MOLLIE: Although I adore shows and circuses I don’t like to watch people make fools of themselves. Are you saying I’m making a fool of myself about Phillip?
JOHN: Are you still in love with him?
MOLLIE: I fell in love with Phillip at first sight. At that time he was engaged to the Governor’s daughter. Mother Lovejoy said Phillip flew high and lit low.
JOHN: Mother Lovejoy must be a prize old bitch to say that.
MOLLIE: That’s what I always thought in the back of my mind. But after all, she was Phillip’s only mother. Aristocrats. And she was heartsick about Sister.
JOHN: What had Sister done to make her heartsick?
MOLLIE: She came out fifteen years ago, and nothing ever happened. She never married. Works in the library, whispers—she breaks my heart. I love her. Most sisters-in-law don’t love each other, but I do love Sister.
JOHN: Whispers?
MOLLIE: It’s from working in the library. Even when she comes home, she whispers. Just reads and whispers, and writes in notebooks from time to time. She once fell in love with a man in Z.
JOHN: What do you mean—a man in Z?
MOLLIE: He was standing before the Z Section in the library.
JOHN: What was he doing in Z?
MOLLIE: Just taking out Rats, Lice and History, by somebody Zimmerman. I don’t know what he was doing, but it was love at first sight.
JOHN: A whispering sister in the Z Section does not sound like the same family with Phillip Lovejoy.
MOLLIE: Sister is gentle—but Phillip—he struck me, he beat me up so many times. Once he tore off my nightgown and put me out of that front door . . .
(Points to door.)
naked as a jaybird. And I stood it!
JOHN: Why, Mollie?
MOLLIE: I—why we—I— In spite of all Phillip’s terrible failings he had a lot of charm. A redeeming charm, somebody once said.
JOHN (ironically): I get it.
MOLLIE: I stood it. I stood the beatings-up. The time I was locked out of the house buck naked. I stood it all. Until he—did something I couldn’t forgive.
JOHN: What on earth did Phillip do you couldn’t forgive?
MOLLIE: He began hurting my feelings. He said I used clichés.
JOHN: Clichés?
MOLLIE: That’s a French way of saying a person is next door to a fool.
JOHN: And that hurt more than the beatings?
MOLLIE: Far, far more. I had only brought him up a plate of spaghetti when he was working. And seeing him so tense and worried I said to him, just to comfort him, “Art is long and life is fleeting.” Then he used that word and he dumped the plate of spaghetti all over the typewriter. That limp tomato spaghetti and that hard black typewriter.
JOHN: So you got a divorce on the grounds of a cliché?
MOLLIE: Not only that, John.
JOHN: For God’s sake what else, Mollie?
MOLLIE: I realized, John, that Phillip was unfaithful to me, in fact, I realized he was polygamous.
JOHN: Dear me!
MOLLIE: I didn’t want to realize it. It was like a cloud on a summer’s day.
JOHN: What did you do?
MOLLIE: I tried to be a brass monkey.
JOHN: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
MOLLIE: Exactly. But after the clichés and spaghetti, polygamy was just too much. I had to get a divorce because of my pride and because of Paris’ pride. I had custody of Paris, of course, and Phillip had good visiting privileges.
JOHN: Tell me, Mollie, why did you remarry Phillip Lovejoy?
MOLLIE: I—I was under a spell—a strange spell. When you’ve been married to a man and he is allowed by court injunction to visit his son . . .
JOHN: Did he come often?
MOLLIE: Yes. He got to coming frequently. At first he came on weekends. Then it was reversed.
JOHN: Reversed?
MOLLIE: The weekends were longer and longer. Soon he stayed all the time and only went to New York on the weekends. So under the circumstances—
JOHN: Yes, it would be a shame to be living in sin with a man you’ve been married to once before.
MOLLIE: That’s what I thought. But hindsight is wiser than foresight.
JOHN: That’s what they say.
MOLLIE: It seems to me that Phillip was happy so many times, but never knew it. When he realized he was happy, then he was sad. Because then it was finished. Even after he wrote “The Chinaberry Tree” he was unhappy.
JOHN: That was his successful book.
MOLLIE: Yes. The only one. Sometimes I wish he had never written it. It gave him all the kudoes and a fortune, but it was such a great success he began to hate it. For years after he couldn’t work.
