Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage Page 4

  Suicide was not as common then as it is now, and I had never before known anybody who wanted to die—or who had as great a desire for life. Orson fascinated me, though the chemistry between us was calm. I enjoyed our philosophical conversations, and since he also lived in New York most of the year, we were able to meet reasonably frequently. Our friendship was not romantic, but we talked about music, compared records; enjoyed walking all over the city while we talked about the books we were reading, and what Orson was thinking about God and superstition and mythology and mysticism.

  It was a chilling shock one day on Tenth Street when I answered the phone and learned that Orson had gone to the Downtown Athletic Club and jumped out a window. There was no turning back this time. And I asked myself with anguish if he hadn’t wanted to change his mind as he plummeted down through the air.

  I began to learn that life is a mixture of mutually contradictory feelings. Orson’s death saddened me, shocked me, but did not prevent me from being elated when my second novel was accepted, with enthusiasm. But, alas, Bernard Perry was gone. There was nobody at Vanguard at that time to tell me that what I had submitted was an excellent first draft but that my manuscript needed work, a lot of work.

  I have been blessed with editors who have pushed and prodded me, made me go back to the typewriter and rewrite and revise. This second novel needed that kind of editorial nudging and didn’t get it. Hugh was ultimately to be my fiercest editor, but meeting him was still around the corner.

  Despite a widening circle of friends, my solitude often turned to loneliness. I decided ruefully that what I had hoped for in the kind of love that is the foundation for marriage was nothing but an idealistic figment of my imagination.

  Through my secretarial work for Miss Le Gallienne I met a Hungarian refugee, a cultivated man who took me to the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall, introduced me to the music of Bruckner, which I found rather heavy, and to Hungarian fruit soups, which I found rather sweet. One evening he invited me to an elegant and expensive restaurant for dinner, and it was evident that this was to be a special evening. As we ate, he told me that he was married and that he and his wife loved each other. She was a winter-sports instructor and some kind of childhood trauma had made her incapable of normal sexual intercourse. In fact, whenever he attempted to consummate their marriage she had responded by throwing up. They had been to the finest therapists. It had nothing to do with him. It was her specific problem, no matter whom she was with. She fully understood his need for sexual fulfillment, but he had not found a suitable mistress since their flight to America. He assured me that he could put me up in a much nicer apartment than my beloved place on Tenth Street. He could get me an apartment on Park Avenue, give me a mink coat …

  I told him gently that I enjoyed his company but I did not think I was mistress material. After dinner he took me home, and I never saw him again.

  Had I, once more, been incredibly naïve to be totally taken aback by his proposal? I was badly shaken. As was my late-evening habit, I put Touché on her leash and walked over to Fifth Avenue, past Mark Twain’s house, past the Marshall Chess Club, where the windows were still lit and I could see the silhouettes of men bent over chessboards. On the corner of Tenth and Fifth is Ascension Episcopal Church. It had been endowed with a fund to keep it open twenty-four hours a day. So I tied Touché in the vestibule and slipped into the back of the church to sit and think. Not so much to pray as to take time to be. It was a while, that evening, before I could stop my mind from its chaotic whirling.

  Almost every night around midnight (for I kept theatre hours—bed at 2 a.m., up at 10 a.m.), I slipped into the church. I would not have dreamed of going in during a church service. My parents’ church had not done well by me. In my Anglican boarding schools I was taught Anglican virtues, all self-protective: do not show emotion; do not grieve; do not ask for help; do it yourself. My father died when I was seventeen and no one told me that it was all right to cry, to hurt. True to my tradition, I carried on, did all the brave things, and repressed my grief.

  It was a long time before I learned that Anglican virtues and Anglican theology are barely compatible. But Ascension Church was a special place for me, part of my deepening, along with the piano, the books, and the typewriter, which had once been my father’s.

  Journal entries for those days were earnest. I was reading as many letters of the great writers as I could get hold of, and copying out the things that touched me closely. Knowing that I would soon be traveling with the Cherry Orchard company during the upcoming tour, I read deeply from Chekhov and learned much.

  “You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, for failures …

  “Something in me protests: reason and justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat …

  “The thought that I must, that I ought to write, never leaves me for an instant.”

  And I added: Nor me.

  The next day I wrote: “Today I sold ‘Vicky’ to Mademoiselle magazine for $200.” That was big money.

  And I wrote down these words of Thoreau: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”

  On a hot summer evening I went with an actress friend from Uncle Harry to spend the night on her tugboat, anchored off the tip of Manhattan. We went into a dock-front bar, were the only ones there, and were treated to a long soliloquy by the owner, who delighted me by saying of one of his patrons, “He was so stingy he wouldn’t pay a nickel to see the Statue of Liberty piss—’scuse my language.”

  As I recorded such small events in my journal I was, in effect, writing my own story. What we write down we tend not to forget, and that unique evening is as vivid to me now as it was then.

  I quoted again (was it Chekhov?): “If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.”

  And from Plato: “He who having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple with the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted …

  “And there is the madness, too, of love, the greatest of Heaven’s blessings.”

