—I didn’t say your fault. I’m talking about the movie.
—I just told you. He said do you want to go to the movies and . . .
—And then you went to a Chinese restaurant, fine. Now the movie.
—Like you said, there was all this blood. Right here, can you feel something?
—In the battle scenes, but what about . . .
—I just closed my eyes. Where you see this soldier get almost cut right in half and, and his, where this soldier waving a sword rides right over him I just closed my eyes.
—Listen, just start at the beginning.
—This first time they meet? where he’s out hunting and she rides up on this horse? So she’s acting very superior and says what is he doing on their land, only then she gets off the horse because it’s real hot and then you know what? Her hand had come burrowing under the quilt he’d pulled up —where he’s wearing these kind of overalls?
—I can guess. Listen . . .
—Where her hand down there is unbuttoning these buttons? The mound under the quilt stirred —and you can practically see what her hand is doing in there. Like, remember in the hospital? where you didn’t want to do anything because the nurse might come in? The mound gently receded, gently rose, —Oscar? Who’s that picture.
—The, who?
—Up there by those books, in this black bathrobe.
—It’s not a bathrobe he’s a judge, it’s my grandfather when he, what are you doing . . .
—I just don’t like the way he’s watching what we’re doing here . . . and she had, in fact, drawn up her blouse clambering off the end of the bed to reach up and turn the picture’s face to the wall —because it’s none of his business is it? her blouse falling open again —look. Do they look lopsided?
—Do, what?
—I said don’t they look lopsided? like this one’s higher than . . .
—Listen! I’ve got to clear things up about this movie. We’re going to read the play right from the start and you tell me if you saw the same thing in the movie, here. You read the part of the Mother.
—Me?
—Just read it! I’m Thomas, I’m standing silhouetted against the window, left, my back on the room and a letter clutched in my hands behind me and I say, Dead! Now go ahead.
—But I thought we . . .
—Just read it! Where it says His Mother. Is that the place?
THOMAS
(IN A HOARSE WHISPER)
Dead!
HIS MOTHER
Is that the place? On your cheek? Where you were wounded?
THOMAS
(INSTINCTIVELY RAISING HIS HAND TO HIS CHEEK)
It’s healed.
HIS MOTHER
Like a kiss . . .
THOMAS
(TURNING SLOWLY TO FACE HER)
Is it so bad, then?
HIS MOTHER
No, not bad Thomas no, only . . . you look surprised. Is it true then, what we heard? That you were a hero?
THOMAS
Where?
HIS MOTHER
On the . . . battlefield?
THOMAS
I mean where did you hear it.
HIS MOTHER
Ambers heard, up at Quantness. What happened?
THOMAS
(DISMISSING IT IMPATIENTLY)
What happened? A shot, or a flying splinter. How’s one to tell at a moment like that . . . ? I didn’t know myself when it happened.
Seating himself in the window, THOMAS raises a boot to the sill and smooths letter out against it, intently as though trying to read.
HIS MOTHER
(ANXIOUSLY)
Didn’t know yourself, Thomas?
(SHE PAUSES, AS HE PAYS HER NO ATTENTION)
You don’t look well, Thomas. I couldn’t see when you came in, coming before it was light, but I knew your step. You look like you’ve scarcely eaten or slept the whole year you’ve been gone, since it started . . . You’re thinner and tired, too, now I can see. You might have lost an eye.
THOMAS
Tired . . . ?
HIS MOTHER
Or been blinded for life.
THOMAS
(EXCITEDLY PLANTING BOOTS, BRANDISHING LETTER)
I told you I hadn’t slept! How could I, with this?
HIS MOTHER
Your uncle never gave things away before. Not a smile, not a penny, and his own brother lying dead and buried in a foreign land . . .
THOMAS
(WITH ELATION)
And he never died before either! Dying intestate, Lord! I admire that, I must confess it. I don’t know why, but I admire that ‘intestate.’ For him, of all men, to die without leaving a will! And after the way he talked to me then, when we came back from France like beggars looking for a new exile, and you sent me up there to see him? ‘Coming in here in your fine French clothes demanding your rights,’ he said to me, when I asked him for the money that he owed to my father, when I’d spent the morning trimming frayed cuffs and pinning the hem on my father’s coat to try to look fit to call. Five hundred dollars! What was that to him, ‘the prominent coal magnate’ this letter calls him, and here . . .
