Act Four
SCENE
The same. It is around midnight. The lamp in the front hall has been turned out, so that now no light shines through the front parlor. In the living room only the reading lamp on the table is lighted. Outside the windows the wall of fog appears denser than ever. As the curtain rises, the foghorn is heard, followed by the ships’ bells from the harbor.
Tyrone is seated at the table. He wears his pince-nez, and is playing solitaire. He has taken off his coat and has on an old brown dressing gown. The whiskey bottle on the tray is three-quarters empty. There is a fresh full bottle on the table, which he has brought from the cellar so there will be an ample reserve at hand. He is drunk and shows it by the owlish, deliberate manner in which he peers at each card to make certain of its identity, and then plays it as if he wasn’t certain of his aim. His eyes have a misted, oily look and his mouth is slack. But despite all the whiskey in him, he has not escaped, and he looks as he appeared at the close of the preceding act, a sad, defeated old man, possessed by hopeless resignation.
As the curtain rises, he finishes a game and sweeps the cards together. He shuffles them clumsily, dropping a couple on the floor. He retrieves them with difficulty, and starts to shuffle again, when he hears someone entering the front door. He peers over his pince-nez through the front parlor.
TYRONE
His voice thick.
Who’s that? Is it you, Edmund?
Edmund’s voice answers curtly, “Yes.” Then he evidently collides with something in the dark hall and can be heard cursing. A moment later the hall lamp is turned on. Tyrone frowns and calls.
Turn that light out before you come in.
But Edmund doesn’t. He comes in through the front parlor. He is drunk now, too, but like his father he carries it well, and gives little physical sign of it except in his eyes and a chip-on-the-shoulder aggressiveness in his manner. Tyrone speaks, at first with a warm, relieved welcome.
I’m glad you’ve come, lad. I’ve been damned lonely.
Then resentfully.
You’re a fine one to run away and leave me to sit alone here all night when you know—
With sharp irritation.
I told you to turn out that light! We’re not giving a ball. There’s no reason to have the house ablaze with electricity at this time of night, burning up money!
EDMUND
Angrily.
Ablaze with electricity! One bulb! Hell, everyone keeps a light on in the front hall until they go to bed.
He rubs his knee.
I damned near busted my knee on the hat stand.
TYRONE
The light from here shows in the hall. You could see your way well enough if you were sober.
EDMUND
If I was sober? I like that!
TYRONE
I don’t give a damn what other people do. If they want to be wasteful fools, for the sake of show, let them be!
EDMUND
One bulb! Christ, don’t be such a cheap skate! I’ve proved by figures if you left the light bulb on all night it wouldn’t be as much as one drink!
TYRONE
To hell with your figures! The proof is in the bills I have to pay!
EDMUND
Sits down opposite his father—contemptuously.
Yes, facts don’t mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that’s the only truth!
Derisively.
Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic, for example.
TYRONE
Stubbornly.
So he was. The proof is in his plays.
EDMUND
Well he wasn’t, and there’s no proof of it in his plays, except to you!
Jeeringly.
The Duke of Wellington, there was another good Irish Catholic!
TYRONE
I never said he was a good one. He was a renegade but a Catholic just the same.
EDMUND
Well, he wasn’t. You just want to believe no one but an Irish Catholic general could beat Napoleon.
TYRONE
I’m not going to argue with you. I asked you to turn out that light in the hall.
EDMUND
I heard you, and as far as I’m concerned it stays on.
TYRONE
None of your damned insolence! Are you going to obey me or not?
EDMUND
Not! If you want to be a crazy miser put it out yourself!
TYRONE
With threatening anger.
Listen to me! I’ve put up with a lot from you because from the mad things you’ve done at times I’ve thought you weren’t quite right in your head. I’ve excused you and never lifted my hand to you. But there’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back. You’ll obey me and put out that light or, big as you are, I’ll give you a thrashing that’ll teach you— !
Suddenly he remembers Edmund’s illness and instantly becomes guilty and shamefaced.
Forgive me, lad. I forgot— You shouldn’t goad me into losing my temper.
EDMUND
Ashamed himself now.
Forget it, Papa. I apologize, too. I had no right being nasty about nothing. I am a bit soused, I guess. I’ll put out the damned light.
He starts to get up.
TYRONE
No, stay where you are. Let it burn.
He stands up abruptly—and a bit drunkenly—and begins turning on the three bulbs in the chandelier, with a childish, bitterly dramatic self-pity.
We’ll have them all on! Let them burn! To hell with them! The poor-house is the end of the road, and it might as well be sooner as later!
He finishes turning on the lights.
EDMUND
Has watched this proceeding with an awakened sense of humor—now he grins, teasing affectionately.
That’s a grand curtain.
He laughs.
You’re a wonder, Papa.
TYRONE
Sits down sheepishly—grumbles pathetically.
That’s right, laugh at the old fool! The poor old ham! But the final curtain will be in the poorhouse just the same, and that’s not comedy!
Then as Edmund is still grinning, he changes the subject.
Well, well, let’s not argue. You’ve got brains in that head of yours, though you do your best to deny them. You’ll live to learn the value of a dollar. You’re not like your damned tramp of a brother. I’ve given up hope he’ll ever get sense. Where is he, by the way?
EDMUND
How would I know?
TYRONE
I thought you’d gone back uptown to meet him.
EDMUND
No. I walked out to the beach. I haven’t seen him since this afternoon.
TYRONE
Well, if you split the money I gave you with him, like a fool—
EDMUND
Sure I did. He’s always staked me when he had anything.
TYRONE
Then it doesn’t take a soothsayer to tell he’s probably in the whorehouse.
EDMUND
What of it if he is? Why not?
TYRONE
Contemptuously.
Why not, indeed. It’s the fit place for him. If he’s ever had a loftier dream than whores and whiskey, he’s never shown it.
EDMUND
Oh, for Pete’s sake, Papa! If you’re going to start that stuff, I’ll beat it.
He starts to get up.
TYRONE
Placatingly.
All right, all right, I’ll stop. God knows, I don’t like the subject either. Will you join me in a drink?
EDMUND
Ah! Now you’re talking!
TYRONE
Passes the bottle to him—mechanically.
I’m wrong to treat you. You’ve had enough already.
EDMUND
Pouring a big drink—a bit drunkenly.
Enough is not as good as a feast.
He hands back the bottle.
TYRONE
It’s too much in your condition.
EDMUND
Forget my condition!
He raises his glass.
Here’s how.
TYRONE
Drink hearty.
They drink.
If you walked all the way to the beach you must be damp and chilled.
EDMUND
Oh, I dropped in at the Inn on the way out and back.
TYRONE
It’s not a night I’d pick for a long walk.
EDMUND
I loved the fog. It was what I needed.
He sounds more tipsy and looks it.
TYRONE
You should have more sense than to risk—
EDMUND
To hell with sense! We’re all crazy. What do we want with sense?
He quotes from Dowson sardonically.
“They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.”
Staring before him.
The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the
sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.
He sees his father staring at him with mingled worry and irritated disapproval. He grins mockingly.
Don’t look at me as if I’d gone nutty. I’m talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It’s the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it’s Pan. You see him and you die—that is, inside you—and have to go on living as a ghost.
TYRONE
Impressed and at the same time revolted.
You have a poet in you but it’s a damned morbid one!
Forcing a smile.
Devil take your pessimism. I feel low-spirited enough.
He sighs.
Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You’ll find what you’re trying to say in him—as you’ll find everything else worth saying.
He quotes, using his fine voice.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
EDMUND
Ironically.
Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea.
TYRONE
Disgustedly.
Ach! Keep such sentiments to yourself. I shouldn’t have given you that drink.
EDMUND
It did pack a wallop, all right. On you, too.
He grins with affectionate teasing.
Even if you’ve never missed a performance!
Aggressively.
Well, what’s wrong with being drunk? It’s what we’re after, isn’t it? Let’s not kid each other, Papa. Not tonight. We know what we’re trying to forget. Hurriedly.
But let’s not talk about it. It’s no use now.
TYRONE
Dully.
No. All we can do is try to be resigned—again.
EDMUND
Or be so drunk you can forget.
He recites, and recites well, with bitter, ironical passion, the Symons’ translation of Baudelaire’s prose poem.
“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.’”
