The Irrational Season

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  We talked about theatre and theatre people for over an hour, and he, in his turn, was impressed by my forthcoming tour with Uncle Harry, though I emphasized that I was a mere understudy. After lunch he suggested a movie, and we went to a rerun of Grand Illusion, that magnificent French anti-war movie set in World War I. We remarked on the irony, or, perhaps, the aptness, of this movie’s present popularity, and Paul invited me to have dinner with him. He explained that he had a job as a radio announcer in Philadelphia but that he came into New York every month or so to make the rounds and look for a job on Broadway. He would be going back to Philadelphia that night.

  I said that I’d love to have dinner with him but that I’d like to change my clothes to something a little dressier than my skirt and sweater. So we took the subway downtown and walked to my apartment, where I suggested he sit in the living room while I changed. What incredible naïveté on my part, to ask a totally strange man, personable or no, to come up to my apartment while I changed my clothes! Or was it stupidity? “He could have raped you,” someone said later. Or was it a sense that this young man was, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, a gentleman and could be trusted? In any event, he sat quietly on my little grey sofa while I changed, and we had the first of many pleasant evenings together. These ended after I introduced him to Hugh.

  I loved being on the road. Today, when I go off to give lectures, I call it being “on the road.” I stay in better hotels than I did when my salary was Equity minimum. Indeed, I sometimes stay at the same hotels that Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut stayed at.

  At the first rehearsal for the Uncle Harry tour, before we left New York, I felt elated, despite my low status as understudy. I had a real costume, two lines to say, and a steamer trunk which would appear in my dressing room at each theatre in each city where we played. I had my Equity card. I was a professional.

  The rehearsal went easily. Most of the original cast were going on the road. We broke up at dusk on a lovely autumn evening, and Mr. Schildkraut came over to me. “Madeleine, darling, would you like to have dinner with me?”

  I almost fainted. Managed to stutter, “Oh, y-yes, thank you, Mr. Schildkraut.”

  I had been told that Joseph Schildkraut was partial to little blondes. If there is one thing I have never been, it is a little blonde. The girl who was being asked out to dinner by this glamorous star was nearly six feet tall, and ever clumsy. My hair was what a young friend calls “hair-colored hair,” neither blond nor brown. Not exactly mouse. Just hair. My clothes were clean and tidy but hardly haute couture. I was aware that everybody who had heard the dinner invitation was looking at me with amazed curiosity. Mr. Schildkraut handed me into a taxi and we headed toward the Essex House on Central Park South, where he had a suite. In the taxi he chatted about the upcoming tour, the quality of the actors, the cities where we would be playing. I responded in monosyllables.

  In the Essex House we went up in an elevator to a high suite overlooking the city. I was amazed that his rooms looked totally unlived in. I had assumed that it was his apartment, that it would be full of his things. But there was nothing personal, not a photograph, not a book, not a flower. Through the open door I could see into a bedroom with twin beds, one bed neatly turned down, with striped pajamas laid across it.

  Suddenly I was swept into Joseph Schildkraut’s arms, his lips were on mine, and he was kissing me passionately. I froze.

  Naïve Madeleine.

  I was totally unprepared for this. What had I expected? I don’t think I had any idea what to expect. I, the unimportant understudy, was being asked out for dinner with the great star. My expectations went no further than that. I was terrified. Rigid with shock.

  Mr. Schildkraut dropped his arms, pulled away, asking, “Darling, you don’t want to?”

  “Oh, no, please, Mr. Schildkraut,” I gasped.

  “All right, darling,” he replied. “We have dinner and I talk about my father.”

