ACT THREE
The verandah, several hours later. Cubicles number 3, 4, and 5 are dimly lighted within. We see Hannah in number 3, and Nonno in number 4. Shannon, who has taken off his shirt, is seated at a table on the verandah, writing a letter to his bishop. All but this table have been folded and stacked against the wall and Maxine is putting the hammock back up which had been taken down for dinner. The electric power is still off and the cubicles are lighted by oil lamps. The sky has cleared completely, the moon is making for full and it bathes the scene in an almost garish silver which is intensified by the wetness from the recent rainstorm. Everything is drenched—there are pools of silver here and there on the floor of the verandah. At one side a smudge-pot is burning to repel the mosquitoes, which are particularly vicious after a tropical downpour when the wind is exhausted.
Shannon is working feverishly on the letter to the bishop, now and then slapping at a mosquito on his bare torso. He is shiny with perspiration, still breathing like a spent runner, muttering to himself as he writes and sometimes suddenly drawing a loud deep breath and simultaneously throwing back his head to stare up wildly at the night sky. Hannah is seated on a straight-back chair behind the mosquito netting in her cubicle—very straight herself, holding a small book in her hands but looking steadily over it at Shannon, like a guardian angel. Her hair has been let down. Nonno can be seen in his cubicle rocking back and forth on the edge of the narrow bed as he goes over and over the lines of his first new poem in “twenty-some years”—which he knows is his last one.
Now and then the sound of distant music drifts up from the beach cantina.
MAXINE: Workin’ on your sermon for next Sunday, Rev’rend?
SHANNON: I’m writing a very important letter, Maxine. [He means don’t disturb me.]
MAXINE: Who to, Shannon?
SHANNON: The Dean of the Divinity School at Sewanee. [Maxine repeats “Sewanee” to herself, tolerantly.] Yes, and I’d appreciate it very much, Maxine honey, if you’d get Pedro or Pancho to drive into town with it tonight so it will go out first thing in the morning.
MAXINE: The kids took off in the station wagon already—for some cold beers and hot whores at the cantina.
SHANNON: “Fred’s dead”—he’s lucky. . . .
MAXINE: Don’t misunderstand me about Fred, baby. I miss him, but we’d not only stopped sleeping together, we’d stopped talking together except in grunts—no quarrels, no misunderstandings, but if we exchanged two grunts in the course of a day, it was a long conversation we’d had that day between us.
SHANNON: Fred knew when I was spooked—wouldn’t have to tell him. He’d just look at me and say, “Well, Shannon, you’re spooked.”
MAXINE: Yeah, well, Fred and me’d reached the point of just grunting.
SHANNON: Maybe he thought you’d turned into a pig, Maxine.
MAXINE: Hah! You know damn well that Fred respected me, Shannon, like I did Fred. We just, well, you know . . . age difference. . . .
SHANNON: Well, you’ve got Pedro and Pancho.
MAXINE: Employees. They don’t respect me enough. When you let employees get too free with you, personally, they stop respecting you, Shannon. And it’s, well, it’s . . . humiliating—not to be . . . respected.
SHANNON: Then take more bus trips to town for the Mexican pokes and the pinches, or get Herr Fahrenkopf to “respect” you, honey.
MAXINE: Hah! You kill me. I been thinking lately of selling out here and going back to the States, to Texas, and operating a tourist camp outside some live town like Houston or Dallas, on a highway, and renting out cabins to business executives wanting a comfortable little intimate little place to give a little after-hours dictation to their cute little secretaries that can’t type or write shorthand. Complimentary rum-cocos—bathrooms with bidets. I’ll introduce the bidet to the States.
SHANNON: Does everything have to wind up on that level with you, Maxine?
MAXINE: Yes and no, baby. I know the difference between loving someone and just sleeping with someone—even I know about that. [He starts to rise.] We’ve both reached a point where we’ve got to settle for something that works for us in our lives—even if it isn’t on the highest kind of level.
SHANNON: I don’t want to rot.
MAXINE: You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let you! I know your psychological history. I remember one of your conversations on this verandah with Fred. You was explaining to him how your problems first started. You told him that Mama, your Mama, used to send you to bed before you was ready to sleep—so you practiced the little boy’s vice, you amused yourself with yourself. And once she caught you at it and whaled your backside with the back side of a hairbrush because she said she had to punish you for it because it made God mad as much as it did Mama, and she had to punish you for it so God wouldn’t punish you for it harder than she would.
SHANNON: I was talking to Fred.
MAXINE: Yeah, but I heard it, all of it. You said you loved God and Mama and so you quit it to please them, but it was your secret pleasure and you harbored a secret resentment against Mama and God for making you give it up. And so you got back at God by preaching atheistical sermons and you got back at Mama by starting to lay young girls.
SHANNON: I have never delivered an atheistical sermon, and never would or could when I go back to the Church.
MAXINE: You’re not going back to no Church. Did you mention the charge of statutory rape to the divinity dean?
SHANNON [thrusting his chair back so vehemently that it topples over]: Why don’t you let up on me? You haven’t let up on me since I got here this morning! Let up on me! Will you please let up on me?
MAXINE [smiling serenely into his rage.]: Aw baby. . . .
SHANNON: What do you mean by “aw baby”? What do you want out of me, Maxine honey?
MAXINE: Just to do this. [She runs her fingers through his hair. He thrusts her hand away.]
SHANNON: Ah, God. [Words fail him. He shakes his head with a slight, helpless laugh and goes down the steps from the verandah.]
MAXINE: The Chinaman in the kitchen says, “No sweat.” . . . “No sweat.” He says that’s all his philosophy. All the Chinese philosophy in three words, “Mei yoo guanchi”—which is Chinese for “No sweat.” . . . With your record and a charge of statutory rape hanging over you in Texas, how could you go to a church except to the Holy Rollers with some lively young female rollers and a bushel of hay on the church floor?
SHANNON: I’ll drive into town in the bus to post this letter tonight. [He has started toward the path. There are sounds below. He divides the masking foliage with his hands and looks down the hill.]
MAXINE [descending the steps from the verandah]: Watch out for the spook, he’s out there.
SHANNON: My ladies are up to something. They’re all down there on the road, around the bus.
MAXINE: They’re running out on you, Shannon.
[She comes up beside him. He draws back and she looks down the hill. The light in number 3 cubicle comes on and Hannah rises from the little table that she had cleared for letter-writing. She removes her Kabuki robe from a hook and puts it on as an actor puts on a costume in his dressing room. Nonno’s cubicle is also lighted dimly. He sits on the edge of his cot, rocking slightly back and forth, uttering an indistinguishable mumble of lines from his poem.]
MAXINE: Yeah. There’s a little fat man down there that looks like Jake Latta to me. Yep, that’s Jake, that’s Latta. I reckon Blake Tours has sent him here to take over your party, Shannon. [Shannon looks out over the jungle and lights a cigarette with jerky fingers.] Well, let him do it. No sweat! He’s coming up here now. Want me to handle it for you?
SHANNON: I’ll handle it for myself. You keep out of it, please.
[He speaks with a desperate composure. Hannah stands just behind the curtain of her cubicle, motionless as a painted figure, during the scene that follows. Jake Latta comes puffing up the verandah steps, beaming genially.]
LATTA: Hi there, Larry.
SHANNON: Hello, Jake. [He folds his letter into an envelope.] Mrs. Faulk honey, this goes air special.
MAXINE: First you’d better address it.
SHANNON: Oh!
[Shannon laughs and snatches the letter back, fumbling in his pocket for an address book, his fingers shaking uncontrollably. Latta winks at Maxine. She smiles tolerantly.]
LATTA: How’s our boy doin’, Maxine?
MAXINE: He’d feel better if I could get him to take a drink.
LATTA: Can’t you get a drink down him?
MAXINE: Nope, not even a rum-coco.
LATTA: Let’s have a rum-coco, Larry.
SHANNON: You have a rum-coco, Jake. I have a party of ladies to take care of. And I’ve discovered that situations come up in this business that call for cold, sober judgment. How about you? Haven’t you ever made that discovery, Jake? What’re you doing here? Are you here with a party?
LATTA: I’m here to pick up your party, Larry boy.
SHANNON: That’s interesting! On whose authority, Jake?
LATTA: Blake Tours wired me in Cuernavaca to pick up your party here and put them together with mine cause you’d had this little nervous upset of yours and. . . .
SHANNON: Show me the wire! Huh?
LATTA: The bus driver says you took the ignition key to the bus.
SHANNON: That’s right. I have the ignition key to the bus and I have this party and neither the bus or the party will pull out of here till I say so.
LATTA: Larry, you’re a sick boy. Don’t give me trouble.
SHANNON: What jail did they bail you out of, you fat zero?
LATTA: Let’s have the bus key, Larry.
SHANNON: Where did they dig you up? You’ve got no party in Cuernavaca, you haven’t been out with a party since ’thirty-seven.
LATTA: Just give me the bus key, Larry.
