Free Timebends by Arthur Miller Page A

Mikush, anti-Semitic as he undoubtedly was, going from apartment to apartment with a list of names and ordering us out into trucks bound for a concentration camp and death. After all, he had straightened the fork of my bike.
    Perhaps I was so unprepared, so surprised by my own terror in the library, because of what was to be a lifelong inability to believe that all reality was of the visible kind. We all are taught how to receive our experiences, and my mother, my prime teacher, saw secret signs of other worlds wherever she looked; she was talked to by people far away without benefit of telephone, and even by the dead. As with others so inclined, this gave her, I suppose, an enhanced sense of her importance in the scheme of things and helped make life more interesting. Whatever the cause, I had clearly put out of mind a certain childish recognition of infinite human brutality until suddenly the librarian seemed to challenge me to identify myself as a candidate for victimization, and I fled. I had been taught to recognize danger—even where it did not exist—but not how to defend against it. The dilemma would last a long time. The same quandary, and the effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization, underlie the political aspect of my play
Incident at Vichy.
But as history has taught, that force can only be moral. Unfortunately.
    For me, my mother’s mysticism set death lurking everywhere. It has prejudiced me against teaching children religion; too often God is death and it is death that is being worshiped and “loved.” If I learned early on how to disregard her dark and pessimistic surges, the fact was that they too often turned out to be prophetic. Her brother Moe, who had been a mule driver carrying ammunition up to the front in France, returned from a funeral with her one rainy afternoon, and as he sat on the pinkish satin Louis Something straight chair in the living room, she screamed and her hands flew up to her hair: he must immediately go out the apartment door and wipe a smear of gray cemetery mud off one of his heels lest it bring death to this house. They were beautiful brown calf shoes with a white bead around the seam between soles and uppers. He quickly left the living room, limping to keep the heel off the carpet.
    In appearance, I would grow up to resemble Moe, a tall, thin man of great gentleness whose spirit the Great War seemed to have broken. It was as though in more than the physical sense he could never quite catch his breath. Even then I noted that joy never seemed to collect around him, even for his wedding there was no great party, no welcoming of his tiny wife, Celia, who was barely five feet tall. He was constantly bending to her as they walked, with one gentle hand against her back as though she were a child. Trying to get with the spirit of the twenties, he made it down to Florida to speculate in real estate, but his nerve soon waterlogged, his investment melting into the sea during a great land boom in which immense fortunes were made and innocents like himself fleeced. All Moe returned with was a nice tan that encouraged my mother to believe that his health was permanently restored, but he was soon back in the Veterans Hospital at Saranac Lake, where he died. The cemetery mud on his shoe could not help but cross my mind, and with it the lurking suspicion of some validity in the superstition. That only my mother knew the rules and regulations tended to leave me with all of the attendant apprehensions and none of the satisfactions of prediction—“I knew,
I knew!”
she wailed when we heard the news of his death.
    It was the same when, out of a deep sleep in an Atlantic City hotel where we were spending the High Holidays, she suddenly sat up and said, “My mother died”—which she had, it turned out, and at approximately that hour of the night. Of course, her secret powers were not all negative and would as often