Young Hearts Crying (18 page)

“Well, is it – does it have a private entrance?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, would I have to walk through a whole dormitory full of people every time I—”

“Ah, that won’t matter; they won’t notice, or if they do they won’t care. They’re all nice kids.”

Lucy had never been inside the dormitory building before. It smelled of dust and old lumber, and the shadowed ground floor of it, where the theater people took their meals, was still warm
with the redolence of recent cooking: there had been liver and bacon for supper tonight.

Upstairs she discovered that almost all the living quarters were arranged in an open space, with narrow beds placed at intervals along the walls in the style of an infantry barracks. Here and there some shy person had made an attempt at privacy by hanging sheets or blankets around a bed like curtains, but those few ineffectual hiding places only called attention to themselves: most members of the company were apparently contented to live in the open. And a good many of them were gathered now in talking, laughing clusters around the big, bright room. Except for an occasional middle-aged face they looked very young, and Lucy was careful to pick one of the boys, rather than one of the girls, for making her inquiry.

“Excuse me; do you know where I can find Mr. Halloran?”

“Mr. who?”

“Jack Halloran.”

“Oh,
Jack.
Sure; there.”

And when she turned to where the boy pointed she knew she could easily have found it herself because it was the only door in sight.

“Hi, baby,” Jack said. “Sit down. Be with you in just a second, okay?” He was standing with his shirt off at a small sink and mirror, shaving with an electric razor. There was nowhere to sit except on his bed, which was a cot of the same size and kind as the ones outside, but Lucy wasn’t ready to sit down anyway. She moved around like a housing inspector, peering closely at everything. There was a bathroom, or rather a closet containing a toilet bowl; there was a window that might by day command a view of Ben Duane’s flowers, and there were two big, cheap suitcases sagging against the wall, ugly with age and grime and heavy use. If you saw such dismal bags in a bus station,
would you have any way of guessing they might belong to a bright, ambitious young actor-director on the road? Well, probably not; more likely your glance would dismiss them at once as pitiful emblems of strain and failure – the kind of luggage carried by worn-out Negroes, say, on a journey from one state’s welfare program to another.

When she did sit down on the bed she saw that the door of the room had a keyhole of the big old-fashioned kind used for peeping, with no big old-fashioned key thrust into it, and at about the same time she found that the small unvarying sound of the electric razor was making her teeth ache.

“Is there a key?” she asked him.

“Huh?”

“I said is there a key for the door?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Got it in my pocket.”

Then at last he switched off the razor and put it away. He locked the door with what seemed some difficulty – he had to try the knob several times to make sure the job was done – and came to sit close beside her, slipping one arm around her ribs. “I was careful to reserve this room before the kids came up,” he said, “because I knew I’d want privacy, but I didn’t know I’d have somebody so nice to share it with. Oh, and I got us some beer, too.” He reached under the cot and pulled out a six-pack of Rheingold Extra Dry. “Probably isn’t very cold anymore, but what the hell. Beer’s beer, right?”

Right. Beer was beer; bed was bed; sex was sex; and everybody knew there were no social classes in America.

When she’d taken off her clothes she said “Jack? How am I going to get out of here?”

“Same way you got in, I guess. How do you mean?”

“Well, I can’t stay very long, you see, because Laura isn’t used to being left alone, and the point is I really don’t know if I—”

“Didn’t you give her the phone number up here? Case she needs you for anything?”

“No. I didn’t. And the point is I really don’t know if I can go out and face all those people again.”

“Ah, I think you’re being a little silly about this, Lucy, don’t you?” he said. “Now come on, settle back. If we haven’t got much time we might as well make the most of it.”

And they certainly did. Getting laid on a cot was even better, in a way, than getting laid in a double bed: it meant you were never apart; it made you feel that both of you were only halves of a single aching animal in urgent and overwhelming need. And in the final throes of it, when Lucy was afraid her helpless sounds could be heard throughout the dormitory, a phrase from Shakespeare floated into her mind for the first time in years: “Making the beast with two backs.”

“Oh, God,” she said when she’d recovered her breath. “Oh, my God, Jack, that was – that was really—”

“I know, baby,” he told her. “I know. It really was.”

The New Tonapac Playhouse would begin its season with a light comedy – “Just to get our muscles in shape,” Jack Halloran explained – and Lucy attended the last few rehearsals of it, sitting alone in the big old barnlike theater across the road.

