Three Plays of Tennessee Williams

by Tennessee Williams

  AMANDA: Inside where?

  LAURA: I went in the art museum and the bird-houses at the Zoo. I visited the penguins every day! Sometimes I did without lunch and went to the movies. Lately I've been spending most of my afternoons in the jewel-box, that big glass-house where they raise the tropical flowers.

  AMANDA: You did all this to deceive me, just for deception? [Laura looks down.] Why?

  LAURA: Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!

  AMANDA: Hush!

  LAURA: I couldn't face it.

  [Pause. A whisper of strings.]

  AMANDA [hopelessly fingering the huge pocketbook]: So what are we going to do the rest of our lives? Stay home and watch the parades go by? Amuse ourselves with the glass menagerie, darling? Eternally play those worn-out phonograph records your father left as a painful reminder of him? We won't have a business career—we've given that up because it gave us nervous indigestion! [Laughs wearily.] What is there left but dependency all our lives? I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South—barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife!—stuck away in some little mousetrap of a room—encouraged by one in-law to visit another—little birdlike women without any nest—eating the crust of humility all their life!

  Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves? I swear it's the only alternative I can think of!

  It isn't a very pleasant alternative, is it? Of course - some girls do marry.

  [Laura twists her hands nervously.]

  Haven't you ever liked some boy?

  LAURA: Yes. I liked one once. [Rises.] I came across his picture a while ago.

  AMANDA [with some interest]. He gave you his picture?

  LAURA: No, it's in the year-book.

  AMANDA: [disappointed]: Oh—a high-school boy.

  LAURA: Yes. His name was Jim. [Laura lifts the heavy year-book from the claw-foot table.] Here he is in The Pirates of Penzance.

  AMANDA [absently]: The what?

  LAURA: The operetta the senior class put on. He had a wonderful voice and we sat across the aisle from each other Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in the Aud. Here he is with the silver cup for debating! See his grin?

  AMANDA [absently]: He must have had a jolly disposition.

  LAURA: He used to call me—Blue Roses.

  AMANDA: Why did he call you such a name as that?

  LAURA: When I had that attack of pleurosis—he asked me what was the matter when I came back. I said pleurosis—he thought that I said Blue Roses! So that's what he always called me after that. Whenever he saw me, he'd holler, 'Hello, Blue Roses!' I didn't care for the girl that he went out with. Emily Meisenbach. Emily was the best-dressed girl at Soldan. She never struck me, though, as being sincere.... It says in the Personal Section—they're engaged. That's—six years ago! They must be married by now.

  AMANDA: Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man. [Gets up with a spark of revival.] Sister, that's what you'll do!

  [Laura utters a startled, doubtful laugh. She reaches quickly for a piece of glass.]

  LAURA: But, Mother—

  AMANDA: Yes? [Crossing to photograph.]

  LAURA [in a tone of frightened apology]: I'm—crippled!

  AMANDA: Nonsense! Laura, I've told you never, never to use that word. Why, you're not crippled, you just have a little defect—hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it—develop charm—and vivacity and—charm! That's all you have to do! [She turns again to the photograph.] One thing your father had plenty of—was charm!

  [Tom motions to the fiddle in the wings.]

  THE SCENE FADES OUT WITH MUSIC

  SCENE THREE

  [Tom speaks from the fire-escape landing.]

  TOM: After the fiasco at Rubicam's Business College, the idea of getting a gentleman caller f

  or Laura began to play a more and more important part in Mother's calculations. It became an obsession. Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment...

  An evening at home rarely passed without some allusion to this image, this specter, this hope.

  Even when he wasn't mentioned, his presence hung in Mother's preoccupied look and in my sister's frightened, apologetic manner—hung like a sentence passed upon the Wingfields!

  Mother was a woman of action as well as words.

  She began to take logical steps in the planned direction. Late that winter and in the early spring - realizing that extra money would be needed to properly feather the nest and plume the bird - she conducted a vigorous campaign on the- telephone, roping in subscribers to one of those magazines for matrons called The Home-maker's Companion, the type of journal that features the serialized sublimations of ladies of letters who think in terms of delicate cup-like breasts, slim, tapering waists, rich, creamy thighs, eyes like wood-smoke in autumn, fingers that soothe and caress like strains of music, bodies as powerful as Etruscan sculpture.

  [Amanda enters with phone on long extension cord. She is spotted in the dim stage.]

  AMANDA: Ida Scott? This is Amanda Wingfield! We missed you at the D.A.R. last Monday! I said to myself: She's probably suffering with that sinus condition! How is that sinus condition?

  Horrors! Heaven have mercy!—You're a Christian martyr, yes, that's what you are, a Christian martyr!

