by Moss Hart
“Anything you need—anything you want—drop in any time and just ask me for it. I’ll have the train tickets for you and your father and brother for May fifteenth, and I’ll be up at camp a day or two before you arrive waiting for you. You’ve done a very good thing for yourself today,” he called jocularly over his shoulder as the door closed behind him, that forthright smile still lingering on his lips. Basking in the security of a job at last and the warmth of that smile, I whole-heartedly agreed with him, having no inkling whatever that I had just signed a contract with one of the most thoroughgoing rascals I was likely to meet for quite a while.
* * *
That evening, hesitantly and using all the powers of persuasion at my command, I outlined to my mother and father and brother the change I contemplated making in their lives. I was quite prepared to argue all night and if necessary until an hour before the train left for Vermont, for I knew how big a change I was asking them to make. I was prepared to argue interminably, but I was by no means certain I could make them accept it, for to separate my mother and father for the first time in their married life, to put all our belongings in storage, to send my mother off to live alone in a furnished room for the next four months, was no small thing to ask.
I well knew my mother’s intense and fierce feeling for the tiny world of her family and the grim battle she waged against any part of it being separated from herself. Only bleak necessity had allowed me to escape for so small a time as I had. To my complete surprise, it was she who was the first to agree—the first to see the wisdom of the move—the first to declare herself in favor of the whole idea of change. To this day I do not understand why. It was opposed to her every trait of character—to everything she seemed to hold inviolable.
The simple truth perhaps was that she, too, may have come to the end of her rope in the ceaseless struggle of staving off day after day the butcher, grocer, milkman and landlord. She would have to do it still, of course, wherever we moved, but at least the old pleas and lies would not seem so worn and threadbare with a new butcher and landlord to tell them to. It may have been quite as simple as that. I cannot otherwise explain her immediate and delighted welcome of a change to which I had expected to find her in bitter and implacable opposition. I was a trifle stunned, in fact, by my almost too easy victory, but my mother’s quick and unexpected agreement had an electrifying effect on all of us.
We talked and shouted and interrupted each other and began to plan immediately on where we would go—even of the possibility of finding a small flat and doing without boarders to help pay the rent, an idea that had not occurred to me but which delighted us all, for we shared an equal distaste for the dismal people who seemed forever to be moving among us.
The prospect of sitting down to a meal by ourselves and not having to share the rooms we lived in with others was something to savor and relish, even in anticipation. We became, all of us, a little intoxicated with the excitement of the great change to come, and by the time we went to bed that evening my brother spoke to me not as a stranger, I thought, for almost the first time.
“What’s camp like?” he asked, as we lay side by side in the dark.
I tried to tell him and I spoke also of the good times I hoped we would have together, rushing headlong and too fast into an intimacy that he was not yet prepared to give, and he relapsed back into silence. But I was well content. It had been a remarkable and lucky day, and whatever misgivings I had about going to camp with a staff I had never laid eyes on, I brushed aside as the usual twinges of my overcautious nature and refused to be deviled by them. It was enough to fall asleep with a job safely tucked under the pillow and the knowledge that come fall, my eyes would not open each morning on that same grimy courtyard.
The next two weeks seemed to fly by with an unholy speed. There did not seem to be quite enough hours in the day for all that had to be done in the time that remained. The little-theatre group at the Labor Temple and the group in the Bronx were winding up the year with public demonstrations of their art. My days were filled with dress rehearsals and my evenings with the performances. The clutter of more than nineteen years of living had to be gone through and some of it discarded before our belongings could be put in storage, a task complicated by my mother’s desire to hold on to every scrap. A place had to be found for her to live in while we were away and, if possible, a new flat spotted for our return. And endless hours on my own part were devoted to reassembling all the material Eddie and I had used at camp the previous summer, a good deal of which I had thoughtlessly mislaid and now could not find in the welter of furniture and boxes piled in every room.
