Christopher Hacker - The Morels

Our return to the carriage house coincided with a visit from Benji, bursting with good news. We had been granted more time. The first day of trial had been pushed back three weeks, to the middle of January. “We have over a month now, which still isn’t enough time, but it’s more than we had.”

This wasn’t all. He’d also been contacted by one of Arthur’s former students. A groundswell of support was growing at the university for Arthur’s “plight,” for what some saw as yet another vicious attack in Mayor Giuliani’s war against the arts. There were flyers everywhere around campus, a burgeoning Myspace page with thousands of fans. They wanted to help in any way they could. A legal defense fund was being created, and Benji had at his disposal a small army of smart young volunteers. Were these two bits of news related? Benji had to wonder. Did the judge (and the administration) see the futility in trying to keep a lid on this case and the danger of giving Arthur legitimate grounds for a mistrial or at the very least a guaranteed overturn on appeal? “Or maybe it was a schedule conflict. Who knows, who cares. I’ve got more than a month now and some extra hands. I’m happy.”

Benji wasn’t the only one. Doc and Cynthia had news as well. They’d been contacted by a few former members of the Carriage House Players. Koko, Winston, and one of the Brooklyn Trio. “They’re coming out of the woodwork now that they know there’s a documentary about this place,” Doc said. “They’re an incorrigible bunch of hams.” How had these people learned we were making a documentary? This was really our first inkling, along with the student who’d contacted Benji out of the blue, that this thing, as Penelope put it, was taking on a life of its own.

Ticulous was Samuel Weintraub, currently of New Haven, Connecticut. He had heard about Arthur’s arrest and sought out Benji to see how Arthur was holding up. It was interesting that he was not one of the “incorrigible bunch of hams” to call the carriage house. Several of the others, after getting in touch with Doc and Cynthia, contacted us directly to demand a part in our movie. Not Samuel “Ticulous” Weintraub. Samuel was reluctant to speak with us, and only after a hard sell would he agree to an interview. We took Metro North and were met at the station by his gunmetal-gray Camry.

“You gentlemen may find you’ve wasted your time,” he said while we set our equipment in his trunk. “As I told you on the phone, I have no interest in reminiscing fondly about my youth or trashing those with whom I spent it. The past is the past.” We assured him that we were only interested in hearing him speak about whatever, and whomever, he wanted. If he was willing, we would also be interested in getting his thoughts on Arthur’s current situation.

Samuel’s bald head was like shiny plastic; he had a bushy gray mustache. Under his down jacket he was wearing a suit and a tie. He was the director of Freshman Composition at the University of New Haven, which he described as a “glorified commuter school.” Area students attended to take degrees in forensic medicine and fire science. His wife was a Yale professor. They lived on a lovely tree-lined street off Whitney Avenue. We set up in the bay-windowed breakfast nook by the foyer, trying not to trip over a friendly gray cat who kept rubbing against our shins. Samuel was concerned about us filming his “good” side. He wanted to see how he looked in the monitor and shifted his seat several times on the padded banquet, trying different positions with his hands on the small antique table before he was satisfied.

As promised, we refrained from asking questions, which worked out fine because he was a nervous talker, and this situation for some reason made him very nervous. He went on about a great many things having absolutely nothing to do with Arthur or the carriage house. He devoted a lot of time to the topic of national politics — Clinton’s impeachment, the upcoming election. He talked about the departmental politics his wife was forced to endure at the School of Management, as well as the politics of his own department.

Eventually he did come around to the subject of the old days. “It’s a shame what became of them. What became of us, really. But that’s the problem of art in a country like ours. On the one hand you are stuck in a box. The only way to survive as an artist is to follow the market, no matter whether you’re a television scriptwriter or an MFA grad in plastic arts. And yet, on the other hand, you are free to do what you like. Free to do anything. Anything. And this makes some people crazy, this much freedom. In a sea of freedom, it’s easy to drown. Sometimes, when I was still a practicing artist, I found myself wishing that I was living in an oppressive totalitarian regime. It would be easy to create daring art under those circumstances. I would be a hero for saying anything that strayed from the party line. I could martyr myself. Such opportunities don’t exist in a free society. Here, it’s much more difficult to be a hero. Some think they can do it by becoming the iconoclast , that by declaring themselves an iconoclast, they are taking a stand, but here’s the irony. Isn’t it the single most quintessentially American gesture, this declaration of independence? To say you are different from other Americans is to say what every other American says about himself. Snowflakes. All unique, all identical. The American who declares himself an iconoclast ends up anything but — he’s a stereotype and, therefore, an oxymoron.

“But who am I kidding? If I had been making art in an oppressive totalitarian country, I wouldn’t be the dissident. I don’t have the energy, the staying power. No, I would be one of those state-endorsed propagandists, extolling the patriotic virtues of the regime.”

“You use the word hero . Do you think Arthur is a hero for writing that book?”

“It was inevitable that he would write that book. His poor wife and son. They never had a chance. When I was in school, I was always skeptical of literary time — the way in those nineteenth-century British novels a character could be so single-minded, pining after some woman for an entire lifetime, or a single childhood experience determining the course of an entire career. This just doesn’t happen in real life. In real life we are not so singularly defined, so easily plotted. We pine, and then we forget; we fall in love with someone else. As children we want to be all sorts of things. I wanted to be at one time or another a fireman, a mail-man, a pilot, a tennis pro, a clown, an oil baron, and a veterinarian. For some reason I’m thinking of Great Expectations . The character Estella, orphaned as an infant and brought under the care of bitter Miss Havisham, jilted at the altar so many years prior, never to recover. She teaches Estella to hate men, to be as cruel and unfeeling as Miss Havisham is, so that she will never have to have her heart broken on her wedding day. Too neat. In real life, Miss Havisham would have gotten over her disappointment, and Estella wouldn’t have proved to be so entirely malleable to become the cruel mistress Miss Havisham had in mind. Estella would have rebelled or run away.

“But I have to marvel at just how direct a trajectory those two have sent Arthur on. That boy was wound up from conception, destined wherever he went, whatever he did in the world, to go off in somebody’s face — in this case quite literally. He was Cynthia’s own Exploding Inevitable, wreaking havoc wherever he went. Destined to destroy his own family.”

Benji — too busy now with preparations and the particulars of his own life to visit us at the carriage house — offered his updates by phone. He had been forced to subcontract his work at the software company so that he could work full-time on the case, a cost defrayed somewhat by the legal fund. He was in to see Arthur at the detention center at Rikers every other day and was becoming concerned about his brother’s well-being.