The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [24]
In any case, after Uncle Vanya I made a terrific ass of myself by more or less staying in character perpetually, wearing an antique brocade vest I found in a junk shop, speaking with a slight accent, pretending to have to reach for an English word, mumbling in what I imagined sounded like Russian. I became somewhat more popular, as amusing lunatics sometimes do, and I began to get invitations to high-end parties thrown by the popular Jewish girls. The next play we did was Romeo and Juliet and I was Mercutio. The fit with him was much better than with Telegin, for to fill the harmless air with witty nonsense, strike antic poses, and absurdly die seems glorious to the young; nor is it o’er taxing to speak, like this, in rich and flowing iambs, till all about you wish you dead. For the teenaged boy playing Mercutio the hard part is to speak the dirty stuff without cracking up, all that business about pricks in act I, scene iv, for example, may be even harder than doing a convincing job as Romeo. As for Juliet…you know, speaking as an IP lawyer, I would say that Shakespeare’s famous powers of invention do not show well in the matter of plots. All but two of the plays are ripped off, sometimes blatantly, from prior sources; and it was a good thing for him they didn’t have copyright in those days. We go to hear his plays for the language, just as we go to opera for the music; plot is secondary in both, trivial really, but—and contemporaries picked this up as well—there is no one like him for seizing something out of life and putting it on the stage. Such a coup is the end of act II, scene ii. This is the famous balcony scene, and I don’t mean the front part that everyone quotes but the depiction of a love-mad child at the end. An adult playing it—Claire Bloom perhaps—can’t help but seem absurd, but a sixteen-year-old can make it live, especially if one is in love with the girl, as I was, and I recall very distinctly the moment when, as I watched the divine Miss Gottleib draw out the long goodbye, I thought to myself this is the life for me, this is my destiny, to open my being to genius, to be possessed, to be free of my miserable self.
This was my junior year in high school, a year that marked the beginning of the long twilight of the mob in New York. In that era, before the code of silence collapsed with Mr. Valachi, the best way to put a big-shot Italian away was to get him for tax violations, and my dad was therefore right in the crosshairs. As usual, they had him on numerous charges and were putting on the pressure to make him testify against his employers. Had they taken time to consult his family they would not have thus confused him with someone lacking moxie. All during the fall of that year, while we rehearsed R&J, Dad was on trial in federal court for the southern district of New York. While we had never been what you could call a happy household, this period was especially grim.
Let me here touch briefly upon the family drama. Izzy and Ermentrude continued as they had begun, at gunpoint (at least metaphorically), although I believe they believed they were in love, this defined as the continued attempt to bend the beloved to one’s own will. Here is the tableau that sticks in my mind. It is evening. We boys are prepubescent, perhaps I am eight, Paul is ten, the girl is six. We have dutifully done our homework and had it inspected by Obersturmbannführer-Mutti. The air is redolent with heavy Teutonic cookery. This is still the time of alles in ordnung, before the discovery of That Whore, his mistress, after which our mom more or less gave up on life for a while. We are perhaps watching a small-screen colorless television, perhaps arguing over which channel to watch. Growing tension as six o’clock comes and goes. Will he appear? Will he be in a good mood or not? Six-thirty, and Mutti is banging