by Steve Fisher
Betty had obviously caught only the "husband" and she said: "Yes. Grant is going to play too."
There had been a time when looking at Betty had made Mrs. Davis want to commit suicide. Betty's father had died of acute alcoholism a good many years ago and Mrs. Davis had raised her daughter for the stage. She had perhaps been a trifle possessive and dictatorial, but it was, after all, for the girl's own good. She had refused for years to believe that Betty was actually not quite as bright as other people. With her influence she found her a play and a producer. Because she was hard of hearing Betty missed half of the cues, and the half she did catch made little difference. The show closed in two nights, and the word flashed around the world that there would be no one in Mrs. Davis' family to carry on any traditions of the theater. Mrs. Davis was sure Betty could do better and the following year put her in one of her own plays. The play made money only after Betty had been removed from the cast. Betty was hopeless. She simpered. Her mind was shallow, and she was lost in a discussion of even the most obvious subjects. She was pampered and spoiled. She never read. She had to be constantly entertained. People were nice to her only because she was Mrs. Davis' daughter.
"And this afternoon," Betty continued, standing at the window, "I'm going to a tea."
"I beg your pardon," said Mrs. Davis, "I say, I beg your pardon, but I have other plans."
"Other plans, Mother?" Anything that was not fully explained invariably baffled Betty.
"We're going to have guests," Mrs. Davis went on, "a house full of guests for the summer. I want you to go out this afternoon and hire several new servants. Grant must stay here and see that our present staff gets the house in shape."
Mrs. Davis had naturally put in strenuous objections to her daughter's marriage since the first eight suitors were either out and out fortune hunters or young actors who believed such a match could benefit them. All of these men had been much too brilliant for Betty and their pretended amour had been somewhat nauseating. Grant Smyth of London was someone different, however. His father had been knighted by the king and possessed a fortune greater than Mrs. Davis'. Grant, after attending Harvard, had liked America so much that he took out citizenship papers. His romance with Betty had been the most natural thing in the world. For Grant Smyth was perhaps the only person alive more stupid than Betty herself. Having the same faults they enjoyed doing the same things for entertainment. Their love-making was so sweet it was sickening. But through the four years of marriage they had been happy together. Mrs. Davis, of course, had been unwilling to give up her only daughter, particularly since she was so ill-equipped to go out into the world, so Grant had agreed to live at the house, making a trip home to London only once a year, and then by himself.
Betty said: "Guests? Mother, have you lost your mind?"
Rhea Davis folded her hands in her lap. "For one of your mental status," she said, "to make idle commentary on the minds of others—"
She didn't finish, because Grant came in then, walking in his long, easy stride, his jaw slightly agape, which was a more or less natural position. He was tall and very thin, and in white flannels and a polo shirt he looked like anything but a Bill Tilden. His hair was the color of straw, and his eyes were a watery blue. He was carrying a bundle wrapped up in newsprint.
"I say, old girl, would this belong to you?"
"I'm not an old girl," said Rhea Davis harshly.
"You're still a girl, aren't you?"
"Well—"
"And you aren't very young?"
"You're right about that, but—"
"You jolly well know I am, Ducky," Grant said. He laid the package on her bed. "It's downright lousy of you to be so beastly in the mornings."
"I've told you not to use the word lousy all the time!"
"It's American, isn't it?"
"And quit trying to prove things to me," said Mrs. Davis. "You're not a bit clever, Grant. Really you aren't."
"Righto, Ducky. But open the package. I found it in my closet this morning and I'm damn well curious about it. I'm certain I didn't put it there."
Betty said: "Mother's having guests." She didn't sound enthusiastic.
Rhea Davis opened the package and found a pair of low-heeled walking shoes which she had sent out for a minor repair three days ago.
Grant was rubbing his hands briskly. "Good. I like company. I shall enjoy a house full of people. Ah, they were yours, then—the shoes, Mater?"