SHANNON: In a pig’s—snout!—like yours!
LATTA: Where is the reverend’s bedroom, Mrs. Faulk?
SHANNON: The bus key is in my pocket. [He slaps his pants pocket fiercely.] Here, right here, in my pocket! Want it? Try and get it, Fatso!
LATTA: What language for a reverend to use, Mrs. Faulk. . . .
SHANNON [holding up the key]: See it? [He thrusts it back into his pocket.] Now go back wherever you crawled from. My party of ladies is staying here three more days because several of them are in no condition to travel and neither—neither am I.
LATTA: They’re getting in the bus now.
SHANNON: How are you going to start it?
LATTA: Larry, don’t make me call the bus driver up here to hold you down while I get that key away from you. You want to see the wire from Blake Tours? Here. [He produces the wire.] Read it.
SHANNON: You sent that wire to yourself.
LATTA: From Houston?
SHANNON: You had it sent you from Houston. What’s that prove? Why, Blake Tours was nothing, nothing!—till they got me. You think they’d let me go?—Ho, ho! Latta, it’s caught up with you, Latta, all the whores and tequila have hit your brain now, Latta. [Latta shouts down the hill for the bus driver.] Don’t you realize what I mean to Blake Tours? Haven’t you seen the brochure in which they mention, they brag, that special parties are conducted by the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, D.D., noted world traveler, lecturer, son of a minister and grandson of a bishop, and the direct descendant of two colonial governors? [Miss Fellowes appears at the verandah steps.] Miss Fellowes has read the brochure, she’s memorized the brochure. She knows what it says about me.
MISS FELLOWES [to Latta]: Have you got the bus key?
LATTA: Bus driver’s going to get it away from him, lady. [He lights a cigar with dirty, shaky fingers.]
SHANNON: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! [His laughter shakes him back against the verandah wall.]
LATTA: He’s gone. [He touches his forehead.]
SHANNON: Why, those ladies . . . have had . . . some of them, most of them if not all of them . . . for the first time in their lives the advantage of contact, social contact, with a gentleman born and bred, whom under no other circumstances they could have possibly met . . . let alone be given the chance to insult and accuse and. . . .
MISS FELLOWES: Shannon! The girls are in the bus and we want to go now, so give up that key. Now!
[Hank, the bus driver, appears at the top of the path, whistling casually: he is not noticed at first.]
SHANNON: If I didn’t have a decent sense of responsibility to these parties I take out, I would gladly turn over your party—because I don’t like your party—to this degenerate here, this Jake Latta of the gutter-rat Lattas. Yes, I would—I would surrender the bus key in my pocket, even to Latta, but I am not that irresponsible, no, I’m not, to the parties that I take out, regardless of the party’s treatment of me. I still feel responsible for them till I get them back wherever I picked them up. [Hank comes onto the verandah.] Hi, Hank. Are you friend or foe?
HANK: Larry, I got to get that ignition key now so we can get moving down there.
SHANNON: Oh! Then foe! I’m disappointed, Hank. I thought you were friend, not foe. [Hank puts a wrestler’s armlock on Shannon and Latta removes the bus key from his pocket. Hannah raises a hand to her eyes.] O.K., O.K., you’ve got the bus key. By force. I feel exonerated now of all responsibility. Take the bus and the ladies in it and go. Hey, Jake, did you know they had Lesbians in Texas—without the dikes the plains of Texas would be engulfed by the Gulf. [He nods his head violently toward Miss Fellowes, who springs forward and slaps him.] Thank you, Miss Fellowes. Latta, hold on a minute. I will not be stranded here. I’ve had unusual expenses on this trip. Right now I don’t have my fare back to Houston or even to Mexico City. Now if there’s any truth in your statement that Blake Tours have really authorized you to take over my party, then I am sure they have . . . [He draws a breath, almost gasping.] . . . I’m sure they must have given you something in the . . . the nature of . . . severance pay? Or at least enough to get me back to the States?
LATTA: I got no money for you.
SHANNON: I hate to question your word, but. . . .
LATTA: We’ll drive you back to Mexico City. You can sit up front with the driver.
SHANNON: You would do that, Latta. I’d find it humiliating. Now! Give me my severance pay!
LATTA: Blake Tours is having to refund those ladies half the price of the tour. That’s your severance pay. And Miss Fellowes tells me you got plenty of money out of this young girl you seduced in. . . .
SHANNON: Miss Fellowes, did you really make such a . . . ?
MISS FELLOWES: When Charlotte returned that night, she’d cashed two traveler’s checks.
SHANNON: After I had spent all my own cash.
MISS FELLOWES: On what? Whores in the filthy places you took her through?
SHANNON: Miss Charlotte cashed two ten-dollar traveler’s checks because I had spent all the cash I had on me. And I’ve never had to, I’ve certainly never desired to, have relations with whores.
MISS FELLOWES: You took her through ghastly places, such as. . . .
SHANNON: I showed her what she wanted me to show her. Ask her! I showed her San Juan de Letran, I showed her Tenampa and some other places not listed in the Blake Tours brochure. I showed her more than the floating gardens at Xochimilco, Maximilian’s Palace, and the mad Empress Carlotta’s little homesick chapel, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the monument to Juarez, the relics of the Aztec civilization, the sword of Cortez, the headdress of Montezuma. I showed her what she told me she wanted to see. Where is she? Where is Miss . . . oh, down there with the ladies. [He leans over the rail and shouts down.] Charlotte! Charlotte! [Miss Fellowes seizes his arm and thrusts him away from the verandah rail.]
MISS FELLOWES: Don’t you dare!
SHANNON: Dare what?
MISS FELLOWES: Call her, speak to her, go near her, you, you . . . filthy!
[Maxine reappears at the corner of the verandah, with the ceremonial rapidity of a cuckoo bursting from a clock to announce the hour. She just stands there with an incongruous grin, her big eyes unblinking, as if they were painted on her round beaming face. Hannah holds a gold-lacquered Japanese fan motionless but open in one hand; the other hand touches the netting at the cubicle door as if she were checking an impulse to rush to Shannon’s defense. Her attitude has the style of a Kabuki dancer’s pose. Shannon’s manner becomes courtly again.]
SHANNON: Oh, all right, I won’t. I only wanted her to confirm my story that I took her out that night at her request, not at my . . . suggestion. All that I did was offer my services to her when she told me she’d like to see things not listed in the brochure, not usually witnessed by ordinary tourists such as. . . .
MISS FELLOWES: Your hotel bedroom? Later? That too? She came back flea-bitten!
SHANNON: Oh, now, don’t exaggerate, please. Nobody ever got any fleas off Shannon.
MISS FELLOWES: Her clothes had to be fumigated!
SHANNON: I understand your annoyance, but you are going too far when you try to make out that I gave Charlotte fleas. I don’t deny that. . . .
MISS FELLOWES: Wait till they get my report!
SHANNON: I don’t deny that it’s possible to get fleabites on a tour of inspection of what lies under the public surface of cities, off the grand boulevards, away from the night clubs, even away from Diego Rivera’s murals, but. . . .
MISS FELLOWES: Oh, preach that in a pulpit, Reverend Shannon de-frocked!
SHANNON [ominously]: You’ve said that once too often. [He seizes her arm.] This time before witnesses. Miss Jelkes? Miss Jelkes!
[Hannah opens the curtain of her cubicle.]
HANNAH: Yes, Mr. Shannon, what is it?
SHANNON: You heard what this. . . .
MISS FELLOWES: Shannon! Take your hand off my arm!
SHANNON: Miss Jelkes, just tell me, did you hear what she . . . [His voice stops oddly with a choked sobbing sound. He runs at the wall and pounds it with his fists.]
MISS FELLOWES: I spent this entire afternoon and over twenty dollars checking up on this impostor, with long-distance phone calls.
HANNAH: Not impostor—you mustn’t say things like that.
MISS FELLOWES: You were locked out of your church!—for atheism and seducing of girls!
SHANNON [turning about]: In front of God and witnesses, you are lying, lying!
LATTA: Miss Fellowes, I want you to know that Blake Tours was deceived about this character’s background and Blake Tours will see that he is blacklisted from now on at every travel agency in the States.
SHANNON: How about Africa, Asia, Australia? The whole world, Latta, God’s world, has been the range of my travels. I haven’t stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I’ve always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see!—the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never! [The passion of his speech imposes a little stillness.]
LATTA: Go on, lie back in your hammock, that’s all you’re good for, Shannon. [He goes to the top of the path and shouts down the hill.] O.K., let’s get cracking. Get that luggage strapped on top of the bus, we’re moving! [He starts down the hill with Miss Fellowes.]
NONNO [incongruously, from his cubicle]:
How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch. . . .
[Shannon sucks in his breath with an abrupt, fierce sound. He rushes off the verandah and down the path toward the road. Hannah calls after him, with a restraining gesture. Maxine appears on the verandah. Then a great commotion commences below the hill, with shrieks of outrage and squeals of shocked laughter.]
