Cheat and Charmer (21 page)

L
et us find something out of the wind if that’s possible,” Dorshka suggested. It was now a little after one o’clock and very gusty at the open-air tables of the Brentwood Mart. Dorshka was tying a faded scarf of blue silk under her chin.

Dinah recognized it, and she remembered admiring this touch of high style in a woman who was otherwise indifferent to fashion. Expensive silk scarves were the one luxury Dorshka had permitted herself during the days when she was pouring almost every cent of her high screenwriting fees into getting refugees out of Europe. She would cover her head with one of these silk scarves—bright red or emerald green—whenever she drove her red Buick convertible with the top down. It was exhilarating to see her dashing around in that car, wisps of red hair escaping from under the scarf. Sometimes she was alone; sometimes with Michael, who sat in the front seat with his arms crossed, shrinking a little from his mother’s flamboyance and the humiliation of not being old enough to drive; and sometimes with her lover, Bernhard, who sat back in the sunshine with his eyes closed, blissfully happy.

The two old friends settled at a table sheltered by a big canvas umbrella. “That’s more like it,” Dorshka said, taking a deep breath. “These winds—they are relentless, like a big stampede of cattle. Very American!” Then she gestured discreetly at a woman sitting nearby, a movie star who was reading the newspaper and, with the tip of the nail on her pinkie, scratching a tiny itch just inside her right nostril.

“Ah,” Dorshka whispered, “today she thinks herself invisible, like the rest of us civilians. Celebrating the arrival of the New Year with a delicious
hour or two of complete anonymity. Enjoying with all her heart the privileges of the nobody, because so few people are out today.”

Dinah loved the expression on Dorshka’s face—her mouth taut with a sardonic downturn. “Oh, Dorshka, you must have been s-s-s-something onstage,” she said. “Like a great gilded g-g-goblet of vitality and intelligence.”

Dorshka smiled at the compliment.

“The critics always compared me to wild beasts. Wild
female
beasts. My Medea was a lioness. My Lady Macbeth a tigress. My Phèdre a—good heavens, now, what
was
my Phèdre?” Dorshka laughed. “But you know, in all these roles it was Ventura’s direction that brought it out in me. ‘Be strong in grief. Be strong in madness. Be strong in hatred. Even in
weakness
be strong. Don’t be a little weak. Be a lot weak!’ ”

She sighed. “It’s been so many years now, and still … every day I think of him. My best friend.”

“Why didn’t you two get married?”

“But, darling, I was already married! Didn’t you know that? To Albrecht. And then, when he died, already Stefan and I were working together, and when you spend all day every day working with a man, well—even with lovers it just turns into something else. And it doesn’t matter a bit.”

Abashed, Dinah struggled to find something to say. The simple mention of Stefan’s name opened a valve in her memory and at once something warm, but also troubling, surged through her. “What I liked best about Stefan,” she observed shyly, “was that he took the time to explain to me what people were saying—you know, when everyone was speaking German. I was so l-l-l-lost—I didn’t understand anything—and he was patient and kind.”

“Yes,” said Dorshka. “I remember how you two would sometimes laugh when he translated something. Always it was the complaints! He thought they were so funny.”

“He was nice to me even though I wasn’t, you know, important. He was nice to my mother and father, too.”

“I’m sorry about your father, dear,” Dorshka said, putting her hand over Dinah’s. “He was a real American character.”

“I suppose he was. But to me he was just a lonely, embittered old coot who adored my sister and couldn’t get along with anybody else.”

“You loved him very much.”

“I did. He didn’t love me.”

“No,” said Dorshka, not contradicting her. “He didn’t. I could tell. I think he liked you, though.”

“Yes, but for a child that isn’t enough. But no matter. You can’t spend your whole life wishing somebody l-l-l-loved you who didn’t. Tell me something, dear,” Dinah said, plunging ahead. “Did Veevi write anything about coming here for Christmas?—I mean, this Christmas, the one we had last week?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Dorshka looked puzzled. “Why?”

“Pop seemed to think she was coming, with everyone—Mike, Claire, the baby.” She told Dorshka about finding the presents, and the letter, in her father’s trailer. “Why would she say they were coming when her passport had been taken away? And why now? Why would she come if it meant she wouldn’t be able to leave again?”

