Act One

by Moss Hart

  I remember, too, quite as vividly, watching a man at a gas station toss a half-eaten sandwich onto a rubbish heap, where it lay a little dusty but still quite edible, and considering whether to pick it up surreptitiously after he had moved away. Again I did not possess sufficient courage, or some foolish nicety of pride prevented my boldly snatching at it. But I am certain that, given a few hours more of hunger, no such civilized considerations would have stopped me from making straightaway for that bit of bread and meat and gobbling it up, no matter who was watching. I have always readily understood since then how a hungry man could contemplate cracking a safe or smashing a bakery window, and it has never surprised me that the stark streak of barbarism beneath the surface in all of us is but thinly held in check.

  Nevertheless, we arrived back in the Bronx not one bit the worse for our fast, except for an excessive irritability on my part, and on my brother’s, an alarming tendency to be sick after each mouthful he ate. There was not much time, however, to waste on either irritability or an upset stomach.

  My mother’s furnished room, now occupied by my father as well, was luckily paid for until the beginning of the following week, and the landlady had already agreed that my brother and I could sleep on the sofa in her living room for a night or two; she would also trust us for meals. But it was plain that this arrangement, good-willed as it was, could not last for more than a few days at most. The landlady had troubles of her own and could ill afford to add ours to them. We were, if we dared to face the fact honestly, actually homeless, and though a strange roof was temporarily over our heads, we were, except for the remnants of the last ten dollars I had sent her that remained in my mother’s purse, penniless as well.

  At no one time that I could remember had our fortunes been at this low an ebb. Again my mother surprised me. Her defenses where her family was concerned were paper-thin, and her given way in a crisis was usually to dissolve into helpless tears as a practical method of meeting the crisis head-on. But now, as on the day of our leave-taking for camp, she remained dry-eyed and clear-minded. She had even, awaiting my return, written down on the back of an envelope a list of a number of relatives, and beside each name she had set down a sum she thought it likely we might be able to borrow from them.

  I took the envelope and quickly added up the column of figures. It was woefully inadequate for our needs. As closely as I could figure it, we needed not less than $200 to see our furniture out of storage, including the transportation of it to wherever we went, and with the month’s rent in advance that was always demanded on a new apartment, plus the amount we would need to live on until I could get my little-theatre work started again in late October—all this could not possibly be managed on less than $200, a sum that would loom large at any time but at this particular moment seemed gigantic.

  We knew not a single soul, either relative or friend, who possessed enough ready cash to allow the borrowing of $200. Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.

  I stared hard at the envelope and hopefully enlarged the sum my mother had set beside each relative’s name. It came to no more in aggregate than a paltry $110. I refused point-blank to borrow it. To borrow this money and dissipate it on furnished rooms, I pointed out, critical though our situation was, would only serve to precipitate a worse crisis in very short order. There was, of course, an ever-present alternative, but the thought of it was chilling. The alternative was to face the blunt fact that my scheme of social directing in the summers and little-theatre work in the winters was not going to work. If that was true, there seemed to be no choice but to give up the idea of writing plays and take a regular job in the workaday world tomorrow morning. I did not suggest this. I barely allowed myself to think it. It had taken so long to get this far and, inconsiderable though the distance was, I clung fiercely to the advantage of having my days free to write. It represented the one good chance I had of entering the theatre again, and to give it up, to turn back now, I felt, was to turn away from the theatre forever.

  I well remembered Eddie’s admonition: Never go back—you’re swallowed up if you do! It sounded in my ears again with an irrevocable rightness. Self-pity is not a pleasant emotion and it is a fruitless one as well, for its point of no return is an onset of black despair in very short order. I gave way to both now. I sat silent for so long a time that my mother finally began to clear the dishes from the table. I knew they were all waiting for me to speak, to come to some sort of decision, but I could not. I was dissolved in a kind of wild panic—a new and sudden panic that had nothing to do with our present reality. I could not put a name to it, though I could dimly surmise its content.

  I have always had a strong, almost an overpowering, sense of family unity. Its roots are perhaps racial and lost in the atavistic past of a people whose history is a stern one; or it may be that I had inherited a good deal more than I suspected of my mother’s own deep feeling of family ties. I felt those ties slipping away now, felt our family, small as it was, disintegrating before my eyes. It was the unreasoning panic one feels as a child, not as an adult. I was gripped by an intense anxiety, by wave after wave of a heart-clutching fear that left me without speech. I cannot recall another emotion so engulfing, so choking in its intensity, and I believe some remnants of that moment remain with me still. It could account in some measure for my curious habit in later years—a habit of such repetitive pattern that it might almost come under the heading of “mania”—of buying apartments and houses, decorating them to the hilt, and then abandoning them with almost the same compulsive ferocity that had given me no rest until they were furnished, with every match box and ashtray in place. It was as if no one apartment, no one house, was ever secure enough against the picture of family dissolution I still carried with me.

