by Jane Bowles
(LIONEL comes downstairs. GERTRUDE stiffens and pulls MOLLY to her side with a strong hand, holding her there as a guard holds his prisoner.)
GERTRUDE Lionel, we’re going. It’s all settled. We’re leaving at once. Molly’s coming with me and she’s not coming back.
MOLLY (Her voice sticking in her throat) I …
LIONEL (Seeing her stand there, overpowered by her mother, as if by a great tree, accepts the pattern as utterly hopeless once and for all. Then, after a moment) Good-bye, Molly. Have a nice time at the birthday supper … (Bitterly) You look very pretty in that dress.
(He exits through oyster-shell door.)
GERTRUDE (After a moment. Calm and firm, certain of her triumph) Molly, we’re going now. You’ve said good-bye. There’s no point in standing around here any longer.
MOLLY (Retreating) Leave me alone …
GERTRUDE Molly, what is it? Why are you acting this way?
MOLLY I want to go out.
GERTRUDE Molly!
MOLLY I’m going … I’m going out.
GERTRUDE (Blocking her way) I’ll make it all up to you. I’ll give you everything you wanted, everything you’ve dreamed about.
MOLLY You told me not to dream. You’re all changed … You’re not like you used to be.
GERTRUDE I will be, darling. You’ll see … when we’re together. It’s going to be the same, just the way it was. Tomorrow we’ll go back and look at the vines, thicker and more beautiful …
MOLLY I’m going … Lionel!
GERTRUDE (Blocking her way, fiendish from now on) He did it. He changed you. He turned you against me.
MOLLY Let me go … You’re all changed.
GERTRUDE You can’t go. I won’t let you. I can stop you. I can and I will.
(There is a physical struggle between them near the oyster-shell door.)
MOLLY (Straining to get through the door and calling in a voice that seems to come up from the bottom of her heart) Lionel!
GERTRUDE I know what you did … I didn’t want to … I was frightened, but I knew … You hated Vivian. I’m the only one in the world who knows you. (MOLLY aghast ceases to struggle. They hold for a moment before GERTRUDE releases her grip on MOLLY. Confident now that she has broken her daughter’s will forever) Molly, we’re going … We’re going home.
MOLLY (Backing away in horror) No!
GERTRUDE Molly, we’re going! (MOLLY continues to retreat) If you don’t (MOLLY, shaking her head still retreats) If you don’t, I’ll tell her! I’ll call Mrs. Constable.
MOLLY (Still retreating) No …
GERTRUDE (Wild, calling like an animal) Mrs. Constable! Mrs. Constable! (To MOLLY, shaking her) Do you see what you’re doing to me! Do you? (MRS. CONSTABLE appears in doorway. GERTRUDE drags MOLLY brutally out of her corner near the staircase and confronts her with MRS. CONSTABLE) I have something to tell you, Mrs. Constable. It’s about Molly. It’s about my daughter … She hated Vivian. My daughter hated yours and a terrible ugly thing happened … an ugly thing happened on the cliffs …
MRS. CONSTABLE (Defiantly) Nothing happened … Nothing!
GERTRUDE (Hanging on to MOLLY, who is straining to go) It had to happen. I know Molly … I know her jealousy … I was her whole world, the only one she loved … She wanted me all to herself … I know that kind of jealousy and what it can do to you … I know what it feels like to wish someone dead. When I was a little girl … I … (She stops dead as if a knife had been thrust in her heart now. The hand holding MOLLY’S in its hard iron grip slowly relaxes. There is a long pause. Then, under her breath) Go … (MOLLY’S flight is sudden. She is visible in the blue light beyond the oyster-shell door only for a second. The Mexican band starts playing the wedding song from Act One. GERTRUDE stands as still as a statue. MRS. CONSTABLE approaches, making a gesture of compassion) The band is playing on the beach. They’re playing their music. Go, Mrs. Constable … Please.
(MRS. CONSTABLE exits through oyster-shell door.)
