Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

by Madeleine L'engle

  Buff wallpaper with a spider design was peeling off the walls. A lumpy iron bedstead angled out from one corner. The floor was covered with cigarette butts. Fiona and I looked at each other.

  “Let me see the bathroom,” Fiona said bravely. We were astounded to find the bathroom reasonably clean and reasonably modern. We thought of our bottle of Lysol and nodded.

  Fortunately, we weren’t too far from the Lord Baltimore. We retrieved our bags and were grateful that most of our things were in the steamer trunks which would be waiting for us at the theatre. We thought of Hugh and Bob, having had dinner, asleep in comfortable twin beds, and felt very sorry for ourselves, and not kindly disposed toward anyone who had not shared our ordeal.

  It was after one when we finally got to our room. We were far too tired, hungry though we were, to think about dinner. Besides, what would have been open in Baltimore so late on a Sunday night?

  Fiona got out the Lysol and we wearily scrubbed the bathroom and the foot and headboards of the bed and all the doorknobs. Someone had put clean sheets on the bed while we were fetching the suitcases, but the blankets hadn’t been changed since the opening of the hotel a couple of centuries before. I spread my coat on the foot of the bed and put Touché’s blanket over that.

  Fiona and I took baths and then I got Touché’s dog biscuits out of my suitcase and the three of us each ate several and fell asleep counting, instead of sheep, the days until we could leave Baltimore for three weeks of one-night stands.

  Perhaps I remember Baltimore particularly because the hotel was miserable; the early December weather was terrible, sleety and raw. In a department store between the hotel and Ford’s Theatre was a life-sized Santa Claus, hands on hips, constantly going, “Ho ho ho.”

  Hugh’s and my blossoming love was a bright contrast to the winter drabness, and the Cherry Orchard company was charmed by it. But their overt interest and approval was, as I look back, anything but helpful. Years later one of the company told me that she had overheard Miss Le Gallienne saying earnestly, “Hugh, when are you going to marry Madeleine?” Miss LeG, Pepé, everybody, was shoving me down Hugh’s throat.

  One day, when the Cherry Orchard company boarded a train, Hugh did not sit by me as was his custom, but at the far end of the car. I knew that our friends were looking at us with curiosity and distress. But no one asked, “What happened?”

  The next evening Cavada came into our dressing room with a small plaster lamb which looked amazingly like Touché. It was her way of saying, “I’m sorry for whatever it is that’s come between you and Hugh.”

  Oh, but my heart hurt.

  It is said that the body does not remember pain. When I fell on the ice in the woods and broke my shoulder, it hurt; it hurt excruciatingly. And yet now that it is mended and functional once again, I don’t remember the feel of what the pain was like, only that it was intense.

  Perhaps a psychic blow produces such pain that it, too, is forgotten once it has healed. I can remember without feeling it the agonizing pain of my broken shoulder. I can remember that Hugh’s turning away hurt agonizingly, too, and that even in my pain I knew that I would wait for Hugh to come back to me. I couldn’t go running after him, crying out, “But what happened? What’s wrong?”

  The rest of the tour was not happy for me.

  We had Christmas on the road, in Washington, and all I remember of that particular Christmas is that Hugh sent me a present through one of the other girls. It was a pair of pink knitted bed socks. I was furiously insulted.

  We got back to New York in the early spring and I returned to my much loved apartment. Touché and I went for long walks. I wrote some stories. Worked on a novel which never came to fruition, probably because it was more about my father than about me, and I was still far too young to understand the complexities of my father. One of my stories was called “The Course of Smoothe Love Seldom Runs True” (I spelled smooth smoothe until Hugh taught me the correct spelling). I saw friends. Was determined that no one would know that my heart ached. Was determined that I would not call Hugh or try to get in touch with him in any way.

  Six

  One day I was sitting at the typewriter when the classical musical station I was listening to was interrupted for a news flash. President Roosevelt was dead.

