Читать книгу Bethel Merriday - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 3

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That was the first time that anyone ever called her an actress--June 1st, 1922, Bethel's sixth birthday. There was no spotlight, no incidental music, and her only audience were her mother and a small dog looking regretfully through the window of a boarding-house. But she was sensational.

Her mother and she were on their way to the A. & P. Store, and as usual Bethel had with the greatest violence been running in circles. She was slight and small and entirely feminine, but she was the best runner in her neighbourhood.

She stopped, then moved with a queer slow hitching. In front of them an old lady was scraping along, sunk forward from her shoulders as though she had given up all hope of ease and love. Her whole life seemed to be in her painfully sliding feet. Bethel tried to recreate that dejected walk, and she went at it so earnestly that the back of her neck ached with the weight of sagging shoulders, and every step was a frightened effort.

Her mother interrupted.

'Good gracious, don't copy folks that way, Bethel. You'll hurt their feelings.'

The small, black-eyed child halted, in protest.

'Oh! I'm not copying her. I'm trying to be her. I can be a lot of different people.'

'My, aren't we grown-up! I'm afraid that you like to show off, dear--the way you always say your text so loud in Sunday school.'

'I love to say texts! "I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole heart. I will show forth all thy marvellous works".'

'It all sounds like maybe you're going to be an actress. I guess that wouldn't be a bad text for an actress.'

'Look how the poor old lady's heels are run down,' said Bethel, too busy with her career for prophecies of glory.

Bethel was born in 1916, on the day after the Battle of Jutland. Her father, kneeling by the bed, had prayed, 'Dear Lord, please make this baby a child of peace and justice--yes, and happiness, Lord'.

Five months after the six-year-old Bethel gave her imitation of the old lady, the Black Shirts marched bravely into the maws of the movie cameras in Rome; and five months after that, Hitler bounded out of a Munich beer garden. But perhaps it was as important that at this time John Barrymore was playing Hamlet and Pauline Lord Anna Christie and the Theatre Guild producing Back to Methuselah. They were so much less stagy.

Herbert Merriday, Bethel's father, was a dealer in furniture, to which, later, he was importantly to add electric refrigerators and radios. They lived in Sladesbury, a city of 127,000, in central Connecticut, a fount of brassware, hardware, arms, precision instruments, clocks. Here is the renowned establishment of Lilydale & Duck, makers of machine-guns for killing policemen and revolvers for killing gangsters and the Duck Typewriter for joyfully chronicling both brands of killing.

Sladesbury is Yankee, not Colonial, and it envies and scorns the leisurely grace of Litchfield and Sharon. It proclaims itself constantly as 'modern', and is beginning to boast of being 'streamlined'.

Even for Sladesbury, the Merriday family stood high in modernity. They had been the first family to have a radio installed in their car, and Mrs. Merriday, though she was a solid Universalist, was so advanced as to belong to the Birth-Control League.

In May of 1931 Bethel was almost fifteen, and finishing sophomore year in high school. It was suitable to the neighbourhood modernity that her brother Benny, now twenty-one, should be working in the Dutton Aeroplane Works, and talking about designs for transatlantic clippers, talking about (though never actually reading) the Bible by Karl Marx, and that the girls she knew should be talking about careers. They wanted homes and babies as much as their mothers had, but none of them expected to be entirely supported by husbands. Most of them were, they asserted, going to be aeroplane hostesses, motion-picture stars or radio artists, though certain of the less studious sort confessed that they would not mind being 'hostesses' in the large dance halls.

Bethel could not look upon serving cold consommé at an altitude of a mile, or dancing the rumba, as having much meaning. She was learning touch typewriting in high school--that was her father's one insistence about her studies--and she could become a secretary, busy and important, receiving the boss's magnificent callers. But privately, ever since her sixth birthday, she had yearned to be an actress.

