DOCTOR: You went back to the—?
MRS. VENABLE: Terrible Encantadas, those heaps of extinct volcanos, in time to witness the hatching of the sea turtles and their desperate flight to the sea! [There is a sound of harsh bird-cries in the air. She looks up.] —The narrow beach, the color of caviar, was all in motion! But the sky was in motion, too. . . .
DOCTOR: The sky was in motion, too?
MRS. VENABLE: —Full of flesh-eating birds and the noise of the birds, the horrible savage cries of the—
DOCTOR: Carnivorous birds?
MRS. VENABLE: Over the narrow black beach of the Encantadas as the just-hatched sea turtles scrambled out of the sand pits and started their race to the sea. . . .
DOCTOR: Race to the sea?
MRS. VENABLE: To escape the flesh-eating birds that made the sky almost as black as the beach! [She gazes up again: we hear the wild, ravenous, harsh cries of the birds. The sound comes in rhythmic waves like a savage chant.] And the sand all alive, all alive, as the hatched sea-turtles made their dash for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped to attack and hovered and—swooped to attack! They were diving down on the hatched sea turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh. Sebastian guessed that possibly only a hundredth of one per cent of their number would escape to the sea. . . .
DOCTOR: What was it about this spectacle on the beach that fascinated your son?
MRS. VENABLE: My son was looking for— [Stops short: continues evasively—] Let’s just say he was interested in sea turtles.
DOCTOR: You started to say that your son was looking for something.
MRS. VENABLE [defiantly]: All right, I started to say that my son was looking for God and I stopped myself because I was afraid that if I said he was looking for God, you’d say to yourself, “Oh, a pretentious young crackpot!”—which Sebastian was not. All poets look for God, all good poets do, and they have to look harder for Him than priests do since they don’t have the help of such famous guidebooks and well-organized expeditions as priests have with their scriptures and churches. All right! Well, now I’ve said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow’s nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I’ve seen Him! —and he meant God . . .
DOCTOR: I see.
MRS. VENABLE: For several days after that he had a fever, he was delirious with it. I took command of the ship and we sailed north by east into cooler waters . . .
[Miss Foxhill comes out silently on rubber-soled white oxfords, and waits to be noticed. She carries a water glass.]
Next? India, China! —In the Himalayas— [Notices Miss Foxhill.] What? Oh, elixir of—ha! —Isn’t it kind of the drugstore to keep me alive! [Tosses down medicine with a wry face and dismisses Miss Foxhill with a slight gesture.] Where was I?
DOCTOR: In the Himalayas.
MRS. VENABLE: Oh yes, that long-ago summer. . . . In the Himalayas he almost entered a Buddhist monastery, had gone so far as to shave his head and eat just rice out of a wood bowl on a grass mat. He’d promised those sly Buddhist monks that he would give up the world and himself and all his worldly possessions to their mendicant order. —Well, I cabled his father, “For God’s sake notify bank to freeze Sebastian’s accounts!”—I got back this cable from my late husband’s lawyer: “Mr. Venable critically ill Stop Wants you Stop Needs you Stop Immediate return advised most strongly. Stop. Cable time of arrival. . . .”
DOCTOR: Did you go back to your husband?
MRS. VENABLE: I made the hardest decision of my life. I stayed with my son. I got him through that crisis too. In less than a month he got up off the filthy grass mat and threw the rice bowl away— and booked us into Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and the Ritz in Paris— And from then on, oh, we—still lived in a—world of light and shadow. . . . [She turns vaguely with empty glass. He rises and takes it from her.] But the shadow was almost as luminous as the light.
DOCTOR: Don’t you want to sit down now?
MRS. VENABLE: Yes, indeed I do, before I fall down. [He assists her into wheelchair.] —Are your hindlegs still on you?
DOCTOR [still concerned over her agitation]: —My what? Oh—hind legs! —Yes . . .