  Slowly I was learning who I was and who I wanted to be with the help of the great ones who had gone before me. Composers, too. After sitting at the piano I wrote: “The thing I love about Bach is the strength and simplicity and shape he gives to beauty. For most of us everything in the world seems to swirl around in an amorphous mass of confusion—even the lovely parts of it. Bach takes its beauty—which is somehow blurred in its looseness—and subdues it to his own great and simple spirit.

  “It seems to me that most of us don’t know anything about life but its bare facts, and they’re all pointless unless they’re interpreted. I like the way Bach does it.”

  After an hour with the C-minor Toccata and Fugue I wrote about “Bach’s immense and vital freedom within the tight boundaries of strict form. Perhaps that’s why life doesn’t drive one mad; it’s interesting to see how alive and free one can remain within the limits that are always imposed on one and from which there can be no escape.”

  Life was not entirely “art.” I was very aware of the precariousness of the world. I had lost several friends overseas in the war in Europe. What was even worse was seeing a man I had once known as an insouciant stagehand come home trembling, shaking inwardly and outwardly from the horrors he had witnessed on Okinawa.

  I saw more of the unspeakably traumatic results of this war when I was asked to be in a Theatre Wing production of The Warrior’s Husband
. I played one of a dozen long-legged Amazons. Our theatres were Army and Navy hospitals, and then mental hospitals for men who had been shellshocked. These soul-sick patients acted as stagehands for us, and we had been warned that they were apt to walk out if we didn’t please them. But they liked The Warrior’s Husband with its ebullience and humor—and probably the almost entirely female and scantily attired cast.

  After I had declined to be my Hungarian friend’s mistress, I was more than ever convinced that marriage was not going to be part of my pattern. I would write, see friends, write, go to the theatre, write, but ultimately I was going to walk alone.

  Nevertheless, I went out with several people. One was a handsome blond man with a great golden mustache, whose wife had abandoned him for a Spaniard, ironically enough named Julio, leaving him with the care of their preschool children. He was nicknamed Cap and he definitely pursued me, and it is a human reaction to enjoy being pursued.

  Cap was brought up in various capitals of Europe, a delicate, sensitive little boy. In many ways he never grew up, but he had charm and he kept calling me and taking me out. I was pretty forlorn at that time, and Cap was good for my amour-propre. I knew that he liked me; I thought he was handsome; we had a good deal in our backgrounds in common, and he was fun to go out with—but I was completely taken aback when he asked me to marry him.

  It was New Year’s Eve. I had flu, and I was in bed, wearing a white flannel nightgown, with a piece of red flannel a doctor friend had ordered me to keep tied about my throat. I was lying in the dark, the lights out, in a cold room which a small fire in the fireplace did little to help. Shortly before midnight Cap arrived with a bottle of champagne and some food and then he told me that he was in love with me and wanted me to marry him.

  I was fond of him. I wondered whether my ideal of what being in love was like might not be a mirage, and I finally agreed not to say no at once, but to wait six months before giving my answer. I knew long before the six months were over that I couldn’t marry him. For one thing, he talked constantly, and it seemed to me that anyone who could love so vocally, who found it so necessary to reiterate out loud the depth of his passion, might not, in reality, be very deep.

  But Cap would not take no for an answer. He refused to admit that I had ever mentioned the word “no.” Or he would make scenes. Or send the children to climb in my lap, twine their arms about my neck, and tell me they wanted me for a mother—and they were darling children. But the answer was no.

  I remember Cap with affection and gratitude. He helped me regain my self-confidence at a period when it was at one of its lowest ebbs, and for this I owe him an eternal debt of gratitude.

  When the time came for rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard, there was considerable recasting. I think that Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster believed that the brevity of the New York run was due to errors in casting. This time they were going to be much more careful.

  The role of Petya Trofimov, the young student who was Chekhov’s alter ego, was being recast. The actor who had played the role in New York was admirable, but he did not mix with the company, at least not with the underlings. I had high hopes that a young Austrian actor would get the role, a man I had worked with in small acting groups and admired enormously. We had sat on high stools at drugstore counters and sipped coffee together and talked theatre. Coffee was my idea of a “grownup” drink. I usually drank milk or cocoa and sometimes tea. I looked up to this dark-haired man who was very different from golden-mustached Cap.

  When I went to the first rehearsal, in an old theatre on Forty-second Street, my Austrian actor friend was not there. Instead, I saw a very tall, thin young man with black hair and enormous, very blue eyes. I had never seen such eyes. In spite of my disappointment that my Austrian friend would not be playing Petya Trofimov, I realized that this young man was gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous, and assumed that he would be as aloof as the actor who had played the role on Broadway. Petya Trofimov was out of my league.