As she had never seen a play with professional actors, she was shaky as to just what being an actress implied, and certainly she never admitted to her companions so eccentric an ambition. She was one of a whole generation of youngsters under twenty who considered the London of Shakespeare and the Paris of Molière as barbaric and rather comic, who were familiar with radio broadcasts from Madrid and aeroplanes just landed from Alaska and two-million-dollar film dramas and the theory of the atom, but half of whom had never seen a real play or entered an art gallery or heard an orchestra play anything but dance music.

Bethel herself had seen only a high-school farce, in which a football player in a red wig kept kicking a fat boy; a Republican party pageant in Brewster Park, with Lawyer Wilkie as Lincoln, heavily accented as to shawl and beard; and the melodramas about gun-molls and sunken submarines which Alva Prindle and Bethel herself performed on the workbench in the Prindle garage. So altogether futile and babyish seemed the intention of acting that probably she would not have confessed it to her friends Alva Prindle and Charley Hatch on that evening in May 1931, had the newspapers not been hinting that, for the first time in ten years, Sladesbury was to have a professional stock company all summer long.

And it was one of her queer, secret, sensitized days when she saw everything with intolerable acuteness.

When she awoke, that Saturday in May, the morning was bewitched with fog.

She had, proudly, a room of her own, with a candlewick cover on a spool bed of 1860. Benny, the worshipper of new machinery, laughed at the bed as old-fashioned, but she prized it as somehow connected with Pilgrims who shot wild turkeys with blunderbusses on Thanksgiving Day, and came home to drink hot toddies in the company of grey ladies in poke bonnets.

She also had a shaky white-painted desk of her own, with a bookshelf on which were a complete Shakespeare, an Edgar Wallace novel, a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel, a ragged volume of Keats, a manual of tennis, and No. 1567 in the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, namely, Making Men Happy with Jams and Jellies. The wallpaper was canary yellow, with small scarlet birds; the rug was blue. She loved her secure retreat and its friendly brightness.

But this morning of mist was forlorn to her as she crawled out, in her blue-and-white-striped pyjamas, her bobbed hair, which was very black, flickering above her charming shoulders, which were very white. She was afraid, or pretended that she was afraid, to look out of the window--and then looked. The Hatch house, next door, had alarmingly vanished in the fog. The elms were hard pillars, their foliage unseen; the silver birch was chilly as winter.

On such a day, even at her mature age of fourteen years and eleven months, she could again convince herself that she was the foundling child of wicked gipsies.

She knew that all this was quite insane. But there was a good, efficient, earthy Bethel who always guarded the mad Bethel, and who now insisted that being a gipsy was no crazier than her father's love for assaulting golf balls, or her mother's stated belief that anyone born in New Hampshire was handsomer and healthier than any Vermonter.

As Bethel wriggled and rubbed herself under the shower bath--oh yes, the Merridays were as modern as all that--and drew on her bloomers, her rolled stockings, her flowery cotton dress, she was prim and a little stern, that she might not betray her Crazy Ideas.

Things were not right, downstairs.

The house was only ten years old, and the living-room was still of suitable modernness, with interior decorations correct by the highest standards of the women's magazines: a large, frameless mirror over the white fireplace, reflecting two marble vases; a glass-topped nickelled coffee table in front of the convertible davenport; on the wall, a travel souvenir in the way of a 'Ye Motor Mappe of Ye Quaint Olde Cape Codde', depicting whales and Pilgrims; an enormous combination radio and phonograph, shining like syrup; and no books whatever. But to the revolutionary Bethel, this morning, the room was as oppressive as too hot a bath.

She apologized to herself that her father and her mother and her house were really very nice. But a little smug . . .?

Then she first really discovered ash trays; then she found that ash trays can be fascinating but horrible. On the coffee table was a still unemptied tray; a half-sphere of rock crystal, which should have been spotless, shining as a handful of upper air, but was smeared now with black ash stains and filled with dead paper matches and cigarette stubs like the twisted dead white arms of babies. The whole thing, she shuddered, was a shell pit, only smaller.

But she seized herself and pushed herself on into the dining-room, with a reproving, 'You're imagining things!'

'Good morning, Beth. That's doing pretty well. Only ten minutes late. You look as if you slept pretty well,' said her father.

