Nobody had ever told her definitely that they were engaged. Chadbourne did have a rather proprietory manner regarding Lucky, but she also had it about her other particularly intimate acquaintances; it might not mean much except that she was used to being looked up to because her mother was rich. And Lucky himself, Francie recalled, didn’t talk as if there were any “understanding” between them: he seemed to go out of his way to speak of Chadbourne, when he had occasion to mention her, in a detached manner.
Yet there was a general impression around town that they belonged together. It was Chadbourne who had introduced him to her crowd; Chadbourne took him everywhere; he belonged to Fredericks & Worpels, and that made it somehow likely that he belonged to Chadbourne too. And Francie felt bound to notice that he hadn’t come from his own apartment to see her this evening. He had dropped in on his way from Chicago, the one time out of a hundred when Chadbourne would assume he was getting home late. Probably she just didn’t know he was in town, that was all.… Francie pulled herself up. She was getting awfully cynical, she thought sorrowfully, and catty, too.
The telephone rang and she went to answer it.
“Francie?” said a voice that made her feel guilty. “This is Chad.”
“Oh yes, Chadbourne—I mean, Chad,” said Francie, her mind racing. “How are you?” To herself she sounded much too hearty, but that is the trouble with tones of voice; you never know how they sound until you have tried them out.
Chadbourne said that she was fine, and how was Francie? Without waiting for a reply she went on, “Is Bruce there?” Perhaps Chadbourne, too, wasn’t always satisfied with her own tone of voice; as if she didn’t like the sound of that question, she added, “I mean, has he arrived yet? He told me he might be dropping in on you tonight.”
Francie said that Bruce had arrived and went to call him. She should have been relieved. Instead, she was really very much annoyed.
She and Aunt Norah were belatedly putting the dishes in the machine and cleaning up the kitchen. They had of course assured Mrs. Clark that they would just stack the dishes and leave them until morning, but it seemed easier and pleasanter to wash everything that night, after all, while they waited for Pop to return from taking the guest home. They were having a comfortable post-mortem when they heard the front door being closed and locked. Pop came into the kitchen.
“We were just saying how nice Anne still is,” said Aunt Norah. “Don’t you agree?”
“Very nice. Got a lot of common sense, that woman,” said Pop.
“And she must have been awfully attractive,” said Francie, “when she was young.”
Aunt Norah snorted indignantly. “I’ll have you know she’s still an attractive woman, Francie Nelson. Whatever do you mean, ‘must have been’?”
It surprised Francie. She looked toward Pop for support; it just hadn’t occurred to her that people of Aunt Norah’s age were capable of feeling vanity, either for themselves or others of the aged brigade. But Pop made no comment at all.
CHAPTER 9
The crowd had assembled again in the Fredericks’s rumpus room for a meeting of the new dramatic society. It was the fourth meeting in the fourth week, and the intervening time had brought many changes in Francie’s attitude. She now sat in the front row and giggled with the others of the elect. Unlucky newcomers still paused uncertainly on the threshold before making their timid way to inconspicuous seats, and they looked resentfully at the gay young people in front, but Francie didn’t notice all that any more. She was practically a part of the zoo, though she had stopped calling it that. Chadbourne’s friends weren’t so bad when you got to know them as she did, she had decided; light, of course, and idle—all except Lucky Munson—but good company. Lucky saved the record. He was a working man and he had more sense than the others. In spite of looking the way he did, he had a lot of solid qualities; Francie was sure of it. They had become more than just casual acquaintances, she felt, though he still did behave very casually toward her, especially—she could not help this much suspicion of his attentions—when Chadbourne happened to be looking their way. He paid a sort of court to her, though, even in Chadbourne’s house: he was sitting next to her now.
“… and I nearly died this morning, choked with rage,” she was saying to him in confidential tones while they waited for the meeting to open. “You know my Cousin Biddy. That is, you don’t, and I would simply hate you to. But today she—”
Lucky interrupted, dead-pan. “I’m longing to meet Cousin Biddy. Little by little I hope to meet the whole family.”