Mrs. Davis nodded. "They must have come back yesterday and Frances put them in your closet by mistake." Grant was by this time at the window kissing Betty. "All right," Mrs. Davis said shrilly, "quit being so stupid and listen to me. We're going to have company for the entire summer. We're going to have a house full of music and noise and chatter until—until—the leaves turn brown on the trees." She executed these last sentences in a dramatic fashion intended to impress them, but instead they were stupefied. At last Grant said: "Oh, yes, old girl. Fine.”
* * *
It was hours later that Roy drove her through the baking hot streets of New York, and Rhea Davis sat in the cushioned back seat, a tiny fan blowing directly on her, but perspiring nevertheless. She had eaten a light supper in one of the Fifth Avenue hotels and autographed the napkin for the waiter, and then she had started out again in her quest for guests, but she discovered suddenly that she was tired. She ached in every muscle and joint. The dust of Manhattan caked in her throat, and the sultry air stifled her.
She sat back in the seat now, wanting terribly to go home and He down, but pressing herself on because of the burning fever that consumed her. She was sick, though. She could not pass off the ache that was in her to a weary body. She felt once as though a poison was filling her veins like lead. Her arms and legs were heavy. But she dismissed this thought because it frightened her. She was not going to die: not until she was eighty. Life was just beginning. Yet again and again today she had been filled with a morbid fear that was almost hysteria.
She opened her purse and took out a letter. It was one of the many she had received last winter during the run of her unsuccessful play. She had never answered, but also she had never forgotten it. It was crisper and more sincere than anything similar she had ever seen. She read parts of it again:
"... We put on shows down here for the local baggage; we have our own plays and playwrights, and we're never too tired from tramping around all day for a job to put on our best performance. The take isn't big, of course, but the whole cast dines on spaghetti now and then; and naturally the experience, and the element of keeping in shape for a break when one comes is invaluable. We'd appreciate it awfully if you could take a peek in at one of the plays. We aren't afraid of criticism. If we're rotten we'd like to be told we're rotten so we can improve. I know you're an important and busy woman, but just an hour of your time...?
Hopefully,
Dorothy Noel”
Earlier in the letter Dorothy Noel had stated that the playhouse in which they experimented was actually an unrented Chinese laundry, or had been, and they had torn out all the fixtures so that they were able to seat about seventy people (though they never had that many at one performance) and they had built their own stage. It was on East Seventeenth Street, just outside of Greenwich Village, where they all lived. "We want legitimate trade," she had written, "not Villagers with buttons and booze instead of money, who will applaud anything artistic no matter how bad it is, so we're squeezed right in between factories and tenements..." The rent, which was ten dollars a month, had naturally been an item, she said, but they had so completely demolished the place for a prospective Chinese laundry man that the landlord had been more than lenient when they were several months behind, though he steadfastly refused to take tickets in payment instead of money. "And he's a good fellow," she had penned, "so now and then we do manage to give him something." She had gone on from there into detail about their star playwright, Clifton Dell, who, according to her, was a house afire, and a genius.
Mrs. Rhea Davis put the letter in her
purse now and closed it. She saw that Roy was pulling the car up to the curb in front of the "Seventeenth Street Playhouse." The chauffeur climbed out and opened the door for her. She alighted and told him to wait, then she proceeded across the sidewalk to the theater. There was no box office and she stopped to read the program tacked up on the door.
The Seventeenth Street Players present
"SATURDAY"
A Drama in Three Acts by
CLIFTON DELL
Featuring: Clifton Dell, Dorothy Noel, Sherry Moore, Robert Weston and Mary O'Conner Staged and directed by:
CLIFTON DELL
She opened the door and went inside. The odor was musty and close. The seats were about half filled. A pale-faced boy looked at her coldly and held out a Salvation Army basket. The play was already on.
"How much?" said Mrs. Davis.
"Anything you can," the boy whispered.
She put in a dollar bill and took a seat in the back row. The people on the stage engrossed her, and she was already avid with interest, forgetting at once the crude details of the theater. There were three characters on the boards, two men and a girl, but the girl was carrying the role in what seemed to be a heavy scene. Her voice fairly cracked with stinging bitterness. She was pretty and well-built, wearing a plain black dress which had the startling effect of toning up her figure rather than smothering it. Mrs. Davis could not help but notice the smoothly-rolled lines of her bust and waist and the more than noticeable shapeliness of her legs as she moved across the stage. The girl's hair was a rich mahogany that was curled at the end and barely touched her shoulders, accentuating the pale white of her face.
