by Jerry eBooks
Just then a punch line came in the dialogue. The curtain banged down on the first act.
II
DOROTHY came into the dressing-room physically tired because she had wrung herself inside out in the role, for no reason, except that she had believed in the part and she had lived in it.
She sat before the battered little mirror in the room which was smaller almost than a telephone booth, but was at least private; she sat with her head in her arms, crying a little through the sheer relief that the performance was over and she was Dorothy Noel of Greenwich Village once more.
How much longer would it go on like this, night after night, the smell of gas strangling in her lungs, and slivers of wood slipping through the thin soles in her shoes? How much longer wearing no stockings, existing on doughnuts and spaghetti, and tramping around from agent to agent and theater to theater?
This was art, but she wanted recognition and fame and money and nice cars. She had thought at first that this was temporary, but after a year, where was the rainbow, the promised prince, the Cinderella finish? You could burn yourself up here and die in the gutter and who would know or care?
She took her head from her arms and looked up into her own face. That mirror—you couldn’t tell whether you were getting jaundice or were just tired. She dipped her hands into the cold cream, then smeared it on her face until she glistened like a Channel swimmer.
Her hands moved in a circle on her cheeks, rubbed the cold cream into her forehead, under her chin, and then she heard voices outside the room. Excitement which warned her something was up. She looked toward a window through which she might flee.
Suddenly her mind leaped back in time to Michigan and to the memory of her godfather whom she had hit on the skull so that he dropped at her feet. Her godfather and dramatic coach and only parent lying there, motionless, blood running from his head. She saw herself backing away, with a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. She had rebuffed his advances until this was the only way. She had packed and fled. She hadn’t known whether he was dead or alive. She had been too hysterical to wait and see.
Hearing the noise in the hall she thought of this, as she always thought of it. Of the police.
She rose, shaking in every limb, knowing she could never squeeze through the window; knowing that if this was the end she had to face it. Just then she heard a smooth, round voice. It was just a little shrill, but it was dramatic, it carried force and depth.
“I should like to see Dorothy Noel.” Dorothy opened the door, and stood back against it, her face flushed, and glistening with cold cream.
“I’m Miss Noel,” she said. She saw a small old woman whose eyes shone with a fierceness that almost frightened her. “You are—Rhea Davis?”
“Yes. I saw the performance.”
The whole cast was gathering now, Clifton prominent, of course, Clifton standing there with his hands on his hips, looking the world’s greatest legitimate actress up and down, as though she were a piece of merchandise he was considering purchasing. Clifton, with his shaggy black hair, and his shining black eyes, and his jutting cheekbones and jaw, his rough handsomeness despite all this. Clifton Dell, twenty-four years old, the playwright, actor, producer. Clifton, the very torch of the little theatre.
Words rushed to Dorothy’s lips: “I hope you liked the show. It was so good of you to come.”
“I thought you were tremendous,” Rhea Davis said quietly.
Dorothy couldn’t breathe. She just stood there with the dank little back-stage swimming around her. She saw Sherry Moore. Sherry, with her pinkish-red hair, and her oval face, and the little bags under her eyes. Sherry, plump, thirty, full of laughter and hard talk, and carrying a great big heart on her sleeve. She saw Robert Weston, gaunt and tall, and she read the awe in his eyes; she saw Mary O’Connor, seventeen, and cute, a trifle short, a nose that turned up.
SHE saw these people, and Clifton; Clifton, his eyes burning. If Dor thy had worked, Clifton had slaved. All night. One play after another. Rehearsals and production and worrying about everything. Clifton had chained his life to this; he had let the stone wheel of suffering roll over and over him and each time he was crushed he laughed, bitterly, cocksure. The world was wrong, he was right. The ignorant fools didn’t know what a drama was.
“How was the play?” he said hoarsely. “How was the play, Mrs. Davis?” He looked wild—and never more desperate.
“The play was all right,” Mrs. Davis said.
