Theophilus North

by Thornton Wilder

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Years ago, Badger, I planned to make my life-career that of being a detective. When boys are ambitious they really are ambitious. I read all the professional handbooks about it—hard, tough books of instruction. And I remember that the tracing down of anonymous letter writers was an important section. We were taught that there are twenty-one ‘give-away’ clues to every anonymous letter. Give me these letters and in two weeks I’ll find the writer and drive him—or her—out of town.”

  “But, Theophilus, maybe him or her is right. Maybe my husband loves Miss Desmoulins. Maybe my baby has no father any more. Then I might as well die. Because I love my husband more than anything else in the world.”

  “Badgers don’t cry, Myra—they fight. They’re smart, they’re brave, and they defend what they’ve got. They also have something that I find missing in you.”

  She looked at me, appalled. “What?”

  “They’re like otters. They have a sense of fun and laughter and wicked tricks.”

  “But, Theophilus, I’ve always had them too. But lately I’ve had so much illness and lonesomeness and boredom. Believe me, my father used to call me his ‘little devil.’ Oh, Theophilus, put your arm around me one minute.”

  Laughingly I squeezed her hand hard and said, “Not one second!—Now promise me that you’ll put this whole wretched business out of your head for a week. . . . Badgers always catch the snake. Can I call Mrs. Cummings now? . . . Mrs. Cummings, it’s school time. Mrs. Cummings, you’re a wonderful friend and you should know what we talked about. Mrs. Granberry heard an ugly bit of gossip. I told her that no one who’s intelligent and beautiful and rich has ever escaped gossip. Aren’t I right?”

  “Oh, Mr. North, you’re very right.”

  Naturally that about the twenty-one clues was sheer kite-flying. In my hasty glance at the letter I read that Mr. Granberry entertained Mlle. Desmoulins at dinner in one of the small dining rooms at the Muenchinger-King every Thursday night. It went on to tell of Flora Deland’s dinners, mentioned myself, bloodwarmingly, as an “odious person,” then rambled on in a grieved self-righteous way. I judged that they had been written by a woman, some former friend of George Granberry, that unoccupied planless inventor—perhaps by a Granberry. I returned to our classroom work as though nothing had intervened to upset it. We read Walden.

  I needed help—that is to say, I needed to know more.

  I arranged to meet Henry for a pool game at Herman’s. During an interval I asked him if he knew George F. Granberry. He was chalking his cue thoughtfully and said, “Funny, your asking me that,” and went on with the game. When the set was over we paid up and withdrew to a corner and ordered our usual.

  “I don’t like to mention names. We’ll call the party Longears. Choppers, under idleness all men and women become children again. Women cope with it better than men, but all men become babies. Look at me: when my Chief’s away I have to fight it every minute. Fortunately, just now I’m busy. Edweena and I are exchanging letters and making plans. We’re the Governors of the Servants’ Ball at the end of the season and that takes a lot of hard work. . . . Longears belongs to a very large family. He could get a job any minute in the family’s firm, but it’s stuffed already with a dozen members of the same name, all of them brighter than he is. They don’t want him. He doesn’t need the money. Before the War there were scores of young and middle-aged men like him in New York and Newport, rich, and idle as tailors’ dummies. In 1926 you can count ’em on one hand. When I arrived here he was already a divorced man—so maybe the blight had set in early. Everybody said he used to be intelligent and popular. For some reason he couldn’t get into the War. He married again—a girl from the Wild West, like Tennessee or Buffalo. She has poor health. Nobody sees her much. Men like that take to drink or women or gambling. A few take to boasting, to setting themselves up as some kind of superior person—something special. Longears pretends that he’s an inventor. He has a workshop out in Portsmouth—very secret, very important. Rumors—some say he’s making bread out of seaweed or making gasoline out of manure. Anyway, he hides there. Some people say that he doesn’t do anything more than play with electric trains or stick postage stamps into his collection. . . . Used to be a fine fellow. He was my Chief’s best friend, but now my Chief just wags his head when he’s mentioned.”

