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Act One

Page 2

by Moss Hart


  The trip was not without fateful consequences of its own. My mother and father met in London—he followed her to America a year later. And on my Aunt Kate the trip produced so profound an impression that she never recovered from it for the rest of her life. She was twenty at the time and my mother eighteen, and for both of them it was a glimpse of a kind of life they had never known or were to know again. To my poor Aunt Kate, an incurable romantic, this whiff of how the other half lived was like some fearful narcotic. From that moment onward, she behaved like a lady of fashion, disdaining work of any sort, and was supported for the rest of her days—she lived to be sixty-odd—first by my grandfather and then by my father, whom she detested and who detested her in return. It was a rather strange obsession, but one that remained unshakable, in spite of the fact that she sometimes had to read her inevitable novel by candlelight, since there wasn’t always a quarter to put in the gas meter. One of the most vivid memories of my own childhood is seeing her trail into her room with her bottle of smelling salts and a book or the Sunday papers, and hearing the lock click shut. Her behavior remained unchanged, while my mother cooked, cleaned and did the washing and ironing not only for ourselves but for the boarders we took in to help pay the rent. It drove my father crazy, as well it might, for she never lifted a finger to help in any way, not so much as by drying a single dish. Yet it was she who opened up the world of the theatre to me and I loved her and am forever grateful to her. It was she, too, who was largely responsible for the powerful effect my grandfather was to have on my early years.

  Shortly after the family returned to America, my grandmother died—heaving, I imagine, a sigh of relief that must have pushed her halfway to heaven—and my mother took over the role of housekeeper for my grandfather. This circumstance was an unfortunate blow to my father’s courtship, for it was some ten years before my mother could be pried loose from my grandfather and allowed to marry. He was not precisely the man to let love interfere with his creature comforts. Besides, my mother acted as a daily keeper of the peace between her father and her sister, who reacted fearfully on each other’s nerves—a part she was also to play for many years with her sister and her future husband, though she could not have known it then. Knowing my father as I do now, it does not strike me as at all strange that he should have been willing to sit out patiently an engagement of ten years. It was, on the contrary, rather typical of him. He is a man who has made a lifelong hobby of unruffled self-preservation. At any rate, the long engagement finally ended. They were married and set up a ménage of their own, leaving my grandfather and his remaining daughter in a state of armed and uneasy truce.

  My mother and father were not to be alone for long, however. About a month before I was born, my grandfather appeared at their door at two o’clock in the morning, and roused them out of their bed. He was in a wild state and threatened that if my mother did not move back with him he would kill himself or Kate, one or the other. He could not and would not stand another day of it. In some awful way I can sympathize with him. I have a rough idea of what my Aunt Kate’s housekeeping must have been like, since I once or twice sampled her cooking, and her own room, no matter how tidied up by my mother, always gave the impression of a countryside ravaged by a long and fierce war. I can’t think how my mother and father ever agreed to this foolish and tragic plan. Certainly neither they nor their marriage ever recovered from it and my mother never ceased to look wistfully back on the only time she ever spent alone with my father in their thirty years of married life.

  * * *

  Thus it was that I was born in my grandfather’s house, and I am told that I had no sooner entered into the world with that age-old wail of protest, than I was picked up bodily by this seventy-nine-year-old autocrat and became his sole and jealously guarded possession. How clearly he still stands out in my memory and how much of him remains!

  I can see him now, with absolute clarity, bending over my bed, lifting me high up in his arms, then putting me on his shoulder, taking me into the dining room and standing me in the center of the dining-room table. And I can still dimly see the ring of upturned faces smiling at me. The faces belonged to the Friday Evening Literary Society, of which he was president, which convened, as per its title, every Friday evening at our house. Supper was always served at ten thirty, and before the cloth was spread, he would march into my room, wake me up and carry me into the dining room. I would stand on the table, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, and as soon as I could collect myself, I would proceed to recite one of his favorite bits from A Christmas Carol, which he had taught me during the preceding week, and once, I believe, at the age of five, I did him proud by belting into Hamlet.

  Still earlier, I have another vivid memory of the terrible day he took me to the barber and had all my hair cut off. Without a word to my mother, of course. I was not quite three at the time, and my curls, which were the fashion then for little boys, were my mother’s particular pride. But he had humored her, apparently, as long as he intended to, and since he never asked approval for anything he did, much less discussed it beforehand, he had simply taken me to the barber and returned me, fait accompli, to my mother. It was the only time, I think, she ever talked back to him and then only through her sobs, while my father was dispatched to the barber shop to try to retrieve a curl from the floor; which he did, and which my grandfather promptly flushed down the toilet. Scenes like this were the rule rather than the exception in my grandfather’s daily life; he generated high drama as his key turned in the door, and I was usually the storm center of both his violence and his tenderness.

