Bethel Merriday

XVII

Five more weeks of summer theatre, and of school for Bethel: voice projection; building up a laugh; answering cues with not a tenth-of-a-second wait. In the last week, Miss Sample unwillingly hurled at her a laurel wreath: 'Well, you may have a chance. You better try New York once, before you give up. You never can tell. I read the other day that the Shuberts are giving tests to an Eskimo.'

And in odd hours she was sent back again to building scenery. Now that she had had to act before it, scenery was no longer a stupid mass of mechanism but a living part of the action.

Toni, Iris, Doc Keezer could not see why an actor should know anything about scenery. Even Walter Rolf grumbled, 'No more need of it than there is of an author's learning printing and binding'. But Bethel saw that the scene designer could ruin the actor--swamp him in flamboyant form and colours, or make a whole scene dreary by too drab a background--or help him by making it clear, as the curtain went up, just what sort of person he was, how rich or poor, how precise or slatternly.

And the actor could use the scenery; he could really look out of that window and see the Kentish downs there--though if he was not actor, he would behold, through the paneless windows, nothing but Toni Titmus, in dirty linen overalls, sitting on a kitchen chair in front of a melancholy pile of furniture all on end, humped up over the play script, and passionately attacking gum.

The actor could, if the script demanded it and Roscoe had screamed at him enough times, remember to shut the door when he went out, so that it wouldn't be standing open when Lord Blenkinsop was to be discovered standing behind it. And it made a difference whether the door was so situated that the actor could slip off the couch and out, or had to walk between the two violent lovers. Even technical details mattered, perceived Bethel. You couldn't be properly gloomy in a darkened room if a streak of light was shooting in between two badly fastened flats. And, useful or not, she was plain curious, like a squirrel, about everything in the theatre.

She learned how to make an entire flat; laying out the thin battens of white pine on the workbench (which, loving all technical terms and loving to be able to annoy Iris and Toni by using them, she was zealous to call a 'template'), fitting the battens together--stiles on each side, top and bottom rail, the enchantingly named 'toggle rail' in the centre, with butt joints reinforced by corner blocks and corrugated fasteners; turning it over, stretching canvas (which she had learned to fireproof, with borax, sal-ammoniac and water) across the frame, tacking it, gluing it, then on the back attaching the hardware, brace cleats, and lash cleats for joining flat to flat to make a complete wall.

She even learned to make mortise-and-tenon joints for the shutter of a doorframe unit, and that is the jewel-work, the higher metaphysics, of stage carpentry.

They did not make many new flats in a summer theatre, however; and Bethel was expert at washing off the glue-mixed paint from old flats and turning a section of a cottage wall into a satin panel for a château drawing-room.

She liked the smell of new pine; the honest workshop floor, rough, scurfy with dried paint in a hundred faded tones of red and green and grey.

To citizens like Charley Hatch, who pictured all actresses as lying, in scandalous negligées, on chaise-longues, to all the girls of her own age whose bibles were magazines about Hollywood, it would have been incomprehensible to see Bethel, in vile old basketball bloomers and a cardigan, with blue paint on the end of her nose, red paint on her knuckles, and a painful clot of glue in her tangled hair, noisily sawing a mitre joint, yet all the while whistling 'Old Man River', and looking up to see the dusk grow soft on the eel grass, the golden pools of water, at the edge of swamps across the bay.

Andy Deacon stopped by to wonder, 'Aren't you working overtime?'

'I didn't know.'

'Like it?'

'Lots.'

'But why the passion for carpentry?'

She plumped down on the template, stared at him--the late light shone through his coppery brush of hair--and thought aloud:

'I honestly don't know. I just want to be able to do anything in the theatre.'

'That's--that's swell!' said her poet hero. 'Maybe some day, pretty soon, I'll have a theatrical unit of my own, independent of the old-line producers, and if I do, you're the kind of kid I'll want.'

And he looked at her as though he might actually know her again a month from now.

The season wound up on Saturday night, September 3rd, with a gargantuan beach picnic: with hot dogs, roasted corn, tamales and beer, and an enormous mulligan of beef and veal and chicken and goose and oysters, that had been boiling on the shore all day long, attended by Pete Chew--the best theatrical activity he had found yet.

There was a quarter-moon, and quarter-music: Johnny Meddock, the grounds custodian, on the accordion, and Butch Stevens, of the Lobster Pot, on the mouth organ. They were, unfortunately, more successful than that fair-faced young apprentice, Bruce Pasture, with his violin. It was no night for Brahms. They rioted, and sang 'Coming Round the Mountain', and danced in long, wavering, hand-clasping lines along the sand, to conceal the melancholy of parting. They all confessed, to-night.