“It was good, wasn’t it? It had—ah—it had smash, and fire and real stuff, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Davis, “it had all of that.”
“It’s better than anything on Broadway, isn’t it?”
“You have promise,” Rhea Davis admitted. “You have a lot of promise.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks.”
Rhea Davis appeared to be a trifle amused at Clifton’s energy, Dorothy thought; amused, if not suddenly envious. The actress looked at Dorothy now. “I should like to coach you, my dear. I see no reason for not coming to the point. Mr. Dell’s play would not have been nearly so good if you had not put over even his clumsy lines.”
“Clumsy lines?” Clifton roared.
“A few of them were.”
He laughed bitterly. “What did you have in your play last winter? Speeches three pages long. But you put most of them over. Some of them God couldn’t have put across. And you talk about me being clumsy.”
Dorothy felt it necessary to cut in. “Clifton, do you realize you’re talking to the world’s greatest actress?”
“Listen, Dot,” he said, “I realize this: the great day has come, and I’m getting my oar in, if I have to tie Mrs. Davis up and sell her Clifton Dell in seventeen easy lessons.”
“Mrs. Davis,” said Dorothy, “I’m sorry. I—”
Rhea Davis smiled thinly and took Dorothy’s letter from her purse and fanned herself with it. The heat was stifling.
“I should like you to spend the summer with me, Miss Noel,” she went on. “I think I shall be able to do something for you.”
Dorothy said: “Oh, I . . . Oh, that’d be—”
“I live in Mamaroneck,” Mrs. Davis continued. “Come tomorrow. Come early. Telephone from the station and I will send a car for you.” She turned to the rest of the cast. “You all did very well, and I regret that my house is limited, else I should be tempted to invite you all. I urge you to keep on. I shall ask producers to drop down and see you now and again.”
Clifton Dell caught her arm. “Mrs. Davis—”
“Yes?”
“Couldn’t I come?”
“You mean for the summer?”
“You know what I mean. Like Dorothy. I write every bit as well as she acts. I need breaks too. I haven’t got any strong enough leads for the show with Dorothy gone. I can play along like the rest of the so-called little theaters with ham talent, but I won’t . . . Then I can come?”
“Did I say you could?”
“Yes,” said Clifton, “your eyes did. I’ll come on the same train with Dorothy. We’ll call you from the station.”
“Be on the same train,” Mrs. Davis said, and for a moment she kept looking at Clifton. The light in her eyes, and the expression that suddenly flickered across her face, frightened Dorothy.
There was wild confusion the moment Mrs. Davis had gone. People were falling on each other’s necks and laughing and crying and promising one another breaks when the time came. It was during this merriment that Dorothy saw Sherry Moore sobbing; that she saw her slip quietly out the side way, and she did not try to stop her, for there was nothing she could say. Clifton had been heartless, to gain his point. She was Clifton’s girl. Every other week she alternated with Dorothy in the lead roles, so that it had been possible to keep the Seventeenth Street Playhouse going.
BUT Clifton had not even put in a bid for Sherry or mentioned her, and now she was gone. It would have been futile for Dorothy to have tried to stop her. She knew Sherry Moore
inside and out. Blond and hard, a capable actress, but no great fire; a swell assistant, a sensible writer’s aid, a tireless worker, a starve-with-you-till-the-ender, but no part of Clifton Dell’s magnificent future. A stepping stone merely, a broken heart, when there would be a string of them before he wore a crown, and go on stepping on and crushing people.
So Sherry was gone, and Clifton here, laughing, wild, drunk on his own ego, didn’t even know she was gone. He put on his felt hat, cocking it to one side of his head. Then he laughed, showing his white teeth, and said:
“Let us vacate this squalor, Thespians, and off to lights and gaiety!”
Then they were walking on the street, just Dorothy and Clifton, and he was doing a little cake walk. People watched him stroll, and strut, knowing he wasn’t drunk, because it wasn’t that kind of a walk, knowing only that he must be full of wild promise and happiness.