  Well, I just have happened to notice that your subscription to the Companion's about to expire! Yes, it expires with the next issue, honey!—just when that wonderful new serial by Bessie Mae Hopper is getting off to such an exciting start. Oh, honey, it's something that you can't miss! You remember how 'Gone with the Wind' took everybody by storm? You simply couldn't go out if you hadn't read it. All everybody talked was Scarlet O'Hara. Well, this is a book that critics already compare to Gone with the Wind. It's the 'Gone with the Wind' of the post-World War generation!—What?—Burning!—Oh, honey, don't let them burn, go take a look in the oven and I'll hold the wire! Heavens—I think she's hung up!

  [DIM OUT]

  [Before the stage is lighted, the violent voices of Tom and Amanda are heard.

  They are quarrelling behind the portières. In front of them stands Laura with clenched hands and panicky expression. A clear pool of light on her figure throughout this scene.]

  TOM: What in Christ's name am I—

  AMANDA [shrilly]: Don't you use that—

  TOM: Supposed to do!

  AMANDA: Expression! Not in my—

  TOM: Ohhh!!

  AMANDA: Presence! Have you gone out of your senses?

  TOM: I have, that's true, driven out!

  AMANDA: What is the matter with you, you—big—big IDIOT!

  TOM: Look!—I've got no thing, no single thing—

  AMANDA: Lower your voice!

  TOM: In my life here that I can call my OWN! Everything is—

  AMANDA: Stop that shouting!

  TOM: Yesterday you confiscated my books! You had the nerve to—

  AMANDA: I took that horrible novel back to the library—yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. [Tom laughs wildly.] I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them—[Tom laughs still more wildly.] BUT I WON'T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! NO, no, no, no, no!

  TOM: House, house! Who pays rent on it, who makes a slave of himself to—

  AMANDA [fairly screeching]: Don't you DARE to—

  TOM: No, no, I mustn't say things! I've got to just—

  AMANDA: Let me tell you—

  TOM: I don't want to hear any more! [He tears the portières open. The upstage area is lit with a turgid smoky red glow.]

  [Amanda's hair is in metal curlers and she wears a very old bathrobe much too large for
her slight figure, a relic of the faithless Mr. Wingfield. An upright typewriter and a wild disarray of manuscripts are on the drop-leaf table. The quarrel was probably precipitated by his creative labour. A chair lying overthrown on the floor.

  Their gesticulating shadows are cast on the ceiling by the fiery glow.]

  AMANDA: You will hear more, you—

  TOM: No, I won' t hear more, I'm going out!

  AMANDA: You come right back in—

  TOM: Out, out, out! Because I'm—

  AMANDA: Come back here, Tom Wingfield! I'm not through talking to you!

  TOM: Oh, go—

  LAURA [desperately]: —Tom!

  AMANDA: You're going to listen, and no more insolence from you! I'm at the end of my patience!

  [He comes back toward her.]

  TOM: What do you think I'm at? Aren't I supposed to have any patience to reach the end of, Mother? I know, I know. It seems unimportant to you, what I'm doing—what I want to do—having a little difference between them! You don't think that—

  AMANDA: I think you've been doing things that you're ashamed of. That's why you act like this. I don't believe that you go every night to the movies. Nobody goes to the movies night after night. Nobody in their right mind goes to the movies as often as you pretend to. People don't go to the movies at nearly midnight, and movies don't let out at two a.m. Come in stumbling. Muttering to yourself like a maniac! You get three hours' sleep and then go to work. Oh, I can picture the way you're doing down there. Moping, doping, because you're in no condition.

  TOM [wildly]: No, I'm in no condition!

  AMANDA: What right have you got to jeopardize your job - jeopardize the security of us all? How do you think we'd manage if you were—

  TOM: Listen! You think I'm crazy about the warehouse? [He bends fiercely toward her slight figure.] You think I'm in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that—celotex interior! with—fluorescent—tubes! Look! I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains—than go back mornings! I go! Every time you come in yelling that God damn 'Rise and Shine!' 'Rise and Shine!' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are!' But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self—selfs' all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I'd be where he is—GONE! [Pointing to father’s picture.] As far as the system of transportation reaches! [He starts past her. She grabs his arm.] Don't grab at me, Mother!

  AMANDA: Where are you going?

  TOM: I'm going to the movies!

  AMANDA: I don't believe that lie!

