Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000 - Softcover

Miller, Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142000051 ISBN 13: 9780142000052

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2001

Synopsis

For some fifty years now, Arthur Miller has been not only America's premier playwright, but also one of our foremost public intellectuals and cultural critics. Echoes Down the Corridor gathers together a dazzling array of more than forty previously uncollected essays and works of reportage. Here is Arthur Miller, the brilliant social and political commentator-but here, too, Miller the private man behind the internationally renowned public figure.Witty and wise, rich in artistry and insight, Echoes Down the Corridor reaffirms Arthur Miller's standing as one of the greatest writers of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1963), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and The American Clock. He has also written two novels, Focus (1945), and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977), three books of photographs by his wife, Inge Morath. More recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), and the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season, and Mr. Peter's Connections (1998). His latest book is On Politics and the Art of Acting. Miller was granted with the 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

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Echoes Down the Corridor

Collected Essays, 1944-2000By Arthur Miller

Penguin Books

Copyright © 2001 Arthur Miller
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0142000051

Chapter One

A Boy Grew in Brooklyn

Nobody can know Brooklyn, because Brooklyn is the world, and besidesit is filled with cemeteries, and who can say he knows thosepeople? But even aside from the cemeteries it is impossible to say that oneknows Brooklyn. Three blocks from my present house live two hundredMohawk Indians. A few blocks from them are a group of Arabs living intenements in one of which is published an Arabic newspaper. When Ilived on Schermerhorn Street I used to sit and watch the Muslims holdingservices in a tenement back yard outside my window, and they had areal Moorish garden, symmetrically planted with curving lines of whitestones laid out in the earth, and they would sit in white robes?twenty orthirty of them, eating at a long table, and served by their women who worethe flowing purple and rose togas of the East. All these people, plus theGermans, Swedes, Jews, Italians, Lebanese, Irish. Hungarians and more.created the legend of Brooklyn's patriotism, and it has often seemed to methat their having been thrown together in such abrupt proximity is whatgave the place such a Balkanized need to proclaim its never-achievedoneness.

    But this is not the Brooklyn I know or was brought up in. Mine waswhat is called the Midwood section, which now has no distinguishingmarks, but thirty years ago was a flat forest of great elms through which ranthe elevated Culver Line to Coney Island, two and a half miles distant. MyBrooklyn consisted of Jews, some Italians, a few Irish?and a Mr. Dunham,whom I remember only because he was reputed to carry a gun as partof his duties as a bank guard.

    Children going to school in those days could be watched from the backporch and kept in view for nearly a mile. There were streets, of course, butthe few houses had well-trodden trails running out of their back doorswhich connected with each other and must have looked from the air like across section of a mole run; these trails were much more used than thestreets, which were as unpaved as any in the Wild West and just as muddy.Today everything is paved and your bedroom window is just far enoughaway from your neighbor's to leave room to swing the screens out when fallcomes.

    My aunts and uncles, who moved there right after World War I, couldgo to Manhattan on the Culver Line for a nickel (although my cousins alwaysclimbed around the turnstile, which was easy, so long as you didn'tmind hanging from iron railings a hundred feet or so above the street), butthey had to buy potatoes in hundred-pound sacks because there was nogrocery store within four miles. And they planted tomatoes, and theycanned fruits and vegetables, and kept rabbits and chickens and huntedsquirrels and other small game. The Culver Line cars were made of wood,like trolleys hooked together, and clattered above the cemeteries and theelms, and I must say there was something sweet about it when you gotaboard in the morning and there was always the same conductor who knewyou and even said good morning.

    I don't precisely know why, but Brooklyn in my memory has alwaysbeen full of characters and practical jokers. I suppose it is really a collectionof villages which all seem the same to the stranger's eye, but are not;and characters thrive and express their special ways in a village atmosphere.My father was one, and is the last of those Mohicans as he sits infront of his frame house of a Sunday afternoon, remembering, as heglances down the tree-lined block, the old friends and screwballs wholived in each of the houses and are now resting peacefully in the cemeterythat spreads out two blocks away, their pinochle decks laid down forever,their battles done.

    My father, a large, square-headed man who looks like a retired policecaptain, and has that kind of steady severity, is likely to feel the need, fromtime to time, to "start something." Years ago, he sat down on the CulverLine one morning, and seeing a neighbor whom he regarded as particularlygullible, moved over to him and in his weightiest manner, began:

    "You hear my brother-in-law got back from Florida?"

