Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  “Yes,” he said, “hold tight to the inside of the barrel.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. “What barrel?”

  “Any barrel,” he said, “and we’re inside it, not outside it.”

  “Darling,” she said, “think of all these people coming to see your play. I wish I’d written it.”

  “All right,” he said, “you can do the next one. I’d rather have a baby.”

  “Don’t keep saying ‘baby,’” she said, “just when I start feeling happy. Oh, my God, Tom, what are we going to do if all these people don’t like it?”

  “It’s companionate of you to get around to that point,” he said.

  “Anyway,” she said, “of course they’re going to like it. Please don’t get me frightened, Tom.”

  He held her hand and it was still cold as ice.

  “Look,” he said, “there could be a lot worse things than this, Rhoda.”

  He did not believe what he was saying. There could be death, destruction and ruin—but nothing could be worse than the first night of one’s first play on Broadway.

  There were some writers he knew with such a resilient enthusiasm and with such poignant narcissism that they never seemingly tired of any line they had written. Unfortunately he had always found that once he was finished with anything, he was finished. He could polish and revise, but there eventually came a point when perspective would depart, and when finally every word would be stale and distasteful. When he heard the opening speeches of his play that night, his anxiety grew because of his deathly weariness at their repetition. He knew by heart each lilt of voice, each gesture, but his uneasiness was worse between the acts.

  “Wouldn’t you like to walk outside and listen to what people are saying?” Rhoda asked, when the first act ended.

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference what they’re saying.”

  That was correct. A play was done when it opened and curiosity regarding its reception was fruitless.

  “Tom,” she asked him, “do you think it’s terrible?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good to be frightened.”

  But he could feel a cold paralysis of a theatrical fear that was different from any other in its physical and mental elements. It was more than fear of failure or disgrace. There were minglings of self-pity and dread of the future, and he had never subsequently been able to analyze the mixture.

  “They seem to be listening, don’t they?” she said. “And I haven’t heard anybody cough.”

  He did not answer and she tugged at his sleeve.

  “Tom,” she whispered, “what’s the matter?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken a chance on me,” he said.

  “Tom,” she said, and her voice broke, “don’t say that. When are we going to know?”

  “When the reviews come out,” he said. “When we see the New York Times. We’ll have to go to Arthur Higgins’s party and just wait.”

  “Oh,” she said. “All we do is wait and wait.”

  His nerves were on edge.

  “Stop being a goddam little bellyacher,” he whispered. “I’m the one who’s taking the beating, not you.”

  “No,” she said, “me too.”

  He never had any adequate recollection of the performance as a whole, except that it had seemed ragged. The actors were uncertain of their timing, and seemed out of touch with the audience from start to finish, and in the third act Delia Duneen dropped two lines, and, even though Briggs improvised, the sequence was meaningless. The parts that he thought had depth and poetry only grated on his nerves. When the applause grew louder and the laughter sounded more natural, he listened in disbelief. He already knew that the stage had its own rules of behavior, one of which was to applaud excessively when a first-night curtain fell. He left Rhoda and Mrs. Browne as soon as the applause started, and reached the indescribable plainness and disorder of backstage which was to be part of his life. He stood for a minute in the wings watching the cast change order each time the curtain fell. There was a gloomy dusk in the wings created by the glare of the footlights, and an ugly businesslike reality that counteracted the unrealities of the stage set. He did not realize that Arthur Higgins was standing beside him until he heard his voice.

  “It may be genuine applause,” Arthur Higgins said. “This has gone on two minutes longer than is conventionally necessary, and it still keeps up. Did you like the performance, Tom?”

  “I couldn’t follow it,” he answered.

  “Listen to the hand Briggs and Duneen are getting,” Arthur said. “It is more than is absolutely necessary. George—”

  Then he saw that George Rosen, the assistant stage manager, was with them.

  “George, tell Duneen to go out alone.”

  It was instructive to watch Arthur Higgins gauge the reaction without excitement or emotion.

  “They are sometimes kind to a new face,” Arthur said, “but this may mean more. It isn’t dying down. George, keep the curtain down ten seconds longer, and if it keeps up, send out Briggs.”

