Ghost Trio: Pinter's Family Voices

Ghost Trio: Pinter's Family Voices HERSH ZEIFMAN The first voice we hear in Harold Pinter's I 98I radio play, Famity Voices, is that of a young man, starting a new life "in this enormous city, all by myself,"! dutifully writing a letter home to his mother. Although lacking both salutation and signature, the words the voice speaks are obviously meant to be epistolary, as the close of his first communication clearly suggests: "And so I shall end this letter to you, my dear mother, with my love" (p. 69). The tone of his letters captures beautifully that uncertain mixture of bravado and fear, innocence and guile, characteristic of a young man gingerly testing the boundaries of a recently won independence. "At the moment I am dead drunk," he boasts early in his first letter, only to retreat uneasily a dozen lines later: "When I said I was drunk I was ofcourse making ajoke. / I bet you laughed. / Mother? / Did you get the joke? You know I never touch alcohol" (pp. 67-68). Quickly sketching in the contours of his new life, the son writes that he has rented a room in a house run by a charming landlady, and the bulk of his letters describe in detail his relationships, vacillating between the implicitly sexual and the bewilderingly mystifying, with the other occupants of the house, each relationship a little dagger designed to pierce his mother's heart. The first of these "daggers" is the landlady herself, Mrs Withers, who adopts him as a surrogate son: "Sometimes she gives me a cuddle, as if she were my mother" (p. 72), he blithely informs his mother. In addition to the maternal Mrs Withers, there are two other females in the house: "a woman who wears red dresses" (p. 70), later identified as Lady Withers, and a schoolgirl, Jane Withers, whose black-stockinged toes play restlessly in the son's lap as the two of them share a small sofa in Lady Withers's room during a suggestively erotic tea-party. There are also two men in the house. Riley is a big man with black hair- "He has black eyebrows and black hair on the back ofhis hands" (p. 7I)who bursts in one day as the son is taking a bath, perching on the edge ofthe tub and admiring the son's "wellknit yet slender frame" (p. 75). " ... I could crush a Ghost Trio: Pinter's Family Voices slip of a lad such as you to death," the son later reports Riley telling him as the two sip, not tea this time but cocoa, in Riley's room, "I mean the death that is love, the death I understand love to be" (p. 79). The other man, later identified as Benjamin Withers, is old, bald, and baffling, whose one conversation with the son is filled with cryptic warnings the son is unable to decode. "You're in a diseaseridden land, boxer," the son quotes Withers. "Keep your weight on all the left feet you can lay your hands on. Keep dancing. The old foxtrot is the classical response but that's not the response I'm talking about" (p. 77). Nor is this all the son finds baffling. "At night I hear whispering from the other rooms and do not understand it," he writes to his mother. "I hear steps on the stairs but do not dare go out to investigate" (p. 71). Still, he has carved out a niche for himself in this strange house, among people with whom he feels he belongs: "Oh mother, I have found my home, my family. Little did I ever dream I could know such happiness" (p. 77). Interspersed with the son's letters are those of his recently widowed mother, the second voice we hear in this play of family voices. Her letters are generally much shorter, alternating between loving concern ("Darling. ... 1I think of you and wonder how you are.... 1There are so many nice boys and nice girls about. But please don't get mixed up with the other sort" [po 69]), and bitter reproach ("Perhaps I should .forg~t all about you. Perhaps I should curse you as...