[Slight, tense pause.]
MRS. HOLLY: Violet! Not Lion’s View!
[Sister Felicity had started conducting Catharine back to the patio; she stops her, now.]
SISTER: Wait, dear.
CATHARINE: What for? I know what’s coming.
MRS. VENABLE [at same time]: Why? Are you all prepared to put out a thousand a month plus extra charges for treatments to keep the girl at St. Mary’s?
MRS. HOLLY: Cathie? Cathie, dear?
[Catharine has returned with the Sister.]
Tell Aunt Violet how grateful you are for her makin’ it possible for you to rest an’ recuperate at such a sweet, sweet place as St. Mary’s!
CATHARINE: No place for lunatics is a sweet, sweet place.
MRS. HOLLY: But the food’s good there. Isn’t the food good there?
CATHARINE: Just give me written permission not to eat fried grits. I had yard privileges till I refused to eat fried grits.
SISTER: She lost yard privileges because she couldn’t be trusted in the yard without constant supervision or even with it because she’d run to the fence and make signs to cars on the highway.
CATHARINE: Yes, I did, I did that because I’ve been trying for weeks to get a message out of that “sweet, sweet place.”
MRS. HOLLY: What message, dear?
CATHARINE: I got panicky, Mother.
MRS. HOLLY: Sister, I don’t understand.
GEORGE: What’re you scared of, Sister?
CATHARINE: What they might do to me now, after they’ve done all the rest! —That man in the window’s a specialist from Lion’s View! We get newspapers. I know what they’re . . .
[The Doctor comes out.]
MRS. VENABLE: Why, Doctor, I thought you’d left us with just that little black bag to remember you by!
DOCTOR: Oh, no. Don’t you remember our talk? I had to answer a call about a patient that—
MRS. VENABLE: This is Dr. Cukrowicz. He says it means “sugar” and we can call him “Sugar”—
[George laughs.]
He’s a specialist from Lion’s View.
CATHARINE [cutting in]: WHAT DOES HE SPECIALIZE IN?
MRS. VENABLE: Something new. When other treatments have failed.
[Pause. The jungle clamor comes up and subsides again.]
CATHARINE: Do you want to bore a hole in my skull and turn a knife in my brain? Everything else was done to me!
[Mrs. Holly sobs. George raps his knee with the tennis racket.]
You’d have to have my mother’s permission for that.
MRS. VENABLE: I’m paying to keep you in a private asylum.
CATHARINE: You’re not my legal guardian.
MRS. VENABLE: Your mother’s dependent on me. All of you are! —Financially. . . .
CATHARINE: I think the situation is—clear to me, now. . . .
MRS. VENABLE: Good! In that case. . . .
DOCTOR: I think a quiet atmosphere will get us the best results.
MRS. VENABLE: I don’t know what you mean by a quiet atmosphere. She shouted, I didn’t.
DOCTOR: Mrs. Venable, let’s try to keep things on a quiet level, now. Your niece seems to be disturbed.
MRS. VENABLE: She has every reason to be. She took my son from me, and then she—
CATHARINE: Aunt Violet, you’re not being fair.
MRS. VENABLE: Oh, aren’t I?
CATHARINE [to the others]: She’s not being fair. [Then back to Mrs. Venable:] Aunt Violet, you know why Sebastian asked me to travel with him.
MRS. VENABLE: Yes, I do know why!
CATHARINE: You weren’t able to travel. You’d had a— [She stops short.]
MRS. VENABLE: Go on! What had I had? Are you afraid to say it in front of the Doctor? She meant that I had a stroke. —I DID NOT HAVE A STROKE! —I had a slight aneurism. You know what that is, Doctor? A little vascular convulsion! Not a hemorrhage, just a little convulsion of a blood vessel. I had it when I discovered that she was trying to take my son away from me. Then I had it. It gave a little temporary—muscular—contraction. —To one side of my face. . . . [She crosses back into main acting area.] These people are not blood relatives of mine, they’re my dead husband’s relations. I always detested these people, my dead husband’s sister and—her two worthless children. But I did more than my duty to keep their heads above water. To please my son, whose weakness was being excessively softhearted, I went to the expense and humiliation, yes, public humiliation, of giving this girl a debut which was a fiasco. Nobody liked her when I brought her out. Oh, she had some kind of—notoriety! She had a sharp tongue that some people mistook for wit. A habit of laughing in the faces of decent people which would infuriate them, and also reflected adversely on me and Sebastian, too. But, he, Sebastian, was amused by this girl. While I was disgusted, sickened. And halfway through the season, she was dropped off the party lists, yes, dropped off the lists in spite of my position. Why? Because she’d lost her head over a young married man, made a scandalous scene at a Mardi Gras ball, in the middle of the ballroom. Then everybody dropped her like a hot—rock, but— [She loses her breath.] My son, Sebastian, still felt sorry for her and took her with him last summer instead of me. . . .