“Nobody, but nobody could possibly want to make Biddy’s acquaintance,” said Francie. “Just listen, Lucky: this morning she was on the telephone as usual, and suddenly she said, ‘I hear such interesting things about your new society, Frances Beatrice. I understand you’re going to produce one of my favorite plays, Charley’s Aunt.’ Now where in the world would she have got hold of an idea like that, do you think? Why, Charley’s Aunt—it’s some old Edwardian thing, isn’t it? I mean to say, nobody in this generation would dream of putting on an old thing like that. She must be mad. I mean it, she must be.”
“Probably lives in a world of her own,” said Bruce.
“Oh, she lives in her own world all right,” said Francie. “I can imagine what amateur societies were like when she was a girl. I guess they acted Charley’s Aunt every season, when they weren’t performing in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines.” Francie giggled. “It’s so typical of Biddy. She’s proud of always knowing everything, and the point is, she always gets her information slightly cock-eyed.”
Bruce said sadly, “Well, if she does know everything I only wish she’d let me have a look in her crystal ball. I’d give a lot to know what in the world we are going to select for the first J.D.S. number. I’m the director and I’d naturally like a little advance information before I die of old age, stalling around waiting for the go-ahead signal. The way things look, we’ll be another four weeks making up our minds.”
“Oh, at least four weeks!” Francie sighed, thinking about the arguments that were besetting the Play Choice Committee, and it wasn’t only the committee that kept running into trouble. The minute a newcomer joined up—and the recruits were surprisingly numerous now that the society was well under way—he seemed to arrive with a pet project, a play that simply had to be put on immediately. The selection was large and all-embracing. Francie, Bruce, and a few others of the more knowledgeable charter members argued their way deftly out of suggestions for pageants, for example; pageants in celebration of (a) their state, (b) their America, and (c) their new local nursery school. The society had discussed at length and then discarded ambitious plans for Pinafore or The Mikado. A few experiments proved beyond a doubt that they didn’t have enough good voices in the club to render such a production anything but painful. Then there was the intellectual young man; he argued passionately in favor of Shaw. Anything would do, evidently, as long as Shaw had written it. He brought in his entire set of Shaw’s works and read out bits in order to prove his point. They had samples of Man and Superman, Captain Brasshound’s Conversion, Fanny’s First Play, and St. Joan. They were not convinced.
“I thought you said we were to do something worth while!” he cried. “I thought our intention was to elevate the public taste!”
They had not, as a society, said anything of the sort or expressed any such conviction, but his eyes were fixed reproachfully on Francie as he spoke, and she knew what he meant. It was exactly what she had hoped for at the beginning. She left moved to defend herself. “We do want to do all that,” she said, “but whatever we try must be done right, especially the first play. And if we try to put on something grand and difficult and fail, we’ll get an awful slap in the face. It might kill the whole thing.”
“This town is nothing but a bunch of Philistines,” said the intellectual young man hotly.
“It is not!” said Francie, as stung as if she had not often made the same remark. “I keep telling all of you, there are ple
nty of beautiful little short plays. I’m very keen on Yeats myself. There’s one of his, The Land of Heart’s Desire, that we just couldn’t go wrong on. Do let’s have a shot at that, Lucky.”
Lucky muttered something unkind about Celtic twilight, but Francie persuaded the society to have a trial reading nevertheless. In vain: they didn’t like Yeats as much as she thought they ought to. She reflected that the effect was ruined, anyway, by the way it was read. They had to circulate one book round and round the circle. There were never enough volumes, naturally, for everybody to have one to hold during a reading. Chadbourne attempted to overcome the difficulty and give everybody a chance to feel that he was participating in the proceedings at the same time by suggesting that they take turns reading the parts in tryout.
“It will give us practice as well,” she explained, pink and earnest. “It ought to make a very nice impression, and give us an idea of the way the play sounds at the same time. You know the technique—like John Brown’s Body.”
