Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

Perhaps the hours they had listened to muted soap operas while they studied gave the younger generation a glibness that had been lacking in his youth.

  “Yes, that certainly is so, Ted,” Evangeline Krumbough answered, and he could see that it was quite a moment for Evangeline. “We have an enthusiastic theatrical group at the high school, comprising the sophomore, junior and senior classes.” Eva paused and drew in her breath before she could continue. “This season we gave a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan.”

  “Did you?” he heard himself answering. “That’s a very interesting play. Back in my time there used to be an organization called the Footlights Club, but we never got much further than Charley’s Aunt and Officer 666—slapstick, you know, not art.”

  He was unhappy to see they were not quite with him.

  “Is that so?” It was the boy called Tommy Scalponi speaking. “Did you happen to play in either of those productions, Mr. Harrow? I mean, Charley’s Aunt or Officer 666?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did have some small part in Officer 666,” Tom Harrow said.

  “Ted, boy,” Tommy Scalponi said, “make a note, will you? We’ll look it up in the Gazette files in the library. Is that where you got your inspiration, Mr. Harrow, for starting writing for the stage?”

  “Well, no,” he said. “To be frank, I am pretty much of a ham actor.”

  “But at the same time, Mr. Harrow,” Ted Williams said, “you direct plays sometimes, don’t you?”

  “That’s different,” he said.

  “Just to start the ball rolling,” Tommy Scalponi said, “when did the urge of writing plays strike you?”

  Exactly when did anyone ever start wanting to do anything? Desires and half-born wishes sprang from too many vague unfulfillments to set them into any mathematical relationship. It might very well have been the electric lights on Broadway on that single night his father had taken him to Jack’s.

  “It’s a little hard to tell,” he said. “Everyone finds himself pushed into things by circumstances. As a matter of fact, my family sent me to a boys’ camp one summer when I was about thirteen. The man who ran the camp was named Grimsbee.” They were hastily writing in their notebooks, except Evangeline, who started at him fixedly. “He was the benevolent despot type and he had a curious way of gesturing with his hands, and a string of phrases. He would always start by saying, ‘What I want most is to have everybody—’ and then he would always end, ‘Now I hope you boys have followed my line of thinking.’”

  They had all stopped writing and there was nothing like an audience. “You get to imitating someone like that. After about a month, on Award Night, our tent gave a Grimsbee play. I was the one who wrote it.” He could remember it very clearly now. “It was the first time I ever heard words that I had written spoken by someone else and received by a group of people. There is nothing exactly like it. You can write a book and people will read it, but you don’t hear them laugh.”

  If he had not been working that afternoon, he would not have gone on so far; but as it was, he had momentarily forgotten his interlocutors.

  “There’s nothing like it except drug addiction,” he said. “There’s nothing more, well, naked than writing a play. If you write a book and the critics pan it, you can comfort yourself by believing that you are a misunderstood genius, but when most of an audience walks out on you after the first act, it’s your own fault, and it’s one of the worst in the realm of human experience.”

  “Did you ever have it happen to you, Mr. Harrow?” The girl had asked the question.

  “Oh,’ yes,” he said, “of course.”

  “But I bet it hasn’t happened many times.”

  “Often enough so that I know how it feels,” he said. “You have to have intestinal fortitude in the theatre—most of the time.”

  “You said the same thing once, didn’t you, Mr. Harrow, in the introduction you wrote for the Modern Library collection of your plays?”

  It was the bright one, Tommy Scalponi, who had asked the question.

  “So you took the trouble to read that?” he asked. “Well, everyone repeats himself.”

  “Would you tell us, Mr. Harrow,” Ted Williams asked, and the light glinted sharply from his spectacles, “what was your first successful play, and what was the date?”

  “Hero’s Return,” he said. “I remember Mr. Arthur Higgins, who produced it, gave me a thousand dollars cash advance, an unusually high advance in those days, because he thought that I had promise. Maybe I had, in those days. It opened in the autumn of 1928 and it ran all through the next spring. I was lucky. It was my first try on Broadway.”

