It was not necessary to pull Emily out of her chair. She still had coordination.
“I’ll be over in about half an hour,” he said. “There are just one or two things I’ve got to look over in my third act, but if I’m not back in half an hour, maybe you’d better send for me. And don’t be lonely, Emily.”
“All right,” she said. “I don’t feel that way any more. You’re the one who looks lonely.”
“Why, Emily,” he said, “it’s always lonely, writing, and I’m pretty used to it by now.”
“Well,” Emily said, “don’t get too lonely. And mind, only half an hour. You know how nervous they get in the kitchen if everybody’s not on time.”
There was a more solid sort of silence in the room after Emily was gone that reminded him of the silence of a dimly lighted house after the last of an audience had left a theatre. There was still the consciousness of recent excitement, of noise and voices long after the audience was gone. There was still the echo of Emily’s voice and the imprint of her personality. There was no doubt that Emily was becoming increasingly what the world called a character. The bounce and the ebullience of the little Hoosier girl was growing rather than diminishing. It was a quality that reminded him of the magic rubber ball. He should have told her the whole story. He knew that it was dangerous to put things off when it came to Emily, or any other woman. They always interpreted delay as a sign of weakness, and usually they were right.
The quiet had a deeper quality when he took the Kleenex back to Miss Mulford’s office. He picked up the folder from her desk containing his penciled pages, took out his ring of keys, and opened the locked drawer of the letter file and found the investment list in the securities folder. It was an act that had always demanded an effort, because he was congenitally bad with figures. He sighed as he put the play folder and the investment list on his writing table. The securities, with their book value in one column and their current market value in another, were like a complicated equation which he knew before he started that he had not the skill to solve. The neat pages, as he turned them, made an ominous, rattling sound in the silence, reminiscent of the noise of rain on a shed roof. And after all, it was a matter for the lawyers, and the bank had warned him at the time of the loan that the collateral offered no great margin.
It was a matter for the lawyers, but his draft of the third act was different. He was surprised, as he read his penciled pages, how well he had written in spite of all that had occurred to disturb him. There were always pitfalls that the most experienced writer could not avoid—of easy effects that led to sloppiness, and also the constant danger of repetition; but he was sure that nothing that he had done was bad. In fact, he believed that the problems of the third act that had vexed him for the last six weeks were solved in the draft that he was reading; and there was even a spontaneity in the lines that reminded him of some of his earlier work, although it was not the same sort of spontaneity. Professionally, he knew very well, no one stood still. Work either went up or down, but he was sure that what he had before him was nothing of which to be ashamed. Still, the spontaneity which pleased him also disturbed him. Its lightness and what he hoped might be its brilliance, had the echo of an earlier time—the echo of the boundless confidence of youth. The spirit of the earlier Harrow was in it without the crudeness or the carelessness. He wished that he might get some of the crudeness back and that he might recapture his old, boisterous quality, but it was gone of course, lost in years of rehearsal and rewriting. As he was feeling now, he would willingly have traded the competence that time had given him for the old self-confidence that had once almost been like a gambler’s intuition. If you had it, nothing could go wrong. And where had it gone, he wondered. He was back where he had started earlier that afternoon. Where in hell had everything gone?
XI
There’s Something I Ought to Tell You, Emily
In the days before air travel had become a popular means of locomotion, he and Rhoda had sailed to France each winter for several years, after he had purchased a perfectly impossible house at Antibes. They had gone to the French Riviera during the last months of the bright assurance of the Twenties that had submerged so rapidly into the social consciousness of the Roosevelt era. There had been a brief moment, after his first play had been a hit on Broadway, when taxes were still too low to siphon off all earnings, so that the prospect of increasing affluence had seemed rational. There were no caustic remarks among the intelligentsia during those brief years if a writer or artist chose to buy or rent an interesting place on the Riviera. Even some of the theatre’s greatest liberals had enjoyed the Riviera then, but the climate had changed by 1937 when he sold the Antibes house for half of what he had paid for it. On the whole, it would have been nearly as profitable to have given it to Rhoda, and she might have owned it still if old associations would not have been disturbing. Indeed, he often found himself thinking affectionately of old pre-war Antibes, before it was saturated with trippers, and before its roads were jammed with English, French, German and Italian motor vehicles.