Although Rhea Davis knew nothing about the story that had preceded this sequence the girl's poise, execution and instinctive sense of drama swept her at once into the play's mood. She moved across the boards like a young animal. The character she was portraying possessed her and made her a vibrant torch. Rhea Davis was absolutely stunned. She could sense in the girl's manner, the way she spoke her lines, the personality that came out through the play, that she was the Dorothy Noel who had written the letter. There could be no doubt. She would definitely be one of Mrs. Davis' summer guests. Definitely.
Just then a punch line came in the dialogue. The curtain banged down on the first act.
CHAPTER THREE
There was feeble applause and they took only two bows after the third act curtain, Clifton Dell changing his mind at the last minute about making a speech that this was the play's first actual performance, though he believed—and told Dorothy so as she was coming off—that this was "the best damn play ever written by man or beast."
Dorothy came into the dressing-room physically tired because she had wrung herself inside out in the role, for no reason, the crowd out front wouldn't know the difference, except that she had believed in the part and she had lived in it, the hell and damnation and bitterness of the girl Clifton had invented (was it invented, or was she Marie, of St. Louis, whose actual end had been suicide from a New York dock?).
Dorothy sat before the battered little mirror in the room which was smaller almost than a telephone booth, and yet withal, was at least private; she sat with her head in her arms, crying a little through the sheer relief that shuddered all through her now that the performance was over and she was Dorothy Noel of Greenwich Village once more. She would never give that much of herself to the Seventeenth Street Playhouse again. It would kill her. Yet she always vowed that she would conserve her energy, and with the first curtain threw herself almost violently into the role. How much longer would it go on like this, night after night, the smell of gas strangling in her lungs, and slivers of wood slipping through the thin soles in her shoes? How much longer wearing no stockings, existing on doughnuts and spaghetti, and tramping around from agent to agent and theater to theater? Burlesque in the summer would almost be better. Fourteen dollars a week for a strip down to flesh and a prostitute's wiggle. This was art, but she wanted recognition and fame and money and nice cars. She had thought at first that this was temporary—oh, somebody'll see us—Clifton always said, but after a year, when you were getting thinner, and at twenty-two when a performance night after night put rings under your eyes, and made your beauty—if any was left-gaunt and pale, you wondered where the end was, where was the rainbow, the promised prince, the Cinderella finish? You could burn yourself up here and die in the gutter and who would know or care?
She took her head from her arms and looked up into her own face—that mirror: you couldn't tell whether you were getting jaundice or were just tired—and dipped her hands into the cold cream, rubbing the palms of her hands together, then smearing it on her face, until she glistened like a Channel swimmer, only her eyes burning out and looking into themselves. She would sleep tonight. She would sleep like something dead and Sherry would have to pull her out and pour ice water down her neck (was there any ice, a drink would be nice, a long, cool drink, and then to bed to fight the heat, and to doze off, wringing with sweat, and twisting last week's sheet up around your neck); Sherry would have to get her up and dressed and painted, then with a jelly doughnut and a cup of sloppy coffee in her, she'd be off again, gone with the wind on the long, long trek: Under the El, through a Times Square traffic jungle, hurrying and scared with taxi horns and trolley bells in her ears; along theater row, 44th, 46th, 48th; a glance in at Sardi's, stopping in the foyer of The Shubert to look at pictures of the Lunts in their current vehicle, just as though she could afford the price; hoofing it past the Lincoln on Eighth Avenue; up and down in elevators, ogling at a million twenty-year-old Robert Taylors in high-waisted pants up to their chests, and wondering how they lived, never getting a part, if they lived; throwing pebbles to the pigeons on the Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street library steps and trying to convince them it's popcorn; getting jammed and stepped on in the downtown dime store where you go to get a tube of toothpaste. Coming back for rehearsal then, at the Seventeenth Street Playhouse, where four o'clock is the sacred hour, and five-thirty the greasy dinner hour.