  When the curtain was down the sound from the house was deadened, but the applause was still insistent.

  “All right,” Arthur Higgins said, “send it up again. This really is longer than is conventional. It’s always very tricky; you never can be sure.”

  His voice was drowned out as the curtain rose.

  “It’s a smash hit, Mr. Higgins,” George Rosen said. “Listen to the lovely hand they’re giving Mr. Briggs.”

  George Rosen was a young man then, with a great future ahead of him, and he was now out on the Coast—where, if he had wanted, he could have bought the rights of Porthos of Paris—but he had been assistant stage manager, then.

  “You can’t trust them,” Arthur said. “When those people get in the right mood of mass hysteria, they will applaud their grandmother’s funeral. They may think better of it in the morning.”

  “But still, sir,” George Rosen said, “they are going for Mr. Briggs in a very big way.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said, “but the reviews will tell better. Send the curtain down, George, and tell Briggs and Duneen to go out and kiss each other lightly and then we’ll send it down for good. Nothing resembling a clinch, George. Sex must not enter into it, you understand, now the show is over.”

  “It might be a lovely touch,” George said, “if you and Mr. Harrow, Mr. Higgins, went out to take a bow.”

  “Never make such a suggestion again,” Arthur Higgins said. “If they saw Mr. Harrow and me, they wouldn’t believe the play. Excuse me, Tom, nothing personal intended.”

  They were still applauding when the curtain rose on the chaste embrace.

  “I think I can honestly detect an undertone of enthusiasm,” Arthur Higgins said. “Tom, would you like to go out alone? The new playwright—it won’t hurt, if the reviews are good.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s bad enough right here.”

  “You’re being debonair,” Arthur said. It was still difficult to hear him in the wings.

  “The hardest trick is to be debonair when you take it on the chin,” Arthur Higgins said. “Keep the curtain down, George, and dim the footlights. Put on all lights on stage. Bring on the cast, and go and kiss Duneen, Tom, and tell her she was wonderful. Shake hands with Briggs, in a very manly way, and then kiss the other girls. Don’t kiss them too hard because you’ll have to do it all over again at the apartment. Yes, on the whole it might be wise to hoard the osculation, Tom.”

  Tom wished that at the In Memoriam meeting held for Arthur Higgins he had remembered to quote that bit. He had said only that Arthur was the greatest trouper he had ever known, and who wasn’t the greatest known trouper when he died?

  “You are all over queer perfume,” Rhoda said. She made the remark in the taxi when they were on the way with his family-in-law to Arthur Higgins’s apartment.

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s mostly Duneen, I think. Arthur made me kiss them all. I
t’s etiquette.”

  “I’d just as soon you didn’t kiss Duneen too often,” Rhoda said. “She’s too pretty for her own good.”

  Now that the play was over, he was able to think of Rhoda and of how she would adjust herself to everything.

  “I do think Miss Duneen is lovely,” Mrs. Browne said, “with fine features, but she is not distinguée. She has not the patrician look.”

  “Yes,” he said, “you’re very right”—and he noticed that his voice had assumed the inflections of Arthur Higgins—“she isn’t and Rhoda is. The thought crossed my mind the first moment I saw her.”

  He was glad to hear Rhoda laugh.

  “Don’t you believe him, Mother,” she said. “It didn’t cross his mind at first that you came from Baltimore.”

  “I’m sure it crossed his mind that you were a lady, dear,” Mrs. Browne said.

  “There used to be a race-track man down in Maryland I used to know,” Mr. Browne said, “who once said he could always guess the blood lines from looking at a filly.”

  “Hudson,” Mrs. Browne said. “What are you giggling at, dear? I don’t think your father’s very funny.”

  “I’m nervous, Mother,” Rhoda said. “I can’t help it until I know what’s happened to the play.”

  “What’s happened, dear?” Mrs. Browne said. “Why, it was marvelous from start to finish, and everyone clapped and clapped except some men in the row in front of us who left in a very rude way right in the middle of everything.”

