“Okay, then,” he said. “Sleep well.”
She was scrupulously careful to avoid any suggestion of wanting to be a ‘star’ as the second night’s performance got under way. She took pains to be considerate of all the minor actors, and she almost wanted to evaporate in her scenes alone with Julie Pierce, so that Julie could get the most out of whatever it was that Julie wanted to do. All this, she kept telling herself, all this would soon be over.
But when she walked into the wings at the end of Scene Three, Jack Halloran intercepted her with an imploring look, incongruously dressed in Stanley Kowalski’s bowling shirt.
“Listen, dear,” he said. “Don’t get mad at me, but listen. You’re going off in the opposite direction this time. You’re too subdued out there; you’re too remote. And we may get away with it in these early scenes, but the point is you’ve gotta start pulling out the stops pretty soon, Lucy, or we’re not gonna have any show at all tonight. You follow me?”
And she followed him. He was the director; he’d never been wrong before; and she’d spent most of this day regretting that she hadn’t gone up to the dorm with him last night.
It was all a matter of balance – of going far but not too far – and Lucy was almost sure she achieved the right balance in the rest of that second performance.
But then she had to find ways of getting through the third night, and the fourth and the fifth – and sometimes the final curtain would fall before there was time for her to tell whether she’d achieved the right balance or not. Certain nights were better than others – she knew that – but by the end of the week she could no longer sort them out; couldn’t remember which were which.
Her most vivid memory, when it was all over, was of going out for the curtain call with Jack after the final performance, and of holding hands for the people one last time. She wouldn’t forget knowing she had better be happy to take this applause – stand here and take it however it came – because it was something that would never happen again.
Jack didn’t have much to say to her backstage that night except that she’d done very well. Then he said “Oh, and listen, the kids’re throwing a little party up in the dorm later on. Can you make that? Say about an hour from now?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Well, look, I’ve gotta stay here and help ’em get started tearing down some of this stuff. You want to take the flashlight?”
“No, that’s okay.” And she assured him, meaning it as a wry little joke, that she was used to walking home alone in the dark.
The party, as she could have predicted, was less a celebration than a nice try. Jack seemed glad to see her there and so did Julie Pierce; so, too, did most others among the oddly assorted people she had come to think of as “the kids” – and several of them, carefully holding cans of beer or paper cups of wine, wanted to tell her what a pleasure it had been to know her this summer. From the sound of her own voice in repaying those compliments, Lucy knew she was doing pretty well; she was holding up nicely.
But she ached with tiredness. She wanted to go home and sleep – this whole damned summer had robbed her of privacy and silence – still, she knew it might look rude if she left early.
For what seemed half an hour she stood in a shadowed section of the room and watched Jack and Julie talking quietly together. It was only reasonable that they’d have things to discuss: Julie’s New York audition would be coming up soon, and Jack would be in the city too, looking first for an apartment and then for whatever work he could find. (“I always try to spend as much time as I can in New York,” he’d explained once, “because that’s where the – you know – that’s where the theater is.”)
But when Lucy found she was trying not to watch them talk – when she’d begun willing herself to look into all other parts of the big room before allowing her eyes to go back to them, briefly and almost furtively – she knew it was time to get out of here.
She went around to all the people who’d been nice to her and wished them goodnight and good luck, and three or four of them kissed her cheek. Then she went up to Jack, who said “I’ll give you a call tomorrow, dear, okay?” and to Julie Pierce, who told her she’d been “wonderful.”
The next morning she drove into White Plains – it was the only town for miles around that had decent department stores – and there she bought two handsome, identical, dark-tan suitcases that cost a hundred and fifty dollars apiece.
When she’d brought them home she hid them away in her bedroom closet, so that Laura wouldn’t find them and ask questions; then she settled herself in the living room and began to wait for Jack to call.
When the phone rang she sprang for it, but it was Pat Nelson.
“Lucy? I’ve been trying to call you all week but you’re never home. Listen, we really enjoyed the play. You were very impressive.”
“Oh, well, thanks, Pat, that’s – very kind.”
“Oh, and listen, Lucy.” Pat lowered her voice to a husky murmur of girlish confidence. “This Jack Halloran of yours is really something. He’s adorable. Will you bring him over to the house sometime?”
There was no call from the Maitlands, and Lucy supposed it had been foolish to imagine they would squander a nonunion carpenter’s pay on theater tickets – let alone on tickets for some dumb little summer-stock theater that nobody ever heard of.
That afternoon she stood at the window to watch a straggling procession of New Tonapac Playhouse people setting out on the long walk to the train station. And from this distance they all did look like kids – boys and girls from far and wide with their cheap hand luggage and their Army duffel bags, brave entertainers who might travel for years before it occurred to them, or to most of them, that they weren’t going anywhere.
Julie Pierce was not among them – but then, nobody would have expected her to be. Julie had undoubtedly chosen to stay here a day or two more, to get some rest for her celebrated nerves and begin to regain the strength she would need in meeting the challenges of a real career.
Then at dusk the phone rang again.