'Foggy enough for you to-day?' said Gwendolyn, the hired girl.

'Hya, Toots. Hya, handsome,' said her brother.

'Good morning, dear. You look cheerful, this morning,' said her mother.

(She didn't feel cheerful, and she was hanged if she'd be cheerful, not all day long, she reflected. But if they thought she looked so, she must be doing some good acting.)

She studied her corn flakes, and found that corn flakes are as fastastically [sic] improbable as ash trays, once your eyes were open. They certainly didn't look like food. Food was lamb chops and chop suey and corn on the cob and apple pie à la mode; these things were twists of brown paper, with minute bubbles on their speckled surfaces. What a thing to eat!

She did eat them, and enjoyed them very much, but now she was at the fascinated vexation of studying just how they all ate. Her father sturdily opened his lips up and down like a pair of trap doors, showing his teeth. Her mother nibbled like a rabbit, her faded pink lips (she would not use her lipstick till she went to the bridge club this afternoon) trembled a little and hid her teeth. And Brother Ben twisted his mouth sidewise, with the right corner of it scornfully elevated.

She tried to imitate them all.

'What are you daydreaming about, dear?' said her father.

'Eat your nice hot muffins, Beth,' said her mother.

'I hope you'll know me the next time you see me,' said her brother.

'What makes it foggy to-day?' said Bethel.

'The fog,' said Ben.

For two hours, that schoolless Saturday morning, she worked in her father's store, polishing tables and radio cabinets. Her hands were swift, and she liked seeing the sleek grain of the wood emerge from dullness. But as this was, she luxuriously sighed, one of her poetic days, she would spend all afternoon in Brewster Park. It had a grove of thick Japanese walnuts with a tiny stream, and there, on a small pad of the best linen correspondence paper, she would write a poem about the Grecian city hall . . . She was much given to writing poetry, except that she never had been able to write more than a dozen lines of it.

But into the store bounced her friend Alva Prindle, to demand that she come to the North Side Tennis Club that afternoon.

Alva Prindle was a big, beautiful, bouncing blonde. She was born that way; she was spiritually like that; she would have been a big, beautiful, bouncing blonde even if she had been as dark and delicately made as Bethel. It was Alva whom the high-school girls had nominated as a future Queen of Hollywood.

Bethel did play tennis that afternoon, and she played well enough, and she hated it. She felt that there must be something complicated and wrong in herself, for while just that morning she had been able to see herself as Lady Macbeth, satisfyingly murderous and flamboyant before an audience of two thousand, this afternoon, showing off her rapid, accurate, nervous little serve before an audience of not more than a dozen musical young gentlemen aged sixteen, she was terrified; she was embarrassed every time Alva answered the gallery's 'Good work, beautiful', with a merry: 'Go climb a tree'. (Alva varied it by retorting, 'Go lay an egg' or 'Go jump in the lake'.)

The North Side Tennis Club was founded by the medium-successful retail merchants, the minor doctors and lawyers and insurance agents and real-estate sellers of Sladesbury, to give their children something of the social glory of the private en-tout-cas courts of the bank vice-presidents and the factory owners. Its club house was a one-room shack with a counter at which were sold Coca-Cola, orangeade, cigarettes, chewing-gum and stale sweet crackers, but this counter was to Bethel what Twenty-One and El Morocco and the Stork Club and the like New York exhibits of elegance and celebrity were some day to seem.

Alva dragged her in there after the match. The young men lounged on high stools, drinking soda from bottles through straws, and singing 'She Didn't Say Yes, She Didn't Say No'.

The sanctities of Prohibition had more than two years to run, and the young people still considered it a social duty to drink raw gin. The oldest of their group--Morris Bass, the handsome, the fast-driving, the generous, the loudly lecherous, eighteen and the sole scion of a catsup factory--was urging on them cheer from a gin bottle with a counterfeited Gordon label. Alva had a shot of it in her root beer and began to giggle.

