Bethel Merriday

XV

Bethel was shy enough; in any mob of more than five people she was so uneasy that she chattered, and hated herself for chattering. Yet exposed before the four hundred and seventeen people at the first night of Stage Door--and that was a large audience for the Nutmeg Theatre--she was, after the agony and trembling of waiting for the curtain to go up, as placid as a bishop. For she was not Bethel Merriday at all; she was Bernice Niemeyer; and very intrusive.

In her dressing-room, between scenes, she felt sure of herself. It was a real dressing-room to which she had now climbed. Though it was a large, jammed, low-ceiled den, which she shared with three other apprentices, and with Iris, Clara Ribbons and Maggie Sample, it had real dressing-room shelf-tables, narrow enough so that she could study her make-up in a mirror enchantingly rimmed with lights.

At the final curtain line-up, she got a reasonable share of the hands, and knew that if she had not been brilliant, she had not been bad. Fletcher Hewitt cried, afterward, 'You were magnificent, baby'; Andy Deacon beamed, 'Nice work, Miss M-Merriday'; Roscoe Valentine so far extended himself as to croak, 'You were all right, I guess'; Iris Pentire, as they undressed (no elaborate task in the days of three-piece robing) caroled, 'Just be careful and don't jump cues, dear'; and Mr. Black Bart wrote, in the New London Era:

As it is probable that off-stage she is a very charming sloe-eyed young woman, a new friend, Miss Bethel Merriday, is all the more to be praised for having made Bernice so objectionable and flashy that she made you itch, and yet so pathetic when she busted down that you changed your mind and decided to just shoot her instead of boiling her in hair oil.

That review is on page seven of Beth's scrapbook, just after her dance programmes, the programme of a Universalist Church cantata in which she sang two lines, the stub of her ticket to her first basketball game at Point Royal College, and the programme of A Doll's House. And just before it appears the first opening-night telegram that she ever received; it came from Charley Hatch, Alva Prindle and Ben Merriday, and read 'All wish you thousand good wishes to-night good luck wish were there'. That had made her homesick, on first night, for at least two minutes.

Through the week, all the evenings after the strained first night, it was pleasant to slip out of doors between acts for one of her few cigarettes.

You could do that, in a summer theatre, under the trees--though also you had to endure the inquisitive spectators, city brokers feeling superior on vacation--millionaires for sixteen days a year--who sneaked around back of the theatre to stare at the actors as at a zoo. Some of them even had the bad manners to ask for autographs between acts, but this did not annoy Bethel--she was not yet notorious enough to be dunned, or to hate the whole tribe of autograph hunters, the thick-skinned devotees of the one hobby in the world which consists in turning into brazen beggars and annoying innocent strangers, preferably by interrupting their talk with friends just at the moment when they are most weary and relaxed. To Bethel the theatre-goers were still heavenly visitors who, out of pure benevolence, were permitting her to act.

Through the week while she was playing Stage Door, Bethel was rehearsing all day long for her second role, that of the maid in George and Margaret. Iris should have had this lively bit, but Iris was to take part in a broadcast in New York on an evening this next week--a fact which made Bethel, who had come to consider Iris as a pink papier mâché sphinx, to hold her again in awe. Was Iris not one of the magicians who could make twenty million modern Americans listen to such bodiless beauty, such skylark melody as the shoplifter in a radio drama lilting to her mate, 'Grab your rod and scram--it's de G-men'?

Now, first, Bethel knew something of the labour of the real theatre--a toil which was already persuading Anita Hill and Harry Mihick to talk of Roscoe Valentine as a slave driver and of doing the stage an irreparable injury by renouncing it. She was working violently, sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. All day she rehearsed in George and Margaret, in the brown, stuffy, spicy heat of the theatre, which she loved above the sea foam and sea gulls and silver-channelled sea outside. All evening, and at Wednesday matinée, she played Stage Door. Till two o'clock she sat up studying her new lines and helping make her costume as maid. She was afraid of mixing up the two plays, so that as the bounding Bernice from the Bronx--standing out there, helpless, fanning the air for her line--she would be able to say nothing to her fellow-job-hunters beyond 'Very good, moddom'.