CATHARINE [springing up with a cry]: I can’t change truth, I’m not God! I’m not even sure that He could, I don’t think God can change truth! How can I change the story of what happened to her son in Cabeza de Lobo?
MRS. VENABLE [at the same time]: She was in love with my son!
CATHARINE [overlapping]: Let me go back to Saint Mary’s. Sister Felicity, let’s go back to Saint—
MRS. VENABLE [overlapping]: Oh, no! That’s not where you’ll go!
CATHARINE [overlapping]: All right, Lion’s View but don’t ask me to—
MRS. VENABLE [overlapping]: You know that you were!
CATHARINE [overlapping]: That I was what, Aunt Violet?
MRS. VENABLE [overlapping]: Don’t call me “Aunt,” you’re the niece of my dead husband, not me!
MRS. HOLLY [overlapping]: Catharine, Catharine, don’t upset your—Doctor? Oh, Doctor!
[But the Doctor is calmly observing the scene, with detachment. The jungle-garden is loud with the sounds of its feathered and scaled inhabitants.]
CATHARINE: I don’t want to, I didn’t want to come here! I know what she thinks, she thinks I murdered her son, she thinks that I was responsible for his death.
MRS. VENABLE: That’s right. I told him when he told me that he was going with you in my place last summer that I’d never see him again and I never did. And only you know why!
CATHARINE: Oh, my God, I—
[She rushes out toward garden, followed immediately by the Sister.]
SISTER: Miss Catharine, Miss Catharine—
DOCTOR [overlapping]: Mrs. Venable?
SISTER [overlapping]: Miss Catharine?
DOCTOR [overlapping]: Mrs. Venable?
MRS. VENABLE: What?
DOCTOR: I’d like to be left alone with Miss Catharine for a few minutes.
MRS. HOLLY: George, talk to her, George.
[George crouches appealingly before the old lady’s chair, peering close into her face, a hand on her knee.]
GEORGE: Aunt Vi? Cathie can’t go to Lion’s View. Everyone in the Garden District would know you’d put your niece in a state asylum, Aunt Vi.
MRS. VENABLE: Foxhill!
GEORGE: What do you want, Aunt Vi?
MRS. VENABLE: Let go of my chair. Foxhill? Get me away from these people!
GEORGE: Aunt Vi, listen, think of the talk it—
MRS. VENABLE: I can’t get up! Push me, push me away!
GEORGE [rising but holding chair]: I’ll push her, Miss Foxhill.
MRS. VENABLE: Let go of my chair or—
MISS FOXHILL: Mr. Holly, I�
��
GEORGE: I got to talk to her.
[He pushes her chair downstage.]
MRS. VENABLE: Foxhill!
MISS FOXHILL: Mr. Holly, she doesn’t want you to push her.
GEORGE: I know what I’m doing, leave me alone with Aunt Vi!
MRS. VENABLE: Let go me or I’ll strike you!
GEORGE: Oh, Aunt Vi!
MRS. VENABLE: Foxhill!
MRS. HOLLY: George—
GEORGE: Aunt Vi?
[She strikes at him with her cane. He releases the chair and Miss Foxhill pushes her off. He trots after her a few steps, then he returns to Mrs. Holly, who is sobbing into a handkerchief. He sighs, and sits down beside her, taking her hand. The scene fades as light is brought up on Catharine and the Sister in the garden. The Doctor comes up to them. Mrs. Holly stretches her arms out to George, sobbing, and he crouches before her chair and rests his head in her lap. She strokes his head. During this: the Sister has stood beside Catharine, holding onto her arm.]
CATHARINE: You don’t have to hold onto me. I can’t run away.
DOCTOR: Miss Catharine?
