“Indeed yes,” he said.
Tom understood after that that anyone was a fool who underrated Arthur Higgins, and you could never be sure exactly when he was laughing inside himself.
“I wonder how you hit on the theme,” Miss Adair said. “I suppose it came to you in a burst of inspiration, and the title captures it perfectly—Hero’s Return.”
“It sounds beautiful as you speak it, Miss Adair,” he said, and then he tried his best not to look at Mr. Higgins, but his curiosity was too great. “I got the title idea from Stevenson’s poem, of course.”
“Oh, yes,” Miss Adair said, “dear R.L.S. He did lay him down with a will.”
“We must find an actor,” Arthur Higgins said, “who can look like a soldier and talk like one, but I don’t want him What Price Glory?—this isn’t Stallings. I am thinking especially of the new boy, Albert Briggs. We’d better get him in to read, don’t you think so, darling?”
“Yes,” Miss Adair said, “although I love to talk to Mr. Harrow, dear. He’s so much more literate than I thought he would be.”
“It’s a literate play,” Arthur Higgins said, “and I think it’s an acting play, and you don’t so often get those two together, but there’s one thing I think you ought to cut, an incongruity in my opinion, but we need not mention it now.”
That was what they always did. They led up to it gradually, putting you off your guard by intelligent praise before they delivered the punch, but he was not aware of the technique then.
“What incongruity?” he asked.
“Where he sings that song,” Arthur Higgins said. “In a mood of deep seriousness that verges upon tragedy, he suddenly sings a musical comedy lyric. It seems to me an inartistic clash of contrast. Don’t you agree with me, dear?”
“Yes,” Miss Adair said, “I am afraid perhaps I do.”
He was to learn that the Higginses always stuck together and that Arthur Higgins was constantly looking for incongruities, but it was not an incongruity. It was dramatic contrast and in its place more tragic than any serious line.
“You mean,” he said, “someday the nation will honor you, too, as it’s honored your dear old pop?”
“That’s it,” Mr. Higgins said, “incongruous.”
“Not if it’s done right,” he said. If he had not stood up for his lines then, he would have been like all the others who ended by letting Mr. and Mrs. Higgins write their plays for them. As it was, he was one of the very few who could argue with Arthur Higgins.
“I can see no right way of doing it,” Arthur Higgins said.
There was a pause, and Tom Harrow realized that a new tension had crept into the room.
“You see, it’s this way,” he said, “he’s been drinking. He comes on after the automobile smashup and they tell him the girl is dead, and he knows he’s a hell of a hero. Well, he sings it and does a dance step—that’s the way he reacts, that’s all.”
“Does a dance step?” Arthur Higgins said. “Oh, no, not a dance step.”
“Yes,” Tom Harrow said, “like a song and dance man. He says, ‘Oh, she’s dead, is she?’ And then he goes right into it. I could show you what I meant if I had a hat and cane.”
Arthur Higgins picked up the telephone beside him, an antiquated, upright instrument whose receiver hung on a hook, but there was no way of knowing then that it would grow antiquated.
“Ask Miss Mulford to bring in a walking stick and a hat right away,” he said. “I didn’t know you were an actor.”
Tom had never been an actor except for being able to illustrate a line. He still remembered the business with the hat and cane, and he had often done it afterwards—people would ask him sometimes at Palm Beach and Antibes if he would mind doing that song routine in Hero’s Return. Miss Mulford handed him his hat and Arthur Higgins’s malacca cane.
“Well, it goes like this,” he said. “‘Oh, she’s dead, is she?’—and he gives a double shuffle, and then he repeats it: ‘Oh, she’s, dead, is she? All right, strike up the band!
“Stay in there punching, sonny,
Don’t let your heart fall plop,
Someday the nation will honor you, too,
As it’s honored your dear old pop.”
How am I doing, pals?’ … That’s all, and it fits if you do it right.”
