Arthur Goldhammer
From across the room I had for some time watched Martin Bernstein's weather eye dart nervously over the protective hedge of seersucker and summerweight poplin. The island hardly blushes for celebrities any more—Charlie and May have seen to it that we receive ample exposure—but a sitting Undersecretary of State with a taint of scandal and well enough known from a week of televised grillings is sufficient, apparently, to entice even Wall Street types from their boats. Such is the aura of power: an emanation, a will-o'-the-wisp, an odor, a scent of blood, perhaps, that draws so many sharks who in the ordinary course of events must content themselves with the less primitive smell of money. And many of the assembled had known Martin since he was a boy: his family had begun summering here even before mine.
For my own presence at this celebration of notoriety I can hardly adduce such elemental or comprehensible grounds. Katia, aware that my gorge rose whenever my eyes fell upon my former student's name in the papers, had been somewhat wary of conveying Charlie's invitation. Yet for all her wariness, second nature after forty years' education in the harsh school of matrimony, I had anticipated that I would not much like what she would eventually tell me as I watched her, wearing a floppy sunhat and heedless of the sumac that lay in ambush, wading homeward through the field of rye that separates our house from Charlie and May's just over the rise. Even as a young man the sight of Katia so lithe and insubstantial used to make me feel all the weight of my lugubrious self. Now the sag of our well-used summer mattress, its centripetal central crease, only underscores my perception of ponderousness. Hers is the lightness of step for which the word cavort was invented. Had my failing eyes been able to make out butterflies at such a distance I have no doubt that they would have flitted no more easily than she. Odd, is it not? that a spirit so at home in the light should find solace in the incensed mysteries of the Eastern Church. Upon this and other blatant incongruities in our long, unblemished marriage none of our friends ever remarks.
Katia, as she will when something between us needs discussion, had sat herself in the armchair beside my desk and with artful indirection embarked upon fifteen minutes' discussion of the tides, the price of smoked bluefish, the whale tangled in a net off Grace's Point, the state of the vegetable garden, and the need to lay in fresh supplies before the onslaught of weekend guests. Finally, as if in afterthought, she came to the point. "Oh, and I don't suppose you'll be pleased to learn that we've been invited for cocktails at Charlie and May's in honor of Martin Bernstein."
"Honor?" I queried, with all the sarcasm I could muster. "I don't think that's quite the word to use in connection with Marty."
Moving quickly to cut off any thought I might have of beating a coward's retreat, she added, "I've already accepted. Charlie said Martin had particularly asked to see you, by the way."
Thus forewarned, I knew I would not be able to slip out, as I often did, unnoticed by hale Charlie and his hearty, bibulous crowd. So I waited for Marty to make the first move, damned if I would do anything to make it easy for him. But as I watched him from my station between scampi and yolanci dolma I became nervously aware that for the once awkward Bernstein everything had become easy. Twenty years had changed him less than I would have expected. He had the same ratty little eyes, the same pugnacious jut of jaw, the same wry cruelty in his feeble, flickering smile, but somehow these parts now coalesced as they had never done before. The effect was as though someone had taken an ugly, tarnished silver vase and polished it with great diligence, producing a brilliant luster that revealed a hideousness previously softened by neglect.
I knew perfectly well that he saw me, too, and doubted that he found me as little changed as I found him. Having devoted altogether too much of this summer to patching the various leaks and cracks and bungholes that are the natural concomitant of aging in shingle and plank, I am only too aware of decay in the parts of things that lie hidden from casual inspection. We may be composed of sturdier stuff than our weathered homes, but they will likely outlast our meager three score and ten. From somewhere between right buttock and pelvic girdle a persistent pain radiates downward only to vanish indistinctly at midthigh. Were I a god this is no doubt the part of my anatomy from which I would have plucked a heroic child to animate the myth that would perpetuate my name. Being human, however, I am told by my physician—or, rather, by my "health care provider," an employee of my "health maintenance organization"—that I am alas not divine but mortal, with a cholesterol level that would make a respectable batting average and a BP of 162 over 96. "No worse than many men your age," the young doctor mutters without looking up from the paper on which he is recording in astonishingly brief compass and matter-of-fact prose the saga of my decline. "But I would be concerned. I am concerned." In the emendation of indolent conditional to emphatic indicative I sense at my back time's wingèd chariot, hurrying near.
