Two-Part Invention

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  How happy were the early months of the Cherry Orchard tour when Hugh and I were, in the old-fashioned phrase, courting! I remember scuffling through the autumn leaves in Madison, Wisconsin, holding hands. I missed seeing a lot of the October glory because of course when I was with Hugh I wouldn’t wear my glasses, and I was extremely myopic.

  In Madison, the University of Wisconsin treated us to a special rerun of the old Lillian and Dorothy Gish silent movie Orphans of the Storm, in which the very young Joseph Schildkraut had a small role. I didn’t even have my glasses with me in the theatre and couldn’t see a thing. Thelma had a postcard and pricked it with a pin and handed it to me, and I held it to my eyes, one at a time, and so saw a little. It didn’t really matter. Hugh sat on one side of me, Bob on the other. We were surrounded by our fellow players. Life was rich. No matter what the future held, this was a marvelous moment.

  I remember we spent a Sunday on a riverboat in St. Louis in the unusual warmth of what seemed like a summer evening. And Monday evening after the show Hugh, Bob, and I went to playwright Bill Inge’s rooms and talked the night away. Good talk, serious talk, but more about interpreting the events of the human heart in words and music than about the outer events of a troubled world.

  When we left St. Louis I remember the soot piling up on the train windowsills like black snow as we sped toward Chicago on a Sunday afternoon, arriving just in time to check in at our hotels and rush out to the ballet. I can still feel the tingle of thrill as the orchestra played a Tchaikovsky overture.

  Bach is for me the composer of my heart. The structure of a fugue is far more nourishing to me than the emotionalism of the romantics, but Tchaikovsky played a special part in that autumn and early winter. Not only was there the joy of listening to that lush overture with Hugh, but one of Tchaikovsky’s waltzes from Swan Lake provided the theme music for The Cherry Orchard and was played over and over during the party scene. It became “our” music.

  With Miss Le Gallienne and Miss Webster, a play was never “set.” Hugh, in his role of Petya Trofimov, kept on experimenting and deepening. He would suggest a new interpretation of a scene, and Miss LeG would say, “Let’s try it.” After the performance, while I waited for Hugh, I would watch them walking to and fro at the back of the stage, either incorporating what Hugh had done into the play, or else discussing why it didn’t work, and planning to try something else, and I took this creative fluidity for granted, not understanding until later how generous and unusual was such openness.

  Those of us on the lower rungs of the theatrical ladder were encouraged to work on scenes from other plays in order to develop our acting techniques. We were allowed to rehearse onstage, although, because of the rigid rules of the stagehands’ union, we were not allowed to move any of the furniture. Occasionally we made bold to shove a table or chair out of the way, but we had to be sure we were not caught doing it (otherwise, the stagehands would have had to be paid), and we had to put whatever it was back in exactly the place from which we had taken it.

  Two of my more interesting jobs in The Cherry Orchard were musical. At the end of the first act I played a small lullaby on a recorder. It was necessary that I be in full costume and visible from at least one seat in the audience; otherwise, I would have had to join the prohibitively expensive musicians’ union.

  Far more difficult than the recorder was the musical saw. In the second act of the play Lubov Andreyevna, Petya Trofimov, and several others are sitting outdoors in the warmth of a spring evening, and Lubov asks, “What was that? It sounded like a harp string breaking, or a bucket falling in the pit.”

  Harp strings had been broken, buckets dropped, but nothing had the eerie and nostalgic sound that Miss Le Gallienne sought, until someone suggested the musical saw. This instrument (which looks like an ordinary saw), when curved in just the right way and hit with a padded mallet, gives out a weird, vibrating noise which was just right for the desired effect. It was my job, also in full costume, to sit backstage and tap the saw. The great problem was that if the saw was not hit in precisely the right way, instead of the eerie, wailing musical sound it emitted a dull thunk. This happened several times in rehearsal to loud laughter, and I was terrified of making a thunk during performance, which would totally destroy the mood of the scene. Somehow or other, this never happened, and each night the eerie wail followed my tapping of the saw.

