Drinks Before Dinner by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page A

moving. Their engines make the ground tremble. I point the way for the priest and we say farewell. I race back home. And when I open the parcel I find he has given me for safekeeping Adolf Hitler’s dinner jacket.
MICHAEL    Why, that could be an end of the world, all right.
CLAUDETTE    Michael, have you gone mad? Alan, this manhas forced us to tie you to a chair and you tell him your dreams? The world is not ending! Nothing is happening except that he is holding a gun and terrifying us all and threatening our lives. Nothing is happening except that he has frightened my children to such a degree that they are in fear of the end of the world. How do you condone this? How do you speak to him; why do you listen to him? Why are we allowing ourselves to be humiliated this way? It is the utmost form of humiliation to begin thinking like him.
ALAN    Please, Claudette. I am not unaware of the position I’m in. Think of this as a negotiation.
EDGAR    But what is it we’re negotiating? The end of the world? How can that be negotiated? What single human is so stupidly arrogant to put himself in that role?
ALAN    All revolutionaries want to end the world as they know it.
EDGAR    You think I’m a revolutionary?
ALAN    If you are not a revolutionary, then you are a criminal psychopath. One can be both, of course, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.
EDGAR    Things happen so fast. Determinations are made so fast. In the back of my mind I have not ruled out the possibility that we may yet sit down to dinner.
ALAN    I would give up that idea if I were you. You are holding a roomful of people at gunpoint. Including several women and two children. They are not likely to agree happily to sit down to dinner with you. You are not only holding a gun but constructing a dangerous rationale for holding it. You are saying that if the world is coming to an end, then the carrying of a pistol is somehow appropriate, although you do not yet know in what way. Do I represent your position correctly?
EDGAR    It is unprecedented for me to be carrying this gun. My buying it was a mysterious act. A child sold it to me.Another child perceives the ending of the world. We must learn what it is the children know.
ALAN    The danger in your thinking, of course, is that any action can be justified, no matter how mad or destructive it is, if the world is presumed to be ending. Even if, granting for a moment, the world is ending, there is no guarantee that each and every person’s anticipation or perception is worthy or appropriate. If you and I act differently or in opposite ways, who is to say which of our actions is appropriate. The true response to the anticipated end of the world might be to get down on our knees together and pray. Besides which, the world may not be ending. And I may be doing more for the world and all its revolutionary possibilities in deciding it is not going to end than you are in deciding that it is.
JOEL    Yes, and let me remind you that this man, our oldest dearest friend, whom you have so brutally abused, is a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace.
EDGAR    ( To ALAN ) Yes, your argument could have validity if not for that. I might seriously consider it if you were not someone apart from the rest of us. But you’re famous. Your hosts invited you here not only for their own honor but altruistically to give you a quiet evening away from your public life. You have a public life. You have received the Nobel Prize for peace and you dream of inheriting Hitler’s dinner jacket. You are one of those whom society appoints to embody its values for the rest of us. How, then, can you judge what is appropriate or inappropriate? You no longer know what it means to be human. You are disqualified.
GRACE    That is an outrage.
EDGAR    But I mean nothing personal. It is precisely the point that none of us any longer can mean anything personal. Let us assume we are all beginning to