  Years later, another memory of him was brought sharply back to me on a very eventful night in my own life. My first play was being given a spring tryout in Brighton Beach. I was hurrying along the boardwalk to the theatre, when I stopped and stared at a ramshackle building which had become a public bathhouse. Suddenly I remembered a sweltering August night long ago when my grandfather had led us all into this same building, then a kind of boardwalk night club, and like a flash of summer lightning illuminating a dark landscape, that whole agonizing time rushed into my mind: the terrible heat, the oppressive silence that had filled our house for so many weeks, the blind panic a child can feel when he senses a crisis in the family—it all flooded back as I stopped and stared at that building.

  The crisis which I sensed but could not understand, nor do I suppose they could have explained it to a child of six, was that modern industrial methods had finally caught up with the ancient trade of cigarmaking. A machine had been invented to turn out cigars from the tobacco leaf to the finished, banded and boxed product, and the craft of making cigars by hand was suddenly and overnight revolutionized. My grandfather and my father, a cigarmaker by trade also, had been out of work for months. We lived as best we could on the paltry benefits doled out by the Cigarmakers Union, never a very rich union at best, and I have never forgotten, nor shall I, the plight of these two men whose trade had suddenly been snatched away from them. My grandfather was too old to try anything else, my father too frail. They tried desperately at first to hang on to their only means of livelihood by buying raw tobacco, making cigars in the kitchen, and peddling them from door to door; but competition with machine-made cigars was a pathetically lost cause.

  Finally, in this terrible summer I speak of, they had stopped trying altogether and sat helplessly all day around the house, a growing fear in my grandfather’s eyes and a tightness about his lips that frightened me. Even I, who could do anything with him, could not penetrate his cold despair, and this particular night he had shut himself in his room and had not appeared for the evening meal, nor did my entreaties or repeated knocks on the door, when I was sent to fetch him, call forth an answer. I remember I had wandered out to the fire escape, my mother, father and aunt sitting in heavy silence in the stifling room behind me, when my grandfather’s door suddenly opened and he shouted to my mother, “Lily—how much money is there in the house?” She told him, and he called back, “Give it to
me and get your hats on! We’re going to Brighton Beach! I’ve had enough of this!” He knew, of course, that it was not only all the money in the house, but all the money they possessed in the world; but he had had enough of fear and despair, and off we went to the seashore and a boardwalk floor show in the very building I was standing in front of now. I had adored him more than ever that night, and I thought, as I walked away from the place, what delight it would have given him to know that I had written a play—what infinite pleasure he would have taken in hurrying along to the theatre with me and watching the curtain go up. He was a very dramatic fellow himself.

  He died just a year later, when I was seven years old, in the same week that my brother was born, and with him went the only things that I remember with any pleasure of my childhood. It may be that I have made him sound faintly like a monster, and it cannot be denied that he was certainly monstrous to have around the house, but by the same token he was a unique figure of enormous vitality, color and salt. Every memory I have of him is vivid and alive, from the Sunday morning ritual of standing on a chair beside him while he dyed his hair, mustache and goatee a jet-black—he was as vain as he was bad-tempered—to the recollection of watching him try to catch a butterfly for me with his Panama hat, while a delighted crowd of Central Park strollers looked on, laughing their heads off. I think perhaps that I gave him the only peaceful and untroubled emotion he ever knew in his turbulent and unhappy life, and he gave me in return, for good or ill, a relish for people of thunder and lightning and a distaste for the humdrum. After his death, I turned not to my mother or father, but to my Aunt Kate, and like all seemingly innocent happenings which afterward shape our destiny, this unconscious turning to my aunt was the most important event of my boyhood.

  I SUPPOSE it is a trifle too easy and, in fact, a little simple-minded to look down the long corridor of one’s life and say with any degree of surety, “Here is how it happened—here is where the door opened—this was the turning point.” After all, how does one know? Suppose, for instance, there had been no Aunt Kate, or presume she had been a less strange person than she was; would the door have opened differently, the path turned the other way? Perhaps. I cannot be certain. But my aunt, in her own way, had the same streak of iron in her that my grandfather had in him, and though the iron emerged in my aunt’s case as a kind of childish and permanent romanticism, her influence on my awakening mind and senses, particularly in the void left by my grandfather’s death, was a powerful and determining factor in all the young years that followed.

  To the casual eye, she must have seemed a foolish, if not a downright ridiculous woman. She was full of airs and graces that were faintly grotesque considering the lowly orbit in which she moved; but apart from her obsession, which was pathological and worsened with the years, she was extremely intelligent. It is both sad and strange that this often silly woman, dressed usually in a most idiotic attire, was in fact an immensely shrewd and sensitive human being. The two are not mutually exclusive. I sat in a theatre a few years ago at the out-of-town opening of a now famous play and watched, fascinated and puzzled, as the actress on the stage played out the tragic destiny of the playwright’s imagining. There was something about the character of this woman on the stage that tolled the bell of remembrance within me. It was almost as though I had known this woman myself—echo after echo reminded me of someone I had known in my own life—and suddenly I knew who it was I was remembering. Aunt Kate. The play that brought her back to me so sharply was A Streetcar Named Desire and the character was the unforgettable Blanche Du Bois. I do not mean to suggest that the story of Blanche was my aunt’s story or that she was anything like the twisted and tormented Blanche; but there was enough of Blanche in my Aunt Kate—a touching combination of the sane and the ludicrous along with some secret splendor within herself—that reawakened long-forgotten memories. I think Tennessee Williams would have understood my Aunt Kate at once—perhaps far better than I did, for in those early years I confess I was a little ashamed of her. She was too strange a figure for the conforming little beasts that children usually are for me to have been completely comfortable about her. I always looked straight ahead when we passed other children that I knew in the street and swallowed my discomfort as best I could.