“Certainly it’s odd, but I don’t know anything about it, my dear,” Dorshka said, glancing a little to the side. Dinah wondered if she was telling the truth.

“Do me a favor and don’t say anything to them about it now. I clearly wasn’t supp-p-p-posed to be in on it.” She hesitated. “Have they said anything to you about—?”

“Your little talk with the boys?”

Dinah nodded.

“Well, I know they know. I know that Mike wrote to you a year ago. But I haven’t seen you, dear, since you came to see me.” She smiled at Dinah, who was too absorbed to register embarrassment.

“I suppose,” she blurted, “he was so disappointed by Veevi’s not coming that his heart just broke. Because of me. He d-d-d-died because of what I did. He must have felt he’d never see her again.”

“Oh, Dinah, who knows about all this?” Dorshka scrutinized Dinah’s face. “The main thing is, you must be absolutely clear about what you have done and what you haven’t done—or else you will torture yourself and everybody else who knows you, and that will not be good for any of us.”

Dinah stared down into her coffee cup. Dorshka was offering comfort, but she was also lecturing. Dinah wanted her friend’s reassurance, but right now she also felt a keen resentment against Dorshka and her European wisdom, aged and cooled in the cellars of experience, mellowed by education, books, acting, theater, music, and love affairs, none of which Dinah possessed in any comparable degree. How on earth did one get to be
like that? How did one get free of the muddle, the sheer incomprehensibility, of everything? Sitting across the plain wooden table from her friend, with the wind blowing hard against the overhead umbrella, Dinah yearned to know what Dorshka knew—she craved Dorshka’s ability to make the distinctions and discriminations that she found it impossible to make—but at the same time she hated it when Dorshka treated her as if she knew nothing.

“You see, darling, sometimes our actions have consequences—”

“Dorshka, please! I’m not twelve. I know what I did and why. I can l-l-l-live with myself.”

“And that’s why you called me on this nice New Year’s Day, right?” Dorshka countered. “Of myself or Veevi I am not speaking, Dinah, but of you. By doing this thing, it is yourself you have hurt the most, no?”

“You’ve said that to me before. It’s not true, and I don’t want to hear it again.”

“Dinah, the trouble with you is that you don’t want to hear anything—not from me or anyone else. Like most Americans, you think that you don’t have to pay attention to what the world says about you. But you are wrong, Dinah, very wrong. There is no self without the world of other people. Thinking you have done this for love and that therefore it doesn’t matter what people think is foolish and naïve. So maybe you hurt your sister and maybe not, or maybe you hurt your father and maybe not. What I am telling you is that the person you injure the most is you—not because of what will happen but because of what already has.”

“Look, Dorshka, I know one thing: I haven’t done anything to myself that I wasn’t prepared to do. I did what I did to keep what I have—because what I have is what I want, and I never had anything before. But I don’t like the feeling that maybe—maybe I killed my father.”

Dorshka shook her head. “Dinah, come now, you cannot say that this is what you did. It is too easy! Much harder is not to know. And you never will know.
Never!
And anyway, would you have done it if in advance you had known this would happen?”

“You mean, would I have done it if someone had said to me, ‘If you t-t-t-testify, you will start something that will end with the death of your father’?”

“Yes. That is exactly what I mean.”

“Well, no. I mean, of course not.”

“You would have gone to jail? Moved to Mexico?”

Dinah heaved a big sigh. “I don’t know. Honestly. What you say to yourself is, Go ahead and get it over with. The sooner you do it, the sooner you’ll have your life back like it was before. You don’t really think about anything else.”

“And you thought this way?”

“Dorshka, I did it to keep my husband from being hurt; I didn’t think about whether I’d be hurting anyone else.”

“And your friends?”

“What ‘fr-fr-fr-friends’?” Dinah exploded. “That’s what all these martyrs say: ‘Don’t rat on your friends.’ What f-f-f-fucking fr-fr-fr-friends did I have in the Party? I haven’t seen those people in years. They were Veevi’s friends, not mine!”

“You know, Dinah, I am afraid that it was Jake who made you do it. If so, he’s a
Schwein
.”

“You’ve said that before, Dorshka, and dammit, it’s not true. Nobody made me do it—not Jake, not anybody. I
chose
to do it. And it’s not that I
did
it that’s driving me nuts, only what’s happened
because
I did it.”

