The Cabin Read online

  David Mamet

  The Cabin

  David Mamet is the author of various plays, including American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Speed-the-Plow, Glengarry Glen Ross (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), and Oleanna. He has written and directed the films Homicide, House of Games, and Things Change (written with Shel Silverstein), and has written the screenplays for The Untouchables and Hoffa. He is the author of two previous collections, Writing in Restaurants and Some Freaks. Mamet lives in Massachusetts and Vermont.

  ALSO BY David Mamet

  Writing in Restaurants

  Some Freaks

  On Directing Film

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 1993

  Copyright © 1992 by David Mamet

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously

  in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published in hardcover by Turtle Bay Books, a division

  of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1992.

  Portions of this work were originally published in the Chicago Tribune,

  Hampton’s, Harpers, HG, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and

  The Traveler.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mamet, David.

  The cabin: reminiscence and diversions / David Mamet.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78751-4

  1. Mamet, David—Biography. 2. Dramatists, American—20th

  century—Biography. I. Title

  [PS3563.A4345Z465 1993]

  812′. 54—dc20

  [B] 93-10493

  v3.1

  FOR MY SISTER, LYNN

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Joni Evans and Julie Grau for their interest in and care of these essays; and I would like to thank my assistant, Harriet Voyt, for her lovely good nature and for her help with the preparation of this book.

  Prologue: Rutland Gate

  I met Pat Buckley on my first trip to London. I had just turned thirty, and he was something over eighty.

  We were walking near Parliament, and he gestured and said that his solicitors’ offices were just nearby. I was shopping for a lawyer myself, and I asked him how long the folks over there had been his solicitors. “For about a hundred twenty years,” he said.

  He remembered, as a child, he said, being taken to see Queen Victoria. He had been at school with Lord Mountbatten; he was a man-about-town in the twenties. When the BBC did a retrospective on the Charleston in the seventies, Pat was remembered as a leading exponent of the dance, and he spoke about it and twenties London over the radio.

  He had been in MI5 during the Second World War. He told this story: an MI5 officer friend of his had been traveling from London to Scotland by rail. The man was in a private compartment with his batman, when an enlisted man entered and said that there was another officer in the coach who somehow looked out of place. The MI5 man asked for the officer to be brought to his compartment, and he was.

  The officer’s papers were all in order, and there was nothing out of place about him, and nothing to excite suspicion. Nonetheless the man did not seem quite right.

  “Take off your jacket,” the MI5 man asked, and the officer did so. He was then asked to take off his shirt and then his undershirt, under which were seen large red welts of the sort caused by a parachute harness. The man turned out to be a German spy who had parachuted into England that morning. He was tried and executed—“lovely story,” Pat said, “I could have dined out on it all throughout the War, but, of course, while the War was on, I couldn’t tell it.”

  I think he was himself the MI5 officer on the train.

  I wonder what he did during the First World War, in which he must certainly have fought, but about which he would not speak.

  I know that in the late twenties and thirties he wrote travel books, which were a favorite of Queen Mary—he showed me correspondence and a photograph she had autographed to him. He also toured America in that period, lecturing about Great Britain, and was a great success, it seems. He had several quite intimately inscribed photos of a very well-known film actress on his mantel.

  We walked through Knightsbridge. He took me to a decorator’s shop to show me some material. There was a very pretty young woman proprietor, and she treated him with great deference, and referred to him as Major Buckley.

  We stopped at a storefront tailor where he was having his suits recut. They were of excellent manufacture, and quite old, and, as he was losing weight, he was having them made over from single- to double-breasted cut.

  And at the tailor he showed me an innovation of which he was proud: he’d had the man sew a two-inch-diameter red felt circle over the label on the inside of the collar of his raincoat. Everyone in London had the same coat, he told me, and this made it a breeze to reclaim his from the coat-check room.

  This seemed to me a terrific idea, and for years I have been meaning, and still mean, to do it to my coats.

  We went back to his flat in Rutland Gate and he told me this:

  A friend of a niece of his had come to visit London from the States. She came round to his flat, he made her some lunch, and, when she had left, he noticed that his wristwatch, which he had left on his dresser, was missing. He told me it was a Patek Philippe watch in platinum, that he had worn it for over fifty years, and that she had certainly taken it.

  On my next trip to London five years later, Pat told me the story of the watch again, as if the theft had happened to him just the day before.

  I was reading a posh British magazine the other day, and came across a real estate listing for a beautiful flat in Rutland Gate. It had several photos of the flat and listed the amenities, and, having visited there myself, I agreed with the description. One of the photos showed the mantel, and, on it, the photo of the very famous film star.

  Well, we have no more Victorian gentlemen with us.