  “Was it the divorce that broke him up?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I think it’s merely nothing-to-do. Idleness is dry rot. . . . He has a girl hidden in the bushes here somewhere—he’s not the only one who does that, of course. . . . That’s all I know,”

  At the next session I appeared with a satchel under my arm. Among the books it contained were three school editions of Twelfth Night and three of As You Like It. I had worked for hours on them, selecting scenes for group reading. “Good afternoon, ladies. Today we are going to try something new.” I drew out the copies of Twelfth Night.

  “Oh, Theophilus—not Shakespeare! Please!”

  “You dislike his work?” I asked in hypocritical wonder. I began cramming the copies back into the satchel. “That surprises me, but you remember we agreed at our first meeting that we’d not read anything that bored you. Excuse me! My mistake is due to my inexperience. Hitherto I’ve tutored only boys and young men. After a short resistance I’d found that they take to Shakespeare enthusiastically. I’ve had them striding up and down my classroom pretending to be Romeo and Juliet and Shylock and Portia—eating it up! . . . I remember now how surprised I was when Mr. Granberry also said that he had always thought Shakespeare to be ‘piffle.’ Well, I have another novel here to try.”

  Myra was staring at me. “Wait a minute! . . . But his plays are so childish. All those girls dressing up in men’s clothes. It’s idiotic!”

  “Yes, a few of them. But notice how Shakespeare has arranged it. The girls have to do so because they’re destitute; their backs are against the wall. Viola is shipwrecked in a foreign country; Rosalind is exiled—thrown out into the wilderness; Imogen has been slandered in her husband’s absence. Portia dresses like a lawyer to save the life of her husband’s best friend. In those days a self-respecting girl couldn’t go from door to door asking for a job. . . . Let’s forget it! . . . But what girls they are: beautiful, brave, intelligent, resourceful! In addition, I’ve always felt they have a quality that I’ve found . . . a little . . . missing in you, Myra.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A humorous mind.”

  “A what?”

  “I don’t know exactly what I mean, but I get the impression that they’ve observed life so attentively—young though they are—that they don’t shrink from the real; they’re never crushed or shocked or at their wit’s end. Even when the big catastrophe comes their minds are so deeply grounded that they can face it with humor and gaiety. When Rosalind is driven out into that dangerous wilderness she says to her cousin Celia:

  Now go we in content

  To liberty, and not to banishment.

  I wish I’d heard Ellen Terry say that; and soon after Viola had lost her brother in that shipwreck someone asks her about her family and she—dressed as a boy and now called Cesario—says:

  I am all the daughters of my father’s house,

  And all the brothers too.

  I wish I’d heard Julia Marlowe say that.”

  Myra asked me harshly, “What good does it do you—this famous ‘humorous mind’?”

  “Shakespeare places these clear-eyed girls among a lot of people who are in an incorrect relation to the real. As a later author said, ‘Most of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.’ A humorous mind enables us to accommodate ourselves to their folly—and to our own.—Do you think there’s something in that, Mrs. Cummings?”

  “Oh, Mr. North, I think that’s why nurses laugh when they’re off duty. It helps us—like you might say—to survive.”

  Myra was staring at me without seeing me.

&nb
sp; Mrs. Cummings asked, “Mrs. Granberry, can’t we ask Mr. North to read to us a little out of Shakespeare?”

  “Well . . . if it’s not too long.”

  I put my hand tentatively into the satchel. “My idea was that we all take parts. I’ve underlined Myra’s part in red, and Mrs. Cummings’s in blue, and I’ll read the rest.”

  “Oh,” cried Mrs. Cummings, “I can’t read poetry-English. I couldn’t do that. You’ve got to excuse me.”

  “Cora, if that’s the way Mr. North wants it, I suppose we must let him have his way.”

  “God bless my soul!”

  “Now slowly, everybody—slowly!”

  Within the week we had done scenes from those plays—and repeated them, switching roles—and the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice. Mrs. Cummings astonished herself as Shylock. It was Myra who, at the end of each scene, said, “Now let’s do it again!”