In the midst of these last hectic days I made the unpleasant discovery that I possessed no summer clothes at all other than two pairs of bathing trunks faded green by the sun and a couple of sport shirts rather badly frayed around the collars. At Camp Utopia I had filled in my scant wardrobe by liberally borrowing whatever I needed from Eddie. All I had with which to make my debut as a full-fledged social director at the Half Moon Country Club, except for those bathing trunks and two bedraggled shirts, was the blue serge suit I walked around in every day.
Now, a sport coat and white flannel trousers were as necessary to a social director as a suit of armor to a Knight of the Round Table—perhaps a little more necessary, for a Knight without armor at King Arthur’s Court would appear less foolish somehow than a social director making announcements in front of the curtain on show night, or appearing in the dining room and on the dance floor of the social hall, in a blue serge suit.
He need not outdress the Beau Brummells who arrived in camp every two weeks with wardrobes whose colors put the Japanese night moth to shame, but whatever else his wardrobe lacked, however sparse it might be, a sport coat and a pair of white flannel trousers were the dead rock bottom he could get by on. Those he had to have. I knew I could not go to camp without them, yet I doubted, in fact I knew, that by the time we paid the necessary deposit to the storage and moving people and left enough for my mother to live on until I could send her some money from camp, there would be nothing at all left to buy a handkerchief with, let alone a sport coat and a pair of white flannel trousers.
It was going to be embarrassing, but I would have to ask Mr. Axeler for a small advance. After all, he had said, “Anything you want, anything you need, just ask for it”—and this request after all was as much for his sake as for mine. He would certainly understand that a social director in a blue serge suit was a downright impossibility. Mr. Axeler did understand. Quickly and sympathetically he proved to be as charming, as forthright and as good-humored as he had been at our first meeting. Of course I must have the sport coat and the white flannels. He saw that at once. And perhaps even a change of sport coats and a pair of gray flannels as well.
There was one little hitch, however. He had partners, and one of the strict rules between his partners and himself was that no one of them was ever to advance any sum whatever to any of the employees no matter what the circumstances. He must have seen my face fall, for the smile came brightly on as though he had touched a switch under his desk, and his voice grew cheerful again. He had a solution, never fear. A dear friend of his owned a haberdashery store on Eighth Avenue. I was to go there, mention his name, select whatever I needed or wanted and have it all sent direct to the Half Moon Country Club and charged to him personally. Wouldn’t that solve the difficulty? It would indeed. I thanked him profusely. We talked for a few minutes more, but now I could hardly wait to get out of the office and over to that haberdashery store.
Though I had never had the wherewithal with which to indulge myself, I was at that time and for a long time afterward absolutely clothes crazy. It amounted to a hunger for clothes I could never seem to satisfy. I professed to scorn the high-style outfits most male guests paraded around camp in, but secretly I envied them. I craved and coveted the sky-blue turtleneck sweaters and the striped jackets with brass buttons, with a multicolored handkerchief peeking discreetly out of the breast po
cket, and a tie that matched, and white suede shoes with patent leather tops. I craved those absurd getups with a real passion.
It may be imagined, then, with what haste and urgency I made my way over to Eighth Avenue and that haberdashery store. I stood outside the shop admiring the display of shirts and coats and trousers in the windows for a full five minutes, and when I opened the door to step inside, it seemed as though every article of apparel on the shelves and hangers trembled with pleasure in anticipation of being on my person. I could hardly see anything at all at first, not because I had been standing in the bright sunlight outside, but because my eyes seemed blinded by the dazzling array of rainbow-hued wonders that might soon be mine.
