Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

by Tennessee Williams

  Please hold me! I’ve been so lonely. It’s lonelier than death, if I’ve gone mad, it’s lonelier than death!

  GEORGE [shocked, disgusted]: Cathie! —you’ve got a hell of a nerve.

  [She falls back, panting, covers her face, runs a few paces and grabs the back of a chair. Mrs. Holly enters.]

  MRS. HOLLY: What’s the matter, George? Is Catharine ill?

  GEORGE: No.

  DOCTOR: Miss Catharine had an injection that made her a little unsteady.

  MRS. HOLLY: What did he say about Catharine?

  [Catharine has gone out into the dazzling jungle of the garden.]

  SISTER [returning]: She’s gone into the garden.

  DOCTOR: That’s all right, she’ll come back when I call her.

  SISTER: It may be all right for you. You’re not responsible for her.

  [Mrs. Venable has reentered.]

  MRS. VENABLE: Call her now!

  DOCTOR: Miss Catharine! Come back. [To the Sister:] Bring her back, please, Sister!

  [Catharine enters quietly, a little unsteady.]

  Now, Miss Catharine, you’re going to tell the true story.

  CATHARINE: Where do I start the story?

  DOCTOR: Wherever you think it started.

  CATHARINE: I think it started the day he was born in this house.

  MRS. VENABLE: Ha! You see!

  GEORGE: Cathie.

  DOCTOR: Let’s start later than that. [Pause.] Shall we begin with last summer?

  CATHARINE: Oh. Last summer.

  DOCTOR: Yes. Last summer.

  [There is a long pause. The raucous sounds in the garden fade into a bird song which is clear and sweet. Mrs. Holly coughs. Mrs. Venable stirs impatiently. George crosses downstage to catch Catharine’s eye as he lights a cigarette.]

  CATHARINE: Could I—?

  MRS. VENABLE: Keep that boy away from her!

  GEORGE: She wants to smoke, Aunt Vi.

  CATHARINE: Something helps in the—hands. . . .

  SISTER: Unh unh!

  DOCTOR: It’s all right, Sister. [He lights her cigarette.] About last summer: how did it begin?

  CATHARINE: It began with his kindness and the six days at sea that took me so far away from the—Duelling Oaks that I forgot them, nearly. He was affectionate with me, so sweet and attentive to me, that some people took us for a honeymoon couple until they noticed that we had—separate staterooms, and—then in Paris, he took me to Patou and Schiaparelli’s—this is from Schiaparelli’s! [Like a child, she indicates her suit.] —bought me so many new clothes that I gave away my old ones to make room for my new ones in my new luggage to—travel. . . . I turned into a peacock! Of course, so was he one, too. . . .

  GEORGE: Ha ha!

  MRS. VENABLE: Shh!

  CATHARINE: But then I made the mistake of responding too much to his kindness, of taking hold of his hand before he’d take hold of mine, of holding onto his arm and leaning on his shoulder, of appreciating his kindness more than he wanted me to, and, suddenly, last summer, he began to be restless, and—oh!

  DOCTOR: Go on.

  CATHARINE: The Blue Jay notebook!

  DOCTOR: Did you say notebook?

  MRS. VENABLE: I know what she means by that, she’s talking about the school composition book with a Blue Jay trademark that Sebastian used for making notes and revisions on his Poem of Summer. It went with him everywhere that he went, in his jacket pocket, even his dinner jacket. I have the one that he had with him last summer. Foxhill! The Blue Jay notebook!

  [Miss Foxhill rushes in with a gasp.]

  It came with his personal effects shipped back from Cabeza de Lobo.

  DOCTOR: I don’t quite get the connection between new clothes and so forth and the Blue Jay notebook.

  MRS. VENABLE: I HAVE IT! —Doctor, tell her I’ve found it.

  [Miss Foxhill hears this as she comes back out of house: gasps with relief, retires.]

  DOCTOR: With all these interruptions it’s going to be awfully hard to—

  MRS. VENABLE: This is important. I don’t know why she mentioned the Blue Jay notebook but I want you to see it. Here it is, here! [She holds up a notebook and leafs swiftly through the pages.] Title? Poem of Summer, and the date of the summer—1935. After that: what? Blank pages, blank pages, nothing but nothing! —last summer. . . .