Harry Mihick and Anita Hill and four other apprentices were giving up the stage. (But they explained that it was only temporary.) Pete Chew was giving up and going to work for an uncle in Zanesville, Ohio, and Bruce Pasture was giving up and going to Paris (left-bank) for practically the same reason: Bruce because the Nutmeg Players spoke such primitive American that he couldn't stand it; and Pete because they spoke such pedantic Oxonian that he couldn't understand it. None of them, you understand, were giving up because they hadn't proved to be very good actors.

Marian was to try Broadway for one year, but in her eyes you could see a vision of a summer theatre back in the Nebraska cornfields. Toni Titmus was doubtful; she hinted that the Theatre Guild was begging her to come in and see them for a part in the Lunt-Fontanne tour, but also that an extremely rich aunt was imploring her to spend the winter in Santa Barbara and that there she would practically take charge of all the Little Theatre groups.

Five apprentices were definitely going to plunge into Broadway--they spoke, rather, as though they were enlisting in a revolution--and one of them, Walter Rolf, actually had a job . . . reading scripts in the office of a manager who had almost produced a musical show in 1932 and who still had a telephone number to prove that he was a manager.

As a surprise to them all--probably it was rather a surprise to her--Andy had invited his more-or-less fiancée, Joan Hinterwald, down from Newport. She appeared at a moment when they were particularly rackety. Three of the men, who had been having a moonlight swim, wore coats and old trousers over wet bathing suits; Anita Hill had dressed up as a woman of the French Revolution, and Doc Keezer as a clown, with red nose and flour cheeks; two girls were in evening clothes and two in voluminous white slacks; and all of them were dancing in a circle about Johnny Meddock, standing by the fire and playing 'Pop Goes the Weasel' on his accordion. The bonfire was painting them into pirates and their molls.

They were aroused from their private frenzy by the hortatory sound of a motor horn, and out of her pale green roadster, airy in a pale green knitted suit, tripped Miss Hinterwald, waving amiably; the princess amused by her peasants.

They froze. They all became, instantly, free strolling players, the honourable company of rogues and vagrants, resentful of secure and prosperous outsiders, whether nobility or dusty shopkeepers. They could admit the cynical Johnny Meddock, worthy journeyman of broom and dustpan, or Butch Stevens, oyster huckster, but not the too-well-bathed young lady from Newport. They forgot internal feuds; they became one harshly loyal company: Roscoe with Bethel, Mahala with the scornful Cynthia, Harry Mihick and Bruce Pasture, Iris Pentire and Maggie Sample. Arm in arm, they froze and stared at Joan--for whom Bethel was sorry, as she watched Joan freeze, too, and her white-kid cheeks become stiff and her eyes turn hostile.

But instantly Bethel was sorrier for Andy, who stepped out cheerily to greet the royal fair one, then felt around him the hatred of his companions for her . . . It was As You Like It rewritten by Strindberg.

They were silent enough to hear him hail her, 'Come join the dance. This is a very special dance of triumph over all critics and creditors.'

'Oh, thanks, but I think you can do it very nicely without me. I'll just watch.'

Miss Hinterwald perched on a decayed boat and, while they tried to resume the gaiety of the dance, she looked as though there were no doubt in her mind that they were all, including Andy, the loosest fools in Connecticut.

At supper-time, at one in the morning, sitting beside the wretched Andy, Joan nibbled one hot dog, but refused the noble mulligan, and immediately afterward walked toward her car and sourly waved good-bye. But that was, for Andy, merely the beginning of trouble. He came back to Mahala, perched on a slightly wet rock, but Mahala did not welcome him.

'Hello, Maggie dear. Haven't had a chance to talk with you this evening,' said Andy.

'Why should you, when you've had elegant Newport society yearning over you?'

'Poor Joan! She felt out of it. I wish you knew her better. She's really a good sport.'

'She wouldn't care to know me better. Don't kid yourself, Andy, my bright young friend. I'm a poor working girl--I don't act to show off, as Joanie would, but to make a living. But you and that young woman are rich, so why do you try and patronize me?'

'Oh, please, Maggie, don't you go and get complicated, too.'

'No. Of course. So sorry. Working girls have no right to get complicated. That's reserved for women that haven't anything else to do.'