“Why, it’s the best thing that ever happened to the old dame,” he said, “getting us to come out.”
“You think so?”
They walked along, past the diner, across the street from The Jumble Shop. They stopped at Womrath’s and looked at the books in the window.
“I can write better than all those guys,” said Clifton. “What you write with is a lighted torch, not a pen with invisible ink, so the words vanish.”
“You’ve got more confidence than ability,” Dorothy replied, “but you’ve got the ability, too.”
“So have you,” he said. “We’re alike. Like old shoes in an alley getting polished up for Park Avenue. We’re going to turn Broadway and Hollywood upside down.”
“But I’m scared,” said Dorothy.
“Scared?”
“You know,” she said.
He threw back his head and laughed. “You mean Michigan. Because you got orphaned when a train smacked your old man into Kingdom Come and a sweet-pussed godfather took you to his house to live and spent the next six months trying to make you. Don’t be afraid of that. Even if you killed him you can beat it.”
“I just left him there and ran,” she said.
“So what? He had it coming, didn’t he? Are they going to start locking up girls because they defend themselves?”
“But I ran away. I didn’t wait. And as soon as I get a little fame they’re going to come and get me. Oh, I they are, Clifton.”
“You can’t run away and hide,” he said.
“No. No, I’ve got to go on.”
“Where’s Sherry?” he said suddenly. “I saw her go out of the theater, crying,” Dorothy told him.
He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Now isn’t that silly? You’d think she’d want to shout she’d be so happy, wouldn’t you?”
“What’s she got to shout about, I would like to know?”
“Well, she ought to shout for me. Didn’t she help me? Don’t you think she ought to show some pride in my achievement? Well, the hell with her, if she wants to be that way.”
She patted his arm. “Clifton, you’ll some day be either a tremendous success, or you’ll die a violent death. And in either case there’ll be women or a woman behind it . . .”
Dorothy didn’t get back into her apartment until one in the morning. It was a small one-room place on the ground floor. There was a combination bathroom and kitchenette, barely big enough to squeeze into, but it afforded little else. A bookcase crammed with sensational novels Sherry had snitched when she worked for a fly-by-night publisher. Two day cots with cotton mattresses, and one sheet for each; an old green chair, a little three-year-old radio which had cost ten dollars new that Sherry had won in a crap game; a dresser that was warped and had a mirror that gave you three chins and an oblong head. This was home, sweet home.
DOROTHY pulled her suitcase out from under the cot and put it on the bed.
She opened the case, then went to the dresser and started taking out her clothes.
She tried to make a job of it, an occasion, a symbol; good-by to all this, and hello fame, but it was no use. She was packed before she knew it.
Suddenly the door opened. Sherry stood framed in it, then she stepped in, unsteadily, and closed the door behind her. She leaned back against it. Her round face was flushed. She hiccoughed. Her blond hair was disarrayed. Her lip rouge was smeared. She lifted her hand in greeting.
“To the lovely flower of the stage,” she said. “To the lovely, lovely flower of the stage. ‘My dear, I want you to come out for the summer. I think you’re just too, too terrific.’ ”
Dorothy said: “Where have you been?”
“Out slopping beer with coal drivers,” Sherry said. “Dire, dire end, must you be here so soon? Out, flung out into the wilderness of the Village, flitting here and there and the other place, two coal drivers on each arm, and taking bids from sailors!”
“Sherry!”
“Oh, shut up.” Sherry walked over to her bed and flung herself on it. “What do I do now? Take a man in to pay the rent? For what have I worked? A sweet slice of a genius who forgets me while I’m still standing there. It wasn’t that I didn’t know it would come some day. It was only that I didn’t know it would be so sudden, and that it would hit so hard.”
“But—”
“Oh, I’ll go on,” Sherry said. “These things don’t kill you. Only it means that I’m through with the stage. I started big time legitimate and worked down to Seventeenth Street and you and Clifton are going the other way. So that washes me up for good and all. I’ll make the rounds now. I won’t be so high-hat a guy can’t feed me and pay my rent.
