XVIII

He Heard about Hal in Wilmington

It was always possible to argue over the virtues or defects of tryout towns—New Haven, Philadelphia, Wilmington or Washington, or Boston—and the audience reaction to opening plays differed in each of these cities, but no tryout town could be perfect, and Wilmington was convenient because there was the theatre, right inside the hotel. Thus the ordeal of an opening night, the clash of personalities, the trauma of watching a play run through for its first time before a paying audience, and the final post-mortems and rewrite hours, all those things that made a first night hideous, could take place under one roof.

“I don’t see why, if you’re so nervous,” Rhoda said, “you and I can’t have supper alone, instead of being even more nervous with Arthur and Helen Higgins.”

“Please stop calling her Higgins,” he said. “She’s Helen Adair—she doesn’t like to be called Mrs. Higgins.”

“I don’t see why she can’t take it,” Rhoda said, “I have to be called Mrs. Harrow, don’t I?”

“You didn’t have to be, once,” he said. “Remember the idea was that you decided to take the chance.”

“I know,” she said, “I had to. You’d never have come back. You’d have forgotten all about me. In fact, you keep forgetting me the way it is.”

“I’ve got a lot of things on my mind, Rhoda,” he said. “This business is sort of like having a baby. Everyone says so.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Suppose we should start having a baby?”

“You don’t think you are, do you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That makes you frightened, doesn’t it?”

“Not frightened, only startled,” he answered.

“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you didn’t say that it makes you startled ‘on top of everything else.’ Everything that happens lately is on top of everything else, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” he said, “everything is on to top of everything.”

“I never knew there could be so much to get on top of,” Rhoda said. “Aren’t you going to wear a dinner coat?”

“No,” he answered.

“I don’t see why,” she answered. “Arthur Higgins always does, and you needn’t be cross about it.”

“I’m not going to wear a dinner coat on top of everything else,” he said.

“There,” she said, “don’t say it that way. If you wore a dinner coat, you wouldn’t look so much like a genius. You’re getting to look more and more like one all the time.”

“I wish to God I were one,” he said.

“Well, hook up my dress,” she said. “You still like it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, “except for the hooks.”

“I don’t believe anybody could be worse with hooks than you,” she said. “I wish I had a maid.”

“I wish you had, too,” he said.

“Don’t be so cross,” she said. “I know you’re worried. Do I look all right?”

He had never seen her look better. The dress went with her hair and eyes. The only thing that disturbed him was that she had never looked so expensive.

“What’ll we do if it doesn’t work?” she said.

“If what doesn’t work?” he asked.

“You know,” she answered. “The play—and you’re afraid it isn’t going to work, aren’t you?”

“That’s right, I’m afraid,” he said.

She moved her bare shoulders impatiently.

“I wish I understood any of this,” she said. “I don’t see why you and Arthur Higgins don’t know whether the play is going to be good or not, after all the weeks you’ve been going over it and over it—and instead of that you all get more and more uncertain.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I thought it was good when I wrote it, but I don’t know anything about it now. I guess that’s how it is with plays.”

“But lots of people have seen it,” she said. “Haven’t they told you what they think?”

“It doesn’t matter what they think,” he said, “because they didn’t pay to see it.”

Bridge was entirely different when you played for even a small stake, and the same was true with a play. Once an audience had a stake in a play, there was a psychological release that built a new relationship between audience and players. If you wanted to be philosophical, perhaps this condition was like all phases of life; if you wanted to live you had to pay, and if the management gave you a complimentary ticket, you did not live. It was interesting that Rhoda had echoed that thought that night.

“Yes,” she said, “I guess everyone’s got to pay.”

Her remark still annoyed him. He never had been able to discover just what Rhoda had paid for. She had always got in with what was still called at the box office an “Annie Oakley.” She had always had a free ride, ever since he had met her on Dock Street, but then perhaps no ride was ever wholly free.

“Tom,” she asked him, “did you ever happen to know any of the du Ponts?”

“You ask the damnedest questions,” he said. “No, I don’t know any of them.”

“There must be lots of them living around here, mustn’t there, to have this big hotel and everything?”

“Yes,” he said, “there should be lots and lots.”

