Over his second or third beer he let something slip that he probably wasn’t used to confiding on such short acquaintance: he had made up his name. “My real name’s Lithuanian,” he explained, “and it’s got more syllables in it than most people can work their mouths around. So I settled on ‘Jack Halloran’ when I was sixteen because it seemed to me the Irish kids were getting all the breaks; that’s the way I signed up in the Marines. Then later it came to feel more natural, once I started working in show business, because a lot of show people have stage names.”
“Sure,” Lucy said, but it was a disappointing piece of information. She had never known anyone who lived under an assumed name; she wouldn’t even have thought people did that kind of thing unless they were criminals, or unless – well, unless perhaps they were actors.
“Well, I think we’ll have a good summer,” he said, getting up in readiness to leave. “I like it here. Tell you a funny thing, though: I never would’ve expected to find an actor of Ben Duane’s stature in a place like this. I asked him if he might consider working with us, but he’s a stubborn old bastard: if he can’t work on Broadway, all he wants to do is grow flowers.”
“Yes. Well, he’s quite a – quite a character.”
“It was Mr. Duane who gave me your name,” Jack Halloran said. “He told me you’re divorced, too – I hope it’s okay to mention that.”
“Certainly.”
“Well, good. And look: as long as we’re going to be neighbors, Lucy, maybe I can see you again, okay?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’d like that, Jack.”
After closing the kitchen door behind him she began to dance around on tiptoe. She executed six or eight neat, whirling steps all the way back into the living room, where she made a little curtsy.
… And from the moment I met him, Doctor, I began to feel this strange, warm, wonderful sense of–
But she didn’t even finish that sentence in her mind, because it was something Dr. Fine might never have to hear. All she could do, as her heart slowed down, was stand looking out an open window into the colors of spring.
Chapter Two
For a day or two, waiting for him to come back, she entertained a sobering, cautionary thought: Could you really make love with a man when you didn’t even know his name? But in almost no time at all, after he did come back, she learned the answer to that question.
Yes. You could. You could rapturously kiss and clasp and writhe and heave with a man all day in what had once been your husband’s bed; you could crave a man so badly it was almost like dying; you could open your legs wide for him if that was the way he liked it, or bring them close around him if he seemed to like that better; you could even cry “Oh, Jack! Oh, Jack!” while knowing all the time that “Jack” was part of an alias conceived because the Irish kids were getting all the breaks.
She meant to ask him about the name right away – she knew the longer she waited the more awkward it might be – but she could never quite find the words because there was too much of Jack Halloran in her life now, filling all her senses and her very bloodstream, filling her dreams.
And there never seemed to be enough time. Every afternoon, at first, they had to be up and dressed and downstairs, seated at a conversational distance, when Laura got home from school. And the ending of the school year imposed a subtler, more hazardous kind of secrecy: Laura might be far away for hours with the Smith girls, up in the woods or out across acres of grass, but there was no telling when she might come slamming back into the house. Then the actors and the stage technicians began to arrive on the estate, five or six or more of them each day, and this required Jack to be gone a lot of the time on business.
On the last day before rehearsals began he stole most of the afternoon to be alone with her, and their knowing it was stolen time made it all the more exquisite. When they’d fallen apart at last they lay weak with laughter at some small funny thing he had said; they were still laughing in helpless, subsiding spasms as they went lazily about the business of putting on their clothes and making their way downstairs. In the kitchen, fully recovered, he stood holding her close in a long romantic embrace.
Then very shyly, with her face against his shirt, she said “Jack? Do you think you might tell me your real name now?”
He drew away and gave her a short, speculative look. “Nah, let’s hold off a while on that, honey, okay? I’m sorry I even told you about it.”
“Well, but I thought it was charming that you did,” she said, afraid he could tell she was lying. “It was one of the first things I liked about you.”
“Yeah, well, okay, but that was before we got to know each other.”
“Well, exactly. And the point is I can’t go on saying ‘Jack Halloran’ indefinitely, don’t you see? It’s like taking something counterfeit and pretending not to care. Oh, listen: I can work my mouth around any number of syllables, and I’d love to. Do you think I’m a snob or something?”
He seemed to be turning that question over in his mind. Then he said “No; it’s more that I’m the snob. You’ll find your average Lithuanian slum child can be snobby as hell around high-class New England girls – didn’t anybody ever warn you about that? My kind of people always feel superior to your kind, you see, because we’ve got the brains and the guts and all you’ve got is the money. Oh, maybe we can take you one at a time, once in a while, but even then there’s bound to be an element of condescension in the deal. So I really think we’re both better off this way, Lucy, don’t you? As long as I’m Jack Halloran we can have a lot more laughs, and that’s a promise.”
Then suddenly he was gone, out in the sunshine where he’d come from, heading for the hill to the dormitory. And at least half the dormitory, by now, would be filled with girls.
