Mary
– I never said you could come in, Mrs. Marsh.
– And I didn’t say you could be late, Dr. Werth. It’s past five already. I’ve been sitting here wondering what to think. Do you call that a decent way to treat a patient?
– Mrs. Marsh—
– It’s Miss Dawn.
– Very well, Miss Dawn, you know I had to cancel an existing appointment to accommodate you.
– No reason to be so sharp. I make an appointment I expect the other person to keep it.
– Shall we begin, Miss Dawn, or are you just here to get my approval of your new scent?
– I know what you’re like. Make me stop dead on time and still charge for the full hour. Sun’s in my eyes. Can’t you close the blinds?
– That better?
– Turn the slats a little more.
– Isn’t that too dark?
– Don’t like to feel I’m in a police interview. Smells like pipe smoke in here.
– My smoking bothers you?
– What’s a pipe but a prop? Every analyst has to have one. Or was it cigars? Bet you all get them in the same place when you come out of analyst school. Whole store for analysts full of pipes and couches that look the same and come with the same sick smell. Reminds me of my grandfather. God it’s like midnight in here now. Can’t you turn on a light or is this the blackout?
– That better?
– It’s in my eyes again.
– How’s that?
– It’ll do.
– What’s so urgent you couldn’t wait for your appointment next week?
– I’m trying to decide if I should cancel my birthday party tonight.
–
– Well aren’t you going to say something?
– You came to ask me about your birthday party?
– Don’t sound so patronizing!
– I didn’t mean to insult you.
– You don’t understand what a shame it would be to waste everything, what with the band already paid. Guess I could go ahead with it and drive to Malibu later.
– Are you going to Malibu tonight?
– If you interrupt all the time how am I supposed to get anything said?
– I—
– That’s a rhetorical question, Dr. Werth, you don’t have to answer it.
– Quite.
– I keep wondering what I’ll do about a maid in Malibu. I can’t take Nathalie. Her boys make my hair curl. Suppose I could use my girl in the meantime, but she’s such a grouch. You’d think she was white the way she puts up a fuss if you ask her to do anything she fancies isn’t part of the job. I tell her, listen, you’re my assistant and if you’re assisting you do whatever I ask, even vacuuming and dusting. Could you stop that? I don’t like the way your teeth knock against the pipe. Can’t stop thinking about the bit in your mouth.
– What is it about the pipe that so disturbs you?
– I don’t know – the bone between your teeth.
– Bone?
– Isn’t it bone?
– I wouldn’t know.
– The idea of sucking smoke through a bone. Doesn’t it make you gag?
– Ever know anyone else who smoked a pipe?
– Großpapa. I mean my grandfather. Grandpa Karl.
– Did his pipe make you sick?
– I remember feeling sick in the farmyard when he stood there smoking, or in the kitchen, when Grandma went to town and he smoked inside even though he wasn’t to, and if she caught him she’d whack him with a rolled-up newspaper like he was one of us kids. Nothing worse than the smell of pipe smoke mixing with coffee and eggs and fresh bread, cow manure on his boots, right in the kitchen. She could always tell if he’d done it. She’d cluck and lift her nose and hide all his pipes for a week. He had a dozen of them, all from the old country. I knew when he didn’t have his pipes he’d go for the willow switches. Smoked a pipe just like yours. Same tobacco I bet.
– Where was the farm, Miss Dawn?
– Where do you think? Oklahoma of course. Middle of nowhere. The house and barn faced west and Grandpa Karl would stand there in the evening looking at his wheat and smoking as the sun went down. Said he was watching for the end of the world. I always imagined he was thinking about Germany. I never had any memory of Germany myself. Left when I was three, just after the war. Not even my husband knows I was born in Germany. My brother knows and now you know and my grandparents knew but they’re dead. My parents knew of course but they died before my grandparents. My friends at school didn’t know. My grandparents thought we should keep it secret so I just always have. Only other person who knows is Leo Krug and that’s why. . . What brand is that tobacco?
– What’s the rule?
– You and your rules. I’ve never been a monologue actress. I need another person talking so I know what to say.
– I thought you didn’t want me to interrupt you.
– I’m uncomfortable on this couch.
– Why don’t you lie down? It’s more conducive—
– Who would want such a shade of green upholstery, and why this awful knobby fabric? Did you choose it?
–
– Well it scratches, even through my gloves. When I imagine all the other bodies that must have been lying on this couch it makes me want to gag. I should buy you a couch to keep just for me, or maybe from now on you should come to the house. Where are all those certificates from? They’re not in English, are they? Or German? I can usually tell German when I see it even though I never learned to read it.
– Does it concern you if my degrees are from foreign universities?
– Are you foreign?
– Does it make you anxious that I might be foreign?
– You sound American enough.
– Don’t you speak German as well as English?
– It’s un-American to speak any language other than English.
– There’s nothing wrong with speaking other languages.
– I don’t want to speak anything but English ever again. I think we Americans speak the best English of anyone. It’s plain speaking. I worry sometimes I might have a German accent. What do you think?