JOHN: Didn’t he write another book?
MOLLIE: Yes. And when that went badly, he blamed me, Paris, the city. Mother Lovejoy bought this apple farm for us. We were going to do manual labor.
JOHN: Who was going to do manual labor?
MOLLIE: All of us. But instead, Phillip started a play. He said it was easier. We all had such hopes. Then he got restless, and went to Mexico.
JOHN: To gather local color?
MOLLIE: Maybe so, but not for the play. He found somebody else and got a Mexican divorce. And for almost a year it was like somebody with a terrible chisel was cracking at my heart all day long and every night.
JOHN: What about his play?
MOLLIE: The play was set a hundred years from now after everybody had been destroyed by some moon-bomb. There were only two people left on earth; a man, a woman and a snake. You see, it was awfully symbolic.
JOHN: I see.
MOLLIE: Maybe that’s why it failed. On opening night the audience started leaving during the first act. Mother Lovejoy stood in the lobby and tried to herd them back into their seats like a sheep dog.
JOHN: Where was that?
MOLLIE: In Boston, a month ago. Yankees are so cold. After the curtain fell, Phillip went back to the hotel and slashed his wrists. Writing plays must be a terrible shock to the nervous system.
JOHN: Particularly if they close on opening night.
MOLLIE: I don’t think Phillip wanted to die. But Mother Lovejoy sent him to this sanatorium. He’s there now. Poor Phillip.
JOHN: Have you ever kissed anyone else but Phillip?
MOLLIE: Why naturally not.
JOHN: No one?
MOLLIE: Of course not, outside the family. I told you, when I kiss, something very peculiar happens to me.
JOHN: It’s not that peculiar.
MOLLIE: After a kiss my head is swirled and crazy. My legs turn to macaroni.
(He kisses her.)
Cooked macaroni.
(SISTER appears, dressed in a robe and curlpapers.)
JOHN: Look.
MOLLIE: Sister. Are you all right?
SISTER: I thought I heard voices. Am I disturbing you?
MOLLIE: Of course not. You look flustered and unnerved. What’s the matter?
SISTER: The wind and the banging.
MOLLIE: It’s that garage door that keeps banging whenever there is a wind.
SISTER: It scared me.
JOHN: I’ll secure it.
(He exits.)
MOLLIE (calling after him): The tool kit is in the garage.
(To SISTER)
Sister, you’ve been tense and troubled ever since you came this morning. What is it?
SISTER: I needed to talk to you alone. Without Mother or Paris around.
MOLLIE: A sisterly talk, darling? Or trouble?
SISTER: Both.
MOLLIE: Mother Lovejoy said Phillip is brown as a nut.
SISTER: Brown as a nut is all very well—but it’s about Phillip I have to tell you. He’s coming tomorrow.
MOLLIE: Tomorrow? Phillip coming?
SISTER: Phillip wants you, Mollie. He’s going to ask you to marry him again.
MOLLIE: He’s so erratic. Or is it erotic? I always confuse the two words.
SIS
TER: Erratic denotes going every which way. Eros is the god of love.
MOLLIE: Either word will do.
SISTER: Do you still love my brother?
MOLLIE: Phillip abandoned us. But when he comes in the door, when he looks into my eyes, and when he—I—I always know exactly what he wants.
SISTER: It’s probably always the same thing.
MOLLIE: It’s not me doing it. Me, Mollie Henderson.
SISTER: Phillip is a boy that sex throws right off his rocker.
MOLLIE: As I well know.
SISTER: He has led you a merry dance.
MOLLIE: It wasn’t merry. I had a sad slice of life with him.
SISTER: Are you going to marry Phillip a third time?
MOLLIE: I don’t want to.
SISTER: There’s no law that requires you to keep marrying and marrying him.
MOLLIE: No law?
SISTER: No legal law, that is. And no prizes for marriage marathons.
MOLLIE: It’s only that when I look into his eyes—his eyes are blue with yellow flecks. I can’t describe it.
SISTER: I have observed it.
MOLLIE: You’re so pure-minded. It’s difficult . . .
SISTER: You would be surprised to know what goes on sometimes in my mind.
MOLLIE: Why? Have you ever loved a man, Sister?
SISTER: Yes.