  I would have liked to have known more about MI5, and the Great War, and his affair with the film star.

  I would have liked to have listened to him tell about the film community in the thirties, and whether it was in fact he who caught the German spy.

  He was a gracious man, and good to talk to me. It occurs to me that he must have, consciously or not, told me the story of the Patek watch because he was worried that I might take something from him. I’d like to put another coloration on it, but if the reminiscence is going to have any worth it should, I think, be accurate.

  This volume is, mainly, travel and reminiscence, and, if I am going to analyze the content accurately, I suppose it must mean that I, too, am getting old.

  Best wishes,

  David Mamet

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: Rutland Gate

  The Rake

  Memories of Chelsea

  P.Q.

  The Watch

  The Cabin

  A Country Childhood

  WFMT

  Cold Toast

  The Truck Factory

  In Vermont

  Music

  The Hotel Lincoln

  The Shooting Auction

  Wabash Avenue

  Various Sports in Sight of the Highlands

  My House

  Seventy-first and Jeffery

  Cannes

  The Buttons on the Board

  The Rake

  There was the incident of the rake and there was
the incident of the school play, and it seems to me that they both took place at the round kitchen table.

  The table was not in the kitchen proper, but in an area called the “nook,” which held its claim to that small measure of charm by dint of a waist-high wall separating it from an adjacent area known as the living room.

  All family meals were eaten in the nook. There was a dining room to the right, but, as in most rooms of that name at that time and in those surroundings, it was never used.

  The round table was of wrought iron and topped with glass; it was noteworthy for that glass, for it was more than once and rather more than several times, I am inclined to think, that my stepfather would grow so angry as to bring some object down on the glass top, shattering it, thus giving us to know how we had forced him out of control.

  And it seems that most times when he would shatter the table, as often as that might have been, he would cut some portion of himself on the glass, or that he or his wife, our mother, would cut their hands picking up the glass afterward, and that we children were to understand, and did understand, that these wounds were our fault.

  So the table was associated in our minds with the notion of blood.

  The house was in a brand-new housing development in the southern suburbs. The new community was built upon, and now bordered, the remains of what had once been a cornfield. When our new family moved in, there were but a few homes in the development completed, and a few more under construction. Most streets were mud, and boasted a house here or there, and many empty lots marked out by white stakes.

  The house we lived in was the development’s model home. The first time we had seen it, it had signs plastered on the front and throughout the interior telling of the various conveniences it contained. And it had a lawn, one of the only homes in the new community that did.

  My stepfather was fond of the lawn, and he detailed me and my sister to care for it, and one fall afternoon we found ourselves assigned to rake the leaves.

  Why this chore should have been so hated I cannot say, except that we children, and I especially, felt ourselves less than full members of this new, cobbled-together family, and disliked being assigned to the beautification of a home that we found unbeautiful in all respects, and for which we had neither natural affection nor a sense of proprietary interest.

  We went to the new high school. We walked the mile down the open two-lane road on one side of which was the just-begun suburban community and on the other side of which was the cornfield.

  The school was as new as the community, and still under construction for the first three years of its occupancy. One of its innovations was the notion that honesty would be engendered by the absence of security, so the lockers were designed and built both without locks and without the possibility of attaching locks. And there was the corresponding rash of thievery and many lectures about the same from the school administration, but it was difficult to point with pride to any scholastic or community tradition supporting the suggestion that we, the students, pull together in this new, utopian way. We were in school in an uncompleted building in the midst of a mud field in the midst of a cornfield. Our various sports teams were called the Spartans; and I played on those teams, which were of a wretchedness consistent with their novelty.

  Meanwhile, my sister interested herself in the drama society. The year after I had left the school she obtained the lead in the school play. It called for acting and singing, both of which she had talent for, and it looked to be a signal triumph for her in her otherwise unremarkable and unenjoyed school career.

  On the night of the play’s opening she sat down to dinner with our mother and our stepfather. It may be that they ate a trifle early to allow her to get to the school to enjoy the excitement of the opening night. But however it was, my sister had no appetite, and she nibbled a bit at her food, and then when she got up from the table to carry her plate back to scrape it in the sink, my mother suggested that she sit down, as she had not finished her food. My sister said she really had no appetite, but my mother insisted that, as the meal had been prepared, it would be good form to sit and eat it.

  My sister sat down with the plate and pecked at her food and she tried to eat a bit, and told my mother that, no, really, she possessed no appetite whatsoever, and that was due, no doubt, not to the food, but to her nervousness and excitement at the prospect of opening night.

