The Last Supper: And Other Stories

The Last Supper

And Other Stories

Howard Fast

For Bette, Rachel and Jonathan

Contents

The Last Supper

The Ancestor

The Vision of Henry J. Baxter

A Walk Home

Coca Cola

Christ in Cuernavaca

The Power of Positive Thinking

Dignity

Gentleman from Mississippi

Journey to Boston

The Child and the Ship

Sunday Morning

The Upraised Pinion

The Holy Child

My Father

Coda: The Poet in Philadelphia

 

Courage yet, my brother or my sister !

Keep on—Liberty is to be subserv'd whatever occurs;

That is nothing that is quell'd by one
or two failures, or any number of failures,

Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people,
or by any unfaithfulness,

Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.

 

What we believe in waits latent forever through all the
continents,

Invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and
light, is positive and composed, knows no discouragement.

Waiting patiently, waiting its time.

W
ALT
W
HITMAN

The Last Supper

O
NE OF THE ADVANTAGES OF LIVING IN A TOWER
apartment in the Elmsford on Fifth Avenue was that your place was the only stop on the floor for the elevator. It gave one the maximum amount of privacy that one could expect living in New York, and Harvey Crane enjoyed privacy when he wanted privacy. He felt that he had earned the privilege of privacy. He was forty-six years old, tall, broad-shouldered and distinguished in appearance except that he bulged a little over his belt, and he felt that at forty-six, with a career that stretched back over a quarter of a century, one deserved a little privacy.

Therefore, when he was handed a subpoena, this sense of violated privacy—a violation of all that a tower apartment in the Elmsford meant—well nigh overcame his mixed response of fear and surprise. Instead of reacting in terms of a sense of terror and expectancy that had been building up in him these five years past, he thought,

“Well, God damn it, if this is all you can expect when you pay seven thousand dollars a year rent, then the hell with it! They can take their God damn lease and put it you know where!”

Then he read the subpoena, mixed himself a drink, even though it was only noon, and called his lawyer, Jack Henderson, of
Henderson, Hoke, Baily and Cohen
, thinking to himself that it was a break for him that he, had never been represented by Mike Cohen, of the same firm, not because he had anything against Jews—most of his best friends were Jews, when you came right down to it—and if there was one thing he despised, it was a racist; but because you had to think of everything once you were in this lousy spot, and say what you would, they felt differently down there about a Jew lawyer than they did about someone like Henderson.

“Jack,” he said, when he got through to Henderson,—“Jack, just listen to this. Just listen. Of all the stinking, lousy breaks—what do you suppose happened not five minutes ago?”

Henderson couldn't imagine, but he felt that whatever it was, Harvey should take it easy and not get excited.

“I love lawyers,” Crane said. “The whole world could collapse, but don't get excited. Not at all. I'm as calm as a cucumber, exactly. I've just been handed a subpoena—right at my front door, can you imagine, and God help the little rat that's on the elevator—a subpoena to appear before the, House Committee on Un-American Activities tomorrow, no less, but you don't want me to get excited!”

Henderson agreed that it was a very worrisome thing, but also that it was just such worrisome things that one had to resist worrying about. The thing to do, he explained in his calm, balanced and warmly comforting voice, was to come out of such an experience positively. Like a good friend or physician, rather than simply as a lawyer, Henderson told Harvey Crane to eat lunch, have a few drinks, and drop into his office, at about three o'clock, and such was his ability to reassure, even over the telephone, that Crane felt considerably relieved after speaking to him.

Nevertheless, he obeyed an impulse that had begun to form the moment the subpoena was handed to him; and as soon as he was through speaking to Henderson, he broke his date with Madaline Briggs, the lead in his current show, called his former wife, and begged her to have lunch with him. When she pointed out that she already had a luncheon date, he told her that he had broken his own date, that he needed her desperately, that something, perhaps the most awful and consequential thing in his whole life, had just happened, and that he had to have lunch with her, and that he would not take no for an answer.

He knew this kind of pleading would be effective, because it always had been; and that was something you could say about Jane, his second wife, that she had a heart; and as he had often told his analyst, the deepest trouble with his second marriage was that he felt more like Jane's son than her husband, not because she wasn't sufficiently young and attractive, but precisely because she was so responsive to his woes, particularly his deepest conflicts. His first wife, Anita Bruce, the actress, whom he had met on his first distant assignment to Hollywood, had been much too concerned with herself, her body, her face and her admirers to allow him to use her as a mother, and as Crane often put it, he had simply leaped from one extreme to the other.

“Look, Harvey,” Jane said, “when I divorced you, I divorced you—I didn't simply step out of a professional status to take on an amateur rating.” And then more gently, “You can't keep calling me every time anything goes wrong. At least, you have to try to get out of the habit—” He could sense that underneath her irritation, she was flattered, and thereby felt that he had won; and he wondered why he felt her so much more attractive and needed her so much more than when they were married, but at the same time had a pleasant sense of power in his being able to demand her and have the demand answered, even though some people—those who didn't know the whole story—felt that he had acted rather shamefully when he broke up the marriage. “I'm not your analyst after all,” she said lamely. “What is this awful crisis?”

