Youngblood Hawke, page 67
This young fellow was a boor. Smart New Yorkers do not venture a verdict during the intermissions of a first night. They chatter as loudly and brightly as they can about everything but the play, unless they know each other extremely well. Husbands may express sotto voce opinions to their wives, for instance. But many a polished New York husband fears his wife's disdain too much to stick his neck out, even in connubial confidence, before the critics have spoken. Of course the ordinary people from the balcony, and the rich but gross out-of-towners in the orchestra, will argue out loud as to whether what they are witnessing is a hit or a flop. In so doing they betray themselves as surely as if they had come to the premiere in greasy blue overalls. To the New York view, talking of the success or failure of a play in the hour of its agony is an error of taste. Fear of being caught out in a wrong opinion is not given as the objection.
Hawke came slouching through a side door at a far end of the lobby and leaned against the wall in his raincoat, with his cap pulled down. He wanted to see Jeanne, and his mother and sister; he knew that the word of his presence at the theatre would spread from backstage, if it had not already done so. Accoutred as he was, standing as he did against the wall, he passed as a shabby oversized intellectual from the balcony. Nobody gave him a second glance as he peered here and there. Outside the wind seemed to have stopped, but rain cascaded from the marquee like a waterfall.
In the center of the lobby Frieda shone, greeting people as they wandered by, turning from one to another with a handshake, a laugh, a joke. Her eyes were unnaturally wide and agleam, her smile was exaggerated, her movements were very quick, everything about her trumpeted modishness, self-satisfaction, triumph. Paul Winter stood beside her with one hand in his jacket pocket, smoking the kind of small thin cigar he always lit up in an intermission. Hawke could not hear Frieda, of course, over the lobby din, but he did not have to. He had accompanied her to dozens of first nights, sometimes with the husband and just as often without. He knew the flip irrelevant chatter by heart. Tonight, of all nights, she would surely say nothing about the play. He did not care what she thought of it. It surprised him a little to note how indifferent he had become to Frieda, and indeed to the ways and the opinions of New York.
This scene in the lobby was quite foreign to him, and faintly unreal, perhaps because he had plunged back into his old milieu too suddenly. The thronging bare white shoulders of women, the costly dresses in the queer swathes, drapes and twists of high fashion, the twinkling jewels, the supercilious looks of the young beauties and the strained haughty smiles of the older women, the strutting men in evening clothes with eyes a-roll for pretty girls or for men better known or richer than themselves—once such pictures had been exciting and novel to him; then they had become commonplace with repetition; tonight this living parade of self-conscious New Yorkers before his eyes seemed almost a hallucination, a satiric description of high society in an old book come to life in modern dress. It was almost as though these people were acting a loud determined parody. How could they possibly be taking themselves, their dress, their gestures, their talk seriously, when they must know they were all familiar extras, mere background figures, in a dusty chapter of Lost Illusions or Vanity Fair?
Frieda Winter was no background figure, she commanded the scene. She was, he thought, as beautiful as she had been at the Prince party so long ago; a little older, perhaps, but still vivid with the provoking charm, the sophisticated gleam, which had once made her seem the most desirable woman on earth. He had possessed his heart's desire, he had tasted ashes, and it was over. Her opinions, and New York's opinions, did not matter to him any more except insofar as they affected his chances of making money from this play.
He saw Ross Hodge, who was taller than most of the people in the noisy smoke-filled lobby, far down at the other end. Surmising that Jeanne would be with him, and probably Nancy and his mother, he started to make his way through the crowd. Then it was that Frieda—who had seen him wearing these same clothes in Venice—recognized him, before anyone else. "My God," she said to her husband, "It's Arthur. There's Arthur!"
"You're seeing things," Winter said, but Frieda had already started away from him. She said impatiently over her shoulder, "Don't you suppose I know him? He's come home. Arthur! Arthur!" She headed straight for him, with an excited wave of her hand.
