by Carson, Tom
Well! He hadn’t been watching Clock get wound up since November. One foot dandling toward Hollywood like a cat burglar’s, Pat Carpet breaks off blocking scenes to take calls from his agent, who’s angling to get him into the director’s chair for the film adaptation of—this had to hurt—A Clod Washed Away by the Sea, an anti-Nazi play by a onetime Murphy mimic named Ernest Bellman that ran at the Gypsum for most of 1940 while Bran, hands tied by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, fumed on the sidelines. Old Floss Bicuspid, Ethel Barrymore’s understudy in A Doll’s House in 1905 and taking her first crack at political theater as Mrs. Magnate, keeps trying to ingratiate herself by fluting that she’d love to play Eleanor Roosevelt. And a certain pea-brained, pear-boobied ingenue has just grabbed a wastebasket to retch the unmistakable retches of an otherwise healthy girl in the first stage of pregnancy.
“Meta Carpet.” That’s Hans Caligar, the dignified refugee from the Berlin stage recruited to play Hitler’s emissary. His accent tends to thicken when indignant: “On behalf ufa cast, I henreid [can read]. I must ask, murnau weill dalio marlene [more now while daily I more lean] brecht waltz to please you, veidt U.S.A. [why do you say], ‘Avast, palatial hum’”—he smacked the script—“when dix-sept is salka viertel fritz lang [this set is such a virtual prison]?”
“Minute, Hans.” Pat Carpet’s on the phone, finger screwed to free ear like an unpopped champagne cork. “Who? Gabby Chatterton? Christ, no. Well, all right.”
“You’ll just have to act more impressed when you walk in, Hans,” says my hubby—chipper, grandly sweatered, and betraying his agitation only with a slightly sickly Time-cover grin. “Acting! That’s what we pay you for.”
“So magnificently.”
“Damn it, Hans. Viper, stop vomiting! And don’t look at me like that. I told you that restaurant was no good. Where in hell is Lavabo? Listen, Herr Caligar—we’re all making do, all right? We tried again just last week to get a bigger sets and props budget, but those Yid bastards who do Rose Dawson’s books turned us down.”
“I am a Yid bastard, Meta Morphy. My last Berlin performance was on Kristallnacht. It is agony for me to play this Nazi role—crated by an impish isle [imbecile].”
By then, you might think even Murphy would’ve known an anti-Semitic Irish playwright working in left-wing theater in New York might want to watch his goddam mouth. Grudgingly (Hans had had tears in his eyes), he did write a speech about Kristallnacht into Act Two. After von Deutrifau got done gloating about it, Brendan Leary—usually ready to have at the Nazi bastard for paragraphs at a time—got a surprising stage direction: “Speechless with fury, Brendan changes the subject.”
Placating his own production wasn’t my hubby’s only worry as winter drew near. Brendan’s diatribes lashed out so furiously at America’s unpreparedness—“Tell those dead men lying out on the hills in Spain we’re safe at home” and so on, Viper Leigh winning Murphine dudgeon when she piped her guess that, while she didn’t know much about Iberian hygiene, they’d probably be buried by now—that it was a relief when the hero wound up and remembered to blast Hitler for a change.
The comrade in him at rare odds with the playwright, Murphy sulked every time another Lend-Lease shipment left for Murmansk. Pencil tapping a script whose latest caret added “buried” to Brendan’s zinger, he winced whenever the papers or radio reported our Navy playing cat and mouse with U-boats. It wasn’t only the actor’s insufficient preparation that aggrieved him when Clock lumbered toward its premiere with young Hal Lime on the playbill’s errata slip as the production’s fourth successive Brendan Leary: one after another, the first three had gotten their induction notices.
Came opening night. It was Friday, December 5, 1941.
Posted by: Pamdemonium
I know it was nerves, but Bran and I had one of our increasingly nasty political arguments that afternoon. One of the real ones, not the midnight farces when a very twenty-one-year-old me used to drunkenly smack his bespoke shirt’s heated front, yowling “Murderer, murderer.”
I knew those were idiotic, since the rest of the time I didn’t get that worked up lamenting Trotsky or the POUM. Only when I’d had a few did turning accusatory appeal to me, not to mention borrowing Jake Cohnstein’s politics to get the Mighty Tower’s goat. This was different: still a liquid coffin by night, the East River by day was a slow-oozing comic strip, prefiguring Bran’s final career with its sun-Blondied tugboats and Dagwoody scows. Pam was sober, and my hubby’s trial-baloney suggestion that Lend-Lease was a capitalist trick had exasperated me.
