Free Dictation by Cynthia Ozick Page A

do it, that's the problem."
    Naturally he couldn't do it. And he resented Silkowitz's demand that he trek all the way down to that sex-shop corner again—wasn't the telephone good enough? Silkowitz threw out the news that he couldn't proceed, he couldn't think, except in person: he was big on face to face. As if all that counted was his own temperament. With a touch of spite Matt was pleased to be ten minutes late.
    A young woman was in the outer cubicle.
    "He's waiting for you," she said. "He's finishing up his lunch."
    Matt asked where the boy was.
    Silkowitz licked a plastic spoon and heaved an empty yogurt cup into a wastebasket across the room. "Quit. Got a job as assistant stage manager in some Off Off. So, what d'you say?"
    "The part's not for me. I could've told you this straight off on the phone. The character's ten years older than I am. Maybe fifteen."
    "You've got plenty of time to grow a beard. It'll come in white."
    "I don't know anything about the background here, it's not my milieu."
    "The chance of a lifetime," Silkowitz argued. "Who gets to play Lear, for God's sake?"
    Matt said heavily, bitterly, "Yeah. The Lear of Ellis Island. Just off the boat."
    "That's the ticket," Silkowitz said. "Think of it as a history play."
    Matt sat there while Silkowitz, with lit-up eyes, lectured. A history riff for sure. Fourth, fifth generation, steerage troubles long ago strained out of his blood—it was all a romance to little Teddy Silkowitz. Second Avenue down at Twelfth, the old Yiddish theater, the old feverish plays. Weeping on the stage, weeping in all the rows. Miller-Weinstock ("May she rest in peace," Silkowitz put in) was the daughter of one of those pioneer performers of greenhorn drama; the old man, believe it or not, was still alive at ninety-six, a living fossil, an actual breathing known-to-be-extinct duck-billed dodo. That's where she got it from—from being his daughter. Those novels she turned out, maybe they were second rate, who knows? Silkowitz didn't know—he'd scarcely looked at the handful of reviews she'd sent—and it didn't matter. What mattered was the heat that shot straight out of her script, like the heat smell of rusted radiators knocking in worn-out five-story tenements along Southern Boulevard in the thirties Bronx, or the whiff of summer ozone at the trolley-stop snarl at West Farms. It wasn't those Depression times that fired Silkowitz—it wasn't that sort of recapturing he was after. Matt was amazed—Matt who worshiped nuance, tendril, shadow, intimation, instinct, Matt who might jig for a shoemaker but delivered hints and shadings to the proscenium, Matt who despised exaggeration, caricature, going over the top, Matt for whom the stage was holy ground ... And what did little Teddy Silkowitz want?
    "Reversal," Silkowitz said. "Time to change gears. The changing of the guard. Change, that's what! Where's the overtness, the overture, the passion, the emotion? For fifty, sixty years all we've had is mutters, muteness, tight lips, and, goddamn it, you can't hear their voices, all that Actors Studio blather, the old religion, so-called inwardness, a bunch of Quakers waiting for Inner Light—obsolete! Dying, dead, finished! Listen, Matt, I'm talking heat, muscle, human anguish. Where's the theatrical
noise?
The big speeches and declamations? All these anemic monosyllabic washed-out two-handers with their impotent little climaxes. Matt, let me tell you my idea, and I tell it with respect, because I'm in the presence of an old-timer, and I want you to know I know my place. But we're in a new era now, and someone's got to make that clear—" Silkowitz's kindling look moved all around, from desk to floor to ceiling; those hot eyes, it seemed to Matt, could scald the paint off the walls. "This is what I'm for. Take it seriously. My idea is to restore the old lost art of melodrama. People call it melodrama to put it down, but what it is is open feeling, you see what