It did not occur to her that she was making a mistake. She was riding the crest of glory. She had quite put out of mind the misadventure in Venice. After all, they had had many quarrels! Serenely confident, her face glowing with gaiety and assurance, she drove toward him through the crowd of chattering playgoers—who fell away from her, indeed, since they were all well aware of who she was. A lane opened before her to the huge man in the gray raglan raincoat and tweed cap.
"Arthur!" she said, holding out her hand and coming up to him. "You couldn't resist, could you? How wonderful! Welcome home, dear."
He took her hand and briefly shook it. "Hello, Frieda," he said. He walked past her through the lane that she had just created. "Hey, Ross. Ross! Mah folks theah with you?"
Frieda stood stunned for only a second or two, still smiling, as he walked off. That moment of shocked immobility, with that frozen smile, was enough to give her away to any alert person who was watching. There were dozens. Hawke had not cut her, exactly. It was impossible to find fault with what he had done. Yet he had shown an indifference to her which surpassed contempt. She might have been someone he had once known in college. Frieda pulled herself together as the lobby noise increased, turned on her heel, and rejoined her husband, laughing. "Poor fellow, he's in a daze. He probably hasn't slept in a week."
Winter said, "You know him, dear, but I'm not sure he knows you."
Fanny Prince, who had been standing and talking to the Winters—and to whom this moment was one of the sweetest of her life, though Frieda was as good a friend as she had—said, "A playwright on opening night isn't human. He's getting handsomer all the time, though, isn't he? He ought to get married."
Nobody in the large knot of people around Ross Hodge had an inkling that Hawke was back in the United States, except Gus Adam. For a couple of minutes after the author came shouldering through the theatre crowd in his bizarre coat and cap, whirling the clouds of tobacco smoke, all was delighted confusion at that end of the lobby. The mother and sister embraced him, he shook a dozen hands without knowing whose they were, curiosity seekers sidled up and thickened into a ring, and through this ring pushed more acquaintances to shake his hand. Nancy, after remarking that he looked terrible and would have to come back to Hovey for a long rest, guilelessly proclaimed that the play was absolutely wonderful, a sure smash hit. The mother said that it looked to her like another right smart money maker. Ross Hodge, since the subject was started, stoutly ventured that Hawke had tackled a new art form and knocked the ball right out of the park; and the writer retained enough of his peculiar remoteness to be amused at the mixing of images. His brother-in-law, Weltmann, who seemed to have gotten twice as fat and ugly since he had last seen him, stated in solemn tones that the play had started very slowly but was picking up, and there was a good chance that it might make money, depending on the next act. Karl Fry said nothing could stop it, Hawke had the Midas touch, and he fully expected him to come up next with a volume of excellent sonnets, damn his soul.
Jeanne Fry said nothing. She did not offer to shake his hand. She stood beside her husband, half hidden from Hawke by another Hodge Hathaway editor. She seemed pleased to be hidden. The look she gave him was peculiarly shy and timorous. Hawke at last stepped past the man between them. "Hello, Jeanie. How are you?"
She said in the grainy voice he liked so well, "Oh, you recognize me! Thank heaven for that, most of my friends don't." She wore a low-cut black dress that flared widely at the waist; he could see that she had put on a lot of weight. Her face was quite round, the angular thrust of her jaw was gone. Her neck and shoulders were much prettier with the boniness softened. He said, "Why, I think you're looking wonderful."
Jeanne said, "My face bears a strong resemblance to the harvest moon."
Karl said, "She won't believe me that a little weight is becoming."
"I really came back from Europe just to see Jim, Jeanie. How is he?"
"Revolting. Nobody can see him till he sheds his tail."
Ross Hodge said, laughing, "He's the prettiest baby you ever saw, Arthur."
