by Jess Gregg
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said. “I’ll give it some prayer.”
From then on, I watched him uneasily, waiting for him to inform on me. Balding, and beginning to put on weight, Wilton was an automobile salesman whose special gift was reaching prodigals, and directing them home to a loving Father. For all his platitudes, he became absolutely direct when he sat down with the young convicts, most of whom had grown up without any mature male influence. Some responded at once to his urgency, but when all else failed, he would heap sympathy on their loneliness until they broke down. It seemed a kind of emotional rape to me, and yet by the time he lent them his handkerchief, he usually had them ready to change their ways. LeeRoy, the most unruly of our regulars, had not been put in isolation since Mr. Wilton had shaken him up. Neither had Junior or Highpockets. Only Donnie stayed cheerfully unaffected.
Donnie never seemed to get the idea he had done anything that needed correction. He was like a puppy who bounds about playfully when menaced with the slipper he has just chewed up. Tall and good-looking, this engaging young Black was perfectly ready to oblige whoever had his ear, whether it was Mr. Wilton or the neighborhood drug lord. “I don’t think you’re taking correction seriously,” the judge had told him, when Donnie was arrested for pushing dope a week after serving a year for the same offense. “I’m going to see that you stay off the streets until you can live by the rules.”
Mr. Wilton asked Donnie if he knew what rules were, and Donnie said he did. “But after he’d been explaining for a minute,” Wilton told me, “I realized he was talking about playing basketball.”
Reclaiming Donnie was soon his primary focus. “That boy doesn’t realize he has any worth,” he kept telling the ladies. In an effort to give Donnie some sense of his own value, Wilton piled on the praise whenever the young man remembered to say “thank you”; lauded him for not whispering to the others during silent prayer, and even commended him publicly for using a handkerchief.
Still, there wasn’t much time left to change him. The prison only held a convict until he could be processed to a larger penitentiary such as Sing Sing or Auburn, and Donnie’s transfer was imminent. Mr Wilton tripled his efforts, but nothing seemed to sink in until their final meeting, when the two were saying goodbye. “So, hey, take care yourself, man,” Donnie told Mr. Wilton. He slapped the older man’s palm, basketball style. “See you aroun’, okay?”
Mr. Wilton caught his hand, and holding it between both of his, met Donnie’s eyes squarely. “Go with God, Donnie,” he said. “He loves you, and so do I.”
Donnie started to grin, and then didn’t. Something apparently happened in him that his face wasn’t used to. The other cons, shoving out of the chapel, swept him along, but the look he turned back was of such sudden illumination that the lady with the bluesy voice whispered, “Bingo!”
During the week, Wilton phoned me at home. He had just received a letter from Sing Sing, and with a voice full of glory, announced that Donnie had unequivocally decided to follow the Better Path. “He says it’s something he’s never tried before, but that nothing else in his life had paid off, so why not give it a go?” Wilton’s spirits soared as he quoted a citation about the joy in heaven over one sinner saved.
I said I was glad to hear this, but in fact, I was pestered by quite another feeling. It seemed to me that neither man had remotely understood the other’s message. Some irreverent sense kept suggesting that Donnie had put a strictly jailhouse spin on Mr. Wilton’s statement that he loved him. In which case, Donnie’s willingness to “give it a go” might not be quite what Wilton had in mind.
The collision with reality had already begun when I arrived at the chapel the following Monday. Wilton’s greeting seemed distracted. At the first opportunity, he slipped me a letter that had apparently arrived that day. “Read this!”
Donnie’s handwriting was hard to make out. Here and there, I could decipher some really awful endearments, but only his request for a new pair of high-priced Nike sneakers was entirely legible. The signature, however, was blurred by the imprint of a kiss.
Wilton appeared to have recovered somewhat by the end of prayer meeting, but two days later, he telephoned me in whispered despair. “Oh, God,” he said. “Donnie’s sent me a tracing of his member.”
