Timebends (52 page)

In the black darkness I could only sense him turning his head to me with what I took for surprise. “I don't know,” he said, as though the question had never occurred to him. He had become the bridegroom of war.

In the half-century to come, the shadow upon all the wars of liberation would always be Spain, and the long, faith-lifted gaze of Ralph Neaphus would hover above China and Vietnam, the Maquis and the Algerian FLN, and all the scores of wars of untrained, passionate men against regular armies.

The rain was not letting up, and I had been driving all day. Both of us couldn't possibly sleep inside the car, so I took my yellow slicker out of the trunk and let Ralph have the seat. I stretched out on the sodden ground, put my arm under my cheek, and quickly fell asleep, the rain pouring on my head.

Sunlight woke me. Opening my eyes, I saw a pair of woman's shoes, thick ankles, and legs a few inches away. Above me an angry middle-aged face glared down. Behind it was her house. We were on her waterlogged lawn, and the tracks of the car were deeply gouged into it. I tried to explain, but she was too furious, so I got in and we quickly drove off.

In a few miles the forward band of the planetary transmission began slipping, and I opened the gearbox and tightened it. Now the engine roared, but midway up the hills we were almost standing still. So I turned the car around and went up in reverse. Drivers overtaking us, seeing us apparently heading down the mountain on the wrong side of the road, jammed on their brakes to avoid colliding, then started up tentatively behind us and passed, often cursing out their windows at us, though one or two urged us playfully on. Then the battery died and the brakes wouldn't hold, so as we descended into towns I had to use the reverse pedal to slow down while both of us banged on the outside of the doors and yelled to warn people away. I had about three dollars, and Ralph had agreed to split the gas with his four, so repairs were out of the question. We had to get to New York and the Spanish war so that Ralph could die there; and we would have to do it in this car in this condition. I was already mourning him, and he began to look beautiful, which he really was not, with his slightly turned-up nose and peering eyes and rather forbiddingly straight neck, a naive neck, too, somehow.

Finally, heading across the George Washington Bridge, the front wheels suddenly broke into a violent shimmy, like a circus fun car. I could hardly hold on to the wheel at all. The sun was shimmering on the Hudson on this gorgeous June day. As we approached the New York end of the bridge, a cop appeared, wearily raising his hand, and I jammed down the reverse pedal to be sure to come to a stop before running him over. The car whined when you did that, but it did stop, although breathing hard. In that leisurely way they have, the policeman walked up to my window looking the car over. He was kind of naive too.

“You don't want to bring that thing into the city, you're liable to kill somebody. There's a lot of people in this city, you know, a lot of cars and things.” The Michigan plates had obviously convinced him that we were from a town with maybe two streets.

“Well, I just want to get to Brooklyn, and then I won't drive it anymore …”

He could not think of anything to do or say and just stood there nodding, but I thought to demonstrate my innocence by asking how to get onto Riverside Drive. With the Michigan plates and two valises tied with clothesline to the running board on Ralph's side, we apparently deserved some commiseration, and pointing up at a lamppost, the cop said, “See that sign?”

“Yep,” I said, as hicky as I dared.

“That says One hundred sixty-nine Street, got it? Well, you turn right and you keep an eye on each corner which is gonna say One
hundred sixty-eight, One hundred sixty-seven, One hundred sixty-six, One hundred sixty-five …”

“I got it. Those are streets, you mean.”

“Tha-a-t's right, those are streets. When you get to where it says Hundred sixty-fourth, turn right and that'll put you onto the drive. But go very slow, will ya? Don't rush. Brooklyn'll take you about an hour. Take your time, and good luck.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Try not to kill anybody.”

Ralph wanted to see Forty-second Street, so we turned and crossed town, and on the corner of Broadway he revolved in a circle taking it all in for his first and last time. This was before the blessings of cocaine and heroin, but the garish lights of the theatre marquees were on in the sunshine, and the hoarse, self-advertising atmosphere was as fraudulently cheerful as ever. There were the same drifting midday crowds on Broadway, the young down from the Bronx or up from Brooklyn to hit the Paramount and the Palace, munching the nickel hotdogs with a hunger for the hopeful glamour of these movie palaces so unlike the barren drabness of their neighborhood theatres.