Bernstein, by contrast, exudes youth perhaps a little too ebulliently pressing at the confines of middle age. He is of an age that the Times' editors evidently consider fit to print, for they invariably conjoin the scant number of his years to the grandiloquent splendor of his title, as if to invite marvel at such great achievement in one so young. Yet the achievement so far as I can tell is primarily to have pushed himself to the head of the line of ambitious young men and to have held on to his place with exemplary tenacity. But what do I know of the talents it takes to go so far so fast? A lifetime in academia ill prepares one to judge that kind of success.
Martin, with the keen sense of timing that had served him so well, waited until I was occupied with a drink in one hand and canapé in the other and then pounced. "Excuse me, please, gentlemen, there's someone I must say hello to," I heard him say in a raised voice aimed squarely in my direction, and then, louder still, so loud as to be almost a challenge, an insult hurled across the room that caused others momentarily to unglue politely smiling eyes from their interlocutors in order to prick their ears and sniff the air as if in anticipation of a fight: "Professor Schwartz, I had a dream about you last night."
Already he was at my side, already his arm was around my shoulders, already he had swung me away from the expectant faces of those with whom he had been talking in order to draw me down with insistent pressure to his runty height and confide in my ear, in a ridiculous stage whisper, his implausible revelation: "You were the statue of the commendatore in Don Giovanni, and you came to drag me down to hell." And then he straightened up so suddenly that I wet my tie with my drink. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry," he said. "Here, let me fix that." Pulling from his breast pocket a handkerchief of pale blue silk and holding between his brief, pudgy little fingers the barely moistened fabric of my tie, he wiped with ferocious alacrity.
"I don't think you've ever met my wife." Suddenly, at his side, there appeared a short, bosomless woman with taut, pasty lips and straight hair cropped at midear à la Paul McCartney, circa 1963. I could swear she had not been there a moment before, and the effect was as though Marty had reached again into his breast pocket and produced this time not a blue handkerchief but a wife. His marriage had indeed been a magical trick of sorts, and I am not referring merely to the miracle of his having pulled it off despite what I would consider a singular lack of physical charm. Most of the ladies' men I know are not particularly prepossessing. But Marty lacked every other kind of charm as well, except the quite resistible one of a formidable intelligence whose greatest gift was to generate its own peculiar limelight. His brain was a gaudy bauble, a diamond pinky ring, a really big rock of the sort a bloated gunsel or ward heeler might wear in a novel by Bellow. And in another age the mob or the courthouse or the exchange was the sort of place a man like Marty would have gravitated to, his possibilities of public life foreclosed not by sound judgment but by rank prejudice. Power like water seeks its own level.
But now that all doors are open to talent there's no stopping an irresistible force like Marty. In the Moskowitz girl he'd seen the main chance and taken it. I had known her father at Harvard before the war and in Europe after it but before his rise to national notoriety, and it was absolutely inconceivable that this frail creature was Bernie Moskowitz's child. I could imagine easily enough how Marty had availed himself of her money and connections, but had he drained the blood from her veins as well? I wondered if she might not be ill. She bore his proprietary embrace with dignified equanimity, barely managing a wan smile when he had completed his rather elaborate introduction of me as the teacher most responsible for the man he had become. The compliment took my breath away, as if a strangler's hands had closed around my windpipe.