More and more people pressed in on Hawke, though ringing bells and blinking lights heralded the end of the intermission: Lax, Givney, a couple of newspaper columnists. Scotty Hoag pushed through the onlookers and delivered himself of half a dozen "sumbitches," while asserting that the play was a gold mine. Scotty had lost almost all the hair on top of his head, and to compensate was allowing the fringe hair to grow in thick. At Adam's office that afternoon, where they had spent several hours signing contracts, Scotty had needed a shave and a haircut badly, but now he was barbered smooth and pink. He wanted Hawke to come to a little party after the show. So did a dozen other people, including Ferdie Lax, Roland Givney, and several of the rich women he had met in his first days of being lionized for Chain of Command. Hawke knew the manners of New Yorkers at first-night intermissions well enough to perceive that his show looked like a hit. Authors were avoided in the lobby at a failure as though they were covered with the pustules of smallpox. When the verdict seemed uncertain people were polite and hearty, but constrained. The kind of cordial excitement that was swirling about him now was the old honey-seeking buzz of knowledgeable flies—the buzz he had first heard at the Princes' Christmas party years ago, when he had been an unknown clodhopper in a brown suit.
Through the press around him he caught sight of Frieda with her husband and the Princes, still standing in the center of the lobby. There was no busy little knot of people around them now, and Frieda was not hailing and joking and chattering in her usual way. Playgoers were streaming past her into the theatre. She was looking straight at him. Her tiara was like a party hat after the party is over, excessively bright and a little sad. He felt sorry for her, but in truth he had no awareness that he had snubbed her or been mean to her. In view of the way they had parted in Venice, his manner of greeting her had been natural and unpremeditated; he could not have done otherwise. He saw her turn and say something to her husband, and then she walked with her old resolute stride into the theatre.
6
The play was almost over. Irene Perry lay majestically dead in the gloom of the sickroom, lit by four tall candles. The bankrupt nephew had broken into her desk and was rummaging through her papers, casting a horrible furtive glance now and then at the corpse. Still to come were the raucous invasion of the whole family, the ghastly wrangle in the presence of the dead body and the stunning denouement of the aunt's will. The audience was hushed and unmoving. Nobody had coughed for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Though it was a first night, though these playgoers had come to enjoy the cruel glittering circus of the premiere and not to see a drama, though during most of the evening they had been preoccupied with trying to guess whether they were seeing a hit or a flop, the miracle of the theatre had at last conquered them. They had forgotten themselves. They believed what they were seeing. They hungered like children to know, not whether the show was a money maker, but how the story would come out. Hawke's tale, and the art of Georges Feydal and Irene Perry, had cast the old sublime spell over these New Yorkers; for as Hawke had said they were only people, after all, and their hearts had to respond to the truth well told.
Even Frieda Winter was caught, for the theatre experience is a mass hypnosis. She knew the story to weariness, she had seen rehearsals, out-of-town performances, and a preview; yet she was watching the play with rigid attention, and so, for all his expressed disenchantment, was her husband.
It was therefore a real shock when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was like being waked out of sleep, but worse; it was a grotesque surprise, totally unexpected and strange. She shivered and looked around incredulously. The person who had touched her was a theatre usherette, a gray-haired woman with an embarrassed, frightened look, whose glasses glittered spectrally in the light from the stage. "I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. Winter," the woman whispered. "There's a telephone call for you."
Frieda collected herself with difficulty. "Who is it? Can't it wait?" All around her the people were turning to stare, angry at the shattering of the stage illusion.
"I'm sorry, they say it's urgent. It's from the Devon School."
Frieda and her husband exchanged a glance. She said, "I never did call. It got so late—" He shrugged, his face blank as a dead man's. They rose, slipped past the august critic beside them, and walked up the aisle after the usherette.