MAXINE [rushing to the path]: Shannon! Shannon! Get back up here, get back up here. Pedro, Pancho, traerme a Shannon. Que está haciendo allí? Oh, my God! Stop him, for God’s sake, somebody stop him!
[Shannon returns, panting and spent. He is followed by Maxine.]
MAXINE: Shannon, go in your room and stay there until that party’s gone.
SHANNON: Don’t give me orders.
MAXINE: You do what I tell you to do or I’ll have you removed—you know where.
SHANNON: Don’t push me, don’t pull at me, Maxine.
MAXINE: All right, do as I say.
SHANNON: Shannon obeys only Shannon.
MAXINE: You’ll sing a different tune if they put you where they put you in ’thirty-six. Remember ’thirty-six, Shannon?
SHANNON: O.K., Maxine, just . . . let me breathe alone, please. I won’t go but I will lie in the . . . hammock.
MAXINE: Go into Fred’s room where I can watch you.
SHANNON: Later, Maxine, not yet.
MAXINE: Why do you always come here to crack up, Shannon?
SHANNON: It’s the hammock, Maxine, the hammock by the rain forest.
MAXINE: Shannon, go in your room and stay there until I get back. Oh, my God, the money. They haven’t paid the mother-grabbin’ bill. I got to go back down there and collect their goddam bill before they. . . . Pancho, vijilalo, entiendes? [She rushes back down the hill, shouting “Hey! Just a minute down there!”]
SHANNON: What did I do? [He shakes his head, stunned.] I don’t know what I did.
[Hannah opens the screen of her cubicle but doesn’t come out. She is softly lighted so that she looks, again, like a medieval sculpture of a saint. Her pale gold hair catches the soft light. She has let it down and still holds the silver-backed brush with which she was brushing it.]
SHANNON: God almighty, I . . . what did I do? I don’t know what I did. [He turns to the Mexican boys who have come back up the path.] Que hice? Que hice?
[There is breathless, spasmodic laughter from the boys as Pancho informs him that he pissed on the ladies’ luggage.]
PANCHO: Tú measte en las maletas de las señoras!
[Shannon tries to laugh with the boys, while they bend double with amusement. Shannon’s laughter dies out in little choked spasms. Down the hill, Maxine’s voice is raised in angry altercation with Jake Latta. Miss Fellowes’ voice is lifted and then there is a general rhubarb to which is added the roar of the bus motor.]
SHANNON: There go my ladies, ha, ha! There go my . . . [He turns about to meet Hannah’s grave, compassionate gaze. He tries to laugh again. She shakes her head with a slight restraining gesture and drops the curtain so that her softly luminous figure is seen as through a mist.] . . . ladies, the last of my—ha, ha!—ladies. [He bends far over the verandah rail, then straightens violently and with an animal outcry begins to pull at the chain suspending the gold cross about his neck. Pancho watches indifferently as the chain cuts the back of Shannon’s neck. Hannah rushes out to him.]
HANNAH: Mr. Shannon, stop that! You’re cutting yourself doing that. That isn’t necessary, so stop it! [to Pancho:] Agarrale las manos! [Pancho makes a halfhearted effort to comply, but Shannon kicks at him and goes on with the furious self-laceration.] Shannon, let me do it, let me take it off you. Can I take it off you? [He drops his arms. She struggles with the clasp of the chain but her fingers are too shaky to work it.]
SHANNON: No, no, it won’t come off, I’ll have to break it off me.
HANNAH: No, no, wait—I’ve got it. [She has now removed it.]
SHANNON: Thanks. Keep it. Goodbye! [He starts toward the path down to the beach.]
HANNAH: Where are you going? What are you going to do?
SHANNON: I’m going swimming. I’m going to swim out to China!
HANNAH: No, no, not tonight, Shannon! Tomorrow . . . tomorrow, Shannon!
[But he divides the trumpet-flowered bushes and passes through them. Hannah rushes after him, screaming for “Mrs. Faulk.” Maxine can be heard shouting for the Mexican boys.]
MAXINE: Muchachos, cojerlo! Atarlo! Esté loco. Traerlo acqui. Catch him, he’s crazy. Bring him back and tie him up!
[In a few moments Shannon is hauled back through the bushes and onto the verandah by Maxine and the boys. They rope him into the hammock. His struggle is probably not much of a real struggle—histrionics mostly. But Hannah stands wringing her hands by the steps as Shannon, gasping for breath, is tied up.]
HANNAH: The ropes are too tight on his chest!
MAXINE: No, they’re not. He’s acting, acting. He likes it! I know this black Irish bastard like nobody ever knowed him, so you keep out of it, honey. He cracks up like this so regular that you can set a calendar by it. Every eighteen months he does it, and twice he’s done it here and I’ve had to pay for his medical care. Now I’m going to call in town to get a doctor to come out here and give him a knockout injection, and if he’s not better tomorrow he’s going into the Casa de Locos again like he did the last time he cracked up on me!
[There is a moment of silence.]
SHANNON: Miss Jelkes?
HANNAH: Yes.
SHANNON: Where are you?
HANNAH: I’m right here behind you. Can I do anything for you?
SHANNON: Sit here where I can see you. Don’t stop talking. I have to fight this panic.
[There is a pause. She moves a chair beside his hammock. The Germans troop up from the beach. They are delighted by the drama that Shannon has provided. In their scanty swimsuits they parade onto the verandah and gather about Shannon’s captive figure as if they were looking at a funny animal in a zoo. Their talk is in German except when they speak directly to Shannon or Hannah. Their heavily handsome figures gleam with oily wetness and they keep chuckling lubriciously.]
HANNAH: Please! Will you be so kind as to leave him alone?
[They pretend not to understand her. Frau Fahrenkopf bends over Shannon in his hammock and speaks to him loudly and slowly in English.]
FRAU FAHRENKOPF: Is this true you make pee-pee all over the suitcases of the ladies from Texas? Hah? Hah? You run down there to the bus and right in front of the ladies you pees all over the luggage of the ladies from Texas?
[Hannah’s indignant protest is drowned in the Rabelaisian laughter of the Germans.]
HERR FAHRENKOPF: Thees is vunderbar, vunderbar! Hah? Thees is a epic gesture! Hah? Thees is the way to demonstrate to ladies that you are a American gentleman! Hah?
[He turns to the others and makes a ribald comment. The two women shriek with amusement, Hilda falling back into the arms of Wolfgang, who catches her with his hands over her almost nude breasts.]
HANNAH [calling out]: Mrs. Faulk! Mrs. Faulk! [She rushes to the verandah angle as Maxine appears there.] Will you please ask these people to leave him alone. They’re tormenting him like an animal in a trap.
[The Germans are already trooping around the verandah, laughing and capering gaily.]
SHANNON [suddenly, in a great shout]: Regression to infantilism, ha, ha, regression to infantilism . . . The infantile protest, ha, ha, ha, the infantile expression of rage at Mama and rage at God and rage at the goddam crib, and rage at the everything, rage at the . . . everything. . . . Regression to infantilism. . . .
[Now all have left but Hannah and Shannon.]
SHANNON: Untie me.
HANNAH: Not yet.
SHANNON: I can’t stand being tied up.
HANNAH: You’ll have to stand it a while.
SHANNON: It makes me panicky.
HANNAH: I know.
SHANNON: A man can die of panic.
HANNAH: Not if he enjoys it as much as you, Mr. Shannon.
[She goes into her cubicle directly behind his hammock. The cubicle is lighted and we see her removing a small teapot and a tin of tea from her suitcase on the cot, then a little alcohol burner. She comes back out with these articles.]
SHANNON: What did you mean by that insulting remark?
HANNAH: What remark, Mr. Shannon?
SHANNON: That I enjoy it.
HANNAH: Oh . . . that.
SHANNON: Yes. That.
HANNAH: That wasn’t meant as an insult, just an observation. I don’t judge people, I draw them. That’s all I do, just draw them, but in order to draw them I have to observe them, don’t I?
SHANNON: And you’ve observed, you think you’ve observed, that I like being tied in this hammock, trussed up in it like a hog being hauled off to the slaughter house, Miss Jelkes.
HANNAH: Who wouldn’t like to suffer and atone for the sins of himself and the world if it could be done in a hammock with ropes instead of nails, on a hill that’s so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, Mr. Shannon? There’s something almost voluptuous in the way that you twist and groan in that hammock—no nails, no blood, no death. Isn’t that a comparatively comfortable, almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer for the guilt of the world, Mr. Shannon?
[She strikes a match to light the alcohol burner. A pure blue jet of flame springs up to cast a flickering, rather unearthly glow on their section of the verandah. The glow is delicately refracted by the subtle, jaded colors of her robe—a robe given to her by a Kabuki actor who posed for her in Japan.]
SHANNON: Why have you turned against me all of a sudden, when I need you the most?
HANNAH: I haven’t turned against you at all, Mr. Shannon. I’m just attempting to give you a character sketch of yourself, in words instead of pastel crayons or charcoal.