(LOOKING AT LETTER AGAIN, WAVING IT)
‘The eminent Pennsylvania political leader,’ shabbier than I was with his tarnished buttons, and a coat gone green at the seams. And not for want, mind. He was proud of it, of saving the cost of a coat. Do you know where he’d got it? Off his coachman’s back, when even the coachman was ashamed to be seen in it. And even at that, would he part with the five hundred dollars? Three hundred, take it or leave it, he said, and a deed to oblivion, the deed to this place he’d been stuck with on a bad debt.
(CHUCKLING WITH RELISH)
What a fine pair of tramps we must have made, and this fortune between us, when he sent me off to see his man Bagby. This same one, his General Manager, the same Bagby that’s written this letter. ‘Bagby takes care of such things,’ he said when he sent me off. Seven years ago, this same one, this same Bagby.
(PACING THE ROOM, MUTTERING WITH RELISH)
Sitting up stark naked in the middle of his bed gaping at a comic print, a bag of jawbreakers beside him and a hard hat on his head. ‘Come in,’ he says to me, into his dingy furnished room. ‘There’s your money on the chiffonier, I’ve no doubt you’ll want to count it.’ ‘Here? The devil it is,’ I told him, without even touching the envelope. ‘My uncle said gold, and where’s the deed that he talked about?’ ‘Suit yourself,’ says Bagby, cracking a jawbreaker in his teeth, ‘in the top drawer,’ and back he went to his comic. There it was, three hundred dollars counted out in the drawer, and the deed to this place with it. And now . . . !
(TURNING HALF TOWARD HER)
‘Bagby takes care of such things . . . ’ By God, and he does!
HIS MOTHER
Thomas! . . . Language fit for the battlefield, you’re not in camp now among strangers and animals.
THOMAS
(APPROACHING HER)
A battlefield, that’s what it’s been all our lives! And now? Isn’t it a time for . . . ‘language,’ as you say? To owe no one, after . . . all this. The years of all this, and of talking poormouth at Quantness . . .
HIS MOTHER
You’ve earned your keep up at Quantness.
THOMAS
And to never be forced into any man’s debt again!
HIS MOTHER
Do they know?
THOMAS
Know? Up at Quantness? Of course. And the first thing the Major said, when I told him about it last night, was ‘Get up there and claim it.’ Do you think he wants the mines, the coal, all of it seized by the Federal government? Confiscated, if I don’t claim it? Do you know how much we need coal?
HIS MOTHER
(LOOKING PAST HIM TO WINDOW)
I do know, Thomas.
THOMAS
When I rode in there last night, on furlough, and found this news waiting, why I . . . I was a hero, home from the war, as though I�
�d lived there all my life and not just these three years since I married.
HIS MOTHER
(RUEFULLY)
They’ve needed you more than you did them, Thomas. The work you put in on Quantness cotton while this place ran to ruin . . .
Standing over her, THOMAS gestures imploringly, then turns and crosses to the window, where he stands staring out.
THOMAS
By heaven, what a day!
HIS MOTHER
(AFTER PAUSE)
They’ve stopped the pension, Thomas.
THOMAS
(TURNING)
Pension?
(STARES AT HER FOR A MOMENT, THEN BREAKS INTO LAUGHTER)
My father’s pension? That . . . how-much-was-it-a-month?
(ADVANCING TOWARD HER AGAIN)
Listen, don’t you understand? This, what we have now, it’s worth all the pensions they ever paid?
(HALF TURNING FROM HER DOWNSTAGE CENTER)
It was an insult, that pension, coming year after year to remind us what injustice was, in case we’d forgotten. In case I’d been able to forget all the plans that he had for me, for a great career in public life, bringing me up to read Rousseau, believing the ‘natural goodness of man . . . ’
Turning to her impulsively, THOMAS goes down to one knee beside her chair, and she throws up a hand to save the lamp from falling.
Listen, we can wait our lives out, Mother! Waiting for something like this . . . Waiting for something to happen, isn’t that what people do? What keeps them alive, this waiting? What . . . even my father, wasn’t he? Waiting for something to happen? to come out of nowhere and change things . . . and then?
As his enthusiasm fails to kindle her, THOMAS regains his feet slowly, turning away pensively toward the window.
Why, they die that way, waiting.