“Do you think any of them will be at the play tonight?”

“Why do you care?” he asked her. “I don’t know.”

“I’d just like to see what one of them looks like,” she said.

“God almighty,” he said. “They must look like other people.”

“But Tom,” she said, “they aren’t like other people. They aren’t like you and me.”

“I don’t know whether they are or not,” he said, “and I don’t care. I don’t want to be a du Pont.”

“I know you don’t,” she said. “That’s what I don’t understand about you, because I’d like to be one.”

“All right,” he said, “all right—and exactly why should you like to be a du Pont?”

“Don’t get cross, Tom,” she said. “I’d like to be a du Pont because they don’t have to worry in the way we do. No matter what happens, there they are.”

Rhoda, more than political arguments, had made him into an approximation of a liberal. Instead of being amused, he was angry, which showed that the strain of the play was telling on him.

“All right,” he said, “I’d rather worry than be a du Pont.”

“I don’t see why you say that,” she said. “I hate to worry, and no du Pont has to.”

“Listen,” he said, “there might be a revolution.”

“A revolution?” she said. “Don’t be silly. Look at this hotel.”

“Listen, baby—” he said.

“Don’t you call me baby,” she told him. “You’ve been picking up all sorts of words since this play has been in rehearsal.”

It was consoling to believe that he had been justly angry.

“Listen, baby,” he said, “to have this on top of everything else is more than I can take tonight.”

“There you go again,” she said, “on top of what?”

“Listen, baby,” he said, “I have to worry about the play and about you and me, and what are you being but a selfish little bitch?”

“Would you kindly say that again?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Who were you when I saw you in front of that typing school? Who brought you to the Hotel du Pont, anyway? Who paid for that goddam frock you’re wearing? I repeat the phrase with pleasure, you’re a selfish little bitch.”

It hit her between wind and water, because once you showed Rhoda the picture, she was able to see it, almost always.

“That’s right,” she said. “I guess you’re right.”

“Well, as long as you admit it,” he said, “stop crying, Rhoda.”

She did not stop, but there had never been anything painful about Rhoda’s weeping because she was always attractive when she cried.

“I know you’re right, dear,” she said. “I know I’m selfish. Mother’s always told me so, and I love you, and I know all the things you’ve done for me. Tom, you’re wonderful and there isn’t much I can do back for you.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” he said, “you only have to love me.”

“Oh, Tom,” she said, “of course I love you, and I always will—only I wish we didn’t have to worry.”

“Listen, baby,” he said, and for once she did not mind if he called her baby, because she was crying in a nice way and her head was on his shoulder, “everybody has to worry.”

“Yes,” she said, “except the du Ponts, the Fords, the Rockefellers and people like that.”

“Listen, baby,” he said, “maybe they have to worry, too, in different ways.”

“Oh, Tom,” she said, and she sobbed, “I don’t think I’d mind so much worrying in a different way.”

He held her closer. After all, she had taken his mind off the opening, and furthermore, he was master of the situation.

“Listen, baby,” he said again, “if you would only stop it, everything would be wonderful. Just you let me do the worrying.”

“But, Tom,” she said, “I have to worry, too.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Can’t you stop it, Rhoda?”

Her sobs increased but she still was beautiful. He could almost think, much as he hated Victorian similes, that Rhoda was like a lily of the valley in the spring.

“But I’ve got something more to worry about,” she said.

“Well, put it off,” he said. “We’ve got to have supper with Arthur Higgins. Rhoda, I don’t mean to be cross, but I’ve a lot on my mind tonight.”

“I’ve a lot on mine, too,” she said.

“I can only repeat,” he told her, “you’re being selfish.”

“Maybe I am,” she said. “But Tom, I really am going to have a baby.”

He had never brought himself to tell Harold of that moment. There were some things one never could discuss freely, and this was one of them. In a few episodes in life, at least, there came a first time which you knew could not be the same again. Rhoda’s news had seemed incredible that night and at the same time like a gift from the gods. He had tried later to recapture the portents of that moment by the aid of the written word and the skill of actors, and once or twice the result was not bad, but it had never been the same. You could not live through a first time twice, and no one could ever do it for you, and there it was that night, on top of everything.

