by Steve Fisher
"How was the play," he said hoarsely, "how was the play, Mrs. Davis?" and he was wringing his hands, and cocking his head. He looked wild... and never more desperate. He was waiting. The beating of his heart was waiting.
"The play was all right," Mrs. Davis said.
"It was good, wasn't it? It had—ah—it had smash, and fire and real stuff, didn't it?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Davis, "it had all of that."
"It's better than anything on Broadway, isn't it? Isn't it the best damned thing ever written by man or beast in the last—"
"No. I wouldn't say that."
"But it is good? It—it has—"
"You have promise," Rhea Davis admitted, "you have a lot of promise."
"Thanks," he said, "thanks."
Rhea Davis appeared to be a trifle amused at Clifton's energy, Dorothy thought; amused if not suddenly envious. Clifton was a dynamo. The actress looked at Dorothy now.
"I should like to coach you, my dear. I judge from your letter that was what you wanted. I see no reason for not coming to the point. Mr. Dell's play would not have been nearly so good—unrevised as it obviously is—if you had not put over even his clumsy lines."
"Clumsy lines?" Clifton roared.
"A few of them were."
He laughed bitterly. "What did you have in your play last winter? Speeches three pages long. But you put most of them over. Some of them God couldn't have put across. And you talk about me being clumsy; I could write a play for you that'd be better than anything you've had since you were twenty-five!"
Dorothy felt it necessary to cut in. "Clifton, do you realize you're talking to the world's greatest actress?"
"Listen, Dot," he said, "I realize this: the great day has come, and I'm getting my oar in, if I have to tie Mrs. Davis up and sell her Clifton Dell in seventeen easy lessons. I'm too good to starve in this stink house. Who the hell am I to give away my talent to a bunch of ignorant Wops that drop pennies in the box office and sit in the audience eating garlic while my life blood passes across those boards? Life doesn't go on forever. You get old sometime, you know. She's old and she needs me. She needs blood that boils. And if you think she's the best, drop in and see Katharine Cornell and Ethel Barrymore sometime. They're good, too, you know; they and the Lunts, and maybe Burgess Meredith—"
"Mrs. Davis," said Dorothy, "I'm sorry, I—"
Rhea Davis smiled thinly and lifted her hand. "Miss Barrymore is my neighbor. I have respect for her. She is indeed good. But she has appeared in cinema and I never have." She took Dorothy's letter from her purse and fanned herself with it. The heat was stifling. "I should like you to spend the summer with me, Miss Noel," Rhea Davis went on. "I think I shall be able to do something for you."
Dorothy said: "Oh, I—oh, that'd be—"
"I live in Mamaroneck," Mrs. Davis continued. "Come tomorrow. Come early. Telephone from the station and I will send a car for you." She turned to the rest of the cast. "You all did very well, and I regret that my house is limited else I should be tempted to invite you all. I urge you to keep on. I shall ask producers to drop down and see you now and again."
CJifton Dell caught her arm. "Mrs. Davis—"
"Yes?"
"Couldn't I come?"
"You mean for the summer?"
"You know what I mean. Like Dorothy. I write every bit as well as she acts. I need breaks, too. I've broken my back here for three years and I'm getting a taste in my mouth that's like shoe leather, and an ache in my guts that's like appendix. I haven't got any strong enough leads for the show with Dorothy gone. I can play along like the rest of the so-called little theaters with ham talent, but I won't. We've got a good supporting cast, but no star. So I'll be out, with a broken back, and a pair of crutches, and if you don't invite me—well—it'll be lousy. It'll be the lousiest summer that—"
"Don't say lousy!"
"Then I can come?"
"Did I say that you could?"
"Yes," said Clifton, "your eyes did. You gave away for an instant. You hate my insolence. You think I'm crude. You think I carry a different banner than you. Well, maybe I do. But we're in the same art, and you admire the fire in my guts."
"Quit using the word guts!" Rhea Davis said shrilly.
"Then I'll come. I'll come on the same train with Dorothy. We'll call you from the station."
