Three Plays (24 page)

LAURA:
I've just been going out walking.

AMANDA
: That's not true.

LAURA
: It is. I just went walking.

AMANDA
: Walking? Walking? In winter? Deliberately courting pneumonia in that light coat? Where did you walk to, Laura?

LAURA
: All sorts of places - mostly in the park.

AMANDA
: Even after you'd started catching that cold?

LAURA
: It was the lesser of two evils, Mother. I couldn't go back up. I—threw up—on the floor!

AMANDA
: From half past seven till after five every day you mean to tell me you walked around in the park, because you wanted to make me think that you were still going to Rubicam's Business College?

LAURA
: It wasn't as bad as it sounds. I went inside places to get warmed up.

AMANDA
: Inside where?

LAURA
: I went in the art museum and the bird-houses at the Zoo. I visited the penguins every day! Sometimes I did without lunch and went to the movies. Lately I've been spending most of my afternoons in the jewel-box, that big glass-house where they raise the tropical flowers.

AMANDA
: You did all this to deceive me, just for deception?
[Laura looks down.]
Why?

LAURA
: Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!

AMANDA
: Hush!

LAURA
: I couldn't face it.

[Pause. A whisper of strings.]

AMANDA
[hopelessly fingering the huge pocketbook]
: So what are we going to do the rest of our lives? Stay home and watch the parades go by? Amuse ourselves with the glass menagerie, darling? Eternally play those worn-out phonograph records your father left as a painful reminder of him? We won't have a business career—we've given that up because it gave us nervous indigestion!
[Laughs wearily.]
What is there left but dependency all our lives? I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South—barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife!—stuck away in some little mousetrap of a room—encouraged by one in-law to visit another—little birdlike women without any nest—eating the crust of humility all their life!

Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves? I swear it's the only alternative I can think of!

It isn't a very pleasant alternative, is it? Of course - some girls
do marry
.

[Laura twists her hands nervously.]

Haven't you ever liked some boy?

LAURA
: Yes. I liked one once.
[Rises.]
I came across his picture a while ago.

AMANDA
[with some interest]
. He gave you his picture?

LAURA
: No, it's in the year-book.

AMANDA
:
[disappointed]
: Oh—a high-school boy.

LAURA
: Yes. His name was Jim.
[Laura lifts the heavy year-book from the claw-foot table.]
Here he is in
The Pirates of Penzance
.

AMANDA
[absently]
: The what?

LAURA
: The operetta the senior class put on. He had a wonderful voice and we sat across the aisle from each other Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in the Aud. Here he is with the silver cup for debating! See his grin?

AMANDA
[absently]
: He must have had a jolly disposition.

LAURA
: He used to call me—Blue Roses.

AMANDA
: Why did he call you such a name as that?

LAURA
: When I had that attack of pleurosis—he asked me what was the matter when I came back. I said pleurosis—he thought that I said Blue Roses! So that's what he always called me after that. Whenever he saw me, he'd holler, 'Hello, Blue Roses!' I didn't care for the girl that he went out with. Emily Meisenbach. Emily was the best-dressed girl at Soldan. She never struck me, though, as being sincere.... It says in the Personal Section—they're engaged. That's—six years ago! They must be married by now.

AMANDA
: Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man.
[Gets up with a spark of revival.]
Sister, that's what you'll do!

[Laura utters a startled, doubtful laugh. She reaches quickly for a piece of glass.]

LAURA
: But, Mother—

AMANDA
: Yes?
[Crossing to photograph.]

LAURA
[in a tone of frightened apology]
: I'm—crippled!

AMANDA
: Nonsense! Laura, I've told you never, never to use that word. Why, you're not crippled, you just have a little defect—hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it—develop charm—and vivacity and—
charm!
That's all you have to do!
[She turns again to the photograph.]
One thing your father had
plenty of
—was
charm!

[Tom motions to the fiddle in the wings.]

THE SCENE FADES OUT WITH MUSIC

SCENE THREE

[Tom speaks from the fire-escape landing.]

TOM
: After the fiasco at Rubicam's Business College, the idea of getting a gentleman caller f
or Laura began to play a more and more important part in Mother's calculations. It became an obsession. Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment...

An evening at home rarely passed without some allusion to this image, this specter, this hope.

Even when he wasn't mentioned, his presence hung in Mother's preoccupied look and in my sister's frightened, apologetic manner—hung like a sentence passed upon the Wingfields!

Mother was a woman of action as well as words.

She began to take logical steps in the planned direction. Late that winter and in the early spring - realizing that extra money would be needed to properly feather the nest and plume the bird - she conducted a vigorous campaign on the- telephone, roping in subscribers to one of those magazines for matrons called
The Home-maker's Companion
, the type of journal that features the serialized sublimations of ladies of letters who think in terms of delicate cup-like breasts, slim, tapering waists, rich, creamy thighs, eyes like wood-smoke in autumn, fingers that soothe and caress like strains of music, bodies as powerful as Etruscan sculpture.