“Darling,” he said, “don’t cry. That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.”

“How’s that again?” she asked.

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “It makes me feel like a du Pont. It’s all right, I’ll take care of everything.”

He wished there had been more times when she had needed to believe him as much as she had then. Everything might have been much better if he had not taken care of her too quickly, too easily and too well. A time of stress and struggle would have brought them together, and Rhoda could have taken it if he had not hit the jackpot quite so soon. Neither of them knew, he was glad to recall, that the scales were already weighted down. All that they could know of that present was the joy that they took in each other and a sense of confidence and fulfillment that was gone before you could recognize its worth.

“Darling,” she said, “I never knew you were so wonderful.”

It was still something to remember that they had stood alone and self-sufficient and that there had been a union of their thoughts and wishes.

“And I don’t want you to be anything else,” she said. “I love you just the way you are, and if he’s a boy, I want to call him Harold.”

“Harold?” he repeated after her. “Why Harold?”

“Because he lost the Battle of Hastings, the way his mother did,” she said. “I never expected there to be a Harold, but I’m awfully glad because I love you, darling.”

Then the room telephone rang, reminding him that they were late.

“Hurry and wash your face,” he said. “It’s a good thing you don’t puff up when you cry.”

No matter what might happen to a marriage, the play moved on, and in the end everyone on the program owed his first allegiance to the play.

“Have you two been quarreling?” Helen Adair asked.

“Why no,” he answered, “not at all.”

“Well, if you haven’t been,” she said, “you’ve been making love and it’s almost the same thing.”

“Helen,” Arthur said, “let’s not think any more quaint thoughts. Helen only means you’re looking charming, Rhoda dear—Venus rising from the sea.”

“Arthur,” Tom said, “how is it you think of things like that?”

“Because I’ve had a drink,” Arthur Higgins said. “The shaker’s on the table, and there are orchids for the girls beside the cocktail shaker, Tom.”

“Orchids,” Tom said, “I should have thought of orchids.”

“You will eventually,” Arthur said. Arthur was in a dinner coat and pearl studs, impeccable in spite of the endless days and sleepless nights. “I’ve sent flowers to the girls backstage in both your name and mine. Sandwiches and salad are coming up and black coffee. I’ve never believed in prisoners eating a hearty breakfast.”

“Arthur,” he said, “do you think it’s going to be as bad as all that?”

“We don’t know,” Arthur said, “but we may three hours from now.”

“Don’t look so worried, dear,” Helen said to Rhoda, “Arthur’s always like this before openings, bitter and nasty nice.”

“We should go backstage before curtaintime and say kind words,” Arthur Higgins said. “Then you and I will watch from the back of the house.”

The worst of it all, and this never changed with years of experience, was standing at the back of the house watching the waiting audience. There was a hostile impersonality in the voices and in the rustling of the programs. He could never get rid of a tenseness that verged on stage fright, and the uncertainty never changed. He had first faced that night one of the theatre’s most hideous dangers, that once you had lost the attention of an audience, nothing could bring it back again. The first sight of the set, the first motion of the players, their first speeches, grew vitally important. Standing together in back of the darkened theatre while the curtain rose, revealing the sitting room of a small-town home, he was aware of tension in Arthur Higgins.

“Yes, son,” Arthur said later in New York, “in the first two minutes most of your chips are down. A play’s like a newborn baby. If it breathes in the first two minutes, maybe it will live to grow up.”

He was aware even then of the first stirrings of life in Hero’s Return. The first moves of Albert Briggs made the play move: the door opening to the left, the tired man returning to the scene he had left two years ago—and the pause, the incredulity. Albert Briggs had understood the elements as Arthur Higgins had been sure he would. Arthur Higgins had wanted someone who would give a suitable character interpretation of the part, not necessarily an actor with a public, and Albert Briggs had not been well known before that night. In fact, Hero’s Return made two stars, Albert Briggs and Delia Duneen. Tom Harrow must have known, that night, that nothing mattered so much as the craft to which he was dedicated, and even Rhoda and her secret vanished while he watched his people live.