“Tell the drowned merchant sailors it’s a capitalist trick,” I mocked him. It was an awful thing to do to a playwright on his opening night, since I was parrot-parodying a line from his play. Just as bad, I was challenging his loyalty to the Merchant Marine, to which Murphy’s attachment had grown stronger as his nonmembership in it receded. No wonder we were both seething in the cab.
Despite Hal Lime’s scant eight days with the production as the fourth Brendan, Pat Carpet’s habit of sticking the film script for A Clod Washed Away by the Sea inside the soiled one of the last play he’d ever direct, and a set that—bearing out Hans Caligar’s objections—would’ve done Mrs. Gillooley proud, the debut performance of A Clock with Twisted Hands didn’t go badly at first. Murphy did have a gift for situations that made Lillian Hellman’s look like mayonnaise, and the colliding attitudes—the contempt for our weakness roiling away under von Deutrifau’s praise of baseball, the magnate’s undermined prowess as clay began to ooze out past his socks’ gartered tops, Vickie Patricia Lucy’s girlish dreams of a simple life in a (somewhat) less stately mansion, Brendan’s clenched fists stage left and deaf Mrs. Magnate’s symbolic ear trumpet stage right—all soon had the stage littered with the charred hulks of America’s illusions.
Even the chuckles of recognition as it dawned that Count von Deutrifau was a Nazified Addison DeWitt were delighted, not scornful. New York opening-night audiences are too pleased by any reminder of their insider status to question its dramatic sense, and the man who normally would’ve—Addison—could only tackle it obliquely in his review. “The slyboots!” he crowed to me years later over a mai tai in the DeWitts’ Topanga garden, riotously Californian and burly in one of the loud Hawaiian shirts that drove Eve up the wall and still tickled by Bran’s atypical cunning.
As the Act Two curtain fell and Pam got over her annoying shudder at the offstage gunshot that ended it, my hubby was signaling his excitement at the applause with a gesture I never had the heart to describe to Garth Vader. Three fingers of one hand extended, he was smacking them against his other forearm—counting his third Pulitzer before it had hatched. It wasn’t to be, but I claim my share of the responsibility, if any, was minor. I wasn’t the one who’d gotten Viper pregnant, couldn’t have if I’d tried.
Act Three opened with everyone’s return from the magnate’s funeral, including the coup de théâtre of von Deutrifau’s now openly displayed swastika armband. That made it even more menacing when he turned out to be bent, somewhat peculiarly—I wouldn’t have recognized Elsie Dodge Plough’s pointed cough—on marrying Vickie Patricia Lucy. When she resisted, the now blatantly rabid Nazi bastard hurled himself at her, tearing her blouse—and Viper Leigh screamed, as she was supposed to.
Then, grabbing her tummy as her eyes grew big as new planets, she waved Hans Caligar away and staggered offstage—which she wasn’t. My first guess was panic, since over the past week or two we’d all (well, perhaps not all) been baffled by Bran’s demands for a more violent rape scene.
“Come on, Hans!” he’d hectored our star at one late rehearsal from the Gypsum’s sixth row. “Hell, I know it’s hard for you, Mein Herr. It was damned hard for me to write too. Picture it this way—Viper’s the Kraut, not you. That’s it. You’re giving it back to them for Kristallnacht!” Exuberant now, he swung his fist in an uppercut.
As Han
s quite audibly asked Viper if he could borrow her wastebasket, my hubby turned to Pat Carpet. “Damn it, Pat! Do your job. Fuck Ernest Bellman.” Enraged, he grabbed the hidden script for A Clod Washed Away by the Sea and hurled it at the cheap seats.
Our director consulted his cigar tip. “Sense memory, Hans,” he called. “You’re fighting your way out of the womb.”
“I was quite happy there, Patkavan. Perhaps more than I knew.”
“Then you’re fighting your way back into it,” Pat Carpet shrugged.
“That’s not a memory. Do you really believe your own Scheiss?”
“Thanks, Hal,” Pat said as his script was returned. Hal Lime wanted to see Hollywood too, and not as a Coast Guardsman on leave.
