Make Believe

“What else is there that we have, Sol?”

The others were filing into the theater, so I nudged Sol. Yet he stood there, eyes brighter now, determined. “They think it’s some obsessed patriotic fanatic. You know, all those death threats Max got. Some America First zealot, armed with a gun and a head filled with delusions. Why should the cops care? One more Red sympathizer bites the dust.” He took my arm and we walked toward the open doors of the theater. “Or,” he added, “it was Frank Sinatra or one of his goons.” A sickly smile. “I guess the cops could believe that scenario.”

“You don’t really believe that, Sol?”

He stopped and I crashed into his side. “No, I don’t. Frank is a blowhard. I don’t like that man, but I think he’s a scared little boy playing in the big leagues with the tough guys. He’ll always be a loudmouth boy performing for the bullies in the class. Not a bad person, Miss Ferber, and sometimes I think deep down he’s a good person at heart, but he’ll always be a scared, bad boy.”

I breathed in. “So who killed Max?”

We were the only two standing in the aisles now, and I pointed toward seats up front. Sol deliberated. “Everyone is wrong in thinking it had to do with the blacklist. With the infernal letter. Those phony patriots with their Bibles tucked up against their firearms, posters of George Washington and Abe Lincoln taped to their walls.” He lifted his arms and spread them out.

“Then who?” I persisted.

“Those cowards don’t kill. You know why? The blacklist is their most powerful weapon. They want the Commies to be alive. To stay alive. They don’t want people like Max Jeffries or Doc Trumbo or Ring Lardner Junior-any of the Hollywood Ten and the others-to die. They believe in public humiliation. They want us out of jobs, imprisoned, begging, impoverished, suffering. They want to see our children starving. Beg for crumbs. That’s the American way. Death is too simple for them. No, Max’s death had nothing to do with being blacklisted. Someone wanted him dead for another reason.”

In a low voice, “God, what?”

“Find out, Miss Ferber. You find out.”

I nodded. Yes, I thought, I will find out. I had no choice: my mind catalogued and sorted through the folks I’d met out here, watching, watching, the faces tugging at the edges of my days.

He blinked wildly. “Be the irritant that produces the surprisingly important black pearl.”

I nodded again. Yes.

Already the organ music swelled from the side of the room, a lugubrious hymn that sounded like a liturgical rendering of an old Irving Berlin show tune. Then, to my horror, I realized it was. Sol and I rushed to our seats, joining the others huddled together down front. Desmond Peake sat alone a dozen seats back on the side, the solitary Greek chorus, hopefully mute.

At the microphone Reverend Smithson spoke in a dreary monotone, an informal greeting and a brief remembrance of trying to cheat Max at rummy, and Max letting him. A curious beginning, I thought, especially coming out of a clergyman’s mouth. I cheated at cards and he let me.

Few trappings of religion here, to be sure, though the Reverend Smithson did read a passage from Ecclesiastes-to every thing there is a season-and the Twenty-Third Psalm. The Lord is my Shepherd.

Finally, he signaled the organist who played a morbid medley of music Max had composed or orchestrated, a rolling hodgepodge that sounded painfully labored.

The organist was an old woman who wore an incongruous straw sun hat, her ample body bursting out of a black dress that probably had been bought off the rack a good three decades earlier. As she assaulted the hapless keys and stops, I thought I detected the strangulated strains of “Mis’ry Comin’ Round,” that mournful dirge from Show Boat, the haunting Negro chorus that augurs the exit of Julie and Steve from the Cotton Blossom and the downward spiral of Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal. A dark lament, and, played here, appropriate.

Then, her body trembling, Alice approached the stage and talked briefly about Max’s love of theater and movies, and his deep love of his friends. She read a letter she’d received from George S. Kaufman celebrating Max. I thrilled to hear my old New York friend’s loving words. Finally, her voice a whisper, she stopped and walked back to her seat.

No one moved.