The show as it had played in Wilmington was closer to being set and ready to move to New York than they had thought it would be; but there was some cutting and a new series of lines for the final curtain, and the revisions had to reach the actors early enough so that they could be tried in the afternoon run-through. They got back to their rooms at one o’clock and Rhoda had been tired, but he still had the impression that she always looked prettier as the night wore on.

“I wish you could come to bed,” she said, “instead of sitting up writing, and if you keep having to do this as a regular thing, I wish you had a wine-colored silk dressing gown, that writers and artists wear in the movies when they are on one of those Italian terraces having breakfast with their mistresses.”

“How do you know their dressing gowns are wine-colored?” he asked.

“They’d have to be,” she said, “if you had one. I’ll buy you one as soon as we get some money. The funny little man who comes around with the railroad tickets and pays the hotel bill and things said we ought to get a piece of change from the box office tonight. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, “I guess so.”

“There’s one nice thing about being on the road,” Rhoda said, “Arthur Higgins pays all the expenses.”

“Don’t forget it’s very generous of Arthur,” Tom said. “There’s nothing in the contract that makes him pay for us both.”

“Well, anyway, the first thing, I’m going to buy you a wine-colored dressing gown. There must be some in Wilmington. The du Ponts must wear them, don’t you think?”

“Maybe none of the du Ponts are writers,” he said.

“They don’t need to be,” she said, “but maybe some of them have mistresses.”

“Maybe. I wouldn’t know,” he said. “You don’t need it, but you’d better get your beauty sleep.”

“I’m glad if you think I’m beautiful,” she said.

“You know I think so, and I’ve told you that before,” he said.

“I still don’t believe it,” she said, “unless you tell me. Tom, everything’s awfully strange tonight. All those people talking and kissing each other and calling each other ‘darling.’ Are theatre people always like that?”

“Yes,” he said, “I guess they’re volatile. But what’s so strange?”

“We seem to be moving around so fast,” she said, “into Niagara Falls and sex and that Hotel Bulwer and new dresses, and then down here and all this, and then going to have a baby.”

“All right,” he said, “blame it on the Bulwer.”

“I’m not blaming either you or the Bulwer,” she said. “But everything’s moving so fast I can’t remember what I used to be like.”

“I thought the idea was that you didn’t want to be what you were like,” he said.

“I know,” she said, “but it’s unsettling when you begin not to be able to remember. Now kiss me, and not the way the hero did when he met his high-school sweetheart. Good night, and don’t sit up too long.”

He could never estimate the lapse of time, but he must have been at his typewriter an hour or so when he heard her speak to him again. He had not heard her enter the room and her voice startled him.

“Tom,” she said, “you’re not angry about our going to have a baby, are you?”

“No,” he said, “on the contrary, I’m getting more enthusiastic every minute.”

“All right,” she said. “I only wanted to know, and I won’t interrupt you any more. I love you, and I’d rather have you than the du Ponts, in case that worried you.”

“Why, thanks, dear,” he said, “it’s been worrying me all night.”

“And now you’d better come to bed,” she said. “You must be finished with that by now.”

It had always been a problem when to stop writing plays and dealing with characters, and get back again to being married.

There could never be an adequate preview of the world of tomorrow, no way of realizing until much later how close he had been to Rhoda, or how near he had been to grasping the elusive. A word or two would have done it, and those words might not have been associated with the act of love. Had she been willing to give that night while he had been unwilling? It was too late now fully to reconstruct the scene, and no way of realizing then that opportunity was moving and that each advancing minute would add to the static, unbreakable side of a relationship. There was a time for everything under the sun, but you seldom knew the time.

“Do you have a feeling,” she said that night, “that everything is beginning to move so fast that we’ll have to run to keep up with it?”

“Yes,” he said. “If it keeps on going this way, there won’t ever be any time for you and me—but of course it’s going to stop.”

“I wish we could stop, just you and me,” she said, “and watch the rest of it move. Just you and me on solid ground.”

“I know what you mean,” he said. “There’ll be lots of time for you and me, but it’s got to be our kind of time.”

He never should have taken it for granted that he and she could be much alike, and perhaps it was something to be thankful for that neither one of them had ever tried too ploddingly to understand the other.