My own daughter, Sonya, had had Martin Bernstein's number from the first. He had pursued her, I eventually came to understand, as a side-prey in his pursuit of me. At that time I was still giving him the benefit of the doubt. Sonya, then still a teen, had endured his simpering attentions for two weeks before finally blurting out her exasperation. We had slipped into a pew at Sanders for a performance by the Beaux Arts Trio. The musicians were already on stage: egglike Pressler perched awkwardly on his piano bench, eclipsed by the score; elegant Cohen, handkerchief deployed, ready to cradle the precious violin; stolid Greenhouse stiffly embracing his cello with a hint of embarrassment, as of a young man obliged before an audience to take his still youngish mother in his arms; and the two interlopers pressed into service for Schubert's Trout, looking—I beg your indulgence for the bad pun—like fish out of water. Entranced by the musicians' preparations, by the imminence of the first anticipated notes of Die Forelle, which hummed softly in the thick, moist depths of my larynx, I scarcely noticed the commotion two rows ahead of us. Bernstein was there, had turned his head for some reason, caught sight of us, noted the empty seat beside Sonya, and despite the need to disturb a dozen people and the imminent commencement of the piece began to clamber his way toward us. With a full measure of pardons he made his way to the empty seat over ranks of averted thighs and with a loud creak that coincided with the first stroke of the bow lowered himself into it. Leaning far forward and at the same time obliquely across Sonya he somehow twisted his head upward to the left to look me squarely in the eye from below. The effect was that of a cringing animal. "Hello, Professor," he said, effectively roiling the waters in which The Trout had just begun to move. This fish, I observed ruefully to myself, had very definitely gotten away. Bernstein then settled back into his seat to enjoy the concert, taking care to signal his blissful absorption by pronounced rhythmic movements of his head. When the piece was done, Sonya whispered in my ear a question that minced no words: "Who IS that CREEP? He's been bugging me at the library for the past two weeks." The very platitude of her generational diction struck me as admirably and eloquently just.
Not that he was an altogether despicable young man. He had what I then admired but have since learned to regard with extreme prejudice, a glib moral earnestness that assorted tolerably well with a remarkably trenchant tongue. When passion seized him he forgot his squirming awkwardness, uncurtained and uplifted his eyes, and implored heaven above. As we then shared enemies (the Establishment—the liberal Establishment, Marty with a nod to his new friends would now say—responsible for the war in Vietnam) I found myself more than occasionally beguiled. He was a better talker than any of his classmates. Unfortunately he aspired not to talk but to write, even to write poetry, which for reasons not altogether clear he ranked very high. And since he had an absolute cast of mind, what he ranked very high mattered very much to him. I should have foreseen that his inevitable failure in that regard would ultimately sour what little sweetness had not already been fermented by ambition, which burnt in him like a canker.
In due course I was obliged to inflict upon him his first scholastic disappointment. With other kinds of disappointment he was of course familiar. Sonya's utter dismissal was not the first or last he would endure in that line. I suppose I would not have been so frank with him had I thought he had no gifts. It was precisely because I thought he had that I felt he needed to be apprised that they lay not where he thought or would have wished.
During that dismal interview in the gloom of my office he first revealed the viperous side of his character. I had just made a pretty little speech about the desolation of literary failure, draining, in order to make an impression on him, perhaps a little more than I ought to have done my private cup of bitters. All the while he had been staring at his right shoe resting on his left thigh, or plucking pointlessly at its lace. With his eyes cast down I could see only his exuberant black brows, which stood out from his face on little simian ridges. Suddenly he looked up and I saw under that wild dark brush a smoldering heat. He twisted his mouth into an expression I had never seen before. "Well," he said, "even if I have no talent perhaps I'll have the wit to emulate your brilliant coup in marrying the daughter of a Nobel laureate."
Sonya had warned me that Bernstein was uncommonly well informed about my private life, but only in that instant of humiliation's revenge did I understand the vague dread that knowledge had caused me. I had something he wanted, and in his diligent, literal-minded way he had attempted to figure out how I had gotten it. I perceived that he thought me capable of the basest calculation: that the University, in order to hold on to its illustrious economist, would have been desperate enough to have found a sinecure for the indifferent poet I am and was simply because I'd been cunning enough to marry the great man's daughter. How wrong he had got the story Martin would never know. At that moment echoes of old Dmitri's raucous laugh began to ring quite loudly in my years. For once I wished the cantankerous old bastard genius had been there to roll up his sleeves and thrash the little snot, which is undoubtedly how he would have handled the matter. "Pugilistics, my dear son-in-law, pugilistics is the essence of life" was after all one of the little sayings in which Dmitri conveniently encapsulated the wisdom distilled from his life's work for the benefit of wretches like myself, so pitiably incapable of reading him in the pristine clarity of his mathematical hieroglyphics.