FREDERICA (Entering from street, calling, exuberant) Eastman Cuevas! Eastman Cuevas! Uncle Umberto is ready. We are waiting in the car … Where’s Molly? (She falters at the sight of GERTRUDE’S white face. Then, with awe) Ay dios … ¿Qué pasa? ¿Qué tiene? Miss Eastman Cuevas, you don’t feel happy? (She unpins a simple bouquet of red flowers and puts it into GERTRUDE’S hand) For your birthday, Miss Eastman Cuevas … your birthday …
(She backs away into the shadows, not knowing what to do next. GERTRUDE is standing rigid, the bouquet stuck in her hand.)
GERTRUDE (Almost in a whisper, as the curtain falls) When I was a little girl …
Plain Pleasures
Plain Pleasures
Alva Perry was a dignified and reserved woman of Scotch and Spanish descent, in her early forties. She was still handsome, although her cheeks were too thin. Her eyes particularly were of an extraordinary clarity and beauty. She lived in her uncle’s house, which had been converted into apartments, or tenements, as they were still called in her section of the country. The house stood on the side of a steep, wooded hill overlooking the main highway. A long cement staircase climbed halfway up the hill and stopped some distance below the house. It had originally led to a power station, which had since been destroyed. Mrs. Perry had lived alone in her tenement since the death of her husband eleven years ago; however, she found small things to do all day long and she had somehow remained as industrious in her solitude as a woman who lives in the service of her family.
John Drake, an equally reserved person, occupied the tenement below hers. He owned a truck and engaged in free-lance work for lumber companies, as well as in the collection and delivery of milk cans for a dairy.
Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry had never exchanged more than the simplest greeting in all the years that they had lived here in the hillside house.
One night Mr. Drake, who was standing in the hall, heard Mrs. Perry’s heavy footsteps, which he had unconsciously learned to recognize. He looked up and saw her coming downstairs. She was dressed in a brown overcoat that had belonged to her dead husband, and she was hugging a paper bag to her bosom. Mr. Drake offered to help her with the bag and she faltered, undecided, on the landing.
“They are only potatoes,” she said to him, “but thank you very much. I am going to bake them out in the back yard. I have been meaning to for a long time.”
Mr. Drake took the potatoes and walked with a stiff-jointed gait through the back door and down the hill to a short stretch of level land in back of the house which served as a yard. Here he put the paper bag on the ground. There was a big new incinerator smoking near the back stoop and in the center of the yard Mrs. Perry’s uncle had built a roofed-in pigpen faced in vivid artificial brick. Mrs. Perry followed.
She thanked Mr. Drake and began to gather twigs, scuttling rapidly between the edge of the woods and the pigpen, near which she was laying her fire. Mr. Drake, without any further conversation, helped her to gather the twigs, so that when the fire was laid, she quite naturally invited him to wait and share the potatoes with her. He accepted and they sat in front of the fire on an overturned box.
Mr. Drake kept his face averted from the fire and turned in the direction of the woods, hoping in this way to conceal somewhat his flaming-red cheeks from Mrs. Perry. He was a very shy person and though his skin was naturally red all the time it turned to such deep crimson when he was in the presence of a strange woman that the change was distinctly noticeable. Mrs. Perry wondered why he kept looking behind him, but she did not feel she knew him well enough to question him. She waited in vain for him to speak and then, realizing that he was not going to, she searched her own mind for something to say.
“Do you like plain ordinary pleasures?” she finally asked him gravely.
Mr. Drake felt very much relieved that she had spoken and his color subsided. “You had better first give me a clearer notion of what you mean by ordinary pleasures, and then I’ll tell you how I feel about them,” he answered soberly, halting after every f
ew words, for he was as conscientious as he was shy.
Mrs. Perry hesitated. “Plain pleasures,” she began, “like the ones that come without crowds or fancy food.” She searched her brain for more examples. “Plain pleasures like this potato bake instead of dancing and whisky and bands.… Like a picnic but not the kind with a thousand extra things that get thrown out in a ditch because they don’t get eaten up. I’ve seen grown people throw cakes away because they were too lazy to wrap them up and take them back home. Have you seen that go on?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Mr. Drake.