  It was apparent to the company that although I had two young men carrying my bags, something special was going on between the young leading man and the understudy. Pepé noticed it. As well as playing the clumsy maid in the first act, I was a guest in the ballroom scene, and for costume wore a beautiful period ballgown. One evening I was standing in the wings waiting to go on when Pepé came by, lifted the skirts of my ballgown, saw my English schoolgirl’s white cotton underpants, and said, “Oh no, darling, those will never do.”

  The next evening he presented me with a pair of lace panties.

  I don’t remember whether or not I ever wore them. But I knew that lace panties were not the key to Hugh Franklin’s heart. And somehow or other I had the sense not to throw myself at him. I remembered being on a staircase backstage in a New York theatre and seeing a woman, a singer, far more glamorous than I, flinging herself at him. And I saw him pull back.

  One night at an after-theatre supper with several other members of the company present, Hugh picked up my bill, and continued to do so. Neither of us said anything about this new development. We were articulate about the theatre, about books, about music, and amazingly inarticulate about our feelings.

  Hugh not only picked up my tab in restaurants, he helped me bathe and clip Touché, and walked her with me after the theatre. On the evenings when I was not with Hugh, she would always head for the nearest lamppost—because it was a spotlight, not because it was a lamppost. Touché loved spotlights. On nights when Hugh, of whom she approved, was with me, she took much longer, bless her. We would sometimes walk with her half an hour or more, while inwardly I urged her to hold herself back as long as possible.

  The world with civilization as I knew it might be falling apart around us, but I was in love.

  In Chicago, where we stayed for several weeks, there were other plays in town, and some of them played on Sunday when we were dark, and we would be given standing room in the back of the theatre. Hugh knew many of the players, and one night after a show we went backstage to congratulate one of his friends on her performance. As we were leaving her dressing room, she called me back in and shut the door and told me that she and Hugh had been very close the year before, but that I should feel free to pursue our friendship; she would not stand in the way. She sounded tolerant and forbearing and a little condescending.

  I murmured politely and fled. I had not looked beyond the moment to Hugh’s past. I had not thought about previous women being part of his life, especially one who was far more advanced in the theatre and in life than I was. But Hugh and I were both well into our twenties. I had gone out with other men before I met Hugh; of course he had gone out with other women. Cap had not taken it kindly when I told him that I was in love with somebody else and could not possibly be engaged to him, that my answer was no. So why was I staggered at this encounter?

  But the tour continued and I was happy. We left Chicago and went farther west, then turned back toward the Northeast. There are many bright memories of cities, theatres, strange cheap hotels. Because of Touché, it was always a problem finding a hotel, and there’s one night of hotel hunting I’ll never forget.

  It was about eight-thirty in the evening when the train, several hours late as usual, pulled into Baltimore, and we were starved because we hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. There was no stop long enough for us to dash to a station lunchroom; nobody came through the train with paper cups of coffee and sandwiches. No dining car. We were tired, too, because we’d just done a week of one-night stands, and the prospect of a week, seven whole nights, in one bed was very welcome.

 
Fiona and I were the only two in the company who weren’t settled with friends or relatives or in a hotel, and Fiona wasn’t settled only out of kindness to me—and Touché. Even when I wrote ahead and received a confirmation in the mail, I would sometimes arrive at a hotel, with the dog, only to be rejected, confirmation or no. I was very grateful to Fiona.

  She had once played a summer of stock in Baltimore and had stayed in a boarding house where she was great friends with the landlady, so for once we weren’t worried about finding a room. Touché was as hungry as Fiona and I, so one of the first things we did was stop at a lunch wagon and buy her a hamburger. Fiona and I had some coffee but resisted the temptation to get a couple of hamburgers for ourselves because we had decided to get settled first, then meet Hugh and Bob for a bang-up dinner, bottle of wine and all.

  Baltimore has two train stations, one at each end of the city, but it seemed Fiona’s boarding house was very close to the station we had not arrived at. So Fiona led the way. Touché and I followed her blindly. The only thing I was sure of was that I would never go back to the dreadful hotel where, on the Uncle Harry tour, four of us had shared two very dirty double beds, and where there was a bathtub in the middle of the room with a screen around it—but no toilet. The fact that we paid four dollars a week didn’t make up for the discomfort.

