, and Danny. But the music was moving on and he began to move with it, like a wind, out of the desert, across the steppes to a stretch of cold, flat land. He knew the shot Hal meant. Taken high, from on top of the cab of an Army truck, panning slowly, left to right, over the endless reach of the camp. And as he listened, he saw the finished film, the plain mournful sound passing over the miles of barracks, a perfect match, as if the writer of the song, from its first clear note, had known all along it would end this way.
When the cantor finished there was a stillness. Fay put her hand over Sol’s, bringing him back, the tear discreetly brushed away. Then another piece of music began, the ark was opened, and everything went on.
“You know what it’s called?” Hal whispered.
Ben shook his head and Hal made a note to himself, jotting something on the program.
“You think we could get him?” He nodded to the cantor.
Ben didn’t bother to answer. Did anyone ever say no? But the mood was broken, the haunting music of the dead now just sound to be scored, used. But isn’t that why they were making the film, for them?
“Make it the last shot,” he said. “Use it at the end.”
Jonathan read well, his young boy’s voice surprisingly clear and precise, pitched to his family in the first row. Esther looked side to side, pleased, but Sam kept his eyes on the bema, his face soft with unguarded affection. Around them people were nodding, one of them patting Sam on the arm. A few rows behind, Liesl was following with polite attention, her blond hair hanging back, grazing her shoulders. Another Mischling. Was the hair from Hans, the mother another dark Sara? She turned, meeting his gaze, then looked down, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth, and Ben realized she had misinterpreted. When she looked back again, just a moment between them, she was answering something else, not what had been in his mind at all, and he felt his face answer her, another layer. It could go on this way, he thought, one response building on the next, all begun with a mistake. Maybe that’s how we all talked, not knowing each other, a verbal house of cards.
They were seated at lunch with studio people, away from the family table down front. The Cocoanut Grove was usually lit softly to suggest evening, and the bright daylights now made the prop palms look slightly tawdry, like an island beach that unexpectedly turns out to be littered. The band had already been playing when they arrived and the floor beyond the Moorish arches had been kept clear for dancing, just a few extra tables laid along the side. Waiters had held out trays of drinks as they arrived.
“A little early in the day, don’t you think?” Dick Marshall said, taking one.
“Not for champagne,” Liesl said.
They were playing a couple, moving through the room together. Only a few people were actually sitting down. After they found their place cards, they circled the room, seeing everybody.
“How long is this going to last?” Rosemary said to Ben.
“You have to stay for the speeches. After that-”
“All day, then.”
They had reached the buffet table of canapes, elaborately laid out, with ice sculpture centerpieces.
“They sneaked the picture,” she said suddenly. “You were there.”
“The cards were good.”
“So why is Al so nervous. Level with me.”
“They liked it. They didn’t love it.”
She flinched a little, a jab to the stomach.
“They liked you. It wasn’t you.”
“And that’ll make a difference.”
“Nobody’s saying-”
“Nobody’s saying anything. That’s the trouble. You think I don’t know how to read the tea leaves?”
“You’re overreacting.”
“You think so?” She touched her forehead. “You know what that is, what they call it in the theater? Flop sweat. In a refrigerator like this. Do they always keep it so cold? It’s like a banana boat.”
“Coconuts,” he said, smiling, looking up at the trees, then back at her. “Don’t worry. It’s one sneak. Kids in Glendale.”
“You haven’t been here very long, have you? Don’t worry. How? You stop worrying, you’re dead.”
“I just meant-”
“I know what you meant. My option gets picked up in January. So we have to talk now, and all they’re thinking about is the kids in Glendale.”
“You’re the biggest star on the lot.”
“After Dick. And nobody’s hiring Ben Hecht to do rewrites for me.” She looked across the room to where Liesl was standing with Marshall.
“One week.”
“So, one week. They just shot ours. Every lousy line. For her, Hecht.” She stopped, lowering her head. “They’re rushing her picture. She’s all they’re thinking about now. Funny, isn’t it? That it’s her. After everything.”
The early cocktail hour went on, but the waiters had begun to put out the fruit cups so people slowly gravitated to the tables. It was then that the bandleader announced a special treat and introduced Julie Sherman. She was dressed modestly, a blue jersey with a big pin, but the dress was formfitting, clinging and folding, showing her off. Ben thought of her on the train, drawing eyes. But she’d done the voice-over in a day, professional, and the surprise now was that s
he was good, one of those performers who comes alive with music, warm and easy, comfortable with herself. They were doing “Let Me Off Uptown,” and while she wasn’t as throaty as Anita O’Day she had the same swinging assurance, fronting the band, too distinctive to be background. A few people turned to look as they made their way to the tables. Bunny, not expecting this, was watching her carefully, evaluating. The up tempo seemed designed to move people to their seats and the band kept it up with “Riding High,” the bright Porter lyrics an even better showcase for her voice.
“Do you believe this?” Lasner said, annoyed. He’d been coming back from the men’s room and stopped midway, next to Ben. “He has her at his kid’s Bar Mitzvah? A piece he’s banging? What the hell is he thinking? What’s Esther supposed to think?”
But Esther, oblivious, seemed happy, the entertainment just another benefit of being a studio wife.
“She knows?”
“It’s the idea of it. Where’s the sense? Anyway, who has a Bar Mitzvah in a nightclub?” He flung his arm to take in the room. “Downstairs in the temple. Some cakes, coffee, maybe lunch somewhere after. No, that’s not enough, he has to have a floor show. With her yet. It’s a question of respect. A nightclub.” He looked around the oasis room. “You know where they got the palms? The Sheik. Off the set. It was Valentino’s idea. Well, that was a while ago. Maybe they’re not the same ones anymore, who knows? Here he brings his kid. You know we go back. Sam, he was an extra, in the Gulch. Waiting around. I pick him one day and he tells me the picture’s a piece of shit. Oh yeah, so what would you do? And he tells me and you know what? He’s right. So I give him a shot. Fix it and we’ll do some business. That’s twenty-five, thirty years now. He never lost me a nickel, not once. Still, all this- You want to chase something, all right, but you don’t bring it home.”
