DOROTHEA: Bodey.
HELENA: Dorothea.
BODEY [calling through]: Dotty.
HELENA: You really must let me check on her condition.
DOROTHEA [in the bedroom]: Don’t forget . . . phone call.
BODEY: No, Dotty.
DOROTHEA [faintly, clinging to something]: Tell Miss Brookmire I’ve retired for the day.
HELENA: What?
BODEY: She’s not coming out. She’s not coming out till you leave here—
[Bodey bolts the bedroom door.]
HELENA: I beg to differ. She will and I’ll sit here till she does!
[Miss Gluck has taken a bite of a cruller, dunked in coffee, and begins to blubber, the coffee-soaked cruller dribbling down her chin.]
BODEY: Look, you upset Sophie!
MISS GLUCK: Eine—Woche vor—Sonntag—meine Mutter—
BODEY [comfortingly]: Ich weiss, Sophie, ich weiss.
MISS GLUCK: Gestorben!
BODEY: But she went sudden, huh, Sophie? [She crouches beside Miss Gluck, removing the dribblings of cruller and coffee from her mouth and chin.]
HELENA: I don’t understand the language, and the scene appears to be private.
BODEY: Yeh, keep out of it. [She turns to Miss Gluck.]—Your mother, she didn’t hang on like the doctor thought she would, Sophie. Now, face it, it was better sudden, no big hospital bill, just went and is waiting for you in Heaven.
HELENA: With open arms, I presume, and with coffee and crullers.
BODEY: So, Sophie, just be grateful that she went quick with no pain.
MISS GLUCK [grotesquely tragic]: Nein, nein, sie hat geschrien! I woke up runnin’!
BODEY: To her bed, you reached it and she was dead. Just one scream, it was over—wasn’t that a mercy?
[Helena laughs.]
Sophie, honey, this woman here’s not sympathetic. She laughs at sorrow; so maybe you better take the coffee, the cruller—here’s another—upstairs, Sophie, and when we get back from the Creve Coeur picnic, I will bring you beautiful flowers, schöne Blume. Then I’ll come up and sing to you in German—I will sing you to sleep.
[Miss Gluck slowly rises with coffee and crullers. Bodey conducts her gently to the door.]
MISS GLUCK [crying out]: Ich bin allein, allein! In der Welt, freundlos!
BODEY: No, no, Sophie, that is negative thinking.
MISS GLUCK: Ich habe niemand in der Welt!
BODEY: Sophie, God is with you, I’m with you. Your mother, all your relations are waiting for you in Heaven!
[Shepherding Miss Gluck into the hall, Bodey repeats this assurance in German.]
HELENA: Sometimes despair is just being realistic, the only logical thing for certain persons to feel. [She addresses herself with a certain seriousness, now.] Loss. Despair. I’ve faced them and actually they have—fortified and protected, not overcome me at all . . .
BODEY [in the hall with Miss Gluck]: Okay? Verstehst du, Sophie?
HELENA [still ruminating privately]: The weak. The strong. Only important division between living creatures. [She nods birdlike affirmation.]
[Miss Gluck remains visible in the hall, afraid to return upstairs.]
MISS GLUCK: Allein, allein.
[There is a change in the light. Helena moves a small chair downstage and delivers the following to herself.]
HELENA: Allein, allein means alone, alone. [A frightened look appears in her eyes.] Last week I dined alone, alone three nights in a row. There’s nothing lonelier than a woman dining alone, and although I loathe preparing food for myself, I cannot bear the humiliation of occupying a restaurant table for one. Dining au solitaire! But I would rather starve than reduce my social standards by accepting dinner invitations from that middle-aged gaggle of preposterously vulgar old maids that wants to suck me into their group despite my total abhorrence of all they stand for. Loneliness in the company of five intellectually destitute spinsters is simply loneliness multiplied by five . . .
[There is a crash in the hallway.]
DOROTHEA [from the bedroom]: Is it the phone?
HELENA: Another visit so soon? Miss Bodenheifer, your bereaved friend from upstairs is favoring you with another visit.
MISS GLUCK [wildly]: Mein Zimmer is gespukt, gespukt!
HELENA: “Spooked, spooked”?
BODEY: Sophie, your apartment isn’t haunted.
HELENA: Perhaps if you went up with her, it would despook the apartment.