[Amanda enters with phone on long extension cord. She is spotted in the dim stage.]

AMANDA
: Ida Scott? This is Amanda Wingfield! We
missed
you at the D.A.R. last Monday! I said to myself: She's probably suffering with that sinus condition! How is that sinus condition?

Horrors! Heaven have mercy!—You're a Christian martyr, yes, that's what you are, a Christian martyr!

Well, I just have happened to notice that your subscription to the
Companion's
about to expire! Yes, it expires with the next issue, honey!—just when that wonderful new serial by Bessie Mae Hopper is getting off to such an exciting start. Oh, honey, it's something that you can't miss! You remember how '
Gone with the Wind'
took everybody by storm? You simply couldn't go out if you hadn't read it. All everybody
talked
was Scarlet O'Hara. Well, this is a book that critics already compare to
Gone with the Wind
. It's the '
Gone with the Wind
' of the post-World War generation!—What?—Burning!—Oh, honey, don't let them burn, go take a look in the oven and I'll hold the wire! Heavens—I think she's hung up!

[DIM OUT]

[Before the stage is lighted, the violent voices of Tom and Amanda are heard.

They are quarrelling behind the portières. In front of them stands Laura with clenched hands and panicky expression. A clear pool of light on her figure throughout this scene.]

TOM
: What in Christ's name am I—

AMANDA
[shrilly]
: Don't you use that—

TOM
: Supposed to do!

AMANDA
: Expression! Not in my—

TOM
: Ohhh!!

AMANDA
: Presence! Have you gone out of your senses?

TOM
: I have, that's true,
driven
out!

AMANDA
: What is the matter with you, you—big—big IDIOT!

TOM
: Look!—I've got
no thing
, no single thing—

AMANDA
: Lower your voice!

TOM
: In my life here that I can call my OWN! Everything is—

AMANDA
: Stop that shouting!

TOM
: Yesterday you confiscated my books! You had the nerve to—

AMANDA
: I took that horrible novel back to the library—yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence.
[Tom laughs wildly.]
I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them—
[Tom laughs still more wildly.]
BUT I WON'T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! NO, no, no, no, no!

TOM
: House, house! Who pays rent on it, who makes a slave of himself to—

AMANDA
[fairly screeching]
: Don't you DARE to—

TOM
: No, no, I mustn't say things!
I've
got to just—

AMANDA
: Let me tell you—

TOM
: I don't want to hear any more!
[He tears the portières open. The upstage area is lit with a turgid smoky red glow.]

[Amanda's hair is in metal curlers and she wears a very old bathrobe much too large for her slight figure, a relic of the faithless Mr. Wingfield. An upright typewriter and a wild disarray of manuscripts are on the drop-leaf table. The quarrel was probably precipitated by his creative labour. A chair lying overthrown on the floor.

Their gesticulating shadows are cast on the ceiling by the fiery glow.]

AMANDA
: You
will
hear more, you—

TOM
: No, I won' t hear more, I'm going out!

AMANDA
: You come right back in—

TOM
: Out, out, out! Because I'm—

AMANDA
: Come back here, Tom Wingfield! I'm not through talking to you!

TOM
: Oh, go—

LAURA
[desperately]
: —Tom!

AMANDA
: You're going to listen, and no more insolence from you! I'm at the end of my patience!

[He comes back toward her.]

TOM
: What do you think I'm at? Aren't I supposed to have any patience to reach the end of, Mother? I know, I know. It seems unimportant to you, what I'm
doing
—what I
want
to do—having a little
difference
between them! You don't think that—

AMANDA
: I think you've been doing things that you're ashamed of. That's why you act like this. I don't believe that you go every night to the movies. Nobody goes to the movies night after night. Nobody in their right mind goes to the movies as often as you pretend to. People don't go to the movies at nearly midnight, and movies don't let out at two a.m. Come in stumbling. Muttering to yourself like a maniac! You get three hours' sleep and then go to work. Oh, I can picture the way you're doing down there. Moping, doping, because you're in no condition.

TOM
[wildly]
: No, I'm in no condition!

AMANDA
: What right have you got to jeopardize your job - jeopardize the security of us all? How do you think we'd manage if you were—

TOM
: Listen! You think I'm crazy about the
warehouse?
[He bends fiercely toward her slight figure.]
You think I'm in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that—
celotex interior!
with—
fluorescent—tubes!
Look! I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains—than go back mornings! I
go!
Every time you come in yelling that God damn
'Rise and Shine!' 'Rise and Shine!'
I say to myself, 'How
lucky dead
people are!' But I get up. I
go!
For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being
ever!
And you say self—
selfs'
all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I'd be where he is—GONE!
[Pointing to father’s picture.]
As far as the system of transportation reaches!
[He starts past her. She grabs his arm.]
Don't grab at me, Mother!