He grins at his father provocatively.
TYRONE
Thickly humorous.
I wouldn’t worry about the virtue part of it, if I were you.
Then disgustedly.
Pah! It’s morbid nonsense! What little truth is in it you’ll find nobly said in Shakespeare.
Then appreciatively.
But you recited it well, lad. Who wrote it?
EDMUND
Baudelaire.
TYRONE
Never heard of him.
EDMUND
Grins provocatively.
He also wrote a poem about Jamie and the Great White Way.
TYRONE
That loafer! I hope to God he misses the last car and has to stay uptown!
EDMUND
Goes on, ignoring this.
Although he was French and never saw Broadway and died before Jamie was born. He knew him and Little Old New York just the same.
He recites the Symons’ translation of Baudelaire’s “Epilogue.”
“With heart at rest I climbed the citadel’s Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,
Where evil comes up softly like a flower. Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain, Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;
But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain To drink delight of that enormous trull
Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.
Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full, Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and Hunted have pleasures of their own to give, The vulgar herd can never understand.”
TYRONE
With irritable disgust.
Morbid filth! Where the hell do you get your taste in literature? Filth and despair and pessimism! Another atheist, I suppose. When you deny God, you deny hope. That’s the trouble with you. If you’d get down on your knees—
EDMUND
As if he hadn’t heard—sardonically.
It’s a good likeness of Jamie, don’t you think, hunted by himself and whiskey, hiding in a Broadway hotel room with some fat tart— he likes them fat—reciting Dowson’s Cynara to her.
He recites derisively, but with deep feeling.
“All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”
Jeeringly.
And the poor fat burlesque queen doesn’t get a word of it, but suspects she’s being insulted! And Jamie never loved any Cynara, and was never faithful to a woman in his life, even in his fashion! But he lies there, kidding himself he is superior and enjoys pleasures “the vulgar herd can never understand”!
He laughs.
It’s nuts—completely nuts!
TYRONE
Vaguely—his voice thick.
It’s madness, yes. If you’d get on your knees and pray. When you deny God, you deny sanity.
EDMUND
Ignoring this.
But who am I to feel superior? I’ve done the same damned thing. And it’s no more crazy than Dowson himself, inspired by an absinthe hangover, writing it to a dumb barmaid, who thought he was a poor crazy souse, and gave him the gate to marry a waiter!
He laughs—then soberly, with genuine sympathy.
Poor Dowson. Booze and consumption got him.
He starts and for a second looks miserable and frightened. Then with defensive irony.
Perhaps it would be tactful of me to change the subject.
TYRONE
Thickly.
Where you get your taste in authors— That damned library of yours!
He indicates the small bookcase at rear.
Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I’ve three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read.
EDMUND
Provocatively.
They say he was a souse, too.
TYRONE
They lie! I don’t doubt he liked his glass—it’s a good man’s failing—but he knew how to drink so it didn’t poison his brain with morbidness and filth. Don’t compare him with the pack you’ve got in there.
He indicates the small bookcase again.
Your dirty Zola! And your Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was a dope fiend!
He starts and looks guilty.
EDMUND
With defensive dryness.
Perhaps it would be wise to change the subject.
A pause.
You can’t accuse me of not knowing Shakespeare. Didn’t I win five dollars from you once when you bet me I couldn’t learn a leading part of his in a week, as you used to do in stock in the old days. I learned Macbeth and recited it letter perfect, with you giving me the cues.
TYRONE
Approvingly.
That’s true. So you did.
He smiles teasingly and sighs.
It was a terrible ordeal, I remember, hearing you murder the lines. I kept wishing I’d paid over the bet without making you prove it.
He chuckles and Edmund grins. Then he starts as he hears a sound from upstairs—with dread.
Did you hear? She’s moving around. I was hoping she’d gone to sleep.
EDMUND
Forget it! How about another drink?
He reaches out and gets the bottle, pours a drink and hands it back. Then with a strained casualness, as his father pours a drink.
When did Mama go to bed?
TYRONE
Right after you left. She wouldn’t eat any dinner. What made you run away?
EDMUND
Nothing.
Abruptly raising his glass.
Well, here’s how.
TYRONE
Mechanically.
Drink hearty, lad.
They drink. Tyrone again listens to sounds upstairs—with dread.
She’s moving around a lot. I hope to God she doesn’t come down.
EDMUND
Dully.
Yes. She’ll be nothing but a ghost haunting the past by this time.
He pauses—then miserably.
Back before I was born—
TYRONE
Doesn’t she do the same with me? Back before she ever knew me. You’d think the only happy days she’s ever known were in her father’s home, or at the Convent, praying and playing the piano.
Jealous resentment in his bitterness.
As I’ve told you before, you must take her memories with a grain of salt. Her wonderful home was ordinary enough. Her father wasn’t the great, generous, noble Irish gentleman she makes out. He was a nice enough man, good company and a good talker. I liked him and he liked me. He was prosperous enough, too, in his wholesale grocery business, an able man. But he had his weakness. She condemns my drinking but she forgets his. It’s true he never touched a drop till he was forty, but after that he made up for lost time. He became a steady champagne drinker, the worst kind. That was his grand pose, to drink only champagne. Well, it finished him quick— that and the consumption—
He stops with a guilty glance at his son.
EDMUND
Sardonically.
We don’t seem able to avoid unpleasant topics, do we?
TYRONE
Sighs sadly.
No.
Then with apathetic attempt at heartiness.
What do you say to a game or two of Casino, lad?
EDMUND
All right.
TYRONE
Shuffling the cards clumsily.
We can’t lock up and go to bed till Jamie comes on the last trolley— which I hope he won’t—and I don’t want to go upstairs, anyway, till she’s asleep.
EDMUND
Neither do I.
TYRONE
Keeps shuffling the cards fumblingly, forgetting to deal them.
As I was saying, you must take her tales of the past with a grain of salt. The piano playing and her dream of becoming a concert pianist. That was put in her head by the nuns flattering her. She was their pet. They loved her for being so devout. They’re innocent women, anyway, when it comes to the world. They don’t know that not one in a million who shows promise ever rises to concert playing. Not that your mother didn’t play well for a schoolgirl, but that’s no reason to take it for granted she could have—
EDMUND
Sharply.
Why don’t you deal, if we’re going to play.
TYRONE
Eh? I am.
Dealing with very uncertain judgment of distance.
And the idea she might have become a nun. That’s the worst. Your mother was one of the most beautiful girls you could ever see. She knew it, too. She was a bit of a rogue and a coquette, God bless her, behind all her shyness and blushes. She was never made to renounce the world. She was bursting with health and high spirits and the love of loving.
EDMUND
For God’s sake, Papa! Why don’t you pick up your hand?
TYRONE
Picks it up—dully.
Yes, let’s see what I have here.
They both stare at their cards unseeingly. Then they both start. Tyrone whispers.
Listen!
EDMUND
She’s coming downstairs.
TYRONE
Hurriedly.
We’ll play our game. Pretend not to notice and she’ll soon go up again.
EDMUND
Staring through the front parlor— with relief.
I don’t see her. She must have started down and then turned back.
TYRONE
Thank God.
EDMUND
Yes. It’s pretty horrible to see her the way she must be now.
With bitter misery.
The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it’s more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately,
that’s the hell of it! You know something in her does it deliberately—to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we’re alive! It’s as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!
TYRONE
Remonstrates gently.
Now, now, lad. It’s not her. It’s the damned poison.
EDMUND
Bitterly.
She takes it to get that effect. At least, I know she did this time!
Abruptly.
My play, isn’t it? Here.
He plays a card.
TYRONE
Plays mechanically—gently reproachful.
She’s been terribly frightened about your illness, for all her pretending. Don’t be too hard on her, lad. Remember she’s not responsible. Once that cursed poison gets a hold on anyone—
EDMUND
His face grows hard and he stares at his father with bitter accusation.
It never should have gotten a hold on her! I know damned well she’s not to blame! And I know who is! You are! Your damned stinginess! If you’d spent money for a decent doctor when she was so sick after I was born, she’d never have known morphine existed! Instead you put her in the hands of a hotel quack who wouldn’t admit his ignorance and took the easiest way out, not giving a damn what happened to her afterwards! All because his fee was cheap! Another one of your bargains!
