XVII

There Was Enough to Take Her Shopping

There were occasions in his later life when he had actually missed the Bulwer. He doubted whether this had ever been so with Rhoda, who ever afterwards refused to stop at anything she termed a second-class hotel. They frightened her, she said. There was a nightmare quality in their dingy lobbies and in their efforts to make the dark dining rooms look attractive. Then there were the people, aging, about to lose their bridgework, and always the shaking old lady who had just forgotten who she was. She did not mean to be unkind, Rhoda used to say, and she could never understand why people like that always fascinated him, even after the hotel scene in Flagpole for Two. He could see those people if he wanted, and get into conversations with them if he wanted, but Rhoda could not help being frightened.

Whenever she thought of the Hotel Bulwer, she always thought simultaneously how dreadful it would have been if they had always had to stay there, if he had been obliged to get a position at fifty dollars a week or something in a publishing company or a magazine or somewhere. What was even worse was to think that someday, if things did not work out right (and of course he could not always be successful), they might have to return to the Hotel Bulwer, after they had been used to other things for years. This could happen (he might not be successful always) and they were accustomed now to spending such a fearful lot of money. It was her fault, admittedly, because she was an expensive girl who grew more and more expensive all the time, but being so did make her frightfully insecure. She occasionally had nightmares in which she was a little girl again and her father was losing all his money and sometimes she would get Tom confused with her father. That was why she was afraid, even when she so much as saw a second-rate hotel.

He could appreciate her point of view, but there had been advantages about the Bulwer. For one thing, there were no possessions, except his typewriter and their suitcases. They had only each other at the Bulwer, no automobiles whose fenders you might dent, no Chippendale tables you might stain, no Aubusson carpets upon which someone might drop a cigarette, no jewelry to lose, no mink, no Waterford, no Lowestoft, no Renoir or Matisse or Picasso. For that brief interval, he had been free from the fetters that held him ever after, and he still could believe that they had been closer together then than they ever were again because of those beautifully limiting factors.

He could grant that their apartment at the Bulwer was not much of a place in which to have each other, but it had not been a double bedroom. It had been a suite, so-called, because he had not wanted to think of Rhoda all alone all day in a double bedroom while the show was in rehearsal; and besides, there had to be a place where he could do rewriting at night without keeping Rhoda awake. In spite of the prosperity of the era, the Bulwer was not one of those New York hotels that had pulled itself together to face new competition. It was not redecorated and it did not announce that it was under new management, and there was no appeal in the wheezy elevator to try the New Cuisine in the New Dining Room. Their suite looked out on an airshaft which gave the place an eerie silence, except for phonographs and domestic quarrels that echoed in the shaft in the middle of the night. The purple upholstery of the sitting room sofa and the two armchairs had fallen to greasy ruin. The reproduction of a Maxfield Parrish fairy palace was terrible; the double bed sagged in the middle in such a way, as Rhoda said, that neither could have kicked the other out of bed, no matter how much either one might have wished to. There was nothing that you gave a damn about, nothing that you coveted; there was nothing to do but love each other and be delighted with each other and hope that very shortly they would find some better dwelling place.

“Well,” he said that autumn afternoon when he returned from those tryouts at the Higgins office, “have you been looking for apartments, Rhoda, the way you said you were going to?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “and kiss me again, please. When I’m here alone, I keep thinking I’m a little girl.”

“Did you see any good apartments?” he asked. “Just to take your mind off our poverty?”

“No,” she said, “I wasn’t dressed for the good ones. I never made Park Avenue. The man only showed me cute places where you walk upstairs in old houses, and he tried to kiss me in one of those cute places.”

“I don’t blame him,” he said, “and it does show you were dressed for something.”

“It shows I’m not Park Avenue,” she said. “I don’t think he was the Park Avenue man. By the way, the man who runs our elevator is named Bill.”

“Oh,” he said, “just my Bill.”

“He said he had a brother in a drugstore who could get us a pint of something anytime. I got him to get it. I haven’t tasted it because I know it’s wrong to drink alone.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “That proves you have a reason to be glad to see me.”