BODEY: Aw, no, I got to stay down and keep a sharp eye on you.
HELENA: Which means that she will remain here?
BODEY: Long as she pleases to. What’s it to you? She got nothin’ contagious. You can’t catch heartbreak if you have got no heart.
HELENA: May I suggest that you put her in the back yard in the sun. I think that woman’s complexion could stand a touch of color.
BODEY: I am puttin’ her nowhere she don’t want to be. How about you settin’ in the back yard? Some natural color would do your face good for a change.
[Sensing the hostile “vibes,” Miss Gluck moans, swaying a little.]
HELENA: Miss Bodenheifer, I will not dignify your insults with response or attention!
[Miss Gluck moans louder.]
Aren’t you able to see that this Miss Gluck is mental? Distressing to hear and to look at! . . . Be that as it may, I shall wait.
BODEY: Sitting? Tight as a tombstone? Huh?
HELENA: I can assure you that for me to remain in this place is at least as unpleasant to me as to you. [She cries out to Dorothea who is still in the bedroom.] Dorothea? Dorothea? Can you hear me?
DOROTHEA [clinging to something in the bedroom]: See you—Blewett—t’morrow . . .
HELENA: No, no, at once, Dorothea, the situation out here is dreadful beyond endurance.
[Abruptly, Miss Gluck cries out, clutching her abdomen.]
BODEY: Sophie, what is it, Sophie?
MISS GLUCK: Heisser Kaffee gibt mir immer Krampf und Durchfall.
[This episode in the play must be handled carefully to avoid excessive scatology but keep the humor.]
BODEY: You got the runs? Zum Badezimmer? Sophie’s got to go to the bathroom, Dotty.
DOROTHEA: Hasn’t she got one upstairs?
BODEY: After hot coffee, it gives her diarrhea!
DOROTHEA: Must she have it down here?
MISS GLUCK [in German]: KANN NICHT WARTEN!
BODEY: She can’t wait, here, bathroom, Sophie! Badezimmer!
[Miss Gluck rushes through the bedroom into the bathroom.]
DOROTHEA: What a scene for Helena to report at Blewett. Miss Gluck, turn on both water faucets full force.
BODEY: Sophie, beide Wasser rennen.
DOROTHEA: Bodey, while I am here don’t serve her hot coffee again since it results in these—crises!
BODEY: Dotty, you know that Sophie’s got this problem.
DOROTHEA: Then send her coffee upstairs.
BODEY: Dotty, you know she needs companionship, Dotty.
DOROTHEA: That I cannot provide her with just now!
[Bodey returns to the living room.]
HELENA: How did Dorothea react to Miss Gluck’s sudden indisposition?
BODEY: Dotty’s a girl that understands human afflictions.
[There is a crash in the bathroom.]
DOROTHEA: Phone, Ralph’s call—has he—did he?
BODEY: Phone, Dotty? No, no phone.
HELENA: I wouldn’t expect—
BODEY [to Helena]: Watch it!
HELENA: Watch what, Miss Bodenheifer? What is it you want me to watch?
BODEY: That mouth of yours, the tongue in it, with such a tongue in a mouth you could dig your grave with like a shovel!
HELENA [her laughter tinkling like ice in a glass]: —The syntax of that sentence was rather confusing. You know, I suspect that English is not your native language but one that you’ve not quite adequately adopted.
BODEY: I was born on South Grand, a block from Tower Grove Pa
rk in this city of St. Louis!
HELENA: Ah, the German section. Your parents were German speaking?
BODEY: I learned plenty English at school, had eight grades of school and a year of business college.
HELENA: I see, I see, forgive me. [She turns to a window, possibly in the“fourth wall.”] Is a visitor permitted to look out the window?
BODEY: A visitor like you’s permitted to jump out it.
HELENA [laughing indulgently]: With so many restrictions placed on one’s speech and actions—
[Bodey turns up her hearing aid so high that it screeches shrilly.]
DOROTHEA: Is it the phone?
HELENA: Please. Is it controllable, that electric hearing device?
BODEY: What did you say?
[The screeching continues.]
HELENA: Ow . . . ow . . .
[Bodey finally manages to turn down the hearing aid.]
DOROTHEA: Oh please bring a mop, Bodey. Water’s streaming under—the bathroom door. Miss Gluck’s flooded the bathroom.