TYRONE
Stung—angrily.
Be quiet! How dare you talk of something you know nothing about!
Trying to control his temper.
You must try to see my side of it, too, lad. How was I to know he was that kind of a doctor? He had a good reputation—
EDMUND
Among the souses in the hotel bar, I suppose!
TYRONE
That’s a lie! I asked the hotel proprietor to recommend the best—
EDMUND
Yes! At the same time crying poorhouse and making it plain you wanted a cheap one! I know your system! By God, I ought to after this afternoon!
TYRONE
Guiltily defensive.
What about this afternoon?
EDMUND
Never mind now. We’re talking about Mama! I’m saying no matter how you excuse yourself you know damned well your stinginess is to blame—
TYRONE
And I say you’re a liar! Shut your mouth right now, or—
EDMUND
Ignoring this.
After you found out she’d been made a morphine addict, why didn’t you send her to a cure then, at the start, while she still had a chance? No, that would have meant spending some money! I’ll bet you told her all she had to do was use a little will power! That’s what you still believe in your heart, in spite of what doctors, who really know something about it, have told you!
TYRONE
You lie again! I know better than that now! But how was I to know then? What did I know of morphine? It was years before I discovered what was wrong. I thought she’d never got over her sickness, that’s all. Why didn’t I send her to a cure, you say?
Bitterly.
Haven’t I? I’ve spent thousands upon thousands in cures! A waste. What good have they done her? She always started again.
EDMUND
Because you’ve never given her anything that would help her want to stay off it! No home except this summer dump in a place she hates and you’ve refused even to spend money to make this look decent, while you keep buying more property, and playing sucker for every con man with a gold mine, or a silver mine, or any kind of get-rich-quick swindle! You’ve dragged her around on the road, season after season, on one-night stands, with no one she could talk to, waiting night after night in dirty hotel rooms for you to come back with a bun on after the bars closed! Christ, is it any wonder she didn’t want to be cured. Jesus, when I think of it I hate your guts!
TYRONE
Strickenly.
Edmund!
Then in a rage.
How dare you talk to your father like that, you insolent young cub! After all I’ve done for you.
EDMUND
We’ll come to that, what you’re doing for me!
TYRONE
Looking guilty again—ignores this.
Will you stop repeating your mother’s crazy accusations, which she never makes unless it’s the poison talking? I never dragged her on the road against her will. Naturally, I wanted her with me. I loved her. And she came because she loved me and wanted to be with me. That’s the truth, no matter what she says when she’s not herself. And she needn’t have been lonely. There was always the members of my company to talk to, if she’d wanted. She had her children, too, and I insisted, in spite of the expense, on having a nurse to travel with her.
EDMUND
Bitterly.
Yes, your one generosity, and that because you were jealous of her paying too much attention to us, and wanted us out of your way! It was another mistake, too! If she’d had to take care of me all by herself, and had that to occupy her mind, maybe she’d have been able—
TYRONE
Goaded into vindictiveness.
Or for that matter, if you insist on judging things by what she says when she’s not in her right mind, if you hadn’t been born she’d never—
He stops ashamed.
EDMUND
Suddenly spent and miserable.
Sure. I know that’s what she feels, Papa.
TYRONE
Protests penitently.
She doesn’t! She loves you as dearly as ever mother loved a son! I only said that because you put me in such a God-damned rage, raking up the past, and saying you hate me—
EDMUND
Dully.
I didn’t mean it, Papa.
He suddenly smiles—kidding a bit drunkenly.
I’m like Mama, I can’t help liking you, in spite of everything.
TYRONE
Grins a bit drunkenly in return.
I might say the same of you. You’re no great shakes as a son. It’s a case of “A poor thing but mine own.”
They both chuckle with real, if alcoholic, affection. Tyrone changes the subject.
What’s happened to our game? Whose play is it?
EDMUND
Yours, I guess.
Tyrone plays a card which Edmund takes and the game gets forgotten again.
TYRONE
You mustn’t let yourself be too downhearted, lad, by the bad news you had today. Both the doctors promised me, if you obey orders at this place you’re going, you’ll be cured in six months, or a year at most.
EDMUND
His face hard again.
Don’t kid me. You don’t believe that.
TYRONE
Too vehemently.
Of course I believe it! Why shouldn’t I believe it when both Hardy and the specialist—?
EDMUND
You think I’m going to die.
TYRONE
That’s a lie! You’re crazy!
EDMUND
More bitterly.
So why waste money? That’s why you’re sending me to a state farm—
TYRONE
In guilty confusion.
What state farm? It’s the Hilltown Sanatorium, that’s all I know, and both doctors said it was the best place for you.
EDMUND
Scathingly.
For the money! That is, for nothing, or practically nothing. Don’t lie, Papa! You know damned well Hilltown Sanatorium is a state institution! Jamie suspected you’d cry poorhouse to Hardy and he wormed the truth out of him.
TYRONE
Furiously.
That drunken loafer! I’ll kick him out in the gutter! He’s poisoned your mind against me ever since you were old enough to listen!
EDMUND
You can’t deny it’s the truth about the state farm, can you?
TYRONE
It’s not true the way you look at it! What if it is run by the state? That’s nothing against it. The state has the money to make a better place than any private sanatorium. And why shouldn’t I take advantage of it? It’s my right
—and yours. We’re residents. I’m a property owner. I help to support it. I’m taxed to death—
EDMUND
With bitter irony.
Yes, on property valued at a quarter of a million.
TYRONE
Lies! It’s all mortgaged!
EDMUND
Hardy and the specialist know what you’re worth. I wonder what they thought of you when they heard you moaning poorhouse and showing you wanted to wish me on charity!
TYRONE
It’s a lie! All I told them was I couldn’t afford any millionaire’s sanatorium because I was land poor. That’s the truth!
EDMUND
And then you went to the Club to meet McGuire and let him stick you with another bum piece of property!
As Tyrone starts to deny.
Don’t lie about it! We met McGuire in the hotel bar after he left you. Jamie kidded him about hooking you, and he winked and laughed!
TYRONE
Lying feebly.
He’s a liar if he said—
EDMUND
Don’t lie about it!
With gathering intensity.
God, Papa, ever since I went to sea and was on my own, and found out what hard work for little pay was, and what it felt like to be broke, and starve, and camp on park benches because I had no place to sleep, I’ve tried to be fair to you because I knew what you’d been up against as a kid. I’ve tried to make allowances. Christ, you have to make allowances in this damned family or go nuts! I have tried to make allowances for myself when I remember all the rotten stuff I’ve pulled! I’ve tried to feel like Mama that you can’t help being what you are where money is concerned. But God Almighty, this last stunt of yours is too much! It makes me want to puke! Not because of the rotten way you’re treating me. To hell with that! I’ve treated you rottenly, in my way, more than once. But to think when it’s a question of your son having consumption, you can show yourself up before the whole town as such a stinking old tightwad! Don’t you know Hardy will talk and the whole damned town will know! Jesus, Papa, haven’t you any pride or shame?
Bursting with rage.
And don’t think I’ll let you get away with it! I won’t go to any damned state farm just to save you a few lousy dollars to buy more bum property with! You stinking old miser—!
He chokes huskily, his voice trembling with rage, and then is shaken by a fit of coughing.
TYRONE
Has shrunk back in his chair under this attack, his guilty contrition greater than his anger. He stammers.
Be quiet! Don’t say that to me! You’re drunk! I won’t mind you. Stop coughing, lad. You’ve got yourself worked up over nothing. Who said you had to go to this Hilltown place? You can go anywhere you like. I don’t give a damn what it costs. All I care about is
to have you get well. Don’t call me a stinking miser, just because I don’t want doctors to think I’m a millionaire they can swindle.
Edmund has stopped coughing. He looks sick and weak. His father stares at him frightenedly.
You look weak, lad. You’d better take a bracer.
EDMUND
Grabs the bottle and pours his glass brimfull—weakly.
Thanks.
He gulps down the whiskey.
TYRONE
Pours himself a big drink, which empties the bottle, and drinks it. His head bows and he stares dully at the cards on the table—vaguely.
Whose play is it?
He goes on dully, without resentment.
A stinking old miser. Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe I can’t help being, although all my life since I had anything I’ve thrown money over the bar to buy drinks for everyone in the house, or loaned money to sponges I knew would never pay it back—
With a loose-mouthed sneer of self-contempt.