MOLLIE: Oh, my precious. I’m so glad. Is he a Society City man?
SISTER: No.
MOLLIE: From Atlanta?
SISTER: Never Atlanta.
MOLLIE: Well, what? Where?
SISTER: My love lives in other countries—always far away.
MOLLIE: You mean a foreign man? What does Mother Lovejoy say?
SISTER: Mother doesn’t know. And it’s not one man, but many.
MOLLIE: Many foreigners? Oh, Sister, you are excited after your trip. Rest with me.
SISTER: My loves are not real to anybody else. But they are real to me.
MOLLIE: Oh, imaginary friends.
SISTER: There’s one in particular that I’ve had a long time. His name is Angelo. We live in foreign places and we love each other like married people love. Does this shock you, Mollie?
MOLLIE: No, my darling.
SISTER: Another time I had a lover called Rocco, but he died of something terrible, and so did I, in a kind of lingering way. It went on night after night, like chapters. It was terrible but in that kind of daydream, it was fascinating too, because we loved each other so much. And when you love each other very much, death is romantic so long as you die together.
MOLLIE: Although your loves are only daydreams, they must be a comfort to you. Like John is a comfort to me.
SISTER: John? The man who is fixing the door? The tenant in the barn?
MOLLIE: John Tucker. Isn’t that a lovely name? He’s in love with me.
SISTER: Don’t hurt him, Mollie.
MOLLIE: I’d cut off my ears, sew down my eyelids and pull out my tongue before I’d hurt him.
SISTER: Gracious, Mollie. You swear like a child.
MOLLIE: He’s in love with me, and I couldn’t hurt him.
(MOTHER LOVEJOY enters from upstairs, dressed like Sister in robe and curlpapers.)
MOTHER LOVEJOY: Mollie, is there any milk of magnesia or castoria?
MOLLIE: I’ll get it. It’s on the shelf in the kitchen.
(She exits.)
MOTHER LOVEJOY: Travel is so binding. And that northern train food. I heard talking when I woke up. And nothing aggravates me more than knowing that somebody is saying something in a house that I don’t hear. I am only happy when I’m in the center of things.
SISTER: Well, here you are.
MOLLIE (re-entering): Sister told me Phillip is coming tomorrow.
MOTHER LOVEJOY: Loreena Lovejoy, you know I always like to be the one to tell important news.
MOLLIE: But is Phillip ready to leave the sanatorium?
MOTHER LOVEJOY: He’s dying to get out.
MOLLIE: But is he ready?
MOTHER LOVEJOY: Phillip needs you, Mollie, and wants to marry you again.
MOLLIE: I didn’t think you liked Phillip being married to me.
MOTHER LOVEJOY: The first time I nearly had a stroke. The second time I was bitter but resigned. But now I am used to it. Economics and common sense.
MOLLIE: Economics?
MOTHER LOVEJOY: That sanatorium, dear girl, costs one thousand six hundred dollars a month.
SISTER: But you have all that money that Uncle Willie left you.
MOTHER LOVEJOY: Yes, a beautiful will. Such a fair will. I was only a cousin twice removed, but I was the chief beneficiary. Such a fair will and such a surprise to everybody. It’s a case of still waters run deep.
SISTER: Not that Uncle Willie was ever still.
MOTHER LOVEJOY: He had locomotor ataxia. An old-fashioned disease that happens sometimes to aristocrats. But nobody connected with stocks, oil wells, business ventures. In fact, he was supposed to be a little irresponsible, bless his heart. He came to me in a mysterious way too.
MOLLIE: Mysterious?
MOTHER LOVEJOY: Toward evening, just before supper, when there was the smell of turnip greens, Uncle Willie walked up the front porch and sat down in the rocking chair. He said, “Ophelia, I’ve come to this house and I’ve come to stay.” Rocking, smelling, listening, “I’ve come to this house and I’ve come to stay.” Mysterious, really. Then he said something kind of cute. “Aside from the greens, what else is there for supper?”
MOLLIE: Weren’t you surprised?
MOTHER LOVEJOY: Well, frankly, at first I was appalled. But he stayed on with us eleven years, eating buttermilk ice cream every day with a napkin round his chin, and oiling my sewing machine and raking the yard.
MOLLIE: How much money did Uncle Willie leave you?