  Which we did. What might easily have been a terrible trauma turned into a rich friendship, and Mr. Schildkraut became Pepé. He ordered dinner, which was set out on a small table by the window, from which we could see the bright lights of the city. New York was shortly to have a brownout, its lights dimmed because of the war, but the Great White Way was still bright. While we ate, Pepé told me stories of the great Rudolph. With incredible generosity, Pepé adored his father, telling me plainly that Rudolph was a far greater actor than he. I saw Rudolph only in The King of Kings, so I have no way of knowing, only of admiring Pepé for the simplicity of his love. Perhaps Rudolph was a more consistent actor; Pepé, for all his brilliance, was variable, and one never knew what his performance was going to be like. At least it was never static, and if some nights it worked better than others, it was always an interesting performance.

  Nearly once a week, during the length of the tour, he would come to me backstage, asking, “Dinner, darling?”

  “Of course, Mr. Schildkraut.”

  “Pepé, darling.”

  “Pepé,” I would reply.

  On a tour, one goes from hotel to hotel. On Equity minimum, I shared hotel rooms with other women, so the tour was a combination of the joy of the professional theatre and being back in a dorm with roommates. But I flourished in the community of the touring company. Thelma, the stage manager, and her assistant took me under their competent wings. They were considerably older than I, and far older in experience than chronology. Somehow or other they managed to protect me from my own ignorance, while gently instructing me. Thelma was tiny as a bird, but the large stagehands wherever we went ran to do her bidding and held her in great respect.

  The tour ended in late spring and my first novel was optioned by the Vanguard Press for three months for one hundred dollars. The manuscript had gone to Vanguard because the publisher, Jim Henle, had been the first of several publishers who had read one or another of my stories in various literary magazines and had written to inquire if I was writing a novel.

  I was fortunate at Vanguard to have a fine young editor, Bernard Perry, who later founded the University of Indiana Press. Bernard somehow managed to make me understand what I needed to do with the shapeless mass of material I had given Vanguard, to refine it and tidy it until it became a novel.

  I worked hard that summer, and hard work is in itself a protection. I had to get a finished manuscript in to Vanguard by the end of the summer. Idleness was not a problem. I might still be amazingly ignorant in most aspects of life, but I knew how to work. That was probably the most important lesson I learned in college.

  Even with hot dogs a nickel and hamburgers a dime, it wasn’t easy to live for the entire summer on one hundred dollars. I picked up extra money with odd jobs, and I continued to sell war bonds in theatre lobbies. Since I also saw all the plays, this seemed more a pleasure than a contribution to the war effort, so I became a volunteer at St. Vincent’s Hospital on Twelfth Street. The hospital was in desperate need of help. The volunteers trained by doing whatever job had to be done, and in a few weeks I became the equivalent of the recovery-room nurse, staying with patients after surgery until they were fully out of anesthesia.

  This gave me a feeling of real usefulness. Ours was not an ambiguous war (as I had occasion to tell our son and some of his friends during the Vietnam War). Even before Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States, willy-nilly, into the war, I had cousins in England who were being bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe; cousins in France fighting with the maquis, or in Africa with de Gaulle, who was still a great hero for us. I, too, wanted to help stop the megalomaniac in Germany from destroying the Europe I knew and loved, stop him from taking over the world.

  Even so, I was limited by my own concerns, my little world of theatre and literature. During that summer I wrote much and ate little.

  I left my work on the novel briefly to audition for a role (walk-on and understudy) in the forthcoming production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, starring Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut
and directed by Margaret Webster. Assured that I would be a small part of this project, I returned to the typewriter.

  Before the first rehearsal, I had finished The Small Rain, and this first novel was accepted by Vanguard and published. Not only did it have good reviews, it had excellent sales. Vanguard arranged to pay my royalties at the rate of two hundred and fifty dollars a month, on which at that time I could live comfortably (rent was eighty dollars a month), rather than loading all the money on me at once. For the several years the money lasted, I had an assured income.

  So I started rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard feeling rich indeed, with Equity minimum added to my Small Rain money.

  According to Peggy Webster’s staging, the first act of The Cherry Orchard starts with two young maids carrying a large wicker hamper between them, running across the stage. One of them was to trip and fall.

  “Which shall it be?” asked Miss Webster.

  “Madeleine, of course,” said Miss Le Gallienne.