"I didn't say—"
"But you will. You've got to. Don't you see this is—is—"
"Be on the same train," Mrs. Davis said, and for a moment she kept looking at Clifton. The light that rose in her eyes, and the expression that suddenly flickered across her face, frightened Dorothy. Rhea Davis turned to go and Clifton walked as far as the door with her. He spoke to her for an instant in lowered tones, then Mrs. Davis left.
CHAPTER FOUR
There was wild confusion the moment the door closed behind Mrs. Davis. People were falling on each other's necks and laughing and crying and promising one another breaks when the time came. They said they'd never forget, Clifton and Dorothy said this, and the rest of them sang songs like "Auld Lang Syne," while the old stage hand, the one and only—"Old Trusty"—produced a bottle of gin from somewhere, and some of the cast drank from it, though not much, it wasn't necessary, they were all drunk on the heat and the gas odor from the lights and a dream that had walked in and out again. It was during this merriment that Dorothy saw Sherry Moore sobbing; that she saw her slip quietly out the side way, and she did not try to stop her, for there was nothing she could say. Clifton had been heartless to gain his point. She was Clifton's girl. Every other week she alternated with Dorothy in the lead roles, so that it had been possible to keep the Seventeenth Street Playhouse going. But Clifton had forgotten Sherry and the nights they had walked the floors reading script, and the days on end when Sherry had done his typing; he had forgotten the words about love, and the Village basement rendezvous where they had sat and laughed at people who called themselves poets. He had not even put in a bid for Sherry or mentioned her, and now she was gone; gone out the door, and perhaps gone forever. It would have been futile for Dorothy to have tried to stop her. She knew Sherry Moore inside and out. Blonde and hard and thirty, a capable actress, but no great fire; a swell assistant, a sensible writer's aid, a tireless worker, a starve-with-you-till-the-ender, but no part or parcel of Clifton Dell's magnificent future. A stepping stone merely, a broken heart, when there would be a string of them before he wore a crown... when there was already a row behind him, girls who had helped (remember Marie from St. Louis?), and he would go on, stepping on and crushing people. For that was success. No Horatio Alger sweet cake of hard work, but a cruel, selfish, deliberate plunge into the softness of humanity and tearing it apart with hardness.
So Sherry was gone, and Clifton here, laughing, wild, drunk on his own ego, didn't even know she was gone. Three years of hard labor and one of the world's greatest actresses had walked in and out again and—presto—a playhouse hidden in the squalor of factories and tenements turned back into a laundry.
There was no more to say finally, they were beginning to repeat things. A reflex was beginning to come: comprehension and bitterness, so that the others, the unlucky ones, as if realizing for the first time that the union was broken, that all this was over, were drawing into their shells and beginning to ask Clifton pointless and embarrassing questions. He was a smart lad, Clifton, he knew it was time to get out, and he put on his felt hat, cocking it to one side of his head, and shoving it back; and then he laughed, showing his white teeth, and said: "Let us vacate this squalor, thespians, and off to lights and gaiety and midnight!"
Then they were walking on the street, just Dorothy and Clifton, and he was doing a little cake walk, and he had his hat at an extreme angle. "When he saw old women standing in doorways fanning themselves he slapped them on the back, or he kissed their cheeks. With some of them he tried to do a little jig. His laughter was catching. He lit up the town. People watched him stroll, and strut, knowing he wasn't drunk, because it was
n't that kind of a walk, knowing only that he must be good and great, a story book man, full of wild promise and happiness.
"Why, it's the best thing that ever happened to the old dame," he said, "getting us to come out.”
"You think so?"
"Think so?" he said. "You saw her play last year. It stunk like yesterday's socks. She's falling apart. And that's one crying shame, because the old hag is good. She's got something. But she needs a writer. No sack of bones sixty years old ever carried a show yet that didn't have dialogue and swat behind it. She needs me like babies need milk—and I'm here to deliver!"
They walked along, past the diner, across the street from The Jumble Shop. They stopped at Womrath's on the corner and looked at the books in the window.
