“Sure, sure.”
“Somehow the subject got onto you—how I don’t know— and I was really shocked to think that they’d say what they really felt about you with me right there. They know I’m your wife! But Les was saying you didn’t know anything at all about theater, and your reviews were a big joke and all. Then Bob Leanard, your friend, he said the biggest joke of all was the play you were supposed to be writing. He said he didn’t even believe you were writing a play, at least he’d never seen it and neither had anybody else. I kept my mouth shut, just smiling and all, and then Marge Clouden, Ruby McKay’s married sister, who’s doing costumes—Marge, not Ruby—came in and offered me a ride home.
“Well, I was really mad about it last night. Here you’ve been writing all these wonderful things about the Civic Theater year after year and that’s the kind of thanks you get! So this morning I got to studying about it, and the more I thought about it the madder I got. And I thought to myself, ‘All right! They think they’re so good and so smart; let ’em find out how they do when there isn’t any Hudson around to carry ’em along!’ So this afternoon I called Bob Leanard, told him I was quitting, and that was that.”
The radiant love in Beryl’s clear, gray, innocent eyes was so blinding I had to turn my head away with embarrassment. Beryl had grabbed a fat, juicy, acting plum that had been coveted by at least twenty other young women, all of them more talented in acting than she, and yet she had tossed it back in their faces for daring to criticize her husband! She wasn’t even close to being Mrs. Huneker’s understudy.
But from this moment on I was irrevocably Beryl’s. So long as she loved me and was confident that I loved her, nothing else mattered. Beryl had a champion who was ready to defend her against the world, a man who was up in his lines and ready to go on for her at any time.
I resolved, then and there, that somehow, someway, I would be the man she really thought I was already—no matter what it cost me and no matter what happened.
Perhaps one of these days, I will even have a play running on the Broadway stage. I’ve got the incentive. God knows, I’ve certainly got enough incentive.
And besides, such things happen all the time—especially in the movies.
…yeah.
Understudy for Death Page 20