Not till now had anyone like Morris Bass ever given heed to Bethel, but this afternoon (she was flattered, so baronial was he in his pink-and-apricot sweater, his white-linen plus fours, his oiled chestnut hair) he dragged her by the arm to a bench outside the club shack, poured half a glass of gin into her sarsaparilla, and with heavily breathing satisfaction pushed his heavy arm about her waist . . . In her life, she had tasted gin perhaps twice; certainly no gallant had embraced her publicly. The Modern Merridays did not hold with drunkenness and public slobbering.

'Please!' she begged.

'What's a matter? Don't you like hootch?'

'Oh, yes, I think I do, but I've been playing tennis so hard--'

'Go on! Bottoms up!'

A stir of pride and rebellion ran through her profound shyness. She set the drink on the ground and drew his arm from about her.

'Little Puritan, eh? Haw, haw, haw!'

'No! I'm not! Of course I'm not!'

It must be admitted that to Bethel, like most children in most Sladesburys in the 1930's, it was worse to be prudish than to be loose. She was sorry that she didn't like to have Morris's thick red hand pawing her white linen blouse.

'No! Of course I'm not a Puritan!'

'Then what's a matter? First time I ever got a good eyeful of you, this afternoon. You played pretty good tennis. And you got nice legs. I guess you won't ever get thick ankles, and that's a girl's best point, believe you me. So what's eating you? Not afraid of a little necking, are you?'

He kissed her, greasily.

She was up and away from him, all in one compact movement. 'I just don't like uncooked beefsteak!'

She ran like a leopard.

As she reached home, her only conclusion was that 'necking' in itself seemed interesting but that, unfortunately, something in her would always make her sick of the Morris Basses and all persons who drank out of bottles and exploded in laughter. Were actors ever like Morris? she wondered. Would it keep her from being an actress?

'There won't be any people like that in my theatre, when I'm running a show!' she snapped; and it is curious, not to be explained, that she should have said that, because never in her life had she heard of an actor-manager, of an actress-producer.

She knew nothing beyond the names of Sarah Bernhardt and Duse and Mrs. Fiske and Ethel Barrymore; nothing of the young Helen Hayes, except as a movie actress, nor of the young Katharine Cornell, who just then was appearing in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Like a child born to be a painter, she got her ideas from the wind, the earth; and this moment she, who couldn't possibly have known about anything of the kind, saw herself in a star's dressing-room, halting her making-up to look at a bill for new props, and then, ever so gently and sympathetically, giving a drunken leading man his two weeks' notice.

After such eminence, it was with a good deal of quiet dignity that she went into the kitchen to help Gwendolyn, the youthful cook, wash the vegetables for dinner. (For fifteen years now the Modern Merridays had had evening dinner at seven instead of evening supper at six.)

'Have a nice time playing tennis?' bubbled Gwendolyn, who was the lady-love of a prominent bus driver.

'Oh--yes--pretty nice . . .'

(Silver lace and a tiara--the queen enthroned, centre-stage. Dirt-crusted bars and the hateful teeth of grinning guards--the queen waiting for the guillotine.)

'Still foggy near the river, Beth?'

'I don't--no, I don't guess it was quite so foggy.'

(A young farmwife who has hidden her murderer-husband in the attic, and who faces expressionless the searching sheriffs.)

'What're you so quiet about? Guess you must be in love.'

'I am not!' And Bethel shuddered. Love did not, to her, seem a mystery to be funny about.

With dignity and a degree of hunger for all the whipped cream of culture, she paraded royally into the living-room and put an aria from Carmen on the phonograph. She did not hear it through. She was so suddenly and bewilderingly sleepy that she dashed up to her little room and till dinnertime slept like a kitten.

The star is sleeping, as only stars can sleep.

With the blonde goddess, Alva Prindle, and Charley Hatch, the sturdy, soothing, rather stupid boy next door who was Bethel's trustiest friend, she went to the Connecticut Palace Motion Picture Theatre that evening, and breathlessly viewed The Heart of an Understudy.