But, of course, that was in barrooms, when I was full of whiskey. I can’t feel that way about it when I’m sober in my home. It was at home I first learned the value of a dollar and the fear of the poorhouse. I’ve never been able to believe in my luck since. I’ve always feared it would change and everything I had would be taken away. But still, the more property you own, the safer you think you are. That may not be logical, but it’s the way I have to feel. Banks fail, and your money’s gone, but you think you can keep land beneath your feet.
Abruptly his tone becomes scornfully superior.
You said you realized what I’d been up against as a boy. The hell you do! How could you? You’ve had everything—nurses, schools, college, though you didn’t stay there. You’ve had food, clothing. Oh, I know you had a fling of hard work with your back and hands, a bit of being homeless and penniless in a foreign land, and I respect you for it. But it was a game of romance and adventure to you. It was play.
EDMUND
Dully sarcastic.
Yes, particularly the time I tried to commit suicide at Jimmie the Priest’s, and almost did.
TYRONE
You weren’t in your right mind. No son of mine would ever— You were drunk.
EDMUND
I was stone cold sober. That was the trouble. I’d stopped to think too long.
TYRONE
With drunken peevishness.
Don’t start your damned atheist morbidness again! I don’t care to listen. I was trying to make plain to you—
Scornfully.
What do you know of the value of a dollar? When I was ten my father deserted my mother and went back to Ireland to die. Which he did soon enough, and deserved to, and I hope he’s roasting in hell. He mistook rat poison for flour, or sugar, or something. There was gossip it wasn’t by mistake but that’s a lie. No one in my family ever—
EDMUND
My bet is, it wasn’t by mistake.
TYRONE
More morbidness! Your brother put that in your head. The worst he can suspect is the only truth for him. But never mind. My mother was left, a stranger in a strange land, with four small children, me and a sister a little older and two younger than me. My two older brothers had moved to other parts. They couldn’t help. They were hard put to it to keep themselves alive. There was no damned romance in our poverty. Twice we were evicted from the miserable hovel we called home, with my mother’s few sticks of furniture thrown out in the street, and my mother and sisters crying. I cried, too, though I tried hard not to, because I was the man of the family. At ten years old! There was no more school for me. I worked twelve hours a day in a machine shop, learning to make files. A dirty barn of a place where rain dripped through the roof, where you roasted in summer, and there was no stove in winter, and your hands got numb with cold, where the only light came through two small filthy windows, so on grey days I’d have to sit bent over with my eyes almost touching the files in order to see! You talk of work! And what do you think I got for it? Fifty cents a week! It’s the truth! Fifty cents a week! And my poor mother washed and scrubbed for the Yanks by the day, and my older sister sewed, and my two younger stayed at home to keep the house. We never had clothes enough to wear, nor enough food to eat. Well I remember one Thanksgiving, or maybe it was Christmas, when some Yank in whose house mother had been scrubbing gave her a
dollar extra for a present, and on the way home she spent it all on food. I can remember her hugging and kissing us and saying with tears of joy running down her tired face: “Glory be to God, for once in our lives we’ll have enough for each of us!”
He wipes tears from his eyes.
A fine, brave, sweet woman. There never was a braver or finer.
EDMUND
Moved.
Yes, she must have been.
TYRONE
Her one fear was she’d get old and sick and have to die in the poorhouse.
He pauses—then adds with grim humor.
It was in those days I learned to be a miser. A dollar was worth so much then. And once you’ve learned a lesson, it’s hard to unlearn it. You have to look for bargains. If I took this state farm sanatorium for a good bargain, you’ll have to forgive me. The doctors did tell me it’s a good place. You must believe that, Edmund. And I swear I never meant you to go there if you didn’t want to.
Vehemently.
You can choose any place you like! Never mind what it costs! Any place I can afford. Any place you like—within reason.
At this qualification, a grin twitches Edmunds lips. His resentment has gone. His father goes on with an elaborately offhand, casual air.
There was another sanatorium the specialist recommended. He said it had a record as good as any place in the country. It’s endowed by a group of millionaire factory owners, for the benefit of their workers principally, but you’re eligible to go there because you’re a resident. There’s such a pile of money behind it, they don’t have to charge much. It’s only seven dollars a week but you get ten times that value.
Hastily.
I don’t want to persuade you to anything, understand. I’m simply repeating what I was told.
EDMUND
Concealing his smile—casually.
Oh, I know that. It sounds like a good bargain to me. I’d like to go there. So that settles that.
Abruptly he is miserably desperate again—dully.
It doesn’t matter a damn now, anyway. Let’s forget it!
Changing the subject.
How about our game? Whose play is it?
TYRONE
Mechanically.
I don’t know. Mine, I guess. No, it’s yours.
Edmund plays a card. His father takes it. Then about to play from his hand, he again forgets the game.
Yes, maybe life overdid the lesson for me, and made a dollar worth too much, and the time came when that mistake ruined my career as a fine actor.
Sadly.
I’ve never admitted this to anyone before, lad, but tonight I’m so heartsick I feel at the end of everything, and what’s the use of fake pride and pretense. That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune. I didn’t want to do anything else, and by the time I woke up to the fact I’d become a slave to the damned thing and did try other plays, it was too late. They had identified me with that one part, and didn’t want me in anything else. They were right, too. I’d lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard. Thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season like snapping your fingers! It was too great a temptation. Yet before I bought the damned thing I was considered one of the three or four young actors with the greatest artistic promise in America. I’d worked like hell. I’d left a good job as a machinist to take supers’ parts because I loved the theater. I was wild with ambition. I read all the plays ever written. I studied Shakespeare
as you’d study the Bible. I educated myself. I got rid of an Irish brogue you could cut with a knife. I loved Shakespeare. I would have acted in any of his plays for nothing, for the joy of being alive in his great poetry. And I acted well in him. I felt inspired by him. I could have been a great Shakespearean actor, if I’d kept on. I know that! In 1874 when Edwin Booth came to the theater in Chicago where I was leading man, I played Cassius to his Brutus one night, Brutus to his Cassius the next, Othello to his Iago, and so on. The first night I played Othello, he said to our manager, “That young man is playing Othello better than I ever did!”
Proudly.
That from Booth, the greatest actor of his day or any other! And it was true! And I was only twenty-seven years old! As I look back on it now, that night was the high spot in my career. I had life where I wanted it! And for a time after that I kept on upward with ambition high. Married your mother. Ask her what I was like in those days. Her love was an added incentive to ambition. But a few years later my good bad luck made me find the big money-maker. It wasn’t that in my eyes at first. It was a great romantic part I knew I could play better than anyone. But it was a great box office success from the start—and then life had me where it wanted me—at from thirty- five to forty thousand net profit a season! A fortune in those days—or even in these.
Bitterly.
What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth— Well, no matter. It’s a late day for regrets.
He glances vaguely at his cards.
My play, isn’t it?
EDMUND
Moved, stares at his father with understanding—slowly.
I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa. I know you a lot better now.
TYRONE
With a loose, twisted smile.
Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. Maybe you’ll only feel more contempt for me. And it’s a poor way to convince you of the value of a dollar.
Then as if this phrase automatically aroused an habitual association in his mind, he glances up at the chandelier disapprovingly.
The glare from those extra lights hurts my eyes. You don’t mind if I turn them out, do you? We don’t need them, and there’s no use making the Electric Company rich.
EDMUND
Controlling a wild impulse to laugh—agreeably.
No, sure not. Turn them out.
TYRONE
Gets heavily and a bit waveringly to his feet and gropes uncertainly for the lights—his mind going back to its line of thought.
No, I don’t know what the hell it was I wanted to buy.
He clicks out one bulb.
On my solemn oath, Edmund, I’d gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank—
He clicks out another bulb.
I’d be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.
He turns out the third bulb, so only the reading lamp is on, and sits down again heavily. Edmund suddenly cannot hold back a burst of strained, ironical laughter. Tyrone is hurt.
What the devil are you laughing at?
EDMUND
Not at you, Papa. At life. It’s so damned crazy.
TYRONE
Growls.
More of your morbidness! There’s nothing wrong with life. It’s we who—
He quotes.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”
He pauses—then sadly.