Tom saw his father’s face, and he could hear his father’s voice again in Jack’s. It was inexplicable, what details stuck in memory. He was not an actor, but he had given them the idea, and he knew they were with him.
“I’m sorry you haven’t had experience,” Arthur Higgins said. “I’d like to have you direct the play; but at any rate, I want you at rehearsals regularly. Miss Mulford, find that place in the script and give a copy to Mr. Briggs. Let him study it for ten minutes. Send in the first girl out there who’s been reading those speeches in the living room scene. We’ll do the juveniles first because we’ll need Miss Adair’s reaction.”
There was never any trouble for him in the Higgins office. He knew his way around there instinctively after that.
“Let’s see,” Mr. Higgins said. “Helen, my dear, haven’t we dinner for Wednesday night open? If we have, how would it be if Tom Harrow and his beautiful wife—she must be beautiful—dined with us, informally, en famille?”
“Indeed yes,” Miss Adair said. “Will you tell us where you are living so that I can call her myself and extend the invitation? And I also am sure she must be beautiful.”
“She is,” Tom Harrow said, “and I know she would love to come to dinner, Miss Adair.”
“If I call you Tom,” Miss Adair said, “you may call me Helen, and what, pray, is your wife’s first name?”
“It’s Rhoda,” he said.
“Rhoda,” she said. “I might wish that my mother had called me Rhoda. And where is it I may reach her, Tom?”
“At the Hotel Bulwer, on West Thirty-fourth Street.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’ve never heard of the Hotel Bulwer, but it is a resounding name.”
She stopped. A girl was coming in, young and frightened, holding a typed copy of the play, and Tom knew how she felt. The mantle of majesty had descended on him by then. He was the author, and it was his first experience.
“My dear,” Miss Adair said, “try doing that again.”
“Doing what?” the young girl asked.
“Walking in again,” Miss Adair said, “and this time, my dear, please walk, don’t amble. Why is it no American girls learn to walk? Don’t look startled, try it again, my dear.”
“You are reading the part of Alice in the script, I believe,” Mr. Higgins said. “I’ll give you Stanley’s lines. I start in the middle of page twenty, Act I, beginning, ‘Well, well, look who we’ve got here, not that I give a damn,’ and you take it on. No, not now. Get yourself ready and I’ll repeat, ‘Well, well, look who we’ve got here, not that I give a damn.’ …”
The girl must have come straight from the Drama League. Who had sent her around, he wondered? Had she been obliged to sleep with anyone to get the chance, or had she been calling at the office day after day? The byplay and the speculation interested him more than the lines, and years later the incident came back to him when he was writing All Ashore. Her face and voice for no good reason stood out from all the others. Her hopelessness was touching. Her wish to be on the stage was fading into nothing. Where had she come from, and who was she? It was his persistent curiosity that had given his work vitality and his interest in people and motives was still as keen as ever.
“Thank you, my dear,” Arthur Higgins said. “You’ll hear from us. Thank you very much.”
They were all silent until the dark oak door had closed.
“My God!” Helen Adair said. “Do you agree with me?”
“Indeed yes,” Arthur Higgins said, “especially since she impresses you, darling, in such a fashion. I hope you agree too, Tom.”
“Indeed yes,” Tom Harrow said.
“Look here,” Miss Adair said, “I begin
to think you boys are making fun of me.”
“Indeed yes,” Arthur Higgins said, “I think perhaps Mr. Harrow is pulling your leg, my dear.”
“Only figuratively,” Tom Harrow said.
“Sometime when Arthur’s out,” Miss Adair said, “perhaps you’ll venture to try it another way. I knew as soon as I saw that script we’d all get on. Call for the next poor thing, Arthur. Arthur always insists on cleaning up the bit parts first. What was the name of that hotel?”
“The Bulwer,” he said, “on West Thirty-fourth Street.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “the Bulwer, and the name is Rhoda. Do you frequently pull Rhoda’s leg?”