MRS. VENABLE: Well, then you’re not a donkey, you’re certainly not a donkey because I’ve been talking the hindlegs off a donkey—several donkeys. . . . But I had to make it clear to you that the world lost a great deal too when I lost my son last summer. . . . You would have liked my son, he would have been charmed by you. My son, Sebastian, was not a family snob or a money snob but he was a snob, all right. He was a snob about personal charm in people, he insisted upon good looks in people around him, and, oh, he had a perfect little court of young and beautiful people around him always, wherever he was, here in New Orleans or New York or on the Riviera or in Paris and Venice, he always had a little entourage of the beautiful and the talented and the young!
DOCTOR: Your son was young, Mrs. Venable?
MRS. VENABLE: Both of us were young, and stayed young, Doctor.
DOCTOR: Could I see a photograph of your son, Mrs. Venable?
MRS. VENABLE: Yes, indeed you could, Doctor. I’m glad that you asked to see one. I’m going to show you not one photograph but two. Here. Here is my son, Sebastian, in a Renaissance pageboy’s costume at a masked ball in Cannes. Here is my son, Sebastian, in the same costume at a masked ball in Venice. These two pictures were taken twenty years apart. Now which is the older one, Doctor?
DOCTOR: This photograph looks older.
MRS. VENABLE: The photograph looks older but not the subject. It takes character to refuse to grow old, Doctor—successfully to refuse to. It calls for discipline, abstention. One cocktail before dinner, not two, four, six—a single lean chop and lime juice on a salad in restaurants famed for rich dishes.
[Foxhill comes from the house.]
MISS FOXHILL: Mrs. Venable, Miss Holly’s mother and brother are—
[Simultaneously Mrs. Holly and George appear in the window.]
GEORGE: Hi, Aunt Vi!
MRS. HOLLY: Violet, dear, we’re here.
MISS FOXHILL: They’re here.
MRS. VENABLE: Wait upstairs in my upstairs living room for me. [To Miss Foxhill:] Get them upstairs. I don’t want them at that window during this talk. [To the Doctor:] Let’s get away from the window. [He wheels her to stage center.]
DOCTOR: Mrs. Venable? Did your son have a—well—what kind of a personal, well, private life did—
MRS. VENABLE: That’s a question I wanted you to ask me.
DOCTOR: Why?
MRS. VENABLE: I haven’t heard the girl’s story except indirectly in a watered-down version, being too ill to go to hear it directly, but I’ve gathered enough to know that it’s a hideous attack on my son’s moral character which, being dead, he can’t defend himself from. I have to be the defender. Now. Sit down. Listen to me . . .
[The Doctor sits.]
. . . before you hear whatever you’re going to hear from the girl when she gets here. My son, Sebastian, was chaste. Not c-h-a-s-e-d! Oh, he was chased in that way of spelling it, too, we had to be very fleet-footed I can tell you, with his looks and his charm, to keep ahead of pursuers, every kind of pursuer! —I mean he was c-h-a-s-t-e! —Chaste. . . .
DOCTOR: I understood what you meant, Mrs. Venable.
MRS. VENABLE: And you believe me, don’t you?
DOCTOR: Yes, but—
MRS. VENABLE: But what?
DOCTOR: Chastity at—what age was your son last summer?
MRS. VENABLE: Forty, maybe. We really didn’t count birthdays. . . .
DOCTOR: He lived a celibate life?
MR
S. VENABLE: As strictly as if he’d vowed to! This sounds like vanity, Doctor, but really I was actually the only one in his life that satisfied the demands he made of people. Time after time my son would let people go, dismiss them!—because their, their, their!—attitude toward him was—
DOCTOR: Not as pure as—
MRS. VENABLE: My son, Sebastian, demanded! We were a famous couple. People didn’t speak of Sebastian and his mother or Mrs. Venable and her son, they said “Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian are staying at the Lido, they’re at the Ritz in Madrid. Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian have taken a house at Biarritz for the season,” and every appearance, every time we appeared, attention was centered on us!—everyone else! Eclipsed! Vanity? Ohhhh, no, Doctor, you can’t call it that—
DOCTOR: I didn’t call it that.
MRS. VENABLE: —It wasn’t folie de grandeur, it was grandeur.
DOCTOR: I see.
MRS. VENABLE: An attitude toward life that’s hardly been known in the world since the great Renaissance princes were crowded out of their palaces and gardens by successful shopkeepers!