Anyhow, when Viper fled, Hans stood onstage solo in stunned silence. As murmurs told him the hall was catching on, he tried to improvise, reworking lines of von Deutrifau’s caustic speech about baseball. Unfortunately, when Hal Lime took matters into his own hands and burst onto the scene, that made Brendan’s shout of rage at Vickie Patricia Lucy’s violation—“You Hun reptile. That’s strike three”—apropos in all the wrong ways. Then the curtains swept shut as the two men stared at each other.
As murmurs spawned giggles and confused applause, Murphy grabbed my arm. “Christ! Snooks, for fuck’s sake get back there and find out what’s happened to Viper. The captain can’t be seen leaving the bridge.”
Once I’d not very unobtrusively maneuvered myself down the aisle, I went up the steps to the side stage door and down a corridor to the dressing room Viper shared with Floss Bicuspid. Her own part done after Act Three’s first scene, Floss was nowhere in sight; still in Vickie Patricia Lucy’s torn blouse and beige skirt, Viper sat clutching her belly on the couch. Her face was two blue marbles above a red-rimmed, mobile Rorschach blot.
“Mascara, mascara,” she moaned.
Hesitant—but she was an actress—I started fumbling among her cosmetics. “No, no!” Viper pled. “Miscarria-, miscarria—I think I’m having a misc—ow, ow, ow, ow!”
“Call an ambulance,” I told Floss as her face appeared in the doorway.
“I’ve just told someone to. Dear God, where’s the stage manager?”
“So hot,” Viper whimpered. “Can’t brea—”
Her temperature must’ve been well over a hundred. Gently prying away the slim arms clamped to her slender tummy, a tongue-biting Pam tugged buttons from buttonholes and torn collar from shoulders and then passed two slim pale arms through armholes, feeling very peculiar. It hadn’t been all that long, and Viper’s hot skin was moist.
Reframed things by imagining I was Murphy’s first wife working at Gimbel’s, and once I had the blouse off the mannequin, Viper’s breathing grew easier. I had no real call to free her anxious boobies from their brassiere. I didn’t yet know my hubby had unhooked, uncupped, mouthed, and squashed them dozens of times, testosteronically gorging on nipples I’d pictured as hard-centered red dollops on two shadowed and unsprung soft pears.
“The skirt too, Snooks.” Captain of his own soul first, a maddened Murphy had decided the bridge could go hang. “We’ll need the costume. Where in hell’s Viper’s understudy?”
“Why, Brannigan! San Diego,” said Floss Bicuspid. “Judy ran off with that young Marine—what was his name, Walker? Ah, love on a train! Love on a train.”
“Christ!” As abruptly as if a vaudeville hook from the Rosalie Gypsum’s previous incarnation was to blame, Murphy’s face yanked itself away. “Get Pat Carpet back here,” he bawled. “And Lavabo! Lock the lobby doors if you have to. Nobody’s leaving this theater until the curtain comes down for real.”
Distraught, Viper looked up from her reclutched tummy. “Please, can’t I? Branny, I’ll stay if I have to. But—ow, ow, ow, ow.”
As Murphy charged off, I hesitated. The blouse had been for Viper’s sake; the skirt was for Murphy. Whose conversion into a newly founded small town named Bran, NY, I was in no shape to absorb. I’d have to get her to her feet too, feel that feverish but unhappy body knock against mine as Floss looked on.
Floss herself forestalled me: “I’ll do it. We’re a bit less bashful at my age,” she said, misunderstanding my hesitation slightly. I didn’t want to watch her taking my place. Outside the dressing room, in backstage light like Edisonized perspiration, my tuxedoed hubby, framed by a jumble of flats—one still marked “Prom in Mad II/2”—was mighty-towering over Pat Carpet.
“Snooks!” he told me. “There’s nothing for it. You’re going to finish Viper’s part.”
“What on earth are you talking about, Bran? I can’t act. I’m a writer.”
“Oh, hell! We can all act. If Viper can, who can’t? And as for you being a—damn it, just do what I say.”
“But I don’t know the part,” I said.
He stared the way Houdini must’ve after that fatal punch to the solar plexus. “After a month?” my hubby roared. “Christ, you’ve been sitting right next to me. What were you doing, knitting?”
I floundered. “Oh! I mean—of course I know all Viper’s big lines, like ‘Aaieee.’ But—oh, Bran, it’s all the blah, blah, blah in between. My God, you don’t really expect anyone to remember that, do you?”