  “It won’t be long now,” Fiona said comfortingly after we had tramped for blocks and blocks and Touché was beginning to drag on her leash. “It’s a lovely boarding house with great big rooms and it’ll be a grand change after all those awful dumps.” Fiona is a creature brimful of love, with masses of red hair and alabaster skin, so lovely that most people, learning that we were “in the theatre,” asked if we were playing at the Gaiety, or whatever was the name of the nearest burlesque house. She walked along now, her face held up to the soft white flakes that were beginning to fall, humming a little. Touché and I dragged after her, and finally Touché deliberately held up one forepaw and started limping pathetically on three legs, until she got her own way and I picked her up and carried her.

  We walked and we walked and we walked and Touché, for all her beauty and grace, grows heavy after a while. Finally Fiona said, “Funny we aren’t there yet. This doesn’t look like a very nice neighborhood.” She hailed a passing man and asked for the address of the boarding house. The man leered at us, his eyes going suggestively from our heads to our feet and back up again in a most unpleasant manner, but he did make it clear to us that we had walked all the way across Baltimore for nothing. Fiona’s boarding house was a few blocks from the station at which we had arrived.

  Fiona turned red and then white and red again. “I don’t know how it could have happened—I could have sworn—oh, please forgive me!” she gasped. If it hadn’t been for Touché and me, Fiona would have been safely-settled in the Lord Baltimore with Hugh and Bob and most of the rest of the company. How could I help forgiving her?

  She flung her arms around me. “Tonight I’ll give you the ten-dollar back rub. That’s a promise.”

  Touché, my protector, growled as Fiona touched me. “Angel,” she said, “I am not molesting your mistress.” And then to me, “What on earth are you going to do with Toosh on your wedding night?”

  In a weary hour and a half we were back in what, to Fiona, was familiar ground, and soon we went up the brownstone steps of a very nice-looking house. I didn’t care what sort of room they gave us. I didn’t even care about dinner with Hugh and Bob. I just wanted to take a hot bath and get into bed.

  The boarding-house keeper gave one look at my beautiful, my talented, my adorable Touché, and said they didn’t take dogs and couldn’t make an exception even for a dog who worked to earn her own living. Fiona cajoled and wheedled with all her Irish charm, and Touché, true to her histrionic nature, stood on her hind legs and danced, but the boarding-house keeper was a hatchet-faced old sourpuss and there was no getting around her. As she was pushing us out the door, she started to coo over Touché. This was the last straw.

  “If you refuse to allow my dog into your house, please stop gurgling at her,” I said coldly, and stalked away.

  Fiona hurried down the steps after me. “Angel, that was rude of you, you know,” she said softly.

  I was ashamed of my temper, as I always am once it’s lost. I reached in my coat pocket and pulled out the typewritten list of Baltimore hotels that Al Finch, our advance manager, had posted on the call board. We started by trying all the hotels in the neighborhood. They were without exception expensive, but that needn’t have bothered us, because they wouldn’t take Touché anyhow. Finally we decided to forget the size of our pay checks and go to the frightfully expensive hotel where Miss Le Gallienne and Mr. Schildkraut were staying.

  “I’m sorry,” the manager said, “but we don’t take dogs.”

  “Look here”—I was almost in tears—“Miss Eva Le Gallienne is staying here and she has two dogs. And Mr. Joseph Schildkraut is here, too, and he has three dogs.” At this point the hotel orchestra, which we could hear playing dimly in the distance, for some reason began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As Touché heard the familiar strains her ears pricked up and, tired though she was, she rose to her hind legs. I relaxed, certain that now we would be shown the bridal suite.

  The manager didn’t change expression. “I’m very sorry, but we take no dogs.”

  Part of my job as assistant stage manager included walking the dogs of the stars. I looked at him with brimming eyes. “If you keep on telling lies, someday God will strike you down. Come, Fiona. Come, Touché.” And we stalked out again.