SHANNON: You’re certainly suddenly very sure of some New England spinsterish attitudes that I didn’t know you had in you. I thought that you were an emancipated Puritan, Miss Jelkes.
HANNAH: Who is . . . ever . . . completely?
SHANNON: I thought you were sexless but you’ve suddenly turned into a woman. Know how I know that? Because you, not me—not me—are taking pleasure in my tied-up condition. All women, whether they face it or not, want to see a man in a tied-up situation. They work at it all their lives, to get a man in a tied-up situation. Their lives are fulfilled, they’re satisfied at last, when they get a man, or as many men as they can, in the tied-up situation. [Hannah leaves the alcohol burner and teapot and moves to the railing where she grips a verandah post and draws a few deep breaths.] You don’t like this observation of you? The shoe’s too tight for comfort when it’s on your own foot, Miss Jelkes? Some deep breaths again—feeling panic?
HANNAH [recovering and returning to the burner]: I’d like to untie you right now, but let me wait till you’ve passed through your present disturbance. You’re still indulging yourself in your . . . your Passion Play performance. I can’t help observing this self-indulgence in you.
SHANNON: What rotten indulgence?
HANNAH: Well, your busload of ladies from the female college in Texas. I don’t like those ladies any more than you do, but after all, they did save up all year to make this Mexican tour, to stay in stuffy hotels and eat the food they’re used to. They want to be at home away from home, but you . . . you indulged yourself, Mr. Shannon. You did conduct the tour as if it was just for you, for your own pleasure.
SHANNON: Hell, what pleasure—going through hell all the way?
HANNAH: Yes, but comforted, now and then, weren’t you, by the little musical prodigy under the wing of the college vocal instructor?
SHANNON: Funny, ha-ha funny! Nantucket spinsters have their wry humor, don’t they?
HANNAH: Yes, they do. They have to.
SHANNON [becoming progressively quieter under the cool influence of her voice behind him]: I can’t see what you’re up to, Miss Jelkes honey, but I’d almost swear you’re making a pot of tea over there.
HANNAH: That is just what I’m doing.
SHANNON: Does this strike you as the right time for a tea party?
HANNAH: This isn’t plain tea, this is poppy-seed tea.
SHANNON: Are you a slave to the poppy?
HANNAH: It’s a mild, sedative drink that helps you get through nights that are hard for you to get through and I’m making it for my grandfather and myself as well as for you, Mr. Shannon. Because, for all three of us, this won’t be an easy night to get through. Can’t you hear him in his cell number 4, mumbling over and over and over the lines of his new poem? It’s like a blind man climbing a staircase that goes to nowhere, that just falls off into space, and I hate to say what it is. . . . [She draws a few deep breaths behind him.]
SHANNON: Put some hemlock in his poppy-seed tea tonight so he won’t wake up tomorrow for the removal to the Casa de Huéspedes. Do that act of mercy. Put in the hemlock and I will consecrate it, turn it to God’s blood. Hell, if you’ll get me out of this hammock I’ll serve it to him myself, I’ll be your accomplice in this act of mercy. I’ll say, “Take and drink this, the blood of our—”
HANNAH: Stop it! Stop being childishly cruel! I can’t stand for a person that I respect to talk and behave like a small, cruel boy, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: What’ve you found to respect in me, Miss . . . Thin-Standing-Up-Female-Buddha?
HANNAH: I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency and his—
SHANNON: What decency?
HANNAH: Yes, for his decency and his bit of goodness, much more than I respect the lucky ones that just had theirs handed out to them at birth and never afterward snatched away from them by . . . unbearable . . . torments, I. . . .
SHANNON: You respect me?
HANNAH: I do.
SHANNON: But you just said that I’m taking pleasure in a . . . voluptuous crucifixion without nails. A . . . what? . . . painless atonement for the—
HANNAH [cutting in]: Yes, but I think—
SHANNON: Untie me!
HANNAH: Soon, soon. Be patient.
SHANNON: Now!
HANNAH: Not quite yet, Mr. Shannon. Not till I’m reasonably sure that you won’t swim out to China, because, you see, I think you think of the . . . “the long swim to China” as another painless atonement. I mean I don’t think you think you’d be intercepted by sharks and barracudas before you got far past the barrier reef. And I’m afraid you would be. It’s as simple as that, if that is simple.
SHANNON: What’s simple?
HANNAH: Nothing, except for simpletons, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: Do you believe in people being tied up?
HANNAH: Only when they might take the long swim to China.
SHANNON: All right, Miss Thin-Standing-Up-Female-Buddha, just light a Benson and Hedges cigarette for me and put it in my mouth and take it out when you hear me choking on it—if that doesn’t seem to you like another bit of voluptuous self-crucifixion.
HANNAH [looking about the verandah]: I will, but . . . where did I put them?
SHANNON: I have a pack of my own in my pocket.
HANNAH: Which pocket?
SHANNON: I don’t know which pocket, you’ll have to frisk me for it. [She pats his jacket pocket.]
HANNAH: They’re not in your coat pocket.
SHANNON: Then look for them in my pants’ pockets.
[She hesitates to put her hand in his pants’ pockets, for a moment. Hannah has always had a sort of fastidiousness, a reluctance, toward intimate physical contact. But after the momentary fastidious hesitation, she puts her hands in his pants’ pocket and draws out the cigarette pack.]
SHANNON: Now light it for me and put it in my mouth.
[She complies with these directions. Almost at once he chokes and the cigarette is expelled.]
HANNAH: You’ve dropped it on you—where is it?
SHANNON [twisting and lunging about in the hammock]: It’s under me, under me, burning. Untie me, for God’s sake, will you—it’s burning me through my pants!
HANNAH: Raise your hips so I can—
SHANNON: I can’t, the ropes are too tight. Untie me, untieeeee meeeeee!
HANNAH: I’ve found it, I’ve got it!
[But Shannon’s shout has brought Maxine out of her office. She rushes onto the verandah and sits on Shannon’s legs.]
MAXINE: Now hear this, you crazy black Irish mick, you! You Protestant black Irish looney, I’ve called up Lopez, Doc Lopez. Remember him—the man in the dirty white jacket that come here the last time you cracked up here? And hauled you off to the Casa de Locos? Where they threw you into that cell with nothing in it but a bucket and straw and a water pipe? That you crawled up the water pipe? And dropped head-down on the floor and got a concussion? Yeah, and I told him you were back here to crack up again and if you didn’t quiet down here tonight you should be hauled out in the morning.
SHANNON [cutting in, with the honking sound of a panicky goose]: Off, off, off, off, off!
HANNAH: Oh, Mrs. Faulk, Mr. Shannon won’t quiet down till he’s left alone in the hammock.
MAXINE: Then why don’t you leave him alone?
HANNAH: I’m not sitting on him and he . . . has to be cared for by someone.
MAXINE: And the someone is you?
HANNAH: A long time ago, Mrs. Faulk, I had experience with someone in Mr. Shannon’s condition, so I know how necessary it is to let them be quiet for a while.
MAXINE: He wasn’t quiet, he was shouting.
HANNAH: He will quiet down again. I’m preparing a sedative tea for him, Mrs. Faulk.
MAXINE: Yeah, I see. Put it out. Nobody cooks here but the Chinaman in the kitchen.
HANNAH: This is just a little alcohol burner, a spirit lamp, Mrs. Faulk.
MAXINE: I know what it is. It goes out!
[She blows out the flame under the burner.]
SHANNON: Maxine honey? [He speaks quietly now.] Stop persecuting this lady. You can’t intimidate her. A bitch is no match for a lady except in a brass bed, honey, and sometimes not even there.
[The Germans are heard shouting for beer—a case of it to take down to the beach.]
WOLFGANG: Eine Kiste Carta Blanca.
FRAU FAHRENKOPF: Wir haben genug gehabt . . . vielleicht nicht.
HERR FAHRENKOPF: Nein! Niemals genug.
HILDA: Mutter du bist dick . . . aber wir sind es nicht.
SHANNON: Maxine, you’re neglecting your duties as a beerhall waitress. [His tone is deceptively gentle.] They want a case of Carta Blanca to carry down to the beach, so give it to ’em . . . and tonight, when the moon’s gone down, if you’ll let me out of this hammock, I’ll try to imagine you as a . . . as a nymph in her teens.
MAXINE: A fat lot of good you’d be in your present condition.
SHANNON: Don’t be a sexual snob at your age, honey.
MAXINE: Hah! [But the unflattering offer has pleased her realistically modest soul, so she goes back to the Germans.]
SHANNON: Now let me try a bit of your poppy-seed tea, Miss Jelkes.
HANNAH: I ran out of sugar, but I had some ginger, some sugared ginger. [She pours a cup of tea and sips it.] Oh, it’s not well brewed yet, but try to drink some now and the—[She lights the burner again.]—the second cup will be better. [She crouches by the hammock and presses the cup to his lips. He raises his head to sip it, but he gags and chokes.]