  TOM [crouching toward her, over-towering her tiny figure. She backs away, gasping]: I'm going to opium dens! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals' hang-outs, Mother. I've joined the Hogan gang, I'm a hired assassin, I carry a tommy-gun in a violin case! I run a string of cat-houses in the Valley! They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, I'm leading a double-life, a simple, honest warehouse worker by day, by night a dynamic tsar of the underworld, Mother. I go to gambling casinos, I spin away fortunes on the roulette table! I wear a patch over one eye and a false moustache, sometimes I put on green whiskers. On those occasions they call me—El Diablo! Oh, I could tell you things to make you sleepless! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. They're going to blow us all sky-high some night! I'll be glad, very happy, and so will you! You'll go up, up on a broomstick, over Blue Mountain with seventeen gentlemen callers! You ugly—babbling old—witch…. [He goes through a series of violent, clumsy movements, seizing his overcoat, lunging to do door, pulling it fiercely open. The women watch him, aghast. His arm catches in the sleeve of the coat as he struggles to pull it on. For a moment he is pinioned by the bulky garment. With an outraged groan he tears the coat of again, splitting the shoulder of it, and hurls it across the room. It strikes against the shelf of Laura's glass collection, there is a tinkle of shattering glass. Laura cries out as if wounded.]

  [MUSIC: 'The Glass Menagerie']

  LAURA [shrilly] : My glass!—menagerie.... [She covers her face and turns away.]

  [But Amanda is still stunned and stupefied by the 'ugly witch' so that she barely notices this occurrence. Now she recovers her speech.]

  AMANDA [in an awful voice]: I won't speak to you—until you apologize! [She crosses through portières and draws them together behind her. Tom is left with Laura. Laura clings weakly to the mantel with her face averted. Tom stares at her stupidly for a moment. Then he crosses to shelf. Drops awkwardly on his knees to collect the fallen glass, glancing at Laura as if he would speak but couldn't.]

  'The Glass Menagerie' steals in as

  THE SCENE DIMS OUT

  SCENE FOUR

  [The interior is dark. Faint light in the alley.

  A deep-voiced bell in a church is tolling the hour of five as the scene commences.

  Tom appears at the top of the alley. After each solemn boom of the bell in the tower, he shakes a little noise-maker or rattle as if to express the tiny spasm of man in contrast to the sustained power and dignity of the Almighty. This and the unsteadiness of his advance make it evident that he has been drinking.

  As he climbs the few steps to the fire-escape landing light steals up inside. Laura appears in night-dress observing Tom's empty bed in the front room.

  Tom fishes in his pockets for door-key removing a motley assortment of articles in the search, including a perfect shower of movie-ticket stubs and an empty bottle. At last he finds the key, but just as he is about to insert it, it slips from his fingers. He strikes a match and crouches below the door.]

  TOM [bitterly]: One crack—and it falls through!

  [Laura opens the door.]

  LAURA: Tom! Tom, what are you doing?

  TOM: Looking for a door-key.

  LAURA: Where have you been all this time?

  TOM: I have been to the movies.

  LAURA: All this time at the movies?

  TOM: There was a very long programme. There was a Garbo picture and a Mickey Mouse and a travelogue and a newsreel and a preview of coming attractions. And there was an organ solo and a collection for the milk-fund—simultaneously—which ended up in a terrible fight between a fat lady and an usher!

  LAURA [innocently]: Did you have to stay through everything?

  TOM: Of course! And, oh, I forgot! There was a big stage show! The headliner on this stage show was Malvolio the Magician. He performed wonderful tricks, many of them, such as pouring water back and forth between pitchers. First it turned to wine and then it turned to beer and then it turned to whisky. I knew it was whisky it finally turned into because he needed somebody to come up out of the audience to help him, and I came up - both shows! It was Kentucky Straight Bourbon. A very generous fellow, he gave souvenirs. [He pulls from his back pocket a shimmering rainbow-coloured scarf.] He gave me this. This is his magic scarf. You can have it, Laura. You wave it over a canary cage and you get a bowl of gold- fish. You wave it over the gold-fish bowl and they fly away canaries.... But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail, [He has come inside.] There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this 2 by 4 situation! [Flops on to a bed and starts removing shoes.]

  LAURA: Tom—Shhh!

  TOM: What're you shushing me for?

  LAURA: You'll wake up mother.

  TOM: Goody, goody! Pay 'er back for all those 'Rise an' Shines'. [Lies down, groaning.] You know it don't take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?

  [As if in answer, the father's grinning photograph lights up.]

  [SCENE DIMS OUT.]

  [Immediately following: The church bell is heard striking six. At the sixth stroke the alarm clock goes off in Amanda's room, and after a few moments we hear her calling 'Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine! Laura, go tell
your brother to rise and shine!']

  TOM [sitting up slowly]: I'll rise—but I won't shine…

  [The light increases.]

  AMANDA: Laura, tell your brother his coffee is ready.

  [Laura slips into front room.]

  LAURA: Tom!—It's nearly seven. Don't make mother nervous. [He stares at her stupidly. Beseechingly.] Tom, speak to mother this morning. Make up with her, apologize, speak to her!

  TOM: She won't to me. It's her that started not speaking.

  LAURA: If you just say you're sorry she'll start speaking.

  TOM: Her not speaking—is that such a tragedy?