“Oh,” she said, “I’ve got a lot of others. When you came in just now you looked like someone in one of those true-confession magazines that Mother never let me read, like someone from another world.”

“Well,” he said, “I am just back from one.”

He did not know it; it took him years to see that he was always coming back from make-believe into her world of fact, and she had never been able to follow him into the world of make-believe. She had never been at home in its unrealities because she was nervous with unreality, more particularly the unreality of the theatre and of the people in it. You could make a parody of Ecclesiastes out of her thoughts: insecurity of insecurities, the Preacher said, all the theatre is insecurity. But Rhoda had always been a good trouper in those days. She had to be; and for his money, she was always better than the bunch of them. Goodness knew, he knew them all, the writers and producers of his time, the actors and the actresses, Hollywood, Broadway and London, and there was friendship, and love and admiration, devoid of inevitable pretense. Yet he could understand that this was something that Rhoda had never wanted, or something Rhoda had never seen. He could pass in review the great figures of the theatre, alive and dead, down to the level of the younger ones beginning to be. He was still a part of the world of make-believe that in the end had made all worlds unreal, but he could not blame Rhoda for never having understood.

“The Higginses are asking us to dinner,” he said, “on Wednesday, informally, just en famille, and Miss Adair will telephone you.”

“Don’t be so snooty,” Rhoda said. “I know my high-school French, but—oh, my God, darling, I haven’t anything to wear, even en famille. Look what happened when I was looking at apartments.”

“I know,” he said, “but according to what happened there, people are still able to get together and we’ll have to buy you something to wear en famille.”

“We haven’t got the money,” she said.

“Never mind the money,” he said.

She put her arms around his neck and her head on his shoulder and began to laugh.

“That’s where I want us to be,” she said, “in the never-mind-the-money land. I’m tired about minding about money.”

“Just hold me tight,” he said. “Just hold onto my coat-tails and maybe I can get you there.”

“In a big way?” she asked.

Then he began to laugh, too. From the very beginning her preoccupation about money and security had never greatly disturbed him, and besides, they were in love.

“By God,” he said, “you’re the queen of the gold diggers, aren’t you?”

“Don’t,” she said, “don’t say it like that. You see, I really love you, Tom.”

Love, to use a new expression, was, no matter what one said about it, in the end a highly personalized affair. Their love had been personalized, and he was very glad it had been, because the memory of it was still fresh and strange and different by far from other memories. He knew she loved him because she always gave in her way as much as he gave her. They were crazy about each other in those days and they both must have shared a feeling that they were on the verge of something rich and strange. You never could separate the components of love and you were a fool to try when they were blended into the most potent potion in the world.

“I’ll take you shopping first thing tomorrow,” he said, “because I want to see you looking swell, baby.”

Songs then were different and they danced to different tunes, but there was no change in meaning, and she must have known darned well, baby, that he had given her quite a lot of other things besides love.

It was a pity he knew so little about women’s clothes before the theatre had made him a specialist on the subject, and perhaps Rhoda had helped in that interest. Ever since that morning, he had always looked at beautiful women with an appraising eye, wondering whether their dresses would be becoming to Rhoda. He remembered that Betty Howland had spoken of a fashionable place—one that depression had driven out of existence long ago—and its name now eluded his memory, but he still could remember the perfume, the discretion of the carpets and the comfort of the chairs and a Parisian sophistication. The lady in charge of the floor had been gracious, and he had handled the situation in the best way he could. He was a beneficent, rich young man, well-dressed, married to a simple country girl, and Rhoda had looked simple in her tweed suit.

“I want a very simple but becoming dinner frock for my wife to wear tomorow night,” he said. He could not remember whom he had heard use the word “frock” but it sounded well. “And I should also appreciate your advice regarding the accessories. We’re dining with Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Higgins, the producer, tomorrow night.”

“Oh,” the floor lady said, and her face cleared, “Mr. Arthur Higgins. Did he send you?”

“He might have, but he didn’t,” he said. “I’m Thomas Harrow, the playwright.”