SHANNON: Caesar’s ghost!—it could be chased by the witches’ brew from Macbeth.
HANNAH: Yes, I know, it’s still bitter.
[The Germans appear on the wing of the verandah and go trooping down to the beach, for a beer festival and a moonlight swim. Even in the relative dark they have a luminous color, an almost phosphorescent pink and gold color of skin. They carry with them a case of Carta Blanca beer and the fantastically painted rubber horse. On their faces are smiles of euphoria as they move like a dream-image, starting to sing a marching song as they go.]
SHANNON: Fiends out of hell with the . . . voices of . . . angels.
HANNAH: Yes, they call it “the logic of contradictions,” Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON [lunging suddenly forward and undoing the loosened ropes]: Out! Free! Unassisted!
HANNAH: Yes, I never doubted that you could get loose, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: Thanks for your help, anyhow.
HANNAH: Where are you going? [He has crossed to the liquor cart.]
SHANNON: Not far. To the liquor cart to make myself a rum-coco.
HANNAH: Oh. . . .
SHANNON [at the liquor cart]: Coconut? Check. Machete? Check. Rum? Double check! Ice? The ice-bucket’s empty. O.K., it’s a night for warm drinks. Miss Jelkes? Would you care to have your complimentary rum-coco?
HANNAH: No thank you, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: You don’t mind me having mine?
HANNAH: Not at all, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: You don’t disapprove of this weakness, this self-indulgence?
HANNAH: Liquor isn’t your problem, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: What is my problem, Mr. Jelkes?
HANNAH: The oldest one in the world—the need to believe in something or in someone—almost anyone—almost anything . . . something.
SHANNON: Your voice sounds hopeless about it.
HANNAH: No, I’m not hopeless about it. In fact, I’ve discovered something to believe in.
SHANNON: Something like . . . God?
HANNAH: No.
SHANNON: What?
HANNAH: Broken gates between people so they can reach each other, even if it’s just for one night only.
SHANNON: One night stands, huh?
HANNAH: One night . . . communication between them on a verandah outside their . . . separate cubicles, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: You don’t mean physically, do you?
HANNAH: No.
SHANNON: I didn’t think so. Then what?
HANNAH: A little understanding exchanged between them, a wanting to help each other through nights like this.
SHANNON: Who was the someone you told the widow you’d helped long ago to get through a crack-up like this one I’m going through?
HANNAH: Oh . . . that. Myself.
SHANNON: You?
HANNAH: Yes. I can help you because I’ve been through what you are going through now. I had something like your spook—I just had a different name for him. I called him the blue devil, and . . . oh . . . we had quite a battle, quite a contest between us.
SHANNON: Which you obviously won.
HANNAH: I couldn’t afford to lose.
SHANNON: How’d you beat your blue devil?
HANNAH: I showed him that I could endure him and I made him respect my endurance.
SHANNON: How?
HANNAH: Just by, just by . . . enduring. Endurance is something that spooks and blue devils respect. And they respect all the tricks that panicky people use to outlast and outwit their panic.
SHANNON: Like poppy-seed tea?
HANNAH: Poppy-seed tea or rum-cocos or just a few deep breaths. Anything, everything, that we take to give them the slip, and so to keep on going.
SHANNON: To where?
HANNAH: To somewhere like this, perhaps. This verandah over the rain forest and the still-water beach, after long, difficult travels. And I don’t mean just travels about the world, the earth’s surface. I mean . . . subterranean travels, the . . . the journeys that the spooked and bedeviled people are forced to take through the . . . the unlighted sides of their natures.
SHANNON: Don’t tell me you have a dark side to your nature. [He says this sardonically.]
HANNAH: I’m sure I don’t have to tell a man as experienced and knowledgeable as you, Mr. Shannon, that everything has its shadowy side?
[She glances up at him and observes that she doesn’t have his attention. He is gazing tensely at something off the verandah. It is the kind of abstraction, not vague but fiercely concentrated, that occurs in madness. She turns to look where he’s looking. She closes her eyes for a moment and draws a deep breath, then goes on speaking in a voice like a hypnotist’s, as if the words didn’t matter, since he is not listening to her so much as to the tone and the cadence of her voice.]
HANNAH: Everything in the whole solar system has a shadowy side to it except the sun itself—the sun is the single exception. You’re not listening, are you?
SHANNON [as if replying to her]: The spook is in the rain forest. [He suddenly hurls his coconut shell with great violence off the verandah, creating a commotion among the jungle birds.] Good shot—it caught him right on the kisser and his teeth flew out like popcorn from a popper.
HANNAH: Has he gone off—to the dentist?
SHANNON: He’s retreated a little way away for a little while, but when I buzz for my breakfast tomorrow, he’ll bring it in to me with a grin that’ll curdle the milk in the coffee and he’ll stink like a . . . a gringo drunk in a Mexican jail who’s slept all night in his vomit.
HANNAH: If you wake up before I’m out, I’ll bring your coffee in to you . . . if you call me.
SHANNON [His attention returns to her]: No, you’ll be gone, God help me.
HANNAH: Maybe and maybe not. I might think of something tomorrow to placate the widow.
SHANNON: The widow’s implacable, honey.
HANNAH: I think I’ll think of something because I have to. I can’t let Nonno be moved to the Casa de Huéspedes, Mr. Shannon. Not any more than I could let you take the long swim out to China. You know that. Not if I can prevent it, and when I have to be resourceful, I can be very resourceful.
SHANNON: How’d you get over your crack-up?
HANNAH: I never cracked up, I couldn’t afford to. Of course, I nearly did once. I was young once, Mr. Shannon, but I was one of those people who can be young without really having their youth, and not to have your youth when you are young is naturally very disturbing. But I was lucky. My work, this occupational therapy that I gave myself—painting and doing quick character sketches—made me look out of myself, not in, and gradually, at the far end of the tunnel that I was struggling out of I began to see this faint, very faint gray light—the light of the world outside me—and I kept climbing toward it. I had to.
SHANNON: Did it stay a gray light?
HANNAH: No, no, it turned white.
SHANNON: Only white, never gold?
HANNAH: No, it stayed only white, but white is a very good light to see at the end of a long black tunnel you thought would be never-ending, that only God or Death could put a stop to, especially when you . . . since I was . . . far from sure about God.
SHANNON: You’re still unsure about him?
HANNAH: Not as unsure as I was. You see, in my profession I have to look hard and close at human faces in order to catch something in them before they get restless and call out, “Waiter, the check, we’re leaving.” Of course sometimes, a few times, I just see blobs of wet dough that pass for human faces, with bits of jelly for eyes. Then I cue in Nonno to give a recitation, because I can’t draw such faces. But those aren’t the usual faces, I don’t think they’re even real. Most times I do see something, and I can catch it—I can, like I caught something in your face when I sketched you this afternoon with your eyes open. Are you still listening to me? [He crouches beside her chair, looking up at her intently.] In Shanghai, Shannon, there is a place that’s called the House for the Dying—the old and penniless dying, whose younger, penniless living children and grandchildren take them there for them to get through with their dying on pallets, on straw mats. The first time I went there it shocked me, I ran away from it. But I came back later and I saw that their children and grandchildren and the custodians of the place had put little comforts beside their death-pallets, little flowers and opium candies and religious emblems. That made me able to stay to draw their dying faces. Sometimes only their eyes were still alive, but, Mr. Shannon, those eyes of the penniless dying with those last little comforts beside them, I tell you, Mr. Shannon, those eyes looked up with their last dim life left in them as clear as the stars in the Southern Cross, Mr. Shannon. And now . . . now I am going to say something to you that will sound like something that only the spinster granddaughter of a minor romantic poet is likely to say. . . . Nothing I’ve ever seen has seemed as beautiful to me, not even the view from this verandah between the sky and the still-water beach, and lately . . . lately my grandfather’s eyes have looked up at me like that. . . . [She rises abruptly and crosses to the front of the verandah.] Tell me, what is that sound I keep hearing down there?
SHANNON: There’s a marimba band at the cantina on the beach.
HANNAH: I don’t mean that, I mean that scraping, scuffling sound that I keep hearing under the verandah.
SHANNON: Oh, that. The Mexican boys that work here have caught an iguana and tied it up under the verandah, hitched it to a post, and naturally of course it’s trying to scramble away. But it’s got to the end of its rope, and get any further it cannot. Ha-ha—that’s it. [He quotes from Nonno’s poem: “And still the orange,” etc.] Do you have any life of your own—besides your water colors and sketches and your travels with Grampa?
HANNAH: We make a home for each other, my grandfather and I. Do you know what I mean by a home? I don’t mean a regular home. I mean I don’t mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don’t regard a home as a . . . well, as a place, a building . . . a house . . . of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can . . . well, nest—rest—live in, emotionally speaking. Does that make any sense to you, Mr. Shannon?
SHANNON: Yeah, complete. But. . . .
HANNAH: Another incomplete sentence.