DOCTOR: I see.
MRS. VENABLE: Most people’s lives—what are they but trails of debris, each day more debris, more debris, long, long trails of debris with nothing to clean it all up but, finally, death. . . . [We hear lyric music.] My son, Sebastian, and I constructed our days, each day, we would—carve out each day of our lives like a piece of sculpture. —Yes, we left behind us a trail of days like a gallery of sculpture! But, last summer— [Pause: the music continues.] I can’t forgive him for it, not even now that he’s paid for it with his life! —he let in this—vandal! This—
DOCTOR: The girl that—?
MRS. VENABLE: That you’re going to meet here this afternoon! Yes. He admitted this vandal and with her tongue for a hatchet she’s gone about smashing our legend, the memory of—
DOCTOR: Mrs. Venable, what do you think is her reason?
MRS. VENABLE: Lunatics don’t have reason!
DOCTOR: I mean what do you think is her—motive?
MRS. VENABLE: What a question! —We put the bread in her mouth and the clothes on her back. People that like you for that or even forgive you for it are, are—hen’s teeth, Doctor. The role of the benefactor is worse than thankless, it’s the role of a victim, Doctor, a sacrificial victim, yes, they want your blood, Doctor, they want your blood on the altar steps of their outraged, outrageous egos!
DOCTOR: Oh. You mean she resented the—
MRS. VENABLE: Loathed! —They can’t shut her up at St. Mary’s.
DOCTOR: I thought she’d been there for months.
MRS. VENABLE: I mean keep her still there. She babbles! They couldn’t shut her up in Cabeza de Lobo or at the clinic in Paris—she babbled, babbled! —smashing my son’s reputation. —On the Berengaria bringing her back to the States she broke out of the stateroom and babbled, babbled; even at the airport when she was flown down here, she babbled a bit of her story before they could whisk her into an ambulance to St. Mary’s. This is a reticule, Doctor. [She raises a cloth bag.] A catchall, carryall bag for an elderly lady which I turned into last summer. . . . Will you open it for me, my hands are stiff, and fish out some cigarettes and a cigarette holder.
[He does.]
DOCTOR: I don’t have matches.
MRS. VENABLE: I think there’s a table-lighter on the table.
DOCTOR: Yes, there is. [He lights it, it flames up high.] My Lord, what a torch!
MRS. VENABLE [with a sudden, sweet smile]: “So shines a good deed in a naughty world,” Doctor—Sugar. . . .
[Pause. A bird sings sweetly in the garden.]
DOCTOR: Mrs. Venable?
MRS. VENABLE: Yes?
DOCTOR: In your letter last week you made some reference to a, to a—fund of some kind, an endowment fund of—
MRS. VENABLE: I wrote you that my lawyers and bankers and certified public accountants were setting up the Sebastian Venable Memorial Foundation to subsidize the work of young people like you that are pushing out the frontiers of art and science but have a financial problem. You have a financial problem, don’t you, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Yes, we do have that problem. My work is such a new and radical thing that people in charge of state funds are naturally a little scared of it and keep us on a small budget, so small that—. We need a separate ward for my patients, I need trained assistants, I’d like to marry a girl I can’t afford to marry! —But there’s also the problem of getting right patients, not just—criminal psychopaths that the state turns over to us for my operation! —because it’s—well—risky. . . . I don’t want to turn you against my work at Lion’s View but I have to be honest with you. There is a good deal of risk in my operation. Whenever you enter the brain with a foreign object . . .
MRS. VENABLE: Yes.
DOCTOR: —Even a needle-thin knife . . .
MRS. VENABLE: Yes.
DOCTOR: —In a skilled surgeon’s fingers . . .
MRS. VENABLE: Yes.
DOCTOR: —There is a good deal of risk involved in—the operation. . . .
MRS. VENABLE: You said that it pacifies them, it quiets them down, it suddenly makes them peaceful.
DOCTOR: Yes. It does that, that much we already know, but—
MRS. VENABLE: What?
