Sullivan, page 8
But there was this. In order to guide an actor’s steps you must know something about him; his background; how he lives and moves and feels. But he didn’t know a thing about Sullivan. Sullivan was a book closed. He was gay, he was insouciant, sometimes he was inordinately gloomy, tight-lipped and untalking. Why? Mahon couldn’t know however much he probed. So he was afraid of Sullivan. Like, say, you would be walking on a beach and you would pick up a narrow canister with no label on it. What was in the canister? You didn’t know. It could be tomato soup or it could be dynamite. He knew how Sullivan’s father had died. He wondered if that made him shut up in himself. He knew he was well read. Some old eccentric up where Sullivan lived gave him reams of books to read. He could quote Shakespeare for an hour without stopping, but he was not ostentatious about it. It was just something he knew. How had he learned so much of Shakespeare or why? Mahon didn’t know that. Nobody learned so much Shakespeare for their Leaving Certificate, which Sullivan had passed with honours. He was always well dressed, not quite conservatively, not quite artistically, but somewhere in between. He didn’t appear to have many vices. In a small theatre where young men and women are thrown into each other’s company intimately, under rather encouraging conditions for freedom of emotions, of hate or love or intrigue, Sullivan remained controlled and unmoved. There was a luscious girl in the company who liked Sullivan and did all she could to attract his attention. (Would you mind putting this safety-pin in my bra? Be an angel and rub this horrible liquid on my thigh. Ooh, you shouldn’t come into the ladies’ dressing-room without knocking, see how you saw me with hardly anything on.) Mahon knew all this went on. The clasping of hands in the wings, the touch of thighs, the movements at rehearsals when a hand caught a soft breast instead of an arm. He was surprised that Sullivan remained nice and polite and jocose and easy about all things. Was there somebody else? That Bernie girl? Was Sullivan in love with her? Was that why he remained pure under pressure?
Mahon sighed. Sometimes he thought it might be preferable to be working only with sows’ ears.
There was Sullivan now, standing up cool and collected. (He even had the correct instinct and hand for applying make-up so that it looked right.) He was talking. This was the first time he was ever appearing before an audience for money. Very little money, but money. He should be sensitive. He should be very nervous. Mahon himself was nervous. No matter how many first nights he got over, the next one was always worse than the last. He thought Sullivan would suffer, whether he knew it or not. He called him.
Sullivan came over to him.
‘What’s up, Tony?’ he asked.
‘How do you feel, Sullivan?’ Tony asked.
‘I feel fine,’ said Sullivan, his eyebrows raised.
‘No nervous feeling in the pit of the stomach?’ Tony asked.
‘No,’ said Sullivan, feeling his stomach with his hand. ‘I had a good tea.’ He is genuinely puzzled, Mahon thought, God help him.
Upstairs the warning gong sounded.
Sullivan stood back and watched the frantic rushing of the others; the last-minute application of talcum; the last-minute visit to the toilet; and as they went past him mounting the stairs towards the stage, he saw each one muttering a line, pulling down their foreheads or smiling a false smile, donning clothes that changed their personalities. Mahon, changed into the padded suit that made his lithe body look heavy and his face lowering; his daughter, the pretty dark girl with the mole high on her cheek, his wife, the luscious girl with the overflowing figure who brushed past him and kissed him on the cheek as she passed, saying ‘Good luck’; the young lead with the coal-black hair and the long nose who nodded as he passed him. He didn’t like Sullivan. He was an actor of limited ability. Sullivan’s performances during rehearsals made him dislike Sullivan, because he felt that he would be doing all the hard work and this complete newcomer from God knows where was likely to walk off with a lot of kudos. That’s what he was afraid of and he didn’t like it; he didn’t like it at all. Sullivan just sensed that this lad didn’t like him. He shrugged his shoulders.
Sullivan followed them up the stairs and stood in the wings waiting. He had his hands in the pockets of the dungarees he was wearing. He was only in the first act. He wished he was in all three. Out front an orchestra of three was sawing away, quite good, quite lively. Mahon was on the stage having a last look up at the position of the lights as they were switched on, nodding at the electrician on the platform. The setting was flooded with an amber glow. It was the office, crudely boarded, with the good office furniture an incongruity, and outside the window, at the back, the streaming factory chimneys could be seen in the blue glaze of the cyclorama. (This office was good enough for my grandfather, it was good enough for my father, and its good enough for me. Moving with the times is fine, but money is better invested in a machine than rigid cement that produces nothing.) Mahon was at the desk. He signalled with his hand. The gong sounded again and the orchestra outside the curtain brought their piece to a conclusion.
It was only then that Sullivan was aware of the audience. He hadn’t thought of them at all. They buzzed. It had a depressing effect on him suddenly. He could hear the seats being raised and lowered with a bang. He heard somebody laughing. He knew that it was a small place out there, which full would hold three hundred people, but up to this he had never been behind and heard the empty place come alive with people and it made him feel nervous. He moved his feet. Real people who paid actual money to come and watch and listen, and criticise. That was their privilege if they felt that they weren’t getting value for their money.