  One afternoon Myra greeted me at the door with an air of suppressed excitement. “Theophilus, I asked my husband to come here at four-thirty. We’re going to do the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice and I’m going to make him play Shylock. You be Antonio, I’ll be Portia, and Cora will be everybody else. Let’s rehearse it once before he comes. Cora, I want you to be splendid as the Duke.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Granberry!”

  We put our hearts into it. Myra had memorized her lines.

  A knock on the door: enter George F. Granberry II. Myra was silken. “George darling, we want you to help us. Please don’t say no because it would make me very unhappy.”

  “What can I do?”

  She put the open book in his hands. “George, you must read Shylock. Go very slowly and be very bloodthirsty. Sharpen the knife on your shoe. Mr. North is going to lean backward over that desk with his chest exposed and his hands tied behind him.”

  “Now, Myra, that’s enough! I’m no actor.”

  “Oh, George! It’s just a game. We’ll do it twice so you’ll get the hang of it, and go slowly.”

  We started off haltingly, groping for our words on the page. As Shylock leaned over me, an ivory paper-cutter in his hand, he said under his voice, “North, I’d like to cut out your gizzard. Something’s going on here that I don’t like. You’ve fouled up the whole air around here.”

  “You engaged me to interest your wife in reading and especially in Shakespeare. I’ve done that and I’m ready to resign when you pay the three two-week bills I’ve sent you.”

  That took his breath away.

  During the first rehearsal Myra had made a show of reading indifferently and stumbling over her words. On the second time around we played for all we were worth. Myra laid aside her book; at first she represented the young lawyer Balthasar with a slight playful swagger, but she grew in authority speech after speech.

  George was caught up into the spirit of the thing. He roared for his “bond” and his pound of flesh. Again he leaned over me, savagely, knife in hand. Then something extraordinary took place.

  PORTIA:

  Do you confess the bond?

  ANTONIO:

  I do.

  PORTIA:

  Then must the Jew be merciful.

  SHYLOCK:

  On what compulsion must I? Tell me that!

  Here George felt a hand rest on his shoulder and heard behind him a voice saying—gravely, earnestly, from some realm of maturity that had been long absent from his life:

  PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strained,

  It droppeth like the gentle rain . . .

  . . . We do pray for mercy;

  And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

  The deeds of mercy. . . .

  George straightened up and threw down the ivory knife. He said confusedly, “Go on with your reading. I’ll see you . . . another time,” and he left the room.

  We looked at one another surprised and a little guilty. Mrs. Cummings took up her sewing. “Mr. North, play-acting is a little too exciting for us all. I haven’t said much about it, but Mrs. Granberry always stands up and moves about the room. I don’t think the doctor would like that. We haven’t had a talk-time lately. You told Mrs. Granberry you’d tell her sometime what it was like when you went to school in China.”

  I vowed that I’d send in my resignation that night—before I was fired—but I didn’t and I wasn’t. I was more than half in love with Myra. I was proud of her and proud of my work. A check arrived for me in Monday morning’s mail. We began Huckleberry Finn. On Friday another surprising thing happened. I bicycled up to the portal of the house. I saw a young man of about twenty-four strolling on the lawn, smelling a long-stemmed rose. He was dressed in the height of fashion—straw hat, blazer of the Newport Yacht Club, flannels, and white shoes. He approached me and put out his hand.

  “Mr. North, I believe. I am Caesar Nielson, the twin brother of Myra Granberry. How d’you do?”

  Zounds! Holy cabooses! It was Myra.

  God, how I hate transvestism! I shuddered; but never contradict a pregnant woman.

  “Is your sister at home, Mr. Nielson?”

  “We’ve ordered the car. We thought it would be nice to drive to Narragansett Pier and ask your friend Mademoiselle Desmoulins for a cup of tea.”

  “Sir, you forget that I am employed here to read English literature with Mrs. Granberry. I am only here under the conditions of my contract. Will you excuse me? I don’t wish to be late for my appointment.—Would you like to join us?”