He had already decided to stop writing any more letters to the young convict. This, however, did not stop Donnie from writing to him. Another letter came a few days later, reminding Wilton about the new sneakers, and visualizing the day when he would be free, and they could move in together. “Man,” Donnie promised, “we sure gone melt down that ol’ bed.”
Reason was no comfort to Mr. Wilton this time. I told him that Donnie would probably have forgotten this romantic intention by the time he had served his sentence. “After all, he’s still got a couple of years to go.”
“We don’t know that,” Wilton cried. “They’re letting prisoners out earlier every year now. And he knows where I live, I gave him my address so he could write to me. By summer, he could be standing on my doorstep with his suit-case, ready for I don’t know what. Can you imagine how I’ll explain to my wife?”
He began pacing back and forth. “Oh, Lord,” he groaned, “I don’t know what to do.”
“I know what I’d do,” I said.
I told him, but he rejected the suggestion unconditionally. “That would break about half the Commandments in the Decalogue,” he protested. “Just what I’d expect of you!”
However, another letter from Sing Sing apparently arrived soon after—one especially fraught with erotic enthusiasm, I suspect, because the next week, Wilton was waiting for me in the prison parking lot, so agitated that he scarcely gave me time to get out of my car. “All right then, have it your way,” he cried. “Only it’ll have to be in your handwriting, because he’d recognize mine.”
He had the note paper ready, and told me what to put down. “Dear Donnie,” he dictated, “it is my sad duty to inform you that dear Mr. Wilton died in his sleep last night—”
It was a long letter full of reverence for the deceased, and he had me sign it “Mary Burns, registered nurse.” Once this was mailed, we heard no more from Donnie.
But it was not the last I heard about the episode. Every time I met Wilton at Sunday school, he had a new explanation for it. These grew to be more and more removed from the original incident, increasingly aglow with nobility and sacrifice, and culminating, he claimed, in Donnie’s permanent redemption. By the end of the year, Wilton had turned his little grain of truth into a really spectacular pearl.
I never let on about this to the Lieutenant, of course. And you can be sure Wilton never let on about me.
Agnes de Mille
15
EATEN ALIVE
She came into the University Place coffee shop for breakfast every morning. The imperious nose and raveled-rope hair easily identified her as Agnes de Mille, but the customers were New Yorkers, used to celebrities, and gave no sign that they noticed. The counter man, however, served her cautiously. “Don’t get in her way, buddy,” he told me once. “She’ll eat you alive.”
I didn’t doubt him for a moment. Ever since she had burst into the public awareness with her stunning choreography for Oklahoma! some twenty years before, she had earned a reputation for fierce independence. I watched her carefully as she ate her scrambled eggs each day, hoping she would do something characteristic that would make a good letter home. She spoke to no one, however, and seldom looked up from the book she brought along, or the manuscript she was correcting. But then, one February morning, she upset her coffee cup.
Leaping up, she snatched her papers out of harm’s way, spattering droplets onto the suddenly hunched shoulders of other customers. As the counter man stayed well out of it, I grabbed some paper napkins and tried to blot up the mess. Perhaps she suddenly realized everyone was watching, possibly enjoying, for she tossed her head, and, gathering up her purse and papers, stalked out of the coffee shop. The counter man l
eaned forward. “See what I’m sayin’?” he said. “She’s probably blamin’ you for it already.”
That possibility seemed even more likely when she marched up to me the next morning. “Are you the young man of yesterday?” she demanded. I nodded, and braced myself for her reprimand. Instead she thanked me briskly, and opened her purse. I had a sudden fear she was going to give me a quarter, and said, “No, no, it was my pleasure.” Except what I said was “my pressure.” And anyway, she was only taking her glasses out of her purse. She searched my face for some sign of coherence, then once more marched away.
Yet after that she sometimes nodded to me. Once she remarked that it was a dreadful morning; once observed that spring had finally arrived. It seemed too tenuous a connection to survive the two weeks I had to be out of town, however, and on my return, I passed her at the counter without making any effort to renew our acquaintance. While she clearly did not like to be bothered, neither apparently would she tolerate being ignored, and on her way out, she addressed me. “You’ve been away.” She meant it kindly, I expect, but it sounded like an accusation.