The praise Edwin Booth gave my Othello. I made the manager put down his exact words in writing. I kept it in my wallet for years. I used to read it every once in a while until finally it made me feel so bad I didn’t want to face it any more. Where is it now, I wonder? Somewhere in this house. I remember I put it away carefully—
EDMUND
With a wry ironical sadness.
It might be in an old trunk in the attic, along with Mama’s wedding dress.
Then as his father stares at him, he adds quickly.
For Pete’s sake, if we’re going to play cards, let’s play.
He takes the card his father had played and leads. For a moment, they play the game, like mechanical chess players. Then Tyrone stops, listening to a sound upstairs.
TYRONE
She’s still moving around. God knows when she’ll go to sleep.
EDMUND
Pleads tensely.
For Christ’s sake, Papa, forget it!
He reaches out and pours a drink. Tyrone starts to protest, then gives it up. Edmund drinks. He puts down the glass. His expression changes. When he speaks it is as if he were deliberately giving way to drunkenness and seeking to hide behind a maudlin manner.
Yes, she moves above and beyond us, a ghost haunting the past, and here we sit pretending to forget, but straining our ears listening for the slightest sound, hearing the fog drip from the eaves like the uneven tick of a
rundown, crazy clock—or like the dreary tears of a trollop spattering in a puddle of stale beer on a honky-tonk table top!
He laughs with maudlin appreciation.
Not so bad, that last, eh? Original, not Baudelaire. Give me credit!
Then with alcoholic talkativeness.
You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea. Here’s one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!
He grins wryly.
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!
TYRONE
Stares at him—impressed.
Yes, there’s the makings of a poet in you all right.
Then protesting uneasily.
But that’s morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death.
EDMUND
Sardonically.
The makings of a poet. No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit. I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.
A pause. Then they both jump startledly as there is a noise from outside the house, as if someone had stumbled and fallen on the front steps. Edmund grins.
Well, that sounds like the absent brother. He must have a peach of a bun on.
TYRONE
Scowling.
That loafer! He caught the last car, bad luck to it.
He gets to his feet.
Get him to bed, Edmund. I’ll go out on the porch. He has a tongue like an adder when he’s drunk. I’d only lose my temper.
He goes out the door to the side porch as the front door in the hall bangs shut behind Jamie. Edmund watches with amusement Jamie’s wavering progress through the front parlor. Jamie comes in. He is very drunk and
woozy on his legs. His eyes are glassy, his face bloated, his speech blurred, his mouth slack like his father’s, a leer on his lips.
JAMIE
Swaying and blinking in the doorway—in a loud voice.
What ho! What ho!
EDMUND
Sharply.
Nix on the loud noise!
JAMIE
Blinks at him.
Oh, hello, Kid.
With great seriousness.
I’m as drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.
EDMUND
Dryly.
Thanks for telling me your great secret.
JAMIE
Grins foolishly.
Yes. Unneshesary information Number One, eh?
He bends and slaps at the knees of his trousers.
Had serious accident. The front steps tried to trample on me. Took advantage of fog to waylay me. Ought to be a lighthouse out there. Dark in here, too.
Scowling.
What the hell is this, the morgue? Lesh have some light on subject.
He sways forward to the table, reciting Kipling.
“Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river, Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!
Keep the crossing-stakes beside you, an’ they will surely guide you ’Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark.”
He fumbles at the chandelier and manages to turn on the three bulbs.
Thash more like it. To hell with old Gaspard. Where is the old tightwad?
EDMUND
Out on the porch.
JAMIE
Can’t expect us to live in the Black Hole of Calcutta.
His eyes fix on the full bottle of whiskey.
Say! Have I got the d.t.’s?
He reaches out fumblingly and grabs it.
By God, it’s real. What’s matter with the Old Man tonight? Must be ossified to forget he left this out. Grab opportunity by the forelock. Key to my success.
He slops a big drink into a glass.
EDMUND
You’re stinking now. That will knock you stiff.
JAMIE
Wisdom from the mouth of babes. Can the wise stuff, Kid. You’re still wet behind the ears.
He lowers himself into a chair, holding the drink carefully aloft.
EDMUND
All right. Pass out if you want to.
JAMIE
Can’t, that’s trouble. Had enough to sink a ship, but can’t sink. Well, here’s hoping.
He drinks.
EDMUND
Shove over the bottle. I’ll have one, too.
JAMIE
With sudden, big-brotherly solicitude, grabbing the bottle.
No, you don’t. Not while I’m around. Remember doctor’s orders. Maybe no one else gives a damn if you die, but I do. My kid brother. I love your guts, Kid. Everything else is gone. You’re all I’ve got left.
Pulling bottle closer to him.
So no booze for you, if I can help it.
Beneath his drunken sentimentality there is a genuine sincerity.
EDMUND
Irritably.
Oh, lay off it.
JAMIE
Is hurt and his face hardens.
You don’t believe I care, eh? Just drunken bull.
He shoves the bottle over.
All right. Go ahead and kill yourself.
EDMUND
Seeing he is hurt—affectionately.
Sure I know you care, Jamie, and I’m going on the wagon. But tonight doesn’t count. Too many damned things have happened today.
He pours a drink.
Here’s how.
He drinks.
JAMIE
Sobers up momentarily and with a pitying look.
I know, Kid. It’s been a lousy day for you.
Then with sneering cynicism.
I’ll bet old Gaspard hasn’t tried to keep you off booze. Probably give you a case to take with you to the state farm for pauper patients. The sooner you kick the bucket, the less expense.
With contemptuous hatred.
What a bastard to have for a father! Christ, if you put him in a book, no one would believe it!
EDMUND
Defensively.
Oh, Papa’s all right, if you try to understand him—and keep your sense of humor.
JAMIE
Cynically.
He’s been putting on the old sob act for you, eh? He can always kid you. But not me. Never again.
Then slowly.
Although, in a way, I do feel sorry for him about one thing. But he has even that coming to him. He’s to blame.
Hurriedly.
But to hell with that.
He grabs the bottle and pours another drink, appearing very drunk again.
That lash drink’s getting me. This one ought to put the lights out. Did you tell Gaspard I got it out of Doc Hardy this sanatorium is a charity dump?
EDMUND
Reluctantly.
Yes. I told him I wouldn’t go there. It’s all settled now. He said I can go anywhere I want.
He adds, smiling without resentment.
Within reason, of course.
JAMIE
Drunkenly imitating his father.
Of course, lad. Anything within reason.
Sneering.
That means another cheap dump. Old Gaspard, the miser in “The Bells,” that’s a part he can play without make-up.
EDMUND
Irritably.
Oh, shut up, will you. I’ve heard that Gaspard stuff a million times.
JAMIE
Shrugs his shoulders—thickly.
Aw right, if you’re shatisfied—let him get away with it. It’s your funeral—I mean, I hope it won’t be.
EDMUND
Changing the subject.
What did you do uptown tonight? Go to Mamie Burns?
JAMIE
Very drunk, his head nodding.
Sure thing. Where else could I find suitable feminine companionship? And love. Don’t forget love. What is a man without a good woman’s love? A God-damned hollow shell.
EDMUND
Chuckles tipsily, letting himself go now and be drunk.
You’re a nut.
JAMIE
Quotes with gusto from Oscar Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House.”
“Then, turning to my love, I said,
The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.”
But she—she heard the violin, And left my side and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust.
Then suddenly the tune went false,
The dancers wearied of the waltz …”
He breaks off, thickly.
Not strictly accurate. If my love was with me, I didn’t notice it. She must have been a ghost.
He pauses.
Guess which one of Mamie’s charmers I picked to bless me with her woman’s love. It’ll hand you a laugh, Kid. I picked Fat Violet.
EDMUND
Laughs drunkenly.
No, honest? Some pick! God, she weighs a ton. What the hell for, a joke?
