Bethel Merriday

XIII

The apprentices were permitted each to appear in three plays during the season. Not till the fourth play, Stage Door, by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman, which opened on July 18th, did Bethel have her chance.

The sensation of the two weeks after The Petrified Forest was the appearance, like a transitory comet--a rather old and tired-out comet that had gone a long way--of Miss Nile Sanderac as guest star in Candida.

She was the first really distinguished actress that Bethel had ever seen in the flesh--the exquisite flesh, shining, ageless, more than human.

Everybody in the United States--'everybody' indicating that 00.05 per cent of the population that cared a hang about the theatre--knew that Nile Sanderac's real name was Nelly Sanders; that she was half Irish, half Yankee. Her career had been energetic. She had appeared in eleven witty plays about London society, ten plays about Park Avenue society, nine plays about Long Island society, and one play about the wrongs of lap dogs. She had been married four times. She was a friend of Gene Tunney, Grover Whalen, Dwight Fiske, the Duke of Westminster, Heywood Broun, Professor Millikan and Representative Sol Bloom. She was forty years old. At least. Her hair had, at various epochs, been mouse, chestnut, black, gold, grey, platinum, and gold again. She had given away, to various worthless but pleasant males, over $42,000. She owed, to various jewellery shops, dressmakers and hotels, over $48,000. She had a bad temper and a kind heart. Her pure shoulders enabled her to wear low black evening gowns to advantage. She spoke French absolutely, and she had never read one book clear through.

Incidentally, she was a very good actress.

The Nutmeg Players did not see much of Miss Sanderac, outside rehearsals. She didn't stay even in the exclusiveness of the House, with Roscoe and Andy and Mahala and Tudor Blackwall, but at the tapestry-brick mansion of the rich Jeddabys, in Grampion Centre. Always, Miss Sanderac was half shabby, in grey suits or spinsterish dresses of grey crêpe de Chine. She seemed to Bethel to have no personal life whatever: she didn't even scold her silent coloured maid or shriek at Roscoe for shrieking. Just once did Miss Sanderac come alive for Bethel and betray that she had private life in plenty--when Bethel saw a puffy man with puffy eyes and a grey moustache pouring out champagne for Miss Sanderac in her dressing-room, and, afterward, taking her off in a limousine. It all dated 1906, sighed Bethel.

Yet every apprentice on the lot, particularly Bethel, loved Nile Sanderac and hoped to be able to die for her. For she smiled at them, a special smile reserved for actors, not the mock-humble grimace she gave to barbarian outsiders; not a stingy smile, but a large one, that showed all her excellent teeth. The smile said that they were all comrades and fellow mummers, rogues and vagabonds, and that laymen were pretty funny.

But that smile was a wall, too, that protected her. Day after day, while the fledgelings expected her to go farther and say something cheerful and intimate, like 'The rehearsals aren't going as bad as you'd think', it became more evident that she had a low opinion of Mr. Roscoe Valentine, a high and lively opinion of Mr. Andrew Deacon, a fellow-workman liking for Doc Keezer, and of the others, no opinion at all.

Poor Andy, blundering as bountifully as any other young collegian, tried to persuade Miss Sanderac to like his Mahala, who was not in the Candida cast and therefore sulkily invisible for a while. Sitting in the grass before the porch of The House, Bethel heard Miss Sanderac crying to Andy, 'Oh, Andy, don't you want to drive me to Clinton for dinner? We can get back here before you have to make up.' And heard Andy loyally trying to drag in his pet gazelle, with:

'I'd love to go, Nile. How about taking Mahala with us?'

'Oh, I guess we won't have time, after all,' sniffed Miss Sanderac. And still Andy did not learn. He cried to the great lady, 'I do wish you could have seen Mahala in You Cannot Dispossess Our Souls. She was swell--absolutely like a young prophetess!'

'In what?'

'In You Cannot--Oh, you heard me, I won't say it again.'

'I should think not, darling. "You Can't Possess Us." What a title! What is it?'

'It's a play about share croppers.'

'No. You're kidding.'

'Oh, quit it. And she was swell!'

'Who was swell?'

'Mahala Vale.'

'Who's Mahala Vale?'

'Oh, dry up.'

'That's right, darling. Go on. Use me as you will. Yell at me. Beat me. Divorce me. You never did divorce me, did you?'

'I would, if I had you.'