It sometimes happens that critics leave a play before it ends. That is an ominous sign indeed. Most of the playgoers who saw the two people get up and leave thought at first that this was a critic and his companion, but then many of them recognized the Winters. The interruption was hard on the play. There was some whispering, and a barrage of coughs. Hawke was decidedly annoyed when he saw that it was Frieda and her husband who were causing the commotion. His first thought was that Frieda was going out of her way to be dramatic and ungracious. Then in a little while he felt a stir of uneasiness. It penetrated to his attention that the Winters had not walked out by themselves; there had been three figures in the gloom, one of them an usherette. He recalled that he had seen the usherette moving down the aisle alone before the Winters had left. These puzzling circumstances worked around in his mind. He got out of his seat and went to the lobby. It was empty. He saw a chauffeur closing the door of a limousine on the Winters, who were talking excitedly. He hesitated for a few moments, then ran out into the street exclaiming "Frieda!" The limqusine drove off into thick rain suffused with the red and yellow glow from Broadway.
7
After the cheers and the repeated curtain calls, and Irene Perry's low curtsey which brought a tempest of handclapping, and Feydal's incongruous sidling on stage in his bulging dinner jacket to the applause of the cast, Hawke was surprised at the speed with which the theatre emptied. The triumph—as it seemed to be—went by so fast! A few rises and falls of the curtain, a couple of minutes of enthusiastic noise, and then people were rushing past, hardly pausing to look at him, full of their own concerns. Then he recalled that he had himself behaved just this way at other premieres; in fact he had often dived for an exit after the first curtain in order to summon Frieda's limousine or to snare a taxi. The city's erratic transportation, the after-theatre crush in the smart restaurants, the hurry of New Yorkers to get on to the next pleasure—all these things made for the dreamlike speed with which the cheering audience all at once dissolved, leaving usherettes in black moving glumly through barren rows, picking programs off the floor and pushing up the seats with a melancholy slap-slap, while the curtain rose again on a set exposed in its fakiness by a single naked electric light.
Only his mother, his sister, and his brother-in-law remained in the deserted orchestra, lingering because he lingered. He took them backstage, where he found a mood of cautious optimism among the actors and their visitors. In various stages of undress and paint-removing, the players greeted his family charmingly, and seemed grateful for Nancy's gushing compliments, and Mrs. Hawke's assurances that the show was a big success. Weltmann said nothing, apparently quite overwhelmed by the perfume and the glare of backstage, and by the glimpses of actresses darting around in flimsy flying bathrobes. Feydal and Carmian fell on Hawke. The young producer, unlike the others, was exulting recklessly. Handsome as ever, foppish as ever in a curiously frilled shirt and perfect dinner jacket, his teeth flashing, his eyes glittering, his hands fluttering, Carmian hugged Hawke wildly and then he kissed Mrs. Hawke and Nancy. It was hard for Hawke to imagine that there had once been such a vast loathing between himself and this fellow that he had pitched Carmian into a swimming pool. Carmian said to Mrs. Hawke, "How does it feel to be the mother of America's greatest writer, bar none! A man who produces big best-sellers and smash hit plays at the turn of a crank?"
"Why, it feels right good," said Mrs. Hawke, who evidently enjoyed being cuddled by the incredibly good-looking young man. "So does this, aha ha ha."
Feydal said, beaming, "Pierce, dear lad, the seven little gray men have not yet spoken."
"Damn the seven little gray men," said Carmian, his arm still around Mrs. Hawke. "Forgive my language, mother, but are we afraid of the seven little gray men?"
"Why, they can't hurt my Art. I say damn the seven little gray men, too."
Carmian was so explosively amused at this that he all but flew apart. "I'm going to adopt you, mother. A man can adopt a mother, can't he?"
Irene Perry was sitting at her light-ringed mirror, wiping her pale glistening face with a towel, talking to half a dozen people, when Feydal conducted the Hawkes into her spacious dressing room. Feydal told her who Mrs. Hawke was. The star gravely rose and held out her hand. "I'm honored. How proud, Mrs. Hawke, how very proud you must be of your son."
When they left her room the mother said, "There's the first genuine lady I've met in this city. The greater they are, the finer they are. It's that simple." Hawke thought it as well not to mention that the star had been through four divorces, had twice attempted suicide, and was now carrying on a curious kind of affair with the ingenue of the company.