BODEY: What? Bring?
HELENA: Mop, mop!
[Helena moves toward the bedroom door but Bodey shoves her back.]
BODEY: Stay! Put! Stay put!
[Bodey grabs a mop from the closet and then rushes into the bedroom.]
DOROTHEA: See? Water? Flooding?
BODEY: You told her to turn on both faucets. SOPHIE! Halte das Wasser ab, Sophie! [Bodey opens the bathroom door and thrusts in the mop.] Here, das Wust, das Wust, Sophie!
DOROTHEA [to herself]: This is incredible to me, I simply do not believe it! [She then speaks to Bodey who has started back toward the living room.] May I detain you a moment? The truth has finally struck me. Ralph’s calls have been intercepted. He has been repeatedly calling me on that phone, and you have been just as repeatedly lying to me that he hasn’t.
BODEY: LYING TO—?
DOROTHEA: YES, LYING! [She stumbles to the door of the bedroom.] Helena, will you please watch that phone for me now?
HELENA [crossing to the bedroom door]: I’m afraid, Dorothea, that a watched phone never rings!
[Bodey emerges from the bedroom. She and Helena return to the living room while Dorothea retreats to the bed, shutting the door behind her.]
What a view through this window, totally devoid of—why, no, a living creature, a pigeon! Capable of flight but perched for a moment in this absolute desolation . . .
INTERVAL
The scene is the same as before. The spotlight focuses on the lefthand, “bedroom” portion of the stage where Dorothea, seated at her vanity table and mellowed by her mebaral and sherry “cocktail,” soliloquizes.
DOROTHEA [taking a large swallow of sherry]: Best years of my youth thrown away, wasted on poor Hathaway James. [She removes his picture from the vanity table and with closed eyes thrusts it out of sight.] Shouldn’t say wasted but so unwisely devoted. Not even sure it was love. Unconsummated love, is it really love? More likely just a reverence for his talent—precocious achievements . . . musical prodigy. Scholarship to Juilliard, performed a concerto with the Nashville Symphony at fifteen. [She sips more sherry.] But those dreadful embarrassing evenings on Aunt Belle’s front porch in Memphis! He’d say: “Turn out the light, it’s attracting insects.” I’d switch it out. He’d grab me so tight it would take my breath away, and invariably I’d feel plunging, plunging against me that—that—frantic part of him . . . then he’d release me at once and collapse on the porch swing, breathing hoarsely. With the corner gas lamp shining through the wisteria vines, it was impossible not to notice the wet stain spreading on his light flannel trousers. . . . Miss Gluck, MOP IN!!
[Miss Gluck, who has timidly opened the bathroom door and begun to emerge, with the mop, into the bedroom, hastily retreats from sight.]
Such afflictions—visited on the gifted. . . . Finally worked up the courage to discuss the—Hathaway’s—problem with the family doctor, delicately but clearly as I could. “Honey, this Hathaway fellow’s afflicted with something clinically known as—chronic case of—premature ejaculation—must have a large laundry bill. . . .” “Is it curable, Doctor?”—“Maybe with great patience, honey, but remember you’re only young once, don’t gamble on it, relinquish him to his interest in music, let him go.”
[Miss Gluck’s mop protrudes from the bathroom again.]
MISS GLUCK, I SAID MOP IN. REMAIN IN BATHROOM WITH WET MOP TILL MOP UP COMPLETED. MERCIFUL HEAVENS.
[Helena and Bodey are now seen in the living room.]
HELENA: Is Dorothea attempting a conversation with Miss Gluck in there?
BODEY: No, no just to herself—you gave her the sherry on top of mebaral tablets.
HELENA: She talks to herself? That isn’t a practice that I would encourage her in.
BODEY: She don’t need no encouragement in it, and as for you, I got an idea you’d encourage nobody in nothing.
DOROTHEA [in the bedroom]: After Hathaway James, there was nothing left for me but—CIVICS.
HELENA [who has moved to the bedroom door the better to hear Dorothea’s “confessions”]: This is not to B. B.!
BODEY: Stop listening at the door. Go back to your pigeon watching.
HELENA: How long is this apt to continue?
DOROTHEA: Oh, God, thank you that Ralph Ellis has no such affliction—is healthily aggressive.
HELENA: I have a luncheon engagement in La Due at two!