  Three

  In due time I discovered that I had outgrown my apartment on Twelfth Street. It wasn’t that my little walk-up was too small; it was that the kitchen was two gas burners over a small box of a fridge tucked in a closet. Dishes had to be washed in the bathtub, across which a wide board was laid. I loved having friends in for dinner; I longed for a real kitchen. Apartments had become hard to come by in wartime New York. Amazingly, I met a young couple who lived on Tenth Street in the parlor floor-through of a brownstone, and who did not want to cook, would just as soon not have a kitchen. They liked my walk-up. We agreed to switch apartments.

  Thelma, the stage manager, and several friends helped me move, so that by the first evening on Tenth Street I was already settled in and at home, pictures hung, books in the shelves, music on the piano. The apartment had a lovely big living room overlooking a small garden used by the basement tenants. There was a marble fireplace, over which I hung my mother’s Venetian mirror. The piano, of course, had pride of place, and I played at least a couple of hours a day. There were already bookcases built in on one side of the fireplace, and friends helped me balance the architecture with more shelves on the other side. Helped? I watched, while they built.

  To get to the bedroom, which faced onto Tenth Street, one had to go through the kitchen to the bathroom, through the bathroom, and thence to the bedroom. But the kitchen was a real kitchen with a stove with four burners and an oven. There was a real standing refrigerator and a proper sink. One wall was filled with cupboards with two pull-out wooden work shelves. It was a small kitchen but so well conceived that it was beautifully functional. The bathroom had a long, deep tub. No shower, but I have always preferred the relaxation of a hot soak to the stimulation of a shower.

  That first night I read until I was sleepy, then turned out the light. Slept soundly. Suddenly I was wakened by a horrible, grinding roar. I sat up in bed, terrified, until I realized that the noise came from a garbage truck. They came by, grinding and gnashing, at five o’clock every morning. After the third or fourth morning I never heard these monsters; they had become a subconscious part of my normal routine.

  The Cherry Orchard ran to distinguished reviews but slim houses. The people in the company were friendly enough, but there was none of the intimacy of the group on the Uncle Harry tour. I felt that I was only an understudy, a person of little importance. The best thing that came to me was the little dog who had to be bought for the play. Charlotta Ivanovna, the governess, had a dog who was frequently referred to. Of course, all the players in the company wanted their dog to get the role. But the noise of the party scene was too much for these pets. At the last moment Touché was bought, a charming grey mop of a poodle when small poodles had not yet been overbred and become nervous and yappy. Touché was a born actress. She loved the noise and confusion of the party scene. She learned her entrances and exits so that Charlotta Ivanovna could time herself by Touché, rather than the other way round. Touché was everybody’s pet, but I, as assistant stage manager, was given her care. I was very lonely at this time, having broken with most of my old friends, who had come to represent a way of life which seemed to me irresponsible. Surely Le Gallienne, Webster, and Schildkraut saw my loneliness and decided to give Touché to me.

  She was my first dog, the first in a long succession of canine companions. She was friendly with all the company, but in a few days there was no question that Touché was my dog and fiercely protective. She had been bought from a reputable kennel, but she had what was ultimately diagnosed as low-grade distemper. I hand-fed her ground beef, which used up my wartime meat coupons. During the day she wilted in my lap like the dying Marguerite in La Dame aux Camélias. In the evening I would put her on her leash, walk her to the subway, then drape her over my shoulders like a fur piece and she, little actress that she was, would lie, unmoving, until we were uptown. We would walk to the theatre, Touché drooping miserably. But as soon as we got to the stage-door alley, up would come her little chrysanthemum of a tail and she would trot into the theatre, her ills forgotten in the delight of being onstage.

  When audiences dwindled radically, it was decided to close the show for the rest of the season, and then take it on the road in the late summer. During the intervening months I worked on my second novel and learned about life. I learned that I, at any rate, could not make love where there was no love. I learned to laugh when men suggested to me that I should go to bed with them “for the sake of my art.” I learned that much that masquerades as love is undisciplined lust. I learned to be wary of young men who had what Miss Le Gallienne called “the honest blue eyes of the congenital liar.”

