Young Hearts Crying (21 page)

“Oh.” And it may not have been the first time in her life that she’d felt shame all over her skin and deep inside her, too, crawling in her bowels – there must surely have been other such times in childhood, or in college, or even in the years since then – but it seemed now that never before had she fully understood the meaning of the word. This was shame. “Oh,” she said again, and then in a small voice she said “So I made a fool of myself.”

“Ah, Lucy, come on, I didn’t mean anything like that,” he told her. “Listen, it’s no big deal. This happens all the time with beginners. Having a real audience out there is sort of intoxicating, and it makes a lot of people want to be ‘stars,’ you see, before they’ve learned to work with other actors. All you have to remember, dear, is that the theater is a communal enterprise. Hey, listen: whaddya say we go to your place and get some more of that good whiskey. That’ll pick you up.”

And they sat drinking in the living room for half an hour, but it didn’t make the shame go away.

Lucy wasn’t sure if her voice would work, but she tried it. “And I suppose Julie Pierce was the one who minded all my ‘upstaging’ the most?” she inquired.

“Nah, nah, Julie’s a pro,” he said. “She’ll always understand this kind of thing. Besides, I don’t think anybody ‘minded’ anything, dear. We all like you, and we’re proud of you. You came in out of nowhere and learned an extremely difficult part, and you brought it off. I think you’ll find ordinary people are nicer than you give them credit for being, Lucy – probably nicer than you’ve ever let yourself believe.”

But her mind was far away, thinking of people who weren’t so ordinary.

“Well, sure she hammed it up,” Tom Nelson might well be saying to his wife as they went about their preparations for bed, “and sure she was embarrassing. Still, isn’t it good that she’s finally got something to do? And isn’t it nice that she’s fixed up with what’s-his-name? The guy that runs the show?”

And in another, very different house, Paul Maitland might be fingering his mustache with a small, devilish smile as he said “What’d you think of Lucy?”

Then Peggy would say, “Yuck,” and “Squaresville, man,” and “Emotional City,” and whatever other cool little disparagements she’d managed to pick up, along with her dirndl skirts and her gypsy friends, in her time as a child of bohemia.

“Would it be helpful,” Jack said, “if I try to give you a few pointers about tomorrow night?”

“No. Please. I don’t think I can bear any more pointers.”

“Well, hell, I probably exaggerated the whole thing. I’d never’ve said anything if I’d known it’d make you feel so bad. Listen, though, Lucy. Can I tell you just one more thing?”

He came over to her chair and took her chin in his hand, tilting it up to make her look into his remarkably good-looking face. “None of this matters,” he told her, and he winked. “Do you understand? None of it matters at all. It’s only a dumb little summer-stock theater that nobody ever heard of. Okay?”

He let go of her face then and said “Feel like coming on up to the – up to the dorm with me?” And the hesitation in his voice told her at once that he wouldn’t care if she said no.

“I don’t think so, Jack; not tonight.”

“Okay, then,” he said. “Sleep well.”

She was scrupulously careful to avoid any suggestion of wanting to be a ‘star’ as the second night’s performance got under way. She took pains to be considerate of all the minor actors, and she almost wanted to evaporate in her scenes alone with Julie Pierce, so that Julie could get the most out of whatever it was that Julie wanted to do. All this, she kept telling herself, all this would soon be over.

But when she walked into the wings at the end of Scene Three, Jack Halloran intercepted her with an imploring look, incongruously dressed in Stanley Kowalski’s bowling shirt.

“Listen, dear,” he said. “Don’t get mad at me, but listen. You’re going off in the opposite direction this time. You’re too subdued out there; you’re too remote. And we may get away with it in these early scenes, but the point is you’ve gotta start pulling out the stops pretty soon, Lucy, or we’re not gonna have any show at all tonight. You follow me?”

And she followed him. He was the director; he’d never been wrong before; and she’d spent most of this day regretting that she hadn’t gone up to the dorm with him last night.

It was all a matter of balance – of going far but not too far – and Lucy was almost sure she achieved the right balance in the rest of that second performance.