“They waste a lot,” she remarked.
“Well, I do like plain pleasures,” put in Mr. Drake, anxious that she should not lose the thread of the conversation.
“Don’t you think that plain pleasures are closer to the heart of God?” she asked him.
He was a little embarrassed at her mentioning anything so solemn and so intimate on such short acquaintance, and he could not bring himself to answer her. Mrs. Perry, who was ordinarily shut-mouthed, felt a stream of words swelling in her throat.
“My sister, Dorothy Alvarez,” she began without further introduction, “goes to all gala affairs downtown. She has invited me to go and raise the dickens with her, but I won’t go. She’s the merriest one in her group and separated from her husband. They take her all the places with them. She can eat dinner in a restaurant every night if she wants to. She’s crazy about fried fish and all kinds of things. I don’t pay much mind to what I eat unless it’s a potato bake like this. We each have only one single life which is our real life, starting at the cradle and ending at the grave. I warn Dorothy every time I see her that if she doesn’t watch out her life is going to be left aching and starving on the side of the road and she’s going to get to her grave without it. The farther a man follows the rainbow, the harder it is for him to get back to the life which he left starving like an old dog. Sometimes when a man gets older he has a revelation and wants awfully bad to get back to the place where he left his life, but he can’t get to that place—not often. It’s always better to stay alongside of your life. I told Dorothy that life was not a tree with a million different blossoms on it.” She reflected upon this for a moment in silence and then continued. “She has a box that she puts pennies and nickles in when she thinks she’s running around too much and she uses the money in the box to buy candles with for church. But that’s all she’ll do for her spirit, which is not enough for a grown woman.”
Mr. Drake’s face was strained because he was trying terribly hard to follow closely what she was saying, but he was so fearful lest she reveal some intimate secret of her sister’s and later regret it that his mind was almost completely closed to everything else. He was fully prepared to stop her if she went too far.
The potatoes were done and Mrs. Perry offered him two of them.
“Have some potatoes?” she said to him. The wind was colder now than when they had first sat down, and it blew around the pigpen.
“How do you feel about these cold howling nights that we have? Do you mind them?” Mrs. Perry asked.
“I surely do,” said John Drake.
She looked intently at his face. “He is as red as a cherry,” she said to herself.
“I might have preferred to live in a warm climate maybe,” Mr. Drake was saying very slowly with a dreamy look in his eye, “if I happened to believe in a lot of unnecessary changing around. A lot of going forth and back, I mean.” He blushed because he was approaching a subject that was close to his heart.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mrs. Perry. “A lot of switching around is no good.”
“When I was a younger man I had a chance to go way down south to Florida,” he continued. “I had an offer to join forces with an alligator-farm project, but there was no security in the alligators. It might not have been a successful farm; it was not the risk that I minded so much, because I have always yearned to see palm trees and coconuts and the like. But I also believed that a man has to have a pretty good reason for moving around. I think that is what finally stopped me from going down to Florida and raising alligators. It was not the money, because I was not raised to give money first place. It was just that I felt then the way I do now, that if a man leaves home he must leave for some very good reason—like the boys who went to construct the Panama Canal or for any other decent reason. Otherwise I think he ought to stay in his own home town, so that nobody can say about him, ‘What does he think he can do here that we can’t?’ At least that is what I think people in a strange town would say about a man like myself if I landed there with some doutbful venture as my only excuse for leaving home. My brother don’t feel that way. He never stays in one place more than three months.” He ate his potato with a woeful look in his eye, shaking his head from side to side.
Mrs. Perry’s mind was wandering, so that she was very much startled when he suddenly stood up and extended his hand to her.
“I’ll leave now,” he said, “but in return for the potatoes, will you come and have supper with me at a restaurant tomorrow night?”
She had not received an invitation of this kind in many years, having deliberately withdrawn from life in town, and she did not know how to answer him. “Do you think I should do that?” she asked.