He could not have thought of a better thing to say. The word cast a glow of the arts and made Rhoda sweet and simple like his high-school sweetheart.

“Oh,” the floor lady said. “Oh yes, Mr. Harrow.”

They were snobs at heart in those places when dealing with the arts.

“Something simple,” he said, “but at the same time becoming.”

“Yes,” the floor lady said. “I think I know what you mean, but I wish the young lady had a slightly different hair style.”

“She can get a different one,” he said, “this afternoon, can’t you, dear?”

“Yes, dear,” Rhoda said.

“The best way to make up our minds,” the saleslady said, “is to have a few simple things modeled, and the hair style of our first girl is something of the style I mean, if you’d care to watch her, Mr. Harrow.”

She walked down the length of the room and disappeared behind a velvet curtain while he and Rhoda sat in painful silence.

“The bitch,” Rhoda whispered. “I don’t think she thinks we’re married.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he answered.

“It matters to me what she thinks,” she whispered. “My mother brought me up to be a good girl. I’m going to take my glove off so she can see my ring.”

“By God,” he said, “I think perhaps you’d better, darling.”

He thought of that place again long afterward when he saw My Fair Lady. The scene at Ascot brought it back, and the music fitted with that distant mood. He could remember his sense of creative triumph, more poignant and perfect than anything later, and rightly so, since never in his life again would he deal so closely with that species of human value. It was he who had brought Rhoda there; it was he who had selected the evening gown.

“While we’re here,” he said, “we’d better make arrangements for a day and afternoon dress, but only the evening one must be ready tomorrow, and I’ll be glad to leave you a check on the Fifth Avenue Bank.”

It sounded well. He was glad that his uncle had opened an account for him there while he was at school.

“It really isn’t necessary, Mr. Harrow,” the floor lady said. “Mrs. Harrow does look fetching, doesn’t she?”

Of course it was necessary. Dresses or frocks were cheaper then, but what with accessories, Tom must have been committed for nearly eight hundred dollars before they were on the street.

“I don’t know how you can act like a millionaire,” Rhoda said. “You shouldn’t have done it, darling.”

“Of course I should,” he said. “I said I wanted to see you looking swell, didn’t I, baby?”

“But Tom,” she said, and he knew she was torn both ways, “we’re beginning to spend all the money in your account, and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Don’t you see it doesn’t matter?” he said. “You’ve got the dresses, haven’t you?”

There you were again. It was something she could never see—the value of a moment. She could never tell the things that existed on which only a sense of being alive could place a value. She could accept the theory, but never the fact that there was sometimes safety in the throwing-away of safety.

When Cliff Wisehall, who had provisionally promised to do the directing of Hero’s Return, found himself unable, because of pressure, to attend the first four casting sessions, Arthur Higgins became annoyed, although no one knew better than he that annoyance was valueless in dealing with theatrical impresarios. It was apparent that as Cliff Wisehall’s reputation grew greater his flamboyancy increased in a direct ratio. When Arthur Higgins remonstrated, Cliff explained that he was trying to get the feel of the play, and until he could get the feel, it was futile for him to pick actors. He was trying and trying to get the feel sitting up all night, pacing the streets all day, to get the feel, and frankly, it eluded him. He wondered whether Tommy—he had begun calling Tom “Tommy-my-lad” after their first meeting—actually had grasped the inner meaning of the play himself. He also wondered whether Arthur Higgins understood the inner meaning of the play. If either the maestro or Tommy-my-lad did understand just let them tell him.

It began to dawn on Tom Harrow—after a conference that ended, like others he sat in later, in a barrage of finely balanced rhetoric—that Cliff Wisehall had not got around to reading the play; and finally the same truth dawned on Arthur Higgins, who said late one afternoon that he would direct the play himself.

Arthur Higgins both presented and directed Hero’s Return, and Tom Harrow learned more of the feel of the theatre in those days with Arthur than he ever needed to learn again. Arthur had learned, by patient experiment, to reconcile the unreality of a stage set with the actualities of living as understood by an audience. He always insisted that his actors must know where they should be every second they were on stage and know what they were doing, and why. There were plenty of actors and actresses who dreaded the Higgins direction, but those who adjusted admired him. Later Tom knew others who were able to achieve more memorable effects, but no one with the Higgins thoroughness or logic. It was his first experience of seeing a play, a figment of his own imagination, start from the beginning and move into tangible shape, and ever afterwards he had never tired of this intricate process.

