Act One

by Moss Hart

  With the sun overhead once more, we managed to achieve a second wind, somehow, and plowed through the rest of the season, not without a few stern measures being taken by W. J. Perleman, for Eddie’s eyes were turned toward the upcoming South African tour, and his lack of interest in what went on on the stage of the social hall of Camp Utopia was painfully obvious and his rehearsals increasingly disorganized, even for Eddie.

  One historic Saturday night’s musical comedy was improvised right on the stage after the curtains parted, with Eddie shouting from the wings what to do next, no rehearsal of any kind having been held beforehand. The audience howled and jeered, and that Sunday we did not appear on the dining-room steps to sing farewell songs to the departing guests. We were right back on the steps, however, to sing welcoming songs to the new batch of guests that arrived from the station, on the shaky assumption that the new arrivals would not have had time to compare notes with our audience of the night before.

  And then, suddenly, it was Labor Day—and my first season in camp was over.

  I was fifteen pounds lighter. My face was pallid; those nine days of rain and the subsequent all-day rehearsals in the social hall in preparation for the Labor Day weekend had robbed it of the last bit of tan, and my eyes seemed to have sunk far back in their sockets. It was too bad that we had not scheduled some scenes from Julius Caesar, for though I had eaten like a horse all summer, I had the lean and hungry look that Cassius is supposed to have and could have played him without any make-up at all.

  By the afternoon of the day after Labor Day, the camp was empty of guests, waiters and social staff—not a single remnant remained of the summer except myself. It was as though a sudden outbreak of cholera had emptied the place of all humankind, and only the trees and the cloudless sky looked down on what had been, just the day before, a teeming, roiling mass of humanity that overflowed the lawns and walks and dotted the lake with every available canoe and rowboat. I was staying on for three or four days by permission of William J. Perleman, while the local workmen closed up the camp for the winter.

  Eddie had left on the early-morning train for New York, his nose pointing straight to South Africa, where indeed it took him in company with a troupe that included Luther Adler and Harry Green, and I did not set eyes on him again for over two years. The rest of the staff, still barely speaking to each other now, became as one with the last of the departing guests and cluttered around the buses, cars and piled-up luggage, and it was I alone who stood on the dining-room steps and waved them off.

  I stood on the steps and looked down the cabin-lined paths toward the lake. There was not a soul to be seen—not a single girl drying her hair in the sun, her shoulder straps pushed down as far as the law would allow; not a single boy doing push-ups in front of his cabin, showing off his muscles to the girl. The silence of a lovely September day was unmarred by wolf calls, whistles, or the shrieks of girls being pinched on their bottoms through a bath towel as they ran toward the showers. Not one ukulele strummed, not one record played “Indian Love Call,” while another record drowned it out with “The Japanese Sandman.” And the dining room, a roaring boiler factory at each mealtime, was empty and silent behind me.

  I strolled down to the social hall and peered in; the litter of the farewell Labor Day Carnival still strewed the floors and walls. On the empty stage lay the tin shovels and pails I had used the night before in my impersonation of Fanny Brice as “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach.” Two straw hats, kicked clean through the center now, that Eddie and I had used for our Gallagher and Shean number, rested on the footlights, and tossed heedlessly over one of the musician’s stands was the black cape I had used for my Hamlet soliloquy at the last campfire. I smiled benignly on it all and strolled on down to the lake. Next Monday morning I could awake without the knowledge that I would have to do a Charleston encore that evening—and next Monday was what I wanted to think about.

  It was to have time to think that I had asked permission to remain these three extra days in camp alone. I took my favorite canoe and paddled straight out toward the island. Never had camp seemed so pleasant, and I knew that never again would it be like this. But summers in camp were part of my plan now, and they would remain part of my life until I was permanently attached to the theatre.

  It had become clear to me, or so it seemed in those hours I had managed to snatch away on this island, that only by a process of ruthless elimination and no daydreaming whatsoever would I find a path of re-entry into the theatre. Acting was out of the question. That I already knew, for even my success as an actor in certain parts in the plays we had done this summer had not changed my mind on that score. I had ruled out very quickly the possibility of getting another job as a theatrical office boy, for if I was going to have to swallow being a social director every summer far into the unforeseeable future, I wanted a good deal more than just free theatre tickets and the smell of a theatrical office. I wanted nothing less than to be an active part of the theatre itself.

  I thought long and hard and from every conceivable angle, including that of lying about my inexperience and trying for a job as a stage manager, but I felt that even if I were not quickly found out, I might very well starve in the process of trying, for stage manager jobs were almost the hardest to come by. I had even, in a wild moment or two, considered writing a letter to Edgar C. Davis—a credulous and seemingly demented Texan, who poured thousands of dollars into a play called The Ladder, giving the tickets away free—and asking him to subsidize me until I found my place in the theatre. But subsidize me for what? I had composed half the letter in my mind when I stopped. Even a crazy Texan did not dish out money to an unknown youth from the Bronx simply because he was stage-struck! I made a list of other possible and perhaps saner benefactors of the theatre, including Otto Kahn, and then tore it up. My own sense of reality set me to laughing even as I put down the names.