She was always a little dazed, always surprised to find that she had, without having for a second heard her own voice, got clear through an evening of Stage Door without making a fool of herself. Roscoe was wearing down, and beginning to shriek all through rehearsals, but Bethel was too numb now to resent it.

Then, on Saturday morning, the spell was broken, and Roscoe became her enemy.

Roscoe had become edgier every day through the week, and last night he had fully attended a Chianti party among the artists at Old Lyme.

Gladys the maid, who was Bethel, was supposed to enter in the third act of George and Margaret with a smartness befitting her new God-given station as the fiancée of the oldest son of the family. It was morning, and Bethel had slept, and she knew her lines, and at rehearsal she was one with the gods as she blithely tripped in, chirping 'I'm going now, Mrs. Garth-Bander'.

'Oh God, Bethel, don't you know anything about your part?' yelled Roscoe. 'This wench is supposed to be scared to death of the old hag. Try to act, even if God did make it impossible. Take that entrance again.'

Bethel looked at him silently, unhappily. She thought that Andy Deacon, perched on the back of a seat far back in the auditorium, seemed annoyed and smoked rapidly.

Again she came on, through an imaginary door between two chairs. She smiled wanly at Clara Ribbons, who was yawning as she tried to wake up enough to impersonate Mrs. Garth-Bander, and she said 'I'm going now' timidly.

Roscoe yelled again, and hysterically: 'I didn't tell you to play it like a funeral, you fool! Get some life into it, d'you hear me, d'you hear me, D'YOU HEAR ME?'

In the quiet after this shrieking, Andy came down the centre aisle, blank as a sleepwalker, and spoke to Roscoe, flatly, 'Don't talk that way. I do not like it. I do not like your screaming. Do not talk that way, Mr. Valentine!'

And clumped back to his seat.

Bethel had never before really seen anyone turn purple. Roscoe turned purple. He glanced for a second at Andy's broad back, he glanced at Fletcher and Doc Keezer and Clara, who had made their faces expressionless, he glanced at the trembling Bethel, with poison pouring out of his red eyes and loose mouth. He pushed forward his neck like a turtle. He spoke calmly enough.

'I am sorry, Miss Merriday, if I have been too enthusiastic in my directing, as Mr. Deacon seems to think. We will go on now. Try your entrance again. You come in gaily, but your courage begins to ooze when you see the old woman. All right.'

He never called her 'Bethel' again.

She appeared in one more play, in the tiny part of Eva Blake in Noel Coward's We Were Dancing, and in that Roscoe directed her with just as much interest as if he were winding a watch.

When they had sifted out for lunch, after this fatal rehearsal, Andy patted her back, grinned, said casually, 'I'm afraid I just made you the more uncomfortable by blowing up and bawling out poor old Roscoe. He'll forget it by to-night. You're doing swell work--uh--Bethel.'

This voice from Eden did not console her. She took Fletcher aside after lunch:

'What will I do? I've made an enemy of Mr. Valentine, and I didn't mean too. Honestly, it isn't because I'm scared about his keeping me from getting jobs and so on, but it makes me feel sick to think of him looking at me that way . . . as if I were a bedbug.'

Fletcher was cheerful. 'Beth, I'd be unhappy about your future if I didn't think the spiteful people are going to dislike you. That's one test of success. And--I'm afraid I know better now why girls adore Andy. He didn't jump on Roscoe just because he can afford to. He would have jumped just the same if he'd been a walk-on with holes in his soles. While I sat back and didn't say anything. Sorry.'

Fletcher turned away quickly.

The Nutmeg Players were going to hold their first party this Saturday evening, the end of the run of Stage Door, and Bethel felt high.