  DOCTOR: What’s that got to do with—?

  MRS. VENABLE: His destruction? I’ll tell you. A poet’s vocation is something that rests on something as thin and fine as the web of a spider, Doctor. That’s all that holds him over! —out of destruction. . . . Few, very few are able to do it alone! Great help is needed! I did give it! She didn’t.

  CATHARINE: She’s right about that. I failed him. I wasn’t able to keep the web from—breaking. . . . I saw it breaking but couldn’t save or—repair it!

  MRS. VENABLE: There now, the truth’s coming out. We had an agreement between us, a sort of contract or covenant between us which he broke last summer when he broke away from me and took her with him, not me! When he was frightened and I knew when and what of, because his hands would shake and his eyes looked in, not out, I’d reach across a table and touch his hands and say not a word, just look, and touch his hands with my hand until his hands stopped shaking and his eyes looked out, not in, and in the morning, the poem would be continued. Continued until it was finished!

  [The following ten speeches are said very rapidly, overlapping.]

  CATHARINE: I—couldn’t!

  MRS. VENABLE: Naturally not! He was mine! I knew how to help him, I could! You didn’t, you couldn’t!

  DOCTOR: These interruptions—

  MRS. VENABLE: I would say “You will” and he would, I—!

  CATHARINE: Yes, you see, I failed him! And so, last summer, we went to Cabeza de Lobo, we flew down there from where he gave up writing his poem last summer. . . .

  MRS. VENABLE: Because he’d broken our—

  CATHARINE: Yes! Yes, something had broken, that string of pearls that old mothers hold their sons by like a—sort of a—sort of—umbilical cord, long—after . . .

  MRS. VENABLE: She means that I held him back from—

  DOCTOR: Please!

  MRS. VENABLE: Destruction!

  CATHARINE: All I know is that suddenly, last summer, he wasn’t young any more, and we went to Cabeza de Lobo, and he suddenly switched from the evenings to the beach. . . .

  DOCTOR: From evenings? To beach?

  CATHARINE: I mean from the evenings to the afternoons and from the fa—fash—

  [Silence. Mrs. Holly draws a long, long painful breath. George stirs impatiently.]

  DOCTOR: Fashionable! Is that the word you—?

  CATHARINE: Yes. Suddenly, last summer Cousin Sebastian changed to the afternoons and the beach.

  DOCTOR: What beach?

  CATHARINE: In Cabeza de Lobo there is a beach that’s named for Sebastian’s name saint, it’s known as La Playa San Sebastian, and that’s where we started spending all afternoon, every day.

  DOCTOR: What kind of beach was it?

  CATHARINE: It was a big city beach near the harbor.

  DOCTOR: It was a big public beach?

  CATHARINE: Yes, public.

  MRS. VENABLE: It’s little statements like that that give her away.

  [The Doctor rises and crosses to Mrs. Venable without breaking his concentration on Catharine.]

  After all I’ve told you about his fastidiousness, can you accept such a statement?

  DOCTOR: You mustn’t interrupt her.

  MRS. VENABLE [overlapping him]: That Sebastian would go every day to some dirty free public beach near a harbor? A man that had to go out a mile in a boat to find water fit to swim in?

  DOCTOR: Mrs. Venable, no matter what she says you have to let her say
it without any more interruptions or this interview will be useless.

  MRS. VENABLE: I won’t speak again. I’ll keep still, if it kills me.

  CATHARINE: I don’t want to go on. . . .

  DOCTOR: Go on with the story. Every afternoon last summer your Cousin Sebastian and you went out to this free public beach?

  CATHARINE: No, it wasn’t the free one, the free one was right next to it, there was a fence between the free beach and the one that we went to that charged a small charge of admission.

  DOCTOR: Yes, and what did you do there?

  [He still stands beside Mrs. Venable and the light gradually changes as the girl gets deeper into her story: the light concentrates on Catharine, the other figures sink into shadow.]

  Did anything happen there that disturbed you about it?

  CATHARINE: Yes!

  DOCTOR: What?

  CATHARINE: He bought me a swimsuit I didn’t want to wear. I laughed. I said, “I can’t wear that, it’s a scandal to the jay birds!”

  DOCTOR: What did you mean by that? That the suit was immodest?