    "Yes, I heard," said the neighbor. "What does he do down there? Justfish and like that?"

    "Oh, no," my father said, "haven't you heard about his new business?"

    "No. What?"

    "He raises cockroaches there."

    "Cockroaches! What does he do with the cockroaches?"

    "What does he do with the cockroaches? Sells them!"

    "Who wants cockroaches?"

    "Who wants cockroaches! There's a bigger demand for cockroachesthan for mink. Of course they gotta be of a certain breed. He breeds themdown there. But they're all purebred."

    "But what good are they?"

    "Listen," my father confided, lowering his voice. "Don't say I evenmentioned it, but if you happen to see any cockroaches around, in yourhouse, or anywhere like that, my brother-in-law would appreciate it if youbrought them all to him. Because I tell you why, see?he's raising them uphere now, right in his house, but in Brooklyn it's against the law, you understand??butonce in a while a couple of them escape, and he's bashfulto ask people, but you'd be doing him a big favor if you happen to catchany, bring them to him. But be very careful. Don't hurt them. He'll pay fivedollars for any purebred cockroach anybody brings him."

    "Five dollars!"

    "Well, listen, that's his business. But don't tell anybody I told you becauseit's against the law, you know?"

    Having planted this seed, my father left the neighbor. A week or solater my uncle's doorbell rang, and there was the man, considerably insecurein his mind, but there nevertheless, with a matchbox full of cockroaches.For three whole days my uncle refused to play casino with myfather.

    There is Ike Samuels, who runs?or rather sits outside?the hardwarestore. Ike's way with women who come in not knowing precisely whatthey want is something not easily described. I have watched him double-talkinga Hausfrau for better than ten minutes; but when they come in withcomplaints he rises to a height of idiotic evasion that is positively lyrical.I was myself a victim of his for years, as a boy. We lived three blocks fromhis store, and often as I passed he would open his eyes against the sunlightwhere he sat in his rocker beside the door, and say, "Raining on OceanParkway?"

    For years I answered him seriously because he has a remorselesspoker face and thick lenses on his eyeglasses that make a clear view of hiseyes impossible. Out of respect, at first, I described the weather threeblocks away; but later I began to doubt myself and came to wonder, nowand then, whether it had been raining there while the sun shone here.

    But that was the least of Ike Samuels. I happened to be in his store onemorning when a woman entered. Like so many of them at eleven A.M., shehad a coat on top of her nightgown?and in her hands was an electricbroiler which Ike had repaired only a week before. She strode in, a largewoman with lumpy hair that, in her anger at the broiler, she had neglectedto comb, and she plunked the broiler down on the counter.

    "You said you fixed it!" she began.

    "What is the trouble?" Ike said.

    "It don't heat! My husband came home last night, I put four lambchops in, we could've dropped dead from hunger, it was like an ice box inthere!"

    Ike took the top off the broiler and made as though to examine itsworks. There was a silence. He peered this way and that inside it, and Icould tell that he was winding up for a stroke that would resound throughhis whole day. Looking up at her like a detective on the scent, he asked,"What did you say you put in here?"

    Suspecting, perhaps, that she had in fact done something wrong, sheparried: "What do you mean what did I put in here?"

    Like a prosecutor, Ike leaned in toward her: "Answer my question,madam; what did you put in this broiler?"

    Her voice smaller now, off balance, she replied, "I said?lamb chops."

    "Lamb chops!" Ike rolled his eyes at the ceiling, where the mops andpails hung. "Lamb chops she puts in!"

    Close to tears now, the woman began to plead, "Well, what's the matterwith lamb chops?"

    "What's the matter with lamb chops!" Ike roared indignantly. "Can'tyou read, lady? What night school did you go to? Look!" With which heturned the broiler upside down and pointed to the brass plate riveted tothe bottom, on which were embossed the long serial numbers of the manufacturer'spatents, and the Underwriters' Laboratory seal.

    She bent over to peer at the tiny numbers and the few words. And beforeshe could fix her eyes Ike was on her. "It's plain as day. `No LambChops,' it says; this is written by naval architects, graduate engineers fromthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology?`No lamb chops'?and youthrow lamb chops in there. What do you want from me, lady? I fixed it forsteak!"