For Marty, on the other hand, the world was not a system of partial differential equations but a congeries of conspiracies. Congeries of conspiracies: there was Marty's mind in a nutshell, and the years had only coarsened it. So I had not precisely been astounded to hear of his having been called before a committee of Congress investigating a diversion of funds to Latin mercenaries alleged by their official champions to be wresting from Moscow's henchmen a certain Central American country that the Russians purportedly intended to use as a landing field for their bombers, which, after unloading Armageddon upon New York, would lack sufficient fuel to complete the roundtrip home. Noble savages, those Russians: such tender post-apocalyptic solicitude for a few airmen holds out hope for the regeneration of mankind within a millennium or two after the catastrophe. I gaped at the very implausibility of the scenario, which of course no civil servant of Marty's sagacity actually believed, but which was good enough fiction, apparently, to induce wealthy widows to part with large sums of their late swashbuckling husbands' cash in order to provide secret financing for swarthy generalissimos. I had watched the committee's televised hearings in unworldly amazement. Surely it was all too preposterous to have happened. But then came Marty's turn, and his being just as I remembered him, by turns unctuous and arrogant, cringing and savage, persuaded me that the rest of the dramatis personae were similarly no more or less than they seemed. Somewhere along the way Marty had imbibed a strangely exalting contempt for those less capable than himself of discerning the devil's handiwork. One of the committee's rightwing gasbags obligingly permitted my erstwhile student to demonstrate that he'd done his homework. Yes, a member of congress had no doubt unwittingly permitted his name to be used by an organization founded by no less notorious a villain than the former secretary general of the Salvadoran Communist Party. Listening to Marty's testimony with my eyes shut, I remembered that when he read in class from his own work his voice quavered and he seemed such a lonely, vulnerable boy, but when he criticized the works of other students his face turned smooth and firm and mean, and more than once he'd reduced a classmate to tears.
About what did one make conversation with a man like Martin Bernstein? I had determined long before crossing Charlie's doorstep that I would avoid the mined waters of politics. It had been many years since I'd lost my temper in public, and I would certainly make a fool of myself if I began to fulminate and sputter in that bosom-soft salon high above the gray swell of the sea, amid the mildly voluptuous curves of floral upholstery and inoffensive clutter of wicker and teak and colored glass with the accumulation of which May consumed her days. The effortless grace of it all must have attracted Marty once, but now he seemed a trifle impatient, full of an animal vitality somehow caged by the bric-a-brac of the bourgeoisie. To these merely wealthy people he may have represented Washington power, but he obviously knew how far from real power he still was, how low on the totem pole he stood, and his restless eyes roved constantly in search of connection. Yet all around there was nothing but glass and, beyond, empty beach, cloudy skies, and gray ocean. He was too shrewd to try to impress me with his importance, for he knew how little store I set by the kinds of things he had achieved. What seemed to matter to him was that I not think success had dulled his finer instincts. He spared me the need to search for subjects by questioning me closely about books I would not have expected him to have read. "What do you think of Freccero's Dante?" was his first gambit. "You know, speaking of Dante, I often think of your lecture on Auerbach." I doubted it, but I admired the thoroughness of his preparation. He was softening me up as he might soften a congressional adversary of his policy with a suavity of which he had given no sign as a young man. Clearly he had learned a lot since leaving school.
"I should think the Inferno might seem rather pallid after Washington."
He laughed. Marty's laughter had always been the most genuine part of his character, the bedrock. It sometimes betrayed him into honest revelation.
"There's plenty of sin there, if that's what you mean. Only you know, we won't know which are the sinners and which the saints until history's verdict is in."