  This time Fiona did not scold me for being rude. Back on the street I turned up my collar and blew my nose. “Here’s one that says ‘theatrical rates’ only a couple of blocks from here.”

  “Let’s go.” Fiona started off determinedly.

  I ran after her. “Look, Fifi, Toosh and I will understand perfectly if you go on back to the Lord Baltimore. Do go, please, and we’ll call you when we find a place and tell you where we are.”

  Fiona simply continued her brisk pace. We got to the corner where the theatrical hotel was supposed to be, but at the number was an imposing building with a canopy, and we guessed with sinking hearts that the management had changed and the rate would no longer be “theatrical.”

  “Let’s try it anyhow, it’s only money,” Fiona said.

  We went up to the door and were just about to push it open when Fiona clutched my arm in a frantic manner and pointed to a brass plate on the door. In chastely etched letters it announced: CREMATORIUM.

  We turned and ran down the steps and I started to laugh. “What,” demanded Fiona, “is funny?”

  “I was just thinking,” I explained, “how they’d have looked if we’d gone in and asked if they took dogs.” At least we could still laugh.

  We started back to the center of town and the hotels that were nearer the theatre. It was after eleven by now and even the inexhaustible Fiona was on her last legs. We looked for a phone and I finally went into a bar and called Hugh and Bob at the Lord Baltimore to tell them to check our suitcases, which they were keeping for us, and go on to bed. We’d probably sleep in the station or maybe find a church that was open all night. Hugh was properly sympathetic but agreed to leave the bags at the desk, saying that they were very tired and they’d already had something to eat because they hadn’t heard from us …

  They were tired! I thought furiously and hung up.

  “What about that hotel you stayed in …” Fiona started tentatively.

  “Fifi, we simply can’t stay there. It’s too awful to describe, and Touché would never agree to it.”

  By midnight we had tried all the hotels on the advance manager’s list except one. His comment about this was, “Cheap, but certainly wouldn’t recommend it for girls.”

  It was only a couple of blocks from the theatre, so we decided to try it anyhow. The exterior didn’t look too prepossessing. Outside a dirty brown building a large sign in luri
d red lights proclaimed: ONE DOLLAR A NIGHT.

  Fiona turned to me. “At this point we’ll try anything, but this looks like a House, not a hotel.”

  We went into the lobby. A few exhausted-looking sailors were sprawled in chairs whose springs sagged through torn upholstery. Fiona and I looked at the man behind the desk; his face was the color of parchment; he looked as though he’d been embalmed and then the embalmer decided he wasn’t dead after all. On his head he wore a pale pink wig. Out from under it strayed a few damp grey hairs.

  “Do you take dogs?” Fiona demanded.

  The man giggled foolishly. “Do I take dogs!”

  Taking this to mean yes, Fiona continued, “One bed is cheaper than two?” He nodded. “All right. How much for a double bed for one week?”

  “Five dollars apiece for the young ladies. The dog can share it with you.”

  “Let’s see it,” Fiona said brusquely.

  The pink-wigged man took us up in one of those scary elevators where there aren’t any doors and only two walls. “What do you girls do?” he asked.

  “We work in the theatre,” Fiona said.

  “At the Gaiety?” he asked—as usual.

  “No!” Fiona was indignant. “We’re playing in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard with Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut.”

  The pink-haired man looked disappointed, but then his eyes flickered hopefully. “Either of you by any chance Eva Le Gallienne?” Fiona and I imagined Miss Le Gallienne staying in this particular hotel and burst into laughter.

  The little man looked hurt and took us down a dim and dirty corridor and flung open a door with a flourish. “Some sailors been sleeping here today,” he said, “but we’ll change the sheets for you.” He made this sound like a great favor.

  “Not just sailors,” Fiona whispered, pointing to some bobby pins.

  Buff wallpaper with a spider design was peeling off the walls. A lumpy iron bedstead angled out from one corner. The floor was covered with cigarette butts. Fiona and I looked at each other.