Three Plays (11 page)

BIG DADDY
: What?

BRICK
[lifting his glass]
: This!—Liquor...

BIG DADDY
: That's not living, that's dodging away from life.

BRICK
: I want to dodge away from it.

BIG DADDY
: Then why don't you kill yourself, man?

BRICK
: I like to drink....

BIG DADDY
: Oh, God, I can't talk to you....

BRICK
: I'm sorry, Big Daddy.

BIG DADDY
: Not as sorry as I am. I'll tell you something. A little while back when I thought my number was up—

[This speech should have torrential pace and fury.]

—before I found out it was just this—spastic—colon. I thought about you. Should I or should I not, if the jig was up, give you this place when I go—since I hate Gooper an' Mae an' know that they hate me, and since all five same monkeys are little Maes an' Goopers.—And I thought, No!—Then I thought, Yes!—I couldn't make up my mind. I hate Gooper and his five same monkeys and that bitch Mae! Why should I turn over twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile to not my kind?—But why in hell, on the other hand, Brick—should I subsidize a goddam fool on the bottle?—Liked or not liked, well, maybe even—
loved!
—Why should I do that?—Subsidize worthless behaviour? Rot? Corruption?

BRICK
[smiling]
: I understand.

BIG DADDY
: Well, if you do, you're smarter than I am, God damn it, because I don't understand. And this I will tell you frankly. I didn't make up my mind at all on that question and still to this day I ain't made out no will!—Well, now I don't
have
to. The pressure is gone. I can just wait and see if you pull yourself together or if you don't.

BRICK
: That's right, Big Daddy.

BIG DADDY
: You sound like you thought I was kidding.

BRICK
[rising]
: No, sir, I know you're not kidding.

BIG DADDY
: But you don't care—?

BRICK
[hobbling toward the gallery door]
: No, sir, I don't care.... Now how about taking a look at your birthday fireworks and getting some of that cool breeze off the river?

[He stands in the gallery doorway as the night sky turns pink and green and gold with successive flashes of light.]

BIG DADDY
:
WAIT!
—Brick...

[His voice drops. Suddenly there is something shy, almost tender, in his restraining gesture.]

Don't let's—leave it like this, like them other talks we've had, we've always—talked around things, we've—just talked around things for some rutten reason, I don't know what, it's always like something was left not spoken, something avoided because neither of us was honest enough with the—other....

BRICK
: I never lied to you, Big Daddy.

BIG DADDY
: Did I ever to
you?

BRICK
: No, sir....

BIG DADDY
: Then there is at least two people that never lied to each other.

BRICK
: But we've never
talked
to each other.

BIG DADDY
: We can
now
.

BRICK
: Big Daddy, there don't seem to be anything much to say.

BIG DADDY
: You say that you drink to kill your disgust with lying.

BRICK
: You said to give you a reason.

BIG DADDY
: Is liquor the only thing that'll kill this disgust?

BRICK
: Now. Yes.

BIG DADDY
: But not once, huh?

BRICK
: Not when I was still young an' believing. A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young an' believing.

BIG DADDY
: Believing
what?

BRICK
: Believing....

BIG DADDY
: Believing what?

BRICK
[stubbornly evasive]
: Believing....

BIG DADDY
: I don't know what the hell you mean by believing and I don't think you know what you mean by believing, but if you still got sports in your blood, go back to sports announcing and—

BRICK
: Sit in a glass box watching games I can't play? Describing what I can't do while players do it? Sweating out their disgust and confusion in contests I'm not fit for? Drinkin' a coke, half bourbon, so I can stand it? That's no goddam good any more, no help—time just outran me, Big Daddy—got there first...

BIG DADDY
: I think you're passing the buck.

BRICK
: You know many drinkin' men?

BIG DADDY
[with a slight, charming smile]
: I have known a fair number of that species.

BRICK
: Could any of them tell you why he drank?

BIG DADDY
: Yep, you're passin' the buck to things like time and disgust with 'mendacity' and—crap!—if you got to use that kind of language about a thing, it's ninety-proof bull, and I'm not buying any.

BRICK
: I had to give you a reason to get a drink!

BIG DADDY
: You started drinkin' when your friend Skipper died.

[Silence for five beats. Then Brick makes a startled movement, reaching for his crutch.]

BRICK
: What are you suggesting?

BIG DADDY
: I'm suggesting nothing.

