“For some things, maybe. Not too much.”
“But some?”
“Yes, some,” Schlossberg carelessly granted.
“Something at last pleases him, thank God!” Shifcart said.
“I try to give everybody credit,” declared the old man. “I am not a knocker. I am not too good for this world.”
No one contradicted him.
“Well,” he said. “And what am I kicking for?” He checked their smiles, holding them all with his serious, worn, blue gaze. “I’ll tell you. It’s bad to be less than human and it’s bad to be more than human. What’s more than human? Our friend-” he meant Leventhal, “was talking about it before. Caesar, if you remember, in the play wanted to be like a god. Can a god have diseases? So this is a sick man’s idea of God. Does a statue have wax in its ears? Naturally not. It doesn’t sweat, either, except maybe blood on holidays. If I can talk myself into it that I never sweat and make everybody else act as if it was true, maybe I can fix it up about dying, too. We only know what it is to die because some people die and, if we make ourselves different from them, maybe we don’t have to? Less than human is the other side of it. I’ll come to it. So here is the whole thing, then. Good acting is what is exactly human. And if you say I am a tough critic, you mean I have a high opinion of what is human. This is my whole idea. More than human, can you have any use for life? Less than human, you don’t either.”
He made a pause — it was not one that invited interruption — and went on.
“This girl Livia in The Tigress. What’s the matter with her? She commits a murder. What are her feelings? No love, no hate, no fear, no lungs, no heart. I’m ashamed to mention what else is missing. Nothing! The poor husband. Nothing is killing him, less than human. A blank. And it should be so awful the whole audience should be afraid positively to look in her face. But I don’t know if she’s too pretty or what to have feelings. You see right away she has no idea what is human because her husband’s death doesn’t mean to her a thing. It’s all in packages, and first the package is breathing and then it isn’t breathing, and you insured the package so you can marry another package and go to Florida for the winter. Now maybe somebody will answer me, ‘This sounds very interesting. You say less than human, more than human. Tell me, please, what is human?’ And really we study people so much now that after we look and look at human nature — I write science articles myself — after you look at it and weigh it and turn it over and put it under a microscope, you might say, ‘What is all the shouting about? A man is nothing, his life is nothing. Or it is even lousy and cheap. But this your royal highness doesn’t like, so he hokes it up. With what? With greatness and beauty. Beauty and greatness? Black and white I know; I didn’t make it up. But greatness and beauty?’ But I say, ‘What do you know? No, tell me, what do you know? You shut one eye and look at a thing, and it is one way to you. You shut the other one and it is different. I am as sure about greatness and beauty as you are about black and white. If a human life is a great thing to me, it is a great thing. Do you know better? I’m entitled as much as you. And why be measly? Do you have to be? Is somebody holding you by the neck? Have dignity, you understand me? Choose dignity. Nobody knows enough to turn it down.’ Now to whom should this mean something if not to an actor? If he isn’t for dignity, then I tell you there is a great mistake somewhere.”
“Bravo!” said Harkavy.
“Amen and amen!” Shifcart laughed. He drew a card out of his wallet and threw it toward him. “Come and see me; I’ll fix you up with a test.”
The card fell near Leventhal, who seemed to be the only one to disapprove of the joke. Even Schlossberg himself smiled. The sunlight fell through the large window over their heads. It seemed to Leventhal that Shifcart, though he was laughing, looked at him with peculiar disfavor. Still he did not join in. He picked up the card. The others were rising.
“Don’t forget your hats, gentlemen,” called Harkavy.
The musical crash of the check machine filled their ears as they waited their turn at the cashier’s dazzling cage.
11
“I SAW Williston last night,” Leventhal mentioned to Harkavy outside.
“How is Stan? Oh, yes, about that thing you were telling me.” Harkavy would perhaps have said more, but the others were waiting for him. “Say, one of these days let me know how you’re making out with it, will you?”
“Sure,” Leventhal said. And Harkavy loitered off eastward on Fourteenth Street with Goldstone and his friends. He was the tallest among them. His yellow hair drifted flimsily, silkily over his bald spot. Leventhal watched him go. He would not admit to himself that he felt deserted. “Maybe it’s a good thing he isn’t interested,” he thought. “I don’t know if I could explain it anyhow. It’s getting too complicated. And he’d give me all kinds of useless advice — the usual. Anyhow I’m glad. I don’t think I really wanted to talk about it.” He remained aimlessly in the same place for a while and then walked off, pressing the bulky Sunday paper under his arm. He did not have a conscious destination and was distantly under the dread of being the only person in the city without one.
In the next block he remembered that he had neglected to call Elena to make sure Philip had gotten home safely and to ask about Mickey. He stopped at a cigar store and dialed Villani’s number. He sat in the booth, one leg stretched out of the door. No one answered. Leaning out, he looked at the clock cut squarely into the patterned tin of the wall. It was half-past two, and Elena had probably left to visit Mickey. He phoned the hospital, though he understood well enough that the information given about patients wasn’t reliable. He heard that Mickey was doing nicely, which was what he had expected to hear. There were upward of three thousand beds in the hospital. How could the girls at the switchboard be expected to know anything but the bare facts about each patient — whether he was alive or dead, that is? The word “dead,” dissociated from what he had thought, accompanied him ominously out of the store, and he made haste to get rid of it, simultaneously realizing, in another part of his mind, how superstitious he was becoming. All he had meant was that the hospital was too vast, and suddenly he had to erase an incidental word. Why, everyone born was sick at one time or another. Nobody grew up without sickness. He had had pneumonia himself and an ear infection, and Max had been down, too — he couldn’t recall with what.
He began to wonder how long Max was going to put off coming home. “Maybe he’s afraid of being tricked into returning,” he thought. “I’ll have a thing or two to say to him when I see him. For once in our lives. It’s time somebody called him down. Elena won’t, so he’s used to doing whatever he wants.” And what would Max have to say for himself? Something simple minded and foolish, he was certain. Because he was foolish. Philip already had more common sense than his father. Leventhal visualized his brother’s strongly excited face and imagined his incoherencies. “He sends them money and that makes him a father. That’s the end of his responsibilities. That’s fatherhood,” he repeated to himself. “That’s his idea of duty.”
From the dark staircase and hall, he entered the brilliantly sunlit front room. He sat on the edge of the bed and pushed off his shoes. The sheets were warm to his touch. The heavy folds of the curtain, the brown door, the fine red flowers in the carpet slowly consumed into a light smoke of dust, gave him a feeling of suspension and quietness. There was a long spider’s thread on the screen, quivering red, blue, and deeper blue against the wires like the last pliant, changeable thing in the stiffening, fixative heat. With one stockinged foot set on the other, his shoulders drooping, Leventhal sat watching, his face somnolent, his hands looking as if it would require a great effort to unclasp them.