“I never crawled,” he said finally.
“What’s that, Arnold?”
“I never crawled. My mother tells me I never crawled. Proper crawling is very important.”
“Of course you crawled. All babies crawl.”
“No. ‘Odd as it may seem to parents for whom the clumsy crawling maneuvers of a toddler are “cute” and often comic, the act of crawling is a sine qua non of proper locomotor development. Studies have shown a close relationship between later athletic development and efficient crawling.’” Arnold quoted letter-perfect from one of his many sources.
“Then let’s teach you to crawl,” I said.
“I’d feel funny,” he said. “You’d laugh. No, it’s no good. I’m too clumsy. I’m just wasting your time, Miss Steep.”
“You aren’t wasting my time.”
“No,” he said, “it’s no use.”
“Are you going to give up now, Arnold? After we’ve made so much progress? Am I wrong about you? Are you a coward? Is that it? Maybe you haven’t got the guts to be in show business. Maybe your guts are as undeveloped as your grace. Because believe me, Arnold, there are going to be places where the stages aren’t equipped with stairs and it’s a bigger jump than a lousy four and a half feet.”
“I can’t.”
“These are bad times, Arnold. Everywhere our foreign relations are deteriorating. The Middle East, the Far East, Europe. Our neighbors north and south. Wars are coming, Arnold. The USO is going to be bigger than ever. Do you think the theaters in a theater-of-operations are going to have stairways? You’re going to have to make up your mind, Mr. Menchman.”
“You’ll laugh.”
“Did I laugh when you fell out of chairs?”
“No.”
“Or when you tripped over your shadow that time in the studio?”
“No.”
“Well then?”
“Teach me to crawl,” he said.
So I did.
We crawled together across the stage all night. We played follow the leader on our hands and knees. It was exactly what was missing in Arnold’s locomotor development! Before we left that night Arnold had learned not only to crawl but to negotiate that jump. He could have leaped from any stage in the world. It was our single most productive session.
Now Arnold could move almost as well as your average man on the street, and in the next two weeks he made even greater progress. Inside a month we were able to make a stage of everything, anything. We drove into deserted parking lots at supermarkets and Arnold burst out of the window of my automobile nimble as Houdini. He climbed the hood and jumped up onto the roof of the car like Gene Kelly. He scrambled up the pedestal of a statue in the park and, holding onto the horse’s leg, swayed far out over its base, cocky as a ballet sailor in a dance. He was beautiful, suddenly lithe as a cat burglar. I couldn’t have taught him another thing about movement … It was at about this time, incidentally, that Dick had him on the show.
“I guess we won’t be seeing each other much from now on,” I told him one night when we got back to my studio.
“You’re a marvelous teacher.”
“You’re an apt pupil.”
“I’m very confident about my appearance. I owe you a lot.”
“You worked hard.”
“I still really haven’t got much of an act, though.”
“Oh, well,” I said, “your act. Your act is your mind.”
“I guess so … But a person’s act has to be structured. There has to be a patter. You know. Style is important, delivery is.”
“You’ll work it out.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know so much about these things.”
“I don’t either.”
“Oh, you do. Miss Steep?”
“Yes?”
“If I gave you more money, could you … do you think—?”
“What?”
“Could you be my audience for a bit? Just for as long as it takes me to work out my routines?”
“I couldn’t take money for watching you perform, Arnold.”
“I’d be taking up your time.”
“I’d love to watch you, but not for money. I’ve become very interested in your career,” I said.
So that’s what I did. We still used the makeshift curtain, but the way he moved now it could have been the handsomest setting in show business. He invented his routines right before my eyes. All I did was teach him a few flourishes. Not very good ones, I’m afraid — just that kind of handling themselves that professionals do. You know what I mean — a hand clasping the forehead in concentration, or two fingers buttering the right eyebrow, chin cuppings, scowls to make what he did look difficult. Later we discarded even these. He didn’t need them; he was too good. His memory should seem to be what it was: a function as naturally available to him as touch. What was wanted was ease, the juggler’s divided attentions, his camouflaged concentration, to be centerless, detached, incorruptible. BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Just so, Pepper.
PEPPER STEEP: I had never seen anything so fine. He must have known this, though he still needed assurances.
“Will I be good, do you think?”
“Perfect.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I have every confidence.” We laughed together at the word.
“Still,” he said, “I’m a naturally clumsy man, Miss Steep. My smoothness is only a veneer. Just tonight, getting off the bus to come here, I tripped and almost fell.”
“An accident.”
“Yes, but suppose I do something like that when I’m onstage?”
“Onstage, Arnold, you’ll be magnificent. You move like a dancer.”
“On our stages. Bare floors, familiar terrain, tamed place.”
“Anywhere. Everywhere.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Arnold, I’d like to see one last performance.”
“Oh?”
“A final dress rehearsal.”
“But it’s not here I’m worried about. This”—he gestured about him— “this is like singing in the bathtub.”
“I don’t mean here.”
“You don’t?”
“The staircase.”
“The winding staircase?”
“Yes.”
“The whole act?”
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tonight. Now.”
“But I—”
“Come.”
We went to the high room where the staircase wound its wide barber’s spiral to within six feet of the ceiling. Standing at the bottom and shading his eyes, Arnold leaned his head back and looked up to the top step. “Go on,” I said. He glanced at me for a moment and began to move up the stairs, at first holding on to the rail, then letting it go. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced, “it’s with great pleasure and pride that we now present one of the most amazing performers in the world. The man you are about to see isn’t an actor, for an actor, properly speaking, is one whose dramas are inflexible and fixed. There is nothing inflexible and fixed about the drama you will now witness. Nor do I now introduce a man who is a mere adept in some unvarying physical routine which, though impossible for average muscles and ordinary limbs, is simply the product of repetitive exercise. Like the actor, however, and like the acrobat as well, he is about to face an extraordinary challenge — a challenge which each of us sitting here tonight faces daily. Ah, but we fail. This man won’t. It is a challenge of getting and a challenge of having, of keeping and possessing — of reach and embrace itself. For he pits himself not as the stand-in actor against the poet’s contrived pressures, nor as the proven tumbler against a previously conquered gravity, but as the one man in the world against — simply—everything! To have it all at once, easier than Atlas, bearing all the awful tonnage of impression — the juggler of the living world …”