Bethel Merriday

VIII

Bethel's dormitory room, a double room which she was to share with Iris Pentire of the stock company, was as utilitarian as a boxcar. It had two cots, two straight chairs, two tilted bureaus, with blisters in the paint, and a row of hooks. But to Bethel, washing up for dinner on her first evening in Grampion, it was enchantment, for on the wall was a last season's poster:

THE NUTMEG PLAYERS

Present

MISS ETHEL BARRYMORE

in

THE CONSTANT WIFE

This was no bedroom, but the anteroom to glory! Here her friend Iris Pentire and she would be queens of the stage, along with Ethel Barrymore.

Cynthia Aleshire, the scene designer, said that Iris, who would arrive to-morrow, was a phenomenon: slim, lovely, only twenty, but already a professional actress and one of the seven Equity-member professionals of the Nutmeg permanent stock company at Grampion. Iris had, reported Cynthia, been a chorus girl, a photographer's model, played stock in Baltimore, and toured in a minor part in Teacher Mustn't Slap. In fact, at only twenty, Iris had as much grilling stage experience as, a generation before, she would have had at the age of six. But as the youngest of the professional stock company, at minimum salary, Iris was to live not in the Bostonian luxury of The House but with the submarginal citizens of the dormitory.

Bethel was going to love Iris even if she hated her.

She stripped off her sweater and slacks, sang in the shower, and in the pride of blue skirt and clean white sweater she ran down to dinner.

There were sixteen student-apprentices at Grampion. They were unpaid, and classed as amateurs, but each of them was permitted by Equity to appear in three plays during the summer. Higher in the hierarchy were the permanent stock company, with Mr. Andrew Deacon and Miss Mahala Vale as leads, and other visiting professional actors and 'guest stars' who appeared in one or two out of the schedule of ten plays presented during the summer of 1938.

To-night eleven out of the sixteen apprentices had come, and were being dramatic over veal loaf, cottage-fried potatoes, coleslaw, stuffed peppers, and huckleberry pie about a table which was made of two retired barn doors resting on saw horses.

Pete Chew, the rich and roundly young, of whom it was already obvious that his best role in the theatre world would be donating scholarships to the hat-check girls in night clubs, had wondrously changed from overalls (by Abercrombie, Fitch) to chequed grey trousers, black and white shoes, and a sweater from the Isle of Uist. (But why Uist?) He had been buzzing about Toni Titmus at the workshop; now, as Bethel ventured into the dining-room, Pete looked brightly at her, approached her with a festive waddle, seized her arm and cheered, 'Uncle Pete'll sit beside you, pretty-pretty, and save you from the sharks.'

'So the poor little rich boy is going to tell another prospect how unappreciated he is,' said Marian Croy, the teacher-secretary-apprentice.

'Let him alone. Maybe he'll put money into a show for us someday!' screamed Toni.

'I don't think it's nice of you to mock a fellow-traveller on the gipsy trail of the arts,' said Harry Mihick.

Bethel listened doubtfully. But Cynthia Aleshire was talking about things called 'functionalism' and 'formalism' in stage settings, and how you can play Macbeth all up and down and under a staircase.

The sea, filling the windows, was softening into apricot over toward the horizon; and now Bethel met Fletcher Hewitt . . . quite the nicest man, she decided, whom she had ever seen.

Fletcher Hewitt, though he could not have been over thirty, was the traditional Yankee; Uncle Sam without his whiskers; tall, thin, rusty-haired, speaking with calc'lation. His father had been a Rhode Island carpenter, his mother an ambitious New Jersey school teacher, caught in matrimony on an innocent summer vacation. At eighteen, with his widowed mother, Fletcher had gone direct to Broadway. He was a good stage manager. He had nursed twoscore plays in New York and on the road. In the Nutmeg Players it was his job not only to watch entrances and off-stage noises and curtains and all the other housekeeping and kitchenwork of the arts, but to carry on direction when Mr. Valentine was sick after one of his nauseas of temperament, and to keep Cynthia from making the scenery so functional that it wouldn't function.

Fletcher's pale blue eyes were serene as summer.

Looking at the Higher Thinkers--Marian Croy, Cynthia Aleshire, Fletcher Hewitt, Walter Rolf--Bethel was certain that she was going to have four solid friends. But still to arrive were the real divinities: Andrew Deacon, Mahala Vale, the young leading woman, and Iris Pentire, who would be Bethel's own true twin.

The rocks looking on the Sound were their drawing-room after dinner, and the twilit moment was complete as they lounged there--Bethel, Fletcher, Walter, Toni Titmus; tired actors (tired from scraping scenery), carelessly disposed in rest (but pretty careful about their attitudes of carelessness; the indolence of a knee, the angle of a face resting on a hand).

Toni screamed, 'I've got to go up and write the loving parents. I wonder do we get any dancing lessons this summer? Oh, to be a Bernhardt, now that my stage career is here, and me not in the doghouse--not yet. See you soon.' Walter Rolf sighed, 'I've got to try and finish Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares, before we get down to real work and I learn that Stanislavski is all exhibitionistic nonsense. Good night.'

Fletcher Hewitt stretched and demanded, 'Your name's Bethel?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Going to take acting seriously?'

'Oh, I am.'