Mr. Drake assured her that she should do it and she accepted his invitation. On the following afternoon, Mrs. Perry waited for the bus at the foot of the short cement bridge below the house. She needed help and advice from her sister about a lavender dress which no longer fitted her. She herself had never been able to sew well and she knew little about altering women’s garments. She intended to wear her dress to the restaurant where she was to meet John Drake, and she was carrying it tucked under her arm.
Dorothy Alvarez lived on a side street in one half of a two-family house. She was seated in her parlor entertaining a man when Mrs. Perry rang the bell. The parlor was immaculate but difficult to rest in because of the many bright and complicated patterns of the window curtains and the furniture covers, not the least disquieting of which was an enormous orange and black flowerpot design repeated a dozen times on the linoleum floor covering.
Dorothy pulled the curtain aside and peeked out to see who was ringing her bell. She was a curly-headed little person, with thick, unequal cheeks that were painted bright pink.
She was very much startled when she looked out and saw her sister, as she had not been expecting to see her until the following week.
“Oh!” Dorothy exclaimed.
“Who is it?” her guest asked.
“It’s my sister. You better get out of here, because she must have something serious to talk to me about. You better go out the back door. She don’t like bumping up against strangers.”
The man was vexed, and left without bidding Dorothy goodbye. She ran to the door and let Mrs. Perry in.
“Sit down,” she said, pulling her into the parlor. “Sit down and tell me what’s new.” She poured some hard candy from a paper bag into a glass dish.
“I wish you would alter this dress for me or help me do it,” said Mrs. Perry. “I want it for tonight. I’m meeting Mr. Drake, my neighbor, at the restaurant down the street, so I thought I could dress in your house and leave from here. If you did the alteration yourself. I’d pay you for it.”
Dorothy’s face fell. “Why do you offer to pay me for it when I’m your sister?”
Mrs. Perry looked at her in silence. She did not answer, because she did not know why herself. Dorothy tried the dress on her sister and pinned it here and there. “I’m glad you’re going out at last,” she said. “Don’t you want some beads?”
“I’ll take some beads if you’ve got a spare string.”
“Well I hope this is the right guy for you,” said Dorothy, with her customary lack of tact. “I would give anything for you to be in love, so you would quit living in that ugly house and come and live on some street nearby. Think how different everything would be for me. You’d be jollier too if you had a hus
band who was dear to you. Not like the last one.… I suppose I’ll never stop dreaming and hoping,” she added nervously because she realized, but, as always, a little too late, that her sister hated to discuss such matters. “Don’t think,” she began weakly, “that I’m so happy here all the time. I’m not so serious and solemn as you, of course.…”
“I don’t know what you’ve been talking about,” said Alva Perry, twisting impatiently. “I’m going out to have a dinner.”
“I wish you were closer to me,” whined Dorothy. “I get blue in this parlor some nights.”
“I don’t think you get very blue,” Mrs. Perry remarked briefly.
“Well, as long as you’re going out, why don’t you pep up?”
“I am pepped up,” replied Mrs. Perry.
* * *
Mrs. Perry closed the restaurant door behind her and walked the full length of the room, peering into each booth in search of her escort. He had apparently not yet arrived, so she chose an empty booth and seated herself inside on the wooden bench. After fifteen minutes she decided that he was not coming and, repressing the deep hurt that this caused her, she focused her full attention on the menu and succeeded in shutting Mr. Drake from her mind. While she was reading the menu, she unhooked her string of beads and tucked them away in her purse. She had called the waitress and was ordering pork when Mr. Drake arrived. He greeted her with a timid smile.
“I see that you are ordering your dinner,” he said, squeezing into his side of the booth. He looked with admiration at her lavender dress, which exposed her pale chest. He would have preferred that she be bareheaded because he loved women’s hair. She had on an ungainly black felt hat which she always wore in every kind of weather. Mr. Drake remembered with intense pleasure the potato bake in front of the fire and he was much more excited than he had imagined he would be to see her once again.