'Oh course you would, my pie-lamb. Wait! Aren't you the young man I just met this week? We haven't been married, not ever, have we?'

'We have not, darling. Not yet.'

'And you've never even married some little number like Mahala? Oh, dearie me, you have been busy with the Career!'

Andy Deacon could not have known that the slight, pleasant dark girl, sitting on the grass, chin in hand, her back to them--Bess Meredith her name was, or something of the sort--was not only devouring their words but scolding him ferociously:

'Oh, Andy, my dear boy, what a fool you are . . . And so sweet . . . And so dumb! . . . I know, dear; this Sanderac woman is ten or twelve years older than you are, and she's hard-boiled and she's extravagant, and she doesn't care any more for the spotlight than she does for heaven. But how much better it would be if you could fall in love with someone like her, that is honest and stands on her own feet and that can act, instead of these camelia-scented sharks like Mahala or Joan, that'll get everything they can out of you, that'll never stop acting off stage or start acting on! . . . I'll bet Mahala has never kissed you--or anyway, she held on to the kiss and snatched it back. And of course you'd never know that a really nice girl like me ever existed!'

Since she was not rehearsing for Candida, Mahala had the daytimes this week vacant, from her favourite rising hour--noon--till early supper. Bethel innocently wondered what this young actress, not without experience and ambition, would do with her freedom.

Read? Exercise? Go and be noble about something?

Well, Mahala slept. And she also sat on the beach and looked sorry for herself.

Bethel too was lonely--when she had time to think about it. The offended Pete Chew had taken Toni away from her; she could never get through the veil of sweet, shining nothing that surrounded Iris Pentire; and Fletcher Hewitt and Walter Rolf were as pleasant as the west wind and just as impersonal. But she understood loneliness. She was used to being lonely; she always had been, always would be, unless Fate flourished the one miraculous lover . . . who would surely look extraordinarily like Andy.

She watched Mahala looking for a confidante to share her free week; poking a mental finger into the ribs of Iris, Toni, Marian Croy, Anita Hill, and giving them up as too commonplace to appreciate her. At last, rather obviously for a lady actress, she decided that Bethel would have to do, as servant of her bosom. Bethel told herself that she wasn't at all flattered--and was thoroughly flattered and excited by the favour of this wise, experienced old actress of twenty-six. They sat yawning or laughing on the beach, Mahala in a bathing suit so tight, so white, with such handsome long white legs, that she would have seemed embarrassingly naked, had she not too much resembled an unbreathing marble statue.

'Oh, this place is such a bore,' whined Mahala. 'I think I'd of done better to go out to Southampton, on Long Island--Mrs. Fribble invited me to go out and spend all summer--you know, the Montgomery Fribbles, he's the banker; they got scads of money and a yacht. Roscoe is too pixie--he couldn't direct swatting a fly--and the stock company are all such hams.'

'Oh, not Andy, Mahala!'

'No, he's a pretty fair actor--if he doesn't tackle any parts that require subtlety. I had the most awful time carrying him in Petrified Forest. He would play Alan, who ought to be all delicacy, like a Yale basketball player. And he's not so young--he's older than I am; not so young that you can excuse him for falling for an old jalopy like Nile, who'll be playing Irish grandmothers in Hollywood in another year.'

'Mm,' said Bethel.

'You're lucky, Beth. Of course it doesn't make any difference to you what second-raters everybody here are, as long as they're fun to play around with. I notice this Chew boy is interested in you (oh, I never miss anything; that's my business, as an actress!). He's a little dumb, but he ties his ties well, and I know he's got lots of money. You better grab him and marry him--or else you might have to go back to your home town, wherever that is. You're lucky not having the kind of irresistible leaning toward a stage career that I'm cursed with.

'It's all very well for me to get a lot of silly flattery about my talent and beauty--and honestly, I'm so honest with myself, I don't think I'm especially beautiful--but they're like chains--they bind me to the theatre--people just won't let me go and retire and live a quiet life, the way I'd like to.