– Why do you worry about your accent?
– The elocution lady at the studio taught me how to speak only sometimes I still have problems with my vowels. My grandparents always spoke to us in German even when I told them to stop and my r’s roll sometimes without I want them to, and my s’s sometimes turn to sh’s and I get so embarrassed. One of my worst fears is sounding like Marlene Dietrich.
–
– I wish you’d say something rather than asking me questions all the time. Isn’t the idea that you’re giving me advice? You sitting there saying nothing makes me feel like I’m closed up in a coffin.
– Do you know what claustrophobic means?
– Don’t patronize me. I make lists of words whenever I come across ones I don’t know. The proper use of words, this is what the elocution teacher told me, makes a person sound more sophisticated. Most people think when they meet me I couldn’t string a sentence together without a writer to make it up for me. What they don’t know is if I didn’t put some real life into the scripts the lines would sound like nothing anyone ever spoke in a million years, which is why I just say what I think the character ought to say and forget the writer. Men have no idea what a woman would say, especially the fairies. They don’t even like women to begin with. Why should I have to say words made up by a pervert who doesn’t even look at me twice?
– Do you associate language with disgust, Mrs. Marsh?
– I wish you’d not call me that.
– Why don’t you want me to call you ‘Mrs. Marsh’?
– Because I hate my husband.
– Is that really true?
– Not quite. Maybe I’m thinking through my characters. They’re twin sisters and I play both parts in the picture. One character hates her husband, but she also loves him, and she hates the husban
d of her sister, but she also loves him. I don’t think love and hate are so different. They’re not even two sides of the coin. They’re all part of the same metal, the same stuff, don’t you think? Hate a person long enough and you grow to love him. It’s awfully cold in this room. Trying to scrimp on heating?
– Why don’t you say whatever comes into your head, Mrs. Marsh?
– I don’t want to be called Mrs. Marsh! That’s not who I am!
– Then who are you?
– I don’t know anymore! I was Rosa Schumacher for the first eighteen years of my life until Leo Krug looked at me and said from now on, you’re Mary Dawn. A new beginning, a new dawn for a new girl, that’s what Krug said when I got my contract, and you know what he did then? Cupped his hand under my bottom and said, Buttercup, as if I was supposed to like it. You can’t just stop being the name you were, it doesn’t work like that, so for ages I wouldn’t even turn around when someone called me Mary or Miss Dawn and they’d have to call for me more than once, or sometimes use the name of the character I was playing, and I knew I should turn around if they called out one of those names but it took years before I felt like Mary Dawn, and then you get married and what do they expect but you should take a whole new name. It’s too much. I’ve been three people in thirty-five years and I don’t know which one is really me, never mind all the parts I’ve played, not that I think I’m any of those gals, but they soak into your own character somehow, I mean you noticed it last time, the way I start quoting lines from my pictures. I know I’ve done it just now, part of what I said came out without me even thinking about it, but they were lines from the picture where I was a war widow who discovered her late husband was a German spy. You know the hell it was to play that part? That’s what first got me thinking about going into analysis because the whole time I was acting that widow of a spy I was thinking, what else am I but the granddaughter of spies? Not that my grandparents were actual spies, but they were foreigners in this country, and I was born a foreigner and isn’t a foreigner a kind of spy? I mean I know they weren’t, not really, but no one ever thinks you’re a real American unless your family has been in the country for several generations and we’ve hardly been here ten minutes as far as the history of America is concerned.
– Would you feel more comfortable if I called you Miss Schumacher? Would that help in any way?
– Oh no you don’t. Call me Miss Dawn or Mary.
– Perhaps you could answer my question by telling me why you don’t want to be called by your legal name, why you would wish to call yourself Miss rather than Missus, and why you refuse to lie down on that couch?
– But I’ve just told you. You aren’t listening.
– Maybe I’m asking the question in the wrong way. What I want you to think about is why you have an aversion to being identified as a married woman. Forget about names, and think just about that, what is it about being recognized as a married woman instead of a single one that makes you so uncomfortable? No, don’t open your mouth. Think about it for a moment.
–
– Try to focus, Mary, think about why the idea of being married is so uncomfortable for you.
–
– Can you answer the question yet?
– You want me to say it’s because of sex. You want me to say I don’t like to be called a married woman because it means I’ve had sexual relations with a man and everyone can see I’ve had sexual relations because I have a daughter and I’m afraid it will make me look like a sex fiend.
– Is that the case? Do you think any of those things?
– I suppose you’re going to say that because I’ve said them I must think them. Well maybe I do. What if it’s true? What’s wrong with not wanting people to think I’m a slut?
– Most people have sex, Mary. I would dare say almost all married people have sex, although I have met exceptions in my time. Why don’t you want to be identified as a married woman who has sex?
– Keep asking questions like that, Doctor, and people might get the idea you’re a sex fiend.
– Is it because you want people to think you’re innocent, or childlike?
–
– Why is sex so shameful to you? Don’t you imagine the president and his wife have sex?
– I’m sure it’s none of my business.