But he was back that very evening, soon after dark, barely visible through the screen door except for the burning end of his cigarette. When she let him into the kitchen he seemed to feel that no apologies were necessary, unless she chose to find an implicit apology in the way he winked and murmured “Lucy” just before he kissed her. Then he said “Listen, baby. I’ll be working every day now, and of course I can’t spend any time here at night without upsetting Laura, so how’s this: I’ve got a nice room up in the dorm – it’s all my own and it’s big enough for two. Think you could manage to come up there once in a while?”
“Well, is it – does it have a private entrance?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, would I have to walk through a whole dormitory full of people every time I—”
“Ah, that won’t matter; they won’t notice, or if they do they won’t care. They’re all nice kids.”
Lucy had never been inside the dormitory building before. It smelled of dust and old lumber, and the shadowed ground floor of it, where the theater people took their meals, was still warm with the redolence of recent cooking: there had been liver and bacon for supper tonight.
Upstairs she discovered that almost all the living quarters were arranged in an open space, with narrow beds placed at intervals along the walls in the style of an infantry barracks. Here and there some shy person had made an attempt at privacy by hanging sheets or blankets around a bed like curtains, but those few ineffectual hiding places only called attention to themselves: most members of the company were apparently contented to live in the open. And a good many of them were gathered now in talking, laughing clusters around the big, bright room. Except for an occasional middle-aged face they looked very young, and Lucy was careful to pick one of the boys, rather than one of the girls, for making her inquiry.
“Excuse me; do you know where I can find Mr. Halloran?”
“Mr. who?”
“Jack Halloran.”
“Oh, Jack. Sure; there.”
And when she turned to where the boy pointed she knew she could easily have found it herself because it was the only door in sight.
“Hi, baby,” Jack said. “Sit down. Be with you in just a second, okay?” He was
standing with his shirt off at a small sink and mirror, shaving with an electric razor. There was nowhere to sit except on his bed, which was a cot of the same size and kind as the ones outside, but Lucy wasn’t ready to sit down anyway. She moved around like a housing inspector, peering closely at everything. There was a bathroom, or rather a closet containing a toilet bowl; there was a window that might by day command a view of Ben Duane’s flowers, and there were two big, cheap suitcases sagging against the wall, ugly with age and grime and heavy use. If you saw such dismal bags in a bus station, would you have any way of guessing they might belong to a bright, ambitious young actor-director on the road? Well, probably not; more likely your glance would dismiss them at once as pitiful emblems of strain and failure – the kind of luggage carried by worn-out Negroes, say, on a journey from one state’s welfare program to another.
When she did sit down on the bed she saw that the door of the room had a keyhole of the big old-fashioned kind used for peeping, with no big old-fashioned key thrust into it, and at about the same time she found that the small unvarying sound of the electric razor was making her teeth ache.
“Is there a key?” she asked him.
“Huh?”
“I said is there a key for the door?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Got it in my pocket.”
Then at last he switched off the razor and put it away. He locked the door with what seemed some difficulty – he had to try the knob several times to make sure the job was done – and came to sit close beside her, slipping one arm around her ribs. “I was careful to reserve this room before the kids came up,” he said, “because I knew I’d want privacy, but I didn’t know I’d have somebody so nice to share it with. Oh, and I got us some beer, too.” He reached under the cot and pulled out a six-pack of Rheingold Extra Dry. “Probably isn’t very cold anymore, but what the hell. Beer’s beer, right?”
Right. Beer was beer; bed was bed; sex was sex; and everybody knew there were no social classes in America.
When she’d taken off her clothes she said “Jack? How am I going to get out of here?”
“Same way you got in, I guess. How do you mean?”
“Well, I can’t stay very long, you see, because Laura isn’t used to being left alone, and the point is I really don’t know if I—”
“Didn’t you give her the phone number up here? Case she needs you for anything?”
“No. I didn’t. And the point is I really don’t know if I can go out and face all those people again.”
“Ah, I think you’re being a little silly about this, Lucy, don’t you?” he said. “Now come on, settle back. If we haven’t got much time we might as well make the most of it.”
And they certainly did. Getting laid on a cot was even better, in a way, than getting laid in a double bed: it meant you were never apart; it made you feel that both of you were only halves of a single aching animal in urgent and overwhelming need. And in the final throes of it, when Lucy was afraid her helpless sounds could be heard throughout the dormitory, a phrase from Shakespeare floated into her mind for the first time in years: “Making the beast with two backs.”
“Oh, God,” she said when she’d recovered her breath. “Oh, my God, Jack, that was – that was really—”
“I know, baby,” he told her. “I know. It really was.”
The New Tonapac Playhouse would begin its season with a light comedy – “Just to get our muscles in shape,” Jack Halloran explained – and Lucy attended the last few rehearsals of it, sitting alone in the big old barnlike theater across the road.
The show was far enough along now so that most of it moved and developed without requiring much help from Jack, but it was a pleasure just to watch him standing tense with concentration on one shadowed side of the stage and to know he was wholly in charge. He held the open script in one hand, and he slowly wagged the loose forefinger of the other at the thigh of his jeans as if it were a metronome subtly attuned to the rhythm of the play. Sometimes he would call out to one of the actors: “No, to the left, Phil; to the left” or “Jane, you’re still not getting the right inflection in that line; let’s try it again.”