  He was lucky. He had married Rhoda that autumn. He could remember sitting beside her on that first night, before the first curtain.

  “You must have been awfully excited,” Evangeline Krumbough said.

  “I suppose I was,” he said, “but I felt sick to my stomach first.”

  “And your next play was Little Liar, wasn’t it, about the man and his conscience? Say, that was quite a play, Mr. Harrow.”

  It had been and perhaps it still was quite a play.

  “That’s right,” he said, “Little Liar.”

  When he repeated the title, he could see the curtain rising again on its first act. He could remember the long sessions and the interviews in the Higgins office when they were looking for an ingenue. Arthur Higgins was never a careless producer. When he came to Little Liar, he exhibited flair and courage, and besides, perhaps he had thought of a brilliant way to cut down on production costs. It had an ingenue part, a word which Tom disliked as much as he did a lot of the theatre jargon. Helen Hayes would have been a natural selection, but Arthur Higgins had wanted a new girl. Laura Hopedale had been the ingenue, a Drama League girl with no previous experience, and Tom’s having picked her out had made him realize that he had casting ability himself and that a flair for the offbeat could succeed. Arthur Higgins, who was dealing with the values of an older theatre, had only seen that she was shy and rather plain and too precise when she read the lines. He had not seen the sensitivity or the malleable intelligence that finally put Hopedale in the class of Hayes and Cornell.

  “Mr. Harrow, could you tell us how you first started writing plays—aside from the skit at the camp, I mean?”

  He was surprised how far his mind had wandered off the track, but his voice was easy when he answered.

  “I got pushed by degrees. When I was at college there was a sort of local boy-and-girl thing called the Play Club. Then I was in a summer theatre and I met a Mr. Walter Price there who was working in the old Sullivan and Herrick dramatic agency in New York. It’s interesting, now we’re on the subject, that Mr. Price is right here in the house spending a few days with me. Well, he got me a job at Sullivan and Herrick’s, and the only way to know the theatre is to be in the theatre. During my three years in Sullivan and Herrick, I wrote my first play. You’ve got to get a touch of grease paint,” he laughed, “and grease paint doesn’t rub off as fast as lipstick.”

  It would be quite a day for the Lectern, he thought, if Walter Price were to start talking, but he was the one they wanted, not Walter Price.

  “Mr. Harrow, do you write every day or when the spirit moves you?”

  He found himself laughing as though they were old friends.

  “These days,” he said, “I write whenever my wife and the tax collector let me.”

  “Are you writing on anything now, Mr. Harrow?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’m working on a play, but I won’t tell you what it’s about. I’ve always found it bad luck to talk about anything I’m writing.”

  There was a moment’s heavy silence.

  “Well,” Evangeline Krumbough began, “it’s really been awfully kind of you, Mr. Harrow, to give us all this time, and we certainly appreciate it …”

  She drew in her breath hastily so that she could continue with her speech, but she never did finish with it. There was a slamming of a door, and there was Emily.
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  X

  If Change Would Not Keep Changing

  They all stood up as she crossed the room and he hoped that Miss Krumbough and Williams and Scalponi had not observed, as he had, that Emily was annoyed and was making very little effort not to show it. A tight new curl and the fresh lacquer-luster in her blond hair indicated that she had been out from under the dryer only very recently. She was slightly out of breath from negotiating the gravel path in her high heels and her breathlessness gave her face an unduly reddish tinge. The editors of the Lectern stared, and Emily was still something to stare at in a small town. It was true that she had put on weight. As Emily had said herself, it was neurotic fat. When she was nervous she simply could not restrain herself from nibbling. Nevertheless her tight girdle partially dispelled the impression of embonpoint, and she still had her stage posture and she was making the typical Arthur Higgins entrance, with just the right sway of hips. Her light gray gabardine suit, tailored by Dior, had a smartness that was deceptively ascetic, and it served to bring out her best features—the wide brown eyes, the dimple on her cheek. The Dior suit, too, was a suitable setting for the jewelry, and its severity partially dissipated the impression of being overbraceleted with tangible property that Emily gave when in a housecoat. Her diamond and ruby clip made in a modernistic gold swirl and the matching earrings and the oversized link bracelet and the gigantic star sapphire in her ring were only barely overelaborate against the Dior backdrop. They only gave her a freshness that was not rural, that was accentuated by a touch of Guerlain.