  “Mother,” Rhoda said, and the weary patience of her voice showed how quickly she could move to another way of life, “those were the critics. They had to leave to meet their deadline.”

  “I still think they might have done it more politely,” Mrs. Browne said. “Everything was perfectly lovely. I’ll never forget how everyone else clapped.”

  “I know, Mother,” Rhoda said, “but applause doesn’t mean anything on a first night, and I’m not sure the play or the audience became alive.”

  Rhoda never forgot words or phrases; she was quoting Arthur Higgins.

  “Why Rhoda, it was magnificent,” Mrs. Browne said. “Wasn’t it wonderful, Hudson?”

  “Yes, Estelle,” Mr. Browne said, “it was a hundred per cent, and I don’t think we’ve thanked Tom enough for asking us down to see it. It’s the finest time I’ve had in years.”

  He was glad that he had asked the Brownes and that at least someone had derived some happiness from the ordeal.

  “There’s only one thing …” Mr. Browne said.

  “You’re the one who always picks holes, Hudson,” Mrs. Browne said. “What thing?”

  “I didn’t know Rhoda would marry a famous man,” Mr. Browne said. “It’s going to be tough for me to get on with a famous man.”

  It was easy enough to laugh, and to suggest that they wait to see the papers, but at the same time the house at Daytona Beach might have been much farther inland if it had not been for that remark of Mr. Browne’s.

  That ride in the dark uptown on Park Avenue, past the glittering windows of the apartment buildings, was a last link between a past and a future that he was hardly beginning to discern. He was approaching a set of values unknown to him except in an academic way, and no one in the world could explain any human value academically. It was not Rhoda’s fault that she had failed to grasp that future in the same way that he had. He was leading and she was following. Besides, no two people ever reacted in the same manner to any given situation, and the complexities of that future were with him still. The complexity of the creative urge and the riddle of artistic integrity were all intermingled with tenets of love and marriage. He could see, now, that he was inevitably more involved in that future than Rhoda ever had been.

  For example, that party at the Higgins apartment was bound to have more overtones for him than for her. Beautiful as she had looked, light and easy as she had seemed, she was bound to be less aware than he of the significance of that party. In spite of the strangers gathered in the Higgins living room, the party had a tribal quality. They all were waiting for the word; the livelihood of many guests depended on it. Like hundreds of similar gatherings he had attended later, theatrical democracy was behind it. The Higgins office force was waiting to express a word of hope and cheer; there was champagne and there were cold filings to eat. The sight of the table in the Higgins dining room made Tom suddenly hungry. Arthur Higgins, even in his last days, had always insisted on champagne.

  In the Higgins apartment, defiant loyalty temporarily overcame petty jealousies. There was a murmur that seemed rehearsed when the Brownes, Tom, and Rhoda entered. He had never been as much the center of anything before, walking in with Rhoda. Perhaps he already had a premonition that he would be the center of similar gatherings for years to come, that voices ever afterwards when he entered a New York drawing room or restaurant would drop for an appreciable moment, that ever afterwards he would be the center of critical likes and dislikes, enthusiasms and enmities.

  “Here he is,” Arthur Higgins said, crossing the room to meet him. “Here’s the hero.”

  It was solid corn, but the speech also had a sort of authentic old-school quality in the Higgins apartment. The room, with its tapestries, its dark woodwork and its upstairs gallery, was a larger, more gracious projection of the office. There was nothing that exactly resembled its spirit any more unless some odd corner of the Cloisters up the river, but the late Charles Dana Gibson would have been entirely conversant with the background. A moment’s pause after Arthur Higgins’s courtly speech made Tom aware that everyone was waiting for a bon mot in return, and that he had to be right out there with Arthur Higgins.

  “Good evening, Arthur,” he said, and he waved his hand to the office and theatre personnel and other guests with whom he was only half familiar. “Let’s not cheer yet. The poor devil may be dying.”

  It was nearly his first experience in delivering an apt, informal line. Arthur understood such grace and waited until a ripple of mirth subsided.

  “But you could still do with some champagne, couldn’t you?” Arthur said.