SHANNON: We better leave it that way. I might’ve said something to hurt you.
HANNAH: I’m not thin skinned, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: No, well, then, I’ll say it. . . . [He moves to the liquor cart.] When a bird builds a nest to rest in and live in, it doesn’t build it in a . . . a falling-down tree.
HANNAH: I’m not a bird, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: I was making an analogy, Miss Jelkes.
HANNAH: I thought you were making yourself another rum-coco, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: Both. When a bird builds a nest, it builds it with an eye for the . . . the relative permanence of the location, and also for the purpose of mating and propagating its species.
HANNAH: I still say that I’m not a bird, Mr. Shannon, I’m a human being and when a member of that fantastic species builds a nest in the heart of another, the question of permanence isn’t the first or even the last thing that’s considered . . . necessarily? . . . always? Nonno and I have been continually reminded of the impermanence of things lately. We go back to a hotel where we’ve been many times before and it isn’t there any more. It’s been demolished and there’s one of those glassy, brassy new ones. Or if the old one’s still there, the manager or the maître d’ who always welcomed us back so cordially before has been replaced by someone new who looks at us with suspicion.
SHANNON: Yeah, but you still had each other.
HANNAH: Yes. We did.
SHANNON: But when the old gentleman goes?
HANNAH: Yes?
SHANNON: What will you do? Stop?
HANNAH: Stop or go on . . . probably go on.
SHANNON: Alone? Checking into hotels alone, eating alone at tables for one in a corner, the tables waiters call aces.
HANNAH: Thank you for your sympathy, Mr. Shannon, but in my profession I’m obliged to make quick contacts with strangers who turn to friends very quickly.
SHANNON: Customers aren’t friends.
HANNAH: They turn to friends, if they’re friendly.
SHANNON: Yeah, but how will it seem to be traveling alone after so many years of traveling with. . . .
HANNAH: I will know how it feels when I feel it—and don’t say alone as if nobody had ever gone on alone. For instance, you.
SHANNON: I’ve always traveled with trainloads, planeloads and busloads of tourists.
HANNAH: That doesn’t mean you’re still not really alone.
SHANNON: I never fail to make an intimate connection with someone in my parties.
HANNAH: Yes, the youngest young lady, and I was on the verandah this afternoon when the latest of these young ladies gave a demonstration of how lonely the intimate connection has always been for you. The episode in the cold, inhuman hotel room, Mr. Shannon, for which you despise the lady almost as much as you despise yourself. Afterward you are so polite to the lady that I’m sure it must chill her to the bone, the scrupulous little attentions that you pay her in return for your little enjoyment of her. The gentleman-of-Virginia act that you put on for her, your noblesse oblige treatment of her . . . Oh no, Mr. Shannon, don’t kid yourself that you ever travel with someone. You have always traveled alone except for your spook, as you call it. He’s your traveling companion. Nothing, nobody else has traveled with you.
SHANNON: Thank you for your sympathy, Miss Jelkes.
HANNAH: You’re welcome, Mr. Shannon. And now I think I had better warm up the poppy-seed tea for Nonno. Only a good night’s sleep could make it possible for him to go on from here tomorrow.
SHANNON: Yes, well, if the conversation is over—I think I’ll go down for a swim now.
HANNAH: To China?
SHANNON: No, not to China, just to the little island out here with the sleepy bar on it . . . called the Cantina Serena.
HANNAH: Why?
SHANNON: Because I’m not a nice drunk and I was about to ask you a not nice question.
HANNAH: Ask it. There’s no set limit on questions here tonight.
SHANNON: And no set limit on answers?
HANNAH: None I can think of between you and me, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: That I will take you up on.
HANNAH: Do.
SHANNON: It’s a bargain.
HANNAH: Only do lie back down in the hammock and drink a full cup of the poppy-seed tea this time. It’s warmer now and the sugared ginger will make it easier to get down.
SHANNON: All right. The question is this: have you never had in your life any kind of a lovelife? [Hannah stiffens for a moment.] I thought you said there was no limit set on questions.
HANNAH: We’ll make a bargain—I will answer your question after you’ve had a full cup of the poppy-seed tea so you’ll be able to get the good night’s sleep you need, too. It’s fairly warm now and the sugared ginger’s made it much more—[She sips the cup.]—palatable.
SHANNON: You think I’m going to drift into dreamland so you can welch on the bargain? [He accepts the cup from her.]
HANNAH: I’m not a welcher on bargains. Drink it all. All. All!
SHANNON [with a disgusted grimace as he drains the cup]: Great Caesar’s ghost. [He tosses the cup off the verandah and falls into the hammock, chuckling.] The Oriental idea of a Mickey Finn, huh? Sit down where I can see you, Miss Jelkes honey. [She sits down in a straight-back chair, some distance from the hammock.] Where I can see you! I don’t have an X-ray eye in the back of my head, Miss Jelkes. [She moves the chair alongside the hammock.] Further, further, up further. [She complies.] There now. Answer the question now, Miss Jelkes honey.
HANNAH: Would you mind repeating the question.
SHANNON [slowly, with emphasis]: Have you never had in all of your life and your travels any experience, any encounter, with what Larry-the-crackpot Shannon thinks of as a lovelife?
HANNAH: There are . . . worse things than chastity, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: Yeah, lunacy and death are both a little worse, maybe! But chastity isn’t a thing that a beautiful woman or an attractive man falls into like a booby trap or an overgrown gopher hole, is it? [There is a pause.] I still think you are welching on the bargain and I. . . . [He starts out of the hammock]
HANNAH: Mr. Shannon, this night is just as hard for me to get through as it is for you to get through. But it’s you that are welching on the bargain, you’re not staying in the hammock. Lie back down in the hammock. Now. Yes. Yes, I have had two experiences, well, encounters, with. . . .
SHANNON: Two, did you say?
HANNAH: Yes, I said two. And I wasn’t exaggerating and don’t you say “fantastic” before I’ve told you both stories. When I was sixteen, your favorite age, Mr. Shannon, each Saturday afternoon my grandfather Nonno would give me thirty cents, my allowance, my pay for my secretarial and housekeeping duties. Twenty-five cents for admission to the Saturday matinee at the Nantucket movie theatre and five cents extra for a bag of popcorn, Mr. Shannon. I’d sit at the almost empty back of the movie theatre so that the popcorn munching wouldn’t disturb the other movie patrons. Well . . . one afternoon a young man sat down beside me and pushed his . . . knee against mine and . . . I moved over two seats but he moved over beside me and continued this . . . pressure! I jumped up and screamed, Mr. Shannon. He was arrested for molesting a minor.
SHANNON: Is he still in the Nantucket jail?
HANNAH: No. I got him out. I told the police that it was a Clara Bow picture—it was a Clara Bow picture—and I was just overexcited.
SHANNON: Fantastic.
HANNAH: Yes, very! The second experience is much more recent, only two years ago, when Nonno and I were operating at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, and doing very well there, making expenses and more. One evening in the Palm Court of the Raffles we met this middle-aged, sort of nondescript Australian salesman. You know—plump, bald-spotted, with a bad attempt at speaking with an upper-class accent and terribly overfriendly. He was alone and looked lonely. Grandfather said him a poem and I did a quick character sketch that was shamelessly flattering of him. He paid me more than my usual asking price and gave my grandfather five Malayan dollars, yes, and he even purchased one of my water colors. Then it was Nonno’s bedtime. The Aussie salesman asked me out in a sampan with him. Well, he’d been so generous . . . I accepted. I did, I accepted. Grandfather went up to bed and I went out in the sampan with this ladies’ underwear salesman. I noticed that he became more and more. . . .
SHANNON: What?
HANNAH: Well . . . agitated . . . as the afterglow of the sunset faded out on the water. [She laughs with a delicate sadness.] Well, finally, eventually, he leaned toward me . . . we were vis-à-vis in the sampan . . . and he looked intensely, passionately into my eyes. [She laughs again.] And he said to me: “Miss Jelkes? Will you do me a favor? Will you do something for me?” “What?” said I. “Well,” said he, “if I turn my back, if I look the other way, will you take off some piece of your clothes and let me hold it, just hold it?”
SHANNON: Fantastic!
HANNAH: Then he said, “It will just take a few seconds.” “Just a few seconds for what?” I asked him. [She gives the same laugh again.] He didn’t say for what, but. . . .
SHANNON: His satisfaction?
HANNAH: Yes.
SHANNON: What did you do—in a situation like that?
HANNAH: I . . . gratified his request, I did! And he kept his promise. He did keep his back turned till I said ready and threw him . . . the part of my clothes.
SHANNON: What did he do with it?
HANNAH: He didn’t move, except to seize the article he’d requested. I looked the other way while his satisfaction took place.
SHANNON: Watch out for commercial travelers in the Far East. Is that the moral, Miss Jelkes honey?
HANNAH: Oh, no, the moral is Oriental. Accept whatever situation you cannot improve.