BODEY: Well, go keep it! On time!
HELENA: My business with Dorothea must take precedence over anything else! [Helena pauses to watch with amused suspicion as Bodey “attacks” the Sunday Post-Dispatch which she has picked up from the chair.] What is that you’re doing, Miss Bodenheifer?
BODEY: Tearing a certain item out of the paper.
HELENA: A ludicrous thing to do since the news will be all over Blewett High School tomorrow.
BODEY: Never mind tomorrow. There’s ways and ways to break a piece of news like that to a girl with a heart like Dotty. You wouldn’t know about that, no, you’d do it right now—malicious! —You got eyes like a bird and I don’t mean a songbird.
HELENA: Oh, is that so?
BODEY: Yeh, yeh, that’s so, I know!
[Pause. Bodey, who has torn out about half of the top page of one section, puts the rest of the paper on the sofa, and takes the section from which the piece has been torn with her as she crosses to the kitchenette, crumpling and throwing the torn piece into the wastebasket on her way.]
HELENA: Miss Bodenheifer.
BODEY [from the kitchenette]: Hafer!
HELENA: I have no wish to offend you, but surely you’re able to see that for Dorothea to stay in these circumstances must be extremely embarrassing to her at least.
BODEY: Aw, you think Dotty’s embarrassed here, do you?
[Bodey has begun to line a shoebox with the section of newspaper she took with her. During the following exchange with Helena, Bodey packs the fried chicken and other picnic fare in the shoebox.]
HELENA: She has hinted it’s almost intolerable to her. The visitations of this Gluck person who has rushed to the bathroom, this nightmare of clashing colors, the purple carpet, orange drapes at the windows looking out at that view of brick and concrete and asphalt, lamp shades with violent yellow daisies on them, and wallpaper with roses exploding like bombshells, why it would give her a breakdown! It’s giving me claustrophobia briefly as I have been here. Why, this is not a place for a civilized person to possibly exist in!
BODEY: What’s so civilized about you, Miss Brooks-it? Stylish, yes, civilized, no, unless a hawk or a buzzard is a civilized creature. Now you see, you got a tongue in your mouth, but I got one in mine, too.
HELENA: You are being hysterical and offensive!
BODEY: You ain’t heard nothing compared to what you’ll hear if you continue to try to offer all this concern you feel about Dotty to Dotty in this apartment.
HELENA: Dorothea Gallaway and I keep nothing from each other and naturally I intend, as soon as
she has recovered, to prepare her for what she can hardly avoid facing sooner or later and I—
BODEY [cutting in]: I don’t want heartbreak for Dotty. For Dotty I want a—life.
HELENA: A life of—?
BODEY: A life, a life—
HELENA: You mean as opposed to a death?
BODEY: Don’t get smart with me. I got your number the moment you come in that door like a well-dressed snake.
HELENA: So far you have compared me to a snake and a bird. Please decide which—since the archaeopteryx, the only known combination of bird and snake, is long extinct!
BODEY: Yes, well, you talk with a kind of a hiss. Awright, you just hiss away but not in this room which you think ain’t a civilized room. Okay, it’s too cheerful for you but for me and Dotty it’s fine. And this afternoon, at the picnic at Creve Coeur Lake, I will tell Dotty, gentle, in my own way, if it’s necessary to tell her, that this unprincipled man has just been using her. But Buddy, my brother Buddy, if in some ways he don’t suit her like he is now, I will see he quits beer, I will see he cuts out his cigars, I will see he continues to take off five pounds a week. And by Dotty and Buddy there will be children—children!—I will never have none, myself, no! But Dotty and Buddy will have beautiful kiddies. Me? Nieces—nephews. . . . —Now you! I’ve wrapped up the picnic. It’s nice and cool at Creve Coeur Lake and the ride on the open-air streetcar is lickety-split through green country and there’s flowers you can pull off the bushes you pass. It’s a fine excursion. Dotty will forget not gettin’ that phone call. We’ll stay out till it’s close to dark and the fireflies—fly. I will slip away and Buddy will be alone with her on the lake shore. He will smoke no smelly cigar. He will just respectfully hold her hand and say—“I love you, Dotty. Please be mine,” not meanin’ a girl in a car parked up on Art Hill but—for the long run of life.
HELENA: —Can Dorothea be really attached to your brother? Is it a mutual attraction?