Timebends (86 page)

I projected onto the city this same dislocation: people were in the wrong bodies with the wrong mates, saying things they did not really believe or understand. They were speeding around in motorboats, tossing things overboard to bob around in the wake—children, pots, pans, dogs and cats, houses and husbands and wives, all roiling around in the frothy water and then sinking out of sight and mind.

The theatre's serious work now was all about devastation, which is not the same as tragedy. I didn't accept it, even as I could hardly argue with it, given what had become of my own life.

Oddly enough, as the sixties began, the decade was being heraided
as a time of acceptance of human nature, man shorn of illusions, but to me it seemed a time of denial. But of what? What had we done that we could not face?

I got to thinking again about Camus's
The Fall,
about the moralist unable to forget that he had not tried to stop the girl from jumping to her death in the river. I would put it differently. The question was not so much whether one had failed to be brave. It was something else. You can't oblige people to be brave, they either are or they aren't. What was there to say about this?

In Roxbury, spending more and more days of each week alone, I began to fear I was loving solitude and silence too much. My decaying barns, idle since the previous owner had departed, and my fallow fields, which for two centuries had supported families, cried out to be used again, just as my own spirit now seemed to have been left to the uses of chance for too long. Like my own interior terrain, the land longed for purpose and the forms that only loving work can bestow.

Inge, filled with purposefulness, was on assignment in France. I missed her sense of the hour's importance, the possibilities waiting in the unfolding day. I needed an ordered space around me if I was to work again, and when Inge was off on one of her jobs, I took on a tendency to walk into doors. But I must never form another commitment again, we were all too much like music, sounding illusions of hope from the mere pressures of air upon the ear, which last a moment before vanishing. The despair I felt was impossible to face or flee, and my only certainty was the hunger for long stretches of uninterrupted time to find my feet as a writer again. No partner ought to be asked to contribute to silence. In this year of knowing one another the simplest of ideas—that I needed help in order to live—became not only obvious but honorable and even a kind of strength. Maybe Ibsen had been wrong: he is not strongest who is most alone, he is just lonelier.

Down the road lived the Calders, Sandy and Louisa, whom I had known since moving into the area in the late forties. Their presence had always been a kind of reassurance for me, but they had begun to spend a lot of time in France. I had liked to come in the afternoons and drink wine with Louisa or go out and gossip with Sandy in his studio as he twisted wire and cut tin for a mobile. One day he sat drawing shapes for acoustical panels to be hung from the ceiling of the great concert hall in Caracas—Inge and I would see
them there twenty years hence—for he had graduated from the Stevens Institute as an engineer, with the highest grades on record. Like the painter Peter Blume and his wife, Eby, who lived over in Sherman close to Malcolm Cowley, the Calders had come up here in the Depression when small, bony farms still covered the landscape. All these people had known how to live happily on little money—the Calders' place had cost thirty-five hundred dollars, and the hundred-dollar down payment had been borrowed from Bob Josephy, one of the finest book designers of the time. Even then the farms were dying off, but the area still wore its pleasing air of relaxed rural decay. I still had in my barn the gig in which the farmer who sold me my place had driven to church.

Sandy transcended no matter what he did because his spirit was a child's, as was his seriousness; he never theorized, either about art or politics, and glancing at a canvas he didn't like, he would simply say, “Poopy-doopy,” without lingering on it long. But he was shrewd about what was going on and went out of his way to show me welcome in the bad time when I lost my passport and was being pushed around. He and Louisa were more than a decade older than I, and I found a certain historical pleasure in their witness to the twenties and thirties, when she, a great-niece of Henry James, and he, son of the sculptor of the great arch in Washington Square, had experienced a New York so different from the one I knew, a city not of striving immigrants but of old families and quiet, powerful men. They continued to live in the relaxed style of bohemian acceptance, judging no one, curious about everything, but not far beneath the surface was a stubborn and somehow noble sense of responsibility for the country, a sure instinct for decency that, in the wildly experimental and super self-indulgent sixties, seemed in its quality of unpretentious simplicity all but lost to history. In another quarter of a century I would try to express my love for them both in
I Can't Remember Anything,
a one-act play.

