Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Yes,” Philip said.

“Tell me about your play, Mr. Bloomer. Tell me about the part you had in mind for me.” She recrossed her legs comfortably, as though preparing for a long session on the sofa.

“Well,” Philip said, “it’s about a boarding house. A low, dreary, miserable boarding house with bad plumbing and poor devils who can’t pay the rent. That sort of thing.”

Miss Gerry said nothing.

“The presiding genius of this boarding house,” Philip went on, “is a slatternly, tyrannical, scheming, harsh woman. I modeled her on my aunt, who keeps a boarding house.”

“How old is she?” Miss Gerry asked, her voice small and flat.

“Who? My aunt?”

“The woman in the play.”

“Forty-five.” Philip got up and started to stride up and down the room as he talked of his play. “She’s continually snooping around, listening at keyholes, piecing together the tragedies of her boarders from overheard snatches, fighting with her family, fighting with …” He stopped. “Why, Miss Gerry,” he said. “Miss Gerry …”

She was bent over on the couch and the tears were dropping slowly and bitterly from her eyes.

“That man,” she wept, “that man …” She jumped up and swept across to the phone, dialed a number. Unheeded, the tears streamed down through the mascara, eye-shadow, rouge, powder, in dark channels. “That man,” she wept, “that man …”

Philip backed instinctively against a wall between a table and a chest, his hands spread coldly out behind him. Silently he stood there, like a man awaiting an attack.

“Lawrence!” she cried into the phone. “I’m glad you were home. There’s a young man up here and he’s offered me a part in his play.” The tears coursed bitterly down the dark channels on her cheeks. “Do you know what part it is? I’m going to tell you and then I’m going to throw the young man right the hell out of this hotel!”

Philip cowered against the wall.

“Keep quiet, Lawrence!” Miss Gerry was shouting. “I’ve listened to your smooth excuses long enough. A woman of forty-five,” she wept, her mouth close to the phone, “a bitter, slatternly, ugly, hateful boarding-house keeper who listens at keyholes and fights with her family.” Miss Gerry was half bent over in grief now, and she gripped the telephone desperately and clumsily in her two hands. Because her tears were too much for her, she listened and Philip heard a man’s voice talking quickly, but soothingly, over the phone.

Finally, disregarding the urgent voice in the receiver, Miss Gerry stood straight. “Mr. Bloomer,” she said, her teeth closing savagely over the name, “please tell me why you thought of me for this rich and glamorous role.”

Philip braced himself weakly against the wall between the chest and the table. “You see,” he said, his voice high and boyish and forlorn, “I saw you in two plays.”

“Shut up, for the love of God!” Miss Gerry called into the phone. Then she looked up and with a cold smile, spoke to Philip. “What plays, Mr. Bloomer?”

“ Sun in the East ,” Philip croaked, “and Take the Hindmost .”

A new and deeper flood of tears formed in her dark eyes. “Lawrence,” she sobbed into the phone. “Do you know why he’s offering me this part? He saw me in two plays. Your two great successes. He saw me playing a hag of sixty in Sun in the East and he saw me playing the mother of a goddamned brood of Irish hoodlums in Take the Hindmost . You’ve ruined me, Lawrence, you’ve ruined me.”

Philip slipped out of his niche against the wall and walked quickly over to the window and looked out. Twelve stories, his mind registered automatically.

“ Everybody’s seen me in those parts. Everybody! Now, whenever there’s a play with a mother, a crone in it, they say, ‘Call up Adele Gerry.’ I’m a woman in the full flush of my powers. I should be playing Candida, Hedda, Joan, and I’m everybody’s candidate for the hero’s old mother! Boarding-house keepers in children’s first efforts!”

Philip winced, looking down at Madison Avenue.

“Who did this to me?” Miss Gerry’s tones were full, round, tragic. “Who did it? Who cajoled, pleaded, begged, drove me into those two miserable plays? Lawrence Wilkes! Lawrence Wilkes can claim the credit for ruining the magnificent career of a great actress. The famous Lawrence Wilkes, who fooled me into playing a mother at the age of thirty-three!”

Philip hunched his shoulders as the deep, famous voice crowded the room with sound.

“And now you wonder,” even at the phone, her wide gesture of shoulder and arm was sharp with irony, “now you wonder why I won’t marry you. Send me flowers, send me books, send me tickets to the theater, write me letters telling me you don’t care if I go out with other men. From now on I’m going out with the entire garrison of Governor’s Island! I’ll eat dinner next to you with a different man every night! I hate you, I hate you, Larry, I hate you …”

Her sobs finally conquered her. She let the phone drop heedlessly, walked slowly and with pain over to a deep chair and sank into it, damp, bedraggled, undone, like a sorrowing child.

Philip breathed deeply and turned around. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.

Miss Gerry waved her hand wearily. “It’s not your fault. I’ve been getting this for three years. You’re the agent of events, that’s all.”

“Thank you,” Philip said gratefully.

“A young woman like me,” Miss Gerry moaned, looking like a little girl, miserable in the deep chair. “I’ll never get a decent part. Never. Never. Mothers! That man has done me in. Don’t ever get mixed up with that man. He’s an egotistic maniac. He would crucify his grandmother for a second-act curtain.” She wiped her eyes in a general smear of cosmetics. “He wants me to marry him.” She laughed horribly.

“I’m so sorry,” Philip said, feeling finally, because that was all he could say, like a farm boy, a dairy-hand. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“He says go up and get your script,” Miss Gerry said. “He lives across the street in the Chatham. Just call up from the desk and he’ll bring it down.”

“Thank you, Miss Gerry,” Philip said.

“Come here,” she said, the tears departing. He walked slowly over to her and she pulled his head down to her bosom and kissed his forehead and held his ears with her two hands. “You’re a nice, clean, stupid boy,” she said. “I’m glad to see there’s a new crop springing up. Go.”

Philip limped to the door, turned there, meaning to say something, saw Adele Gerry sitting in her chair, looking blankly at the floor, with her face a ruin of sorrow and mascara and age. Philip softly opened the door and softly closed it behind him.

He went across to the street, breathing the cold air deeply, and called Lawrence Wilkes on the phone. Philip recognized Wilkes when he got out of the elevator with a copy of The House of Pain under his arm. Wilkes was neatly and beautifully dressed and had a hit running and had just been to a barber, but his face was worn and tortured and weary, like the faces of the people in the newsreels who have just escaped an air-raid, but who do not hope to escape the next.

“Mr. Wilkes,” Philip said softly.

Wilkes look at Philip and smiled and put his head forgivingly and humorously to one side. “Young man,” he said, “in the theater you must learn one thing. Never tell an actress what type of part you think she can play.” And he gave Philip The House of Pain and turned and went back into the elevator. Philip watched the door close on his well-tailored, tortured back, then sprang out into the street and fled across town to the Theatre Guild.