  It was a hazard I willingly undertook, for when we walked out together we were almost always on the way to the theatre, and that delightful prospect was enough to make me run any gantlet. I did not know until long afterward how she managed these excursions to the theatre for herself and me, and the method she used was, I think, very characteristic of her. Quite simply, she managed them through pure blackmail. After my grandfather’s death, my father continued to support my aunt in the style, such as it was, that she was accustomed to. Poor as we were, this was somehow taken for granted—I do not pretend to understand why. However, Aunt Kate’s style was of necessity somewhat curtailed now that my father was the sole wage earner. It could not possibly include the theatre and novels, two items she found as necessary to living as breathing and eating. So she promptly sat down and wrote a fine blackmailing letter to the rich relatives in London, outlining in the best tear-drenched tradition of the period, I am sure, her sad plight as the now orphaned daughter, and shaming them into a small monthly allowance. This she used exclusively for theatre tickets and books, and come hell or high water not one penny of it was ever touched otherwise.

  I can well remember the times we went to bed in the dark because there was no quarter to put in the gas meter; or even more vividly, some evening meals eaten by candlelight for the same reason, after which Aunt Kate would emerge from her room, attired in what she considered proper fashion, and be on her way to David Belasco’s production of The Darling of the Gods or the equivalent hit of the moment. Incredible as it may seem, never once did she offer to forgo the theatre, no matter how dire the financial crisis might be and, equally astonishing, it seems to me, was the fact that she was not expected to. In some curious way I think the answer is that we were grateful for this small patch of lunatic brightness in the unending drabness of those years. Just as she never admitted to herself the poverty in which we lived, so through her passion for the theatre she made us forget it for a little while, too.

  My mother and I always waited up for her return, and then she would re-create the entire evening for us. She was a wonderful reporter. She had a fine eye for irrelevant detail and a good critical sense of acting values. Her passion for the theatre did not include being overwhelmed by it, nor was she a blind idolater of stars. She always sat in the gallery, of course, but she always got to the theatre early enough to stand in the lobby and watch the audience go in—in order, as she expressed it, to get all there was to get! She must have been a strange figure indeed, standing in the lobby, her eyes darting about, “getting” everything there was to get, her conversation, if she spoke to anyone, a mixture of Clyde Fitch and Thomas Hardy; her own clothes a parody of the fashionable ladies going into the theatre. But little indeed did escape her and she regaled us with all of it, from the audience arriving to the footlights dimming, and then the story of the play itself. She would smooth out the program on the kitchen table, and there we would sit, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning, reliving the play with her, goggle-eyed at the second-act climax, as ready to applaud the curtain calls as the audience itself had been.

  It is hard to realize now in these days of television, movies, radio and organized play groups what all this meant to a child of those days. It was not only the one available source of pleasure and wonder, it was all of them rolled into one. I remember my constant entreaty was, “When will you take me?” And then my aunt decided, with the knowledge kept from my father of course, that I was old enough to go. I was too young to be taken downtown to see plays, but from the time I was seven years old I was kept out of school every Thursday afternoon and taken to the Alhambra Theatre—to which my aunt had a season subscription ticket each year—where I watched, sober-faced, all the great vaudeville headline
rs. Then, still in conspiracy against my father, I graduated to Saturday matinées at the local stock company and a little later to touring companies at the Bronx Opera House. Not unnaturally I lived for those wonderful Thursday and Saturday afternoons, and in between waited out the days for those evenings when my aunt returned from the greater world of Broadway.

  The effect of all this on the curious and aloof little boy that I must have been is not hard to imagine. Psychologically, of course, it was less than salutary, and I paid the price for it in my adult life. A target for a child’s love and affection is a basic necessity to the security of his early years, and my childhood world was a bewildering battlefield of conflicting loyalties. My aunt and my father were in a state of constant daily warfare. My mother seemed to live only to appease them, a role not unnoticed by me and deplorable to me even then. Even the beloved figure of my grandfather had been in some ways a terrifying one. As a consequence, the world outside my home was seen through the filter of waiting for those two glorious afternoons. At school I was a lonely and alien figure. My given name, to begin with, was a strange one, and children are quick to hold suspect and to damn anything different from themselves, even a name. Added to this was the fact that I spoke with a faint English accent; and my manner of speaking, I’m afraid, was a trifle too literate, if not downright theatrical—the one a heritage from my family, the other a carry-over from Thursday and Saturday afternoons at the Alhambra Theatre and the Bronx Opera House.

 

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