Letting himself down slowly half seated against the window-sill, THOMAS opens his coat and takes out a tobacco case and a cigar.
(HALF TO HIMSELF)
Free to be something, all the things . . . things we’ve talked about, to make choices. Yes, free to make choices, instead of being driven to them, will you get ready Mother, please? They’re waiting for us, up at Quantness.
As though regretting this show of impatience, THOMAS seats himself back against the sill, and picks up a strip of rag he finds there.
They’re expecting you . . .
HIS MOTHER
Is that the same uniform you went off in? Yes, it looks like it, now I can see.
Restraining himself, THOMAS crosses a boot over his knee and begins to rub it clean with the rag.
I remember when it was new, before you went off, you’d lay a handkerchief over your knee when you crossed your leg up that way, with your soiled boot . . .
THOMAS
(WITH EFFORT, NOT LOOKING UP, CONTINUES RUBBING)
They’ve done things, at Quantness, getting ready. A room . . .
HIS MOTHER
That cloth, Thomas.
THOMAS (HOLDING UP THE RAG, PERPLEXED)
What?
HIS MOTHER
Please don’t use it, for that. We’ve kept it for lampwick.
THOMAS
(STANDING, BARELY ABLE TO CONTROL EXASPERATION)
Listen, will you get ready? They expect you. They’re waiting. They expect you up there to stay while I’m gone.
HIS MOTHER
(QUIETLY)
I’ve kept well here this whole year you’ve been away Thomas, and the chance that you mightn’t come back at all. I can’t leave here now.
THOMAS
(BURSTING OUT AT LAST)
Can’t leave? Here? Look at it! The gate off, the fence fallen, corn dead on the stalk and tobacco rotted on the ground. The door latch was broken when I came in. I’m not blaming, I know it’s been hard, I’m not blaming anyone. You or old Ambers, or John Israel, no, I know it’s been hard. But now? You can leave it! Leave all this behind, things broken and worn out and saving precious rags, the cold and . . . all this.
THOMAS flings the rag to the floor between them and stands confronting her.
HIS MOTHER
(WITH A SORROWING CALM)
I was proud of you here, Thomas.
THOMAS
Proud!
HIS MOTHER
(AS THOUGH TRYING TO REACH HIM)
Of your work, your courage, that you’d found a place, your . . . you loved this land, Thomas. The life, things growing, even your new tobacco, your new bright leaf, you called it? It’s still down in the barn where you hanged it to cure. I gave orders no one to disturb it. I’ve thought I’ve heard you down there at night sometimes, Thomas. The way you used to go down and grind corn? Do you remember?
THOMAS
(BROODINGLY)
Remember . . . !
HIS MOTHER
And the way you went off, when the war came . . .
THOMAS
(WITH BROODING INTENSITY)
Yes, and who do you think I’ve been fighting up there, but my uncle and all his damned Bagbys? Fighting, for this? For the right to lie down at night counting the minutes, the years, the days that can’t be told one from another? And a red stripe in that flag of theirs for every year of . . . humiliation, straining side by side in the mud with old Ambers and John Israel, two black wretches who can’t call their souls their own, planting and putting in fence. Yes, four years of that, and then three talking poormouth at Quantness, and you ask me to hesitate? With these seven stripes across my back, and now this on my face to remember?
(PAUSING, AS SHE JUST LOOKS AT HIM, HE ADDS WITH BITTER AFTERTHOUGHT, LOOKING ROUND)
‘One of the finest private mansions in the Carolinas,’ and look at it. Look at it now. That’s what my uncle called it that day, just to get rid of us. Lord! the way he described it. Had he ever come down here and seen it? Why, he talked as though he’d seen Quantness.
HIS MOTHER
(COLDLY DIRECT)
The way you did.
THOMAS
(DRAWN UP SHORT)
I . . .
HIS MOTHER
The way you saw it that first day we came, and you drove that old rig right up to Quantness as though you’d lived there all your life. Standing up as you drove and pointing things out with the whip, the house and the tall white columns, and seeing it all for the first time yourself. I might have thought that you’d been born there, if I wasn’t your mother and knew.