There was, it seems, a woman star, beautiful but wicked, and jealously devoted to ruining the fine young leading man by scandal-hinting and cruel looks instead of by the simpler and much more effective weapon of upstaging him. This lady fiend had an understudy, a poor foundling girl, who had learned her histrionic craft in a Seventh Day Adventist Home for Orphans. The understudy hadn't a friend in the company except the kind young leading man, who carried her bags on overnight jumps.

So the wicked star also persecuted the understudy, till the glorious night when the star fell ill (with a particularly sudden onset of author's disease) and the understudy went on, and played so radiantly, so competently, that the critics and a lot of reporters--who just happened to be in the theatre on that ninety-third night of the New York run--wrote reports which were given two-column heads in all the dailies: 'Miss Dolly Daintree Greatest Theatrical Find of Years: Unknown Girl Thrills Thousands at the Pantaloon Theatre.'

The star seemed distinctly annoyed by this until, dying, she discovered that the unknown female genius was her own daughter, by some marriage that she had forgotten, and handed her over to the arms of the hero, along with a sizable estate--presumably so that they wouldn't have to go on acting.

It was a gorgeous movie, with shots of the Twentieth Century train, supper with the producer at the Waldorf, and gilt cupids on the star's pink bed. There was even a tricky shot in which a minor movie actor acted as though he were a trained actor acting.

When the screen had darkened, Bethel did not merely hope--she joyously knew that she was going to be an actress.

She confessed it to Alva and Charley Hatch at their after-theatre supper at the Rex Pharmacy and Luncheonette.

The Rex, a drugstore which was less of a drugstore than a bookstore, less of a bookstore than a cigar store, less of a cigar store than a restaurant, was characteristic of a somewhat confused purpose in American institutions, whereby the government has been a producer of plays and motion pictures, movie producers are owners of racing stables, churches are gymnasiums and dance halls, telegraph offices are agencies for flowers and tickets, authors are radio comedians, aviators are authors, and the noblest purpose of newspapers is to publish photographs of bathing girls.

The actual drug department at the Rex consisted of a short counter laden with perfume bottles and of a small dark man who looked angry; but along one whole side were magnificent booths with ebonite tables shining like black glass. Here, cosily, the three children, world-weary connoisseurs of radio programmes and ventilation systems for motor-cars, supped on a jumbo malted milk, a maple pecan sundae and a frosted coffee.

'That was a wonderful movie. That dress the star had on at the dance must of cost a thousand dollars,' said Alva.

'Yuh, pretty good. That was swell where she bawled out the fellow in an aeroplane and he said he'd chuck her overboard if she didn't shut her trap,' said Charley.

'I'm going to be an actress,' said Bethel.

Alva gurgled noisily with a straw. 'Look who's here! You don't think you're serious?'

'Yes, I am!'

'Honest, Beth, you aren't so bad, in a mousy kind of way--you got nice big eyes and a kind of, oh, ivory skin, but if you tackled Hollywood, the producers would laugh themselves sick. Now I am going in the movies. Maybe I'm dumb--I can't do Cicero like you can--but I got the build.'

Alva made rather indelicate motions, denoting curves.

'I'm not going to Hollywood. I'm going to be a stage actress. And be able to act, like that understudy.'

'Honest, Beth, you slay me!'

'I am! I'm going to study voice in college--'

'You better study mascara! Beth, there ain't any stage actresses any more! All that old-fashioned junk has gone out. Plays!'

'You've never seen one.'

'I read about 'em in Movie and Mike Weekly. What's a stage play got? Couple scenes, maybe three, and six-eight actors, where in the movies, lookit what they show you--a castle on the Riveera and a submarine torpedo room and the Paris fashions and a Chinese geisha girl and everything; and in a show you wouldn't get but sixty dollars a week, but in the movies I'll get a thousand! Hot dog! I'm going to have a sable coat!'

More sympathetic, Charley offered, 'No, you don't want to be an actress, Beth. They all lead immoral lives. And you wouldn't like it on the stage. You'd be scared. You're kind of shy. You better be a nurse.'

'I will not! I'm going to act.'

'Maybe you could organize an amateur show in the hospital.'

'I'm not going to be an amateur. I'm not going to play at playing. No! It isn't good enough!'