Inside, Outside, page 40
My sister Lee was at a desk in the outer office. The office looked much smaller, like the rest of the place. I could remember how grandiose the building had once seemed, with its smokestack reaching to the clouds, and its vast interior vistas of awe-inspiring machinery. Now it had the seedy sooty look of a common factory going full blast, and the spaces had shrunk. My sister looked seedy, too, in a brown skirt and brown blouse, shuffling stacks of frayed file cards. Pop’s office door opened as I talked with Lee, and he came striding out, papers in hand, countenance stern, movements brisk, speech terse to the clerks. The Boss. The faces at the desks sobered, and all bent over their work, even Lee. But when he noticed me, his tough aspect softened. “Yisroelke! Come inside.” His office was half the size I remembered.
“Well, congratulations,” Pop said, nodding over my license and handing it back. “What can I do for you?”
Clear implication, without malice: Yisroelke doesn’t travel up to the Bronx and visit Pop in the laundry, unless he wants something. The request for the twelve-cylinder Cadillac all but stuck in my throat. How dreary the laundry was, and how unhealthy! I was thinking that this was where my father made his money, after all; this was what kept us on West End Avenue; this was how I was being supported at Columbia, while Felix Brodofsky already supported a wife. Still, I got the words out.
“I see. When would you need it?”
I told him. He thought a moment, and then managed a smile.
“You shall have it.”
53
Opening Night
“Camel’s hair?” said Lee at dinner. “For opening night? Are you out of your mind, Davey? Nobody wears brown with tails. You’ll look like a gangster.”
“Shows how much you know,” I said. “At Columbia, nobody wears anything else.”
Bob Greaves had taken to arriving at dances with a camel’s-hair topcoat over his white tie and tails. Whether he had no money for a black coat, or just hit on this as a stroke of ultra-smooth reverse snobbery, I don’t know. Maybe it was the thing that year at Yale or Princeton. In any case, our class had broken out in a rash of camel’s-hair coats at formal dances, always with the collar turned up, because that was how Bob Greaves wore his. One day in the Jester office I glanced at the label inside Greaves’s coat, hanging in the closet: Finchley’s, with a Fifth Avenue address. That did it. I might be the author of the Varsity Show, the Vicomte de Brag, assistant managing editor of the Jester, I might have a twelve-cylinder Cadillac at my disposal; all that was as smoke on the wind, unless I could get a Finchley camel’s-hair coat to wear over my rented tails on opening night, with the collar turned up. Only then could I be sure of sweeping Dorsi Sabin off her feet.
“Well, it’s no problem,” Mom said. “Michaels’ has racks and racks of camel’s-hair coats.”
“The only place to get a real camel’s-hair coat,” I said, “the kind everyone wears, is at Finchley’s, on Fifth Avenue.”
“David,” said Mama kindly to her unfortunate cretin son, “on Fifth Avenue you pay for the high rent, not for the merchandise. If you must have a camel’s-hair coat to wear over white tie and tails—”
“It’s completely ridiculous,” said Lee.
“Do you wear a high hat,” asked Pop, “with the camel’s-hair coat?”
“He wears a lampshade with it,” said Lee, “a brown lampshade. At Columbia nobody wears anything else.”
Lee was an embittered soul. I ignored and forgave her.
“No hat, Pop. Just the coat. With the collar turned up.”
“But must it be Finchley’s?” asked Pop. “Mama is right, it will cost twice as much.”
“Pop, Finchley’s has the coat I want.”
“Then that will be our present,” he said, “for your opening night.”
“The lampshade he can get at Macys,” said Lee.
I said, “Thanks, Pop. The author will be a real smoothie that night. You’ll see.”
“Smoodie?” he said, glancing up from his soup. Pop never quite lost his accent, and I can’t forget his pronunciation of that word. “What’s a smoodie, Yisroelke?”
“Oh, you know. A man of elegance. Chic. Smart. In the fashion. Comme il faut.”
“Comme il faut,” Pop said. “Yes. Tolstoy writes about being comme il faut. Good, then we’ll be proud because you’ll be so comme il faut.”