THOMAS
(ANNOYED BUT TAKEN ABACK)
And why not? It was just a mistake, following what directions we had and after he’d described this place as ‘one of the finest private mansions . . . ’
HIS MOTHER
(CUTS IN SHARPLY)
And this now? This great fortune? No Thomas, your father had a friend, what was his name from back in the old whaling days, they called him the Sage of Sag Harbor and what he used to say. There is never a treasure without a following shade of care . . .
(HOLDING UP A HAND TO FORESTALL HIM)
And you sound like you did seven years ago, like you did when we drove into Quantness, standing up in that old rig and crowing. Pointing out things that you thought were yours, horses, stables, I won’t forget, even that sundial by the drive, there wasn’t a tree or a blade of grass, a dog or a darkie that wasn’t yours the moment you saw it, not a fear or a doubt in your mind, and now . . .
THOMAS
(CUTTING HER OFF FIRMLY)
Quantness is my home now.
HIS MOTHER
(SNIFFING, FUMBLING AS THOUGH SEEKING A HANDKERCHIEF)
It has changed you, Thomas. A year from home and people.
THOMAS
And people! By heaven, people? What do you think war is?
HIS MOTHER
No, mindful of others, I mean to say. I cannot see you, a year ago, using such language in the parlour, lighting up your tobacco without excusing yourself, putting your feet up on the woodwork . . . No, not only this, only this as a part of you now. Coming
so sudden at dawn, you look so big to me, so different, so like and so different. Some dream of yourself, coming in so rumpled, your beard not trimmed and the way your face is drawn on that one side . . . you look outraged. I’ve dreamt of you Thomas but not my dream. Someone’s dream, someone else, yours perhaps, coming in with this letter from your Mister Bagby and your talk of going north now, today, when you’ve scarcely laid eyes on your family at Quantness, when you haven’t been home yet once round the clock . . .
THOMAS
(BLURTS OUT)
Listen . . . ! If all this is to keep me here, Mother? Because I can’t stay, isn’t that clear? If you’d . . . tell me what it is that you want. When war came you didn’t want that, you didn’t want me to go, and now you don’t want me to leave it? When I planted tobacco you didn’t want that, we couldn’t eat it or wear it, and now you were proud of it. You said I was vain when I put on this uniform, now when I cross a boot over my knee . . . what is it you want? And when this fortune was out of our reach, why you . . . and now, you won’t have it? What is it!
HIS MOTHER
(WITH REPROACHFUL CALM)
What I have always sought, for myself and those in my keeping Thomas. To know the Lord’s will, and submit. To lay up treasures in heaven, Thomas, treasures even for you, while you seek here below . . .
THOMAS
(HOARSELY CHALLENGING)
Only justice!
THOMAS draws both hands down his face and stands staring.
All of this came when my spirit was almost broken . . . or when I suddenly knew that it could be, and that’s the same thing . . .
He turns away slowly as he speaks, nearing the door and there staring at an old shotgun racked on the wall.
When I’ve laid out there with their screams in my throat, the screams of men being torn to pieces in my own throat because I had to be next, but I couldn’t be . . .
He takes down the shotgun as he speaks and with the suppressed horror of somnambulism goes through the scene which he describes.
All of it couldn’t be happening. There? to me? It couldn’t be, no . . . But what happened once, what happened there, what happened before still happens at night. It happens the way it happened then, when I went up hunting on their property, over the rise where the chapel looks across the fields and over the creek, staring through rail fence and that creek to Quantness house itself. It was when we first came here, we knew no one, and I’d never hunted a thing in my life. With this gun . . . there’s a path that runs up the rise and broadens into a wagonroad straight through a clearing a half mile long and brown with cornstalks standing uncut where the woods farther on fall back. And there, coming over the foot of that rise, three cock pheasants burst up off the ground with the terrible slowness of things in a dream. They wheeled, I fired, and they were gone . . . but there on the ground with a broken wing one of them struggled across the stones, and I fired again, and it kept on, struggling until it reached a wall where it fought its head in amongst the stones. I wanted to leave it, and let it live, to remember as something I hadn’t seen. Worse happens in nature that we never see. Worse happened. I killed it cutting its throat, too kind to do it the violence of wringing its neck or snapping its head against a stone. But around its throat, the brilliant feathers, I couldn’t get the knife through . . . It wouldn’t cut without . . . God! The absurdity of it. It wouldn’t stop fighting, and not fighting me . . . It was fighting to fly from what was happening.
Frolic of His Own Page 8