'I guess most of the apprentices are. For instance, a nice chap like Rolf--I'll bet anything he's got an uncle who's head of some factory and would give him a job, but Walter will gamble on earning fifty dollars a week twenty weeks a year, as an actor. Or an old bird like me--I'm thirty and I didn't have a job all last winter and I have to support my mother and prob'ly I could make two hundred a week in Hollywood, but I'd rather get sixty as assistant stage manager of a road show. Thousands of youngsters ready to starve if they can just have a chance on the stage, and no more permanent winter stock companies to train them, and so few touring companies--and that's the fault of the provincial audiences; they'd get the shows if they wanted 'em enough, if they knew their business as audiences as well as we know our jobs on the stage. So we flock to these theatrical Boy Scout camps--and we're making 'em into good theatres, too! Probably eighty-five summer theatres in the country solid enough to last through the season--probably two thousand kids, mostly from comfortable homes, that are willing to scrub floors and usher and shift scenery, with the thermometer a hundred backstage, to get a chance to act. If the theatre's dead, we're going to revive it--we're reviving it right now! So! Well, I've got to go and have a fight with our electrician.'

She was alone on the rocks when the oversize faun, Pete Chew, found her and crouched by her and automatically seized her hand.

'You like it here?' he said.

'Oh yes.'

'And we'll have a good time, too. You stick by Uncle Pete, pretty-pretty. There's a lot of places where you can go dancing, and take a drink, but I'm liberal; I never insist on a girl taking a drink, unless she wants to. If we can maybe get hold of another fellow when the rest get here--I thought Walter Rolf would be a good sport, but he's a stuffed shirt--but if we can round up some live wire, him and Toni and you and I can have one swell summer. And swimming.'

'I'm afraid I'm going to work most of the time.'

'Oh, don't be that way. That kind of junk is all right in college, but we're artists--we can do anything we like and get away with it. Don't you know that?'

'I'm afraid I hadn't thought about it.'

'Well, I see where old Uncle Pete has got to start your brain whirling. You come from a woman's college, don't you? And the backwoods?'

'Just a small manufacturing city.'

'You see? How do you expect to be a high-class actress and act in plays about Long Island society if you don't hustle up and see the world? Why, I'll take you down to New Haven sometime, and we'll do Savin Rock. I got my own car. A Lincoln!'

Bethel tried to be tactful and retreat. 'Do you want to act in society plays?'

'Well, I'll tell you, Bethel. I'm not so much on the charm and social stuff, though my family is one of the best in Bronxville. I'm more you might say a comedian. I did Falstaff in prep school--the Ypsilanti Military Academy. I had a row with a crank in the dramatic club at Amherst, so I never got into that--oh yes, I'm an Amherst man, I went there till I got sick of the place, so darn provincial--but I'm a good comedian. And I'm thinking about doing a lot with the financial backing of plays. I can be the biggest influence on Broadway! That's why I want all this training this summer. You'll see me one of the hottest producers in town some day. What I could do for a girl! I'd plan for her and make her the biggest actress in America!'

'I see. Maybe you can do that for Toni Titmus.'

'Her? That little tramp? She thinks she knows everything. I told her I was just interested in her artistically, and she laughed at me. She claims she was a walk-on in Our Town, and so she's a professional, is she! And when I asked her if she liked presents, she says she only likes jewellery! Nothing doing! No, no--but you and me would get along wonderfully. I had a voice teacher in New York for a month, Miss Lazla Lastigora--you know, the famous one that taught Mrs. Pat Campbell and Clark Gable and everybody--and she said I was very sensitive. Come on!'

He patted her shoulder enthusiastically.

She achieved in answer nothing more than, 'I--uh--'

'If you been stuck away in a girls' college, you probably don't know anything about having a good time. And I certainly hate to see as lovely a kid as you wasted on a lot of amateur hams here. Maybe you think it's kind of sudden, but I swear, I'm falling in love with you. Do you like me?'

She spoke feelingly:

'I hope it won't happen to you, what happened to the last boy that fell in love with me.'

'What's that?'

'Yes. In Sladesbury. Oh, the handsomest, wildest, gayest boy--Charlemagne Hatch. I told him I wouldn't be good for him. I warned him. But oh, why, why, why did he--'

'Did he what?'

'Just when I'd got so I couldn't live without him. I was always telephoning him when he wasn't there! Why did he do it?'

'W-what did he do?'

'Leaped right off the top of the City Hall.'

'Gee!'

'Oh, ever so much worse than that old professor . . . Doctor Bickling.'

'W-what happened to him?'

'Oh, not so bad, but I remember he talked so much like you. He was sensitive, too, the way you are. And just when I thought he and I were going to be so happy he--I can't stand it!'

'What did he do?'

'He ran away.'

'Golly!'

'They say somebody saw him afterwards in a low grogshop in, uh, Mexico!'

'No!'

'Why is it, Pete? You don't think I'm insane, do you--am I a femme fatale?'

'A what? No, no, I don't believe you are. Well, I--gotta be getting along. I'll be seein' you!'

Bethel heard him shouting under Toni's window. 'Hey, come on down and let's go summers and get a drink. I need one!'

She smiled, even as she sat among the ruins hearing her mother say, 'Bethel Merriday, I'm sur-prised!'

But in the darkness she remembered Fletcher Hewitt's sermon about the children's crusade of the summer theatre. She thought of the hundreds of other young people who were this moment dreaming of the theatre, by the sea, in the cool hills, in the rustling woods, under the stars--boys and girls from factories and colleges and farms, from disapproving New England mansions and flats in the East Side ghetto, exhibitionists and sound workers, Communists and Tories and plain bored at home--an army of Gay Contemptibles.

How absurd must once have seemed the butcher's son from Stratford, piping on his penny whistle as he trudged to London, under the stars.