I could hardly speak for a minute or two. Never before had I been in a clothing store with the opportunity of saying, “I’ll take this—and give me two of those—” no one who has cared about clothes as I did, and who has never experienced the joy of being able to buy clothes for the very first time, can know or understand the almost sensual pleasure this can be. I proceeded to go on what can best be described as a “clothes drunk.” I bought and bought the way a man, about to fall off the wagon, blindly and blithely starts on a lost weekend. I went a little berserk. The sport coat and the white flannel trousers were bought almost without looking at them, and I went on to splurge in sweaters, shirts, socks, ties and what is known in haberdashery circles as “novelties”—kerchiefs to wear twisted around the neck instead of ties, reversible two-toned pullovers, a beach jacket and sandals with flying fish all over them, and the crowning purchase of all, an utterly useless but completely irresistible smoking jacket with what appeared to be a coat of arms embroidered in silk thread-of-gold on the breast pocket. I stood in front of the mirror in it, staring at myself absolutely enraptured. Where or how or under what circumstances I expected to wear this thing of glory, even I could not have explained; but I knew that I was incapable of not buying it. Even the clerk who was waiting on me demurred at this obvious bit of folly and suggested I think it over and come in and try it on again when the owner of the shop, Mr. Axeler’s friend, would be there himself to advise me, but I could not be dissuaded. Think it over indeed! I could almost not bear to take it off and hand it back to him to wrap.
By the time I finished, I had bought in all about $135 worth of clothes—an amount of money that in those days could have outfitted at least three people for two summers. The clerk, himself a little flushed at so large a sale, shook my hand and promised faithfully to explain everything to Mr. Axeler’s friend and have it all charged and shipped immediately to Mr. Axeler in Vermont. I think he understood in a dim way the extent of my passion. I staggered out of the store as a drunk might stagger into the dawn from an all-night bar, wonderfully warm inside and satisfied to the core, my thirst quenched at long last. I well knew that I had bought foolishly and wildly, that I could not afford any of it, that I did not even know how it could be paid for. But for once, none of that seemed to matter in the least, any more than tomorrow’s hangover seems to bother a man at the height of a wonderful jag; and trancelike I moved through the remaining days until we left, thinking of practically nothing but those clothes.
I opened each package over and over in my mind, I saw myself entering the dining room or social hall in one of the two-tone pullovers with a yellow kerchief tied around my neck. I even found a one-act play to do that would give me a chance to wear the smoking jacket on the stage. I might even, I thought, give a select party or two in my own cabin and as host wear the smoking jacket. I could barely wait for the sun to go down each evening and to come up again the next morning. My impatience to be off was doubled by the fact that each day that passed was one day less we would have to spend in that hated flat.
Yet when the day at last arrived and I opened my eyes to look for the last time at the streaked wallpaper on the bedroom walls, the elation that I had expected to feel was strangely missing. I could not think why. Perhaps the end of anything is somehow a little sad. Perhaps it seemed the final erasure of my aunt and my grandfather, whose living presence these rooms had known; or it may be that my feeling of abhorrence for the place was already expended, now that we were to leave it forever.
We must all have felt something of the sort, each one in his own way, for we walked down the four flights of stairs to the street soberly and without speaking, and stood, still silent, on the stoop in front of the house. To my mother’s credit, she was for once un-tearful. Now that she might have rightly shed a tear or two, watching her family leave her and going off while she was to live alone in a furnished room, she was dry-eyed and cheerful. There was, as a matter of fact, no time for much of anything in the way of emotion. The moving van was at the curb, the men already clambering down from the truck, mercifully cutting short the good-byes. There was time for nothing but a quick kiss to each of us before she had to return upstairs with the moving men. She waved again from the front window as we got to the corner, and then we climbed the subway steps and were on our way.
THE RIDE to Vermont was an overnight one; and by coach, as we were going, it was long, hot and uncomfortable. The train seemed to make endless little stops, so that it was impossible to sleep except in fits and starts along with the train. Even if we could have slept, hunched up in the seats as we were, we gave up the pretense long before the train pulled into our station at six o’clock in the morning.
We scrambled onto the platform with our suitcases and bundles, unwashed, unkempt and hungry, and stood blinking in the uncertain light for a glimpse of the car that was supposed to meet us. It was nowhere in sight, nor was there anything to be seen that looked like a diner or restaurant. Quite some distance across the tracks there seemed to be a place with a light still on that looked like an all-night coffee shop or a bar and grill, but it was too far away to go and run the risk of missing the car. There was not even a ticket taker to ask a question or leave a message with. The ticket window was shut tight.