JAMIE
No joke. Very serious. By the time I hit Mamie’s dump I felt very sad about myself and all the other poor bums in the world. Ready for a weep on any old womanly bosom. You know how you get when John Barleycorn turns on the soft music inside you. Then, soon as I got in the door, Mamie began telling me all her troubles. Beefed how rotten business was, and she was going to give Fat Violet the gate. Customers didn’t fall for Vi. Only reason she’d kept her was she could play the piano. Lately Vi’s gone on drunks and been too boiled to play, and was eating her out of house and home, and although Vi was a goodhearted dumbbell, and she felt sorry for her because she didn’t know how the hell she’d make a living, still business was business, and she couldn’t afford to run a home for fat tarts. Well, that made me feel sorry for Fat Violet, so I squandered two bucks of your dough to escort her upstairs. With no dishonorable intentions whatever. I like them fat, but not that fat. All I wanted was a little heart-to-heart talk concerning the infinite sorrow of life.
EDMUND
Chuckles drunkenly.
Poor Vi! I’ll bet you recited Kipling and Swinburne and Dowson and gave her “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.”
JAMIE
Grins loosely.
Sure—with the Old Master, John Barleycorn, playing soft music. She stood it for a while. Then she got good and sore. Got the idea I took her upstairs for a joke. Gave me a grand bawling out. Said she was better than a drunken bum who recited poetry. Then she began to cry. So I had to say I loved her because she was fat, and she wanted to believe that, and I stayed with her to prove it, and that cheered her up, and she kissed me when I left, and said she’d fallen hard for me, and we both cried a little more in the hallway, and everything was fine, except Mamie Burns thought I’d gone bughouse.
EDMUND
Quotes derisively.
“Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give, The vulgar herd can never understand.”
JAMIE
Nods his head drunkenly.
Egzactly! Hell of a good time, at that. You should have stuck around with me, Kid. Mamie Burns inquired after you. Sorry to hear you were sick. She meant it, too.
He pauses—then with maudlin humor, in a ham-actor tone.
This night has opened my eyes to a great career in store for me, my boy! I shall give the art of acting back to the performing seals, which are its most perfect expression. By applying my natural God-given talents in their proper sphere, I shall attain the pinnacle of success! I’ll be the lover of the fat woman in Barnum and Bailey’s circus!
Edmund laughs. Jamie’s mood changes to arrogant disdain.
Pah! Imagine me sunk to the fat girl in a hick town hooker shop! Me! Who have made some of the best-lookers on Broadway sit up and beg!
He quotes from Kipling’s “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal.”
“Speakin’ in general, I ‘ave tried ‘em all,
The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world.”
With sodden melancholy.
Not so apt. Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That’s where I’ve got—nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won’t admit it.
EDMUND
Derisively.
Can it! You’ll be crying in a minute.
JAMIE
Starts and stares at his brother for a second with bitter hostility—thickly.
Don’t get—too damned fresh.
Then abruptly.
But you’re right. To hell with repining! Fat Violet’s a good kid. Glad I stayed with her. Christian act. Cured her blues. Hell of a good time. You should have stuck with me, Kid. Taken your mind off your troubles. What’s the use coming home to get the blues over what can’t be helped. All over— finished now—not a hope!
He stops, his head nodding drunkenly, his eyes closing—then suddenly he looks up, his face hard, and quotes jeeringly.
“If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
I know whose love would follow me still…”
EDMUND
Violently.
Shut up!
JAMIE
In a cruel, sneering tone with hatred in it.
Where’s the hophead? Gone to sleep?
Edmund jerks as if he’d been struck. There is a tense silence. Edmund’s face looks stricken and sick. Then in a burst of rage he springs from his chair.
EDMUND
You dirty bastard!
He punches his brother in the face, a blow that glances off the cheekbone. For a second Jamie reacts pugnaciously and half rises from his chair to do battle, but suddenly he seems to sober up to a shocked realization of what he has said and he sinks back limply.
JAMIE
Miserably.
Thanks, Kid. I certainly had that coming. Don’t know what made me— booze talking—You know me, Kid.
EDMUND
His anger ebbing.
I know you’d never say that unless—But God, Jamie, no matter how drunk you are, it’s no excuse!
He pauses—miserably.
I’m sorry I hit you. You and I never scrap—that bad
He sinks back on his chair.
JAMIE
Huskily.
It’s all right. Glad you did. My dirty tongue. Like to cut it out.
He hides his face in his hands—dully.
I suppose it’s because I feel so damned sunk. Because this time Mama had me fooled. I really believed she had it licked. She thinks I always believe the worst, but this time I believed the best.
His voice flutters.
I suppose I can’t forgive her—yet. It meant so much. I’d begun to hope, if she’d beaten the game, I could, too.
He begins to sob, and the horrible part of his weeping is that it appears sober, not the maudlin tears of drunkenness.
EDMUND
Blinking back tears himself.
God, don’t I know how you feel! Stop it, Jamie!
JAMIE
Trying to control his sobs.
I’ve known about Mama so much longer than you. Never forget the first time I got wise. Caught her in the act with a hypo. Christ, I’d never
dreamed before that any women but whores took dope!
He pauses.
And then this stuff of you getting consumption. It’s got me licked. We’ve been more than brothers. You’re the only pal I’ve ever had. I love your guts. I’d do anything for you.
EDMUND
Reaches out and pats his arm.
I know that, Jamie.
JAMIE
His crying over—drops his hands from his face—with a strange bitterness. Yet I’ll bet you’ve heard Mama and old Gaspard spill so much bunk about my hoping for the worst, you suspect right now I’m thinking to myself that Papa is old and can’t last much longer, and if you were to die, Mama and I would get all he’s got, and so I’m probably hoping—
EDMUND
Indignantly.
Shut up, you damned fool! What the hell put that in your nut?
He stares at his brother accusingly.
Yes, that’s what I’d like to know. What put that in your mind?
JAMIE
Confusedly—appearing drunk again.
Don’t be a dumbbell! What I said! Always suspected of hoping for the worst. I’ve got so I can’t help—
Then drunkenly resentful.
What are you trying to do, accuse me? Don’t play the wise guy with me! I’ve learned more of life than you’ll ever know! Just because you’ve read a lot of highbrow junk, don’t think you can fool me! You’re only an overgrown kid! Mama’s baby and Papa’s pet! The family White Hope!
You’ve been getting a swelled head lately. About nothing! About a few poems in a hick town newspaper! Hell, I used to write better stuff for the Lit magazine in college! You better wake up! You’re setting no rivers on fire! You let hick town boobs flatter you with bunk about your future—
Abruptly his tone changes to disgusted contrition. Edmund has looked away from him, trying to ignore this tirade.
Hell, Kid, forget it. That goes for Sweeny. You know I don’t mean it. No one hopes more than I do you’ll knock ‘em all dead. No one is prouder you’ve started to make good.
Drunkenly assertive.
Why shouldn’t I be proud? Hell, it’s purely selfish. You reflect credit on me. I’ve had more to do with bringing you up than anyone. I wised you up about women, so you’d never be a fall guy, or make any mistakes you didn’t want to make! And who steered you on to reading poetry first? Swinburne, for example? I did! And because I once wanted to write, I planted it in your mind that someday you’d write! Hell, you’re more than my brother. I made you! You’re my Frankenstein!
He has risen to a note of drunken arrogance. Edmund is grinning with amusement now.
EDMUND
All right, I’m your Frankenstein. So let’s have a drink.
He laughs.
You crazy nut!
JAMIE
Thickly.
I’ll have a drink. Not you. Got to take care of you.
He reaches out with a foolish grin of doting affection and grabs his brother’s hand.
Don’t be scared of this sanatorium business. Hell, you can beat that standing on your head. Six months and you’ll be in the pink. Probably haven’t got consumption at all. Doctors lot of fakers. Told me years ago to cut out booze or I’d soon be dead—and here I am. They’re all con men.
Anything to grab your dough. I’ll bet this state farm stuff is political graft game. Doctors get a cut for every patient they send.
EDMUND
Disgustedly amused.
You’re the limit! At the Last Judgment, you’ll be around telling everyone it’s in the bag.
JAMIE
And I’ll be right. Slip a piece of change to the Judge and be saved, but if you’re broke you can go to hell!
He grins at this blasphemy and Edmund has to laugh. Jamie goes on.
“Therefore put money in thy purse.” That’s the only dope.
Mockingly.
The secret of my success! Look what it’s got me!
He lets Edmund’s hand go to pour a big drink, and gulps it down. He stares at his brother with bleary affection—takes his hand again and begins to talk thickly but with a strange, convincing sincerity.