Rain was threatening, and they would have the party in the dormitory instead of on the beach. In the dining-room Japanese lanterns were so blossoming by supper-time that the place looked more like a Baptist lawn festival in Sladesbury than like a temple of Chekhov.

As Bethel crossed to the theatre, before evening performance, she was excited by the omens of the storm. It was unnaturally dark, and incessant distant lightning revealed whitecaps and shaken sailboats out on the Sound and turned the sedge grass to a poison green, while the whole shifting air was filled with uneasiness and the brave last fireflies were menacing points of flame.

The audience was small, and it breathed hard at the occasional thunder, yet it was a good audience, quick to laugh, quick to be stilled in sympathy. Already Bethel had learned to be conscious of audiences; not to fawn to them, but to feel them. To-night she was playing well enough--or it may have been badly enough--so that she didn't care whether anybody else thought she was playing well or ill.

She was annoyed, from the wings, at Iris's mourning and handclasping as the suicidal Kaye; she felt somehow responsible for her room-mate. But at the end, when the audience stopped even in reaching for raincoats and rubbers to applaud and scream 'Bravo' as the cast assembled for curtain call, Bethel felt ten feet tall, in golden armour, and ran into the communal dressing-room emitting happiness like a cloud of steam.

If Roscoe pettishly stayed away from them, Andy looked in to shout, 'You were all on your toes to-night, kids. You're all Margaret Sullavans, the whole lot of you.'

They were all stripped to dressing-gowns, rubbing cold-creamed faces with wads of tissue, when an unknown voice, like that of a young Scotti, rumbled at the door, 'May I come in?'

The owner of the voice ploughed in without waiting.

He was a belligerent-looking, square young man, with tousled brown hair and a face, healthy and slightly rough of skin, that turned instantly from impish impertinence to sorrow and back again. He might have been a butcher, a Communist poet, a fundamentalist evangelist, a prize fighter or a researcher in physics. His bare head, his thick brown sweater, his khaki trousers dripped rain.

'Hello, girls,' he said. He stopped beside Toni Titmus (she had played the Hollywood hussy) and grunted, 'You weren't too bad--you had some hint of oomph, sister.'

'Whadya mean "sister". I never saw you before,' bristled Toni.

'You will. Plenty. On Broadway. With Maurice Evans and the Theatre Group, some day. I'm Zed Wintergeist, of the Dory Playhouse--Jerry O'Toole's select summer sisterhood down the coast. Not playing this week. Took the night off to give your masterpiece the once-over . . . God, most of you were bad! I should come out in the rain to see you, sweetie!'

Young Mr. Zed Wintergeist had plodded over to Iris Pentire now and was looking down at her, amused, apparently not overcome by the sight of her delicate shoulders. 'It didn't look as though it was economic inequality that made you bump yourself off in the play, but just plain bellyache.'

'Really!' said Iris.

He proceeded to Bethel, dripping all the way. His glance, bold but good-humoured, impertinent yet honest, made her too uncertain for any Sladesburian retorts of outraged ladyhood.

'You were pretty fair, Bethel--I take it from the programme that that's your pious name. Lemme look at your eyes.'

'Really!' said Iris again: and Toni, 'Of all the nerve!' But in silence Bethel let the young bully jab his forefinger under her chin, tilt her back head and stare at her eyes. 'Yeah. I guess so. You got some perception. You got into Bernice's hide--made me understand how much that poor gutter pup longed for a chance to parade, and yet you didn't do much tear-jerking--you made her as intrusive and offensive--'

'As you are!' yelped Marian Croy.

'Exactly. That's what I was going to say!'

'I suppose you're casting us all for the play you're going to produce in 1968,' cried Iris. (It was the first time that Bethel had ever seen Iris yanked out of her frail aloofness, and for that she could have loved Zed Wintergeist.)