  “Yes,” he said, “I really could.”

  A waiter arrived who looked like a Gibson waiter, with a tray of glasses.

  “One moment,” Arthur Higgins said, “before we lapse into easy conversation.” He was made to be a master of ceremonies, and he had always loved that sort of thing. “The last few years have been a bright period for the American stage. I predict that everyone will know this news tomorrow, but in the meanwhile, I am proud to propose the health of one of our newest and finest playwrights.”

  It was a time to be quiet and to touch glasses with Arthur Higgins, and to face the fact that Arthur might be right.

  “Darling,” Helen Adair said, “the interesting thing is that Arthur means it.”

  He was able to tell himself that everyone meant things when caught in a theatrical emotion, and that such an outgiving was like the bubbles of champagne. Then he was shaking hands with everyone and their faces still returned to him with his memories of the Higgins apartment. He saw Mort Sullivan and the girls from the Sullivan office; and Walter Price, thin and handsome in those days; and Waldo Francis, who handled the publicity; and Dick Brogan, his assistant; and Curt Winternitz from the box office; and Nancy Mulford; and Bess Moriarty, who ran the switchboard; and Celestine Guin, who was wardrobe mistress; and Marie, whose last name he never did remember, who was Duneen’s maid; and Gus, the call boy; and Lou Achir, the stage manager; and George Rosen, his assistant; and Bob Solomon, the assistant business manager.

  Then he was meeting the Higginses’ special guests and friends, and the financial backers, and shaking hands with Mr. and Mrs. Paul J. Merriman, Mr. Higgins’s lawyer; and Mr. Benjamin F. Chew, Mr. Higgins’s financial adviser; and Mrs. Chew, who lived in a charming estate in Bronxville. He was meeting Spike J. Maxwell, who had roomed with Arthur Higgins at Harvard; and General G. Wesley Jones and Mrs. Jones, now at Governors Island, who were deeply int
erested in the play because General Jones, then Colonel Jones, had distinguished himself in the Bois des Rappes, mentioned in the play. The general lost interest on learning that Tom had not served in World War I.

  “I wanted to go, sir,” Tom had told him, “but I was not in the age group.”

  He could remember the lines in the general’s face and he was sure the general had understood and applauded the psychology of heroes. Then Arthur Higgins introduced him to Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Twining Hertime.

  “Tom,” he said, “these are special friends and they are especially anxious to meet you because they are sharing some of our financial burdens.”

  Mr. Hertime laughed in a very jocular way.

  “Don’t tell tales out of school, Art,” he said. “We are very pedestrian people, Mr. Harrow, but may I call you Tom, and may I call your gorgeous wife Rhoda? We are so pedestrian that Mrs. Hertime and I enjoy a change sometimes, don’t we, my sweet? And we have certainly enjoyed this evening.”

  “And I am certainly sure after this evening,” Arthur Higgins said, “that you are going to make some change out of it, Art.”

  Mr. Hertime laughed again.

  “Whether I do or not,” he said, “it’s been more fun than a barrel of monkeys, meaning nothing personal. Hasn’t it been more fun than a barrel of monkeys, Angela?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hertime said, “but you mustn’t mind him, Mr. Harrow, and neither must your ravishing wife. What did you say your first name was, dear?”

  “Rhoda,” Tom Harrow said.

  “Rhoda. It’s one of my favorite names,” Mrs. Hertime said. “Haven’t I met you somewhere, dear, at Palm Beach or somewhere?”

  “Palm Beach?” Rhoda said. “No, but I wish you had.”

  “Did you hear that one?” Arthur Hertime said. “She wishes she had! Tom, if I make take the liberty of saying so, your wife is as witty as she is beautiful. Waiter, bring me some more happy water. Here’s looking at you, Mrs. Harrow—but may I call you Rhoda?”

  “Why, yes, if you’d like to, Mr. Hertime,” Rhoda said.

  “It’s a deal if you call me Art,” Mr. Hertime said. “Angela, I’ve got an idea. These kids must be very, very tired. Do you get the idea? Why not take them down to the beach with us next week, after the show is set?”