Free Dictation by Cynthia Ozick Page B

I mean? And the chance came out of the blue! From the daughter of the genuine article!"
    Matt said roughly (his roughness surprised him), "You've got the wrong customer."
    "Look before you leap, pal. Don't try to pin that nostalgia stuff on me. The youthful heart throbbing for grandpa's world. That's what you figure, right?"
    "Not exactly," Matt fibbed.
    "That's not it, honest to God. It's the largeness—big feelings, big cries. Outcries! The old Yiddish theater kept it up while it was dying out everywhere else. Killed by understatement. Killed by abbreviation, downplaying. Killed by sophistication, modernism, psychologizing, Stanislavsky, all those highbrow murderers of the Greek chorus, you see what I mean? The Yiddish Medea. The Yiddish Macbeth! Matt, it was
big!
"
    "As far as I'm concerned," Matt said, "the key word here is old-timer."
    "There aren't many of your type around," Silkowitz admitted. "Look, I'm saying I really want you to do this thing. The part's yours."
    "A replay of the old country, that's my type? I was doing Eugene O'Neill before you were born."
    "You've read the script, it's in regular English. American as apple pie. Lear on the Lower East Side! We can make that the Upper West Side. And those daughters—I've got some great women in mind. We can update everything, we can do what we want."
    "Yeah, we don't have the writer to kick around." Matt looked down at his trouser cuffs. They were beginning to fray at the crease; he needed a new suit. "I'm not connected to any of that. My mother's father came from Turkey and spoke Ladino."
    "A Spanish grandee, no kidding. I didn't realize. You look—"
    "I know how I look," Matt broke in. "A retired pants presser." He wanted to play Ibsen, he wanted to play Shaw! Henry Higgins with Eliza. Something grand, aloof, cynical; he could do Brit talk beautifully.
    Silkowitz pushed on. "Lionel says he's pretty sure you're free."
    Free. The last time Matt was on a stage (televison didn't count) was in Lionel's own junk play, a London import, where Matt, as the beloved missing uncle, turned up just before the final curtain. That was more than three years ago; by now four.
    "I'll give it some thought," Matt said.
    "It's a deal. Start growing the beard. There's only one thing. A bit of homework you need to do."
    "Don't worry," Matt said, "I know how the plot goes. Regan and Goneril and Cordelia. I read it in high school."
    But it wasn't Shakespeare Silkowitz had in mind: it was Eli Miller the nonagenarian. Silkowitz had the old fellow's address at a "senior residence." Probably the daughter had mentioned its name, and Silkowitz had ordered his underling—the boy, or maybe the girl—to look it up. It was called the Home for the Elderly Children of Israel, and it was up near the Cloisters.
    "Those places give me the creeps," Matt complained to Frances. "The smell of pee and the zombie stare."
    "It doesn't have to be like that. They have activities and things. They have social directors. At that age maybe they go for blue material, you never know."
    "Sure," Matt said. "The borscht belt up from the dead and unbuckled. You better come with me."
    "What's the point of that? Silkowitz wants you to get the feel of the old days. In Tulsa we didn't
have
the old days."
    "Suppose the guy doesn't speak English? I mean just in case. Then I'm helpless."
    So Frances went along; Tulsa notwithstanding, she knew some attenuated strands of household Yiddish. She was a demon at languages anyhow; she liked to speckle her tougher crosswords with
cri de coeur, Mitleid, situación difícil.
She had once studied ancient Greek and Sanskrit.

    A mild January had turned venomous. The air slammed their foreheads like a frozen truncheon. Bundled in their down coats, they waited for a bus. Icicles hung from its undercarriage, dripping black sludge. The long trip through afternoon dark took them to what seemed like a promontory; standing in the driveway of the Home for the Elderly Children