  “My dear,” he said, “what happy concatenation of circumstances brings you here?”

  She only looked good-naturedly put-out. It was her color, not her expression, that betrayed her annoyance.

  “I wish you’d stop them putting more and more pebbly gravel on the path,” she said, “it’s like something on the bottom of a fish tank. I don’t see how you keep your footing on it. I turned my ankle twice.”

  “If you’d only wear country shoes,” he said, “you could cope with the gravel better. This is pretty rural here, my dear; in fact, almost country.”

  “Almost?” Emily said, and she laughed in a way that indicated that she was a perpetually good-natured person whose patience was being tried. “Isn’t this really country?”

  There were times when he was still diverted and amused by Emily.

  “My sweet,” he said, “you ought to know this isn’t on the farm, even if it isn’t Westchester County. As you’ve so often said, you’re still just a Hoosier girl at heart.”

  “Tom,” she said, “you do sink ankle-deep in that round slippery gravel, and you know it. But let’s not quibble in front of company.… I’m sorry, darling, I’m afraid I’ve interrupted you.”

  Yet as she looked at the Lectern editorial board, she did not appear very sorry.

  “This is a part of the Lectern editorial board,” he said. “They’ve been good enough to stop in and interview me.”

  “The Lectern?” Emily said. “What’s the Lectern?”

  “You really ought to get around more, dear,” he answered. “The Lectern is the high-school paper and they’re putting their finishing touches on the Commencement Number.”

  “Oh,” Emily said. “We’ve been wondering what’s been keeping you all afternoon.”

  “We were just going,” Evangeline Krumbough said. “You’ve been ever so kind, and we mustn’t keep you any longer, Mr. Harrow.”

  “Don’t go,” Tom Harrow said. “I’m glad Mrs. Harrow’s dropped in so that you can meet her. This is Evangeline Krumbough, my dear. This is Ted Williams—but no relation to the ballplayer—and this is Tommy Scalponi, who, I predict, will make the Phi Beta Kappa when he gets to college.”

  “Oh, how do you do?” Emily said.

  “How do you do, ma’am,” Tommy Scalponi said. “Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Harrow, and good-by.”

  Emily was silent for a moment, and then she sighed.

  “Jesus H. Mahogany Christ,” she said.

  She sank down in a chair and he thought as he watched her that there was hardly an actress anywhere who could ever sit down naturally.

  “Why the initial?” he asked.

  “Jesus H. Mahogany Christ,” Emily said again. “Tom, darling, can’t you find some more interesting and dignified way of pandering to your vanity, darling, than showing off before three high-school adolescents?”

  There was truth to her impeachment. He had been showing off.

  “You can’t be disagreeable to three poor kids, Emily,” he said.

  “And my God,” Emily said, “you remembered all their names. Honestly, darling, don’t you see how you are beginning to behave here? It’s getting to be just a little too good to be true—or, to put it another way, and to use one of your favorite words—isn’t it almost on the verge of being corny?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I’ve been coming apart at the seams all day, but you didn’t come out here all this way to ask me that specific question, did you?”

  He lighted a cigarette, but he did not offer one to Emily because Arthur Higgins had told her long ago that cigarettes were bad for the voice. Some cynic had once said that you never really could find out what any woman was like until you married her, and then it was too late. He was trying to recall what Emily had been like. He could only remember that she had been good-natured and gay; but as for the rest of it, reality had obscured illusion.