Alas, their early attempts didn’t sound in the least like John Brown’s Body. It was much more like the reading hour in grammar school, and was guaranteed to spoil the effect of the most rugged lines. Abandoning The Cherry Orchard, which was Mrs. Fredericks’s idea, they listened to Bruce and turned their attention to Dunsany, The Gods of the Mountain. That wasn’t too good either. In fact, it was even worse. “We’ll have to learn a lot more before we attempt that play,” Bruce admitted.
Lottie Fredericks had drifted in one evening to perch like an impatient butterfly on the edge of a chair, listening to the arguments. Finally she spoke up. She said she couldn’t understand why nobody had yet thought of suggesting Lady Precious Stream. It was a charming play! You wouldn’t have to worry much about scenery, as everybody knew the Chinese used their imaginations instead of backdrops. But with the exception of Chadbourne, who always listened with adoring open-mouthed attention to whatever her mother had to say, this contribution left them cold: whimsy was not their dish in Jefferson.
So it went. Shakespeare was rather wistfully proffered by the intellectual boy, but Lucky promptly quashed that; he said he couldn’t possibly face directing anything as difficult as the Dream or, worse, one of the tragedies. No, no Shakespeare, said Bruce. Chadbourne then spoke up for comedy. After all, she pointed out, people didn’t want the Jefferson Dramatic Society to improve them; they wanted to be amused. The members, on the whole, agreed with her, but they couldn’t carry their agreement to the point of picking out a play. It was all getting boring, if not exasperating.
Now Chadbourne walked out onto the platform carrying an armful of books which she plunked down on a table. She started to say something that was lost in the chatter, and she pounded on the table with her fist, shouting, “Quiet, everybody! Please!” Chadbourne’s attitude had changed noticeably during the past few meetings; she had developed authority, in her pallid way. Certainly the society had brought her out, Francie reflected. A little more pride in her position, a little more independence of her mother, and she might even be better-looking. The way you feel does have something to do with the way you appear, Francie firmly believed.
Chadbourne went on to say, without understatement, that things had come to a critical point in the J.D.S. They couldn’t fool around any longer; everybody was getting heartily tired of these preliminaries. “Me, too,” she said, “and so today I went to the library, and I found the shelf where they keep comedies, and I just swept it clear and brought along everything I could carry.”
“I didn’t know they’d let you take out more than two at a time,” said somebody.
Chadbourne said, “Special case. I just explained what I wanted them for and she let me go ahead.”
There was a hum of admiration; Chadbourne flushed with pleasure and spoke faster to hide it. “Now I’m going to go right through them reading the titles out to you,” she continued. “If a title doesn’t mean anything to you, skip it. There must be a lot of stuff here we can’t possibly use anyway. But if you happen to recognize something and it sounds promising, please speak up, otherwise I don’t see how we’re ever going to get over this hump. We’ve got to come to a conclusion tonight—that’s the way I feel about it.”
Without waiting for any objections she picked up the first book and, announced its title. It was a selection of plays from the repertory of the Abbey Players. Nobody, not even the intellectual boy, showed any stir of interest; the prospect of trying to instill an Irish accent into an entire cast of Midwesterners was enough to make even Bruce Munson pale. He gave a panicky glance around the room and relaxed. Chadbourne put it down and picked up the next book. Evidently, it didn’t mean a thing to anybody. Nor did the next or the next. At last Francie stood up.
“Excuse me for interrupting,” she said, “but I think one of our troubles, or anyway one of the troubles with this method, is that most of the plays in the library are naturally unfamiliar to us, and I don’t know if we’re going to get anywhere at this rate.”
Chadbourne said, “Oh dear, that’s what’s been the trouble all along. I guess we’ll have to admit we just aren’t a very well-read group. What do you think, Francie, shall we draw lots, or decide arbitrarily and stick to it no matter what anybody says?”
A girl from the zoo, who was a dramatically pale blonde, cut in. “We don’t want to do anything we don’t already know,” she said. “It would be more fun, and easier, and more popular with the audience—if we ever have an audience, while I’m beginning to doubt—to put on a play that’s recently had a popular success. Something everybody’s been down to Chicago to see. People like things they know.” She sat down hard and looked around defiantly.