– And your parents? They must have had sex at least twice in their lives.
– Maybe. Maybe not.
– Certainly. They produced you and your brother, as you must have had sex with your husband to produce your own daughter. How often do you have sex with your husband?
– It’s been at least six months.
– Does he try to be intimate with you?
– He squeezes my arm like he’s trying to take my blood pressure. Does that count?
– Do you have sex with men besides your husband?
– That’s none of your business.
– People at the studio?
–
– Mary?
– Yes.
– And why do you do that? Do you not think that infidelity is shameful? Are you not afraid someone will discover you’re an adulteress? Isn’t that worse than being seen as a married woman who is intimate with her husband, a relationship sanctioned by society and religion and the government? It could be bad for your career if people found out.
– The way I manage things it’s nothing but good for my career. When I sleep with a man I’m showing I own him. It’s not the way you think. I’m showing I make the decisions and then he respects me. It’s like staking my territory.
– Is that the real reason you don’t want to be identified as Mrs. Marsh, because it makes you look less powerful to other men?
– Listen, it’s not about sex. The truth is, I’m leaving my husband. I’ve already left him, only he doesn’t know it yet.
– What about your daughter?
– Oh, I’ll manage her later.
– You don’t think she’ll miss you?
– I’m doing this for my daughter, and really, if you must know it, for the sake of the country, for the safety and security of every God-fearing American who walks the earth this day.
– You’re quoting one of your films again, Mary.
– You want me to talk or not?
– Continue.
– I can’t go on living with that pig of a man. You know what I see when I look at John Marsh? The face of a traitor. Even so, I don’t actually want a divorce, not because I think divorce is immoral, although I do, but because it won’t do me any good with my fans. But now I have no choice, and when they come to know the truth about John Marsh, about all he’s done, then they’ll understand. You must believe me, I’m doing this because I have to do it, for my own sake, and my daughter’s.
– You just described your husband as looking like a pig, and the first time we met you described your grandfather as pig-faced. I wonder whether you think that your husband and grandfather share any similarities? Why don’t you tell me about your grandparents, both of them. Describe what they were like. Start with their appearance.
– They wore heavy clothes.
– Why is that important, do you think?
– I swore I’d never wear wool again if I could avoid it, or any color darker than navy. When I remember my grandparents they’re always crossing themselves, genuflecting, praying their rosaries, even as they worked the wheat fields and fixed up the farm buildings and machineries and got up before dawn and went to bed after dark. They almost never smiled. They were blocks of wood. They only ever spoke German. My brother and I had to do the real communicating, I mean with people in town, when we went to market and whatnot. I hated how foreign they were. I wanted them to speak English and dress like Americans and stop being so pious.
– And your parents?
– My mother, she was also called Rosa, she died giving birth to me, and my father died that same year, run over by one of the combines, or so my grandparents told me. My brother, Henry, he’s
five years older than me, he said Grandpa Karl was driving the combine. He’s sure he remembers it that way.
– You mean your grandfather was responsible for your father’s death?
– I’m not saying it was murder. Maybe it was just a bad accident. Maybe that’s why they were so solemn. Is it possible for Henry to remember from such a young age?
– I’ve had patients with reliable memories all the way back to infancy. But let us continue with your grandfather. Perhaps you could tell me about your sense of him when you were a child, and what your relationship was like with your grandmother as well.
– I loved Grandpa Karl at first. My earliest memory is sitting on his knee, and his knee bouncing up and down, and him holding my hands in his. I was facing him, and his knee was going up and down, and he sang a song about riding a pony, and I remember laughing and him laughing and then he would tickle me.
– Is that a happy memory?
– I’ve never thought to wonder whether it was happy or unhappy. It’s my first memory, and I’m laughing, so it has to be a happy memory. Most of my early memories are happy. It was only later that things started to change.
– Change in what way?
– He’d whip me, and whip Henry, even if we hadn’t done anything. I had a dog, Kaiser, who used to protect us from my grandfather. That dog would put himself right between us and Grandpa Karl and bare his teeth whenever that old man came for us, and then I woke up one morning to a gun going off and when I looked out the window I saw Kaiser dead and Grandpa standing over him with his shotgun. Henry and me, we rode to town the next day and bought the meanest dog we could find, fed him up, made him loyal, and when he started protecting us Grandpa killed him too. I rode to school five miles in both directions with Henry on our horse and it was a one-room schoolhouse. All the way through school we had the same teacher, Miss Turnley. She was young when I started and gray by the time I finished. She must be dead now. Maybe not. I should send an autographed picture. People appreciate it when you remember them. We always got along well, Miss Turnley and me. That’s how things stopped being so bad with Grandpa. Miss Turnley arranged so I started lodging in town when I turned twelve, and then I only saw Grandma and Grandpa twice a month on weekends and made sure I was on my best behavior so there was no risk of the willow switch. I hitched a ride with Okies coming west when I was only seventeen and made my way to Los Angeles and here I am. Well aren’t you going to say anything, Dr. Werth? What’s that look on your face?
Night for Day Page 30