MOTHER LOVEJOY: Don’t you know, Mollie, that you can ask poor people about their finances, but it’s not tactful to ask the well-to-do? Law, children, do you know what time it is?
MOLLIE: Yes, it is late.
MOTHER LOVEJOY: You people in the North stay up like people in Russian plays. Come on, Sister.
(As she exits, whispering)
Did your bowels move?
(JOHN returns.)
JOHN: Phillip’s mother doesn’t stay very long, does she?
MOLLIE: No. But Phillip stays longer and it makes me nervous.
JOHN: Why does it make you nervous?
MOLLIE: When you loved a man and you’re divorced, it just makes you nervous.
JOHN: Is Phillip coming again?
MOLLIE: Yes.
JOHN: When?
MOLLIE: Tomorrow.
JOHN: What are you going to do?
MOLLIE: I’ve already broken the Ten Commandments with him.
JOHN: All ten?
MOLLIE: Not all ten of them.
JOHN: Hast thou made any graven images?
MOLLIE: Of course not.
JOHN: Coveted thy neighbor’s ox or ass?
MOLLIE: My neighbor’s ass?
JOHN: We’ll check that one off.
MOLLIE: The everyday one.
JOHN: Oh, that one.
MOLLIE: But it wasn’t me doing it. Me! Mollie Henderson! Reared in the first Baptist Church of Society City. I got five gold stars for attendance.
JOHN: You slept with him, Mollie, after the divorce.
MOLLIE: I know it was a sin. But it’s not adultery. Two times I said, “I, Mollie, take thee, Phillip, to be my lawful husband. To have and to hold. For richer or poorer. For better or worse. In sickness and in health.”
JOHN: Hush, Mollie!
MOLLIE: “Till death us do part.” Two times I said it to a preacher. How could it be adultery.
(She knocks on wood.)
JOHN: What are you doing?
MOLLIE: Knocking on wood.
JOHN: Why do you do that?
MOLLIE: I don’t want it to happen again. But somehow three bad things go together.
JO
HN: Like what?
MOLLIE: Three blind mice. Three witches.
JOHN: And going down three times when you drown.
MOLLIE: Sometimes I feel that Phillip and I are like two magnets running together.
JOHN: Mollie, have you ever thought of marrying me?
MOLLIE: You never asked me.
JOHN: I’m asking you now.
MOLLIE: Have you ever been in love before?
JOHN: Of course. Lots of times.
MOLLIE: But you never married.
JOHN: I did.
MOLLIE: What was she like—your wife?
JOHN: Very beautiful. It’s hard to describe. Hard to remember. I loved her.
MOLLIE: What happened?
JOHN: It was just as I was finished with the Navy. I was doing construction work—really just a laborer—we were very happy or so it seemed to me. Then my wife fell in love with another man, although she said she loved me too.
MOLLIE: What a predicament.
JOHN: Then still another man. It came to the point when I went in the front door I would feel someone going out the back door.
MOLLIE: That’s unbelievable.
JOHN: Though I loved her so very much, I had to leave.
MOLLIE: And you still loved her.
JOHN: Still I loved her but I had to leave. Before I met my wife I was a four-by-four person and then I was cut down to a three-by-four. Before I was cut down to a two-by-four man I divorced her and used the GI bill to study. I always wanted to be an architect.
MOLLIE: I don’t see how anybody could treat you like that, John. She must have been crazy, or something.
JOHN: Call it sick, Mollie. But I was so much in love with her. We had a cottage on the beach and I used to cook shore dinners.
MOLLIE: A shore dinner?
JOHN: You dig a pit in the sand, light a fire and let it burn to coals. You have lobster, clams, and layers of seaweed in between, then more lobster, more clams. You can make it as complicated as you want, with ears of roasted corn or potatoes. The shore dinner bakes for a whole afternoon in the hot sand. Then, at evening, when the sky is darkening and the waves dark and shushing on the shore, you dig into the shore dinner. I have not made a shore dinner since then or watched the flickering twilight on the ocean since that time.
MOLLIE: And yet she was unfaithful to you. Women can talk on and on about sorrow, but when a man grieves, he doesn’t say a word. When my father lost the hardware and notion store, he sat at home and never said a word—bankrupt—the store taken away from him. He grieved to death and never said a word. Nobody could help him.