Bruce Munson said, “But, Evelyn, I’ve told you the trouble with that scheme. I’ve said it over and over—an amateur company can’t usually get permission to put on anything new; they naturally won’t issue acting rights until a thing’s been sold to Hollywood, and the radio, and television, and everything else; in other words until it’s just about dead and buried. I’ve been up against all that before. You can take my word for it.”
“Oh, bother,” said the blonde. “Well, all right. Then let’s have a good old mystery play.”
“Such as?” asked Lucky.
Chadbourne suddenly wailed. “Oh dear, we just go over and over the same ground, every time we meet.”
“I’m sorry I started all this,” said Francie. “Your idea’s as good as any we’ve tried out, Chad, so go ahead reading and don’t pay any attention to me.”
Duly they plowed through half a dozen more titles until only a few books remained on the unscanned heap. Chadbourne picked up a worn, dirty little volume and read mechanically, “Charley’s Aunt.”
She looked up inquiringly as Francie snorted with violent giggles, covering her face with her hands and rocking back and forth in the chair. Chadbourne was about to ask the reason for this behavior when the blonde named Evelyn cut in: “Isn’t that terribly funny? Seems to me I’ve heard about it somewhere; Mother or somebody mentioned it. Must have been an old movie.”
Other voices joined in; there was a general impression that Charley’s Aunt had indeed been made into a picture—lately? They couldn’t be sure, but certainly it had been funny, of that they were positive.
Bruce spoke with lazy assurance. “Yes, it was a picture. And a few years ago it was extremely popular in New York. Ray Bolger played in it. Made from a farce that’s been popular amusement for at least fifty years. Yes, it’s funny all right, if you don’t mind something that’s been funny all that time.”
“Well, I saw it,” said a girl who had never spoken before. “I laughed myself sick, that’s all I know. Maybe I haven’t got very good taste but I laughed myself sick.”
“It must be side-splitting,” said Chadbourne. “Look at Francie. Tears running down her cheeks and everything.”
“Have we at last hit on something?” asked Evelyn.
Francie was sobered abruptly. She sat up. “Oh, no!” she said shar
ply.
“Why not? What is this?” asked Chadbourne. “What have I missed?”
Why not indeed? There were various reasons, good ones no doubt, but Francie realized she couldn’t very well convince them with the main one, which was that Cousin Biddy had made the suggestion first. The J.D.S. could hardly be expected to share her conviction that Biddy must never on any account be encouraged. Francie fell back instead on the argument that had long since become her theme song: they didn’t have the experience or the stamina to act a full-length three-act play. “You need somebody professional, even if it’s only one in the cast, to carry it,” she argued, but it was a lost cause already and she realized it. Wasn’t Bruce practically professional? Evelyn made the point triumphantly; Bruce modestly deprecated it, but you could see he wasn’t displeased actually, and Francie had no desire to offend him. He had no Cousin Biddy: plainly he was favorably disposed to the idea, and so were most of the others. As for Chadbourne, she was overwhelmed with relief at having at last hit upon something that attracted popular support.
“Let’s put the matter to a vote,” she said. “Let’s have a show of hands. All in favor of Charley’s Aunt—”
It was nearly unanimous. As the others waved their hands in the air Francie turned around solemnly and shook her fist at Bruce. Dead-pan, he muttered, “It was a pretty close race between Charley’s Aunt and Francie’s Cousin.”
The rest of the evening was occupied with plans on practical matters, an easy task now the important decision had been made. A new spirit was abroad in the J.D.S. Somebody promised to make typescripts of all the parts before the first important reading and casting. It was turned into a late, enjoyable session. Bruce drove Francie home; he almost always did now when they had both had supper with the Frederickses.
“Thank God that’s over, anyway,” he said as he turned, the car out of the driveway. Francie didn’t reply immediately; she was still preoccupied with her chagrin. “Tired?” he asked softly, and dropped his hand over hers on the seat. She thought of pulling away, and then she didn’t. It would have seemed like making too much of what was probably merely a friendly gesture, the sort of thing people did without thinking twice in Lucky’s crowd. Nevertheless she remained very conscious of it.