The cast first met in a private dining room in the Hotel Astor. They had already assembled when he arrived, sitting on banquet chairs like a class about to attend a college lecture. A new cast, he often thought, resembled a crew signed up for a long voyage in the age of sail, all listening with anxiety for the good word from the captain. Of course many were friends who had signed up together on other voyages, but others were new, silently eying each other with a competitive jealousy peculiar to their profession.

“Well, here’s the author,” Arthur Higgins said. “He’s late, but we can start now.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Higgins,” Tom said.

“No one has a right to take time away from other people,” Arthur said. “Remember, after this, everyone on time. And, now the author’s here, we’ll spend the morning reading through the play. I want the people in the opening scene to move to the far end of the room. All right, my dear—you’re the young sister, aren’t you? I’m sorry, I forget your name.” It was one of the ingenues, a girl who was new on the stage.

“Delia Duneen,” she said.

“Thank you,” Arthur Higgins said, “I won’t forget again.”

As a matter of fact no one did, after Hero’s Return opened. She was not billed as a leading lady until later, and she was established after that.

He had met all the cast before, but he had never seen them together and he had never previously been through the experience of listening to any long work of his own read by a group of strangers. No one could ever tell, playwright, director or actors, what might eventually happen to a play while it was in rehearsal. Everyone was groping in his own sort of darkness, particularly in the first reading. While he listened to these strangers stumble over his lines, he was beginning to perceive the theatre’s utter lack of self-concealment. Everyone was involuntarily subjected to the criticism of everybody else, and it was a sort of criticism that demanded self-reliance or inordinate vanity or the help of others. He always understood afterwards why people in the theatre were always drawn together, apart from the rest of the world, and why so many of them were generous and considerately kind. You knew people better in the theatre than in other environments because you had to. There was not much to know about some, but you always had to know what there was and you had to remember through the years tastes and capacities.

Well, in the end, he had known them, nearly all the great ones and the lesser ones, and their faces and voices now formed a procession through his memory. He could see the ending generations of his early days, the Drews, the Marlowes, the Keanes, the Sheldons and the Thomases. He could recall the first time he had met John Barrymore and the last. He had seen youth grow to middle age and disappear, and he had seen the authors come and go. It startled him to realize that so many of them only a few years his senior were gone already—O’Neill, Howard, Barry, and Sherwood. He had seen new ones take their places, the Millers and Williamses. The truth was, if he lived much longer, he would get to be a grand old man of the theatre himself. He had known them all and he could believe he had been backstage ten thousand times, kissing the leading lady and the supporting girls and telling each that she had been glorious, and saying it was the best performance he had ever seen and predicting that the play would run for a thousand years. You had to keep your head to discount the flattery, but there was genuineness beneath the convention. There was the strong wine of friendship, the common bond and community experience. You were a part of the brotherhood and, once you were, you were never wholly like anyone outside the boundaries.

He could see why Rhoda had never really been at home with those people, although she had always looked at home. She had always been uncertain in the presence of make-believe and she could never sort out as he could the values of illusion and reality.

“The trouble is,” she said, “I don’t like insecurity.”

She had never said a truer thing. The theatre was as insecure and fickle as public taste.

“And you’re insecure yourself,” she had said. “That’s what makes me so nervous, Tom. You’re getting more that way all the time.”

Frankly he was already beginning to suspect the word, and it happened, when Rhoda had made that particular remark, he was less secure than he had ever been afterwards. She made it the day they were going to try out Hero’s Return in the theatre in the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware. He had not been sleeping well; he had been rewriting several scenes that were more on his mind than Rhoda was. In the theatre, insecurity constantly moved into some new sort of insecurity. If you were once successful, you always had a fear that you would never be so good again, and so, whatever happened, there was always insecurity.