  Like the rest of the nation and the world I was shocked. And as always in time of shock I wanted to talk with someone. I knew that Hugh had admired the President, and without stopping to think I dialed his number. He was home, and fortunately he had already heard the news. I told him how sorry I was, and that I knew how much he had cared about the President. He sounded grateful for the call, though we didn’t talk long.

  Days and weeks went by and I was adhering to my decision not to call Hugh again. What we had had was over, if indeed it had been anything beyond my own imaginative longings.

  But I could not put Hugh out of my heart and I thought a great deal about marriage. I had seen young actresses who, before marriage, were always careful never to go out without full makeup, which often included false eyelashes. Their hair was carefully coiffed, their clothes were whatever was the latest fashion. After marriage they became careless about their appearance, wearing shabby dressing gowns until well into the afternoon, leaving their hair up in curlers, forgetting about their faces. I was never one for full makeup plus eyelashes except onstage, but I decided that in the unlikely event of my marriage I would get up in the morning and dress, fix my hair, put on lipstick. It seemed to me the height of discourtesy to dress as though for a performance until you had your man, and then not bother to try to look your best.

  In the early summer Hugh called, inviting me out to dinner.

  The next evening I joined him at a restaurant near his apartment on Fifty-fifth Street. He was leaving the following day for a full summer of stock, was subletting his apartment, and would not be back in the city till fall.

  But we talked. Not as we had after the first rehearsal of The Cherry Orchard, when we were discovering each other, but in a far more intimate way. Hugh told me about his childhood, the friends he had made in college, his aspirations as an actor. He talked far more than I did, and I sat across from him, listening, marveling.

  He paid the bill and walked me to the subway. When I got home I thought to myself that a man did not talk that openly and vulnerably to a woman he did not intend to marry.

  It was a long summer. I did not hear from Hugh. Miss Le Gallienne, Miss Webster, and Mr. Schildkraut did not have a production planned for autumn. I did not make the rounds. I thought that I needed to concentrate on the typewriter.

  Bob Hartung and I saw a good deal of each other, rode the Staten Island ferry, walked home with Touché. Once on our way home we saw a man sprawled out on a doorsill and were both too inexperienced to know that he was dead drunk, not dead, until the passing policeman we summoned enlightened us. We collaborated on a comedy which ultimately was to see an Off-Broadway production. We went to the movies, saw mutual friends. I was not unhappy, but a part of me kept remembering that last conversation with Hugh.

  In the early autumn he called me. He was home only for a few days, staying with a friend because he was continuing to sublet his apartment since he was about to go on the road in a Philip Barry play, The Joyous Season, with Ethel Barrymore. It was slated for Broadway, but would try out on the road for several months first. He asked me to have dinner with him the next night.

  This time we met at a restaurant in the Village, and again we talked. He told me about his friendship with Philip Barry, and his admiration for Arthur Hopkins, the director of the play.

  And he told me of his beginnings in the theatre. When he was an undergraduate at Northwestern he became good friends with a graduate student, Walter Kerr, later to become one of the theatre’s most distinguished critics. When Walter finished his degree, he went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., to teach and to direct plays in that university’s excellent theatre. Sometimes he would bring Broadway stars down to Wash
ington to play leads. Sometimes the stars were not yet stars. Hugh gained rich experience working under Walter’s direction.

  One day he got a phone call from a nun in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She explained that she was the head of the theatre department in her college there, and that they were planning to do Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as their biggest production ever, and they had called Catholic University for advice about getting a Broadway star, and Walter Kerr had suggested Hugh. They would pay all his expenses and one hundred dollars.

  To an unemployed young actor, that sounded like a good deal.

  A tall young woman named Jean Collins met his train. If he stood up straight, Hugh was six feet three inches tall. Jean was nearly six feet tall and always on the lookout for tall men. Before they reached the college she had asked Hugh to the prom, and thus began a friendship that would endure through the years.