    Her eyes were distraught now, utterly bewildered. "But he likes lambchops," she pleaded.

    And now, having won the initiative, he came around the counter andescorted her to the door. "Now look, don't be discouraged. I'll do my best,and I'll fix it for lamb chops. I got a license for that, but you gotta have adouble affixative on the forspice."

    "Could you put one on?" she asked, exhausted.

    "For you anything, darling," he said, and sent her on her way.

    It was a village, even down to the feeble-minded Danny, who hungaround Ike's store, and when you came by he would point at you and say,"Navarre 8-7135," because his pride lay in remembering everybody'sphone number. If he overheard Ike talking about somebody's aunt, hewould interject, "Dewey 9-0518," which, in his mind, identified the aunt."Ulster 5-8009 is getting married, Ike," he announced one morning.Asked who the bride was, he answered, "Navarre 8-6661." But he had hisdignity, which he enforced. If they started kidding him, he would get offthe barrel and leave, saying, "I gotta see a party."

    It was a village, and while to the stranger's eye one street was no differentfrom another, we all knew where our "neighborhood" somehowended, and the line of demarcation was never more than three blocksaway. Beyond that, a person was somehow a stranger.

    It was a village with village crimes. I don't recall any time when thecops had to be called. Everyone was so well and thoroughly known that thefrown of his neighbors was enough law to keep things in line. When westole from the candy store, when we played handball against the druggist'swindow and broke it, it was enough for the offended proprietor to let it beknown to the parents. Although I must add that Mr. Dozik, the pharmacist,had it a little harder. The wall of his building was perfect for handball, andpoor Dozik had to be all the time giving us water from his soda fountain.He tried putting up billboards that projected from the wall, but we playedaround them, until finally he had his soda fountain removed. Mr. Dozik isthe first man in history to discover that boys cannot play handball wherethere is no cold drinking water.

    He's still there as he was then?a kind of doctor who knows what ailseverybody; a man who sewed up the arms, hands and ears of all mycousins and remembers every stitch.

    It was a village with no stream, however, so my cousins and I wouldget up at four in the morning and climb around the turnstile of the CulverLine, and go rickety-rackety down the two-mile track to Coney Island andfish off the rocks and bring home flounder or sea bass?even in winter,when the wind was raw off the ocean.

    I got to know those village winters especially well because I deliveredrolls and bread every morning for the bakery before I went to school. Therewere no gloves warm enough to keep the icy cold of the handlebars awayfrom my fingers, so I wore long woolen plaid stockings that came up to myelbows, and with the basket over the front wheel piled high with bags ofbread, rolls and bagels, I would ride forth through the streets at four-thirtyin the morning.

    In the spring and fall it was lovely and one could sing out loud for thebeauty of it, but when the snow fell, or worse yet, when the streets werecovered with ice, a special kind of hell broke loose. Bread means somethingvery special to these people. A man rising to breakfast in thosehouses expects his bagel, or his rye bread, or his onion roll or whatever itis he craves most. Give a bagel man an onion roll and his whole day isruined, while for a rye-bread man a bagel is beneath contempt, especiallyfor breakfast when one's taste buds are fresh and quivering and so verydelicately attuned to flavors.

    So it used to be with a somewhat trembling care that I would guide thebike down the streets when there was ice, because each bag was filled withits special order, and each one marked in crayon with its proper address.I would slowly ride down the center of the street, carefully holding to thecrown of the road, and the cold cats would follow me, meowing and pleadingfor warmth and food, and the dark sky of winter was merciless over myhead. And there came a time, once, when the bike suddenly slid out fromunder me, and the bags tumbled out of the wire basket, and many broke,and others just opened because they were overstuffed, and as I sat thereon the ice, I could see bagels, onion rolls, whole rye breads, sliding outover the sheet ice in all directions. Few people can imagine how far abagel will slide on clean ice. I know.

    And besides, the baker had gallstones. I hadn't the heart to return andtell him of this catastrophe. So I went about on the empty street, gatheringup the cargo, some of which had come to a stop three quarters of a blockaway. I then sat on the ice, flashlight gleaming, trying to put things backinto the proper bags. Some were easy, because the bags had been packedso tightly that the impressions made by the hump of a rye bread's back andthe circle of a bagel were unmistakable. But most were simply bags, likeany other bags, and I finally just stuffed them as best I could, spreadingthe bagels through the lot, and offering, in short, what I thought was a nicevariety to each customer. I had, as amateur mechanics do when they try toassemble a machine that has been taken apart, several pieces left over,which I simply ate before delivering the bags.

