Totempole by Sanford Friedman

Author:Sanford Friedman [Friedman, Sanford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590177877
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2014-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

With gloom everywhere,

I sit and I stare,

I know that I’ll soon go mad.

In my solitude . . .”

“Roggie . . . Roggie . . .” Stephen knew he was wasting his breath, wasting his tears: Roger was not going to open the door. In one night he had alienated his brother, cursed his mother, and lost his friend, Dennis.

Hearing Billie Holiday’s refrain: “I know that I’ll soon go mad,” Stephen slumped away from Roger’s door, down the dark hall and into his own room. There, he shut the door, undressed, got into bed, turned off the light, and plunged into his vice.

On Saturday at breakfast Saul characterized the fight between his wife and son as a “little misunderstanding,” and he prevailed on Stephen to apologize. Not only did Harriet welcome the apology with tears of gratitude and professions of love, she gave her son a dollar for the movies.

In the afternoon Stephen went alone to see Kings Row. After buying a box of Goobers, he found a seat on the right side of the orchestra, as far from the children’s section as possible. Even before the film began, during the credits, Stephen was captivated by its theme music—a simple, Sibelian melody that made his eyes brim with tears, so filled with yearning did it sound—and he knew he was going to adore Kings Row.

By the time the childhood sequences were over and Paris Mitchell, a boy in knickerbockers, had climbed the stile on the hill only to return, a moment later, a man in full-length trousers, the music mounting gloriously, the camera panning up his legs and body until at last it stopped and focused on the face of Robert Cummings, Stephen was completely engrossed and nervously peeling the silver foil off his empty Goober box. Never before had he identified with any leading man as he did now with Robert Cummings. In the actor’s sensitive and handsome face, his earnest eyes, his sensual nose, his halting speech, his innocent and well-bred manner, Stephen saw his ideal self, he found his ideal other. As such: partly as himself, partly in flight from himself and pursuing the other, who, in turn, was not the other but himself as Robert Cummings, portraying yet another, Paris Mitchell, who was all of them together, Stephen left the RKO and entered eagerly the dark and morbid world of Kings Row. There, he devoted himself to his loving grandmother, Ouspenskaya, he befriended a wild Ronald Reagan, he studied medicine with a stern and somber Claude Rains, and fell in love with his weird and haunted daughter, Betty Field. There, he sensed something fishy about the town’s G.P., Charles Coburn, so strict and cruel, and his even stricter wife, Judith Anderson, mercilessly dominating their frail and nervous daughter, Nancy Coleman. There, as if they were his own, one by one, Stephen suffered the tragedies that overcame these lives: the death of Ouspenskaya, the murder of Betty Field, the suicide of Claude Rains, the unnecessary amputation of Ronald Reagan’s legs, the revelation that Charles Coburn was a sadist.

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