  Walter Kerr was invited to the production and came, mostly to see Hugh, but also looking for talent for Catholic University. Walter is not a tall man; Walter looked for girls who were shorter than he. Hugh said, “Walter, I want you to meet Jean Collins. Jean, this is Walter Kerr.” And that was that. Jean Collins became Mrs. Walter Kerr, the Jean Kerr who was to write such best-selling books as Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and such Broadway hits as Mary, Mary.

  I, in turn, shared my friends: Cavada, who had washed the pots and pans and was becoming a superb actress; Pat, tall and socially awkward like me, with whom I could talk about anything, and who was to become a distinguished physician.

  Walter was also responsible for Hugh’s friendship with Philip Barry. He had managed to persuade Julie Hayden to come to Washington to play in Barry’s Hotel Universe. She was already a well-known Broadway star, having made her mark in Sean O’Casey’s Shadow and Substance and William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life. Then Walter called Hugh to come and play the male lead.

  Rehearsals were in a big gym, and after rehearsals the actors played with the equipment. One afternoon Hugh jumped up to one of the rings, caught it, and pulled himself upside down. At that moment the rope broke.

  He woke up in the hospital with a fractured pelvis, fractured collarbone, multiple bruises. Why he didn’t break his neck, heaven knows. Father Hardtke, the head of the theatre department, stood by his hospital bed and said, “The doctor tells me that if we postpone the show a week you’ll be able to go on. Julie has agreed to stay. How about it?”

  When Hugh got out of the hospital he went to rehearsal in a wheelchair, then on crutches, then with a cane.

  And then he was on.

  He had big hopes for Hotel Universe. Surely with Julie Hayden playing opposite him, he would be seen by Broadway producers. There was no air shuttle in those days; it was several grimy hours by train, but Julie was a big enough draw to bring important people down from New York. This production could mean everything to Hugh’s career.

  The opening came and went. Nothing happened. As far as he knew, nobody came from New York. He returned to his apartment on Fifty-fifth Street still in pain, feeling sore and depressed.

  One day out of the blue a telegram came: Call me at the Theatre Guild Regards Philip Barry.

  Hugh suspected that one of his friends was playing a joke on him, but he called the Theatre Guild anyhow. Indeed, Philip Barry had been trying to find him. A close friend of Barry’s had been at the opening of Hotel Universe (she wouldn’t have been there at the original opening date the week before), and had called Barry: “I’ve found your new leading man for you.”

  And so Hugh got his first big break on Broadway in Philip Barry’s Without Love. Barry, he said, was all set to have him play opposite Katharine Hepburn, but Kate said that she was far too insecure to play with a totally unknown actor, no matter how handsome and talented. But Barry saw to it that Hugh was given another role, was standby for Elliott Nugent, and was assistant stage manager. Later he played Nugent’s role opposite Constance Bennett. This led to a featured role with Helen Hayes in Harriet. By the time Hugh and I met, he was assured of featured roles and he had earned them; he was an honest actor, as well as an excellent one; reliable (on time for rehearsals; did not get drunk); faithful to the intent of the playwright, imaginative in interpretation, not overwhelmed with his own importance.

  He starred in Ruth and Arnold Goetz’s One-Man Show, then went off on the road with Ethel Barrymore. When they played in New Haven, he came back to New York after the show Sunday night and asked me out to dinner on Monday. We came back to my apartment after the meal and talked, and my heart beat rapidly because I knew that this was the night he was going to ask me to marry him.

  Just as we were, I felt, approaching the moment, the doorbell rang. Reluctantly I went to answer it, and it was a man with whom I went out occasionally, a physician and psychiatrist who should have had enough sensitivity to know when he was barging in. He didn’t. After half an hour or so, Hugh stood up and said he had to leave. The next day he would be in Philadelphia. I didn’t know when I would see him again.

  My mother came to New York in early November to spend a month with me, to see some plays, hear some music, see old friends. She already knew many of my friends, had met Hugh and hadn’t much liked him (“He was too possessive,” she said later), but Hugh was on tour with Miss Barrymore and wasn’t around.