  The new one … the next one … and the grander one, was always the house or apartment that would push the panic safely and farther away, and forever shatter the picture of sitting around that table in a stranger’s kitchen, with no home of our own. It may be, too, that the buying sprees at Cartier’s were tantamount to the endless decorating of houses, the sets of gold cuff links and shirt studs, the countless gold cigarette cases and keys and chains and rings and watches that I bought so heedlessly—all were talismans against a repetition of that moment.

  I got up from that table now and walked out of the kitchen and out of the house. The house was about three blocks distant from our old place, and I walked back to where we used to live and stared up at the fourth-floor windows. Our apartment was already rented, the window of the front room, where my brother and I had slept for so many years, inevitably draped with a woman’s figure leaning out, a small child on either side of her, all of them staring idly down into the street below, much as my brother and I had done in our early childhood. Even now, with the few coins from my mother’s purse jingling in my pocket—all the money we possessed in the world—it was still a comfort, a victory of sorts, to be out of those hated rooms and to know that we would never go back.

  I felt decidedly better for having looked at it. Anything, even our present state, was better than living in the symbol of defeat those rooms had become for me. The sight of the familiar windows, the discolored stoop with the broken railings leading down into the janitor’s apartment, the fire escapes laden with stunted geraniums and drooping rubber plants, had the tonic effect of clearing my mind of all regret and stiffening the resolve that was already taking shape in my mind. I had only to think of it as our home once again and to envisage walking up those steps into the dirty hallway and of climbing those four flights of stairs, to know that being homeless was not the worst of all possible evils. The real evil was to live on in it, not to fight one’s way out, and suddenly I was able to think clearly again. To turn back now was to give up more than just the idea of becoming a playwright—it was to relinquish as well the vision of a way of life. I knew now that I was not
prepared to give up my chance at that vision without a struggle. Somewhere in this city must be someone who could lend me $200. There must be someone I had not thought of or had forgotten, someone who must be remembered now.

  I thought at once of the richest person I had ever known—Mrs. Henry B. Harris. She had liked me and she was a woman given to impulsive generosity. I turned away and walked quickly toward the candy store on the corner. To the side of it were the same steps I had sat on, in those summers that now seemed of an altogether faraway and ancient time, telling the gang stories of Dreiser and Frank Norris, buying my way with the only coin I possessed. It had seemed easy enough to dream of the theatre then.

  There was another group of kids on the steps now, another gang almost indistinguishable from my old one, and I looked at them enviously. Whatever dreams they were having of growing up would be safer dreams than my own had been. The theatre, in more ways than one, is a curse.

  I looked up Mrs. Harris’ number in the telephone book and gave the number to the operator. The connection was made almost too quickly. Mrs. Harris was out of the city and would not be returning until late November. So much for the richest person I knew.

  I thought briefly of Mr. Pitou, but he was not rich in the sense Mrs. Harris was, and I had cost him dearly enough already. He had every reason to refuse me, even if I could think of a good enough reason to ask for the money, and I did not relish the asking. I longed for Eddie to be back from South Africa, not that he was likely to possess $200, but because he was always wildly ingenious in situations that demanded evoking money out of thin air; and I was of a mind, in this present moment, to clutch at straws and miracles, even of Eddie’s unsteady kind. I considered briefly going to Washington Heights and asking Eddie’s parents for the money. They knew me, of course. But even as I thought of it, I knew that it was unlikely they would have it to give, nor had I any right to ask it of them.

  I began to thrash wildly about the back corners of my mind. Priestly Morrison might give it to me, for he had been quite outspoken in his belief that I could write, in spite of his close acquaintance with The Beloved Bandit, but I had no idea of where to find him. He did not seem to be listed in the telephone directory; but even as I turned the pages, vainly seeking his name, the name of another who had evinced a belief in my ability flashed into my mind. Joe Hyman. He had come back to camp once more during the summer, and again he had worked the lights and curtains, and again we had talked at length about the theatre. It was stretching our slim summer acquaintance a good deal to call it a friendship, but I had gathered in one of our talks that he was a full partner in the second largest knitwear business in the city, and that was enough for me to know.

  For a terrible moment I could not remember the trade name of the concern, and his own name was not listed separately, but then it came to me and I gave the number to the operator in a voice that was considerably more husky than my usual one. The words “last chance” seemed to glow on and off in the glass door of the telephone booth as I gave my name to a voice that said, “Holman Knitting Mills, good afternoon,” and waited.

  Joe Hyman came to the phone immediately and his voice was warm and welcoming. He would be in the office all afternoon, he said, and he would be glad to see me any time I came. I would be there within half an hour, I informed him, a little breathlessly. I hung up the receiver and bought myself a cherry soda to steady my nerves. I must make sure to present my request for the money correctly. There would be no second chance; no new $200-names flashing providentially into my mind if I failed.

