“Yes,” Hal said. “I told her you’d be over about four.”
“You drive me over, will you?”
“I told you,” Hal said, “that she wants to see you alone.”
“Never mix whiskey, gin, and champagne,” Tom said. “But how can you help it? You have to take everything as it comes, and some things are whiskey, and others are gin, and others champagne. Well, it’ll be nice to see her again, just for a change, I mean.”
“I wish you’d tell me sometime,” Hal said, “what happened between you and my mother. No one ever tells a kid those things.”
“Listen,” Tom said, “nobody ever tells anybody else much of anything. You’d better go wake up Price now and get him on his feet and upstairs, and don’t let him get in here. That’s a good boy, Hal.”
The library lights were soft and the room was almost as silent as the library had been in the Judge’s house. All his worst thoughts were returning, but he had to face them eventually. All the disconnected questions were coming back. Where was the little joker now? Where had everything gone? And once again he knew that he had once had everything. People like himself could not help but be aware of it. He knew that he had once had something, if not everything, when he first met Rhoda Browne, and that was a long way from anywhere—and the funny part of it was, he needn’t have met her; but that was true with almost everything. You needn’t have done almost everything you did, but you could never separate the need-not from the want-to of the moment.
XIII
The Play Might Get to Broadway—and Never Mind the Girls
There was always a beginning to everything, which was not as trite as it sounded, considering how a lot of playwrights he had known could hash up a beginning. He had been interviewed by members of the press and by staff writers for periodicals far more frequently than he cared to remember. There was, he perceived, after the first flush of his success, a horrid similarity in journalistic thought. They actually always asked about the same things as those recent adolescents from the Lectern, and he had spent endless hours saying the same things brightly. One of the oldest chestnuts was the inevitable question of what had started him writing plays, and this was a silly question. You started writing plays because you had to do something. He could have phrased a better question. When did he first have the knowledge that he had a gift of quality not possessed by anybody else?
He first had an idea regarding quality in his sophomore year at college, which was an archaic period, now that it was becoming difficult for him to realize that any moment in the past had once been a new and glittering present. There were still surface trolleys in his sophomore year, and he still could remember the crackling of blue sparks that came from the overhead wires, but trolleys were nearing extinction now. There had been people then who jacked up their cars during the winter months because of the wear-and-tear of unplowed city and suburban streets. True, there was prohibition, but there were several reputable college bootleggers, much less aggressive than present purveyors of Scotch and bourbon. Believe it or not, the radio was in its infancy and there were even individuals who used earphones and crystal sets. In the gay and roaring twenties, as they called them now, there was still a veneer of good manners and the last dim echo of Edwardianism. He should have known that even in the Coolidge era the world was breaking away from its old security, but of course he had been too young to care.
Motion pictures were still silent in his sophomore year at college, and there were only vague reports of sound, which one received with incredulity. You could sit in a moving-picture house in those days and see restful, silent, flickering film, and hear only the playing of a piano that followed the pictorial mood. Now it was voices, voices, voices—coming out of radios, out of TV’s, out of public and private address systems—until he was beginning to develop a detestation for human speech. How different it had been when the motion pictures were muted, and how infinitely desirable! And when you were tired of the film, there would be trick dogs or a juggling act or illustrated songs. Time was marching on, and how time had marched! Nobody played a piano in a movie house any more, except occasionally in the Museum of Modern Art to the tittering sophistication of young people who did not know what Theda Bara and Francis X. Bushman had meant to the youth of another more charming era.
And there had been private charities in those days. There were living then people who were even so backward as to possess what was called a “sense of social obligation” and what is now generally termed “free social guilt.” There were efforts, pathetic and abortive in view of the enormously intelligent efforts of the present, to bring culture, good behavior and good fellowship into the less privileged areas of our cities. And from such efforts sprang an institution known as a “settlement house,” a term now becoming as obsolescent as the trolley car. But in his sophomore year, settlement houses still possessed a novel social significance and also a note of social hope.
Doubtless settlement houses still existed in underprivileged neighborhoods, but the emphasis was changed and the social workers who once staffed them had moved long ago into fields where their enthusiasms could blossom into something more closely approaching a Messiah complex. The spirit of philanthropy had now assumed a professionalism which had only existed in rudimentary forms during his sophomore year at college. Doubtless there were still volunteers who ventured to be big brothers and to organize basketball games and dances, calculated to tempt children off the streets, but guidance clinics and marriage counsel clinics were taking the place of mere entertainment. Back in his sophomore year, a number of his contemporaries gave up one or two evenings a week to help out in settlement houses, and one of them was Garrison Wilkes, who also rowed number five on the second crew and played basketball in the winter.
Garry, as his friends called him in those days, was already developing qualities of leadership that carried him far up in the WPA and eventually to important posts in foreign aid. From his earlier years he had evinced an intense desire to help other people and this had always struck Tom Harrow as an admirable attribute. Yet at the risk of being critical (and there was nothing so devastating or so useless as nonconstructive criticism), it was apparent now that it had never occurred to Garrison Wilkes that anyone might have different desires and drives from his own, and this gave him a fine assurance that led to qualities of leadership.