“Well,” he said, “I try.”
“I think we’d better get the next girl,” Mr. Higgins said. “I don’t want you falling in love with another playwright this year. Next year, but not this year, darling.”
XVII
There Was Enough to Take Her Shopping
There were occasions in his later life when he had actually missed the Bulwer. He doubted whether this had ever been so with Rhoda, who ever afterwards refused to stop at anything she termed a second-class hotel. They frightened her, she said. There was a nightmare quality in their dingy lobbies and in their efforts to make the dark dining rooms look attractive. Then there were the people, aging, about to lose their bridgework, and always the shaking old lady who had just forgotten who she was. She did not mean to be unkind, Rhoda used to say, and she could never understand why people like that always fascinated him, even after the hotel scene in Flagpole for Two. He could see those people if he wanted, and get into conversations with them if he wanted, but Rhoda could not help being frightened.
Whenever she thought of the Hotel Bulwer, she always thought simultaneously how dreadful it would have been if they had always had to stay there, if he had been obliged to get a position at fifty dollars a week or something in a publishing company or a magazine or somewhere. What was even worse was to think that someday, if things did not work out right (and of course he could not always be successful), they might have to return to the Hotel Bulwer, after they had been used to other things for years. This could happen (he might not be successful always) and they were accustomed now to spending such a fearful lot of money. It was her fault, admittedly, because she was an expensive girl who grew more and more expensive all the time, but being so did make her frightfully insecure. She occasionally had nightmares in which she was a little girl again and her father was losing all his money and sometimes she would get Tom confused with her father. That was why she was afraid, even when she so much as saw a second-rate hotel.
He could appreciate her point of view, but there had been advantages about the Bulwer. For one thing, there were no possessions, except his typewriter and their suitcases. They had only each other at the Bulwer, no automobiles whose fenders you might dent, no Chippendale tables you might stain, no Aubusson carpets upon which someone might drop a cigarette, no jewelry to lose, no mink, no Waterford, no Lowestoft, no Renoir or Matisse or Picasso. For that brief interval, he had been free from the fetters that held him ever after, and he still could believe that they had been closer together then than they ever were again because of those beautifully limiting factors.
He could grant that their apartment at the Bulwer was not much of a place in which to have each other, but it had not been a double bedroom. It had been a suite, so-called, because he had not wanted to think of Rhoda all alone all day in a double bedroom while the show was in rehearsal; and besides, there had to be a place where he could do rewriting at night without keeping Rhoda awake. In spite of the prosperity of the era, the Bulwer was not one of those New York hotels that had pulled itself together to face new competition. It was not redecorated and it did not announce that it was under new management, and there was no appeal in the wheezy elevator to try the New Cuisine in the New Dining Room. Their suite looked out on an airshaft which gave the place an eerie silence, except for phonographs and domestic quarrels that echoed in the shaft in the middle of the night. The purple upholstery of the sitting room sofa and the two armchairs had fallen to greasy ruin. The reproduction of a Maxfield Parrish fairy palace was terrible; the double bed sagged in the middle in such a way, as Rhoda said, that neither could have kicked the other out of bed, no matter how much either one might have wished to. There was nothing that you gave a damn about, nothing that you coveted; there was nothing to do but love each other and be delighted with each other and hope that very shortly they would find some better dwelling place.
“Well,” he said that autumn afternoon when he returned from those tryouts at the Higgins office, “have you been looking for apartments, Rhoda, the way you said you were going to?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “and kiss me again, please. When I’m here alone, I keep thinking I’m a little girl.”
“Did you see any good apartments?” he asked. “Just to take your mind off our poverty?”
“No,” she said, “I wasn’t dressed for the good ones. I never made Park Avenue. The man only showed me cute places where you walk upstairs in old houses, and he tried to kiss me in one of those cute places.”
“I don’t blame him,” he said, “and it does show you were dressed for something.”