There were always guests stopping at their villa, most of whom, as Rhoda said, exerted a bad influence on him. Yet Rhoda herself sometimes admitted that it was fun at Antibes, and sometimes she even forgot to worry about Antibes’s lack of solidity, and heaven knew, in retrospect, that it had not been very stable. As Rhoda had said more than once—when they were safe in their small suite on the old Aquitania—expensive though she knew it was, and uselessly so since neither of them was a good sailor, it was fun to get away. It might not be good for Harold, in spite of the chance the winter gave him to make French his true second language, but still it was fun to get away; and if Antibes was not a constructive sort of change, it surely was a change.
The Aquitania still remained in his memory as a fine symbol of a vanished world. It had been wholly different from the Elizabeth and the Mary. For one thing, in spite of all its comfort, the Aquitania had given the impression of being a ship, and he had always had the feeling of going on a voyage. There was also a sense of irrevocable commitment, the illusion that you might not return, or, if you did, that things would never be quite the same again.
If he was not mistaken, ships in those days customarily sailed at midnight, and once the Aquitania was under way his last glimpse of New York was a large and magic panorama of lighted buildings, never so beautiful or so poignant as when one sailed at midnight. He was separated from the city once the ship was under way, no longer a part of it, and merely not being so made him wish vaguely that he might be back. There was always regret, now that New York belonged to him no longer. It had been a long while since he had thought much of the Aquitania, but now the same sense of impending change was back with him as he walked toward the house. Although he still owned it, it was no longer his, and he saw it in a new proportion because his emotions and immature visions were no longer involved in it; the house had never seemed so beautiful.
He could regret that the place would belong to someone else and that it would doubtless sell for half of the money that he had put in it, but this regret was tempered by the conviction that nothing he did in a business way had ever turned out as expected. In spite of mixed emotions, he was able to view the lawns, the shrubbery, the fenestration, the cornice, and the cupola of that graceful Federalist dwelling nearly with the eyes of a stranger. It seemed to him that he had never been so lightly involved with anything else that he had ever done.
The small front parlor was finished and the marble-topped table from the Judge’s sitting room, and the iron plant-stand from the Judge’s house helped, like the horsehair sofa, to break down formality. The large sitting room, too was finished. He had been careful that none of its furnishings had been too violently restored and he had spent a long while searching for a well-worn Oriental rug. The place looked easy. The sofa and chairs by the fireplace had a used look. He had not needed an interior decorator, nor a stage designer, to achieve what he desired. This effect was now enhanced by the corpu
lent and aging figure of Walter Price, dozing in the wing chair by the sitting room fire, with a battered play script half open beside him. You always needed life to make a room alive. He could not blame himself for admiring the whole setting, and he found himself mentally writing stage directions again, as he had in the dining room that morning.
“Oh, Walter,” he said, “I’m sorry to arouse you. You looked so comfortable, but perhaps we both should do something about getting ready for dinner. Dick and Marion Bramhall are coming over.”
Walter straightened himself slowly and blinked his bleary eyes.
“Dear me,” he said, “I must have dozed off. It’s an old habit of mine, as you may remember—the habit of the old trouper and the old soldier. Snatch a catnap while you can. One of my favorite mottos.”
“I’m glad you snatched it here,” Tom said. “It’s just what the room needed—a touch of informality. Do you remember the old Belasco days, when the curtain rose on an empty stage, with nothing but a cat asleep in the old inglenook? And then the cat would rise and stretch, just the way you’re stretching now, except that it was a cat. Was it Belasco, or who was it who thought of that?”
Walter Price smiled.
“Dear old Tom,” he said. “I was thinking only this morning that there is no one else so beautifully endowed with your powers of reminiscence. I am familiar with the one about the cat, but I do not believe it was Belasco’s idea. Actually, as I cudgel my brains, I think I invented the cat technique myself when I was property man for a horror play. When the Clock Strikes, or something of the sort. I distinctly remember the opening scene called for a cat stretching. It was I who conceived the idea of placing our cat in a small box one hour before curtain. By removing him and placing him on stage just one half-minute before the curtain was rung up, the cat would always be stretching before the fire. There was always applause. I’m very sure I invented that technique.”