I told her I had been in Philadelphia. That could mean only one thing to her. “With the try-out of that new musical?” she asked. Even before I admitted it, she took stock of my lanky frame. “But surely you’re not a dancer!”
I explained I was a writer called in to help with revisions. She examined my answer thoughtfully, then sat down beside me and asked about my work—wanted to know if I had ever had anything produced or published, and who I liked to read. She too wrote, she admitted.
I had, in fact, read two of her books, and was able to come up with the title of one, the autobiographical Dance to the Piper. Her eyes were direct, but seemed neither pleased nor surprised at anything I said. Yet when she stood up, it was as if I had passed some kind of test. “All right,” she said, “come have a drink with me at five tonight.”
To make clear that I was accepting an invitation and not obeying a command, I arrived a little late. I had been told to ask the elevator man for “Mrs. Prude,” and he took me up to the ninth floor. A plump French housekeeper ushered me into the living room. Still lit by sunset, it was handsome and comfortable, full of things that were meant to be discovered. A shelf of bound theatre magazines from turn-of-the-century Paris looked especially tempting. Above the fireplace was a portrait of de Mille that seemed to be made of those bright candy dots and dashes that sprinkle children’s birthday cakes. I saw fine Meissen figurines, a flat basket of annotated musical scores, and some of the awards she had won for great Broadway musicals. Brigadoon. Carousel. A bronze bronco commemorated her ballet, Rodeo. I could have browsed happily for several hours, but her brisk footstep in the hall announced that she, at least, kept no one waiting.
She served me a glass of sherry, but was so impatient to discuss what was on her mind that small-talk became microscopic. Suddenly, she pushed a sheaf of papers toward me. “Read this!”
I was aware of her watching intently as I read, which only added to the strain. This was the opening chapter to another book of memoirs, but unlike Dance to the Piper, this seemed to be cover-to-cover complaint. It was not just the raw anger of a woman having to compete in a field that had always been dominated by men, she also worked in the long-time feud with her powerful uncle, Cecil B. De Mille, and trashed heredity for giving her a body so unsuitable for a dancer. I began to feel besieged, and she sensed it immediately. “You don’t much care for the book, do you?” she said. “The fact is, you dislike it intensely.” When I tried to answer with tact, she interrupted. “Nothing but utter frankness can possibly help me.”
We talked about her chapter for nearly an hour, but “utter frankness” seemed to antagonize her as much as diplomacy. When I left, it was with the feeling that I had lost any chance of ever getting to look at her volumes of fin de siecle theatre.
Yet when she came into the coffee shop, the following day, she sat down beside me. “I expect I was very rude last night,” she said. “At all events, it wasn’t you I was impatient with, it was myself, my own limitations.”
She ordered coffee for us both, and, stirring more than she sipped, spoke passionately of what was waiting to be achieved in the theatre, in literature and dance. It was a magnificent vision, one that she was to call to my attention again and again, over the years. She was helplessly a teacher, and even as we sat there at the counter, I had a vision too: that of a tigress licking a cub into shape.
Only as we parted that morning, did she mention her memoirs again. “I’ve put that chapter aside until it calms down,” she said briskly. “You have to let creative work develop in tranquility.”
Tranquility was the no-win word. I saw precious little of it in her, then or ever. Controversy seemed to be her natural element. Even when we would appear to agree, I would suddenly discover we were on opposite sides. Neither of us, for instance, had a good word to say for censorship. How was it, then, that after a lively discussion of it, we stopped speaking for two weeks?
“And if you think that was bad,” said one of her former friends, with a sharp smile, “wait till she finds out that you’re gay.”
“I’m sure she must know already,” I said.
“Then she’s saving it to finish you off with.” The smile grew sharper. “Wait!”