It went on. But in concentrated venom, in off-stage staginess, it was no better than the rival show that Bethel was watching over to her left. And that was the spectacle of Toni Titmus watching Pete Chew drawn by Iris Pentire's magnetic emptiness into a fascinated circle: the rowdy Cy Fickerty, the bumbling Harry Mihick, Doc Keezer, who was old enough to know better, the morocco-bound Walter Rolf, who certainly did know better, and even the aesthetic Bruce Pasture. They were all squatting on the sand at Iris's feet as she throned it on a noble beer barrel.

Tudor Blackwall was looking on in delicate reproach, but in Toni's watch over her straying Peter, there was nothing delicate whatever. She stood, arms akimbo, like a plump model of a pioneer woman facing a bear. She was unconscious of being observed, and when she had stood enough, her yell of 'Pete! You come here!' was the pioneer woman communicating across five miles of prairie. Pete weaved over to her sheepishly. Whatever Toni said, it was punctuated by pounding her hand with her fist.

'Oh dear,' sighed the lorn lone Bethel. 'I wish I had anybody as much interested in me as Andy and Mahala are in each other, or Pete and Toni, or Iris and the Seventh Regiment.'

Pete and Toni came to her arm in arm, and it was Pete who looked proud, as though this had been his idea all along, Toni who was shamed and halting.

'We want you to know--nobody else,' caroled Pete. 'The kid and I are going to middle-aisle it. I convinced her that our contribution to the stage will be to back shows and encourage actors. As soon as I can get the rich uncle in Zanesville to let us, we'll have a flat in New York and--wow!--will we catch ourselves a Time. We'll have a lot of actors and writers and bohemians. You must hang out there a lot.'

'That's fine,' said Bethel.

Fletcher Hewitt had been stage-managing the picnic. While the rest made suggestions and looked helpful, he stirred the mulligan, kept the hot dogs hot, bribed Butch Stevens, with forbidden whisky, to play his mouth organ, and soothed away five several quarrels between Roscoe Valentine and Cynthia Aleshire. But the food was gone now, at half past two, along with the moon, and Fletcher had coaxed the apprentices to lug the plates and pots up to the dormitory instead of waiting till dawn.

Mahala had gone off to bed. Sadly Bethel had seen Andy bid her good night--he so pleading, Mahala so patronizing. Why couldn't he pick someone more appreciative?

Fletcher wearily dropped on the sand beside Bethel, scratching up a little pile for a pillow, looking up at the stars, holding her hand casually, and speaking at his most casual and cool and calm.

'So, Beth, it's Commencement. When do you go to New York?'

'After a week or ten days home. You'll be on Broadway before I am.'

'No, I won't be there at all. Beth! I'm going to quit the stage.'

'You're what?'

'I can't face another winter of tramping from office to office, till the snow leaks in through the soles of your shoes, looking for a job. I don't care for making much money, but I do want to buy a few things for my mother--she's so little and sweet and pretty--and for you.'

'Eh?'

'More and more, every day, watching you, I've decided you're extraordinarily like her, and then I knew that someday you and I would be married.'

'Eh?'

'Yes. You'll remember me when you're sick of hunting for glory.'

'But I thought you felt the stage was sort of sacred to you and me.'

'I do. And you're to have your shot at it. But I've done my bit. And when you're tired, you'll come back to me. You see, I'm really the hometown boy that every young actress has waiting for her--I'm him, and not this Charley Hatch you had here. Neighbourhoods don't matter, houses next door don't matter, playing with the same air rifle as kids doesn't matter, time doesn't matter. It's all imagination. In these ten weeks I've become your old schoolmate, that lent you the bandanna handkerchief when your nose bled at the party, haven't I?'

'Yes but.'

'Good. And I know what I'm going to do now. Mother and I have been phoning. I'm going to lease a grand old inn up between Millerton and Lakeville; swell summer business, and I think if it's run right--and you know I do run that kind of thing right?'

'Oh yes.'

'I think I can keep it full all winter. And some day I'm going to try and turn the big old stable there into a first-rate summer theatre. So you see? We won't be giving up the holy cause! And anyway, Mammy and you and I will be there, and we'll have a good serene life. Sound like fun?'

'Yes but.'

'But what?'

'Darling, it's hard to tell you.'

'But you do like me.'

'Oh yes, Fletcher.'

'You know that I think you have the most beautiful eyes--for a skinny chick--and the most graceful walk in the world? And incidentally, if that interests you, a shining soul. And you'd like me better and better. I think you could depend on me.'

'Darling, I just can't.'

'Afraid of my mother complex?'

'I don't believe so.'

'In love with Andrew the Anvil King, Galahad the Grail Hound?'