Sandy's slurred speech was as hard to understand as it was unmistakable, and coming through my bedroom window early one Sunday morning in the fifties, it shocked me out of sleep—could he be out on the road speaking
French?
I went outside and found him in his cutoffs and broken sandals walking slowly along with Oskar Nitschke, a French architect who had recently lost his hearing; Sandy had rigged up a piece of garden hose attached to a tin funnel, into which he was making conversation while Nitschke held the end of the hose to his ear and complained that Sandy was
yelling too loud. From Nitschke's neck hung a cardboard sign inscribed in Calder's inimitable hand, reading, “I AM DEAF.” Each was carrying a bottle of red wine. They were in a very serious discussion the subject of which I have forgotten, but I remember joining in for a while, until they turned and walked the mile back to Calder's place. It was the end of one of their all-night parties. The two of them strolled down the middle of the road, on which no more than two or three cars a day passed in those days.

The Calders were hardly here anymore, and the men and women I had known who worked the land were almost all gone. Still, in the cold mornings there was the old softening whiff of a country spring in the air, a weather that had always triggered new works in me. But I was unready for even that much commitment, and in such a mood one invites new escapes: I must go to Paris, where Sidney Lumet was about to begin shooting a film of
A View from the Bridge
with Raf Vallone and Maureen Stapleton. Vallone had had a greatly acclaimed success with the play through two seasons there. Even better, I had accumulated enough royalties in London to buy a Land Rover and drive it down to Paris. That all this was a ruse to meet Inge I was perfectly aware, but sometimes even weak self-delusion is better than none. The truth was that I simply wished to praise the day and hope another one would follow, and Inge was a fine partner for that. Happy the man who need never assert more than he knows or less than he believes. I found in myself a novel respect for sheer fact, wanted to go with the facts and that was all. Perhaps I also longed to see Inge again because she so respected muddle, but being an artist herself, she could easily combine muddle with resolve. Besides, she seemed more and more beautiful, which is to say, undefinable. I knew, in short, that I was in trouble.

The Pont-Royal, where I had stayed after the war, was under renovation now, and its old golden patina of French bourgeois elegance shone once again through the grime of the war years. Gone was the concierge with frayed cuffs rushing across Paris once a day to feed his rabbits. Gone too, by the first of the sixties, the vistas of avenues and streets: parked cars blocked the view of all the lower stories and the grand entrances. Cars were now the foreground of Paris, architecture the background, and people were fragments worriedly maneuvering through the maze of bumpers and fenders and fumes. But the oysters and the color of the Paris sky were glorious still.

And Inge savored life as only one can who has nearly been killed. In this age survivors understand one another. It all seemed quite simple to her: there was little to expect from people, but what there was one had a right to demand and they an obligation to give.

At Tempelhof, a gate had been bombed open, and she had simply walked out, heading south toward Austria, more because she had to have a destination than from any belief that the family had survived and still lived in Salzburg. It was the story one heard a hundred times then: the exploding end of the Reich, the rides on trucks, the streams of people pressing in both directions, the unexpected decencies and the usual betrayals. Until at last she stood on a little bridge and, starting to climb the rail to let herself drop to her death in the water, was stopped by an older man, a soldier on crutches, who lectured her never to give up and made her follow him, and finally after days and nights on the road they arrived in Salzburg.