Next day I stood outside Finchley’s, peering in as if it were a Catholic Church, and just as shy about entering. I could see the salesmen standing about inside, all so well groomed, so erect, so tweedy, so unlike Mr. Michaels! Finchley’s appeared to be staffed entirely by old frozen-faced Dekes. I was not even sure they would take my money and sell me a camel’s-hair coat like Bob Greaves’s. Such a coat hung on a dummy in the window, the exact Bob Greaves coat, with the collar turned up. The dummy itself looked gentile, in fact not wholly unlike Bob Greaves, especially with that turned-up collar and the slight waxy sneer. I had to have that coat. I nerved myself and plunged in.
Well, Finchley’s took my money, all right, and sold me a coat; though not before the salesman who waited on me, a sandy-haired patrician with a toothbrush mustache and a British accent, obviously a Coldstream Guard fallen on lean times, let me know just how out of place I was. The coat looked fine on me, in fact marvellous. I was faintly disappointed, I admit, standing at the three-way mirror, to observe that in that perfect coat, with the collar turned up, I bore a striking resemblance—which I had somehow never noticed before—not to Bob Greaves, but to my Aunt Faiga. Also, as I turned here and there, I noticed there was no belt in the back. I could have sworn Bob Greaves’s coat had one. I mentioned this to the Coldstream Guard.
“If you want a belt in the back, sir”—he spoke the word sir like a Shakespearean actor doing Antonio and addressing Shylock—“you will have to go to Canal Street.”
I paid my money and escaped into the hazy sunlight of Fifth Avenue with a Finchley camel’s-hair coat in a box under my arm, the Jew who never felt deprived. The salesman was right, by the way. There was no belt on Greaves’s coat. All those coats at Michaels’ had belts, no doubt, every last one of them. Now suppose I had showed up at opening night in a belted Michaels’ coat? I might as well have worn phylacteries.
***
“The Cadillac is here.” Lee burst in on me, as I toiled at my books.
I leaped up. “Where? Where is it?”
“Right downstairs.”
I put on the Finchley coat and turned up the collar. Downstairs Pop was talking to Pat the doorman, and there at the curb was the Cadillac.
“Take a spin,” said Pop, “Smoodie.”
I got behind the wheel. Ah, this gigantic gleaming beautiful thing, smelling so rich, mine to drive! I started the engine. Ah, that low majestic powerful purr! In the Finchley coat, I felt invincibly competent and cool. I waved at Pop, and turned up the Finchley collar a bit more. He stood smiling, one foot in front of the other, his right hand in a jacket pocket. In photographs taken in his twenties, in his forties, in the last snapshot before he died, he is invariably standing just that way. For him that right hand in the jacket was comme il faut. You see it in old pictures of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia; the right hand either inside the jacket, Napoleon-style, or else thrust in a pocket.
The Cadillac moved like a cloud one rides in a dream. I arrived back in front of the house numb with euphoria. Dorsi Sabin was mine. Pop still stood there with Pat.
“It’s wonderful, Pop.”
“Smoodie,” said Pop, “I’ll take it to the garage.”
***
Dress rehearsal. The cast, all painted, wigged, and costumed, milling on the stage in a great dither. Stagehands shouting as they move flats into place. The shirt-sleeved musicians of the orchestra tuning up. I stand alone, at the rear of the empty rows of chairs in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria; on tenterhooks, contemplating this swarming enterprise taking final form. The curtain falls on the disorderly racket on stage. Overture time! The conductor has put together a potpourri of the show’s tunes, but I have not yet heard this overture, and the first notes send warm sharp thrills along my spine. What I hear is a fife shrilly piping “Yankee Doodle,” to the rat-tat-tat of a drum. Nothing else.
God Almighty, the evocative power of music! It was all there in those opening bars: the Minutemen, George Washington, Valley Forge, the crossing of the Delaware, the Spirit of ’76; I was almost ashamed of having made fun of the American Revolution, so flooded was I, at the sound of that fife and drum, with the naive copybook patriotism of my childhood. Several drums took up the beat, and the orchestra crashed into our opening number, the March of the Minutemen, which has since become a Columbia football song. Right now, forty years later, as I write about that moment, pins and needles are prickling all over my body. And that was the onset of the creative fever; an infection of which I have never been wholly cured, it seems, tax man though I am—or what are these hundreds and hundreds of yellow pages all about?