With his large, blue-green eyes he looked directly into mine. I took it as a plea. In back of his trimming and duplicity, he hoped I would believe, were reason and a conscience. Agree to disagree, fair play, loyal opposition, respect for the adversary—the genius of democracy. For a moment I nearly forgot what he had done. Oh, he was good. Really good. He'd missed his calling. He should have gone on the stage.
Charlie tugged at Marty's sleeve. There was a big man in bauxite the undersecretary simply had to meet. A stammered over-the-shoulder farewell was his parting shot. If his poetry had been a little better perhaps I wouldn't have dissuaded him from the path he had set for himself and he'd now be harmlessly professing the Metaphysicals to the Madonna generation in southern Illinois. History has its ironies. I turned toward Katia, who was deeply engaged with the Moskowitz girl.
"Joining us, David? I think you'd find Bernice's views on Washington life quite interesting. I was telling her that we knew her father."
The Moskowitz girl was indeed petite, like my daughter Sonya. A thick-necked brute like Marty was not right for either one, but then there was nothing delicate about Bernice's father, either. Picking up Katia's cue, I began telling Bernie Moskowitz stories. I had a number of them, burnished over the years by reuse. Since Bernie invariably figured in them as a fool or scoundrel, telling them to his daughter required quick and deft editing. I of course omitted the fruity art dealers and poules de luxe from the tale of Bernie the postwar publishing impresario battening himself like a late-imperial decadent on the carcass of Europe, a disgusting spectacle that I, as an old classmate and SHAEF staffer with access to certain potentially useful ears, was invited to witness during his time in Paris. To his daughter I was willing to portray the younger Bernie, not wholly inaccurately, as a man with a great gusto for all that mere money could acquire. He even acquired a modicum of discrimination in the course of so much buying and selling, so that in the end he could distinguish, let us say, between seventy-five-year-old Cognac and seventy-five-year-old Armagnac about as accurately as he could tell Rubens apart from Titian. His house—by then in fact his, though I for one shall always think of Moskowitz Publishing as his father's, silver-haired Samuel being a gentleman of the old school, who loved books perhaps even more than he loved racehorses and women—also published my first book of poems, though I shudder to think that Bernie (as he always claimed) might have had anything to do with that. This blessed event occurred after my return to New York, in the months before I married Katia and while I was still kicking up my heels in the rather animated ambiance of the Village as it was then, a sort of bazaar of displaced geniuses, poseurs, and ambitious young men and women who felt lucky to have survived the war yet impatient at the thought that the conflict, by its very duration, might nevertheless have claimed the youth and talent that made survival worthwhile. Bernie left his stamp on that scene, too: though a trifle elderly to play the bohemian, he did, I grant, blow a passable Goodmanesque clarinet, and with the patter he had picked up around New York's jazz clubs he had an easy way with the blacks whose presence was de rigueur at any party that aspired to ecumenical sophistication. With all the good will in the world some of us found it difficult to feel truly at ease with some of the—how shall I put it?—more raffish of Bernie’s guests. But it was a heady time, and Bernie could afford to be indiscriminate, loading his groaning board with enough Beef Wellington to fill the stomachs of the poseurs and con men as well as the geniuses. I was pretty good at telling the difference; had I not been it would have been unforgivable of me to spoil Marty’s hopes later on. But you learn to trust your instincts. I met Ellison, for instance, at one of Bernie’s parties, and from the moment he opened his mouth I was persuaded that I must read every word this man wrote. Bernie, I once heard him say, was a “poltroon of the arts. He invests in the already famous.” Regrettably, he was prevented from elaborating on this thought by an outbreak of honest-to-god fisticuffs between Communists and Trots. It was on this raucous occasion, as a matter of fact, that I was introduced to my future wife.