  Finally, I came to the conclusion—and so simple it seemed that I wondered why I had not hit upon it right off—that the only way for me to get past a stage door again was to write a play. Nothing short of that would bring me within sniffing distance of the grizzled old doormen that guarded the backstage portals. There was no hesitation once I thought of it—it was as though another apple had dropped on Newton’s head and my own theatrical law of gravity established once and for all. I knew instantly that I was right. It struck me even then how downright accidentally a lifelong vocation can be come upon. I have wondered since if others have experienced the same strange difficulty of perceiving where they really belong.

  Having stumbled dim-wittedly upon the correct choice, however, I proceeded to plan as carefully as I could for its achievement. I was not fool enough to think that plays were easily written, or even if they were, that they had any certainty of success or of production. A number of years might pass and a number of plays might have to be written before one even received production, let alone achieved success. The question was, how to exist and earn a living in the meantime? I dismissed the facility with which I had tossed off The Beloved Bandit as a snare for claptrap writing—indeed, some of its shoddy dialogue still echoed embarrassingly in my ears. Even if I could quickly write another play on the kitchen table at night after a day of work as a shipping clerk or an office boy, the chances of its being any good were highly unlikely.

  Instinctively I knew that I would need a certain sense of composure, a time to work when my mind was fresh and all my senses alert, if I was to have a fair shake of the dice for the high stakes of the game I was going to play. If I was going to attempt to be a playwright, the first necessity was to arrange to have my days free, and Eddie and this past spring and summer had shown me a heaven-sent way. If I could convince William J. Perleman to let me continue directing plays at the Labor Temple and also get one or two other little-theatre groups to direct (for one group alone would not pay enough for food and the roof over our heads), social directing during the summer would see me through the year until the little-theatre groups picked up again
in the fall. Except for the summers, only my evenings would be taken up with work and I would have the days free to write plays. It seemed simple, conclusive, almost an accomplished fact. All I would have to do from here on in, as a famous playwright once fatuously remarked when asked how a play of his was coming along, was to “dialogue it.” “It’s all right here in my head,” said this fool, tapping his brow. “All I have to do now is dialogue it.”

  Paddling back across the lake in the twilight, “dialoguing it” seemed the easiest thing in the world to do. The hammer blows of the workmen boarding up the dining-room windows echoed softly across the water and seemed like the gentle tap-tap of fame already knocking at my door.

  Three days later I was home once again, ringing the doorbell I had rung for so many years and waiting for the door to open.

  IT WAS A CURIOUS homecoming. I don’t know quite what I expected after this, my longest absence from home. I suppose I had carried back from camp with me a fantasy of change—that somehow my mother and father and brother would be “different,” that even the dingy rooms and the threadbare furniture would be less ugly.

  Nothing, of course, had changed. Pleased though they were to see me, my mother and father were utterly incurious as to what the summer had been like or even what I did at camp, and my brother Bernie as usual ignored me, speaking only when I pointedly asked him a direct question. Almost before I sat down, the litany of unpaid grocers’ and butcher bills, the two boarders’ rooms unrented, and the rent three months overdue now that must somehow be paid by the first of the month, began as though I had never been away. In less than half an hour I settled back into the old thralldom; it was as though not a day had passed since last spring and I had simply emerged from the subway that evening as usual.

  But there was a difference in this homecoming—a very significant difference. And I wonder if a first absence away from home marks for others the same curious emotional change in family orientation that this absence did for me in my relationship with my mother and father, and most of all with my brother. Is there a precise moment when we see our parents as though for the first time—look upon them with eyes that seem to see them as strangers see them?

  I think there is such a moment—a moment when we see our parents plain, not when they are grown old and are a symbol of ancestry to be honored or tolerated and when we can no longer know what they were like, but a moment when we see them suddenly for the first time as people. It is a fleeting moment and it passes, to be quickly replaced with the usual façade of filial devotion—that coin of the realm that passes for affection between the generations—but when this moment occurs, it seems to cut through a lifelong incrustation of love and hate, and for however brief a time it lasts, we see our parents as the fallible human beings they are and for a little while we hold them blameless.

  The precise moment happened for me as I stood in the hallway in front of our flat, pressing the doorbell and waiting for the door to be opened. When my mother opened the door, I stood blinking at her as though it were an unexpected and surprising stranger I was seeing, instead of the face of my earliest memories, the face and eyes I had looked up into from the time my own eyes had sight in them. But in a very real sense, or so it seemed to me, I was gazing at a stranger—for the first time I was seeing my mother as the person she was. Even as we threw our arms around each other and embraced, and her first words of greeting reached my ears, I was conscious of hearing her voice as a stranger might hear it—not as her son—without the clatter of a thousand admonitions, beseechings and warnings echoing in my ears. It was a young voice with music in it—not the voice whose every nuance I thought I knew so well; nor was it the face I carried in my mind’s eye, lined and careworn, a face twisted by a thousand demands—so that I was impelled to look at her before I kissed her, and I was surprised to find her face still young and unmarked.

