“Stop it,” he said. “It’s my funeral, not yours.”
While he watched her, she gave what is known in directions as a stifled sob.
“It was so needless,” she said, “to take such a big piece of it.”
“Yes, my dear,” he said. “I should have realized that musicals are more expensive than they used to be. This is no longer the day for what they used to call an extravaganza. Madame is going to cry—but honestly, you don’t have to.”
Miss Mulford rose and went into her own room. He hoped and expected that she would close the door until she could control herself, but he was wrong. She had only gone to get some Kleenex.
“To think a Louis Treize soldier could do that to you!” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s just so unnecessary, that’s all.”
“If you’re referring to dear old Porthos, he was a turkey,” he said, “but I still think Bethel did a good job setting the ballads to music.”
“Oh, no, he didn’t,” she said. “And I told you no one living would care about any of the Three Musketeers.”
“Please don’t go on telling me,” he said, “because Madame will tell me, too, as soon as she gets the news.… No one can be always right.”
He could still believe, even if the show had closed at the end of two weeks, that it was the customers’ fault, not his.
“You know what the idea was—a Beggar’s Opera satire on life today; and I still say it had sound dramatic values—Paris, the Louvre, inn courtyards, whores, thieves, rags and tatters, the noblesse, the clergy, and then the voice of a great man running all through it. The loves of a great man to exciting music, and Porthos actually was a great bighearted man.”
“He wasn’t, at the Winter Garden,” she said.
“I know,” he answered. “I know very well that I’m not a Hammerstein now, and I know it wasn’t South Pacific, and I know I shouldn’t have tried to make a million dollars. Besides, we’re not finished yet.” He smiled. He had talked himself into feeling better. “Don’t forget the picture rights. It will make a better film than stage show. They’re screaming for musicals around Culver City, and don’t forget Ed Beechley wants me to call him and he’s just in from the Coast.”
He smiled again. He had succeeded in talking himself out of disbelief, and there was no reason why he should not have, because he had become expert over the last twenty years at maintaining confidence. He had always had to stand by himself in all that period, when all the chips were down. He did not have to be infallible, but he had to have confidence, and once one lost it, one was gone. He believed for the moment that it was not the fault of the book but of the composer, together with bad direction, that his effort at a musical comedy was ruined. The idea had been basically sound.
“Get me the Beechley office. He’ll be there now,” he said.
He believed, as he watched her call Long Distance, that she had forgotten about the picture rights—a silly thing to do, because picture rights had averted a lot of wrecks in his experience.
“I want to make a call to New York City, please,” he heard her saying.
It was her cool, polite and precise telephone voice, but it had a different timbre. It never paid to depend too much on anyone, because in the end you were always out there alone. If you depended, you became suspicious. You listened for details.… There was not the conviction that there should have been in her voice when she made that call.… A few sentences from the reviews passed through his mind. The production had been “pretentious” and “perfunctory.” The badinage, which had amused him at the time he had written it, had been “bad Rostand.” But in Cyrano there had been room for pretentiousness and mechanized slapstick, because there had been warmth and humor and sentiment. It had never occurred to him until that instant that he might really have been imitating Rostand. In the end you always began repeating yourself, or repeating someone else. In the end the sands in the hourglass ran out, depositing themselves in a small and undramatic heap of rubble, and in the end there was absolutely nothing left on top.
“What’s holding up the call?” he asked. “Are the circuits busy?”
“They’re ringing now,” she said.… “Mr. Beechley, please? Mr. Harrow calling for Mr. Beechley …” And she handed him the telephone.
He sat down in front of his worktable.
“Hello,” he said, “is that you, Ed?”
It could not have been anyone else, because he could hear the wheeze in Ed Beechley’s voice showing that Ed, who had never been careful with his weight, must have moved rapidly to get to the telephone.
“Well, well, Tommy,” Ed Beechley said. “How are things up there? Is there still any desire under the elms?”
Ed had been his agent ever since Mort Sullivan had died and they had been associated long enough so that he could judge Ed by his voice as accurately as he could Miss Mulford. He knew when Ed was going to be tactful by a certain clearing of the throat. He could tell when Ed was going to give hard advice by the slowing of the tempo. He could tell when Ed was going to prevaricate by a sudden gay spurt of humor, not that Ed was not always honest when you laid it on the line. As Ed put it, why throw emery dust into the gears? The truth was, there were a lot of people in the theatre who honestly did not want to know the truth and who lived on the belief that what you did not know would not hurt you. It was a world of diplomacy and implication, and Tom Harrow had moved through it so long that he had become as pliable as a willow wand. Rhoda had told him so once, after overhearing some statements he had made at a Sunday night party. She never had been able to understand that it was unpardonable to hurt anyone’s feelings in the theatre unless it was absolutely necessary.
“Frankly, Ed,” he said, “the elm trees up here are literally dripping with desire. It’s all I can do to remember my age up here. I wish O’Neill could have seen them.”
“Well,” Ed said, “Emily’s all right, isn’t she?”
“Oh, Emily’s fine,” he said, “uprooted but gallant, the way she always is when she moves out of Sutton Place.”