'Still, I'll admit there are rewards, when--only it doesn't happen very often--these playwrights are such dopes!--when you can get a play that's really worth interpreting. I wish I were back in You Cannot Dispossess Our Souls. Maybe it didn't run so very long, but the praise we got--you never heard anything like it! Oh, the professional critics ganged up on us, of course; they always do; they're jealous of all brave new experiment. Brooks Atkinson said in the New York Times that it was "dull though doubtless worthy", and Dick Watts said in the Herald-Tribune that it was "worthy though doubtless dull", and the second-string critic on the Sun, he wrote almost a whole column--he said it wasn't a play at all, but just a Communist attack on the Governor of Oklahoma, and the New Masses--they said it was a Trotsky-ist attack on Communism and Abraham Lincoln! But they all said I was all right, and Ward Morehouse, he had a note in his column that said I looked like Joan Crawford.'

Mahala stopped, scratched her knee, looked at the sea, apparently decided that all this water was pretty useless, and sighed:

'I loved my role. I had such a good costume change. Here in the first act I was the wife of the local doctor and I wore a cocktail gown from Bergdorf Goodman's--it cost two hundred bucks! The director kicked like a steer--he said it wasn't suitable to an Oklahoma small town, but the producer was kind of sweet on me--he was a Communist and awfully rich, his father's a New York banker, he was a sweet boy, only kind of a screwball--and he let me have it. And even the director came to admit I was right, because it made such a swell contrast when my husband gets bumped off and I'm a poor widow and living in a share cropper's shack and I'm all in rags and barefoot--and thank God I've got feet that will stand showing--look; see how regular the toes are and what a high arch--and I was kind of the queen of the share croppers, you might say--you know, with my hair loose and a spotlight on me--and I led the revolt--wow, it was colossal! Oh dear!'

Bethel was a skilful listener; always had been; and until Nile Sanderac was gone and Andy again delivered to the arms--or at least, the conversation--of Mahala, she was Mahala's heart's-ease and swimming companion.

Mahala Vale was neither a fool nor entirely vicious. She was a handsome young woman whose mind was flexible enough to give her a high stand in the stage army--she would certainly some day be one of the best of the second-rate actresses. There was one small trouble with her: she could not conceive that any person or any play or any historical event or any dollar in legal minted coin could have any importance except in its relationship to her.

Bethel had to admit that Mahala taught her several bits of stage craftsmanship--all of the lowest and trickiest. You must always assume, even if unfairly, insisted Mahala, that almost any old trouper was at any moment likely to do anything short of creeping up behind you and clapping on a red nose, to turn the audience's attention from you to him.

He would stand facing the audience, with his back to you, during your long, tear-dripping confession, and you could see that he wasn't moving, not doing anything to throw you--no, he was merely looking comically lugubrious, and twisting a coat button, or running his fingers along the edges of his lapels. And the dear old lady, the mother of the company, seated way down right-stage--it wasn't her fault that you always got a wrong laugh when you were gazing into the hero's eyes; all the old darling had done was to light a cigarette as though she had never, never smoked one of the horrid things before, and give a dear little pussy sneeze.

Mahala said righteously: 'People that do lousy tricks like that, they ought to be kicked off the stage. They have no appreciation of the fact that you all got to work together to make a perfect performance; and there isn't any one actor, no matter how perfect he is, that's got a right to grab any spotlight off anybody else. So when you run into scene stealers like that, you just do something to throw 'em, and maybe that'll teach 'em something!

'I remember once--it wasn't so long ago, either!--I was playing There's Always Juliet in stock with a born kleptomaniac. His ducky little trick was to pause before the last three-four words of a speech, so you didn't know whether he was going to give you your cue or not, and then if you jumped it, he'd give you the cue after all. I fixed him! Middle of a speech, I'd start to powder my nose, and just held it and stared at him. I got him so embarrassed he used to blow every night!

''N' of course--and here's something you'll never learn from Roscoe or any of these dramatic schools or those amateurs: the way to cure upstaging is, if a guy starts going upstage, on account of he thinks you'll turn your back to the audience and follow him, why, you just deliberately go right down to the foots, giving your lines to him over your shoulder--and if you think the producer ain't around to catch you, you can even kind of half wink at the audience so's they'll know what's up. That'll show 'm!'

'I see,' said Bethel.

Mahala had often spoken of the wealth and other charms of a young Mrs. Tzirka who in summer lived at East Haddam, ten miles from Grampion. Her husband was a stockbroker--but artistic; she was the daughter of a wholesale jute dealer--but a very wholesale dealer in the best of jute; one of the men who had given jute its social significance.

On Saturday, Mahala permitted Bethel to borrow Pete's car and drive her to the Tzirka villa.

'They won't want to see me,' Bethel had hesitated.