The sort of stress she subjected her friendships to only hinted at the pressure she put on herself. Most of her creative work seemed to be done under the most harrowing tension. Backstage or in shabby rehearsal halls, hounded by traffic noises, arguments in the wings, and an ever-nearing opening date, she could be seen straining to transform some elusive emotion into a complex pattern of movement. When inspiration faltered, her dancers would stand waiting while she paced back and forth, her clasped hands pressed to her brow, every tendon tightened in an effort to force out some innovation. Little wonder, her dancers slyly pronounced her first name “Agonize.”
Yet it was at rehearsal that one could most nearly come to know this driving and driven woman. I think immediately of a winter day in a West Fifty-Seventh Street studio when The Four Marys was taking shape. Structurally, the ballet was nearly complete, but the rich characterizations, always the heart of a de Mille work, were still unrealized by the dancers. Persistently, even with patience, de Mille kept clarifying the emotional relationships, inventing the revealing gesture, improving, refining, encouraging. When a principal ballerina seemed unable to project a certain quality, Agnes took over the role herself to illustrate what she wanted. Lightly touching her partner’s arm, this middle-aged woman in mud-spattered galoshes moved forward to the music, seamlessly transfigured into a tender, trusting girl, glowing with beauty. It wasn’t mere performance. The beauty was de Mille’s own, but I had never seen it before. The costume designer standing beside me had the explanation. “It’s hard for her to let go in real life,” he said. “You come to realize she’s only herself when she can be someone else.”
Generally, she was too busy to make the most of how she looked. Too busy, or too self-conscious. “My sister inherited Mother’s beauty,” she said once. “I got Father’s nose.” She made a magnificent appearance on first nights and for curtain calls, but on ordinary occasions, seemed satisfied if one shoe matched the other. When a tour took her to Moscow, she told one of her dancers, “I must be looking particularly dowdy today—everybody keeps coming up to me and speaking Russian.”
Paradoxically, her increasing fame had begun to limit her opportunities on Broadway—few directors wanted to share authority with her, and opted instead for a choreographer less likely to take over. Consequently, Agnes began focusing her fierce energies elsewhere, forming her own dance company, hustling for its endowment, creating its ballets, and endlessly drawing the public’s attention to it with her appearances on television. This last, though it was great for business, seemed a terrible trial to her. “Too competitive,” she said.
What she meant by this, I didn’t learn until the September day her son left home to
enter college. “—and as if that wasn’t enough to bear,” she said on the telephone, “I have to watch myself on TV in a few minutes. Could you come over and be moral support?”
The uncertainty in her voice was too rare to ignore, and I hurried down the block to her address. The windowless room I was shown into contained little beside the television set and two rocking chairs. Agnes was hunched down in one of these, looking like an old-maid schoolmarm: her mouth was bleak, her dress wrinkled, and her graying hair skewered back. In contrast, the TV screen was beginning to show a stately image moving down a long corridor to sonic booms of Russian music. It was herself in a velvet ball gown that showed off her beautiful bosom and her mother’s jewels. Drawing in close to the camera, she threw her head back and graciously announced, “I am Agnes de Mille.” The woman in the rocking chair sat up contentiously. “The hell you are, honey,” she growled.
Although her dances are full of delicious insights, and she often spoke with great wit, I have never been certain she had a sense of humor. Yet sometimes, especially during the summer, she lapsed unaware into fun. “Come out to Merriewold for the weekend,” she would call up and say. “We’ll be very informal, just family.”
Family was her husband, Walter Prude, a well-made, crisply assured man, and their son, Jonathan, then in his teens. The estate had been her playwright father’s, and was several hours’ drive from the city, an unpretentious farmhouse in the Catskills. There was a lake nearby, and acres of woods, where dappled shadows sometimes turned out to be deer. Nothing much was ever planned. We wandered, we ate, we read. A volume pulled from the shelves was likely to have John Barrymore’s bookplate in it, or an affectionate inscription from Mary Martin. Agnes seemed almost relaxed here—even on the day Paulette, her French housekeeper, overturned the table of priceless Canton china. The whole household sat out in the sunshine, casually gluing it back together. Conversation, when it happened at all, was lazy and frequently backward in glance.