SHANNON: “When it’s inevitable, lean back and enjoy it—is that it?
HANNAH: He’d bought a water color. The incident was embarrassing, not violent. I left and returned unmolested. Oh, and the funniest part of all is that when we got back to the Raffles Hotel, he took the piece of apparel out of his pocket like a bashful boy producing an apple for his schoolteacher and tried to slip it into my hand in the elevator. I wouldn’t accept it. I whispered, “Oh, please keep it, Mr. Willoughby!” He’d paid the asking price for my water color and somehow the little experience had been rather touching, I mean it was so lonely, out there in the sampan with violet streaks in the sky and this little middle-aged Australian making sounds like he was dying of asthma! And the planet Venus coming serenely out of a fair-weather cloud, over the Strait of Malacca. . . .
SHANNON: And that experience . . . you call that a. . . .
HANNAH: A love experience? Yes. I do call it one.
[He regards her with incredulity, peering into her face so closely that she is embarrassed and becomes defensive.]
SHANNON: That, that . . . sad, dirty little episode, you call it a . . . ?
HANNAH [cutting in sharply]: Sad it certainly was—for the odd little man—but why do you call it “dirty”?
SHANNON: How did you feel when you went into your bedroom?
HANNAH: Confused, I . . . a little confused, I suppose. . . . I’d known about loneliness—but not that degree or . . . depth of it.
SHANNON: You mean it didn’t disgust you?
HANNAH: Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, violent. And I told you how gentle he was—apologetic, shy, and really very, well, delicate about it. However, I do grant you it was on the rather fantastic level.
SHANNON: You’re. . . .
HANNAH: I am what? “Fantastic”?
[While they have been talking, Nonno’s voice has been heard now and then, mumbling, from his cubicle. Suddenly it becomes loud and clear.]
NONNO:
And finally the broken stem,
The plummeting to earth and then. . . .
[His voice subsides to its mumble. Shannon, standing behind Hannah, places his hand on her throat.]
HANNAH: What is that for? Are you about to strangle me, Mr. Shannon?
SHANNON: You can’t stand to be touched?
HANNAH: Save it for the widow. It isn’t for me.
SHANNON: Yes, you’re right. [He removes his hand.] I could do it with Mrs. Faulk, the inconsolable widow, but I couldn’t with you.
HANNAH [dryly and lightly]: Spinster’s loss, widow’s gain, Mr. Shannon.
SHANNON: Or widow’s loss, spinster’s gain. Anyhow it sounds like some old parlor game in a Virginia or Nantucket Island parlor. But . . . I wonder something. . . .
HANNAH: What do you wonder?
SHANNON: If we couldn’t . . . travel together, I mean just travel together?
HANNAH: Could we? In your opinion?
SHANNON: Why not, I don’t see why not.
HANNAH: I think the impracticality of the idea will appear much clearer to you in the morning, Mr. Shannon. [She folds her dimly gold-lacquered fan and rises from her chair.] Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level. . . . Good night, Mr. Shannon. I have to pack before I’m too tired to.
SHANNON: Don’t leave me out here alone yet.
HANNAH: I have to pack now so I can get up at daybreak and try my luck in the plaza.
SHANNON: You won’t sell a water color or sketch in that blazing hot plaza tomorrow. Miss Jelkes honey, I don’t think you’re operating on the realistic level.
HANNAH: Would I be if I thought we could travel together?
SHANNON: I still don’t see why we couldn’t.
HANNAH: Mr. Shannon, you’re not well enough to travel anywhere with anybody right now. Does that sound cruel of me?
SHANNON: You mean that I’m stuck here for good? Winding up with the . . . inconsolable widow?
HANNAH: We all wind up with something or with someone, and if it’s someone instead of just something, we’re lucky, perhaps . . . unusually lucky. [She starts to enter her cubicle, then turns to him again in the doorway.] Oh, and tomorrow. . . . [She touches her forehead as if a little confused as well as exhausted.]
SHANNON: What about tomorrow?
HANNAH [with difficulty]: I think it might be better, tomorrow, if we avoid showing any particular interest in each other, because Mrs. Faulk is a morbidly jealous woman.
SHANNON: Is she?
HANNAH: Yes, she seems to have misunderstood our . . . sympathetic interest in each other. So I think we’d better avoid any more long talks on the verandah. I mean till she’s thoroughly reassured it might be better if we just say good morning or good night to each other.
SHANNON: We don’t even have to say that.
HANNAH: I will, but you don’t have to answer.
SHANNON [savagely]: How about wall-tappings between us by way of communication? You know, like convicts in separate cells communicate with each other by tapping on the walls of the cells? One tap: I’m here. Two taps: are you there? Three taps: yes, I am. Four taps: that’s good, we’re together. Christ! . . . Here, take this. [He snatches the gold cross from his pocket.] Take my gold cross and hock it, it’s 22-carat gold.
HANNAH: What do you, what are you . . . ?
SHANNON: There’s a fine amethyst in it, it’ll pay your travel expenses back to the States.
HANNAH: Mr. Shannon, you’re making no sense at all now.
SHANNON: Neither are you, Miss Jelkes, talking about tomorrow, and. . . .
HANNAH: All I was saying was. . . .
SHANNON: You won’t be here tomorrow! Had you forgotten you won’t be here tomorrow?
HANNAH [with a slight, shocked laugh]: Yes, I had, I’d forgotten!
SHANNON: The widow wants you out and out you’ll go, even if you sell your water colors like hotcakes to the pariah dogs in the plaza. [He stares at her, shaking his head hopelessly.]
HANNAH: I suppose you’re right, Mr. Shannon. I must be too tired to think or I’ve contracted your fever. . . . It had actually slipped my mind for a moment that—
NONNO [abruptly, from his cubicle]: Hannah!
HANNAH [rushing to his door]: Yes, what is it, Nonno? [He doesn’t hear her and repeats her name louder.] Here I am, I’m here.
NONNO: Don’t come in yet, but stay where I can call you.
HANNAH: Yes, I’ll hear you, Nonno. [She turns toward Shannon, drawing a deep breath.]
SHANNON: Listen, if you don’t take this gold cross that I never want on me again, I’m going to pitch it off the verandah at the spook in the rain forest. [He raises an arm to throw it, but she catches his arm to restrain him.]
HANNAH: All right, Mr. Shannon, I’ll take it, I’ll hold it for you.
SHANNON: Hock it, honey, you’ve got to.
HANNAH: Well, if I do, I’ll mail the pawn ticket to you so you can redeem it, because you’ll want it again, when you’ve gotten over your fever. [She moves blindly down the verandah and starts to enter the wrong cubicle.]
SHANNON: That isn’t your cell, you went past it. [His voice is gentle again.]
HANNAH: I did, I’m sorry. I’ve never been this tired in all my life. [She turns to face him again. He stares into her face. She looks blindly out, past him.] Never! [There is a slight pause.] What did you say is making that constant, dry, scuffling sound beneath the verandah?
SHANNON: I told you.
HANNAH: I didn’t hear you.
SHANNON: I’ll get my flashlight, I’ll show you. [He lurches rapidly into his cubicle and back out with a flashlight.] It’s an iguana. I’ll show you. . . . See? The iguana? At the end of its rope? Trying to go on past the end of its goddam rope? Like you! Like me! Like Grampa with his last poem!
[In the pause which follows singing is heard from the beach.]
HANNAH: What is a—what—iguana?
SHANNON: It’s a kind of lizard—a big one, a giant one. The Mexican kids caught it and tied it up.
HANNAH: Why did they tie it up?
SHANNON: Because that’s what they do. They tie them up and fatten them up and then eat them up, when they’re ready for eating. They’re a delicacy. Taste like white meat of chicken. At least the Mexicans think so. And also the kids, the Mexican kids, have a lot of fun with them, poking out their eyes with sticks and burning their tails with matches. You know? Fun? Like that?
HANNAH: Mr. Shannon, please go down and cut it loose!
SHANNON: I can’t do that.
HANNAH: Why can’t you?
SHANNON: Mrs. Faulk wants to eat it. I’ve got to please Mrs. Faulk, I am at her mercy. I am at her disposal.
HANNAH: I don’t understand. I mean I don’t understand how anyone could eat a big lizard.
