Timebends (68 page)

But for the moment I had no resolve, and seeing that I was floundering, he said he had to make a phone call in his office and would be right back.

I stood staring out the window at the empty street below. My brain had died. Exhaustion suddenly drained my legs and I sat down, realizing too late that I had chosen a chair directly facing the dove gray cowboy. His jaws stood out like angle irons. Now he looked me in the eye. “I'm Carl Royce. I know who you are.” Surprised, I said I was glad to meet him, and he leaned powerfully across the space between us and shook my hand. His calloused palm was hard enough to slap a nail through a board. For the first time I noticed a large American flag on an eagle-topped staff in the corner of the room, its colors menacing. In the silence I waited for the emptiness in my head to fill.

“What are you going to do about it?” His tone was dead neutral. I had to be careful.

“I haven't had a chance to think,” I stalled. What did he want? Who was he?

“I hope you're not going to tell those bastards anything.” We were beyond pleasantries now; he had wrath in his sky blue eye.

I supposed he could see my surprise. Still cautious, I hedged, since a confidence misplaced could have consequences. “I've always opposed the Committee.”

“Do you know Dashiell Hammett?”

“Of course. Sure.” What in God's name could a radical like Hammett have to do with John Wayne?

“He was my sergeant in the Aleutians; we lived in the same tent a couple of years. He taught me everything I know.” I felt numbed. A few years earlier, Hammett had spent time in jail for refusing to give investigators the names of contributors to the bail fund of the Civil Rights Congress.

I had never been close to Hammett, if only because he so rarely spoke—a reticence I sometimes thought was a strategy of putting everyone else on the defensive before his raised-eyebrow silence. But he was rare, a man with a code whom one was bound to respect, and of course he had written wonderfully. For all his repute as an action man, I often used to wonder if he was not in reality painfully bottled up. Everything that was new in the postwar climate he seemed to greet with a supercilious grin, as though the past were just around the corner and the present not a serious matter. Like Lillian Hellman, his longtime companion, he was a putative aristocrat whatever his leveling convictions, and while affecting to denigrate the immature politics and personal derelictions of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, he plainly felt closer to them than to the left-wing writers. The twenties were still his frame of reference, with their happy deference to talent and the interesting rich, and what got a rise out of him more quickly than anything else was the present indifference to quality in human relations.

I began to feel light-headed as Royce joined the conspiracy too. “I'm only here for the day to buy cattle. My place is in Texas. I could fly you out of here in about an hour and a half; my plane and pilot are waiting at the airport. I have a couple of thousand acres, and one of the houses is empty, right in the middle of it. They'd never find you there. You can just wait this out down there till they get tired of it. In fact, Dash stayed in that same house when they were after him, but then he got foolish and left, and that's when they got him. He would never have gone to jail if he'd stayed there. You can stay as long as you like, maybe use the place to write
something for a couple of months. You could just forget about them.”

“I'm wondering if it'll seem like I'm trying to escape a subpoena. They could blow that up into something even bigger.”

But Royce dismissed this as a mere detail—with his thousands of acres it seemed ridiculous to be concerned with what anyone thought of him. “I wouldn't worry about that; the main thing is not to let them get you. All it is is a publicity stunt for them anyway.”

Hills came out of his office to tell Royce that he could go over to another law office down the street now to sign the cattle deal. We all walked to the outer door together. “It's a Cessna Barron, red with white wings, just ask for Royce's Cessna. The pilot is Bill Sisley. I'll call over to tell him you're coming. Think about it, and I hope you do it. I'll be out there in about an hour, hour and a half. Wait in the plane if you like, they won't touch you in there.”

“You can leave by the back door,” Hills added. “I have a car and driver parked behind the building. I'll tell him now that you might be coming, and he can drive you to the airport. I've got the judge coming over in about twenty minutes, so there won't be any need to go to court.”

“I don't know,” I muttered. Royce grabbed my hand, gave me a wonderful stare of encouragement, turned, and went out.

“Let me know,” Hills said, and returned to his office.