He heard the sounds of them dying away as the man up above pulled down on the dimmers of the house lights. He saw Mahon, sitting in the swivel chair, reaching for the pen and wetting his lips with his tongue, first the lower lip, and then the upper lip, and Sullivan suddenly found himself doing the same thing.
Then the runners on the curtain started to click and it swung back and Sullivan had his first look at a paying audience. He could see them through a crack in the window flat behind which he was standing. He could only see three of them in the reflected light from the stage: a fair-haired young man and his girl eating sweets, daintily, and an old woman with a fur coat, glasses, and an austere countenance. He watched them fascinated as the play got under way. He noticed with amazement that you could gradually see the reaction on their faces to the sense of the voices coming from the stage. How they first held themselves in, their faces masks, until Marty, the small man doing the secretary (he had sandy hair and a mouth turning up at the corners), started to warm them up. They were sympathetic to him. They smiled for him. (Here’s a letter from the opposition. He says that he has more men hidden under the sawdust than you have working for you altogether.) They frowned at the way Mahon gruffly addressed this nice funny little man. They greeted the entrance of Mahon’s ‘wife’with interest. He noticed the young man’s face lighting a little, an eyebrow raised, his lips pursed in a silent wolf whistle at the red hair, the curves in the tight-fitting dress worn under the fox-fur cape. The girl beside him stopped eating sweets and frowned a little, immediately, went over to the side of The Tycoon.
Then out of the blue it suddenly struck Sullivan that he himself would have to step on the stage in about ten minutes. He pulled back from his audience-gazing and found that his left leg was trembling. Even when be pressed his foot tightly to the boards, it kept trembling and his mouth was as dry as sand on a sunny shore. He tried frantically to think of his lines. The first one couldn’t pass his mind at all. What in the name of God was it? He tightened the muscles of his stomach with his thinking. Then he got it. You sent for me? Dots, dots, dots, dots. Sir, when you stand in this office … You only purchase my labour, my body belongs to myself, and I reserve my respect for people who merit it – on it would go, building up for ten solid minutes to a climax where The Tycoon stood over him waving a heavy paperweight in his hand ready to crash it down on a defiant head. Then he would have the last carefully planted word and he would go, and that was the end of Sullivan in the play. But the part left behind a bomb that would explode into action as the play went on. They will remember Sullivan, he said to himself with tight lips as he rehearsed the lines. He didn’t think: They’ll remember Corrigan, which was his name in the play, but: They’ll remember Sullivan. This didn’t strike him as being incongruous.
He listened again and from the cues knew that his time was near, but his limbs had not stopped trembling and his mouth was just as dry, and when the electrician shoved the bottle into his hand he put it to his mouth and swirled the stuff around. It was a warm sticky lemonade and it only seemed to make it worse, but he swallowed it and handed it back remembering to say thanks. The electrician watched him and shook his head and thought: He has a bad case of them and no mistake, and then went back up to his perch. Bet his face would be white under the make-up if only you could see it. The electrician had seen a lot of them come and a lot of them go. ‘Good luck now,’ he whispered down to the lad below. A funny customer, the electrician thought. Pleasant enough but not very forthcoming, but the makings of a smashing actor. He hoped Tony could hold on to this fellow for a while. He might improve receipts and then they might all get a rise.
Sullivan’s mind suddenly became a blank. He tried to reason with himself. What does it matter? It’s only a play in a small town. Out there are only people you see walking around the town every day. What does it matter? Even if you can’t remember a word and stand up there with your mouth open you can be safe because Tony will cover over the period until you can get going. Why didn’t I know this was going to happen to me? Why didn’t somebody warn me? I would have been prepared. I would have taken myself in hand an hour ago.
He watched the upraised hand of the prompter with petrified attention and as it fell he walked to the door, opened it and stepped on to the stage. It seemed a long half-mile over to the desk where Tony sat. His head was down. He was paying no attention to the entrance of the young radical in the dungarees. That was in the script. (Corrigan is supposed to be intimidated by the sight of the Tycoon, writing and ignoring the opening of the door. Corrigan looks around the room disdainfully, saunters over to the desk and sinking into the chair in front of it crosses a leg over a knee and says casually ‘You sent for me?’)
Sullivan crossed the room, but he didn’t go as it was in the script or as he had been directed or as he had done so compellingly at rehearsals. He thought as he went over of the time the film had gone on fire outside in the yard, when they were all young, and of the years he had devoted to reading and reading out loud, in his room, in the darkness of the night out in the Back, on the lonely beaches far from the town, all those places, so he went over and sat down and forgot to cross his leg over his knee and he said his words and when they came out they weren’t right. They came out: ‘Y-y-you s-s-sent f-f-for me?’ He saw Mahon looking at him with his mouth open, and Sullivan’s heart was filled with despair and terror.
The scene went on, but it wasn’t Sullivan’s. Tony got up from the desk, and walked back and forth and shouted, things he wasn’t meant to do at all. But there was no covering it up. Sullivan tried. He tried all the tricks he had learned before. He shoved the sentences high in his head and half sang them. But he stuttered at all the important places. And what happened? Some of the audience started to titter (tittering when they should have been stuck to their seats with tension!), and the scene was dead and Tony rushed it and Sullivan came off the stage.