SHANNON: Don’t be so critical. If you got hungry enough you’d eat it too. You’d be surprised what people will eat if hungry. There’s a lot of hungry people still in the world. Many have died of starvation, but a lot are still living and hungry, believe you me, if you will take my word for it. Why, when I was conducting a party of—ladies?—yes, ladies . . . through a country that shall be nameless but in this world, we were passing by rubberneck bus along a tropical coast when we saw a great mound of . . . well, the smell was unpleasant. One of my ladies said, “Oh, Larry, what is that?” My name being Lawrence, the most familiar ladies sometimes call me Larry. I didn’t use the four letter word for what the great mound was. I didn’t think it was necessary to say it. Then she noticed, and I noticed too, a pair of very old natives of this nameless country, practically naked except for a few filthy rags, creeping and crawling about this mound of . . . and . . . occasionally stopping to pick something out of it, and pop it into their mouths. What? Bits of undigested . . . food particles, Miss Jelkes. [There is silence for a moment. She makes a gagging sound in her throat and rushes the length of the verandah to the wooden steps and disappears for a while. Shannon continues, to himself and the moon.] Now why did I tell her that? Because it’s true? That’s no reason to tell her, because it’s true. Yeah. Because it’s true was a good reason not to tell her. Except . . . I think I first faced it in that nameless country. The gradual, rapid, natural, unnatural—predestined, accidental—cracking up and going to pieces of young Mr. T. Lawrence Shannon, yes, still young Mr. T. Lawrence Shannon, by which rapid-slow process . . . his final tour of ladies through tropical countries. . . . Why did I say “tropical”? Hell! Yes! It’s always been tropical countries I took ladies through. Does that, does that—huh?—signify something, I wonder? Maybe. Fast decay is a thing of hot climates, steamy, hot, wet climates, and I run back to them like a. . . . Incomplete sentence. . . . Always seducing a lady or two, or three or four or five ladies in the party, but really ravaging her first by pointing out to her the—what?—horrors? Yes, horrors!—of the tropical country being conducted a tour through. My . . . brain’s going out now, like a failing—power. . . . So I stay here, I reckon, and live off la patrona for the rest of my life. Well, she’s old enough to predecease me. She could check out of here first, and I imagine that after a couple of years of having to satisfy her I might be prepared for the shock of her passing on. . . . Cruelty . . . pity. What is it? . . . Don’t know, all I know is. . . .
HANNAH: [from below the verandah]: You’re talking to yourself.
SHANNON: No. To you. I knew you could hear me out there, but not being able to see you I could say it easier, you know . . . ?
NONNO:
A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould. . . .
HANNAH [coming back onto the verandah]: I took a closer look at the iguana down there.
SHANNON: You did? How did you like it? Charming? Attractive?
HANNAH: No, it’s not an attractive creature. Nevertheless I think it should be cut loose.
SHANNON: Iguanas have been known to bite their tails off when they’re tied up by their tails.
HANNAH: This one is tied by its throat. It can’t bite its own head off to escape from the end of the rope, Mr. Shannon. Can you look at me and tell me truthfully that you don’t know it’s able to feel pain and panic?
SHANNON: You mean it’s one of God’s creatures?
HANNAH: If you want to put it that way, yes, it is. Mr. Shannon, will you please cut it loose, set it free? Because if you don’t, I will.
SHANNON: Can you look at me and tell me truthfully that this reptilian creature, tied up down there, doesn’t mostly disturb you because of its parallel situation to your Grampa’s dying-out effort to finish one last poem, Miss Jelkes?
HANNAH: Yes, I. . . .
SHANNON: Never mind completing that sentence. We’ll play God tonight like kids play house with old broken crates and boxes. All right? Now Shannon is going to go down there with his machete and cut the damn lizard loose so it can run back to its bushes because God won’t do it and we are going to play God here.
HANNAH: I knew you’d do that. And I thank you.
[Shannon goes down the two steps from the verandah with the machete. He crouches beside the cactus that hides the iguana and cuts the rope with a quick, hard stroke of the machete. He turns to look after its flight, as the low, excited mumble in cubicle 3 grows louder. Then Nonno’s voice turns to a sudden shout.]
NONNO: Hannah! Hannah! [She rushes to him, as he wheels himself out of his cubicle onto the verandah.]
HANNAH: Grandfather! What is it?
NONNO: I! believe! it! is! finished! Quick, before I forget it—pencil, paper! Quick! please! Ready?
HANNAH: Yes. All ready, Grandfather.
NONNO [in a loud, exalted voice]:
How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.
A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then
An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth’s obscene, corrupting love.
And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?
Have you got it?
HANNAH: Yes!
NONNO: All of it?
HANNAH: Every word of it.
NONNO: It is finished?
HANNAH: Yes.
NONNO: Oh! God! Finally finished?
HANNAH: Yes, finally finished. [She is crying. The singing voices flow up from the beach.]
NONNO: After waiting so long!
HANNAH: Yes, we waited so long.
NONNO: And it’s good! It is good?
HANNAH: It’s—it’s. . . .
NONNO: What?
HANNAH: Beautiful, Grandfather! [She springs up, a fist to her mouth.] Oh, Grandfather, I am so happy for you. Thank you for writing such a lovely poem! It was worth the long wait. Can you sleep now, Grandfather?
NONNO: You’ll have it typewritten tomorrow?
HANNAH: Yes. I’ll have it typed up and send it off to Harper’s.
NONNO: Hah? I didn’t hear that, Hannah.
HANNAH [shouting]: I’ll have it typed up tomorrow, and mail it to Harper’s tomorrow! They’ve been waiting for it a long time, too! You know!
NONNO: Yes, I’d like to pray now.
HANNAH: Good night. Sleep now, Grandfather. You’ve finished your loveliest poem.
NONNO [faintly, drifting off]: Yes, thanks and praise . . .
[Maxine comes around the front of the verandah, followed by Pedro playing a harmonica softly. She is prepared for a night swim, a vividly striped towel thrown over her shoulders. It is apparent that the night’s progress has mellowed her spirit: her face wears a faint smile which is suggestive of those cool, impersonal, all-comprehending smiles on the carved heads of Egyptian or Oriental dieties. Bearing a rum-coco, she approaches the hammock, discovers it empty, the ropes on the floor, and calls softly to Pedro.]
MAXINE: Shannon ha escapade! [Pedro goes on playing dreamily. She throws back her head and shouts.] SHANNON! [The call is echoed by the hill beyond. Pedro advances a few steps and points under the verandah.]
PEDRO: Miré. Allé ’hasta Shannon.
[Shannon comes into view from below the verandah, the severed rope and machete dangling from his hands.]
MAXINE: What are you doing down there, Shannon?
SHANNON: I cut loose one of God’s creatures at the end of the rope.
[Hannah, who has stood motionless with closed eyes behind the wicker chair, goes quietly toward the cubicles and out of the moon’s glare.]
MAXINE [tolerantly]: What’d you do that for, Shannon.
SHANNON: So that one of God’s creatures could scramble home safe and free. . . . A little act of grace, Maxine.
MAXINE [smiling a bit more definitely]: C’mon up here, Shannon. I want to talk to you.
SHANNON [starting to climb onto the verandah, as Maxine rattles the ice in the coconut shell]: What d’ya want to talk about, Widow Faulk?
MAXINE: Let’s go down and swim in that liquid moonlight.
SHANNON: Where did you pick up that poetic expression?
[Maxine glances back at Pedro and dismisses him with, “Vamos.” He leaves with a shrug, the harmonica fading out.]
MAXINE: Shannon, I want you to stay with me.
SHANNON [taking the rum-coco from her]: You want a drinking companion?
MAXINE: No, I just want you to stay here, because I’m alone here now and I need somebody to help me manage the place.
[Hannah strikes a match for a cigarette.]
SHANNON [looking toward her]: I want to remember that face. I won’t see it again.
MAXINE: Let’s go down to the beach.
SHANNON: I can make it down the hill, but not back up.
MAXINE: I’ll get you back up the hill. [They have started off now, toward the path down through the rain forest.] I’ve got five more years, maybe ten, to make this place attractive to the male clientele, the middle-aged ones at least. And you can take care of the women that are with them. That’s what you can do, you know that, Shannon.
[He chuckles happily. They are now on the path, Maxine half leading half supporting him. Their voices fade as Hannah goes into Nonno’s cubicle and comes back with a shawl, her cigarette left inside. She pauses between the door and the wicker chair and speaks to herself and the sky.]
HANNAH: Oh, God, can’t we stop now? Finally? Please let us. It’s so quiet here, now.
[She starts to put the shawl about Nonno, but at the same moment his head drops to the side. With a soft intake of breath, she extends a hand before his mouth to see if he is still breathing. He isn’t. In a panicky moment, she looks right and left for someone to call to. There’s no one. Then she bends to press her head to the crown of Nonno’s and the curtain starts to descend.]
THE END
NAZI MARCHING SONG
Heute wollen wir ein Liedlein singen,
Trinken wollen wir den kuehlen Wein;
Und die Glaeser sollen dazu klingen,
Denn es muss, es muss geschieden sein.
Gib’ mir deine Hand,
Deine weisse Hand,
Leb’wohl, mein Schatz, leb’wohl, mein Schatz
Lebe wohl, lebe wohl,
Denn wir fahren. Boom! Boom!
Denn wir fahren. Boom! Boom!
Denn wir fahren gegen Engelland. Boom! Boom!
Let’s sing a little song today,
And drink some cool wine;
The glasses should be ringing
Since we must, we must part.
Give me your hand,
Your white hand,
Farewell, my love, farewell,
Farewell, farewell,
Since we’re going—
Since we’re going—
Since we’re going against England.