I stood at the window again trying to think clearly. My disappearance would cause a tremendous sensation now that it was known that Marilyn and I were to be married sometime soon, and the brunt of it all would fall on her. A new, lurid chapter of her life, but this time with overtones of disloyalty. And there would be no chance to explain to my children. But the image of a lone house on a couple of thousand acres made me yearn for its peace. Perhaps there I could begin to write again . . .

I had to move my legs, I was all tightened up. I went out to the elevator and rang. I could see an open filigree cage rising to the gate before me. A man was in it. The gate opened, and he glanced at me and proceeded toward Hills's door. The words were out of my mouth before I could think.

“Are you looking for me?”

He turned and came back to me: a comfortable man of the suburbs in his late forties, almost my height, a stranger to agony in a checked linen sports jacket of pinkish hue, slacks, and a good snug haircut. I thought there was a look in his eye of surprised disadvantage at being taken unawares. Maybe this was why I had made the
move when I could have gone down the elevator and out into Texas. I did not want to be running, I guess, from myself or anyone else, and I resented being afraid.

He took the pink onionskin subpoena out of his breast pocket and, while asking me if I was Miller, touched it to my lapels, technically serving me. I looked at the paper, seeing nothing. Now he relaxed and asked if I would join him for a cup of coffee, two ordinary citizens again. Out of curiosity I agreed, and we went down into the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Mapes across the street.

His name, William Wheeler, rang a bell; I had read about this diabolically clever investigator, who had had much success in bringing film people to see the light. I wanted to know what it felt like to be worked over by a talent like that. And it may also have been a thirst for reality in this dreamlike affair that made me want something more than a mere piece of paper as executioner.

After a few falsely relaxed preliminaries about the weather and Nevada's gambling-dominated society, of which he was amusingly disapproving, he said, “I'd like to talk this over. There's really no need to make this overly public.”

I nodded, said nothing.

“By the way,” he interjected awkwardly, as though he had only this moment thought of it, a not too persuasive bit of acting, “I'm a very close friend of Lee Cobb's. Do you ever see him?”

“No, but he lives in California, doesn't he?”

“Yes, but I just wondered. He thinks the world of you.”

This, apparently, was one of his deft ploys to smoke out my attitude toward Lee, who had informed to the Committee three years earlier, an act for which I might denounce him now or with darkened brow refuse to discuss his treachery. But Lee, of course, was incidental; the real question on the table was how I would behave before the Committee, as pussycat or rattler, and it pleased me not to let on just yet. In fact, I could not help thinking of Lee, my first Willy Loman, as more a pathetic victim than a villain, a big blundering actor who simply wanted to act, had never put in for heroism, and was one of the best proofs I knew of the Committee's pointless brutality toward artists. Lee Cobb, as political as my foot, was simply one more dust speck swept up in the thirties idealization of the Soviets, which the Depression's disillusionment had brought on all over the West.

“What do you think of him as an actor?”

“Well, he certainly was my favorite Willy.”
My praise seemed to surprise him; apparently he had expected moral indignation against an informer. I decided to match blandnesses and revealed, “In fact, I offered him the part of Eddie Carbone in
A View from the Bridge.
He was my first choice.”

Wheeler's face showed a real confusion whose unconcealment lowered my estimate of his professional cool. Could this really be the subtle genius, the Svengali, who had turned so many actors and directors to his gods?

“I never knew about that,” he said rather skeptically.

“Why don't you ask his agent?”

“An actual offer?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You talked to him yourself?”

“No, Bloomgarden talked to his agent. You see,” I added, “there was no doubt in my mind that Lee would have made the best Eddie Carbone I could imagine, and since I don't believe in blacklisting artists for their political opinions, even when I absolutely disagree with them, I told Bloomgarden to make the offer. Marty Ritt had no objection either,” I put in, since he must have known about Ritt's low opinion of his old friend's having broken before the Committee.

Wheeler was silent, seemed unsure where to put his foot down next. “You're different than I expected,” he finally said. “You should check this with Lee's agent.” “He'd have been good in that part.”

“Oh, yes. He wanted to do it, too. But the agent told Bloomgarden that Lee was afraid to act in one of my plays because the Legion would make it hot for him again.” As I didn't need to remind Wheeler,
View
was, among other things, about a man who informed on his own relatives to the immigration authorities. Cynically or not, I had thought that under the circumstances Lee would bring the pain of the harried longshoreman onto the stage rather than some studied impersonation.