"I can write better than all those guys," said Clifton. "What you write with is a lighted torch, not a pen dipped in invisible ink that makes the words vanish so quickly you've forgotten them day after tomorrow!"
"You've got more confidence than ability," Dorothy replied, "but you've got the ability, too."
"So have you," he said. "We're alike. Like old shoes in an alley getting polished up for Park Avenue. We're going to own things and do things. We're going to turn Broadway and Hollywood and London upside down. They're going to look at us and wonder what the hell the rest of the boys and girls are doing hanging around."
"But I'm scared," said Dorothy.
"Scared?"
"You know," she said.
He threw back his head and laughed. "You mean Michigan. Those puny little police. Because you got orphaned when a train smacked your old man into kingdom come and a sweet-pused godfather took you to his house to live and spent the next six months trying to make you. Don't be afraid of that. Even if you killed him you can beat it. The star you're going to be. The people that you're going to have behind you!"
"I just left him there and ran," she said.
"So what? The old stinker had it coming, didn't he? What is this? A free country or not? Are they going to start locking up girls because they preserve themselves?"
"But I ran away. I didn't wait. And as soon as I get a little fame they're going to come and get me. Oh, I know they are, Clifton. It's a thing that follows and haunts me until sometimes I want to go completely mad!"
"You knew it ail along, though," he said, "and you worked for fame. You knew sometime, someday—"
"Yes... yes. But it was always someday. Never now. Never the present. But it's here. Or it will be. Next season when Mrs. Davis presents
me—"
"You can't run away and hide," he said.
"No. No, I've got to go on. But I'll keep thinking of it."
"Where's Sherry?" he said suddenly. He stopped and looked around him as though he thought she had been walking with them all this time.
"I saw her go out of the theater crying," Dorothy told him.
He stopped, put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. He flicked away the match. "Now isn't that silly? You'd think she'd want to get up and shout she'd be so happy, wouldn't you?"
"What's she got to shout about, I would like to know?"
"Well, she ought to shout for me. Didn't she help me? Don't you think she ought to show some pride in my achievement? That's the way with women, though. You get something and they burn up with jealousy and run off and get slopped up in some beer joint with a coal driver. Well, the hell with her, if she wants to be that way. I can always get along!"
She patted his arm. "Clifton, you'll someday be either a tremendous success, or you'll die a violent death. And in either case there'll be women or a woman behind it."
* * *
Dorothy didn't get back into her apartment until one in the morning. It was a small one-room place on the ground floor. There was a combination bathroom and kitchenette, barely big enough to squeeze into, but it afforded little else. A floor they had painted black because the boards were rotting and they had no rug. A bookcase crammed with sensational novels Sherry had snitched when she worked for a fly-by-night publisher. Two day cots, hard as nails, with cotton mattresses, and one sheet for each (which was all you needed in this heat); an old green chair whose belly was flabby for stuffing long ago pulled out and lost; a trunk standing in the corner and a typewriter on top of it; a little three-year-old radio which had cost ten dollars new that Sherry had won in a crap game; a dresser that was warped and had a mirror that gave you three chins and an oblong head. This was everything. This was home, sweet home. This was nighties and dime store perfume and spilled toothpaste; this was tears and soda pop and home and ambition; this was dialogue and rehearsal, and lines repeated over and over into the oblong mirror. This was jelly doughnuts and starvation and lukewarm coffee and cockroaches. This was the palace: twenty dollars a month with heat. It was empty without Sherry. Without Sherry sitting in the corner at the typewriter with the single white light shining down over her shoulder, and Clifton pacing up and down dictating as fast as he could think, and faster than Sherry could type. It wasn't the old place—it wasn't 13 Christopher Street—without Dorothy sitting there in the other corner, wanting to sleep, sitting there in a coolie coat and bare feet, and sometimes falling right off onto the cot and sleeping to wake up when Sherry was in bed and Clifton had long ago gone. It was empty and bleak. The walls seemed to know. The windows, yawning open to their hilt, connived in the agony. The oven heat that sifted through the room and hung in layers, one thick layer after another, smothering rather than choosing the decenter boiling death, were in on it. Emptiness. Heaven, oh, heaven, didn't she want to leave it now? Did she love this poverty and pretending and going on and on and on into nothing?