“Ach, now you talk sophistry. This is disingenuous.”

“I’m talking
what
? Save it for a Double-Crostic, Dorshka. Don’t talk to me about big concepts and morality and all that jazz, because my eyes’ll gl-gl-gl-glaze over. I testified so that my husband could keep working, and I did it because I love him—end of story. I can live with that part of it. I can live without hearing from my sister, or even seeing her again, if that’s what she wants. But having Pop die—that, I didn’t expect.”

“Didn’t it ever cross your mind that they would ask you about Veevi?”

“No. I didn’t think
I
mattered. It never occurred to me they’d come after me. I’m just a housewife, I’m not a radio writer anymore, I don’t have a college education, and I spend my time gardening and schlepping kids and groceries in my station wagon. Was I dumb to think they would never come after me? God yes. Dumb doesn’t begin to say it. And I just wish, you know, I just wish Veevi would get in touch. I worry about her. Do you think she’s okay?”

“Dinah, dear,” Dorshka said with finality. “Look here. There’s no mystery—no surprise. She learned that one’s passport is not a piece of personal property. And for this, as you know, she and Mike have cut you. This business with your father … Well, who knows what that was about? But you and Veevi are out of each other’s lives for now. Do you wish absolution? To be forgiven automatically?”

Dinah pondered. “No, it isn’t absolution I came for,” she said, suddenly aware that there was an entirely different conversation she wanted to have with Dorshka. There were questions she wanted to ask, questions that were years old. But they were like things stored away so long ago in the attic that to come upon them was to experience bafflement, a kind of amnesia even.

She looked over at Dorshka. The grand old woman had loosened her scarf and her broad face seemed to drink in the January light and the rushing winds. Dinah asked her if she had been disappointed by the election.

“I had no hopes, so I am not disappointed,” Dorshka replied. “American politics used to fascinate me. I used to think, Well, maybe here there is real democracy. Now it is nothing but a bore. Tell me, even if Stevenson had won the last election, what would he have done for this brutal and hypocritical country? Would he have helped the Negroes? No one here is ever going to help the Negroes. Would he have stopped the McCarthys over here and defended the ‘premature anti-fascists’? Is it a surprise that they elect Eisenhower? The war is over seven years and who wins? A blue-eyed general with a German name! And how happy they will be to live under this authority, this military guy! What did all of you expect?” A worldly shrug. “I am sick to death of America. The stupid McCarran Act. The steel strike. And this horrible Korean War. I tell you, I am with all of it fed up—up to here.” She made a cutting motion across her throat and smiled wearily—and a bit theatrically, Dinah thought, conceding, however, that she had earned the right to be wearily theatrical.

“I want to talk to you about something else, Dorshka,” Dinah said.

“Yes, my dear? What?”

“Well, the old days.”

“And what about them?”

“Why did Stefan and Veevi go to Europe? I never understood that.”

“He was finished here—you knew that.”

“But it was suicide to leave then.”

Dorshka shrugged. “He thought it was suicide to stay.”

There were other questions Dinah wanted to ask, but Dorshka’s blue eyes reflected a certain wariness.

“But didn’t you think there would be trouble? Wasn’t it like walking into the jaws of, I don’t know, d-d-d-death or something?”

“Well, yes. I worried, like everyone else. But Stefan had good friends over there.”

Dinah felt certain that Dorshka knew something that Dinah wasn’t supposed to know. Enough for now. She glanced at her watch.

“I see you’ve got to get cracking,” Dorshka observed. “It’s too windy here anyway.” And she retied the blue scarf around her luminous head.

“Some people are stopping by this afternoon,” Dinah said. “Would you like to come over?”

Of course Dorshka understood that the open house had been planned well in advance and that Dinah hadn’t thought to invite her earlier. “No thanks, my dear. I shall curl up with a good book today. But come whenever you like. I’m glad you still want to see your old Dorshka.”

“No, Dorshka, it’s the other way around—I’m glad you still want to see
me
.”

Dinah felt her hand blanketed by Dorshka’s own. “This has not exactly been for you a bed of roses and wine,” said the old woman.

Dinah laughed kindly. “Oh, Dorshka—”

“What—did I say it wrong? Come, tell me how it is supposed to go?”