Yes, she would sleep. She would sleep through the heat that would bake her, and the empty coal trucks that banged up and down the cobblestone street outside her window; she would sleep while drunks stood on the nearest corner and sang and laughed, and short-haired women and long-haired men marched past on the sidewalk in endless parade flaunting their filth and talking about art, but never getting the time or energy to practice it.
She would sleep, and if she dreamed, it would perhaps be of Michigan, and if she cried out in her sleep, it would perhaps be that the dream had turned to nightmare and Michigan was catching up with her: she would probably dream of a long arm stretching out after her, and she would flee breathlessly away from it, crying out, and tossing and turning on the sweat wet bed.
Her hands moved in a circle on her cheeks, rubbed the cold cream into her forehead, under her chin, and then she heard voices outside the room. A pitched excitement which warned her at once something was up. She looked toward a window through which she might flee Michigan: her godfather whom she had hit on the skull so that he dropped at her feet. Her godfather and dramatic coach and only parent, lying there, motionless, blood running from his head. She saw herself backing away, with a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. She had rebuffed his advances until this was the only way. But she was frightened. She packed and fled.
Hearing the noise in the hall she thought of this, as she always thought of it. Of the police. Of the eventual. Of the ultimate. She knew not whether her godfather was dead or alive. She had been too hysterical to wait and see. She had spent six months with him after the death of her father: six months of fighting. That scene of him lying on the floor had been the last.
She rose, shaking in every limb, knowing she could never squeeze through the window; knowing that if this was the end she had to face it. Just then she heard a smooth, round voice. It was just a little shrill, but it was dramatic, it carried force and depth; it had a huskiness and full round vowels
in the words it pronounced.
"I should like to see Dorothy Noel."
Dorothy opened the door, her heart aching; she opened the door and stood back against it, her face flushed and pale, and glistening still with cold cream.
"I'm Miss Noel," she said. She saw a small, old woman whose eyes shone with a fierceness that almost frightened her. Her mind travelled swiftly: the passes Clifton had gotten for Mrs. Rhea Davis' guild production. Fever surged into her cheeks. "You are—Rhea Davis?"
"Yes," said Rhea Davis. "I saw the performance."
The whole cast was gathering now, Clifton prominent, of course, Clifton standing there with his hands on his hips, looking the world's greatest legitimate actress up and down, as though she were a piece of merchandise he was considering purchasing. Clifton with his shaggy black hair, and his shining black eyes, and his pale, hard face; the jutting cheekbones and jaw; Clifton Dell with the desperate burning light in his countenance: his thick, derisive lips, his beaked nose, his rough handsomeness despite all this. Clifton, twenty-four years old, the playwright, actor, producer. Clifton: the very torch of the little theater.
Words rushed to Dorothy's lips: "I hope you liked the show. It was so good of you to come—"
"I thought you were tremendous," Rhea Davis said quietly.
Dorothy couldn't breathe. She just stood there with the dank little backstage of what was once a Chinese laundry swimming around her. She saw Sherry Moore. Sherry with her pinkish-red hair, and her oval face, and the little bags under her eyes. Sherry, plump thirty, and getting old, full of laughter and hard talk, and carrying a great big heart on her sleeve. She saw Robert Weston, gaunt and tall, and she read the awe in his eyes; she saw Mary O'Conner, seventeen, and cute, a trifle short, a nose that turned up. Mary O'Conner with her mouth gaping open, and saying afterward: "Honest, Mrs. Rhea Davis stood right there and said Dot was tremendous!" She saw all of the cast, the others who worked with them, but she saw these few people mostly, these few who were closest to her. These people, and Clifton; Clifton, sweating, his eyes burning brighter. If Dorothy had worked, Clifton had slaved. All night. One play after another. Rehearsals and production and worrying about everything. Clifton had chained his life to this; he had let the stone wheel of suffering roll over and over him and each time he was crushed he laughed, bitterly, cocksure. The world was wrong, he was right. The ignorant fools didn't know what a drama was.