She felt she should cry, but she was tearless, and sweating. She pulled her suitcase out from under the cot and put it on the bed. She was not tired. She was numb. She opened the case, then went to the dresser and started taking out her clothes. One after another she piled the things in, neatly, daintily, as though she had a lot and didn't know where she was going to get room to put it all. She left the soap and the nail polish and the combs and brushes for Sherry. She would take only what she needed... then perhaps one of the novels that neither she nor Sherry had had time to read.
She tried to make a job of it, an occasion, a symbol; goodbye to all this, and hello fame, but it was no use. She was packed before she knew it, and it was too hot to dance around the room in any kind of ceremonial celebrating. She sat on the cot, curling her feet under her, and for a long time she just sat there, listening to the sounds in the night: cats yowling, drunks singing, crowds passing the windows and chattering, trucks crashing on the street, a neighbor's too-loud radio, a girl in the upstairs flat across the street cursing at the top of her lungs and throwing something at an unseen somebody deeper in the room.
Then suddenly the door opened. Sherry stood framed in it, then she stepped in, unsteadily, and closed the door behind her. She leaned back against it. Her round face was flushed. Her pink cheeks had turned red. The little bags under her eyes were big bags. She hiccoughed, putting her hand to her mouth as she did it. Her blonde hair was disarrayed. Her lip rouge was smeared. She lifted her hand again and passed the back of it in a wide sweep across her eyes which was a greeting.
"To the lovely flower of the stage," she said, "to the lovely, lovely flower of the stage. My dear, I want you to come out for the summer. I think you're just too, too terrific."
Dorothy said: "Where have you been?"
"Out slopping beer with coal drivers," Sherry said. "Clifton always predicted that for me. Dire, dire end, must you be here so soon? Out, flung out into the wilderness of the Village, flitting here and there and the other place, two coal drivers on each arm, and taking bids from sailors!"
"Sherry!"
"Oh, shut up." She walked over to her bed and flung herself on it. "What do I do now? Take a man in to pay the rent? Do I spend my nights in Max's Vanguard basement instead of in a laundry on Seventeenth Street? For what have I worked? A sweet slice of a genius who forgets me while I'
m still standing there. It wasn't that I didn't know it would come some day. It was only that I didn't know it would be so sudden and that it would hit so hard."
"But—"
"Oh, I'll go on," Sherry said. "These things don't kill you. You don't go up to the Brooklyn Bridge and jump off just because a bag of wind that rattles dialogue like Chinese firecrackers gives you the breeze. All you do is walk around the street chewing your agony and telling yourself that justice has an odor. Only it means that I'm through with the stage. I started big time legitimate and worked down to Seventeenth Street and you and Clifton are going the other way. So that washes me up for good and all. All this faking I've been doing and pretending I was twenty instead of thirty. I'll make the rounds now. I won't be so high hat a guy can't feed me and pay my rent. I won't ever starve any more. No more cockroaches and dirty sheets and bleeding fingers from pounding a typewriter for a scab playwright. I'm going to live for what's left in me. I'll leave my soul on that stage so that it'll be there even when Chinks are ironing shirts on it, and the rest of me'll go on!"
"You must hold on," said Dorothy, "until summer's over, until—"
"Until summer's over. Until leaves turn brown, and I'm a skinny blonde instead of a fat one, sitting on a gutter stone with my hair in my eyes. Until summer's over and I'm in my grave with a headache from listening to too many bum plays. Why kid ourselves? Why feed on fairy tales and keep running from what's here in front of us? Why—"
Someone pounded on the door.
Dorothy got up and went. It was the man who lived in the apartment across the hall. "Listen, kid," he said, "fun's fun, and you may be waiting for a call from a theatrical agent—but when you start giving my phone number so guys can call you up at three o'clock in the morning—"