What a turn in my life! The conductor knew the plot of my show, and had simply stated the theme in the most obvious way. But “Yankee Doodle” hit me like a sledgehammer. I, David Goodkind, I was the creator of Oliver Obverse! All those actors, all those costumes, all those musicians, all that scenery, all these rows of empty seats that would be filled for three nights running—all, all was my doing. Writing for “Off-hour” and Jester had just been my way of becoming somebody at Columbia, but that fife piping “Yankee Doodle” spoke to my soul. It told me that there was nothing on earth like authorship, that a man could do nothing better with his life, and that few achievements were even comparable. I still believe that. But many are called by that fife, and few are chosen. Peter Quat was called and chosen. What he did with his talent is something else. I did not have what it takes, so I became a tax man.
***
On that night of nights, in white tie and tails, I thought I looked very like a Coldstream Guard out on the town, except for a fresh crop of pimples, incompletely masked by powder. But a Varsity Show author was above such trivia. In the Finchley coat, the box with two white orchids under my arm, I said goodbye to my family. Lee’s eyes glistened at me as she fussed with her evening gown. “Hi there, Handsome! Good luck!”
Mama said, “It’s the proudest night of my life. You’ve made Papa and me so happy!” She added, in a voice that resounded through the apartment, “Now, if someone else would only get married!”
Pop accompanied me out to the elevator in his new tuxedo. This was his night, as much as mine; this was his triumph in the Goldena Medina, long, long delayed, and he was revelling in seeing it unfold in style. Such was my surmise, but all he said, as the elevator door closed, was “Smoodie!”
Dorsi came sashaying out into her parlor in a cloud of delicate scent, in a dazzling effulgence of white arms, white bosom, and sequined red floor-length dress. “Oh, my,” she said, inspecting me up and down, “Don’t you look smooth! And thank you for these flowers.” The orchids nodded on her shoulder, a month’s allowance, and cheap at the price. When I opened the door of the Cadillac for Dorsi, the thoughtful look appeared in those celestial eyes, which I had seen when I told her I was taking her to the Orchid Grill. If I could read the hieroglyphs of that uninformative face, Dorsi was having second thoughts about cooling the Vicomte. Young, yes—but God, what a conquistador!
“Your father’s car?” She gathered up her skirt and cloak, and stepped into the Cadillac like the Queen of England.
“Well, it’s not mine, Dorsi,” I said. Dorsi burst out laughing, and laughed and laughed until tears stood in her eyes, while I started the Cadillac and drove down the Grand Concourse. “Oh, David,” she gasped, “sometimes you’re so priceless.” Well, fine. I had bounced a hundred jokes off this girl and barely elicited giggles. Making Dorsi Sabin laugh heartily was as random a hit as a double jackpot in Las Vegas.
At the Waldorf-Astoria we rode a large elevator to the grand ballroom amid a crush of Columbians in camel’s-hair coats with the collars turned up, and their sweet-smelling shiny-eyed girls, who were making a noise like an aviary. I was recognized. I was congratulated. The author’s girl, cloak thrown back to show her white orchids, quietly glowed. As usual, she disappeared into the ladies’ lounge. I lurked nearby in a mirrored hall, pacing among the potted plants, my palms wet, my heart thumping. The mirrors showed a white-faced spook in white tie and tails, staring back at me with tense triumph. Curtain in ten minutes. In five! At last, at last I had reached the mountaintop on which Peter Quat had stood. My picture took up a full page in the program, as Peter’s had.
Not long ago I dug out that forty-year-old picture: a profile of a lean Jewish kid, so very young, with a prideful hint of mocking humor about the mouth.
I. DAVID GOODKIND
AUTHOR
For this I had waited and worked for three years; sharpened a knack for humor, written a two-hour show, had it rejected, and written another in ten days and nights. This full-page picture in the Varsity Show program was the laurel wreath I would now lay at Dorsi Sabin’s feet.
As we walked together down the center aisle of the packed ballroom toward our seats, I was hailed left and right by well-wishers. The orchestra was already in place, tuning up. From a box Mom, Pop, and Lee waved to me. Two programs lay on our seats in the second row. The cover design showed the fife-player, flag-bearer, and bandaged drummer of the Spirit of ’76, marching through smoke and flame cross-eyed. The title was spelled out in Old English lettering:
Oliver Obverse
Ye 1933 Columbia Varsity Showe
We sat down. Dorsi turned the pages of the program, and came on my photograph.