“Now, fellows,” Garrison used to say, and it never sounded embarrassing when Garrison addressed a group as “fellows,” “it will do you good and give you a fine feeling inside to do something for other people, and fellows, we need more help down at Fellowship House. There’s a fine group of boys and girls there who want fun and exercise as much as you and I, and every Tuesday night is entertainment night at Fellowship House. Who’s going to get on the entertainment team? How about it, Tommy?”
In the light of the present there was an element of pathos in that appeal. It contained none of the resounding words that one heard so often later, such as “underprivilege” or “inequity.” It was only a suggestion that one should share something, and Tom Harrow would have gone much earlier to an entertainment night at Fellowship House if it had not happened that every time Garrison Wilkes appealed to his better nature there was something else he had to do.
“How about it, Tommy?” Garrison kept saying. “You’ll get a real thrill out of it if you think up a skit or something. It doesn’t take much to entertain those kids, and you’ll get a real thrill out of it, Tommy. Say, you can be the life of the party—just an imitation or any kind of a skit.”
One of Tommy’s greatest troubles had always been that he could not say “No” indefinitely, and eventually he found himself in Fellowship House on entertainment night.
He could remember the place distinctly. Years ago the large and shabby brick house on a shabby South End square must have been a prosperous, Victorian dwelling. The walnut woodwork and doors, and the parquet floor of the big front parlor that could be made into a schoolroom, a game room or gymnasium, was sti
ll in fair condition. He could remember the unwashed atmosphere, the lack of ventilation and the suspicious faces of the neighborhood boys and girls. He was standing beside a piano, and it was the first time he had ever wondered in this particular way whether or not the journey was worth his while. It was the first time that he had experienced such a fervent wish that he might be anywhere else. Truthfully, he was afraid of those unwashed teenagers who were watching him.
Burt Hewitt was the boy who had been roped in to play the piano, and it was no help to Tom to observe that Burt was also nervous. Neither of them should have come and they had rehearsed for only half an hour what they were going to do; but it was too late now with Garrison Wilkes’s voice ringing through the room.
“We have a real treat this evening, folks,” Garrison Wilkes said, “and as long as we keep everything on a first-name basis at Fellowship House—this is Burt, who’s going to accompany Tommy over here on the piano, but Tommy isn’t going to sing. Tommy’s going to do something else.”
Then a girl’s voice interrupted from somewhere in the middle of that watchful room.
“Gee,” the girl’s voice said, “I wish he’d do it to me.”
He had never been able to explain why the indignant reddening of Garrison Wilkes’s face should have amused him as much as it did. Then he discovered that he had taken over instead of Garrison Wilkes. For the first time in his life he knew what it was like to have the feel of an audience.
“Whoever made that remark is a very intelligent girl,” he said, “and I hope she’ll be waiting after the show.”
He had never been a good actor in spite of his experience with the stage, but he could understand an actor’s urge and ability to move outside himself.
“We are going to endeavor to give you,” he said, “a short motion-picture show without a film, but only with sight and sound effects. It’s about a poor but honest girl named Louise. Start the music going, Burt.”
Stage sense was only instinctive and most of it included holding mass attention and forming a collective mood.
“On this particular evening,” he was saying, “this poor but honest girl is sitting before the briskly burning logs in a humble cabin in the Kentucky mountains, watching as she wishes in the flames.”
Burt did not do badly with the music. The chords were appropriate when he drew a matchbox from his pocket and lighted a single match. Do it wrong, and it would be nothing. Do it right, with just the proper elaboration, and you could get them. He knew before it came that the laughter would be right. It was the first time that he had ever dreamed of the delight that came of controlling mass reaction. He knew that the rest of what he was doing did not matter because they were all with him. The main thing was not to hold a mood too long, and the only point to the memory was that he knew that he was good and that not everyone could do what he was doing, evoking a girl out of a background of tin-pan music, moving up a halfbreed villain and an honest trapper, and finally bringing in the Canadian Mounted Police.
Considering the importance of what had happened to him, his sequence of recollection was surprisingly dim. In fact, he was unable to recall whether or not his admirer had waited for him after the show was over—probably not, considering that Garrison Wilkes was there. You could afford to lose money, children, women, and reputation as long as you did not lose belief in self. At least in the theatre this was so, and in that single evening he had been called into the theatre’s service. There would be plenty of times when he would wish he had not been, but the addiction was already there.
There had been three of them there that night, Garrison, Burt and himself, thrown together without design; but their destinies must have already been written. Not one of the three of them could have turned out much differently from what they had, because of built-in qualities. The last he had heard of Garrison, Garrison had been trying to teach the principles of irrigation to a group of nomads in the vicinity of the River Tigris, who preferred to continue as nomads. When it came to Burt, he had always been one of those piano players whose rendering of nostalgic popular songs covered up his intellectual deficiency. They had met, not so long before, at a class reunion and their badges with their names on them had not been necessary, and Burt had played the piano at the drop of a hat and had kept on playing it until five in the morning.