The mistake was that he had called up Ed. Ed should have been paying for the call, and it was time to get down to business.
“It was nice of you to want me to call you, Ed,” Tom said, “on your first day back from the coast. I had rather hoped to hear from you out there.”
There was a pause that would not have been perceptible to a stranger, but it registered accurately with Tom Harrow.
“You know how it is out there, Tommy. Talk about cats on a tin roof—what with the TV and everything, nobody can keep his mind calm out there any more. I’ve got quite a lot of thoughts for you, fella, but I know how you feel about the telephone.”
“I’m sorry I’ve never been able to get over how I feel about the telephone,” Tom said.
Ed gave an appreciative chuckle.
“There you go,” he said. “Everybody’s funny about money in some area, but what about business deductions? We’re talking business, aren’t we?”
“It would be nice to know,” Tom said. “Are we?”
There was an infinitesimal pause.
“And even if we weren’t,” Ed said, “you’re talking to your agent, and you’re in the eighty-five per cent bracket, aren’t you?”
“Not as far as I know,” Tom said. “Not after we went to the cleaners on that musical.”
“Oh,” Ed said, “do you mean to say you’re up there desiring under the elms and beating your head against the Porthos of Paris? Well, don’t worry.”
The title, which had seemed so merry once, made Tom wince, but Ed’s voice was running on. “I always loved that title, with its alliteration. And Doré has got it, too. You know, they’re gradually going nuts about the whole idea—that is, Doré and Egbert.”
“Who is Egbert?” Tom asked.
“I thought of course you knew him, Tommy. I’m referring to Egbert Rhinestein. Egbert’s the newest, most brilliant independent director and producer out there, with real Texas money behind him.”
“As long as it’s Texas money,” Tom said, “and not funny money.”
“It’s real, all right,” Ed said, “right out of the ground in barrels. It’s occurred to me, during my visits to the Coast, that Texans sometimes don’t know what to do with money. But Egbert knows. He has that De Mille sense of grandeur and he wants something big—crowds, streets, costumes and music. He’s all the time thinking widescreen.”
Tom could not help feeling more cheerful as he thought of Mr. De Mille.
“Well, that sounds pretty good, and I’m glad he’s interested,” he said, “and I’d just as soon let Egbert do it all himself, and not go out there. I want to put on the new play.”
“Of course you want to, Tommy,” Ed Beechley said, “and there isn’t anything as immediate as all that.”
Tom Harrow straightened up and he saw Miss Mulford watching him.
“How do you mean, not immediate?” he asked.
“It’s only at the simmering stage,” Ed said. “You know it takes quite a while out there, Tommy, to get anything as subtle and, well—statuesque as Porthos of Paris to impinge.”
“You mean nobody gives a damn for it?” Tom Harrow asked.
“Oh, no,” Ed Beechley said. “Doré and Egbert are both slowly but surely going nuts over it.”
Tom Harrow spoke so quickly that he interrupted the even flow of Ed Beechley’s speech.
“Are they ready to bid against each other?”
There was a longer pause. It could only mean that Ed Beechley was being obliged to pull himself together.
“Frankly, it hasn’t reached the negotiation stage yet, Tommy,” he said, “but I know they’re basically both nuts about it. It’s only simmering, but haven’t I told you that it’s a real piece of property?”
Tom Harrow sighed. He felt like an explorer who, after struggling through the entangling vines of the jungle, has finally reached the hidden river.
“Good,” he said. “Now tell me this. Does anybody out there really seriously give a damn about that flop, or don’t they?”
Another pause reminded Tom Harrow that Ed Beechley was tenderhearted.
“Now you put it that way, Tommy,” Ed Beechley said, “I would say that the interest, at the moment, is negative.”
“Well, thanks, Ed,” Tom Harrow said. “That’s the information I wanted.”
There was concern in Ed Beechley’s voice. “I don’t quite understand what’s worrying you, Tommy,” he said. “Is it the bank loan?”
“Yes,” Tom said, “that’s what’s worrying me.”
Ed Beechley laughed.
“Tommy,” he said, “I love the way you always get mixed up about money. I was with you—remember?—when you put up five hundred thousand for collateral. Why should they be worried?”
He wished that he might see Ed’s expression. It always had a slapstick quality when Ed was wrong.
“Maybe you haven’t noticed,” Tom said, “the market’s been going down. And there’s an item I had forgotten myself. There are capital gains on all that stock. They’ve called it, Ed.”
“God,” Ed said. “You mean they’re cleaning you out?”
“Approximately,” he answered. “It’s a funny feeling, Ed.”
There was no doubt any longer that he and Ed were friends.
“I’ll get a plane this afternoon, Tommy, and you meet me at the airport,” Ed said.
“Oh, no,” Tom Harrow said. “Don’t bother about that, Ed. I suppose in the end I’ll need a lawyer to go over facts and figures, but never mind it now.”
“God, Tommy,” Ed said, “I know how you worked for that money.”
His arm was cramped. It was a relief to set down the telephone.
