2
Under the Spell
ON THE WALK from my hotel up to West 71st Street I stopped at a liquor store to buy a couple of bottles of wine for my hosts and then proceeded quickly on my way to watch the election results of a campaign that, for the first time since I was made aware of electoral politicsâwhen Roosevelt defeated Willkie in 1940âI knew barely anything about.
I had been an avid voter all my life, one whoâd never pulled a Republican lever for any office on any ballot. I had campaigned for Stevenson as a college student and had my juvenile expectations dismantled when Eisenhower trounced him, first in â52 and then again in â56; and I could not believe what I saw when a creature so rooted in his ruthless pathology, so transparently fraudulent and malicious as Nixon, defeated Humphrey in â68, and when, in the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a âgreat communicatorâ no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide. And was there ever an election like Gore versus Bush, resolved in the treacherous ways that it was, so perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizenâs naivetĂ©? Iâd hardly held myself aloof from the antagonisms of partisan politics, but now, having lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century, I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a childâthe emotions of a child and the pain of an adult. At least not so long as I holed up in my cabin, where I could manage to remain in America without Americaâs ever again being absorbed in me. Aside from writing books and studying once again, for a final go-round, the first great writers I read, all the rest that once mattered most no longer mattered at all, and I dispelled a good half, if not more, of a lifetimeâs allegiances and pursuits. After 9/11 I pulled the plug on the contradictions. Otherwise, I told myself, youâll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman, the village grouch, manifesting the syndrome in all its seething ridiculousness: ranting and raving while you read the paper, and at night, on the phone with friends, roaring indignantly about the pernicious profitability for which a wounded nationâs authentic patriotism was about to be exploited by an imbecilic king, and in a republic, a king in a free country with all the slogans of freedom with which American children are raised. The despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious citizen in the reign of George W. Bush was not for one who had developed a strong interest in surviving as reasonably sereneâand so I began to annihilate the abiding wish to find out. I canceled magazine subscriptions, stopped reading the Times, even stopped picking up the occasional copy of the Boston Globe when I went down to the general store. The only paper I saw regularly was the Berkshire Eagle, a local weekly. I used the TV to watch baseball, the radio to listen to music, and that was it.
Surprisingly, it took only weeks to break the matter-of-fact habit that informed much of my nonprofessional thinking and to feel completely at home knowing nothing of what was going on. I had banished my country, been myself banished from erotic contact with women, and was lost through battle fatigue to the world of love. I had issued an admonition. I was out from under my life and times. Or maybe just down to the nub. My cabin could as well have been adrift on the high seas as set twelve hundred feet up on a rural road in Massachusetts that was less than a three-hour drive east to the city of Boston and about the same distance south to New York.
The television set was on when I arrived, and Billy assured me the election was in the bagâhe was in touch with a friend at Democratic national headquarters, and their exit polls showed Kerry winning all the states he needed. Billy graciously accepted the wine and told me that Jamie had gone out to buy food and should be back at any minute. Once again he was expansively agreeable and exuded a jovial softness, as though he werenât yet and probably never would be expert at wielding authority. Is he a throwback, I wondered, or do they still exist like this, middle-class Jewish boys who continue to be branded with the family empathy that, despite the unmatchable satisfaction of its cradling sentiments, can leave one unprepared for the nastiness of less kindly souls? In the Manhattan literary milieu particularly, I would have expected something other than the brown eyes weighty with tenderness and the full angelic cheeks that lent him the air, if not still of a protected small boy, then of the generous young man wholly unable to inflict a wound or laugh with scorn or shirk the smallest responsibility. I speculated that Jamie might be a lot more than could be managed by the sweet selflessness of one whose every word and gesture was permeated with his decency. The trusting innocence, the mildness, the sympathetic understandingâwhat a setup for the rogue with an eye to stealing the wife whose infidelity would be unimaginable to him.
The phone rang just as Billy was preparing to open one of the bottles of wine, and he handed it across to me to uncork while he snatched up the phone and said, âWhat now?â After a moment he looked up to tell me, âNew Hampshireâs sewed up. D.C.?â Billy then asked the friend who was phoning. To me again he said, âIn D.C. theyâre going eight to one for Kerry. Thatâs the keyâthe blacks are turning out en masse. Okay, great,â Billy said into the phone, and upon hanging up told me happily, âSo we live in a liberal democracy after all,â and, to toast the mounting thrill, he poured each of us a big glass of wine. âThese guys would have devastated the country,â he said, âhad they won a second term. Weâve had bad presidents and weâve survived, but this oneâs the bottom. Serious cognitive deficiencies. Dogmatic. A tremendously limited ignoramus about to wreck a very great thing. Thereâs a description in Macbeth thatâs perfect for him. We read aloud together, Jamie and I. Weâre doing the tragedies. Itâs in the scene in act three with Hecate and the witches. âA wayward son,â Hecate says, âspiteful and wrathful.â George Bush in six words. Itâs all so awful. If youâre for your kids and God, youâre a Republicanâmeanwhile, the people who are being screwed the most are his base. Itâs amazing they pulled it off for even one term. Itâs terrifying to think what they would have done with a second term. These are terrible, evil guys. But their arrogance and their lies finally caught up with them.â
My mind still full of my own thoughts, I allowed a couple of minutes more for him to continue to watch the first election results trickle in before I asked, âHow did you meet Jamie?â
âMiraculously.â
âYou were students together.â
He smiled most appealingly, when, given my thoughts, he would have done better pulling the dagger that had done in Duncan. âThat makes it no less miraculous,â he said.
I saw there was no need to stop myself from hurtling forward for fear of being found out. Clearly Billy couldnât begin to imagine that someone of my years might be asking about his young wife because his young wife was now all I could think about. There was my age to mislead him, and my eminence too. How could he possibly believe the worst about a writer heâd begun reading in high school? It was like meeting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. How could the author of âThe Song of Hiawathaâ take a licentious interest in Jamie?
To be on the safe side, I asked first about him.
âTell me about your family,â I said.
âOh, Iâm the only reading person in the family, but that doesnât matter; theyâre good people. In Philly now for four generations. My great-grandfather started the family business. He was from Odessa. His name was Sam. His customers called him Uncle Sam the Umbrella Man. He made and repaired umbrellas. My grandfather expanded into luggage. In the teens and the twenties, train travel boomed and suddenly everybody needed a piece of luggage. And people were traveling by ship, transatlantic ships. It was the era of the wardrobe trunkâyou know, the big, heavy trunks people took on long journeys that opened up vertically and had hangers and drawers in them.â
âI know them well,â I said. âAnd the others, the smaller black ones that opened up horizontally like a pirateâs chest. I had a trunk like that to go off to college with. Nearly everyone did. It was constructed of wood and the corners were sheathed in metal and the fancy ones were girdled with bands of embossed metal and the lock was brass and made to withstand an earthquake. You used to ship your trunk by Railway Express. Youâd take it down to the train station and leave it with the clerk at the Railway Express desk. The guy at Newarkâs Penn Station in those days still wore the green eyeshade and kept his pencil tucked behind his ear. Heâd weigh the trunk and youâd pay per pound and off your socks and underwear would go.â
âYes, every city of any size had a luggage store, and the department stores all had luggage departments. Itâs airline stewardesses,â Billy told me, âwho revolutionized how Americans felt about luggage in the fiftiesâpeople saw that it could be light and chic. Thatâs about when my father went into the business and modernized the store and changed the name to Davidoffâs Fashionable Luggage. Until then, the place was still known by the original name, Samuel Davidoff and Sons. About this time along came the luggage on wheelsâand that, vastly abridged, is th...