But her memory failed, she could no longer recall the house where she had lived, and now it seemed certain the parents could not possibly be living there still. The crippled soldier led her down one block after another, but nothing came to her until, at the edge of an affluent part of town, she had a warming sense of familiarity. But he scoffed at this—there were only prosperous people here to whom a scabby girl in rags could hardly belong—and they started to go on when suddenly she recognized a brass knocker and knew it was her house and rushed up to it and banged on the door, and there stood her mother, amazed. A miracle. They embraced, and she turned to thank the soldier and invite him in, but he was gone. She ran into the street, looked up and down, but there was nothing. As though she had dreamed of an angel. She was sure she hadn't. Why had he hurried away? Had he seen that he could not fit in with these elegant folk? Maybe he hated wealthy people or feared them.

It was not that she lacked all self-pity in the telling but that she seemed to take it absolutely for granted that you had to find the strength to save yourself; a bracing implication of self-reliance made for tragedy rather than mere pathos. She was neither optimist nor pessimist; sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof, and why go looking for more? She welcomed the good in people despite expecting the worst; indeed, a realistic philosophy had to allow for her soldier or it was false to life, and to mourn the world totally was to evade the terrifying contemplation of goodness. Such a war should not have tempered one such woman, but it had. It was hard to think of an American as cheerful as she.

And so, some four years after Walter Wanger had asked me to
write a film of
The Fall
—the story of a man who had failed to save a woman leaping from a bridge—a woman was telling me of a man who had held her back from just such a leap.

How strange, though, that he should have vanished in air!

One midday Marilyn showed up at the country house with her half sister, Berneice Miracle, and Ralph Roberts, an actor friend profoundly devoted to her, during the war an officer in Carlson's Rangers, now a masseur, a powerful, gentle half-Indian giant with wide cheekbones. He drove them up in a borrowed station wagon to get the big TV set from the second floor, a gift from RCA a couple of years before, as well as some other things of Marilyn's.

Marilyn wanted to show Berneice the house and all the changes she'd made in it. She took her upstairs and down and then out on the lawn to see the endless view. She described how she had dormers put in and raised the roof over one wing to make a room above the kitchen, and so on. Roberts was meantime carrying things to the station wagon. I gave them some tea and left them, thinking she wanted privacy with Berneice, a demure young woman from Florida. I gathered that they had met for the first time only recently, and Marilyn presented her to me with a certain pride in her relatedness. As far as I could recall, Marilyn had never mentioned her before, and if I had ever known she was Marilyn's mother's daughter by her first marriage, I had put it out of mind.

After half an hour I heard the tailgate slam shut and came down from my studio and said goodbye to Roberts and Berneice, who were just getting into the car. Standing alone in front of the garage, I faced Marilyn, and we grinned at each other and at the absurdity. I wondered what she remembered of our years and what she could not. And later I asked myself how much I had been unable to retain once denial had done its scrubbing job. She noticed the new tan Land Rover I had brought back from Europe a month before and assumed from it that I intended to live up here, which intrigued her. She wanted to know what
that
was sticking out of the back of the chassis, and I told her it was a power takeoff shaft to drive spraying equipment for fruit trees I intended to plant. She gave me a look of surprise in which I thought I saw some regret, considering all the hope we had put into this place; she had pressured me to buy more and more land, and I had resisted at first, saying it was unnecessary and would put us in debt, but it had turned out to be a clever investment as well as a beautiful one. Nevertheless, I had
just had to sell some of my manuscripts to pay off our taxes. Yet here I was, apparently settled in, while she was in midair again, just as she had always been and as I could not be if I was to resume a working life. We had simply unveiled the austere perseverance of the past, and I knew now that one was never cleansed of it—not without the risk of suicide or murder in the attempt to escape it. What we are is what we were, give or take a few small crucial improvements if we're lucky, and Marilyn and I had pressed it all to the limit.

She seemed to delay leaving. Behind her the broad dogwood tree was losing the last of its dry little leaves, and the light on her was the gray color of its bark and of fall. She was wearing moccasins, which had always made her look fourteen, and a tan sweater, which she suddenly pulled up to reveal a dressing wrapped around her torso.

“See my bandage?” She grinned mischievously, as though it proved some point she wanted to make.