by Moss Hart
Yet out of this first meeting came one of the most rewarding relationships of my life. I suppose his passion for the theatre was the bond that initially sealed the friendship between us, for he was a businessman who hated business, and he was in fact as wide-eyed and stage-struck about the theatre as I was. For some reason, and it must have been a twisted reason of his own for he had a maddeningly perverse turn of mind, he believed in me immediately, and luckily for me he was a man of incorruptible honesty and steadfastness.
MY CHIEF CONCERN, now that the opening show and the opening week of camp were over, was for my father and brother. I had had no choice but to let them survive as best they could through these first two weeks, for I was having some difficulty in surviving them myself. I suspected, however, that whatever hopes I may have had of bridging the gap between my brother and myself had now grown slimmer, if indeed they had not vanished altogether.
He had had, of course, no actual knowledge of what my duties as a social director would entail; but I knew that some of the posturings and foolishness he would see me engaged in would come as something of a shock to him, for he had never before seen this side of me; he was then, as now, a shy, private and intensely conventional fellow, but I took it for granted that in the loose and silly climate of camp he would accept my sometimes embarrassing behavior as a necessary part of my job. Unfortunately, he did not. Whatever hope there may have been for any kind of intimacy between us that summer vanished the day I stood in the doorway of the dining room dressed in that first ridiculous getup.
He had a tray full of dirty dishes in his hands when I made my appearance as a Confederate general—and for a moment I thought he was going to let the tray drop to the floor. Instead, he stood staring at me as though he were looking into a distorting mirror in some nightmare amusement park, and then dashed out red-faced and indignant. At my subsequent appearances he scurried out of the dining room as fast as possible, as if to disclaim any part of family relationship between us, and he avoided me as much as possible—not without, however, casting a malevolent glance in my direction if our paths happened to cross.
My father was an altogether different story—my father, in fact, turned out to be the surprise of the summer, for if my brother was seeing a side of me that he had never known before, I was seeing my father in an altogether new and quite astonishing way. From the night the canteen in the social hall opened and he stood behind the counter dispensing soft drinks, cigarettes and cigars, ten years seemed to drop from his shoulders and he became a loquacious, merry and delightful human being. He quickly established himself as a camp favorite, and he knew it and enjoyed every moment of his popularity.
Though neither his sons nor his wife seemed to have been aware of it, the simple fact was that my father had grown increasingly lonely as his role in the family circle grew dimmer and as my mother’s dominant personality gradually rubbed out his own more gentle one. He had withdrawn more and more silently into himself. As I returned home each evening, I had grown used to seeing him sitting at the window, wrapped in an old gray sweater. Now he blossomed in a hundred different enjoyable ways. There was something heart-warming as well as faintly comic in seeing him hurrying all over camp at a fast clip, with never the slightest reference to the hacking cough that had seemed as much a part of him as the old gray sweater and his silence.
The cough and the sweater and the silence disappeared forever, as his loneliness was replaced by the newly discovered pleasure of being accepted for the sunny creature he really was, now that he was at last relieved of the role of husband and provider, and there was never the slightest complaint about the terrible cubbyhole he slept in or the long hours he worked. I doubt if he noticed either one, so heartily did he continue to revel in and enjoy every moment of what was to me this most miserable of summers.
I was grateful enough that this should be so, not only for his sake but for my own, for there was little I could have done about it in the way of help. The daily routine of camp activities was now in full swing, and as they ground steadily along I had time for little else but to grind ponderously along with them and to fall heavily into bed in the Bastille each night, trying not to lie too long awake in contemplation of the next day’s program.
* * *
After a few weeks I settled into a lengthy siege of melancholia, from which I could not seem to rouse myself and on which outward events, including the ever-recurring camp crises, major or minor, seemingly made no impression whatever. There is a point where bottled-up rage, combined with the continuous and unending drudgery of a job that one hates, can give rise to a kind of homicidal mania. By the end of July, when campfire nights, dress-up nights, games nights, Saturday night shows and guest parties all seemed to blur together in a stream of deadly tedium, I began to indulge in a series of conscious daytime fantasies that had a touch of the paranoiac in them. I would “fantasy” myself setting fire first to the social hall and then to the main building, and these fantasies were not merely simple instantaneous bursts of psychic satisfaction that flashed through my mind, but hour-long, consciously induced daydreams filled with minute and scrupulous detail, all constructed anew each day, with a beginning, a middle and an end. The end was always, of course, the gratifying picture of the charred remains of the Half Moon Country Club still smoking behind me as I took off down the road to the railroad station to catch the train for New York.
Another manifestation of my sickly state of mind at this time was my deep and obsessive concern with money. I not only literally counted out every penny I spent, I grew incapable of spending the most trifling sum without experiencing a real and sharp stab of pain at the pit of my stomach, and almost without being aware that I was doing so, I gradually began spending less and less, until I had stopped using my money completely. Instead, I would stand by the canteen in the social hall of an evening and cadge cigarettes and Coca-Colas from the guests. I was open and shameless and compulsively driven into what was little short of outright begging night after night, and though I understood very well what I was doing, I could not stop. I would stand at a guest’s elbow, staring hungrily at him as he smoked or drank, until he was sufficiently embarrassed to offer me a cigarette or a Coke, and for the space of six weeks I drew not one penny of my salary except the ten dollars I sent to my mother every Monday morning to pay for her room and board.