He assured her that it was something that could hardly be discussed on the telephone, and arranged to meet her at twelve forty-five at the Plaza. Once he had finished with the luncheon arrangements, his sense of power went away, as did his anger with the elevator operator who had allowed the process server to come to the door of his apartment.

For the first time since the thing had happened, the true icy tentacles of fear began to creep down around his neck, along his spine, and like blood circulating into his body and into his heart. He was caught in a sudden paralysis that did not even allow him the privilege of reflection upon the fear itself. His thoughts slowed down and caught themselves in a circle; the circle said, “This is the end. It's over. There's no way out—no way out. Over. Over. Over.” Then his thoughts broke out of the circle and raced back through his past, and he found himself suddenly full of rage at something he had been, at himself in the long gone past. The anger helped him. It was an anger that involved no danger, and so he dressed and left the house in a fierce, pugnacious mood.

Some of the mood still remained when he met Jane at the Plaza. Somehow, it made him feel a little bit like a hero, a little bit like a martyr, true, but more like a martyred hero as he strode past the fountain and into the hotel. Jane was there ahead of him, and as she smiled and greeted him, she seemed genuinely glad to see him. She was a tall, dark-haired woman with a good figure, now dressed neatly in a gray flannel suit, but attractive to him and kindling in him a sudden wave of desire. The desire and the remnants of his rage at his own past combined to give him a new sense of being both romantic and desirable, and he felt an excitement he had never experienced before, not even in the wave of a successful opening night.

“You look different, Harvey,” his ex-wife acknowledged. “I hope it's nothing really bad.”

He ordered lunch before he would discuss it. Then he told her what had happened.

“But is it really so dreadful, Harvey?” Jane asked. “I mean, I never did agree with your ideas in that direction. I mean, I guess, when you come right down to it, I'm just an old fashioned conservative and you were always such a fire-breather, a real radical, I mean, and I never could feel that nothing was right and everything had to be changed, but you never belonged to anything, did you, and isn't there this Fifth Amendment thing that you read about in the papers and everybody talks about?”

“Oh yes—yes, indeed,” he nodded, gobbling nervously at his Hudson River shad roe, “yes, indeed, there is such a thing as the Fifth Amendment. You take the Fifth and don't answer their questions and then all that happens, is that you don't work again and never have another show produced and that's the end of the three hundred thousand dollars we've, raised already for the new musical and that's the end of Hollywood and TV and everything else. That's all that happens. Nothing happens.”

“Please don't eat so fast,” she reminded him, in the tone one would take with a small boy. “You know that when you eat and talk at the same time and eat too fast it gives you a nervous stomach and starts your ulcers up. Anyway, I don't think you should be eating shad roe with bacon.”

“Never mind how I eat,” he retorted. “This isn't me alone. Don't you see that I have a larger responsibility than myself? I pay you two hundred dollars a week, don't I? The truth is that I need a gross income of eighty thousand a year just to exist. Not to pamper myself, but just for hand to mouth existence!”

“Of course, I know that,” she said more sympathetically. “The fact is that I always defend you, Harvey. I know how hard it is. I know what it means to be a creative artist. That's why I could always understand and make allowances for everything that happened. It wasn't I who wanted the divorce, Harvey.”

“Look, baby, let's not rehash our marriage. Right now I'm in a devil of a spot.”

“And I want to help you, Harvey. Couldn't that word be the key to it—
help
? Perhaps they are calling you to have you help them. You know, there are witnesses that help, Harvey—people who help to keep us free from tyranny. Perhaps you won't have to take the Fifth at all. After all, you've written nothing for fifteen years to make them think you're subversive.”

“God knows what's subversive today!”

“And you could tell them that those old plays you wrote so many years ago were just done by a foolish young man. And a very poor one. You know, you did always say that when you wrote
Let the Sun Shine
, you lived for three weeks on crackers and cheese and water. What would they expect under such circumstances?”

“And betray what I wrote? Renounce
it
? Condemn it?—No—God damn it, no! There's talent in that stuff! Yes, it's off base, it's not in the, stream of the American way of life—hell, it may even be subversive, for all I know. But it's good, and a damn sight better dialogue than anything being written today!”

“Harvey, you're shouting. The point is, you wouldn't write it today, would you?”

“No, I don't suppose I would.”

“And you can't be held responsible all your life for what you did as a child.”

“I wasn't a child at twenty-two.”

“Of course you were. You didn't have a penny to your name.”

“That's true enough. Jane, I wish I could make you understand how rough it was then. But that's the trouble with people who are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They never can understand real poverty. I don't suppose it would do any good to try to make you understand—”