'Yes, sweetie, and maybe I am, at that. Be good, girls. See you all at the party. Don't let Mahala Vale put anything over on you. I saw her once, in an awful piece of tripe about share croppers. She was lousy. She peeled potatoes with kid gloves on. Andy Deacon doesn't know it yet, but he's going to invite me to your party. See you there, Bethel! Be good.'

They all begged her not to take the monster's attentions seriously.

She told them that she didn't intend to take them at all--only Zed wasn't really a monster--not really--just a 'fresh kid'--couldn't be over twenty-two--just a baby--

'In sin and impertinence, he's ninety-two,' groaned Marian Croy. 'His heart is black with vice. He thinks he can act! I know he was the prize scholar in a progressive school, and got the works of John Dewey bound in ooze calf for graduation.'

'That's just what I was going to say!' said Toni.

'Yes! So was I!' said Iris.

'Were you, darlings?' said Marian.

As all of the apprentices had appeared in Stage Door, Roscoe made only four of the more docile among them miss the party and work all of Saturday night changing the sets. He even hired two men to work with them; Doc Keezer alleged that this must have cost Roscoe all of ten dollars, almost the only money that he had been ever known to pay in wages without compulsion.

Before the Stage Door set came down, Bethel went on to stare at it with more nostalgic love than she had ever given her wide-porched home in Sladesbury.

On a stage twenty-one feet wide between the proscenic pillars, Cynthia had magicked a forty-foot apartment. That was Bethel's real home, that canvas-walled, canvas-ceilinged, littered den, with its fourth wall made of air: the handsome stairway out in the hall, the fireplace with white wooden columns like a small-sized edition of a national bank, the huddle of couch and piano, the handsome double doors that led to a festive dining-room, off-stage left, where she had eaten so many meals with her companions of the Footlights Club.

She murmured to Doc Keezer--now changed from a frail country doctor back to a short, grizzled, somehow unidentifiable trouper. 'Oh, Doc, won't you miss this set? Don't you think it's terrible it has to come down after only one week?'

Doc Keezer looked startled. He said mildly, 'Set? Don't know's I noticed it much. Any set's all right, if you can get on it without stooping through the doors and barking your shins, but otherwise, they all seem alike, after thirty-five years of it--I started at fifteen--my father and mother were in burlyque. No, dear, I don't think I'll miss it!'

She heard the bumptious invader, Zed Wintergeist, just off-stage, greeting Andy Deacon.

'H're you, Andy? Remember me?'

'Why--oh, of course! Zed! See the show to-night?'

'Yes. Ran up from the Dory. I'm doing time there this summer.'

'How did you like us?'

'Oh--well--you know. Can't expect much from stock.'

'I see.'

'Look, Andy, what you going to do this fall? If I had your money--and your patience--yes, and talent, too--I'd produce something experimental.'

'Maybe I will, Zed. Look me up in the fall--if you're interested.' But Andy did not sound too cordial.

'You bet your life I'm interested! I'll look you up. Say, uh, understand your gang is having a spirited little gathering this evening.'

'Yes. In the dorm. Come along, will you? And can I put you up to-night? Rain's pretty bad.'

'Yes to both. See you later.'

She stood with Andy at the stage door, awaiting a halt in the rain before they should scurry over to the dormitory.

'I heard you talking to that Wintergeist boy, Andy. Is he a good actor?'

'Excellent. I'm not sure but that Zed'll turn out to be another Burgess Meredith or Van Heflin or Dean Jagger.'

'He seems so bumptious.'

'Young people of talent often are. I haven't had the chance to get much acquainted with you yet, my dear--not my fault, I assure you!--but I haven't a doubt that you're just as cocksure of yourself--'

'Oh, I am not!'

'--only you have more ladylike manners. You wouldn't want Zed to be ladylike, would you?'

'Who is he?'

'Nobody--yet. He's conceited and destructive. He'd be perfectly capable of telling Guthrie McClintic or Tony Miner that their direction is rotten. But he's honest, and he's got ideas, and he doesn't want to be an elegant connoisseur--like me!'

'Oh, you're not!'