For the last two weeks of this curious period I would not even buy toothpaste and did not brush my teeth at all, nor would I send out any laundry, since we had to pay for laundering ourselves, and I grew a sparse and scraggly beard in order not to buy razor blades and shaving cream. I was not only unshaven, but unwashed and dirty as well. Then, as strangely as it had begun, this obsession about money completely disappeared. With it a large portion of the melancholy and despair seemed to lift also, and I shaved off the beard and was clean once more.
It was not that life in camp grew any more pleasant, for as the season rounded into August, the guests came in ever-increasing numbers, and the social activities pulsed and throbbed through every hour of the day and evening at a constantly accelerated pace. I think I finally was beginning to realize that the summer was coming to an end, a fact that had seemed to hold no reality at all for me during the endless month of July. Now that I believed it with some degree of inner conviction, I began to mark off the days remaining until Labor Day as I dropped off to sleep each night, much as prisoners are supposed to mark off a calendar as they await the end of their prison term, and the last two weeks of camp rushed headlong into the big Labor Day weekend almost without my being aware of it.
On Labor Day night, as the curtains closed on the final show of the season, I stood on the stage stock-still for a long moment, waiting to have the realization that it was over and done with at last flood through every particle of my being—but nothing happened. I could feel nothing at all but the same dull insensibility with which I had managed to blot out so much of the summer. What we badly needed at this moment—waiters, musicians and all—was
an innocent relief of some sort to snap the tension, such as the Great Mustard Fight at Camp Utopia. But we were all too weary, and desperately sick of each other and of the Half Moon Country Club, to do anything more than apathetically kick the footlights in, half-heartedly pile a mound of Coca-Cola bottles in the center of the stage for the social director of next summer to clean up, and then trudge silently off to bed.
I looked around the Bastille for the last time and remembered my first horrified glimpse of it—it seemed years ago now—and tired as I was, I walked over to the garbage pails in back of the kitchen and came back with two paper bags full of garbage. It was a silly and mean thing to do, but I carefully placed the bags outside the door to be distributed the next morning under the wooden slats. Then, deeply satisfied and strangely wide-awake after this gratifying bit of malice, I began to pack. There was an early-morning train out, and what I now wanted more than anything else in the world was to collect my salary from Mr. Axeler and get my father, my brother and myself on that train.
There was not going to be a moment wasted, if I could help it, in putting Mr. Axeler, his horse, his smile and his damnable environs behind us. I dropped off to sleep finally, allowing myself the last indulgence of a fantasy that consisted of returning to New York, forming an Association or Union of Social Directors, and blacklisting Mr. Axeler and the Half Moon Country Club right off the summer-camp circuit forever.
How absurd it was to dream of triumphing over Mr. Axeler in terms of anything except fantasy was exquisitely demonstrated the next morning in very short order. I had grown so used to accepting the unmistakable figure on horseback on some corner of the horizon as the first sight that greeted my eyes as I left the Bastille in the morning, that I was immediately conscious that something was amiss when I stepped out of the doorway for the last time and the horse and rider were nowhere to be seen. I was uneasily aware that the landscape lacked an unmistakable trademark, much as a sailor might be made uneasy if he were to sail into the Strait of Gibraltar and the Rock did not loom slowly out of the mist. My disquiet was heightened by an unusual amount of activity which could be heard going on in the office behind closed doors as I passed it on my way into the dining room, and I hurried through breakfast and came out to the desk to have a talk with Herb Morris. He, too, was nowhere to be seen, but I hung about a bit and finally the door to the office opened slightly and he emerged looking white-faced and shaken.
A premonition of the disaster about to befall us swept over me, but I dismissed it instantly as being too macabre for even my active imagination to accept. “What’s up?” I said to Herb. “What’s going on in there? Where is Mr. Axeler? What’s all the mystery about?”
He shook his head and motioned me closer to the desk, his eyes large and solemn. “There’s going to be a meeting of all the employees—counselors, waiters, kitchen help, everybody—in the dining room at eleven o’clock,” he whispered.
“What for?” I whispered back. “What’s happening?”
“Mr. Axeler took the late train out of here for New York last night,” he replied. “He left a letter. The partners got it this morning. There’s only enough dough to get the kids and the counselors home by train. Nobody’s going to get paid, not a cent. They’re in there now trying to scare up enough money between them to get the rest of us home somehow. Even the waiters’ pool of tips is gone.”
I stared at him stupidly, too stunned to take in quite everything he was saying. “I don’t know what most of us are going to do for tuition money for the fall term,” he went on. “It has to be paid by the fifteenth of September. Almost everyone let their salary accumulate so they could use it for school.” He looked at me sharply. “You drew most of yours during the summer, didn’t you, to send home? You’re lucky, brother.”