“Maybe you'd like to talk to me again,” Wheeler said. “I could see you in New York or LA, either one.”

“What I have to say I'll say to my lawyers.”

“I see.” He seemed to want to press on but gave it up quickly. “Well, okay.” In short, I would get the full treatment from the Committee.

We got up from the table, and I gave him an unsmiling goodbye. He wandered off into the lobby, where even at this early hour the slot machines were thumping away. Ridiculously, I could not help
wondering as he was swallowed up by the lobby crowd whether this event had had any meaning for him or was simply a government-paid junket from LA to Reno for a little chat that would fill up quite a nice report before he got back to his golf game. But few are that jaded; we all believe in something, I suppose. Of course in our brief exchange of words there was no mention of my having broken a law. Purely a matter of my agreeing to a public rite of contrition was what it came to, an obligatory kowtow before the state, the century's only truly credible god, for having had in the past certain thoughts that I had indeed harbored, and for having met, as I had also done, with other like-minded writers in an attempt to advance the idea of socialism, or more especially human brotherhood, however muddled and profoundly unexamined the means. That all of this was now long gone with the wind was beside any conceivable point, there being no trace of an American left anymore and nothing in reality to be loyal or unfaithful to. Nothing, that is, except the most generous thoughts of one's youth, which, to be sure, had turned out to be badly mistaken in practical terms, but whose impulse had had some touch of nobility; it was youth's ample heart that was now up for betrayal or disavowal or mockery. From such Marxism as I had once espoused I had not wanted anything for myself, that was certain; it had been far less a political than a moral act of solidarity with all those who had failed in life, an abnegation of power in the guise of a materialistic thrust for it, a redemption from the self. Just as I had gone, a week after the success of
All My Sons,
and offered myself to the employment service for a menial job that I could bear for a week and no more, so I had from time to time thrown myself toward one or another Party front and stayed long enough to be bored and frustrated all over again by its rote emptiness. However, by this time, 1956, I had learned to trace the leveling impulse to less exalted arenas than morality and public reform, back to the ancient competitions with my brother and illiterate father, whose metaphoric retaliation for my victories I had dodged by declaring my equality with the least of the citizenry while in the real world working day and night to achieve what glory and superiority my art might win me.

In twenty-two years I would hear my own story—from the mouths of Chinese writers returning from exile after the Cultural Revolution. Of course their punishment had been immeasurably greater, but my own experience made their emotions uncomfortably easy to grasp.

The plane to New York was half empty, and I could stretch out across a couple of seats. There was time now for fear, not so much of what would become of me but of being unable to answer this summons to explain my life and justify it as an authentically American one when in fact I didn't understand my life. It was one of those moments when unfinished recollections return with their embarrassing unanswered questions. Maybe I had simply been a conformist and not a radical at all, fearful of the left's opprobrium for those who failed to fail and proved thereby that a robust pulse remained in the body of America. For example, I had realized long ago what lay behind the Communists' disapproval of
Salesman
and
All My Sons:
their success and critical acceptance had thrown doubt on the shibboleth that American theatre could not, and theoretically should not be able to, support socially truthful plays. A work that really told how it was could not succeed. The left had been living in the Last Days before the Coming, a pleasing mental environment for the passive moralist who need only know Truth to experience Salvation, a fix as old as Pauline theology and as seductive as justification by faith alone. But as an artist I knew that creation demanded a forward motion, an assault upon the world's slothful sleep of sensibility. My whole life had been a struggle between action and passivity, creation and detached observation. Flying toward New York, I made a note recalling a dream I had had some years before, of a theatre where I was watching one of my plays with an audience that I suddenly realized was motionless as death, and in one sweeping glance I saw the faces of family, friends, all the people I had ever met in my life, and I shouted, “My God, I have killed them all!” as though to create likenesses was to steal the spirit out of the bodies of those portrayed; yet I felt an illicit exhilaration, too, at having violated the Commandment, for I had made life, just like God.