  Behind her my father stood waiting, a stranger, too. In back of him my brother stood, grave and unsmiling—all three of them as curiously removed and remote from myself as figures glimpsed in a distant landscape. In these first few hours at home, I moved through the familiar rooms a stranger myself—almost an observer—seeing clearly my father’s corrosive sadness and defeat, understanding for a little while, and able to forgive, my mother’s tyranny.

  But my thoughts turned mainly to my brother and myself. We had lived all of our lives together, he and I, yet between us there existed only the slimmest line of communication and not the slightest awareness of each other—of what we might be like as human beings. We were more than strangers—we were alien figures who slept in the same bed together each night, the breach between us widening as we awoke each morning and, almost without speaking, went our separate ways.

  Why could we find no words for each other? Was it the seven-year difference in age that separated us? Was it simply the years that kept us locked mutely apart? I did not think so. The age span narrows as one grows older, and a boy of twelve is already an individual, he has tastes and strong judgments and a temperament already formed—and of these things in my brother Bernie I knew nothing. In the uncomfortable and uneasy silence that had become a way of life between us, I could discover not the slightest clue to the kind of person who was growing up beside me, and now for the first time I felt the need to know.

  Puzzling it out, trying to fit the separate pieces of our lives together, I thought I could understand why we had had almost no chance to know each other, or even feel the lack of a normal relationship between us. After all, he had been only five years old when I was working in the music store afternoons after school, a bare seven when I was first locked away in the fur vault, and hardly eleven years old when I returned from Chicago after The Beloved Bandit, a full-fledged failure at eighteen. I had been out of the house and into the world almost before he could put words together; but now he was twelve and I was nineteen, and I was puzzled by and resentful of this total stranger who slept beside me. Perhaps for the first time, in these months away, I had felt an unconscious need for the brother I had never had, or a desperate want of someone to confide in. Whatever it was, I felt a compelling need to try and bridge the gap between us.

  In the first day or two at home I became sharply aware of something that I had not been fully conscious of before. The major decisions of family life were left to me, and it was taken for granted not only by my mother but by my father as well that I, and I alone, should make them. My mother turned to me and not to my father, even in the smallest crises of daily living, and with a somewhat late and guilty clarity I realized that in these last few years my father had receded more and more into the dim background and I had replaced him, as husband and father. This is not an unusual occurrence in families of our circumstance. The breadwinner, whether he likes it or not, and sometimes unbeknownst to himself, gradually assumes a role that is not rightly his, and should not be. And when this happens there is a displacement in the family picture, a twisting and disorientation of family relationships that the years afterward fail to make whole again. It is not surprising that my brother should have rejected a brother he had never known or refused to accept the substitute father I had become.

  Poverty does more than rob one of creature comforts and the right to live with dignity—its thievery can encompass the loss of a brother and father as well. Shaw was correct when he declared that poverty was a sin against God and man alike, and he might have added that ugliness, which is a concomitant of poverty, can be equated with evil. I resolved to do something about both.

  I looked around me at the ugliness in which I had spent the first nineteen years of my life. I watched my brother, more withdrawn and distant than ever, and I decided that somehow or other I must manage to take him away with me to camp the following summer. He would be almost thirteen by then and a job as busboy in the dining room would not be impossible for him to handle. If I could also contrive to get my father a job in the canteen that dispensed cigarettes and soft drinks in the social hall, our combined salaries, if we wat
ched every penny during the summer, might enable us to move to a different flat in a different place—as far away as possible from this present ugliness which was choking us all. If it did nothing more than serve to bring Bernie and me a little closer, it was worth the try.

  It did not. It was a long time before we reached each other unencumbered by the past, and those lost years I still hold guilty of denying me the companionship of the witty, beguiling, sweet-natured human being to whom I am now devoted.

  * * *

  I hated to let a moment of time slip away now, but I let almost a week go by after my return to the city before I called on William J. Perleman and asked to take over the little-theatre group at the Labor Temple again for the new winter season. I thought it wiser to allow a little time to elapse before we met again, for I was certain that his memory of that last unrehearsed musical at camp was still green. It was indeed, and he grumbled and harumphed a good deal about Eddie’s disorderliness, of which he held me a part. But he was surprisingly sympathetic to my aspirations as a playwright and willingly gave me the job. He even suggested another little-theatre group—flourishing, or rather, withering away—in the far reaches of the Bronx, which was in need of a director, and gave me a letter to them.