“It shows I’m not Park Avenue,” she said. “I don’t think he was the Park Avenue man. By the way, the man who runs our elevator is named Bill.”
“Oh,” he said, “just my Bill.”
“He said he had a brother in a drugstore who could get us a pint of something anytime. I got him to get it. I haven’t tasted it because I know it’s wrong to drink alone.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “That proves you have a reason to be glad to see me.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’ve got a lot of others. When you came in just now you looked like someone in one of those true-confession magazines that Mother never let me read, like someone from another world.”
“Well,” he said, “I am just back from one.”
He did not know it; it took him years to see that he was always coming back from make-believe into her world of fact, and she had never been able to follow him into the world of make-believe. She had never been at home in its unrealities because she was nervous with unreality, more particularly the unreality of the theatre and of the people in it. You could make a parody of Ecclesiastes out of her thoughts: insecurity of insecurities, the Preacher said, all the theatre is insecurity. But Rhoda had always been a good trouper in those days. She had to be; and for his money, she was always better than the bunch of them. Goodness knew, he knew them all, the writers and producers of his time, the actors and the actresses, Hollywood, Broadway and London, and there was friendship, and love and admiration, devoid of inevitable pretense. Yet he could understand that this was something that Rhoda had never wanted, or something Rhoda had never seen. He could pass in review the great figures of the theatre, alive and dead, down to the level of the younger ones beginning to be. He was still a part of the world of make-believe that in the end had made all worlds unreal, but he could not blame Rhoda for never having understood.
“The Higginses are asking us to dinner,” he said, “on Wednesday, informally, just en famille, and Miss Adair will telephone you.”
“Don’t be so snooty,” Rhoda said. “I know my high-school French, but—oh, my God, darling, I haven’t anything to wear, even en famille. Look what happened when I was looking at apartments.”
“I know,” he said, “but according to what happened there, people are still able to get together and we’ll have to buy you something to wear en famille.”
“We haven’t got the money,” she said.
“Never mind the money,” he said.
She put her arms around his neck and her head on his shoulder and began to laugh.
“That’s where I want us to be,” she said, “in the never-mind-the-money land. I’m tired about minding about money.”
“Just hold me tight,” he said. “Just hold onto my c
oat-tails and maybe I can get you there.”
“In a big way?” she asked.
Then he began to laugh, too. From the very beginning her preoccupation about money and security had never greatly disturbed him, and besides, they were in love.
“By God,” he said, “you’re the queen of the gold diggers, aren’t you?”
“Don’t,” she said, “don’t say it like that. You see, I really love you, Tom.”
Love, to use a new expression, was, no matter what one said about it, in the end a highly personalized affair. Their love had been personalized, and he was very glad it had been, because the memory of it was still fresh and strange and different by far from other memories. He knew she loved him because she always gave in her way as much as he gave her. They were crazy about each other in those days and they both must have shared a feeling that they were on the verge of something rich and strange. You never could separate the components of love and you were a fool to try when they were blended into the most potent potion in the world.
“I’ll take you shopping first thing tomorrow,” he said, “because I want to see you looking swell, baby.”
Songs then were different and they danced to different tunes, but there was no change in meaning, and she must have known darned well, baby, that he had given her quite a lot of other things besides love.
It was a pity he knew so little about women’s clothes before the theatre had made him a specialist on the subject, and perhaps Rhoda had helped in that interest. Ever since that morning, he had always looked at beautiful women with an appraising eye, wondering whether their dresses would be becoming to Rhoda. He remembered that Betty Howland had spoken of a fashionable place—one that depression had driven out of existence long ago—and its name now eluded his memory, but he still could remember the perfume, the discretion of the carpets and the comfort of the chairs and a Parisian sophistication. The lady in charge of the floor had been gracious, and he had handled the situation in the best way he could. He was a beneficent, rich young man, well-dressed, married to a simple country girl, and Rhoda had looked simple in her tweed suit.
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