The show was far enough along now so that most of it moved and developed without requiring much help from Jack, but it was a pleasure just to watch him standing tense with concentration on one shadowed side of the stage and to know he was wholly in charge. He held the open script in one hand, and he slowly wagged the loose forefinger of the other at the thigh of his jeans as if it were a metronome subtly attuned to the rhythm of the play. Sometimes he would call out to one of the actors: “No, to the left, Phil; to the left” or “Jane, you’re still not
getting the right inflection in that line; let’s try it again.”

Once, when a contagious series of fumbled lines threatened to wreck a whole scene, he called everything to a stop and walked out into the lights.

“Now, look,” he began. “An awful lot of time and talent has gone into this show, and we’re going to get it right. We’re going to get it right if we have to double up and rehearse around the clock, is that clear?”

He paused there as if to allow for questions or complaints, but nobody said anything. Most of the actors were looking at the floor like embarrassed children.

Then he said “I just don’t understand how we can still have mistakes like this. Some of you people seem to think this is amateur night in Dixie or something.”

There was another silence, and when he spoke again it was in a lower, less exasperated voice. “Okay. We’ll go all the way back to Martha’s line about happiness and take it from there. Only, this time, pay attention.”

The opening-night audience filled only a little more than two thirds of the theater, but the encouraging thing was that they didn’t all look like local people. It seemed evident that some kind of New York crowd really might be expected to come all the way out here this summer – even for this first and relatively minor offering.

And the performance went well. There were no visible mistakes; the laughter came up full and spontaneous in all the right places, and the applause at the end was long and loud enough to warrant three curtain calls. Then, just before the curtain came down for the last time, one of the actors brought Jack Halloran out from the wings to take a shy, courteous bow, and Lucy was so proud she could have cried.

*

Jack owned a noisy, bad-smelling, eleven-year-old Ford, seldom repaired and never washed; he always apologized for it, but there were quite a few nights that summer when he found it useful for taking Lucy out on long drives to “get away from the whole damn place for a while.”

Once the car was on the road it seemed as good as any other car, and they would ride for miles over Putnam County while he told her about the daily rehearsals and the nightly performances, about certain people in the company who weren’t shaping up very well and others who were a pleasure to work with.

They would stop to drink at bars featuring pinball machines and tall jars of pickled pigs’ feet, the kind of quaint “townie” bars she hadn’t visited since college, but they never stayed very long in those places because Jack would begin to worry about the many things he had to do the next day. And that was all right with Lucy: after an hour or two of traveling she was always eager to get back to his little room.

By late summer, with a new show every week, the company had presented plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, and Eugene O’Neill, as well as an overly ambitious production of
King Lear
that Jack had come to consider their only failure so far (“Ah, we all tried too hard on that one, and it showed”).

There was never enough sleep or even enough rest for the performers, and there were tearful outbursts among the girls at more than a few rehearsals. Even one of the boys broke down and cried once, clearly ashamed of himself as he turned on Jack and called him a fucking slave-driving prick.

But the people from New York kept coming out, in ever-increasing numbers, and most of the evenings began to seem triumphant. A man from the William Morris Agency went backstage to tell Jack he would like to “handle” him, but later, when Lucy said “Wonderful!” Jack said it was no big deal.
“These Morris people are a dime a dozen,” he explained; “besides, I already have an agent. No, the only one of us who got a real break tonight is Julie. God damn, isn’t that fine? I’m very – I’m really very proud for her.”

“Well, so am I,” Lucy said. “And she certainly deserves it.”

Julia Pierce was a thin girl of twenty-four with straight dark hair and big, luminous eyes. She had played the leading roles in
The Sea Gull,
in
A Doll’s House,
and again in
Major Barbara –
and her “real break” was that she had now been asked to audition for a part in a new comedy by a well-known Broadway playwright.

She was very quiet and shy offstage, and often seemed acutely nervous – Lucy had noticed that her fingernails were bitten down to the flesh – but the nervousness always vanished when she went to work. Three or four other girls in the company were prettier than Julia Pierce, and they knew it, but they could only envy and admire what they called her “terrific authority” as an actress. Her clear and resonant voice, filling the theater even when she murmured, was a marvelously subtle instrument for bringing make-believe situations to life.