  The young man was duly introduced to me as Hugh Franklin, and I was told of some of his other featured roles on Broadway. The rehearsal started, and it was an arduous one because of the major casting changes, but it was immediately evident that this was a much better ensemble than the previous one. Miss Le Gallienne had referred to the actress who played Charlotta as a “constipated actress.” This new one was warm and responsive. And there was no question that Hugh Franklin was a fine actor who brought a radiant and youthful idealism as well as talent to the role of Petya Trofimov. Miss LeG and Peggy were obviously happy with this new cast. Thelma was again the stage manager and she, too, not overeasily pleased, was smiling.

  The rehearsal had started early, at ten in the morning, and broke at three. To my amazement, Petya Trofimov crossed the rehearsal hall to me and suggested that we get a bite to eat—we had not taken time out for lunch.

  The rules of theatre etiquette were very different from the rules of debutante parties in Jacksonville, Florida, but they were rules, nevertheless. Women paid their own way. If a man picked up the tab it meant that something really serious was going on. Hugh and I sat over our hamburgers and milk shakes till nearly two in the morning. Then I paid my share of the tab and he walked me to the subway.

  But we had talked for ten hours without noticing the time passing. I let myself into my apartment thinking elatedly, “I have met the man I want to marry.”

  Gone were any lingering ideas of marrying Cap. Gone were doubts about the existence of real love. I wasn’t anywhere near understanding it yet, but I was full of joy.

  Five

  Hugh and I saw a great deal of each other. I went up to his apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street to meet some of his friends. It was a studio apartment with a garden—or what could have been a garden—out back. He was only two years older than I, but I felt that he moved in a far more grownup world. His friends were people who had already made their mark in the theatre. I began to realize that I, too, had grown up, with one book successfully published, and another accepted by the publisher.

  If it did not cross my dazzled mind to wonder why Hugh Franklin was working in the theatre, rather than being in uniform, it crossed his. One evening after rehearsal we were eating supper together in a small, dark restaurant, and he told me he had wanted to be in the Air Force, but they had turned him down because traces of albumin were found in his urine. He had then applied to the Navy and been rejected there, too. Then he was drafted, and the Army wouldn’t have him either. When the American Field Service turned him down he was truly distressed; the American Field Service tended to take anyone who could walk.

  Hugh explained that he had been very ill as a child. He did not know whether it had been scarlet fever or rheumatic fever, but it was assumed that this was what had caused the traces of albumin in the urine. Today this would not be taken nearly as seriously, but then the fear was that even a small trace of albumin indicated the possibility of kidney failure. Had medical science known then what it knows now, Hugh would probably have been accepted by the Air Force. A sensitive and intelligent doctor had told him that there was no need for him to panic, that he should just lead a normal life. It was a blow to him, nevertheless. I was already so much in love that I was only grateful for his presence.

  We finished rehearsals and the show went on the road and I was happy, although Cap provided unexpected complications. He had refused to accept my answer of no, and he kept refusing it. To my dismay, he followed us to Wilmington. He appeared one morning on the train, having bribed his way into the car in which the Cherry Orchard company was traveling. He even went to Hugh’s dressing room to talk to him and then went out with us afterwards. I was highly embarrassed, not realizing that it probably did me no harm in Hugh’s eyes to be pursued by a man who was both sophisticated and good-looking and boyishly passionate about me.

  Suddenly I felt desirable and beautifully feminine. Not only was I seeing a lot of Hugh, not only had Cap pursued me, but there was another tall and handsome young ma
n in a smaller role vying for my attention, Bob Hartung, still a good friend. To my amazement and delight, when we arrived at a train station I had two young men carrying my bags. This was heady wine for a young woman who had been the wallflower at coming-out parties, to whom to be feminine meant to be petite, who knew every trick of staying in the washroom as long as possible, even going to such lengths as ripping the hem of my dress so that I could take half an hour or more sewing it up.

  It was a good thing that Hugh had some competition from Cap and Bob; Hugh, being Hugh, would not have trusted a girl who came to him too easily. It was also a good thing that my innate shyness and ingrained reticence kept me slightly withdrawn; otherwise, I might not have been able to keep from throwing myself at this dazzling young star.

  The Cherry Orchard road company had the same wonderful sense of community as had the Uncle Harry company, and there were many of the same components: the two stars, Le Gallienne and Schildkraut (and Pepé would still call me and say, “Darling, dinner?”), and Thelma the stage manager. Fiona O’Shiel, who had played the barmaid in Uncle Harry, was a luscious young maidservant. Cavada, who had washed the pots and pans on Ninth Street, was also in the company.

  Into this circle of friends came Anne Jackson, a very young actress playing Anya. Annie, Cavada, Fiona, and I usually shared hotel rooms, often sharing beds in order to save money. My mother would have been horrified at some of the hotels we stayed in. Redheaded Fiona traveled with a bottle of Lysol, and we frequently had to scrub our hotel bathroom before it was fit to use. Touché, of course, was an added problem. I would write ahead to hotels, explaining earnestly that I had the dog who was in the play, and that she had a major role, while I was a mere walk-on. It seemed that only the most expensive or the most primitively cheap hotels would take dogs. Annie, Cavada, and Fiona were incredibly patient with Touché and me and the flea-bags which were often the only places willing to accept us.