DOCTOR: Well, it will be ten years before we can tell if the immediate benefits of the operation will be lasting or—passing or even if there’d still be—and this is what haunts me about it!—any possibility, afterwards, of—reconstructing a—totally sound person, it may be that the person will always be limited afterwards, relieved of acute disturbances but—limited, Mrs. Venable. . . .
MRS. VENABLE: Oh, but what a blessing to them, Doctor, to be just peaceful, to be just suddenly—peaceful. . . .
[A bird sings sweetly in the garden.]
After all that horror, after those nightmares: just to be able to lift up their eyes and see— [She looks up and raises a hand to indicate the sky.] —a sky not as black with savage, devouring birds as the sky that we saw in the Encantadas, Doctor.
DOCTOR: —Mrs. Venable? I can’t guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her—babbling!!
MRS. VENABLE: That may be, maybe not, but after the operation, who would believe her, Doctor?
[Pause: faint jungle music.]
DOCTOR [quietly]: My God. [Pause.] —Mrs. Venable, suppose after meeting the girl and observing the girl and hearing this story she babbles—I still shouldn’t feel that her condition’s—intractable enough! to justify the risks of—suppose I shouldn’t feel that non-surgical treatment such as insulin shock and electric shock and—
MRS. VENABLE: SHE’S HAD ALL THAT AT SAINT MARY’S!! Nothing else is left for her.
DOCTOR: But if I disagreed with you? [Pause.]
MRS. VENABLE: That’s just part of a question: finish the question, Doctor.
DOCTOR: Would you still be interested in my work at Lion’s View? I mean would the Sebastian Venable Memorial Foundation still be interested in it?
MRS. VENABLE: Aren’t we always more interested in a thing that concerns us personally, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Mrs. Venable!!
[Catharine Holly appears between the lace window curtains.]
You’re such an innocent person that it doesn’t occur to you, it obviously hasn’t even occurred to you that anybody less innocent than you are could possibly interpret this offer of a subsidy as—well, as sort of a bribe?
MRS. VENABLE [laughs, throwing her head back]: Name it that—I don’t care—. There’s just two things to remember. She’s a destroyer. My son was a creator! —Now if my honesty’s shocked you—pick up your little black bag without the subsidy in it, and run away from this garden! —Nobody’s heard our conversation but you and I, Doctor Sugar. . . .
[Miss Foxhill comes out o
f the house and calls.]
MISS FOXHILL: Mrs. Venable?
MRS. VENABLE: What is it, what do you want, Miss Foxhill?
MISS FOXHILL: Mrs. Venable? Miss Holly is here, with—
[Mrs. Venable sees Catharine at the window.]
MRS. VENABLE: Oh, my God. There she is, in the window! —I told you I didn’t want her to enter my house again, I told you to meet them at the door and lead them around the side of the house to the garden and you didn’t listen. I’m not ready to face her. I have to have my five o’clock cocktail first, to fortify me. Take my chair inside. Doctor? Are you still here? I thought you’d run out of the garden. I’m going back through the garden to the other entrance. Doctor? Sugar? You may stay in the garden if you wish to or run out of the garden if you wish to or go in this way if you wish to or do anything that you wish to but I’m going to have my five o’clock daiquiri, frozen! —before I face her. . . .
[All during this she has been sailing very slowly off through the garden like a stately vessel at sea with a fair wind in her sails, a pirate’s frigate or a treasure-laden galleon. The young Doctor stares at Catharine framed by the lace window curtains. Sister Felicity appears beside her and draws her away from the window. Music: an ominous fanfare. Sister Felicity holds the door open for Catharine as the Doctor starts quickly forward. He starts to pick up his bag but doesn’t. Catharine rushes out, they almost collide with each other.]
CATHARINE: Excuse me.
DOCTOR: I’m sorry. . . .
[She looks after him as he goes into the house.]
SISTER: Sit down and be still till your family come outside.
DIM OUT
SCENE TWO
Catharine removes a cigarette from a lacquered box on the table and lights it. The following quick, cadenced lines are accompanied by quick, dancelike movement, almost formal, as the Sister in her sweeping white habit, which should be starched to make a crackling sound, pursues the girl about the white wicker patio table and among the wicker chairs: this can be accompanied by quick music.
Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer Page 12