'Betty Tzirka'll most especially want you. Her brother, Jock, a grand kid, 'll be there, and he'll think you're manna from heaven.'

This, felt Bethel, was going to be her first real 'society party' (she called it that) and a foretaste of the refined exuberance, the beautiful people, she was going to know. She pressed out her best silk print dress in the dormitory kitchen and dared try some flowers in her hair.

When she saw the Tzirka house, she suddenly knew what sort of a retreat she would have when she had become a reigning actress. It was simple enough, a white salt-box cottage at peace with a landscape of river and small hills and apple orchards, but it had been made frivolous with a green-and-white awning and a crazy-paving terrace, with green wicker chairs and glass-topped small tables, concealed by an old stone wall above the roadway. Here the Famous Merriday would read, rest and talk with friends . . . talk about the stage, of course.

Mrs. Tzirka, thirty and slim and quivering and chemically blonde, met them at the flight of stone steps up from the roadway. Bethel was conscious of being regarded without favour.

Mahala bellowed, 'Betty! Darling! Priceless! I've brought you a lovely date for your imbecile Jock. Beth Merriday.'

Mrs. Tzirka crooned at Mahala in answer, and doves at twilight were as nothing beside her: 'Oh, Maggie! Duckie! Darling! I'm too-too sorry. Jock, the monster, has gone up to Hartford to see the polo. But I'm enchanted to see you, Miss Merriday.' She glanced at Mahala over Bethel's shoulder, with a distinct lack of enchantment.

And now did Bethel find herself on-stage in a play with a charming set of sun-speckled awning and wicker couches and glasses of gin rickey and maple trunks, expected to snap up her cues and give her lines at fever tempo. But the cues were in some foreign language and she didn't know any of her lines. She didn't even know what the play was about.

There had been provided, for Mahala and Mrs. Tzirka, two slightly rancid young-old men, aged some indistinguishable where between twenty-five and forty-five, both with double-breasted grey flannel suits, black moustaches, meaningless yelps at the names of meaningless people, and a way of looking at her as though she were a milkmaid. ('Two villains in the damn play,' sighed Bethel.)

The four Sophisticated People were amused rather than annoyed when she carried her rusticity so far as to refuse a gin rickey, and they plunged into a coloured pool of gossip, of which Bethel understood not a word:

'Simmy's going to divorce Natalie--he ran into her with Tom at El Morocco and--you know how quick on the trigger he is--he said, "Sweetie-pie, if you want a round-trip Reno ticket, I think Tom and I ought to split the cost".'

'I don't believe a word of what she says about Joe always nipping outside the house. I know for a fact he's completely domesticated. It's the parlourmaid at home he's interested in.'

'Xavier isn't broke. He's still got his annuity. Why, he's got a Scotch grouse moor. No--fact--he's laid it out in his own back yard.'

At what time in this feast Mahala rose with the younger of the two beaux--or maybe it was the older--muttered 'Be back in a moment', and drifted off with him to the birch grove beyond the house; at what time Mrs. Tzirka followed with the other prize, Bethel was not quite sure; but presently she was entirely alone on the terrace, and she was alone for half an hour.

It was a half-hour of growing and healthy anger. She suddenly knew that these slick people, with their references to polo and yachting and Meadowbrook, were fakes; that they hadn't much even of the one thing they worshipped--money. It was good that they had not buttered her; their rudeness had made her less likely ever again to mistake insolence for good manners.

It didn't much help her temper that they would have to drive wildly back to Grampion and have only a sandwich for dinner, if Mahala was to be in her dressing-room on time.

Bethel spent part of her isolation in imitating Mrs. Tzirka's tricks of chain-smoking--taking five puffs of a cigarette, exactly five, lighting another from it, and crushing out the first with a nervous sidewise brushing motion; of showing her knees and nervously, constantly, pulling down her skirt; of arching her right big toe in her half-sandals; of widening her eyes with glad surprise every time she looked at a male.

When Mrs. Tzirka galloped back, gushing 'So sor-ry--we were looking at my espaliered pears,' Bethel bowed quite amiably and in silence.

In the car Mahala shrieked, 'You were very rude, not even saying good-bye to your hostess.'

Bethel was pleased to hear herself saying nothing whatever, and pleased that, whether Mahala knew it or not, there was war between them now, and no sex loyalty need stop her if she should ever be able to protect Andy Deacon, her god and reckless child, from the man-eating Mahala.