  I was not letting my mother or anybody else know that I was seeing Hugh again. If things weren’t going to work out this time, nobody was going to know it. I had worn my heart on my sleeve and everybody had seen it bleed and that wasn’t going to happen again.

  My birthday was at the end of the month. Hugh wired roses to me, but Bob also sent flowers and asked me out to dinner; I had calls or presents from a couple of other young men. On the second of December I took Mother to Penn Station and saw her onto the train. It was a Sunday morning. Hardly had I got in the door of my apartment when the phone rang and it was Hugh. He was in New York for the night. Could I have dinner?

  I told him that I had just put my mother on the train and yes, I was free. We went to one of our favorite restaurants in the Village, and after dinner he came home with me. We talked. About this, about that. He suggested that we play records, and chose Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

  He picked up a book of poetry off the shelves and began leafing through it, and then read me Conrad Aiken’s beautiful words:

  Music I heard with you was more than music,

  And bread I broke with you was more than bread.

  And then he said, “Madeleine, will you marry me?”

  And then we talked and talked. He told me that his mother had promised him his grandmother’s wedding band and engagement ring, but that he would buy me anything I wanted. I told him that I would love his grandmother’s rings. We talked about our desire for children, for family life. He told me again about his childhood illness, and that because of it he didn’t expect to live very long, into his fifties, perhaps. We were still in our twenties. The fifties seemed centuries away. And I would take Hugh for any length of time, no matter how short.

  He would be in Philadelphia for another week, but would come again to New York the next Sunday.

  It must have been toward morning when he left. I got undressed and into bed, but was far too wound up to sleep. For some reason I reached for a volume of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and read for the rest of the night. We had agreed not to tell anybody about our engagement, except our parents.

  I called my mother in Jacksonville, asked her how the trip had been, was glad she was safely home, then said, “Oh, by the way, I’m going to get married.”

  Poor Mother.

  She was, of course, to come to love Hugh dearly but at that moment she was not pleased. She had not been forewarned. She had thought that our friendship was long dust. He was an actor and therefore a bad risk. She knew nothing about his family.

  I was furious to learn, later, that she had made some discreet inquiries and been satisfied; now that I am older, with children of my own, I understand
better.

  As for Hugh’s mother, it must have been an equal shock to her when her baby boy wrote to tell her that he was marrying what she called “a bachelor girl,” living alone in Greenwich Village, who had written two novels, acted in the theatre, and was an Episcopalian! This last may have been the most bitter blow of all.

  What must she have felt when Hugh and I were married in a church with the heathenish name of St. Chrysostom’s?

  But I loved her son. I might not be able to iron his shirts so that they were fit to wear, in those days before drip-dry materials, but I loved him.

  She sent him the rings and Hugh brought them to me, a broad gold wedding band which he would keep until the day of our wedding, and a gold engagement ring with a small diamond in a Victorian setting. He also brought me a pair of gold and topaz (my birthstone) earrings, so that I would have something from him which he himself had bought.

  A few weekends later I gave a party, inviting all of Hugh’s and my friends, though not mentioning that he was going to be there, or even that he was in town. When everybody arrived, Hugh walked out of the kitchen and we shared our news.

  I had hidden my heart well. The astonishment of the group was a delight. But it was not only astonishment at this union of two people our friends had thought separate forever, it was genuine joy that at last Hugh and I had come together, where we belonged.

  INTERLUDE

  I learned fairly early in my marriage that I did not have to confide everything on my mind to my husband; this would be putting on him burdens which I was supposed to carry myself. When a bride insists on telling her lover everything, I suspect she is looking for a father, not a husband. Some of my life was mine to be known by me alone. But our marriage was ours, belonged to the two of us, and was full of wonderful things, terrible things, joyous things, grievous things, but ours.

  Crosswicks is an icon of our marriage, that old house we have loved for forty years. We bought it in the spring of our marriage for the (even then) amazing sum of sixty-three hundred dollars. It was my first real experience with a house.