Listen, Kid, you’ll be going away. May not get another chance to talk. Or might not be drunk enough to tell you truth. So got to tell you now. Something I ought to have told you long ago—for your own good.
He pauses—struggling with himself. Edmund stares, impressed and uneasy. Jamie blurts out.
Not drunken bull, but “in vino veritas” stuff. You better take it seriously. Want to warn you—against me. Mama and Papa are right. I’ve been rotten bad influence. And worst of it is, I did it on purpose.
EDMUND
Uneasily.
Shut up! I don’t want to hear—
JAMIE
Nix, Kid! You listen! Did it on purpose to make a bum of you. Or part of me did. A big part. That part that’s been dead so long. That hates life. My putting you wise so you’d learn from my mistakes. Believed that myself at times, but it’s a fake. Made my mistakes look good. Made getting drunk romantic. Made whores fascinating vampires instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are. Made fun of work as sucker’s game. Never wanted you succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama’s baby, Papa’s pet!
He stares at Edmund with increasing enmity.
And it was your being born that started Mama on dope. I know that’s not your fault, but all the same, God damn you, I can’t help hating your guts—!
EDMUND
Almost frightenedly.
Jamie! Cut it out! You’re crazy!
JAMIE
But don’t get wrong idea, Kid. I love you more than I hate you. My saying what I’m telling you now proves it. I run the risk you’ll hate me—and you’re all I’ve got left. But I didn’t mean to tell you that last stuff—go that far back. Don’t know what made me. What I wanted to say is, I’d like to see you become the greatest success in the world. But you’d better be on your guard. Because I’ll do my damnedest to make you fail. Can’t help it. I hate myself. Got to take revenge. On everyone else. Especially you. Oscar Wilde’s “Reading Gaol” has the dope twisted. The man was dead and so he had to kill the thing he loved. That’s what it ought to be. The dead part of me hopes you won’t get well. Maybe he’s even glad the game has got Mama again! He wants company, he doesn’t want to be the only corpse around the house!
He gives a hardy, tortured laugh.
EDMUND
Jesus, Jamie! You really have gone crazy!
JAMIE
Think it over and you’ll see I’m right. Think it over when you’re away from me in the sanatorium. Make up your mind you’ve got to tie a can to me— get me out of your life—think of me as dead—tell people, “I had a brother, but he’s dead.” And when you come back, look out for me. I’ll be waiting to welcome you with that “my old pal” stuff, and give you the glad hand, and at the first good chance I get stab you in the back.
EDMUND
Shut up! I’ll be God-damned if I’ll listen to you any more—
JAMIE
As if he hadn’t heard.
Only don’t forget me. Remember I warned you—for your sake. Give me credit. Greater love hath no man than this, that he saveth his brother from himself.
Very drunkenly, his head bobbing.
That’s all. Feel better now. Gone to confession. Know you absolve me, don’t you, Kid? You understand. You’re a damned fine kid. Ought to be. I made you. So go and get well. Don’t die on me. You’re all I’ve got left. God bless you, Kid.
His eyes close. He mumbles.
That last drink—the old K. O.
He falls into a drunken doze, not completely asleep. Edmund buries his face in his hands miserably. Tyrone comes in quietly through the screen door from the porch, his dressing gown wet with fog, the collar turned up around his throat. His face is stern and disgusted but at the same time pitying. Edmund does not notice his entrance.
TYRONE
In a low voice.
Thank God he’s asleep.
Edmund looks up with a start.
I thought he’d never stop talking.
He turns down the collar of his dressing gown.
We’d better let him stay where he is and sleep it off.
Edmund remains silent. Tyrone regards him—then goes on.
I heard the last part of his talk. It’s what I’ve warned you. I hope you’ll heed the warning, now it comes from his own mouth.
Edmund gives no sign of having heard. Tyrone adds pityingly.
But don’t take it too much to heart, lad. He loves to exaggerate the worst of himself when he’s drunk. He’s devoted to you. It’s the one good thing left in him.
He looks down on Jamie with a bitter sadness.
A sweet spectacle for me! My first-born, who I hoped would bear my name in honor and dignity, who showed such brilliant promise!
EDMUND
Miserably.
Keep quiet, can’t you, Papa?
TYRONE
Pours a drink.
A waste! A wreck, a drunken hulk, done with and finished!
He drinks. Jamie has become restless, sensing his father’s presence, struggling up from his stupor. Now he gets his eyes open to blink up at Tyrone. The latter moves back a step defensively, his face growing hard.
JAMIE
Suddenly points a finger at him and recites with dramatic emphasis.
Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury.
Seize on him, Furies, take him into torment.”
Then resentfully.
What the hell are you staring at?
He recites sardonically from Rossetti.
“Look in my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.”
TYRONE
I’m well aware of that, and God knows I don’t want to look at it.
EDMUND
Papa! Quit it!
JAMIE
Derisively.
Got a great idea for you, Papa. Put on revival of “The Bells” this season. Great part in it you can play without make-up. Old Gaspard, the miser!
Tyrone turns away, trying to control his temper.
EDMUND
Shut up, Jamie!
JAMIE
Jeeringly.
I claim Edwin Booth never saw the day when he could give as good a performance as a trained seal. Seals are intelligent and honest. They don’t put up any bluffs about the Art of Acting. They admit they’re just hams earning their daily fish.
TYRONE
Stung, turns on him in a rage.
You loafer!
EDMUND
Papa! Do you want to start a row that will bring Mama down? Jamie, go back to sleep! You’ve shot off your mouth too much already.
Tyrone turns away.
JAMIE
Thickly.
All right, Kid. Not looking for argument. Too damned sleepy.
He closes his eyes, his head nodding. Tyrone comes to the table and sits down, turning his chair so he won’t look at Jamie. At once he becomes sleepy, too.
TYRONE
Heavily.
I wish to God she’d go to bed so that I could, too.
Drowsily.
I’m dog tired. I can’t stay up all night like I used to. Getting old—old and finished.
With a bone-cracking yawn.
Can’t keep my eyes open. I think I’ll catch a few winks. Why don’t you do the same, Edmund? It’ll pass the time until she—
His voice trails off. His eyes close, his chin sags, and he begins to breathe heavily through his mouth. Edmund sits tensely. He hears something and jerks nervously forward in his chair, staring through the front parlor into the hall. He jumps up with a hunted, distracted expression. It seems for a second he is going to hide in the back parlor. Then he sits down again and waits, his eyes averted, his hands gripping the arms of his chair. Suddenly all five bulbs of the chandelier in the front parlor are turned on from a wall switch, and a moment later someone starts playing the piano in there—the opening of one of Chopin’s simpler waltzes, done with a forgetful, stiff- fingered groping, as if an awkward schoolgirl were practicing it for the first time. Tyrone starts to wide-awakeness and sober dread, Jamie’s head jerks back and his eyes open. For a moment they listen frozenly. The playing
stops as abruptly as it began, and Mary appears in the doorway. She wears a sky-blue dressing gown over her nightdress, dainty slippers with pompons on her bare feet. Her face is paler than ever. Her eyes look enormous. They glisten like polished black jewels. The uncanny thing is that her face now appears so youthful. Experience seems ironed out of it. It is a marble mask of girlish innocence, the mouth caught in a shy smile. Her white hair is braided in two pigtails which hang over her breast. Over one arm, carried neglectfully, trailing on the floor, as if she had forgotten she held it, is an old-fashioned white satin wedding gown, trimmed with duchesse lace. She hesitates in the doorway, glancing round the room, her forehead puckered puzzledly, like someone who has come to a room to get something but has become absent-minded on the way and forgotten what it was. They stare at her. She seems aware of them merely as she is aware of other objects in the room, the furniture, the windows, familiar things she accepts automatically as naturally belonging there but which she is too preoccupied to notice.
JAMIE
Breaks the cracking silence—bitterly, self-defensively sardonic.
The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!
His father and brother both turn on him fiercely. Edmund is quicker. He slaps Jamie across the mouth with the back of his hand.
TYRONE
His voice trembling with suppressed fury.
Good boy, Edmund. The dirty blackguard! His own mother!
JAMIE
Mumbles guiltily, without resentment.
All right, Kid. Had it coming. But I told you how much I’d hoped—
He puts his hands over his face and begins to sob.
TYRONE
I’ll kick you out in the gutter tomorrow, so help me God.