  On the subway ride downtown I thought of something else he had said in one of our talks together. I reminded him of it as I sat across the desk from him in his office, although not at all in the way that I had intended. Anyone who has ever sat across a desk from another man and asked him for money knows what an unpleasant and unhappy business it is. Like the effort to end a love affair, there is no nice way of doing it. I struggled through a few minutes of chatter, and then in spite of the fine dignified scene I had played out for both of us in my mind coming downtown in the subway, the words began to emerge quite differently. I was startled to hear myself speaking in a belligerent tone, wholly foreign to the way I felt and which I could do nothing to modify.

  “If you meant what you said,” I was saying aggressively, “this is the chance for you to get into the theatre. You told me this summer you wanted to sell your share in the business some day and produce plays. Well, I’m going to write plays, and if you’ll lend me two hundred dollars you can produce them. This is a good chance for you.”

  I stopped, as astonished as though someone else had been speaking. Even to my own ears it sounded crude and insufferably patronizing. What a way, I thought numbly, of asking a comparative stranger for money! What in the world had prevented me from telling him simply and truthfully that I was dead-broke and that without his help I might have to give up the idea of play-writing entirely. The truth was simple enough, and it had a ring of decency about it in contrast to the hollow nonsense I had just spoken that must have rung as falsely in his ears as it did in my own.

  I stared miserably across the desk at him. He had listened to me quite straight-faced, but now he smiled. “All right,” he said, “we’re partners. Do you want it in cash or by check?”

  “Cash,” I replied quietly, too surprised to add a “thank you.” He reached into his wallet and counted out $200.

  “You go ahead and write ’em,” he said, handing me the bills, “and maybe I will do just that … sell this business and produce plays. Not right away, perhaps, but someday. Meanwhile, I’ll be around if you need me to manage your fortune.”

  I said “Thank you” a little lamely and we shook hands.

  * * *

  I rode the subway back uptown, with my hand clutched around the bills in my pants pocket so tightly that I could hardly open it when I arrived safely back in the Bronx. It was more money than I had ever seen at one time; more money than I think my parents had ever seen at one time before, too, when I tossed it on the bed in my mother’s room. They stared hard at it and at me, as though to make sure I had not stolen it, but I brushed all their questions impatiently aside. The story of Joe Hyman could wait. What I wanted now was the details of the apartment for rent in Brooklyn that my mother had written to me about a few weeks earlier. I wanted the move made by tomorrow night, if possible. Not one penny of this money was going to be wasted on furnished rooms while we shopped around for an apartment, if I could help it. We had been too close to the edge for me to relish looking over it again.

  My mother had not actually seen the apartment. It had been looked at by some Brooklyn relatives and reported on as a pleasant three rooms in a new building, within the price we could afford for rent without taking in boarders.

  “Take it,” I said without hesitation. “Go downstairs and phone them to take it for us, and tell them we’ll be out there tomorrow morning to pay the deposit.”

  “But we’ve never seen it,” my mother protested. “And it’s over an hour’s subway ride away—it’s only one station from Coney Island.”

  Brooklyn, then as now, seemed another country to inbred New Yorkers, and to my mother’s loyal Bronx ears I might well have been suggesting a trek into the western wilderness.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I insisted. “The only thing that matters is to get settled quickly. I’ll phone the storage people while you’re talking to Brooklyn. I want to be in that apartment by tomorrow night.”

  My sense of urgency prevailed. Even Santini Brothers, the storage and moving people, who were generally not prepared to act this quickly in what was their busiest month, succumbed to the bribe of an extra five dollars for hurrying. The infinite speed that only money can buy was not lost upon me. In less than an hour all arrangements had been made, and at eight o’clock the next morning we were on our way to Brooklyn. The furniture, I was assured, would be arriving by ten. It was something to know we would be eating a meal in a kitchen of our own by eve
ning.

  Our new home was indeed well over an hour’s subway ride from even Times Square, a fact that was to devil me considerably later on, but now I could only enjoy the idea that we were getting almost as far away from the Bronx as it was possible to get. That single fact in itself was of no small moment in my eyes, though the new apartment was something of a shock to all of us. The three tiny rooms on the ground floor dashed the fond hopes we had held after gazing admiringly at the brand-new building they were in, but compared with what we had left they were the Taj Mahal as far as I was concerned.

  The building itself had a little forecourt with trees and a tiny fountain, around which was set on three sides, with no protruding fire escapes, the apartment house itself. Our apartment had evidently been designed as a superintendent’s or janitor’s quarters. It lay directly at the entranceway and conveyed a view from all its windows of moving feet on the street outside; there was no sense of privacy, unless the shades were kept drawn at all hours.

  With the six rooms of furniture that my mother had insisted on keeping, those tiny rooms would be overpoweringly cluttered, but no matter. At last there would be no other people moving about in them but ourselves. I paid the deposit to the superintendent, and as the moving van arrived in front of the building, I announced I was going for a walk to explore the neighborhood while the van was being unloaded and our belongings moved in. This was true only in part. The actual truth was that I was ashamed of seeing our shabby furniture brought in under the curious eyes of our new neighbors, and snobbish enough to want to detach myself from the scene.