  CATHARINE: My God, yes! It was a one-piece suit made of white lisle, the water made it transparent! [She laughs sadly at the memory of it.] —I didn’t want to swim in it, but he’d grab my hand and drag me into the water, all the way in, and I’d come out looking naked!

  DOCTOR: Why did he do that? Did you understand why?

  CATHARINE: —Yes! To attract! —Attention.

  DOCTOR: He wanted you to attract attention, did he, because he felt you were moody? Lonely? He wanted to shock you out of your depression last summer?

  CATHARINE: Don’t you understand? I was PROCURING for him!

  [Mrs. Venable’s gasp is like the sound that a great hooked fish might make.]

  She used to do it, too.

  [Mrs. Venable cries out.]

  Not consciously! She didn’t know that she was procuring for him in the smart, the fashionable places they used to go to before last summer! Sebastian was shy with people. She wasn’t. Neither was I. We both did the same thing for him, made contacts for him, but she did it in nice places and in decent ways and I had to do it the way that I just told you! —Sebastian was lonely, Doctor, and the empty Blue Jay notebook got bigger and bigger, so big it was big and empty as that big empty blue sea and sky. . . . I knew what I was doing. I came out in the French Quarter years before I came out in the Garden District. . . .

  MRS. HOLLY: Oh, Cathie! Sister . . .

  DOCTOR: Hush!

  CATHARINE: And before long, when the weather got warmer and the beach so crowded, he didn’t need me any more for that purpose. The ones on the free beach began to climb over the fence or swim around it, bands of homeless young people that lived on the free beach like scavenger dogs, hungry children. . . . So now he let me wear a decent dark suit. I’d go to a faraway empty end of the beach, write postcards and letters and keep up my—third-person journal till it was—five o’clock and time to meet him outside the bathhouses, on the street. . . . He would come out, followed.

  DOCTOR: Who would follow him out?

  CATHARINE: The homeless, hungry young people that had climbed over the fence from the free beach that they lived on. He’d pass out tips among them as if they’d all—shined his shoes or called taxis for him. . . . Each day the crowd was bigger, noisier, greedier! —Sebastian began to be frightened. —At last we stopped going out there. . . .

  DOCTOR: And then? After that? After you quit going out to the public beach?

  CATHARINE: Then one day, a few days after we stopped going out to the beach—it was one of those white blazing days in Cabeza de Lobo, not a blazing hot blue one but a blazing hot white one.

  DOCTOR: Yes?

  CATHARINE: We had a late lunch at one of those open-air restaurants on the sea there—Sebastian was white as the weather. He had on a spotless white silk Shantung suit and a white silk tie and a white panama and white shoes, white—white lizard skin—pumps! He— [She throws back her head in a startled laugh at the recollection.] —kept touching his face and his throat here and there with a white silk handkerchief and popping little white pills in his mouth, and I knew he was having a bad time with his heart and was frightened about it and that was the reason we hadn’t gone out to the beach. . . .

  [During the monologue the lights have changed, the surrounding area has dimmed out and a hot white spot is focused on Catharine.]

  “I think we ought to go north,” he kept saying, “I think we’ve done Cabeza de Lobo, I think we’ve done it, don’t you?” I thought we’d done it! —but I had learned it was better not to seem to have an opinion because if I did, well, Sebastian, well, you know Sebastian, he always preferred to do what no one else wanted to do, and I always tried to give the impression that I was agreeing reluctantly to his wishes . . . it was a—game. . . .

  SISTER: She’s dropped her cigarette.

  DOCTOR: I’ve got it, Sister.

  [There are whispers, various movements in the penumbra. The Doctor fills a glass for her from the cocktail shaker.]

  CATHARINE: Where was I? Oh, yes, that five o’clock lunch at one of those fish places along the harbor of Cabeza de Lobo, it was between the city and the sea, and there were naked children along the beach which was fenced off with barbed wire from the restaurant and we had our table less than a yard from the barbed wire fence that held the beggars at bay. . . . There were naked children along the beach, a band of frightfully thin and dark naked children that looked like a flock of plucked birds, and they would come darting up to the barbed wire fence as if blown there by the wind, the hot white wind from the sea, all crying out, “Pan, pan, pan!”

  DOCTOR [quietly]: What’s pan?