“Ha! There you are,” she said.
The lights were dimming. The audience was quieting down. “Not a bad picture, Dorsi, eh?”
“Well,” said Dorsi Sabin, with a side-glance and a giggle, “at least it doesn’t show those horrid PIMPLES.”
Darkness. The fife and drum played “Yankee Doodle.” But the music did not affect me this time as it had at dress rehearsal. What I heard this time was
Pimples Doodle went to town
Riding on his pimples,
Stuck some pimples in his hat
And called them horrid pimples.
The curtain rose on the chorus of marching Minutemen. The audience applauded. I glanced up at my family in the box. They beamed proudly down at me, and Lee gently waved her fingers. I had a sudden very faint inkling of what her pain must have been, at hearing that Moshe Lev was in South Africa; of what it was like to take the shock of offhand, instantaneous, bloodcurdling disenchantment. But there was a gulf of difference. She was a rejected woman in love. I was a mere doting fool, getting a casual kick in the teeth that I had asked for.
The show was a hit. Laughs greeted my jokes, applause and cheers the sweaty dancing of the hairy-legged chorus. Dorsi herself, totally oblivious to the ruin she had wrought, had a high old time. At the final curtain the audience generously applauded, though there were no calls for “Author,” except for stentorian female cries from my family’s box; and when I looked up in embarrassment, there was Lee vigorously telling Mom to be quiet.
One more memory of that evening so haunts me that I have to add it. After the show, the chairs were cleared for dancing. Dorsi disappeared to the ladies’ lounge, of course, as couples filled the floor. I stood on the sidelines, accepting compliments right and left. Puss Puss Ohlbaum came drifting past me with a distracted air.
“Hi, Puss Puss. Dance?”
“I can’t find Monny,” she replied. “Monny was here a minute ago. Have you seen Monny?”
“Monny will show up, Puss Puss. Don’t you want to dance with the author?”
“Oh, all right,” she said. “But I wish I could find Monny.” I took her in my arms. She lifelessly shuffled around with me, looking here and there over her shoulders. “Where can Monny be?”
“Did you like the show?”
“Well, Monny said he’ll give you a good review. I wonder where—oh, there Monny is! Monny!” Breaking away from me, she darted for Biberman and threw herself into his arms. They danced past me. Her face was turned up to him with a love-light in her eyes that I had never known, that I had fully expected to see, this night of nights, in the eyes of Dorsi Sabin; and had learned instead—or should have learned, for there is more to tell—that in her eyes I would never see it.
I saw eyes shining like that for me years later, for the first time in my life, in the face of a professional beauty, a singing girl in a Broadway show, Bobbie Webb. It was my fate, I guess, that she was not to be a nice Jewish girl like Dorsi Sabin, damn her soul.
54
Pincus Forever
“David, you are a pew-et,” Professor Vyvyan Finkel insisted, as we drank champagne in his apartment, toasting my success the day after Oliver Obverse opened. (That was how “poet” came out, in his ultra-British diction.) “A true comic pewet. You can be the Mark Twain of the theatre! The American Molière! Mark Twain too was a pewet, you know, an unappreciated prose pewet. You are a pewet, David.”
All this, from a man who seldom gave an A, who himself wrote sardonic essays and verse for Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly! Professor Finkel was a most imposing man, very tall, very lean, with thick graying hair and an enormous craggy nose. A demanding lecturer, a murderous marker, Professor Finkel had already taken quite a shine to the witty if pimply young Vicomte de Brag, but his admiration for Oliver Obverse was almost disorienting. Then Bob Greaves stunned me by remarking, after congratulating me on Oliver Obverse, that he thought I should be the next editor of Jester; after all, I had done the most work on the magazine, and I was a very amusing fellow. This was mighty decent and unexpected of Greaves. Was he feeling the impact of Roosevelt? We were in the famous first hundred days of the New Deal: the bank holiday, the Brain Trust, the fireside chats, the repeal of Prohibition, that whole carnival of swift gaudy change; and possibly a Jewish editor of Jester seemed in the spirit of the times.