But then she had to find ways of getting through the third night, and the fourth and the fifth – and sometimes the final curtain would fall before there was time for her to tell whether she’d achieved the right balance or not. Certain nights were better than others – she knew that – but by the end of the week she could no longer sort them out; couldn’t remember which were which.

Her most vivid memory, when it was all over, was of going out for the curtain call with Jack after the final performance, and of holding hands for the people one last time. She wouldn’t forget knowing she had better be happy to take this applause – stand here and take it however it came – because it was something that would never happen again.

Jack didn’t have much to say to her backstage that night except that she’d done very well. Then he said “Oh, and listen, the kids’re throwing a little party up in the dorm later on. Can you make that? Say about an hour from now?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Well, look, I’ve gotta stay here and help ’em get started tearing down some of this stuff. You want to take the flashlight?”

“No, that’s okay.” And she assured him, meaning it as a wry little joke, that she was used to walking home alone in the dark.

The party, as she could have predicted, was less a celebration than a nice try. Jack seemed glad to see her there and so did Julie Pierce; so, too, did most others among the oddly assorted people she had come to think of as “the kids” – and several of them, carefully holding cans of beer or paper cups of wine, wanted to tell her what a pleasure it had been to know her this summer. From the sound of her own voice in repaying those compliments, Lucy knew she was doing pretty well; she was holding up nicely.

But she ached with tiredness. She wanted to go home and sleep – this whole damned summer had robbed her of privacy and silence – still, she knew it might look rude if she left early.

For what seemed half an hour she stood in a shadowed section of the room and watched Jack and Julie talking quietly together. It was only reasonable that they’d have things to discuss: Julie’s New York audition would be coming up soon, and Jack would be in the city too, looking first for an apartment and then for whatever work he could find. (“I always try to spend as much time as I can in New York,” he’d explained once, “because that’s where the – you know – that’s where the theater is.”)

But when Lucy found she was trying
not
to watch them talk – when she’d begun willing herself to look into all other parts of the big room before allowing her eyes to go back to them, briefly and almost furtively – she knew it was time to get out of here.

She went around to all the people who’d been nice to her and wished them goodnight and good luck, and three or four of them kissed her cheek. Then she went up to Jack, who said “I’ll give you a call tomorrow, dear, okay?” and to Julie Pierce, who told her she’d been “wonderful.”

The next morning she drove into White Plains – it was the only town for miles around that had decent department stores – and there she bought two handsome, identical, dark-tan suitcases that cost a hundred and fifty dollars apiece.

When she’d brought them home she hid them away in her bedroom closet, so that Laura wouldn’t find them and ask questions; then she settled herself in the living room and began to wait for Jack to call.

When the phone rang she sprang for it, but it was Pat Nelson.

“Lucy? I’ve been trying to call you all week but you’re never home. Listen, we really enjoyed the play. You were
very
impressive.”

“Oh, well, thanks, Pat, that’s – very kind.”

“Oh, and listen, Lucy.” Pat lowered her voice to a husky murmur of girlish confidence. “This Jack Halloran of yours is really something. He’s adorable. Will you bring him over to the house sometime?”

There was no call from the Maitlands, and Lucy supposed it had been foolish to imagine they would squander a nonunion carpenter’s pay on theater tickets – let alone on tickets for some dumb little summer-stock theater that nobody ever heard of.

That afternoon she stood at the window to watch a straggling procession of New Tonapac Playhouse people setting out on the long walk to the train station. And from this distance they all did look like kids – boys and girls from far and wide with their cheap hand luggage and their Army duffel bags, brave entertainers who might travel for years before it occurred to them, or to most of them, that they weren’t going anywhere.

Julie Pierce was not among them – but then, nobody would have expected her to be. Julie had undoubtedly chosen to stay here a day or two more, to get some rest for her celebrated nerves and begin to regain the strength she would need in meeting the challenges of a real career.

Then at dusk the phone rang again.

“Lucy? This is Harold Smith?” Some people always spoke their names in the form of a question, as if you might not think them worthy of a statement. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he began, “because I haven’t quite recovered yet, but Nancy and I thought you were absolutely marvelous. We were overwhelmed.”