    I returned to the bakery to leave the bike, and already the phone wasringing, or more accurately, burning. The baker looked ghastly. In hiswhole life nothing like this had happened. Utterly baffled, he listened toMrs. 1690 screaming in his ear for her onion rolls, her husband is going tobe shaved in five minutes! And Mrs. 1277 asking when in her nine yearsof dealing with him she had ever ordered rye bread! And the poor manturned to me, his two overcoats making him look like a mountain of horrification,and I explained at last. But it remained a tragedy from which, asfar as I could tell, he never fully recovered.

    I do not think I am painting it more serene than it was. There was arhythm and a flowing to the days that began with the men trekking to AvenueM from all the side streets in the early morning, and like a column ofants climbing up the long steep stairs to the Culver Line, and it endedtoward nightfall when they trekked down again and dispersed into theirhouses. We walked three miles to James Madison High School, and theambitious track men among us trotted all the way, stopping only to look atthe girl setting out the blackberry tarts in the window of the Ebinger Bakery.I do not think there were any intellectuals among us and as far as I canremember the greatest thing anybody could do was to get on the footballteam, or run like hell, or swim a couple of miles in the ocean in the summer.I know that in later years, when I began to publish, my old highschoolteachers looked through their records in an attempt to rememberme, but not one of them could. I was, in fact, thoroughly invisible duringthe entire four years, and this is by all odds my most successful accomplishmentso far. Because the idea all of us subscribed to, was to get outonto the football field with the least possible scholastic interference, and Ican fairly say we were none of us encumbered by anything resembling athought.

    The first ripple of what may properly be called the Outside World wasfelt one day when a crowd of people formed at the doors of The Bank of theUnited States?which was not even in our neighborhood, being five blocksaway. To be succinct about it, the thing had closed. This in itself did notbother me particularly because, while I had been a depositor to the tune oftwelve dollars, I had withdrawn the entire amount the very day before tobuy Joey Backus's Columbia racer. What did bother me was that the dayafter the bank closed I got hungry, left the bike in front of our house, wentinside for some bread and jam, and came out to find no bike, and a blockcan never look as empty as it does to a boy whose bike should be on it andisn't. In that emptiness lay the new reality.

    With this incident I was introduced to the Depression Age. Suddenly,overnight, in fact, the postman became an envied character because hecould not lose his job and even had a paid vacation. Our postman, unlikesome others, did not flaunt his new superiority but went right on openingour front door, coming into the living room and calling up to my mother toread her the mail: "Nothing important, Mrs. Miller. Gas bill, electric bill,and a card from your sister. She says she's enjoying the hotel and will behome next Friday," with which he simply went out, just as he always had.

    But other things had begun to change, sometimes in a weird way. Thegovernment soon took over practically every mortgage on the block, andthe result was that all the housewives started making more and better coffee.When the man came to our house to collect the payments, my mother,for one, got out the coffeepot and her wonderful coffeecake, and he wouldsit down and before he could say a number she was stuffing him, and forabout a year or so this collector always left our block bloated, and not withmoney either. It got so he would never mention the mortgage, but just sitthere and wait to be served.

    There was a lot of tension, though, in that time, and in a little whileyou could see grown men sitting on the porches in the middle of a weekdayafternoon, and the trotters to Madison High were thinned out as oneafter another had to go looking for work. And the line of breadwinnerscoming down the stairs of the Culver Line had the slump of humiliationand bewilderment in their shoulders, and there were stores empty now,and when you ripped your shirt it was a minor tragedy, and every now andthen, toward midnight, there were voices raised in loud argument withinthe houses. It got so bad that one night, after dinner, my grandfather putdown his paper?he who had been a Republican all his life and believed,if you pressed him hard enough, that what America needed was a king likethey had in Austria?my grandfather turned to me with his great baldhead and the bags under his eyes like yon Hindenburg's, and said, "Youknow what you ought to do? You ought to go to Russia."

    The silence that fell is better described as a vacuum so powerful itthreatened to suck the walls in. Even my father woke up on the couch. Iasked why I should go to Russia.