The other actors were in the wings, watching him as he passed below. The electrician was looking down at him, thinking: Oh my God, that’s that! Nobody spoke to him. He spoke to nobody. He went below feeling completely numb and he sat in front of the glass and he rubbed cold cream on his face and cleaned it off with a towel, and took off his dungarees and the khaki shirt and got into his own clothes, and by that time he heard the click of the curtain runners and the over-loud clapping of the audience and he turned as Tony came down the stairs.
What did he expect Tony to say?
Tony came close to him and said, quietly, calmly, ‘ What happened, Sullivan?’
Sullivan told him he had a defect. This defect. He thought it was beaten. It always came back at periods of great excitement. He thought it was beaten. But it wasn’t beaten. It was back. So there.
‘To-morrow?’ asked Tony.
No, no to-morrow for Sullivan. You see. I won’t say I’m sorry for all the trouble, Tony. You know. I go now. It’s a short part. You shove in a substitute. I’ll go out the back door here. So goodbye, Tony.
‘Listen, Sullivan, don’t go, I can help you. Wait. Come back. Come down in the morning. I can help you.’
Sullivan shook his head and went out of the back door and closed it softly after him. His face was set.
Suddenly he thought, Why, Bernie is out there in front Bernie! Then he thought, She might come looking for me. That would be just what Bernie would do, so he went quickly and hurriedly out at the side, and as he emerged from the alleyway he peered around it like a criminal on the run, scanned the few people who were outside smoking, and then went off the other way, keeping closely to the walls of the houses.
What am I going to do now? he wondered. Where am I going to go? He thought of Pi. How long ago it seemed that he had spoken to Pi. Just because he had been moving with different people, Pi was avoiding him. Sometimes he saw him long enough to wave a hand. That was all. He wanted to see Pi. That’s what he wanted. It would be good to see Pi. Pi was the only one really who was not upset while he stuttered away at him.
He went around the back ways, avoiding the lights of the street lamps, and headed for Pi’s home.
Chapter Nine
He lifted the latch and walked into the kitchen saying without looking, ‘ Is P-P-Pi within, Mrs. Clancy?’ Only Mrs. Clancy was not there. A girl was sitting on a stool in front of the open turf fire, her legs spread, and she was reading a cheap paper magazine. She looked up at him. She had fair hair cut long with a strip of purple velvet secured under it and tied in a bow on top of her head.
‘Will I do?’ she asked him. ‘Pi isn’t here?’
He looked closely at her. Pi’s little sister, if you don’t mind, all grown up. All he could remember of her, casting his mind back, was a little child crawling on the floor with a dirty face and a bare bottom. He came in. ‘’lo, Lucy,’ he said, glad that he had remembered her name.
‘Are you slumming?’ she asked him.
He didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘We don’t see much of you lately,’ she said.
They didn’t see him at all. He didn’t like Pi’s house, because Pi himself was so different from his house. Pi was a flower growing out of a pail of garbage. So what would Pi’s sister be? An orchid growing out of the same pail? She had good eyes and very clear skin and a shapely nose. Her lips were thick and red and held slightly open so that you could always see her teeth. She had a full figure, and if Sullivan knew anything she was wearing nothing at all under the dress. She wore coloured stuff on her legs instead of stockings, and high-heeled shoes that had widened a bit on her feet. She was very well put together, all except her hands, which were ugly and their ugliness was emphasised by a very dark-coloured nail polish. She was smart, she saw him looking at her hands. She didn’t hide them.
‘If you had to work for a living too,’ she said, ‘ your hands might be hard to keep well, Mister Sullivan.’
She embarrassed him.
He didn’t mean to be looking at her that closely, he told her, but she surprised him.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘There was a time when we saw more of you. Not now that you’re movin’ in high society.’
Sullivan laughed. He was glad to hear that, he said, and was surprised that he could laugh, when he had a load of lead in his belly.
‘Why do you want Pi?’ she asked him.
Just for company, he told her.
‘Amn’t I good company?’ she asked him.
She would be what? Eighteen. She was very self-possessed. She would have to be, he thought. Her father was a chronic drinker – but worse, a chronic idler. All his life he got charity from the same story, about how he had pains here and there, he wasn’t well, the doctors told him that his back was bad, and he had two childer and wife to support and how was he going to do it? The people called him Kruschen from the advertisement of the fellow with the furrowed forehead holding his back. The mother was lazy, a very indifferent housewife and a whiner. People gave for the sake of charity, but they resented it. They were so different to the hard-working, mostly uncomplaining people of Duke Street, who bore their cares when they came with tight lips or a laugh and said ‘Tomorrow is another day’. It only struck him now, how well Pi had come out of the set-up, what effort it must have cost, and he suddenly felt sorry for this girl with her factory-stained hands.
She wasn’t sorry for herself.
He told her she was good company. She had very long dark lashes. There were raindrop stains on her instep.