Katia, I noticed, had knit her brows in that disapproving way she had when I went on too long in what she called my "raconteur mode." Her mother tongue being Russian, she may not have properly appreciated my effort to register, by precision of tone, the exact atmosphere of those transfigured nights, of that crepuscule of our waning youth. She had been a dancer for a short time and walked with an assured feline step not at all incongruous with a wary watchfulness of expression. The escape from the Soviet Union in 1942 had been harrowing. Katia was then a mere slip of a girl, and the soldiers with the large red stars on their caps who, happily not altogether diligently, had poked their bayonets into the gunny sacks awaiting shipment in which Dmitri and his family were hiding, must have assumed monstrous proportions in her dreams. The existence of Communists in America puzzled her. For her the politics of the apocalypse was linked to sensations of rot: to the dry-rot eating away at the wood of Dmitri's old Moscow apartment, to the stench of backed-up sewage in the pipes, to the stifling fumes emanating from the spoiling grain in the gunny sacks beneath which she rode to freedom. All such disagreeable odors had been banished from the land of the free and the home of the brave. It was something of a joke in the family that Dmitri, ever the enfant terrible, was—by dint of his intellectual's curiosity about the economics of the Austro-Marxists and the applications of Walrasian general equilibrium theory to state planning—regarded in some quarters of his adopted homeland as a crypto-Red. As Katia knew better than anyone, Dmitri's politics were actually quite consonant with his general misanthropy: "Politicians take the people they govern for fools, and vice versa," he liked to say. "Both are correct."
I read a warning in Katia's eyes. Preternaturally aware as always of a stammer in the ego of certain young women that forever trips them up on the verge of self-revelation, she sternly hinted that I'd played long enough at the old duffer regaling the ingénue with tales of "when I was young." The time had now come for Bernice to get on with her own tale. After a fashion she did. It never ceases to amaze me how even our well-educated young no longer know how to give point to anything. It is as if they live in an eternal present. At a certain social level this immobility of time embodies itself in the eternal and I dare say infernal recurrence of the present tense: "First he goes, and then she goes, and then I says and then he says, you know?" From such hell there is no exit.
Bernice, having sampled if not quite "had" all the advantages, is not as uncouth as that. When I ask her, for instance, how Marty has weathered his recent time of troubles, she has no difficulty at all replying that Marty is a wonder, a rock, the most courageous man imaginable, a veritable Lion-Heart of the Potomac. Despite my self-conscious effort to take this preposterous encomium as blandly as possible, I feel the involuntary twitch of my eyebrows as they arrange themselves into an arch. Bernice, to my surprise, notices. Her countenance darkens from tentative to melancholic, then tightens to defiant silence. In this sequence of expressions there is something inordinately familiar yet painful beyond words. I have seen it before, often, in the two women in my life, Katia and Sonya. It can't be easy being Dmitri's daughter, or mine. We cow them. Our authority burns ever so brightly until it has consumed all the oxygen around us, and we die. And there is nothing left, either, for those who love us and cling to us, who hover about our flickering flame.
Those we repel survive. Marty for instance: I tried to smother him, but he was too quick for me. He comes now to reclaim Bernice. "Bernice is my biggest admirer," he says. "We all need admirers, especially when the world is against us, don't you think, Professor? Promise has so many enemies. Was it Cyril Connolly who said that? One of the many things I must thank you for, my discovery of Cyril Connolly. He's such a consolation in dark times."
Bernice, safe again in his encircling grasp, relaxes. It astonishes me to see Marty loved. No doubt it astonishes Marty to find that he shares that good fortune with a man he hates. Here lies his ultimate perfidy: he is living proof that nothing is so hateful that it cannot inspire love, and he therefore diminishes love itself. Katia, sensing a sudden unsteadiness in me that is apparent to no one else, comes and takes my arm, leaning against me as if she were the one in need of support. Appearances are safe. Charlie comes and draws Marty away into the crowd, which closes around him as the seas close over even the most hideous of leviathans. In the southeast there is the glimmer of a fair tomorrow. Life will go on, but for some months—and how many more remain to me?—I will not dare to venture far from shore. But Marty is like my shadow: the only way to do away with him is to cut myself off from the sun. This will be my atonement for the sins I did not prevent.
[end]