  “Tom, darling,” Emily said, “I know you can’t help it because I know it’s the stock-and-trade of every artist, but I do wish at least in the late afternoon you could stop having yourself continually on your mind and recollect at least with half of yourself that other people, too, have problems.”

  Again there was no doubt that loquacity was growing on her and every year her methods of expression were becoming more involved.

  “Now, Emily,” he said, “I haven’t had time to be thoughtless. I’ve been out here working.”

  Emily laughed lightly.

  “I know,” she said. “Alfred said you were too busy to come in to lunch. Oh, hello, Mulford.”

  Miss Mulford had opened the door of her office.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Harrow,” she said. “I just wanted to ask you, Mr. Harrow, if you want me any longer today.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “I don’t think so”—and he handed her the penciled pages he had written—“as long as you can get these typed first thing in the morning.”

  There was silence after Miss Mulford closed her door—the heavy, self-conscious silence that ensued when someone had interrupted a quarrel.

  “I have told you,” he said, “that I wish you wouldn’t call her Mulford.”

  Emily laughed again in her airiest manner.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I remember now. It sounds patronizing when I call her Mulford, and I remember now that you didn’t like it when I started to call her Nancy, and I remember that she’s been with you for years and years, longer than I have, but please don’t say that I haven’t tried to make her like me. I’ve done the best I could with what I think is a very anomalous position, darling. I don’t mean that there’s anything that can be helped, and I’m not blaming anyone at all—and why should I, because I know in many funny little ways that I am an outsider, especially in the area of your workroom or studio, or whatever you call it, darling.”

  Emily must have always enjoyed the sound of her own voice, but lately she was beginning to enjoy her own balancing of words. It would have been fruitless to interrupt her, but one could always play a guessing game as to what was coming next.

  “I am only saying, darling,” Emily said, “that it’s a little hard to accept the truth that there is someone like Nancy Mulford who is so much more integrated in many ways than I am into your life and who knows so many sides of you that are deliberately concealed from me, somebody who knows so much more about your business affairs than I, for example. But I don’t mean to be disagreeabl
e, darling, and I’m sorry that I inadvertently called her Mulford, but I don’t think I hurt her feelings. I couldn’t; I’m not important enough. You see, Nancy Mulford and I know where we both stand, darling.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” he said. “If I may be allowed to get a word in edgewise today—”

  “Oh, darling,” she said, “you’re so irrepressibly funny when you talk about getting a word in edgewise, as if everybody doesn’t listen to you and simply hang on everything you say. That is, everybody except Walter Price, and he’s your friend and not my friend, darling. Walter’s the one who won’t let anyone get a word in edgewise. My God, darling, that’s why I came out here, just in self-defense. A refugee from verbosity. Tom, just what is it that strikes you as funny now?”

  “That phrase of yours,” he said, “a refugee from verbosity.”

  Emily shook her head in a careful balance between tolerance and irritation.

  “Seriously, Tom,” she said, “you’re not implying that I talk too much? I wish to goodness that you wouldn’t always be so logical in such a superior and masculine way. There isn’t any need for it. Goodness knows that you’re brighter than I and people like to listen to you more than to a poor little girl from the Midwest, who started to try to be an actress and who, just when she knew that she couldn’t make the grade, was rescued from failure inadvertently.”

  “I wouldn’t say inadvertently, my dear,” he said. “As far as I can remember, I gave the matter a lot of serious thought. Why don’t you take off your shoes and see if there’s any of that round gravel in them?”

  “Oh, Tom, you do get off the subject in the funniest ways,” she said.

  “Maybe if you’d tell me what the subject was, I wouldn’t get off it,” he told her.

  “Oh, Tom,” she said, “you say the funniest things sometimes. Please don’t ask me again why I came out here, because it isn’t very polite or gracious, is it, and I know there’s a sort of Polynesian tribal taboo about this place, what with you and Miss Mulford—and don’t forget I called her Miss Mulford—and the family photographs and everything? I still did come out here, didn’t I?”