He had not, and doubtless both of them knew it. He was obviously quoting from some theatrical memoir, although Tom Harrow could not remember the exact one at the moment.
“Yes, Tom,” Walter said, “I frankly attribute my present mental alertness and my powers of memory to my having cultivated the habit of snatching a sleeping minute at odd intervals. I invariably wake like a flash, as I did just now, revivified. You know, it might not do you harm to practice that same relaxation. You look drawn and tired this afternoon—unnecessarily tense. There’s nothing on your mind, is there?”
The question made Tom nervous, since Walter Price very seldom noticed anything except himself.
“Well, I do have a few things on my mind, Walter,” he said. “I’ve been working on the third act most of the day and maybe I overdid it.”
“I’m afraid you’re not very happy about it,” Walter said.
He understood that Walter’s curiosity had sprung from what Emily had said in the dining room that morning. The difficulty of success was that even one’s best friends were seldom averse to the prospect of eventual failure.
“If you want to know,” Tom said, “I’ve never been happy when I’m writing, Walter, and I suspect anyone who says he is.”
“Perhaps you are right,” Walter said, “but I believe dear old George used to be happy while in the throes of composition.”
“Dear old George Who?” Tom Harrow asked.
“Why, dear old George Bernard Shaw, of course,” Walter said. “You remember, naturally, how dear old George depended on my advice during his last years. But perhaps you did not know that we had reached a first-name basis? Believe me, not everybody called him George.”
“I’ll bet they didn’t,” Tom Harrow said. “You certainly have something there, Walter.”
“Ah, memories, memories,” Walter Price said. “Who did you say was coming to dinner?”
“Dick and Marion Bramhall,” Tom Harrow said. “You remember them, don’t you? Rhoda and I met them that winter we were at Palm Beach before we bought the Antibes villa.”
“Yes,” Walter said, “indeed I do remember.
It was time to be walking up the stairway to its nearly perfect landing, with its fine old clock, the product of a Hingham, Massachusetts, clockmaker, and then up the left of the landing to the so-called “flying staircases” to dress for dinner. It was time and high time, as he knew after having lived so long with the dogma that the show must go on. It was time, as common sense told him, to tell Emily of his financial ruin, and his conscience also told him that he had been a moral coward not to have given Emily this briefing in the reconstructed coach house. What was it that had made him hesitate? Was it his annoyance because Emily had called Miss Mulford, Mulford—or was it due to the high heels and the petulance of Emily’s manner, which he realized now had given him a hopeless feeling of encirclement? He was obliged to doubt these reasons. In the end he had been a moral coward, lacking intestinal fortitude. Truthfully, he had put off the moment because he had feared Emily’s tears and her recriminative anger. Truthfully, he had the American man’s dread of the potentialities of the American woman, that was instilled in the American male, beginning with his school-marm. It was time to pull together the vestiges of manhood left him from this hurly-burly, but he was still reluctant. Though his conscience and the fine old staircase of the Saebury house were beckoning, he felt an old call from the past. Although it was true that Walter Price was boring him to extinction, habit told him that there were no friends like old friends.
“Well, Walter,” he said, “you look perfectly all right as you are, and this dinner party is not your funeral, but I’ve got to change because Dick Bramhall invariably dresses for dinner.”
His tone lacked complete conviction. Walter did not look all right as he was, and Emily would be waiting upstairs, reproachfully if nothing else, to have him zip her up, and zipping Emily was growing to be more of a problem annually.
“Dear old Tom,” Walter said, “you never did like dinner parties.”
“No, I never did, dear old Walter,” Tom Harrow said, “and from what I gather from indirection, if not from intimacy, your dear old friend, dear old George, didn’t like them, either. It’s pretty tough writing all day and then sitting down with an unrehearsed cast and talking dialogue all night.”