CATHARINE: What?
DOCTOR: Your aunt is a very sick woman. She had a stroke last spring?
CATHARINE: Yes, she did, but she’ll never admit it . . .
DOCTOR: You have to understand why.
CATHARINE: I do, I understand why. I didn’t want to come here.
DOCTOR: Miss Catharine, do you hate her?
CATHARINE: I don’t understand what hate is. How can you hate anybody and still be sane? You see, I still think I’m sane!
DOCTOR: You think she did have a stroke?
CATHARINE: She had a slight stroke in April. It just affected one side, the left side, of her face . . . but it was disfiguring, and after that, Sebastian couldn’t use her.
DOCTOR: Use her? Did you say use her?
[The sounds of the jungle-garden are not loud but ominous.]
CATHARINE: Yes, we all use each other and that’s what we think of as love, and not being able to use each other is what’s—hate. . . .
DOCTOR: Do you hate her, Miss Catharine?
CATHARINE: Didn’t you ask me that, once? And didn’t I say that I didn’t understand hate. A ship struck an iceberg at sea—everyone sinking—
DOCTOR: Go on, Miss Catharine!
CATHARINE: But that’s no reason for everyone drowning for hating everyone drowning! Is it, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Tell me: what was your feeling for your cousin Sebastian?
CATHARINE: He liked me and so I loved him.
DOCTOR: In what way did you love him?
CATHARINE: The only way he’d accept: —a sort of motherly way. I tried to save him, Doctor.
DOCTOR: From what? Save him from what?
CATHARINE: Completing! —a sort of! —image! —he had of himself as a sort of! —sacrifice to a! —terrible sort of a—
DOCTOR: —God?
CATHARINE: Yes, a—cruel one, Doctor!
DOCTOR: How did you feel about that?
CATHARINE: Doctor, my feelings are the sort of feelings that you have in a dream. . . .
DOCTOR: Your life doesn’t seem real to you?
CATHARINE: Suddenly last winter I began to write my journal in the third person.
[He grasps her elbow and leads her out upon forestage. At the same time Miss Foxhill wheels Mrs. Venable off, Mrs. Holly weeps into a handkerchief and George rises and shrugs and turns his back to the audience.]
DOCTOR: Something happened last winter?
CATHARINE: At a Mardi Gras ball some—some boy that took me to it got too drunk to stand up! [A short, mirthless note of laughter.] I wanted to go home. My coat was in the cloakroom, they couldn’t find the check for it in his pockets. I said, “Oh, hell, let it go!”—I started out for a taxi. Somebody took my arm and said, “I’ll drive you home.” He took off his coat as we left the hotel and put it over my shoulders, and then I looked at him and—I don’t think I’d ever even seen him before then, really! —He took me home in his car but took me another place first. We stopped near the Duelling Oaks at the end of Esplanade Street. . . . Stopped! —I said, “What for?”—He didn’t answer, just struck a match in the car to light a cigarette in the car and I looked at him in the car and I knew “what for”! —I think I got out of the car before he got out of the car, and we walked through the wet grass to the great misty oaks as if somebody was calling us for help there!
[Pause. The subdued, toneless bird-cries in the garden turn to a single bird song.]
DOCTOR: After that?
CATHARINE: I lost him. —He took me home and said an awful thing to me. “We’d better forget it,” he said, “my wife’s expecting a child and—”—I just entered the house and sat there thinking a little and then I suddenly called a taxi and went right back to the Roosevelt Hotel ballroom. The ball was still going on. I thought I’d gone back to pick up my borrowed coat but that wasn’t what I’d gone back for. I’d gone back to make a scene on the floor of the ballroom, yes, I didn’t stop at the cloakroom to pick up Aunt Violet’s old mink stole, no, I rushed right into the ballroom and spotted him on the floor and ran up to him and beat him as hard as I could in the face and chest with my fists till—Cousin Sebastian took me away. —After that, the next morning, I started writing my diary in the third person, singular, such as “She’s still living this morning,” meaning that I was. . . . —“WHAT’S NEXT FOR HER? GOD KNOWS!”—I couldn’t go out any more. —However one morning my Cousin Sebastian came in my bedroom and said: “Get up!”—Well . . . if you’re still alive after dying, well then, you’re obedient, Doctor. —I got up. He took me downtown to a place for passport photos. Said: “Mother can’t go abroad with me this summer. You’re going to go with me this summer instead of Mother.”—If you don’t believe me, read my journal of Paris! —“She woke up at daybreak this morning, had her coffee and dressed and took a brief walk—”
DOCTOR: Who did?