  My mother, again, said that, as the food had been cooked, it had to be eaten, and my sister tried and said that she could not; at which my mother nodded. She then got up from the table and went to the telephone and looked up the number and called the school and got the drama teacher and identified herself and told him that her daughter wouldn’t be coming to school that night, that, no, she was not ill, but that she would not be coming in. Yes, yes, she said, she knew that her daughter had the lead in the play, and, yes, she was aware that many children and teachers had worked hard for it, et cetera; and so my sister did not play the lead in her school play. But I was long gone, out of the house by that time, and well out of it. I heard that story, and others like it, at the distance of twenty-five years.

  In the model house our rooms were separated from their room, the master bedroom, by a bathroom and a study. On some weekends I would go alone to visit my father in the city and my sister would stay and sometimes grow frightened or lonely in her part of the house. And once, in the period when my grandfather, then in his sixties, was living with us, she became alarmed at a noise she had heard in the night, or perhaps she just became lonely, and she went out of her room and down the hall, calling for my mother, or my stepfather, or my grandfather, but the house was dark, and no one answered.

  And as she went farther down the hall, toward the living room, she heard voices, and she turned the corner, and saw a light coming from under the closed door in the master bedroom, and heard my stepfather crying and the sound of my mother sobbing. So my sister went up to the door, and she heard my stepfather talking to my grandfather and saying, “Jack. Say the words. Just say the words …” And my grandfather, in his Eastern European accent, saying, with obvious pain and difficulty, “No. No. I can’t. Why are you making me do this? Why?” And the sound of my mother crying convulsively.

  My sister opened the door, and she saw my grandfather sitting on the bed, and my stepfather standing by the closet and gesturing. On the floor of the closet she saw my mother, curled in a fetal position, moaning and crying and hugging herself. My stepfather was saying, “Say the words. Just say the words.” And my grandfather was breathing fast and repeating, “I can’t. She knows how I feel about her. I can’t.” And my stepfather said, “Say the words, Jack. Please. Just say you love her.” At which my mother moaned louder. And my grandfather said, “I can’t.”

  My sister pushed the door open farther and said—I don’t know what she said, but she asked, I’m sure, for some reassurance or some explanation, and my stepfather turned around and saw her and picked up a hairbrush from a dresser that he passed as he walked toward her, and he hit her in the face and slammed the door on her. And she continued to hear “Jack, say the words.”

  She told me that on weekends when I was gone my stepfather ended every Sunday evening by hitting or beating her for some reason or other. He would come home from depositing his own kids back at their mother’s house after their weekend visitation, and would settle down tired and angry, and, as a regular matter on those evenings, would find out some intolerable behavior on my sister’s part and slap or hit or beat her.

  Years later, at my mother’s funeral, my sister spoke to our aunt, my mother’s sister, who offered a footnote to this behavior. She said when they were young, my mother and my aunt and their parents lived in a small flat on the West Side. My grandfather was a salesman on the road from dawn on Monday until Friday night. Their family had a fiction, and that fiction, that article of faith, was that my mother was a naughty child. And each Friday, when he came home, his first question as he climbed the stairs was “What has she do
ne this week …?” At which my grandmother would tell him the terrible things that my mother had done, after which she, my mother, was beaten.

  This was general knowledge in my family. The footnote concerned my grandfather’s behavior later in the night. My aunt had a room of her own, and it adjoined her parents’ room. And she related that each Friday, when the house had gone to bed, she, through the thin wall, heard my grandfather pleading for sex. “Cookie, please.” And my grandmother responding, “No, Jack.” “Cookie, please.” “No, Jack.” “Cookie, please.”

  And once my grandfather came home and asked, “What has she done this week?” and I do not know, but I imagine that the response was not completed, and perhaps hardly begun; in any case, he reached and grabbed my mother by the back of the neck and hurled her down the stairs.

  And once, in our house in the suburbs, there had been an outburst by my stepfather directed at my sister. And she had somehow prevailed. It was, I think, that he had the facts of the case wrong, and had accused her of the commission of something for which she had demonstrably had no opportunity, and she pointed this out to him with what I can imagine, given the circumstances, was an understandable, and, given my prejudice, a commendable degree of freedom. Thinking the incident closed, she went back to her room to study, and, a few moments later, he threw open her door, batted the book out of her hands, and picked her up and threw her against the far wall, where she struck the back of her neck on a shelf.

  She was told, the next morning, that her pain, real or pretended, held no weight, and that she would have to go to school. She protested that she could not walk, or, if at all, only with the greatest of difficulty and in great pain; but she was dressed and did walk to school, where she fainted, and was brought home. For years she suffered various headaches; an X-ray taken twenty years later for an unrelated problem revealed that when he threw her against the shelf he had cracked her vertebrae.