    "Because in Russia they haven't got anything. Here they got toomuch. You can't sell anything here any more. You go to Russia and open achain of clothing stores; you could do a big business. That's a new country,Russia."

    "But," I said, "you can't do that there."

    "Why not?" he said, disbelieving.

    "The government owns the stores there."

    His face would have put fear into Karl Marx himself. "Them bastards,"he said, and went back to his paper.

    By this time, of course, inevitable changes had helped to destroy somuch that was human and lovely in my neighborhood (although much remainseven today)?changes that had nothing to do with the Depression.The woods were gone now and there were houses everywhere, and even thelast lot left to play football on was turned into a fenced-in junkyard. Barshad begun to sprout along Gravesend Avenue, and the whole idea of drinking,which the old neighborhood had never known, became quite normal.

    An invisible vise seemed to be forever closing tighter and tighter, andthe worst, most unimaginable fates became ordinary. The star footballplayer became a shipping clerk, and was glad to have the job; I, who hadplanned to go to Cornell because they offered a free course in biology?althoughI had not the slightest interest in the subject?waited around untilthe fall term began, and seeing that nobody in the house was in possessionof the fare, I went to the employment offices for a couple of months andended up in a warehouse. It was the time Nick appeared on the scene andthe time my grandfather decided to die.

    About Nick in a moment. One hot afternoon, while the neighborhoodand the nation slumbered in the tortured sleep of the Depression and afiery heat wave in the bargain, my grandfather began to pant. He rarely satoutside his bedroom without his jacket, stiff collar and tie, but that day hegradually took off all but his shirt, and even went for his wire-frameglasses, which were cooler, he believed, than the tortoise-shell ones. Thenhe lay down on the couch and heaved his chest and looked terrible, andmy mother called the doctor and her two sisters and several sisters-in-law,and in half an hour they were all wailing around him and trying to preventhim from speaking, but at last his right arm raised up imperiously, palmout, and they fell silent.

    He had been a blunt sort of Germanic businessman all his life; hadhad a factory of importance for many years, and it is enough to say of hisphysique that whenever there was a strike in his plant he would pick uptwo workers and knock their heads together. This was as far as his ideas oflabor relations went.

    With the Depression his income was gone, and he had been shuntedfrom one daughter's house to another's, and while no one dared cross him,they did manage to palm him off on the next one every six months or so"for his sake." Unfortunately, he could not get sick. He drank gallons ofmineral water, panted, and I had often seen him striding down Avenue Mwith his cane flashing and hardly touching the pavement, but when heturned into our block, he would slow down, pant, lean heavily on the caneand barely make it to the door. Then he would eat the equivalent of awash basin of thick soup, as many chops as there were, and sit down tolisten to Lowell Thomas, and if some fool forgot and asked him how hewas feeling, he would shake his head like an ailing emperor and couldbarely be heard complaining. He was so neat he folded his socks beforeputting them in the laundry hamper, and it took him five minutes to get histwo pillows set exactly where he wanted them on the bed before he laydown, or rather half sat up, to go to sleep. Once a week he went to the barberto have his little Vandyke trimmed, and insisted on being sprayed withtoilet water of a certain brand. Even his rubber heels he wore out evenly,and his four hats were kept in their original boxes. Once every week hesmoked a cigar.

    And now he lay dying. Slowly the last words issued from his lips. LikeLear parceling out the nation he told each daughter what she was to haveof his possessions. The trouble was that he only had twenty-six dollarsleft, and his hats. But it made no difference, each one burst into thankfultears as her bequest was mentioned. And finally, he said, "And don'tbury me in the old plot. It's too crowded there. I want a little room. AndI don't want to be where people are going to be walking over me allthe time." He always liked room and plenty of air. "Put me on the aisle,"he concluded, probably feeling at the moment that it would be coolerthere.

    Having gotten their agreement, he groaned and sat up. After a whilethey tried to make him lie down but he said he felt better now. The conversationturned to other things, and pretty soon the women were playingrummy and forgot all about him. The next they knew he was coming downthe stairs, cane, jacket, felt hat, stiff collar and tie. "Where you going,Papa?" his daughters screamed.

    He turned in the doorway, his brows drawn together as though in preparationfor a mission of importance. "I gotta go for a fitting," he said.

    "A fitting!" they called. "You can't go out in this weather!"