At its leisure, my brain couldn’t have manufactured anything as devastating. If we’d been at home in Sutton Place, Murphy’s face would’ve erupted for two hours without letup as the East River’s prostrate Dagwoods and Blondies—those heralds of his literary but never marital destiny—oozed mutely by behind him. But after a tense facial struggle, a stark determination to keep Bran Hume in the anchor’s chair outfactored his urge to explode as Brannigan Gillooley.
“Give her a script. Let her take it on with her.”
Pat Carpet looked appalled. “Bran, please. You aren’t the only one here with a reputation. Jesus Christ! You stupid Mick prizefighter. Let’s just Booth it, thank ’em all for showing up, and better luck next—”
“No. No. Four fucking years! Four fucking years, while you were looking up Bellman’s porthole. You whoring son of a bitch. Our only other bet is Floss, and come on. At least they’ll think Hans might—might!—want to rape Pam.” He glared at me.
“My God, this is insane,” I wailed. “Bran, my friends are out there”—and if I may be so bold as to quote from Clock, that was strike three. Even as the words escaped, I knew that now I’d have to do it unless I wanted my first and, at that point, only marriage to bite the dust instanter.
“Someone’ll have to go out and tell them. And soon.” Pat Carpet had just done what he did best: assert his authority in surrender. You probably don’t remember his ’53 HUAC testimony, though, or even what the HUAC was.
Chin rising, Murphy said, “I’ll handle that”—by which he meant Murph Vanity would. “When I say it was sabotage, they’ll believe it from Brannigan Murphy. God damn it, get changed, Pam. We go on in five minutes.”
Smoothing his bow tie’s ends, he strode off as Hal Lime rushed up. “The ambulance is here. My God, aren’t we Boothing this thing?”—a vintage Broadway expression, oddly unpreserved in slang dictionaries, for sending the audience home with the play incomplete.
Pat Carpet gestured Pamward. Hal stared. Reaching rather grimly for my gown’s zipper—it was low-backed, the reason I hadn’t worn a bra—I stalked back into the dressing room.
Vickie Patricia Lucy’s torn blouse and beige skirt were both safely draped on a chair. As Floss tried to sponge her forehead, a still moaning Viper lay turned to the wall on the couch. She was wrapped in a blanket not all that discreetly, and the blood that darkly spidered the thighs below her barely crescented pale little buttocks made me ashamed.
“You are joking,” said Floss as I pushed my gown’s top to my waist. I was so addled I thought she meant the now revealed, less than splendid Buchanan bosom. “If we aren’t Booth
ing, I rather thought, for the show’s sake—well, I’ve played Desdemona, you know.”
“Ow,” Viper moaned. “Ow, ow.”
I’d just kicked Pam’s gown under the dressing table when the door swung open and two ambulance attendants bundled a stretcher through. The grab I made for the blouse just got in their way as they pushed by, spread the stretcher, and started to lift Viper onto it.
“Jesus, what’s this place coming to? She’d never have cut it here in the old days,” one said, and I don’t think he meant Viper. Thankful its collar was already ripped, I yanked Vickie Patricia Lucy’s top down over my head, then lunged for the skirt as they knelt to lift her.
Again thankfully, though on me it damn near invented the miniskirt, it hadn’t been visibly bled on. As I smoothed the bunching over the too tight hips, Floss said, “Dear God! Your hair—I mean your hairdo.” A trouper, she reached for a hairbrush; a realist, she left it lying there.
Since I’d known at first glance Viper’s shoes were no go, I was crouching to retrieve my own—beaded black evening heels, all wrong for the rest of the outfit—when Viper’s frightened blue eyes and “ow”-ing red-rimmed Rorschach blot went by a foot from my nose. Horrified at how fast I’d forgotten she was real and in pain, I scrambled up in my stocking feet and dashed out of the dressing room after her stretcher.
“Viper!” I called. “You shouldn’t be alone. Hadn’t we better notify”—well, there had to be one—“the father?”
Above the blanket’s receding rim, her bobbing blue eyes stared back. She was miscarrying; she didn’t really know the rules of anything. No doubt she meant to protect Mrs. Murphy’s privacy. As the doors opened and she was borne into the early-December night, she jammed a hasty finger into her mouth and held it glisteningly aloft to a red moon we both knew.
“Come on, Pam!” Pat Carpet shoved a script folded to page 102—Viper’s temperature, their hotel key’s number?—into my hand. “Murph’s just wrapped it up.”