CATHARINE: She did. I did—from the Hotel Plaza Athénée to the Place de l’Etoile as if pursued by a pack of Siberian wolves! [She laughs her tired, helpless laugh.] —Went right through all stop signs—couldn’t wait for green signals. —“Where did she think she was going? Back to the Duelling Oaks?”—Everything chilly and dim but his hot, ravenous mouth! on—
DOCTOR: Miss Catharine, let me give you something.
[The others go out, leaving Catharine and the Doctor onstage.]
CATHARINE: Do I have to have the injection again, this time? What am I going to be stuck with this time, Doctor? I don’t care. I’ve been stuck so often that if you connected me with a garden hose I’d make a good sprinkler.
DOCTOR [preparing needle]: Please take off your jacket.
[She does. The Doctor gives her an injection.]
CATHARINE: I didn’t feel it.
DOCTOR: That’s good. Now sit down.
[She sits down.]
CATHARINE: Shall I start counting backwards from a hundred?
DOCTOR: Do you like counting backwards?
CATHARINE: Love it! Just love it! One hundred! Ninety-nine! Ninety-eight! Ninety-seven. Ninety-six. Ninety—five— Oh! —I already feel it! How funny!
DOCTOR: That’s right. Close your eyes for a minute.
[He moves his chair closer to hers. Half a minute passes.]
Miss Catharine? I want you to give me something.
CATHARINE: Name it and it’s yours, Doctor Sugar.
DOCTOR: Give me all your resistance.
CATHARINE: Resistance to what?
DOCTOR: The truth. Which you’re going to tell me.
CATHARINE: The truth’s the one thing I have never resisted!
DOCTOR: Sometimes people just think they don’t resist it, but still do.
CATHARINE: They say it’s at th
e bottom of a bottomless well, you know.
DOCTOR: Relax.
CATHARINE: Truth.
DOCTOR: Don’t talk.
CATHARINE: Where was I, now? At ninety?
DOCTOR: You don’t have to count backwards.
CATHARINE: At ninety something?
DOCTOR: You can open your eyes.
CATHARINE: Oh, I do feel funny!
[Silence, pause.]
You know what I think you’re doing? I think you’re trying to hypnotize me. Aren’t you? You’re looking so straight at me and doing something to me with your eyes and your—eyes. . . . Is that what you’re doing to me?
DOCTOR: Is that what you feel I’m doing?
CATHARINE: Yes! I feel so peculiar. And it’s not just the drug.
DOCTOR: Give me all your resistance. See. I’m holding my hand out. I want you to put yours in mine and give me all your resistance. Pass all of your resistance out of your hand to mine.
CATHARINE: Here’s my hand. But there’s no resistance in it.
DOCTOR: You are totally passive.
CATHARINE: Yes, I am.
DOCTOR: You will do what I ask.
CATHARINE: Yes, I will try.
DOCTOR: You will tell the true story.
CATHARINE: Yes, I will.
DOCTOR: The absolutely true story. No lies, nothing not spoken. Everything told, exactly.
CATHARINE: Everything. Exactly. Because I’ll have to. Can I—can I stand up?
DOCTOR: Yes, but be careful. You might feel a little bit dizzy.
[She struggles to rise, then falls back.]
CATHARINE: I can’t get up! Tell me to. Then I think I could do it.
DOCTOR: Stand up.
[She rises unsteadily.]
CATHARINE: How funny! Now I can! Oh, I do feel dizzy! Help me, I’m—
[He rushes to support her.]
—about to fall over. . . .
[He holds her. She looks out vaguely toward the brilliant, steaming garden. Looks back at him. Suddenly sways toward him, against him.]
DOCTOR: You see, you lost your balance.
CATHARINE: No, I didn’t. I did what I wanted to do without you telling me to. [She holds him tight against her.] Let me! Let! Let! Let me! Let me, let me, oh, let me. . . .
[She crushes her mouth to his violently. He tries to disengage himself. She presses her lips to his fiercely, clutching his body against her. Her brother George enters.]
Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer Page 14