“Say, Tommy,” he had said, “do you remember how you panicked them at that Fellowship House? Come on over to the piano and let’s put that act on again.”
“Burt,” he had answered, “I wouldn’t mind, but I honestly don’t remember it. It was quite a while ago.”
There were some things that one should remember and some far better to forget.
Delightfully enough, Rhoda had never asked him how he had started writing plays. When he had first seen her, he was three years out of college, earning fifty dollars a week doing odd jobs in New York for the Sullivan and Herrick dramatic agency. There were still a few thousand dollars from his father’s estate, enough for him to draw on occasionally to buy good clothes and to pay the dues of a New York club. He was at a crossing of the ways that summer, but he had finished the first draft of his first comedy, Hero’s Return. Only a day or two before he met Rhoda, the Arthur Higgins office had taken the play and had paid him a thousand-dollar cash advance, and in spite of this, there was no way of knowing at the end of June 1928 that Hero’s Return was going to hit the jackpot. He knew he was good, but he did not know how good, and neither did Rhoda Browne.
Rhoda was one girl at least who had never asked him how he started writing Hero’s Return, or whether or not he wrote when the inspiration moved him. It was a relief that Rhoda, frankly, had never cared, because she was the kind of girl who accepted things from life without thinking or asking much about circumstances. But there was one question that she had often asked him, the beguiling question that one could only ask and answer when one was in love.
“Tommy,” was the way her favorite question went, “what did you think when you first saw me that morning on Dock Street?”
“Why,” he always told her, “when I saw you, my mind was a perfect blank, except I thought you looked lousy, Rhoda.”
That was the sort of joke that could once bring the house down, given the suitable time and place. She had a way of smiling—and this was one of the first things that he had noticed about her—that gave her face mirth and expression without cracking it into pieces. There never had been anything perfunctory, up to the very last, when Rhoda smiled. There was something in this usual display of pleasure that had always appealed to him, as well as most other men; and he had seen a lot of smiles in his time.
Everyone, particularly women, unless the women were angry at him, had, it seemed, smiled at him ever since, but then, smiles were an American custom. Pictorially, everyone had to smile in America until finally, like President Eisenhower, they began laughing photogenically. Everyone had to smile in the American theatre or when the light bulbs flashed at the Stork or El Morocco, or whatever it was that light bulbs did when a Very Important agency was publicizing a moist yet kissproof lipstick, or a new dentifrice, or a foam-rubber mattress, or, best of all, one of those automobiles that were getting to be as flat as pancakes. Everybody except dentists explaining toothbrushes smiled at everything. They smiled when they applied paste to their teeth; they smiled when they finally realized that various nationally advertised ingredients could rid them of excess perspiration and body odor. They smiled when they were suffering from mal-de-mer on the rear decks of cruise ships. One had to smile, even though the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Aegean, where burning Sappho loved and sang, were usually as turbulent as the British Channel. You had to smile because everything, including electric toasters and diaper services, was so enlightened in America.
The smiling problem was difficult for a woman, who now had to smile in a prefabricated way, with an elaborate dental finish, and when she smiled, her freshly polished teeth had to be in a conventional dental juxtaposition; and her lips, freshl
y kissproofed with a lipstick that would not come off no matter how hard she tried, had to be entirely symmetrical. Also, any good American woman, housewife or mother, when she smiled, had to have exquisitely but informally plucked eyebrows, and at the same time she had to roll her eyes sideways in a roguish but not immodest manner. She had to be Pollyanna, the Glad Girl, even when she was in her girdle, or when the electrician came to fix the stove. It was immoral to admire a cross girl, and most cross girls knew it. But when Rhoda smiled, self-making pancakes did not matter, or vacuum cleaners—but why go on with it? Rhoda instinctively knew how to smile.
“You don’t have to tell me how I looked,” Rhoda used to say. “I didn’t care how I looked.”
“Oh yes, you did,” he said.
“Only in a perfunctory way,” Rhoda used to answer. “But what did you think? You know your mind never is a perfect blank.”
It was a pleasure to try to recall what he had thought, though the effort made him sadder now, but it was still a pleasure.
“Well,” he said, “I thought the old town wasn’t what it used to be. And what did you think when you saw me?”
“Well, if you really want to know,” Rhoda used to say, “I said to myself that here was someone who might save me from a fate worse than death. Don’t be hurt, dear. You can’t possibly understand because you’ve never been so mobile downwards, and besides, you looked perfectly beautiful, carelessly beautiful, I mean. You looked as though you’d won the game. It’s funny, I’ve never seen you look exactly that way again, and you’ve won so many games.”
There was every reason why he should have looked that way and perhaps one did look so only once, because there was always a first game which was different from all the others. He had finished his draft of Hero’s Return, which must have been good because Mr. Arthur Higgins had paid out a one-thousand-dollar advance on it, and that was something that happened only once to anybody.
Women and Thomas Harrow Page 22