'I played with him on tour in that English mystery melodrama, The Light Goes Out. He was the English captain who'd murdered the Rector of Mittyford, and he made even that phony part believable. You could almost smell the mess port and the machine-gun grease. And I, my dear Beth, will have you understand that I was a chief inspector of Scotland Yard--chief inspector, not a plain one!--and I was so realistic that in Pittsburgh, Harold Cohen wrote that I made him homesick for the Camden, New Jersey, police station . . . Yes. I'm a better organizer than Zed; I'm more punctual and I can keep expense accounts more accurately; but I'll never be able to act as well,' said the honest Andy.

'You just mean you'll never be able to act as noisily.'

The great man was looking grateful.

'Thank you, my public! Zed's a biological and biographical sport. I'm afraid I'm too standardized. He's one half Virginia gentry, and a quarter German and a quarter Irish, I suppose with some good Jewish blood for flavour. I suspect his real Christian name of being Ezekiel. He's about twenty-three, I guess. He came from a Montana ranch to Broadway via a country newspaper in Minnesota and a medicine show and a year in Dartmouth College and a few months in the New York School for Design and six months playing Shakespeare in the Old Vic in London. God knows how he got into any of 'em, but it's easy to see how he got out of all of 'em. Well, Iris, darling--oh, I'm sorry! Bethel darling, I mean!--let's forgive him. Look! Rain's let up. Let's scoot.'

Somebody--Bethel suspected Andy--had for the party provided cold chicken, lobster salad, English sweet biscuits and champagne--oh, a very little champagne, of a very little domestic brand, but it was the first Bethel had ever tasted, and on tasting it she decided that it wasn't half as good as cider. Nothing so obvious as alcohol or nicotine would be the downfall of Bethel Merriday.

At the party they played The Game, inevitably, and Maggie Sample astounded them by coming to life and riotously enacting the advertising slogan, 'A skin you love to touch'.

Zed Wintergeist went around being superior to these puerilities. In a corner he muttered again to Bethel that she really hadn't been bad--that she might have a chance to become a real actress, if she worked like a slave.

It was the warmest attention she had ever had from a fellow priestling. 'They say my danger is overplaying,' she confided.

'Nonsense! Bunch of amateurs! Overacting did used to be the tradition. Then the Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild came along and made acting more natural. Now we're going too far, underplaying too much. Can't you see from the words themselves that underplaying must be just as bad as overplaying. I'd rather be a scenery chewer than play so far down that it ain't playing at all. Playing, that's what you'll do!'

Maybe she was being taken seriously! breathed the ecstatic Bethel.

Andy and Mahala were burlesquing their last scene in Stage Door.

ANDY: By the way, you are my girl, aren't you, Maggie? You know I'm co-director of the Nutmeg Players.

MAHALA: Okay. Here's where I kiss you--only I don't--it's after eleven-thirty and it'd cost you time and a half overtime, Equity ruling.

ANDY: Roscoe would never stand for that, so we'll just pay a spiritual tribute to your great future on the stage.

MAHALA: No, 'tis something else I want, too--a room of my own.

ANDY: And that's your curtain line? What kind of an ending is that for a romantic play!

Everybody laughed very much--except Bethel and Marian, who felt embarrassed, and Roscoe, who glared at the reference to his parsimony, and Zed, who snarled to Bethel, 'That's the worst piece of irreligiousness I ever heard! To burlesque a part you've just been playing, no matter what part, is my idea of a damn blasphemous sacrilege!'

'Oh, dry up, angel,' said that seasoned woman of the world, Miss Merriday.

He looked offended and stalked away, and she was certain that he had none of Andy's warm humour. A quarter of an hour later she beheld Zed squatted on the floor by Iris's chair and gazing at her rapturously, while Iris dripped down upon him all her frail sweetness.

'And to think that young man dared to criticize Andy! Mr. Jerry O'Toole and the Dory Playhouse can keep him!' snorted Bethel.