Up six-lane Ocean Parkway the Model T, like a horse nearing its barn, lost its shimmy and behaved, and we could relax on the nearly empty road. The horses on the bridle path confused Ralph, who could hardly believe that people would pay money to ride, let alone to head nowhere. I told him that I had done it myself pretty often, at two dollars an hour. He leaned forward to observe the miles of neat one-family houses, like a man in a foreign country. At home, my mother welcomed us and made up a bed for him on the couch but stiffened when she heard what his mission was, fearing its contagion. Her eyes threatened whenever I mentioned his imminent transatlantic voyage to Spain. Ralph himself kept silent about it, the Lincoln Brigade being an illegal recruitment organization. On his third and last night with us, his silence spread to everyone despite our awkward attempts to enliven the conversation. I began to hate my mother for her unprincipled selfishness in restraining me and reminded myself that I was past twenty-one, old enough to decide for myself; but I fell back on Ralph's having already graduated while I still had a year to go before my degree—as though one had to have a degree before dying in a war. Actually, most of the time I was not afraid to die; no one at twenty-one or -two would ever really die, certainly not in perfect health. Except maybe Ralph. Anyway, I could not find the trigger in myself that would propel me, as Ralph had clearly done. Eating in
silence on this last evening, none of us any longer attempted to keep up the polite chatter, for Ralph seemed to be enveloping himself in a kind of membrane, the isolation of the committed. Maybe he was steeling himself against deviating from his path, but I felt that even in these few days together he had gradually hardened against the trivialities of ordinary life.

Next morning I walked him the three blocks to the elevated Culver Line that I had ridden for two years to my warehouse job, its cars still the drafty old wooden kind with iron coal stoves around which in winter the handful of passengers would sit with gloved fingers outstretched. I wanted to break through Ralph's distance from me as we walked, for it was like a form of distrust between us now; after all, he was doing an illegal thing. The word
fate
was not in my vocabulary then, but by this morning I knew that I was not to go to Spain, my drift was in another direction. At the turnstile Ralph glanced back and gave me a dry, silent wave and was gone into the rickety train, his heavy valise packed with all he owned in the world banging against his leg. So wrapped in his mission was he that I wondered for that instant if he would mind dying. I bounded down the long steel stairway to the sidewalk and strolled toward home, past the two empty lots where we used to play football, glad for the spring sun and the clear blue sky and the clean snuggling silence of Brooklyn at midday, glad for the sense of some spreading power in me, and turning into Third Street from Avenue M, I broke into a run at top speed, arriving at our stoop with heart pounding. I walked into the house and saw my mother at the stove in the back kitchen. She glanced up at me placidly, having won. For which I resented her, and even more deeply my own complicity with her. I could not stay in the room with her. I opened the back door and walked out on the gray porch, the porch I had built seven years before, which continued—only I was secretly aware of it—to part from the house by fractions of an inch each year.

When I returned to school for my senior year, the news that Ralph Neaphus had been captured was all over campus. Then he was safe! I was immensely happy, as though some blame had been lifted from me. And then, two or three weeks later, came the report that Franco's Moorish troops had shot their prisoners and that he had been among them. This was one of the debts I would carry in my heart, an invisible force that pressed me more than a decade later to cross the line of nuns around the Waldorf, one of the many secret debts borne by all of us whose souls had been enlisted in that consensus or coalition or, rather, condition of antifascism. Or perhaps not even a condition but an atmosphere of
alienation from what seemed the worldwide drift into what Odon von Horváth called the “age of the fish,” where grinning, killing, and feeding were the only signs of human life.

Hollywood for me will always evoke a contradictory mixture of certain scents. A sexual damp, I have called it, the moisture in the clean creases of a woman's flesh, combined with a challenging sea-salt smell; the exciting air surrounding a voyage on water and the dead ozone inside a sound stage; raw gasoline and lipstick perfume; swimming pool chlorine and the scentless smell of rhododendron and oleander, nature's attempts at plastic flora, plants that really belong in mountains, not in the rescued desert of Los Angeles where their artificiality adds its evergreen shine to the oppressive perfection.

We were met at the station by a man from Twentieth Century Fox who handed the keys of the small black Lincoln to Kazan and with barely a nod left us to drive off with it.