'Oh, what would be the use of my caring for him?'

'Plenty! He's not such a fool, even if he does let emotional usurers like Mahala tie him up. He'll wake up someday to the fact that you're solid--solid silver--solid gold. Mahala's plated. He'll really see you. Would you be in love with him then?'

'I might be. But I don't think it's Andy, at all. I've always wanted the stage. I can't imagine myself without it.'

'But I told you, we'll try to make a summer theatre. Maybe we'll even do some exciting experimental things. I know you and I are the kind that could--and you'd be surprised how sound Mammy's advice is--she's the best sport--of course you are, too.'

'No! I want training. Professional training. The hardest kind. I mustn't fool myself. In the theatre I'm of the mental age of three. I want to have some real hard-boiled director give me the devil. I want to do one-night stands. I want to act twenty different roles in a year.'

'Well, judging from the number of shows that close in four days, now, you'll have a chance to. And then maybe you'll be willing to come back to hometown boy, that'll be waiting. I've never once kissed you. I'm going to!'

He did. She was rather astonished.

As the older actors began to make home-going motions of yawning and kicking at the sand, Roscoe Valentine chased Iris off her beer-barrel throne, climbed on it, and spoke:

'Boys and girls, this is our last feast of unreason together till next summer. I now descend from my temporary grandeur as director and become an eccentric old gentleman toying with an arty magazine and gilded theateria in Boston. But I want to tell all of you, all of you, that if I have ever seemed to ride you, if I have ever been temperamental or unreasonable, it's only been because I love you, and love the theatre, and have wanted to wed these twain and--God bless you all!'

Maggie Sample, standing beside Bethel, muttered, 'Wouldn't you know he'd manage to get the curtain? I wish I'd thought of that. Anyway, Merriday, here's your chance at me. I'm no longer your loving teacher, and you can get back at me for all my grouches. Shoot.'

It is possibly a little sad, but Bethel didn't even hear her. She was looking at the passing Andy, with firelight in his hair. Andrew the Anvil King, Andy the Grail Hound, Andy the Paladin.

Everybody drifted away. Bethel, in her dormitory room, now light with dawn, listened to Iris snorting that she was sure she didn't want Pete Chew hanging around her and Toni could have him, for all she cared.

Bethel decided that she couldn't sleep. She crept downstairs, stole a horrible cold griddle cake and wolfed it, and slipped out to the beach again. And there, solitary, looking out to the dreary dishwater of morning sea, his back to her, squatted with hands on knees, was Andy.

She came up to him cautiously. He looked up and snorted, 'Hello, kitten. What you doing up?'

'I couldn't get to sleep.'

'Neither could I.'

'Andy! What's trouble? You look unhappy.'

'Hell, I am! I'm sick of running around with garlands in my hair yelping that I'm artistic and happy. It's all a mess.'

'People?'

'Eh? Oh, I don't mean my lady-loves. Mahala and Joan are good girls--though I do sometimes wish that they could take out their undoubted powers in work, as apparently you can, Beth, instead of in getting their little feelings hurt. But it's not that. It's career. Work. Art. Ambition. Purpose. Looking at the apprentices to-night, I've been thinking: nice bunch of kids, but what have they got out of this summer? Picnickers, that's what they are--that's what I am. What have Roscoe and I done? Good plays, but not one new one in try-out--not even one unusual one, not one profound characterization in the acting, mine or anybody's. I've been doing my parts on my head. That Zed Wintergeist that came up here from Dory Playhouse said we were Boy Scouts. He was right. The genial Mr. Andy Deacon! Why does he waste his time so, Bethel? Why does he?'

She patted his hand, and together they looked out as a young rosy light quivered on the slaty waves.

'Andy, I've learned to relax here, and feel at home on the stage, and I learned it from watching you, so sure and so easy, and not from listening to Roscoe shrieking.'

'Maybe both you and I need more shrieking at. But--You really have enjoyed it?'

'Incredibly.'

'I'm glad.'

And already, with the rising flood of light, the spirits of the mercurial Andy were rising. He rose, lifting her up, and cried, 'We have left undone the things we ought to have done, but this coming season, we'll be swell! On to New York, kitten! We'll have our names in electric lights there before spring! Absolutely!'

She wanted to wail, 'But I'll never see you, once you get to New York.' Violently she kept herself from it, as he chanted on:

'You saw Our Town, didn't you? Remember the end:

'"Everybody's resting in Grover's Corners. To-morrow's going to be another day. You get a good rest, too. Good night."'