“Lucy? This is Harold Smith?” Some people always spoke their names in the form of a question, as if you might not think them worthy of a statement. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he began, “because I haven’t quite recovered yet, but Nancy and I thought you were absolutely marvelous. We were overwhelmed.”
“Well, that’s – awfully nice of you, Harold.”
“Isn’t it the damndest thing,” he said, “how you can live across the yard from somebody for years, be on friendly terms and all that, and never even know who they are? Oh, listen, I’m saying this all wrong and I knew I would; all I’m trying to do is convey our – our very great admiration, Lucy, and our thanks. For what you gave us.”
She said that was the nicest thing she’d heard in a long time; then, shyly, she asked him which performance they had seen.
“We saw it twice – the first night, and then again the night before last. And I couldn’t begin to make comparisons because they were both tremendous; both great.”
“Well, actually,” she said, “I was told I sort of overdid everything on that first night. I was sort of told I’d embarrassed people by trying to be a ‘star’ or something.”
“Ah, that’s crazy,” he said impatiently. “That’s just crazy talk. Whoever told you that is outa their mind. Because listen. Oh, listen, baby, you were in command of that stage. You went straight for everybody’s throat and you never let go. You were a star. And I want to tell you something: I’m not very big in the crying department, but when that curtain came down you had me crying out there like a little bastard. Nancy too. And I mean for Christ’s sake, Lucy, isn’t that what the theater’s for?”
She managed to fix an adequate supper for Laura and herself, though she could only hope Laura didn’t notice that she ate almost nothing.
It was after eight o’clock when Jack called her at last. “Dear, I can’t ask you up to the dorm tonight because I’ve gotta be an accou
ntant,” he said, “and it’ll probably keep me up till morning. There’re all these accounts to be settled, you see, for the whole company, and I’ve been neglecting most of ’em all summer. This is one aspect of show business I was never cut out for.”
And maybe he was a good actor, even a born actor, but any child could have told from the texture of his voice that he was lying.
For almost the whole of the following day she walked around the house with her knuckles pressed to her lips – the very mannerism specified, in the stage directions of the play she knew by heart, as being characteristic of Blanche Dubois.
“Still up to my neck in paperwork, I’m afraid,” Jack told her on the phone that evening, and she wanted to say Oh, well, look: let’s forget it. Why don’t you just forget everything and go back to wherever you came from and leave me alone?
But then he said “Be okay if I come down to your place for a drink tomorrow? Say about four?”
“Well,” she said, “sure, that’d be nice. And I’ve got something for you.”
“Got something for me? What’s that?”
“Well, I think I’d rather have it be a surprise.”
Some kind of private, giggling business with the Smith girls kept Laura far away from the house all afternoon, and Lucy was grateful for that; still, at the moment when she shyly brought the suitcases into the living room and up to Jack Halloran’s chair, she almost wished Laura could have been there with her to see his eyes growing as round in wonder as those of a little boy on Christmas morning.
“Son of a bitch,” he said in a hushed voice. “Son of a bitch, Lucy, those are the two prettiest things I ever saw.” And she knew Laura would have liked that.
“Well, I thought they might be useful,” she said, “because you travel a lot.”
“ ‘Useful,’ ” he repeated. “Know something? I’ve wanted stuff like this as long as I can remember.” Putting down his glass, he reached forward and unfastened the clasps of one of the bags to open it and inspect its interior. “Built-in coat hangers and everything,” he announced. “And my God, look at all these separate compartments. Lucy, I don’t know how to – don’t know how to thank you.”
One of the small misfortunes of being a rich girl, and she’d known it all her life, was that people would often exaggerate their pleasure when you gave expensive gifts. It came from embarrassment, because they couldn’t offer anything comparable in return, and it nearly always made her feel foolish, but it hadn’t ever stopped her from making the same mistake the next time.
When she’d brought in fresh drinks and settled herself across from him again, it became increasingly clear that they didn’t have much to say to each other. They couldn’t even seem to meet each other’s eyes, except at long intervals, as if each were afraid of the other’s pleasant, precarious smile.
Then she said “So when are you planning to leave, Jack?”
“Oh, sometime tomorrow, I guess.”
“Think the car’ll make it to the city?”
“Oh, sure. Got me up here, it’ll get me back. No, all I’m dreading now is the business of finding a place to live. Have to go through that every year, if I want to stay in New York. Still, it always works out; I always manage to hole up for the winter.”
“And this year it’ll be especially nice, won’t it,” she said, “because you’ll be holing up for the winter with Julie Pierce.”
The look on his face gave everything away. He seemed to know at once that there would be no further point in trying to keep his secret.
“Well, and so what?” he said. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“If memory serves,” Lucy began, “she’s way too skinny and she hasn’t got any tits at all. She may be talented as hell but there’s something a little cracked upstairs.”
“That’s in very poor taste, Lucy,” he said when she was finished. “I’d think a girl of your class would have much better taste than that. I thought it was something you people were born with.”
“Ah. And what are you people born with? An endless capacity for lust and betrayal, I imagine, and a crafty little talent for inflicting senseless pain. Right?”