“If I may say so,” Walter said, “your dialogue grows more succinct and crisper every year—but how about you and me having a little drinkie, Tom, before you go upstairs? We’ve hardly had a moment together. How about a little drinkie, just for old times’ sake?”
At least Walter had not said “for auld lang syne.” It was a bad idea to have a drink before the dinner cocktails, but then, Walter was his guest, and it was only courteous to have a drink with Walter, but he could not fool himself about the underlying reasons for his courtesy. He was a moral coward. He wished to delay telling Emily the bad news.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll get Alfred to make us a Martini apiece. Alfred isn’t bad with Martinis.”
“I’m delighted you fall in with my mood, Tom,” Walter said, “and that gin you left in my bathroom is smooth and delicious. May I be so bold as to make a suggestion? Almost no vermouth and let us hold that thought.”
Tom Harrow crossed the room to an authentic petitpoint bell pull and rang it. The bell pull, he was happy to remember, had been one of the architect’s ideas, not his, and it operated by electricity. After ringing it, he remembered that Alfred was averse to answering the summons of a bell, perhaps because of some directive from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and so he was not surprised that there was a considerable interval before Alfred, in his alpaca coat, appeared.
“Alfred,” Tom said, and he used almost the same smile that he employed when he had to say “No” to talented but middle-aged actresses, “I know how busy you must be, but even if the table will not be quite so perfect, do you think you could find time to stir one Martini for Mr. Price and myself—the best gin, and almost no vermouth?”
“Yes, sir. Directly, sir,” Alf
red said.
It was a response that demonstrated that he was popular with servants because he respected their routine. Emily, he was thinking, never respected anyone’s routine, including his own. When he drank the Martini, his heart felt warm toward Walter. After all, there were no friends like old friends, but there was more to it than that. The Martini had created a change of mood. He felt a new confidence in his capacity. Through the sitting room window where the lilacs were budding and where the reddish shoots of the peonies soon would turn to green, the late sunlight was mellow, gilding the Chinese shapes of the azaleas. There was no house like an old New England house, sparse and graceful, and he had saved it—not any architect. He had taken the burden and the heat of the day, and he still was able to take more because he was the master of his fate.
“Walter,” he said, “those delightful Bramhalls will be upon us before we know it. But don’t you move, you look perfectly all right.”
The gracious Saebury staircase was no longer formidable. It gave him no feeling of effort or reluctance, and there was another good thing about that crisp, dry Martini. He was now fully prepared to tell Emily the bad news, and delightfully enough, the announcement would not be time-consuming because very shortly now, the Bramhalls would be arriving. The show would be on the road. On the whole, it was delightful that Emily had asked the Bramhalls.
His bedroom, with its controversial bath, was in the rear of the main part of the house, and a door connected it with Emily’s larger room and her bath-dressing-room that looked over Johnson Street. When the house had finally been remodeled and adequately furnished, a magazine of the House and Garden school had sent a writer and a photographer to do the Harrow house. Of course it was good publicity, if you were seeking publicity, but Tom Harrow had refused to let them go upstairs. He had always felt that those snooping photographs of bedrooms, boudoirs, with their chaise longues and conveniently arranged closets, were an indecent invasion of privacy and an indecent exposure of convention. He was not going to have Life, Look, House and Garden or any other magazine taking photographs of his wardrobe. The living quarters of his house were private and he had insisted that they be comfortable, regardless of the authenticity; but those fine rooms, with their fireplaces and their excellent woodwork, had demanded formal furniture. His own bedroom was larger than any he had ever previously occupied—large enough so that it was a considerable walk to the curly maple bureau where he kept the gold-backed military brushes that the cast of his play had given him—large enough for a writing desk and an armchair with a good reading light in case he wanted to work late in the evening, and for a radio and record player. This was an idea of his that was not successful because music, when he wanted it, invariably disturbed Emily, who was a fitful sleeper. Out of sentiment, he had hung in his room two steel engravings from the Judge’s house, not caring whether they clashed with the authentic reproduction wallpaper. It was sad to think that he was just beginning to grow accustomed to the room, now that necessity would make him leave it, but that interlude with Walter Price had moved him off the track of self-pity.
Women and Thomas Harrow Page 18