“Ed gets more and more long-winded all the time,” he said. “Don’t say anything. I guess you get the story, and I should say the sun is definitely over the yardarm. How about being a good girl and getting us each a drink?”
The Scotch-and-water she had given him was stronger than usual. It was surprising, after the first sinking feeling he had experienced, how little he seemed to care. There would be regrets and wonderings, later, why he had ever done this and that; but they would be like the backwash that followed any crisis; and he was not aware of them as yet. Instead, a feeling of relief centered around the idea that he had heard the worst.
“Thanks,” he said, and he took a careful swallow from his glass. “Let all this be a lesson to you, Miss Mulford.”
“Everything here has always been,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “sit down and take your drink. I don’t know whether that remark of yours was kind or not.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “I only meant that you’ve taught me a lot.”
He was alarmed to see that her eyes had filled with tears again, because his own self-pity was somewhere just around the corner.
“But still, I haven’t taught you all I might have,” he said. “But remember not to forget this lesson: Don’t start getting interested in large sums of money.”
He took another swallow of his drink, and as usual he could see pieces of his thought in dialogue.
“It is gratifying, isn’t it, to believe that our elected rulers and representatives in the last decade were as keenly alive to the danger of the rich as the late Karl Marx once was? They’re doing the best they can to stop new people from getting rich and occasionally they try, in halfhearted ways, to whittle down the ones who are. Now please don’t think I’m being bitter about this for a single moment, Miss Mulford. A wise and kind government has done its level best to keep me from the troubles in which I find myself involved. There is the graduated income tax, the justest form of tax ever imposed on man, in that he who earns the most pays the most, and I believe that there was a judge not so long ago who stated that it is every citizen’s duty to pay as high, not as low, an income tax as possible.”
“Did he? When?” Miss Mulford asked.
He was startled by her interruption.
“I don’t know when,” he said, “but the thought is in keeping with our times. Then there is the inheritance tax, and the state income tax, and the gift tax. Of course all of these things are beneficial in that they conspire more and more to prevent any wage or salary earner thinking of making money—and after all, why should we?”
“Would you like it if I sweetened your drink a little?” Miss Mulford asked.
Miss Mulford was the only person left with whom he could share his intellectual excursions. Rhoda had listened once, but she had not always been an intelligent listener. Laura Hopedale was never good at following abstract thought; and Emily, he had learned, seldom listened to anyone except herself. Miss Mulford listened because she was paid to do so, but at the same time, she might have learned rather to enjoy it.
“That’s thoughtful of you, as always,” he said. “Just a very little and I’ll be over being loquacious very soon. I don’t want you for a moment to think that I am criticizing our economic way of life, because I’ve learned very succinctly, only this morning, exactly how unhappy the profit motive can make one. There’s only one difficulty about these benign, restrictive measures. They tend to make you a little wistful when you come into contact with the rich—and you can’t avoid them always.”
He paused to taste his reinforced whiskey.
“You see,” he said, “I’ve had the misfortune to be thrown with a number of wealthy persons, not only in the theatre, but also in the area of what we might call established wealth. My first wife used to make friends with these people. You see, we were an interesting, intellectual couple who didn’t get drunk or disorderly, and they began asking us around to all sorts of places, like Palm Beach; but never mind. I’m not a Marxist, but occasionally they did elicit a spirit of social envy. Occasionally I would start thinking how such dull people could make money. I should have known that money-making has more to do with emotional stability than with intellect. Then another great misfortune befell me.”
; He lowered his voice. Miss Mulford was listening; you had to have an audience.
“I had a Broadway hit in the autumn of 1928, and another in ’30 and another in ’33, and in ’34 I had a very big Hollywood contract. Granted these last were depression years, still they hadn’t got around to doing much about the income tax. I made quite a pile of money. And, as I say, some friends of my first wife’s took a friendly interest. You see, I was writing reasonably light comedy, but the main point was that I bought a sound list of stocks at the bottom of the market.… Don’t worry, I’m almost through.”
“I was only looking at the time,” she said, “because Alfred will be coming with the tray.”
“What? Is it as late as that?” he asked.
“It’s getting on toward half past twelve,” she said. “But what happened then?”
He would have to stop. Emily and Walter Price would be expecting him for lunch and a cocktail on the terrace.
“And I forgot to tell you,” Miss Mulford said, “that Harold wanted to see you, and I told him to come over any time after half past twelve—but I hope you’ll go on with what happened.”
He could guess Hal’s subject would be money and as long as Rhoda had given him custody, which was one of those unanticipated things that Rhoda did sometimes, he was financially responsible.
“I’m glad I’ve held your interest,” he said. “There isn’t much more except that I wish I had that money now—and it was well invested, too. It’s better for me not to think what it would be worth today, but most of it went into my settlement with Rhoda, which was perfectly correct. She was always afraid of being poor—and Hopedale of course still draws alimony.”
“I know,” she said.
“It’s a little ironical, under the circumstances,” he said, “to recall that both of them are now married to very wealthy men. But then, I have never cared much about money, even as a symbol. Unfortunately, it came so easily in the beginning that it gave me the bad habit of believing that I could get some more at any time.”
Women and Thomas Harrow Page 13