[The shuffle and clop of Brick's rapid hobble away from his father's steady, grave attention.]

—But Gooper an' Mae suggested that there was something not right exactly in your—

BRICK
[stopping short downstage as if backed to a wall]
: 'Not right'?

BIG DADDY
: Not, well, exactly
normal
in your friendship with—

BRICK
: They suggested that, too? I thought that was Maggie's suggestion.

[Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse. The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to 'keep face' in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the 'mendacity' that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important. The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent—fiercely charged!—interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can—but it should steer him away from 'pat' conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just play, not a snare for the truth of human experience. | The following scene should be played with great concentration, with most of the power leashed but palpable in what is left unspoken.]

Who else's suggestion is it, is it
yours?
How many others thought that Skipper and I were—

BIG DADDY
[gently]
: Now, hold on, hold on a minute, son.—I knocked around in my time.

BRICK
: What's that got to do with—

BIG DADDY
: I said 'Hold on!'—I bummed, I bummed this country till I was—

BRICK
: Whose suggestion, who else's suggestion is it?

BIG DADDY
: Slept in hobo jungles and railroad Y's and flophouses in all cities before I—

BRICK
: Oh,
you
think so, too, you call me your son and a queer. Oh!! Maybe that's why you put Maggie and me in this room that was Jack Straw's and Peter Ochello's, in which that pair of old sisters slept in a double bed where both of 'em died!

BIG DADDY
:
Now just don't go throwing rocks at—

[Suddenly Reverend Tooker appears in the gallery doors, his head slightly, playfully, fatuously cocked, with a practised clergyman's smile, sincere as a bird-call blown on a hunter's whistle, the living embodiment of the pious, conventional lie. | Big Daddy gasps a little at this perfectly timed, but incongruous, apparition.]

—What're you looking for, Preacher?

REVEREND TOOKER
: The gentlemen's lavatory, ha ha!—heh, heh...

BIG DADDY
[with strained courtesy]
: —Go back out and walk down to the other end of the gallery, Reverend Tooker, and use the bathroom connected with my bedroom, and if you can't find it, ask them where it is!

REVEREND TOOKER
: Ah, thanks.

[He goes out with a deprecatory chuckle.]

BIG DADDY
: It's hard to talk in this place...

BRICK
: Son of a—!

BIG DADDY
[leaving a lot unspoken]
: —I seen all things and understood a lot of them, till 1910. Christ, the year that—I had worn my shoes through, hocked my—I hopped off a yellow dog freight car half a mile down the road, slept in a wagon of cotton outside the gin—Jack Straw an' Peter Ochello took me in. Hired me to manage this place which grew into this one.—When Jack Straw died—why, old Peter Ochello quit eatin' like a dog does when its master's dead, and died, too!

BRICK
: Christ!

BIG DADDY
: I'm just saying I understand such—

BRICK
[violently]
: Skipper is dead. I have not quit eating!

BIG DADDY
: No, but you started drinking.

[Brick wheels on his crutch and hurls his glass across the room shouting.]

BRICK
: YOU THINK SO, TOO?

BIG DADDY
:
Shhh!

[Footsteps run on the gallery. There are women's calls. Big Daddy goes toward the door.]

Go 'way!—Just broke a glass....

[Brick is transformed, as if a quiet mountain blew suddenly up in volcanic flame.]

BRICK
: You think so, too? You think so, too? You think me an' Skipper did, did, did!—
sodomy!
—together?

BIG DADDY
: Hold—!

BRICK
: That what you—

BIG DADDY
: —
ON
—a minute!

BRICK
: You think we did dirty things between us, Skipper an'—

BIG DADDY
: Why are you shouting like that? Why are you—

BRICK
: —me, is that what you think of Skipper, is that—

BIG DADDY
: —so excited? I don't think nothing. I don't know nothing. I'm simply telling you what—

BRICK
: You think that Skipper and me were a pair of dirty old men?

BIG DADDY
: Now that's—

BRICK
: Straw? Ochello? A couple of—

BIG DADDY
: Now just—

BRICK
: —fucking sissies? Queers? Is that what you—

BIG DADDY
: Shhh.

BRICK
: —think?

[He loses his balance and pitches to his knees without noticing the pain. He grabs the bed and drags himself up.]

BIG DADDY
: Jesus!—Whew.... Grab my hand!

BRICK
: Naw, I don't want your hand....