  I looked up at the house and saw Mrs. Cummings and Carel, stricken, watching us from the drawing-room windows. Faces were similarly framed in many windows of the upper floors.

  Myra came nearer to me and murmured, “Badgers fight to defend what they’ve got.”

  “Yes, but since nature made them small she made them clever. No well-conditioned badger or woman destroys her home to preserve it. Please precede me, Mr. Nielson.”

  She entered the house disturbed, but chin up. As I followed her through the hall Carel said to me in a low voice, “Mr. Granberry has been in the house for half an hour, sir. He returned by the coachhouse drive.”

  “Do you think he saw the show?”

  “I’m sure he did, sir.”

  “Thank you, Carel.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I followed Myra and Mrs. Cummings into the morning room. “Myra, please change your clothes quickly. Mr. Granberry is in the house and will probably be here in a few minutes. He will probably dismiss Mrs. Cummings and me, and your next few months will be very dreary indeed.”

  “Shakespeare’s girls did it.”

  “Please leave the door of your dressing room open two inches so that I can talk to you while you are changing your clothes.—Can you hear me?”

  But we were too late. Mr. Granberry entered the room without knocking. “Myra!” he called. She appeared at the door, still Caesar Nielson. She returned his angry gaze unabashed.

  “Pants!” he said, “PANTS!”

  “I’m an emancipated woman like Miss Desmoulins.”

  “Mrs. Cummings, you are leaving the house as soon as you can pack. Mr. North, will you follow me into the library?”

  I bowed low to the ladies, opening my eyes wide in smiling admiration.

  In the library Mr. Granberry was seated behind the desk like a judge. I sat down and crossed my legs composedly.

  “You broke your promise to me. You told my wife about Narragansett Pier.”

  “Your wife told me about Narragansett Pier. She had received two anonymous letters.”

  He blanched. “You should have told me that.”

  “I was engaged by you to be a reader of English literature, not a confidential friend of the family.”

  Silence.

  “You’re the biggest nuisance in town. Everybody’s talking about the hell you kicked up among the Bosworths at ‘Nine Gables.’ And Heaven knows what’s going on at the Wyckoff place. I’m sorry I called you in.—God, I hate Yale men!”<
br />
  Silence.

  “Mr. Granberry, I hate injustice and I think you do too.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “If you dismiss Mrs. Cummings as incompetent in her profession, by God, I shall write a letter to the doctor or to whatever agency sent her telling them what I found here.”

  “That’s blackmail.”

  “No, that is a deposition in a suit for slander. Mrs. Cummings is obviously a superior trained nurse. In addition—as far as I can see—she has been your wife’s only friend and support in a difficult time.” I put a slight emphasis on the word “only.”

  Another silence.

  He looked at me somberly. “What do you suggest I do?”

  “I seldom offer advice, Mr. Granberry. I don’t know enough.”

  “Stop hammering that ‘Mr. Granberry.’ Since we hate each other I suggest we use first names. I’m told that you are called Teddie.”

  “Thank you. I don’t give advice, George, but I think it would help you if you just talked to me at random about the whole situation.”

  “God damn it, I can’t live like a monk half a year again, just because my wife’s under doctor’s care. I know a pack of men who have someone like Denise in the woods. What did I do wrong? Denise was a friend of a friend of mine; he passed her over to me. Denise is a nice girl. The only trouble with her is that she cries half the time. French people have to go back to France every two years or they expire like fish on ice. She misses her mother, she says. She misses the smell of the Paris streets—imagine that! . . . All right, I know what you’re thinking. I’ll give her a pack of Granberry stock and send her back to Paris. But what the hell will I do here? Play Shakespeare all day? . . . Well, say something. Don’t just sit there like an ox. Jesus!”

  “I’m trying to get some ideas. Please go on talking a little longer, George.”

  Silence.

  “You think I neglect Myra. I do and I know I do. Do you know why? I . . . I . . . How old are you?”