We sat down on our suitcases in the empty station and waited, shivering a little with sleepiness and hunger. “They must have had a flat tire,” I said cheerfully, and then with a further attempt at cheerfulness, rendered quite hollow by the fact that my teeth were chattering, I spoke again. “Bad beginning, good ending. Isn’t that what you always say, Pop?” I asked. He did not answer and I did not speak again. We just sat—staring miserably up the one road leading to the station that the car might appear on. Finally I got up and walked over to a door marked “Gentlemen.” Inside, the washbasin was filled with cigar butts and what appeared to be a sodden remnant of the Police Gazette. The floor was littered with cigarette ends and toilet paper that had been used in lieu of towels—though how anyone could have washed his hands in that basin escaped me.
I let quite some time go by before I emerged from the washroom, because I was shaking with rage and a strange kind of panic. Our arrival seemed to me (who was forever on the lookout for omens, good or bad) to be an omen that foretold the whole horrible summer that lay ahead—I seemed to know at that instant that something was rotten in both Denmark and Vermont. I stood in that filthy washroom in a morass of indecision, unsure of whether to wait right there in the station for the next train out and go back to New York, or to go on. But where was the train fare to come from? And go back to what? Our furniture was in storage, my mother was in a furnished room; and outside my father and brother sat on two suitcases waiting for me to lead them on to the summer of milk and honey I had promised.
When I rejoined them, and sat down on my suitcase again, I knew we must go on, for there was no place else for us to go.
At eight thirty or thereabouts, some two and one-half hours late, a car drew up to the station with a fearful grinding of brakes. The driver, a grizzled, taciturn, unpleasant man, did not even bother to get out, but called out of the side of his mouth, “You the social director? Get in.” I stared at him for a long moment. In some fatheaded way I had half expected Mr. Axeler himself to be in the car, to welcome us and smooth everyth
ing over with his easy charm and ready smile. Now there was not even a word of apology or regret for the two and one-half hours we had sat there waiting.
“Could we get a cup of coffee before we start?” I asked. “We’ve been sitting here a long time.”
“You can get coffee at camp,” he replied disagreeably, still talking out of the side of his mouth and making no move to help us load our suitcases and bundles into the car. He barely waited until we were seated, and then he slammed away from the station with the same grinding of brakes and squealing of tires. It did not occur to me until we were already under way to ask, “How far is it to camp?”
His reply, and he addressed no further words to us the rest of the trip, was, “Forty-five miles. And it’ll take just as long as it takes me to get there,” he added, just in case I might ask him a further question.
We rode in silence, too dispirited to talk among ourselves, but as I stared at the Vermont countryside whipping by, my spirits rose in spite of myself. One could not remain low in mind for long in the face of those beautiful hills and the fresh, clean fields dotted with trim farmhouses and grazing herds. Vermont is a feast to the eye, and a first glimpse of it on an early spring morning is enough to lift the heaviest heart or the lowest of spirits. I felt the weight on my chest begin to lighten. Things may not be as bad as you think, I told myself reassuringly. Everything was bound to take on a sinister look in that dark, depressing station, with no breakfast and that long, long wait. Anyway, why not wait and see? How could anything be really bad in this beautiful setting? My spirits shifted suddenly from low to high and I began to sing, partly out of relief but mainly, I think, because I was so pleased to feel my confidence returning.
Long before we reached the road that led into the club itself, the surrounding countryside suddenly changed for the worst. The hills and green fields stopped abruptly, as though a stage manager had called out, “Strike the set,” to a crew of stagehands, and in place of the shimmering hills and lush green fields came a barren reach of flat, stony land with stunted trees and great rolling beds of poison ivy stretching away as far as the eye could see. There seemed to be nothing else on either side of the car for miles and miles, though I knew we must surely be approaching Lake Champlain itself and I had heard of its beauty and had seen photographs of it. Indeed, the Half Moon Country Club featured a stunning picture of the lake on the cover of its booklet.