But Jamie’s sobbing breaks his anger, and he turns and shakes his shoulder, pleading.
Jamie, for the love of God, stop it!
Then Mary speaks, and they freeze into silence again, staring at her. She has paid no attention whatever to the incident. It is simply a part of the familiar atmosphere of the room, a background which does not touch her preoccupation; and she speaks aloud to herself, not to them.
MARY
I play so badly now. I’m all out of practice. Sister Theresa will give me a dreadful scolding. She’ll tell me it isn’t fair to my father when he spends so much money for extra lessons. She’s quite right, it isn’t fair, when he’s so good and generous, and so proud of me. I’ll practice every day from now on. But something horrible has happened to my hands. The fingers have gotten so stiff—
She lifts her hands to examine them with a frightened puzzlement.
The knuckles are all swollen. They’re so ugly. I’ll have to go to the Infirmary and show Sister Martha.
With a sweet smile of affectionate trust.
She’s old and a little cranky, but I love her just the same, and she has things in her medicine chest that’ll cure anything. She’ll give me something to rub on my hands, and tell me to pray to the Blessed Virgin, and they’ll be well again in no time.
She forgets her hands and comes into the room, the wedding gown trailing on the floor. She glances around vaguely, her forehead puckered again.
Let me see. What did I come here to find? It’s terrible, how absent-minded I’ve become. I’m always dreaming and forgetting.
TYRONE
In a stifled voice.
What’s that she’s carrying, Edmund?
EDMUND
Dully.
Her wedding gown, I suppose.
TYRONE
Christ!
He gets to his feet and stands directly in her path—in anguish.
Mary! Isn’t it bad enough—?
Controlling himself—gently persuasive.
Here, let me take it, dear. You’ll only step on it and tear it and get it dirty dragging it on the floor. Then you’d be sorry afterwards.
She lets him take it, regarding him from somewhere far away within herself without recognition, without either affection or animosity.
MARY
With the shy politeness of a well-bred young girl toward an elderly gentleman who relieves her of a bundle.
Thank you. You are very kind.
She regards the wedding gown with a puzzled interest.
It’s a wedding gown. It’s very lovely, isn’t it?
A shadow crosses her face and she looks vaguely uneasy.
I remember now. I found it in the attic hidden in a trunk. But I don’t know what I wanted it for. I’m going to be a nun—that is, if I can only find—
She looks around the room, her forehead puckered again.
What is it I’m looking for? I know it’s something I lost.
She moves back from Tyrone, aware of him now only as some obstacle in her path.
TYRONE
In hopeless appeal.
Mary!
But it cannot penetrate her preoccupation. She doesn’t seem to hear him. He gives up helplessly, shrinking into himself, even his defensive drunkenness taken from him, leaving him sick and sober. He sinks back on
his chair, holding the wedding gown in his arms with an unconscious clumsy, protective gentleness.
JAMIE
Drops his hand from his face, his eyes on the table top. He has suddenly sobered up, too—dully.
It’s no good, Papa.
He recites from Swinburne’s “A Leave-taking’ and does it well, simply but with a bitter sadness.
“Let us rise up and part; she will not know. Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here? There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world is bitter as a tear.
And how these things are, though ye strove to show, She would not know.”
MARY
Looking around her.
Something I miss terribly. It can’t be altogether lost.
She starts to move around in back of Jamie’s chair.
JAMIE
Turns to look up into her face—and cannot help appealing pleadingly in his turn.
Mama!
She does not seem to hear. He looks away hopelessly.
Hell! What’s the use? It’s no good.
He recites from “A Leave-taking” again with increased bitterness.
“Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear. Let us go hence together without fear;
Keep silence now, for singing-time is over, And over all old things and all things dear.
She loves not you nor me as all we love her. Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear,
She would not hear.”
MARY
Looking around her.
Something I need terribly. I remember when I had it I was never lonely nor afraid. I can’t have lost it forever, I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope.
She moves like a sleepwalker, around the back of Jamie’s chair, then forward toward left front, passing behind Edmund.
EDMUND
Turns impulsively and grabs her arm. As he pleads he has the quality of a bewilderedly hurt little boy.
Mama! It isn’t a summer cold! I’ve got consumption!
MARY
For a second he seems to have broken through to her. She trembles and her expression becomes terrified. She calls distractedly, as if giving a command to herself.
No!
And instantly she is far away again. She murmurs gently but impersonally. You must not try to touch me. You must not try to hold me. It isn’t right, when I am hoping to be a nun.
He lets his hand drop from her arm. She moves left to the front end of the sofa beneath the windows and sits down, facing front, her hands folded in her lap, in a demure schoolgirlish pose.
JAMIE
Gives Edmund a strange look of mingled pity and jealous gloating.
You damned fool. It’s no good.
He recites again from the Swinburne poem.
“Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see. Sing all once more together; surely she,
She too, remembering days and words that were, Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we,
We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there. Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me,
She would not see.”
TYRONE
Trying to shake off his hopeless stupor.
Oh, we’re fools to pay any attention. It’s the damned poison. But I’ve never known her to drown herself in it as deep as this.
Gruffly.
Pass me that bottle, Jamie. And stop reciting that damned morbid poetry. I won’t have it in my house!
Jamie pushes the bottle toward him. He pours a drink without disarranging the wedding gown he holds carefully over his other arm and on his lap, and shoves the bottle back. Jamie pours his and passes the bottle to Edmund, who, in turn, pours one. Tyrone lifts his glass and his sons follow suit mechanically, but before they can drink Mary speaks and they slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them.
MARY
Staring dreamily before her. Her face looks extraordinarily youthful and innocent. The shyly eager, trusting smile is on her lips as she talks aloud to herself.
I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth. She is so sweet and good. A saint on earth. I love her dearly. It may be sinful of me but I love her better than my own mother. Because she always understands, even before you say a word. Her kind blue eyes look right into your heart. You can’t keep any secrets from her. You couldn’t deceive her, even if you were mean enough to want to.
She gives a little rebellious toss of her head—with girlish pique.
All the same, I don’t think she was so understanding this time. I told her I wanted to be a nun. I explained how sure I was of my vocation, that I had prayed to the Blessed Virgin to make me sure, and to find me worthy. I told Mother I had had a true vision when I was praying in the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, on the little island in the lake. I said I knew, as surely as I knew I was kneeling there, that the Blessed Virgin had smiled and blessed me with her consent. But Mother Elizabeth told me I must be more sure than that, even, that I must prove it wasn’t simply my imagination. She said, if I was so sure, then I wouldn’t mind putting myself to a test by going home after I graduated, and living as other girls lived, going out to parties and dances and enjoying myself; and then if after a year or two I still felt sure, I could come back to see her and we would talk it over again.
She tosses her head—indignantly.
I never dreamed Holy Mother would give me such advice! I was really shocked. I said, of course, I would do anything she suggested, but I knew it was simply a waste of time. After I left her, I felt all mixed up, so I went to the shrine and prayed to the Blessed Virgin and found peace again because I knew she heard my prayer and would always love me and see no harm ever came to me so long as I never lost my faith in her.
She pauses and a look of growing uneasiness comes over her face. She passes a hand over her forehead as if brushing cobwebs from her brain— vaguely.
That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.
She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless.
CURTAIN
Tao House
September 20, 1940
.
Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) was born in New York City, the son of James O’Neill, a popular actor, and Mary Ellen Quinlan. During his childhood years he lived mainly in hotels with his family, following the tours of his father’s company; the only permanent home the young O’Neill knew was a summer cottage in New London, Connecticut, which later became the setting for Long Day’s Journey into Night.
As an adolescent, O’Neill attended eastern preparatory schools and then Princeton University for one year until he was expelled. During the next five years he worked as a gold prospector, a sailor, an actor, and a reporter.
O’Neill began writing plays in 1913, and by 1916 his one-act play Bound East for Cardiff was produced in New York by the Provincetown Players, a group he had helped found. In 1920 his full-length play Beyond the Horizon was produced in New York and won O’Neill the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. During decades of extraordinary productivity, O’Neill published 24 other full-length plays. After receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, he published two of his most highly acclaimed plays, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten. O’Neill died in Boston in 1953. Long Day’s Journey into Night, often regarded as his finest work, was published three years after his death.