“Wrong. We’re born with an instinct for survival, and it doesn’t take most of us long to learn that nothing else matters in the world.” Then he said “Ah, Jesus, Lucy, this is dumb. We’re talking like a couple of actors. Listen: is there really any reason why you and I can’t be friends?”
“It’s often occurred to me,” she said, “that ‘friend’ is about the most treacherous word in the language. I think you’d better get out of here now, Jack, okay?”
And the worst part – for both of them, it seemed – was that he had to make his exit with the two new suitcases hanging from his hands on either side.
She was cleaning up the kitchen the next morning, trying and trying to put him out of her mind, when he came to stand outside the screen door in exactly the way he had appeared the first time, a strikingly handsome young man with his thumbs in his jeans.
When she let him into the kitchen he said “Casimir Micklaszevics.”
“What?”
“Casimir Micklaszevics. That’s my name. Would you like me to write it down?”
“No,” she said. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll always remember you as – Stanley Kowalski.”
And he awarded her a wink. “Not bad, Lucy,” he said. “Pretty nice little curtain-line you came up with there. Guess I could never top a line like that. Well, anyway, listen: Have a good life, okay?” And he was gone as abruptly as he’d come.
Later, from a living-room window, she saw the snout of his old car coming around the trees at the far side of the dormitory building. A gleam of sunlight eclipsed its windshield, and she turned quickly away and crouched and covered her eyes with both hands: she didn’t want to see Julie Pierce riding beside him.
Later still, when she lay on her bed and gave in at last to the kind of crying Tennessee Williams described as “luxurious,” she wished she had allowed him to write down his name. Casimir what? Casimir who? And she knew now that her nice little curtain-line about Stanley Kowalski had been worse than cheap and spiteful – oh, worse; worse. It had been a lie, because she would always and always remember him as Jack Halloran.
Chapter Four
When Lucy finally did decide where to go, it wasn’t very far away. She found a solid, comfortable house at the northern edge of Tonapac, almost on the Kingsley town line, and arranged to buy it at once. She had been saying “rent” for so many years, aloud and in her mind, that the very act of walking into a bank to buy a house gave her a sense of brave beginnings.
She liked everything about this new house. It was high and wide without being too big; it was “civilized.” No neighbors were visible on any side because of tall shrubs and trees, and she liked that, too; but what she liked best was that there would now be only a short stretch of gently curving blacktop road between her door and the Nelsons’. She could walk over there any time she happened to feel like it, or the Nelsons could walk over here. On summer afternoons whole groups of the Nelsons’ guests might come strolling along in the dappled sunshine of this road, laughing and carrying their drinks, calling “We want Lucy! Let’s get Lucy!” and so the possibilities of romance were almost infinite.
The Maitlands would be more remote now; but then, she had come to think of them as being more remote in the other sense as well. If they wanted to persist in their willful poverty – if Paul was stubbornly determined to go on shunning the Nelsons and all the bright opportunities implicit in the world of the Nelsons’ parties – then it might be only sensible to leave them behind.
She knew Laura would miss the Smith girls, and possibly the ragged expanse of the old estate itself, but she promised to take her back there for visits as often as she wanted to go. And the great practical advantage of staying within the limits of Tonapac, as Lucy explained several times to her mother and others on the phone, was that Laura wouldn’t have to change schools.
; Within a very few days she bought a whole houseful of good new furniture, along with a few antiques of the kind called “priceless,” and she bought a new car. There was no reason why any of the things in her life should not be the best she could find.
All she knew about the New School for Social Research, in New York, was that it was an adult-education university. There had been rumors, some years ago, that it was a haven for old-line communists, but she’d never minded that because she had often considered that she herself, if born a decade earlier, could easily have been an old-line communist too. Some of her comrades might have despised her for her money, though her modest way of living would always have been beyond reproach, but others might have esteemed her all the more for it. Even in her own time she had never been impatient with communist talk except when it came from someone like Bill Brock, and that was because she’d always suspected that Bill Brock would be among the first to fold up under any kind of political pressure.
But now the surprisingly thick spring catalogue of the New School lay open before her on the new coffee table in the new living room of her new house, and she was taking her time over it, beginning to plan a new life.
The departmental section called “Creative Writing” offered five or six courses, each with a paragraph or two of descriptive material, and it didn’t take her long to figure out that each instructor must have written his own course description in a painstaking effort to compete with the others.
One or two of the teachers were writers she’d heard of but hadn’t read; the rest were unknown to her. In the end she settled on one of the strangers, someone named Carl Traynor, and marked him heavily in the margin with her pencil. His credentials weren’t very striking (“Stories in numerous magazines and several anthologies”) but she’d found herself coming back time and again to his course description until she had to acknowledge it as her favorite.
This is a course in writing short stories. There will be assigned reading of stories by established authors, but the main part of each weekly class will be devoted to critical evaluation of students’ manuscripts. It is expected that students will attain a working knowledge of the craft, and the ultimate aim of the course is to help each new writer find his own literary voice.