In my mid-thirties, I still looked out at the world half as an adolescent. Hollywood in 1950 had not lost the tags of mystic glamour, success, and escape that it had once had for kids in a Brooklyn high school. At the same time, as we drove through Los Angeles toward Beverly Hills, my feelings were satisfactorily different from what they had been when I arrived, an unknown, to work on Cowan's movie almost eight years before; now the place was all about power for me, about using the power I had presumably earned with my plays. In the unwavering sunshine I found myself turning grave precisely as the boy within smelled sexuality and the adventure of making a film. The studios then were still in full command, and the notion of the writer's control over his script—or, for that matter, the director's over his film—was simply beyond discussion. I took for granted that we were heading into a struggle in the coming days, but the prize was worth it: a truthful film about a dark cellar under the American Dream. Everything was contradictory, inside me and without. And with Kazan, too, my relation was complex.

Not unlike other writers who had worked with him, I felt a partnership without ever forgetting that it was an illusion, for in making a play or film people come together primarily as elements of a creating organism and not out of love or mutual regard. I had never known Kazan to chat, to call for no specific reason, in those times when, in his mid-forties, he was building his career. But if he was honed down to an instrumentality of his work, that was part
of his attraction for writers, who are forever trying to ward off aimlessness in their attempt to penetrate to some systematic core that generates the bewildering sparks and fires of chaotic life.

We drove into Beverly Hills, perfection to right and left, the nests of the famous and the rich impressing my ambitious heart and leaving an uneasiness in the mind. The place was so depressingly completed—maybe that was it, the sheer end-of-the-road materiality. The Tudor castle divided by a hedge from the New England farmhouse divided by a driveway from the French provincial. To each his individual dream, connected only by the silent little Japanese gardener and his son padding from lawn to immaculate lawn picking up the browned fallen palm frond, the crisp, dead, adventurous leaf, while nothing whatsoever moved, stirred, cried out, each house suspended in its spell of total achievement and guaranteed against ever becoming a ruin, all too perfect to die. And here was I carrying into this deep dream of peace a script about an old waterfront where the sun shone through dust and the acrid smell of steel, a slum where nothing looked completed or else was broken and falling apart. So young in comparison, Beverly Hills seemed frozen in timeless self-approval. Of course they were going crazy inside the houses, but I knew nothing of that yet.

I planned to stay a week. We settled into the house of Charles Feldman, formerly an agent and now one of the leading producers
(A Streetcar Named Desire,
his latest film, had been directed by Kazan), a handsome, suave man close to fifty and eager to make himself useful to Kazan. I was still revising the screenplay, which was far too long but in sufficiently good shape, Kazan believed, for its feasibility as a film to be determined. He had sent a copy to Harry Cohn, the Columbia chief. I could continue working on it for a couple of days while Cohn made up his mind.

But it was impossible to concentrate. As I sat at a glass table beside Feldman's swimming pool, the waterfront kept vanishing into the sun sparkling on the eggs Benedict, the very effort to conjure it up whispering of fraud. A Filipino houseman provided coffee and whatever else I could imagine eating. I finally gave up and lay staring at the birdless foliage wondering if this was what being “in” meant. It was a question I would never be able to answer; it may be that Hollywood is merely a living Escher drawing with no inside at all, only an outside, since everyone I met regarded himself as an outsider perpetually passing through, like politicians in Washington.

Meantime, there was a “party” each evening. Although his
young wife's photos remained all over the house, Feldman was divorced or separated, and there were usually eight or ten for dinner. The folkways excited and puzzled me; even when they arrived together, couples turned out to be only recently met, some as recently as an hour earlier, and women—many of them, if not all, ambitious for stardom—arrived and left alone in their own cars. It took a while to realize that some were mine to select from. I would later write in a poem, “Lines from California,” that to succeed in Hollywood a woman had to have a car. The company would sit around after dinner in the lavishly plain living room or wander out to the pool for more intimate conversation or to dance to succulent big band records. At one point I danced with an elegantly tall young woman, an heiress, I was told, who had come to Hollywood to be a star. But it was hard to know whether her unshakable silence meant contempt or awe or some stupendous inertia brought upon her by the oppression of great wealth. Jack Warner came one evening, looking amazingly like the comedian Victor Moore playing Wintergreen, the sappy presidential candidate in
Of Thee I Sing,
as he sat broadly grinning in a high-backed chair for over an hour telling one joke after another, a ritual of Hollywood parties, evidently. Yet Warner Brothers, slightly more socially conscious than the other studios, had made some good topical and biographical movies. I wondered for a fleeting moment if I was merely a snob trying to suppress a perverse attraction to his cultural type, for he reminded me of my father, who might have inspired similar deference if he had decided to lend Bill Fox some money.