    "I'm having a suit made downtown. Beautiful material. Two pairs ofpants." With which he walked out and lived ten years longer. The wholething was just due to the general discouragement, I guess.

    Equally unforeseeable, but a sign of the times and the nature of theneighborhood, was the way Nick made out. One day, in the year of especiallylong bread lines, a man knocked on my aunt's door and asked if hecould wash the windows for her. He was built low to the ground, lisped,and was neatly combed and obviously quite poor. In those days strangemen were constantly appearing in the neighborhood looking for work or apiece of bread, and we had more than a few who fainted from hunger onour steps and only my mother's chicken soup could revive them. My father,slightly more cynical than some others, said, "Sure, they smell thechicken soup and decide it's a good place to faint," and we spent onewhole Sunday morning looking all over the house for any mark or secretsign that seemed to lead these fellows directly to our door.

    But my aunt hired Nick and he worked carefully, and when nightcame she let him sleep in the cellar. Next morning, when the family camedown, the dining-room table was set with a tablecloth and napkins standingup stiffly. The breakfast he cooked and the way he served it swept themall away, as well it might, since Nick had been a steward on three greatocean liners for fifteen years. To make a long story short, Nick lived tobury my uncle and my aunt, painted the house three or four times in thenearly twenty years he lived there, and was periodically thrown out neverto return because he would wait until my uncle had squeezed all thegrapes and made the wine, and then drank it up down in the cellar, gallonafter gallon, and had to have his stomach pumped by the ambulancedriver, who, after a while, got out the stomach pump the minute he pulledup in front of the house.

    It was a village, and the people died like the elms did, and I do notknow those who live in their houses now. I go back there now and then, butwhether it is I that am no longer young or the people who have changed, Iknow only that things are alien to me there and I am as strange to the placeas if I had never known it. The cars, for one thing, jam bumper to bumperalong the curbs on streets where there was so much clear space we couldhave bumping matches with our first jalopies, and ride backwards and forwardsand up on the sidewalks and never find an obstruction anywhere.And people seem to move in and out more often than they did, and thereare many who have lived there five or six years now and the people nextdoor still don't know what they do for a living, or anything more than theirnames. The drugstore has a chromium front now and fluorescent lighting,and young Mr. Dozik is a gray-haired man. A lot of picture windows arebeing put in to get a better view of the wall of the next house a driveway'swidth away. And when anyone looks out the picture window all the peoplenext door are there watching television anyway.

    But there is still the smell of the leaves being burned in the fall, and Iimagine some boy is delivering the rolls, and all these strangers must beclose to somebody, although I would swear they are more formal towardeach other than we used to be, and there is an indifference in their eyes,even the ones who sit out in front of their houses in the cool of the evening.My father sits out there waiting for a friendly conversation, and usuallyends up, after an hour or so, going up to bed without having talked to anyone.There has been a scandal or two and amorous conflicts the like ofwhich were rare before, but the children still wonder if my father is reallythe mayor, as he claims to be in such dead earnest, and now and again afew who have not yet caught on will come to the house leading a cat by arope because, in a sudden fit of ennui, a few weeks ago, he said to a littleboy passing by, "I buy all kinds of cats," or a child will stop a stranger toask what his business might be because my father, what with all the casinogames dead and gone, has persuaded the five-year-olds to "stand guardand watch the block."

    But I think, as I watch him sitting there, that the smell of the burningleaves and autumn will never be enough to make those few, once spacefilledblocks the center of the world again, the way they used to seem. Insteadof the pies and cakes being trafficked back and forth across thestreet, and much visiting from house to house and the late card games anda certain energetic noisiness that was full of heat, there is now an order,and more politeness, and even when people do live there a long time now,they always have the feeling that someday they might not, and thatchanges things.

    Still, as my father said the other night, "It's a different kind of people,but so is the world. They'll make out all right." And he stared down thestreet at the unbroken line of cars, at the old houses ludicrously changedto look more ranchy, at the tall apartment houses beyond the corner, andthe metallic sound such buildings seem to make, and he got up and foldedhis chair and carried it into the house.

    Brooklyn is a lot of villages. And this was one of them.

1955

Continues...

Excerpted from Echoes Down the Corridorby Arthur Miller Copyright © 2001 by Arthur Miller. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0142000051
• ISBN 13: 9780142000052
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Centola Steven R