I stood and moved in front of that imposing and unnecessary microphone. I told stories. The oft-repeated tale of our first meeting at the Show Boat tryout in Washington D.C. The two of us in a New York deli sending back the split pea soup over and over because it was too cold. Max tickling a howling Fanny Brice in Times Square. Then he tickled me. I recounted his years of involvement with the various incarnations of Show Boat, his particular fondness for Paul Robeson’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” and quoted him: “It always makes me sob, that memory.” He’d learned to make crepes Suzette for Ava because it was her favorite dessert. He had a childlike love of root beer. His joy at marrying Alice.

I ended with: “Sometimes Max and I didn’t see each other for years, though we always wrote long, chatty letters, his humor livelier than mine. But, as with any true friend, it didn’t matter the distance of miles or time, the long silences-I felt Max was always right next to me.” I sat down, and Alice nodded at me.

Beside me, Sol squirmed. He stood now, though I could see he was nervous. Hesitantly, shaking, he walked to the front. For a while he said nothing, this stump of a man in the over-sized suit. Near me, Lorena rustled in her seat. Then, in a tinny voice that was nearly a stage whisper, he began, and immediately he found his wonderful power.

“Max used to say that I was the funniest man he’d ever met in his life. That wasn’t true. He was. Yes, I did the stand-up routines, the radio skits, the vaudeville shtick, but Max would sometimes look at me, after I’d blathered some nonsense, and you could see the funny in his eyes, in the twitching of his lips, the way he tilted his head. One time, years back, he was working on a score and had a bout of insomnia. So he went to a doctor for sleeping pills.” Sol imitated Max in a Yiddisher voice: “‘So doctor, some pills to sleep, yes?’ When I saw him I said, ‘For God’s sake, Maxie bubbe, sleeping pills? What for?’ With a shrug of his shoulders he says, ‘Because I keep waking up in the middle of our conversations.’” Sol chuckled. We joined in.

But then Sol shifted his eyes. Another long silence, his head bent to the side as though listening to some inner voice, his hand rubbing the side of his jaw, his body trembling. He looked out over the few of us. “He shouldn’t have died like that.”

We all tensed up, waiting. Alice sucked in her breath, a rasp that made everyone look her way.

“You know, Max helped hundreds of careers, but that’s not important. What was important was that he was a friend to hundreds, and they turned their backs on him. Such a good, good man, a mensch, let me tell you. So where are they?” He stopped, pointed around the nearly empty chamber. For some reason, probably nerves, the aged organist inadvertently touched a key of the organ and the discordant note, powerful as a gunshot, made us jump. Sol glanced at her but then went on. “There’s something wrong here today. Small-minded people, narrow and mean-spirited people…they use innuendo…they say they speak for America…but…they…” He trailed off, helpless, now weeping.

Lorena looked at me, despairing.

Then he gazed at us. No, he looked at the vast number of unoccupied seats, the ghosts of Max’s friends and acquaintances oddly there-at least to him. “Old friends,” he muttered. Then, almost incoherent, “The three musketeers.” And I knew-I supposed we all did at that moment-he was talking about the absence of Larry Calhoun.

Sol’s voice became thunderous now. “Belly-crawlers,” he yelled out. “Turning in their friends for a few pieces of silver. Judas.” He faltered and let out a teary gasp. “The Talmud says…the man who turns in his brother, the one who betrays…” Then, loudly: “Akhal Kurtza.” Hebrew, I assumed. “The man who ravishes the flesh of a brother…gnaws on the marrow of his brother…”

It was an awful moment, raw as dripping blood. Sol, confused now, stood there, unable to move. Quietly, in an act of utter beauty, Alice went to him, wrapped an arm about his waist, and led the weeping man back to his seat.

Dizzy, spent, I bent over in the seat, my eyes closed.

Nothing happened. Reverend Smithson sat on the side, the lost Lamb of God himself.