“Well, that’s – awfully nice of you, Harold.”

“Isn’t it the damndest thing,” he said, “how you can live across the yard from somebody for years, be on friendly terms and all that, and never even know who they are? Oh, listen, I’m
saying this all wrong and I knew I would; all I’m trying to do is convey our – our very great admiration, Lucy, and our thanks. For what you gave us.”

She said that was the nicest thing she’d heard in a long time; then, shyly, she asked him which performance they had seen.

“We saw it twice – the first night, and then again the night before last. And I couldn’t begin to make comparisons because they were both tremendous; both great.”

“Well, actually,” she said, “I was told I sort of overdid everything on that first night. I was sort of told I’d embarrassed people by trying to be a ‘star’ or something.”

“Ah, that’s crazy,” he said impatiently. “That’s just crazy talk. Whoever told you that is outa their mind. Because listen. Oh, listen, baby, you were in
command
of that stage. You went straight for everybody’s throat and you never let go. You
were
a star. And I want to tell you something: I’m not very big in the crying department, but when that curtain came down you had me crying out there like a little bastard. Nancy too. And I mean for Christ’s sake, Lucy, isn’t that what the theater’s for?”

She managed to fix an adequate supper for Laura and herself, though she could only hope Laura didn’t notice that she ate almost nothing.

It was after eight o’clock when Jack called her at last. “Dear, I can’t ask you up to the dorm tonight because I’ve gotta be an accountant,” he said, “and it’ll probably keep me up till morning. There’re all these accounts to be settled, you see, for the whole company, and I’ve been neglecting most of ’em all summer. This is one aspect of show business I was never cut out for.”

And maybe he was a good actor, even a born actor, but any child could have told from the texture of his voice that he was lying.

For almost the whole of the following day she walked around
the house with her knuckles pressed to her lips – the very mannerism specified, in the stage directions of the play she knew by heart, as being characteristic of Blanche Dubois.

“Still up to my neck in paperwork, I’m afraid,” Jack told her on the phone that evening, and she wanted to say Oh, well, look: let’s forget it. Why don’t you just forget everything and go back to wherever you came from and leave me alone?

But then he said “Be okay if I come down to your place for a drink tomorrow? Say about four?”

“Well,” she said, “sure, that’d be nice. And I’ve got something for you.”

“Got something for me? What’s that?”

“Well, I think I’d rather have it be a surprise.”

Some kind of private, giggling business with the Smith girls kept Laura far away from the house all afternoon, and Lucy was grateful for that; still, at the moment when she shyly brought the suitcases into the living room and up to Jack Halloran’s chair, she almost wished Laura could have been there with her to see his eyes growing as round in wonder as those of a little boy on Christmas morning.

“Son of a bitch,” he said in a hushed voice. “Son of a bitch, Lucy, those are the two prettiest things I ever saw.” And she knew Laura would have liked that.

“Well, I thought they might be useful,” she said, “because you travel a lot.”

“ ‘Useful,’ ” he repeated. “Know something? I’ve wanted stuff like this as long as I can remember.” Putting down his glass, he reached forward and unfastened the clasps of one of the bags to open it and inspect its interior. “Built-in coat hangers and everything,” he announced. “And my God, look at all these separate compartments. Lucy, I don’t know how to – don’t know how to thank you.”

One of the small misfortunes of being a rich girl, and she’d known it all her life, was that people would often exaggerate their pleasure when you gave expensive gifts. It came from embarrassment, because they couldn’t offer anything comparable in return, and it nearly always made her feel foolish, but it hadn’t ever stopped her from making the same mistake the next time.

When she’d brought in fresh drinks and settled herself across from him again, it became increasingly clear that they didn’t have much to say to each other. They couldn’t even seem to meet each other’s eyes, except at long intervals, as if each were afraid of the other’s pleasant, precarious smile.

Then she said “So when are you planning to leave, Jack?”

“Oh, sometime tomorrow, I guess.”

“Think the car’ll make it to the city?”