  I learned what it was to be truly lonely. I loved my writing and I loved my apartment, but I had neither the money nor the inclination to meet friends at nightclubs or bars, and spend hours in what seemed a terrible waste of time. Touché and I used to go for long walks together, and I explored a city which was still safe to walk in. It was full of soldiers and sailors on leave. Young men I knew slightly from my visits to Jacksonville came through New York on their way overseas and, rather to my surprise, called me and took me out. From one of these, Norman, a distant cousin, I had my first kiss. (If Pepé had kissed me, I had certainly not kissed Pepé.) So late in life? I was a very slow bloomer.

  Norman was in New York for only a few days. He took me to dinner at the Plaza, in the elegant Edwardian Room. Later we listened to the famous Hildegarde sing Noël Coward songs. Then we crossed to the Central Park side of Fifty-ninth Street and got into one of the horse-drawn hansom cabs and clopped through the park. And Norman kissed me. He was going overseas; he might get killed (he didn’t); kissing was what was expected of us. We were diligent about it, but it meant little to me and probably no more to him.

  With three friends I took acting lessons twice a week from a well-known actor and his violinist wife. His star was in the ascendant when he generously took on some young pupils, and it has gone on rising. He is an old man now, and a great actor. He charged us twenty-five cents a lesson, on the theory that it was not good for us to get something for nothing. I learned a great deal from him.

  He and his wife lived in a brownstone in the East Seventies, and on New Year’s Eve they gave an enormous party. We young ones were invited to come, hang up coats, serve drinks and food, but also we would be mixing with all the great names in theatre and music. We were thrilled, even though we were too busy being servants to speak to anybody other than asking, “May I hang up your coat?” or “Would you like something to drink?” But we watched, listened, were filled with excitement.

  At midnight our host stood on a chair and began giving toasts to the glorious Red Army. That was fine. Russia was our ally. But he didn’t give toasts to anybody else. Not to the men and women from the United States who were overseas. Not to the British bravely defending their island. Not to the French trying to save some pride out of defeat. Only to the glorious Red Army. I didn’t understand what was wrong, but I knew things were skewed. I felt embarrassed
, then unclean. I slipped downstairs, put on my coat, went back to my apartment, and took a bath.

  So I was saved, as some of my friends were not, from flirting with communism. At that time it was not only attractive, it seemed to fit in with the teaching of Jesus far more than did Christianity. Share everything with the poor. Keep nothing for yourself that you do not need. Find work for all the unemployed. Why wasn’t it as wonderful as it sounded? I don’t know how I knew that it wasn’t, but I knew. Some of my friends found out in a far more distressing way than at a New Year’s Eve party.

  I did want to build up a new circle of friends, so I accepted invitations to people’s homes. One night I went to a party given by a couple whose living room was filled with tanks of tropical fish. Our host would not allow a glass to remain empty for a moment. If I took a sip of my drink my glass would be refilled if I turned my head. So each time he would refill it, I would slosh some into the fish tanks. When I saw several fish swimming around and bumping drunkenly into each other, I decided that it was time to go home.

  Even though I had been disturbed at the New Year’s Eve party, I was still politically naïve. I had read about the Spanish Civil War but it had never touched me personally. Then one evening I went to a party hosted by an artistic couple, a cellist and a sculptor, which affected me as profoundly as the toasts to the glorious Red Army. Suddenly, in an ugly argument between an emotional Spaniard and a cool American, the Spanish Civil War was present.

  The young Spaniard’s name was Julio. I spoke reasonable French, but no Spanish, and was fascinated by the pronunciation, Hoolio. He was a poet, and his passionate war poem had just been published to critical acclaim, and the party was in his honor. Most of the people at the party were a little older than I, and far more sophisticated, and I stood on the outskirts, a little awed, listening.