We all looked at each other for a moment in a sort of dazed silence. I didn’t know if I could talk about the Haber meeting in my mother’s presence. Had their intimacy gone far enough for that to be okay? She didn’t know what had transpired between us two men since last night and she was smart enough to let us set the tone and pace. Stockman had his airship überagenda mixing with his jealousy over his woman.
We were relieved by the bartender, whose arrival I realized by Albert’s eyes shifting abruptly up and over my shoulder. He looked back to me. “What are you having?”
I looked down at the table.
It was Sam Thompson again, though if this was still the first bottle of the evening, the two of them were drinking their way forward quite moderately, judging by the amount of whiskey remaining. Their glasses were presently empty.
“There seems to be plenty of rye left,” I said.
“A third glass, Hans,” Stockman said to the bartender.
And we were silent for another moment.
Stockman was going to have to start this.
I took out a Fatima and gestured the pack to the snuggly couple.
Stockman waved it off with a thanks and dipped into his evening suit inner pocket and took out a silver cigarette case, going after his own brand.
My mother also declined the Fatimas, with a little shake of the head and a focusing of her eyes on mine and a surging of something in them that I read as, Well, here we are, my son, in quite a melodrama together.
Stockman lit his cigarette and offered his match across the table. I bent to it and sat back, as did Stockman, and we blew smoke together.
“I was telling Isabel about our impassioned Jew at the chemistry institute,” Stockman said.
So they’d gone that far in their intimacy.
Then he made his more important point: “She has her own Jew to deal with.”
Barnowsky was still weighing heavily on him.
I glanced at Mother. She was no doubt grinding her teeth, but she was a fine actress, after all, and, indeed, since she was already pressed shoulder to arm to hip to thigh against Stockman, she even crossed her free right arm over her body and placed her hand gently on his forearm. While wishing, instead, I would’ve bet, that she could slap him in the face.
But maybe not.
She was, indeed, quite convincing. Maybe she forgave him this attitude. She was, after all, presently in love with him.
“Herr Barnowsky is a sad, driven man,” Isabel Cobb said.
Stockman took another drag on his cigarette, turned his face sharply away from us both, and blew the smoke toward the door, apparently releasing his jealousy, for his face swung back to Isabel and he put his hand over hers. “You work very hard for your art,” he said.
“Don’t I though,” she said. She was looking into his eyes for this line, but I decided she was talking to me, telling me not to worry, she wasn’t so smitten as to lose her secret way with him.
He patted her hand again and looked at me.
“This Albert Einstein was a touchy subject for our impassioned Doctor Haber,” I said.
Stockman nodded.
I deliberately slowed down.
I took a drag on my cigarette. I blew the smoke.
My glass arrived.
“May I?” Hans the bartender said.
“Sure,” I said, and Hans poured me a couple of fingers of rye.
Only when all this was done and the bartender had disappeared did I say, “You know anything about Einstein?”
“He’s a Zionist,” Stockman said. “I believe in the sincerity of Doctor Haber’s allegiance to Germany, as far as it is possible for that to go, but this other man is a dangerous man. Made even more acutely so by his apparent genius.”
“Albert was asking Herr Barnowsky about Herr Einstein,” my mother said.
Stockman turned his face sharply to her. “Are you sure this director isn’t a Zionist?”
“Of course he’s not,” she said. “He is a citizen of Shakespeare and Ibsen and Shaw.”
“This Einstein likes his Shakespeare as well, apparently,” Stockman said. “That doesn’t prevent him from despising the land that gave him birth.”
My mother patted his hand. “Victor Barnowsky is no Zionist, my darling.”
“I say you deserve better, is all,” said darling Albert.
She patted him some more. “I’ve dealt with this all my professional life.”
Stockman’s voice mellowed a little. “How difficult for you.”
He turned to me now. He was, of course, trying to make a case for himself. As her exclusive lover. Perhaps even as her husband. I was his foil. I was the jury. I was the impartial public in obvious, silent agreement with him. He said, “This is widely overlooked by lovers of the theater, the terrible sacrifice a great actress must endure for her art. That she must inevitably surround herself with actors and directors and other men of that world, unprincipled men, emotionally tumultuous and unreliable men, morally weak men.”
I could see her jaw clench at this, great actress though she was. Her hand stopped patting, but it stayed on his forearm.
Man oh man, was he ever trying to make a case. He even started to swerve back to Einstein.
“And these revered scientists. These outsiders.”
He paused dramatically.
She must have said something admiring about scientists along the way.
He said, “This Einstein has a wife and two children. They were with him when he came to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and he drove them away. She fled to Zurich because he began an affair with his own cousin in Berlin. This cousin was no doubt the reason he returned to his despised Germany. Not his vaunted research.”
He paused to present us a moue of pained disapproval. Even Stockman could not miss the blanching of Mother’s face. He just didn’t have a clue what was behind it.
“I’m sorry to mention these scandalous things,” he said. “But there are many men of this sort in the world who can be very attractive to women. I just believe in a different way of living.”
As different as Stockman felt himself to be from the men of the theatrical world, he was, however, their kin. By something stronger than blood. By an instinct for self-performance. Little did he know. And little did he know that it was perhaps the deepest hook he had in my mother.
I could sense her gathering her actor’s strength now. She said, “This is why I’ve come so quickly and strongly to rely on you, my darling.”
He put his hand on hers. “I know,” he said.
She grew urgent. “Must you leave me next week?”
“We’ve spoken of this,” he said, lowering his voice a little. This was something he didn’t want to discuss in front of me.
Mother was playing her own, woman’s version of Albert’s earlier strategy. A man used the public setting to display his plumaged worthiness. The woman reopened a private argument with her man. I was foil. I was jury.
Of course, Mother was also doing her job. She was giving me information.
He’d told her he was going away.
This was, I assumed, the Mit der Hand trip.
“I know we’ve spoken,” she said. “But you have only reminded me now, with your characteristic eloquence — oh how I would miss that too, for even a few days, your lovely words — you have reminded me how bereft I will be.”
“You must rehearse,” he said.
“Opening night is still two weeks off. I can take a few days.”
“It’s strictly business.”
“I won’t interfere,” she said.