  CATHARINE: The word for bread, and they made gobbling noises with their little black mouths, stuffing their little black fists to their mouths and making those gobbling noises, with frightful grins! —Of course we were sorry that we had come to this place but it was too late to go. . . .

  DOCTOR [quietly]: Why was it “too late to go”?

  CATHARINE: I told you Cousin Sebastian wasn’t well. He was popping those little white pills in his mouth. I think he had popped in so many of them that they had made him feel weak. . . . His, his! —eyes looked—dazed, but he said: “Don’t look at those little monsters. Beggars are a social disease in this country. If you look at them, you get sick of the country, it spoils the whole country for you. . . .”

  DOCTOR: Go on.

  CATHARINE: I’m going on. I have to wait now and then till it gets clearer. Under the drug it has to be a vision, or nothing comes. . . .

  DOCTOR: All right?

  CATHARINE: Always when I was with him I did what he told me. I didn’t look at the band of naked children, not even when the waiters drove them away from the barbed wire fence with sticks! —Rushing out through a wicket gate like an assault party in war! —and beating them screaming away from the barbed wire fence with the sticks. . . . Then! [Pause.]

  DOCTOR: Go on, Miss Catherine, what comes next in the vision?

  CATHARINE: The, the, the! —band of children began to—serenade us. . . .

  DOCTOR: Do what?

  CATHARINE: Play for us! On instruments! Make music! —if you could call it music. . . .

  DOCTOR: Oh?

  CATHARINE: Their, their—instruments were—instruments of percussion! —Do you know what I mean?

  DOCTOR [making a note]: Yes. Instruments of percussion such as—drums?

  CATHARINE: I stole glances at them when Cousin Sebastian wasn’t looking, and as well as I could make out in the white blaze of the sand-beach, the instruments were tin cans strung together.

  DOCTOR [slowly, writing]: Tin—cans—strung—together.

  CATHARINE: And, and, and, and—and! —bits of metal, other bits of metal that had been flattened out, made into—

 
DOCTOR: What?

  CATHARINE: Cymbals! You know? Cymbals?

  DOCTOR: Yes. Brass plates hit together.

  CATHARINE: That’s right, Doctor. —Tin cans flattened out and clashed together! —Cymbals. . . .

  DOCTOR: Yes. I understand. What’s after that, in the vision?

  CATHARINE [rapidly, panting a little]: And others had paper bags, bags made out of—coarse paper!—with something on a string inside the bags which they pulled up and down, back and forth, to make a sort of a—

  DOCTOR: Sort of a—?

  CATHARINE: Noise like—

  DOCTOR: Noise like?

  CATHARINE [rising stiffly from chair]: Ooompa! Oompa! Ooooooompa!

  DOCTOR: Ahhh . . . a sound like a tuba?

  CATHARINE: That’s right!—they made a sound like a tuba. . . .

  DOCTOR: Oompa, oompa, oompa, like a tuba.

  [He is making a note of the description.]

  CATHARINE: Oompa, oompa, oompa, like a—

  [Short pause.]

  DOCTOR: —Tuba. . . .

  CATHARINE: All during lunch they stayed at a—a fairly close—distance. . . .

  DOCTOR: Go on with the vision, Miss Catharine.

  CATHARINE [striding about the table]: Oh, I’m going on, nothing could stop it now!!

  DOCTOR: Your Cousin Sebastian was entertained by this

  —concert?

  CATHARINE: I think he was terrified of it!

  DOCTOR: Why was he terrified of it?

  CATHARINE: I think he recognized some of the musicians, some of the boys, between childhood and—older. . . .

  DOCTOR: What did he do? Did he do anything about it, Miss Catharine? —Did he complain to the manager about it?

  CATHARINE: What manager? God? Oh, no! —The manager of the fish place on the beach? Haha! —No! —You don’t understand my cousin!

  DOCTOR: What do you mean?

  CATHARINE: He! —accepted! —all! —as—how! —things! —are! —And thought nobody had any right to complain or interfere in any way whatsoever, and even though he knew that what was awful was awful, that what was wrong was wrong, and my Cousin Sebastian was certainly never sure that anything was wrong! —He thought it unfitting to ever take any action about anything whatsoever! —except to go on doing as something in him directed. . . .