I won’t ever starve any more. I’m going to live for what’s left in me.”
“You must hold on,” said Dorothy. “Until summer’s over, until—”
“Until summer’s over. Until leaves turn brown, and I’m a skinny blond instead of a fat one, sitting on a gutter stone with my hair in my eyes. Why kid ourselves?”
Someone pounded on the door.
Dorothy got up and went. It was the man who lived in the apartment across the hall.
“Listen, kid,” he said, “fun’s fun, and you may be waiting for a call from a theatrical agent, but when you start giving my phone number so guys can call you up at three o’clock in the morning—”
Dorothy shared her phone with this man. She had her name in the book, but the number was the same under which his was listed. She and Sherry had managed to pay him two dollars a month.
She stepped across the hall into his apartment. It occurred to her that Mrs. Davis might be calling to cancel the invitation.
“Miss Dorothy Noel?” It was a man’s voice.
“Yes.”
“This is a friend,” the voice went on. “I feel it my duty to warn you not to accept Mrs. Rhea Davis’ house party invitation.”
“But I—”
“If you value your life,” the voice continued, “you will stay away.”
“But I can’t!”
“Remember it is your life!” said the voice. Then the line went dead.
Dorothy was a little dazed when she came back into her own apartment. Sherry asked about the call, and she said: “It was a mistake.” She was afraid to talk about the call. She was afraid that Sherry or Clifton would try and make her stay in New York.
Dorothy lay sleepless throughout the night, her arm under her head, and her throat dry with suffocation. When there was light she got up, and made the coffee. Sherry was drowsy and the skin seemed to be flat and dead on her face. She sat in her slip in the old green chair, dipping her doughnut in the coffee and not smiling, but saying once:
“So it’s another day.”
III
WHILE Dorothy finished packing she turned on the radio, and tried to be cheerful. She had on her hat and her purse was in her hand, when, turning, she was startled to see Sherry standing at the door. Sherry stood very straight.
“So long, peanut,” she said.
Dorothy said: “But—”
Then she embraced Sherry, crying a little, and telling her she
didn’t want to go and leave her here; and Sherry cried too, saying all the things you say when you’re being a good sport and a martyr . . .
Clifton was waiting at Grand Central. He was nervous and Dorothy thought he looked strange, out of his element—needing a haircut and wearing an immaculate though wrinkled linen suit, and an old Panama hat. Dorothy looked somewhat better in cool green and a leghorn bonnet that shaded her eyes.
On the train she watched the soot of the tunnel as they pulled out, and she listened to the click of the wheels on the rails.
“Did you get a phone call last night?” Clifton asked.
She stiffened.
“So did I,” he said. He looked as though he was going to say more about it, then instead he glanced into the aisles and up at the ads.
Dorothy had expected Clifton to scoff, and now she felt herself growing tense. As the train swished from the tunnel into the open sunshine, rumbled across the Harlem River Bridge and left the sweltering island of Manhattan behind, she tried to put it out of her mind. She thought about her father whom a train had killed. She had been only seven when her mother died and all she remembered about her was what her father had told her. She had been in a circus, a great, beautiful woman who could make tigers perform; and when one of the tigers had scratched her, her father had married her and taken her out of the life to settle down as the wife of a lawyer. But she had never been really happy, Dorothy’s father said. She was too vital for a small town, and she was restless, with the circus in her blood, until the day she died.
It was strange that although it was her father she had known, it was actually her mother Dorothy remembered when she thought of him. Her mother, and Henry Myers, after her father’s death. There had been nowhere for her to go and because Henry Myers was her godfather he had taken her in. Henry with his round, flabby face, and his dark, shining eyes; Henry, the widower, watching her when she rehearsed for local amateur theatricals, staring at her while she ate her breakfasts in the mornings, questioning her when she returned from a date with a boy, and then kissing her for the first time, taking her into his arms while she fought him.