I shook my head at him, still unable to speak. He whistled softly and then sighed. “Well, we’ll all get the glad news in a few minutes. I’ll see you at the meeting—I gotta get back inside.” He grabbed some ledgers from under the desk and disappeared into the office again. I stood where I was for a moment or so more, and then walked outside and wandered off into a field, avoiding everyone I saw. I did not want to be the bearer of this news or discuss it with anyone. I wanted time to think, but I could not seem to think clearly of what had to be faced now, and quickly, too; nor could I bear to try to find my father and brother and break the news to them myself.
I could think only of the boils I had suffered, the filth I had slept in, the sweat and loathing I had poured into every moment of this horrible summer; and I reflected bitterly that in some way I should have known this would happen and been smart enough to have withdrawn my full salary week by week. Of course, this was sheer nonsense, for there was no way I could have foreseen this ultimate disaster. But the more I thought of it, the more insanely sensible it seemed that I should have known it, and I wandered over the fields in a torment of self-contempt at my brainlessness and a blazing fury at Mr. Axeler. Had that horse of his turned up at that moment I would have tossed rocks at the poor animal.
At eleven o’clock I joined the employees’ meeting in the dining room. They all knew the worst now and sat in grim silence as one of the two partners spelled out the extent of the carnage and what little they could do about it. We were all to be given notes for our salary, which were to be paid in full as soon as possible in the fall—a grandiose promise that fooled nobody; and the waiters’ pool of tips was to be figured on the basis of other years’ pools, and that, too, was to be paid in full. And since the children were of first consideration and would have to be sent back by train, the counselors would accompany them; and all the others would be given an equal amount for railroad fare that would take them as close to where they were going as the sum allowed. The rest of the way they would have to hitchhike.
As far as I could make out then and afterward, Mr. Axeler had not actually absconded with any money, but had simply not kept his partners directly informed as to the true state of the camp’s income and outgo—not unnaturally a somewhat difficult job to perform while in the saddle. And since his partners had been no more successful in catching him unhorsed than the rest of us, he had smiled his way through the summer and only dismounted long enough to write them the letter they had found in the safe this morning instead of the money.
We lined up glumly in front of the table while a sad-faced partner doled out a sum to each of us for train fare that would at least take us out of Vermont.
I stood beside my father and brother in the line. Their reaction to what had happened was typical, in a special way, of each of them. My father remained unruffled and philosophical, his chief regret (or so it seemed) being only that this blissful summer was at an end. He seemed unaware of, or unwilling to face, the fact that our always shaky financial structure had finally and at last hit rock bottom; but I did not press the point upon him. I was grateful enough for his sunny good humor. His lifelong habit of blotting out anything that was “upsetting” or “unpleasant,” a trait which I had always found infuriating, I now accepted with relief and gratitude. For the first time I envied and almost admired what I had always considered a cardinal weakness of my father’s character.
My brother remained silent as usual, but there was no hint of recrimination in his attitude. I think perhaps we were closer together at that moment than we had ever been before. He knew quite as well as I did how desperate our situation was, and that the sorry fix we were in, to say nothing of this whole miserable summer he had suffered through, had originated with me. But his silence conveyed understanding, not blame. There is a quality of silence quite as verbal as words, and his wordless sympathy formed the first slim bond that had ever existed between us. Though we did not speak, our eyes occasionally met as my father burbled on, and I correctly detected an unspoken agreement between us to share this family crisis together and say nothing. I began to feel better in spite of myself—sharing a common disaster always lightens the burden—and my spirits lifted still further when it turned out th
at after buying my father a ticket straight through to New York, there would still be enough money left to get my brother and myself as far as Albany.
This was far better than I had dared hope. The sad-faced partners had behaved like gentlemen. With a little luck on the road we might be able to make it in little more than a day and a night.
* * *
It was not, as it turned out, either a hard or unpleasant journey. Had we had enough extra money to buy food, it would actually have been a quite enjoyable way of traveling. Hitchhiking was an accepted courtesy of the road in those days, and we thumbed our way from one car to another with no difficulty whatsoever. Hunger, however—real hunger, not the hunger of an appetite waiting with the knowledge that it will soon be appeased—was something that neither my brother nor myself had ever experienced before, and we learned quickly enough what a devilish traveling companion it can be. I discovered on that journey that there is an appetite beyond hunger—an appetite beyond appetite, that comes from the contemplating of hunger itself—and it is an experience I have no wish to repeat, despite the testimony of saints and martyrs of the state of grace that is achieved once the demands of the body are spurned and overcome.
If ever I needed an illustration that I am an earthbound creature, tied to the gross and ignominious demands of my body, I received it on that hitchhike, for when we left the train at Albany, we had little more than the subway fare we would need to get home with. That little we soon spent as the first pangs of hunger attacked us. For the rest of the way, though it was not long in terms of time, we simply did without. It was an unedifying twenty-four hours. Hunger seems to etch each gnawingly empty moment with a remarkable clarity, and I can still recall with acid sharpness the tantalizing picture of a small child seated alone at the roadside, a large box of raisins in its lap, cramming fistfuls into its mouth, while I stood watching it malignantly—and I remember the overwhelming temptation I had to grab the box of raisins and run, though I either lacked the courage or was not yet quite hungry enough to do so.