Once, when a contagious series of fumbled lines threatened to wreck a whole scene, he called everything to a stop and walked out into the lights.
“Now, look,” he began. “An awful lot of time and talent has gone into this show, and we’re going to get it right. We’re going to get it right if we have to double up and rehearse around the clock, is that clear?”
He paused there as if to allow for questions or complaints, but nobody said anything. Most of the actors were looking at the floor like embarrassed children.
Then he said “I just don’t understand how we can still have mistakes like this. Some of you people seem to think this is amateur night in Dixie or something.”
There was another silence, and when he spoke again it was in a lower, less exasperated voice. “Okay. We’ll go all the way back to Martha’s line about happiness and take it from there. Only, this time, pay attention.”
The opening-night audience filled only a little more than two thirds of the theater, but the encouraging thing was that they didn’t all look like local people. It seemed evident that some kind of New York crowd really might be expected to come all the way out here this summer – even for this first and relatively minor offering.
And the performance went well. There were no visible mistakes; the laughter came up full and spontaneous in all the right places, and the applause at the end was long and loud enough to warrant three curtain calls. Then, just before the curtain came down for the last time, one of the actors brought Jack Halloran out from the wings to take a shy, courteous bow, and Lucy was so proud she could have cried.
*
Jack owned a noisy, bad-smelling, eleven-year-old Ford, seldom repaired and never washed; he always apologized for it, but there were quite a few nights that summer when he found it useful for taking Lucy out on long drives to “get away from the whole damn place for a while.”
Once the car was on the road it seemed as good as any other car, and they would ride for miles over Putnam County while he told her about the daily rehearsals and the nightly performances, about certain people in the company who weren’t shaping up very well and others who were a pleasure to work with.
They would stop to drink at bars featuring pinball machines and tall jars of pickled pigs’ feet, the kind of quaint “townie” bars she hadn’t visited since college, but they never stayed very long in those places because Jack would begin to worry about the many things he had to do the next day. And that was all right with Lucy: after an hour or two of traveling she was always eager to get back to his little room.
By late summer, with a new show every week, the company had presented plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, and Eugene O’Neill, as well as an overly ambitious production of King Lear that Jack had come to consider their only failure so far (“Ah, we all tried too hard on that one, and it showed”).
There was never enough sleep or even enough rest for the performers, and there were tearful outbursts among the girls at more than a few rehearsals. Even one of the boys broke down and cried once, clearly ashamed of himself as he turned on Jack and called him a fucking slave-driving prick.
But the people from New York kept coming out, in ever-increasing numbers, and most of the evenings began to seem triumphant. A man from the William Morris Agency went backstage to tell Jack he would like to “handle” him, but later, when Lucy said “Wonderful!” Jack said it was no big deal. “These Morris people are a dime a dozen,” he explained; “besides, I already have an agent. No, the only one of us who got a real break tonight is Julie. God damn, isn’t that fine? I’m very – I’m really very proud for her.”
“Well, so am I,” Lucy said. “And she certainly deserves it.”
Julia Pierce was a thin girl of twenty-four with straight dark hair and big, luminous eyes. She had played the leading roles in The Sea Gull, in A Doll’s House
, and again in Major Barbara – and her “real break” was that she had now been asked to audition for a part in a new comedy by a well-known Broadway playwright.
She was very quiet and shy offstage, and often seemed acutely nervous – Lucy had noticed that her fingernails were bitten down to the flesh – but the nervousness always vanished when she went to work. Three or four other girls in the company were prettier than Julia Pierce, and they knew it, but they could only envy and admire what they called her “terrific authority” as an actress. Her clear and resonant voice, filling the theater even when she murmured, was a marvelously subtle instrument for bringing make-believe situations to life.
And one sweltering night, after a little knock on the door of Jack Halloran’s room, it was Julia Pierce’s unmistakable voice that called, quietly, “Mrs. Davenport? Your daughter’s on the phone.”
Lucy had been drifting off to sleep with Jack’s arm close around her and his hand cupping one of her breasts, but she struggled free and got dressed in such haste that she left her stockings and underwear on the floor.
Out at the telephone, which was attached to a wall near the stairs, she said “Laura?”
“Mom, can you come home now? Because Daddy just called and he sounded all funny.”
“Well, dear, sometimes your father does have too much to drink, and then he—”
“No, this wasn’t drunk; this was different. I mean he wasn’t even making any sense.”
She couldn’t hurry past the heavily fragrant flower-bed terraces because she was afraid of missing each downward step in the darkness, but once she was on level ground she broke into a run for the lighted house. In the living room she gave Laura a quick, reassuring hug and said “Tell you what we’ll do. I’ll call Daddy now and find out if he’s sick or anything; then if he is, we’ll do everything we can to help him get better.”