And one sweltering night, after a little knock on the door of Jack Halloran’s room, it was Julia Pierce’s unmistakable voice that called, quietly, “Mrs. Davenport? Your daughter’s on the phone.”

Lucy had been drifting off to sleep with Jack’s arm close around her and his hand cupping one of her breasts, but she struggled free and got dressed in such haste that she left her stockings and underwear on the floor.

Out at the telephone, which was attached to a wall near the stairs, she said “Laura?”

“Mom, can you come home now? Because Daddy just called and he sounded all funny.”

“Well, dear, sometimes your father does have too much to drink, and then he—”

“No, this wasn’t drunk; this was different. I mean he wasn’t even making any sense.”

She couldn’t hurry past the heavily fragrant flower-bed terraces because she was afraid of missing each downward step in the darkness, but once she was on level ground she broke into a run for the lighted house. In the living room she gave Laura a quick, reassuring hug and said “Tell you what we’ll do. I’ll call Daddy now and find out if he’s sick or anything; then if he is, we’ll do everything we can to help him get better.”

She settled herself at the phone and began to dial Michael’s number in New York, and even before she’d finished dialing she was afraid he wouldn’t be there: he might have called Laura from any of a million phone booths, anywhere.

But he answered on the first ring. “Oh, Lucy,” he said. “Oh, I knew you’d call back. I knew you wouldn’t let me down. Listen, can you stay on the phone a minute? I mean can you just sort of stay on the phone a minute?”

“Michael?” she said. “Can you tell me what the trouble is?”

“What the trouble is,” he repeated, as if the question had helped to clear his head. “Well, I haven’t had any sleep for about five – no, about seven – shit, I don’t know how many days. I keep watching the sun come up over Seventh Avenue and then I turn around half an hour later and it’s the middle of the night again. And I don’t think I’ve been out of this place for a week – or maybe it’s more like two or three weeks now. There are paper bags full of trash standing all around this room, and a couple of ’em have fallen over and spilled. Are you getting the picture, Lucy? I’m scared. I’m scared shitless, you see. I’m scared to walk out the door and up the street, because every time I do I see all kinds of people and things that aren’t even fucking
there.”

“Well, wait, Michael, listen. Do you have a friend I could
call? Someone who might come over and sort of look after you?”

“A ‘friend,’ ” he said. “You mean a girl. No, there isn’t anybody like that. Oh, but don’t get me wrong, sweetheart: I’ve had a whole lot more than my share of girls since you threw me out of the house. Jesus God, I’ve been having pussy for breakfast, pussy for lunch, pussy for—”

“Come on, Michael,” she said impatiently. “Listen: let me call Bill, okay?”

“—pussy for dinner,” he was saying, “oh, and plenty of pussy for leftovers at midnight, too. Bill who?”

“Bill Brock. He might be able to come over and—”

“No. That’s out. I won’t have Brock walking into this place. He’s been wallowing in psychoanalysis for years. He’ll sit here trying to psychoanalyze me, and the point is I may be crazy but I’m not
that
crazy. Oh, Jesus, Lucy, try to understand. All I need is sleep.”

“Well,” she said, “perhaps Bill can get you some sleeping pills.”

“Ah, yes, ‘perhaps.’ Tell me something, Lucy: How come you always say ‘perhaps’ instead of ‘maybe’ when you’re in this Miss-Purse-the-Nurse frame of mind? You’ve always had about six artificial, affected ways of speaking, you know that? Your whole personality changes to suit the occasion. I noticed it way the hell back in Cambridge, but I thought it was something you’d outgrow. Only you never have, so now I guess you’re stuck with it for life. And I guess it comes from being a millionaire girl among ordinary people, because I mean you feel you’ve gotta be up there on stage all the time, right? Playing one fucking role after another? Gracious Lady Bountiful dispensing favor? Well, that’s exactly the kind of horseshit I came to find very, very tiresome over the years, Lucy. And do you want to know something else? For most of the time we were married I
was in love with Diana Maitland. Never had her, never came within a mile of her, but, oh, Christ, I could’ve died for that girl. Ah, I used to wonder if you knew what I was going through, but then I’d figure it didn’t matter anyway because you were probably in love with Paul – or if not with Paul then with Tom Nelson, or else with some romantic abstraction of a man who’d turn out to be about twenty-nine times stronger and better than me. Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives
yearning.
Isn’t that the God damndest thing?”